Her hips rocked against him. “Now.” He stopped teasing, sucked greedily instead until she moaned. “Marus, now—”
He let her go, but only so he could grasp her hips tightly and position her over him. Candlelight played over her skin, and with her shirt open he saw scars he hadn’t expected, old marks on the skin he’d caressed. But it didn’t matter, not when she looked into his eyes, her hair tumbling down over her shoulders. Not when the head of his cock just touched her, barely entering her hot, yielding flesh, and her hands tightened on his shoulders as she lowered herself onto him.
Nothing between them now, nothing held back, nothing but her body opening to him, accepting him, possessing him even as he claimed her completely. She sank onto him until he was seated fully in her, the muscles locked in his throat and chest from holding back. Then she rose, and that time when she fell, he met her, pushing up, thrusting so deep a shudder of sensation went through her. They moved together, in, out, wet flesh sliding against rigid heat, faster and harder until everything clenched close around him and he came with her, a hoarse shout torn from his throat as he shuddered, spilling hot and wet and deep inside her.
She collapsed, and Marus broke her fall, catching her and lowering her to him. Her breasts moved against his chest, slick with their mingled sweat, her thighs trembling as he eased out from between them. He turned over just enough to get her under him while still keeping her in his arms, so he could look down into her face when her eyes opened, hazy with the aftermath of her pleasure.
She reached up to touch his face, cupping his cheek where the bruise was now little more than a shadow under the skin. He’d been touched more times than he could count, but never so tenderly, and he turned his head to press a kiss into her palm.
“We should get dressed,” she whispered, sounding reluctant but resigned. Marus got to his feet and gave her a hand to draw her up.
“I always thought our eyes were better than human ones,” he said.
She frowned. “Why?”
“Well, ours aren’t so vulnerable. Human eyes can be blinded, can’t they? Ours? Push a knife into mud and see what happens.”
“Why did you change your mind? You said you—”
She stopped and grabbed her ruined shirt off the floor with one hand, her rifle with the other. “Someone’s at the gate.”
Chapter Eleven
Kat slipped out with her rifle, because if Ractane could use his daughters to win his battles, she sure as hell wouldn’t put it past him to send people to the gate. In the dark, she couldn’t see who they were, but when a night-lantern flashed thrice, she hurried forward as quietly as she could. A pony snorted, harness jingling as it shook its head. She slid to one side of the gate and tapped thrice on it.
“It’s me,” Janice called out, and Kat sighed with relief as she signaled Marus forward. Janice opened the other panels on her lantern. Ranj and another of the town guard flanked her, guns drawn.
Mounted on a fourth pony was the girl. She wore a hand-me-down blue dress that almost fitted her, and the tangles were washed out of her hair, but she sat rigidly and gripped the reins as if the pony was picking its way along a mountain ledge. If Kat had seen any child that age so clearly scared, she would have issued a weapon and taught the child how to use it.
Marus joined them, and Janice gave him one of her glacial smiles. “Highness, I’m glad to see you’re recovering.” Ranj held her pony’s reins as she dismounted. “After speaking to your niece, I think we have a means of defeating Ractane.”
Marus looked more surprised by the mention of a niece than the rest of the announcement, and Kat slung her rifle back over her shoulder. “How?”
“The same way the two of you destroyed the linx,” Janice said, far too cheerfully for Kat’s comfort.
“We can split Ractane in half?” she asked.
Janice gave her an exasperated look. “No, I mean showing him what he needs, just as you gave the linx a morsel of food and then dangled a bigger, tastier meal just out of reach.”
Bigger, tastier…never mind. “What does Ractane need except power?”
Marus shrugged. “With enough of that, he won’t need anything else.”
“My point is, we don’t have any to give him,” Kat said. “Unless we offer to be his slaves, and that’s not what he’s after. He wants you dead.”
“Not quite,” Janice said. “He wants your power, and then he wants you dead.”
“Yes, he’s got his priorities straight.” Mud rippled as though Marus had just rolled his eyes. “Well, he has my power.”
“If he did, why would he send her here?” Janice asked.
Kat supposed Ractane had wanted to make doubly certain Marus wasn’t a threat, and had therefore dispatched two daughters rather than one, but…no, think like a Prince. If she’d gone to all that trouble to breed voids, would she let two of them go if one sufficed? Of course not.
“What’s your name?” Marus said to the girl.
She gave him a sideways look. “I don’t want the one he gave me.”
“Very well, uh, niece. What do you make of our situation?”
She twisted the reins as if trying to wear them away, and her voice was jerky when she answered. “Power is passed down in blood or seed. He told me that. So if one of—one of my sisters has your power, why would she go back to him? I wouldn’t.”
Kat understood. “Because he’d kill her, or at least bleed her, to take that power into himself. Of course she wouldn’t go back. Why should she, when she might have earth power of her own now?”
Marus’s smile was ironic. “You think like a Princess. Good for you.”
Janice nodded. “Ractane doesn’t know for certain that you’ve lost your power, Highness, because the woman who took it never went back to him. What if he believed your niece here had stolen it instead?”
Use her as bait, Kat realized. “He’d kill her.”
“But he would take that power first,” Marus said softly. “He wouldn’t allow it to be wasted.”
“Yes.” Janice glanced at Ranj, and he reached into a saddlebag, while the other guard unslung his rifle. “That’s the only chance we have.”
“Just a moment.” Marus held up a hand, as much in authority as if he’d been stronger than the Queen. “Kat, I need a word with you.”
Wondering what this was about, she went back inside the broken gate with him, glancing over her shoulder as Ranj helped the girl to dismount. Marus stopped and drew her close enough to whisper in her ear.
“How are uncles supposed to treat nieces?” he asked.
She pulled back, disbelieving. “That’s what you wanted to ask me?”
“Yes. She’s my niece. She could die tonight along with the rest of us, and I don’t know what to say to her.” Kat stared at him, and he said, “Never mind, I’ll ask Captain Blake.”
He started to turn around, and she grabbed his arm, pulling him back so hard he would have collided with her if he hadn’t caught himself. She put her other hand on his shoulder and leaned in close.
“Pretend she’s just another little girl from the town,” she said quietly, “and you had to do something nice for her.”
When they went back, Janice told them the plan and Kat modified it, as always happened. Marus’s part worried her more than she dared show—he had to carry a rifle too, but he couldn’t shoot worth a damn, his arm still hadn’t fully healed from the stab wound, and he had a disturbing tendency to do the unexpected.
Oh, admit it, she thought angrily. She didn’t want him to be hurt. All her life she’d kept herself safe from emotional entanglements, hadn’t lost her heart to anyone, but somehow a proud and frustrating and unpredictable Prince had got past every lock. A Prince who would be even more alien if he regained his power. And yet she had no choice about this.
Ranj tied the reins of the girl’s pony to his sadd
le horn, and Janice lightly touched one thin, blue-covered shoulder before she remounted. “Good luck,” she said and gave the pony her heels. With her guards on either side, she was gone, lost in the darkness. Holding the lantern they’d left with her, the girl stood there unmoving, as if determined not to look back.
“You’d better hide,” she said to Kat. “He’s close.”
Marus started to turn, the borrowed rifle swinging in one hand, then paused. “Once this is over, you’re welcome to visit,” he said casually. “I could use some help with the repairs, and you can feed the birds that fly into the tower.”
“I’ll teach you how to shoot,” Kat added, and the girl’s startled expression gave way to a spark in her eyes. She didn’t speak or even smile, just gave a tiny nod of her head, so slight a response that Kat wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t been standing so close. Then all but one panel of the lantern shut. The girl turned and began to pick her way carefully down the hill.
* * *
From his hiding place low on the hillside, Marus raised his head. The top of the tower was in sight over the rocks above him.
He shifted the lumpy package of three sticks of dynamite, tucking it securely into his shirt. Just behind him, the hillside dropped away into a gully, where collected rainwater showed the moon.
The reflection tremored and broke, glimmers scattering. Even if he hadn’t felt subsurface vibrations through the rock which braced him, he would have known a Prince was on the way.
A sound in the distance grew louder—a thick sludging gush, heavy and viscous against the ground. Marus didn’t need to look up to know a dark river poured itself through the foothills and was gathering speed. His heart thudding, he climbed a little higher until he saw the whole tower. Candles and lanterns turned it to a lighthouse, glowing defiance.
If he remembered Ractane correctly, his brother had never been able to resist a challenge.
The oncoming surge hit the tower like a battering ram. In the moment before impact, Ractane must have hardened to granite, because the tower flew apart, chunks of stone spewing in all directions. The force of it cracked Ractane’s body, but he turned to molten rock that descended on the rest of the outpost, smashing windows, crushing the stable to splinters. Marus’s heart lurched. The outpost had been the worst place he’d ever lived in, but it had belonged to him.
Dust and steam rose in a cloud from the remains of the outpost, but those dissipated as Ractane changed to mud. With a slow gurgle, the mud flowed off the ruins and came together, turning solid and forming a huge mound of dark featureless earth, a pillar five times the height of a man.
Marus dropped, crouching to make himself smaller. He knew why Ractane had done that—to have a better view of the surrounding land. Kat was stationed on the opposite side of the hill, and he hoped desperately that she’d found a safe hiding place.
“My Prince!” a high voice called out.
That might have gone unheard during Ractane’s attack, but now it sliced through the silence—and it came from the foot of the hill, where the trail led back to the town. The mound of earth turned to a slurry before it hit the ground. Marus moved fast as well, climbing the side of the hill as his brother flowed across the top of it. One good thing, he thought grimly, about the Princes being so large and powerful in earth form was that they made enough noise to drown the sound of a human hurrying through the shadows.
And of course, Ractane was too intent on his daughter’s voice to look behind him.
Marus gained the level ground. Trying to move as silently as possible, he ran past chunks of broken rock and smashed timbers. A burning splash of spilled oil stood out brightly, and he paused to pick up a split of wood that had caught fire from it. The gate was gone, torn apart as Ractane had flowed out, and a wide muddy swath led to the top of the trail where Ractane reared up, a wave held motionless in the instant before it could break.
Marus could see nothing past his brother’s bulk, but he knew the girl waited at the foot of the hill, wearing nothing but a ragged shift that didn’t hide her childishly undeveloped body—and incidentally, showed she didn’t carry a weapon. Except for the void within her.
“He ran,” she called out. “But I had him first.”
Marus knew Ractane would attack her now; he had never wanted rivals, whether they were brothers or daughters, and he’d had only one purpose in begetting children. If he drained what the girl had absorbed—
The slurry dropped to plunge down. And an instant later a sharp crack rang out as a rifle fired. There was no sound from the girl, but a deep subsurface tremor shook the hill, the roar of an enraged Earthborn Prince.
Marus ran forward, keeping his head low. The burning length of wood flickered, but didn’t go out. His borrowed rifle bounced against his back. He came to a panting halt behind the huge boulder at the top of the trail and glanced out from behind it.
A smooth stone wall twenty feet high now stood at the base of the hill. No sign of the girl, so she had to be behind that, and Marus bit back a grin. Ractane needed to be in flesh form to drain her blood, and yet the instinctive response of any Prince to an attack was to stay earth, whether that took the shape of a wall or a boiling lava flow.
But there were some things which could affect a Prince in that form, and he had one of them. He yanked the bundle of dynamite out of his shirt.
The stubby cylinders were stuffed heavy with powder. Marus wedged them deep into a crack in the boulder, their fuse dangling outside, and touched the burning split of wood to it.
The fuse was paper wrapped around more powder and coated in wax, so it would burn even if the boulder rolled over on it. It caught, and the flame streaked up it faster than he had expected. Sparks flew into the air. He threw his weight against the boulder, his heels digging into the ground as he pushed with all his strength.
If he hadn’t positioned the boulder when he’d first arrived in the outpost, and dug away enough of the earth around it, it might never have moved. Now it shifted—and rolled. Marus nearly went with it, and caught himself just in time. The boulder plunged down towards Ractane, loosening a volley of other rocks with it, and Marus could only hope the resulting cloud of dislodged earth hid the explosives.
The small landslide slammed into the stone wall and detonated simultaneously. An earsplitting roar shook the world. Stone shattered. Marus was so close to the blast that it knocked him flat, and superheated air rolled overhead as he struggled back to his knees.
At first nothing was visible through the smoke, but then the wind picked up, cool against the sweat on his skin. He saw the destruction below. Huge broken chunks of hot rock—and of Ractane—were scattered over an area fifty feet wide, still giving off wisps of smoke.
And in their midst, a filthy but unhurt figure dragged herself out of a pit that had been sunk around her. She shook her head in a dazed way.
Marus leaped down the hillside. Loose rocks gave way beneath him, but he kept moving, shifting his weight an instant before his previous footholds collapsed. Ractane moved too, the chunks of rock liquefying in moments. They turned to scorching lava and began to flow back together.
Marus paused less than a dozen feet from the base of the hill, unslung the rifle and jammed the stock against his shoulder as he’d seen Kat do, what felt like years ago. He’d never fired a gun, but he curled his finger against the trigger—that looked convincing enough—and pointed the barrel at the girl. She went still.
“One drop closer and I’ll kill her!” he shouted.
Ractane froze—literally, as the lava hardened to a gleaming spread of obsidian. It surrounded the girl like a dark lake, and for a moment, none of them moved. Marus knew the last thing Ractane wanted was for the girl to die with her store of power wasted, which was why he’d instantly sunk the pit to protect her, but at the same time, Marus couldn’t reach her with his brother in the way. Breathing hard, he stared at her, wi
lling her to act.
“You won’t have me, Prince Marus,” she said to him, her voice thick with disgust. “You’ll never have me.”
Her arm whipped up. There was a sliver of obsidian in it, shining black in the moonlight, and she drew the shard across her throat.
Marus yelled inarticulately and dashed forward, but Ractane was faster. He melted into slurry, moving in a swift rushing arc across the ground, a river that curved in a tight hairpin bend. Part of his trailing edge, already hardening to shale, hit Marus and slammed him almost casually aside before Ractane surged on to the girl.
The push was the barest flick, the least of what an Earthborn Prince could do. It broke the arm Marus flung up, and sent him rolling over the hot, stone-covered ground. He fetched up facedown against a slab of rock. For a moment he could do nothing but lie there, curled in on himself; he’d never known anything could hurt so much. His arm felt as if something was trying to bite it off with blunt, acid-tipped teeth. He tasted blood and wondered if more bones had broken inside his chest.
He raised his head, mud and sweat slipping down the side of his face, and saw Ractane reach the girl’s body.
She twitched feebly, choking, and the mass of sludge loomed over her like the hood of a giant cobra before it collapsed in on itself. It drew together and reshaped itself into a body that seemed human, but was only half so. Ractane didn’t bother to look back at Marus as he knelt and scooped the girl into his arms. He bent his head over her to swallow her blood.
Her hand flashed up. Marus didn’t see the sliver of obsidian, but when Ractane shrieked, he knew the shard had struck home—and the girl was close enough to jerk up, her lips open.
Ractane staggered back. The girl sprawled flat. Her mouth was a hole in a red mask, her body shaking with the power she’d absorbed. Of course, it had that effect on someone mostly human. For a moment Marus forgot the pain, because now he saw why sex was a safer way to trick a Prince.
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