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Dare doesn’t count out the notes as he slaps two brown ones down on the glass. Neither does he share her pandering desire found in the tentative smile she aims at him as she hands over the cones.

I know Dare well enough that I doubt he’ll ever look at the shop girl with a hint of that lust she craves from him.

She’s too narrow in her shape, too stick-like, and since I met him in the Fae Eclipse, he’s only ever chased females with more generous shapes.

As Dare passes me my ice-cream cone, I notice the inky sketch that was on his palm some phases ago is gone, washed away.

“Decided against the sun?” I clamp my mouth around cold of the ice-cream. My face wrinkles against the instant bite of cold. “I thought you would get it tattooed.”

“I will.” He turns his back on the glass casing. He lifts his free hand and presses it flat against the spot between his pecs. “Right here.”

I study his profile for a moment, the low set of his long lashes—how it casts shadows over his sharp cheekbones. A distant sadness in him.

“You’ll find her,” I say. “You wouldn’t feel her if you weren’t going to find her soon.”

He just glances at me for a heartbeat, then returns to his pink, chunky ice-cream. Like I hadn’t spoken at all, he stares at the table the others are gathered around, but I suspect his mind is elsewhere.

Aleana pushes her paper cup aside. “I don’t like it.”

Her ice-cream isn’t frozen anymore, just a murky liquid with some sweets trickled all over it, and the colours are bleeding.

She wipes are her lips with a napkin as she lifts her gaze over Ridge’s shoulder at me. “Do you have any honeywine?”

I look down at my body, the small black dress and plain black boots. Where would I have honeywine stashed away?

Eamon reaches into his pocket. “I’ll call Bee and get us a table at a bar.”

Daxeel’s jaw clenches, tight. Shadows cut into his cheeks, his dimples deep enough that I think his teeth should shatter in his mouth.

“Bee is a friend in this land,” Eamon adds at Aleana’s questioning look.

Her frown doesn’t lessen as he tugs out a black fone from his pocket.

I step closer.

Just a step, but enough to betray myself. I didn’t know he had one of those fones.

And with this trip, it’s starting to feel like there are so many parts of Eamon I don’t know.

He hits some buttons on the fone then lifts it to his ear.

On the chair beside him, Ridge inches his curious frown closer and studies the back of it as though reading invisible inscriptions, learning all its secrets.

I’m fleetingly reminded of Dare on the street outside of the Midhouse studying the bi-see-kal.

Daxeel’s hard look is lethal enough to completely silence both me and Aleana. Seems about ready to snatch us back to the Midlands and throw us in the dungeons.

I don’t risk so much as a bite of my ice-cream. Not that I liked it anyway, this flavoured winter.

Aleana has taken to staring at a framed portrait of colour on the wall as though it’s the most interesting thing she’s ever seen.

Neither of us move an inch.

Faintly, a trilling sound comes from the fone. So quiet that I’m certain the server who cleans under the shelves across the small shop can’t hear. But then the trilling stops—and there’s a voice to replace it.

I blink, surprise slackening my face.

The echoes of a female’s voice are distant, but undeniably coming from that thing in Eamon’s hand. He speaks when the other voice pauses, and I’m not so focused on what he’s saying, rather that he seems to be communicating with Bee through a black metal slab.