A sharp gasp and moan slipped from me before I found the breath to respond, this time in more of my own voice. “I don't even know. But I don't believe I care either. She is me, and I am her, we are two becoming one, and soon it will be irrelevant who is who.”
“Do you want this?” His fingers flicked upward, sending pulsing waves of pleasure shooting through me. “Or does she?”
“Do you care?” I countered, meeting his gorgeous green eyes with confidence. “You don't strike me as the type to second-guess yourself where sex is concerned.”
“You're right,” he murmured, his eyes turning hard and cold. “I warned you that you were playing with fire, and yet here you still are. What happens next …” Arlo scoffed and stood up, withdrawing his hand and all the pleasure it brought with it. “What happens next is … if you want to get on my good side …”
He lifted his fingers to his lips, the tips shiny with my wetness. I watched in abject fascination as he sucked them clean.
“Then get the fuck out of my room and go choose your own.”
Arlo turned and stormed out the door, his boots loud against the floor as he went.
I watched him go and then paused, letting myself fall back into the blankets and rolling to one side, gathering them up in my hands and pressing them to my face.
They smelled good, earthy and musky, like Arlo himself.
I did not want to pick another room … but what I did want was to get on his good side.
So I would lie here for just a moment longer and absorb his smell, and then I would indeed choose my own bedroom.
But would it be lonely?
Or after so much time in captivity, would my solitude be bliss?
There was only one way to find out.
“That fucking girl,” I snapped, tossing out a hand in the general direction of the clubhouse and storming up to Reece. He had one boot up on an old wooden shipping crate, a cigarette in his tattooed fingers, and a chuckle dancing on his stupid motherfucking lips.
“Dat fuckin' girl is Le Gardien, and you'd do best to get dat in your head and remember it, you.” Reece stood up and flicked his still burning smoke into the water. “'Ey, Meme!” he shouted, calling for that stupid goddamn alligator again. But I wasn't done with my bitchin' session. If this asshole had time to stand here and feed marshmallows to a friggin' lizard, he had time to listen to me and complain.
“Yeah, the same guardian that our fathers' comrades had sex with over a hundred fuckin' years ago.”
“Naw,” Reece said, smacking his lips at the gator as she chomped down on a floating white marshmallow and then leapt up to crunch the bit of raw chicken off the end of his hook. “Just da same body, but not da same girl. A new soul be in dat girl, and you know it.”
I clenched my damn teeth.
“She keeps fucking callin' me Cernunnos.”
Reece threw back his head and laughed, flashing white teeth in a dark night. It was hard to believe, standing out here like this, that I'd seen that fragile fucking girl tear a man's soul to pieces right in front of me.
The hell is this world coming to?
My brothers might want things to go back to the way they used to be—down with the fucking Veil, a return to the Wild Hunt, a destiny laid out like a road map—but I sure as shit did not. I liked being a man, as close to human as anyone else in this club, and I liked living in the bayou, fucking club whores, smoking and drinking. I liked the business of hustling and I was damn good at it.
All of this magic shit?
My glamour shifted and cracked, just like that—and I still had my cut on, too. These leather vests, they were more than just colors for us, more than just symbols, they were quite literally a glamour, easy to toss on and take off when needed.
But here I was, standing in mine and it was shattered to shit.
“Feet pue tan,” Reece howled, turning his brown eyes over to me. You son of a bitch. “You are fuckin' Cernunnos, you dang fool, you.” Reece shook his head and leaned down to pull a chicken leg out of the cooler, tossing it onto the warped wood of the old deck with a wet slap.
The gator—this six foot son of a bitch—leapt onto the wood and snatched it up before sinking back into the murky waters. The only light we had was the moon, but that was enough. As much as I wished I weren't sometimes, I was faerie.
Fucking. Goddamn. Faerie.
And it ain't as nice as any of that shit on TV or in books and movies.
No, the fae were dark and they were fucked and they were as awful as the lowest bottom dwelling scum humanity could dredge up. Hell, they were worse sometimes. A lot of the time.
“My father is Cernunnos,” I growled out, but in the mix of wild bird calls, the whir of cicadas, and the grunts of gators, it was a weak noise.
“Your Père was Cernunnos,” Reece said quietly, and I felt my entire body go stiff as he stood up straight and stretched his arms over his head.
I chose not to respond to that statement. What was the point?
He was right, and I goddamn hated it.
“Want to go hit the bars?” I asked and Reece scoffed, shaking his head and giving me a look like I was the craziest son of a bitch this side of the Mason-Dixon line.
“She won't much like dat and I'm not lookin' to make trouble wit' da Veil Keeper, me.”
“Fuck the Veil Keeper,” I snarled, turning and using the narrow path on the side of the clubhouse to get to the parking lot. Once there, I booted up my hog with a kick and got the fuck out of there before I did something crazy.
Like fuck a woman who was older than time itself …
And whose soul looked back at me with eyes too broken and too young to be so fucking sad.
The only bar in town that I was sure I could find a red-blooded human woman at this time of night was Voila Merde, which pretty literally meant go to shit in French. The tourists all thought it sounded real purdy, and the locals thought it was funny as hell.
It was a notorious mixing spot for out-of-towners that'd cleared their visit to our turf with the boss … and also the one place in town that the rougarou liked to stir shit up in front of humans.
The sign in front said No Flying Colors, but I ignored it and pushed my way inside, my glamour restored with the emergency bottle we all kept in our front pockets, my temper at an all-time high.
“Give me something that'll get me drunk quick,” I said as I slid onto one of the cracked leather bar stools and flicked my glance to the right.
A curvy little blonde sat there all alone, sipping some bright blue froufrou drink and staring into her glass like it had the wisdom of the gods. But I'd met the gods. Shit, I was supposed to be one in a sense. And let me tell you this—they're just as fallible as mortals.
I studied her as I waited for my drink. She wasn't wearing a Property Of jacket, and clearly, she didn't have a man with her. Maybe she'd come down to Voila Merde to drown her sorrows … but I doubted she just wanted to drown them in alcohol.
Most women that came down here were looking for trouble … and sex.