Read Online The Ruby Kiss by Helen Scott Taylor - Free Book Online Page A

legs. What she wanted to do was sleep for a week, but she couldn’t leave her dogs alone.
    Twister cast her a veiled look. “If you leave the Bunker, you’ll be an easy target for the Seelie hunters. Once they have you, you’ll be lost to me. Lost to
us,
I mean.”
    “Is there no way I can sneak out without the specters seeing me?” Ruby asked. “Nightshade can fly me home and back. Quick. It would give me a chance to get some decent clothes.”
    “Seelie hunters now know the taste of the Mistress’s power. You’ll never evade their specters,” Twister said. “I can find you something more suitable to wear.”
    Reality hit Ruby like a slap across the face. She couldn’t go to fetch her dogs. She couldn’t even wear decent clothes. While she had her damned affliction, fabric made from cotton, silk, or wool unraveled and behaved like rabid spaghetti.
    Her legs trembled. She dropped back onto the sofa and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes to hold back tears of weary frustration. She hated her affliction, hated having to depend on these people. She just wanted to go home.
    Twister issued orders to someone to fetch her dogs and secure her house.
    “Ruby?” Nightshade said. He put his arm around her shoulders. “I’m sure your dogs will be all right.”
    “It’s not that,” she mumbled. When she’d finally reached the age where she could be independent from her harebrained mother, she’d promised herself never again to allow anyone control of her life. Her mother hadn’t cared what was best forRuby. She had been obsessed with finding Ruby’s father and expected Ruby to somehow use her power to sense where he was. When she couldn’t, her mother accused her of not trying hard enough. Because of her affliction she’d been made to feel like a failure. Now Ruby had a home and career she loved, and she would never allow herself to lose her independence, all she’d worked so hard to achieve, everything she’d done to be normal and forget the past.
    Twister came and stood over her. “It’s a formality, but I want to verify that you are the Mistress of the Beasts.”
    “What sort of power does the Mistress wield?” Nightshade asked.
    “Who cares,” Ruby snapped. “Just tell me how to get rid of it.”
    A stunned silence met her statement.
    “That’s not possible,” Twister replied. He signaled to Nightshade to move out of his way, and he sat beside her on the sofa.
    Nightshade crouched down in front of Ruby. He squeezed her hands. “I’ll be right here all the time.”
    Ruby watched the king warily. She sensed no malice in him, but the chilling resolve in his eyes set her nerves jumping.
    “The Mistress of the Beasts can manipulate the life force present in any living organism,” the Unseelie king began. “Magic is muted in the Bunker, but if you truly are the new Mistress, my beasts will connect with you. I’m a shape-shifter,” he reminded her. Then he held out a hand, the palm scored and callused.
    After a few seconds of hesitation, Ruby drew a fortifying breath and placed her hand in his. A frisson of awareness ran up her arm like a gentle breeze stirring the hairs on her skin. Her eyelids fell, and an image of Twister’s golden eagle flashed through her mind before morphing to the gray fur and golden eyes of a wolf. The creature’s teeth drew back on a snarl; then itfaded into a mighty red deer stag, pawing the ground, its lethal rack of antlers lowered in warning.
    Twister’s hand jerked away. Immediately, the images behind Ruby’s eyelids blanked. She became aware of breath sawing in and out of her lungs as though she’d run a race. She opened her eyes to find Nightshade staring at her, his face tight with concern.
    “Thor’s blood,” Twister swore softly. He stared at her in wonder, while his perpetual motion devices clicked and whirred in the silence. “Without the damping effect of the Bunker, you’d have forced me to change shape. You’re definitely the new