My heart practically stopped. It definitely skipped a beat, because my chest wrenched as a cold sweat broke out over my entire body. I sucked in a breath, clutching at my shirt with one hand, staring at Dain. "What?"

He looked puzzled. "Did you think that the gods would allow a fae's soulmate to wither and die while he watched, helpless to intervene?"

"I didn't consider it at all," I said, my voice high and strained. "So I'm not the first human soulmate? You know this for a fact?"

"Don't flatter yourself," Dain said with a snort. "Fae and humans have lived alongside each other since the dawn of humanity. It's not common, but you're hardly the first."

I made some sort of sound that attempted to be laughter, but came out a lot more like panicked horror. "Cool, cool, cool," I said. "Immortality, A-plus, love it."

"Ah, yes. The sound of happiness," he replied, totally deadpan.

I whined at him, and looked back up at the sky. Okay. One more horrible thing to consider. I was stuck in Faery. Dain had promised to have me as his guest for a year and a day or until we became balanced soulmates, whichever came first. He was physically incapable of lying, which meant I would be stuck here either for a year and a day or until I died. People hated Dain enough to hurt me to get at him; right now Dain had put the fear of himself into everyone, but Susan had said that if he and I got affectionate, all bets were off, and I believed her. Add to that stack of badness the fact that I'd apparently become as immortal as him if we ended up balanced soulmates, and my chances at escape were starting to look narrow indeed.

How the hell was I supposed to make it three hundred and sixty more days without getting into a stable relationship with him? We were going to see each other a lot, and whatever mystical shit tied us together had clearly done some form of pattern-matching, putting a girl who liked weird monster romances with a weird monster guy, and picking someone with a spine to shove in the face of someone like Dain. I wasn't a particularly spiritual person, but the presence of actual magic was making me reconsider some of my deeply-held beliefs, and I couldn't rule out the concept that he and I would be perfect matches of some sort, whether that was in affection or opposition.