The temptation was too much: she gave in and touched his arm, not a caress, but contact. “Don’t stand so close to the edge next time, okay? Please.”

He said nothing. Her hand was on his skin, and they were both motionless, staring at each other.

“But I wasn’t too close—” He glanced at her hand, and then back at her. “I know this might sound crazy after I fell and just about crushed you, but do you want to do something later?”

She opened her mouth, but no words came out. The last time anyone had shown romantic interest in her was well over a century ago, when she was mortal, when she had no idea that faeries were real. She couldn’t remember how to do this, how to be a girl next to a boy.

No good comes of faeries pursuing mortals, she reminded herself. I can’t do this.

Panicked, she looked at the cliff. The faeries were gone.

“I need to go,” Rika announced, and then she turned and ran, not as fast as she could, because that would be the sort of thing any mortal would notice as Other, but fast enough that there was no way Jayce could catch up to her.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

Hours passed as Rika sat inside the cave she’d called home for years. Only one lamp cast light in the shadows, and the fire pit remained cold. The desert heat was enough that she wasn’t uncomfortable, but the chill had begun to creep into her home. Rather than do anything about it, Rika curled on her pallet in the shadows, hiding like an injured animal. Water ran through the side of the cavern in a little fissure, and the sound of it calmed her a bit.

“I can’t risk it. Not again.” She spoke the words to no one in particular. Like most of her conversations, there was no one to reply to her complaints. She’d chosen this life, the solitude she’d found here in the cave in the desert, far from the faery courts, separate even from the desert fey.

She’d tried. Before. Before the winter, before I lost everything. . . . That had been a mistake. Love is a mistake.

She forced herself to remember, to dredge up the thoughts that would help her stick to her resolve. She remembered sitting at a table with Keenan. He had looked human, too. She didn’t know it then, but now she knew that he was hiding his true self under a glamour, an illusion faeries create to mislead mortals.