“Tea,” he said coldly, pulling gloves off his hands, finger by finger. “Oolong. From Kilauea, if you have it.”
The woman stammered back at him, seemingly unable to tear her eyes off his face. “I-I-I don’t think we do?”
“Whatever, then,” he cut in, annoyed. “Black. Whatever’s decent. No milk.”
He stuffed his gloves into his pocket and then, seeming to feel the eyes on him, he turned. His eyes shocked me as much as they must’ve done the barista. They were an odd, inhuman-looking gold, closer to molten metal.
They took in the room in an aggressive sweep.
They eyes stopped abruptly on me.
I stared back at him, feeling caught.
A smoky, black and bone-white primal perched on the mage’s shoulder.
Gods. It looked like… was that really…?
“It’s a dragon,” the new mage said coldly.
His voice was unmistakably hostile.
Made of bones?I wondered silently.A dead dragon? How is that a primal?
The dragon wasn’t truly dead, though. While made entirely of bones, it moved like it was alive. I watched it flap its bony wings and adjust its claws on his shoulder as it stared at me with glowing black eyes.
It wasn’t like any other primal I’d seen.
“Obviously.” The mage’s lip curled. “Unless you’d met someone in my family, youwouldn’thave seen it.” He paused. “Are you expecting an answer to your idiotic questions, witch? When you won’t even bother to voice them aloud?”
I felt some of the blood drain from my face. I was definitely more disturbed by the thought that he’d read my mind than I was by his dead-looking primal. He couldn’t have picked that much up from just my facial expression, could he?
“Do I really need to explain to you what a familial primal is?” the white-haired mage asked coldly. “Where’s yours, witch? Is it hiding? Or were you about to tell me…”
His voice trailed off.
My breath caught as his eyes shifted upward, aiming directly over my head.
It was the exactness of that head-tilt, maybe.
It was the blank look of disbelief that flashed in those oddly-colored eyes.
Maybe it was simply the way he stared straight up, like I had a unicorn horn on top of my head, one that aimed at the rafters of the tea shop. Or maybe I’d finally noticed the exact texture of his white hair, which was longer than I remembered, but still strangely spiky around his ears and forehead. His face had narrowed a lot. The youthful roundness was gone, leaving more angles and high cheekbones and a sharp jaw.
He was obviously older, and dressed less like a fae princeling.
But I knew that face.
I bloodyknewit.
My chest violently clenched. My heart pounded, lights sparking at the edges of my vision. I felt like I was on the verge of a panic attack. Gods, he wasn’t a dream.
All this time, I’drememberedhim.
At some point in my wanderings around Magical London, I’d stopped looking for his face, his hair, those shocking gold eyes, but everything came crashing back now. I felt like I’d been punched, hard, in the chest.
“You,” I muttered, fighting to breathe. My chest hurt so badly, I raised a hand to it and pressed. Gods, I was going to have a heart attack.
I was going to pass out, and they’d all think I was mad.
