Chapter 3
Callie avoided the park for more than a week before she realized that she was being ridiculous.
It was one thing for her to lock eyes with the golden male before quickly sliding her gaze away, as if it was just a coincidence. It was something else entirely for him to step through the veil, his intent to approach her as obvious as the layer of glamour he wore over his stunning shape.
Only it couldn’t be a glamour, she told herself repeatedly.
Because even when she was trying not to consciously see things, she did so anyway.
Consider it more than two decades of practice or something like that.
No matter how one of the faerie folk—and, from her research, she was sure she’d narrowed down his kind—glamoured themselves to appear, she always saw them as they truly were.
But that was the thing. Glamour was a lure, a way to trick unsuspecting humans close, to make them believe what they were seeing instead of hearing the clanging warning bells that said that anyone from Faerie was dangerous.
If she focused, she could just about make out the image they protected, but since it often left her with a migraine, she didn't usually bother. Why, when it didn’t matter?
Callie’s vision showed the truth. And the truth was that, as ethereal and alluring as the fae—because fae, he had to be fae—are, the handful she’d seen always had something exaggerated about them to make them seem almost alien.
From their long, slender fingers, to the eerie perfection of their features, plus their oversized eyes…
they were gorgeous, but they were also predators.
And she was tempting fate by returning to the park.
She had to, though. She managed to sell her photograph to Buster’s client while also side-stepping his offer of a date.
To her surprise, the older gentleman took her rejection with a smile, then actually showed some interest when she mentioned her idea of creating a summer version of the photo he bought from her.
The male fae was there upon her return, but she was prepared for it.
She wore a pair of sunglasses and a floppy summer hat so even if she found it difficult not to sneak glances over at him, she was hoping he wouldn’t be able to tell.
And since the hours passed as she worked and he stood like a motionless statue on the other side of the veil, she figured she pulled it off.
The first round of photos were good when she developed them, but they weren’t of the same caliber as the spring shot. Since part of photography relied on luck as well as skill and preparation, she had been expecting that. So, the next afternoon, she went back to the park.
And the next.
A thunderstorm rolled in, closing out the week, and while she thought about seeing how the tree would look backlit by the purple clouds and the lightning streaking across the dark sky, she remembered the charred remains of her tree and decided that maybe she should wait out the storm.
On Monday, feeling the pressure after the gentleman came to check on her progress, Callie went to the park, determined to get the shot that would get Buster’s client to start talking about a possible showing again.
The first thing she noticed was that, while the shimmering patch of space that marked the veil into Faerie was still there, the fae male was not.
For the handful of hours that she worked, she kept one eye on that patch.
She blamed it on how careful she’d been to avoid him during her previous trips while secretly wondering where he had gone—and what had he been doing there, watching the human world, in the first place.
Then, because he wasn’t there acting as her silent shadow, Callie threw herself into her work.
She lost track of time as she set up, using a point and shoot digital camera to get an idea if the shot might be successful before replicating it with her professional piece.
She played with angles, shutter speeds, aperture, anything to bring her vision to life.
She didn’t know when he winked into sight.
At first, she thought it was a stray sunbeam that blinded her before she lifted her head and saw that, instead, it was the blinding, dazzling male standing closer than he ever had before.
He was still in the same spot as always, but perspective was a funny thing and Callie was a trained photographer.
He was definitely closer—and he was carrying something.
She noticed all of this in a blink of her eye before she turned away, lifting her camera again, anything to keep him from noticing her in return.
Ignoring him, she decided to use his shine—the only part of him that would show up in the photo as Callie knew well from experience—to highlight the tree.
So consumed with getting the perfect shot, she didn’t see what happened next—but she sure as hell heard the shrieking sound that nearly blasted her poor eardrums.
Callie nearly dropped her camera. Only an ingrained instinct to never, ever drop her two thousand dollar camera had her clutching it tightly as her head jerked up in time to see a… a thing racing away from the hazy patch of space.
It was a dark blur, with skin the color of mahogany and a leather tunic stretched over its mis-shapened, hunched body.
It loped on all fours with teeth that belonged in the mouth of a shark jutting over its jaw.
Through her terror, she picked up on the glamour overlaying the creature and saw that it appeared as some kind of oversized mutt, but Callie knew better.
Blinking again, she saw that it was a nightmarish creature straight out of Faerie—and it was coming right at her.
There wasn’t even time to scream. Adrenaline coursing through her, her brain shouted at her to run while her legs stayed firmly planted on the grass as the thing aimed at her.
Just when she thought that this was it, right as her life was flashing before her eyes, something amazing happened—amazing because she never in a million years would’ve expected it to.
The golden male burst out of the veil, a brilliantly shining sword held in front of him as he arrowed after the snarling monster.
When there were barely a few feet separating Callie from the threat, the creature pounced.
She braced herself, unable to do anything else, and through wide, terrified eyes she watched as the male lunged right in time to stab the length of his sword through the back of the goblin-looking thing’s neck before slamming the sword—and the body—into the ground.
He landed in a graceful crouch right behind his sword, his long, tawny hair rippling in the slight summer breeze.
The thing let out a garbled sound that might’ve been a shriek if it wasn’t for the sword buried in its neck. Its four limbs twitched and jerked for a few terrible moments before it went completely still against the earth.
Callie didn’t scream. She wanted to, had every intention to, and it came out as a rush of air instead.
“Holy shit,” she said, the words tripping over themselves as her heart pounded wildly in her chest. “You… you saved my life.”
The male had been crouched over the creature, most likely checking to see that it was dead.
Which, yeah, considering it was skewered on his sword through its throat, there was a good chance it was dead.
As soon as he heard Callie’s strangled words, though, he slowly, gracefully rose from his crouch, pulling his sword out of the dead monster as he did.
A flash of surprise crossed his face, even more glorious up close, but it was there and gone again by the time Callie got her frantic, frightened breathing under control.
“Yes,” he said clearly, in an accented voice that was so soft, so lyrical, yet undeniably haughty. “I did.”
Callie felt like she heard danger alarms going off. If there was one thing she learned from the faerie folk before she began to ignore them completely, it was pure trouble to be in their debt since they believed they were in their rights to demand anything to make things even.
And how did you make a life debt even?
She swallowed, hoping desperately that she found the one being from Faerie who saved her because he was a good samaritan.
“It came out of nowhere,” she said, hoping to show him that it wasn’t her fault that the toothy goblin-like creature attacked her. “I just saw it running with those teeth…”
The words thank you were on the tip of her tongue.
Only the memory of a mistake in her youth—one that cost her a pint of blood, a lost baby tooth, and a promise to a sprite she hoped never got called in—kept her from saying the words.
If there was any hope that he’d walk away and the two of them could go back to pretending that the other didn’t exist, she had to be on her guard.
There was something about him. Something she recognized the first time she looked in his sun-colored eyes. He wasn’t anything like the faerie folk she once knew, or most of the ones she spent her teenage and young adult years avoiding.
This close, Callie could sense the power and strength humming off of him, and not only because she knew he was quick enough and forceful enough to catch up to a faerie creature and stab it like that.
“You saw it?” the male wondered. His golden eyes darkened for a heartbeat, before he resumed the same indifferent expression he’d been wearing. “So it’s true, then. You’re part of the sealladh.”
Huh? “The what?”
“A human with the gift of sight. You can see me. You can see me as I am, just like you saw the kobold. Is that so?”
“Oh. I—” Callie didn’t quite know how to answer him.
A lie would be a mistake, and it wasn’t like she could deny it when she was looking at him, talking to him, anything to keep from glancing down at the creature’s body in the grass.
Which, now that she thought about it, she couldn’t stop herself from doing again.
She fought a shudder as she pointed and, instead of answering him, said, “Um… are you going to leave that there?”