Page 108 of Hunted By Fae

Her jaw rolls. “Where’d you see it?”

“About two blocks back.”

Her gaze snaps to me. “Two blocks back and you’re just strolling?”

The smile I force isn’t overly kind. “I don’t have much energy left to run. I was there, where the fire is—” She shifts her gaze again, this time to the distant gleam of red on the other side of the city. “I got out and then saw that one alone. He was headed this way.”

For a long moment, she thinks on it. Her tongue drags over her teeth, then tightens with a suck. Her tongue smacks back into place.

But still, she considers the darkness around us, the gleam of crimson in the far distance.

I eye the trail of black dots on her cheek. Looks like they’ve been printed there, so dark that they have a whisper of a navy hue to them.

Three freckles in a crooked line.

To humans, those really are just freckles. Common. Everyone has them. Why look twice?

But I know what they really are.

Those three freckles in that one crooked line, the exact print of Orion’s Belt—the stars Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka—is a mark on a human that means one thing.

That human descends from fae.

She iskuri.

A distant descendent of fae bloodlines, very distant.

And I suddenly understand, fingers snapping in my brain, the humans imprisoned by the dark fae units, the enslaved people—they aren’t picked at random.

If I would have looked closer at them, I’m sure I would have seen each of those captive humans with their own three freckles in that same crooked line. It will be somewhere on their bodies, whether on their backs, their legs, their arms, it doesn’t matter, and some will have just one kuri mark, while others will have a dozen.

It all means they are kuri.

And so is this woman.

It doesn’t mean she is fae.

Far from it. But when the seams joining the worlds touched that bit more, thousands of years ago, and fae wandered in to lure humans, mate with them, trick them, or my kind—the kintas—were discarded here as babies, swapped over for healthier human newborns, that meant strands of fae in the bloodlines of this world. Carry it down through generations, wash it out more and more and more, and what’s left is a kuri: A human who simply acclimates better to the fae realm, who lives longer inslavery, who can birth healthier halflings, and easier than a regular human can.

I wish I had the freckles, just so the dark ones would take me back to the realm—and from there, I could maybe escape to the light lands.

As it is, I have more to fear from the dark warriors than this partly toothless kuri does.

But she makes the mistake of not fearing me.

These two fucked up enough to hold a blade to my throat and aim a gun at me.

I am their mistake.

I might look human, but I was raised in Licht. I was raised litalf.

I can fight.

And I can trick.

So the moment it happens, the exact second she lowers the pistol—even if it’s slowly, gradually—and that doubt etches onto her frowning face from the seeds I planted in her mind, and her gaze is turning all over the darkness, I act.

I shove my free hand upwards, slipping it between the flesh of my throat and the sharp edge of the blade.