Текст книги "Shadowfever"
Автор книги: Karen Marie Moning
Соавторы: Karen Marie Moning,Karen Marie Moning
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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 37 страниц)
33
CONS: Why I’m not the king
1. I was a baby twenty-three years ago. I saw pictures of me, and I remember growing up. (Unless someone planted false memories.)
2. I don’t even like the concubine. (Unless I fell out of love with her a long time ago.)
3. I don’t feel like I’m split into multiple human parts, and I’ve never been attracted to women. (Unless I’m repressing.)
4. I hate Fae, and especially Unseelie. (Am I overcompensating?)
5. If I were the king, wouldn’t the Unseelie Princes have known me and not raped me? Wouldn’t somebody … recognize me or something?
6. Where have I been for six or seven hundred thousand years? And how could I not know about it? (Okay, so maybe somebody forced me to drink from the cauldron.)
PROS: things that make it look like I could be
1. I knew what the White Mansion looked like inside. I also knew every step I walked in the Unseelie prison. Same with knowing that Cruce had wings. I have a ton of knowledge I can’t explain having. (Maybe somebody planted memories. If they can plant false ones, why not real ones?)
2. I’ve been dreaming of the concubine all my life and, even though she was unconscious, she managed to summon me. (Maybe she was manipulating me in the Dreaming like she did the Keltars.)
3. I can conjure runes that are supposedly part of what was used to reinforce the Unseelie prison walls. (Not sure which column this goes in. Why would the king have helped?) (Maybe it’s part of my sidhe-seer gifts.)
4. The Book hunts me and plays with me like a cat worrying a mouse. (Can’t think of a way out of this one. There’s obviously something different about me.)
5. K’Vruck poked at me mentally, then said, “Ah, there you are.” (WTF????)
6. I can go through the mirror that only the king and concubine can go through, and the queen is the concubine. Barrons can’t. Fiona couldn’t.
7. When I was in the White Mansion, I could see the concubine but not the king, which makes perfect sense if it was the king’s memories I was living, because when you’re remembering something, you don’t see yourself in the memory, you see who else was there and what happened around you.
I dropped my pen and snapped my journal shut. Daddy could have used those last two PROs to get me life without parole.
I needed to perform more experiments with the Silver. That was all there was to it. Once I proved someone else could go through, I could quit driving myself nuts.
“Right,” I muttered. “More experiments. Sound like someone else we know?” Like maybe an obsessed king that had experimented an entire race of monsters into being. There was no getting around a brutal fact: If my tests failed, my test subjects would die. Was I so desperate to exonerate myself that I was willing to become a murderer? Sure, I’d killed a lot in the past few months, but in the heat of the fight, not premeditated, and Fiona had wanted to die.
A pure human would be the best test.
I could probably find someone hanging out at Chester’s who was in love with dying. Or too drunk to—
Was I losing my humanity? Or had I always been a little short to begin with?
I clutched my head and groaned.
Suddenly every muscle in my body tensed as if standing up in greeting, even though I didn’t move. “Barrons.” I dropped my hands and raised my head.
“Ms. Lane.” He took a chair across from me with such eerie grace that I wondered how I’d ever believed he was human. He poured himself into the brocade wing chair, like water over stone, before settling into sleek muscle. He moved as if he knew where everything in the room was, in precise measurements. He didn’t walk, stalk, or prowl; he glided with flawless awareness of all other atoms in relation to his. It made it easy for him to conceal himself behind inanimate objects and to assume a similar … structure or something.
“Have you always moved like that in front of me and I just never noticed? Was I oblivious?”
“No and yes. You were oblivious. Head up that tight pink ass. But I never moved this way in front of you.” His look dripped sexual innuendo. “I might have moved this way a time or two behind you.”
“Not hiding anything from me anymore?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“What does someone like you conceal?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” His glittering eyes raked me with a hard once-over.
It had been nearly a week since we’d killed Fiona in the Silvers, and my wardrobe was giving me more fits than ever. I was wearing distressed black leather pants with a tattooed gray grunge element and my favorite baby-doll pink tee that said I’m a JUICY girl across the front and had chiffon cap sleeves. I’d tied a Goth scarf around my blond curls and had on a pair of Alina’s dangling heart earrings. My fingernails had grown out and I’d done a French manicure on my hands, and but I’d painted my toenails black. The dichotomy didn’t end there. I had on a black lace thong and a pink-and-white-striped cotton bra. I was having issues.
“Identity crisis, Ms. Lane?”
There was a time when I’d have fired back a pithy retort. But I was drunk on the moment: sitting in my bookstore, sipping hot cocoa, staring across a coffee table at Barrons by candle and firelight, with my journal and iPod handy and the assurance that my parents were well and my world was mostly fine except for my own little personality crisis. Friends and loved ones were safe. I breathed. So did the people that mattered to me. Life was good.
Not long ago, I’d thought I would never step foot in this place again. Never see the faint, sexy lift of his lips that told me he was amused but still waiting to be really wowed. Never bicker and banter and argue and plan. Never bask in the knowledge that, so long as the previous owner of this establishment was alive, this place would stand bastion in far more than mere latitude and longitude, keeping Dark Zones, fairies, and monsters at bay. It was the place of last defense in my heart.
Although I hated him for letting me grieve, I couldn’t be more grateful that he was unkillable, because it meant I would never have to grieve him again.
I could never be broken about Barrons. Nothing could hurt me where he was concerned, because he was as certain as the nightfall, he would recur as eternally as the dawn. I still had questions about what he was and concerns about his motives, but they could wait. Time might sort things out in ways pushing and prying never could. “I don’t have any idea what to wear anymore, so I tried to cover all bases.”
“Try skin.”
“Little chilly for that.”
We looked at each other across the coffee table.
His eyes didn’t say, I’d heat you up, and mine didn’t say What are you waiting for? His didn’t reply, Fuck if I’m making the first move, so I was careful not to say, I wish you would, because I can’t, because I’m … and he didn’t snap … choking on your pride?!
“As if you aren’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“Really, Barrons,” I said drily. “I’m not the only one who didn’t just not have that conversation, and you know it.”
There was the faint, sexy lift of his lip. “You’re a piece of work, Ms. Lane.”
“Right back at you.”
He changed the subject. “The Keltar moved their wives and children into Chester’s.”
“When?”
Our sojourn in the White Mansion had cost us nearly five weeks, Dublin time. We’d stopped in the libraries on the way out and taken as many of the Unseelie King’s books as we’d been able to wrap up and carry out along with Fiona’s body. I’d not only missed Dani’s birthday, I’d missed my own, on May 1. Time sure did fly.
“About three weeks ago. Long enough that they’ve settled in. They refuse to leave until we give them the queen.”
“Which will be never,” I said.
“Precisely.”
“How many kids?” I tried to picture Chester’s with families living on the cool chrome-and-glass top floor. Towheaded tots carrying blankets and sucking their thumbs, walking along the balustrade. It seemed terribly wrong—and laughably right. Maybe it could eradicate some of the fundamental badassness of the place.
“The four Keltar Druids brought their wives and children. They breed like it’s their personal mission to populate their country in case somebody attacks again, as if anybody wants the bloody place. There were dozens of them. Everywhere. It was total chaos.”
“Ryodan must be losing his mind.” I had to bite my lip not to laugh. Barrons sounded downright consternated.
“A child followed us on our way to see the queen. Wanted Ryodan to fix a toy or something.”
“Did he?”
“He got upset because it wouldn’t shut up and tore its head off.”
“The child?” I gasped.
He looked at me like I was crazy. “The bear. The battery was dying and the audio file was looping. It was the only way to make it stop.”
“Or put a new battery in.”
“Child screamed bloody murder. Army of Keltars came running. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”
“I want to see my parents. I mean, visit with them.”
“V’lane agreed to help the Keltar get Christian out of the Unseelie prison. He has them rebuilding the dolmen at LaRuhe he crushed for you.” He shot me a look that said, Too bad you didn’t think before you did that one; would have saved time. “He believes that once it’s complete he can reestablish the connection and bring him out.”
So V’lane was playing nice, batting hard for the team. We had serious unfinished business, but I no longer had his name in my tongue and I suspected he was avoiding me. I’d been in no mood for confrontations in the past week. Confronting myself was hard enough. “If you don’t arrange it, I’ll go by myself.” We’d have Christian soon! The moment I’d returned from Fiona’s mercy killing, I’d begun lobbying to get Christian out of the Unseelie prison. I would have begun my campaign sooner, but finding out I was Not the Concubine had thrown me for a wicked, mind-numbing loop. “When will he be back?”
“Your pretty college boy isn’t so pretty anymore.”
“He isn’t my pretty college boy.”
Our gazes locked.
“But I still think he’s pretty pretty,” I said, just to antagonize him.
See you in bed with him like I saw in the Silvers, I’ll kill him.
I blinked. I did not just see that in Barrons’ eyes.
He evaporated from the chair and reappeared five feet away, standing in front of the fire, his back to me.
“They expect to have him back any day now.”
I wanted to be there when they got Christian out, but the Keltar had made it clear they didn’t want me around. I should never have told them I’d fed their nephew Fae flesh. I wasn’t sure if they found it cannibalistic, sacrilegious, or both, but it had certainly offended them. I’d gone light on details about what it had done to him. They’d find out soon enough.
I shivered. The time was approaching. We would be doing the ritual soon. “We need to have a meeting with everyone. Keltar, sidhe-seers, V’lane. Iron out the details.” What would happen when we finally had the Book under lock and key? How did Barrons think he was going to use it once it was contained? Did he know the First Language? Was he that old? Had he learned it over time, or been taught? Did he plan to let us re-inter it at the abbey again, then sit down and read it?
And do what with the knowledge?
“Why don’t you just tell me what you want the Sinsar Dubh for?”
No longer staring into the fire, he faced me.
“Why do you keep moving like that? You never used to do it before.” It was unnerving.
“Does it unnerve you?”
“Not at all. It’s just … hard to follow.”
A haze of red slithered through his eyes. “Doesn’t faze you at all?”
“Not a bit. I only want to know what changed.”
He shrugged. “Concealing my nature requires effort.” But his eyes said, Think you accepted the beast? Stare at it, day in, day out.
Not a problem.
“The queen came to—”
“She’s conscious?” I exclaimed.
“—briefly before she went under again.”
“Why does it always take you so long to tell me the important things?”
“While the queen was lucid, Jack had the presence of mind to ask her who sealed her in the coffin.”
Expectancy straightened my spine. “And?”
“She said it was a Fae prince she’d never seen before. He called himself Cruce.”
I stared, stunned. “How is that possible? Is anyone who’s supposed to be dead actually dead?”
“Doesn’t seem like it.”
“Did he have wings?”
He gave me a look. “Why?”
“Cruce does.”
“How do you—ah. Memories.”
“Does it bother you? That I’m …” Not the Concubine. I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“No more human than I? On the contrary. You’ve either lived a very long time or you prove reincarnation. I’d like to know which it is, so we’d know whether you can die. Eventually the Unseelie King will come looking for you. He and I are overdue for a talk.”
“What do you want the Book for, Barrons?”
He smiled. Well, he showed me his teeth, anyway. “One spell, Ms. Lane. That’s all. Don’t worry your pretty little head.”
“Don’t talk down to me. It used to shut me up. Doesn’t work anymore. A spell for what? To change you back to whatever you were before? To let you die?”
His eyes narrowed and the rattlesnake stirred in his chest. He looked at my face closely, as if reading the tiniest nuances of the way my nostrils flared on each breath, the shape of my mouth, the movement of my eyes.
I raised a brow, waiting.
“Is that what you need to think of me? That I want to die? Must you dress me up in chivalry to find me palatable? Chivalry demands a suicidal bent. I don’t have one. I can’t get enough of life. I get off on waking up every day for infinity. I like being what I am. I got the best end of the deal. I’ll be here while it’s happening. I’ll be here when it ends. And I’ll stand up from the ashes and do it all over when it begins again.”
“You said somebody beat me to damning you.”
“Melodrama. Did it curry favor? You kissed me.”
“You don’t feel damned?”
“God said, Let there be light. I said, Say please.”
He was gone. No longer standing in front of me. The bookstore seemed empty and I looked around, wondering where he’d gone so quickly and why. Had he melted up against a bookcase, faded into a drape, wrapped himself around a pillar?
Suddenly there was a fist in my hair, behind me, pulling my head back, arching my spine up from the sofa.
He closed his mouth over mine and pushed his tongue in, forcing my teeth wide.
I grabbed his arm, but as sharply as he had my head pulled back, all I could do was steady myself.
He wrapped his other hand around my neck, forcing my chin higher, kissing me more deeply, harder, keeping me from resisting.
Not that I wanted to.
Heart slamming in my chest, my legs moved apart. There are different kinds of kisses. I’d thought I’d experienced them all, if not prior to coming to Dublin, certainly after months of being Pri-ya, in bed with this man.
This was a new one.
All I could do was hold on to his arm and survive.
“Kiss” wasn’t the right word at all.
He fused us together—my jaws so wide, I couldn’t even kiss him back. I could only take what he was doing to me. I felt the sharp slide of fangs over my tongue as he sucked it into his mouth.
I knew then—as he’d never let me see in our bed in that basement—that he was far more animal than man. Maybe he hadn’t always been, but he was now. Maybe, long ago, in the beginning, he’d missed being a man—if, in fact, he’d been one to begin with. But he didn’t anymore. He’d gone native.
I was kind of astonished by it: What a man he’d chosen to be! He could easily have gone feral. He was the strongest, fastest, smartest, most powerful creature I’d ever seen. He could kill everything and everyone, including Fae. He could never be killed. Yet he walked upright and lived in Dublin and he had a bookstore and great cars and collected rare things of beauty. He bitched when his rugs got burned and got pissy when somebody messed with his clothes. He took care of some people, whether he seemed to like doing it or not. And he had a sense of honor that wasn’t animal.
“Honor is animal. Animals are pure. People are fucked up. Quit fucking thinking.” He let go of my mouth long enough to speak, then I couldn’t breathe again.
I didn’t play nice. I wasn’t feeling nice. I was plastered at an awkward angle against the couch, completely in his control unless I wanted to try to break my own neck to get free. I wanted to know what spell he wanted, though, so I drew in on myself and volleyed into his head.
Crimson silk sheets.
I’m in her and she’s looking at me like I’m her world. The woman undoes me.
I flinch. I’m having sex with me, seeing myself from his eyes. I look incredible naked—is that how he sees me? He doesn’t see any of my flaws. I’ve never looked half as good to myself. I want to pull out. It feels perverse. I’m fascinated. But this was not what I was hunting for at all …
Where are the handcuffs? Ah, grab her fucking head, she’s going down on me again. She’ll make me come. Tie her up. Is she back? How much longer do I have?
He senses me there.
Get out of my HEAD!
I deepen the kiss, bite his tongue, and he is violent with lust. I take advantage, diving deep. There’s a thought he’s shielding. I want it.
Nobody home but She for Whom I Am the World. Can’t go on like this, can’t keep doing it.
Why couldn’t he go on? What couldn’t he keep doing? I’m having sex with him, any way he wants me, while I stare up at him with utter worship. Where was the problem there?
Weariness suddenly crashes over me. I’m in his body, and I’m coming beneath him, and I’m checking my eyes warily.
What the fuck am I doing here?
He knew what he was, what I was.
He knew we came from different worlds, didn’t belong together.
Yet for a few months there’d been no lines of demarcation between us. We’d existed in a place beyond definitions, where no rules had mattered, and I wasn’t the only one who’d reveled in it. But the entire time I’d been lost in sexual bliss, he’d been aware of time passing, of everything that was happening—that I was mindless, I wasn’t willing, and when I snapped out of it I’d blame him.
Keep hoping to see the light in her eyes. Even knowing it’ll mean she’s saying good-bye.
I had. Irrational or not, I’d held it against him. He’d seen me naked, body and soul, and I hadn’t seen him at all. I’d been blinded by helpless lust that hadn’t been for him. I had been lust, and he’d been there.
Just one time, he’s thinking as we watch my glazed eyes go even emptier.
One time, what? Instead of pushing, I try a stealth attack. I pretend to retreat, let him think he’s won, and at the last minute turn around. Instead of lunging for his thoughts, I stay very, very still and listen.
He pushes my hair out of my face. I look like an animal. There’s no sentience in my gaze. I’m a cavewoman, with a minuscule, prehistoric brain.
When you know who I am. Let me be your man.
He blasts me from his skull with such force that I nearly pass out. My ears ring and my head hurts.
I’m sucking air. He’s gone.
34
I walked through Temple Bar with a spring in my step. I’d woken early, taken one look at the sunshine shafting in through my bedroom window, dressed, and headed out to run errands.
The fridge was empty, I had two birthdays I was determined to celebrate before they got any more belated, and I was going to have to do some serious improvising with ingredients to bake a cake. Since Halloween, butter, eggs, and milk were a scarce commodity, but a Southern woman could do a lot with shortening, condensed milk, and powdered eggs. I was going to bake a chocolate cake with thick, creamy double-chocolate fudge icing if it was the last thing I did. Dani and I would watch movies and paint our fingernails. It would be like old times with Alina.
I turned my face up to the sun as I hurried down the street. After what seemed an interminable hiatus, spring had returned to Dublin.
The season of sunshine and rebirth was overdue for me. Though I’d managed to avoid miserable months of cold weather, busy in Faery or the Silvers, it had still been the longest winter of my life.
Spring didn’t look any different than winter, but you could feel it in the air—the kiss of warmth on the breeze, the scent blowing off the ocean that carried the promise of buds and blossoms, if not here, somewhere else in the world. I’d never thought I’d miss flies and insects, but I did. There wasn’t a single thing growing in Dublin—and that meant no moths, butterflies, birds, or bees. Not a single flower bloomed, no shoots pushed out from young limbs, not a blade of grass grew. The Shades had decimated the city on their way out, before slamming the door shut with a bang last Halloween. The soil was barren.
I was no horticulturalist, but I’d been doing some research. I was pretty sure if we reintroduced the right nutrients into the soil, in time, we’d be able to grow things again.
We had a lot to reclaim. Trees to remove and replace. Planters and flower boxes to fill. Parks to redesign. I planned to start small, haul dirt back from the abbey, grow a few daisies, buttercups, maybe some petunias and impatiens. Fill my bookstore with ferns and spider plants and begin taking back the night in my own space before spilling over onto the rooftop garden and beyond.
One day Dublin would live and breathe again. One day all these husks of what had once been people would be swept up and buried in a memorial ceremony. One day, tourists would come to see ground zero and reminisce about the Halloween when the walls fell—maybe even mention in passing a girl who cowered in a belfry before helping save the day—then head off to one of six hundred newly restored pubs to celebrate that the human race had taken back what was theirs.
Because we would. No matter who or what I was, I was determined to capture and re-inter the Book, then get to work figuring out a way to put the walls back up. Along the way, I’d find proof that I wasn’t the king, just a human woman with a lot of memories someone else had planted for reasons that would make sense when I finally knew them. I wasn’t the fulcrum of a prophecy that would either save or doom the human race. I was merely the person who’d been pre-programmed by the queen—or who knew? Maybe the king—to track the Book in case it escaped, just like the Keltar had been manipulated: one small part of the equation for sealing it away again, forever this time.
As I sauntered through the morning, I tried to slip back into the mind of the young woman who’d stepped off the plane, taken a cab through Temple Bar, and checked in to the Clarin House late last summer, bemused by the thick accent of the leprechaun-like old man behind the reservations desk. Starving. Scared and grieving. Dublin had been so huge, and I’d been so small and clueless.
I looked around, absorbing the silent shell of a city, remembering the hustle and bustle. The streets had been crammed with craic—vibrant life that took itself entirely for granted.
“Morning, Ms. Lane.” Inspector Jayne moved into step with me.
I assessed him quickly. He wore tight khaki-colored jeans with a plain white T-shirt stretched over his barrel chest and military boots laced up outside his pants. He was draped in ammo, pistols in his waistband and arm holster, Uzi over his shoulder. No place for an evil Book to hide. Months ago he’d had the start of a paunch. It was no longer there. He was rangy with muscle, long limbed, and walking like a man who had his feet planted firmly on the ground for the first time in years.
I smiled, genuinely pleased to see him, but it was all I could do not to reach for my spear. I hoped he wasn’t still after it or holding grudges.
“Fine morning, isn’t it?”
I laughed. “I was thinking the same thing. Is there something wrong with us? Dublin’s a shell, and we look ready to burst into a cheery whistle.” The Unseelie-spiked-tea-drinking inspector and I had certainly come a long way.
“No paperwork. I used to hate paperwork. Didn’t know how much of my life it was eating up.”
“New world.”
“Bloody strange one.”
“But good.”
“Aye. The streets are quiet. Book’s laying low. Haven’t seen a Hunter in days. We Irish know to make the most of the times of plenty, for sure enough they’ll be famine again. Made love to my wife last night. Children are healthy and strong. It’s a good day to be alive,” he said matter-of-factly.
I nodded in complete understanding. “Speaking of Hunters, you’ll be seeing at least one in the skies soon.” I filled him in on the outline of our plan—that I would be scouring the streets by Hunter, looking for the Sinsar Dubh. “So don’t shoot me down, okay?”
His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “How do you control it? Can you force it to take you to its lair? We could wipe out the lot of them if we could only find the den.”
“Let’s get the Book off the streets first. Then we’ll help you hunt, I promise.”
“A promise I’ll be holding you to. I don’t like using the girl, but she insists. That one’s had a hard enough life. She should be home, somebody watching out for her. Kills like she was born to it. Makes me wonder how long she’s been—”
“MacKayla,” V’lane said.
Jayne was frozen, mouth ajar, mid-step. Not iced. Just immobilized.
I stiffened and reached for my spear.
“We need to talk.”
“Understatement. You need to explain.” I spun in a circle, spear up. For whatever reason, I still had it.
“Sheathe the spear.”
“Why haven’t you taken it?”
“I offer you a show of good faith.”
“Where are you?” I demanded. I could hear his voice, but he wasn’t visible and the source of his voice kept moving.
“I will appear when you have given me your show of good faith.”
“Which is?”
“I choose to let you keep it. You choose to sheathe it. We will honor each other with trust and confidence.”
“Not a chance in hell.”
“I am not the only one that has some explaining to do. How did you bring the queen out through the king’s mirror?”
“Let me tell you what I don’t understand. Last Halloween I got raped by Unseelie Princes. You told me you were busy carrying your queen to safety on human feet. But now I know the queen had been in the Unseelie prison for—how did you word it?—many human years. Where were you really that night, V’lane?”
He materialized in front of me, a dozen feet away.
“I did not lie to you. Not entirely. I told you I could not be in two places at once, and that much was true. However, I misspoke when I said I was carrying my queen to safety. Instead, I was taking advantage of those hours, searching for her in Darroc’s Silvers. I was certain he was behind her disappearance. I believed he had imprisoned her in one of the stolen mirrors at LaRuhe, but I could not search those Silvers until the magic of the realms was neutralized. When I crushed his dolmen for you—which we rebuilt, and I succeeded in retrieving Christian only last night, or I would have come to explain myself sooner—I endeavored to search them then. But Darroc had learned much from journals stolen from the White Mansion, and I was unable to break his wards.”
“You spent the night I was getting raped searching his house and finding nothing?”
“A regrettable decision only because it did not yield fruit. I was certain she was there. If she had been, it would have been worth it. As it was, when I discovered what had transpired, I felt …” He lowered his lids over his eyes, leaving only a thin band of silver glittering beneath his lashes. “I felt.” His mouth shaped a bitter smile. “It was untenable. Fae do not feel. Certainly not the queen’s first prince. I tasted envy of my dark brethren for knowing you in a way I never would. I choked on rage that they harmed you. I grieved the loss of something of incomparable measure I could never have again. Is that not human regret? I felt …” He inhaled slow and deep, then blew it out. “Shame.”
“So you say.”
The smile twisted. “For the first time in my existence, I wanted to experience a temporary oblivion. I was unable to make my thoughts obey me. They wandered of their own accord to matters that were hellish to suffer. I was unable to make them stop. It made me want to stop. Is that love, MacKayla? Is that what it does to you? Why, then, do humans long for it?”
I jerked, remembering a moment when I’d considered stretching on the ground next to Barrons and bleeding out next to him.
“I am tired of being in impossible positions. For an eternity, my first allegiance has been to my queen. Without her, my race is doomed. There is no successor to her throne. There is none worthy or capable of leading my people. I could not choose to help you over attempting to recover her. My emotions, to which I had no right, could not be permitted to interfere. For too long I have been all that stands between peace and war.” He locked gazes with me. “Unless …”
“Unless what?”
“Still you point that spear at me.”
I stalked toward him, drawing my spear arm back.
He vanished.
He spoke behind me. “Could it be you are becoming like us?”
I whirled, eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Are you becoming Fae, in the way some long ago were born? I suspect the young Druid also suffers birth pains. It is a most unexpected development.”
“And unwelcome.”
“That remains to be seen.”
Was that his breath at my ear, his lips against my hair?
“It’s unwelcome to me! I’m not going to become one of you. Get it out. I don’t want it.”
I felt his hands on my waist, sliding lower, over my ass. “Immortality is a gift. Princess.”
“I’m not a princess and I’m not turning Fae.”
“Not yet perhaps. But you are something, are you not? I wonder what. I weary of watching Barrons piss circles around you. I tire of waiting for the day you will finally look at me and see that I am so much more than a Fae and a prince. I am a male. With hunger for you that knows no bottom. You and I, more than anyone else in the universe, are perfect for each other.”
He was half a dozen feet away, facing me, looking down into my eyes.
“I do not wish to continue like this. I am divided and know no peace. Pride has prevented me from speaking plainly. No more.”
He vanished and reappeared right in front of me, so close I could see a shimmer of rainbows in his iridescent eyes.
The spear was between us.
I tightened my hand on the hilt. He closed his over mine, pointed the spear at his chest, and leaned into me. I could feel him, rock hard and ready, against me. He was breathing fast and shallow, eyes glittering.
