He stops and fixes me with a glare. “I don’t know why those things attacked us or where they came from, and neither, it seems, do you. I’m not going to lead them right to Nicholas, even with the Lodge’s wards in place. If they’re anything like the hounds, they’ve caught our scent and will be on the hunt for us and no one else. I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Why didn’t you sense them?”

His eyes drop and he keeps walking, pulling the only light source with him. “I’m not sure.” Something in his voice sounds off, like he’s holding back an answer he doesn’t want to say out loud.

“How did they steal your aether?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does that mean you’ve never seen a hellfox before?”

He turns around abruptly, and I almost stumble into him. “What are you?”

“I—”

“The truth,” he demands. “How did you generate that aether at your fingertips?”

I blink. “I didn’t generate anything—”

He regards me through narrow eyes. “This explains why you distracted me that night at the Quarry when I was hunting the isel. I detected a flare of your aether, then incorrectly assumed my senses had led me astray.” He leans closer with his flame fingers and points at my chest with his other hand. “But just a few minutes ago you were cooking aether like a furnace, right here.”

“Back off!” I push his hand away and cross my arms over my chest. The scent of even Sel’s small casting is filling the tunnel and clinging to my nose.

“You don’t know how to navigate these tunnels, and even if you could, you can’t open any of the doors to the surface,” he says, raising a brow, “so you may as well be honest. How did you do that?”

I want desperately to stomp off, but he’s right. I have no idea where to go. He watches me come to this conclusion as if dealing with a small, stubborn child who wants to protest their way out of bedtime. I resent everything about his face, from his ridiculous hair to his cambion eyes to the irritating smirk tugging at the side of his goddamn mouth. “I don’t know.” I can hear the petulance in my own voice, and I hate that, too.

Sel narrows his golden eyes to calculating slits while he inspects my face. A beat passes. “You’re telling the truth, at least about what you are and where your power comes from.”

“Yes! I am!” That much is true. I don’t know what I am and neither does Patricia. That I know about root, that my mother was a practitioner—I’ll never tell him those things.