by Dani Harper
“I want to solve this puzzle myself,” she finished at last. Even though she knew full well that flying solo wasn’t always the smartest thing to do, she was determined to be independent a little longer. Or in denial. Sometimes it looked like the same thing.
George took the phone from her and peered into the touch screen, using his fingers to enlarge each card in turn. “Huh. There’s a dog in each of the cards. Does that signify something?”
She frowned and took the phone back from him. The Moon, the Fool, and the Ten of Pentacles all featured a dog somewhere in the picture. In fact, they were the only cards in a tarot deck that did. This time, however, Death had a canine companion as well. She’d seen the somber figure portrayed on a horse, sometimes with ravens or vultures, even cats, but not this. “Dogs and death,” she mused aloud. “That’s really strange. In the tarot, dogs are always guardians and protectors.”
“The big black one beside the Reaper doesn’t look very protective. He looks like he could swallow you whole. Great graphic for my hellhounds post.”
“It doesn’t matter what the dog looks like; the meaning is the same,” she insisted. “Dogs can also signify communication—they’re often viewed as a bridge between worlds, maybe like your uncle’s little clay dogs. Most of the time, though, the appearance of a dog means you’re being protected.”
“In other words, you’re being watched over by the goddamn Hound of the Baskervilles.”
She forced a wan smile. “Just what every girl needs.”
George put an arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry. Look, it’s gotta be simpler than that. Maybe a dog will prevent something bad from happening. Maybe the cards are saying you should adopt a dog for security or something—he could help you watch the shop. You remember Alison, the colorist that works on my comics? She volunteers at the local animal shelter, and they’re having a big open house on Saturday. We could go look around, see if you get any vibes.”
She shook her head. “You forget that I am already owned by three cats. Bouncer would leave home, Jade would stop talking to me, and Rory would plot my demise if I brought a dog into their house.” Brooke turned off the phone and tucked it back into her pocket. “I need to get out my books, do a little research on this. But first I have some spells to do up for people, things to get ready for mailing. Oh, and work on my damn taxes.” Yuck.
“Want a coffee first? That tarot stuff is pretty intense. So’s the taxes.”
“Naw, thanks. Gotta save my pennies till the end of the month.” She had eleven dollars and some change in her purse, and it had to buy cat food. Her cupboards were devoid of the kind Rory liked best: Little Whiskers, the most expensive brand on the market. Why had she thought he’d forgive her for the bargain box she’d picked up instead? Bouncer and Jade were more understanding about her budget as long as the food was plentiful, but Rory had been expressing his displeasure in no uncertain terms. This morning it had been a 4 a.m. paw smack to her forehead.
“Not taking no for an answer here. I’ve got two spaces on my coffee card that say we can go to Magic Beans for something decadent. And it’s only a couple blocks away. Come on, you need some fresh air and a change of scenery before you start unraveling all this juju stuff.”
Brooke hesitated. “How decadent are we talking?”
“Extreme decadence, hermanita. Supersized deluxe.”
How could she resist an offer like that? She wasn’t sure she could unravel the message of the cards, and she was a lot more worried than she dared let on, even to herself.
When the going gets tough, the tough get salted caramel cappuccinos.
THREE
Aidan ap Llanfor drowsed in the deep darkness, neither asleep nor awake…an hour, a day, a year? Within the Fae realm, time didn’t move the same as in the human world, and occasionally it even ran backward. The ethereal kingdom under the Black Mountains was ancient beyond all counting, and yet perpetually young. He had no idea how long he’d been here, only that he had not aged.
At least the body he was in had not aged. It wasn’t his, any more than this place was his home. And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. He’d found that out soon enough. Raging and wild, he’d fought against the fate imposed upon him to no avail. It had been like hurling himself against a stone wall—and flesh and blood, emotion and intellect, could make no impression upon rock that had been solid since the earth was founded. Mere human protests could likewise make no impression on fae ears that had heard those rocks sing when the world was new.
The tywysoges wanted what she wanted. And what she wanted from him was everything, both body and soul. Most of all, she wanted him as a willing partner in her bed. The Tylwyth Teg had long been known to seek out human lovers as diversions, but Aidan ap Llanfor had been determined to die before complying with Celynnen’s wishes in any way.
But it hadn’t been that easy.
He was still chained in the courtyard when she came to him one night, dressed in little more than moonlight. Her hair cascaded wildly down her smooth backside like a waterfall of silver, her shapely arms open to reveal her flawless breasts caressed by a transparent fabric that seemed to have tiny stars woven into it. The see-through material wandered its sparkling way between her legs, illuminating the perfection of her vee before winding around her angled hips. Her long legs were naked, her delicate feet bare except for an exquisite silver bracelet around one perfectly turned ankle. Tall and lithe, bold in her nakedness, she was a goddess: Diana the Huntress stalking the earth, with the moon as her consort.
Aidan’s chains fell away as she lightly grasped one of his hands. “Come with me.” Her voice was a soft, sultry whisper. Her other hand drew a circle around the luscious nipple of her breast, and she licked her lips in such a way that a tiny droplet of sweat ran down his spine in spite of himself. “Let me show you the pleasures of my bed, dearest Aidan. Do mortals not sing songs of the skills of faery lovers?”
Such unearthly beauty coupled with such an alluring offer would have brought a lesser man to his knees. But while Aidan’s memories might have been slowly fading under the influence of the faery realm’s magic, he refused to forget that this inhuman creature was his captor, the despoiler of his life, the one who had plundered whatever dreams he might have had. He was less than a slave to her; he was a temporary plaything, a toy, and he knew it.
He spat at her, marring the nearly invisible fabric right over the spot where her icy heart likely lay. “I’ll not be your pet,” he declared, fully aware of the danger to him. Although Celynnen appeared to have no weapon, she was more than capable of killing him with a single word. Aidan stood straight, calmly waiting for the deathblow to fall, his only regret that he was unable to fulfill his vow to bring about her demise as well.
The blow didn’t come. He could see the fury in her iridescent eyes, the sharp relief of her features as an unholy anger lit them from within. “You are gravely mistaken, mortal,” she said, and her voice was deep with rage. “You will be my pet for as long as I will it.”
A shard of green lightning suddenly snaked down from a cloudless night sky and wrapped itself around him.
“You will learn to do much more than merely obey me,” she declared, as a violent seizure threw him to the ground. Every muscle and tendon, each bone and sinew, suddenly seemed to tear apart from one another and reshape themselves. Convulsing uncontrollably, he would have screamed from the pain had he been able to draw enough breath.
“You will learn to devote yourself to me until you crave my every wish,” she intoned.
The bones in his face felt like they’d exploded, reforming into something alien. His spine stretched torturously until his tailbone uncurled and grew, adding fresh agony to his suffering. Skin split and reknit, fingers shortened, toes lengthened. He was able to draw in a great sucking gasp of air just as the torment reached a crescendo—and his scream came out as a long, hideous howl. The sound rose into the night sky like a live thing, as if to plead with the stars them
selves for an end to the unbearable. Perhaps they heard him. His body was still ablaze with pain, but compared to what he’d just been through, he could shoulder it. Panting heavily for breath, he lay on his side with his eyes closed.
“You will learn to adore me with every breath you take,” she said finally, emphasizing each word. “Until every thought you have is of your undying love for me.”
Damn that to hell. Aidan fought to get up then, his eyes opening to a new nightmare. His strong hands and powerful arms, the instruments of his craft, were gone. Instead, long legs stretched out before him, ending in enormous paws. The blackest of fur shrouded his skin, and a long dark muzzle intruded into his field of sight. He glanced about, taking in the thickly muscled torso and haunches, and the strange new appendage of a tail, and as he struggled unsteadily to his feet, Celynnen laughed.
“Did I not say you would be my pet?” She stood boldly in the bright moonlight, her all-but-naked body silvered by it. There was something silver in her hands too, a great wide band crafted of intricate links.
What she held was a collar, as if he were truly and completely a dog. With a lionlike roar, he leapt at her with bared fangs, bent on tearing out her marble-white throat. His fearsome teeth never connected, however. She backhanded him with such power that he struck the stone wall he’d been chained to and left an impression in it, sliding to the ground in a dazed heap. He tried to rally himself for another lunge, but at a word from Celynnen, he was tied with invisible bonds as securely as if he’d been bound with iron chains from his own forge. Even his muzzle was spelled shut, so that all he could do was curl his lip and snarl at her.
Her perfect face was smug with satisfaction as she knelt beside him and placed the heavy collar around his thick neck. There was no clasp. Instead, she ran a finger over the links and recited some sort of spell in a language Aidan had never heard. The collar knit itself together as if it were a live thing, and he winced inwardly as he heard the final snick of the last link.
Still kneeling, she smiled radiantly at him, and suddenly it seemed as if her beauty had intensified somehow. “I think I like you much better like this,” she said, and every word was an unwanted caress. The filmy material that had only enhanced her nakedness rather than covered it disappeared, and she leaned down to rub her breasts over his thick fur. “Think of what you might have had, dear Aidan, what bliss you might have known,” she purred, and then plunged her fingers into the silvery triangle between her legs. She pleasured herself there in front of him, her head thrown back, her pale nipples erect, and her pelvis rocking to meet her own touch. He closed his eyes against her mockery, sickened by her. Some strange new instinct told him plainly that she was playacting, pretending to be intensely excited when she felt only the barest shadow of it, and somehow that made her all the more repellent.
There was something else. With his new senses, he could smell her—and as he expected, Celynnen’s scent was not that of a human woman. Strangely it was not that of a fae either. Instead it was something entirely new—as if he had turned over a rock and could smell the dank, cold earth beneath it. He could suddenly recall all the scents he had breathed in while captive here. She smelled like none of them…
Eventually, Celynnen tired of her game and left. In the same moment that she vanished, he was freed from whatever magic had held him helpless, and he rose slowly to his feet.
He was no dog.
Massive and powerful, Aidan ap Llanfor was as far from a pet as a dragon was from a house cat. Celynnen had made him one of the most feared creatures in Welsh legend. He was a grim, the gwyllgi of stories told round the fire, the barghest of lore: a monstrous black hound charged with one errand only—to be an omen of death to those unlucky enough to see him.
Within moments he felt the tug and pull of some invisible force. He could sense impending death on the human plane above, and it drew him upwards, impelling him to begin his woeful task.
Now—whenever now was—Aidan had become much like the Black Mountains themselves. They cared not for the kingdom that lay far beneath them and its flamboyant court. They were blind and deaf to its complex intrigues, spared no thought for its many conspiracies, and ignored its comings and goings in general. Most of all, the mountains felt nothing—but that was a state that Aidan had yet to achieve.
He certainly felt very little. No hunger or weariness or physical pain. Heat and cold were the same to him. Memories had been the hardest. At first, they had been traps, whirlpools of unbearable grief and loss, but they had faded all too quickly. Thanks to the magic that both created and ruled this realm, he no longer knew the way to his own past. Except for his name, which he repeated to himself endlessly, when he was in the faery realm he remembered little of what it was like to be human. No matter how hard he’d tried to retain them, the faces of his family, his friends, had gradually dissipated until he could not recall if he had even had any. Gone, all gone.
Sometimes, however, something brushed across his mind like a caress, something that said he’d once had a lover, but what she looked like, how she had felt or sounded, he couldn’t say. Even her name was lost to him. He knew only that he had grieved for her, mourned until the very last nuance of her memory vanished from his grasp.
All he had left was a dull throbbing ache in his chest, as if his heart and all its roots had been extracted like a tooth, leaving a gaping void.
It was part of the enchantment of this kingdom that most of the simple joys and struggles that made up mortal life dissolved into nothingness here. He would have forgotten completely that he had ever had a life before this one—except his morbid task took him into the human world regularly. There he could not help but recall broken fragments of his previous life, small temporary remembrances, even as he watched mortal joys pass him by.
Mortal sorrow was not so kind. Whichever realm he was in, pain was with him every moment. In the human world above, he remembered some of what caused his anguish. Once he returned to the fae kingdom below, however, all he knew was the pain. And that pain spurred the only other emotions he could still summon. Wrath. Fury. Rage.
All the shades of anger were banked like embers and glowed deep down within him, like a volcano biding its time. And with them simmered the desire to turn the cruel injustices he’d suffered back upon the one who had inflicted them. A servant to Celynnen, an orange-eyed crymbil, had once whispered to him that the Tylwyth Teg craved sensation and envied mortals their ability to feel passion and experience emotion. Celynnen desired to feel? He remembered her naked performance when he was newly turned, pretending to enjoy her own stroking fingers when, in truth, neither her body nor her heart had been stirred. Aidan wanted to see the cold-blooded female experience for herself the misery that she’d inflicted on him—and yet he knew that was a vain and foolish dream.
How could the heartless be made to feel heartbreak?
What might be possible, however, was to make her afraid. Somehow or other, Aidan would find a way to make her suffer fear. She cared for no one and nothing but herself, so surely she could feel fear for her life? Perhaps she would fear even more for her beauty. A single drop of his mortal blood had been enough to wound her hand. The mark had scarcely been the size of a barley grain, and a healer had erased it as if it had never been. But what would several drops do? A cup? A pint?
Unfortunately, he did not even have that weapon at his disposal. The powerful canine body he inhabited was a fae creation, and when it was in solid form, it bled blue, just like every other living thing in this realm.
Should he ever regain his mortal form, however, he would find a way to make Celynnen afraid, to make her fear him enough to set things aright, frightened enough to return him to the life she had so callously torn from him.
Right before he killed her.
Ar y gair, he thought. Speak of the devil.
Aidan’s awareness sharpened as the blackness that surrounded him lightened to charcoal and then to gray. It was a false dawn that approached, one that showe
d up all too often in his view, and as the light grew stronger, so did his ire.
A pulsing white orb appeared, driving away each and every shadow as it expanded to reveal Celynnen.
She stood before him, smiling like an angel, her hands outstretched as if welcoming supplications, as if eager to bestow blessings.
Aidan knew better.
Deliberately ignoring her presence, he rose and stretched, sneezed and yawned, then shook himself all over. He’d much rather lunge and tear out her throat than greet her. Better yet, if he’d been a mortal creature, he’d lift a leg and piss on the hem of her richly embroidered dress. Sadly, outright hostility was ineffective. Ever since a droplet of his blood had spattered the princess’s hand, a shield of powerful magic protected her from any action of his, from any physical expression of the roiling anger that churned in his gut at her presence. Words could still penetrate, of course, but he was denied even that. Only human forms could articulate verbal arrows.
He had learned, however, that feigned indifference annoyed the proud fae beings, particularly Celynnen, who was accustomed to being the center of attention. Out of the corner of his eye he witnessed the tiny spark of indignation in hers. Of course, her face remained a saintlike mask, still smiling.
“Dearest Aidan, must we go through the motions yet again? Why do you not rejoice that I have come for you? Surely you will not choose to remain a lapdog when your human form is so pleasing to the eye.”
However many times she came to him—and he had long ago lost count—the pretty speech she gave was always the same: “As my consort, Aidan, you know you would want for nothing. Riches if you wish them, exotic foods you’ve never dreamed of, exquisite clothing, spirited horses. And best of all, I can give you immortality, Aidan. You would live forever, young and handsome, if you would simply take your place by my side.”
