He snorted. “No one tells the old stories anymore, do they?”
“What are we doing?” Hazel asked him.
He took a deep breath. “You need to recall who has Heartsworn. Who gave you the blade and guided your hand? Who told you how to break the casket and end the curse?”
“I can’t—”
“You can,” he said softly. He brought up one hand to her cheek. His fingers were cool against her hot skin, brushing back hair from her face. She shuddered. “For all our sakes, you must.”
She shook her head, thinking of the sword she’d found beside Wight Lake all those years ago, the one that had disappeared from beneath her bed. “Even if I had the first idea where the sword was, what makes you think I would tell you?”
“I know what you want of me,” he said, coming closer. Everything else seemed to melt away. He lifted her chin, canting her face toward his. “I know every one of your secrets. I know all your dreams. Let me persuade you.”
And, pressing her back against the blackened trunk of a tree, he kissed her. His lips were hot, his mouth sweet. And inside her, a warm, numb darkness flooded her thoughts, making her skin shiver.
Then Severin moved back from her, leaving her to smooth down the front of her pajama top.
“Benjamin Evans,” he called into the darkness. “Come out. Don’t worry about interrupting us.”
“Get the hell away from her!” Ben’s voice, shaky but determined, came from the other side of the grove.
It was the worst thing about being a redhead, Hazel thought, the way blushes splashed up onto her cheeks and down her neck until she practically felt as if her scalp were burning.
Ben stepped farther out of the shadows, looking flushed, too. He was carrying an ax their mom used sometimes to chop kindling for the stove in the art studio. “Hazel, are you okay?”
Her brother had come to save her, like in the old days. She couldn’t quite believe it.
The elf knight smiled, and there was an odd light in his eyes. He stalked toward Ben languorously, spreading his arms wide in invitation. “Going to split me open as though you were a woodsman in a fairy tale?”
“Going to try,” Ben said, but there was a quaver in his voice. He was tall and gangly, all loose limbs and freckled skin. He didn’t look dangerous. He didn’t even look like he could heft the ax without straining.
She felt a hot wave of shame that Ben had seen the horned boy kiss her, when for so long he’d been something they’d shared between them.
“Ben,” Hazel cautioned. “Ben, I’m okay. If anyone’s going to fight, it should be me.”
Her brother’s gaze flickered to her. “Because you don’t need anyone’s help, right?”
“No, that’s not—” She took a step toward him, before Severin drew his golden knife.
“It would be better if neither of you fought me,” Severin said. “You’ve got the range and your weapon may bite deeply, but I’ll wager I’m faster. So what are you to do? Will you run at me? Will you swing wildly and hope for the best?”
“Just let her come home,” Ben said. His voice shook a little, but he hadn’t backed down, not an inch. “She’s scared. It’s the middle of the night and she’s not even dressed. What do you think you’re doing, grabbing her like that?”
Severin slid a little closer, moving as lightly as a dancer. “Oh, you mean instead of grabbing you?”
Ben flinched as though he’d been slapped. “I don’t know what you think you’re—”
“Benjamin,” Severin said, his voice dropping low. His face was inhumanly beautiful, his eyes as cold as the sky above the clouds, where the atmosphere is too thin to breathe. “I have heard every word you’ve ever said to me. Every honeyed, silver-tongued word.”
Ben’s mortified blush deepened. Hazel wanted to call to him, to say that Severin had tried the same thing on her, to tell him the same thing had worked on her, but she didn’t want to be a distraction. Ben and Severin had begun to circle each other warily.
“I’m not going away without Hazel,” Ben said, bringing his chin up. “You can’t embarrass me into leaving my own sister.”
He was going to get himself killed. He was no longer quick-fingered, no longer carrying a set of pipes hanging around his throat on a dirty string. He couldn’t play, and he’d never fought with a blade. She had to do something—she had to save Ben.
Hazel hefted the biggest stick she could find. The weight was oddly comforting in her hand, and the stance she went into was as automatic and easy as drawing breath. As soon as the fighting started, she was going to rush Severin and hopefully catch him off guard. It might not be honorable, but it had been a long time since she played at knighthood.
“Don’t be foolish,” Severin told her brother. “I was trained to a sword when I was a child. I watched my mother butchered in front of me. I have cut and I have killed and I have bled. You can’t possibly win against me.” He glanced at Hazel. “Your sister at least seems to know what she’s about. Her stance is good. Yours is abysmal.”
So much for catching him by surprise. She was just going to have to hope for dumb luck.
“If you’re going to kill me, then do it,” Ben told him. “Because if you want to take her, that’s what you’re going to have to do.”
For a frozen moment Severin brought up his blade. Their gazes caught, snagged silk on a thorn.
Hazel held her breath.
With a snort, the elf knight sheathed his knife. He shook his head, looking at Ben oddly. Then he made an elaborately formal bow, his hand nearly sweeping the ground.
“Go, then, go, Hazel and Benjamin Evans,” Severin said. “I release my claim on you tonight. But our business is not done; our affairs are far from settled. I will come for you again; and when I do, you will be eager to do as I wish.” With that, he turned from them and walked deeper into the woods.
Hazel looked at Ben. He was breathing fast, as though from a physical fight. The ax slipped from his fingers onto the forest floor, and he regarded her with wild, wide eyes. “What just happened? Seriously, Hazel. That was insane.”
She shook her head, equally baffled. “I think you impressed him with the sheer force of your stupidity. How did you find me?”
A corner of his mouth curled up. “When you weren’t on Grouse Road, I tracked the GPS in your phone. You were close enough to the casket that I thought you might be headed there.”
“What is that quote?” Hazel said, walking to him, too glad he’d come to object to the danger he’d put himself in. “The Lord protects fools, drunks, and dumb-ass ax wielders?”
He touched her shoulder gently, running his fingers against the fabric of her pajamas and sucking in his breath, as if he was imagining how much all her scrapes had hurt. She realized she was covered in dirt from her fall—dirt and blood. “Are you really okay?”
Hazel nodded. “I crashed my bike when I saw him and Amanda. I’m okay, but I don’t think she is.”
“I called the sheriff’s department, so they must have sent someone over by now. Are you going to tell me what you were doing on Grouse Road?” Ben asked.
Following you, she wanted to say, but the words stuck in her throat. If she told him that, he’d ask her about the earring and then ask all the questions that inevitably followed.
She got into his car instead, resting her head against the dashboard. “I’m really tired. Can we just go home?”
Ben nodded once and walked over, squatting down beside her, inside the open door, visibly swallowing his questions. His blue eyes were black in the moonlight. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
She nodded. “Thanks to you.”
He grinned and pushed himself upright. One hand moved to smooth down her hair. “Our prince really was something, huh?”
Hazel nodded, thinking of Severin’s mouth against hers. “Severin,” she said. “Our prince’s name is Severin.”
Once, Ben had told Hazel a tale about a great wizard who took his heart and hid it in the knothole of a tree so that when his enemies stabbed him where his heart was supposed to be, he wouldn’t die. Ever since Hazel was small, she’d hid her heart in stories about the horned boy. Whenever someone hurt her, she comforted herself with tales of him being fascinating, a little bit awful, and desperately in love with her.
Those stories had kept her heart safe. But now, when she thought about Severin, when she remembered his moss-green eyes and the horrible, shivery thrill of his words, she didn’t feel safe at all. She hated him for waking up and being real and stealing her dreams of him away.
He wasn’t their prince anymore.