“Linton!” I stop fluffing up the dress, which is looking remarkably un-creased for its night on the floor. “Did you…eatthem?”
He continues to grin.
“But you don’t…eat?” I’m entirely confused.
“Sometimes,” he says with a shrug, “I do.” He yawns widely.
I continue to stare at him.
“I prefer to feed, but some items are consumed,” he says, his brow furrowed as if he doesn’t quite trust the words which come out of his mouth.
For all the moon has regenerated parts of his memory and mind, as he suggests, it hasn’t worked on everything, it would appear.
Otherwise, it’s clear he’s bulkier and in certain places furrier. I return to the bed and sit next to him, the dress folded and placed on a chair nearby.
“You are a contradiction.” I snuggle up to him, and he extends a wing over me.
“I am a Bluecap, not a contradiction,” he says without any irony. “I have entered my mating cycle and as such I need to feed, not eat.”
Okay, so perhaps I’m wrong about his lack of insight.
“It is unfortunately the case the inhabitants of the Yeavering only remember Bluecaps for what we do during our mating cycles and not the assistance we provide at other times,” he says. “But as there are so few of us left, perhaps they will never remember what we were.”
He sounds so sad, I press a kiss to his lips.
“It doesn’t have to be that way.” I gently push his hair back behind his pointed ear, and he hums gently, leaning into my touch. “It is possible to change opinions.”
“Not about Bluecaps, I fear.”
“It depends. Nothing is set in stone, Linton. And whatever we do, we do it together.”
His body goes rigid. “You want to be my mate?”
“I’m here, in bed, naked, with you. What makes you think I wouldn’t want to be your mate?” I ask.
Linton snuggles his face into my hair.
“I’ve never had a mate. I’m not sure how it works.”
“This is how it works.”
“Then I like being mated,” he says, voice muffled and his words tickling my ear.
My stomach is warmed, and the bloom spreads up my chest and around my heart.
I think I like being mated too.
LINTON
“What is it?” Kaitlyn asks as I’m out of the bed and across the room.
“Someone is in our lair,” I say. “Stay here.”
I pick up the set of daggers slung on a hook next to the door, ones I carelessly discarded the last time I used this room. Ones I had never had much of a use for, save practice, until I was taken.
Until the Faerie discovered how deadly Bluecaps could be. And how they could use us. How we could fight in the darkness. How we could enter places no one else could.
And how we could die.
