by Richard Amos
Every single time he touched me my body reacted with a billion pulses of fiery pleasure. Was it healthy to be this into someone? I didn’t give a crap. Let me be totally unhealthy and addicted to him. This was the good kind of addiction, nothing harmful or toxic about it. We’d been through a lot to get to this point, to this happiness. And one day he’d be my husband.
Dean’s fingers hooked into the band of my PJ bottoms, tugging teasingly. I locked my eyes to his dark gaze, held there in utter bliss, connected as the fabric started to slide down my hips.
I gasped as my cock was freed. Lifting my hips allowed him to pull the bottoms even lower, then all the way off.
He lowered his head, taking me in his mouth. Yeah, my dick being in there was a hundred times more fun than my finger. With familiar expertise, he worked me, ran his finger on the wonderful strip between balls and arse, giving me a good tickle there.
I giggled and he offered a muffled laugh as he continued to devour me.
Dean’s rhythm intensified, building up a delicious friction that made my back arch, my hands slide into his hair.
“Yes,” I breathed. “Yes.”
I came pretty quickly, tugging on his hair at the release. You had to love a quickie.
He lifted his head, a cheeky grin on his face. “Enjoy that, baby?”
“What do you think?” I pulled him in for a kiss. “Your turn.”
He stripped his shorts and vest off, then positioned himself so he was straddling my chest, his cock resting on my lips.
He’d got his piercing in. Yay!
I licked the silver ring, took it between my teeth and rolled pulled a little to make him moan.
Before I got to work, I had to drink him in; that body of toned muscle, a powerful force above me. He was breath-taking, beautiful. I just liked to stare at his naked flesh. My hands ran up his sides to his chest, back down to his flat stomach, then to his thighs.
“I love you,” I said.
“Love you too,” he answered, stroking the side of my face, tracing his fingertips across my stubbled jawline. “So much.”
I took his hand, kissing his engagement ring.
What a soppy pair!
With that, I moved my hands round to his buttocks, adjusted my position and let him slide his pierced cock into my willing mouth.
He rocked back and forth, making love to me in this other way we liked to do. I teased his backside as he thrusted, drawling circles across that sweet crevice with one hand, while the other played with his balls.
Dean loved it, and I loved hearing his rapid breathing, the moaning that escaped his luscious lips.
I’d had a night of cocoa and an epic fantasy book planned, yet here we were getting down to business. Spontaneous nookie was the best! And the fact he had that Prince Albert of his in tonight made it all the better. There was something about that silver ring that drove me wild.
He climaxed inside me, all hot and yummy, then got off my chest. I moved over to accommodate him on the sofa, and he slid next to me. His arms opened to welcome me in, and I snuggled into him, resting my head on his shoulder, those arms wrapping around me, his chin resting on my head.
We lay there naked and breathless, enjoying each other’s nakedness for a bit, languishing in a happy moment.
I was never gonna finish that book!
“That was fun,” I said.
“It was, baby.”
“Can we stay like this all night?”
“If you want. Better put some clothes on eventually, though.”
“Yeah, that’d be wise. But only until Valentine’s Day, right?”
“Absolutely.” He kissed the top of my head.
I gently ran my fingernails up and down his stomach. “What’s the plan for tomorrow, then?”
One of the cases we were working on involved major weirdness. When wasn’t it weird? There’d been a series of incidents with a creature, a pod-born, hitting tourist attractions and leaving behind dancing clay figures to cause havoc and freak everyone out. We’d encountered one in Rijksmuseum, which had come at me waving its fists. Landed a few blows on my shins, which had been surprisingly painful seeing as the figure was about one-foot tall. I’d kicked the fucker, breaking it into several pieces as it was made of the flimsiest clay ever. The pod-born making it all happen kept slipping through the poxy net!
That was the nature of our lives now. Head-scratching bollocks. As PIAs, we dealt with all sorts of weird. This case was at the ‘hunting the perp’ stage. Various eyewitnesses had given the police a description, which they’d handed over to us so we could track down this creature. Plus, I’d seen the knobhead briefly in the museum.
“Map stuff,” Dean answered my question. “I want to go over it all again before we head out.”
“Okay.” My fiancé thought he might have found the locale of the clay puppet master’s hideout. “Then we go get it?” I asked.
“Yes, baby.”
My stomach did a little flip. Wasn’t like I didn’t know we’d be going out into the field tomorrow. It was just that, well, I hated leaving Lou behind. The Conclave scared the shit out of me, and so did all the stuff with Elijah Hart/Parker Smith. Not having the full story made it a hundred times worse.
Okay. No thinking about that now. “Shall we get dressed?”
“Five more minutes,” he replied.
“Not gonna argue with that.”
DRESSED, our previous positions of book reading on the sofa restored, I was just getting to a really exciting bit where it looked like one of the heroes was about to be bumped off, a fresh mug of cocoa poised at my lips, when a horrible scream came from outside, followed by a heavy bang on our front door. In fact, the whole house shook.
The wards!
“Friggin’ hell!” I yelped, spilling the hot beverage all down my front as I leapt off the sofa, cracking my knee on the coffee table. “Bollocks!” My mug landed some feet away, smashing, my book tossed somewhere else.
God dammit!
Dean was already at the window. “Oh shit!” He sprang into action.
“What’s wrong?”
“There’s a dead goblin on our doorstep!”
TWO
DEAN
I paused at the door, looking back to make sure Jake was ready.
Louise was still asleep, snoring away. That was one good thing. I didn’t want her seeing any of this.
Jake pulled on some boots and grabbed his spear from its secret place in the hallway. I’d built a secret compartment there for a dagger, also adding a bigger compartment to accommodate his weapon.
I slipped some trainers on and retrieved the blade. “You good?” I asked.
“Let’s do it.”
At the top of our stoop, right on our doorstep, was a goblin. His naked body sported multiple stab wounds all over his green flesh, the eyes swollen and purple, his mouth wide open with only a few teeth left in there.
A woman shrieked.
Spread-eagled on the snowy canal path that ran past our house was a man dressed in a long black coat. There were two women backing away from him, their phones out for calling the police, but looking really panicked by the way they fumbled with their devices.
Jake ran down the stoop stairs as I pulled my own phone out.
“Hallo? Dean? It’s so late,” Lars’s sleepy voice answered in Dutch.
“Sorry for the late call, but there’s been an incident.”
Lars was our direct contact with the police, the best man to deal with in a sea of arseholes in the force who didn’t enjoy the company of PIAs. Too bad as they had no choice but to work with us in this insane world we shared.
“What’s happened?” He yawned down the line.
“There’s a dead goblin and what looks like a dead human outside our house.”
“Excuse me?”
“I think you’d better get down here to see for yourself.”
“Give me twenty minutes. Any witnesses?”
“Yes.”
“Shit! See you shortly.” He hung up.
“Definitely dead,” Jake called to me as he checked the human body. Then he went to speak with the women. I could see blood pooling beneath the head, staining the snow a dark crimson under the dim glow of the streetlights.
Sophie and Luuk, our neighbours, came out of their front door to see what all the commotion was about. I waved them over.
“Oh no!” Luuk gasped as he saw the body.
“What’s going on?” Sophie asked.
“This just happened now.”
Sophie looked past me through the open front door. “Is Louise asleep?”
“Yes. At the moment.”
“We’ll go inside,” she said, “keep an eye on her while you deal with this.”
“Thank you,” I replied. “Really appreciate it.”
Sophie, a witch, was Louise’s babysitter and part-time tutor when we didn’t have the time to school our daughter—and all regular schools were closed because of the pods. She and her husband Luuk, a human, were a Godsend, having helped us out time and time again with child-watching duties.
They went inside, closing the door behind them.
I stepped over the goblin, going down to join Jake and the women.
Both of them were pale with red noses from the cold, one with a pink hat, the other a red one. Jake had taken them away from the dead figure.
“This is Jess,” Jake told me, gesturing to the woman with the pink hat. “And this is Fiona.”
Fiona was sobbing.
“Did you call the police?” I asked them in Dutch.
“Sorry, we don’t speak the language,” Jess said with a British accent. “We’re here on holiday.”
I nodded. I repeated my question.
“No,” Jess answered, “he told us you would.” She pointed at Jake. “You’re PIAs?”
“We are and I have called the police, so don’t worry.”
Fiona sniffed, wiping her eyes with the back of a gloved hand.
At least it was just the two of them out on the street. None of the other neighbours had come to their doors. No gathering crowd, for now, was a helpful.
“I just need to talk to my fiancé for a moment,” I told them.
They both nodded, smiling at the word fiancé. “Okay”.
I took Jake to one side. “What did they say?” I kept my voice low.
His forehead creased into a frown. “Don’t know if you were thinking the same as me, but it looked to me like that bloke on the ground had got too close to the wards by putting the goblin on the doorstep.”
“Yes. I was thinking that.”
“Well, Fiona and Jess both said the bloke ran up the steps, the body already there. And he was being chased.”
“By who?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“The goblin was already there?”
“Yeah. Fucked up, right?”
I went over to the human, crouching down for a better look. There was a cut on the forehead, but there was something far worse at the back making all the blood leak out. I wouldn’t move him just yet—wait until the coroner showed up.
“I want to go home,” Jess said. “Can we go?”
“In a bit,” Jake soothed. “We just need to take down some statements first. The police will want to chat to you.”
“Oh, God.”
“It’ll be okay.”
“All we wanted was a fun night out.”
Part of my power as a half-fae was mental manipulation. I could work on the minds of these women, calm them down, make them forget what they’d seen. I didn’t use it much these days, but sometimes a witness needed a magical placebo to make things better after they’d done all they could.
These two would need it as they were both sobbing together now.
My front door opened and Luuk came out with two thick coats flung over his arm.
“Good idea,” I said as he handed me mine. “Thanks. Should’ve thought about that.”
“No problem,” he replied, giving Jake his and hurrying back into the house.
The air was bitterly cold. Adrenaline has a funny way of making you not notice things, even freezing weather, until it fades away. I shrugged the coat on, checking Jake had done the same. We could have gone inside with these women, but we didn’t know them. No stranger got in our house. The circumstances didn’t matter. Our daughter’s safety was the number one priority, and that was our house. Not our offices, but our sacred space. Plus, you never knew who would be working for The Conclave, trying to worm their way into our sanctuary and destroy my family.
I wouldn’t let that happen.
Blue lights in the distance. Lars was approaching.
LARS and I used his car to take the statements from Fiona and Jess while Jake went inside the house. Another three officers had shown up, including Evi, who was another officer on our side, and possibly dating Lars. She and two male officers blocked off the area, which had caught the attention of the neighbours, while the coroner and her crew of two dealt with the body. The appropriate goblins had been notified about the slaying of one of their own, on their way to come and collect him.
The two women sat in the back of the car, us in the front. Lars had a huge notepad ready to record their statement.
Fiona didn’t talk much, Jess the voice of the pair. “We were celebrating being single. Why not? People celebrate anniversaries all the time. We’ve been free from our partners for six years. Both got out around the same time. That’s how we’ve always done things. It’s like we’re twins, really. Anyway, so we decided to come to Amsterdam to celebrate, thinking it would all be pretty and wintery.”
“It is pretty,” Fiona added with a sniff.
“Yes,” Jess agreed. “We heard about that weird candy-striped thing, but then that’s life. Not like we don’t have stuff like that in England.”
“Where are you from?” I asked, watching her through the grate separating the front of the car from the back.
“St. Albans.”
“I know it,” I said.
“Have you been?”
“Once. Lovely cathedral.”
She nodded. “Seems to get way too many pods inside it, though.”
“Really?”
“It’s closed a lot now.”
“Such a shame,” Fiona chimed in. “I love it there.”
I waited, not saying anything. Lars had his pen poised on the paper.
Jess looked out of the window and sighed. “This really is lovely here. It was. It is. I just want to go home.”
“Take a breath,” I said. “You don’t need to rush this.”
“I’m fine.” She let out a heavy sigh. “We’ve been drinking, as you can tell. Had cocktails, went to a peep show, flirted with some guys but we’re not getting involved with men for now. When you’ve been tangled up in a miserable relationship you just need to be free. Not abusive or anything, just everything fizzled out.”
“Yep,” Fiona said.
I got that. Before I’d fallen for Jake, and before leaving Brighton for Coldharbour, I’d had a girlfriend. Claire. We’d grown apart, just friends sharing a flat and a cat and some memories. She’d moved on, I’d found out, married with two kids, finding someone who actually made the sparks go off like I had. Good for her, and good for me.
“I’m waffling,” Jess said. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine. Take your time,” I replied softly. “You said this man was being chased?”
“Yes. So we had the drinks and all the fun and started back for our hotel which isn’t that far from here. Anyway, we saw that poor man running down the path as we approached your house. He slipped a lot and looked really scared. There was…someone else. Something else. It…shimmered.”
Lars looked at me with a puzzled expression, then said, “Can you elaborate?”
Jess massaged her temples, groaned. “Did I actually see it? Too many cocktails.”
“It looked like a person,” Fiona added. “Like you could see the outli
ne of the figure, running, shimmering, blinking on and off.”
Lars scribbled that down, underlining it twice.
Fiona continued, having now picked up the talking stick. “The guy ran up your steps, tripped on the goblin and smacked his head off the ground. I screamed, realising there was a goblin body there, like my brain had just woke up. That shimmering figure slammed into your door. Jesus! The red ripple that went over your house.”
The wards.
“Before the running guy could get to his feet, the figure was up and on him and dragged him off your stoop. Happened so fast. It slammed the man’s head down hard several times. Then it ran off.”
It hadn’t taken me long to get to the window when I’d heard the scream and the bang on the front door. “That was fast,” I said.
“Too fast,” Fiona responded.
“I feel sick,” Jess said.
“Let me open the door,” Lars said, getting out of the car.
“What creature can move like that?” Fiona asked.
My brain was already pondering that exact question, along with the shimmering invisibility aspect.
“Is there anything else?” I asked.
“No. I don’t think so. Can we go now?”
“Yes,” Lars answered. “I’ll take you home.”
“If you remember anything else,” I added, “please don’t hesitate to contact us or the police.”
FULLY DRESSED NOW, the two witnesses gone, Jake and I conducted an investigation of the area before the bodies were removed.
With my specially designed UV light, a handy tool which picked up paranormal traces, I checked the body, the steps of our stoop, and the general area. The dead man had fingerprints of brownish yellow—pod trace—all over his body. Whatever that shimmering thing had been, its hands were all over the corpse. The police would’ve already taken their own images of these prints, and I did the same with my phone. There would be some research going down in my study tonight.
“Pod?” Jake asked from behind me.
“Yes.”
So much for a cosy night with a book, blow job and sleep.
The goblin didn’t have any evidence on him to the immediate eye, the scanner showing nothing. An autopsy might.
