It wasn't only that, either, I realized, playing through those fever-dream memories slowly. I met his eyes, and the world shifted under me, like those party tricks where you yank the tablecloth out from under a set table and leave everything sitting prettily on the bare wood. They were speaking a different language, and as soon as I saw him, I understood the words. I'd known he'd been...

Glamored, my mind whispered. Dain, whose name I knew without ever having met him before, had been wearing a glamor, something to take a man with wolf eyes and turn him human. The eyes had been the worst, but the rest of him had been wrong, too. His friends looked human, beautiful but still humanly beautiful, but they spoke the same language he did. Had they been glamored, too? I hadn't known their names. But I knew his name, somehow, and I could recognize him and I could recognize that he didn't look right.

Oh, I did not like that at all. My e-book reader was full of the sorts of novels you don't usually want physical copies of, in case your mother decides to come over and tidy up for you, and I knew all the tropes. Weird mystical eye things were way up there on the list of things that were fun to think about and probably extremely terrible in practice. One of my favorite stories played with the idea, following a woman who got a narcissistic prick of a fae duke for a soulmate, learned blood magic, and got the hell out of dodge. That seemed more like how it would go than anything else.

I did not want to be in a weird codependent mystical eye relationship with someone who was happy to leave a stranger to die in the woods. I did not want to deal with mystical eye things at all. I wanted to go home and I wanted to curl up in a very small ball to cry for days, while my threadbare old cat purred and chewed on my hair in his version of comfort.

One of my favorite internet videos popped into my head, of a dude chopping logs with a flail ax. It was an incredible sight, of course—a hot dude wielding the most absolutely impractical weapon with total precision—but the best part was one of the replies: "If I saw someone on the opposing team wielding this in battle, I would simply go away. I would be done with that battle. No thank you! I will be stabbed with a normal sword at a later date." The comment seemed very apropos to my situation. Mystical eye things? No thank you! I will be nabbed by a normal boy at a later date.