High Voltage (Fever #10)(113)

He stiffens and growls as I fill him in on all that happened, explaining the parameters of my new existence; his silver eyes blaze with joy.

    “Half the time we’ll be human. The other half, we’ll be beasts together,” he says, laughing softly. “What a fine fucking life.”

Indeed. Still, something’s bothering me. I need to know why he thought I wasn’t coming back, what Y’rill did with my “text.” “Ryodan, didn’t you get my message? I sent you—”

“A bloody chunk of star. Christ, that damned piece of rock has been the bane of my fucking existence.”

So, he did get it. “It was meant to set your mind at ease.”

“Your aim sucked, Stardust,” he growls. He rolls me off him, surges to his feet, stalks to the hearth where he collects something from a box on the floor and brings it back, handing it to me.

I peer at it in the low light and gasp.

It says:


I’M OKAY I’M



“But that’s only half of it!”

“I bloody well know that. What the fuck is the end of that sentence? You have no idea how many words I plugged in. I’m okay, I’m happy. I’m okay, I’m free. I’m okay, I’m never coming back. What the fuck, Dani?”

I turn the chunk of star over and study the edge. “It broke. It must have hit something on the way to you. Where were you when you got it?”

“On a beach.”

I frown. “A beach? You went to the beach?” Lor said he’d not come out of Chester’s since I left.

“I used to walk the ocean at night. It plunged from the sky and landed next to me.”

    “When?”

He laughs but there’s a deep undercurrent of bitterness, a hint of torment in it. “Woman, you have driven me crazy far longer than you know. I got your bloody damned star three thousand, one hundred forty-one years, five months, nine days, and two hours before you turned into a Hunter at the abbey.”

I gasp. “Three thousand years ago?” What was Y’rill thinking? Was her aim that bad? Was manipulating time trickier than she’d cared to admit?

“You’re the reason I began to study linchpin theory, over three millennia ago. You’re the reason I began trying to project the future. You, Dani O’Malley, have been the greatest and most irritating mystery of my existence. I smelled you on the star that night on the beach. The scent of a woman I hungered to know, unlike any woman I’d ever met. I waited to meet her. And waited. And bloody fucking waited. Found her one night in Dublin, an uncontrollable, swaggering child with a bloody death wish, balls of steel, a superhero complex, and a teenage boyfriend.”

“Oh God, you knew I was the one who’d thrown the star when you saw me that night?”

“I’d given up on the whole matter long ago, decided the star was the equivalent of a text message sent to the wrong phone. Then I moved in behind you that night and smelled your scent. I knew you were her, the one who would one day throw a star at me, across time.

“My world went to hell from that moment on. I had no idea what you were or what to do with you. I only knew one day you’d toss a bloody celestial body my way. Admit it, you never wrote any more than that. I tortured you so much, you decided to torture me back for a few thousand years.”

I burst out laughing. If I’d thought of it, I might have.

    “That was all I had to go on. Then when you began to turn black—”

“That’s why you were so certain I was becoming a Hunter,” I exclaim, “because they live among the stars!”

He inclines his head.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He’s silent a long moment then exhales gustily. “It was mindfuck to an extreme. I was concerned I might change things.”

“Illogical. If it—”

“—already happened, yes, it would no matter what. I thought of that, too. Barrons and I discussed it endlessly.”

“Barrons knew?”

“My brother is the only one I told. I’ve learned to take nothing for granted in this world.” He’s silent again then says, “I’d begun to suspect that because of my feelings for you, I’d try to sabotage whatever might happen. I questioned my motives.”

I still as the enormity of what he is telling me sinks in. From the day he met me he’d known I would one day throw a star at him. No wonder he hadn’t thought I was human! Then once I started turning Hunter, he’d known the what of it but not how things would end. He’d not known, even as I branded him, even as he encouraged me to embrace my destiny, if he would ever see me again. Still, he’d helped me through it.

“No cages, Dani. Ever. Not for you. It was possible being a Hunter would be everything you wanted. It was possible the final word was “happy.” If it had happened then it was supposed to happen, and the only thing I could do was be there while it happened. I thought I’d lost you forever. The moment you turned, I could no longer feel you. I thought your star was your goodbye.”

“Never,” I say swiftly. “It was my promise to you that I was returning, to set your mind at ease. Because I didn’t call you for those two years and I should have. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. I wasted those two years because I was stubborn and proud and kept boxing my emotions instead of admitting them. That I loved you. I’ve always loved you.”