“Yeah, fuck that.” I shook my head, but I headed down the street, walking down the road toward the forest line anyway.
“Their parties are somewhere in the forest, Teagan, and the location changes all the time. They go through the streets like the damn Pied Piper and gather people up.”
“Then how come there are people sleeping on every corner?” I asked in a low voice as we walked past a homeless man with a sign that simply read: Will Trade Luck for Meat.
“Here, I’ll show you.” Declan walked over to the homeless man and crouched down. He pulled a paper-wrapped bundle out of his pocket and handed it to the man. “Hey there, Nature. A rabbit leg, raw, for trade.”
“This came from a lean coney,” the man sitting on the street corner said as he took the meat and sniffed it, and I couldn’t help but notice his fingers glittering with colorful rings. He looked barely older than a teenager. His trench coat was the kind of dirty that took weeks to build up. I knew the feel of that level of grime firsthand.
Declan rolled his eyes. “Fern would give me two spells for it, and I saw her a few blocks back.”
The young man glared up at us, and his purple eyes shone out from a layer of thick black makeup. “What do you want for it?”
“A spell to see through glamour.”
The man’s nostrils flared, but he unwrapped the paper and took a big bite of the rabbit leg. I saw blunt teeth in the young man’s mouth, but the bone snapped under his jaws like he had rows of shark teeth. Within seconds, the raw meat and bone were gone.
The man plucked a dandelion from beside the curb and raised it in front of Declan.
“For her.” Declan threw a thumb over at me.
Nature blew, and the fluff detached from the flower and danced up toward me, catching on my eyelashes and in my hair. I reached up to dust it away when the street around us changed.
A pair of colorful wings sprouted up behind the young homeless man’s back. They looked as if they were made of thin sheets of stained glass, but they folded like flesh. Nature smiled and waved, and his grin bared a sharp set of teeth. He turned a finger in the air, “You’ll want to look up.”
The moment I did, I gasped in amazement. Every shop on the street had a second level of colorful storefronts. People in flowing gowns with multicolored fairy wings flew from shop to shop. The colors filled the air like stained glass... and then it was gone.
The street-level caught my eye again as the same woman from last night pushed her cart past with bags of trash. I caught the quickest glimpse of the wilting wings on her back before they vanished, and the woman once again looked entirely human.
“There’s a fae town on top of Grayhaven?” I asked.
“More like, this is the fae neighborhood,” Declan said, “And it’s the only neighborhood in town where you’ll find people sleeping on the streets.” He grimaced, and his nose scrunched up. “Can you guess why?”
“Because it’s only safe for fae to sleep on the street.”
Nature laughed. “You weren’t thinking of sleeping on the street, were you?” He pointed up to the sky. “The queen is planning a feast for tonight. I’d be indoors before the dancing starts.”
Declan clapped Nature on the shoulder. “Thank you for a good trade.”
“It was fair.” Nature smiled, and for just a second, I could see the sharp points of his teeth before they grew blunt. “Next time, bring me venison, and I’ll really take you beyond the veil.”
We strolled for a few minutes in silence, and then I stopped and turned toward Declan.
He held his hands up in front of him. “Just consider coming to the packhouse. That’s all I’m asking you to do. We have unlimited food. You’ll have your own room for as long as you want to stay. No one will order you to do anything.”
I ran my teeth over my lip. “I’m sorry Declan, but, no. I’m still sleeping in the woods. I appreciate how you, Lucas, and your whole pack are treating me. You’ve let me into your territory, and you’ve helped me and fed me twice. I’m grateful for everything you’ve done. Please don’t think that I’m ungrateful. I wish twenty-four hours could restore my faith in werewolf-kind, but I’m not sure that part of me is ever going to be fixed.”
Declan rubbed the top of his head and rolled his head on his neck. “Fine. We’ll sleep in the woods.”
I winced. Declan had orders to keep tabs on me. I was an invader. Which meant I was putting him in a bad spot. Gritting my teeth, I suggested, “How about you show me where your territory ends, and I could sleep beyond that.”
Declan laughed, long and loud. “It feels so normal to be around you, I completely forgot that you don’t know me at all.” He gestured out toward the woods. “Lead the way. I’ve been coloring in the lines for too long now anyway.”
Chapter Six
I leaned into a tree and unbuttoned my fly, shimmying out of my jeans and folding them up.
“You sure you don’t want to even take a peek at my American flag thong?” Declan called from the other side of the tree, and I could hear the smile in his voice.
Chuckling to myself, I shook my head. It said something about my life that the safest option for me was walking into the forest with a perfect stranger and getting naked. I meant that he was perfect in more than one sense of the word. To say that I was tempted to peek around the tree and see how far his tattoos reached was a massive understatement.
It had been a very long time since I enjoyed a man looking at me with desire in his eyes, and I had been flirting with not one but two gorgeous werewolves today. It would be reckless to get intimate with anyone while I was on the run, though. Added to that, Kane would make it his personal mission to hunt down anyone I took for a lover and rip them limb from limb. And, that was not whatsoever the reason for us getting naked right now.
Shifters had resistance to most magic in animal form. Neither Declan nor I was sure that included fae magic, but turning into a wolf seemed like a better bet than staying human. I stripped off my bra and tucked it in my bag before slipping out of my underwear.
The cool evening breeze made my skin prickle with goosebumps up the length of my naked body as I went to my tiptoes to lift my backpack onto a tree branch. My calves ached as I stretched. The backpack just touched the branch, but I wasn’t quite tall enough to slide it up there. I jumped, trying to push my backpack up. The bag smacked back into my hand, making me hiss in pain.
“Want help?” Declan asked, and his voice was very close.
I jumped and pushed the bag up, but it did no good. The first branch was just beyond my reach, and that was one hundred percent why I was going to accept Declan’s help.
“Please.”
Declan rounded the tree, and my goodness, my whole body felt sensitive just at the sight of his naked chest. His tattoos spanned both of his muscular arms and over his shoulders and chest. He was massive in clothes, but I could swear he was even larger standing there naked. My eyes dipped lower, and a laugh burst out of my lips.
“You’re not the only one who doesn’t joke about American flag thongs.”
I met his laughing eyes. “Yes, but those are briefs.”
They were very snug briefs that left almost nothing to the imagination, but they were definitely not a thong.