“I’ll give you space, then.” Fairy began to turn to go back to the chestnut grove.

But the moonlight illuminated her, and she looked almost angelic.

“Wait,” he said. “Come with me. I’m going to climb up closer to the sky.”

“I’m right behind you,” Fairy said without asking why.

He found a tall cypress nearby, with a thick trunk and long branches spread out like open arms. The majestic tree must have been a couple thousand years old. Daemon scaled the tree easily, climbing the trunk and then leaping from branch to branch. He checked to see if Fairy needed any help, but she’d cast a squirrel spell and was almost as nimble as he was. He stopped at one of the sturdier branches, not quite at the top but high enough, and a few seconds later, she landed without a sound next to him.

“What are we—?”

“Shh,” he said.

He waited for the familiar feeling to come—the sensation like a part of him had been missing but now, so far from the ground, the sky could pour into him, fill the emptiness, and make him whole. But there was nothing. He closed his eyes and puffed out his chest, as if inviting the sky in.

Nothing.

“It’s not working,” he muttered.

“What’s not?” Fairy asked.

“I don’t feel a thing.”

She moved closer to him. His eyes were still closed, but he sensed the slight shift in weight on the branch beneath his feet.

“Tell me if this helps you feel,” she whispered.

Then her mouth was on him, soft but insistent, for the first time since he’d kissed her in the Citadel infirmary. She smelled of plums—how did she do that, after being on the road for days?—and her lips told him that the incident in the dining hall on Isle of the Moon when she’d jumped away from him hadn’t been rejection, that she still wanted him.

Another surge of heat flooded his body, and while it wasn’t the same as the sky pouring into him, he couldn’t care less right now.

Her lips parted his, and their tongues found each other. Daemon circled Fairy’s waist and lifted her. She threw her arms around his neck and wrapped her legs around him. He moved closer to the center of the tree and pushed her back against the trunk.

She kissed his neck and toyed with his collar. His hand slid under the hem of her tunic, to bare skin like satin.

“The things I want to do to you,” she purred.

Oh gods. It was as if he were on fire, inside and out. His temperature spiked. Sparks flew.

“Wolf,” Fairy said, and hearing her call out his taiga name with her voice husky from desire made him burn even more.

But then she shoved away from him. “Wolf!”

“Did I do something wrong?” Daemon said, flustered.