Page 255 of A Sanctuary from Shadow
“That’s kind of sweet, Pete.”
“Aye, although it does grow tiresome, soaking here with no one to talk to.” His dark gaze raked me. “Or look at.”
I giggled, cheeks flushing, when his breath caressed my ear. He rumbled, satisfied, as gooseflesh dappled my neck.
“Hm.” Pete licked his soft lips. Drops of water sparkled in his beard as he smiled down on me. “Ken what color your eyes turn when I do that, Shorty?”
“No.” I tittered, waiting for him to do it again.
“Blue.” He kissed the soft spot behind my ear, making me shudder. “As a midnight sky.”
“Yeah?”
“Mm-hm.”
I shivered at the delicate touch of his tongue to my ear arch. “And what about when I—” I bit my lip. “You never did tell me what color they turn then.”
His mouth hitched. “The most vivid violet I’ve ever seen—a blend of your fire and passion.”
“Sounds pretty.”
“Oh, it’s the prettiest color I’ve ever seen.”
I bit my lip, offering Pete my neck to nibble on.
“But there’s one thing I don’t yet ken about your eyes.” His lips brushed the curve of my jaw. I quivered at the tantalizing touch, giggling again. “I don’t yet ken what color they turn when I do this—”
The attack was swift and ruthless—just the way a harbinger would do it. Pete’s fingers went right for my waist, and I balled up like a hedgehog, shrieking for mercy from his tickles. We then thrashed together like drowning birds in the spring. I cackled. Pete guffawed. And regardless of the privacy afforded us, I doubted there was a single soul in Eden who didn’t know what we were doing.
Later, I wondered if there were ever sounds like that in Eden before the fall.
Twodayslater,ithappened.
We’d never have known it was coming, the dusky morning as normal as ever in Eden. Pete and I hadn’t even packed for the Spring Palace yet; we didn’t have many belongings. The cafeteria had started serving lunch, and workers were breaking from their chores to fill their growling bellies. Spirits were high all around. Even Bumble’s, who turned out not to be so ornery once I got to know him. The gruff Dwarf offered me his spot in line for lunch, wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Maybe because I looked like I’d been through the ringer, having spent that morning feeding livestock. The fleecers, especially, could be quite uncouth in receiving their meals. I’d gotten stampeded. Though I’d made it out of the pen unscathed, my braid was in disarray, I smelled faintly of dung, and my leafy ensemble needed scrubbed.
“What happened to you?” Sedge snickered on his way past me, both Kit and Sionna prancing at his heels.
“Bernard,” I named the worst-mannered fleecer. “Hethinkshe’s starving.”
Still snickering, Sedge moseyed on. Or at least he meant to. He stopped dead in his tracks when the ground quaked.
Confusion was my first reaction to the screaming. Abject terror followed when a volley of whispering arrows filled the purple sky.
Sedge unsheathed his blades. “Run for cover!” he bellowed, then smacked Sionna’s already trembling rump, spurring her to seek shelter, before tearing off toward whatever evil slung those arrows. Kit dashed after him.
“Gentian!” someone cried as they raced past. “He’s found us!”
Frozen in place, I watched the barrage skewer those around me like hunks of meat, people I’d come to know, impaled in twos and threes. Bumble got speared through his thigh behind me. The mothers who usually chittered together over lunch were downed before they’d even jumped up to find their faelets. I saw Riordan, standing on the beach, cast a wind at the arrows, trying to blow them back. But whatever wind carried the volley was stronger, for Riordan’s blast barely affected them, and I screamed, enraged, as he took an arrow through the hip.
My shock shattered, I scrambled through the escaping slews, reaching for every power I had—my hands already aflame.
If this was Gentian’s doing, then I was going to find him and incinerate him like the piece of garbage he was. But when I finally encountered an invader, a large Danann warrior taking a sword to an unarmed Middling feyr of medium stature, I froze again. Horrified.
The invader wielded a lightsaber-esque sword. He wore gleaming, engraved armor and a horned helm. An apparition from a dream.
“No.” Chills rippled through my soul. This wasn’t Gentian’s doing. Those weren’t his arrows. And those weren’t his soldiers storming Eden like Vikings fiending for gold.
