“What?” She sputtered, frustration pushing the fizz in her blood up into her throat. “I’m not getting in the way of your gate. I didn’t even know it was there. You think I’m blocking myself?”
“You fell into the phaedrealii because you can’t bear to see yourself revealed truly in the sunlit realm.”
The ring of steely truth—spoken by a lying fairy, no less—pushed her over the edge. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You werelings might have more refined senses, but you are as willfully obtuse as the humans. If you don’t want to see what is right in front of you, then...” He flicked open his fingers in a negligently graceful gesture, setting her loose as he walked toward a curtain of flowstone.
How dare he promise an answer and then turn away, jerking the answer above her head like a teasing toy?
She’d show him what came of tempting a tigress.
Shedding the confines of his borrowed cloak, she leapt at his back.
What she lacked without her cat’s strength and speed, she more than made up for in recklessness. His eyes widened in surprise as he spun to face her attack. If he’d had his knife, he might have had a chance. But she pounced with her legs ready to tangle over his, her fingers wrapping at his throat.
He stumbled under her weight, his back crashing into the stone curtain. His hands rose to wrap around her wrists. The geas he’d carved in her skin flared with sudden light that turned his stunned gray eyes to silver.
“What I see,” she hissed, “is a phae who cannot lie, skin-to-skin.”
She only meant to challenge him with that unfortunate-for-him quirk in phae nature, but her own nature welled up as she clung to him. As long as it had been since she changed, it had been longer still since she’d found someone to ease the equally vital wereling need for touch. Werelings were creatures of sensation, of emotion, but she’d quelled such simple longings to focus on her idealistic quest.
The Amur council had ruled her half sisters unfit, their control of the verita luna shift too tenuous to risk exposure in front of oblivious humans. Their exile was final. Unless Yelena could win them clemency. If she could show the council how she and other werelings like Beck were earning a place among humans, that might open a way for her sisters to walk free in either shape.
Instead, with her own loss of the verita luna, she was only proving the council’s case. Her sudden, inexplicable shift coming to the phae court was the closest she’d come to finding an answer for her problem.
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