“That’s one word for it. She’s barely been out of her room since those rogue Helios-Ra bastards doused her in holy water and left her for dead. She won’t talk to any of us, and she absolutely won’t lift her veil. Not even for Uncle Geoffrey, and he’s practical y a doctor. You should have seen her before the attack. She was unstoppable, afraid of no one, and a bear about courtesy and proper gentlemanly behavior.”

“So that’s where you get it from.”

“What?”

“The way you dress, the way you can bow like this is stil the eighteenth century.”

“I suppose.” I shrugged, sternly tel ing myself not to ask her if she liked it or hated it. I wasn’t going to be that guy.

“If you had dug me out instead of Finn, I might not have realized right away that it wasn’t stil the eighteenth century.” Ordinarily, I’d take that as a great compliment; with her though, I just wasn’t sure.

“Between our matriarch, Madame Veronique, and her medieval lessons and Aunt Hyacinth, I guess it was bound to rub off on one of us.”

“You’re different than your brothers,” Isabeau insisted. “They don’t live it the way you do. I could tel right away.”

“You noticed al that in the few hours you saw them?” And I absolutely wasn’t going to wonder who she’d thought was the cutest. Quinn had a way around girls, and it made them stupid. I suddenly wanted to punch him for it.

“No, it’s kind of nice,” she murmured, and suddenly Quinn’s face was safe from my fist. “It’s like the boys I knew in France.” I wasn’t entirely thril ed with the word “boy.”

“I didn’t know I missed it,” she continued, as if surprising herself.

I’d never wanted anything more than I wanted to kiss her. I wanted it more than I lusted after Christina Ricci in Sleepy Hollow. And I’m al about the girls in corsets. Isabeau’s long, thick black hair, straight as the waterfal in the caves underneath us, her green eyes and scarred arms and vicious parry with a sword. Hot. Every last bit of her.

I decided to take my own life in my hands and I leaned in slowly. I didn’t rush, gave her plenty of time to pul away, but I was inexorably closing the distance between us. She smel ed like rain and earth and wine. If she’d been in a goblet I would have drained it of every drop. I was a whisper away from her now and she stil hadn’t moved.

I wanted to bury my hands in her hair and draw her up against me but I thought she might not be ready for that. She was a little bit like a wild animal, untamed, unbroken, and as untethered as a hawk in the sky. I wouldn’t want her to be anything else.

I slanted my lips over hers and it felt right, necessary. I kissed her deeply, slowly, as if we had al the time in the world. Her mouth opened and her tongue touched mine, hesitantly, sweetly.

I had to clench my fists to keep from grabbing her. The kiss went darker, wilder—one of us made a smal sound but I honestly didn’t know which of us it was.

There was a tingle in the back of my head, a flush of burning heat over my entire body. I pul ed away reluctantly. Her mouth quirked into one of her rare smiles.

“Dawn,” she whispered.

I smoothed her swol en lower lip with my thumb. “Dawn,” I agreed.

The forest was ever so slightly less dark than it had been, more gray than black.

“We should go inside,” she said, both sets of fangs protruding slightly. It was cute as hel .

“Got someplace safe for me to sleep?” I asked.

“Got someplace safe for me to sleep?” I asked.

She linked her fingers through mine.

“Yes.”

CHAPTER 15

LOGAN

“Have I mentioned that this is the worst idea ever?”

“A hundred times.” Isabeau rol ed her eyes. Charlemagne looked like he was considering it too.

“If I say it a hundred and one times wil it convince you?”

“No.” She ducked under a low-hanging branch. “You fret worse than my old nursemaid.”

“I have a great deal of sympathy for your old nursemaid,” I muttered. It was a beautiful night, warm and fil ed with stars and the songs of crickets and frogs. White flowers glowed in the grass. It was a night made for poetry. We should have been kissing. A lot.

Instead we were sneaking out of the caves to a blood-soaked clearing where we’d been ambushed not twenty-four hours earlier. Not exactly an ordinary date.

“It wil be fine,” she assured me, her long black hair swinging behind her. “It’s just trancework, nothing to worry about.”

“Real y?” I answered dryly. “Is that why we snuck out and you wouldn’t tel anyone what we’re doing, not even Magda?”

“I don’t want to worry them. And they wouldn’t understand, anyway.”

“I don’t understand,” I shot back.

“I know. But you’re stil here, you’re stil helping. You’re not trying to stop me.”

I shook my head. “I am so trying to stop you—I’m just doing a piss-poor job of it, apparently.”

When I woke up next to Isabeau in her cave, her hand on my chest, I’d thought the night would go rather differently. I should have known better. There was nothing soft about Isabeau, not even in her sleep. Wel , that wasn’t precisely true. I’d seen a flash of her vulnerability, after al , a flash I didn’t think she was even aware she possessed. She was al shamanka’s handmaiden out of the caves, al warrior and duty. But this was her home and she was comfortable enough to shed a few of her hard outer layers.