by Shai August
He kept her knees up high and resumed his place. This time he licked her swollen clit with his tongue like a sloth instead of hummingbird. Immediately, she mewled long and loud. He alternated slow licks with two seconds of sucking. Two minutes later, she vented her pleasure sinking her nails deep into his scalp and coating him from the tip of his nose to well below his chin in her juices.
The beast rumbled, joy and contentment flowing through them at her boneless-ness underneath them. Cleaning her with his tongue like a mother cat, he worked her essence over his tongue learning every nuance of her. He released her beautiful thighs; they fell to the bed with a small bounce. Her yellow dress was pushed up past her waist, he could see her cute little belly button while her legs were splayed in two different directions.
Standing, he looked down on her, realizing this was the greatest moment of his life and felt the mating bond start to knit itself from his heart to hers. It was the size of dental floss, no thicker than an eyelash, but it was there, making this moment even more real. Cementing itself into his memory. Tears sprang to his eyes, because they couldn’t do more than they had just done. There was Delilah Dennis to find and somehow extricate without reveling themselves as Steward Agents.
“Reese, we have to go back downstairs,” he told her as he went to the bathroom, wetting a towel to clean the rest of her.
Sleepily, she opened one eye at him. “Duty.” She sighed, her eyes were shiny with unshed tears too.
“Duty,” he said wearily.
Chapter Five – Myth, Legend, Whatever
Colt
Shifter and Magic Task Warden training to become an Agent was a six-year affair because agents often worked without backup in weird and wild circumstances tracking shifters and magical creatures who were both criminals and didn’t want to be found. Many of whom were creatures that humans had only heard about in the wildest of midwives’ tales, they were figments of the imagination and on the stage stood one such creature. Light bounced off his obsidian skin like it was reflector, but that wasn’t the only warning he wasn’t human. A sheer curtain of straight inhumanly silver hair couldn’t hide the point of his ears as it fell down to his back to pool on the floor at his feet. All the drow’s features ended in knife sharp points, he wasn’t of towering height like the others of his kind. Reese’s sharp eyes noticed the same time as he did, and he felt her heart rate start pumping faster. His own heart had frozen.
A drow elf had fallen out of a storybook or more accurately a nightmarish cautionary tale and landed in West Texas. Steward population estimates had the total number of elves on the whole planet as less than one thousand and those were the surface-dwelling elves.
A human had a one in a thousand chance of meeting a shifter who had been fully outed after Seraphine Wilson and the Great Shifter War. The odds of meeting a witch or warlock were one in twenty thousand. Odds of meeting one of the surface-dwelling elves were one in a billion.
The dark skinned, silver haired drow elves who lived deep in the bowels of the earth was estimated to be less than fifty total, but that was a rough estimate from a Steward Agent who went underground on a kidnapping case over a century ago. For them to have discovered one was imagination blowing but for there to be one on the surface preying on the human population the odds were astronomical, one in a hundred trillion.
It all made sense now, the multiple layers of high level glamours being held together at one time, the non-human, non-shifter, non-magic staff. It wasn’t a coven of witches as he and Reese had first suspected. A clean escape with Delilah Dennis was looking harder and harder by the moment. They had to continue playing human until they isolated Delilah long enough to break not only the ground hog day spell on her but whatever else was keeping her here.
He looked around the full to bursting auditorium and wondered how many of the people packed inside were trapped in the same spell. Then the realization washed over him all these people were under the same spell. Freeing Delilah meant they needed to free all five hundred people; this mission kept going up in the risk department. It’d gone from difficult to impossible to unachievable to hopeless, The Seer had seen it all. Two undercover Agents with no backup for hundreds of miles attempting to rescue five hundred souls that a drow elf entrapped willingly, no doubt some of the souls here came willingly at least at first.
Reese’s four fingers dug into the crook of his elbow, her sharp nails dancing along the line of drawing blood. “I know.”
Reese
The drow introduced the opera, saying a few brief words before disappearing backstage. She saw his mouth moving, but barely heard them because her mind was spinning. They sat through a full operatic performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto, all two hours and fifty minutes of it. It was a glorious assemblage of voices, the very best she’d ever heard outside of a musical conservatory or a professional opera company, but she couldn’t enjoy a moment of the performance. The drow had assembled the best of the world’s least known opera singers for his… she searched for the right word and all she could come up with was collection.
How? When? Why?
The where was obvious, the Hotel California was a one-way ticket in and there appeared no way out for the great singers and their traveling companions.
There were only two ways for her and Colt to proceed. The first would be them getting up and leaving right now, driving back to Houston HQ; just leave the two of them with no sighting of Delilah to show for their time here. They’d have come back with a battalion of Agent Witches and Warlocks reinforcements to attack the place en masse and be forced to admit they couldn’t handle one single drow elf.
The second option was to confront the drow, weaken him enough that the glamours broke or weakened on their own, freeing the trapped souls. She couldn’t see herself nor Colt turning tail and running from a fight, and there was no doubt The Seer had been right. This was the fight of their lives.
Her new bond with Colt had doubled in size since it formed, thrummed in harmony to her thoughts. Colt’s hand reached for hers and she felt the full weight of him and their mating. She was such a screw up. Just when she had finally stepped away from her reputation of being Reese the Rule Breaker, on the case that could make or break her career she went and mated with her partner before they had accomplished the mission. She didn’t know which was worse, her and Colt mating, mating while on assignment, not having finished the mission or the combination of all three. Steward Agents weren’t allowed to date one another much less be mated or magically compatible with their partners. She and Colt had broken at least a dozen rules.
One of them would be forced out, and it would most likely be her. Colt had the seniority, the commendations and the golden boy persona. He was a walking recruitment poster, the ideal Steward agent and she’d be out on her ass with nothing to show for her years of service, plus she’d be looking for her third career.
Chapter Six – Mystery Solved
Wednesday, October 30th
Reese
The next morning her and Colt’s brief sleep was broken up by vigorous Steward style knocking on the outer door of the suite. Colt jumped up, standing naked over her with his hands partially shifted into talons. She couldn’t help but giggle as battle magics were primed on the tips of her fingers. This was probably the equivalent of human cops waking up pulling out fully loaded automatics.
“What?” he demanded, stalking out of the bedroom.
“Felice! It’s practice time,” Brian Thorne called from the hallway.
Colt pounded toward the door as if he was going burst straight through and out into the hallway. She didn’t want to remind him that he was naked.
She groaned. Practice. Acts Three and Four today with full dress rehearsal tomorrow morning before the actual performance tomorrow night in front of the full audience. This was the terrible part of being undercover faking enthusiasm for mundane things when there were pressing items.
Colt jerked the door and all but growled at Brian who stepped back from the d
oorway as if a rabid dog had appeared. “My wife doesn’t need your escort,” he thundered at Brian before slamming the door hard enough to shake the walls.
Hopefully Delilah Dennis would appear in the practice rooms today, otherwise Colt was going to have to do all the heavy lifting of the investigation. After the performance last night, they’d worked up a plan of isolating one of the giant rat hotel employees. She’d worked most of the night augmenting a pair of handcuffs with both a truth spell and a lost hour forgetting spell so he could interrogate them thoroughly and without repercussions instead of riding Colt like the stallion he was.
She rose and padded to the door where Colt stood panting as if he’d run a full marathon. He pulled her into an embrace. “That man doesn’t understand that he is tempting the beast. He goes too far in his pursuit of you.”
“I don’t want him or Carlos or any other man. Hold out your hands,” she instructed. He held out both hands without hesitation. “Magical people have a combination wedding and magical sharing ceremony.” She held her hands palm down six inches above his open palm, trusting the wards she erected to contain the feedback of what she was about to do. Ordering her breathing, she created two small orbs of her magic then pushed them down into the open palms of Colt.
Greedily, his skin sucked in the magic like the desert floor during the first spring rains.
“What was that?” he asked as his eyes flashed through the entire spectrum of color, bright red then a sunshine orange, a dazzling yellow to a neon green to a fathomless blue to a pure indigo before deepening to a violet then a mutinous black before returning to his normal green speckled brown.
“I shared my magic with you. It has great benefits and lots of disadvantages, but I don’t have time to explain them all. Normally, you’d be a warlock and would already know and would share your magic back with me.”
“Just give me the top three of each and I’ll study the rest later,” he promised, all serious and stoic.
She couldn’t help but smile at the image of him pouring over a pile of magical textbooks learning magical compatibility when he could be living it.
“Good, eventually we’ll be able to share thoughts, you can magically find me anywhere and if you were magical, we could share powers. I’m not sure how this works with you as a shifter. Well the bad,” she grinned, “eventually we’ll be able to share thoughts.” The smile slid off her face. “Your body may experience some changes and if you die, I die and vice versa.”
He grabbed her hands, pulling her back into his embrace. Dropping kisses on her forehead, “Go to rehearsal. We’ll find Delilah. I’ll question one of the staff. We’ll figure how to leave the Hotel California in our rearview mirror.”
Relaxing into the heat of his body, she let them steal a moment that was just their own before they were forced back onto the job. His back, no, his entire body was silk skin over marble and touching it was like sinking into a steaming hot Epsom salt bath after going too hard in the gym. Her hands sucked up the calm he was radiating along with the heat of his body.
“Don’t snuggle in too closely, beautiful lady. We haven’t consummated this new mating yet and all I want is to bury myself between your thighs again.”
“I’d like that more than you can imagine. Who needs to sing Carmen in Carmen when they have a brand spanking new mate’s body to explore?” she questioned as she rubbed her hands down his sculpted back and over the glorious curve of the tightest, roundest ass she’d ever had the pleasure of seeing much less touching. Just because she could, she used both hands to smack it, he rumbled loudly. His rumble was a cross between a loud growl and some kind of screech, and it revved up her motor too. “What is that?”
Then it occurred to her she didn’t even know what kind of shifter her new mate was, not that it mattered. Colt could be a wolf, a bear, or a leaping lemur and she’d still be banging his back out nightly or he’d be banging hers. She was trying to work up how to ask when another knock banged on the door. Stifling Colt’s growl with an index finger over his lips, she walked around him to open the door.
Carlos was there. “I came to escort you to practice,” he offered with an elbow out and a gallant smile.
She curtly slammed the door in his face. “I’m getting dressed. I swear she better show up because spending all day with those two and not pulling their intestines out through their nose will strain all of my patience,” she thundered as she stomped around the room grabbing her clothes for the day.
Colt stood like a naked sentinel and laughed a light show worth of white teeth flashing at her. “My little spitfire has a temper. I knew Reese The Rule Breaker wasn’t all cold inside.”
She stopped dead. “I’m surprised you even know that name.” Stuffing her legs into a pair of pants. “I would think Mr. Never Broke a Rule would ever partake in office gossip,” she teased as she pulled a blouse on as she slipped her feet in a pair of heels.
One last kiss and she was out the door, every step away from Colt she felt the filament of their mating bond stretch to accommodate the distance. His amusement and hunger strummed the line.
Walking into practice was like walking into a chaos, her anger dissipated listening to the chorus warming up. It reminded her of school and touring, reminding her how much she’d loved being a part of this world. If the Stewards booted her, maybe she could go back to singing, aging opera diva wasn’t a bad life.
Four hours of what felt like straight singing made her change her mind about returning to the opera world. She was thoroughly winded when they broke for lunch. Mr. Wilmington was casually leaning against the door jamb, waiting for her. The mating bond had tightened and loosened several times as he moved throughout the hotel during the day. Her nosiness had burned up the back of her brain all day as she felt his emotions reach epic highs and depressing lows.
Wordlessly they returned to the room, she poured them double shots, adding triple the nutrients for Colt.
Colt
“I trapped one,” he told her as he accepted the glass and pulled her into his empty waiting lap. Her plush bottom soothed the ache he’d felt all day and all night that she’d spent working on the handcuffs that worked so well. Debating on whether to mention the scuffle and scratches that he’d gotten from the giant rat, as his mate she didn’t need to know, but as his partner she did need to know that they fought back. They weren’t as docile as they appeared. Tossing back a long drink, before he continued, “After I finally subdued him, he didn’t know much that would help us. The drow has its own suite of rooms. Delilah lives there with him, which is why she can’t be found elsewhere in the hotel.”
He heard her groan with his ears, and felt it traveling down the mating bond and through his body. The double effect was disconcerting to say the least, but sharing her emotions all day he knew how she’d been anticipating an easier conclusion.
“The drow’s private suite is below the hotel, underground and no elevator access. It has four staff members guarding the entrance. He only leaves the suite once a day for the opera performances. Everything else is delivered daily, meals, laundry and a dozen red roses for Delilah.”
Her shoulders slumped the more he shared the intel. “We’ll have to take him out in the open or as he’s exiting or entering his suite,” she reasoned; it was his same attack plan.
He pulled her closer, sticking his nose into the crease of her neck to get his dose of brandy, honey and apricots. They spent the rest of her lunch break with their limbs tangled in an armchair exchanging scotch-soaked kisses that left him breathless and more determined than ever to bring this case to a conclusion soon. He didn’t want the specter of the drow, Delilah Dennis, the weirdness of the hotel and their future careers hanging over them as they consummated their mating. When he sunk his teeth into her, marking her as his, it would be without complications.
He escorted her back to the practice area, waiting for a chance to punch one of the humans to vent his frustrations, but they stood a respectful distance away. Waiting
on the threshold of the door just long enough to hear her glorious singing voice that immediately sent shockwaves of desire through him, he left to explore the hotel looking for the drow’s private entrance. The rat he’d kidnapped hadn’t known for sure where the stairway started, and it was imperative that he narrow down the location before he and Reese made a move.
Three hours later, he was more frustrated than when he’d started his search. The common areas of the three storied hotel where guests were allowed was laid out in a straightforward manner. Once you stepped into the service portions of the hotel it became a ragged warren of left turns that never quite brought you back to your starting point. He’d felt like Hansel lost in the woods after an hour, he started marking his passage with a nick of his talon. During the second hour, every intersection started sporting one of his talon marks from different directions of the intersection even though he’d never physically been able to make a right turn. Making the north, south and west intersection markings inconceivable reminding him of the magicked corridors of the prison below HQ. The entrance to the drow’s suite must be near and he was using an obfuscation spell to stop anyone but staff from finding it.
If the magic hadn’t worn off of his Reese augmented handcuffs, he’d be tempted to detain another staff member. This one hopefully higher up on the organizational chart, maybe the concierge or a manager. He didn’t want to return to Reese like a sorry hunter and bad provider, empty handed. Reassurance twanged the mating bond.
Showering quickly, he went to catch the end of rehearsal. Her voice was a low seductive chorus of emotions, and she sang with her whole body, throwing herself across the practice room. She was mischievous, sexy, independent, flirtatious and when the rebuffed Don Jose stabbed her to death, he felt hot tears trailing down his face. Then they ran the final scene two more times and he cried both times and he had an epiphany that he wasn’t mourning the loss of Carmen. He was mourning Reese as if she was the one killed, not the character.
