by Nunn, PL
She waved a hand at the atmosphere in general. “None of this would be happening if not for me.”
“You mean the ogres at the gate?”
She blinked at him. “What?”
“The forces Azeral are most likely gathering to fetch you back,” he clarified. “The ones that would be ungathered if you were still at his keep and ‘we’ had not chosen to take you from him. This situation does not lie directly on your shoulders.”
She stared at him in misery, not knowing what to say and settled for dropping to her haunches and hugging Phoebe.
“I also, I think,” he said, leaning back against the old twisting willow, “owe you my thanks. You saved my life.”
A laugh of disbelief escaped her. He owed ‘her’ thanks. Was the world so totally upside down?
“My concentration was somewhat fixed. I’m told I came to the slash I have across my back from the blade of a huntsman that you deflected.”
“Oh.” She had managed not to think of that unpleasantness. “I-I never killed anyone before.”
“It is not a thing to boast of. But I owe you my life all the same.”
“I – you’re welcome. Did you get into terrible trouble with Ashara? I know she bit Aloe’s head off.”
He opened his mouth then paused as if thinking better of his first response. He settled on, “She was very explicit on just how displeased she was with the venture. She is not displeased with the results.”
“You mean me?”
“I mean you.”
“So what are you doing to protect the keep if Azeral does decide to come here?”
His frown was instant and dark. “I am doing nothing. I have been forbidden by my lady, among others, to put effort towards the wardings. Others, however, are strengthening the wards already set in the grove as well as placing new ones. The grove itself is the product of Neira’sha’s care, and will deflect what she wills it to. If it comes to that.”
“It will come to that.” A new voice cut through the silence that followed his statement. They both turned and found a tired, disheveled Aloe under the ivy covered arch.
“What?” Okar pushed himself with a grimace from the tree.
The girl shook her head in disgust.
“Ogres in the Hallow Hills. Two, maybe three days, travel. They are under a spell of shielding, so our farlookers have not been able to discern their presence. Scouts made them when they were massing.”
“How many?”
“Too many.” The girl drew a hissing breath between her teeth. “And if the Unseelie hunt follows…”
The utter terror on their faces made Victoria nauseous. She dug her fingers into cat fur and prayed to her God, who, according to Aloe had no place here.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.” But they were gone, flown to Ashara’s side to figure what might be done. She was left alone, with the purrs of the gulun to comfort her. She did not want war. She had had enough of that at home, when it was a ocean away. She did not know if she could tolerate it at her doorstep. And directly due to her. They did not blame her. Okar did not. Nor Aloe. Even Neira’sha, who was wise beyond human reckoning, placed no blame on Victoria’s shoulders. She was not so lenient with herself.
She avoided the sidhe. She fled to her room with the desperate hope that Neira’sha would have more important things to do than hold session with her.
She paced the floor with flustered distraction. She could focus on no one thought. Her mind fluttered from one grisly picture to another. She imagined destruction and grief and all for her. She could strangle Azeral. She wished she had been of saner head when she had first come to his keep and immediately blasted him when she’d had the chance instead of wasting her energy on Alex.
Phoebe watched her sleepily from the bed pillows. There was very little interest from a gulun in human panic. No sympathy at all in those round eyes.
“It’s just not fair,” she cried. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”
She threw herself down onto the pillows, pressing her face into soft gulun fur. She lay for some while, until the lengthening shadows gave thought to lighting the magic-powered lanterns. She should go find Ashara and find out what was going on. Find out what was needed of her in the defense of the keep. The fear of their coming to their senses and placing blame where blame lay, kept her in her room.
Phoebe’s ears pricked and her head came up. She stared at the balcony and the darkening evening without. A bird had most likely landed on the tree outside.
Victoria was not ready to have the gulun abandon her and wrapped her arms more firmly about the furry middle. Then the feeling came back. The sensation that she was being watched. She did not want to move. She had the notion that if she stayed absolutely still she might blend into the bed pillows. But that was silly of course.
She was not possessed of that ability.
Only a night sidhe had that chameleon power.
Then she knew. With all her being she knew that it was not nerves. That she was not alone. She knew what watched her. Death observed her. And facing death was not half so frightening as facing the conundrum of her own emotions. She let out a little cry and pushed herself up, staring wildly about the room, peering into shadows and dark spots. She lit the lamps with a stray thought and the light did her no better service than the dark.
Her whisper, when she spoke, was hoarse and ragged. “Are you here?”
Nothing. No sound more potent than the rasp of her own breath.
“Damn it!” she cried. “Will you make a habit of skulking about my room at night?”
The wind ruffled the drapery at the balcony. He stepped out of it, like shadow parting from shadow. She felt a hysterical laugh bubbling up. At least her senses were not going insane with the rest of her world. Phoebe was up, indignant over not knowing beforehand of the intrusion. The shadow form stood still while the gulun sniffed at the trailing cloak, then whined curiously and butted her head against a hidden leg.
Victoria did laugh. The cub remembered who had supplied her food during the early days of her orphanage.
“She never forgets a scent.” She rose, stood facing him. He was in full camouflage mode. She could make out no detail of his face. His hands were lost in the fullness of his cloak. No move was made at either her or Phoebe’s actions.
“Are you here to take me back again?” she asked softly, a great sadness creeping over her. There was too long of a silence. She had no need to hear the answer after that. She knew.
“No,” she whispered. “Not to take me back.” She swallowed, folding her hands before her. “I don’t understand. If I’m to die by your hand, why is he still attacking this keep? What need?”
“He didn’t know.” His whisper was strained.
“Didn’t know what, Dusk?”
“If you had regained the magic.”
“And if I hadn’t? If I was still safe to manipulate, then he would take me by force? But otherwise I’m to die? Won’t you tell him after I’m dead? To stop the attack.”
“There is no stopping it.”
She stared at him, numb and aghast at the same time. He had told her that if Azeral commanded, he would take her life. How little she had understood. To know that even her death would not stop the assault on Ashara’s keep brought tears to her eyes. Tears of frustration. Anger.
Hurt. But surprisingly little fear.
“So you are his creature after all,” she said, lifting her head. “How demeaning to be so much a puppet. Shall I make it easy for you?” She tilted her head to the side, baring her throat. “But please, answer the question I asked you before – will it make you sad. Killing me? Will it hurt some small bit?”
He stared at her. She knew he was staring beneath his cowl, his face all in shadow. She needed to see his eyes. She wondered what color they might be. Night black or the golden hues the witch light cast on the room. She could not believe she found room for curiosity on the color of her killer’s eyes. She wondered if any magic sh
e might conjure up might affect him before he could strike. According to every one she had spoken with on the subject of Ciagenii, there seemed little chance. And then there was the dilemma of even bothering. Perhaps death would save her the trouble of seeing her friends lose their home and their lives. It would save her the trouble of dealing with Alex and wanting this creature that promised her demise. It seemed a wonderful solution.
She stepped forward, within easy reach. Phoebe looked at her curiously.
That innocent, whiskered face brought a tear to her eye. Her adopted child in this world. The cub might defend her.
“Don’t hurt her,” she asked. “Promise me that.”
He inclined his head. God. He was honorable, she had to admit that.
“I don’t hate you,” she told him and stared into the shadow where his eyes might be. He caught his breath. Almost a sob, but she could not believe him capable of that.
“Yes.” Whispered gasp.
“What?” She stared at him, bewildered.
“I will be sad. I will hurt.”
“Good.” A tiny whisper from her lips and he moved towards her. She expected to die. She did not know how it might feel.
Instead he caught her in his arms and clutched her to him with a force that hurt.
The act was so out of character that she stood limply in his grasp, in a state only slightly less than high shock. He was trembling. She felt it through the connection of their bodies. He pressed his face into her hair and beyond all belief, she felt the moisture of tears on her scalp.
He was crying over her and holding her, and God damn him if it was only a prelude to his own dismay before he killed her.
She struggled to get him at arm’s length, then to clutch his cloak before he could make it a further distance.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. Her heart was beating so hard it hurt.
He shook his head helplessly. “I know not.”
“Are you going to kill me?” She thought he was going to collapse. She felt the whole of him tremble so violently. His answer was barely audible.
“I cannot.”
Her hands dropped numbly to her sides. She stared at him, dumbfounded.
“Why not?” It was not an argument a rational person would initiate.
“I do not know how,” he whispered.
“You don’t know how?” She threw up her hands in amazement. “I thought you knew how to kill anything. I thought that was your special gift. What do you mean you don’t know how to kill me?”
Apparently that explanation was too much to ask. He backed away with a swirl of cloak and she knew he was going to flee. She lunged and caught fabric and the arm under it.
“Oh no, you don’t. You do not come here, tell me you’re here to kill me, then renege and declare that you can’t and run off. I will not have it, Dusk. What’s the matter with you?”
“Let go,” he hissed. She ignored him.
She was utterly sick of not seeing his face. With an irritated swipe, she brushed the cowl back. He glared at her. There were tears in his eyes. Eyes that were golden at the outer rims and dark pools within. Cat eyes.
“Why did you come here?” she whispered.
He stared at her face as he had never looked at her before. No fleeting glance this, but an assessment of her features, a careful scrutiny of her expression. Finally he said, softly, levelly, “At my master’s request.”
“To kill me?”
“Yes.” No hesitation there.
She let out a breath of exasperation. “Yet you tell me you won’t… can’t. But not why. Dusk, what are you doing?”
The lashes fluttered. So much misery on his face. “I know not.”
She threw out her hands in frustration, and both assassin and gulun started. “God! I don’t mind, really. Not dying. But you’ve managed to utterly confuse me. You tell me this, if Azeral sent you to kill me, and you don’t do it, what will he do?”
A slight smile touched his lips. “Be very angry.”
She stared at him. Then let a single laugh escape. “Oh surely.”
His smile faded, replaced by a dark frown. “He’ll make me.”
“Can he?”
“My soul is in his keeping.”
There was nothing she could think to say to that unfairness. Her mind was too full of confusion and the shock of his announcements. He looked so lost, so bereft. But there was something else there.
Something in his eyes that spoke more eloquently than the misery of his face. A deep-set spark of longing that chilled her to the bone. Oh, it was fine to dream about him, to fantasize over something so much more than human. An immortal, beautiful creature who was utterly unattainable. She could carry her secret desires for eternity and not act on them. But to realize that ‘he’ might return the emotion… that notion was terrifying. Thrilling.
She stared at his face, all golden with the fey lights. There was a pit at her feet. A great, yawning drop that she so easily might lose herself to. Gently, she touched his cheek, reckoning herself already lost.
He flinched and she thought his reservations greater by far than her own.
God, how many personal dilemmas was she the root cause of?
“He’s close,” she said. “His forces gather a few days’ travel away.”
“I know.”
“What will you do?”
Silence. He wanted to flee her disturbing presence. She could almost feel his need. She disrupted the way things should be with him. It was another of her powers. Yet one she had been vaguely aware of even before coming to this wonderful, terrifying world. She had never played at using it against Alex. She was not certain why it was almost an electric thrill to exploit it over Dusk. A culmination, perhaps, of all her newfound power. It was so hard to find one’s self endowed with ability and not feel the desire to use it. She was not so blind to hide from herself the plain fact that she was not the same girl who had been so cruelly snatched from her warm, safe bed on humanity’s earth. She was not so sweet nor so naive. She could kill, and had, and found little reservation in the act. She discovered hate in herself, and envy and some touch of maliciousness and was not so inclined to quell the feelings.
And most of all she found she needed this fey creature in a way she could not fathom. It was not the way she had ever wanted Alex. She did not need his protection or the comfort of his arms. She had no need to lean on him for support or gather his advice. All those things she had craved from Alex and he had given freely.
What she wanted from Dusk was nameless. Not his body, though God knew she was attracted to that. Not so much his companionship, for he was an uneasy presence at best. It went deeper and it confounded all her reason.
She held him with no more than the touch of her fingertips to his arm. He was incapable of escape, as enthralled as she. And, she thought, as ignorant of the cause.
“What will you do?” she repeated, dizzied at her own revelations.
“I know not.”
She thought that was a lie. She thought he knew exactly. She could well imagine some grand sacrifice on his part.
Because he had no notion how to deal with her, he would leave her and do God knew what to ensure his master did not force his hand.
Unless she forced it first. She had to clarify the situation as she saw it.
“He’ll hurt you,” she stated.
He said nothing, eyes shielded with gold tipped lashes. Of course he knew that. Look what Azeral had done at her whim! She stepped into him suddenly, pressing her face into the soft folds of cloak at his neck. Almost he backed away. With an effort he stifled the reflex and hesitantly put his hands on her shoulders.
The two of them, she mused, with a tired, dark mirth, were terrified of each other. He was not so much taller than she.
She lifted her lips and kissed him. He pulled back, shocked. Wide-eyed. Almost the same look he’d had the first time she had kissed him.
“You’re scared of me,” she accused, half teasing, half wi
shing to bolster masculine pride.
“I cannot,” he murmured.
Her own eyes clouded with confusion. Hurt. “Why not?”
He stared at her, stricken, then closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to hers.
There was something there she did not understand. Before she could ask, he cupped her face and covered her lips with his own. It was not a graceful kiss. It was unpracticed and frantic. Not at all what she might expect of one living so long in Azeral’s court, one so graceful and ethereal as a sidhe. But it was honest.
She wrapped her arms about him and held on. Half forced him back with the pressure of her body to the cushions where she suddenly found the burning urge to be. Anyone else might have been off-balanced by the abrupt contact with pillows and feet. He managed to make the descent a thing of grace. It was a miraculous mix, that utter, unmitigated grace and his total unfamiliarity with an act that every other sidhe worth his weight held great pride in his expertise at. She, who had slept with one man only, seemed an old hand compared with Dusk.
She did her best to make it easy.
Getting rid of countless layers of cloak and numerous weapons was task in itself.
She started giggling by the tenth silver blade that hit the floor and almost lost him then and there. She managed to coax him back with a gentle, massaging exploration of his body. God! If ever she had skin as silken as a sidhe’s she would die a happy woman. He was ecstasy to touch. She might have been content to just lay with him, bare skin to bare skin, to run her fingers through the length of his hair, all cream and golden, matching the color of her pillows and sheets, the soft light around them. And where they touched, his skin tones blended to match hers. When their hair mingled, his turned shades of coppery bronze. The passion was in turn timorous and wild. It was never planned or properly executed, both of them too much in the throes of exploration. It was not what one might call the most perfect act of lovemaking. It was rather ungainly, truth be known, neither in tune with the idiosyncrasies of the other. Nor the most satisfying. But like his kiss, it was devoid of façade. Honest and open and desperate.
Regret was there too. She saw in it his eyes when they lay in the aftermath. They were too much strangers for her to read the meaning in his emotions, or risk too close an examination even after such an intimate act. Because of it. She was not quite comfortable enough in his presence to know what to say. Even moving from the exhausted position in which she lay against his side seemed somehow intrusive and embarrassing. Coming up with words was a suddenly difficult task.
