Nuada Silverlance was awake and back beyond the walls of the compound when the last rays of the sun disappeared. He took a detachment of twelve men and they rode west hard until the moon came out—less brilliant than it was once, but the sky had been tainted for so long...

The men he brought with him all seemed so young. None of them had even been born when the truce was signed with humans. Most hadn't even seen the myriad betrayals that followed in the decades after. Their distaste for humanity was fueled entirely by the world they'd taken their first breaths in: air and water thick with acrid chemicals, the forests flattened and paved, the lesser creatures of the earth penned and slaughtered casually en masse.

There wasn't one among them who didn't respect him, wasn't grateful to him-but that didn't mean they were friends.

Wink had been his friend. Since they were children, in fact. Wink probably would have made several sideways remarks about the woman they'd thrown to him, but as it was, none of the soldiers even mentioned it. And it had been their damned idea in the first place.

On horseback, moving quickly across the moors, Nuada had time to consider the entire episode.

He'd been upset when Rhiana had casually remarked that some of the soldiers had brought him a prisoner. As though bringing a human girl into his inner sanctum was something that wouldn't concern him.

His mind traveled along darker paths. Elven women of a comparable age to his own were more or less extinct. Their women were more delicate, and the tainted water and the chemical-ridden food and the noxious air killed most girls before they reached adolescence. To say nothing of the predations of human men.

Regardless, Nuada felt no longing for the females of the fading human race. Even though it had been easily two-hundred winters since he'd felt a woman's hand on his face, a woman's breath on his throat. Well, previous to a day ago.

The experience had been out-of-character enough that he'd asked Rhiana (who was wise in the ways of magic) if she felt anything unusual on him before he left. His reaction of the black-haired human girl was not only confounding but troubling. Perhaps he was going soft in his advanced age.

Then they found a camp, and as he let the hot blood of his enemies out into the earth, and he felt better.

Human men were different now: desperate, and therefore more dangerous, not softened by the so-called modern age. And yet, the ragtag bands he still came across were no challenge for one such as him. At times he felt his need for vengeance faltering, but then he remembered all the dead soldiers and never-to-be-women and Wink and his father and he fought on. Sometimes he even thought of Nuala, but then he couldn't sleep for days.

He was wiping their stinking blood off of his spear when, unbidden, anger unfurled itself at the base of his skull. He had chosen this path for his people. He had become a monster because only a monster could do what needed to be done. Whatever attraction he had to the human girl was brought on by pathological loneliness, and that was not an emotion that had any place in his life.

Sex was one thing, but he would not allow himself to become emotionally compromised. And he would not allow some illiterate human girl to think she was more than a slave, even if she was the slave that shared his bed.