But she was not alone. Finn was with her, among and within the waves, and they were of the water, together; made of it, somehow, rather than their heavy bodies which were uncomfortable by comparison. Faye experienced a sense of dissolving into him, and he into her, as they kissed deeper, and the sky rolled back into indigo nothingness above them.
Dimly she was aware of them walking away from the dancefloor, but they were both already somewhere else. They were something else other than they had been separately: combined, even in a kiss, they had half-merged, and both felt the fierce pull of the elemental power that demanded they return to it immediately.
The music quietened; Faye’s eyes cleared a little as she climbed the golden stairs up again to the room with the balcony where they had started. She had no sense of time, or how much time had passed since she had been in the faerie world. But she didn’t care. The flashes of her real, human life that she’d had since she had been there seemed like trivial memories. Compared to Finn, compared to the strange music that inhabited her blood, it was that life that seemed a dream now.
He led her down a corridor and into a bedroom. Faye followed, her hand in his.
In the centre, a golden four-poster bed was covered in green and blue silk and velvet coverings; the walls of the room were covered in the spirals and carvings that were everywhere in the castle. One whole wall was glass, and looked out over a waterfall outside the castle that she hadn’t seen on her way in, but the castle itself was large, and she wasn’t exactly in an analytical headspace at that moment. The glass wall reminded her briefly of something, somewhere familiar she’d been recently, but she was so deep inside faerie now that the pull of the human world was very weak. Faye was now heedless of the danger she was in; the link to her old life was weak now, and it would take very little to sever altogether.
He pulled her to the bed and she fell into his arms.
Finn kissed her again, deeply, and Faye felt the full power of the faerie realm close over her like a cloak of soft seawater. She pulled back from the kiss and gasped as she felt the strangeness come over her, but when Finn kissed her again, she dived gratefully into it.
His lips found her neck, and she moaned in pleasure. His hand caressed her breast through her clothes, and the sensation of his touch on her was like lightning on a black sea. She shivered in rapturous delight as his lips found hers again and they went under, merging with water. She closed her eyes and watched a storm roll over the same unfamiliar sea. Her hands were in his hair, on his chest. He unbuttoned the jacket he had worn which was a little like an old-fashioned doublet; a dark indigo, piped with gold on the shoulders and cuffs which fitted his slim yet muscled chest and shoulders. Underneath the jacket he was bare-chested, but his golden skin held the tattoo she had seen when he stood shirtless on the stage, a horse that reared up his body in a blue the same dark indigo as his jacket. Spirals followed his shoulders and continued down his arms, which Faye saw as he took the jacket off altogether.
She sat up and pulled off the woollen dress she only dimly remembered putting over her vest and leggings when leaving the house. Finn kissed her collarbone and followed the line of lace along the edge of the vest’s neckline, then moved his mouth lower and she felt his warm breath through the flimsy jersey as he kissed her breasts through it.
Faye moaned louder, then, and felt herself grow slick and wet with desire. Finn peeled away the vest and leggings, leaving her completely naked on the bed. The material below her, like silk but something different, seemed to kiss her skin. He knelt and caressed her body, kissing and touching her with a sweetness and ardour she had never experienced before. He was gentle but in control and, as he touched her, she felt her pleasure building like the momentum of a song; like the increasing rhythm of the faerie pipers whose music had inspired such delicious anarchy in her soul.
She wanted more, and couldn’t get enough of his skin; warm, as if he had been in the sun, and which tasted of the sea. Her lips were swollen from kissing him, but she couldn’t stop, and as her lips trailed down to his waist, he pushed down his matching indigo trousers. She went to take him in her mouth, craving all of him, but he smiled and shook his head.
‘Not yet,’ he said, and pulled her back to him. He took one nipple in his mouth and licked and caressed it with his tongue, while stroking her clit gently. Faye felt herself close to orgasm almost immediately, and he seemed to know, because he stroked her more slowly and returned to kissing her mouth and neck.
‘Please. I don’t want to… come… yet,’ she gasped, and reached for him. He was hard with desire for her, and he moaned deeply as she moved her hand gently up and down.
‘Faye. Faye, bruadarach, neach-gaoil,’ he murmured, opening his eyes to meet hers.
‘I want you,’ she breathed, unable to look away from the sapphire depths of his eyes. ‘I want… I…’ She was deep in enchantment, and even telling him she loved him seemed inadequate in that moment, though she knew nothing about him other than this dreamlike ecstasy.
His hands were warm on her thighs as he pushed them apart, and bent his head to her openness. And when she was moaning loudly, lost on the waves of desire and pleasure, and had no control of her body, he pushed deep into her.
He filled her totally, and their bodies fit together as if they were one. Faye had no consciousness apart from pleasure; the hot, sweet orgasm rose from her like an unstoppable wave, reaching and reaching higher and higher as Finn stroked in and out of her slowly, deeply. She was with him under the waves again, in the rolling of the salt water that was their sweat and saliva; they were the power of the ocean, and they were life and death and pleasure combined.
Finally, she shouted for him to come into her as hard as he could, and felt herself clutching and biting his shoulder as her climax came, bigger than she had ever had before.
Her whole body was aflame; pleasure screamed and sang in her stomach, in her elbows and toes. She was screaming his name and other words she had no awareness of. She came again and again against him, feeling him deep and hard within her, returning his urgent, hot kisses as he called out her name, mixed with the Gaelic words she had no idea of. And, yet, at the same time, woven amongst her cries of ecstasy, Faye felt an undercurrent of danger. Perhaps it was because they were in the faerie realm, where time operated differently, but there was an uncountable moment when Faye saw a darkness open up around her. It was like being at the bottom of the ocean, and she felt the terror of drowning. And in the second before she opened her eyes to return to her body, Faye remembered the expression of Glitonea’s human lover, lost in a desire he could never control.
She came back to her body with a sense of foreboding that nestled alongside the pleasure of being next to him, feeling his skin against hers, and dismissed the visions – of drowning, of the ocean, and of Glitonea’s human lover – as a moment of mindlessness.
They lay entangled in each other; he kissed her forehead, the end of her nose; taking her hand in his, he kissed her fingertips. Her heart felt as it never had: open, raw, like a rose that had bloomed before time; it hurt a little from the intensity of their connection. She felt tears start in her eyes, and wiped them away. But the ache wasn’t pain or regret; rather, it was a sadness that she had waited all this time to know this kind of pleasure, given so freely.
He kissed away her tears.
‘What troubles you, neach-gaoil?’ he said, concernedly. ‘You are safe with me. Do not be frightened. You are my lover now; remember, mine is a broken heart that needs to heal. Be happy that you are doing that.’ He put his hand on his heart, then on hers. ‘Here. To here.’ he kissed her again, tenderly. ‘There is a bond now, not easily broken.’
‘No, it’s not that. I’m… I’m fine,’ she murmured, and snuggled against his chest. ‘I just… I haven’t known that before.’
‘You are a virgin?’ he looked at her, surprised.
‘No. Just… I haven’t… not like that,’ she finished. He smiled, and gathered her to him closer agai
n.
‘You have a special magic in you, Faye, that I doubt you know exists,’ he murmured. ‘And we can make each other whole, if we let ourselves trust each other: human and faery, in balance, as we should always have been.’ Faye felt sleep come over her like the calm after a storm. ‘I will adore you, Faye Morgan, if you do me the same kindness,’ he whispered. ‘Give me the whole of yourself and I will give you the world. I will give you everything that my whole heart can command.’
But in her dream, Faye was drowning again, and Finn’s voice was the sound of waves on savage black rock.
Chapter Nineteen
Faye woke up in her own bed to the sound of birdsong. She rolled over groggily, patting the quilt for her phone. Locating it by her feet, she pressed the display and looked at the time. 6 a.m.
She swung her feet out of bed and rested them on the wooden floor, then frowned and pulled up her right foot, resting it on her knee. The skin between her toes was sore. She rubbed her foot gently, waking up, then took her hand away and felt the sand on her palm.
She stared at the tiny granules of dark sand for a minute or more, feeling unease unfurl in her like a stray ribbon.
Faye stood up and caught her reflection in the mirror. She was naked, and a pile of clothes – jumper, dress, thermals – lay on the floor by the end of the bed as if she had stepped out of them there, but she had no memory of doing so. She knew she had got dressed last night and gone to the beach, but then… then, it had felt like a dream. And, listening to the birds at dawn, it seemed highly unlikely that she had in fact been in the realm of Faerie all night.
She went to the bathroom and leaned over to run a bath. As she reached out her hand, she saw the ring on her hand.
It was a large round opal set in rose gold on her thumb. Faye gasped and stood up in shock, looking at her hand, which suddenly seemed completely alien. This wasn’t any ring of hers; usually she wore a silver pentagram ring that had been Moddie’s on her right index finger and a vintage tiger’s eye on her left for protection. It wasn’t a ring from the shop that she’d slipped on by mistake either, as she definitely hadn’t seen it before.
She took it off and held it up to the light. The opal sparkled with unusual gold, pink and orange accents that reflected unexpected hints of magic. She stared at it as the water for the bath filled up slowly.
‘What on earth?’ she muttered, and placed it down on the windowsill as she opened a jar of her own handmade Full Moon bath salts and shook them into the water. The smell of lavender filled the bathroom; Faye sat on the edge of the bath and picked up the ring, replacing it on her thumb. It felt wrong to have put it down, somehow.
She got in the bath, breathing in the fragranced steam, and let it cover her. She closed her eyes and held the ring to her forehead. It was an instinctive gesture, but as soon as she did so, she saw Finn Beatha in her mind’s eye, as if he was with her, in the bathroom. She opened her eyes with a start but there was no-one there.
Cautiously, she held the ring to her third eye chakra in the middle of her forehead again and closed her eyes. As soon as she did, she remembered.
They had just made love – and it was love, fierce and hot and out of any normal frame of reference – that was something she knew, deep within herself, although she didn’t understand it. And, sometime in the night, she had half-awoken, twined in his silk bedsheets. He had kissed her awake and, when she roused, half-sat up in his huge bed, he had placed this ring on her thumb.
‘A gift,’ he had whispered. ‘Wear it and think of me.’
Sleepily, she had held it up to the moonlight, slanting through the window and watched the magic in the stone flicker like fire. She had thanked him, said, what? She couldn’t remember – she was growing drowsy and must have fallen asleep next to him.
Wear it and think of me. She stared at the ring. How was it possible? Any of it? Grandmother and Moddie had told her plenty of tales about the faeries, but she hadn’t ever really believed any of them, if only because she knew that the fae had left Scotland a long time ago, driven out by modernity: industrialisation, pollution, lack of belief. And Moddie. She had seen Moddie there. What did that mean?
If it wasn’t a dream, Finn Beatha was really a faerie king. And Finn Beatha wanted her. At the thought of him, she felt a rush of desire, and instinctively stroked her own body, thinking of him: his tall, rangy, well-muscled body; his arms, covered in the tribal tattoos, and his lips. His pouty, ever-so-slightly scornful mouth that begged to be kissed, and even bitten. She closed her eyes and turned the hot tap back on with her toe. The warm water covered her fully, and the pleasant heat of the water felt like a kiss on her skin.
Faye wondered about Finn: who he really was. He was a king, and he had proved himself a remarkable lover, but she knew very little else about him. He seemed deeply emotional, yet he was guarded. He was powerful and yet tender when he chose to be. Now she was back in ordinary reality, she pondered what he had said about his realm being heartbroken about the lack of – how had he put it? – a balance with humans. That he sought lovers as a way to balance their relationship as two races upon whose harmonious existence the world depended? Grandmother had told her as much with her old tales, but Faye wondered whether Finn was telling the whole truth. Was that really why a faerie king appeared as the frontman of a band in the human world? Or were his reasons much more plainly carnal?
She found she was already wet from arousal, thinking of Finn and their lovemaking. She started stroking herself with one finger and then two, feeling the water on her like Finn’s tongue. She yearned to be with him again. She moaned and spread her legs as far as she could within the bath, and put two fingers inside herself, stroking now with the other hand too. Feeling the orgasm coming, quickly, wildly, uncontrolled, she heard herself speaking his name, calling it, as her pleasure heightened and spread over her like a net, like a spell of desire. Finn, Finn, Finn, come to me, love me, Finn, oh, oh, oh.
When she came it was as though his lips were on hers and his tongue was on her at the same time; the water held her, and he was somehow part of it. She closed her eyes as the pleasure ebbed through her, and saw him again, clearly. She felt another orgasm coming, and she pushed against her fingers hard this time, feeling her insides contract hard, over and over again. She screamed out in pleasure, disconnected from the mundane world. It was like being truly awake for the first time in a life that had only been a dream until now.
When it was over, she got out of the cooling water and dressed. She padded down to the kitchen behind the shop and made breakfast: she was suddenly powerfully hungry. Probably a good idea to ground, she thought; the easiest way to ground yourself, to come back to earth after doing magic of any kind – never mind visiting an alternate dimension, or whatever the realm of faerie was – was to eat and drink. She gulped down a mug of strong tea and made some toast under the grill.
As she ate her breakfast, some of Faye’s spirit returned to her. If she saw Finn again – and she hoped that she did – she resolved that she would keep her head a little better. It was understandable that she had been so thoroughly taken over by being in Murias, and by Finn’s attentions, but she had been raised a witch. She could do better.
Slowly, she started to feel more human, and looked at the clock with the mottled brass rim that hung on the wall behind the counter. Every now and again Faye had to cull the postcards and letters around it that she received from visitors from all over the world, otherwise the clock would be lost under reams of paper and card. Moddie would be proud that Mistress of Magic had, in its own quiet way, quite a following.
With a practised hand, she lit two charcoal discs and placed them inside a large abalone shell, then dropped resinous lumps of dammar gum and frankincense on top of them and rested the incense in its shell on the edge of the shop counter.
The fragranced smoke made the shop smell and feel like a temple and Faye was grateful for its familiar sweet and sharp tang, which gave her a sense of power as surely as the sto
ne flagstones under her feet.
Remembering how the vision of the shop had grounded her, even just for a little while when she was in Murias with Finn, Faye spent a few moments picking up and holding some of her favourite curiosities: possessions belonging to other Morgans, from Grandmother and back into the past. Opening its sealed display cabinet, Faye reached in and carefully took out the Morgans’ crystal ball: not like the acrylic ones she sold in the shop, this was an ancient sphere made of pure quartz. It had one very fine fissure through its middle, like a dim lightning bolt, but otherwise the crystal was without any flaw, which made it incredibly rare.
It had been a long time since Faye had scried with the crystal ball: you had to have the patience or the gift, Grandmother said, and Faye had always found she had neither, though she found it beautiful. Today, she wanted the weight of it in her hands: to be reassured she really was back in the ordinary world. Yet as she turned it over carefully, she thought of all the Morgans that had used it. Wasn’t that her power as much as anything? Her heritage, the blood of all the other witches that flowed in her veins?
It was almost opening time, so she replaced the crystal ball in its case and locked it. When she opened the shop door and looked out onto the street, she saw Annie a few doors away, coming in to start her shift. Faye waved, and the opal ring on her thumb caught the morning sun.
‘Hey! Morning, ma sweet darlin’,’ Annie grinned as she walked in past Faye, and instinctively, Faye put her left hand down by her side in the fold of the long dress she’d pulled on today. It was a deep cerise with a low neck and romantic bell sleeves; not at all the kind of thing she would usually wear. ‘Ye look gorgeous today! New dress?’
‘Er… yes. New stock. Thought we could take a few,’ Faye panicked. In truth, she had no idea where the dress had come from; it was hanging in her wardrobe earlier and she’d put it on without even noticing.
Daughter of Light and Shadows Page 13
