Kinked

and Quentin truly were the only ones around.

Maybe one of the Elves in the missing party was a magic user and could sense what Quentin had just done. If they were still alive. Or maybe they had just attracted the attention of the trespassers, and maybe those trespassers weren’t friendly.

If so, bring ’em on. After discovering the tragedy in the house, shedding tears and suffering through pangs of empathy, she was in the mood for a little gratuitous violence.

They walked the rest of the way to the coast, both eating jerky. The sun beat down on their heads from a cloudless sky as the afternoon turned sweltering. Then a breeze picked up, blowing off the water and bringing a welcome respite from the heat.

Aryal didn’t want to look at Quentin, and she was glad he didn’t seem to be in the mood to talk. She didn’t have to glance at him to know how he walked, moving his long, muscled body with that smooth, boneless grace of his that ate away the miles like a sleek Porsche purring down a road. She could do with not seeing him at all for a couple of months, but for the moment that option wasn’t in the cards.

Her fingers kept remembering the silken glide of his short hair as she stroked him, the feeling of his forehead pressed to the back of her hand as he gripped her. The way he had come running when she had burst out of the house, his expression sharp with concern. His hand, rubbing her back. The raw emotion in his face as he stared at the tiny occupant of that exquisitely carved cradle.

She was in real trouble, all right.

She was in imminent danger of believing Quentin Caeravorn might actually be a decent man after all. Or at least part of him was, the essential part, the part that could be counted on to do the right thing when push came to shove.

Hrmph. She would rather be caught dead before she admitted that to anyone back in New York. It would completely trash whatever reputation she had. With everybody. She was quite sure right now that some of them didn’t expect both her and Quentin to return in one piece.

And well, as far as that went, it was early days yet.

The curving road followed along the coast just on the other side of barrier dunes. She couldn’t contain her curiosity and had to jog over the dunes to taste the water, which was salty. From the shore, she could see a few more details of the blue land in the distance. It looked like an island. A dun-colored line at the water hinted at sand, and a glimpse of green trees on a sharply rising slope rose from the water. Through the trees on the slope, she could see some kind of building.

She made a promise to herself to fly over the next day to explore it, or at least take enough time to make a quick pass over it from the air. She had kept herself grounded for too long, and she was beginning to feel it as a jittering in her bones.

As they reached the shore, the temple on top of the promontory became larger and clearer as well. The figures, along with the pillars that interspersed them, were easily fifty feet tall and dominated the landscape. There were three statues along the side of the temple that faced them, and from the shoreline she could see the profile of the figure facing out over the water. It was male. Was that the god Taliesin, and would the other half of the figure be female? The pattern would make sense if there were three statues on the other side of the temple. One statue for each of the seven Elder Races gods.

Quentin had joined her at the edge of the shore.

“The water is salty,” she said to him. She nodded at the temple. “Have you heard any stories about whether or not the palace is part of that temple?”

“No,” he told her. “ But making a guess right now, I’d say not. I think that’s the palace.” He pointed, and she followed the line of his arm to the long building that hugged the top of the hill where the promontory reached the mainland.

Built of limestone, with four marble pillars at the front, the building glowed golden and white against the green foliage and blue skyline. An immensely long staircase was cut into the hill and lined with stone.

She sucked a tooth and made a small grimace. “Yeah, that looks palacey all right.”

He grinned. The lines of it creased his lean face. “Come on. No time to lollygag and play in the water.”

She followed him over the barrier dunes, watching as his powerful body and long legs made short work of the slippery sand. Some contrary impulse made her say, “You know, just because we’ve sexed it up a couple of times and shared a bad moment over—back there—doesn’t mean I like you very much.”

He turned to face her, blew out a huge breath and rolled his eyes. “Whew, that saves me from having to ask you to back the fuck off. For a while there on the walk, you were getting a little clingy.”

Internal pressure built. She tried to swallow it down. Then their eyes met, and they both burst out laughing.

It felt a lot like the camaraderie she had built up over the years with the other sentinels, not quite the same, but it felt good. He looked great, tanned and blue eyed and bathed in sunshine. He was the very picture of the kind of man who’d had the world laid at his feet by every female he had ever met.

He could have anyone he wanted, anytime he wanted. He was sexy, alpha, secure in himself, and the world adored him for it. He was only messing around with her because there wasn’t anybody around, and if they wanted to go back to their jobs, they were stuck with each other’s company for at least the next week and a half.

Hell, it was the only reason why she was messing around with him too, wasn’t it? She might have found him … okay, sexually intriguing … back in New York, but she would never have acted on anything, especially when she had been so suspicious of him.

Her own feelings confused her. She hated when they did that, almost as much as she hated to cry. Complex, confusing feelings felt like she had a crowd of strangers in her head, and they were all shouting for attention in some foreign language she didn’t understand.

She cut her laughter off abruptly and scowled at him. That only made him laugh harder, and of course that made her feel prone to violence.

Which made her feel better.

Gods, she was a fucking mess, sometimes.

She waved a hand in the air and stomped off. The last five minutes had become meaninglessly complicated. For good measure, she flipped up her middle finger and was rewarded with a guffaw. Oh, screw it all, anyway.

But as much as she didn’t know what to call it, and try as she might to deny it, something had happened back in that beautiful, terrible nursery. Something indefinable but important had shifted between them. She just wished she knew what it was.

Then they reached the center of the city, and she put it all behind her.

By modern standards on Earth, it wasn’t very big. The entire area was easily reached by walking. Many of the large buildings looked like spacious homes, while the rest appeared to be perhaps government buildings, and some looked like shops. Given the size of the Numenlaurian army that Aryal had seen, that would mean many of the Elves must have lived scattered across the land.

The only way Gaeleval could have ensnared them all—or at least the majority of them—was either by patiently combing the countryside, or by casting the enthrallment at some point when the Elves would have gathered here en masse, either for a holiday or some ceremony. Given the location of the bodies they had discovered, Gaeleval must have walked the length of Numenlaur, harvesting people across the land like wildflowers.

They quartered the streets and walked down all of them systematically, looking up at the buildings and inspecting blind alleys. Even though this area was the most developed they had seen since they’d crossed over, there was a symmetry to how the buildings aligned with the countryside, and how the streets and paths followed the natural curvature in the land. Houses nestled into groves of trees, and flower gardens flourished everywhere, overgrown now with weeds.

Skeletons lay strewn in the streets. Scavenging wildlife had made short work of the bodies left out in the open. At one point, Quentin bent to gently pry a sword from a skeleton’s grip. It was a long, lethal piece of loveliness. An Elven-made sword, she knew, was a true joy to wield, slender yet strong, perfectly balanced, and with an edge so sharp it could slice a single hair.

She watched as he wiped it off carefully and inspected the length. Then he swung it back and forth, spun