“Got all night.”
“Fae decisions are not for humans to know and understand.”
“There you go, getting all superior again. You can’t fake nice for more than a few seconds.”
“I am not faking, MacKayla. I am trying to know you, to earn your trust.”
“You could have earned some of my trust by being around when I needed you. Why didn’t you save me?” I demanded. I’d been scarred by my hellish time beneath the Burren in ways I didn’t fully understand and, although my body had healed, and I felt stronger than ever, I wasn’t certain I was necessarily the better for it. “I almost died. I begged you to come.”
He stopped abruptly and spun me to face him. Though his body was as warm and solid as mine, his eyes blazed inhuman fire. “You begged me? Did you cry my name? Pray to me?”
I rolled my eyes. “Figures that’s what you’d hear.” I stabbed him in the chest with a finger. It sent erotic recoils up my arm. Even “turned off” he was turning me on. “The important part in there is that I almost died.”
“You are alive. What is the problem?”
“I suffered horribly, that’s the problem!”
He caught my hand before I could poke him again, turned it up, and grazed his lips across the underside of my wrist, then bit it, sharply. I snatched it away, skin stinging. “Such a naked, defenseless wrist,” he said. “How many times have I offered you the Cuff of Cruce? Not only would it prevent lesser Unseelie from harming you, with it, you could have summoned me and I would have saved you. I told you this at our first encounter. I have offered you my protection repeatedly. You have refused me at every turn.”
“A cuff can be removed.” I sounded bitter because I was. I’d learned that lesson the hard way.
“Not this—” He closed his mouth but it was too late. He’d slipped. All-powerful Prince V’lane of the Supercilious Fae had slipped.
“Really?” I said dryly. “So once it’s on me, I’m stuck with it forever. That’s the tiny little inconvenient catch you’ve never happened to mention to me before?”
“It is for your own safety. As you said, a cuff could be removed. How would that serve you? Better that it cannot be taken off.”
Barrons and V’lane had both been up to the same trick all along: trying to put their permanent mark on me. Barrons had succeeded. I’d be darned if V’lane would. Besides, I was pretty sure Mallucé would have cheerfully sawed off my arm to remove the cuff, which made me really glad I hadn’t been wearing it. “You want me to trust you, V’lane? Give me another way to summon you. A way that costs me nothing.”
He sneered. “And make a Fae prince answerable to a sidheseer?”
“Allow me to put it into perspective for you. I saw the Book again the other night, and had no way to contact you.”
“You saw it? When? Where?”
“How do I summon you?”
“You dare much, sidhe-seer.”
“You ask much, Fae.”
“Not as much as I could.”
Had I lost a few seconds there, or had he been leaning closer all the time? His mouth was inches from mine. I could feel his breath on my skin. He smelled of exotic, drugging spices.
“Back off, V’lane,” I warned.
“I am preparing to give you the way to summon me, human. Stand still for it.”
“A kiss? Oh, please! I’m not that—”
“My name on your tongue. I cannot teach you to say it. Humans do not possess the ability to form such sounds. But I can give it to you. With my mouth, I can place it on your tongue. Then you have but to release my name to the wind, and I will appear.”
He was so close that the heat of his body was sunshine on my skin. Was nothing simple? I didn’t want a cuff. I didn’t want a kiss. I wanted nice normal methods of communication. “How about a cell phone?”
“No towers in Faery.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Did you just make a joke?”
“You walk among the worst of my kind, yet tremble at the prospect of a simple kiss.”
“I’m not trembling. See any trembling here?” I thrust my trembling hands in my coat pockets, and gave him a dead-level, cocky stare. I doubted anything from V’lane was simple. Especially not a kiss. “How about a mystical cell phone, that doesn’t use towers?” I pressed. “Surely, with all that power you’re so smug about, you can create—”
“Shut up, MacKayla.” He grabbed a handful of curls at the back of my head and yanked me toward him. I couldn’t get my hands out of my pockets fast enough, so I slammed into his chest. I considered Nulling him, but if he really was going to give me a way to contact him, I wanted it. It was part of my egg-diversifying plan. I wanted all the backup, potential weapons, and odds in my favor that I could get. If I got into a jam again, like I’d been in beneath the Burrens, V’lane could save me in a matter of seconds. It had taken Barrons hours to track me and get to me, following the beacon of my tattoo.
Speaking of which . . .
V’lane’s knuckles grazed the base of my skull where Barrons had branded me; his eyes narrowed, and he inhaled sharply. For a moment, he seemed to shimmer, as if he was struggling to hold form and not revert to another. “You think to allow his mark upon your body but refuse mine?” he hissed. He closed his mouth over mine.
The Unseelie Hunters are especially terrifying to sidheseers because they know where we live inside our heads. They instinctively know exactly where to find the small, frightened child in us all.
The Seelie princes know where we live, too, but it’s the grown woman they’re after. They hunt us in our own bodies, tracking us without mercy into the darkest corners of our libido. They seduce the Madonna; they celebrate the whore. They serve our sexual needs tirelessly, gorging on our passion, amplifying it, and slamming it back at us a thousandfold. They are masters of all our desires. They know the limits of our fantasies; they take us to the edge and leave us there, hanging by shredded fingernails above a bottomless gorge, begging for more.
His tongue touched mine. Something hot and electric jolted through my mouth, and pierced my tongue. It swelled inside me, filling my mouth. I choked on it, and orgasmed instantly, as hot and electrifying as whatever he’d just done to my tongue. Pleasure ripped through me with such exquisite precision that my bones steamed and turned to water. I would have collapsed, but he took my weight, and I was in a dreamy, surreal place for a few moments, where his laughter was black velvet and his need was as vast as the night, then I was clear and me again.
There was something potent and dangerous in my mouth, on my tongue. How was I supposed to talk around it?
He drew back. “Give it a moment. It will settle in.”
It settled with all the subtlety of multiple orgasms on the cusp of a steel thorn; pleasure inseparable from pain. Aftershocks quaked through me. I glared at him, more shaken by his touch than I cared to acknowledge.
He shrugged. “I dampened myself greatly. It could have been much more . . . what is your word? Traumatic. Humans were not meant to carry a Fae’s name on their tongue. How does it feel, MacKayla? You have a piece of me in your mouth. Would you like another?” He smiled, and I knew he didn’t mean a word, or whatever it was that lay there coiled, slumbering but barely, in a porcelain cage.
When I was fourteen, I chipped a tooth in cheerleader practice. My dentist was on vacation, and it was nearly two weeks before I could get it fixed. During the interminable wait, my tongue incessantly worried the jagged edge of the enamel. That was how I felt now: I had an aberration in my mouth, and I wanted to scrape it out because it was wrong, it didn’t belong there, and as long as it was on my tongue, I wouldn’t be able to scrape the Fae prince from my mind.
“It makes me want to spit,” I said coolly.
His face tightened, and the temperature plunged so sharply my breath frosted the night air. “I have honored you. I have never before given such a gift. Do not belittle it.”
“How do I use it?”
“Need me, open your mouth, and I will be there.” I didn’t see him move but suddenly his lips were against my ear. “Tell no one I gave it to you. Mention it, and I will take it away.” He vanished before he finished speaking. His words danced on the air like the Cheshire cat’s smile.
“Hey, I thought you wanted to know about the Sinsar Dubh!” I was so startled by his abrupt departure that I spoke without thinking. I regretted it immediately. My words hung as heavy as Georgia humidity in the night. “Sinsar Dubh” seemed to echo sibilantly, soughing on the night wind, racing the darkness to darker ears, and I suddenly felt as if I’d stamped a red X on myself.
I had no idea where V’lane had gone, or why he’d disappeared so suddenly, but I decided I’d be wise to do the same myself.
Before I could move, a hand closed on my shoulder. “I do, Ms. Lane,” Barrons said grimly. “But first I’d like to know what the fuck you were doing kissing him.”