Rogue's Paradise

by Jeffe Kennedy

  But I did.

  Despite logic and reason and all the lists in the world, I did.

  I gazed up at his unearthly beautiful face, caged behind the pattern of spirit lines. Silver frost gilded his inky hair, his blue-black magic like a nimbus of light around him, so alien, and saw only the man inside. Him. Not with the eyes, but with the mind. Though we occupied different kinds of bodies, came from different worlds, we were the same on some fundamental level.

  Like to like.

  I’d looked for him even when I hadn’t known what to look for.

  If you won’t do it for your own good, consider doing it for mine.

  If it was a mistake, so be it, but at that moment, nothing existed but the way I felt about him. I added to it, a measure of shining hope for what our future could be, what we could build together. He borrowed that feeling from me and fed it with his own desire, that I would care for him, let him care for me, and we would be one mind, one voice. A force that could not be put asunder.

  He knew it before I did—as always—and, at the moment I formed my wish for us, he set the blazing spark of his intention to it.

  At that precise instant, just as we set intention to desire, we kissed.

  Minds, mouths, wills.

  We joined them together.

  Made them one.

  It detonated around us, our combined wish a shock wave that set the water beneath our feet boiling in reaction. The waterfall curled up on itself, then unwound with crashing force, sending up a chime of songbirds without number.

  The wedding guests cheered in thunderous approval.

  Echoed by Titania’s shriek of rage.

  Chapter Twenty

  Send in the Clowns

  Magic, like individual creativity, is shaped by the person who wields it—and is limited only by their imagination.

  ~Big Book of Fairyland, “Rules of Magic”

  The inhuman sound of Queen Bitch’s fury reverberated through the air and across my nerves like aluminum tapping a mercury filling.

  Rogue kept hold of me though, mouth hot on mine. Steady.

  His thought in my head, unvoiced. Barely discernible from my own.

  Yes.

  It seemed wrong to keep kissing under the circumstances, but the days away from his touch had left me hungry for him, as if he supplied some vital vitamin I withered without. The sound faded away, though it lingered in the bones of my skull, my heart pounding to the sonic boom of utter rage.

  Rogue broke the kiss then and smiled at me. A rare smile of pure and utter delight, unreserved, almost innocently joyful. “It worked.”

  “The marrying each other spell?”

  “Yes. The first step in her destruction.”

  “That’s why she’s so angry.”

  “And afraid. Never mistake but that she’s afraid now.”

  “Why didn’t she try to stop this?”

  “Because, powerful Gwynn, she didn’t know it was possible.”

  “But you did.”

  “I hoped. You showed me the way.”

  I did? “I don’t remem—”

  A roar went up from the dragons circling above, a clear warning. Better get everyone inside.

  I wasn’t sure if it was my thought or his—and ultimately it didn’t matter, though this would take serious getting used to—and as one we turned, crossed the water and told our guests to run for their lives. Most of them already were. The scorching compression of Titania’s imminent arrival thickened the atmosphere, vaporizing the snowflakes before they fell.

  Everyone knew what her advent meant and none wanted to face it.

  “So much for the receiving line,” I muttered, feeling Rogue’s grimly amused response.

  The first of the guests poured across the drawbridge, seeking the castle’s sheltering walls.

  We stayed back, by mutual accord, to draw Titania’s ire away. Oddly, though I should have been afraid, I wasn’t. Maybe I’d gained some of Rogue’s insouciance, born of invulnerable immortality, but I felt only the keen edge of readiness.

  Bring it, bitch.

  Darling Hercules stayed with us, parking himself at my ankle. Goliath, he demanded, so I gave it to him, pulling on the magic—mine, but with blue-black shadows—and made him as big as the dragons coming to land around us. They dropped from the sky, fast as lightning, landing with puffs of snow that made them seem light as dandelion fluff. For a moment, I reflexively cringed, but they turned their great scaly backs to us, forming a defensive perimeter.

  I fretted that, by enclosing us in their circle, they’d create a magic-null field inside, crippling us. But Goliath retained the great size I’d gifted him and his sentient intelligence. The lead dragon, my dragon, if I wasn’t mistaken, glanced back at me with what could only be a smirk. Oh yeah, they could totally direct it.

  The ground shivered and Titania appeared, outside the circle of dragons. She looked as she had before I melted her face—exquisitely lovely in an inhuman way. Like the faces of angels too terrible to look upon. For once not naked, she wore a cloak of fire, oranges and reds teeming in it, swathing her body, hair like silver tinsel trailing down it and dragging through the snow. Leaving it melted in her wake.

  “Am I late for the wedding?” she asked. Her voice rarely seemed to be an actual sound. Instead, like the sonic boom, it crept inside my head, insistent. In my dream I’d seen her as a parasitic wasp, the kind that immobilizes prey and lays her eggs in it, to feed on the haplessly fresh victim when they hatched.

  The image dissolved, replaced by Rogue’s unmistakable presence. Buffering me.

  “I’m afraid you missed the ceremony, my queen,” Rogue spoke with courtesy, but without the obsequious bowing he’d shown before. Power had shifted. She observed it, seeming ready to pop with fury. “You are, of course, welcome to join in the reception, feast and celebration.”

  I hated that but knew he had to say it.

  “You—you—” She stuttered into silence, overcome by daunting rage. Her image similarly lost cohesion for a moment, her face blurring, as if momentarily depixilated. Not really present then? No. But just as dangerous.

  “You worm,” Titania managed. “You think to outwit me? I made you, Rogue. You are mine, made in my own image and you cannot escape me!” She finished on an ultrasonic shriek that sent agony through Rogue’s sensitive ears and made mine ring.

  “We shall see.” He showed none of the pain he felt. A master of the poker face.

  “You have chosen your ally poorly.” She turned her attention on me. “So mortal. So sweetly vulnerable. What will you do when I wrest her from you, make her and her precious cargo mine?”

  Rogue didn’t reply, because I did.

  “You couldn’t do it before.” I shrugged, dismissing her. “You’d simply fail again.”

  Her face contorted, the melt showing through. Resolving and then blurring again. Not completely healed.

  “Will I? Yes, Rogue,” she said, pointedly ignoring me. “We shall see. In the meantime, I brought you a wedding gift.” She dropped the cloak, revealing her voluptuously naked, featureless flesh. As it hit the ground, the cloak broke apart into tens—or hundreds—of thousands of spidery creatures, seemingly made of pure fire.

  Titania laughed and waved her fingers in a little wiggle. “Bye now.” She vanished in stages, her chiming giggle lingering in the air after her image was gone.

  In her wake, the scorching heat of her power rolled over the ring of dragons and down, a fireball of raging insanity. Without time for thought, Rogue and I deflected it, but it hit the invisible wall of the dragons’ null field and shattered into myriads more of the fire-spiders. Glowing, multilegged flames, they swarmed over us, burning and biting until we destroyed them.

  Those outside the circle of dragons found themselves snuffed as they tried to cross between. But plenty fell inside, anchoring into Goliath’s fur and setting him ablaze. The Rogue part of me doused him with water from the pool, leaving him unscathed but furiously drenched
.

  Another fist of power hit, knocking us to our knees as the ground destabilized.

  “Told you we shouldn’t have done this outside,” I had to say.

  “You wanted to work that marriage spell inside and shatter the castle?” Rogue snapped back.

  Together we held off that wave until it dissipated.

  “Point taken.”

  “I knew you’d see the light.”

  Hard on his words, a flare went up from the castle, a precise shaft of black and white that tasted of Marquise and Scourge. In the distance, people were screaming. The promised army advanced from the opposite direction, crawling over the snowy hills like a ravening horde of locusts, obliterating the pristine whiteness with menace. From the seething ranks, missiles catapulted at the towers, some striking the glittering stone with shattering force, others dissipating before contact. More hit than didn’t.

  Rogue narrowed his eyes, seeing farther than I could. “However, we can’t let her keep us from getting back. She appears to have changed her target.”

  “Poof yourself there—they need you.”

  He barely glanced at me, a dangerous flintiness in his gaze. “I’m not leaving you.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  The dragons moved with us, blessedly keeping their defensive perimeter. More spiders swarmed, crystalline, black as oil, with impossible numbers of legs. They poofed into freezing fog or, worse, blood mist, as they struck the null field. We had to be careful to keep to the center, the edges like Novocain on my hyped-up senses, not easy as we lobbed back or busted the missiles that hurtled toward us too. The magical ones were easier to neutralize.

  Some, however, were physical. One, a silver torpedo, breached our defenses and slammed into one of the dragons. Null magic didn’t protect it from the impact. The missile shattered the beast’s great wing, tearing the leathery membrane that stretched between tarsal bones like a bat’s. The multihued jeweled scales glittered in the sunlight, ironically lovely as its yellow blood fountained and the beast trumpeted in the pain.

  We forged on, however, and the dragon kept up, dragging its broken wing. Feeling the urgency, we all picked up the pace. Goliath, behind us, lagged too long and abruptly returned to his usual size. Fortunately it wasn’t enough of a hit to addle his brain, but he wasn’t happy.

  I began to tire, feeling the drain of continuous magic use, especially after that monumental wedding spell. I reached for Mother Earth and Rogue stayed my mental hand. Let me.

  As if he’d slipped inside me in the most intimate physical way, his magic flowed in, stroking my senses with a wash of his essence. This was far more than when he’d fed me energy on Felicity’s back.

  Far more.

  We made it to the drawbridge where the creepy cyborg army was fighting off more spiders that were trying to swarm it, to penetrate the castle. Though they drowned in the moat, the monsters happily surfacing to gobble them down, they kept coming, walking on the backs of dead ones. The gate inside spun, so that any of the spiders that entered the doorway were flung away again, pinballs ricocheting from the center flywheel. More missiles, blasts of pure power—Titania had scaled up in the Faerie arms race—rained down on the castle, sometimes deflected, sometimes not. A tower fell and we winced. Hopefully everyone had been smart enough to hunker down.

  The dragons peeled away at the drawbridge, the foremost ones taking wing to perch on the towers, breathing fire that blasted the magical missiles from existence. They couldn’t step on the drawbridge, I realized—or I pulled the information from Rogue’s brain—without breaking it. The downside of a mundane bridge. We would be on our own to cross.

  Can’t plan for everything.

  “Is she inside?”

  “No—sending her minions. If she entered, she’d be a guest. If we can get across the bridge and through the doors, we’re safe.”

  “Sign me up.”

  “Fast or slow?” Rogue inquired, eyes glittering with battle fury as he eyed the expanse.

  Slow would let us fight along the way, but extended our exposure.

  I enlarged Darling Hercules into Goliath again, giving him lightweight and encompassing battle armor to keep the spiders off, and he preened as I tightened my grip on Rogue’s hand. He manifested the platinum sword in the other.

  “Fast.” Before I finished uttering the word, we took off running down the drawbridge, booted feet pounding, Goliath leading the way. Rogue’s stride outstretched mine, of course, but he couldn’t carry me this time, using his sword and magic together to keep the creatures off us. I concentrated on keeping up and poofing any creatures that tried to attack Goliath.

  Having the time of his life, he swatted the spiders and Cylons alike off the drawbridge with his great paws, clearing the path. Mice! Mice! Mice! He chanted the manic creed in my mind. I skidded on a patch of ice and Rogue yanked me up, bolstering me until I found my pace again. Locks of my hair came undone, tumbling from the artful array, and a yank on my trailing ribbons, quickly released, told me something had nearly gotten me from behind.

  We poured on the speed. Never had a bride and groom pelted back up the aisle as we did.

  With my newly acquired way of knowing Rogue’s thoughts as they occurred, I understood that passing the gate would be the trick, then bringing up the drawbridge. He had to stop the spin long enough for us to enter, which would allow the spiders inside as well. Goliath, at my direction, spun to defend us and Rogue, to my shock, handed me his sword. Nearly as long as I was tall, the thing almost knocked me over, but then a spider came over the side of the bridge and, with skills never taught me, I swung the sword at it, slicing it cleanly in two.

  A starburst bomb went off over my head, raining down more tiny spiders. I created a parasol to hold them off as Rogue worked what appeared to be a magical lock. “Where is she getting all this power?” I yelled over the roar of the spinning gate.

  “You know.”

  I did know. All those fae trapped and cocooned in her lair, feeding her. We’d put a stop to that. Even Rogue agreed. Or couldn’t disagree, with my sense of compassion bleeding through him. The gate abruptly silenced, Rogue snaked a long arm around my waist and yanked me through.

  Goliath resisted my urging to come inside and spun around to continue to defend the drawbridge. He showed me the image of Titania trying to blast him with power back in her palace, to no effect. His immunity to her gave him a great advantage, so I didn’t argue.

  My gut wrenched as Rogue spun the castle like a roulette wheel. I lost my grip on the sword and would have fallen if he hadn’t held me upright. I wished the spiders away from us both, but not before they took some nasty bites from my skin. Rogue gripped me hard, energy zinging between us—adrenaline rush for me, wild magic for him. Or maybe the same for both of us. Like to like.

  With something close to desperate hunger, he dug his fingers into my hair. Cupping my skull in his hand, he lifted me flush against him, his mouth covering mine in an echoing kiss. Feeling his need like my own, I wrapped my hands around the braid at the nape of his neck, crushing the little lilies. Briefly, he tore his lips away and laughed.

  “Did you see what we did?”

  He laughed again and resumed kissing me before I could answer. Though the question needed no reply. We’d managed to win that battle—without trickery, might against might. And without great damage.

  Outside, however, the attacks continued to thunder. Perhaps damage had yet to be assessed.

  “We’d better go find everyone,” I said, though Rogue had already retrieved the sword, taken me by the hand and started down the hall before I finished the sentence. This would get old.

  “The effect should fade, except for when we’re actively using the bond,” Rogue answered out loud, the thought behind it echoing in my head like a bad cell phone connection.

  “I thought no one had done this before.”

  “They haven’t—I’m extrapolating from empirical data.”

  I began to know how Dr. F
rankenstein felt—except that in this case the monster had gone and made a scientist.

  “Very funny,” Rogue commented.

  “I thought so.”

  We turned down yet another hallway, this one ribbed like the inside of a centipede in a most unsettling way, from which we burst into the hall filled with flowers and candles. We should keep it that way forever, so I could find the stairs to our rooms.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, Rogue.” General Falcon, yellow eyes glaring like flashlights, strode up, his face set in even harsher lines than usual. “You’ve gone and made traitors of us all.”

  Despite the wedding decorations, the scene reminded me of the one from Gone with the Wind, with the wounded laid out all up and down the hallway. “Oh, God,” I gasped. “Oh no.”

  Rogue steadied me, absorbing my shock and guilt. Then he turned and addressed Falcon, leaving me to assess the damages. Even as I walked away, I felt his mental caress stay with me. The peace of our mutual accord, of which of us would handle which crisis, shored me up as much as his strong hands had. I’d thought this marriage would be like an anchor, the heaviest of chains around my neck—instead it gave me a foundation.

  Which I sorely needed.

  Fae of all types lay bleeding, poisoned edges of spider bites eating into their flesh. Mistress Nancy moved among them, performing a gruesome sort of triage, having some of Larch’s healthy Brownie fellows move the less worse off to another hall.

  “Where is Lady Healer?”

  “I don’t know that one, dearie. Healing would be a blessing, though, if ye can arrange it.”

  Giving up on protocol, I reached through the web for Athena. She responded alertly, showing up at my elbow in moments, blood on her hands.

  “Fetch Lady Healer, would you? And find Starling—we need her organizational skills.”

  “Gwynn—”

  “You summoned me, my lady?” Healer glided up, irritation oozing out of her at my inadvertent summons. Too loud, as always.

  “Yes. Okay, Athena—just go find Starling, would you?”