I glare at him. He’s never said anything that nice about me.
Dageus finishes his drink and slides it back for another. “I doona ken the names of the slain. During battle for possession of the grounds, a sidhe-seer escaped. We found her stumbling, badly injured, along the road toward Dublin. Drustan took her to the hospital at Dublin Castle. Your Inspector Jayne said he will commit the aid of his Guardians but only if the sidhe-seers turn over either the spear or sword to his troops. Permanently.”
I slap lids on the condiments and shove them in the fridge. Not a chance in hell. “What happened, Ryodan? You were supposed to place more powerful wards around the grounds. That was part of our negotiations.”
“My men have been busy, in case you’ve forgotten. Besides, you asked us to place more wards against Fae. Not humans.”
“Humans took control?” This just keeps getting worse. “Who?”
“The new sidhe-seers say it’s their home now.”
I narrow my eyes and snarl. Sidhe-seers came into our town and took our home? I promised Kat we wouldn’t let this happen. I promised her we would protect the abbey. We’re the home team. Nobody takes our stadium. “How many are there? What weapons do they have? How did they take the abbey? Didn’t Kat put up a fight?”
Dageus says, “If your Kat who was with us that night is in charge now, that may explain things. The woman we found said their headmistress has been missing for nigh a week, and someone inside their own group, Margery, invited the new sidhe-seers in.”
Nearly a week? That means she disappeared the day after our meeting! “Have you seen her?” I ask Ryodan.
“What do you think, she comes to visit me,” he says. “This is Katarina we’re talking about.”
“Bar’s closed,” I snap at a guy about to sit down.
He looks at Ryodan and Dageus. “They’re sitting here.”
“I said it’s closed.”
“Pour me a drink, bitch. It’s a free fucking world.” He drops a leg over the stool.
Ryodan smashes a fist out sideways, squarely into the guy’s face without even looking, while saying, “Assuming I arrange this meeting, the Keltar will aid in regaining control of the abbey regardless of the outcome.” The guy flies backward off the bar stool and crashes to the floor.
“Unlike you, we are men of our word. Unlike you,” Dageus growls, “we are men. As in human.”
“Humans break.” Ryodan doesn’t say it, doesn’t have to, it hangs in the air: We don’t.
The guy Ryodan punched picks himself up, gives us looks like we’re all crazy, and backs away into the crowd.
I tell Dageus, “The meeting with R’jan happens after we free the abbey.”
“It happens before or no’ at all,” Dageus says flatly.
“More sidhe-seers could die!” I say heatedly.
“Aye. Once. Christian is being butchered o’er and o’er again every day.” The Highlander’s brogue thickens. “Who kens it—perhaps he’s died a hundred times so far. Have you any idea what that can do to a man?”
I shiver. Yes. It sounds too similar to the hell Barrons’s son suffered. Regenerating only to be killed each time he was reborn. It turned the small boy into an animal, drove the child deep into madness from which there was no return. What is the same fate doing to Christian, even as we speak, who was highly unstable to begin with? He certainly hasn’t had an easy time of it since I arrived in Dublin: catapulted unarmed into the Silvers for years by a botched ritual, fed Unseelie by myself, locked in a desperate battle for control over what he’s becoming, and now held captive by a monster that rips out his guts every time he heals.
“His mind is fragile. His body is no’. ’Tis a dangerous and deadly imbalance that can go terribly wrong.”
It certainly is.
To Ryodan, I say, “Summon the prince for Dageus or I’m moving back to the bookstore, and leaving you on your own with the Unseelie Princesses. With Barrons in Faery, you’re the only one I’m protecting anyway.”
To Dageus, I say, “Get your clan ready to fight.”
“Och, MacKayla, ’tis no’ a thing for which the Keltar need preparing. We were born ready.”
19
“Hey, hey mama, like the way you move”
LOR
“Think you missed a spot,” I tell the voluptuous blonde that’s washing my dick.
I’m Pri-ya, I can’t be expected to bathe myself. They’ve been giving me sponge baths ’cause I’m pretty much covered from head to toe in * juice. They feed me and fuck me and clean me. Reminds me of the good old days when a man protected women with his club and they took care of him in return.
This week has been one of the finest of my existence—well, at least in the past century anyway—a veritable fuck-party 24/7, with five to ten women in the room at any given time, their sole reason for existing to sate my many needs, all blond, all buxom, all horny as hell. Life rocks. It’s better than Woodstock.
At first I pretended to be completely senseless, incapable of speech, but that gets old fast. Can’t tell a woman what you want next if you’re not talking, can’t ask what they want, although I never have a problem figuring that out. You watch their faces, listen to the sounds they make. Do they whimper, or do that sudden inhale that turns into a killer, husky purr? Do they growl and turn a good fuck into a better fight? Most women in these times got a whole lot of frustration to take out in bed, when they know they got a man big and tough enough to handle it. Are they the kind that tries not to make any sound at all, like they’re too tough to crack? That’s just waving a big-ass red flag at this bull. Those are the ones that always end up making the most noise by the time I’m done with ’em. I especially like the ones that hiss like a cat when I fuck ’em hard from behind, rubbing back, horny and passionate and wild.
Damn, I love women.
One thing that seems universal is that after a good hard fucking, most of ’em love to lay back and have a man take his time with them, stroking ’em from head to toe, licking, petting, telling ’em how beautiful they are, making ’em come over and over, especially with their hands tied, not that I’m into your run-of-the-mill S&M. I like to know the woman in my bed wants to call me master. That being said, I do like chains. Something about the heavy links against soft, silken skin, telling me I can take my time doing whatever I want. Test their sexual limits.
“There’s another sticky spot.” I point to my groin where a smear of honey lingers. She licks it off with catlike delicacy. Then starts sucking. Christ.
Once I realized the boss had fallen for my charade and wasn’t checking on me, I quit being so disgustingly Pri-ya. According to the promise I made Mac, I got one more week of this, then it’s back to the grind.
I mean to make the most of it. Then I’ll hunt and kill the Unseelie bitch that has some kind of strange magic that actually worked on me.
Turn me Pri-ya? You can’t amp up my sex drive. It’s already over the top.
Aw, fuck me, this blonde’s got a tongue that could strip copper tubing clean! I grab her head and pull her up to kiss the honey from her mouth. As I roll her beneath me, crushed between a tangle of naked, horny women, and about to drive in deep, I hear a woman say sternly, “Get out of here. All of you.”
What the fuck? I didn’t even hear the door open. Has the boss figured me out? Did Mac rat on me?
I ignore it. They’re gonna have to drag me out of this bed.
“You know I’m Ryodan’s girlfriend. You know he listens to me. You want to keep your jobs?”
I freeze, halfway in. It’s Jo. What the hell is she doing here?
Reluctantly, with a pissed off sound, the woman in my arms tries to disengage. I groan and hold on, won’t let her go.
“In five seconds anyone that’s still in bed with Lor is fired.”
In two seconds my bed is empty. None of these women are willing to lose such a highly valued commodity as a place to work, food, and shelter, not in times like these. Not even for the glory of my dick.
I sigh then turn it into another weird-ass moan. I don’t moan. I fucking roar. This Pri-ya business is taxing.
I roll onto my side and give Jo my ass, hoping she’ll just say whatever she has to say and go away, send back my babes.
I try to summon a pathetic whimper but it comes out sounding too much like me: a pissed off, sexually frustrated grunt. My dick was ready, almost home sweet home, and now it’s been relegated to a cardboard box beneath a bridge, cold and alone. It’s swollen and painfully compressed between the bed and my thigh.
I’m supposed to be a sex slave, so I can hardly roll over and ask her what the fuck she’s doing here.
I hear a rustling sound then feel her weight settle on the bed next to me.
Then there’s the sound of a washcloth drizzling water as she wrings it out into the basin, and I think, what the hell, Jo’s gonna finish the bath the blondes were giving me?
When she settles a hand on my back, I jerk. This is Jo. This is Ryodan’s territory. I don’t mess with the boss’s stuff. Nobody does. It’d be nearly as stupid as pissing off Barrons.
“Mac told me you’re Pri-ya,” Jo says. “She says she doesn’t remember anything from that time. That it’s all just a blur of sex.”
I’m instantly defensive: she looking to cheat on the boss? Women don’t cheat on Ryodan. Fuck, they don’t cheat on any of us. You don’t give up the best.
She runs her hand over my back, down my ass. I tense but stay perfectly still, thinking.
“God, you’re beautiful,” she says softly.
Wait, I’m supposed to moan. I try but get another frustrated grunt. Shit.
“I need a blur of sex,” she continues, talking and touching.
Who doesn’t? My dick gets harder. She’s not even my type. She’s petite and brunette with huge eyes and a delicate face. She’s exactly what I steer clear of.
But I’m supposedly Pri-ya.
I sigh. Looks like my game is ending sooner than I planned. I grunt with sheer frustration and roll over, look up at her to tell her to get her ass back to the boss and we’ll just forget all about this. My dick snaps straight up pointing to heaven, expressing firm opposition.
I clamp my open mouth shut again, thinking, Aw, no, no, no, no, don’t do that, honey, anything but that. She’s staring down at me with big, beautiful eyes filled with tears.
“You’re not really there, right?” She searches my face and I instantly make my eyes go glassy. I been doing it for days, it’s second nature now. She looks down at my dick and I try to will it limp but it doesn’t work for shit. It’s a simple beast. A woman is an occasion. My dick rises to it.
“I couldn’t stand it if I thought you’d remember this. It’s just that I broke up with Ryodan—”
Aw, shit.
“—not that you can really even call it a breakup because I knew from the beginning we weren’t really together—”