“We say that about animals, not people. ”
“Animals, people, what difference?”
“Seelie, Unseelie, what difference?”
Silvery flakes crystallized in the air between us, icing the night with royal displeasure. “The difference is too vast for your puny mind to comprehend. ”
“Ditto. ”
“You are not naked, on your hands and knees, offering me your pretty little ass, MacKayla, which is what you do when I use the Sidhba-jai on you. Would you like a reminder?”
“Try it and I’ll kill you. ”
“With what?”
I yanked my hand from the button at the back of my skirt and went for the spear holstered beneath my arm, but it was gone. He’d taken it the last time we’d met, too. I wanted to know how he was doing it. I had to find a way to stop him.
He paced a circle around me. By the time he’d completed it, his gaze was as chill as the night air. “What have you been up to, sidhe-seer? You smell different. ”
“I’ve been using a new moisturizer. ” Could he smell my recent cannibalization of his race? Though I no longer suffered the dramatic effects of it, did a residue stain my skin, as it had tarnished another, less tangible part of me? I’d eaten Unseelie, not Seelie; would that make a difference to him? I doubted it. The bottom line was I’d eaten Fae to steal the power of the Fae. And I’d just fed it to another human. And I would never admit either of those facts to any Fae. “Like it?” I said brightly.
“You are powerless to defy me, yet stand before me dripping defiance. Why?”
“Maybe I’m not as powerless as you think. ” What would a bite of Seelie royalty do to me? I’d find out if I had to. Surely I could Null him long enough to sink my teeth in somewhere. The thought was a little too tempting. All that power . . . mine in one tiny bite. Or ten. I wasn’t certain exactly how much I had to eat to get superstrength, when I wasn’t mortally wounded to begin with.
He considered me a moment, then laughed, and the sound made me feel suddenly ebullient, drunk with euphoria.
“Stop it,” I hissed. “Quit amping up my feelings!”
“I am what I am. Even when I ‘mute myself,’ as you say, my presence overwhelms mere humans—”
“Bull,” I cut him off. “When you were kneeling on the beach in Faery, and touched me, you felt like a man and only a man. ” That wasn’t entirely true, but it had been better than this. He could tone himself way down if he chose. “I know you can do it. If you want my help finding the Sin—er, the Book, turn it off, and turn it all off. Now. And keep it off in the future. ” I’d picked up a superstition from Dani, the young sidheseer I’d met recently who’d warned me about casting certain words on the wind I didn’t want traced back to me, so now, whenever I spoke of the Sinsar Dubh aloud, out in the streets, especially at night, I tried to remember to call it simply “the Book. ”
V’lane shimmered, flashed brilliant white, then faded and resolidified. I tried not to gawk. Gone were the iridescent robes, the eyes that burned with a thousand stars, the body that radiated the fire of Eros. A man stood before me in faded jeans, a biker jacket, and boots; the sexiest man I’d ever seen. A golden, horny angel stripped of wings. This V’lane I could deal with. This Fae prince I could keep my clothes on around.
“Walk with me. ” He offered his hand.
Sidhe-seer walk with Fae? My every instinct screamed no. “I’ll Null you if I touch you. ”
He considered me a moment, as if debating whether to speak. Then he shrugged, but not well. The human gesture only made him look more alien. “Only if you wish, MacKayla. The desire to Null or the instinct to defend yourself must be present. If you do not desire it, you may touch me. ” He paused. “I know of no other Fae who would permit such intimacy and risk. You speak to me of trust. I am giving it to you. Once you touch me, you could alter your intent and I would be at your mercy. ”
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I liked that: him at my mercy. I took his hand. It was a man’s hand, warm, strong, nothing more. He laced his fingers with mine. I hadn’t held hands with anyone in a long time. It felt good.
“You spent time in my world,” he said, “now I will spend time in yours. Show me what it is you care for so deeply that you would die for it. Teach me of human ways, MacKayla. Show me why I should care, too. ”
Teach this ancient creature who, in his most recent incarnation, was over one hundred and forty-two thousand years old? Show him why he should care about us? Right. And I was born yesterday. “You never stop, do you?”
“Never stop what?” he said innocently.
“Trying to seduce. You just switch tactics. I’m not stupid, V’lane. I couldn’t teach you to care about us in a million years. But you know what really pisses me off? I shouldn’t have to justify our existence to you, or any Fae. We were here first. We have the right to this planet. You don’t. ”
“If might makes right, we have all the right to this world we need. We could have exterminated your kind long ago. ”
“Why didn’t you?”
“It is complicated. ”
“I’m listening. ”
“It is a long story. ”
“Got all night. ”
“Fae decisions are not for humans to know and understand. ”
“There you go, getting all superior again. You can’t fake nice for more than a few seconds. ”
“I am not faking, MacKayla. I am trying to know you, to earn your trust. ”
“You could have earned some of my trust by being around when I needed you. Why didn’t you save me?” I demanded. I’d been scarred by my hellish time beneath the Burren in ways I didn’t fully understand and, although my body had healed, and I felt stronger than ever, I wasn’t certain I was necessarily the better for it. “I almost died. I begged you to come. ”
He stopped abruptly and spun me to face him. Though his body was as warm and solid as mine, his eyes blazed inhuman fire. “You begged me? Did you cry my name? Pray to me?”
I rolled my eyes. “Figures that’s what you’d hear. ” I stabbed him in the chest with a finger. It sent erotic recoils up my arm. Even “turned off” he was turning me on. “The important part in there is that I almost died. ”
“You are alive. What is the problem?”
“I suffered horribly, that’s the problem!”
He caught my hand before I could poke him again, turned it up, and grazed his lips across the underside of my wrist, then bit it, sharply. I snatched it away, skin stinging. “Such a naked, defenseless wrist,” he said. “How many times have I offered you the Cuff of Cruce? Not only would it prevent lesser Unseelie from harming you, with it, you could have summoned me and I would have saved you. I told you this at our first encounter. I have offered you my protection repeatedly. You have refused me at every turn. ”
“A cuff can be removed. ” I sounded bitter because I was. I’d learned that lesson the hard way.
“Not this—” He closed his mouth but it was too late. He’d slipped. All-powerful Prince V’lane of the Supercilious Fae had slipped.
“Really?” I said dryly. “So once it’s on me, I’m stuck with it forever. That’s the tiny little inconvenient catch you’ve never happened to mention to me before?”
“It is for your own safety. As you said, a cuff could be removed. How would that serve you? Better that it cannot be taken off. ”
Barrons and V’lane had both been up to the same trick all along: trying to put their permanent mark on me. Barrons had succeeded. I’d be darned if V’lane would. Besides, I was pretty sure Mallucé would have cheerfully sawed off my arm to remove the cuff, which made me really glad I hadn’t been wearing it. “You want me to trust you, V’lane? Give me another way to summon you. A way that costs me nothing. ”
He sneered. “And make a Fae prince answerable to a sidheseer?”
“Allow me to put it into perspective for you. I saw the Bo
ok again the other night, and had no way to contact you. ”
“You saw it? When? Where?”
“How do I summon you?”
“You dare much, sidhe-seer. ”
“You ask much, Fae. ”
“Not as much as I could. ”
Had I lost a few seconds there, or had he been leaning closer all the time? His mouth was inches from mine. I could feel his breath on my skin. He smelled of exotic, drugging spices.
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“Back off, V’lane,” I warned.
“I am preparing to give you the way to summon me, human. Stand still for it. ”
“A kiss? Oh, please! I’m not that—”
“My name on your tongue. I cannot teach you to say it. Humans do not possess the ability to form such sounds. But I can give it to you. With my mouth, I can place it on your tongue. Then you have but to release my name to the wind, and I will appear. ”
He was so close that the heat of his body was sunshine on my skin. Was nothing simple? I didn’t want a cuff. I didn’t want a kiss. I wanted nice normal methods of communication. “How about a cell phone?”
“No towers in Faery. ”
I narrowed my eyes. “Did you just make a joke?”
“You walk among the worst of my kind, yet tremble at the prospect of a simple kiss. ”
“I’m not trembling. See any trembling here?” I thrust my trembling hands in my coat pockets, and gave him a dead-level, cocky stare. I doubted anything from V’lane was simple. Especially not a kiss. “How about a mystical cell phone, that doesn’t use towers?” I pressed. “Surely, with all that power you’re so smug about, you can create—”
“Shut up, MacKayla. ” He grabbed a handful of curls at the back of my head and yanked me toward him. I couldn’t get my hands out of my pockets fast enough, so I slammed into his chest. I considered Nulling him, but if he really was going to give me a way to contact him, I wanted it. It was part of my egg-diversifying plan. I wanted all the backup, potential weapons, and odds in my favor that I could get. If I got into a jam again, like I’d been in beneath the Burrens, V’lane could save me in a matter of seconds. It had taken Barrons hours to track me and get to me, following the beacon of my tattoo.
Speaking of which . . .
V’lane’s knuckles grazed the base of my skull where Barrons had branded me; his eyes narrowed, and he inhaled sharply. For a moment, he seemed to shimmer, as if he was struggling to hold form and not revert to another. “You think to allow his mark upon your body but refuse mine?” he hissed. He closed his mouth over mine.
The Unseelie Hunters are especially terrifying to sidheseers because they know where we live inside our heads. They instinctively know exactly where to find the small, frightened child in us all.
The Seelie princes know where we live, too, but it’s the grown woman they’re after. They hunt us in our own bodies, tracking us without mercy into the darkest corners of our libido. They seduce the Madonna; they celebrate the whore. They serve our sexual needs tirelessly, gorging on our passion, amplifying it, and slamming it back at us a thousandfold. They are masters of all our desires. They know the limits of our fantasies; they take us to the edge and leave us there, hanging by shredded fingernails above a bottomless gorge, begging for more.
His tongue touched mine. Something hot and electric jolted through my mouth, and pierced my tongue. It swelled inside me, filling my mouth. I choked on it, and orgasmed instantly, as hot and electrifying as whatever he’d just done to my tongue. Pleasure ripped through me with such exquisite precision that my bones steamed and turned to water. I would have collapsed, but he took my weight, and I was in a dreamy, surreal place for a few moments, where his laughter was black velvet and his need was as vast as the night, then I was clear and me again.
There was something potent and dangerous in my mouth, on my tongue. How was I supposed to talk around it?
He drew back. “Give it a moment. It will settle in. ”
It settled with all the subtlety of multiple orgasms on the cusp of a steel thorn; pleasure inseparable from pain. Aftershocks quaked through me. I glared at him, more shaken by his touch than I cared to acknowledge.
He shrugged. “I dampened myself greatly. It could have been much more . . . what is your word? Traumatic. Humans were not meant to carry a Fae’s name on their tongue. How does it feel, MacKayla? You have a piece of me in your mouth. Would you like another?” He smiled, and I knew he didn’t mean a word, or whatever it was that lay there coiled, slumbering but barely, in a porcelain cage.
When I was fourteen, I chipped a tooth in cheerleader practice. My dentist was on vacation, and it was nearly two weeks before I could get it fixed. During the interminable wait, my tongue incessantly worried the jagged edge of the enamel. That was how I felt now: I had an aberration in my mouth, and I wanted to scrape it out because it was wrong, it didn’t belong there, and as long as it was on my tongue, I wouldn’t be able to scrape the Fae prince from my mind.
“It makes me want to spit,” I said coolly.
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His face tightened, and the temperature plunged so sharply my breath frosted the night air. “I have honored you. I have never before given such a gift. Do not belittle it. ”
“How do I use it?”
“Need me, open your mouth, and I will be there. ” I didn’t see him move but suddenly his lips were against my ear. “Tell no one I gave it to you. Mention it, and I will take it away. ” He vanished before he finished speaking. His words danced on the air like the Cheshire cat’s smile.
“Hey, I thought you wanted to know about the Sinsar Dubh!” I was so startled by his abrupt departure that I spoke without thinking. I regretted it immediately. My words hung as heavy as Georgia humidity in the night. “Sinsar Dubh” seemed to echo sibilantly, soughing on the night wind, racing the darkness to darker ears, and I suddenly felt as if I’d stamped a red X on myself.
I had no idea where V’lane had gone, or why he’d disappeared so suddenly, but I decided I’d be wise to do the same myself.
Before I could move, a hand closed on my shoulder. “I do, Ms. Lane,” Barrons said grimly. “But first I’d like to know what the fuck you were doing kissing him. ”
FOUR
I turned, scowling. Barrons has a habit of popping up, without warning, when I least expect it, at the most inconvenient times. I absorbed him in slow degrees, the only way to look at him. As a whole, he’s jarringly present in the space he occupies, as if ten times the man occupies a normal man-sized space. I wonder why. Because there’s an Unseelie stuffed inside him? I wonder how old he really is.
I should be afraid of him. And sometimes in the middle of the night when I’m alone and I think about him—especially when I picture him carrying the dead woman’s body, and the look on his bloody face—I am.
But when he’s standing in front of me, I’m not.
I wonder if it’s possible for a person to do some kind of “numbing” spell, create a glamour so complete that it deceives all the senses, even sidhe-seer ones.
“There’s something on your lapel. ” I dabbed at it. He’s also meticulous, never a man to sport lint or stains on his clothes, but tonight his dark suit had a shiny spot on the left side. I was dabbing at a . . . man, for lack of a better word . . . who’d had birthdays untold, and walked in Unseelie Hallows, carrying around corpses. It felt as absurd as brushing a wolf’s teeth, or trying to mousse his fur. “And I wasn’t kissing him. ”
And I’d like to know what the feck you were doing with that woman in that mirror, I thought. But I didn’t say it. There’s a legal term my dad likes to use: res ipsa loquitur—the thing speaks for itself. I knew what I knew, and now I was watching him. And my back. Very carefully.
He knocked my hand away. “Then why was his tongue in your mouth? Was he conducting a clinical test of your gag reflex?” He smiled, but not nicely. “Ho
w is your gag reflex, Ms.
Lane? Are you a hair trigger?”
Barrons likes to use sexual innuendo to try to shut me up. I think he expects the well-raised southern belle in me will think eew and back off. Sometimes, I do think eew, but I don’t back off. “I’m a spitter, if that’s what you’re asking. ” I flashed him a too-sweet smile.
“Didn’t look that way to me. I think you’re a swallower. His tongue was halfway to China and you were still taking it. ”
“Jealous?”
“Implies emotional investment. The only investment I have in you is my time, and I’m expecting a big payoff. Tell me about the Sinsar Dubh. ”
I glanced at my hand. It had come away from his lapel wet. I angled it in the light. Red looks black at night. I sniffed it. It smelled like old pennies. Gee, blood. No surprise there. “Have you been in a fight? No, let me guess; you saved a wounded dog, again?” I said dryly. That was the excuse he’d used last time.
“I had a nosebleed. ”
“Nosebleed, my petunia. ”
“Petunia?”
“Ass, Barrons. As in you are one. ”
“The Book, Ms. Lane. ”
I looked into his eyes. Was there a Gripper in there? Something very old looked back. “There’s nothing to tell. ”
“Why did you call after him?”
“I haven’t seen him since the last time we saw the Book. I keep V’lane informed. You’re not the only shark in the sea. ”
He raked me with a contemptuous glance. “It’s a Fae prince’s fundamental nature to enslave a woman with sex, Ms. Lane. It’s a woman’s fundamental nature to be enslaved. Try to rise above it. ”
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“Oh, it is not a woman’s fundamental nature to be enslaved!” Everywoman reared up in me, battle-ready.
He turned and walked away. “You wear my brand, Ms. Lane,” floated over his shoulder, “and if I’m not mistaken, you now wear his. Who owns you? I don’t think it’s you. ”
“It is, too,” I yelled at his retreating back, but he was already halfway down the street, vanishing into the darkness. “I don’t wear his brand!” Did I? Exactly what had V’lane embedded in my tongue? I fisted my hands, staring after him.
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