Page 67

Please, love me back.

Daxeel bows his head, bringing his brow to rest on the crown of my head.

My lashes flutter shut.

And for a moment, we stay like this.

In our little pocket of dark shadows.

Then Eamon barks up the stairs, “Sun-up within the hour!”

Daxeel falls his weight back onto one boot; he pulls away from me and his gaze flares, mutinous.

I huff a breath and push by him.

He tails me out of the club.

It’s quieter outside now, and I vaguely wonder how long it’s been since we arrived. The queue of humans lining the faces of the buildings has dispersed, whether some left or they all made it inside, I don’t know.

Just some black kars rumble on the side of the road and a young man is folded over between two of them, heaving up whatever drinks he’s had throughout the night. A sparkling glitter-faced woman pats him on the back, but her attention is on the glowing screen of her fone.

Eamon has his hand fisted around the handle of a kar door. He yanks it aside with an awful groan, then gestures us in. His weary eyes lift to the end of the road, to the horizon, as though sensing the sun creeping closer. It is, but the sky hasn’t touched pink yet, and so we have time to make it back to the Midlands before Daxeel is incinerated.

Ridge hands over Aleana before he ducks into the kar’s cabin. Eamon manoeuvres her inside, out-cold and limp as a dead weed.

I make to follow before Daxeel looks back at Dare, “Are you coming?”

I trace his gaze over my shoulder.

Dare has his arm thrown around Bee’s shoulders. They both watch the flickering glow of the fone in her slender, long fingers.

Their gazes lift at the same precise moment. She wears a small smile; Dare’s mouth twists into a half-grin.

“Oh, we’re going to get food,” she says. Her lashes are low over her green eyes, so muted that they wear greyish hues to them.

“Food?” I frown between them. “There’s plenty of food at Hemlock—”

But then Daxeel throws me a stark look, and I realize it all.

Dare doesn’t need to return to the Midlands before the sun comes up; his half blood keeps him as safe as Eamon in the light.

And I doubt Dare is sticking around for the human world’s cuisine, but rather to taste the kinta.

“Ah.” I nod once, then twinkle my fingers in a wave. “Bye, kinta!”

“Bye, halfling,” she croons after me.

She doesn’t see my smile as I duck into the kar.

Some moments later, Daxeel joins us—then we leave this world for our own, and I’m glad to return.

10

††††††

All the glamours fade away by the time we’re back in the Midlands and hailing down a carriage. The ride back to Hemlock is so long that the exhaustion has dug down to the bones of us all.

No one speaks in the late hour of the carriage and the Quiet outside thickens the silence.