He copied me, his arms against mine, and held me close.
With a simple thought, the ground beneath us vanished and we began to soar upward.
Strangely, there was no fear. Because we wouldn’t fall. Not unless we wanted to.
Though Iwasfalling, wasn’t I? Not physically, but every part of me was overcome by a fierce tenderness—a mix of softness and fire—and every bit of it was for Reed.
We shot up above the canopy of the forest, the trees becoming dark shapes far below us. The Cascade Mountains stretched out on either side of us, dark peaks illuminated silver by the moon. Even Mount Rainier, capped with snowand startlingly near, seemed surreal—so strikingly beautiful it couldn’t possibly exist in the real world.
“This is incredible,” Reed breathed.
“You’re incredible,” I told him. Then I kissed him again, as we hung suspended in the air, surrounded by the moon and a sea of stars.
We were startled awake by a knocking at the door.
The dream shattered around us and Reed bolted upright in bed. I did the same. The window on the far side of the cabin told me it was just before dawn, the night beginning to lighten to day.
Reed and I exchanged a troubled look. No one in the pack had interrupted us this early—not since I had arrived. Something was very wrong.
Another sharp knock at the door propelled us into motion. Reed and I both jumped out of bed and began pulling our clothing on.
I grabbed my gun from the bedside table and readied it, standing behind Reed so I could cover him. Though, the monster in the woods probably wouldn’t have knocked.
Reed pulled open the door.
A thin, short, redheaded man with bright blue eyes and a smattering of freckles across his nose stood on the doorstep, peering back at us.
“I’m Tamrand,” he told us. “I work at the grill. I need your help.”
“What is it?” Reed demanded.
“Sally’s gone missing,” Tamrand said gravely. “The monster took her.”
CHAPTER TWELVE || REED
“Why are you merely standing there?” Tamrand demanded, though the inflection of his voice didn’t change. “Sally has been taken. You must rally your pack and go find her.”
“Pack?” Harris demanded. “Who the hell is he and what is he doing here?”
“Both good questions,” I replied, eyeing the odd redheaded man on the porch. He was a total stranger—I had never seen him before. So how the hell did he know about us? Did this meanSallyknew what we were? “Who are you?”
“I’ve already told you,” Tamrand said. “I work at the bar and grill in town. I’m Sally’s cook. And she left in the middle of the night. The creature in the woods called to her, and she went away before I could stop her.”
“Called to her?” I demanded, trying to keep up. “What are you talking about?”
“It called out to her with magic and put her into a trance—its spell woke me from my slumber. And Sally went into the woods before I could shake her out of it.”
I studied him, trying to make sense of his presence here. “Is this a trick of some kind?”
“It’s not a trick,” Harris said from behind me, lowering his weapon. He was staring at Tamrand. “Holy shit—Sally wasn’t kidding, was she?”
The strange redheaded man tilted his head quizzically at that. I realized his blue eyes were slightly too vivid to be human—almost as if they were faintly glowing. And his heartbeat sounded different, too. Slower than a regular person’s. And his scent was all wrong—lavender mixed with petrichor. It wasn’t human and it didn’t have the chemical twang of body wash or cologne to explain it away.
Harris’s words suddenly clicked into place, and I remembered Sally joking with us that she had a faerie in the kitchen. With a lurching in my stomach, I realized Tamrand wasn’t human at all. He was something else entirely.
“You’re fae,” I breathed, staring at him. I’d heard stories about the faeries in the Otherworld, but I’d never actually met one before.
Tamrand inclined his head by way of reply.
