11
WHY COULDN’T IT have been an overcast day? Sleep had not been an easy thing to find last night after Gideon left and Sofie was settled from her shower. After a couple slices of lukewarm pizza, a beer, and a quick memory spell on Robert, I had lain in bed staring up at the ceiling, my mind replaying the events of the day until I wanted to scream. The sun was peeking over the horizon when I drifted off and then it was only a short time later when Trixie called with plans to pick me up.
A cold shower got me moving, but I was still waiting for the coffee that I had been sucking on since I fell into her car to get my brain moving. Dressed in jeans and a mostly clean T-shirt, I knew I was underdressed to meet with the queen of the Summer Court, but I couldn’t summon up the energy to care. The dark sunglasses weren’t keeping out nearly enough of the bright, early-afternoon glare, and the world had this cheerful feel that seemed horribly wrong considering that the Towers had an itchy trigger finger and were gunning to take out more people.
It was a struggle to push my grumpy attitude aside. Trixie was strained with worry and fear. I was beginning to think that even in my sleep-deprived state, it would have been a better idea for me to drive. She was hitting the brakes at the last possible second, as if her mind wasn’t fully aware that her body was driving.
“Did you have any problems last night?” I asked, causing Trixie to jump. We had been quiet since I’d slunk into the passenger seat, not even daring to turn on the radio.
“Nothing other than Bronx’s snoring rattling the windows this morning,” she complained, but there was no venom behind the comment. “We stayed up watching old M*A*S*H and Great American Hero reruns. I left him curled up in the shower with a pile of blankets.”
I smiled at the image. It had to be a tight fit and couldn’t be particularly comfortable, but the bathroom was the safest room in Trixie’s apartment since it had no windows. I’m sure Bronx was fine though. The troll slept like the dead and probably wouldn’t stir until sunset.
“After this meeting, we’ll grab some food to drop off to him before heading into the shop.”
“You think we’re going to have any customers today?”
I sighed, placing my travel mug in the cup holder. “I have no idea, but we’ll probably get busy soon.”
Trixie paused, her eyes on the road in front of her as she exited the highway onto the off-ramp. “Did you have any problems last night?”
“A couple,” I admitted, praying that she didn’t press me for details. She already had enough on her plate.
“Did you talk to Sofie?”
“Some. She had a small problem herself, but she’s fine now. Last I saw, she was sprawled across my bed like she belonged there. I swear, I think she’s happier as a cat.”
“Doubtful.” She eased to a stop at a red light, her driving smoothing out as she neared our destination.
“What’s not to love? She sleeps most of the day, has food brought to her, and everyone that sees her rubs her head. Hell, being turned into a cat is starting to sound pretty good.”
Trixie narrowed her eyes at me, but I could see her fighting to hold back her smile. “If it happens, I’ll be sure to have you fixed immediately.”
“That’s cold, woman! You should never talk about cutting off a man’s balls.”
The smile she had been fighting slipped forth as she pressed the gas, sending the car across the intersection. “I think it might be a good idea for the king and I’m sure the queen would agree with me.”
I leaned forward and grabbed my mug. I drained the last of my coffee, grateful that the wheels were starting to turn a little. “I think I’ve got some pruning shears somewhere at the shop. Just a quick snip.”
“For you or him?”
“Him,” I growled, earning me a low chuckle that sent a ripple through my stomach. If we survived all this with the elves, Reave, and the Towers, I swear I was going to lock this woman in some secluded spot with me for a week, and when we were done, we weren’t going to be able to walk right for a goddamn month. Trixie had a way about her that wiped every sane thought from my head.
Winding through the park to an empty row of parking spots, Trixie settled her little green hybrid between a silver minivan and a black sedan baking in the sun. She turned off the engine and dropped her hands into her lap as she stared straight ahead. I reached over and twined my fingers through hers on her right hand, drawing her gaze up to me.
“We’re just meeting to talk,” I said calmly, as I placed my sunglasses on the dashboard. “Get a little information. I’ll be there the whole time and I’m leaving this park with you beside me.”
She nodded, forcing a smile onto her lips. I took in her brown hair, brown eyes, and lovely heart-shaped face. She was putting on the glamour spell out of habit, whether she needed it or not. The human version of her was beautiful, but it rankled me at the same time. It wasn’t Trixie. It wasn’t the green-eyed vixen that I loved. “I think it’s safe to lose the spell. I’m sure the queen would appreciate it.”
Her smile wavered a bit, but with a blink of her eyes, the spell faded away to be replaced by a vision of blond hair and green eyes.
“We should get going. I’d rather not be late,” she murmured as she leaned in and pressed a kiss against my cheek. I released her hand as we got out of the car, but grabbed it again when we started toward the park and the man-made lake with the geyser-like fountain in the center. The area surrounding Mirror Lake was open with neatly trimmed green grass and a scattering of flower beds showing off the last of their summer blooms. There were a few people jogging around the lake and a few others walking their dogs, but otherwise the park was quiet in the warm afternoon sun.
“The gazebo,” Trixie said with a jerk of her head toward the far end of the park.
I squinted against the sun glinting off the water as we turned toward the gazebo. “It’s been a while since I was here. I don’t remember that.” The small open building was painted white with a blue roof and was surrounded by a profusion of flowers. Within the shadows of the gazebo, I could see a few figures, but I couldn’t tell how many.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she had it built for today’s meeting. She is the queen after all.”
“True.” I gave her hand a little squeeze. “How many are here?”
“Other than the queen, twenty-three. All guards.”
“I don’t think she could fit twenty-three guards in that little gazebo with her,” I said with a grin.
“There are three guards in the gazebo with her. The rest are spread around the park, hiding just past the tree line.”
I suppressed a shiver, clenching my teeth. I couldn’t see them and I wasn’t even sure that I would be able to pick them out using magic. Elves were one of the few races that I hadn’t had a lot of experience with. After the Great War, they kept a distance from the rest of the world, particularly warlocks and witches. I couldn’t help but wonder if I had found yet another way to get in over my head.
Trixie’s pace slowed as we reached the small stepping-stones leading up to the gazebo. She tightened her grip on my hand, her touch growing cold. The guard at the entrance to the gazebo glowered at us, his hand resting heavily on the short sword that hung at his hip, before he stepped aside. Gazing in, I found two more guards standing on either side of a lovely woman seated on a cushioned bench near the back of the structure. She was partially hidden in shadows thrown down by a nearby bank of trees.
As Trixie lifted her foot to the first of two steps leading up to the gazebo, I placed my free hand against her stomach, halting her. “Wait,” I said under my breath as I sent a small spell swirling about the gazebo, checking for other spells the elves might have used while unraveling any glamour cast on the area. To my surprise, there was none.
“You don’t trust us?” asked a melodious feminine voice.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s that life has taught me to be cautious, Your Majesty,” I said with a bow of my head toward her.
“That is fair,” she said in an even voice. “Please, enter so that we may talk.”
I dropped my hand from Trixie’s stomach and allowed her to enter first. The guard moved back to the entrance behind me as I stepped before the queen. Seated on a bench with white and pale yellow cushions, she appeared to be quite young, with soft blond hair piled high on her head with jeweled clips. She had the same green eyes as Trixie, but the queen’s were cold as they looked us over, while Trixie’s seemed to twinkle with laughter. Her wispy dress was an ice blue, lending her a cold air. Was she as cold as she seemed? Had she been like this before her husband had started chasing after Trixie? It would explain a few things.
Trixie deeply curtsied before the queen while I dipped into an awkward bow that caused her to give a little giggle as she picked up a delicate cup and saucer from a little table near her knee. “How refreshing! A warlock paying me court,” she said before taking a sip of her tea. “I’d almost be willing to brush this all aside to have you wait on me every day for the rest of your life.”
I clamped my mouth shut, tapping down a dozen different comments, ranging from informative to snide. None of them would help and Trixie didn’t need more problems heaped onto her.
The queen took another sip of tea before placing the cup and saucer on the table again. She turned her gaze on Trixie, her eyes narrowing as she examined her from head to toe. Trixie had chosen to wear an ankle-length floral skirt and long-sleeved blouse that made her look extremely delicate and feminine. It was the most conservative outfit I had ever seen her in and she looked beautiful. Unfortunately, I didn’t know if that would help or hurt her.
“You’ve gotten lovelier,” the queen announced, folding her hands in her lap. “I think I shall take some pleasure in seeing my dear husband’s face when I tell him that I not only saw you but that you’ve gotten even more beautiful since you were last with the court.”
“Please, Your Majesty,” Trixie said, tightly grasping her hands before her. “You must believe me. I don’t want him.”
“Oh, I believe you,” she said with a cold little smile. “It’s the only reason I haven’t sent my own guards to kill you. Allowing you to live out of my husband’s grasp is a far more exquisite torture for him than him believing you dead.”
“Don’t you think enough lives have been disrupted and destroyed by this little game?” I demanded before I could stop myself.
The queen looked up at me, her smile growing even frostier. “I bow to your wisdom on that point. Only a warlock would know what is enough when it comes to destroying lives.”
I inwardly cursed myself, the Towers, and the elves. I should have kept my mouth shut, but it had become apparent that I was going to have to answer for the crimes the Towers had committed on the elves.
As the queen turned her attention back to Trixie, her smile dimmed. “You realize I did not have to agree to this meeting. I could have killed your brother when he requested it. When you arrived, I could have had you killed, and that would have ended my headache after too many long years. I still might.”
“Ah . . . but you have agreed to the meeting,” said a man as he leisurely strolled past the guards and into the gazebo. “And at such a horribly early time of day.” I twisted to watch him walk behind Trixie and me before stopping next to the queen’s little bench. His dark blue eyes drifted over me for only a second before settling on Trixie. He gave a small, distracted smile. “Hello, Ro.”
“Hello, Lori,” Trixie said with a soft catch in her voice. Tears shimmered in her eyes and it looked like she was struggling to stay standing still when she badly wanted to launch herself at the newcomer.
I took another look at him. He didn’t look like an elf. While their paleness seemed healthy and glowing, his was powdery. His pale blond hair was fine, almost like feathers on the top of his head. He was also soft and round, where the elves were all slim and elegant. But there was a grace to him, as if he were trapped in perpetual slow motion. He wasn’t an elf, but I was willing to bet that he was fey.
Despite the growing heat of the day, he wore brown slacks and a pale yellow shirt under a heavy green corduroy jacket, while a blue-and-black scarf was wrapped loosely around his neck. He was reminded of pictures of bohemian artists lounging along the Seine in Paris or even the descriptions of the old Romantics who were troubled with the same soul-weary ennui as Byron.
“It’s good that you could join us,” the queen said a bit frostily.
Lori shrugged, unperturbed by her mood. “When I heard that little Rowena was stopping by, I knew that I had to get a peek at her.” He tilted his head to the side a little as he looked at Trixie. “You haven’t changed.”
“Nor you,” Trixie said, her voice growing firmer.
“You seem eager to help Rowena with her little problem,” the queen interjected into the conversation, her crisp tone chilling as she fixed her narrowed gaze on me.
“Yes.” I waited, wondering what price I would have to pay for the slaughter of her people by the Ivory Towers. And while she was busy taking her pound of flesh from me, would she punish Trixie as well for the trouble caused by her husband?
“Then, since I was so pleased with the feeling of you bowing to me, I think you will be my servant for the day,” she announced with a growing grin. My eyes darted to Lori, weighing his sudden appearance at her side, standing close at hand like a servant waiting to do her bidding. Was that how he had gotten ensnared? Promising to serve the queen for a day?
When I looked back at the queen, her smile was positively sharklike, as if knowing where my thoughts were traveling. Trixie grabbed my hand, squeezing tightly, but she didn’t argue. Not too reassuring, but at least I didn’t have to fight anyone. “What are my tasks?” I asked.
“Nothing much,” the queen said. Her small hand drifted back to her teacup, her finger sliding around the rim. “I’ve decided that I would like some mint for my tea. You will fetch it.”
I nodded, stopping myself from thinking that the task sounded easy enough. “Fine. I know a shop not far from here that sells fresh mint. I’ll—”
“No need to travel so far,” she purred, her voice seeming to warm for the first time. “I have a friend who lives in a house at the edge of the park. She grows many useful herbs. You will fetch me some fresh mint from her.”
I hesitated, meeting Trixie’s wide eyes. My heart pounded at the idea of leaving her alone with the elves. She had spent so much time on the run from them, surviving on her own. I hated the idea of abandoning her in their midst with no one to watch her back. “And Trixie will be safe?”
“No one will touch a hair on her head while you are gone.” The queen was too eager to agree to Trixie’s safety, which only failed to reassure me. But there was nothing I could do. I had to play along with her little game if we were going to reach any kind of agreement that would end the pursuit of my girlfriend.
“Where’s the house?” I asked.
The queen gave a little wave of her hand. “Lori will escort you.”
The pale man sighed but ambled around the gazebo and down the steps. He paused, and stared up at the sky with a grimace at the sun before reaching into one of his jacket pockets and pulling out a folded, floppy straw hat. Plopping it on his head, he continued across the park.
I gave Trixie’s hand one last squeeze before I followed after Lori. A couple jogging steps allowed me to catch up with him and then I had to reduce my natural pace since the man walked so damned slow. It was as if nothing in the world could make him want to rush.
“You’ve known Rowena a long time?” I said after several minutes of silence as we cut across the large open area in the center of the park.
“I saw her born,” he said, and then smiled a little. “She was my student for a time. She loved watching the stars with me.”
“You’re an artist?”
For the first time, his features crumpled a little as he looked over at me. “Of course.” He said this as if that was the only thing he could possibly be. His face smoothed out again like glass and his voice returned to its dreamy state. “She spent years drawing vines and curling leaves, trying to breathe life into her art.”
“Are you an elf?”
“No. My people are called Lorialets.”
“Fey?”
“Not really,” he said with a slight shake of his head as he paused at the edge of the sidewalk. He looked both ways and waited for one distant car to pass us before he continued across the street. “But we prefer to be with the fey. They understand us.”
“I’ve never met a Lorialet.” But I had heard of them. I had thought they were a faery tale, a crazy myth. Lorialets were also called Lunatics, but with the current connotation of the word, I didn’t think he’d take the other name as a compliment. Lorialets were supposedly the children of Selene and Endymion. They were moon gazers, dreamers, poets, musicians, and seers of the past and future.
“There aren’t many of us.”
“Because of the Towers?”
He paused in the middle of the sidewalk and tilted his head a little to the side in thought. “No,” he slowly said. “There were never many of us to begin with, and the Towers have never taken much interest in us.”
I could guess why. Every time he spoke, his voice was soft and distracted, as if his mind were only half on where he was at and what he was doing. He’d drive any warlock or witch insane within a few minutes with his slow, plodding ways.
“Will the queen keep her word and not allow Rowena to come to harm?”
“She has no plans to physically harm our little Rowena,” he said on a sigh.
His choice of words didn’t reassure me.
“At the moment,” Lori continued as he stopped in front of a large two-story home of dark red brick with black shutters, “our lovely queen is telling Rowena who you are getting the mint from.”
“You know whose house this is?”
“Oh, yes. Her name is Demoiselle Noire de Gruchy and I think you will find her quite interesting.”
“I don’t care about this lady. I need to get back to Trixie,” I said in a strained voice, glancing over my shoulder toward the gazebo. Regardless of what Lori said, I didn’t trust the queen.
“You should definitely care,” Lori said. I looked back at my companion and there was something in his eyes as he glanced from me to the house that made me pay attention to my surroundings.
A cluster of magpies roosting on the roof and in the trees in the little front yard had grown silent the moment we stopped before the house. I could feel all their eyes trained on us, watching and waiting. The house looked like any other, but there was a faint tang of magic in the air. It was old, as if years of magic use had settled into the earth and danced on the wind like particles of dust.
Lori sighed and frowned. “She will not be pleased with me,” he muttered to himself as he reached inside his trouser pocket. He pulled out a little glass vile with a cork stopper and handed it to me. “Dab a little on each eyelid. Quickly. Do it now.”
I pulled out the stopper and sniffed the liquid. “Dandelion water?”
“Yes, please hurry.” Despite the intensity of his words, his tone retained its usual dreamlike quality.
I spread a little over each eyelid, smearing it in so that it didn’t drip into my eyes. Blinking a few times, I shoved the stopper into the bottle and handed the vial to Lori. As I looked around, I found that everything looked . . . exactly the same. Dandelion water was supposed to help you see through glamour and keep you from being ensnared by the fey.
“Nothing has changed,” I said.
Lori smiled and gave his little shrug. “I am as you see me. Nothing more. But it will help with her. Don’t tarry too long. The sooner you’re back, the better it will be for everyone.” I opened my mouth to ask about Demoiselle Noire de Gruchy but Lori held up a hand, stopping me. “I can say no more. I’ve already helped more than I should.”
That’s what I was afraid of. I was lucky that he’d helped me this much. His fondness for Trixie was forcing him to give me what little assistance he could, and I appreciated it. With a brittle smile, I turned down the walk and approached the house. The magpies watching me erupted into loud chatter, as if excited that a new fly had fallen into this mystery woman’s web.
The lawn was neatly trimmed without a single stray branch or fallen leaf in sight despite the trees being full of birds. Mums bloomed in the beds along the house and the walk was edged with chest-high hedges. I paused before the front stairs, my right hand hovering over the hedge nearest me. There was a tingle against the palm of my hand and I almost laughed. Noire de Gruchy had hawthorn hedges. How convenient. My wand was made of hawthorn.
Kneeling down, I carefully reached in past the long thorns and broke off a branch. I quickly pulled off the excess shoots and thorns, before shoving the stick in my pocket. It wouldn’t be half as strong as my own wand, but it would give me a little bit of a boost and more control, which I was sure would be helpful against whoever this bitch was.
Armed with a pseudowand and dandelion water, I mounted the stairs and knocked on the front door. A gust of frigid air swept out of the house and bit into my bare arms as the door swung open. I flinched, falling back a step. The day was warm for early September, but not warm enough to have the air conditioner cranked to late-July levels.
“Please, come in,” said a woman’s soft voice. She had stepped back and was hidden within the interior darkness and behind the door.
Wishing I had brought a winter coat along, I stepped into the cold foyer and turned back to face my host as the door closed. Blinking against the darkness, my eyes took a moment to adjust after my walk in the bright afternoon sun.
When my eyes focused, I felt like I had been hit in the gut. The woman standing in the golden sunlight pouring through the slender window beside the door was stunning. Her skin was pale but perfectly flawless as it stretched over high cheekbones on a lovely oval face. She had dark eyes that could have been either dark brown or dark blue, but I couldn’t tell in the shadows. Her exquisite mouth spread into a warm smile when I realized that I had been staring, but even with that knowledge I couldn’t stop myself.
A black silk tank top clung to her breasts and revealed long, white arms. Her black pants hugged her long legs and were molded to her shapely hips. Demoiselle Noire de Gruchy was not a thin, waiflike creature like so many that filled fashion magazines and action movies. She was lush and curvy, leaving me aching to fill my hands with her.
I cleared my throat loudly and jerked my eyes from her, if only so I could get the blood to flow back from my pants to my brain. “Are you Demoiselle Noire de Gruchy?” I asked.
“Yes, I am.” Her voice was silky smooth and left a slow burn in my chest like good Kentucky bourbon. A part of me wanted her to go on talking, but the little sane part that wasn’t my libido was screaming to never let her open her mouth again.
“I’m Gage. The queen . . . the queen of the Summer Court sent me.”
“Oh, yes. She’s in town, isn’t she? Is she well?”
I closed my eyes and drew in a deep breath. There was a hint of something in the air. Almost like flowers. Soft and cloying. I couldn’t identify it without getting a stronger whiff, but I didn’t want to draw more of it into my lungs. Something was off in this house.
With my eyes closed, some of the fog was clearing from my mind and I could think a little better. I was becoming more aware of the slight tingle of magic in the air. It was nothing aggressive and may have been nothing more than a defensive spell or two, but I hadn’t even known the magic was there when I had stared at the woman. I tried to focus on the feeling of the magic, see if I could identify the spell. Was the spell muddling my thoughts, making it impossible to think about anything beyond this woman and sex?
A whisper of fabric was my only warning that Demoiselle Noire de Gruchy had moved closer to me.
“Oh, you poor dear,” she cooed in that intoxicating voice. “You’ve got something in your eyes.” A hand as cold as ice slid along my cheek, chilling my skin while sending a fresh shot of hot lust straight to my dick, which was now rock hard.
I jerked away from her touch, slamming against the nearest wall. My breath exploded from my throat in hard, jerky gasps. She had been about to wipe off the dandelion water. Holy shit, if this was how I was reacting without falling under her glamour, I was totally f*cked without it.
“Mint! The queen needs mint!” I shouted at her, sounding like an idiot, but I didn’t care. I needed to get the mint and get the hell out of there before I lost control. I didn’t know what it was. Her beauty, her smile, the sound of her voice, the scent in the air, the magic—maybe all of the above—but whatever it was, it was driving me toward one thing. Even with my eyes squeezed shut, all I could think about was pinning this woman to the floor and f*cking until we both died of pleasure.
With some effort, I pulled up a pleasant memory of Trixie and clung to it like a life raft bobbing helplessly in the middle of the ocean. I loved Trixie. I wouldn’t betray Trixie with this woman. Trixie was my happiness. Trixie was my sanity. Trixie . . .
Demoiselle Noire de Gruchy gave a little laugh, proving she wasn’t disturbed by my idiotic shouting. “Of course. Come to my greenhouse and I’ll get some for you.” I wanted to tell her that I would wait outside on her front porch in the warm sunlight and fresh air. There were other things I wanted to do to give me some physical relief, but I didn’t want to do them with her. Never with her.
Regardless of what my brain was screaming, I found my body following her through the opulently decorated house to an open, two-story room filled with windows. Sunlight poured in, seeming to glint over her pale skin, but there was no warmth in this room either.
As she picked up a pair of pruning shears, I watched her out of the corner of my eye, but was careful not to look at her directly. My thoughts were sluggish, but at least my mind was working now. Despite my reaction of mindless lust, I knew she wasn’t a succubus. I had a good friend who was an incubus, which meant that I’d met a few succubi in my time—I knew the difference. Noire de Gruchy was perfect in every way but ice cold to the touch. Both incubi and succubi were warm, their body temperatures naturally running a little higher than humans, like most shifters.
Standing beside the long table filled with a wide variety of potted plants, I noticed that the magic felt stronger here. If this woman was fey, it made sense, since the fey got the bulk of their power from nature. But this was different. I held out one hand toward the nearest plant, taking in the stronger feeling of energy, when the plant shivered.
I jerked my hand back, my heart pounding in my chest. Holy f*ck! That plant was human. Unlike the low energy that comes off many plants with magical properties, this one had a pulse and consciousness. I could feel the slight hint of a soul.
Demoiselle Noire gave a little chuckle over the sharp snip of her shears. My eyes jumped to her face and the horror helped knock the lust back. She smiled at me and I could now see that her eyes were black, matching her lush, coal-black hair.
“Finally figured out what I am, have you?” she said in that same low sweet voice that poured over me like warm maple syrup. She could be talking about peeling my skin off with a cheese grater and my brain would imagine hot, sweaty sex.
“The plants. They’re humans,” I said roughly, tightly gripping to my horror as an anchor.
She placed the snippets of mint in a little white envelope and folded it shut. “They were.” Turning toward me, she slowly approached. I backpedaled a step for each of hers. “Former lovers that I’ve grown tired of. So are the magpies on my trees.” She paused beside a large yellow rosebush and gently caressed the glossy green leaves. The bush shuddered and I could feel the hint of intense pleasure from it.
She continued approaching until I was pinned against another wall. Stopping a few feet away, she extended the hand holding the white envelope with the mint. I stared at it, confused. That was it? No attack? No bitter struggle for freedom?
She laughed again and I clenched my teeth against the sound as it throbbed through my body. “Go ahead. Take it. No strings attached.”
My hand was shaking, but it flashed out and snatched the envelope from her fingers before she could draw it back.
“I’ve promised the queen that I wouldn’t kill you. The damage has already been done.”
“What do you mean?”
“Rowena knows you were sent to me. She knows that no man has ever escaped me without visiting my bed. Even if I never touch you and you proclaim your sweet loyalty to her, she will always have a doubt eating away at her happiness in the back of her mind.”
And thus the queen has her revenge on us both. Trixie would spend the rest of our relationship thinking that I had wanted someone else, and I would lose the person I loved most in the world.
My head fell back, hitting the wall behind me as my eyes closed. I had been afraid of the queen kidnapping Trixie, having her put to death, torturing her physically. Hell, I had expected some kind of physical attack on me. I had never thought of an attack of this sort and I had no defense against it.
“You know, if she’s going to think you had sex with me, you might as well have the pleasure,” Demoiselle Noire de Gruchy said.
Lost in my own misery, I couldn’t put up any kind of defense. She plastered her body against mine in a heartbeat. I grabbed her left hand and held it out, while my other hand caught her shoulder as I tried to pry her away from me. Every nerve ending trembled as I struggled against both her and a host of angry instincts that were snarling for sex with this creature. The scent I had picked up earlier came back, thick and heavy, so that my mind was lost in the growing fog.
Straining, I managed to hold her upper body off my chest and keep her from kissing me, but her pelvis was pressed to my groin. She was icy to the touch, but I was putting off so much heat that I was confident that I could have melted an iceberg. Her leg slid up mine and a shudder racked my frame as she ground herself against my erection. This was not how I imagined I was going to die, but my heart wasn’t going to be able to take much more of this.
Her free right hand slid over my chest, dancing over my pounding heart. I dared a glance down at her face and she flashed me a wicked smile. I sucked in a sharp breath before her hand slipped back down my chest and slid inside my pants and boxers. Her long, soft fingers circled my dick and I moaned at the exquisite feeling before I could stop the sound. My hips jerked once, sending her hand over the head and down along the length, pushing another long groan past my lips.
I tensed every muscle in my body as sweat beaded at my temples and dripped down the sides of my face in the strain. I was teetering painfully on the edge, but I refused to give in. This beautiful creature was a monster. She lured lovers to her bed, and when she had sucked them dry of all they had to offer, she turned them into plants and animals so she could remain in control of them. The pleasure she offered wasn’t real. It was an illusion of magic. There was no love, no tenderness. Only Trixie could give me that.
“It’s not real,” I moaned, trying to gather the strength to push her off me.
“This doesn’t feel real?” She squeezed my cock so that I nearly came.
“Trixie is real. I love Trixie,” I said between clenched teeth.
“It’s okay. She doesn’t have to know. Just come for me now. You’re so close. Give yourself that little release. It’ll be our little secret.”
“No!” I roared. Releasing her shoulder, I grabbed her right wrist and pulled it as quickly and carefully out of my pants as I could. When my dick was free of her, I gave her a hard shove across the room. I didn’t see where she landed. Bending down, I grabbed the white envelope I had dropped and ran through the house. Demoiselle Noire’s furious shriek sliced through the air, chasing on my heels. As I hit the hallway, I pulled the hawthorn branch from my pocket and waved it with a quick burst of power that blew the front door off its hinges. Charging down the porch stairs, I started to run across the sidewalk when a rush of power swept across the front yard. The hawthorn hedges shifted and shivered a second before long branches lashed out at me. All the magpies took to the air at once, filling the silence with their loud cries. Ducking my head down under my arms, I kept running, a scream escaping me only when one branch hit my back and dragged the long thorns across my flesh.
I barely missed being hit by a car as I darted across the street, but I didn’t stop until I was back in the park. Struggling to catch my breath, I dropped to my knees in the soft grass before I fell on my face. Muscles screamed and my f*cking dick was throbbing in time with my racing heart. You’d think with the pain burning in my back from the thorns that the damn erection would go away, but I had been so close that some part of me was still crying for sex. For half a breath I thought about stumbling into the nearby woods to finish what had been started, but why give the elves watching me a show? Instead, I dug the fingers of my left hand into a large cut on my right biceps, sending a fresh wave of pain through my body that in turn washed away the last of my erection.
The reasonable part of me knew that the queen had watched her people slaughtered by the Towers. I knew that she had to be hurting over the betrayal of her husband. I knew these things and that reasonable part could understand why she would attack Trixie and me like this. Yet the larger part of me that was in pain, and still trying to get over the horror that I had very nearly been raped by something evil, was pretty f*cking pissed at the queen.