I just about squirt right out of my skin like a dab of toothpaste in a tube squeezed too tight. I expected Ryodan to find me first.

I freeze-frame.

And slam into Christian.

“I’m a full sifter now, lass. You’ll never outrun me again. It was driving me bugfuck that you could get away from me. No more.” His hands close on my waist and I try to twist free but it’s like I got steel vises biting into my body, clamping down on bone. I look up at him. The faint outline of a torque is luminous at his neck. His eyes are iridescent fire. If insanity has a color, it’s swirling in there.

“Humans,” he says coldly, and his face is like chiseled ice. Pale against midnight hair. Brilliant tattoos rush up his neck, around his jaw, back down his body, a kaleidoscopic storm just beneath his skin. “Puny. Stupid. Frightened of their shadow. Why do you bother with them? Why waste your time? You’re worth so much more than that.”

“Dude. I am one. Give me my fecking sword. It ain’t yours.”

“No you’re not. You’re beyond human. You’re what the race should aspire to be.” He leans in, sniffs my hair and sighs. “Stay the fuck away from Ryodan. I bloody hate it when you smell like him. It turns my stomach.”

I search my brain for a way out of this one. With my sword. Is it on him somewhere? I let my lids drift down, peek at his lower body. Don’t want to telegraph. I don’t see it anywhere. Jeans, hiking boots, cream fisherman’s sweater that strains across shoulders way wider than they used to be. To support the wing structure he’s developing? Does he miss who he was? Is that why he’s dressed like this? No visible sign of any weapons on him anywhere, but then he’s so far past needing a weapon. He is a weapon. There’s blood all over his sweater. I don’t even want to know why. “You’re human, too, remember?” Obviously with some part of his brain he does. The Unseelie princes rarely wear clothing.

“Not anymore, Dani, my sweet darling. You know how I’m so sure? I’m a lie detector. I said, ‘I’m human’ and heard my own lie.” He laughs, and there’s madness in it.

“You are what you choose to be,” I say. All the sudden I can’t breathe because his hands have slipped up over my ribs and he’s squeezing me so tight I think they’re going to crack.

“I would NEVER have fucking chosen this!”

“Ow! Volume control, Christian! And you’re hurting me!”

He releases his grip instantly. “Are you all right, lass? Are your ears bleeding? I made the last woman’s ears bleed. Nose, too. And her … well, that’s neither here nor there.”

“Let me go. I got stuff to do.”

“No.”

“Look, if you’re going to try to kill me, get it over with.” I put both of my fists in front of my face. “Put up your dukes!”

He stares at me. “Why would I do that?”

“Hello—Mister I Keep Dead Women Stuffed Down the Side of My Bed!”

“I tried to explain that to you. You wouldn’t listen. You ran away from me. Why did you run away from me? Don’t I keep telling you I’ll never hurt you?”

“Did you kill her?”

“No.”

I give him a look. I don’t need to be a lie detector to see through that one. It was there in the shifty slide of his eyes. “Try again.”

“Fine. Okay. I killed her. But I didn’t mean to. And I didn’t kill her, kill her.”

“Oh, I see. As long as you didn’t kill her, kill her, then that’s okay.”

“I knew you’d understand,” he says, like I’m not being totally facetious. I’m not sure he gets human nuances anymore. I think he’s too far gone.

“All ears here.”

He shrugs. “There’s not much to tell. We were having sex and all the sudden she was dead.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like. It was the bloody weirdest thing. I don’t even know what I did.”

“Your hands weren’t, like, around her throat or holding a knife or anything?”

“No. That’s why I kept her. I wanted to examine her to figure out what I did so I don’t do it again. It’s not like I can go without sex for the rest of my life. I can barely make it a few bloody hours. One second she was having a great time and so was I, and she was making this really hot noise while I was—sorry, you probably don’t want to hear about that. I’m not trying to make you jealous, lass. Then she just wasn’t moving and you have no idea how disturbing that was. Well, mostly. But not entirely. I think the Unseelie I’m becoming was aroused because once she stopped moving it was like—”