by Rhys Ford
“You know, let’s do something different,” he replied, narrowing his sidhe-emerald eyes. “I’m going to be the one that says no this time.”
He bent forward, taking a subtle sip of my mouth. I didn’t want the fire that crept along my skin when Ryder touched me, but I did nothing to stop him.
Ryder took my stillness as assent and pushed on, closing over my mouth with an almost punishing possession. When his tongue touched my lips, I gripped his shoulders, then let him in, kissing him deeply. He sucked at me, shoving his tongue deep into my mouth when I parted my lips for him. I took as much as he gave, sliding around his rough tongue. He drew out the kiss, rolling his hips into me with a slow, circular push.
“Don’t bite me,” he warned, sliding one hand down the back of my neck. “I just need… more.”
Pushing up with his thumb, Ryder turned my chin until my head was thrown back and the soft skin under my jaw was exposed to his questing mouth. Trailing a long, slithering kiss down my skin, he stopped long enough to nip affectionately at my neck before tracing a heart with his tongue below it. His teeth nicked my skin there, and I felt tiny red rosettes welting on my throat.
“Ryder….” I needed him to stop. I was drowning in him, and it was a struggle to pull air into my tortured lungs. “Don’t….”
“Why?” He kissed his way back up to my mouth, then rested his forehead against mine. We breathed into each other, the air hot between us. “Tell me you don’t feel me under your skin. Tell me you can’t feel this between us.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, hooding my eyes from his. Ryder’s eyes tore me apart, ripping me open for him to stare down into my soul. “And it pisses me off. This thing between us is… chemistry.”
“More than that, áinle,” Ryder teased, stealing his cousin’s pet name for me. “But I’ll let you believe that for a little while longer.” He traced my mouth with his finger, and I bit the tip, warning him away. “I don’t want to tame you, Kai. I just want you.”
“Yeah, better men have tried,” I muttered, cocking my head at him. “Let me go now.”
“I still have to know if you’ll help me. Help us.” He cupped my face, all teasing gone from his eyes. “Please.”
Again with the please. Grunting, I pulled away a step, growling under my breath. The air was cold without him against me, and my teeth itched. I wanted to bite into him and leave a mark. I cleared my throat instead. “What happens when your sidhe find out I’m not….”
“Sidhe?”
“Yeah.” My breathing was slowly steadying, but my heart beat frantically, and I wondered if Ryder could hear it. I took another step and exhaled slowly. “Yeah, that.”
“They won’t say anything.” Ryder leaned his hand on the seemingly only palm-sized edge of Oketsu’s hood that remained unscathed by black dog acid, claws, or dragon sear. “I’m not my grandmother, Kai. I see things differently than she does. I’m not easy on them, but I’m not a tyrant. I demand loyalty and community, not blind devotion.”
“I’m not sure I see things the way you do,” I admitted.
“That’s because you’ve not been raised by your own kind,” he protested. “How did Dempsey get hold of you? The elfin are protective of their children. We don’t just let them wander off to be found by a Stalker.”
“I’ve heard different stories about it.” Shrugging, I made a face. “Dempsey was bluffing at cards. Tanic’s guy cheated, but when it was all said and done, he was the proud owner of one Chimera. Dempsey couldn’t pronounce the unsidhe, so he stuck with the Singlish.”
“I wondered about that. It’s an odd name for a kid,” Ryder said softly. His fingers stroked my side. I wanted to pull away, but the touch was comforting despite the strings attached to it.
“I wasn’t a kid. Never was.” I touched his hand briefly, enough to feel his warmth, then pulled back. “Tanic—my father—had a sidhe woman. I don’t know her name. No one ever spoke it near me, but he made sure to let me know what happened to her.”
“You don’t have to tell me this, Kai. Not if you don’t want to.” His hands were still on me, burning and comfortable. “If it’s too hard….”
“I thought about not telling you, especially after your grandmother’s crap, but the more I thought about it, the smarter it seemed, so just shut up and let me talk,” I ordered softly. He said nothing but nodded. “Tanic did something to her, my mother. Well, other than the obvious, but whenever she got pregnant, he would… use his power to alter the children before they were born, changing them into… these things. She gave birth, I think, four or five times before me, but each baby she had died.”
“Died?” Ryder frowned. “From what?”
“Some couldn’t breathe or weren’t… right. They were hideous—extra legs, or tentacles and twisted. Most didn’t live long after they cut open the eggs, but all of them eventually died. Tanic didn’t care. He went back to what he was doing. She wasn’t anything more than a place to cook his seed.”
“Tanic is one of the oldest Hunt Masters from Underhill. He is dedicated to death and suffering. It’s what he is. Every sidhe knows of him. Our mothers use him to make us behave,” Ryder said, risking another touch on my side. I let him lay his hand there, not moving when he stroked at my spine, traveling down my back until his fingers lay on the rise of my ass. “I’m sorry for that, Kai.”
“It’s okay.” I shook my head when he tried to argue. “No really, it’s okay. Or at least now it is. I figure my mother couldn’t deal with it anymore. She couldn’t give birth to any more of those things, so one night she somehow got ahold of a knife and stabbed herself in the belly. It cut through my egg and severed her spine. She was dead before the guards could open her cell.
“She hated the thought of me so much, Ryder. So much that she wanted to kill both of us,” I said, gritting my teeth. The pain I thought I’d tossed off a long time ago came back, kicking me in the heart. “The shell hadn’t hardened enough, and I guess I slid out. I don’t know much else about it.”
“But Tanic… what was he thinking? What did he have to gain from changing the children that way?”
“I don’t know, but Tanic kept at it until he got me.” I blew a breath out of my pursed mouth. “I came out wrong, both sidhe and unsidhe inside. The healers suspected that maybe I was supposed to be twins, that I hadn’t separated or something, but there I was, Tanic’s Chimera.
“He couldn’t ransom me to her house, not with my blood, and he couldn’t keep me as his son, so he had healers age my body, growing me as quickly as they could.” I swallowed, remembering the pain of my bones stretching and breaking through skin. “When they were done, I was pretty much as you see me now. Except for my mind. You can’t age a mind. I was a baby, stuck in a fully grown body.
“I became something for them to play with, something to practice on.” I shrugged at Ryder’s murmur. “Then one day, a guard decided he could get some money out of my mother’s family, and he stole me. I’m not sure where he was going, but eventually he lost everything he had in a card game to a bunch of humans. That’s how I ended up with Dempsey.”
“You don’t owe Dempsey for that.” Ryder’s voice trembled, either from shock or horror. I didn’t feel brave enough to look at his face.
“Dempsey was saddled with an insane mixed-elfin monster who didn’t know enough to unzip before pissing himself. He had to teach me how to eat and to talk. Then he taught me how to shoot and take care of myself. I might be a monkey in a cat suit, but I’m here,” I argued, raising my chin to meet Ryder’s eyes. “He’s not my father. I’d already escaped my father. Dempsey’s a frigging saint compared to him.”
“You should have been with your own people,” he said, touching my cheek with skimming fingers. “You should know what it means to be sidhe.”
“No thanks. I’ve met your grandmother, who I think knows more than she’s saying. Hell, she might know Tanic’s my father. She knew I was a monster. Even called me one.”
“The Sebac’
s wrong,” he finally said, stopping me before I could open my mouth again. Pressing his hand on my back, he pulled me closer, not letting me go until I was up against him. “You’re not a monster, Kai. Those little girls aren’t monsters. So Tanic found a way to blend our races. So what? I found a way to give the sidhe children their bodies won’t kill.”
“Are you going to keep doing that?” I asked, looking up at his face. The light hit his cheekbones, brightening the green in his eyes. “Even knowing that Tanic made things, do you think that’s a good idea?”
“The elfin need to survive, áinle,” Ryder replied. “We need healthy children, and we need to learn to live with the humans, not kill them. And for the record, I don’t think you’re a monster. Far from it.”
He brushed his mouth against my temple, light enough to be a whispering touch. There was no pressure in it. No promise or entanglement. Just a touch of his lips on my skin. And it was more than enough to leave me stiff and uncomfortable.
And wanting more.
“I don’t know if throwing human wombs up for a sidhe free-for-all is right. It’s not… how things should be, and I’m not saying that because it’s some sacred sidhe dogma. It’s… shit, it’s not what nature wanted for the sidhe or the unsidhe.”
“I can respect that you disagree with me,” he said, smirking when I snorted at him. “But that’s not the girls’ fault. They’re innocent in this. Just like you, áinle.”
“No, you’re right there,” I agreed. “Crap, Ryder! I wanted to walk away from all this. From anything even connected to the elfin.”
“And from me?”
“Especially you. You make me….” I left my sentence unfinished. I didn’t want to hear me, and if I said it out loud, I was afraid that what was between us would become more real. My shoulder was beginning to ache, and the previously stitched-up skin over my collarbone itched. I pushed him away again, giving myself some space. “Go home, Ryder.”
“Will you be there?” He cocked his head.
“Yeah, I’ll head over there. Link me the address. I can at least look at what you’ve got.”
“Thank you, Kai.” He touched the small of my back. “I promise, nothing other than business.”
Ryder appeared earnest, a sincere honesty painted over his exotic sidhe features. Being an excellent liar myself, I believed him as far as I could toss a dragon. My doubt must have shown on my face. There was only so much a poker face could cover.
“Pfah,” I said.
“Too much?”
“Like rolling dog shit in sugar and feeding it to me as chocolate. Get out. I need to close up the garage and then get cleaned up. Give me an hour.”
“Okay.” Ryder stepped back, probably fearful I’d deal with him the same way we’d done the Hunt Master. Considering the hood was already banged up, it wasn’t a bad idea. “Are we going to talk about what my grandmother did to you?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Are we ever going to talk about it?”
“Maybe over your grandmother’s dead body,” I replied. Leaving the garage, I hit the access button and rolled the door sheaves down. “She really screwed me up, bringing a Hunt down on your ass. If he didn’t die there, then he’s gone back and told Tanic where he saw me. It won’t take long before someone comes sniffing around here looking for me.”
“I can protect you, Kai,” Ryder promised, adding a sidhe sealing ward behind his promise. Predictably, it made me slightly green. He grimaced. “Sorry. I forgot. No spells on you.”
“You can’t even protect two babies, your lordship,” I said as I headed to the front door. “I think your chances of protecting me from my father are about as good as me learning how to pull a unicorn out of my ass.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A SHOWER took Oketsu’s dirt off my skin, washing Pendle grime and oil down the drain. Fairly new black jeans and a T-shirt were the closest things I had to professional. A black leather jacket, old enough to be butter soft, went on last. It would hide any firearms and keep me warm. There was no helping the boots. They were worn in but could take a beating, which seemed to spontaneously occur whenever I went to stick my nose into someone else’s business.
I’d not told Dalia I was leaving, and since she was working, I wasn’t going to. It seemed safer not to.
The early evening hours were a horrible time to be driving in the center of San Diego. While the upper streets were cramped with traffic, the lower levels were sardined. Tik-tiks flew and dipped as they caught and released overhead cables, and a driver could die of old age waiting for the lights to change as the trolleys filled the underground tunnels. I fought the Broadway lines for almost half an hour before giving up, and stuck my toll pass to the truck’s windshield.
“Screw it. Ryder can pay the damned charges.” The readout ticked off the amount of a shrimp noodle dinner before I hit the off-ramp to the Cortez district. “He wants me here? He can pay to have me here.”
The jacaranda trees left a lavender snow on the streets, their branches twisting up and over the lanes. Walkers trotted behind packs of dogs, stopping to scrape up any feces their furry charges left behind. Overhead, CSiP cops patrolled the air on sleek Spyder Cam-Am. One peeled off, zipping to a side street, the cut-in blue-red lights on his bike flashing as he chased down a speeder. I slowed down, not wanting to be caught driving while elfin. My Stalker creds only got me so far with the local cops, and even closer to nowhere with the CSiP.
While the truck blended on the understreets, above the line it stood out among the sleek-bodied vehicles around me as I drove by. My truck certainly wasn’t pretty, not with its mismatched paint and acid-burned sides, but it was a good honest vehicle. I felt rather offended when someone next to me rolled his window up, as if the truck’s dents would somehow spill onto his sports car.
“It’s okay, old girl,” I said, patting the dashboard. “You’re a working truck. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”
I found the Court’s rented quarters without any trouble. The gated buildings were cordoned off a few hundred yards from the main entrance, mainly to keep the Humans-Only-Earth protesters at bay. Fanatical during the war, their inflamed passions had died down to underhanded petty crimes against elfin or elfin sympathizers. Considering who led Ryder’s Clan, I’d be inclined to agree with them.
Stopping at the gate, I rolled the truck window down. My face was enough to pass a bored human security guard. Other cars came through the gates behind me, waved on either from visual recognition or access chips in their consoles. Delivery trucks came through a service entrance, huge lumbering vehicles that could easily hide an entire bloodthirsty anti-sidhe regiment. From the looks of how easily accessible the area was, I was embarrassed at the laziness of the HOE protesters. If they’d been even marginally serious about storming the towers, someone could have walked in with a bazooka hidden in a bouquet of flowers.
“These people suck,” I said, parking behind a sidhe transport glider docked against the curb.
A familiar form stepped out of the transport. Alexa straightened and stretched her long body before grabbing a pair of bags from the cargo space. Seeing me, her smile brightened the harsh lines of her face, then wavered, probably dimmed by the memory of serving me up to her grandmother’s chewing mandibles.
“Hey,” I said, taking the bags from her. We stared at one another. I wasn’t sure how to say I was over being pissed off, and was about to make some excuse about not calling sooner when her hands cupped my jaw, and she kissed me.
There was not a shred of softness in the kiss, not at the beginning. She poured her taste into my mouth, drowning me. I grabbed a slice of air into my lungs when Alexa slowed her assault, relaxing into her hands when her tongue rubbed against the roof of my mouth. We slid around each other, a sensual slow dance with slightly rough tongues and nips of our teeth. My jeans tightened over my hips, and her hand slid down to cup my ass. It was harder to pull away from her mouth than it was to kill the black dog that snat
ched me from Oketsu’s window.
“What? Do I look easy today?” I grinned at her, unable to stop a smile from spreading on my face.
“You looked kissable,” she said, wiping the edge of my mouth with her thumb. “It is good to see you. You are good to see.”
Ryder’s flat, chilled voice was like someone threw a bucket of ice water over us.
“Alexa, take your hands off Kai,” he said, sliding into view over her shoulder. “Now.”
Unlike Alexa, he wore human clothing, a pair of jeans and a dark green button-up shirt. With his rolled-up sleeves and leather loafers, he could almost have passed for one of the affluent from the neighborhood. If it weren’t for the metallic gold and bronze streaks in his wheat hair or his gem-colored eyes, I would have mistaken him for human from far away.
“He is not yours, and I am happy to see him,” she said, crushing me with strong arms. Her chest was soft, pliable beneath the informal black elfin-cut shirt she wore instead of the uniform I’d last seen her in. There was no mistaking her for anything other than authority, even with her tongue down my throat. If she pulled out a pair of wrist ties and a baton, it would be hard to say no to her, even with my strong dislike of being bound. “You forgive me, then, pretty?”
“Yeah,” I replied, smiling at her wide grin. “I thought about it. Figured it was stupid of me to hold your relatives against you.”
“Good.” Alexa exhaled into my mouth, leaving me with a small taste of her on my lips. “Come along. I will show you where the intruder was.”
“I’ll do that,” Ryder interjected, stepping in to grab my arm. Cocking his head at his cousin, he gave her a cold smile. There was a Newt-like growl under his words, as if someone had poked a paw into his dinner. “Don’t you have some unpacking to do?”
“Jealous, cousin?” she replied, standing firm in front of him, her hands on her hips. “Maybe you heard about my offer to make him purple-eyed babies? Maybe he told you he was thinking about it?”
