Page 173 of A Sanctuary from Shadow
Reality destroyed me. That voice in my head—it hadn’t been me. Although it had known all my basest desires.
“Mercy on you, Pete,” Sedge spat, unyoking himself of alarm and worry. “To think you’d let your guard down by one of the druidic lakes—and with lust in your heart, no less. Even I scented the fervor, and I don’t feed off it. You’re a lucky bugger that I was looking for you and got here as the wight was weaving its spell ’round you. Before you’d gotten snared completely. Gripes, you’d have been lost at that. And to think how I’d have explained your death to those reliant on you: ‘Oh, Pete? Aye, he died. Fornication until starvation, it was.’” Sedge sniffed. “What a pathetic end for you.”
Pete’s mussed head bowed at his friend’s rebuke, but I knew what had happened wasn’t his fault. It was mine. The Incubus had found the lust inmyheart, not Pete’s. For it was me the creature had duped into propositioning Pete. Me, who’d ignored Pete’s pleas to stop. Me, who’d drawn him into an act he’d clearly wanted no part of. Me, who’d just behaved no better than all the other Dananns in the Shadow Palace who’d used his body for sport. And now, as he knelt over me, I saw the stricken expression on his face and felt like a lecher in a dive bar.
Pete reached to help me cover myself. But I wrenched back, righting my shift myself. “Don’t touch me,” I cried before fleeing him and the hoax of our passion.
Desperatetosortoutwhat had just happened to me, I donned Tansy’s dress, not caring that I looked like a drowned streetwalker—or that I was on other harbingers’ Christmas lists—and stormed off down the road. Though Shanerie really wasn’t too far away, I shouldn’t have made it the whole way back to the bustling village. Had Pete realized I needed space and given me extra length on my tether? Thinking so only made me feel worse—for taking advantage of someone so understanding.
It wasn’t you, I told myself. Or tried to.You’d never have done that stuff if the Incubus hadn’t made you do it.
Yeah, but it was all stuff you, in your heart of hearts,wantedto do.
What was worse, now that Pete and I had had this compulsory, untimely encounter, a real romantic moment between us was now out of the question. Not that Pete wanted a real one, anyway, as homely as I was. And not that I should even entertain the thought of a romance with the harbinger sent to capture me. But to know that it wasn’t even a possibility now, that I’d ruined any shot at it—Goddess, it was depressing.
When I barreled past the muddy sign welcoming me to Shanerie, I was pouting like a child. Not even the welcoming candlelit windows and merry pipe music emanating from all the nighttime hotspots lifted my spirits. Although it was the first place I’d seen in Evereostre that reminded me of Pittsburgh—atmosphere wise, anyway.
It was a blessing, though, that I was so forlorn. In my self-pity, I didn’t notice the usual staring, the whispering about me. Until one dude was so obvious about it that he circled me three times to get a closer look. On his fourth circle, I lost my cool.
Baring my teeth, I advanced on the young male Dwarf and grabbed him by his dusty smock. “Whatis your problem?“ I shook him, wanting to shake all the people who’devergawked at me. Wanting to shake Pete for looking so goddamned sorry that we’d hooked up. “Don’t you know it’s rude to stare?”
The stocky feyr goggled, roses blooming on his round cheeks. If he weren’t such a jerk, I might’ve thought him handsome. “I—I—I—”
I shook him again, my kettle close to boiling. “I have feelings, too, you know! Just because I look like this doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to be laughed at!”
“Laughed at, lady?”
“Yes! Or are you more horrified than amused?”
The Dwarf’s jaw slackened just as a set of bear paws, the very ones that had been fondling my ass only an hour ago, snatched me off him.
I whirled on Pete. “Get off me!” Pushing him did nothing.
Sour-faced, he spared me a glance before rumbling, “Run away,” at the Dwarf. Which the feyr did with judicious speed.
Pete’s hair still showed signs of my gripping fingers, but he’d covered the naked chest I’d been kissing by donning his jerkin without his shirt—presumably still bobbing in the lake, half washed. His eyes were on the brink of onyx. “We’re going back to camp.”
I jerked away from him again. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“You are with your eyesthatcolor.”
“I don’t give a fuck what color my eyes are. You’ve no right to tell me what to—”
I shrieked when Pete swept me off my feet and threw me over his shoulder like a rug. My face smacked into his back, flooding my senses with his freshened scent and recent, mortifying memories.
Suddenly hating him for not being able to see past my body, I pummeled Pete’s shifting back like a punching bag, which was about as effective this time as it had been the first time he’d tossed me over his shoulder. But I kept it up until we were halfway to camp, where Pete dropped me on my feet.
Stumbling into a viney tree trunk, I wiped at my cascading tears.
He was breathless, as if he hadn’t stopped running since I’d left him at the lake. “Care to explain why you ran off?”
“You knowexactlywhy,” I wept into my palm.
Something wriggling in his jaw, Pete closed his eyes as if to calm himself. Then he glanced back up, earnest as a news anchor. And yep—there was that regret again. “I suppose I do.” He ran a restless hand through his hair. “Regardless, Shorty, that’s hardly cause to take your wrath into town, threatening innocents with a potential firestorm.”
“That’s not what I was doing!”
“What would you call throttling unwitting chaps just happening by, your eyes the color of rubies?”
