The Elven King Read Online Free PDF

rangers are already hunting me? All this sounded bad to Sade. Very, very bad.
    If she had any sense of self-preservation, she thought, she’d go back through the gate and take her chances with the cops.
    But… she couldn’t just abandon Aranion, not after he’d chosen to risk a horrible death to save her.
    “Maybe you could go back with me?” she suggested. But then, how would she explain him: a man with moonlight hair, who had no records at all and didn’t even speak English? Not to mention the fact that the cops would surely be looking into her life, and her relationship with Michael, as they investigated his disappearance. ‘Missing ex’ plus ‘mysterious new lover’ would certainly equal ‘suspicious’ in anyone’s eyes.
    Aranion shook his head again at her suggestion. “There is too much iron and death on your side of the wall,” he said. “You make your homes from the bones of dead things. Even your chariots, for all their eyes glow with a facsimile of life, have no spirit inside. Besides -- once your people realized my true nature, the torture they’d wreak on my flesh would make the dyre-drakes seem a mercy.”
    Sade’s instinct was to argue with him. But the truth was, she couldn’t say what her government would do if they got their hands on Aranion. Waterboarding might well be the least of it.
    And even if Aranion wasn’t found out as an elf – an alien being, after all -- he had killed someone in cold blood, right on her lawn. Sade couldn’t ignore the possibility that one of her neighbors had seen or recorded some of it from the surrounding windows. After all, someone had called the cops. It was even possible they’d seen her and Aranion dragging Michael’s corpse through the Gate.
    “So,” Sade said, thinking it through. “You can’t lie at all?”
    Aranion said, “I can refuse to answer, or I can answer with a truth that is misleading. But I can’t lie directly. None of us can.”
    “Wow. That’s got to be rough.”
    Aranion shrugged. “As a people, we’ve made a fine art of misdirection.”
    Misdirection, was it? There had to be an answer in that. Sade could feel it, hanging at the edge of her awareness…
    But the horrors of the evening were starting to catch up with her. If this truly was a dream, shouldn’t she have woken up by now? If not, then all of this… Michael’s finding her, his dead body on the mossy ground, and now these threats of torture and death… all of these must be real.
    She couldn’t deal with this. She couldn’t stand here and keep chatting about these things over the corpse of her dead ex-lover.
    “I need to…I can’t stay here…” she began. Where did she want to go? She gestured, vaguely, toward the trees – the only visible direction of escape, or possible shelter.
    She hated the idea of leaving Michael’s body to be eaten by whatever fantastic monsters might live here – she really hated it. But he was already dead.
    She and Aranion weren’t so safe. Not from flesh-eating monsters, nor from these elven rangers who were hunting Aranion. Sade wished she was back in the city. At least there, she knew what she was running away from.
    Aranion was looking at her – strangely, maybe wistfully.
    He said, slowly, as if it was difficult for him: “You should go home.”
    Sade looked back at him.
    She said, her own voice slow: “You’ve seen me before. When I was a child. That’s why you helped me, isn’t it?”
    Aranion nodded. His eyes never left hers.
    “Then I can’t leave you to be killed.” Sade held out her hand.
    “There’s something drawing us together,” she whispered. She hadn’t really meant to say it. But she added, “You feel it too.”
    Aranion nodded again. “I know,” he said.
    He took her hand. His grip was strong, his skin soft. And he smelled way, way too good for someone who’d just killed a man.
    “Then we’re in this together,” Sade said.
    It was an absolutely terrible idea, of course. To fall for an