Dockalfar (15 page)

She thrust her face up and kissed him. He was so shocked that he gave in at first, just let himself go slack and let her have her way. He was soft and fresh, almost innocent. He jerked back so quickly after that that she hit her nose on his chin. He tore away from her and she grabbed after him, determined not to lose him. Fairy hands clutched at him from all sides and she came at him from the fore. Between them all, they bore him down, she on top, trapping his head with her hands while her minions weighted down his arms. He writhed under her and the mass of fairies, the whole of them moved atop him to the ever-changing beat of the music. She wanted to devour him. To smother him.

The power infested being she had become wanted to possess him. She felt very little remorse that she needed to use force. It was wonderfully ironic, that she, little helpless Victoria, had the power to do so.

A fairy screamed and tumbled backwards. Dusk surged up dragging her and the writhing fairies with him. Fairy eyes were wide with fear. One of their own was down, lifeless and limp. He hit another, quicker than she could follow and her fairies started to scatter. She wailed and hit him with her shoulder, driving him back down, drawing on a surge of pure power to pull the very roots from the earth. They broke through the soft ground like skeletal fingers, twining around his arms, about his legs and throat. He was poisoned, rigid and struggling, eyes furious. The fairies backed off, crawling away from her like whipped dogs. She did not care. How little they meant to her when all her concentration was focused on Dusk. She ran her fingers through the tangled mass of his hair. It was earth colored now, moss green in streaks, russet and gold. It was soft like a child’s locks.

She stroked inhumanly soft skin, ran her lips along his jaw. She was minimally aware of the fairies, the whole of them entranced by her and what she was doing, half swaying to the music, half fearful in anticipation over what she had captured.

They feared him so much more than they feared her. She found him not so hard to deal with.

He was speaking to her. Gasping, almost sobbing with effort. She ran her thumbs over his lids, forcing his eyes closed. He was trembling. Anger? Fear? Frustration?

“What are you?”

“What am I?” It was a miraculously potent question. “I don’t know,” she whispered against his lips. “Now, I think, I’m burning and I can’t stop.”

“You must.” Was he pleading?

Delicious. “You’re consumed.” More desperate as her hands roamed down his body. He strained against the natural bonds. “Let me go and I can take you to one who will help you.”

“You took me away from people that would help me, betrayer!” she spat at him, momentarily sidetracked. He clenched his jaw and turned his head from her. She felt various hard objects hidden away in his clothing.

“I take you to your human consort. What of him?”

She stopped in her exploration.

“Alex?” Tiny, lost child voice. It was hard to picture his face with this beautiful creature before her. Hard to form blue eyes in her mind when green and yellow ones leaked tears beneath her. She sat up, straddling him, staring down into his face.

“I love Alex,” she stated, reminding herself. “Where’s Alex?”

She looked around the glade, at the fairies, at the sprites. Her own lights winked out one by one. He should be there. Alex should have been there for her.

No! Not here, not while she lay with Dusk. He would not approve of that. Lie with Dusk? Rape was a more adequate term. God! She rolled off him, eyes wide.

The wings of freedom and power furled inside her, shrinking down in shame and curling into a tight knot. She brought a hand to her mouth, sobbing. What had she done? What had she been thinking?

The fairies had stopped their dance, the music fading away to a mere rustling of leaves and whistle of wind. They crept towards the shelter of wood, wide eyed and staring. The sprites had long since disappeared. She felt nausea rising. She clutched her middle and backed away.

Sanity was too painful, too embarrassing.

She could not look at him. She could do little more than turn and stumble into the wood, fleeing the scene of her crime.

Blindly. Shamefully.

What had she done? What had she done? The branches stabbed at her like accusing fingers. Pulled at hair and worn gown. Harlot! Jezebel. Tears obscured her vision. One word rang above the others in her mind.

Alex!

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The spriggan found himself thrust into the wilderness again, this time on a whim of his master’s to honor a promise to a lowly human. Bashru was highly disgruntled over the situation. He was back on a nighthorse that hated him with all of its inconsequential intellect, on a mission that was not really a mission at all, to track down a missing human girl and a damned unpredictable assassin. That Azeral sent Bashru out alone on this impossible quest told how eager the high lord was to see fruit come of it. He’d probably be just as happy if the girl never did come back. It would give the court more room to work on the man, for whatever purposes the court wanted him.

Bashru tried not to think of what made the Sidhe do what they did. He tried to stay far away from their machinations and their sordid pleasures. One had no desire to find oneself the object of a sidhe’s sadistic humor. And with a spriggan, that the tall, pale sidhe found repulsive and ugly, torments and torture would be all that was forthcoming. No more erotic uses did spriggans or gnomish slaves find themselves cornered into. Not like the fairies, or the half fairy bendithy or the lesser sidhe servants, who occupied certain bedrooms as well as served the keep’s needs.

So really, other than the fact that Bashru found joy in complaining of his lot in life, he was not entirely upset to be away from the keep. He just wished that it were for some real cause. As if he had a chance of finding the girl, if the Ciagenii could not. As if he could find the Ciagenii.

More likely he’d find things in the wood that preferred spriggan for dinner and he’d end his days over a spit. He spat a curse on humans, and another, softer one on sidhe.

He dug his heels into the sides of the rebellious nighthorse. It tossed its head, tearing at the bit, just as surly as its rider to be cast out into the forest in the middle of the night. Bashru settled deeper into his cloak as a drenching rain began to fall.

Omens were not looking good.

~~~

Alex listened to the lilting music of hidden fairy musicians in a garden courtyard. It was late afternoon, the sky almost green with oncoming dusk. He sat on a bench next to a running stream, watching the sidhe who sat on the grass, laughing and playing some game of lights and mazes. Leanan was among them, having left his side to join her brethren in the game. Her laughter drifted above the others, her golden hair and ivory skin a beacon that unerringly drew his eye.

His days had been filled with her.

She never left his side, save when he retired into his silken room. He had yet to decide whether she was his guard or his protector. She served both duties equally well. She kept her predatory fellows from molesting him, and kept him from veering too far from the path she and her father chose that he follow. Sometimes he found himself staring at her. At her perfectly beautiful alien features. And he would blink and find time elapsed and her staring back at him with patient amusement. He thought she found him childish and stupid.

Clumsy and indelicate. He felt it, among these gliding, graceful creatures.

She had taken him to feast for three nights, each evening retiring before the sidhe could commence their after-dinner amusements. Azeral occasionally indulged in small talk, but little else. They all watched him, he thought. At one point or another, each set of eyes rested on him as if he were the next course of the meal and they waited only for Azeral’s command to feast on him. He had nightmares about it.

Himself at their mercy, with no Leanan to hold them back. He dreamed of hurtful hands and malicious minds that crushed his own puny will with neglectful ease.

Sometimes in the dream, Leanan came and pulled him from their clutches and he clung to her. She always smiled her patient smile, held him against her perfect breast and made him forget.

He never remembered the dreams totally. Always he woke and could only grasp snatches of what they did to him.

But Leanan’s participation was never dulled. He remembered each detail of her with crystal clarity. Never once did his old nightmares haunt him. The lapping of waves and the wail of twin engines and fifty caliber machine gun fire were wretched, puny fears compared to the worries that ate at the subconscious here.

If he dreamed of Victoria he could not recall. Sometimes he had a hard time constructing her face in his memory. A tumbling wave of red hair and a pale face. But the features always blurred and melted into something more alien, something more irrevocably beautiful.

There were days he forgot to think about her at all.

“We go on hunt this night.” A voice startled him and he blinked, staring up at a female sidhe that stood over him. Her hair was as dark as the high sidhe’s hair tended to get – russet with strands of gold.

Her face was angular and long. Cold beauty compared to Leanan’s welcoming warmth. He half remembered this woman from the feasts. She talked little, and always sat in observation when the others rose to dance or torment some hapless slave.

“Would you ride with us, human?” There was almost a hint of dare in her soft voice. He glanced back to the game.

Leanan was looking in his direction, face serene as ever. She smiled at him. He could not tear his eyes away. The woman continued, a disembodied voice. “Azeral, for some reason unknown to me, would enjoy your company. His daughter, of course, will ride.”

He swung his gaze back up to her.

She had a brow lifted.

“Who are you?” he asked bluntly.

“Tyra, Mistress of the Hunt. Will you join us this night?”

He shrugged. If Leanan wanted it, he probably would. “Is my consent needed?” he inquired.

“No one who is unwilling rides in my Hunt,” she stated simply. She looked past him, at Leanan who had risen and was approaching. She inclined her head with a relaxed smile and walked on. Leanan paid her no heed. She sat down next to Alex.

“Did the mistress of hunts ask your favor to join the hunt?”

“I suppose. You’re going?”

“Of course. It has been long since the court participated in a great hunt. It will be a most exhilarating experience. Especially for you, this being your first.”

“My first,” he chewed on the inside of his cheek, forcing his eyes away from her face. “What exactly do we hunt?”

Leanan grinned. “Tyra will find something. Something exceptional since we’ve been waiting so long.”

The great hunt always took place at the midnight hour. The witching hour. The pinnacle of night. Alex supposed it had some ritual meaning. Leanan said that the power of the night was at its peak at midnight. Night creatures were their most powerful, and the court wanted the challenge of hunting a beast at its prime.

The hunt left far before that hour.

They set out in mass, almost the whole of the court, decked out in their finest riding dress. They rode high stepping nighthorses with attendants trailing behind carrying baskets of food and instruments to entertain while they traveled and waited for the prey to be found. They galloped down the spiraling mountain path into the wood. The great ones at the fore, Azeral, Tyra and the higher lords seemed to do something to the forest that made it blur and vacillate. The solidity of the world was threatened. The sky darkened and lightened with stars that were there one moment and covered by clouds the next.

Alex stared, unnerved at Leanan at his side. She was dressed in black.

Breathtakingly so. Filmy gauze that flew out behind her as her mount ran, barely containing the ample flesh of her breasts as she bounced with the gait. Her hair was speckled with dark gems, loose and falling about her face. Her skin was pale and flushed in the night’s bluish glow, her eyes large and excited.

“What’s happening to the wood?” he asked.

“What do you mean? The holes?”

He nodded, uncertainly.

“Nothing worthy to hunt lives near the keep. Our prey resides a great distance away. We merely skip stretches of land to make our journey shorter.”

“What do you mean, ‘skip’?”

“My father creates a hole, so to speak, and it opens on the side we’re on and leads to another place. It can only be done if you’re familiar with both places. The Mistress of Hunts knows where the prey is, so Azeral picks the locations from her memory and creates the holes for us all to follow.”

“Oh.”

The landscape altered again and they were in deeper forest, with older trees and more twined undergrowth. The sidhe took it all in stride. Alex felt nausea just from the knowledge of what they were doing. Someone passed a wineskin to Leanan and she took a sip and passed it on to him. He took a grateful gulp and someone else took it out of his hands.

Up ahead, Tyra called a halt to the progress. The court came to an unwieldy stop, mounts milling about in suppressed eagerness. Sidhe started to dismount, giving their reins over to attendants. Alex leaned close to Leanan and asked what was happening.

“We’ll wait until the midnight hour before we start the hunt,” she explained. “The prey is near.” She slipped down from her horse and he followed suit. She waded into the crowd and found a bendithy with a basket. She took it and a skin of wine and settled under a moss-covered tree. Others were splitting off into groups, disappearing into the wood.

Alex sat down near Leanan, attention attracted by Azeral and the luminous female Sidhe he bent over. Their blending was almost sympathetic. Gold and gold, inhuman grace, long graceful limbs.

Movements that might have been a choreographed dance. Leanan followed his gaze, her eyes were not quite warm.

“Ah, my father and his Lady. Pretty pair, no?”

“Your mother?”

Leanan laughed sharply. “No, thank the four gods. Neferia is merely his current favorite.”