Since he’s taken physical form, I pull myself out of the shadows too. The moment I’m visible in front of him, his smile stretches a little wider. “You came.”
I gaze up at his coolly handsome face. “Of course I did. We’re a team, aren’t we?”
Hail’s shoulders hunch slightly.
He looks at the ground. “I’ve never been very good at acting like a part of the team. I—I wanted to tell you that I’d like to change that. At least with you. You’ve been so patient and caring with me, while I treated you like garbage?—”
I touch his arm to stop him. “It’s all right. Well, treating me like garbage isn’t all right, but I know you didn’t really want to hurt me. You just have too many other feelings that keep clashing with each other and throwing you off.”
He gives a hoarse chuckle. “Yeah, that’s one way of looking at it.”
His forehead furrows, but he doesn’t look up. “I don’t know how you can think I still deserve your concern. Or anything. You could tell me to get lost.”
“What good would that do anyone?”
“You wouldn’t have me hassling you anymore.”
I let out a gentle huff. “You don’t hassle me that much. And if you stayed away, I’d just wonder whether you were okay, what was happening to you—it wouldn’t stop me from caring.”
Hail’s gaze jerks up to meet mine. He stares at me for a moment. “Why? Why me?”
I grope for the right words. “I mean, it isn’t just you I care about. Obviously. And I think every being deserves to have someone looking out for them. But… I especially care becauseyoucare. It doesn’t matter how much you pretend not to—I know you worry about the other shadowkind, and mortal animals too. That’s why you’ve said so much awful stuff about humans. That’s why you went off on your own today, isn’t it?”
“I guess that’s true. But even that…”
Hail trails off with a grimace and sits on a fallen tree that hasn’t yet been cleared from the park woods. “Even that is me trying to make up for fucking up, in a way. It’s not like I managed to protect anyone from getting hurt in the first place.”
I sink onto the trunk about a foot away from him. “Why don’t you tell me about it? I’d like to know what made you so angry that it’s still tripping you up after all this time.”
Hail’s hands flex where they’re resting on his knees. Then he reaches out and ever so carefully wraps his slender fingers around mine.
Despite his chilly looks and often icy demeanor, his touch is nothing but warm. More heat blooms beneath my skin, echoing the flare of desire the simple touch provoked in him too.
His grip tightens as if he’s gathering his resolve. “It was… I don’t know how many years ago. At least a few. When I first came into being in the shadow realm, I ran into another fae who’d been alive for centuries. He loved taking trips into the mortal realm—he spent most of his time there. He’d tell me stories of the grand forests and the creatures that lived in them, all the things that grow and thrive…”
Fondness and sorrow twine together with the memories he’s sharing. They squeeze around my heart. “He meant a lot to you.”
“Yes. And when he invited me to join him on his next venture mortal-side, of course I wanted to see this world for myself.”
Hail drags in a shaky breath. “We came through a rift he’d used many times before. It was up in some northern region—he had wintry affinities like I do—and there weren’t often humans around. He’d barely talked about them. Mostly he liked communing with the plants and the lesser creatures. And that was good. But after he’d been showing me around the woods for a few days, we ran into a group of humans. Hunters—the regular kind.”
There’s an ominous note in his voice. I bristle instinctively. “What did they do?”
“We didn’t realize they were there,” Hail says. “They were hidden away in one of those shelters for hunting… We’d let out our full fae forms while we wandered around, so they didn’tsee fellow humans. They saw monsters. And they treated us like that. They started shooting, and then a few came after us with hunting knives and I don’t even know what else—they were so determined to destroy us…”
I shift closer to him and tuck my arm right around his elbow. “They were scared. But that doesn’t make it okay. Sometimes humans do awful things when they’re scared. All kinds of beings do, I think.”
“Yeah. Itwasawful. They came at Resin so hard he couldn’t pull back into the shadows, and his essence was just pouring out of him. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never seen humans before, or guns, or… I was injured and scared too, and I ran off.”
He hangs his head. “They butchered him so badly he died. Just disintegrated into essence and blew away.”
A suffocating surge of guilt, grief, and frustration rolls over me.
I lean into Hail as if I can absorb enough of his anguish to relieve the burden. “I’m so sorry. That must have been so hard for you, especially when you were totally new here, and he was such a good friend to you.”
“Yeah.” The fae man’s voice comes out raw. “That’s what humans are like. They just kill whatever doesn’t fit their idea of what the world should be. We weren’t harming anything, and they still?—”
His jaw clenches. “I know you think most humans are good at heart. And I’m not even saying you’re wrong. But I’ve hardly seen anything except the bad. It’s difficult to believe, no matter how much you argue it.”
