“We can’t. I can’t . . . maintain the illusion . . . if I’m . . . distracted.”
“Okay,” I agreed. And then bit my bottom lip when the strokes suddenly became longer and sweeter, rubbing along the full length of me from behind, like his fingers were still doing in front. And the twin torture was more than I could stand, ripping a soft moan from my lips before his head came down, silencing me with his mouth.
This . . . was not a huge help, I thought wildly. Because now there were three things stroking me, as his tongue joined the other two sources of madness, curling around mine, caressing the inside of my mouth and eating the sounds I was making, because I couldn’t seem to stop. Not with shivers and shudders and then all-out quakes causing me to buck hard back against him, causing him to slip, not inside but against me, against the full length of me, and God, that was almost as good!
“Your name,” he gasped as I shook violently.
“What?”
“Your name!” It was urgent. “Your real one!”
I tried to concentrate, but the question seemed irrelevant and anyway, my brain was busy: tightening my thighs, clenching down, making him work for it. I began to ride him on the outside of my body, and felt him shiver. Arched back against him, like a cat, and heard him groan. And then I was the one shivering, and shuddering, and losing all control as he started hitting that spot, that oh, so sensitive spot, with every stroke, his hands tightening on my body as the friction between us built and built and—
And now his groans were flooding my mouth, spilling over along with my own, and that was bad, but I couldn’t remember why, and didn’t care, didn’t care, and then someone was yelling and someone was grabbing my arm and—
“Your name!”
And then nothing.
Chapter Twenty-five
I woke up dry-mouthed and fuzzy-brained. With no idea where I was, or why I was lying facedown on cold stone, in a small puddle of drool. Not that this was exactly a first.
What was a first, at least lately, was that I didn’t feel like crap.
I waited for the usual pain/exhaustion/nausea combo to kick in, only it didn’t appear interested. Instead, I felt like I had at Caleb’s, after taking the Circle’s special joy juice: distant acknowledgment of the body’s dissatisfaction, but nothing screaming at me. Nothing at all.
Well, except that I was freezing.
Something was over my face. I pulled it off to discover that my slave outfit had been tossed on top of me. It was thin and fairly useless against the cold, but I put it on anyway while checking out the latest version of hell I’d ended up in.
Only to discover that it was just a cell.
I waited, crouched on cold stone, for the punch line. For the vicious ward about to fry me or the pack of slavering dogs about to attack me or the insane prisoner about to decide that I was a threat. But nada.
Just a cold stone block of a room, some straw on the floor, a couple buckets—one filled with water—and a pallet that nobody had bothered to ensure that I landed on.
I stared at it.
It even had a little pillow.
For a minute, I just stayed there, processing that, along with the fact that I wasn’t even tied up. Then I got to my feet and walked to the door. There was a small, high window in it, like it had been made for someone a lot taller than me. But by pulling myself up by the bars, I could just make out a narrow hall with more flickering lanterns.
And the fact that nobody had even bothered to post a guard.
I was starting to feel strangely . . . neglected.
However, they had searched me, and they’d done a thorough job. Because everything was gone: Billy’s necklace, Rosier and his pack, even my bright-eyed chameleon. I guessed the fey had seen something like it before.
But not something like my evil dark-magic bracelet.
The chain of interlocking knives around my wrist made a soft chink, chink when I jumped back down. The fey must have taken it, too, but, as always, it had returned. Meaning that at least one part of the plan had worked. I just didn’t know where the witches were, or where Pritkin was, or what had happened to Rosier, or what was happening in general.
But other than that, everything was fine.
I rolled my eyes at myself and decided to go find out.
“Do you think, just for once, we could not have a hissy fit?” I whispered to my knives. “I need you to stab the lock. Not the nearest guard, not another prisoner’s butt. Just the lock.”
I got a definite spoilsport vibe back, which I ignored.
And then I remembered something else from the debacle at Gertie’s.
“And do it quietly.”
To my surprise, they did. Well, more or less. The lock was stabbed a dozen times in a few seconds by a couple of ghostly knives doing a jackhammer impression. And while it wasn’t exactly quiet, it also wasn’t loud enough to bring anybody running.
Assuming anybody was there, since I’d yet to see a soul.
I creaked the door open—carefully, because this was too easy. Maybe the fey were testing me? Maybe this was some sort of trap?
Or maybe, I decided, as I walked unmolested down the hall, peering into other, empty cells, they just didn’t worry about you if you weren’t at least part fey. So far, it was the only thing I liked about them. Arrogance like that had saved my ass more than once.
And it was about to save Rosier’s.
I peeked around a wall from about knee height, then abruptly jerked back. But a glimpse had been enough: Rosier, in a cage, surrounded by fey, being poked at with sticks. And with the haunted look of a puppy in the middle of a bunch of unsupervised toddlers.
Or, more accurately, like a specimen in a very strange zoo, because he wasn’t the only thing locked up. Cats, birds, even an extra-large rat were in similar cages, arrayed along one wall, making me realize why Pritkin had made that comment about my familiar. Apparently, witches in this era actually used them.
Who knew?
“Kill it and be done,” one of the guards said. “It’s disgusting.”
“That would be a grave mistake,” Rosier said quickly, and then yelped when he was poked again.
“I told you to shut up,” a different fey ordered.
“But you want me to talk. I’ve told you, she’s almost powerless without me—”
“An even better reason to end your miserable life.”
“No! No, no, no!” Rosier said, making me tense up.
And peer around the corner again. The room they were in was just the space where a couple corridors intersected. It had been dressed up with a few cabinets and the table Rosier’s cage was sitting on, allowing it to serve as both checkpoint and break room. But the fey were the real deal, three of them and bristling with weapons, not that they looked like they expected to use them.
Except for the one who had just pulled a knife.
“And forfeit that amount of coin?” Rosier asked, his eyes on the blade. “She’s powerful, as long as she has me as a focus. You stand to make—”
“Nothing, cur. She doesn’t belong to me!”