Immortal Hunter. Kait Ballenger
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her to stay. “I went after that demon tonight.”
Allsún wrapped her arms around her body as if she was trying to hold herself together while she listened to him speak. “And?”
His face hardened at the thought of that demonic piece of shit threatening Allsún. “And I killed him.”
“Good,” she said. She turned to leave again.
“But it knew about you, Allie. It knew you’re the last Fae outside the Isle of Apples.”
Allsún turned back toward him. He could see in her eyes that she realized the ramifications of the news he’d just told her. If that demon had told even one other demon about her—and according to the doctor, it had told far more than one—the word would spread amongst them.
As the natural enemy of the demons, the Fae had been engaged in a constant war with them for centuries. But not long before David and Allsún separated, there had been a mass movement of Fae back to the Isle of Apples, an alternate dimension inhabited exclusively by the Fae, a completely different world. Since then David had done plenty of searching, and as far as he could tell, all the full-blooded Fae were gone, and Allsún was the only remaining half-breed outside the Isle. When she stopped hunting, she had gone undetected by the demons. Now that the demons knew she was still here, they would all be gunning for her.
A slight note of panic crept into her voice. “B-but I’m only a half-breed. He must have realized that I—”
“Allie,” he said, cutting her off before she could get herself worked into a tizzy, “you know that doesn’t make a difference to demons. You’re a faerie all the same. You’re still their enemy. Plus, you don’t think it’s strange that on all the nights you could have woken up, this was the one? I don’t know about you, but that’s a little too coincidental for my tastes.”
“Shite.” Allsún swore under her breath. The slightest bit of her mother’s Irish accent crept into her voice. That always happened when she was upset. “What do I do now?”
He stepped forward again. He was barely a foot away from her. He towered over her small frame and scanned the length of her body. She was hardly covered in the hospital gown, and being this close to her still electrified him. His desire for her came rushing back, though he was certain it had never truly left. God, how he’d missed her.
“Stay with me. Allow me to protect you.” He said the words as if the situation were only temporary, only until they could find a way to get her off the demons’ radar again, but deep down he wanted so much more. Being so near her when he knew she didn’t want him anymore was the sweetest form of torture—painful and divine all at once.
She shook her head. “You know I can’t do that, David.”
“Why not?”
She glanced at the floor, refusing to meet his gaze. “Because forgive me if I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t want to spend time with my ex-fiancé.”
Damn. That stung. His face remained calm on the surface, but inside he wanted to scream in agony. He was tormented by so many emotions he couldn’t let out. He wanted to say that he didn’t have to be an ex-fiancé, that nothing in the world would make him happier than getting back together with her again, but instead he settled for, “You know it’s necessary, at least for a few days until you’re back to normal again and can fight off demons on your own.”
“Fine,” she said. “But I want to make it clear that this is not a chance to mend things between us.”
A sharp pain hit him straight in the heart, but he held on to his poker face.
When he didn’t respond, she continued. “I assume that’s not what you’re going for here, but let’s both be adult enough to agree beforehand that dredging up our past is only going to make both of us miserable. So, if I stay with you for the next few days, just until I’m on my feet again and we’ve figured this situation out, we’ll agree to be just friends and nothing more, okay?”
She stuck out her hand to shake on it. He stared at her and couldn’t help but wonder how they’d gotten to this point. How had their relationship gone so wrong? They’d grown up together, been friends since they were young.
It was the summer in between David’s junior and senior years in high school that changed everything. Allsún had been away all summer in Ireland with her mother, while David had spent his free time acting like an idiot and getting into trouble with Jace, who was home for a brief summer break from training with the Execution Underground. Once Jace had shipped off again, the rest of David’s summer was spent watching too many bad cartoons. With Allsún not scheduled to return until the day before school began, David had anticipated the first day of class like a starving man staring at a juicy hamburger. He had never been a bookworm, much less enjoyed school, but Allsún had gotten him into reading, which was the extent of his interest in learning. His excitement for that first day of classes had been solely because of the chance to see Allsún again. He had counted down the days all summer long until he could tell her his thoughts on the books she had left him to read.
But all of that had been blown to hell as soon as he saw her.
The once gangly Allsún who wore glasses a little too large for her face and a retainer, and possessed an unruly amount of curly, slightly frizzy hair, had blossomed into the gorgeous girl who every guy in high school wanted. Over the summer she had filled out in all the right places. Her hips had widened, and her formerly nonexistent breasts had developed and then some. She’d ditched her retainer, giving her the perfect smile, and her mother had finally caved and bought her contacts. Even her once-crazy curls had now fallen in smooth, perfect ringlets without a hair out of place.
Whatever was in the water in Ireland, David was a major fan.
Really, he hadn’t been sure if he was seeing correctly at first. Hell, he’d always thought Allsún was beautiful, even despite all her geeky attributes, but she’d been transformed overnight from his best friend to the girl he couldn’t stop thinking about.
Sure, even to this day he still felt a bit shallow that he wasn’t interested in Allsún romantically until her inside and outside matched in beauty, but he had been a teenage boy then, and he knew now, as a full-grown man, that even in her nerdlike state he would have fallen in love with her.
When she’d walked into the hallway of Brighton High School after that summer, he’d dropped the three textbooks he was carrying, just like a total idiot.
A smile had blossomed across her face at the sight of him, and she’d thrown her backpack to the ground and run down the hallway to launch herself into his arms. “Hey, jerk. I’ve missed you.”
It had taken him a minute to respond. He’d still been trying to process the fact that his best friend, someone he’d never been nervous around, was suddenly the one girl in school he wished he could take advantage of. Shit, that was so not good.
They’d danced back and forth in an overly flirtatious tango throughout the year. They would go from being comfortable with one another one minute to avoiding each other for days the next, because in some way the thought of wanting to kiss and touch the girl he had once considered to be like a sister made him sick to his stomach with anxiety. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her, and he hadn’t wanted a romance between them to mess up the friendship they’d shared for so long. But that friendship had already changed as soon as his attraction to her had made itself evident. He’d been certain Allsún had noticed the different way he looked at her.
He wished he could say that he’d swept her off her feet on prom night or something equally cheesy, like Sixteen Candles or all those other ’80’s movies that she loved to watch. But he hadn’t shown up with a birthday cake at her house to declare his love, he hadn’t ridden a lawnmower across her front lawn, held a blaring boom box outside her window, or any of the other ridiculous things that Allsún fawned over in those films.
One night, when she was at his grandmother’s house for dinner and his grandmother had gone to bed, leaving the two of