It was as if it had simply never been.

“Jesus,” he said as understanding finally began to dawn. “It was…”—he was choking on his own words—“it was a lie. All of it was…”

He looked down at his clothing, and then shifted his attention to the blue dress with the blue cornflowers that she wore. He remembered that dress. Remembered her coming into the room at the manor house with it on and being stunned at the contrast between it and her black skin. It brought him back in time, brought him back to a gingerbread house made of brilliant pastel colors and a little old lady who had served him sweet tea.

“What the sweet Mary f**k is going on here?” he roared out into the room. He should have shoved away from Faith and all the false emotions he had been made to feel for her, but he simply could not make himself do it.

False or no, a lie or no, it had felt really goddamn real to him. Even now, as the smell of her wafted into his senses, he found his body reacting to it, found himself longing with the urge to bury his face against the side of her neck just under her ear and touching his tongue to the erogenous spot he knew was there. He felt his blood pressure change, felt himself growing hard even in the face of their circumstances. It was as though it had been ingrained into him to feel this way, the way a deep repetitive memory would do. All of it in spite of the fact that he was coming to realize he hadn’t ever so much as kissed her lips.

And that was when he realized that, once again, some sick Nightwalker bastard had fu**ed with his head. Hadn’t he been through enough? Couldn’t the f**king cosmos be happy with the screams of horror, pain, and rage Chatha had wrought from him? Wasn’t it enough that every last ounce of trust he’d had left had already been burned to dust and ash?

A victim. A weak, powerless nothing. A toy for the universe to play with, like a child ripping the hair out of her Barbie doll’s head just to see what she looked like bald. Chemotherapy Barbie.

“Sweet God,” he heard Faith whisper. And that was when he knew she had also realized what was going on. She too was realizing they had been taken on an imaginary journey, no doubt to entertain the sick delights of a bored Djynn. The Djynn that they had come looking for. A web they had willingly thrown themselves into.

And yet…Faith did not let go of him. She still grasped him for comfort. Still held her warmth against him and drew from his strength in order to embolden hers. And as much as he knew it had all been a lie…he couldn’t change the way it made him feel. Needed. Depended on. Loved.

He pushed himself out of her hold at that thought, cursing himself for being twice a fool. It was an illusion! There was no love! It was smoke and mirrors and more fucked-up torture from another fucked-up paranormal piece of shit!

Yet when she gasped in shock from his withdrawal it dragged on his soul, the idea of causing her pain, of setting her adrift in the world. God knew that was what had happened to him. He had been forsaken, cut away and cut into, nothing and no one reaching out to catch him.

She reached for him then, catching his hand in both of hers tightly as she knelt at his feet. Her upturned face was ravaged with emotion, but most of all he saw pain. She was exposed to her core, just as much as he was.

“Please don’t feel that way,” she begged of him, her voice rasping roughly from her throat. He opened his mouth to shut her up and shut her down.

“You don’t know a damn thing about what I feel. And whatever I feel, whatever I felt, was obviously a saturating deception. Your familiarity is inappropriate. You act as though you have a special insight into me, but I can assure you that you don’t. That, like everything else, is a lie. It was all a lie, Faith. I wouldn’t even consider touching one of you people if it could at all be avoided.” He pulled his hand out of hers sharply, coldly. “Never mind becoming a lover to one.”

He watched her wings wilt, dropping slowly until their neon lines were piled onto the floor. Her hands drifted down into her lap. She turned her stricken expression away from him. It baffled him that she was so affected by this. Surely, as intelligent and strong-willed as she was, she could shake this nonsense off and get back to business, couldn’t she?

Her limp hands slowly curled into fists, her wings shuddered a little then snapped into shape, the gracefulness of them missing, however, as they stood straight and stiff.

“Of course,” she said, slowly gaining her feet. “You’re right.”

She turned sharply away from him and he had to pull back in order to avoid getting smacked with the energy of her wings. He was disconcerted enough without the radical sensations coming in contact with her wings caused. “The Djynn was toying with us for a reason. This was a very intricate thing, and he no doubt expended a lot of energy. There must be a reason he would—”

She was whipped out of existence right before his eyes and he felt the shock of it, as if she had been connected to his solar plexus and then was suddenly yanked free of the connection. The feeling infuriated him and he balled his fists tightly.

“I swear to God, if you do this to us again,” he shouted into the sudden darkness, “I’ll rip your f**king heart out!”

And see how you like it, he thought viciously.

That same instant he felt himself get yanked aside, as if he was about to be thrown over the back of a sparring partner. He hit the ground and light exploded all around him, as though someone had suddenly thrown on every light in the world. Of course, that could just be because he’d been in darkness up until then. Not liking being blinded and on the ground, two craptastic defensible positions to be in, he rolled up onto his feet and narrowed his eyes to try to defray the power of the light. The first thing he saw was Faith. It was impossible to miss her, since she was the darkest thing in the room. That and she was standing in front of him. He swept the room for enemy bodies, but was so shocked by what he was looking at that it took him a minute to get his head right.

Gold. Everywhere everything was made of gold. Treasure. Coins in trunks that were overflowing, lamps and jewelry and boxes all made of gold and encrusted with jewels. The walls were covered in beaten gold, the floor tiled with it.

“You gotta be f**king kidding me,” he uttered.

“I hardly think this could be conceived as a source of humor, seeing as how it’s my home.”

Leo’s head whipped hard to the right as he turned his gaze face-front. There was an elaborate throne of gold before them, the back high and curved at the edges like a wing chair. Its seat, a plush red velvet cushion, had been empty mere seconds ago, but now a man was sitting there, lounging indolently, a knee hooked up over the right arm of the chair. He was tall…very tall. Tall enough that Leo could see it in spite of his slouching posture. Also, the muscular build of the man belied the projected image of laziness he was trying to exude as he filed a nail gently and with care for detail, using a file that was, of course, made of gold.

Even his clothing and his hair were as gleamingly rich as all the treasures around them. Leo had never seen anyone with hair color so akin to true gold. Not even out of a bottle…though many women had no doubt tried.

But the matching gold of his brows and lashes and beard attested to the fact that no bottle had come into play. He was not clean-shaven, but his beard had no significant length to it, maybe one to two weeks’ worth. It was neatly trimmed, the line of it perfection, accentuating the strong angles of his face. Leo couldn’t guess at the Djynn’s age, not knowing exactly how or if his species even aged at all. But in appearance he looked no more or less mature than Leo’s own age. The Djynn’s eyes were not the same gleaming gold as the rest of him, but rather a dark honey color.

But Leo couldn’t care less about his appearance.

“Listen Midas, if you’re behind what just happened to us—”

“Of course I am,” he cut Leo off, pausing in his manicure to wave a dismissive hand at him. “Let’s not start this off by lying to each other.”

“And what do you call what you just did to us, you manipulative son of a—”

“How do you know it’s a lie?” the man of gold interrupted once again, punctuating the query with a single raised brow. He tossed the file aside, a little click, like coin against coin, sounding as it hit the nearest pile of the precious metal.

“Because I would never even think of touching someone like her,” he pointed at Faith, “never mind become her lover! Believe me when I say I will be happy the day I excise all of you sick, deceptive sons of bitches from my life!”

“Well, we both know that’s not true,” his opponent said as he got to his feet, delicately brushing an invisible piece of lint from his shoulder. “No matter what you do, we will still be here. And no matter what you do, you will never be able to forget that we are here and could possibly be in any one of the faces you look into in the future.” He came to face Leo, standing about six feet away from him.

Fine. I can do a six-foot leap for the bastard’s throat no problem, Leo thought heatedly.

“And as for being sick and deceptive, we Nightwalkers, as races in general, are no more or less sick and deceptive as members of the human race might be. We have our liars and our truth speakers. We have our saviors and prophets and we have our psychopaths.” He leaned forward a little, “but you already know about that last one, now, don’t you?”

Leo stiffened, ice and rage clawing down his spine. He forgot why he was there, forgot what he was dealing with…he forgot everything but the white hot blinding rage that smacked into him. He leapt those six feet in a single instant, punching up into the Nightwalker’s chin with the meat of his palm.

Only by the time he would have struck, he found himself striking through a cloud of gold with the fineness of sand and glitter. He whirled around to search for the object of his rage, but instead found himself crashing bodily into Faith.

“Leo, stop!” she commanded on a hiss as she grabbed him by both wrists, bringing his angry eyes to hers. “What we’ve been through will be for nothing if you anger him! Do you think he will grant us any favors if you attack him?”

Leo didn’t know why, maybe it was his own logic centers coming forward because of what she’d said to him, but the touch of her hands and the lean of her body into his calmed him. Focused him. He realized the truth in her words and was forced to remember why he had come there in the first place. He looked down into her creamy chartreuse-colored eyes and found himself unable to resist touching his knuckles to her face, running them along her jawline from the tip of her chin to the touch of her hair.

The caress brought them both into feelings and memories shared, false though they may have been. He found himself seeking solace in her soft eyes and was shocked when he found it there. The rage and turbulence that had been his steady partner for all of the days and nights since his return from captive hell just dissolved away. He took a deep, clean breath, feeling her rest a hand onto his chest. Instead of feeling the revulsion that he had felt whenever Jackson or Marissa or any self-proclaimed Nightwalker had touched him since he’d learned of their existence, he warmed, as though she were transmitting a balm of heat and letting it range throughout him, spreading from that focal point where she touched him.

He tried to stir his anger back up, to remind himself that the reaction was in response to the falseness of the Djynn’s manipulations, but it didn’t work. The shape of her lips as she formed a silent “please,” her eyes imploring and worried, filled him with an inexplicable impulse to run his thumb over the extreme fullness of her bottom lip. He drew back before he gave in to it, but he left her gently, rather than with the harshness of the rejections he had been subjecting her to. He reminded himself that she had been just as used and abused by the Djynn. Maybe even more so. After all, he had not been made to feel a child slide from his laboring body and into the world. He couldn’t imagine how that must have felt for her. And here he was, only focusing on himself.

When had he become so selfish? he wondered.

Right about the time that sick f**k was using you like a pincushion.

He took another breath and looked for the Djynn. He was standing, once again, about six feet away from Faith’s back. It made Leo think. That specific distance had to mean something, though he doubted he could figure it out logically. Normal logic was completely suspended in these circumstances. But what it could all boil down to was response time. He needed those six feet of warning in order to move or react in time to thwart any type of attack they could muster up.

Faith turned to face the Marid, but her fingers gently touched the inside of Leo’s wrist, a silent, staying gesture.

“Why have you done this to us? Why have you abused us?” she asked, her tone hard.

“Abused you?” The Djynn chuckled. “Sweet girl, what I’ve given you is a gift. A very generous gift at that.”