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“Oh, you are impossible.”
He tilted his head back to look at me over his shoulder.
“And you are going to get a hide-burn,” he muttered. “You don’t have your cloak on properly. And where are your eye-shells?”
He was right, and that was even more annoying. Before I could shift all the cards I held into one hand, he’d already grabbed at my hood and yanked it up over my head, casting my face in blissfully cooling shadow.
Well, I could at least put my own sunglasses on.
But I couldn’t remember which jacket pocket I’d put them in, and as I shoved my hand fruitlessly into the empty one, Dalk was already swiping them from the other side.
He held them almost daintily in his claws, like he was worried he was going to mangle the tough plastic just by touching them. Which, to be fair, he was probably strong enough to do.
“Thank you,” I said, holding out my empty hand for them. He looked at my outstretched hand.
And completely ignored it.
He tossed his spear down to the stone so that he’d have both hands free, and then unfolded the dark sunglasses.
“I can put them on myself,” I said, surprised he still hadn’t handed them over.
“I want to make sure it is done correctly,” Dalk huffed back.
“Correctly?! You’ve probably never even held a pair of sunglasses before this moment!” I said, instinctively flinching backwards when he came at my face with them. “You’re going to poke me in the fucking eye!”
“I will not,” he said, his voice dark and quiet with focus as his gaze fused itself to my face. “I have a hunter’s aim. I can hit a dakrival in a killing place from hundreds of paces away.”
“I’m not a dakrival!”
“No. Nor are you hundreds of paces away. Be still, Fiona.”
And fuck me sideways, I actually went ahead and did it.
I’ve never been the type to listen to, well, anybody. My Nan absolutely forbade me from getting a tattoo, and that was the first thing I did after I turned eighteen. I went into environmental engineering because I wanted to rebel against systems that seemed designed to destroy us and I ran into my fair share of trouble with the Guardaí during environmental protests in Dublin.
But when Dalk muttered those two little words, Be still, and then tacked my name on the end like a threat, it was like my body obeyed him before my brain could even catch up. My breath caught in my throat, my muscles tightening involuntarily as Dalk slid the arms of the glasses slowly over the tops of my ears and along my temples.
Had my ears always been this sensitive? And not even just my ears. My whole body felt oddly prickly and warm, and I was sure it wasn’t solely from the alien sun beating down. Dalk had his fingers very carefully and intentionally bent so that his claws were angled down, curling around the arms of the glasses, their dangerously sharp tips never coming into contact with my skin. But the smooth surface of their top-curves brushed against my cheekbones as he fixed the sunglasses in place, and I just about combusted on the spot from the tiny stimulation of that touch.
He released the arms of the glasses, and then, giving me an unsatisfied look, he nudged the centre part of the sunglasses higher up on my nose before finally stepping back.
“There.” He said it calmly, decisively.
Like he’d fixed something.
I was tempted, and not just a little bit, to rip them off my face and put them back on myself. But it was sunny. And they were already helping. And that just seemed one petty step too far.
Still thought about it, though. Especially after his “This is why I stay in the Deep Sky” remark. I didn’t want him thinking I was such a helpless idiot that he had to hang around just to make sure I didn’t get sunburned or kidnapped by some desperately horny Deep Sky bloke.
But I guess he really was worried about that latter thing. Because when he swept his spear back up into his claws and turned around to face Gahn Thaleo and the other men approaching, he stepped in front of me and blocked my view again. Or blocked me from view. I stared at the rippling muscled barrier of his back, lined with blade after blade, and tried to decide whether to step around him...
Or if I’d just have to give up and turn these cards into paper airplanes to shoot over his shoulder. With his reflexes he could probably slice them right out of the air if he wanted to, before they’d spent even half a second in flight.
I decided on neither of those things. For the moment, I just subtly leaned around Dalk’s bulk and watched.
CHAPTER SIX
Dalk
