My captor stopped his climb, tossing me to the ground where I huddled, naked and afraid.
I expected to see sharp claws when he stripped off metal gauntlets, and huge teeth in a monster’s maw when he removed his helm. Instead he revealed strong, capable-looking hands and a handsome face. In the Haven, he would have set any young girl’s heart aflutter with his good looks and mine was no different. My cheeks flushed hot.
“Not what you anticipated?” He smiled, showing perfectly normal, white teeth.
“You, and indeed this entire night, have held naught but surprises.” My fingers closed on a stone. I hid it behind my back, lifting my knees, shielding my body from his devouring gaze with my hair, which fell in tangles around me.
“What use will rumination on the past do? Better to move forward, into the now we find ourselves in.” His blue eyes twinkled.
Handsome, well spoken and a philosopher? I could not reconcile the riddle of him, and was more than a little disturbed by my attraction to him. “What now then?”
We had come to a place on the mountain where the trees were thin and stubby, the landscape made up of black flint stone, boulders and dirt. I was reminded of my father as I watched him perch a mail-covered foot upon a large rock and survey the forest below us as a king would his kingdom. The howls of the wolven had grown closer, and now seemed to come from all sides.
“I could eat you or fuck you,” he said, the growl in his voice matching the hunger in his words.
I shivered, wrapping my arms about myself. “I am very thin, surely not fit for a meal.”
“Pity. Skinny and no longer virgin.” His gaze dropped, seeming to see right through the protective veil of my hair.
“Hardly worth your time.” I inched away from him.
“Still, it has been an entire year since I felt the pleasures to be had in the arms of a wet, willing woman.” He took a step closer to me and, despite my fear, I felt myself begin to respond to him.
“I would hardly be called willing.”
“I watched you fucking him. Touch you just right and you’ll be willing all right, as willing as they come.” He reached out and brushed the hair back from my cheek, and my nipples hardened and proved his words true. “Fucked by a man who knows a few things your tender young lover hasn’t learned yet. Things about what women really want.”
What could I say in reply? I had become a wanton in Taran’s arms, and the thought of doing the same with the powerful and handsome stranger had indeed made my body tingle, setting my mind to visions of things I might be made to do by him.
“There is to be a war. The only thing you need concern yourself with now is whether you will be my queen and bedmate, or food for my minions. What shall you choose?”
My fingers itched to throw the stone at his arrogant head. “Our Haven is not worth a war.”
“While your people busied themselves behind their walls, they have been watched keenly and closely by those who put them there to start with. The gods are the ones bringing the war. I only defend my own. As my queen, you will become a goddess when we defeat the gods.”
“I see no god in you!”
“I see a frightened girl who has a choice before her! Queen and willing little fuckmate or meal to the wolven?” he growled.
The wind screamed and from above us came a great flurry of sound unlike anything I had ever heard. Falling from the night sky came an extraordinary beast—an enormous, black, winged horse whose flailing hooves struck my captor, knocking him to the ground.
The Pegasus horse landed in the clearing. His nostrils flared with the breath he sent over my fingers, still lifted in fear until his familiar, equine gaze found mine and he came to a knee before me.
“Taran!” My man of mystery and riddles had kept this last secret to himself.
Behind him, the stricken warrior came to with a mighty roar. I jumped upon Taran’s back, holding tight to his mane as he flew into the night.
Below us the warrior bellowed, whirling like a dervish in his anger, kicking up flint stones that sparked. The wind caught showers of glowing orange embers, sending them dancing over the treetops below us, setting the rain-parched forest aflame like kindling wood. Fire raced down the mountainside.
The wind and smoke tearing my eyes, I gave thanks to the gods for Taran. I would never tell him about the choice I had been about to make when I thought all had been lost, or of my shameless fantasies about my captor.
“Some things a woman must bear for her man,” my mother had taught me and, in this, I believed she was right.
I had made difficult choices this night. There would be thorny questions to answer, decisions to atone for and a war to fight.
My Princess is finally getting her wish—I am taking her home.
What is man’s greatest strength? I cannot answer. Love, however, is mine. I hope it is enough.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
PIERS ANTHONY was born in Oxford, England in 1934. His family was doing relief work in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, so Piers spent a year in Spain. The new fascist government expelled the family from Spain, and Piers had his sixth birthday on the ship to America. He was not a great student, taking three years and five schools to make it through first grade because of his trouble learning to read. Yet in due course he became a writer, making his first story sale in 1962 and going on to have twenty-one novels on the New York Times bestseller list. Today he lives with his wife on their tree farm in backwoods Florida. He is still writing stories and novels.
MEGAN ARKENBERG is a student in Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons and dozens of other places. She edits the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance and the historical fiction e-zine Lacuna.
JANINE ASHBLESS is a multi-published author of fantasy and paranormal erotica. Her stories have been published by—among others—Spice, Black Lace, Nexus, Xcite, Ellora’s Cave, Samhain and Cleis (including the anthologies Red Velvet and Absinthe and The Handsome Prince). She lives in England and blogs at janineashbless.blogspot.com.
M. H. CRANE is a writer and artist in Arizona. She won Silver Honorable Mention and Honorable Mention in the Writers of the Future Contest and appeared in the spec fiction anthologies Such a Pretty Face and Past, Present, Future 2011. Her science fantasy novel Blackfire won a finalist award in the 2011 Suvudu.com Writing Contest sponsored by Random House.
ERIC DEL CARLO’s (ericdelcarlo.com) erotic work has appeared in numerous Circlet Press anthologies, as well as with Loose Id and Ravenous Romance. He also contributed to the Cleis Press collection Beautiful Boys. His mainstream sci-fi and fantasy have been published by Futurismic, Talebones and many other magazines, and is upcoming at Asimov’s and Redstone Science Fiction. He lives in California’s wine country.
AURELIA T. EVANS is the author of several erotic short stories in such anthologies as Amber Dawn’s Fist of the Spider Woman and Kristina Wright’s Fairy Tale Lust. When she isn’t writing, she attends school, makes jewelry and watches horror movies. She lives in Dallas, Texas.
SACCHI GREEN’s stories have appeared in a hip-high stack of publications with erotically inspirational covers, and she’s also edited and coedited eight erotica anthologies, including Girl Crazy, Lesbian Cowboys (winner of the 2010 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian erotica), Lesbian Lust, Lesbian Cops and Girl Fever, all from Cleis Press. Her alter ego Connie Wilkins writes and edits science fiction and fantasy.
KIM KNOX (kim-knox.co.uk) brews sex, magic, darkness and technology in a little corner of northwest England. She writes erotic science fiction and fantasy romance for Carina Press, Ellora’s Cave and Samhain Publishing.
ASHLEY LISTER (ashleylister.co.uk) is the pseudonymous author of more than two dozen erotic fiction titles and countless short stories (one of which appeared in Mitzi Szereto’s Red Velvet and Absinthe: Paranormal Erotic Romance), as well as two nonfiction titles exploring the secret lives of the United Kingdom’s swinging community. Aside from working
as a performance poet, he currently teaches creative writing in northwest England.
ANNA MEADOWS is a part-time executive assistant, part-time Sapphic housewife. Her work appears on the Lambda Literary website and in nine Cleis Press anthologies, including Red Velvet and Absinthe: Paranormal Erotic Romance. She lives and writes in Northern California.
MADELINE MOORE has published three novels: Wild Card, Amanda’s Young Men and Sarah’s Education. Her stories have appeared in many anthologies. The Erotic Awards 2011 declared Madeline “Story Teller of the Year” for “Get Up! Stand Up!” from the anthology The Cougar Book. Madeline lives near Toronto, Ontario.
NYLA NOX is author of the story “Heart of the Desert” (Needles and Bones) and the essay “The Midnight Moralist,” a winner of the 2010 Seven Fund international competition. In 2007 she was shortlisted for a UK first novel prize. She is a magazine columnist in Southeast Asia.
ZANDER VYNE (zandervyne.com) can find something erotic about most situations, so she writes about it. Her macabre story, La Belle Mort, was a reader favorite in Mitzi Szereto’s anthology, Red Velvet and Absinthe: Paranormal Erotic Romance. She lives in Chicago and is currently writing her second novel.
JO WU (jowu-timeispoisoned.blogspot.com) is a UC Berkeley student, an aspiring novelist, and the author of two columns for UC Berkeley’s Caliber Magazine.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
MITZI SZERETO (mitziszereto.com) is an author and anthology editor of multi-genre fiction and nonfiction. She has her own blog, Errant Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto’s Weblog (mitziszereto. com/blog) and a Web TV channel, Mitzi TV (mitziszereto.com/tv), which covers the quirky side of London. Her books include the controversial Jane Austen sex parody Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts; Red Velvet and Absinthe: Paranormal Erotic Romance; In Sleeping Beauty’s Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales; Getting Even: Revenge Stories; Wicked: Sexy Tales of Legendary Lovers; Dying For It: Tales of Sex and Death; the Erotic Travel Tales anthologies and many other titles. A popular social media personality and frequent interviewee, she has pioneered erotic writing workshops in the United Kingdom and mainland Europe and lectured in creative writing at several British universities. Her anthology Erotic Travel Tales 2 is the first anthology of erotica to feature a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She divides her time between England and the United States.
Copyright © 2012 by Mitzi Szereto.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by Cleis Press, Inc.,
2246 Sixth Street, Berkeley, California 94710.
eISBN : 978-1-573-44829-1
Thrones of Desire Page 21
