Are you sorry we had to leave Tòrr behind?I ask her.
She snorts.Not in the slightest. His ego left no room in the stall for me.
I grin, scratching her neck fondly. Still, I know she feels a deep love for the grumpy monoceros…even if the part about his oversized ego is true.
When the sun dips behind the horizon, we make camp off the road, in the ruins of an abandoned old shrine to Immortal Alyssantha. It’s barely more than a few moss-covered marbleblocks, now, the wooden roof long ago rotten out and overtaken by nature. A weather-worn stone statue of the goddess herself is half-buried under creeping phlox.
“Does it bother you?” Basten jerks his head toward the statue. “We could camp somewhere else. Somewhere without a whiff of your family.”
I smile gently. “This is fine—after all, I haven’t met Alyssantha yet. Maybe she isn’t as odious as the others. There’s always hope, right?”
He snorts as he drags over a fallen log to make a fire. “So far, the odds aren’t good. Six fae awake, only one tolerable.You.”
I laugh as I gather kindling from around the clearing. “Woudix isn’t that bad.”
Basten growls deep in his throat, heavy with distaste. He drops the log into the middle of the clearing and then comes over to sweep me up in his arms instead, like laying claim. “If I don’t ever see that damn coffin-peddler again, I’ll die happy.”
I rest a staying hand on his chest, gazing up at him through my lashes. “He only wants to help me.”
“He wants tofuckyou.”
“Easy, wild stallion,” I tease, twirling my finger around the laces at his shirt collar. “Not every person walking around with a dick thinks about sex as much as you do.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he grunts doubtfully. “And you have a lot to learn about men, little violet. Same goes for gods.”
His gaze locks to mine, and his hands come to cup my jaw. I can feel the heat of him, smell the faint trace of leather and salt on his skin.
He kisses me—softly at first and then positively sinfully—and the world disappears.
When he pulls back, just barely, his lips hover above mine. “Alyssantha must still have some hold over this place,” hemurmurs. “No other goddess than the one of sex could dare stir this much want.”
I let out a breath heavy with desire. “Then let her spirit watch,” I whisper, pulling him back down.
When we finally break the kiss, breathless and spent, he heads to the edge of the clearing. “I’ll take the horses to the stream to drink, then hunt us something to eat.”
He disappears with Ranger and Myst into the leafy underbrush, where a burst of iridescent dragonflies rise into the sky in his wake. They’re so beautiful they make my heart ache—but it’s also a stark reminder that we aren’t simply Basten and Sabine on the road to Duren, like before.
We’re in Volkany. A land where the plants gleam and the insects glow.
I settle near the overgrown statue of Alyssantha, arranging the kindling like Basten taught me so long ago. The wood does something to my palms, spurs a strange, feverish tickle across my skin, like it’s calling to me.
I glance in the direction where Basten disappeared. I can barely hear him and the horses at the distant stream. They won’t be back for a few minutes.
“Okay, you can do this,” I tell myself, crouching in front of the log pile. Fire, after all, is pure nature, right? And nature is my domain.
“No Woudix? No problem.” I cup my hands around the dry kindling, and after a deep inhale, slowly let my human glamour fade away like shaking off raindrops.
I think about Woudix’s words, how he pressed his hand over mine, and how my fey responded to his own.
Around me, the wind dies down, and the air grows warmer on my palms, even though the sun has sunk behind the horizon.
Something shifts inside me. It’s as though my attention moves from my head—my ever-messy swirl of human thoughts—to my chest. No, even lower. My belly. As if I’m living truly in my body now, not my mind.
When I breathe out, it’s with sparks at my fingertips.
There’s a crackle. A burn.
My eyes shoot open to stare in disbelief at the small flame flickering on the kindling, which quickly grows into a tidy fire. I let out an excited shriek and look around at the darkening forest, wanting verification from the nearby birds and insects that I really did this—hell, from Basten, too, but he’s too far away.
