“Here they may.” He paused, then his gaze sharpened. “The verita luna. You’ve lost the way. That’s why you wanted to know how I triggered it.”
“No, I—” The lie was bitter in her mouth, and she choked on it. Of all the places where a lie should have been easy. “It’s none of your business.”
“It is now.” He took a step toward her. “That is what brought you here. You are trapped, unable to change, just as we—” He cut himself off as he prowled behind her.
She whirled to face him again. The threatening heat of his big body made her already sensitized skin tingle. As a cat, she would have rubbed against him to release the static charge. A longing for her tigress arrowed through her, as piercing as the knife at his side. She could not admit he was right; to say it made it too true. She hedged, saying, “You think my answer is here.”
“The phaedrealii is rarely a place of answers.” When she opened her mouth to press him, he set one fingertip to her lips, silencing her. “Not that the sunlit realm is any better. But if ever you might find what you seek, it will be with me. Now come.”
His touch burned on her lower lip, and she found herself tilting toward him as if gravity had shifted. His scent—like a storm brewing in the boreal forests she called home, mist and mountain struck by lightning, wild and evergreen—lingered in her flared nostrils. The unintentional change she’d just gone through must have unsettled her more than she’d thought.
But when he turned, she followed. What other choice did she have?
* * *
Which was more dangerous: a tigress by the tail, or a tigress on his tail?
Raze’s spine tingled with awareness of the force of nature prowling behind him as they descended to his lair. She might be smaller than him at the moment, but the wild heat of her was the same in either of her forms. He didn’t doubt holding her would be risky whether her claws were feline or verbal.
But she’d tacitly confessed she’d lost the verita luna. Curiosity prickled more than the sense of danger, both sensations an irresistible lure. Just as well he was no cat or this curiosity might get him into trouble.
He glanced back, and the prickle in his spine shot out along every nerve as he found her golden-green gaze fixed on his backside. She instantly glanced away, but her pupils were blown wide and dark, not just from the low lighting in the stairwell but from something else, something more edgy.
The steep pitch of the stairs left his head level with her belly, and though his gray robe covered her now, his mind’s eye had no trouble seeing right through the rough weave to the memory of her bare curves. His previously loose trousers suddenly felt very constricting.
The werelings had wanted no part of the Iron Wars, and he’d had few dealings with them back when the phae walked the sunlit realm. He knew they were sensual creatures, prone to grand passions of the sort that had been the Undoing of the phaedrealii. Phae magic was destabilized by unruly emotion, and that unpredictable animal fever couldn’t be allowed to wreak havoc on his painfully wrought geasa. Not now, not when he was so close.
She was too close, which was why his pulse was racing as if the fever had already infected him.
“I suspect...” His voice sounded harsh, even to himself, so he cleared his throat and started again. “I suspect the depth of your longing for the verita luna brought you through the lake gate, even though it is locked.” The Queen had crafted the portal with a volatile new compound, which had no doubt exacerbated the already erratic qualities of a doorway woven from algae spores.
Yelena pursed her lips—her wide mouth was the same dusky-rose-red as the tips of her breasts had been; would her tender, inner flesh be as lush?—and he almost fumbled on the last stair.
“You started to say the phaedrealii couldn’t change either,” she mused. “Why not?”
Unbalanced by his misstep—and by his distraction at a simple pout—he spoke without thinking. “Because it would mean the end of us.”
To his relief, she was sidetracked when, triggered by his presence, light bloomed in his lair. Swirls of ammolite phosphorescence spiraled up the fluted columns of flowstone that supported the rough cavern rock far overhead. The glowing traceries branched out across the ceiling like spreading limbs and leaves, a tree of light.
Yelena’s dark pupils constricted in the sudden shine, revealing the wide pools of tigress-gold that shimmered with the iridescence around her. She turned in a slow circle, and in her wondering gaze, he saw anew the beauty of the quartz-studded walls only barely softened by the long falls of silky curtains. The lacy edges drifted on an imperceptible breeze that carried the faint mineral scent of wet stone.
A sudden wish to show her more—to point out the tiny spiderling phae constantly spinning the silk or to guide her deeper into the caverns to reveal the hot springs where he soaked away the agony of his scars—welled in him, a desire even more corrosive to his discipline than the blatant delights of her naked body.
He slammed a halt to the thought, as hard and jagged as the quartz. What in the deepest hells was he thinking? Sharing their magic had almost destroyed the phae. He couldn’t forget that, not even for one, impossible moment with a woman who reminded him of the world he’d lost.
He would have pulled his cloak more tightly around himself, but she was wearing it. He’d coax the spiderlings into weaving him another. Otherwise the tigress’s earthy perfume would haunt him forever.
“Come,” he said again. And this time he did not try to keep the harshness from his voice.
Her upper lip—ah, those lips would not be so easily purged from his memory either—curled at his brusque tone, but she followed him toward a small alcove carved with many sills and ledges holding boxes, bowls, bottles and bric-a-brac.
“A pack rat,” she muttered. “But a tidy one. You’d love my sisters’ matryoshki nesting dolls.”
That was the second time she’d mentioned her relatives. “You are close to your family?”
She watched while he chose a shallow obsidian bowl and various other items from the wall. “Very. Will that make it easier for me to get home?”
He shook his head as he mixed ingredients into a thin paste. “It doesn’t matter either way.” He scraped some of the ammolite from the wall. The dust shimmered like dragon scales as it fluttered into the black glass basin.
Her jaw thrust forward so furiously he could almost see her tigress whiskers bristling. “It matters to me.”
“I meant such connections won’t save you.”
“Oh.” Her face blanked like a mask. “I know that.”
Her bleak tone—a familiar echo to the emptiness inside him—made him pause as he studied her. She might try, but she could not rival him in detachment.
After all, he intended to sever the phaedrealii from the emotional enticements of the sunlit realm forever.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
She eyed him warily. “Are you going to kiss me again?”
He
