Descendant

“I don’t see why not. I believe in carrying as many tricks in your bag as you can. Never know when they might come in handy.” He flicked his thumb on the wheel of the lighter, and a little blue-and-yellow flame sprang to life on the wick.

Hesitantly, Mason reached out with thumb and forefinger. . . .

“Ouch!” she yelped, and drew back.

Fennrys grinned. “You’re playing with fire, Mase. You have to will yourself to not get burned. Try again.”

He watched as her other hand drifted up, fingertips resting lightly on the face of the iron medallion. A tiny crease formed between the dark arches of her brows as her face settled into an expression of fierce concentration. She took a deep breath, reached out again, and gently plucked the flame from the wick of the Zippo. The delighted grin that spread across her face, lit by the tiny fire’s glow, made Fennrys’s heart constrict in his chest.

Mason turned her hand over and nudged the flame from her fingertips to her palm, where it flickered and danced, cycling through shades of orange and blue and green . . . then, suddenly, the blazing little teardrop turned violet and shot into the air like a bullet. Fennrys ducked as it rocketed past his head and began to ricochet wildly off the crumbling brick walls. Mason threw her arms up over her head and crouched, and Fennrys bent his body around her, shielding her from the incendiary little missile. Suddenly, they were both in very real danger of getting badly burned, and there wasn’t anything Fennrys could do. It wasn’t his spell.

Beneath him, he could feel Mason struggling to wriggle free of his protective embrace. He made a grab for her as she slipped free and thrust her hand high above her head—fingers spread wide as if she wore a baseball glove—and snatched the fiery little projectile out of the air. In one fluid motion, she snapped her fingers shut on it like a cage, spun around, and hurled the flame at the pile of kindling . . . where it burst in a miniature explosion of orange and crimson, splashing sparks onto dry branches that blazed up into a crackling, cheery little fire.

Gasping, Mason collapsed forward, propping her hands on her knees, and Fennrys started to laugh. From behind the curtain of her hair, she cast an incredulous look at him as his mirth almost doubled him over.

“See?” he said. “You’re a natural!” Still chuckling, Fennrys walked over and stomped on a pile of leaves smoldering in one corner of the room. He pointed to the campfire. “Look. All we need is marshmallows.”

“Great. You can conjure those. I’d probably wind up calling forth a tiny horde of tasty, demonically possessed puff balls.” She slipped the medallion from around her neck and handed it back to Fennrys, shaking her head. “I’m gonna leave the spell casting to the pros, thank you.”

Fennrys grinned and fastened the charm back around his neck. Instead of the metal shocking him with a chill against the skin of his bare chest, it was warm. He didn’t know whether the heat was from the magick or from Mason, but both were welcome. There was a substantial pile of leaves in a drift near the fire and they sat down in it, Fenn wrapping his arms around Mason and pulling her close.

“You know, this place really isn’t so bad,” Mason said, leaning her head on Fennrys’s chest and gazing up at the broken windowpanes glinting in the last gleam of twilight.

The firelight reflected off her smooth, fair skin, turning her face to pale gold. She gestured at the leaf-and- rubbish-strewn space where the shadows crawled, writhing up the walls and gathering in the broken corners of the roof rafters. As the very last of the day’s light leached from the sky, it felt to Fennrys as if nightmarish things might come seeping through the holes in the walls at any moment.

“All it needs is a good sweeping up,” Mason continued. “A few pieces of art on the walls. Maybe some nice curtains . . .”

The temperature was dropping precipitously with the onset of night, and Fennrys felt the shivering that ran through Mason’s limbs despite her game face. He hugged her close, gazing down at her. She gazed back; brave, trusting, beautiful.

“Curtains,” he said.

“Yeah. Curtains.”

“You’re a weirdo.” Fenn shook his head. “Must be why I love you.”

And time suddenly stopped.

Right there. With those words. That word.

He hadn’t meant to say it, but he knew—in that moment—that he meant it.

Love . . .

Love . . .

Mason’s breath caught in her throat, and her heartbeat slowed to nothing.

She was stranded in a derelict ruin, surrounded by a haunted forest on a phantom island in the middle of the East River with a dead guy, having just escaped from a place that wasn’t really supposed to exist, and her family seemed to be plotting sinister things for her future, and . . .

And none of it mattered. None of it.

Because Fennrys had just told Mason that she was a weirdo.

And that he loved her.

Stunned to silence, Mason looked up into his eyes and saw that he meant what he’d said. And that he felt the exact same way as she did about every other damned thing in that moment. None of it mattered. Smiling his strange and ridiculously beautiful smile, he bent his head to hers, and Mason reached up to wrap her arms around his neck. Her mouth opened under his, and she felt as though she could devour him whole and still be hungry for more.

The way he kissed her back, she could feel that he was just as ravenous. As they pressed against each other, everything else fell away. All Mason could feel was Fennrys’s lips as they moved over hers, his hands— fingers strong and splayed wide, roaming over her back and shoulders as if he needed to touch as much of her as he could all at once—and the beating of his heart as they fell back into the bed of leaves beneath them. The broken walls that sheltered them loomed like the battlements of a medieval fortress, and overhead, Mason thought she saw stars peeking through. The lonely cry of a hunting owl echoed in the distance, the firelight cast Fenn’s profile in crimson and shadows, and Mason felt as though she had fallen into the pages of a fairy tale. Even prefaced by all the madness that had led to that moment, she could hardly find cause for complaint. She just gave herself over to passionately kissing her handsome prince.

So far, this is one of the fairy tales with a happy ending. . . .

She could feel the corners of her mouth turning up at the edges beneath Fennrys’s lips, and he broke the kiss, pulling his head back a few inches so that he could gaze into her eyes.

“Did that tickle?” he asked, his winter-blue eyes glinting with amusement.

“No . . .”

“Then why are you giggling?”

“I was smiling.” She ran her fingertips over the dark-gold stubble that shadowed his jaw and chin. “You could use a shave.”

“I’ve been a little busy.”

“But you’re still not a werewolf, and that, at least, is a great comfort to me.” She felt her grin widening. “Only that’s not why I was smiling.”

“I really think you were on the verge of giggling.”

“I’m happy.”

“You are?” he said, and Mason could hear the apprehension in his voice.

“In spite of everything—”

“And in the middle of all this chaos.”

“—and in the middle of all this chaos . . . yes. I’m happy.”

Fennrys traced the curve of her cheek with the fingertips of one hand. His expression was starkly unguarded in that moment, and Mason was worried suddenly that it might all be too much for him. But then he saw the way she was looking at him, and his mouth bent back into that insanely kiss-worthy smile again.

“Hey,” she whispered against his fingertips as he ran them beneath her cheekbone and across the curve of her lips. Just the slightest touch from him left her skin tingling. “Don’t knock it.” He raised an eyebrow, and she explained. “I think that in a situation like this—not that I’ve ever really been in a situation like this before—you might as well try to find whatever joy you can and make the most of it. I mean, you never know what’s thundering on down the road toward you.”