by Nocturne
The weight of the steel in his pocket seemed heavier than it should, and he half turned to adjust the coil of links.
He faced the throne room doors just as they blew open.
Heavy as they were, their wood warped with the force of the blow. The steel filigree screamed in the sudden distortion. The Hunter guarding the entry was thrown aside, while the nearest dozen phae stumbled backward, hair and wings and tails streaming in a tempestuous wind. Vaile inhaled the scent of ocean touched with a wild sweetness, like some exotic bloom cresting a tsunami.
Imogene. He did not speak her name aloud, not in the midst of the treacherous crowd, but his heart lingered on every syllable.
Slowed by the tangle of gawkers, he pushed between the phae who had recoiled from the newcomer with panicked cries.
Imogene. He might not have recognized her if he hadn’t spent one night memorizing her every detail. What had happened to his flighty sylfana? The butterfly-winged spirit had left him and returned as something…else.
The wind prowled like an unseen beast to lift the red-gold curls of her hair in a blazing halo and plaster the wintry-blue shift around her curves. The princess in pink had remade herself in fire and ice. The will-o’-the-wisps knew her though and whirled around her in a joyful spiral.
She stared toward the Steel Throne, her eyes bluer than any sky Vaile had ever flown, and his wings flared, instinctively—ecstatically—seeking the storm she had brought. The nearest phae scattered from the Hunter mist that spun from his dark vanes.
He cleared only a few steps before the Queen’s voice rang out from behind him. “Hunters, stop her! She is Undone!”
The Queen had risen from her throne to point across the room, sending the elf-man reeling back.
The accusation halted Vaile in his tracks, all the momentum leaving his muscles as if the destructive power of an amber sun had gone off within his bones.
Undone? Like the old mad Lord of the Wild Hunt? The knotted scar behind his shoulder cramped, half folding his vanes.
At the same time, Imogene spread her wings. Against the wide-flung doors with their steel spiderweb filigree, the butterfly scales looked soft and fragile—not dangerous, as the Undoing implied, but endangered.
At the Queen’s command, a half-dozen Hunters converged from the far points of the throne room on the lone sylfana. Several of them were too young to have witnessed the old Lord’s Undoing, and the new Lord Hunter had been away at the time, but he led the phalanx of killers with a brittle smile.
The gathered phae scrambled to clear the way, getting more in the way. In their haste, slip-sliding on jeweled heels or cloven feet, a few stumbled into Vaile. He pushed them aside roughly to keep his gaze pinned on Imogene.
The chaos churned in waves around her silent form—as if she were oblivious to the Queen’s charge of coming Undone, not to mention the charging Hunters.
Vaile’s chest burned with the compulsion to cry out her name. He had found her, and he had lost her.
But here she was. Was his knack giving him one last chance to find his way to her?
He had learned to fear the Undoing even before he had lost the whelp’s chain. He had taken up other chains since—the Hunter’s collar, the hounds’ leashes, the steel links of the amber sun—but it was that first chain that bound him still, in knots thicker than the scar that would have kept him from flying if not for a sylfana’s fearless touch.
He could not let her get away again.
With a hard snap, he straightened the remembered twist to his wing and launched himself over the heads of the fleeing phae.
The throne room, large thought it was, offered little room for maneuvering. His trailing boots made the phae below duck and squeal. But the awkward hop put him between the other Hunters and Imogene. He landed with a solid thud and angled himself toward the throne, arms and wings outstretched to ward them away from each other. The Hunters slowed their rush, and their Lord stared at him expectantly, waiting no doubt for the violent undoing of the Undone.
Vaile could not force himself to look at Imogene, though his body yearned toward hers. “Wait.” His voice cracked.
“Hail, Hunter.” Across the empty crystalline hall, the Queen raised her hand in an elegant gesture. A few dozen of her courtiers lingered near the throne, their personal illusions flickering with their unease. “Once again, you bring us the troublesome sylfana.”
He inclined his head. “My Queen, I bring you nothing this time. My hunt is over.” He took a deep breath. “I have found what I was looking for.”
Slowly, he pivoted to face Imogene. The distance in her eyes almost felled him.
When he had flown the Oregon coast, seeking her, he had one night lost track of where midnight-dark sky and boundless ocean touched. He had spiraled for a few frantic heartbeats, out of control, before he found his bearings and righted himself.
He did not think he would be so lucky this time.
He lowered his wings, leaving only one hand outstretched toward her. “You,” he said quietly. “I found you.”
Her voice was even quieter when she answered, “It would be best for you to pretend you never had.”
From her shadowed gaze, he knew she meant not just as a Hunter finds a runaway phae but the way, together, they’d found sweet release.
“I can’t forget,” he told her. “Do you remember you told me once, long ago, that I wouldn’t always feel your touch as I did then? You were right. I feel more.”
So softly they spoke, and still the word feel echoed around them as if it had stolen magic from the very air. Across the room, the Queen descended from the Steel Throne.
Imogene lifted her chin, and her smile at Vaile was cold, colder than an undine’s grave water, colder than Greenland ice under a manticore’s poisonous quills. “How could you feel anything? I couldn’t even see through your glamour, much less touch you.”
“Maybe you didn’t see that I am a Hunter, but you saw something more. Something I’ve never shown anyone.” The furious pressure of the approaching Queen almost knotted his tongue. “You saw a way to my heart, which had never been touched. Until you.”
“A heart can’t be touched.” At the icy cruelty of Imogene’s smile, the nearest Hunter sidled back. “Not unless it is removed from the chest first.” The faintest crack appeared in her cold look when she gazed at Vaile. “As for your so-called heart? It was a lie.”
“No. You didn’t see what I was. But you saw who I am. And who I could be.”
“And who is that, Hunter?”
“Yours. I would be yours.”
The remaining courtiers—who had drifted closer, drawn by the sentiments they had shunned—loosed a whisper of sound, a sigh that vibrated the silver threads of the walls into a single music tone.
“You did touch my heart,” he promised her. “You made me love you.”
The doubt that turned down the corners of her mouth nearly shattered him. If she escaped him again, this time he would die; like a Hunter who lost his prey would be torn apart by his own hounds, so his heart would be shredded. She wavered, as if buffeted by winds that touched only her. But he felt them too, tearing through his veins. His arm—though honed as the rest of him from centuries of flying and fighting—burned with the effort of reaching out. Maybe it would be easier to tuck close and dive until every sensation was stripped away.
But then he wouldn’t have Imogene. He would give her what she wanted—these corrupting, dangerous feelings—even if he had to spin them out of the nothingness of his heart into something real.
Slowly, with her gaze locked on his, Imogene raised her hand.
“No!” Behind him, the Queen’s growl was more sinister than any Hunter’s hound.
But it was the sound of glass whistling through the air that made him whirl.
The Lord Hunter stumbled into his Hunters’ arms as the Queen had shoved him away. The three-sided glass sword of the Wild Hunt beamed in her hand.
She angled the sword toward Vaile and
Imogene. “This farce ceases to amuse me.”
“Not a farce, my Queen.” Vaile took a sidelong step to cover Imogene with his body, but he kept his voice steady. “This is true.”
“True love?” The virulence of the Queen’s sneer melted the diamonds around her neck. The droplets fell like tears only to congeal again as the temperature in the throne room plummeted. “A figment of your imagination. We sacrificed that to be what we are—powerful, glorious, forever. Phae.”
Vaile shook his head. “If we lost it, then I have found it again. Here.”
The Queen raised the sword. Its prismatic edges captured light just as it captured magic, and sliced rainbows all around them. A low, ominous drone pulsed from the glass. “That is nothing. Nothing!”
Her hiss curled up in an icy plume, and the prism went dark. The rainbows winked out, sucked into the glass.
Surrounded by suddenly hungry shadows, Vaile reached for the blue amber necklace. Its power had turned a nameless whelp into a Hunter. Without it, he would be…
Well, if he did this right, he and Imogene would be alive.
The sword flared with stolen light just as he whipped the chain from his pocket. The pendant arced upward like a blue shooting star.
And the pyramid point of the sword—hungrily drawn to magics—tracked its flight.
The Queen cursed. The Lord Hunter launched himself to her side, reaching for her hands to correct the sword’s attack.
But the sword had already chosen its prey, and the fire that licked from its tip was brighter than a thousand amber suns.
The pendant disintegrated in a blue mist, surrendering its magic to the entrapping prism, but Vaile was already whirling away, reaching for Imogene. In the stark light, his shadow was blacker than his spread vanes. Her white wings flared as she slapped her palm into his.
A hard wind lifted both of them and spun them between the twisted wreckage of the double doors. He stumbled into her with a distinct lack of phae grace, feeling like an awkward whelp again, still seeking his wings.
Until she pulled him into her arms and her lips found his…
This, this was everything, everything he wanted, everything he had dreamed.
And it would be the last thing he knew before the Queen’s magic blasted them into oblivion.
He deepened the kiss, a wild dance of tongues since he would never have the chance to dance with her to the pipes and bells of the phae. Instead, the wind sang around them, whistling through the broken filigree of the doors. The wind lifted their wings, his heart, the edge of her skirt up to her thigh.... He clamped his hand on her bare skin and pulled her hard into his body.
His pulse sang louder than the wind, and his blood burned hotter than any amber sun. Imogene’s wisps joined the dance, whirled by her knack. Their little white lights glimmered in the soft facets of the melted diamonds that were caught in the helix winding around them. Between the ruin of the flung doors, Vaile and Imogene were caged in a shine of wisps and diamond and twisted steel.
The Queen’s fury lashed out again, sharpened by the glass sword, but the delicate web—hardly more than nothingness—that had sprung up at their kiss caught and scattered the blast of magic in all directions.
And shattered the sword.
The courtiers screamed and fled from the deadly shrapnel. The Queen’s shriek was louder yet as the shards of the prism remaining in her hand burned with black flames.
The wisps danced on, free as always.
Imogene raised her hand to Vaile’s cheek. “Want to run?”
“Only with you.” He yanked the vial of gate spores from his pocket and scattered a hasty circle.
For a desperate heartbeat, he feared he had used too many on returning the manticore, that the crystal floor was too slick, too desolate, for the gate to bloom, but before his eyes sprang up a circle of ivy. The leafy tendrils wove into the steel lattice. Through the barrier, the Queen’s cries sounded far away.
Imogene touched the heart-shaped leaves. “Where does the gate open?”
“Someplace we can make our own magic.”
Imogene slipped her hand into his. “Take me there, Vaile, my love.”
He kissed her, hard and quick. “I’ve been dreaming of taking you again, ever since that night. But I have loved you far longer than that.”
She touched the curve of his lower lip, and her blue eyes glinted with promises of passion. “As I am yours.” But she looked back over her shoulder between the wrecked doors. “We phae have given up our dreams for illusion. Are they all as lost as I was?”
“You might have been lost, but you found me. You would make an excellent Hunter. Or maybe savior.”
“I doubt the Queen will see it that way.”
“Her lies and stolen power can’t last. I fear it is the court of the steel-born phae that will come undone in the end.”
He took Imogene’s hand and slipped his last piece of blue amber—the ring—over her finger. He raised her hand to his lips, soothing the iron burn across her knuckles; that story would have to wait until they found their new sanctuary.
When the gate magic flared, she raised herself up to kiss him. Her fingers brushed along his jaw and dropped to his neck. The studded collar, long welded in place, sprang open, and he caught his breath.
She half closed her eyes, and the wind of her knack spread his wings with a caress from shoulders to talons. A few wayward wisps tickled under the vanes like bubbles. He had to smile. “I felt that.”
Her answering smile lifted his heart as she stepped into his arms and crossed with him into the gate. “You caught me, Hunter. Just as I wished.”
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Don’t miss the other sensual, paranormal reads from Harlequin Nocturne Cravings, available at www.ebooks.eharlequin.com and wherever ebooks are sold. Titles include: Moonspun by Michele Hauf
Forbidden by Fate by Kristin Miller
The Darkling’s Surrender by Lauren Hawkeye
Night of the Cougar by Caridad Piñeiro
Seduced by the Vampire King by Laura Kaye
Claimed by Desire by Kristin Miller
Hot Demon Nights by Elle James
The Vampire’s Consort by Caridad Piñeiro
Looking for more paranormal romance? The sizzling and spine-chilling books of Harlequin Nocturne are available at www.Harlequin.com or your local bookstore.
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ISBN: 978-14592-3564-9
Dark Hunter’s Touch
Copyright © 2012 by Jessa Slade
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