dark faerie 04.5 - without armor Read Online Free Page A

blossoming bruise right under the area she’d poked. Strange. Usually, I healed rapidly.
    The pain in my head where I’d cracked my head pulsed in response. I reached up to find a patch of dried blood and a lump underneath. No wonder I’d been unconscious. The fall had knocked me to hell and back. Still, I should’ve healed already. What was going on?
    I held out my hand to ignite a tiny flame in my palm, but it failed to blossom. Concentrating harder, I stared hard at the creases where fire would leak into the atmosphere from within
    Nothing.
    I dropped my head toward the bag tied to my waist. Pulling out a healing potion from it, I pulled the cork and downed half of it. It was a faery draught a friend of my sister had mixed for me. Though I rarely drank it, faery magic had adverse effects on Elementals, I always kept some ready for any moderate to severe bodily injuries I acquired on an Unseelie hunt. It worked well for the moderate injuries, but it was the deeper ones, the life-threatening ones that were the hardest to heal. Those took more than just my magic mixtures to heal.
    The liquid burned, a fiery feeling I rarely had the pleasure to endure, for I didn’t burn anymore. I was immune to it. This potion worked by blocking my magic momentarily, which wasn’t a big deal since apparently, my magic had switched off from all the trauma.
    Or it was that blasted magical disc they’d thrown at me; designed to implode with the presence of fire. Just perfect.
    I watched Isolde move about the room and let out an extended, longing sigh.
    Too bad I had nothing in my bag of tricks to heal broken hearts.
     
     
     

Chapter Six
     
     
     
     
    The wind blew outside this makeshift den they’d dragged me to. I hated to have to hole up when I’d rather be investigating who was behind the kidnapping and magic draining explosion, but I was tired. Healing took more than just magic to work. It took my own energy reserves to recover. There was no other choice but to hunker down for the night since my magic was severely depleted.
    Isolde sat near the fire piled on the cement floor nearby. We were in another abandoned warehouse. They were a dime a dozen in these parts and luckily, no one would be bent out of shape to patrol the area in the middle of a torrential downpour. I liked it that way. The less the humans were involved in affairs of the magical kind, the better. I hated to clean up messes with non-magics. It took time, magic and a bit of mind erasing.
    No one wants to be mind-erased. I wouldn’t want to be mind-erased. It just didn’t seem fair to do to people what I wouldn’t want done to myself. I avoided it at all costs. Sometimes, it couldn’t be helped.
    “Hey,” I called out toward my ex-girlfriend. Her eyes studied the flickering flames as if they could tell her intimate secrets no one else knew. I dragged my butt over to her, making sure to keep an inch or two distance between us. She was jumpy, skittish even, and I didn’t want to encroach on her personal space just yet. Yet was the word.
    She never answered me.
    “Isolde…I…” I cleared my throat, suddenly feeling unsure of what to say. I usually had a quirky comeback or an excellent rebuttal to anyone’s comments or something to say. This time, I had nothing to dispel her silence.
    She tilted her head toward me, a sign to go on.
    “Look, I’m sorry about….about all that happened before. I’m not good at relationships. You and I…we were something special. But I had to go. You were moving away too, remember? What else but to leave it the way it was?”
    Isolde’s fingers rubbed against her arm, fraying the threadbare yarn of the sweater she wore layered over several shirts. That’s how you stay warm in the winter. Layers. Even her holed up sweater held together by tiny knotted strings where the yarn had separated was warmer than nothing. Gritty dirt streaked across her hands and embedded itself in the tiny lines of skin surrounding her nailbeds.