I called out the opening spell again to break the shell creatures’ grip on the undines and then sent a message to the undine whose hand I held to grab one of her sisters. Their hive mind still worked even half-encased in shell-goo. By the time we reached the surface, I was trailing two dozen undines behind me. They wriggled out of the water, shucking the last shell fragments off like last year’s dowdy hand-me-downs – and shucking their tails as well. Somehow in the journey their tails had split into two legs. They jumped up and ran along the grassy bank showing off their slim calves and long, trim thighs with nary a thought for the poor undine who had died in the Borderland. Thoughtless.
Thought-less? I heard one of them think as she turned around to look at me over her shoulder. She had red tangled hair and I recognized her as the one who had shared her breath with me in a kiss. But she is always in our thoughts. She is part of us forever. Then she turned back to her sisters and joined them as they ran over a grassy hill, leaving me gasping on the bank, beneath a weeping willow tree, feeling all the more alone for the absence of their buzzing hive mind.
Alone except for the dark creature that had saved me.
It was still in the water – a swirl of oily black on the water’s surface. I struggled to my knees and leaned over for a closer look … and the black swirl coalesced into a face.
His face.
Liam.
But not Liam.
In the months he’d spent as a bodiless entity in the Borderlands he’d lost some of the features of Liam Doyle, the shape he’d assumed to seduce me so I’d fall in love with him …
You almost did.
I heard his voice in my head. His lips were parted in a rueful smile, an expression I recalled so well I automatically reached my hand out to the surface of the water where the image of his lips appeared … and touched flesh.
“You haven’t forgotten me,” he said, this time moving his lips as his head cleared the water. As I watched, he took shape.
“Your desire for me is giving me form,” he said, his chest – his bare, very nicely muscled chest – rising from the water.
I laughed … or tried to. The sound came out hoarse and raspy. I must have swallowed some water. “I don’t recall you being quite so … buff, Liam … or should I call you that? You’re not exactly him anymore, are you?”
“I can be him,” he said with the Irish lilt and cocky tilt of his chin I recognized as Liam’s. “I can be anything and anyone you want, lass.” The Irish lilt had roughened to a Scottish brogue (he’d called me lass before, I recalled), but the glint in his dark eyes was pure incubus. He was standing hip deep in the pool now, the water lapping teasingly at his groin. I tried to keep my eyes above the waterline … but didn’t quite succeed.
“Um … I didn’t order that,” I said, blushing.
He laughed and took a step toward the bank and I sat back on my heels, poised to stand and … what? Run? What was I afraid of? He wouldn’t hurt me. Was I afraid that if he touched me I would give in to my desire for him?
I didn’t get to find out. Something tugged him back into the water. He fell to one knee, those sweet lips twisting in pain. Instantly I forgot my fear and moved toward him. His right arm was twisted painfully back behind his shoulder, his wrist dragging in the water. Leaning over the bank, I reached under the water for his hand … and touched cold iron.
It was the iron bracelet I had clamped onto his wrist four months ago to banish him. Once the bracelet was on his wrist all I had had to do was turn the key to the right to send him into the Borderlands, but at the last minute I hadn’t been able to do it. Touching that cold iron now I remembered how I’d chosen to dissolve into the shadows with him rather than lose him. I had begun to merge with him – a piece of me had merged with the shadows – a piece that still felt like it was a part of his dark matter. I looked up into his face and saw that his eyes were on my chest.
Typical guy, I thought, aware suddenly of how my wet t-shirt clung to me, but then I realized it wasn’t my breasts he was looking at, it was the iron key that hung between them.
He looked up. “You still wear it. That means …”
“It means nothing,” I said, pulling my hand out of the water. But he grabbed it and intertwined his fingers with mine. He pulled me closer, until his face was even with mine, his lips inches from mine.
“No, Callie, it doesn’t mean nothing. It means you feel …” He tilted his head and moved a millimeter closer. His nostrils dilated as if he were inhaling me. “… sorry.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” I cried out, as if he had just hurt me. But he wasn’t hurting me. His lips grazed my cheek in the gentlest kiss.
“I know,” he whispered, his breath tickling my ear. “You had no choice. You thought I’d preyed on the students.”
“I didn’t know it was Mara!” His lips were on my throat.
“Of course not. I don’t blame you for hating me when you thought I could do that. But even then you hesitated. You wanted to come with me.”
I closed my eyes and recalled that dark urge as I rested my head on his shoulder. He ran his tongue down the length of my neck, and brushed his cheek against the top of my breast, nudging my wet t-shirt away. His face was rough with a day’s worth of bristle, just the way I liked it best. Hmm … hadn’t he been clean shaven a moment ago? He was changing right in front of me, becoming what I wanted him to become, doing just exactly what I liked … He pulled my bra back with his teeth and ran his tongue in a slow circle over my nipple, then sucked. I gasped and fell against his chest. His solid, warm chest. I felt his heart beating. He was real. I wrapped my arms around him, wanting to feel him hold me one last time.
But he still held his arms taut at his sides. He lifted his head and gazed at me out of pain-filled eyes. He slid his eyes to his right hand, the one that still held mine, and lifted it a centimeter above the water. I felt the muscles of his forearm straining. Tendons stood out on his biceps. His jaw was locked with the effort, but he wasn’t able to lift his hand even an inch above the water line. The iron manacle I’d clamped on him held him to the water.
“This is as far as I can go, lass. The green groves of Faerie are not for me.” He nodded his chin towards the grassy meadows where the undines had frolicked. They’d vanished over a hill, but I still heard their laughter. “Follow the sound of their voices and you’ll come to the door back to the human world. You’ll be able to open it. You’ve become more powerful since I saw you last.”
“But what about you?” I asked, running my hand down his clenched arm. He was straining just to keep the iron from dragging him deeper into the water.
“I’ll stay in the Borderlands. I’ve learned to avoid the more dangerous creatures that lurk here – like the shell-eaters. I’ve even been able to help a few creatures across.” He smiled. “I know it will never save me – the way your love would have – but I like to think I am making some amends for the souls I’ve drained over the years in my quest to become mortal. I thought for years that it was their fault for not being able to love me, but after you … well, I see now that I never loved them and that’s why they couldn’t love me.” A tear slid down his face. He tried to shrug his shoulder to wipe it away, but the effort was too much for him.
“Oh, Liam,” I said, reaching over to wipe the tear away. “If only you hadn’t lied to me. Couldn’t you have told me who you were?”
He shook his head and a lock of his dark hair fell over his eyes. “No. I’m not allowed. Would it have made such a difference?”
I brushed damp hair away from his eyes. It would always be wet now. I’d condemned him to this watery hell. His skin was cold. He would always be cold. I wanted to warm him with my flesh. I stepped into the water and ran my hands down his arms until my fingers grazed the cold iron. “If I let you come back, you’d drain me. I’d let you. Neither of us would be able to help it.”
“I know, Callie. I know I can’t go back to your world … but if you release me from my bonds, at
least I could stay here in Faerie.”
I looked into his eyes. “Do you promise you would stay here?”
Tears welled in his eyes. “I’d never risk harming you again.”
I touched the iron key. It lay cold and heavy on my chest. Why had I kept it on if not to use it to release Liam? The knowledge that he was in eternal pain because of me had haunted my dreams. This was my opportunity to free him – and free myself from those dreams.
I slipped the chain over my neck and brought the key to the manacle on his right wrist. My hands were shaking so much I could barely fit the key into the lock. Was it from cold? Or fear that I was making a terrible mistake?
“You know I would never hurt you,” he whispered in my ear as I slid the key in the keyhole and turned it. The click was as loud as a gunshot. Liam sighed and shook free the manacle, which sank into the water. His wrist was cut to the bone.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, fumbling with the manacle on his left hand. “I never meant to hurt you.”
As soon as the left manacle was free he raised both hands to my face and tipped my chin up. He lowered his lips to mine and kissed me, gently at first but then hard, opening my lips with his and pushing his tongue deep into my mouth. His hands roved over my body like birds freed from a cage, stroking my breasts, my belly, then cupping my behind and pressing my hips against his hips. His erection strained against my belly.
“Liam,” I gasped, freeing my mouth from his. “You promised …”
“I promised not to follow you into your world, Callie. I didn’t say anything about what I would do to you in this one.”
He scooped me up in his arms and carried me up the bank, deeper into the shade of the willow. He laid me on a bed of emerald green moss that felt as soft as velvet. He knelt above me, raking my body with his eyes. I couldn’t help doing the same to him. He was Liam, but not. His skin was more golden, his limbs longer … everything was a bit longer.
His eyes – more emerald than black – flashed.
He stroked his hand down my belly and between my legs. “For months I’ve done nothing but remember the exact contours of your body outside …” he slipped his fingers inside me and I let out a moan “… and in.”
He lowered himself onto me and I felt the head of his penis graze my clit. I arched up to meet him, but he moved a fraction away. “Let’s see if I remembered it right,” he said, a sly smile playing on his lips.
“Let’s find out,” I said, wrapping my arms around his back and my legs around his hips, pulling him down into me. This time he met my thrust with his own. I cried out so sharply he pulled out of me.
“Callie? Are you …”
“I’m perfect,” I moaned, pulling him back inside me again. “Perfect.”
CHAPTER FOUR
IF LIAM HADN’T made me leave, I don’t know how long I would have stayed on the bank of the pool beneath the willow.
“The danger of Faerie,” he told me after the second time we made love, “is that the longer you stay, the harder it becomes to leave.”
“Mmmm,” I moaned, nestling my cheek on his broad chest. “Would that be so bad?”
He propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at me. The sunlight brought out red highlights in his dark hair and green sparks in his black eyes – neither of which had been there when he’d been Liam. I wondered if this is how he’d looked when he was mortal, when he’d been a human boy whom the Fairy Queen had stolen away to Faerie where he’d lived so long he lost his human self and become an incubus. But of course he didn’t look like a young boy. He had the body of Adonis, and his eyes looked as ancient as if he had in fact been that god. Looking into them I saw the centuries he had passed here under the unchanging sky of Faerie, slowly losing his humanity, becoming this creature who must feed on the human life force to feel anything.
“You would not like what you would become here, Cailleach.” He pronounced my full name with an Irish lilt. Kay-Lex. “Without human contact, the fey are bloodless creatures: beautiful, but unfeeling, ageless, but with none of the fire of youth.”
A trill of laughter interrupted him.
“That sounds pretty youthful to me,” I said, punching his arm playfully. “Are you sure you don’t want to get rid of me so you can hook up with one of the undines?”
He made a face. “Those poor creatures? One can only pity them. Sure the young ones come back full of the zest and fire they’ve absorbed in the muck and mire of the human world …”
I remembered the taste of raspberry on the young undine’s lips and wondered how she was finding her first moments in Faerie.
“… but after a century here they lose that. Come.” He got to his feet and held out his hand to help me up. “I’ll show you.”
“You’re going like that?” I asked, looking his long, lean naked body up and down. “They’ll never be able to keep their …” But before I could finish my sentence Liam was clothed in a loose white tunic, slim dark green leggings and soft leather boots and I wore a long linen dress that swished as he pulled me to my feet.
“In Faerie you can make yourself into whatever you like,” he said, pulling me close to him. “Although I prefer you unclothed,” he growled. “Those damned undines are just as likely to jump you as me.”
“Maybe we should stay here,” I said, pressing against him. I pictured myself wearing a flimsy nightgown and … presto! I felt the silk slide over my skin. I added a pair of kitten heels and a whiff of Diorissimo.
“I could get used to this – an unlimited wardrobe and no dry cleaning bills!”
Liam gave me an admiring look, but turned to walk up the hill, pulling me with him. “There are other bills to pay,” he said. “Come, I’ll show you.”
I followed him up the grassy hill over which the undines had run, a bit crestfallen that my seduction ploy hadn’t worked. I changed into jeans and t-shirt as we walked, but then, remembering how pretty those undines had looked, switched to a sundress I’d admired in the Anthropologie catalog. As I’d suspected, the halter top was too snug for my breast size, but maybe I could change that …
“Don’t you dare,” Liam growled without turning around.
“Could you always read my mind?” I asked, adding a lacy cardigan to my outfit.
“Not in your world, but in Faerie everything is transparent. It’s one of the things that can get a bit … tedious here.”
I tried to read Liam’s thoughts but got only images – mostly of me naked underneath him.
“Sorry,” he said. “I want to remember every moment.” We’d come to the top of the hill. Turning to me, his eyes were wide with sorrow. “Those memories will have to last me a long time.”
“Oh, Liam …” I began, anguished that I couldn’t give him what he wanted from me, but then my voice froze in my throat as I saw what lay below us. Green meadows starred with wildflowers of every imaginable color rolled down into a valley split by a broad river. Mountains rose on the other side of the river, each range a different hue of indigo, violet and blue, shading away to palest pearl and dove grey. The mountains looked as if the sun was setting over them, but there was no sun. The rest of the valley was filled with honey gold light.
“It reminds me of a painting by one of the Hudson River School painters,” I said as we ambled down the sloping hill. On either side were thick woods. I sensed that they were full of creatures watching our progress, but I only saw the flicker of movement and, once, the silhouette of deer antlers against the ridge behind us.
“The Hudson runs along a rift between worlds,” Liam said. “Often you are looking into Faerie when you look across the river – as those painters found. Come on. The undines are by the river. Their sisters have come to greet them.”
As we walked down the hill the honey-colored light seemed to roll down with us, like a golden tide. The entire valley was drenched with it; I could almost taste it – a honeysuckle nectar.
“Aelvesgold,” Liam said. “The original substance of Faerie, the build
ing block of all magic.”
“Elves?” I asked. “Are there elves, too? I don’t think I’ve met any yet …”
Liam looked alarmed. “Let’s hope it stays that way. The elves were banished long ago when they tried to take over Faerie and enslave humanity. Some say they were destroyed, but others that they changed into monsters.”
I was going to ask Liam to elaborate, but the undines had spotted us and several were running up the hill, a long-legged red-haired one in the lead, loping like a filly straight for me. Upon reaching us, she flung her arms around me in a bone-crunching hug. I smelled raspberry on her breath.
“You saved me!” she said out loud.
“We saved each other,” I said.
She gave me a smile so warm that I wasn’t even scared by her sharp, pointy teeth. Then she twirled around, her long hair fanning out in a brilliant red-gold wave. Her green eyes flashed when she faced me again.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She tilted her head and I could hear her thoughts flickering. Undines didn’t have names until they reached Faerie, I realized. Then she grinned, her sharp teeth glittering in the sunlight.
“Raspberry!” she announced, clearly proud of herself.
I laughed. “That’s the perfect name for you. I’m Callie. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
She giggled and twirled again, then started pulling me toward the crowd on the riverbank. I gave Liam a questioning look, but he was busy fending off the attentions of a giggling pair of undines. Liam might miss me after I was gone, I reflected as Raspberry pulled me toward her companions, but he’d hardly be lonely.
The undines were certainly vivacious. In just the short time they’d been in Faerie – although now that I thought about it, I really had no idea how long we’d all been here – they had changed. Not only did they have legs now, but also their flesh, which had been transparent back in the human world, had turned golden under the Faerie sky. Not that I could say where in the sky the sun was. No. It was more as if the golden light – Aelvesgold, Liam had called it – had filled the transparent vessels of the undines. Their hair was now golden with sea-green highlights; their eyes had changed from moss green to sparkling citrine. Clearly they were enjoying the change. They’d imagined sparkly green and gold dresses for themselves that showed off their new long legs and brought out the sea green highlights in their hair – except for Raspberry who had given herself a pink dress and red highlights in her hair. They flipped their hair over their shoulders and held out their tawny arms as if admiring fresh manicures. I could feel heat rising off them as they gathered around me and laid their hands on me.
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