With a sigh of capitulation, Elle crouched on the floor facing away from Lili, who hated to watch this, closed her eyes, and whispered the “return ticket” incantation. Her stomach churned as organs shifted and bones and muscles enlarged; bile rose in her throat, and she was overtaken by violent trembling. The first dozen or so times she’d done this, as a youth, she’d vomited. She’d trained herself to master the Change Sickness by breathing deeply and steadily, but it was still an utterly wretched feeling.
Her skin stretched to fit the larger, more solid body, except for the breasts, which tightened up. The strangest sensation—but the most comforting—was that of her genital organs rearranging themselves into their male counterparts, especially the expansion of her nerve-packed clit into the heavy, less sensitive but far more familiar penis.
Elic rose slowly to his feet, holding on to the wall for support as he reacquainted himself with the altered center of gravity and the extra height. He reached through the opening of his robe to feel his cock and balls. As usual, he was already half erect from the internal pressure of his burgeoning cache of seminal fluid, both Jason’s and his own. He would be even hornier than usual until he emptied his poor, swollen vesicles, which could only happen through ejaculation in a human female.
“They’re still there,”Lili said with a chuckle. “They’re always still there, always the same size and shape, yet every time, the first thing you do is check to make sure you’ve gotten them back safe and sound.”
“If you were male,” he said as he massaged and rotated his shoulders, “you would understand.”
Elic cracked open the door to la Salle de Pré, a romantic Victorian-style bower with dark gothic furniture and wallpaper scattered with wild pansies, Queen Anne’s lace, and meadow sage, to find both bedside lamps turned on. It amused Elic that this particular guest room—a suite, actually, with a sitting room and bathroom—was where a self-styled “dazzling urbanite” like Isabel chose to stay when she was at Grotte Cachée.
“Déjà vu,” said Elic as they stood over the high four-post bed with its lacy white canopy and crocheted bedspread, which had clearly not been slept in that evening. “Doesn’t anyone sleep any—”
The door to the bathroom opened and Isabel walked out wrapped in a towel, scrubbing her wet hair with another one. It hung over her face, so she didn’t realize Elic and Lili were there until he said her name.
She screamed and dropped the towel, backing up frantically. Her damp, crazily tousled hair made her panic look almost cartoonish.
“Shh, Isabel. Shh.” Elic seized her wrists and closed a hand over her mouth, hoping she hadn’t awakened anyone.
There came a muffled exclamation from behind his hand that sounded like “What the fuck?”
“It’s all right, Isabel,”Lili assured her in a soothing tone. “It’s just us.”
Isabel relaxed a bit as she looked back and forth between them, but her expression was one of utter bewilderment. Lili gave Elic a pointed look, as if to say What are you waiting for?
Removing his hand from Isabel’s mouth, Elic touched her forehead and whispered the Old Norse words that would render her compliant and turn her memory of this night into a dream. “Láta, liggia.”
“What’s that?” Isabel asked. “What are you saying? What does that mean?”
Elic and Lili exchanged a look. The liggia spiall should have made her instantly tranquil, unquestioning, malleable. It always worked on the first try.
Always.
“Is that a spell?” Isabel asked. “Oh, my God, tell me that’s not one of your sex spells.”
Gripping her upper arm, Elic pressed a hand to her forehead and tried a different but similar spiall. “Hlýðni . . .”
She wrenched away from him and backed up into the bathroom, hands raised as if to ward off his Follet sorcery. “You have got to be kidding,” she said, gaping at them. “I mean, you have got to be fucking kidding me.”
He took a step toward her, saying “Isabel—”
“Get the fuck away from me,” she said, grabbing a can of hairspray off the vanity and aiming it at him. “I’ll use this. I’ll spray it right in your eyes.”
“Isabel, have you been crying?” Lili asked.
Elic took a closer look at Isabel, seeing the swollen eyes and shiny red nose. “She has been crying.”
“No I haven’t,” Isabel said, but he could hear it in her voice now, that telltale damp nasality.
“Is it your father?” Lili asked.
“No, it’s . . . it’s nothing.”
Lili said, “It’s Adrien Morel, isn’t it?”
Isabel looked at her sharply.
“You shouldn’t be letting him get to you like this,” said Lili, rubbing Isabel’s arm, “especially given what you’re going through with your father right now. Human beings are complicated. Sometimes there’s just no telling why they do what they do or feel what they feel. He probably thinks he has some reason for not liking you, but—”
“Wait. What?”
“We know,” Elic said. “We can see how he acts with you, how he avoids you.”
“Right,” Isabel said with a bitter little chuckle. “Of course. Listen, I haven’t been crying ’cause Adrien doesn’t like me.”
“Then what’s the matter?” Elic asked.
“What’s the matter?” Isabel repeated. “As in, what’s the matter with me?”
“Well . . .”
“I’m not the one trying to use fucking hoo-doo voodoo to get in the pants of someone you have absolutely no business messing around with that way,” she said, an edge of hysteria in voice. “Geez Louise, what’s wrong with you people? Oh, wait. You’re not people. That’s what’s wrong with you. You’re X-rated elves and fairies—sorry, gods and goddesses—who have to get your rocks off twenty-four-seven or you shrivel up and die, but never fear, you get your fuckmates delivered hot and fresh right to your door, and you don’t even have to fucking date, which isn’t remotely fucking fair. You just hole up here fucking and sucking, sucking and fucking. The fucking Freak Family Robinson.”
She slammed the can of hairspray down, her whole face red now, not just her eyes and nose.
“Not fairies,” Elic said.
“What?” Isabel said.
“None of us is a fairy. Fairies aren’t even that into sex.”
“Well, the rusalki,” Lili said.
“The rusalki aren’t really fairies,” Elic said. “They’re more like psychopathic, sex-crazed water nymphs.”
“What are nymphs but fairies?” Lili asked.
“Can I please get out of this bathroom?” Isabel said.
“Sorry,” Elic said when he realized he and Lili had been blocking the door.
They stepped aside so that Isabel could stalk into her bedroom, her palms pressed to her forehead. “I cannot fucking believe you were trying to fuck me.”
“Your father’s right,” Elic said. “You really do swear like a cutter.”
“I’m trying to do better,” Isabel said as she sank wearily into an ornately carved throne chair, “but my God, when you step out of the shower and find a couple of supernatural sex hounds lying in wait for you . . .”
“I understand how you feel,” Lili told her, “but you should know that we didn’t come here for prurient motives.”
“Oh, like you have any other kind.”
“We came here to make you pregnant,” Elic said.
Isabel cocked her head, narrowing her eyes at him.
Shooting Elic that look that said he was being his usual goonlike masculine self, Lili explained their scheme to extract Jason MacKenna’s superior DNA and use it to impregnate Isabel with a gifted child.
“You were trying to make me pregnant?” Isabel said.
“That’s what I said,” replied Elic, who sometimes just didn’t get this whole female beating-about-the-bush thing.
Isabel shook her head, smiling as if at some private joke. “Um . . . hate to tell you, guys, but your timing could not possibly have
been any worse.”
“It doesn’t matter where you are in your cycle,” Lili said. “The zeru tweaks your hormones and triggers the release of an egg, so your chances of conceiving are actually excellent.”
“She’s about to ovulate anyway,” Elic said.
“Wait—how do you know that?” Isabel asked.
He tapped his nose. “Pheromones.”
“Okay, eeeuw. So you were just gonna pull the old abracadabra and do the deed while I was in some kind of trance or whatever? I know you guys mean well, but frankly, I’m really glad the spell didn’t work. Are some people, like, immune to that shit? That stuff,” she corrected. “I really am trying.”
Lili said, “You don’t know what it means when a Follet’s enchantment doesn’t work on a human?”
Isabel shrugged. “Dad has filled me in on some of this stuff, and I’ve read the first volume of Adrien’s Secret History, but that was just about Brantigern Anextlo—what’s-his-name, and the Gallic Wars and all that. Why? What does it mean?”
It meant that Isabel was gifted. She might not realize it, but it was indisputable. The only humans who were resistant to enchantment by a Follet were those with the Gift.
Lili looked to Elic as if to say What do we tell her? Isabel must know, having read Volume I of the Histoire Secrète de Grotte Cachée, in which Brantigern himself tackled this particular issue, that it took two gifted parents, not just one, to produce a gifted child. Isabel’s mother had the Gift, but Emmett did not. Elic knew this with absolute assurance, having demonstrated some spells on him at his request when he first took over the administration of Grotte Cachée.
If they were to reveal Isabel’s giftedness to her, she would know that Emmett Archer, whom she had grown up calling “Dad,” and whom she was in the process of losing, wasn’t actually her father.
“Some humans are not susceptible to our incantations,” Lili said, her little shrug suggesting that the reason for this was a mystery, when it was anything but. “You, er, probably shouldn’t mention this—our trying to put a spell on you, and so forth—to your father. He might find it . . . disconcerting.”
“He’s going through enough,” Isabel said. “He doesn’t need to know about this.”
Elic said,“You know, even though we can’t use the liggia spiall on you, I can still give you a baby, if you really want one.”
“A gifted baby,” Lili added.
“Um, yeah, well, when I said your timing was bad, I didn’t really mean . . . Well, it’s not about my cycle. This just isn’t the right time. Tell you what. If I reach the point where I’m, like, staring menopause in the face and I still haven’t managed to get one in the oven, I’ll take you up on the offer.”
“A rain check,” Elic said. “You got it.”
As he and Lili were walking back down the hall after taking their leave of Isabel, Elic said, “Do you think Emmett knows?”
Shaking her head, Lili said, “Not from the way he was talking about Madeleine at lunch today. He was talking about that weekend in ’seventy-two when she came here with those friends of hers—you remember.”
Elic smiled. “Inigo’s bed. We painted that guitar on you, and there were a couple of art students, that little ballerina . . . Oh, and Hitch. Of course I remember.”
“Well, apparently Madeleine and Emmett started seeing each other right after they got back to London, and Isabel was born nine months later. He called Madeleine a ‘free spirit,’ implying that they started sleeping together pretty much immediately. Two months later, she told him she was pregnant and they were married.”
“Except the baby wasn’t his. Do you suppose she ever told him the truth?” Elic asked.
“It didn’t sound that way. She wouldn’t be the only woman who ever pulled that one on an unsuspecting, besotted boyfriend.”
“Thank God I’m not human. Way too much melodrama and not enough screwing. Speaking of which . . .” Elic cupped his aching balls with an expression of mock agony.
“On to Plan B,” Lili said.
“Okay, Elic, let me get this straight,” said Grace Garvey, sitting up in bed in a white “wifebeater” tank, her stubby little bleached dreadlocks pulled back by a stretchy headband. “You’re offering to impregnate me with blond, blue-eyed, smart-ass DNA to match Laura’s so that we can have the half Barbadian, half Aryan, café au lait lambkin of our dreams and live happily ever after.”
“Well, green-eyed,” said Elic, picturing Jason.
“But you have blue eyes,” Grace said.
“I keep telling him they’re blue.” Lili, sitting next to Elic at the foot of Grace’s bed, shot him a look. “He keeps insisting they’re sea green.”
“I don’t see a turkey baster sticking out of the pocket of that robe,” Grace told Elic.
“Ah. Yes, well . . . I’m afraid it won’t really work that way.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“I can’t, you know”—he gestured vaguely in the area of his crotch—“in an inanimate object.”
In response to Grace’s skeptically cocked eyebrow, Lili said, “No, it’s true. He can’t even come from oral sex, or if I . . .” She stroked her fist back and forth. “He’s all about the vagina.”
Not that he’d go the turkey baster route even if he could. Grace’s scrubbed-clean, just-awakened face had the quirky prettiness of a couture fashion model. She had just the right amount of muscle shaping her arms, and perfect little breasts that he couldn’t wait to taste.
Grace nodded to Lili. “And you’re here because . . . ?”
“Oh. Well . . . We thought perhaps because you’re, you know, not really that into men . . .”
With a little laugh, Grace said, “There’s an understatement. You thought I’d be more into it with you here to, er . . . rev up the old libido, eh?”
Lili gave Grace her most deliciously seductive smile. “Something like that.”
Grace, although a prime arkhutu—smart, beautiful, and maternal—wasn’t remotely the sure thing, in terms of seduction, that Jason had been. In cases where a human’s cooperation in the transfert de sperme wasn’t a given, Elic would usually resort to his liggia spiall—unless the use of enchantment was likely to create more problems than it solved. In Grace’s case, she would be utterly flummoxed upon finding herself pregnant, given that she didn’t even sleep with men. Far from being thrilled, she might conclude, based upon her “dream” of having had sex with Elic, that she’d been the victim of a date rape drug, in which case she was likely to terminate the pregnancy. She might even report the incident to the authorities, which could be disastrous for him. That left seduction as Elic’s only practical option, with Lili there to sweeten the deal, as it were.
“I thought you two were an item,” Grace said.
“We’re not exclusive,” Lili responded.
“And you’re what—bi?”
“More or less.” Actually, discounting Elle, Lili wasn’t that interested in making love to other women—unless she knew it would excite Elic or her gabru du jour, in which case she approached it with cheerful enthusiasm. Elic, when he was Elle, found both men and women intensely arousing. In his primary male persona, it was strictly women, since that was the only way he could climax. Inigo preferred women, “but my cock isn’t always so particular,” and Darius would absorb the desires of any human who touched him.
“Yeah, well, not only is this whole thing just a wee bit mad,” Grace said, “I’m afraid it’s the wrong time of the month for me to conceive. I won’t be ovulating till . . .” She did some swift fingertip calculating. “. . . the twenty-second at the earliest.”
“That’s five days from now,” Lili said. “Sperm can stay alive that long.”
Grace said, “Yeah, but the longer the interval between sex and ovulation, the less likely it is that any sperm will actually fertilize the egg.”
Elic groaned inwardly. He had to pick a nurse.
Lili said, “From what you were telling us at lunch today about how hard
it is to find a man who’s interested in fathering a child—the right kind of man, anyway—I should think you’d want to take Elic up on his offer and see what happens.”
Grace cast him a speculative look.
“Have you ever made love to a man?” he asked.
“Oh, sure,” she said, “when I was young and stupid and didn’t realize the reason I liked girls was ’cause I liked girls. Last time was a good fifteen years ago.”
“So it’s almost like you’re a virgin,”Lili said. “Elic is wonderful with virgins.”
“I promise it will be good for you,” he said.
“It doesn’t have to be good,”she said. “All I care about is getting your little swimmers where they belong.”
“So, you’ll do it?” Lili said.
“With him,” Grace said. “You’ve got to go.”
“Oh.”
“It’s Laura,” Grace explained. “If I come home and tell her I bonked a tall, blond Viking in the hopes of having a baby with some resemblance to her, well, it might give her pause, but she’ll be okay with it—more than okay if I actually end up pregnant. But if I tell her you were there, keeping the furnace stoked . . .” She appraised Lili with a wistfully lustful expression. “Well, that would be cheating with another woman, and we don’t do that. And we don’t lie to each other, either, so I’m afraid it’s not to be, but don’t think I don’t appreciate the offer.”
After Lili had kissed Elic goodbye and left, he rose and said, “Would you like me to turn off the light?”
“Yes. No.” She thought about it, holding the blanket in front of her chest. “Yes.”
He turned it off, slipped his robe to the floor, and climbed under the covers. Without touching her yet, so as to let her get used to his presence next to her, he said, “I know you don’t care about it being good for you—you probably don’t even want it to be good for you—but with your knowledge of reproductive physiology, I’m sure you’re aware that conception is more likely if the woman climaxes at about the same time as the man.”
Her response was a long sigh.
“And of course,” he continued, lightly stroking her arm, “it will facilitate penetration if you’re wet.”
Whispers of the Flesh Page 22
