“Out,” he growled. “I know we’re feigning an elopement, but you’re not my wife yet.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She rolled over and sat up. “Have you been drinking?”

“Yes, but not nearly enough.”

“What’s wrong? Why are you so angry?” As she’d done earlier that night, she reached out to touch him with a hand that would be cool on his fevered skin, a hand that would make him yearn for more than this ridiculous fantasy they’d embroiled themselves in. But this time he flinched and she withdrew, her fingers tacky with his blood.

“You’re hurt—again.” She sat up, throwing her legs over the side of the bunk. “One would think you seek out trouble.”

He sank back on the bed, closing his eyes. “I was managing fine until someone we know took a board to my skull.”

“So you just happened to be in that alley, David St. Leger? Or should I call you . . . Monster of the Mews?”

He opened his eyes to see her staring down at him, hands on her hips. “Figured it out, did you?”

“Two and two . . . I’ve always been good at sums. But why?” she asked. “Suppose someone caught you?”

“Someone did.”

“Exactly. Why would you put yourself at such risk for complete strangers?”

“Why does anyone do anything, sweet Callista?” he answered. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Much like this . . .” Before he could think better of it, he rolled up and off the bed to cradle the back of her head as he kissed her. She jerked once in his arms but did not run. He ran the tip of his tongue across the tight seam of her lips until she slowly relaxed into his embrace. He felt the mix of fear and want within her but carefully, delicately, he teased her into compliance. Her body slackened, her lips parted to allow his tongue to plunder the velvet within. Edging closer, he reached to palm the luscious curve of a breast—and gasped as a hot slash of pain sizzled down his arm to his fingers.

She jerked away, dazed but quickly refocusing. “I knew it was more than a scratch. Let me take a look.”

“I’m fine,” he said, though the wagon did seem to be pitching and rolling more than it ought—or was that his stomach? Difficult to tell after the insane amount of gin and whisky he’d poured down his throat, not to mention a disgusting brew that tasted like turnips but carried the devil’s own kick.

“I’ll be the judge. Let’s go outside where I can see”—her gaze swept the cluttered wagon’s interior—“and we have some space to breathe.”

He sighed. So much for his famed prowess with women. He’d hoped for a courtesan and had gotten a nurse. He closed his eyes, jaw clamped tight, nostrils flaring in a huff of ironic laughter. Best to surrender to her ministering and get it over with.

Outside, the sky shone black as ink, stars high and cold. She sat him down beside the smoldering gray ash of the cookfire, whispered words under her breath as she fed it kindling and stoked it with the end of a burnt stick until the flames burned bright, dancing in her eyes.

Better flames than death.

“Do you have a healer’s magic as well, Fey-blood?” The sarcasm was unwarranted, but his body throbbed from temples to toes, an effect that hours in the single-minded pursuit of inebriation had done little to curb.

“No, but you can’t just let it fester. You’ll sicken.”

Before he could argue, she had his shirt off with only the slightest hesitation. Her expression grim and businesslike, she dabbed at the long, shallow gash just below his collarbone. The bleeding had stopped, but a thin trail of it remained smeared across his chest, the trail of her finger easily visible even in the thick gloom. “How did it happen?”

“The particulars are vague, but if memory serves, there was a drag hook involved. Must have been baited to catch fox.”

Her body stilled, her breath catching in a ragged gasp as she clutched the rag, eyes locked on the gash with new intensity. “Fox . . . or wolf?”

He lifted her chin with a finger, forcing her to meet his gaze. “It was a coincidence, Callista. That’s all. I should have been paying closer attention. Now that I know the lands hereabout are well guarded, I’ll be more careful.”

“Being careful would mean staying close to the wagons and staying human,” she scolded.

He gave a bleak smile, his pleasant fuzziness fading as if it had never been. But that was always the way. He could run from the ruin his life had become, but it always caught him up in the end.

“I’m not human, Callista . . . not completely,” he answered.

He covered her hand with his own, felt her soft skin, her fingers trembling. Lightning licked along his blood, shooting southward to his groin. There were only inches separating them, inches that closed as he leaned toward her, waiting for her to pull back, to stop him, to run for the safety of the wagon and lock the door behind her. She did none of those things. Instead, she swayed toward him as if strings holding her taut had been cut. Her lips parted, a sigh escaping as he kissed her brow, her temple, her cheek. He turned over her hand and kissed her palm and the underside of her wrist where her pulse fluttered.

“Psiyo kr’ponelos toro.”

“What did you say?”

“I called you a tall, cool drink of water. Something I’m in desperate need of right now.”

“Come inside. I’ll pour you a glass and tuck you into bed.”

Now, there was a loaded suggestion fraught with possibilities, all of them out of bounds. But, Mother of All, he was more than willing to indulge. Already he was rigid as a tent pole. “I think I’ll just sit out here for a bit and, uh . . . whittle.”

She folded her legs beneath her, a clever smile on her face. “Then I’ll keep you company.”

“Is this your friendly way of keeping me sober or keeping me safe?”

She cocked her head with a quick look of amusement. “Too late for both tonight, but we’ll reset the clock and begin fresh from now.” She paused, the smile dying. “Why do you drink so much, David?”

“It keeps me from thinking . . . or feeling. At least for a little while.”

“But don’t you pay for it afterward?”

He shrugged. “A price I find tolerable. Besides, I could guzzle a trough and it would barely affect me. It’s one of the so-called advantages of my shifter blood. A head like a rock.”

A dimple quirked a corner of her mouth, her eyes bright with laughter. “You said it, not me.”

He drew a deep breath. The gash on his chest stung, but it was the throbbing between his legs that nearly brought tears to his eyes. He’d desired women before but never like this. Never with such a visceral yanking of every heartstring in his body. It made no sense. She was pretty, but not beautiful. She was smart, but no bluestocking. She was funny, but hardly a drawing-room wit. So, what was it that made him want to reach out and hold on with both hands? Her courage? Her patience? Her artlessness? Her smile?

“Are all Imnada like you?” she finally asked, breaking into the endless spin of his thoughts.

“Do you mean incredibly virile or breathtakingly dangerous?” he asked with a rakish arch of his brows and a sly curl to his lip—a move that made the typical women of his acquaintance flutter their eyelashes at him in blatant invitation.

Callista laughed and tossed a pebble at him. “Odious man. How about exquisitely conceited?”

The curl of his lip broadened into a genuine smile. “Guilty on all counts.”

An owl called from a nearby tree and sheep murmured in the pens behind them. He leaned back, a hand behind his head, and watched the crackle and dance of the flames. He’d done this earlier, but damn if Callista wasn’t better company than Sam Oakham.

“I just mean that you seem so much”—she paused as if searching for the right word—“so much more than normal humans, or even the Other. Larger than life almost, as if you know a secret the rest of us don’t. As if you possess some great knowledge none of us can even fathom.”

“Perhaps we once did. It’s said we were here long before the Fey. We don’t have their magic, but we tend to be faster, more agile, quicker to respond to danger and quicker to heal when injured.”

“And yet there are so few of you left.”

“We bleed. We die. In the end, disguising what we were was the only way left to us.”

“We’re taught to hide our gifts as well. We learn early how to mask our talents and pass as nonmagical Duinedon.” Was it a trick of the flames or did she shudder, her gaze growing distant, her face heartbreakingly sad?

“Or make money from them?”

Her eyes snapped to his face with a noticeable wince of her shoulders. “That was Branston’s idea, though it never made him the fortune he imagined it would. We always seemed to be one step ahead of constables and moneylenders as we traveled from town to town and fair to fair.”

“No wonder you knew how to escape Corey. It wasn’t the first time you’d slipped the net.”

She made a small gesture, as if shaking off this uncomfortable train of thought. “Enough about my disreputable family. What of yours? Is there a gaggle of equally imposing brothers and sisters out there?”

“No. No one.”

She waited. He could feel her held breath, her expectant silence.

Once remembered, Mother’s words seemed to haunt him with their truth: “The wolf does not run and he does not hide.”

He’d been doing both for the last two years. Hiding from his past. Running from his fate. It had availed him nothing but exhaustion.

“When my parents died,” he said, his throat tight as the words moved like boulders up from his chest, “my uncle was technically in charge of my well-being, but he was an infantry lieutenant and barely around. When I told him I wanted to join the army, he was pleased as punch to arrange my commission. He died later in Portugal.”

She drew her knees to her chest, the flames picking out the hollows beneath her eyes and the kind set of her mouth. “It sounds lonely.”

“The clans never allow one of their own to be alone. The bonds are too strong between kin and holding. And each of the five clans is in constant communication through our krythos, disks that amplify our pathing far beyond their normal range.”

“And you said you possessed no magic.”

“They’re not magic, or not as the Other define it. I can’t explain the krythos. They just have always been.”

His hand still unconsciously reached for his far-seeing disk, though less so now than in the first terrible weeks after he’d destroyed it with a well-aimed swing of a hammer, gratified at the lovely crunch of shattering glass. Unfortunately, it had been a short-lived satisfaction. Much like whisky and women.

And even those two palliatives were losing their efficacy.

A lot like the damned draught, come to think of it.

“Between the bloodline ties and Gather law, even the lowliest orphan is surrounded and supported by family and clan. No one is left behind,” he added.

“No one but you.”

He reeled as if slapped, the breath knocked out of him in a gasp, which he transformed to a quick bark of cynical laughter. “Me? I’m constantly in company. Either at my club, parties, dinners, balls, breakfasts, salons, luncheons, and shopping. You name it. I’m surrounded by people.”

She ran her hands one over the other down her braid in a nervous gesture, eyes locked on his face. “Sometimes that’s when we’re the loneliest.”

He rolled up and onto his feet. Strode away from the fire, though there was nowhere for him to go. Hell, he wasn’t even wearing a shirt. But leaving ended the conversation, or at least this conversation. He didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want to think about what he’d lost, only what he’d found.

“David?”

She had come up silently behind him. Or rather, he’d been so deep in thought and hazy with gin fumes, he’d not have heard a cannon going off in his ear.

“Come to bed.”

“If I didn’t know any better, Miss Hawthorne, I’d say you were trying to seduce me.” He tried for scoundrel, but it came out sounding more like wronged virgin.

She backed up a step, though her gaze never wavered. “You’ll have a good sleep and things will look better in the morning.”

Did she speak for him or for herself now? There was meaning hidden behind her expression. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Couldn’t read her eyes, but it was there. A shadow of trouble.

“A tried-and-true remedy. Unfortunately, it’s never worked yet.”

“There’s a first for everything,” she said with a brisk cheerfulness.