Who cares?her unicorn said impatiently.We know how wonderful he is. If they don’t get it, that’s their loss.
True. But even though she was feeling more mixed-up than ever about who she wanted to be, some part of her still wanted the security of Seraphina and Blake’s approval. Even thetenuousversion of that she’d gotten over the last few months had been like a drug to her. Would it be so bad to let them think that she was getting the kind of picture-perfect marriage they would see a happy ending? Didn’t she sort of owe them that, after all the trouble she’d given them?
And there really had been trouble. After Seraphina’s first match had rejected her, Seraphina had been totally humiliated. She’d begged Iris to tone it down long enough for her to get matched again.
Iris had, and Seraphina had sealed the deal with Blake. But then Iris had gone back to being herself—and even though no one had come right out and said so, she knew that everyone thought that if it weren’t for her, Blake would have snagged the spot on the Silver Council that had opened up last year. He came from the most prestigious family in Purity.
If everyone here thought that she and Keith were going off to disappear into traditional, cookie-cutter respectability, Blake and Seraphina wouldn’t have to shoulder the blame for any of Iris’s behavior. Handling her exit just right would be the perfect going-away present.
“I don’t relax much around my family either,” Iris said honestly. “I know they love me, but I still play it safe. Seraphina, my parents, Blake ... they’re all a lot more like the Council than they’re like me. Lately I just try to make sure I don’t embarrass them.”
“Nobody should be embarrassed by you.”
“Trust me, it’s a lot easier to say that now than it used to be.” She tried to toss that off lightly, like it hadn’t been the most major transition of her life. “Let me just get dressed, and I’ll show you my ... the place.”
“I’m excited to see this mysterious place,” Keith said.
His smile made her feel unsteady. Iris decided this was a much better kind of nervousness than the foreboding she was feeling about everything else.
*
“So do we walk or—”
Drive, Keith had been about to say, but suddenly he was talking to a unicorn.
Of course. He did so much driving on the job that it was now his default way of getting around, but that wasn’t how things worked in Purity. When your whole population could turn into horses, you didn’t usually need cars to get around. You could just trot.
Unicorn Iris gave him a quizzical look and let out an inquisitive-sounding whinny.
“Nothing,” Keith said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Okay, I understand how I forgot that people around here leave their doors unlocked, but this is a hell of a thing to space on. Please blame it on me being tired.”
He lifted his hand, a question in his eyes.
To his overwhelming delight, Iris moved into his touch, laying her long neck against his hand and letting him stroke her silky mane.
She was beautiful like this, too: tall and sleek, a mahogany bay. The sunlight made the red undertones in her coat gleam until they looked almost scarlet. Her horn, though—
There were old stories about a unicorn’s true self showing in the colors and patterns of their horn, like it was a kind of aura. Keith had never been sure if he believed that. He’d never had any guesses about what his own horn supposedly said about him.
But when he looked at Iris, he believed all the legends.
Her horn was shot through with rainbows, with all the same flashes of color that peeked out around her cottage. Keith had seen crystalline horns before, ones that acted as prisms for the light around them, but Iris’s wasn’t like that. The colors here weren’t reflected; they were natural.
No, this didn’t look like anything as simple as crystal. Iris had a whole treasure trove of gems in every color Keith could think of.
It was just who she was. She had succeeded in masking those colors to make the Council more comfortable, but they were still there. And they were absolutely stunning.
“I think I’d still know it was you,” Keith said, “even if I hadn’t seen you shift.”
He stepped back and relaxed into his own shift form.
It had been a while, but it was still effortless, especially since his unicorn had been so chatty lately. It was just like exhaling a deep breath and shaking his shoulders out, except at the end of it, he looked like something else.
Iris gave him another whinny, this time in greeting, and bumped her nose against his.
Keith bumped back.
Hellhounds, Keith knew, had telepathic powers when they were in their shift form, and Logan was able to use his gift to have whole mental conversations with Iz. Keith had always sort of envied that. He sometimes had a hard time talking to people evenwithouttelepathy. He’d thought that it must be nice to be able to reach out to someone else that way, especially when the someone else was your mate.
