“I’m too old for jump scares!” he shouts.
“Hush, my love. It’s okay. The nasty monster is just sitting beside you.”
“It’s not. She just appeared. Like, right there,” Hartley sounds perilously close to tears.
“There, there, my poor love.”
“I just wanted to be friends,” I say as sweetly as I can.
“Christ, that is creepy,” Hartley sobs. “No, we are not being friends, and stop smiling like that! Where’s Puppy? I like him. Says what he means, means what he says.”
I wrinkle my nose and pounce into the bush, coming out with a rat-like creature that screams.
“Put that down!” Ronit snaps.
“I’m hungry!” I snarl.
“You are not eating weird Earth creatures,” he growls at me and grabs my hand over the creature, gripping the nerves until my fingers open. It runs off screaming.
“Why not?” I snap.
“Because no one can stomach you ripping into live prey and eating it like a damn monster.”
“We can’t all be born in the courts of Fae,” I sneer, accidentally giving away that I know more than I let on. “It must be such an incredible miracle to be so blessed with such high morals.”
“I don’t need high morals not to want to vomit watching you behave like a creature from Nightmare.”
He says Nightmare as if it's foul, like it’s disgusting.
I lunge forward, and when his hand slams into my face, I lick it.
He tosses me across the clearing and curses up a storm.
“That is disgusting. Never, ever put your filthy tongue on me again, Strega.”
“Or what?” I say from where I’m rolling in the grass.
“Or I will tear it from your head,” Ronit says in a low, dark promise.
I sigh. “You monsters and Fae are all the same. Taking eyes, tongues, limbs. So unimaginative.”
He splutters, and it’s so cute I have to turn away to keep from laughing. I’m outside for the first time in months; I can move, I can find food. This is brilliant.
Even these stick-up-their-ass Sirens aren’t going to bring me down.
I leap up the nearest tree and race around the canopy in a circle, while Leaf whines in distress below.
“Mei, please come here.”
I consider ignoring it, but Diablos did ask so nicely.
I drop into a crouch in front of him, landing so suddenly and unexpectedly that Diablos snorts a plume of black smoke in my direction.
“Stop that!”
Hartley screams again.
Diablos exhales slowly through his nose. “Mei, stop scaring my mate.”
