NocC 021 - Jessa Slade - Dark Hunter's Touch - Harlequin 2012-08 by Nocturne

whirl.
    The Lord Hunter stumbled into his Hunters’ arms as the Queen
had shoved him away. The three-sided glass sword of the Wild Hunt beamed in her
hand.
    She angled the sword toward Vaile and Imogene. “This farce
ceases to amuse me.”
    “Not a farce, my Queen.” Vaile took a sidelong step to cover
Imogene with his body, but he kept his voice steady. “This is true.”
    “True love?” The virulence of the Queen’s sneer melted the
diamonds around her neck. The droplets fell like tears only to congeal again as
the temperature in the throne room plummeted. “A figment of your imagination. We
sacrificed that to be what we are—powerful, glorious, forever. Phae .”
    Vaile shook his head. “If we lost it, then I have found it
again. Here.”
    The Queen raised the sword. Its prismatic edges captured light
just as it captured magic, and sliced rainbows all around them. A low, ominous
drone pulsed from the glass. “That is nothing. Nothing!”
    Her hiss curled up in an icy plume, and the prism went dark.
The rainbows winked out, sucked into the glass.
    Surrounded by suddenly hungry shadows, Vaile reached for the
blue amber necklace. Its power had turned a nameless whelp into a Hunter.
Without it, he would be…
    Well, if he did this right, he and Imogene would be alive.
    The sword flared with stolen light just as he whipped the chain
from his pocket. The pendant arced upward like a blue shooting star.
    And the pyramid point of the sword—hungrily drawn to
magics—tracked its flight.
    The Queen cursed. The Lord Hunter launched himself to her side,
reaching for her hands to correct the sword’s attack.
    But the sword had already chosen its prey, and the fire that
licked from its tip was brighter than a thousand amber suns.
    The pendant disintegrated in a blue mist, surrendering its
magic to the entrapping prism, but Vaile was already whirling away, reaching for
Imogene. In the stark light, his shadow was blacker than his spread vanes. Her
white wings flared as she slapped her palm into his.
    A hard wind lifted both of them and spun them between the
twisted wreckage of the double doors. He stumbled into her with a distinct lack
of phae grace, feeling like an awkward whelp again,
still seeking his wings.
    Until she pulled him into her arms and her lips found his…
    This, this was everything,
everything he wanted, everything he had dreamed.
    And it would be the last thing he knew before the Queen’s magic
blasted them into oblivion.
    He deepened the kiss, a wild dance of tongues since he would
never have the chance to dance with her to the pipes and bells of the phae . Instead, the wind sang around them, whistling
through the broken filigree of the doors. The wind lifted their wings, his
heart, the edge of her skirt up to her thigh.... He clamped his hand on her bare
skin and pulled her hard into his body.
    His pulse sang louder than the wind, and his blood burned
hotter than any amber sun. Imogene’s wisps joined the dance, whirled by her
knack. Their little white lights glimmered in the soft facets of the melted
diamonds that were caught in the helix winding around them. Between the ruin of
the flung doors, Vaile and Imogene were caged in a shine of wisps and diamond
and twisted steel.
    The Queen’s fury lashed out again, sharpened by the glass
sword, but the delicate web—hardly more than nothingness—that had sprung up at
their kiss caught and scattered the blast of magic in all directions.
    And shattered the sword.
    The courtiers screamed and fled from the deadly shrapnel. The
Queen’s shriek was louder yet as the shards of the prism remaining in her hand
burned with black flames.
    The wisps danced on, free as always.
    Imogene raised her hand to Vaile’s cheek. “Want to run?”
    “Only with you.” He yanked the vial of gate spores from his
pocket and scattered a hasty circle.
    For a desperate heartbeat, he feared he had used too many on
returning the manticore, that the crystal floor was too slick, too