dark faerie 04.5 - without armor (3 page)

He didn’t offer to give my blade back.

“Besides, it’s not the few bottom feeding Unseelie I’m worried about. Their master is the dangerous one, and he seemed really interested in this one.” He lifted the sword up a bit, pointing it at me.

“That’s my sword.” I was still holding the shirt Isolde threw at me as I waited for her idiot companion to give my property back. “Might want to be careful with it. Could get burned.” I waggled an eyebrow, snickering at him.

“Don’t tease him, Ciaran, give it back.” Isolde rolled her eyes as she kept watch on the surroundings, darting her eyes out a broken window.

“They won’t come back.” I offered.

Rolling my shoulders back, I felt a pull of pain in my skull. It had given me a moment’s pause before I continued to yank off my shredded sweater. Letting the cold air of winter solstice pour over my heated skin, I purposely waited to cover up just to let her glide her eyes over me as I pretended to untangle the top she’d given me.

I had to admit, I liked being admired by the ladies. It’d been almost a year and a half since I was a junior in high school, baffled and stunned by her beauty. Now…now I’d grown into my skin well and knew my hard workouts in the wilderness of the world taking down unruly Unseelie had done my body good. No longer did I claim the unsteady slenderness of youth clinging to my bones. Nope. Now I was well suited for fighting and every muscle was hardened with a perfected conditioning I’d kept at while hunting.

It never hurt to look like a million bucks around the opposite sex. Their lure was strong and a constant distraction if I let it get too close. Most days, the isolation of the life I’d chosen kept such problems at bay.

“How can ya be certain dey won’t be back?” Her subtle Irish accent slipped when she was flustered, and it only made me slow donning the shirt even more. I finally shimmied it on for her sake. I didn’t want her stuttering into her old thick and incomprehensible gibberish she’d fall into when agitated with me back in the day. It’d taken her a while to speak more “American” and hide her heritage. Why she had wanted to do that always baffled the shit out of me.

“I track Unseelie for a living. These kind of peons never return to a place they’ve attacked. They just don’t. It’s not in them to stay. They never come back.” I craned my neck as I watched her partner shift next to me. “At least not this exact spot.”

Ciaran snorted. I knew he didn’t believe me, but I couldn’t care less. I studied the warrior. He was also a weaker fey. Not full-blooded, but not quite a half-blood. Still, he’d inherited some magic, though not as much as I bet he let everyone else believe he had. I felt for the guy. He was almost as ordinary as full-blooded humans.

Pity.

“What da hell you smilin’ at?” Ciaran stepped forward, but Isolde was already shoving him back. His own thick accent made me wonder if any of the group were from the states.

“Don’t start anything. I need to think.”

“But ‘e was laughin’ at me.”

“So?” Isolde burned a glare into him, daring him to keep on. Now that was a woman I could entertain for more than just a spell. She was tough as nails and didn’t take any shit from peons like Ciaran. It made me remember exactly why I’d been infatuated with her in high school. She was nothing short of irresistible.

Ciaran didn’t argue any further. Instead, his frown deepened as he turned away, stomping off to check on their friends. It was a pathetic group really. I’d never been around such a weak bunch. They barely oozed of fey blood, but they had it still. I wondered how they defended themselves against attacks from the Unseelie or hell…any other faery for that matter. Their power combined might be enough to keep others from harming them and at bay, but barely just. I had more magic in my smallest toe than they all had combined.

With the exception of Isolde.

She was the glue that held this operation together. That much I could see. Maybe she had figured out a way to combine their efforts and amplify their defenses when threatened. Yes…that was something she would’ve come up with. She was brilliant in a way I’d never seen in others. Almost like a female MacGyver. A wild child, young and free.

We weren’t so different after all.

“Don’t mind Ciaran. He’s just protective of us all, and you’re a stranger. Not too hard to categorize the threat you could be to us, Benton.”

The way she said my name jerked me into the past like a wormhole. I watched her move about the room, her slender body with womanly curves hidden under the long trench coat wrapped around it. I remembered every inch of it, and I closed my eyes as the dark moments rushed back into the front of my mind, where I’d banished them from lurking ever again.

She was my first love. Probably my last.

“Benton?” Her voice pulled me back to the present, and I peered upon her gorgeous face again. Her eyes shined under the dim moonlight slipping through cracks in the roof. Her pale skin told me she didn’t go out in daylight much and avoided crowded places, even now. She was always an outsider, a loner in every definition of the word, but that’s what I’d loved about her. Nothing ordinary would do for her. Maybe that was why she’d chosen me to be her boyfriend in high school.

And I had thought it was because she liked me so damn much.

I chuckled before answering, giving her a five-star grin.

“Yes, Isolde?”

She returned the smile with one that lit up her face brighter than any sun. It made my heart jump.

“There you are…are you sure you’re alright? You seem to be lost inside your head. That was a nasty bump on the head you got from the blast. Do you need any healing?”

I laughed but cut it off immediately when I saw her smile drop from her face.

“Sorry but…I’ve seen what you have in your arsenal of groupies here. I doubt any of them can help me much, let alone heal. Besides I have my own healing magic.”

Her face crinkled into a scowl but instead of walking away, she stepped closer, pressing her lovely chest into mine.

“You best not insult m’comrads. They’re family. You’re not. Remember that.” She pushed at me and I took a step back, only because she had set me off balance. “Don’t ya forget I’ve saved yer ass more dan once? I keep score.”

She shoved a finger into my shoulder right where I’d hit it earlier. I winced but didn’t retaliate. Her accent grew stronger with her anger and had me hung up on her proximity, completely intoxicated. I was a miserable fail at resisting her charm back in high school and even more so now.

Pathetic.

Isolde turned on one foot and headed toward the rest of the group. I blew out a breath, knowing how unsmooth I’d been with her. I enjoyed a feisty woman, but Isolde wasn’t a fool. She’d never return to me after the way I’d left her so long ago.

I rubbed at the spot she’d stabbed. It just occurred to me that it hurt like the dickens. I pulled at the shirt and stared down at a blossoming bruise right under the area she’d poked. Strange. Usually, I healed rapidly.

The pain in my head where I’d cracked my head pulsed in response. I reached up to find a patch of dried blood and a lump underneath. No wonder I’d been unconscious. The fall had knocked me to hell and back. Still, I should’ve healed already. What was going on?

I held out my hand to ignite a tiny flame in my palm, but it failed to blossom. Concentrating harder, I stared hard at the creases where fire would leak into the atmosphere from within

Nothing.

I dropped my head toward the bag tied to my waist. Pulling out a healing potion from it, I pulled the cork and downed half of it. It was a faery draught a friend of my sister had mixed for me. Though I rarely drank it, faery magic had adverse effects on Elementals, I always kept some ready for any moderate to severe bodily injuries I acquired on an Unseelie hunt. It worked well for the moderate injuries, but it was the deeper ones, the life-threatening ones that were the hardest to heal. Those took more than just my magic mixtures to heal.

The liquid burned, a fiery feeling I rarely had the pleasure to endure, for I didn’t burn anymore. I was immune to it. This potion worked by blocking my magic momentarily, which wasn’t a big deal since apparently, my magic had switched off from all the trauma.

Or it was that blasted magical disc they’d thrown at me; designed to implode with the presence of fire. Just perfect.

I watched Isolde move about the room and let out an extended, longing sigh.

Too bad I had nothing in my bag of tricks to heal broken hearts.

Chapter Six

The wind blew outside this makeshift den they’d dragged me to. I hated to have to hole up when I’d rather be investigating who was behind the kidnapping and magic draining explosion, but I was tired. Healing took more than just magic to work. It took my own energy reserves to recover. There was no other choice but to hunker down for the night since my magic was severely depleted.

Isolde sat near the fire piled on the cement floor nearby. We were in another abandoned warehouse. They were a dime a dozen in these parts and luckily, no one would be bent out of shape to patrol the area in the middle of a torrential downpour. I liked it that way. The less the humans were involved in affairs of the magical kind, the better. I hated to clean up messes with non-magics. It took time, magic and a bit of mind erasing.

No one wants to be mind-erased. I wouldn’t want to be mind-erased. It just didn’t seem fair to do to people what I wouldn’t want done to myself. I avoided it at all costs. Sometimes, it couldn’t be helped.

“Hey,” I called out toward my ex-girlfriend. Her eyes studied the flickering flames as if they could tell her intimate secrets no one else knew. I dragged my butt over to her, making sure to keep an inch or two distance between us. She was jumpy, skittish even, and I didn’t want to encroach on her personal space just yet. Yet was the word.

She never answered me.

“Isolde…I…” I cleared my throat, suddenly feeling unsure of what to say. I usually had a quirky comeback or an excellent rebuttal to anyone’s comments or something to say. This time, I had nothing to dispel her silence.

She tilted her head toward me, a sign to go on.

“Look, I’m sorry about….about all that happened before. I’m not good at relationships. You and I…we were something special. But I had to go. You were moving away too, remember? What else but to leave it the way it was?”

Isolde’s fingers rubbed against her arm, fraying the threadbare yarn of the sweater she wore layered over several shirts. That’s how you stay warm in the winter. Layers. Even her holed up sweater held together by tiny knotted strings where the yarn had separated was warmer than nothing. Gritty dirt streaked across her hands and embedded itself in the tiny lines of skin surrounding her nailbeds. Still, even with the filth that probably never came off, she was delicate in appearance. Fragile almost.

I knew better than anyone that she was far from fragile. She was a warrior. One of the first I’d met from the Land of Faerie.

“The past is the past, Benton.” She shifted so she could focus her gaze on me. Her large dark hazel irises shined under the shifting light of the fire, but the warm hue made her faery features appear highlighted and pixie-like. She held off on wearing glamour amongst her friends, but out in the open with humans, she had to wear it to shield the world from seeing her slightly larger eyes. “I don’t think about it anymore.”

“But you did…once. Think about it before, right?”

She sighed, closing her eyes and stuffing her head into her arms resting on her knees.

“Benton, I can’t do this. What more do you want? There’s nothing to say about those days.”

“Just tell me it wasn’t a waste of time.”

She opened her eyes, offering me a hardened stare which made me shift in my spot. Maybe she was right. Maybe I didn’t want to know the answers to some questions.

“Those were the best days of my life,” she whispered.

She jumped to her feet and made her way toward the sleeping area, already neatly laid out and arranged with her blanket, pillow and sleeping bag. She didn’t even pull off her boots when she yanked the blanket over her svelte body, facing away from the fire. It couldn’t be that warm around there, and I watched her for moments afterwards as she eventually curled up into a tight ball and her breathing slowed as she slept.

With the little magic restored to me since the earlier fight, I sent a faint, flickering spell of heat toward her, encasing the vicinity with a continual blow of warmer air. It wasn’t enough to alert her of a major change, but it was enough for her to uncurl her tightened position and calm into a deeper rest.

The frigid air of the night had the entire camp curled up in their beds. I turned toward Ciaran, who had apparently seen the whole spell I’d sent Isolde’s way. His stoic expression didn’t change, but he looked away from me to study the others in the group. He was on first watch and wouldn’t be resting anytime soon. He was going to let my interference slide, for the comfort of his weary leader.

Well, at least there was one thing we both agreed on.

I slid into my own sleeping sack for the night, weary with the day’s events heavy on my head and snaking across my sore muscles and skull. What Isolde said about our time in high school hurt more than it would if she had told me she hated our time together, and I’d been the worst boyfriend ever. Why I’d thought it would’ve been better to hear something else, I didn’t know. All I could say was that my heart never left those days either, and, as a result, we’d both destroyed each other for anyone else.

Chapter Seven

Isolde tossed a crackerjack puff at me, and it bounced off the corner of my mouth onto the rocky sand lying beneath us. We skipped school that day and were sitting at a tiny creek on the other side of the football stadium bleachers of our high school. Snacking on junk food as we laughed, she tried her best to toss one into my mouth.

She was a terrible shot.