Dark Glitter

by C. M. Stunich

  How on earth did I know what both Irish and Cajun accents sounded like yet I didn't know my own name? This was insanity.

  “Yer opinion is noted, VP, but she needs help rebuilding 'er glamour and Caley is too watered-down to do that for her.” Reece's chest vibrated against my body as he spoke and I resisted the urge to lean in closer to him.

  So far, everything these people had said was truth, and a small part of my brain supplied the information I was looking for.

  They were fae. Fae couldn't lie.

  Not that they didn't, but they physically couldn't lie. Suddenly the careful way they were phrasing their sentences made more sense, like how Caley had told me that Arlo meant me no harm. Not that he wouldn't harm me.

  “Yeah, but I think you can at least let her shower alone, Reece,” Caley suggested, ruffling a hand through her short hair and yawning heavily again. “We have no idea what she's been through or how she ended up like this, and the last thing we need you doing is scaring her into taking off. Look, she's fucking terrified of you!”

  Oh.

  I was trembling, but not in fear. No, as soon as Reece scooped me into his arms and pressed my thin, frail body against his chest, the warmth and smell of him overwhelmed me. This woody citrus and spicy scent mixed with the smell of sweat, a masculine concoction that made my chest feel tight and … other things.

  I wet my lips as the bearded man—Donal—stepped in front of Reece and gave him a look that could cut.

  “You sassin' me again, boy?” he asked as I leaned my head against Reece's chest and closed my eyes. The rapid thump bass beat of his heart soothed my own racing pulse and I sighed, laying a hand against the flatness of his pecs beneath his dark t-shirt. “Don't you go gettin' a big head because your daddy's the president. You have superior officers to answer to, brother.”

  Donal paused his rant for a moment and when I cracked my eyes, I saw he was looking right at me. With a sigh, he waved his hand dismissively.

  “Fine. Take 'er upstairs then but wipe that smirk off your damn face.”

  Reece made a low growl in his throat that I don't think he meant for anyone to hear, but I felt it. It vibrated through my cheekbones and into my teeth. It made me wonder for a brief moment what that growl would taste like if I were to put my mouth to his.

  “Reece?” a voice asked from my right. I heard the distinctive sound of want in the flowery, feminine words. Glancing over, I found a girl with glimmering gold skin and translucent wings, like a dragonfly's. Pixie, my brain supplied, yet another tidbit of information that made no sense in its sudden reveal. It was like my mind was a puzzle, and I was desperately collecting the pieces.

  Remembering my own name would help substantially.

  “Goddamn you, Reece,” Donal said as the man in question turned, ignoring the pixie's multifaceted eyes and heading straight for a set of rough wooden steps against the far wall, the ones with no railing. “This is why you should stick to club whores.”

  I watched as the pixie girl came forward and lifted her lips in a snarl, revealing a row of sharp, gold teeth. It was clear her anger was directed not at Reece but at me.

  “Sorry about that, girl,” he told me as we ascended the stairs and I watched the pixie lunge forward, dropping the blanket she was holding and revealing the smooth gold lines of her naked body. Donal stopped her before she got very far, and then we were up the stairs and on the second floor. “I try to be frank with 'em, but they never listen—it's da magic. They can't help themselves, no.”

  Truth.

  The bright bells of honesty rang with each word that fell from this gruff man's lips. Without really knowing what I was doing, I lifted a finger and touched the rough, torn surface of a fingertip to Reece's mouth.

  Energy passed between us, like a kiss of lightning, drawing whatever it was that he had inside himself straight into me.

  I felt it hit me like a shockwave, coalescing around the iron in my side and attacking it like it had claws. A scream ripped raw and ragged from my damaged throat, sparking the awful realization of a broken memory.

  Iron burning my wrists, my ankles, my neck. Screaming but never being heard. Broken but never able to get whole. Pain, blood, darkness.

  “The hell are you doing, girl?!” Reece asked as the piece of iron fell from my side and clattered to the floor, blood staining my threadbare cotton dress, dripping across the leather toes of the large man's feet.

  When I lifted my head up and looked into his face, it was unrecognizable. Gone was the red-brown hair and short, scruffy beard, the skin teased to a warm brown from the sun … Instead, I was looking at someone else entirely.

  “You cracked my glamour, you,” he said, blinking in shock. “Oh, and a whole hell of a lot of somethin' else.”

  My tongue ran across my lips as a warm fire took over my lower belly, pooling between my thighs, making me ache. My nipples pebbled beneath my dress, so painfully tight that they made my breath catch.

  What are you? I wondered as my body was wracked with even more intense tremors, my eyes taking in Reece's new form. His hair was now bloodred and his skin, it was a soft, muted gold color. His smile, that was savage … savage and sex.

  I could remember sex—brief flashes here and there. I'd certainly had it, plenty of it, but it had been a while. It'd been a great many whiles.

  “You feel it, don't you, girl?” Reece whispered, his breath warm against my ear as he leaned in, the scent of tobacco and leather mixing with his own unique smell. “You just borrowed a bit of ol' Reece's magic.”

  He flashed a grin at me, his teeth white in the gently shimmering planes of his face. He didn't sparkle so much as he seemed to burn, like the sun. Oh the sun … I could hardly remember what that looked like.

  But the expression on Reece's face and the feeling inside of me … My body remembered that, even if my mind didn't.

  Coupling, heat, tongues and teeth, hands and fingers, cunts and cocks.

  “You're gonna need more than just a rebuild of dat glamour, girl.”

  I wet my lips again, but try as I might, I couldn't speak. Not yet. Instead, I cupped the sides of Reece's face and leaned in, pressing our mouths together. Heat was rolling over me, flames of lust that seemed to burn. The aching want I felt inside of me, it was almost painful.

  Our lips brushed slow and hot, tongues teasing before he pulled back and looked down at me, nestled there in his arms.

  “They woulda called me a dia gnéas back in the old country, you know? Before the famine drove all them Irish outta dere.” Reece moved down the hallway and kicked in a door at the end of it, letting us into a large bathroom with a clawfoot tub in the center. The floor was the same rough-hewn wood as the rest of the building, but burned into it were symbols, and as Reece and I walked over them, they glowed.

  “That's a god of sex, in case you weren't caught up on your Gaelic. Dieu du sexe if we're speaking French.” Reece paused next to the tub, still looking at me as I squirmed with need and wet my lips. I didn't much care about the blood draining from my side either. Not that or anything else. Whatever I'd done by touching Reece, I felt this primal sexual need that had to be satisfied.

  Bending low, Reece laid me on the cold, scratched porcelain and then flashed another terrible, wicked grin.

  “Dress off, girl,” he told me, reaching down and curling warm fingers around my forearms, carefully avoiding the raw, bruised patches near my elbows. Reece lifted my arms above my head and then reached down, taking the ratty dress in his large hands, hands that shone like gold, etched with dark swirls that chased up the muscular curves of his own arms and beneath his shirtsleeves.

  I did what he asked because why not? I wanted him, naked and hard and on top of me. My breath caught as the scratchy fabric slid over my body and away, landing in a heap on the floor beside the tub.

  Reece stared down at me, his face a wild mask of gold and black, and then he stepped away, heeling the door shut and pressing his fingertips to the wall. Sigils, runes,
whatever they were, flared to life all across the faded, splintered wood walls, a match to the ones burning to life on the floor beneath the biker's feet.

  I watched him carefully, shivering as I sat naked and bruised inside a tub in a strange shack in the middle of the bayou. Have I really never been here before? I wondered as Reece approached me again, shrugging out of his leather vest and setting it aside with a sort of reverence that intrigued me.

  All that care … for a piece of clothing?

  Surely there was more to it than that.

  “Let's put that glamour back in place, girl,” he told me as I blinked heavy lids and touched my hands to my breasts. Whatever Reece had done to me with his magic, they now felt heavy and sore, desperate to be touched.

  I wet my lips again, but I couldn't make myself talk. I wanted to, but my battered throat just wouldn't obey my commands.

  Instead, I watched as Reece turned on the rusted old tap and grinned as I shrunk back from the cold water. As it swirled down the drain, I drew my knees up and lifted my face to the small square window across from me, out at a night as dark as pitch and trees dripping with Spanish moss and secrets.

  Where am I? I wondered because although I remembered that this was a bayou, a swamp, I couldn't remember what state or province I was in, what country even … what world. Because I knew instinctively that things were not always what they seemed …

  “There ya go,” Reece said as the water began to steam and he leaned in to plug up the tub. “We'll get ya all warmed up dere.” He sat back on his haunches and watched me with eyes like the turning leaves of autumn, a warm brown color that said they'd just recently bid their goodbyes to the trees. “You smell somethin' awful, you know dat, you?”

  Reece stood up once again and moved to a large cabinet in the corner, opening up the doors and selecting several glass bottles. When he made his way back over and started popping the corked tops, the air was perfumed with the sweet scent of flowers and growing things.

  Petals drifted into the bathwater and turned it a cheery pink color. It felt good, that heated water swirling against my damaged skin, but it wasn't enough. It didn't satisfy these new needs that Reece had heaped on me.

  “You're one of da gentry that's for sure, yeah?” he asked me, mixing several more ingredients in the water—dried leaves, bits of dirt, ground spices that smelled like cloves, and sweet-scented liquids. “But what exactly you are, I can't even begin ta guess.”

  Reece reached out toward me, running a single finger along a ridge that bordered my spine, teasing rough, ragged flesh that I hadn't even known was there. Glancing over my shoulder, I couldn't even see the awful scar he traced.

  “Plucking da wings off a butterfly,” he murmured, his eyes going sad and dark for a moment before he flicked them back to me and grinned, slow and sharp, like a gator. A gator. See, I knew what a gator was. “You ready, girl?” he asked, and then, with the last bottle set aside, Reece knelt next to the tub on his denim-clad knees, using one hand to grip my hair and tug my head back. The other, he slipped beneath the colored waters and between my thighs.

  My breath escaped in a sharp gasp as he played along that aching, desperate part of me with two careful fingers, teasing the swollen flesh with sure strokes. His right hand kept me anchored as he leaned in and took my mouth, igniting all of that lust inside of me, like fireworks freshly lit. The matches burned, the fuses smoldered, and I was nothing but an explosion of feeling.

  A moan creaked past my lips, brushed against Reece's as he chuckled and teased me some more, running a pair of fingertips from my clit down to my ass and back again.

  “Whatever you are,” he whispered as I bit his lower lip on impulse, “you taste like magic.”

  Reece thrust his fingers into my opening and oh, it was … it was exquisite, like coming home after a long trip. I was tight, almost painfully so, but the lust he'd fired up in me needed to be slaked, satisfied.

  Our tongues slid along one another's as the runes flared on the floor, the ceiling, the walls, across the glass panes of the single window. Reece hooked his fingers inside of me, teased my inner walls while his thumb brushed the painfully hard nub of my clit.

  Cracking my lids just a bit, I lifted a hand up to Reece's face and touched wet fingers to his skin. The pale blue color of my flesh shifted, warming into a peachy-pink, like sunshine over rose petals. And as my own appearance morphed and changed, so did his.

  The gold of his skin faded away, the redness of his hair dimmed.

  Glamour.

  The old faerie word for a magic skin, one that sealed the wearer's true form away from the world.

  I remembered that now.

  Rubbing my cheek along Reece's stubbled one, I dug the fingers of my left hand into the fabric of his t-shirt and scraped my nails down the side of his throat with the other. The gruff stranger worked me into a frenzy with his hand, fanning the flames in my lower belly until they took over everything, igniting me in a sudden blaze that wracked my body and brought a small scream from my throat.

  “Oh,” I whispered as I shivered in the wake of the orgasm, trembling and blinking through the haze. “Oh.”

  “Oh?” Reece asked, giving me one last flick of his fingers before pulling away. “Not bad for a first word, eh, girl?”

  I stared at him, glancing down at my naked body, fresh and pink, all of my scars and bruises gone from sight. I could feel them, but I couldn't see them—not anymore.

  Hmm.

  Reece was right—not bad for a first word, not bad at all.

  #

  Loud male voices made me tense and jump as I cautiously padded my way back down from the bathroom.

  After Reece had resorted my glamour, and reawakened my body, he'd left me to get cleaned up on my own. At first I'd been a bit offended that he hadn't wanted to stay, but the lust quickly melted from me in his absence and I was able to enjoy the warm water in peace.

  Reece was right: I did smell awful.

  He'd left me with several bottles of floral scented products on the side of the tub so I took my time testing them all out and ended up washing my hair three times. Wherever I had been, shampoo must not have been available … I needed to use almost half the bottle of conditioner and let it sit for a few minutes so I could comb through the tangles, too. Despite the glamour giving my hair the appearance of being healthy and soft, I could feel its true condition.

  Once clean to the point of wrinkly, I had gingerly toweled dry and dressed myself in the clothes that Reece had left for me.

  Tiptoeing down the stairs, I chewed on my chapped lip and debated my options. There was clearly an argument going on in the living room where I had first met Reece and Donal, and it sounded like there were several more men present which scared me on a primal level.

  The few fractured memories I had regained spoke of violence, torture, and pain. What if these people had something to do with it? Why else would I remember what a bayou was? Or a gator?

  “Girl?” Reece's rumbling voice broke through my spiraling thoughts and I gasped. He stood at the foot of the stairs I was frozen on, looking up at me with an amused, hungry look on his face.

  My body flushed with heat under his gaze, and my nipples hardened to rocks once more. It had to be his magic. What had he said he was? A god of sex?

  “Don' you look at me with them accusing eyes, girl,” he warned, reaching out a huge arm and snagging my hand to pull me the rest of the way down the stairs. “Ah, ah. I know what you be thinking, bebelle. But Old Reece ain't never forced magic on the unwilling. What you be feelin' is just because you got the hots, y'hear?”

  I couldn't exactly respond, so just narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously. His words rang with truth though, so I had no choice but to believe what he said. Whoever I was, or whoever I had been, I was apparently overwhelmingly attracted to huge, red-haired Irish-Cajun men with fingers like damn magic.

  “Now you c'mon through here so Killian can patch you up. See if he can't sort out that voic
e situation for you, no?” He arched a brow at me and gestured through to the common room where the voices had all but stopped their argument.

  “There she is,” Caley announced as I stepped into the room. “Hey girl, you look way better after a shower! Sorry the clothes are a bit big for you.”

  The clothes in question were a pair of cut-off denim shorts which hung loose around my narrow, bony hips, and a teal green tank top. No undergarments had been provided and I was acutely aware of my nipples standing firm like headlights under the heavy gaze of four men and Caley.

  “Should be fine once I get her healed.” This came from the one man who I didn't recognize, so must have been Killian. Donal and Arlo, Caley's boyfriend, were both standing with arms folded across their chests, watching me.

  The new one, Killian, was just as huge as the other guys but with ink black hair and a scruffy shadow of stubble over his face. As he came closer to me, I tensed and flinched back a step. His cold, ice-blue eyes seemed to see straight through me into my soul, uncovering information I didn't even possess.

  “Don' be scared, bebelle,” Reece murmured, laying a hot hand on my lower back and keeping me from retreating any further. “Kill is all bark and no bite, unless you ask 'im real nice like. That trick 'e's doin' with his eyes is just checkin' you for damages.”

  “I apologize,” the dark-haired man said in a quiet voice, one that held danger and intrigue. It simultaneously scared me and made me curious. I mean, Reece called him Kill … and I got the feeling it was more than just his Cajun-Irish way of shortening words.

  “Let the damn girl sit, Kill!” Arlo snapped, glowering at him.

  “You shut it, boy,” Donal warned. “You could have really fucking screwed the pooch sendin' her off to the damn 'ospital, ya know.”

  “I know.” Arlo's mouth turned down in a frown as he glared at me. That same level of annoyance and disgust was still there, the same way it had been at the diner when Caley had first found me.