Radiant Shadows (Wicked Lovely 4)

For me.

Slowly, as if he were spun glass she could break, she leaned in and brushed her lips over his. It wasn’t even really a kiss, just a butterfly brush, but it felt like the sort of kiss that made the world stop turning—which made her even less able to speak.

What follows those sorts of sentences? Or emotions?

Ani started back toward her steed. “Let’s go.”

“Where?” He looked and felt alarmed. “I can’t take you to Jill. She’s in Faer—”

“I know,” she said. Whatever reason the High Queen had for ordering her death presumably hadn’t vanished, and the last thing she wanted was to have Sorcha actively pursuing her too. It hurt to realize that her mother being alive didn’t make her any less gone.

“What are the odds of my surviving? I mean, really?”

Devlin scowled. “Numbers are not what you need to think about. The probability is that Bananach will not stop thinking of you. The statistically likely results are—”

She held up her free hand. “Right. My odds are not good.”

They walked in silence until they reached the road.

“Camping,” she announced. “Rabbit used to take us camping, but only with a host of guards and just for a couple of days.”

“You’re a peculiar creature, Ani.” Devlin started to pull his hand free, but she held on. Just a little longer. She was pretty certain that this wasn’t a side of Devlin she’d be seeing very often.

She walked to the passenger side of the car. “I want to just go roam in the woods.”

“Cities are probably safer.”

Reluctantly, she let go of his hand. “So that’s the predictable answer, right? Bananach would figure you’d be predictable, what with the whole High Court thing. Let’s not be predictable.”

Devlin paused. “If I insist that cities are the better choice? Will you run?”

“No.” She kissed his cheek before she walked away. “You saved my mother and me. You’re deadly enough to keep me safe. And whether you like admitting it or know why, you are all sorts of interested in me. I’m not High Court, but I’m practical enough to sort out the reasons to stay together. I think I’ll keep you for now.”

“You’ll keep me?” He gave her a look that she suspected was intended to be intimidating, but a faery who’d grown up with the Hunt and the King of Nightmares as playmates wasn’t easily browbeaten.

“For now.” She suppressed a smile at the sliver of arrogance in his voice. “You’re not nearly as boring as you pretend, and considering my family, that’s high praise.”

“Indeed.” He put his hand on the passenger door of what was currently an ostentatious red Lexus.

Ani walked around to the driver’s side and looked over the roof at him. A part of her insufficiently used conscience warned her away from him, but for one of the only times in her life, it wasn’t just hunger driving her interest. She liked Devlin.

CHAPTER 21

Devlin chastised himself as they sped along the freeway. He was becoming far too close to Ani. He’d lived forever, and she’d had barely a blink of existence. She was a Hound unlike any other, a faery unlike any he’d known.

And she’s vulnerable.

And she really shouldn’t even be alive.

And losing her would destroy me.

He didn’t believe in inescapable fate. He’d watched both of his sisters sort through threads of possibilities frequently enough to know that few things in the world were certainties. He’d seen threads himself, watched their fluidity, and marveled at their transience. Where Bananach saw the threads that could further discord, Sorcha saw the threads that could further order. Devlin often saw both, but as he looked at Ani, he realized that he saw nothing. Her entire tapestry was blank to him.

Some fragment of a memory of Ani’s life niggled at his mind, but he couldn’t focus on it. Rae. She knew something. He remembered that. What’s the rest? His head throbbed as he tried to make the memory come clear. Why I was sent to kill Ani? If the threat was to Sorcha, he’d have been willing to kill Ani, but despite what Bananach intimated, Devlin didn’t believe that Ani would help Bananach. Ani wouldn’t give her blood to War or kill Sorcha.

Because she isn’t that cruel.

Devlin wondered if the threads had changed because of his actions, if his telling Ani what he’d done had changed her path. Have my choices changed things, or were these choices already ordained? There was no way to ask Sorcha what she had seen before Ani was tied to Devlin, and there was no way to tell if Bananach had interpreted the possibilities truly. The thinnest thread of possibility was enough for War to embrace as fated truth. Her desires clouded her interpretation. It was a perverted sort of hopefulness.