Page 47

THE HUNTER

T his wasn’t the aloof mask he wore so often. Nor was it what she’d come to think of as the more real version of him: good-humoured and somewhat scatter-brained. It was a version of him she’d seen in dreams, eyes burning with conflicted desire.

“Gisele.” He said her name in a kind of despair and closed the small space between them.

It was different to the dream. Everything there had held a soft not-realness, like kissing in a pleasant fog.

There was nothing ethereal about this, every sensation thick and earthy.

His hands cupped her face; her legs splayed across his thighs.

He kissed like honeyed wine: smooth, sweet, dangerously addictive.

He kissed like the undertow of the tide, and she was borne out to sea by it.

Kissing had never been like this, or perhaps she had forgotten.

Perhaps she’d needed to forget, or she wouldn’t have survived without it for so many years.

She’d told herself she hadn’t missed it; none of her old lovers had ever cared much for her, anyway, but, oh, it was a lie that she hadn’t missed it.

She’d missed it so much, this primal intimacy.

It was in no way a polite kiss. It was decades of yearning piled high and set alight, every nerve ending coming alive with wanting. It overrode all higher thoughts with base animal instinct. Her breasts pressed against his chest. His hands were in her hair. She wanted more. She wanted everything.

And yet.

And yet, she could not help thinking , Does he really want me ? Should we really be doing this now? Do I even want this?

She pulled back, doubt and arousal an uneasy mix. “What are you doing, Mal?” she asked him unsteadily. “What are we doing?”

His harsh pants filled the space beneath the tree, echoing off the stones. “Succumbing to temptation,” he said, voice gone deep and ragged. “I apologise. I shouldn’t have.”

She disentangled herself and sat back, resisting the relentless tide drawing her towards him.

“No, you shouldn’t have,” she said. “I can cope with us either mutually giving in to temptation or agreeing not to. I can’t cope with your halfway giving in and then making me feel guilty for your being forced to be attracted to me. ”

He blinked. “Is that…what you think is happening here? That you are only attractive to me because of some magical effect?”

She folded her arms. “Isn’t that what we discussed earlier?” Heat rose in her cheeks.

His head fell back against the tree as he gave a pained laugh. “The bond is of course exacerbating things, but it has nothing to do with the fact that you’re an attractive woman.”

“How can you possibly know whether?—”

“Because I’m not blind and because it isn’t the bond that makes you quick-witted or argumentative or, ah, shapely.” His cheeks stained with colour. “Things I happen to find appealing.”

Gisele did not feel especially quick-witted. “Oh,” was all she could come up with.

“Has it occurred to you,” he continued, still examining branches, “that I might feel guilty for you being forced to find me attractive, considering all the pain I’ve caused you?

I ought, by rights, to be the least appealing person in all the realms to you.

The fact that I’m apparently not concerns me; it makes me think it must all be due to the bond between us. ”

She rocked back. “You’re perfectly well-aware of your own good looks—don’t pretend you’re not,” she said eventually and with considerable exasperation. “It’s not especially extraordinary that a person might find you attractive, magic bond or not.”

He flashed her a grin edged with a bit of wickedness, but it dimmed quickly.

“That doesn’t alter the fact that you have spent your whole life in fear of me, that I am the central cause of all the worst things that have ever happened to you.

There is every reason for you to find me repugnant, if it weren’t for the magic forcing things otherwise. ”

Gisele gave him a long look. “You severely overestimate both your own fearsomeness and my morals. I’ve slept with plenty of handsome men with terrible personalities before. You are not uniquely attractive to me.” He absolutely was.

“Gisele!” His eyes danced.

“Don’t worry; I’m sure you can’t help your terrible personality,” she told him piously, getting up. A strange lightness of spirit filled her, like being magic-drunk all over again. Flirting. She was flirting, she realised.

“Oh, I can’t, can I?” he pouted, but he took her offered hand. He didn’t release it once he’d gotten to his feet, and they stood there grinning stupidly at each other, holding hands. His ears twitched nervously, and she was struck with a desire to reach out and soothe them.

She shook her head at their mutual foolishness, unsettled by this shift between them but not unhappy with the result. “All right—how does cleansing work?”

Fire and salt, as it turned out. After inspecting the golden lines, Mal declared that they were not contaminated by the solshant and could be dealt with later. They dug a ring in the earth around the solshant’s body.

Through all this practicality, the bond between them roared with suppressed desire, and Gisele’s mind flipped back and forth between two main thoughts.

She had magic. Magic that might be… hers rather than part of some curse?

Mal liked her. Or at least, he found her attractive for reasons other than magical bonds.

He’d said nice things about her. Although, one of those things had been ‘argumentative’, which wasn’t exactly nice, but then, he was a perverse sort of creature.

A seed had grown in her hand, joyful and perfect and not exploding. Mal had kissed her.

They both sobered when the flame went up in great crackling colours held at bay by the circle. It consumed the solshant’s corpse with unnatural swiftness, leaving only smoking earth.

Gisele was glad to leave it behind as they walked back to the house, hand-in-hand.

“Surely kissing alone cannot be too great a risk,” Mal mused. “Maybe we ought to test the effects of it further.”

She raised her eyebrows. “In the spirit of academic rigour?”

“Exactly. I feel quite rigorous.”

She laughed, delighted at this different side of him but not quite delighted enough to forget everything else weighing on her. “How long until your magic comes back?”

He didn’t mistake her meaning. “You mean, how long until it pollutes your magic again?”

“Unless you know how to stop it from doing so?”

He shook his head. “There might be things we could try, now that we know what’s happening. But I don’t know anything for sure.” He gave a deep sigh. “I truly did previously think of myself as a person who knew the answers to things, you know. A scholar. I’ll look.”

That was when she felt it. A shiver passed through the garden, like a shadow covering the sun, making the light shift oddly. A strong animal sense of danger shot through her, raising the hair on the back of her neck.

Mal’s hair was on end too, his tail fluffed right out. “Into the water,” he said urgently.

She followed him without question into the stream, where it formed a deep pool between tower and house, barely noticing the temperature change above the urgency of his fear and the crawling sense of wrongness.

He pulled her, splashing, further into the pool, until they stood beneath the curved footbridge.

The water lapped just below her shoulders.

“What is that?” she whispered.

His eyes were wide. “A hunting spell. Look there—you can see it sparking off the wards.” He raised his hand to point and abruptly seemed to remember that he was still holding hers. Releasing it, he gestured.

She could see the spell, she realised. Or rather, she could see where it was interacting with the wards, outlining a dome over the house and garden in shifting spiderwebs of light. The way it moved made her think of hounds searching for a scent.

The normal sounds of the garden had muted, and she could hear only the small sloshes of the water and the faint creak of Skymallow in the wind, as if the house were uneasy too. Even the ever-present cicadas had gone silent.

“Why are we in the water?” she whispered.

“Water has negation properties. It will help to keep us hidden.” All the blood had drained from his face.

She reached for his hand again and squeezed it, a warm point of contact beneath the cool water.

They both held their breath, waiting to see whether the too-thin wards held. Why did it always come back to waiting, subject to forces beyond her power to influence?

With a rumble of thunder, the threatening storm broke, rain bucketing down with shocking excess, hissing as it hit the water. The space beneath the bridge became a sudden waterfalled cocoon.

Mal’s ears went alert, and he murmured something she couldn’t hear over the rain. She drifted closer, until they were almost touching. “Is it gone?”

He nodded.

“The wards held, then.”

His expression was grim. “The rain helped us. They won’t hold next time.

Or even if they do, that was a hunter spell.

It starts as a passive searching spell on the first pass, but it maps whatever warded areas it doesn’t penetrate.

On the next pass, it’ll have more power behind it.

It will keep passing until it gets through the wards—or until the prince decides to investigate the blank spots himself. ”

“How much time does that give us?”

“Depends how wide an area it’s scanning and how many other warded places it finds. Hunter spells are limited in range, however, so the fact that this one found us means… not more than two days, I expect. I wish— I would send you away from here, if I knew how.”

She shook her head, not appreciating this noble sentiment. “Can we trick the spell somehow, when it returns? Make him think there’s nothing here worth coming to look at?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“To the library once again, then. Is it safe to get out now?” She couldn’t hear anything over the downpour, but Skymallow felt quiet again.

He nodded.

Getting out was a soggy business. The rain dampened the bits of her that hadn’t already been soaking, mainly the top of her head.

Her skirts were sodden, and she had to pause on the bank to wring some of the water out, in a probably futile attempt to make walking easier.

Mal’s shirt had gone translucent, clinging to every lean line of his body.

She suspected her own dress was behaving similarly from the heat in Mal’s gaze.

Determinedly, she ignored the sight and escaped back into the house before she did something foolish.