A Kiss of Shadows mg-1

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  "Yeah."

  "You swear it," I said, "your word of honor."

  His eyes got all serious. He seemed to understand that his word meant something to me that it might not to a human. Finally, he nodded. "Yeah, I give you my word."

  I glanced at Eileen Galan and back to the one-way glass on the far wall. "Spoken before

  witnesses. The Gods themselves beware of it if you break your promise."

  He nodded. "Should I be expecting a lightning bolt?"

  I shook my head. "No, not a lightning bolt."

  He'd started to smile, but when I didn't seem to think it was funny, his smile faded. "I keep my word, Princess."

  "I hope so, Detective, for all our sakes."

  Eileen took me to one side, a few steps away from the detective. "What are you planning to do, Meredith?"

  "Are you a practitioner of any mystic art?" I asked.

  "I'm a lawyer, not a witch."

  "Then just watch. It's sort of self explanatory." I drew away from her gently and walked back to Alvera. I stayed farther away than I would have normally, just close enough that I could touch him. I'd had oil on my fingers, but some of it had rubbed off. I wanted this to work so I drew my fingers across my breasts where the oil was still slick and shining. Branwyn's Tears had a long shelf life. I reached out toward Alvera's face.

  He leaned back out of reach.

  I raised an eyebrow at him, hand extended in midair. "You said I could touch you."

  He nodded. "Sorry, habit." He moved a step closer to me but maneuvered us so that we were in full view of our audience behind the oneway glass. He visibly steeled himself not to flinch away from me. I wasn't sure if he didn't want me touching him because I was fey or because he thought I'd murdered someone by magic or because of some esoteric cop thing.

  I traced my fingertips along his full mouth until they glistened like lip gloss. His eyes widened, and he looked softly stunned. I stepped away from him, and he reached toward me, then stopped himself. He folded his arms across his chest and tried to talk, then shook his head.

  I went back to my chair and sat down. I crossed my legs, and the skirt was short enough that I flashed the lacy edge of the thigh-highs. Alvera noticed. He watched every move of my hands as I smoothed the skirt into place. I could see his pulse in his neck jumping under his skin. The wide eyes, the half-parted lips as he fought to control himself were very intriguing. It took more self-control than was pretty to not close the distance between us and make the first move. I was still safe behind Jeremy's runes, but it was an act of will not to go to him.

  Eileen Galan was looking from one to the other of us, a puzzled expression on her face. "Did I miss something?"

  Alvera just kept staring at me, arms hugging himself, as if afraid to move or even speak, for fear that any forward motion would spill him over the edge and into my arms.

  I answered her. "Yes, you missed something."

  "What?"

  "Branwyn's Tears," I said softly.

  Alvera closed his eyes, his body beginning to sway slightly.

  "Are you all right, Detective?" Eileen said.

  He opened his eyes, and said, "Yeah, I'm..." He looked back at me. "... fine." But that last was barely audible. There was a kind of a panic on his face as if he couldn't believe what he was thinking.

  I don't know how long he might have been able to stand there, but I had run out of patience tonight. I ran my fingertip over the white, glistening mounds of my breasts, and that was all it took.

  He crossed the room in three strides, grabbing my forearms, lifting me to my feet. He was nearly a foot taller than I was, and he had to bend at an awkward angle, but he managed. He put those kissable lips against mine, and the first taste tore Jeremy's careful spell away. I was suddenly a throbbing, needful thing. My body still wanted to finish what had been denied it earlier. I kissed him like I was feeding off of his soft lips, my tongue seeking for something deep inside him. My oiled hands caressed his face. The more oil that touched him, the stronger the spell. He lifted me around the waist, raising me to eye level so he didn't have to bend.

  I wrapped my legs around his waist, and I could feel him through the layers of cloth that separated us. My body pulsed with the contact, and I broke from the kiss, not to breathe but to cry out.

  He pressed me to the tabletop, his groin grinding into me. Lying on the table he was too tall to maintain the kiss and keep our lower bodies pressed together, so he raised himself up on his arms like a push-up, keeping his body pressed into mine.

  I stared up the length of his body and finally met his eyes. They held the darkness that usually doesn't come to a man's eyes until later when the clothes are gone and there's no turning back. I grabbed two handfuls of his shirt and pulled them, sending his buttons flying, baring his chest and stomach. I raised up, doing a sort of sit-up so I could lick down his chest, run my hands across the flatness of his stomach. I tried to put my hand down his pants, but his belt defeated me.

  Suddenly, the room was full of uniforms and plainclothes detectives. They pulled Alvera off me, and he fought them. They had to pile on top of him, ride him to the floor in a mountain of uniforms. He was screaming, wordlessly.

  I lay on the table, the skirt hiked to my waist, my body so full of blood and need that I couldn't move. I was angry, angry that they'd stopped us. I knew that was stupid. I knew I didn't want to have sex in an interrogation room in front of an entire precinct, and yet... I was still angry, still wanting.

  A young uniformed cop was standing beside the table. He was trying not to stare and failing. It was easy to grab his hand, to press the Tears over the pulse point in his wrist. His blood beat against my hand, and he bent over me, kissed me before anyone noticed what was happening.

  Someone said, "Jesus, Riley, don't touch her!"

  Hands grabbed Riley, tore him from my lips, my hands. I reached for him, sitting up, screaming, "No!" I started off the table to go to one of them, when another detective grabbed my arms, held me sitting on the table's edge. He stared down at his hands as if he'd burned them against my bare arms. He said, softly, "Oh, my God."

  Just before he bent and kissed me, he yelled, "Get some women officers in here." I learned later that this medium-build, slightly balding man with the strong hands and the muscled body was Lieutenant Peterson. They had to handcuff him before they could carry him out of the room.

  I was buried under a mound of female officers until I couldn't move. A couple of the female officers had the same trouble that the men had, just as at least one of the men had had no problem not manhandling me. Nothing like being outed at work!

  They got Jeremy back in to redo the warding. I calmed, eventually, but I was in no shape to talk to anyone. Jeremy assured me that he'd talk to narcotics for me, though he was pretty sure that the officers who had been in the room with me would be persuasive on the dangers of Branwyn's Tears.

  Roane was waiting for me, a pair of surgical gloves on his hands so he could touch me, a jacket to throw over my head to keep people from recognizing me. The police took us out the back way. So far the media didn't seem to know that I'd finally surfaced and under what circumstances. But someone at the police station or on the ambulance would talk. They might do it for money, they might do it by accident, but the media would find out. It was only a matter of time. A race to see which hounds would find me first: the tabloids or the Queen's Guard. If I'd been well, I'd have gotten in my car and driven out of state that night or caught the first plane to anywhere. But Roane took me to his apartment because it was closer than mine. I didn't care where we went as long as there was a shower. If I didn't get my body free of the Tears or have sex soon, I was going to lose my mind. I was voting for a shower. What I didn't realize until too late was that Roane was voting for sex.

  Chapter 7

  THE FRONT PART OF MY BRAIN KNEW I SHOULD HAVE HAD ROANE TAKE ME to my car. There was a packet taped under the driver's seat with money, a new identity complete with a driver's licen
se and credit cards. I'd always planned on simply driving out of the city or to the airport and taking the first plane that caught my fancy. It was a good plan. The police would be contacting the embassy by now, and before dawn my aunt would know where I was, who I was, and what I'd been doing for three years.

  The primitive rear of my brain wanted to jump Roane while he was driving eighty on the freeway. My skin felt large and swollen with need. I actually sat on my hands in the car so I wouldn't touch him. The last thing we needed was for me to contaminate him with the Tears. At least one of us needed to be sane tonight, and until I had a shower, it wasn't going to be me.

  I mounted the stairs to Roane's apartment, hugging myself, fingers digging into my arms hard enough to leave nail marks. It was all that kept me from touching Roane as he moved up the stairs just ahead of me.

  He left the door open behind him, and I followed him into the room. He stood in the center of the large open space. Even in the dark the room was strangely bright, the white walls gleaming in the moonlight. Roane stood a dark figure in the midst of all that silver gloaming. He stared out at the sea as he did every time we entered his apartment, stopped and stared out the bank of windows that made up the west and south walls. The sea rolled out and out from the windows in a gleaming, rushing spill of silver and dark, with a rim of white foam riding like an edge of lace as the waves spilled toward the shore.

  I would always be second in Roane's heart because his love belonged to his first mistress-the sea. He would mourn her loss when I was just dust in a grave. There was a loneliness to that knowledge. The same loneliness I'd felt at court, watching the sidhe squabble about insults that occurred a hundred years before I was born, and that the sidhe would still be quarreling about a hundred years after I died. Bitter, a little, but mostly just very aware that I was an outsider. I was sidhe so I couldn't be human, and I was mortal so I couldn't be sidhe. Neither fish nor fowl.

  Even feeling isolated, left out, my gaze slid to the bed. It was a mound of white sheets and scattered pillows-Roane had stripped it but had only done a haphazard job of remaking it. If the sheets were clean, he never understood the reason for getting the wrinkles out. I had a sudden image of him naked against those white sheets. The vision was so sharp that it hurt, tightening my stomach, twisting lower things, until it was hard to breathe. I leaned against the closed door until I could move, then straightened. I would not be controlled by chemicals and magic. I was sidhe, a weak, lesser sidhe, but that didn't change that I was the height of all we and men called magical. I wasn't some human peasant with my first taste of faerie. I was a princess of the sidhe, and I would, by Goddess, act like it.

  I locked the door behind me, and even the sound of the lock going home didn't make Roane turn. He would commune with his view until he was ready for me. I didn't have the patience for it tonight. I walked past him through the darkened room to the bathroom. I turned the bathroom light on and was left blinking in the brightness. The bathroom was tiny, barely room for the stool, small sink, and the bathtub. The tub might have been original to the house because it was deep and claw-footed and very antique-looking. The shower curtain had been strung on a rail above the tub. The curtain had seals from all over the world on it, with their common names in print by each image. I'd ordered it from one of those catalogs that you always seem to get when you have a background in biology, found it in among the animal-motif T-shirts, candles shaped like animals, books about trips to the Arctic Circle and summers spent watching wolves in remote places. Roane had loved the curtain, and I'd loved giving it to him. I loved having sex in the shower surrounded by my gift for him.

  I had a sudden image of his body wet and naked, the feel of his skin slick with soap. I cursed softly and flung the curtain aside. I turned the water on so it would get warm. I needed the Tears off of me before I did something regrettable. I would be safe tonight. No one would be able to show up on my doorstep until tomorrow at the earliest. I could take Roane, fill my hands with the silk of his skin, coat my body in the sweet scented closeness of his body. Who would it hurt?

  It was the Tears talking, not me. I needed tonight for my head start if I was to get out of town. The police wouldn't like me leaving town, but the cops wouldn't kill me, and my family would. Hell, California wasn't even a death penalty state.

  The dress was ripped enough that I tried to pull the sleeves down over my shoulders like a jacket, but the zipper still held it in place. The front of the dress was soaked thick and heavy with the oil. I'd never known anyone to waste so much of something that even the sidhe considered so valuable. But if I'd died with Alistair Norton, then maybe the sidhe wizard was hoping that no one would know what Branwyn's Tears were. The sidhe were very snobbish about what the lesser fey did and did not know. He, she, or they might have thought with me dead, they'd be safe.

  The sidhe, whoever they were, had given Branwyn's Tears to a mortal to be used against other fey. It was punishable by eternal torture. There are a few downsides to being immortal. One of the biggest is that punishment can last a very, very long time.

  Of course, so can pleasure. I closed my eyes as if that would chase away the images that came flooding back. It wasn't Roane I was thinking of. It was Griffin. He'd been my fiance for seven years. If we'd managed to get with child, we'd have been wife and husband. But there had been no child, and in the end there had been only pain. He'd betrayed me with other sidhe women, and when I had the bad taste to protest, he'd told me he was tired of being with a half-mortal. He wanted the real thing, not a pale imitation. I could still hear the words stinging in my ears, but it was his golden flesh I saw behind my eyes, his copper hair spilled across my body, the way candlelight glistened along the shining length of him. I hadn't thought about him in years, and now I could taste him on my lips.

  For this one night while the oil lasted, it could make a lesser fey, or a human, sidhe. They would shine with our power and give and take pleasure as one of us. It was a great gift, but like most gifts of faerie it was a double-edged one. Because the human or fey would spend the rest of their life longing for that power, that touch. A human could waste and die from lack of it. Roane was a fey without his magic, without his sealskin. He had no magic of his own to protect him from what the Tears could do to him.

  I'd known how much I missed the touch of another sidhe, but until this moment I hadn't realized how much. If Griffin had been in the other room, I'd have gone to him. I might have driven a knife through his heart in the morning, but tonight, I'd have gone to him.

  I heard Roane in the doorway behind me but didn't turn. I didn't want to see him standing there. I wasn't sure my abused strength of will could take it. The front of the dress was ripped, ruined, but I still couldn't get the zipper myself. "Could you, please, unzip me?" My voice sounded strangled as if the words had to be pulled from my lips. I think because what I wanted to say was, "Take me, you rowdy beast," but that lacked a certain dignity and Roane deserved better than to be left craving something he could never touch again. I could drop my glamour and sleep with him after this night, but every night he touched me in true form would only draw the addiction tighter.

  He unzipped me, hands moving up to help slide the dress from my shoulders. I jerked away from him. "My skin is soaked with the Tears. Don't touch me."

  "Even with the gloves on?" he asked.

  I'd forgotten about the surgical gloves. "No, I guess with the gloves you'll be safe enough."

  He lifted the cloth off my shoulders, slowly, carefully, as if he were afraid to touch me. I slipped my arms out, but the cloth was so thick with oil that the dress wouldn't slide. It clung to me like a thick, heavy hand, sucking against my skin as I peeled it down my body. Roane helped me pull the wet cloth over my hips, kneeling so I could step out of it. I was unsteady on the high heels and cursed softly that I hadn't taken them off sooner. I'd closed my eyes so I wouldn't see him as he helped me undress. I touched his shoulder to steady myself on the high heels and nearly fell anyway because
my hand touched bare skin.

  I opened my eyes and found him kneeling in front of me, nude except for the gloves. I stumbled back from him so violently that I ended up in the tub, on my ass, one hand held out in front of me to ward him off. I was sitting in about an inch of water and fumbled for the faucets to turn the water off. Though I might have been better off leaving it on and crawling under it.

  Roane was laughing. "I thought I'd get you unzipped before you noticed, but I didn't know you'd close your eyes." He stripped the gloves off using his teeth, my dress still in his arms. He plunged his naked hands into the oil-soaked cloth, hugged it against his bare chest.

  I was shaking my head over and over. "You don't know what you're doing, Roane."

  He looked at me over the tub edge, and there was nothing innocent in his big brown eyes. "For tonight I can be sidhe for you."

  I sat in the tub like I was about to take a shower in my underwear, and tried to sound reasonable. All the blood seemed to have left my brain and gathered in other places. It made it hard to think. "I can't do glamour tonight, Roane."

  "I don't want you to do glamour. I want to be with you, Merry. No masks. No illusions."

  "Without your own magic, you'll be like a human. You won't be able to protect yourself from the charm. You'll be

  "I won't wither and die for want of sidhe flesh, Merry. I may have lost my magic, but I am immortal."

  "You may not die, Roane, but forever is a long time to want what you cannot have."

  "I know what I want," he said.

  I started to open my mouth, to tell him at least part of the truth, part of the reason that I had to clean myself off and get out of town. But he stood up, and my voice died in my throat. I couldn't breathe, let alone talk. All I could do was stare.

  He wadded the dress in his hands so tight that the muscles in his arms strained with the movement. Oil squeezed out of the cloth, gliding in slow lines from his chest, across the flat smoothness of his stomach, trailing ever lower. He was already smooth and hard, but when the oil slid over him, his breath caught in a sharp hiss. He ran one hand down his stomach, spreading the oil in a gleaming sheet across the pale perfection of his skin. I should have told him to stop, should have screamed for help, but I watched his hand move lower, until he cupped himself, slid the oil over the hardness of himself. His head threw back, eyes closed, and words tore in a loud gasp from his strained throat. "Oh, Gods."