Fire and Fantasy: A Limited Edition Collection of Urban and Epic Fantasy

by CK Dawn

  And wasn’t it just? Bastard.

  Twenty-One

  The afternoon light hit the crooked slats of the window’s cheap blinds with all its waning force, yet only streamers of golden sun managed to infiltrate the bedroom. The dust motes the random stripes revealed danced a bit—a token effort to appease on aging master, but otherwise drifted aimlessly in the amber—happy to be ungoverned at least until a new lord rose the next morning.

  A pair of birds—Sparrows, likely, Fel thought—chortled melodically from the leafed-out branches of a responsible sycamore not yet middle-aged, and a third voice, a lonely series of chirps and trills, joined the couple.

  Lulled by this artless imitation of his drowse, Fel smiled a bit before curling his body more securely around Dragon.

  Her skin was so soft. He drew a warm palm along her thigh and hip, a satisfied hum rumbling in his chest. His hand continued its path down the slope of her waist and over her belly, cupping one large breast and swiping his thumb over its nipple repeatedly.

  Dragon sighed, a sound that pleased Fel, and he hugged the arm around her waist closer as she traced the precise scars of his antecedents before slipping under the spell of that sumptuous glow, that honey-silk contentment.

  He rubbed his thighs against the backs of hers, kissing her shoulder when she spread her legs to make space for him. He slowly untangled his hand from her grasp and repositioned her arms so that her breasts were more available. He kissed her shoulder again, buried his face in the curve of her neck where her scent was richer and lay back down, pinching and twisting her nipple almost lazily while a gentle kind of chaos spread within him.

  On the one hand, he wanted his woman again. She was probably sore and unrecovered from their last mingling. He’d been rough with her, but he shrugged off the memory of his intensity easily. In the face of the most genuine desire he’d felt since Shiva knew how long, her minor aches were worth it.

  And easily soothed, he thought, imagining joining her in a warm, languid bath with nothing but time to keep them company.

  On the other hand, a considerate man would wait. He’d feed her—an omelet perhaps—and reassure her with a pretty speech about glass slippers and forever.

  He was not that man, he sighed, wishing for her sake that he was. He was garbage, thrown away years ago by the brightest court in the land. He’d done what he could to survive. Unfortunately, this made him a whore and undertow the only escape from that prison. He was needful and greedy and selfish and hard. He was a confidence artist and a murderer. He was thoroughly disillusioned, yet hungry for a human, sadly hypnotized by her movements and obsessed with her thoughts on the here and now and any future she was so bold as to conjure. Even if that world featured only her.

  He was not a good man. He was Fel, Flannacán map Cinid ocus Barita seirbhíseach Mahb Tóisech of old. He would have her whether she was ready for more or slept. He was a bad, bad man and they both knew it.

  Still, she deserved something more from him than just tussling. She expected love and he’d arrived on her doorstep like a brick with warnings and threats tied to it. He had only the truth at his disposal, and so he gave her that.

  “I need you,” he murmured in her ear, lifting her prone leg and draping it over his hip. He guided his hard length into her warmth, still slick from their last coupling, and watched her slack face bloom with latent desire.

  “Wake up, love.” He reached over her and latched onto her nipple, slaking his hunger by sucking and biting her ravenously. Just as he was about to attend to her other breast, he saw Dragon’s fingers slide into the folds of her sex and he watched as she ran them back and forth over her clit.

  “Love you,” he growled, giving her truth as he palmed her stomach to hold her steady while he took his pleasure. “Love you so much.”

  It wasn’t artful this joining, but it was the genuine article; an accurate tableau of sweaty, dirty love, unconcerned with the look of things or how they seemed. Folk aggressively diving and making for divinity. Life on earth could surely offer nothing better.

  He rocked in and out of her slowly, mimicking the drowsiness of the afternoon sun, and when she woke with a soft moan, her eyes blinking away her dreams, he caught her full lower lip with his own, holding it with his teeth before sliding his tongue in her mouth.

  Her fingers increased their pace between her thighs and instead of following their lead, he halted them, wanting to make this moment—where the love he felt for her and the sensation of her body gloving him ceased to be a separate experience—last forever. He gathered both her hands in his, and crossing their arms across her chest, pressed her stomach into the bed and rode her nice and easy until exquisite pleasure suffused them both like the beginning of high tide.

  Coming wasn’t an elongated moment of stop after going. It was a state of being, a lifestyle one could dream of when daily living became too oppressive, unfulfilling and ill-fitting. The most excessive, opulent, rapturous lifestyle ever.

  “I gotta pee,” Dragon said, pulling away from him and sliding out of bed. She stood a bit creakily, Fel noticed with a grin he smothered when she turned to glare at him.

  “Everything all right?” he asked innocently.

  “Fuck you. Where’s the bathroom?”

  Chuckling, he nodded to the open door to the right of the bed, admiring her large, round behind and its soft, bashful cheeks as they undulated into the bathroom. Then he indulged in a luxuriant stretch. The world was finally right. Never mind bounty hunters and debts and the fact that he was just no damn good. He was happy, content. Now if only the cosmos would let him be.

  “Still think we’re not meant to be together?” he shouted when he heard the bathroom faucet stop running.

  He chuckled at the lack of response, imagining Dragon’s annoyed glare. Wasn’t a woman born who could handle being wrong, especially when she’d had so much evidence that she was right.

  Still grinning, he slid out of bed and approached the closed bathroom door, gingerly twisting the knob and nudging it half open.

  Wrapped in a faded green towel, Dragon sat on the lip of his Formica tub, using the handle of a broken rat-tail comb to pin up her hair.

  Leaning against the jamb, he watched mesmerized as she turned on the tap, unfortunately managing to catch the edges of the towel as they unraveled. Instead of tucking the towel back into place, she held it to her front to keep it from falling in the tub as she tested the temperature of the water, leaving her backside gloriously exposed.

  He’d never seen such skin. Or maybe he had, but like any covering it was the wearer who made it distinctive. He now knew her even brown skin was as soft as it looked. Softer. From the downy hairs at her nape down her back and even over the generous rise of her ass, he’d indulged his urge to taste her for hours and still it wasn’t enough.

  “There might be some salts in the cabinet,” he said, hungry to see if the way her muscles tensed changed the flavor of her skin.

  “Okay,” she said, using one arm to sweep the towel’s dangling edges over her exposed behind. Without looking at him, she retrieved the carton of Epsom from the shelf he’d indicated and scattered it in the rising water.

  He entered the bathroom and closed the door behind him, fitting his naked body against hers. “Answer my question,” he said, his lips grazing her ear as he pulled the towel off of her.

  Slowly she stepped into the tub.

  He mimicked that move and the next, easing them into the tub’s warm water in a few synchronized steps.

  Using her toes to turn off the faucet, she ran her hands along his thighs. “I still think we were designed to be together,” she said stubbornly, making him grin. “But whether we were destiny’s plan all along, or some mustache-twirling bad guy’s or even our own, I am glad.”

  He wrapped his arms around her, squeezing her close. “That’s my girl,” he said. “Finish it now. Tell me what I want to hear.”

  She twisted out of his arms, water splashing over the sides of
the tub, and turned so that they faced each other.

  “I love you,” she said, her deep brown eyes smiling as water lapped at her breasts.

  “Damn right,” he growled, kissing her soundly.

  She wrapped her arms around his waist and settled herself against him with a sigh. “Hey, whatever happened with that whole bounty hunter thing?”

  “Two down.”

  She pulled away from him, sitting between his outstretched legs. “Two down?”

  He waited silently, watching as implications played across her face, resolving into inescapable conclusions.

  “How many more do you expect?”

  “You and I took care of new. Me and Charlie ran into borrowed. Charlemagne removed his head. That leaves blue and old.”

  Nodding, Dragon leaned against the tub’s edge opposite from Fel.

  Frowning Fel said, “Is over there somehow better than over here?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “It’s just that I’m beginning to realize that I’m in the middle of an elaborate puzzle—”

  “Like one of those 3-D things of the library,” Fel said, remembering Robynne’s prophecy.

  “Exactly like that except we don’t have enough pieces yet to see what the picture is, and I don’t know about you, but I get the impression that time is somehow running out.”

  Fel’s grimaced at Dragon’s accurate summary of the situation and put his bathtub fantasy on the back burner.

  “Do you mind if I just talk my way through figuring this out?”

  Fel nodded and sank under the cooling water to help clear his head. “Turn on the hot tap,” he instructed when he reemerged.

  “So there’s bounty hunters—” she shook her head in confusion. “I think I need to start at the beginning to get this all straight.” She twisted the hot water on, moved to the middle of the tub and used one hand to fold the new water in with the old.

  “Take your time,” Fel said, draping her legs over his. He’d collared the need to be inside her again, but couldn’t stop his hand from fingering the submerged underside of her knee.

  “When I met Le Roi Charlemagne—”

  “He stopped being king the minute he enlisted,” Fel said, irritated that his disreputable friend had managed to impress his girlfriend. “He’s more of a nuisance now than anything.”

  “If you say so,” Dragon said patronizingly. “When I met your friend, I took a quick look at his potential.”

  Fel had thought her odd prediction of the demise of Charlie’s bachelorhood nothing more than an attempt to one-up a consummate player. Thanks to Robynne he now knew better. Thanks to the kid, he knew Dragon’s fear that their love had been manufactured was legitimate. He meant it when he told her he didn’t care. As long as forever included the woman in his arms, what brought them together was immaterial. The problem was he knew that snuffing out a few bounty hunters wouldn’t be the end of their troubles.

  “Didn’t know you could do that,” he said carefully.

  She shrugged. “I don’t advertise it.

  “All right, so you saw Charlie as he could be?”

  “A father damn-near henpecked by a wife, a pride of girls and maybe one boy.”

  Fel pictured his friend cowering on a well-worn recliner in the half-finished basement space he’d been allotted and chuckled. “Ah, Charlie,” he sighed, knowing his friend would complain louder than most if he found himself in such a state. He also knew Charlie would hold on to that fate any way he knew how.

  “So you can see the future.”

  “Not events, just people, and not what will be, but what they could be. Go left instead of right—”

  “Up instead of down.”

  “—And the image changes.”

  “Still, it’s not a bad gig.”

  Her mouth turned down and he ran his fingers over her lower lip to coax it into smiling again. When her velvety eyes met his, the deep-seated happiness he was hoping to see was replaced by resignation and a little embarrassment.

  “It hurts,” she said, fingering the callous on his thumb before kissing it. “It never used to. Six months ago, I was good. Saw that one of the kids who goes to the bodega near home will find one boyfriend after another to beat her bloody until she’s dead, just like her mother. I saw that Mr. McLean will be wearing a wedding suit before the end of the year if he plays his cards right and that Dad will get some kind of new job. I kept seeing him dressed to the nines and schmoozing.

  “But now, one little peek and it’s like my skin is being peeled away. It doesn’t last long,” she hurried to assure him. “The minute the dizziness starts, I know the worst is over.”

  “Shiva, Dragon,” he breathed, more frightened than he was willing to admit. He pulled her into his arms.

  “Also, there’s this kind of thing that happens.”

  “Thing?”

  “Well, it’s a process really.”

  He met her eyes and smiled, wondering if the serve and volley they played now would be a game they indulged in well into their dotage.

  “Process?”

  She looked away from him and soaped a rough washcloth, running it over her shoulder and neck before dunking it in their bath water and soaping it again.

  “I see a guy as he could be and this feeling comes over me, this sense of urgency—like I have to do something before it’s too late. And then I’m suddenly cold. Outta nowhere I’m friggin’ freezing, and so I touch him—guys run hotter than women and I’m dying to anyway. When I do, it’s like all the cold runs out of me and into them. Sometimes I can see it running down my arm, this dreadful red, and as it escapes from me to them, it takes every bit of nourishment the flesh in my forearm has to offer.

  “By the time it leaps into them, my fingers are practically skeletal and I just want it out of me. Before I can blink, the potential I saw is reality, and for a split second, he is who he was meant to be and I stand before him, his savior, his goddess.

  “Then he fades away and all that’s left is the lowlife he was before and my need to make him better. There’s payment when I do,” she admitted after a moment. “Make him better, I mean.”

  “What kind of payment?” he asked, dreading the answer.

  “Bliss. Can’t see you though,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder. “Everyone else, I can hit between the numbers, but you… Tried to fix myself once. Looked in a mirror and begged the magic to happen. Nothing,” she said meeting Fel’s eyes. “Worse than nothing, or maybe better. Looking back, I can see that I was too far gone to tell the difference. But I now know that it was peace I saw, true blue.

  “Being around you is like that—no more work to be done, finished at last.”

  At that Fel stiffened and set her at arm’s length so he could see her face. “Robynne told me and Charlie you have my other half.”

  “Your oracle?”

  At Fel’s nod, she resettled herself in the middle of the tub, draping her legs across his and reclining against the tub’s lip, this time unconscious of her nakedness, and the way the water enhanced that, and completely unaware of Fel’s fascination.

  “So, I can see everyone except for you.” She held up her index finger ticking off that complication. “I’m warehousing your other half, which makes my attraction to you, at the very least, significant.”

  “We’re back to that again?” Fel shook his head.

  “I love you. It is what it is and I’m determined to be good with that, but I think it’s naive to disregard the fact that I can’t see you and that your oracle—”

  “Robynne.”

  “—thinks I have your missing pieces. Baby, as much as I want to believe that our love is our business, it’s patently obvious that it’s not and we’d be fools to discount that.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Then there’s the Blushing Bride contract.”

  Understanding dawned on Dragon’s face. “New and borrowed. Blue and old still outstanding. You should’ve milked me like you promised. Then at least we
could cross broken kneecaps off our list of problems.”

  “Putting aside the fact that as far as turnips go, you’re kind of old and wrinkly—”

  “Hey!”

  “There’s no way,” Fel continued with a grin at her disgruntled expression, “Gemma would invest Blushing-Bride-contract money to get back a few hundred lousy vens. Certainly not for an old junkie like me.”

  “And yet here you are hiding from bounty hunters in a—” she took inventory of the bathroom’s chipped pink tiles and outdated sink— “charming three-bedroom ranch.”

  “So it would seem.” He soaked a washcloth and wrung it over her breasts, smiling as the water slid over her dark nipples, fat droplets clinging to the tips. Unable to help himself, he leaned over and greedily sucked her flesh into his mouth, humming with pleasure when he felt her fingers tangle in his hair. He released her nipple with a soft kiss against its erect tip and said, “Which pales in comparison to a flirtation with a Sun prince.”

  “He meant nothing to me, baby. Promise.” Her hand fisted in his hair and Fel gloried in the bite of that needy pull, rewarding her by delving under water to slide his fingers over the swollen folds of her cleft.

  She jerked away from his touch.

  “Sore?” He ran a hand soothingly over her thigh and hip.

  “A little,” she said.

  “Later then.”

  “Yeah. Later.” Her shy smile warmed his heart and he fought to reclaim the thread of their conversation.

  “Did the prince just flirt or did he make you an offer?”

  “Well, now that you mention it,” she said, curling more securely on his lap, her hand massaging his erection rhythmically. “After he told me how unsuitable I was, and after going on about how inconsequential you were, I did get the impression that he was, uh, intrigued.”

  “Is that right?” he ground out, giving in to her ministrations with a groan.

  “Feel good?” she whispered before using her tongue to outline the contours of his ear.

  “Jesus, Dragon,” he cried out, his hips undulating to meet her pumping fist. He moaned raggedly when she used her other hand to stroke his balls and stilled entirely when her index finger dived under water to brush over his anus. “You don’t have to,” he said tightly, praying with everything he had that she would.