I wipe at my eyes. “They get eaten?”
He drops the end of his braid and scowls at me. “Perhaps. Want me to eat you, little girl?”
“I’m not a girl,” I tell him, my cousin’s words returning to me, ringing annoyingly clear. “I’m a woman.”
“Hm.” He makes a show of taking me in from head to toe, and I lift my chin, letting him look. I’m not going to simper or swoon under his gaze.
“Iama woman,” I say, “and I have the curves to prove it.”
“Yeah.” I swear I can see his chest rising and falling faster now, and he swallows hard, the knot in his throat working.
“I’m here for my pendant,” I say. “No more tricks, Adar. No more games. I need it, and it’s mine. If you’re a good person, if you’re a King and have any honor at all, you’ll return it to me.”
He’s still gazing at my body. “I’m Fae. Who says I have any honor?”
“Don’t you?” I stop where the water laps at the shore, gazing at him where he’s oh-so-casually lounging against the log, a large blue tail fin lazily moving back and forth behind him. “Don’t you care what I think of you?”
“Of course not. I know what you think of me. That’s I’m a monster. That I’m amoral. That I set out to seduce you and eat out your heart.”
“Did you?”
“… maybe. Does that scare you?”
Yes, I’m scared. He’s so much larger than me, so much stronger. His looks confuse my mind, muddle my senses. The Fae are the predators, and we’re prey.
And yet I take another step toward him, my bottines splashing into the lake.
“Selina,” he whispers, pushing off the log, diving into the water and surfacing right in front of me, lifting his powerful torso up with his hands. When I stumble back a step, he pulls himself toward me. “Wait.”
But I take another step back. “My pendant, or there will be no more kissing. You’ll remain cursed to the end of your days.”
“You’re cruel.”
“No,youare. My pendant. Where do you keep it?”
“If I tell you, you’ll leave.”
“I’ll leave anyway.” I take another step back. “Where is it?”
He drags himself up the bank and hisses, one of his arms collapsing from under him so that he lies on his side on the shiny pebbles and the mud.
His tail is a gaping wound from side to side. The water around him has the red tinge of blood. His face is pale.
“Adar,” I whisper, my chest suddenly tight. “What happened? That doesn’t look like it should, does it?”
“How would you know how it should look?” he rasps. The spots of red on his cheekbones look like fever.
“This isn’t working the way you’d hoped.”
“Maybe not.” He grimaces as he drags himself a little higher up the bank and stops.
“Tell me about the curse. What caused it. How you ended up here.”
“It’s a long story.”
My throat is dry. “Are you dying?”
“I don’t know. That’s the thing with curses. They aren’t logical and they don’t always work in the way you expect.”