The stranger tensed when she opened the scissors and closed them around the branches that encircled his midsection. She gave him an encouraging smile and cut through them, not without some effort, since they were aged and hard. It hadn’t crossed her mind that she’d get to use the tools after all, let alone that she’d get to use them to free a handsome, naked man who appeared to have been communing with nature a little too much. Life was funny like that, though.
He kept quiet throughout the whole process. His breathing was even; at such close quarters she could smell his skin, and it had the exact same fragrance as the tree bark he was pressed against. He’d been tied to it long enough to start smelling like it. Yet he was surprisingly clean, and though his hair was on the shaggy side of long, his beard and nails looked like they had been trimmed yesterday. Janet stopped for an instant, puzzling at the mystery of him, before shaking her head and continuing to cut through the branches.
“There,” she stated proudly, as soon as the last one was severed. She watched him stagger away from the tree, his eyes wild and wide with incredulity, and crossed her arms. “You’re welcome.”
“Alas, my fair and kind lady, I fear your aid was for naught.”
“. . . what?”
He turned around to face her and grimaced, sinking to his knees. Small wonder, too. If he’d been forced to stand upright for however long he had been tied up, his legs would be bound to give out as soon as he was left without support. Janet came over to help him up, but was pulled down to his level instead.
She squeaked. His legs might be weak, but his arms certainly weren’t. Big hands came up to her face and cupped it, giving her no choice but to meet his harrowed stare. He looked both sides, as if afraid someone was watching, before leaning in and whispering against her cheek.
“Leave me be and flee from this place. Now, before they set their sights on you.”
“They?” Using a strength she didn’t know she possessed, Janet shoved him off her and looked around, her eyes as fearful as his. “The people who left you here, you mean? Are they still around?”
“Aye, the Queen. She always is. She has made these trees her ears and eyes, and when she learns that I walk free, when she comes . . .” The man trailed off, shivering. “I plotted to escape her once. I failed, and I lost my love and my son, and was put in this tree as punishment for defying her will. I tremble to think what she could do to me, now that I am trying to evade her a second time. You needn’t share my burden, or the weight of her wrath. Go, now! Don’t allow these old, tired legs to delay you! If it is His will, God will see to it that I make it out of this land of devils.”
Again, Janet was left without knowing what to say. The man was quite mad, that much was clear. But she had found him, and he was unable to walk unsupported, and it was a long way back to Selkirk. Since he didn’t seem dangerous — delusional, yes, but she thought it encouraging that his delusions made him worry for her wellbeing instead of compelling him to try to harm her — it was her responsibility to see to it that he got somewhere where he could be taken care of.
“Look, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is, I’m as pro-independence as anyone worth knowing, but I doubt that the Queen came all the way over here and personally tied you up to a tree. That’s daft. I don’t know what you took to end up like this, but I’m calling an ambulance and getting you to a hospital.”
Too late she remembered that doing so wouldn’t come as easy as predicted, considering that her phone had died. She remained unmoved, though. She’d help him. She’d help anyone, up to a point.
“Tam Lin,” the man said, barely moving his lips. Janet stared at him questioningly. “My name.”
“Ah. Mine is Janet.” She held out her hand, but he didn’t take it. He stared at her face, not as if he were studying it, but as if he was searching for someone else in her features. Then he looked away, without giving her any sign as to whether he had found it or not. He did smile a tired smile.
“Of course. There must always be a Janet. To speak of salvation. To plague me with blooming hope.”
“It’s the name my father gave me,” Janet replied, unwillingly remembering how her mother had never liked it, or liked calling her by it. Her mother had gotten to pick Ian’s when he’d been born, though, so she’d been forced to swallow that toad. Besides, Janet herself wasn’t too fond of it. She would have preferred to be called something musical with plenty of vowels, that didn’t make her think of insects or things you ate. But Janet was what she was stuck with. “And you are the most ungrateful person I ever untied from a tree. I don’t care if some other Janet, or a dozen of them, plagued you or led you on. Can you stand?”
He nodded, and with some effort, got himself off the ground. She helped him heave himself upright and allowed him, after careful consideration as to how to distribute his weight, to lean on her. Tam Lin rambled away while they passed trees and more trees on their way back. Most of it was mad talk about fairies and magic — he and Greer would get along like a house on fire, she felt — but mostly, he lamented his lot in life and went on about how doom would surely befall her if they didn’t part ways.
Janet thought, rather spitefully, that whatever namesake of hers had wronged him must have just gotten fed up with his nonsense. He was lucky that he was a beautiful man with a beautiful voice who had triggered her Florence Nightingale instincts, or she would have told him to shut up a long while ago.
“Halt!” he hissed all of a sudden, digging his heels in the ground and causing Janet to nearly collapse under his weight. “I see a forest warden walking ahead.”
Humouring him, she looked where he was pointing. Her hand flew to her mouth, not because what she saw frightened her or amazed her, but because she needed it to stifle an emerging laugh. There was, in fact, a large dark form pacing back and forth some distance from where they stood, but she doubted it was a warden of any kind. Far from. The fact that a grown man would feel threatened by its presence was simultaneously comical and sad.
“That’s a cow. See the horns, long hair and tail? Cow. It probably wandered in here from the field.”
She shook off his body and let him lean against a tree, although he patently didn’t want to, and tried to follow her instead, balancing himself on his feet as if drunk. Janet stopped in front of the cow, which didn’t move, and petted its fur. Doleful brown eyes stared back at her. She gave it another pat and turned to Tam Lin, waggling her eyebrows at him to communicate that yes, it was a cow through and through. Nothing strange or menacing about it.
At least she thought so, until the creature started talking.
Janet had heard a lot of magic over the course of her life, by virtue of having a cousin like Greer. Greer liked to talk about it as if it were carpet, sometimes thick and sometimes thin, haphazardly laid out over the floor of real life. A carpet woven of all that was impossible, and unbelievable, and special. Janet rolled her eyes at her whenever she mentioned it, though. To her, impossible things were just things that hadn’t happened yet, and unbelievable things were formerly impossible things that had happened. As for special . . . well, specialness was in the eye of the beholder. None of that was magical, necessarily.
Janet was having a difficult time finding anything natural about something as impossible and unbelievable and special as a talking cow. A coherent talking cow, no less. She had been able to justify away the field, the woods and the sky, but now she felt the part of her that had so helpfully fed her words like ‘quirks of mother nature’ and ‘freak meteorological conditions’ struggle. There wasn’t much that would explain an inhuman voice coming out of an animal’s mouth. Either she was insane, or it was truly happening.
Janet preferred to think that she was not insane.
“I say, mortal!” the creature repeated, “Where do you go with the Queen’s captive?”
To Janet’s amazement, Tam Lin stumbled in front of her and spread his arms, assuming what was clearly meant to be a protective stance. A surge of warmth coursed through her.
It had been a while since anyone had attempted to protect her. Over the last year she had mostly been forced to protect herself, and others from themselves. Besides, if talking cows were something that existed, then there was a very high chance that the man wasn’t as mad as she had initially believed. Which meant that she both owed him an apology, and probably ought to bow out and let him handle the situation.
She stayed behind Tam Lin and clung to his arm while he engaged . . . well, in all honesty, it didn’t look so much like a cow anymore, not now, when she stared at it with eyes that were willing to see the impossible. The shape was still roughly the same, but there was a fluidity to it that hinted that it might become something else at a moment’s notice, should the creature decide that another form would suit it better. It had also ceased to look cute or peaceful. Its formerly dull eyes shone with an intelligence that was as far from being animal as it was from human.
“The lady made an honest mistake,” Tam Lin said. “Leave her be.”
“We have no quarrel with your lover. Return to your tree, and she may pass.”
“She is not my lover. But I will. You have my word.” His shoulders slumped, but there was no sorrow in his expression, only resignation. Janet realised that he’d been expecting something like this since she’d cut him down. He turned and gave her an apologetic smile. “You gave it your best try. I could not have asked for more.”
“No, wait. Hold on!” She stepped from behind him and faced the creature, which by now, was most certainly not a cow. Malevolent eyes turned to her. “You can’t make him stay here. That’s illegal!”
“The fae have their own rules, and are not bound by mortal law.”
Of course, Janet thought. Why couldn’t it have been Greer dealing with this? She was up to her arse in fairy lore. She would know what the rules were, and how to exploit them. Or Shona, Shona would also have done better than her, she would simply have brained the not-cow with the shovel. Janet could take some solace from knowing that she was still doing better than Bree would have — Bree wouldn’t have stopped yelling yet by this point — but being able to feel superior to someone didn’t help matters much. What could she do?
She tried bargaining.
“What if I make this a trade-off?” she said, thinking quickly. “If you let him go, I’ll give you my moto— magical metal horse that never dies or tires as long as you feed it liquid, and can take you across great distances faster than any animal can run. Deal?”
“The Queen is not some petty merchant who can be bartered with. The rules are as they are written.”
“Well, what are they, then? I was never taught.”
“To take from the realm of eternal dusk, you must earn your loot. An earning which requires sacrifice.”
“Such as?” Janet could feel Tam Lin hover restlessly over her shoulder, and without thinking, slipped a hand behind her back, taking his in hers and squeezing it.
If the sacrifice was to be something awful and unacceptable, like limb or life, she would have to refuse, and leave him behind. The creature said they had no quarrel with her, and the last thing she felt like doing was to annoy fantastical beings whom she didn’t know the slightest thing about. She would come back, of course, with police and whoever else decided to believe her, but who was to say that she’d be able to find the way again? She didn’t even know how she had ended up in the fairy lands in the first place.
She squeezed his hand again, praying that the sacrifice would be something easy or silly.
“Not lovers, you say?” the creature sang, turning its head — the only thing it still had in common with a cow was the horns, but even those had changed, grown into thorny protrusions that were more like antlers — to Tam Lin, who nodded gravely. Janet was quick to issue her own confirmation. The thing’s eyes danced between the two of them, gleaming. Her throat filled up with fear when it decided to focus on her the most. “Are you wed yet, lass?”
“No,” she said, and then added, more forcefully and with feeling: “No-ooo.”
“Then I ask that you sacrifice your virtue.” Smoke was beginning to flow from the creature’s mouth, and its eyes didn’t gleam anymore. They burned red like embers. “To a stranger who is not your lover, who will fill you with his seed and his child, and disgrace you in the eyes of all. I ask that you sacrifice your future, the comely suitors who would have made a wife out of you, were you not soiled. The—”
“So, simply put, you want me to do him,” Janet stated flatly.
The creature glowered at her, but she ignored it. She looked back at Tam Lin and felt his hand tighten around her. That was . . . well. It was unexpected, but better than she’d expected. She didn’t need to think deeply to know whether she wanted to play along or not. As things stood, she could either selflessly save someone and get to screw a hot guy, or run off like a coward and not get to screw a hot guy. It wasn’t the be all, end all of hard decisions, to put it mildly.
Besides, her virtue, as it were, had been ‘sacrificed’ six months ago at a concert in Dublin, with some bastard named Tom who hadn’t called her back the next day. And she was on the pill, which made it unlikely that any children would spring forth from their loins. And it was the twenty first century, and women’s rights were a thing, and sex before marriage didn’t equal automatic shunning anymore. She wouldn’t say any of that aloud, of course, because then the wretched creature might change its mind and think up a sacrifice that would actually be a sacrifice. But the fact that it was all true made it very easy to be fine with the proposal.
“Janet,” Tam Lin said urgently behind her. The creature cocked its head, suddenly interested in him, for some reason. “I will not allow it. I wasted away in that tree for years beyond count. Centuries, even. To live in the world again, I would give away half my soul. But I will not claim your virtue.”
“Oh,” Janet said, embarrassed. It dawned on her that she hadn’t even thought about asking him if he wanted to go through with it, which was callous to say the least. “Sorry. If that’s how you want it, that’s alright by me, and I’ll be on my way. I didn’t realise you weren’t willing. Again, I apologize for assuming.”
He stopped her and spun her around. She wondered where his strength had come from, as he was suddenly keeping himself upright with no visible difficulty, but then she looked at his face and realised what it was that allowed him to stand. It was the sheer force of his determination.
“I wasted away in that tree for years beyond count!” he repeated, forcefully. “My willingness is not in question. I would bed a blind owl if I knew it would break the Queen’s hold over me, and had you been another — any other — I would have taken you tumbling in the grass without a word of complaint. But you freed me, came to my aid when I cried out for it. I owe it to you to not ask that you pay such a price!”
Janet murmured another ‘Oh!’ and felt embarrassed all over again. It was a different kind of embarrassment this time, though. A warm, flattered kind. There was something to be said about old fashioned ideals and good manners, and this must be it. She had the feeling that Tam Lin was a man who would call a girl the next day, provided that he was taught how to operate a phone first.
She lifted a hand to his brow and drew a finger along it, while wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue. She’d tacitly avoided thinking about his nudeness up until that moment, mostly out of common courtesy. If she’d been left starkers and tied to a tree, the last thing she would have wanted was for some man to show up and start ogling her goods. The poor sod had been through enough without having to deal with her wandering eyes. However, now that getting down and dirty with him had become a crucial part of saving him, she felt it was her god given duty to appreciate him in full.
And oh, was he gorgeous! If she were the tiniest bit self-conscious, she would have felt unworthy. As it was, she couldn’t only think what an odd but beautiful pair they made, he all sunburnt skin and dark curls and edges, she all soft shapes and clear eyes and pale hair — it was bleached
, but you could hardly tell. Her mind went to another night — many nights, in fact — when she’d been lying on the pier with her friends, talking boys and describing what traits their ideal lover would have. If someone came around to tell her that Tam Lin had been custom-made to hit every single item on her list, she wouldn’t have doubted them.
She let her eyes travel down his body, past his navel and groin, and smiled.
Sacrifice? What sacrifice?
“It’s alright!” she assured him. “I want to! Honest!”
“A Janet!” the creature exclaimed gleefully, cutting off Tam Lin’s beginnings of a reply. She jumped, startled, having almost forgotten that the thing was still there, watching them. Now it shook its head and stomped its black hooves in something resembling a dance. “A Janet, you say! How lucky I learned it in time! There is another rule for Janets! The oldest rule!”
“No,” Tam Lin whispered, his face draining of blood. She stared up at him, confused, and then at the creature, hoping one or the other would elaborate. Which the latter did, in a voice with edges in it:
“Hold him,” it cackled. “Hold him while he goes from man to beast, hold him true, else your sacrifice will be for naught!”
“What, literally?!”
The creature froze. Its evil eyes blinked, as if it were running through a script in its head and wondering what line it was supposed to deliver next. After a moment, it settled on repetition.
“Hold him while he goes from man to beas—”
“I know, I heard. But is he literally going to turn into, say, a snake? Because if he does, I’m not doing this!” Janet placed her arms on her hips and gave Tam Lin an apologetic look. “Sorry, but no. No.”
“Snakes frighten you,” he breathed, as if that were only to be expected. A pained look crossed his face, like he’d just been stung by an unpleasant memory. To her he said, gravely: “I cannot blame you.”
Twist (A BDSM & Romantic Erotica Boxed Set) Page 23
