Page 16

ALASDARE

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To those with more fragile sensibilities, it might be grim to walk through this graveyard.

Dare sees the purpose in it.

A concrete jungle in forever night, once thick with the burning stench of pollution, now breezed with the fresher scent of flowers and trees and dewy soil. The difference is small, the remnants of the world before the dark still lingering in the air, but the progress is undeniable.

Last time he walked these streets, they were bustling with humans, with those rumbling kars speeding down the road, blaring with war cries and wheels skidding and screeching. Shop fronts were alight with the colours of the Sabbat, unnatural lights twinkling with inviting winks, the sweet aroma of sugar luring in buyers, but layered with the stench of burning hair and hot iron, that distinct bitterness that warned the humans to stop—stop fuelling the unnatural, stop their wrongdoings.

The earth was pleading with them.

But they didn’t stop.

So the darkness came.

The iilra touched the Cursed Shadows with poison, a sickness to spread throughout the human realm.

Those who didn’t die in the panic and chaos of the darkness invading their world will have suffered the sickness, the disease that festers in the body, and even fewer will survive that.

The result is obvious as he walks these dead streets.

Now, the silence in this once-bustling town is deafening. The silence is reminiscent of the woods when a predator prowls, it is the sudden quiet of the birds, and it presses down on the lifeless streets with the same unease that comes before that predator strikes its prey—the kill strike.

That’s what will come to the human lands.

The kill strike from the dark fae.

Any survivors who hide out in these dwellings reaching up to the skies in a mass of brick and concrete and metal will fall when the dark fae bring their swords, their war.

Dare’s steps keep to the silence.

He is the predator in those silent woods.

He prowls around the abandoned kars piled along the road, some collided together to merge, others toppled over; he side-steps the open doors and the fallen bags and tumbled carts; avoids the puddles of blood and rainwater, the streams of crimson that run fresh from the mangled corpses that have obviously been either hit the kars or trampled by the boots of fellow humans.

Dare walks the dead streets, but his gaze flickers over the windows high above in the ugly tower dwellings.

In his focus, he catches the occasional flurry of a heartbeat or a breath that’s exhaled too loud.

Survivors of the darkness.

Perhaps some are sick, ailing into death, and others were untouched. They think themselves lucky, perhaps, to have avoided death.

Dare could kill them now. Hunt them, chase up the towers, then head down and flush them out.

He could… but he is not here to start the invasion.

He is here for the kinta.

So he passes the hiding survivors, the ones who haven’t the faintest clue what lurks in the streets below, or what’s to come for them, and he makes his way through the graveyard of kars.

Eamon trails behind him. Steps as soft as his breaths, he keeps Dare’s practiced pace all the way to the leafier streets where there are no tower dwellings, less kars, narrower roads, and more gardens—

Until Dare comes to a stop.

His chin lifts and the piercing glare of his gaze is aimed up at the brown brick face of the box-like dwelling.

Ugly is the first word to spring to his mind, the same thought he had when he first came to this building.

Dare’s tone is soft, “Fifth floor.”

Eamon looks up at a row of old, sliding windows lined with a grey metal.

In the thick darkness draped over the streets of London, both Eamon and Dare see as clearly as they do in the light of dusk. The dokkalf blood that courses through them sharpens their sight and melts them into the dark.

Eamon tilts his head. “This is where she lives?”

Dare nods once.

Eamon fishes out the small black fone from his back pocket. “I’ll try again.”

It is useless.

Just like the last time Eamon tried to use that thing to talk to Bee, it doesn’t light up. It doesn’t turn on. For a moment, Eamon smacks his thumb on the face of the fone before he grunts an annoyed sound, then shoves it back into his pocket.

“That window there,” Dare lifts his chin in a gesture to the glass with the heavy white curtains, “will take us into her home.”

“Or,” Eamon sighs and moves for the concrete steps, “we could use the doors.”

Dare frowns at the back of his head, the slender braids weaved into a thicker plait that’s specked with paint, but Eamon is already at the first grey step, stained with only the gods know what.

Dare pushes into step behind him.

The front door isn’t any better than the rest of this wretched place. Thick metal painted red, peeling all over, and a frosted glass window thicker than bone. A decrepit door that opens to a decrepit place.

Eamon’s nose crinkles as he flattens his hand on the metal door—then pushes. He looks over his shoulder with a smarmy smirk, an unspoken ‘ I told you so.’

Dare gives no answer. His gaze shifts over Eamon’s shoulder to the stairwell, thick with a darkness that stinks of bin liquid. That’s what it is burning his nose. The juice that leaks from rubbish piled too long, an overripe stench of citrus.

He finds the culprit, fast.

At the foot of the concrete stairs leading up to the next level, there are three black bags made from a glossy material, a material that looks wrong . They sit, slumped, in a puddle of stink.

Dare’s upper lip twitches as he shoves by Eamon and starts up the stairs, an urgency in his steps.

Eamon follows.

It isn’t until they reach the third floor that the stench of the bin puddle softens. It hardly disappears, but the burn doesn’t sting at the back of Dare’s mouth anymore.

Still, his lips are pinched shut as he moves for the next staircase—then he pauses.

Slowly, he turns his chin to his shoulder.

His gaze finds Eamon, standing, waiting for him to move, a frown on his face and he stares back at him.

Then, Eamon understands, and he shifts aside, letting Dare’s gaze pierce into the front door of a dwelling.

Eamon’s whisper is so soft, so quiet, that no human would hear it beyond that door, “What?”

Dare listens, sharp.

A rustling sound. A crumpling sound. A faint heartbeat. So faint—so near death.

He lets his focus shut his eyes, lets his instinct drive him. The human beyond that door, in that dank, dark dwelling, is dying… in bed. The rustling, crumpling sound can only be the shift of a quilt sheathed in cheap, coarse linen.

Dare slides his boot back over the concrete step, then lets it drop down onto the landing.

Eamon takes a swift step closer to him. “We are not here for that.”

Dare slides his darkening gaze to the honeyed face before him. “Don’t tell me a recruiter cares for human life.”

Eamon’s mouth tenses. “I recruit for a purpose.”

“Torture or pleasure?”

Eamon tuts. “You know why. The humans are used to fuel the magick of the lands. The humans are sacrificed for our gods’ favour.”

Dare’s smile is small, dangerous. “Strange that the same practice isn’t required in the dark lands, isn’t it?”

Eamon gives no answer.

And Dare lets his smile fade before he relents, turning his back on the landing and hiking the rest of the stairs in silence.

His swift pace only stops when he reaches the door with the false gold plate nailed onto it: NO.9

Eamon steps closer. “Is it unlocked?”

“I don’t know.”

“Haven’t you been here already, looking for her?”

“I didn’t use the door,” Dare says with a glance over his shoulder. “I scaled the front, came in through the window.”

Eamon’s huff is tired. “You and windows,” he mutters under his breath, then reaches for the cold metal doorhandle. His grip is firm before he tries it, once, twice—then releases it with a curt sigh. “Locked, then.”

Dare takes two steps back.

Eamon leans aside, his spine pressing into the railing.

It comes quick and effective.

In a flurry, Dare is a smear of black and gold, and he boots the door so hard that it flies off the hinges and into the dwelling.

A shuddering crash rattles the landing.

Eamon makes a grim face. “If that poorly human didn’t know we were here, he does now.”

Dare looks over his shoulder, brow arched. “He?”

“I guessed.”

“A female is more likely to take to her bed in death.”

Eamon shoots him a quizzical look.

“Females adore their beds,” Dare says with a shrug. “I always imagined it was something to do with nesting.”

Dare turns his back on Eamon and peers into the darkness of the doorless dwelling.

“My mother always feigns headaches in the middle of the phase,” he murmurs, soft, “just so she can cosy up in her bed a while. Not to sleep, not to read… just to be .”

Eamon’s quizzical frown remains, and it’s fixed on the back of Dare’s head, the faint waves of his dark hair. “Unless we find Bee in her bed, none of that is relevant right now…”

Dare tuts, soft, then steps through the threshold. “You spend too much time with Nari. Her moodiness is rubbing off on you.”

Eamon fights the urge to roll his eyes as he follows Dare into the dark home—and it is a home .

Despite the decrepit face of the building, the concrete coldness of the stairwell, the old doors and the stink of abandoned rubbish, Bee has made her place a home.

The entrance opens into the lounge with an attached kitchen, small, but cosy. Eamon sweeps his gaze all over, then lands it on the wooden door on the right wall, beside the record player and vinyl collection; the door is all the way open, revealing the basics of an ordinary bathroom. White tiles, white tub, white toilet.

If Eamon was candid about his preferences in the human realm, it would be that. The plumbing. Toilets, tubs that drain into pipes. Even the basin, though this one is smeared with beige toned face-paint, spilled bags of cosmetics, and soap residue.

He turns his cheek to the obviously unoccupied bathroom.

Across the room, the windows overlook the street they came in from, draped by thick curtains, and the black rods are weaved by a type of devil’s vine, the sort from the human realm that doesn’t poison the air, doesn’t gleam.

The two sets of doors are what hook Eamon’s gaze.

Dare moves for the one on the left, so Eamon heads for the one on the right.

Between the doors is a scuffed wood dining table, circular and littered with parchments and grey devices that Eamon understands to be folded, flat com-poo-turs . A type of device he has not familiarised himself with.

Dare considers the table of mess and devices before he turns to nudge the door open—and Eamon does the same with the other.

Both creak against their unoiled hinges to reveal bedchambers. They are identical in their simple boxed design, far too small to fit more than one person, and even just one person is a stretch.

Dare considers the bedchamber before him. The one he recalls from his time here with Bee. The bed pushed against the wall is much the same as it was that night. Thick, fuzzy blankets thrown around, clothes colour coordinated on racks, books poked out from under the bed, rows of shoes neat on racks.

This bed is where he got his taste of Bee.

A nice taste, as any female is; a pleasant night, as he has had many times before. Beyond it being the human realm, and that the kinta stole his coin, and that their affections didn’t lead to sex, nothing in particular really sings to him about this night.

Fate led him here—and brought him back… and yet, Dare still searches for the secret, the why .

Nari is convinced Dare feels something for the kinta.

‘You like her.’

That is what she boldly claimed to his face.

She didn’t know how wrong she was. Is .

Dare doesn’t not like the kinta—he simply feels the draw of fate luring him. If it weren’t for the gold or the loss of bedding, the chances of his return here to her home would have been slim.

Dare finds nothing of interest in his study of the bedchamber, so tugs away and, in just four steps across the dining space, joins Eamon at the other.

This door was closed when he came here with Bee. The dweller was not home.

He of course checked it, briefly, when he came looking for Bee after he couldn’t find her in Licht.

But now he stands at the doorway, more patience in him, he finds that he sees more than he did last time.

He sees the difference between Bee’s colour coordinated racks, her organised books tucked under the bedframe—and the dweller for this room, whose chair is piled high with worn clothes, the vinyls scattered around the bed, shoes strewn around the floor like foliage, sheets half-tugged off the mattress, at least four empty mugs and two wine glasses stacked on the bedside table.

“It’s a mess,” Eamon declares and steps over a crumpled pile of towels.

“This one is not Bee’s chamber.”

“Oh.” Eamon digs out a foil packet from under the bed—empty, save for some crumbs. “Must be Tesni’s room. Bee never mentioned Tesni was part pig.”

The joke doesn’t land with Dare who, after a beat, tilts his head. “Tesni?”

“Bee’s roommate.” He pushes up to stand. “And close friend. My guess is that wherever Tesni is, Bee is with her.”

Eamon tugs out of the room with two backwards steps, then turns for the dining table.

Dare drags his gaze over the room once more, from the pink lingerie hanging off the wardrobe’s knob and an empty can on the floor, to a golden metal vase with a lid on firm, and the frames on the wall—frames of dead butterflies.

He makes an odd face at the bug corpses before he abandons the disaster of a bedchamber.

Already, Eamon has started to sift through the pile of parchments. He turns over a piece of white, folded paper in his hands. “She’s not here.”

Dare lolls his eyes back. “A solid observation. Have you considered a career in spywork?”

Eamon cuts aside his unamused stare. His jaw works for a beat, then he offers the white parchment. “She’s not here, on this island.”

Dare frowns.

Hesitation steals him for a moment before he snatches the paper fast enough that it cuts Eamon’s finger, a brownish line that looks little more than a wrinkle.

Dare studies the inked letters for a long moment before he shrugs. “What does this mean?”

Of all the languages he’s learned to speak, the one on this island is a language he hasn’t quite mastered enough to read. Speak, yes, but read—not more than few words and numbers.

“She took… a, uh… an air kar.” Eamon frowns on what he’s trying to say, as though unsure himself of what it really means. “It is a kar that flies.”

Dare runs the pad of his slender, pale thumb over the word destination . He slides his gaze to the following letters. At first look, it’s shaped nonsense.

He sounds out the letters, “Vv…ah-nn...”

“Van-koo-ver,” Eamon mutters, reading over his shoulder. “I don’t know where that is. But it’s certainly not on this island—I know every village, town and city in this land.”

Dare keeps his frown focused on the letters he cannot read. “Is there a map?”

Eamon shoves from the dining table, fast, as though burned by the idea. He marches straight for the bookshelf and isn’t kind about the way he riffles through the books. Some topple off the shelves, hit the carpeted floor, hard, until he yanks out a hefty book, glossy blue, and Eamon declares it, “Atlas.”

He tosses it onto the dining table.

It lands with a hard thud.

Dare waits as he fingers through the pages, map after map after map. As he waits, he keeps the parchment pinched between his fingers, and his free hand moves over the rest of the papers scattered over the table. Parchment after parchment, inked with letters he cannot read—until his fingertips touch something glossy.

He pushes aside the envelope that buries the gloss, and revealed are two faces looking up at him. Paintings, of sorts. Pocket-sized painted faces.

Dare’s frown deepens as he plucks the first face up from the table, instantly recognisable. But what Bee’s face is doing looking at him from a pocket-sized painting is unknown to him.

There is a slight difference in this portrait to when he last saw her. To him that was maybe three months ago now, but in her realm it has been a year.

Not a while, but long enough for her to chop much of her hair off until it is blunt over her shoulders, and the icy blond is gone, now left with only her natural mousy shade.

He tucks the small painting into his pocket. Might come in useful. Then he reaches for the second, the face that is not Bee’s…

So this must be Tesni.

A hum thrums his throat, curt.

She is not nearly as grubby as he expected given the state of her bedchamber.

Light hair with a blushed hue; a warm, softly freckled complexion. She would look soft if it wasn’t for the glass-blue of her eyes, the sort of echoing shade that gives her a piercing, hollow stare.

Eamon smacks his hand down on the parted book. “Canada,” he breathes the word with the relief of a bated breath. “That’s where she is. Canada.”

Dare pockets the second portrait and strides around the table to study the map.

Eamon’s shoulders sag. “It makes sense. That’s where Tesni is from. That is her homeland. Bee mentioned it when she spoke of her travels.”

Dare frowns at the map, studies its familiar details.

Eamon drops onto a wooden chair and runs his hands down his cheeks, leaving whitish streaks that are fast to disperse back into his natural complexion.

“She’s stuck.” Eamon lets his lashes shut on the realisation. “The fones don’t work. The air kars won’t work in the Cursed Shadows. And there are no bridges outside of Britain and Ireland. Wherever she is… it’s too far to find safety.”

“The iilra are ripping space apart,” Dare tells him. “New bridges will become outside of these islands.”

“That doesn’t help Bee.” The look Eamon shoots him is desperate. “Even if there’s a new bridge in Canada, how will she know that?”

Dare’s mouth tilts as he sinks into thought.

That word…

Canada.

That is the only word thrumming in Dare’s mind.

A whisper of fate.

Because that is the land his unit is assigned to.

Dare turns his gaze from the map to the parchment still crinkled in his grip. He sweeps his gaze over the top line. Three words only, but words that he doesn’t recognise to read.

“Chances are,” Eamon speaks into his hands, now firm against his flustered face, “she’s dead. Between the humans and their panic, the disease, the famine—and lost on another land…” His words fade to a shake of the head. He mumbles, barely audible, “It’s my fault.”

Dare’s grip on the paper tightens. The parchment crinkles and, for a long moment, he reads that top line again, still not understanding it.

He doesn’t say it, but part of him knows she’s not yet fallen. Like he can feel her life somewhere in the distance, flickering like a single flame from the weakest candle in the thickest darkness.

Out there, somewhere.

“Sun—An… der…soh-n,” he sounds out the letters as best as he can.

Eamon murmurs. “Sunni Anderson.”

Dare stills.

A sudden uncomfortable sensation brings a frown to his brow. “Who is Sunni Anderson?”

Eamon drops his hands to his lap and turns up a grim look at Dare. “Sunni- Bee Anderson.”

Dare stares at him, hard.

The paper starts to crumple in his tightening grip, until it fists at the corner, and Dare exhales a rushed breath. “ What ?”

Eamon watches him fluster, the red that burns at his cheeks, the hardening sheets of gold that his eye sharpens into, the pallor of his porcelain complexion washing out to something greyish and… panicked.

Sunni.

Sun .

“Everyone calls her Bee,” Eamon’s voice becomes something of a background echo, a bass to the darkness that Dare can’t quite focus on. “There was another Sunny, a male halfling, who worked at the same bar around the same time, and so she became Bee. It stuck.”

“Sun,” Dare mutters the word with a whisper. The parchment flitters to the floor as he turns his wrist up and peels back his brace.

Eamon blinks a dull, disappointed look at the fresh ink smearing his marble skin. A small sun, arrowheads for rays.

Dare considers the sun tattoo marring his skin. “I am to invade that very land she is stuck on.”

Panic rises up in Eamon. He stifles it and, with as much calm as he can muster, he speaks, “I need you to do something for me. Find her. Bring her back.”

Dare flicks his gaze to the side, a weary look. “I plan on it.”

“No.” Eamon turns, a desperate rush to his breath. “I need you to promise me. Promise me that you will track her if you can. That you will capture her, you will not kill her , and you will bring her back to the Midlands.”

Dare runs him over, from the thin braids atop his head, spattered with paint, down to the smeared and scuffed toes of his boots.

“I always wondered some.”

Eamon just blinks.

“About you and Nari. You love her, and maybe you love the kinta.”

“Yes. But not in the way you mean,” Eamon sighs. “Bee is… I’ve known her since she was small. She played in the mud pools around my home. I taught her the dances of the High Court during a time she might have wanted to stay in our lands. I defended her against the meaner youth of the village. She is a friend. And I would have warned her, saved her, if I hadn’t been so consumed with myself.”

Between the honour duel, Nari in the Sacrament, and Aleana’s deterioration into death, Eamon gave little thought to anyone outside of Kithe.

He wears the guilt of it, of leaving her behind, in the downturn of his mouth and the sorrowed weight of his lashes. Just as he wears the sorrow of Dare learning Bee’s true name, the name he kept hidden from him.

“Promise me,” Eamon starts and offers his hand, palm-up, “that you will even abandon your unit if you must—to track her and return her to our realm. You do that, and I will give you a share of my tavern.”

The boldness of the offer strikes between them.

A share in a tavern, one with a two bedchambered, private dwelling above it, that is enough to qualify for landlordship. In Kithe, that makes a lord. A small, slight lord without power beyond the right to live in Kithe and speak on honour duels, but the cost of land and homes and establishments in Kithe rivals the Royal Court itself.

The power of the tavern share isn’t something Dare overlooks. And, in the end, wasn’t he always going to hunt her down? Perhaps he wasn’t going to defect from his unit and risk the wrath of General Agnar… but it might be worth it.

Might not.

Dare runs the tip of his tongue over the sharp bite of his teeth. “What is the share?”

Eamon narrows his eyes. “One tenth.”

His upper lip curls before he barters, “You want me to abandon my unit if I must and, by consequence, face lashes from none other than General Agnar. One sixth share of your tavern, nothing less. What is the value of the kinta’s life to you?”

Eamon’s jaw tightens. “Fine,” he grits out the word. “One sixth.”

Dare eyes the upturned bronzed hand for a moment before the slap of palms claps through the abandoned dwelling. They grip, strong, then squeeze to confirm their bargain, the fae promise between them.

Dare tugs back and turns for the window. He hits out at the thick curtain, and it sweeps aside.

“Not that I don’t trust your instincts,” Eamon says, careful, “but I must ask how you mean to find her. That is a large landmass.”

Dare’s smile is small, aimed at the window. “Do you know my fae trait, Eamon?”

“Tracking?”

He shakes his head just a touch, but the movement is enough to loosen a wavy strand of hair. It falls into his face, carved from marble.

“It is of fate .”

Eamon is still for a moment. “Fate?”

“A royal prince of Dorcha has the same,” Dare says with a small smile. “I know of him—and one other with this trait.”

“What does that mean, of fate ?”

“An extra sense that others do not have,” he starts with a shrug, “a whisper in the mind, the touch of a god, evolution—who knows what these traits are, the meaning behind them…” Dare wanders the dining room, pausing to flick through more papers, stopping at the stack of boxed birdseed. “Ever since I was a youngling, I had this niggle in my mind. Once, I was lost in the woods… and that niggle urged me onto the right paths, the right trails. I made it home without a scratch. My mother didn’t even know I had been lost at all. So many villagers take to swimming each phase in the swells. I am often one of them. One morning, I knew not to go to the shore. I told my mother, and of course she trusted me enough, suspected my trait, and she stopped my father from tending to the boat. An unpredicted swell took the shore within the hour, wiped out a quarter of our villagers.”

“Morning?” Eamon interrupts. “Aiteal is not in darkness?”

“Yes,” Dare says, uncertainty tilting his head. “It is in darkness, but the lower landmass of the Midlands sort of…” he lifts his hand and curves it in a swipe, “curls closer to Licht across the sea. Aiteal isn’t in the light, but we see it. We see pink skies in the morning, out on the sea’s horizon. We see grey throughout the day—and red at night before it’s black again. In Aiteal, we use both time measurements, day and night, and phase.”

Eamon’s brows are lifted too high. “It’s no wonder Samick chose Aiteal to be his home,” he finally says. “It sounds lovely.”

“Charming, yes. Small, very.” Dare nods. “Before you get any ideas, no lands are for sale. The last lot went to Samick in a generous bid.”

Eamon smiles. “I’m comfortable with Kithe.”

“Are you comfortable letting fate lead me to the kinta?”

“What exactly do you mean by that, Dare? Why haven’t you found her already if fate leads you?”

Dare’s mouth flattens in thought. “I could have returned for Bee before the second passage,” he says. “I could have gotten my revenge and my gold before the Sacrament ended. I waited. I waited, because fate told me to. A patience nestled in me—and it said not yet. So when the patience lifted, and I travelled to your village, her village, I expected to find her. Never has my trait failed me… I came here… and I failed again.”

“What does your fate whisper to you now?”

“Significance.”

A frown knits Eamon’s honeyed face.

“No direction, no strategy—not even a reassurance that I will have her in my grip soon. I sit here, in her scent, amongst her things… and I know there is significance here.”

“It might be significant for you to know,” Eamon starts with a sigh, “that Bee is fierce in her protection of her friend.”

Dare considers him. “You?”

Eamon shakes his head. A loose braid drags over the groove of his shoulder. “Tesni.” He gestures to the messy bedchamber. “If Tesni is with Bee, then Bee will be doing everything she can to protect her.”

“That’s leverage.”

“That’s risk . I promise you, Tesni is Bee’s soul sister. She is so protective of her that I have never met her.”

Dare’s silent question is a tugged brow.

“Tesni is apparently something of a vicious human,” Eamon tells him. “Vicious in her words, enough that she might get herself in trouble with fae. And Bee thinks she is of sensitive mind, that she—” he quotes his fingers “— can’t handle it , the exposure to our kind.”

“Perhaps that is where my revenge lies,” Dare muses, resting his temple on the window frame. “Kill Bee’s friend, win the game.”

Eamon’s eyes flash. “You didn’t come this far because you thirst for revenge. I know it, you know it… even Nari knows it.”

Dare’s jaw tenses.

“Is it this fate that draws you to her?”

“I believe it’s the reason I came along that night to the human realm… I almost didn’t. But I did… and I saw that painting of eye-scream on the wall… I knew to follow it.”

Eamon sinks into the chair. “And it was at the ice cream shop we decided to drink… and so I called Bee.”

Dare considers the ceiling, as though it is all the puzzle pieces he needs. He sorts his thoughts aloud, “She is beautiful and lovely. I was drawn to her… but there was more than that. Significance . I can’t find the secret in it, no matter how hard I look, the source of the niggle escapes me over and over.”

Eamon just considers him.

“It’s as though something else was supposed to happen…” Dare takes a beat to chew on the inside of his cheek, bite down on his own flesh in contemplation. “But it failed—and I am left stumbling around waiting for the chance to come again.”

“The chance at what?”

“I don’t know…” Dare’s voice is soft, a whisper, his eyes as sharp as blades. “But I will. Fate calls me and I follow. I will find your kinta—and return her, alive. And in doing that, fate will deliver me to what I am meant to find, it will take me to the secret… whatever secret that is.”

“What if…”

Dare lifts his gilded gaze to him, thick lashes bordering the silent stare threaded with warning.

Eamon’s invasive question is predictable: “What if Bee… is evate or even mate?”

“Hardly a handful of litalves have mates,” Dare scoffs and turns his cheek to him. “And I am only half dokkalf… there might be no other soul for me.”

“But her name,” Eamon says, careful.

Dare is quiet for a beat. Then, “Did you know?”

“Yes.”

“And you kept it from me?”

“I did.”

Silence, again, until slowly Dare turns his chin and he spears Eamon with his stare alone. “Why?”

“I do not like you for her.” Eamon turns his cheek. “I watched all those horrors inflicted on my Nari… for what? For evate? For a claim on her that she did not ask for?”

“To protect Bee, then,” Dare decides his motive.

“Yes.”

Dare starts, a faint tug between his brows, “If she were evate… wouldn’t I have known that when I explored her, tasted her? In all the time we spent together, there was a drawing to her, there was lust, but nothing deeper than that. It was something I have felt many times throughout my life, a slight crush perhaps, but it was fun… only fun.”

“Evate could take longer in you… being hybrid, you might not have one at all. The point is, with us, our kind, the halved ones, everything is unpredictable.”

Dare sinks into the window frame, a slouched sigh huffing from him. “Her name could mean anything. It could mean evate, mateship, or the path.”

“The path?”

“That I follow the sun—to find the fate. And if fate did not mean for us to meet again, she would not be lost in the very land that my unit will conquer.”

“Canada,” Eamon says, soft. “At that time of year, it will be a place of snow and ice.”

“Samick will feel right at home, then.”

Eamon frowns. “Is he with your unit?”

“His unit is assigned to the same land mass, but not with mine. We will pass without meeting.”

That faint tick, tock, tick, tock from the clock fills the silence.

“Please, Alasdare,” Eamon breathes the plea, “do not bring her harm.”

“That—” a golden eye flashes, bright, yet layered with a darkness, like light flaring over an abyss “—was not part of our bargain.”