by D. D. Chance
I barely hid the smirk. That was not the concern uppermost in her mind, but I could let her stew a minute longer. She needed to understand the work that faced us both.
“Tomorrow, my instruction begins. I apologize for excluding you from tonight’s conversation, but it was necessary for expediency. You’ll be able to understand our language soon enough, however. War is coming to our lands. I know you’ve picked up that much. Our outer reaches are already overrun with wraiths, and I can’t hold the borders without your magic.”
She made a face. “Oh, give me a break. The high Fae had to have held the borders for eons before the Hogan witches showed up on your doorstep, right? How did you get so lame at the job in one century?”
Her tone was so disbelieving that I scowled, shame twisting its knife. She was right. The royal family should have been able to protect our people. I should have. “The lands of the high Fae were torn with war before the Hogan witches. We’ve enjoyed an era of unprecedented peace under the influence of your magic. Forgive me if I wish to keep my people from dying.”
That stopped her, but only for a moment. “I want to see this contract,” she said, returning to her favorite focus. Well, perhaps her second favorite focus now. “Helping your family shouldn’t be a prison sentence for mine. There has to be another way.”
I shrugged. “We will absolutely see about that. It doesn’t change the urgency of the moment, but we’ll see. Now, however, we both need to rest.”
She flinched. “But you said…”
I barely kept from rolling my eyes, but in this, I wouldn’t be denied. “I’m not going to attack you in the night, Belle. What you do in my bed is your choice—but you will be sleeping with me.”
15
Belle
I startled awake for what seemed like the fifty-seven-millionth time, panicked and disoriented. By now, I had learned not to move, excruciatingly aware of the giant who slept beside me. As I stared at the far wall, the flickering of the fireplace making shadows dance on the inlaid wood surface, I tracked Aiden’s breath. It remained steady, untroubled. Though I tensed, the High King didn’t move, didn’t feel the need, even in the depths of his slumber, to roll my way and drop a heavy arm over me, imprisoning me against him.
I charted my traitorous body’s response to his stillness, recognizing the disappointment even as I hated myself for it. I shouldn’t crave the king of the Fae the way I did. It wasn’t natural. That meant it was magical, at least in part. Some ancient spell put in place to bind the witches of my family to the rulers of these strange and dangerous people. I had no idea what time it was. My cell phone lay with my small stack of belongings by the bedside table. It was long dead, of course, little more than a bauble from another world. I had yet to find an outlet in the Fae realm, and I was pretty sure they didn’t have electricity. Why I’d even thought to bring my phone to this place, I didn’t know. I mean, who was I going to call, anyway? Practical considerations had fled with the arrival of the High King in my bar.
I needed to keep my wits about me. I believed Aiden when he told me there was war in this realm. What little information I had about my great-grandmother’s stay here was that it had also been marked by a need to keep the peace. The few spells that still remained in my book of magic had an unusual number of harmony incantations listed alongside the healing prescriptions. I had never needed to use them before, though they had also been woven into the place wards of the bar. And as a point of fact…we’d never had any fights at the Crane. I’d never given it much thought before, but I did now.
So this was the legacy of my great-grandmother’s time with the Fae: protection and healing for those she loved, a dedication to helping the oppressed escape their oppression—and defensiveness all around. And above all else, a single-minded devotion to hiding herself and her family. Even her beautiful cabin at the edge of the lake had been an idyll of isolation, a deliberate separation from others. That forced loneliness had been a key feature of my life, yet here I was lying in bed with a warrior king who could break me in two simply by rolling over on me.
Think, I implored myself. There had to be a way out of this. The most likely path seemed to be tied up in the contract itself. I suspected I would find duplicitous language with a loophole that favored the Fae, perhaps even one that was glaringly obvious all these generations removed. But where there was one loophole, there were doubtless others. There might be something there I could work with. And at least Aiden seemed reasonably open to letting me look at the thing. That had to be a good sign, right?
A soft chuckle rolled over me. “You think very loudly.”
I froze, which only made Aiden laugh again, the bed sinking beneath him as he rolled to his side, his eyes now open. How long he’d been awake, I didn’t know, but I’d missed my chance at more solitude. Should I have gotten out of bed right away? Crept into the other room to huddle by the fire? I suspected I would have ample opportunity to try other means of temporary escape, but I forced my thoughts away from that idea. The prospect of an interminable number of nights spent escaping the physical reality of my captor made me feel beyond hopeless.
“When will Cyril be here?” I asked instead, hating the way my voice sounded—quiet and subdued, possibly a little cowed. Pitiful, but there was no mistaking the glint of fire in Aiden’s eyes as he shrugged. Was he turned on by my weakness? Was he just reacting to the spell I suspected had been laid on us both, down through the generations? Neither answer was appealing, and once again, I felt uncomfortable in my own skin.
His mind had clearly gone down an entirely different path from my own as he murmured, “Any time now. Which will be unfortunate since I’m not getting out of this bed until you do what you’ve promised.”
My cheeks flamed hot. A kiss in the morning and a kiss at night. Half the time I had woken up over the course of the last several hours, I’d been paralyzed with the thought of that kiss. But now I leaned forward quickly, intending to drop a butterfly-light smooch on his lips and then slide immediately from the bed. He hadn’t pressed me the night before, I didn’t think he would now.
Unfortunately, my body had other ideas. The moment my lips touched his, something warm and enervating blossomed in my belly, making me fall forward against Aiden, swamped by a warm tide of desire. Aiden grunted with surprise, then fell back on the bed, leaving me splayed half over his torso as I pressed harder against him, deepening the kiss. A swell of dark need swept up from my core to the crown of my head, and I shifted higher, realizing almost too late that I was practically climbing his body.
I broke away with an audible gasp and pulled myself free, retreating first to the side of the bed, then nearly falling off it in my haste to get away. The whole time, Aiden made no move to stop me, which confused me even further, though of course that was exactly what I wanted. Fortunately, I hadn’t undressed the night before, so there was no clutching of the sheets as I disentangled myself from the bed and scrambled upright.
By now, he had lifted himself onto one elbow to watch me with half-lidded interest.
I blew out a quick and unsteady breath. “Sorry…sorry,” I said lamely. “It’s not real, the way I’m reacting to you. I don’t know you. You understand that, right? If it were real, I would want you every minute, not just when our bodies touch.”
“And you don’t.” It wasn’t a question.
I shook my head, maybe a little harder than necessary. “I don’t. I’m your captive and your teacher. And I accept my place as both. Anything else is something that’s being done to me, being done to you. It’s not natural.”
If I expected to dismay him with this observation, it wasn’t working. Instead, he pulled himself higher in the bed, settling himself against the pillows. His dark, luxurious hair spilled over his shoulders, and his chest was bare, but he seemed completely unselfconscious as I tried not to stare. “There’s something I’d like to show you, Belle. Would you help me?”
I blinked. “Help you?” I asked suspiciously. “How?�
�
“One of the small magics that the High King alone retains is—as you’ve seen—portal magic. Usually, I can only effect such portals when the need is great. I thought, perhaps, it might not be so difficult with you here.”
He held out his right hand, and I stared down at it, my heart thumping hard against my rib cage. Was this some sort of test? A joke? But Aiden said nothing further, and reluctantly, I laid my hand in his. He closed his eyes as if savoring the touch, then gestured with his left, murmuring a word I couldn’t track.
A rush of cool wind blew across the bed, shifting the heavy blankets, and I gripped Aiden’s hand more tightly, sitting down hard on the bed as a half dozen doorways seemed to open out of thin air. Light, color, and chattering noise filled the room.
“What’s this?” I gasped.
“This is the Fae realm,” Aiden said. I glanced back to him to see his eyes had gone wide, his face arrested by an emotion that made me catch my breath all over again. Love, I thought. Wonder and pride—but he truly loved the world these portals revealed.
It was easy to see why. The realm of the Fae was every bit the land of glitter and unicorns, even if my great-grandmother had kept this information from us. It burst with light and color, music and laughter. Everywhere I looked, Fae were dining, hunting, dancing and singing, working the land or playing in the water. Some of the portals held other scenes—battles with creatures I knew to be wraiths, though I’d seen them only in their human forms at the White Crane. My gaze sheared away from there. The Fae were powerful, dammit. They could fight their own battles.
Aiden huffed a rueful laugh as if he could read my thoughts. “The realm of the high Fae is more than just snow-covered mountains and lush green valleys. It is a place of peace that we have secured through the blood of our people. The stories you’ve heard of our kind dancing, singing, feasting…those are true, as you can see. But it came at a terrible cost.”
“Mmm.” I didn’t trust myself to say anything more. The king wasn’t going to convince me that the fabulously rich, extraordinarily beautiful, and wicked-smart Fae were some kind of benevolent victims worthy of my pity. He wasn’t. He—
A flash of movement caught my attention in the farthest portals, a line of shrouded people, gray against an ash-covered plane. One of them stumbled and fell, rolling down an embankment. Two of his fellow marchers surged toward him, when a bolt of lightning struck both the fallen victim and his desperate friends. All three disappeared, while the others sent up a wail of agony at their passing. “Um, what is that?”
“Our past, Witch Hogan,” Aiden murmured, his voice subdued. “The Fae, after all, were not a race created from nothing. Our reputations as gods purposely and determinedly ignores our origins—a beginning that most of our kind are ignorant of.”
“Stop it,” I whispered as another small group of marchers staggered off from the group, only to be blasted out of existence. “Stay together.”
“We were the castoffs, the mutants of other races,” Aiden continued. “All we had was our magic. Lightbringers in a world of darkness, where our particular light was neither valued nor wanted—or worse, threatening to those few who had cobbled together a manufactured magic that only the rich and powerful of our native realm were allowed to wield. They hunted us. Killed. And eventually convinced us to come forward, offering us contracts in which we gave up our ability to teach and learn magic in exchange for our children’s safety.”
“Oh, no,” I whispered. I couldn’t see the faces of the refugees in the gray portal, but I’d seen plenty like them in my tavern. Monsters hounded from their realm to become lost and alone in mine, desperate only to survive.
“Yes. Our persecutors rounded us up like dogs before the ink was even dry. We’d been deceived by those contracts, the language twisted around into a devil’s knot, but our magical nature was a double-edged sword. We were forced by our very nature to honor the terms of the agreement, even though we had been duped. Our children were killed before our eyes, and the rest of us were banished to a realm that held no light. Ridiculed, scorned, forced to march to our deaths at the ends of whips and spears, we were told to make this land our own. This was in the time before recorded history on your Earth. The time most Fae don’t even know about, except those in the royal line.”
I stared as more figures in the ragged column of marchers fell. Old and infirm, young and strong. As soon as they collapsed, they were killed. “Who’s doing that to them?” I whispered, finally hearing the song of the castoff Fae as they shuffled forward—it sounded like the cry of birds over the ocean, the howling of the wind on a distant night, and it resonated with pure misery.
“Our enemies, who were legion. They crouched on the borders of the prison they had accorded us and hurled fire—using magic, ironically enough. Safe in their beliefs and their prejudices that for them, it was allowed. But not for the Fae. Never for us. They wouldn’t kill us outright, it wasn’t their code. But if we strayed, if we failed—then we became worthy of death. Five hundred Fae came to the blighted realm of our prison. Two hundred survived. And then the borders were closed and finally, we were left alone.”
Darkness fell on the blasted countryside, a misery-filled counterpoint to the Fae realm I could see in the other portals, where birds chirped and flowers bobbed up and down in a gentle breeze. Children laughed in another, and harp music floated through the third. The sound of the crashing sea from yet another portal nearly drowned out the wailing from the dark portal…nearly. But not quite.
I leaned forward in the bed and peered more closely, barely picking out the huddled forms, their bodies racked with sobs.
“What happened?” I finally asked through clenched teeth.
“They sacrificed themselves, pouring out their innate magic for the future of the Fae,” Aiden said. He waved a hand, and the grayness lifted only slightly to show the forms spread out upon the earth in circles, their heads close together, their legs and arms extending like the rays of the sun. Slowly, unsteadily, the ground beneath them began to glow. As it did, the ragtag collection of Fae huffed and trembled, in obvious pain, but a newly joyful song lifted from them all the same, carrying the magic further. The earth warmed, grass grew, light pierced the darkness. A gurgle of water emerged from between two misshapen rocks, flowing first in a trickle, then in a bubbling flow. A bird burst up from a pile of ash, its wings a bright and vibrant emerald green.
Unaccountably, tears sparked at the corners of my eyes, but by the time I brushed them away, the two-hundred-strong group of Fae was gone. Barely three dozen remained, in the center of an idyll as pure and untouched as any Eden. Their faces had been transformed into creatures of undeniable beauty—whether golden haired, brunette, or redheaded, their skin every shade—but it was their eyes that linked them to the refugees they had been before. They burned with pure, cold fire. They’d been transformed into gods and goddesses—the Fae of legend…but they were no longer magical, I knew it in my bones.
“All that remained for us besides the land we had created was our glamour and mind-reading skills, and we vowed to use both with ruthless skill,” Aiden said. “In that moment, we swore we would never be duped by a contract not our own. We would never be destroyed again. And we would do whatever it took to ensure that our people remained safe. You are not my slave, Belle. Your ancestor signed a contract, one we devised, but that was her mistake—not ours.”
“Right,” I muttered, the exhaustion of the refugees I had seen leaching through me. My brain had gone numb, my emotions overwhelmed.
“I wanted you to understand why my fight against these wraiths at our border is so important for me to win,” Aiden pressed. “Our realm is all we have. Without the instruction of outsiders, the Fae have no magic. We cannot teach it to our children or our children’s children because we have no core ability left. Other than the High King’s small skills, we gave our magic to our land long, long ago—and in return, our land sustains us. Not even the royal Fae can wield pure magic, not wit
hout instruction. And even then, a Hogan witch’s magic lasts only as long as the generation she taught—as long as that education is fully completed.”
“And when my great-grandmother left early…”
“It was apparently well before she had completed whatever instruction that was required. And thus began our kingdom’s long decline, a decline I must stop in order to save my people from this newest threat that seems to grow stronger every year.”
I made a face. “Only magic will stop the wraiths?”
“Believe me, I welcome anything else you’d like to suggest,” Aiden said drily. “But until then, I need your magic, and your instruction to help my people. Most of the Fae will never know our true origins—they shouldn’t. Theirs is a legacy of light and beauty, and I’ve dedicated my life to ensuring it. The truth is the High King’s burden alone—but I wanted you to know. You’re not our slave. You will never be our slave. Once you’ve honored the terms of the contract, you can go.”
I swallowed, drawn almost against my will to stare at the Fae survivors in the first portal. They’d fallen to their knees to hug the world they’d just created, weeping with sorrow and exhaustion. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Aiden was a Fae, and the Fae were amazing at manipulation. But this…was some pretty damned good manipulation, I had to admit.
“Got it,” I managed, not willing to give up any more ground.
Aiden nodded, but didn’t say anything further, merely rolled himself out of bed and stood, totally distracting me as every last one of the portals winked out, and all that was left to look at was him.
He was naked. Super naked.
My eyes about fell out of my head, and heat suffused me once more. I wanted to scramble off the bed again, then I wanted to scoot back, bury myself in the covers, but I remained frozen as Aiden lazily reached for his clothes. It wasn’t as if I’d never seen a man before. Aiden didn’t possess anything that an ordinary human didn’t—a broad chest, heavily muscled arms and shoulders, a narrow waist, a dark arrow of hair leading down to a totally erect cock, bracketed by thick quads that tapered down to powerful legs. I mean, sure. He was covered in scars, from a brutal, zigzagging rip that extended halfway down his back, to deep furrows etched into his shoulders and biceps, to a gut-twisting snarl of a wound that spiraled around his left thigh. And this was a guy who healed with remarkable ease—how devastating a fight had he survived to leave behind such marks?
