Page 90 of A House of Cloaks & Daggers

I swallowed again. Hard. “Fine.”

The silence that stretched between us could have lasted forever as we glowered at each other from opposing sides.

“This is the armoury,” he declared at last, waving a careless hand in the air as he pushed away from the bench. At his full height, even from a distance, he absolutely towered over me. “It’s glamoured for reasons that I won’t explain, even if they’re not obvious to you.”

I took a step forward instead of rolling my eyes. “Because you keep weapons here.”

He arched a brow, lips curving upwards in mock surprise. “You’re a genius.”

Giving him a sweet smile, I inclined my head to him. “Why, thank you.”

“Unlike humans,” he went on, ignoring my grin, “High Fae don’t beat each other with large wooden sticks. I noticed you had one in your home. Is there anything else you know how to use?”

I froze, momentarily stunned, as I remembered the baseball bat I brought home one day to protect my mother and little sister and wondered if they would remember it.

Wren told me he didn’t erase their memories of me, but what if he did?

“Didn’t think so,” he said with a sigh, half turning towards the table. He picked up a thin silver blade with edges so sharp that they almost blurred into the gloomy stonework and flipped it in his hand. “How’s your aim?” he enquired, throwing me a wicked smile over his shoulder.

Returning it with one of my own, I took another step towards him.

“I don’t know,” I crooned, tilting my head as I examined the blade again. My gaze drifted to Wren’s body a moment later, searching the hard and unyielding planes of his chest for any soft spots, any weaknesses. His eyes, burning like the edge of the sun, tracked their every movement. “Would you like to be the one to find out?”

Chapter thirty-eight

What Happened to You?

Knife-throwing was easy.

Wren astutely decided not to volunteer himself for target practice. Instead, he wheeled out a thickly padded dummy strung up against a pole a bit like a scarecrow, covered in fabric that might have once looked white. Red and black ink had been applied to outline critical areas of the human—or rather, the faerie—body.

I missed a few times, but in the first ten minutes, I hit the red sections thrice and the black sections five times, with minimal instruction. The weight of the knives had thrown me off a little, being so much heavier than the darts at The Water Dragon.

“Beginner’s luck,” Wren muttered.

“The Water Dragon’s Annual Dart Champion, five years and counting,” I corrected with a wink. “I also played netball for seven years. Made it all the way to nationals in goal attack.”

He frowned, casually looping his arm around the dummy’s shoulders like they were old friends. “You played with awhatball?”

“Netball.” I picked up the last throwing knife and weighed it in my hand. My balance was okay as long as I kept my focus away from the razor-sharp edges and pointed tip. It was a simple silver carving, polished to defy the ages, with a much flatter and longer handle than the darts I’d wielded before. “It’s a sport.”

Wren’s beautiful face screwed up into a look of utter confusion. “You—you hit people with balls made out of nets?”

“No.” I rolled my eyes. “It’s a non-contact sport.”

“I don’t like it,” he declared, shaking his head as he straightened up and removed his arm from the dummy. “I enjoy many things that involve a great deal of contact indeed.”

When he turned around, I made an exaggerated gagging face at the ground, and then I threw the last of the knives towards the red circle outlining the dummy’s heart.

My aim was perfect, and the blade plunged into the target all the way down to the slight outwards curve before the handle.

Apparently, faeries did have hearts—and they were in the same place as mine. Wren told me that if my aim was true and my arm was strong, I could kill one of them with a knife to the heart.

Not him, he added with a smirk, but perhaps another faerie.

Immortality was a concept I still didn’t fully understand. To live forever—but only if you were lucky enough not to be killed by any of the monsters lurking within this realm.

“Your ability to throw things at people is passable,” he commented reluctantly, striding to the thick wooden bench along the wall. Weapons and objects that didn’t look at all familiar to me were lined up on strips of old cloth and leather. “Your perception of things is severely lacking, though.”

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