Free All Night Awake by Sarah A. Hoyt Page B

me, but for mankind entire.”
    The thought of Silver caring about humanity seemed incongruous enough, unlikely enough to keep Will from the depths of desire and awaken in him a shocked interest. “Mankind?” he asked.
    She nodded.
    Will shook his head and swallowed hard. Her beauty had its effect upon his heart, like the flame of a candle that, shining upon wax, will soften it. Yet he could resist the melting warmth and the molten beauty that gazed upon him from those shimmering metallic eyes. But the thought of Silver concerned with low, ephemeral humans puzzled him so that he could not walk away from that. If she lied not, then here was wonder indeed.
    “Please, lady,” he said, both voice and words less resolute than he’d hoped. He wanted to know why she cared for humans, and yet he wanted her to leave him alone. “Please, lady. I am but a fool, but not such a fool who doesn’t know the havoc your kind can wreak. Please go. Be gone. For you must mock. You, care for humans?”
    The lady trembled. From the melting eyes, two tears dropped, rolling down her curved cheek like twin crystalline globules, upon which Will saw all his future.
    He’d die in London, a lonely, desperate man. He’d never again see a glimmer of magical beauty. Never again would he touch something like the silk of Silver’s skin. Never.
    “Humans and elvenkind, in this conjoined,” she said. “Will meet twin dooms if you help me not.”
    This was fantastical and unbelievable. “Lady, you have to go.”
    Silver looked down at him, her eyes like a wet day, all rainy where it was wont to be bright. “I have nowhere else to go,” she said. “I cannot—
    “I cannot go,” she screamed. She covered her face with her pale hands and the whole of her slim body trembled.
    She reached for his arm, and encircled his wrist with her small hand. The touch of her hand, soft upon his skin, made her seem human, frail, in need of protection. It made her seem like the Silver he remembered.
    “To whom will I go if you don’t let me abide?” Tears chased each other down her face. “I’ve had to come to London.” She stomped her foot and bit her lip, but resolution crumpled upon her face and her eyes filled with tears. “In London I have to remain till I find my brother Sylvanus.”
    “Your brother?” Mention of the deposed King of Fairyland, the same mention that the three creatures had made upon his dream, riveted Will’s attention. He remembered Sylvanus as even more scheming than the run of elves. Sylvanus had tried to steal Nan before the Hunter took Sylvanus. Sylvanus would have had Will killed to leave Sylvanus’s path free to wooing Nan.
    “Your brother? Is your brother in London? Why would he be?” Creatures of glade and dale, elves both good and bad, did not belong in London’s reek, in London’s crowded, teeming streets, with their tall houses that obscured the daylight.
    “My brother . . .” Silver sighed and cried, tears chasing each other down her little rounded cheeks to drip upon her bosom, where they ran down in rivulets between the twin globules of her breasts like a mountain stream disappearing into a deep crevice. “My brother has . . . . He attacked the Hunter. He . . .”
    “But your brother is in thrall of the Hunter,” Will said. His astonishment made him forget his hunger, his fear of Silver, his desperate straits. “The Hunter’s slave. The Hunter’s dog. Can a slave thus attack his master?”
    He tried to keep his eyes away from the destination of those drops of water that left her eyes only to travel to more intimate locations, and yet his eyes traced their path down her cheeks, to her velvety bosom, and imagined the course beyond, beneath her perfumed garments.
    He forced his gaze up as one who forces an errant child back to his books. He made himself meet her gaze. “When last we met, you told me that the Hunter was stronger even than elf and that no elf could escape his thralldom. Now you tell