I could almost hear his puzzled frown. “Why don’t you want to talk to me?”

Anger spiked. He had to know by now that I’d been at Kimber’s party. Surely he could figure out for himself why I might not want to talk to him. That he would play innocent just made me more pissed.

“Gee, I don’t know, Ethan,” I said through gritted teeth. “Maybe it would be because I saw you with that redhead at Kimber’s party. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s it.” I found myself holding my breath, hoping that Ethan would have some perfectly innocent explanation for why the redhead had been draped all over him. Hell if I know what that explanation could have been, but that didn’t stop me from hoping.

Ethan’s momentary silence shattered that admittedly fragile hope.

“Asshole,” I muttered under my breath, and once again ordered myself to hang up. Too bad I wasn’t any good at taking orders, even from myself.

Ethan finally found his voice. “It didn’t mean anything. We were just … having a good time at the party. Besides, you’ve made it perfectly clear we aren’t dating, so I figured there was no harm in it.”

On the one hand, he had a point. I had been really clear with my words that we weren’t dating. On the other hand, he’d made it just as clear that he hoped to change my mind, which should have meant he wasn’t hooking up with other girls at the same time.

“You’re right,” I said flatly. “We’re not dating.”

I finally found the willpower to hang up on him, and barely resisted the urge to hurl the phone across the room. Angry tears burned my eyes, but I refused to let them fall.

I took a deep breath, trying to calm down. Every logical bone in my body told me Ethan was bad news for me. He was older than me, he was a player, and he was a liar. He was exactly the kind of boy I didn’t want to get involved with. And yet, stupid me, I wanted him pursuing me, making me feel like a grown woman, rather than a kid. The idea of having a hottie like Ethan choose me over all the other more beautiful, more worldly girls he knew made my heart skip a beat.

But hello, reality here, he wasn’t choosing me over all those other girls. In fact, if he was up to his usual tricks, he wasn’t bothering to choose at all.

Seeing him with that girl at the party had hurt like a slap in the face, but it was probably good for me. Maybe it would help me get my head out of the clouds, help me see Ethan as he really was, rather than how I wanted him to be.

The phone rang again, but I let the answering machine pick up.

“Come on, Dana,” Ethan said after the beep. “Talk to me.”

I folded my arms and resisted the urge to pick up the phone. Ethan sighed dramatically.

“You’re making something out of nothing,” he said. “I was just dancing with her. What’s the big deal?”

If I were a less guarded sort, those words might have made me feel like a melodramatic idiot. Surely Ethan had a right to dance with other girls at a party, especially when he was under the impression I wasn’t going to be there myself. I might even have been able to talk myself into thinking I’d misinterpreted the level of flirting I’d seen.

But I am a guarded sort, and I couldn’t help remembering Ethan’s initial hesitation when I’d asked him about the girl. If he really thought what he was doing with her was so innocent, he wouldn’t have reacted like that.

Reminding myself once again of some of Ethan’s less noble moments—like when he’d tried to seduce me with magic, and when he’d engineered for me to be attacked so he could play the knight in shining armor—I found the willpower to ignore his voice on my answering machine.

Eventually he gave up. Or so I thought.

Chapter eight

I ended up in a nasty, broody mood after talking to Ethan. I tried to get my mind off him by tooling around on the Internet. Then I tried watching TV, but I’ve never been a daytime TV fan. Then I tried reading a book.

Nothing seemed able to distract me from my gloomy thoughts. Now more than ever, I wished I were still having my lessons with Keane. When I was sparring with him, there was no room in my brain for anything other than survival.

Realizing I needed something that would absorb more of my mental energy than anything I’d yet tried, I decided to take one more shot at teaching myself to use magic. I had to shout down the little voice in my head that told me it was a futile effort. I’d been trying ever since the first time Dad had grounded me, and although I could now call the magic to me with relative ease, I didn’t know how to make it do anything.

I’d really have liked to ask for help with it, but I believed Ethan was right and I was better off keeping my affinity with magic secret. According to Kimber, who’d explained the basics of magic to me before I’d had any idea I could use it myself, magic is an almost sentient force—an idea which still creeps me out—that’s native to Faerie. As far as anyone knew, the magic had always treated Faeriewalkers as human in the past, meaning Faeriewalkers couldn’t even sense the magic, much less use it. But for some reason, the magic seemed to have taken a liking to me. Something about my distinctive singing voice, with its Fae purity and its human vibrato, seemed to draw the magic in.

A lot of people were already scared of me. Well, not of me exactly, but of what I was capable of doing. Not only could I travel freely between Faerie and the mortal world, but I—and those within my field of influence—could also carry magic into the mortal world and technology into Faerie. Grace wanted to use me to kill the Seelie Queen because with me at her side, Grace could carry a gun into Faerie and shoot the Queen.