Apparently we were in a greater hurry now that we were leaving the city. “You need to prepare yourself. Most Seelie love to be stared at—”
“Seelie?” I asked.
“There are two different types of fairies—Seelie and Unseelie. The Seelie are what people often think of when they think of fairies, beautiful and ethereal, though not small and winged. They are what light mythology is made of. The Unseelie are the less traditionally appealing side of faerie, the things from which dark mythology was born. But what you will find is that not all that is beautiful is soft, and not all that is visually unpleasing is harsh. It can be just as likely that the opposite holds true.”
“So you’re telling me not to take anyone, or anything, at face value.” I gently extricated my hand from his. He looked at me, unblinking, and took his hand back from the middle of the seat.
“That’s precisely what I’m telling you,” he said, his voice sounding and feeling detached, emotionless. His eyes cooled perceptibly. “A contingent of my guard will meet us at the edge of the mound nearest where Jossel was last seen. I would encourage you to stay within my site, even with them near us.”
“I meant no offense.” I looked down at his hand in his lap and then back to his eyes. “I’m only trying to find where I fit.” I wished fervently that Bahlin had come with us.
“No offense taken.” His eyes and voice both softened. “I forget myself. It must be difficult for you, with all of the changes to your life in the last day and a half.”
I ignored that. “You never did finish explaining why you and Bahlin are so interested in me,” I said. “Not that I want to push, but it might help me understand.”
“Ah. You are persistent.” He leaned his head back on the headrest and closed his eyes. “You might have noticed that Bahlin and I don’t get along too well.”
“Nope, hadn’t observed that at all.”
He rolled his head toward me, staring without smiling before he responded. “Sarcasm? Very well. So you’ve noticed. Bahlin and I have a long history of discord between us, though it has escalated to violence several times in the last several years. We had both been forewarned that the time of the next Niteclif was near—”
Interrupting him, I asked, “By whom?”
“If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll explain. There is a wizard on the High Council who foretold of your coming, and we both have access to Seers within our individual races. The three voices all foretold the same future. The time of the Niteclif was near, you would appear through the stones, and you would be a young woman. What neither of us expected, what I didn’t expect, was that you would be so desirable.”
I snorted and crossed my arms under my breasts. Just having breasts prevented me from truly crossing my arms over my chest, but I did the best I could.
“I am sincere, Madeleine. You’ll find no falsehood in my words. When Bahlin entered your dream yesterday morning, I felt the contact because I’d been preparing to do the same.” Tarrek shifted toward me, putting his arm across the back of the seat and tugging at the end of my hair. “So when I followed his magic trail into your dream and I saw you, I was stunned.”
I thought about what he’d said about the Seelie fairies. “But you see beauty all the time. There’s nothing special about me, Tarrek.”
He reached out and pulled my hair, hard.
“Ow!” I leaned my head away from him and turned on my hip to face him, the movement partially restricted by the seatbelt.
“I’ll tolerate no disparaging remarks about your person, Maddy, not even from you.”
“Fine. Go on,” I snarled.
“You were beautiful, and I was incensed that he had made it to you before I had.”
“So I’m what? A competition between the two of you?” The words were ground out between clenched teeth. “Nice.”
“No, not…really. You are the Niteclif, and you deserve respect. But you are also a woman, and we are men, and we have both found ourselves interested in you as more than our kinds’ detective. Does this make sense?”
The answer was yes and no. Yes, I understood that they both were interested in me because I was the Niteclif, and I was the first female Niteclif at that. And no, I didn’t understand how they could both be interested in me in a personal capacity when