In her present state, delirious from travel and haunted by unknown ghosts, Losa was as susceptible to her changing emotions as a lily bending in the wind—with no protective walls to house her from the unforgiving elements. Terror had gripped her tight as frost crystals crackling along her flesh, only to be melted by the fever of confusion not seconds later. Instinct warned her to remain wary near the charcoal soldier . . . yet begged that she step closer. She did not trust him. She wanted to. The sanity that had insisted Losa not fear the stranger for no decent reason also told her that she owed him nothing: not this conversation, not her attention, not anything. There was no explanation for why the sylph felt so drawn to engage him when she could have, just as easily, made her exit as soon as he entered the stage. They didn’t know each other. They weren’t “friends.”

So why was Losa still here?

When the slender dancer crept closer to this most intriguing puzzle, her dreamy amethyst eyes caught the inward wince that pulled the foreboding beast into himself like a bird of prey huddling into its breast. Immediately Losa halted, inexplicably ashamed. Her absently perplexed features opened into a look of dismay—the child that has reached for a butterfly only to crush it. Had she hurt him with a thoughtless question? Misjudged the dragon’s own precious personal space? It had not occurred to Losa that she was capable of hurting others, or even making them slightly uncomfortable when she herself was so pathetic. And now she’d done something stupid. Her battered heart twisted in mysterious sympathy at the shudder that crawled over the obsidian demon’s frame. What had she just done? No . . . why did she care?

A bewildered apology readied itself behind the girl’s sable lips—and quickly burnt to ash when the outlaw king spoke. Unbidden, his name reformed itself on her tongue. “Hurricane . . .” The title sounded like a forbidden spell in her soft voice. Eyes of evening and sapphire widened, as if the lone princess were struggling to see through a iron curtain dropped in front of her. The pebbled bank no longer seemed solid beneath her bleeding paws. She no longer felt the weight of water streaming down her lithe limbs. Pain stabbed at the back of her brain: a mirror shard with his face reflected on the surface. I KNOW HIM! her mind suddenly screamed—but could not offer up a single memory. Guilt sawed into her chest. Desperately Losa scrambled for another sign, another vision, something to explain the debilitating affect the dragon’s name held over her. The pieces were too sharp. Too scattered. A useless razor mosaic.

The pharaoh with lightning eyes held the earthen bird in thrall with his grasping, lonesome voice. Losa trembled silently while he lowered his colossal form to the ground, deep gravel-textured lyrics echoing her confusion. This was not right. The brute—Hurricane of Mexico—should not be this way.

Despite the anxiety writhing in her abdomen, Losa commanded her coward’s heart to ease the distance separating herself from the midnight monster. One black-gloved foreleg reached out as if to touch Hurricane’s pained muzzle and then jerked back, startled by her own audacity. “Maybe you mistook me for someone else,” the espresso vixen murmured gently, awkwardly, not at all convinced of the words that dropped from her maw. “I’m nobody. I’ve just been wandering around, wasting time. It’s kind of you to mistake me for someone important, though.”

Humiliation burned under her rich fur. She should just leave, and let this ragged knight remember who it was he thought he saw in her before embarrassment overcame him as well.