by May Dawson
“Don’t start that,” she said sharply. “You’re not saying goodbye to me forever.”
“No, of course not,” I said.
Hunters usually could never admit to any feelings. I fit right in with the bastards, though.
“I’m glad I met you too,” she said. “You’re a good girl, Alisa. A good Hunter. Good friend.”
I nodded, biting my lower lip. Duncan had made it sound like I was a nightmare of a princess back home. But Elly reminded me of all the good I’d done with the Hunters in this world.
“I’m glad I didn’t shoot you for your bad manners the day we met. It was fifty-fifty,” she added, and I let out a bark of laughter.
“You’re awful to me,” I said.
“That’s because you’re one of mine,” she said. “Text me so we can plan. I’ll let Julian and Carter know they’re needed.”
Then she hung up before I could figure out what to say to that.
I squeezed my eyes shut, taking a deep, shuddering breath. I didn’t know any life but this one, but it was a good life. I didn’t want to leave it behind.
When I stepped out of the closet, I was still smiling.
Watchful, purple Fae eyes greeted me. Azrael stood there with his arms crossed over that broad chest, filling the doorway with his imposing frame.
I took an automatic step forward, my fists rising for a fight, before I stopped myself. But maybe I shouldn’t have. “What the hell are you doing in my room?”
“Why are you hiding in a closet?” Azrael asked, tilting his head to one side as he studied me. “Were you trying to get away from me?”
“I wasn’t hiding in the closet,” I said, as if that was outrageous.
“Then what were you doing?”
I wasn’t going to answer that. “Stay out of my room.”
He glanced around. “You don’t need to bring much with you. The clothes you wear here will hardly be suitable.”
“What’s wrong with my clothes?” I demanded.
His gaze drifted down my baggy scrubs before he lied, “Nothing.”
“I wasn’t going to wear these.” I felt gross in them, in fact, after everything I’d been through, but I was glad no one had undressed me when they put me in bed. I’d have wanted to twist Duncan’s pointy Fae ears if he’d touched me. “I’ve got Hunting clothes for our visit to the shifters. Then we can go to Faerieland.”
“Please don’t call it that.”
Something about annoying Azrael delighted me. He must really be my ex-boyfriend.
He was so tall and broad shouldered that he filled my doorway. I tried to brush past him, but he didn’t move. My shoulder hit his hard, chiseled arm, and he tilted an eyebrow as he stared down at me.
“They don’t say excuse me in the mortal world?” he drawled.
“Let me guess. In your world, males don’t just move out of the way after going where they aren’t wanted in the first place?”
His lips quirked. “Even when the two of us weren’t exactly friends before, Alisa, you never minded having me in your bedroom.”
Oh my god. He spoke so knowingly. He was so damned cocky, and at the same time as I wanted to tell him off, traitorous desire throbbed between my thighs when his eyes roamed my body, as if I still belonged to him.
Not that I ever did. I wasn’t the kind of girl to belong to anyone.
Yet when the two of us were so close that I could feel his body heat radiating against my own skin, I was somehow sure this man and I had history, that we’d known each other deeper than flesh and bone.
“I’m going to take a shower, if you’ll get out of my way, and then we can go kick some shifter ass.” I said, meeting his eyes as I grabbed the edge of my shirt and pulled it off over my head.
It was supposed to be a sexy power move to bother him as much as he bothered me, but I’d tried to take the scrubs top and long-sleeved tee off in one go, and I got tangled up with the arms, my shirt pulled over my face.
“Do you need help?” Azrael asked as I shifted my weight from foot to foot, desperately trying to drag the shirt off my head. His voice was lazy and amused and I really wanted to kick his ass even more than I wanted to screw him when he talked like that.
I finally yanked the shirt off and threw it over my shoulder. Despite his smug attitude, he studied me with open interest, as if he wanted me as much as I might want him.
“What?” I demanded.
“You’re still so beautiful,” he murmured. “I missed you.”
The admission surprised me.
“I wish I remembered you,” I said, my voice coming out heated. I felt at a loss. The lack of memories always bothered me, but it was even worse now to be face-to-face with someone who remembered me.
I ducked under his arm and headed down the hall. I felt him watch me go. I’d meant to strip in front of him, to tease him and make him feel the same uncertainty I did, but I already felt too naked under his gaze.
As soon as I closed the bathroom door between us, I took a long, shuddering breath, as if I’d almost forgotten to breathe when he was near me.
Chapter Thirteen
Azrael
Seven years earlier
I woke in the shadows of my room. My laundry was hanging across the line over the sink, although it had taken me the last two months to teach Faer how to wash socks competently.
I was generally a level-headed person, but Faer’s deliberate incompetence may have driven me to slapping him with wet socks more times than I ever should have. He’d been rendered helpless—rolling with laughter across the wood floor—so it hadn’t been much of an educational moment.
Still, I had to admit he’d grown on me over the past two months. I might even call him a friend, strangely enough, even though our courts were enemies. I threw my arm over my face to block out the moonlight seeping in through the window, remembering the training yard that morning.
Faer was exasperatingly lazy when it came to his chores and errands. Playfully lazy when it came to getting out of his studies, although he was so bright it all came easily to him anyway. Cunningly lazy when it came to escaping the various facets of hazing the freshmen suffered, and surprisingly adept at getting his peers out of trouble with him. He’d quickly made himself a favorite among the first year students, although the teachers felt a bit differently.
But with all the different shades of Faer’s lazy I’d tried to break since we started school, there was one place he threw himself into his work with full effort.
The training pitch.
Despite everything I’d heard about Faer’s indifference in regard to fighting, he was fierce on the pitch. Earlier that day, we’d had a competition between houses. Each house in the school had picked their favorite senior and junior combination to represent them in a hand-to-hand fight.
Our house had picked Faer and me. He’d grinned at me, sheer delight in his eyes, the crazy kid, and I’d flicked him lightly in the back of the head. “Don’t get smug until we win.”
“Why wait?” he’d asked. “You’re the one who always tells me not to put things off for tomorrow.”
When the four teams fought each other, Faer and I had won easily. We were a flawless team when we worked together.
I rolled over onto my side, curious if he was awake. We hadn’t talked about the fight much afterward. He’d been pulled away into the first-years, and I’d been surrounded by the other upperclassman.
The bed was empty, the blankets dripping off the mattress on the floor because he never made the damned bed unless I threatened him.
The bastard was gone.
I glanced at the bathroom door, but it stood open. He wasn’t in there.
Swearing, wondering what kind of trouble he could have found to get himself into today, I hurriedly dressed.
His sword brace above his desk was empty. I stood there, my jaw ticking, for just one second as my mind melted down imagining what he was up to. Then I grabbed my sword and stormed into the quiet hallway.
In a moment of wishful thinking, I checked the indoor training field and the library first. Both were open all night for the ambitious and thoughtful students. Of course he wasn’t there.
As I headed back down the library steps, I caught a glimpse of movement on the stone wall that surrounded the academy.
There he was, boosting himself up and pausing on the top. Maybe for a brief second, some kind of common sense had disrupted his usual thought processes. Then he dropped out of sight onto the other side of the woods.
The Fae world was always full of danger, but never so badly as at night.
I cursed and started after him. I made sure there were no guards around—their focus was on protecting us from anything that came in, because only one student in the entire population was so foolish as to go out—and then dropped into the quiet of the woods.
The forest looked like a wonderland right now, with smooth, shiny snow gleaming under the moonlight and the trees all edged with snowy lace.
The snow made it easy to follow the idiot’s tracks.
Somewhere along the way the past few months, he’d connived his way into a pair of boots that actually fit. He always talked his way into whatever he wanted. I was normally glad he had that, at least. It was noticeable, because his footprints in the snow were as tiny as his brain. The footprints I left beside him as I stormed after him were much larger.
I glimpsed him in front of me, moving through the woods. I almost shouted at him, but just in case he had a good reason for sneaking through the forest, I moved stealthily after him.
I crept up behind him, and I was almost to him before he whirled. His eyes went wide, so bright and luminous that silvery-blue looked like the moonlight itself in that second.
Then he put a finger to his lips and shushed me.
I could not be held responsible if I murdered him on the spot. Anyone who met him would forgive me.
He extended his arm, pointing to the thing that moved clumsily through the woods. Some kind of monster, far taller than I was, with wicked, dangerous jaws and arms with long claws.
“They can’t live long in the cold,” he muttered. “So where did it come from?”
The monster lurched, and I whispered back, “It doesn’t look like it’ll live long anyway. It’s hurt.”
“Oh, is it?” he asked me innocently, looking every bit the smartass he so often was.
“You,” I said.
“It got away from me last time,” he said. “I came to finish it off.”
“You came to finish it off,” I repeated. “I’m actually going to kill you, Faer, if that monster doesn’t.”
He grinned at me. “Let’s see if you get the chance.”
He moved to attack the monster, stalking it through the forest. His feet were silent, but it smelled him and whirled to attack.
His sword was a flash under the moonlight as he fought a brief bloody fight with the monster that left it sprawled on the snow at his feet. The monster’s blood spread across the snow as Faer flashed me a cocky grin.
“That’s what killed the villager,” he said. “Now the town’s safe.”
“I’m not sure that one killed the villager,” I said.
Faer’s face changed as he understood what I meant, his face going from smug to terrified in an instant as I threw my knife at the monster behind him.
Blood splattered across his face. My knife had stuck in the monster’s eye, and it let out a scream. Then he was moving, finally, diving under the monster’s jaws as the monster lunged at him. He cut one of its legs out and then was back up on his feet, and the thing fell heavily, the force of its huge body making the ground heave.
The trees around us shook with the footfalls of the monsters around us. Another monster broke through the trees, then a third.
Faer and I closed up tight enough to watch each other’s backs.
“You better win this fight,” I warned him. I’d been so proud of him this morning—but that seemed like child’s play now.
“I thought you were implying earlier that I was about to be in so much trouble, I’d be better off dead,” he said blithely.
The monsters attacked, and the two of us went to work.
At the end, we were blood splattered, breathing hard, exhausted.
But we were both alive, and the monsters were dark lumps in the snow.
I turned to Faer, who was bleeding from a gouge wound in his shoulder. His lips moved in a healing spell, but he was struggling, swaying on his feet.
“Let me help you,” I grumbled. “Maybe you deserve to suffer, but I need you to be able to walk back to the academy.”
“Have I ever told you how I appreciate the way you look after me?” he demanded. “Because I don’t.”
He pushed my hands away as I reached for him. I stopped and stared at him.
“You’ve lost yours gods-damned mind,” I said. “Push me one more time, Faer.”
“I can take care of it myself,” he said, just as he wobbled and went down, sitting heavily in the snow.
I snorted and sank to my knees in front of him, reaching for his jacket. He tried to fight me off, but I was done with his shit today. I pushed him back in the snow, ripping his jacket and his shirt open. “You’re too stubborn to listen to correction or to accept help, and both—”
I broke off abruptly as I realized why Faer had tried so hard to keep me from looking closer at the nasty red wound in his shoulder or the scrapes that ran down across his… breast.
Because Faer wasn’t Faer at all.
Chapter Fourteen
Alisa
My shower turned cold far sooner than it should have. I knew exactly how long it took my hot water heater to give up the ghost: eleven and a half minutes.
My hair was streaming wet down my back, drenching my t-shirt to my spine, as I headed down the hall to the kitchen.
Duncan was doing my dishes. Steam billowed around his broad shoulders, his muscles rippling as he scrubbed out a pan. I’d burned rice in that pot and I’d been seriously considering trashing it rather than trying to deal with the pattern of rice grains singed permanently into the bottom.
“What are you doing?” I asked, just as Tiron, humming cheerfully, mopped his way into the kitchen. I stared between the two of them, “Are you two like…house elves?”
Duncan turned and threw the sponge at me, and I ducked it so it went sailing over my head. He crossed powerful arms over his chest. “House elves?” His tone was affronted.
“Well, what’s with the cleaning?” I asked.
“You might want to come back here one day and in that case, it might be best if the place hadn’t been condemned.” Azrael spoke right over my shoulder, and I jumped. I could almost feel the low timber of his voice rolling through my bones. He’d caught the sponge against his chest—there was a wet spot about his left pec—and he threw it back at Duncan.
Azrael looked at me in exasperation. “You’re still a slob.”
“I’m not a slob,” I began.
He pressed his hand over my mouth, a mischievous look in his eyes. That casual, easy touch made my eyes widen, but instead of wanting to kill him, his touch sent a strange tension rippling down my spine.
His voice was warm as he teased, “Let’s not start lying to each other now. Can I show you something?”
“I guess,” I said.
Azrael led me into my bedroom, which caused me to give him a distinctly skeptical look. Then I realized all my clothes had been taken off the bed. “What happened to my clothes?”
“They’re being laundered. They’ll be returned to your apartment tomorrow.” He shrugged. “Maybe you could get a laundry hamper.”
“I have a laundry hamper,” I said, “it’s just full of books because I—you know what, I’m not discussing this with you.”
My cell phone chimed, and I checked it, then held it up. “Some of my friends are inbound in an hour.”
“Fantastic,” he said. “I know you still doubt if I’m telling you th
e truth. I just wanted to show you Princess Alisa.”
“Do you have photos or something?”
“No,” he said. He hesitated, touching his collar absently, then shook his head. “No, no photos needed. Someone enchanted you to make you look fully human. I can’t undo that, not here, but I can show you what you really look like for a few moments.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Okay. Except there’s no way for me to know it’s not just a spell that changes my appearance and has nothing to do with how I really look.”
“Clever girl,” he murmured, the words falling from his lips in a way that made me think he’d said them many times before. “Just humor me. See if your appearance wakes your memories.”
My heart began beating fast. It didn’t help that Azrael shifted close to me, his gaze focused so intently on my eyes, then my lips, that I thought he might kiss me. It was too easy to imagine caressing those soft pink lips above the hard angle of that jaw.
His big hands rose and cupped my face, and my heart stopped. His thumbs caressed my cheekbones.
“Sometimes it’s hard to believe that the first time I saw you, I didn’t really see you,” he murmured.
My hands rose automatically to grip those corded forearms, but I didn’t push him away, not yet. “What the hell does that mean? Have you seen me before since I came here?”
“No.” He frowned as he said the word.
He released me, but his hand dropped to my lower back to propel me gently forward toward the mirror. I was only used to being touched that way when Julian or Carter were posing as my boyfriend, but this was the first time I’d felt a male’s touch so acutely. Each one of his fingers felt distinct and warm, his palm firm.
I stepped quickly away toward the mirror, leaving his hand behind. “Do you have enchantments to make people horny in the Fae world?”
“We do,” he said slowly. “Why? Are you afraid someone enchanted you to be…horny?”
I could see his damned face in the mirror over my shoulder. Those beautifully shaped lips twitched in a smile he was trying—and failing—to restrain. From this distance, the devilish specks in his eyes faded; instead, it was hard to tear my eyes away from the magnetic purple.