Revealed in Fire (Demon Days & Vampire Nights #9)(52)

She is so powerful. She will bring great status to whoever is in her inner circle, the one on the right, a woman with a slight frame and short brown hair, thought. The man on the left had his mind in the gutter.

“Turn around,” I sang to the woman I was following. “Every now and then I get a little bit sad that you won’t just turn around. Turn around…”

“Those aren’t the words,” Penny said.

Not a great singing voice.

“Killjoys.” I stepped out from behind her, right into the path of a tall man with a slight frame and lean muscle tone. He stopped suddenly, and I heard a mental sigh of relief from the woman I’d been following.

Maybe if I just looked now… But the woman’s thoughts trailed away, and her bearing tensed as if she were fighting the urge.

The man’s gaze skittered off me and to the side. He stepped to the right to get by me. I did the same to keep even with him.

So powerful, so fierce, so beautiful. What would it be like to… The man’s thoughts trailed off. He took another step to the right to get around me. Desperate for my attention. Taboo… One night…

I had a feeling he was imagining things. I was a forbidden attraction, like the shifters at first, only now Romulus was trying to assimilate the shifters and normalize their presence. But he hadn’t interfered with my fun. I might just like the guy more because of it.

After listening to everyone’s thoughts, though, that joy was bleeding away slowly.

“I would rock your world so hard,” I told the man, and that brought his peepers to mine in a hurry.

Thoughts crowded in too fast for me to process them. Levitating and gyrating and, wow, this guy wanted a messier life. He was cooped up here, I could tell. Normal people didn’t pine after the exotic this hard.

“You know what?” I turned around and faced Penny, done with that guy.

What just happened… Why did she… His thoughts about me kept drifting away now that they weren’t solely fueled by lust.

“You said the First is in trouble for manipulating people, right?” I asked her.

“Yeah.” She watched the man I’d been harassing pass on by, his gaze focused straight ahead again. “She magically affects her people’s moods and desires, I think. Makes them happy to stay here, want to return if they leave, stuff like that.”

“So she could definitely keep them from wanting strangers in her midst, right?” I was walking before the words stopped falling.

“Yes,” she said. “Which…makes all kinds of sense, actually. She’s been hiding people away, trying to protect them, so she wouldn’t want strangers coming in. And if they did, she wouldn’t want them staying, because that might entice some of her people to leave. Or…more of her people to leave, I guess. I heard that some did get out.”

“Yeah.” A roar blasted out over the village. The T-Rex had been let loose. “Do you think they know that?”

She thought for a second, catching up. “Probably not,” she said. I took a left and cut through someone’s yard. “But would it really matter? They know she’s doing something she shouldn’t be.”

“It might make a difference in how they feel about the shifters. Romulus is trying to bridge the gap between them, but people are still weirded out. They need to be tight with each other if they’re going to work together against the elves, and the memories they create here will stick with them. Any tension between them will be easier for them to overcome if both sides know the warrior fae were duped. See what I mean?”

“You’re really smart when you want to be.”

“Nah. Everyone gets lucky some of the time.”

I hopped a fence and emerged on a little lane surrounded by flowers—this whole freaking place was flowers and gardens, it seemed like, and because they were all real and natural, instead of elf creations, it made the area incredibly cute and picturesque and a huge nuisance. I much preferred the Underworld, which had plenty that was weird and unsavory to balance out the lovely and beautiful. It was a startling realization.

Across a carefully tended plot of grass surrounded by more plants and flowers stood a wooden gate painted white, a man and woman to either side of it, swords on their backs and eyes hard. A chest-high fence stretched away, a tended hedge rising to head height behind it, blocking the view in a beautiful way. A voice rose from within the space, and it seemed that I was a bit late for the proceedings, or they had started early.

Not to worry. I had a plan. One I’d created a split second before.

“What’s up, dickweeds?” I strutted up to the guards, and their gazes landed on me without hesitation. They had been excused from the emotional sabotage the others were plagued with. Unless I was wrong and this was a huge mistake…

I pressed on. Might as well.

“Miss Somerset, please forgive our rudeness, but we—”

I sped up so they couldn’t step in front of me, reached the gate at a blinding speed, and kicked it, right in the middle. The satisfying crack made me smile, followed by the bang of the doors flying open and hitting whatever was on the inside.

“Reinforced steel,” I said as they lunged for me. I shoved them away with my magic. “Reinforced steel makes it harder to kick in doors. Or gates. And now you know.”

“Sorry,” Penny said as she trailed behind, using my magic to create a sort of barrier.