out and get them.
He stared at me for a long time before his gaze dipped to my lips. Air stuck in my chest with nervous, excited energy. Slowly, he moved in, leading my face to his. Finally. I had wanted this for so long.
His lips were only inches from mine.
Millimeters.
BOOM. A hollow bang shook the car.
Both of us jerked apart to see a man standing on the hood of the van. My eyes shifted, my sight perceiving what he really was. His complex aura and glowing eyes showed me he was no ordinary man. He was fae.
The man was so substantial it took me a moment to notice there was a girl beside him, holding his hand. She was tall; her hair was past her waist and a bright plum color. With every move she made, the color flickered and changed under the light. Her eyes were dark and sharp.
But he was the one who captured my attention. A large battle axe stuck up over his shoulder, harnessed across his back. The blade was so sharp it glinted under the streetlight. His dark blond hair looked long, but lines of tight braids were snug on either side of his head, causing the top to look like a Mohawk. His face was thick with stubble and hard cheeks and bones. He had a tattoo on one side of his neck, disappearing under his shirt. Scars lined both his eyebrows, causing me to wonder if they were on purpose. The man had to be at least six-three and two hundred pounds of solid muscle. He was harsh and terrifying—a modern Viking.
The man turned, his pale eyes stared through the window and locked with mine. Breath halted in my lungs. His irises were so light blue they looked white. The pinprick of the black pupils secured the middle of the stormy sea. His focus caused me to shiver, and I closed my eyes under his intense gaze. When I opened them... the couple was gone.
FOUR
“What the hell?” My lids blinked to clear my version. Emptiness filled the space the man and woman had taken up a moment earlier.
Daniel leaped out of the car and spun in every direction, his trained eyes searching for the vanished threat. His hand grasped his dart gun, his fingers twitching to respond. I jumped from the van, mimicking Daniel on the other side.
“You saw them, right?” Daniel touched the dent on the hood. “Where the hell did they go? I’ve never seen fae disappear like they did.”
I saw the Viking man briefly, but it was enough to imprint deeply in my mind. The outline he left was still in my sight, the fae magic thick and overpowering in him. With my familiarity of fae and different levels of magic each one held, I had never experienced anything close to him. It almost hurt to look. Not in the way it hurt to peer at the sun, but that he almost couldn’t be held within my vision. It was a strange pressure. Visually, I had seen scarier creatures, but something about this man terrified me. He was not one you wanted to mess with.
The girl held magic, too, but compared to him, hers appeared dim. It was her beauty that sucked the air from you. She had worn skintight black pants and a long black sweater, which hung slightly off her shoulder. Her over-the-knee black boots only added to her sleek model frame. Even though she looked toned, she was tiny-boned, giving the appearance of being fragile. She seemed a little taller than me, but I had a lot more substance to my build. I was in shape and healthy from training, where a gust of wind might have knocked her over. She looked like she could be from someplace in the eastern block of Europe. She was exotic and beautiful, and I felt very ordinary in comparison.
An unsettling feeling wormed its way into my gut, and I reached into the car and grabbed my phone out of my bag, stuffing it into my pocket. We always kept them on us in case of emergencies or if we got separated. My feet led me away from the van, an impression telling me to head down an unlit alley.
“You sense something?” Daniel called. Sometimes I felt like a trained bloodhound. “You got their scent, girl?” I was waiting for him to pat me on the head.
With my dart gun ready, I nodded and followed my seer intuition. We reached opposite