Darklight by Lesley Livingston

From someone else.
    “Kelley—this isn’t like you. You’re not—”
    “What? Ruthless? Like you?”
    Sonny’s head snapped back as though she’d slapped him. “What?” he whispered, his expression stricken.
    “I’ve seen you, Sonny . . .” I should shut up. I should close my mouth up tight and just stop talking. She knew that. “I’ve seen what you do when you . . . hunt.”
    “Kelley, I—”
    “No!” Her hand sliced through the air. “I don’t want to hear it.”
    “Hear what?” he asked her, the tone of his voice suddenly sharp as the sword she’d seen him wield mercilessly in the dreams her mother sent her. “What exactly is it that you think I’ve been doing here? What exactly do you think of me ?”
    “I don’t know.” Shut up, Winslow. “I don’t really know you, do I?”
    “I thought I knew you . . .” His eyes were full of misery.
    “You didn’t see!” Kelley choked on a sob, her mind flooding with memories of that horrible night in the park when she had stared into Sonny’s eyes and seen nothing but a monster. A monster that had wanted her dead. Her father had done that. “You don’t know what he did to you! Auberon deserves whatever he’s got coming to him—”
    “He’s your father, Kelley.”
    “I don’t care!”
    “He’s my king,” Sonny said again.
    “And what does that make me?”
    Over her shoulder Bob said, very quietly, “It makes you a queen of Faerie. If he dies.”
    Silence like a deep winter snowfall blanketed the room. In the corner, Fennrys shifted uncomfortably on the cot. Bob and Sonny were still as statues.
    Kelley shook her head, suddenly weary. “You know, I guess I can accept that sort of insinuation coming from you, Bob. You’re Faerie, after all. All your kind care about is politics and power.” She turned to Sonny. “But from you? It’s like you’ve been living among these creatures so long, you’ve forgotten how to be human.”
    “No—you’ve forgotten, Kelley,” Sonny answered her in a voice so low that she had to strain to hear him. “I never learned.”
    “Sonny . . .”
    “Maybe a year in your world isn’t enough to teach me what it is to be a mortal man.” He stood straighter, spine stiff. “But growing up here I think I at least might have learned some of what it is to be a son—mortal or not. I’ll come with you, Bob.”
    “I don’t think—”
    “I owe him that much.” Sonny cut the boucca short.
    “He tried to kill me,” Kelley murmured again, the shock of disbelief at Sonny’s actions settling over her. Smothering.
    “And now he’s dying,” Fennrys remarked dryly, his keen-eyed gaze narrowed in her direction. “A less sentimental person than me might call that poetic justice.”
    Kelley went cold with anger. She turned on her heel and stalked out of the cottage, a luminous cloud of fire sprites following in her wake, like surrogates for the sparkling wings she could not now make appear.
    Storming away from the cottage, Kelley kicked at a small rock bordering the path that led through the yard and sent it skittering into the bushes. Something small and spiny scolded her from under a shrub and lobbed the stone right back at her. Kelley hopped out of the way, startled by the reminder that she was no longer in her own world. And that things hadn’t turned out as she’d imagined.
    Her reunion with Sonny was supposed to have been a magical, floaty, sparkly thing. With kissing and tears—strictly of joy, mind you, wherein she cried prettily and without blotchiness—and more kissing. And maybe distant fireworks going off as some kind of backdrop to the moment.
    “Yeah,” she said out loud. “Not exactly.”
    She hadn’t thought anything could come between them—certainly not her father! But now she worried that Auberon had taken Sonny away from her—not just physically when he’d commanded him to return to the Faerie realm, but also in other, more intangible ways. She wondered whether Sonny had changed