Page 5

Chapter 5

Caspian

We stopped again for dinner when I needed to gas up, and since we were still on the Dawnchaser side of the line, the food was . . . well, I, for one, was pro-Dawnchaser in the most general way. I didn’t know any of them other than the ruling family, but I’d liked three out of four of them.

More importantly, they weren’t afraid of butter in their food.

Yeah, yeah, they ate lots of fruits and vegetables, and weird fancy stuff like flaky pastries and moldy cheese. But the fried food was incredible. And fresh bread slathered in butter. Not that I didn’t love my own people’s food, since apparently most of the Summerlands had no idea what a spice was, but still.

Butter.

Watching Frost eat was something else, too. The man put away more food at every meal than I sometimes ate in a day. It made sense, because he had to keep up that enormous frame of his, but it was still astounding to watch. Especially since Ember insisted on ordering a dozen things for dinner and having him try them all. He approached each new dish like it was a snake poised to bite him and was almost always pleasantly surprised. Except with some mushrooms, which he declared “slimy,” and asked that they be moved away from him.

It was fair enough, their texture left something to be desired, and I didn’t want them either. Ember, on the other hand, loved the things and scarfed down the rest of the plate on her own.

The sun was low in the sky, orangey-red and enormous, as we came out of the restaurant. It was the kind of thing I always wanted to stop and snap a picture of, but I knew damn well my phone wasn’t good enough to get a picture of what it truly looked like. I’d end up with a picture that looked like a neon orange golf ball, and people would wonder why I’d bothered taking a picture of something so boring.

As I headed for the car, Ember whipped out her phone. I wondered if she was going to give the picture a try—maybe Moonstriker phones were better than mine—but instead, she started talking. “Okay, this says the closest hotel is about a mile that way?—”

“Hotel?” I turned to stare at her, confused. It was barely six in the evening.

She rolled her eyes at me. “You’re not planning on driving all night, are you? I know we practically did on the way there, but?—”

“Only until, like, eight,” I corrected, then motioned to the sky. “But as long as we’ve got light . . .”

Kit put a hand on her shoulder and pressed her toward the car. Lowering his voice so no one else in the parking lot could overhear, he hissed, “The Sunrunner is missing , Ember. We don’t have time to waste. We’re already wasting time by not flying. We can’t afford to quit early.”

Guilt settled heavy in my gut as he opened her car door, and she wordlessly slid inside.

Was I being that selfish by driving?

I knew something wasn’t right, and my father didn’t just go missing for days at a time. I had lost us time by deciding to drive instead of flying. Sure, I didn’t like airplanes for various reasons, not least of which was recurring airsickness, but if I truly loved my father, wouldn’t I be trying to get this done as fast as I possibly could?

“I’m making us a reservation at a hotel about a hundred miles on,” Frost said to me, holding up his phone to show me a reservation page, then switching over to a map of how to get to the place. “Plenty early enough that we’ll get sleep and be up and moving early in the morning.”

I turned to him, and . . . fuck, he was beautiful. The way the reddish sunset glowed on his face, his pale eyes even paler in the light. More than that, there was something familiar in his expression.

Empathy , Mella pointed out. He doesn’t just feel bad for you, he understands why you might be less worried about a parent than other people think you should be. He’s felt the same .

Suddenly, his pink tongue swept out to wet his lower lip, then he pressed it lightly between his teeth for a moment before speaking again. “You’re not responsible for him, you know. He’s an adult. He’s responsible for himself. Yes, we’re trying to find him, and we hope he’s okay, but it’s not your fault if he’s been hurt. You didn’t hurt him. And we’re trying to find him because the whole world is in danger if we don’t get Nausa’s help.”

I was still staring at his mouth. So inappropriate that I was getting turned on while he was trying to comfort me.

Fuck, I was such an asshole.

Still, he was trying to comfort me, and . . . well hells, he was right. I was not my father’s keeper. I cared about him enough to look for him, which . . . frankly, it was more than I suspected he’d have done if I had been the one to go missing.

Hells, I knew it for a fact. A year earlier I’d been in the hospital with a concussion for almost two days, and he hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone. When I’d gotten home, he acted confused about why I had a heavy bandage wrapped around my head. Never mind the bleeding cut on my temple that had needed six stitches. Why would he have known about that? It wasn’t as though he cared about me.

There was an excellent chance that if I went missing and Aunt Rachel told him nothing was amiss, he’d just drift off to his next meeting or meal or drink without ever thinking about it again.

Without ever thinking about me again, if I never came back.

But also, maybe that was why Aunt Rachel hadn’t even bothered to try to convince me that his absence was nothing. She was so used to my father, who simply accepted whatever people said to him without thinking, let alone searching the words or situations for deeper meaning.

Most of the time he was so out of it, I wondered if he understood the presented information to begin with. He certainly didn’t have the capability of second-guessing someone’s truthfulness or intentions.

“But I should be in a rush, shouldn’t I?” I asked Frost, my voice low. I didn’t want Kit to hear me, didn’t want him to realize that he’d gotten to me so damn well, whether it was what he’d intended or not.

But was he right? Did I not give enough of a damn about my father?

Why the hell would you give a damn about him? Mella asked me. He’s never given a damn about you. He’s a stranger with whom you share DNA . Like the distant cousins you’ve met once. Like Nausa.

“He’s not dangling off the side of a cliff,” Frost said, angling his head to look me in the eye, his gaze intense. “You don’t even know that he’s currently in danger. You know he’s missing. Maybe he ran off for good, maybe he was only missing a few days, and he’s returned since you left, or maybe something awful happened before you even realized he was gone. No matter what it turns out to be, our hurrying or not isn’t going to change this. Flying to Dawnchaser lands and back still would have taken two days, so it wouldn’t have been that much faster.”

The other car door opened, and I glanced up, meeting Kit’s eye. He gave me that universal gesture of “I’m watching you,” where he made his fingers into a V, pointed them at his eyes, and then at me. But then he got into the car, leaving me almost alone with his insanely hot, ridiculously kind brother for the first time ever, and slammed the door behind him.

I winced at the sound of the door slamming, but Frost gave me a gentle smile.

“Kit would never intentionally hurt your property, and if he manages to do damage, he’ll pay to fix it.” He leaned down a little, so close to me that I could smell him. Could smell the spicy aftershave he used, a scent that reminded me of apple cider on a frozen winter morning—crisp and clean and perfect, but somehow warm at the same time.

I shrugged it off, trying as hard as I could to focus on the conversation and not how fucking hot Frost Moonstriker was. My car. The doors. How you could damage a car by slamming the doors.

“It’s okay. If he damages the car, I can fix her myself. It’s one of the only things I’m good for, really.” I held my hands up, wiggling my fingers. “Good with my hands.”

It was only after I said it that I realized how that could be taken, and I almost groaned at my clumsiness.

Frost? He blinked, clearly seeing no innuendo in the words. “That’s very impressive. I’ve never learned how to fix a car. Perhaps you could show me sometime. It seems like that kind of precision work combined with physical labor might be . . . soothing.”

It was my turn to blink, staring blankly at him. Because that was precisely the truth. Fixing things had always been the best way to escape my life without leaving the palace. “Sure,” I agreed. “I’d . . . I’d love to show you. It’s the best.”

It struck me, then, how quiet Mella had mostly been with Frost around. Not because she’d abandoned me, but because I didn’t seem to need any help to talk to him. He took everything at face value, just how I meant it. When he smiled, it was a real smile, not a lie or a threat. When he said he’d like something, he meant that he’d like it. Not that he wanted to make conversation and then forget about it later because he’d just been trying to escape awkwardness by talking over it.

Mella didn’t have to tell me what Frost’s intentions were, because they were written across his face every moment.

This was why Kit was so protective. Because Frost was completely and totally innocent, in a way that no one else I’d ever met had been. He wasn’t unintelligent or naive, just . . . truthful.

Frost Moonstriker was truth personified, unlacquered and unpolished, just sheer reality in an absolutely beautiful wrapper, and just the realization made me fall for him a little more.

I turned slightly and leaned into his space. “Can I see that map again? Just to be sure I know where I’m headed.”

“Of course.” He pulled the phone back up and showed me the map. I could be there in an hour and a half, if I rode the speed limit the whole way.

Dawnchaser speed limits weren’t too low, though the sheer number of towns on the road brought them down a bit, but we were starting to get into clearer land. It was farm land here, mostly, which slowly morphed into enormous empty ranges with some cattle here and there when we got to Sunrunner lands.

I turned back to stare up at him for a moment, and our eyes caught and held. For just a fraction of a second, I thought maybe he’d be the one who kissed me, rather than the other way around. His breath stuttered, and he glanced down at my lips, like they were in any way as distracting as his own.

Then he shook his head and motioned to his phone. “Still, we should get going. We have more than an hour left to drive, and daylight is fading.”

“Right,” I agreed, even though I didn’t want to. I actually wanted to . . . if I lifted up on my toes, I could reach his lips, I was sure of it. He was tall, but he wasn’t out of reach.

And if Kit was going to give me the death glare either way, I ought to earn it, right?

Maybe another time.