Page 148 of Hunted By Fae

Then, slow, he lowers to a crouch.

Forearms braced on his leather-sheathed thighs, his gaze burns from beneath long lashes—and he considers me.

I swallow, a thick, wet sound.

His gaze shifts to my throat, the bob of it, then drops to the wet patch on my jeans.

His head tilts.

Pale hair falls over his knitted brow—and he lifts that look to me.

There’s something in that look…

A short breath cuts through me.

The pale green of his eyes gleams, like faint lights in the dusty blend of torchlight and darkness. His lashes are lowover those piercing, cold eyes—and his stare is spearing into me.

I remember him.

The ice fae wears some speckled dots of white on his face, peppered along the sharpness of his cheekbone—and I find the source, fast. On the arm of his leathers, a hole is carved. A bullet hole.

I have seen him before on the road, when the fae marched by us, and only stopped because Ramona fired at them. This one was on a steed then, too.

And I remember him because he bled different.

The cold fae with sharp green eyes, like frosted blades of grass, bleeds white. It’s thinner. It seeps out of the wound on his arm—the one he seems to be ignoring, no hand pressing against it, no attempt to stop the flow—and it spills like milk.

And he remembers me.

THIRTY-TWO

BEE

I have seen many dark ones before.

I have been in the presence of dokkalves, some fullblood, others like Dare, born of two fae bloodlines.

All have been fearsome, formidable, dangerous.

Yet none have made me so cold with terror that I am stuck in place, breath trapped in my chest just at the sight of him.

This dark one is not like the rest of them.

There’s somethingoffabout him, something that feels like frost forming over my bones.

I hide from it.

I hide from him.

The senses of the dark fae are sharp, and so he must know I am here, pressed between these two cars. But he advances solely on Tesni, the only one of us still out in the open, the only one of us who might still be able to run.

But she doesn’t.

Like me, she’s frozen stiff.

The dark fae crouches down at her boots, just at the nose of the car—and he just considers her.

“Bee.” A sharp whisper from above strikes me like a smack, and I flinch. “Bee.”