Sword up, I squint through puffy eyelids and memorize faces on the way out.
Out in the streets, in the thick of battle, sometimes you have to make hard choices. Sometimes you can’t save everyone.
Humans that hang at Chester’s are never going to be at the top of my list.
FOUR
“I want a girl with a mind like a diamond”
I’m attracted to her.
She’s fourteen. And I’m attracted to her.
I’m eight years older than she is. Eleven if you count the three years I spent trying to escape the Fae Silvers. Eight or eleven: what’s the difference? It makes me one seriously fucked-up Highlander.
Or whatever the hell I am.
She’s a bloody mess, literally. Covered with guts and gore from killing, her nose is crusted with dried blood, she’s bruised, and she’s going to have two fierce black eyes before nightfall. It’s too late for ice to knock down the swelling.
And she’s on fire.
Light shines out of her delicate, battered face, blazes in her green eyes. She’s got a head of curly red hair that falls halfway down her back. Everything about her is brilliant and intense. She’s aware and invested in the world in ways most adults never get around to being. I know. I was once, too. Back when I thought hearing the truth in everyone’s lies was my biggest problem. She does everything one hundred and ten percent, with all her heart.
That’s what gets me.
Attraction isn’t always about sex. Sometimes it’s about something far subtler, and far bigger.
I watched her fight.
And something stirred inside me that I thought was dead.
Not my dick. That’s working great. Better than ever. Always hard. Always ready.
What stirred was like gentle rain on a warm summer day. Sweet. Tender. Something I used to be. With my clan. With my nieces and nephews.
She reminds me of my Highlands—to which I can never return.
I know exactly what she’s going to be one day. Bloody hell is she ever.
Worth. Waiting. For.
Too bad I won’t be here anymore.
Take her now.
“Fourteen,” I growl. I’ve gotten good at arguing with the voice inside my head. I get a lot of practice. An Unseelie prince wouldn’t give a second thought about her age. An Unseelie prince would see only that she has the right parts, and temper to spare. The bigger the fight, the better the feast.
“Why the feck does everybody keep saying that like it’s some kind of insult? Like, maybe I managed to forget for a minute?” she says crossly. “Geez! I’ve never seen so many people obsessed with my age!”
Dani bristling is something to see. I smile.
She takes a wary step away from me. “Dude, you planning to eat me or something?”
My smile vanishes. I look away.
I wear a mask. A face that isn’t mine.
I used to have what women called a killer smile.
Now I have a killer’s smile.
“ ’Cause, like Ryodan already bit me once today. I’m not in the mood for any more teeth in me anywhere.”
Ryodan bit her? One more reason to kill him. I look back at her, my face void of all expression. There’s no point in trying to look reassuring. This face can’t pull it off. “No biting. I promise.”
She squints at me suspiciously. “Dude, what are you? Unseelie or human? What happened to you?”
“Mac happened to me.” She flinches when I say it, and I wonder why. I blame Jericho Barrons, too. If I survive what I’m turning into, I’ll kill them both. Hate ripples through me, dense and black and suffocating. If not for them, I’d still be me. Then again, if Mac hadn’t done what she’d done, I wouldn’t be here at all. Then again, if Barrons hadn’t done what he’d done, or rather failed to do, what Mac did might not have turned me into this. Barrons didn’t check my tattoos before we performed a dangerous Druid ritual, then he abandoned me in the Silvers to die. When Mac found me in the Silvers, she fed me Unseelie to keep me alive. It’s impossible to decide which one of them I blame the most. So I blame both and I’m getting happier about that every day.
I saw Mac a few nights ago, across the club at Chester’s, looking blond and beautiful and happy. I want to take all that shiny-happy-blondness, twist it into a garrote, and strangle her with it. Hear her beg, and kill her anyway, love every minute of it.
Later that night, I’d stared at myself in the mirror for a long time. Arm bent behind my head, scratching my back with a knife—it itches all the time now—relishing the slide of warm blood on my skin as it ran down my spine into my jeans. I used to hate blood. Now I could bathe in it. Mother’s milk.
“Yeah, she does that,” Dani agrees with a sigh. “She happened to me, too.”
“What did she do to you?”
“It’s more like what she will do to me if she catches me,” she says. “Don’t want to talk about it. You?”
“Don’t want to talk about it.”
“Better things to talk about anyway. So, what were you doing at Chester’s?”
Good question. I have no bloody clue. I think the sheer number of Unseelie gathered calls to something in my blood. I don’t know why I go half the places I go anymore. Sometimes I don’t even remember the hours leading up to it. I just become aware that I’m someplace new with no memory of when I decided to go or how I got there. “I wanted a beer. Not many choices left in Dublin anymore.”
“No shit,” she agrees. “Not just for beer, for everything. Which side are you on?” she says bluntly. “Human or Fae?”
It’s a good question. I don’t have a good answer.
I can’t tell her I don’t discriminate. I despise everyone. Well, almost. There’s this fourteen-year-old redhead with a mind like a diamond. “If you’re asking if I’ve got your back, lass, I do.”
She narrows her eyes and peers at me. We’re standing outside Chester’s in a pool of light. The sky is so overcast it looks like dusk at three in the afternoon. I get a sudden image of us from above: slim, delicate-faced young girl in a long black leather coat, hands on her hips, staring up at a Highlander-going-Unseelie prince. The image is painful. I should be a good-looking twenty-two-year-old college student with a killer smile and a bright future ahead of me. We’d plot and plan and fight the good fight together. That version of me would watch out for her. Make sure nobody does to her what the voice in my head tells me the first Unseelie that catches her without her sword is going to do. What a part of me wants to do, too. Fury fills me. At them. At me. At everything. “You never take that sword off your body, right?”