Seduced by Moonlight mg-3

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  A month ago he'd recovered himself. He was simply more. He could call light into my skin by looking at me. I wasn't sure if he was truly more powerful magically, or if it was the nature of his magic. I thought the former, rather than the latter, because he was a death deity and not a fertility god. Surely my body should have reacted more to life than death.

  His voice came soft and low. "What do you want me to do?"

  For a moment I couldn't think what he meant. It took all my concentration not to buckle at the knees. "What?" I asked.

  Frost made a disgusted noise. "She's power-drunk. Rhys, you really must be more careful."

  "It's been almost seven hundred years since I had this much power. I'm a little rusty."

  "You enjoy how you affect the princess," Frost said. He was closer now, but it would have been too much effort to turn my head to look at him.

  "Wouldn't you?" Rhys said.

  Frost hesitated, then said, "Perhaps, but we have no time for it, Rhys."

  I felt Frost's strong hands on my arms as he turned me slowly to face him. "Find robes for both of you while I fix this."

  I thought I heard Rhys move away into the room, but I wasn't sure. I was too busy staring at Frost's chest. His white shirt was buttoned all the way up to the rounded collar. I knew what lay under that tightly buttoned cloth. I knew the swell of his chest as I knew my own hand. I felt heavy and thick—not just thickheaded, but as if the hand I raised toward him was heavier than it should have been.

  He caught my hand before it touched his chest. My red fingernail polish seemed brighter against his white skin, like startled drops of blood. "If there were more time" —he spoke low, just above a whisper —"I would wake you from this befuddlement with a kiss, but I would not trade one bemusement for another." He bent close, whispering against my face, "And if my kiss has not the power to befuddle you, I do not wish to know it."

  I started to say something romantic and silly, like his kiss was always magical, but his hand where it touched mine had gone cold. Ice, his hand was like ice. If I'd been thinking more clearly, I'd have jerked back before he finished, but of course if I'd been thinking clearly Frost wouldn't have done what he did. Cold shot through my body, a cold to freeze the skin and ice the blood. A cold so intense that it stole my breath, and when I could breathe again, it came from my lips in a white fog. I jerked free of him, and he let me go. I was no longer befuddled. No, I was clearheaded, and shivering with cold.

  I fought chattering teeth to get out, "Damn it, Frost, you didn't have to freeze me."

  "My apologies, Princess, but like Rhys, I have not had my full power in centuries. I am still relearning the niceties of it." His grey eyes were full of snow, as if the iris of each eye were one of those snow globes that you shake up to see the snow fly. Almost every other sidhe I'd known glowed with power, and Frost could glow with the best of them, but when he called cold, his eyes filled with snow. Sometimes I thought that if I gazed into those grey, snow-flecked eyes long enough I'd see a landscape done small, see the place where he'd begun, see a time before I was born.

  I looked away. My nerve broke every time, because I wasn't entirely sure where those winter eyes would lead me, or what secrets they might reveal. There was something in the snow that frightened me. There was no reason for it. No logic to it, but I did not like the snow.

  If I'd been human I'd have accused myself of being unnerved by the strangeness of it, but I wasn't human enough for that, and Goddess knows I'd seen stranger things than snow fall in someone's eyes.

  I was already warmer. The cold never lasted long, but I didn't like it. He had used it as foreplay once in our lovemaking, and though interesting, I didn't want to repeat it. To hide the fact that I was unnerved by his magic in a most un-sidhe-like way, I said, "Why is it that only Rhys's magic bemuses me like that?" I didn't meet his eyes as I asked. Eventually, his eyes would return to their normal grey.

  "None of us had lost as much as Rhys, and he was once a deity to rival any."

  That made me look up. His eyes held a sense of movement, but were grey again. "None of you talks about what it was like before."

  "It is hard to speak of that which is lost, and can never be regained."

  "Are you saying that Rhys was more powerful than any of the rest of you?"

  "He was the Lord of Death himself. Death followed at his step, if he willed it. When he was great among us, Meredith, none could withstand us."

  "Then why didn't the Unseelie destroy the Seelie?"

  "Rhys was not always Unseelie."

  That surprised me. "He was Seelie Court?"

  Frost nodded, then frowned. He frowned so much that if he'd been able to wrinkle, he would have had grooves in his forehead and around his mouth by now, but his face was smooth and flawless, and always would be. "Rhys was a power apart. He was the ruler of the land of the dead, and that is not truly Unseelie or Seelie. He was welcome at the shining court, but he was truly a thing apart, as were some of the rest of us. The system of two courts of the sidhe is relatively recent. Once there were many courts. The humans chose to call those of the fey who were beautiful and did them no harm Seelie. Those they found ugly, or harmed them, they named Unseelie. But it was not so clean a line."

  "Like the goblins and the sluagh, now?"

  "More like the goblins. The King of the Sluagh is a noble of the Unseelie Court. They are no longer truly separate. King Kurag holds no title among us; nor does any sidhe hold title in his court."

  Rhys came back in with a white terry-cloth robe belted around his body. It was long enough that it came nearly to his ankles. It would have draped the floor on me. His white curls looked darker against the white of the robe, the difference between fresh snow and ivory. Shades of white.

  He held the robe that matched my bikini. It was red, and meant more to decorate the body than to cover, so that most of the robe was sheer, like seeing your skin through a haze of fire.

  Rhys looked from one to the other of us. "Why do you both look so solemn? Nobody died while I was gone, did they?"

  I shook my head. "Not that I know of." I took the robe and slipped in between the patches of silk and the scratchier sheerness. The next robe I got was going to be just silk, or satin, something that didn't feel like it was catching on my skin as I moved.

  "So what do you want me to do once we're in talking to Kurag?" Rhys asked.

  "Just flaunt yourself—maybe flash your ass or upper thigh. They're supposed to be two of the prime cuts of meat that you can carve off our bodies."

  Rhys put his head to one side, as if thinking. "Will it bother him to see meat he can't taste?"

  "It will be a little bit of torture, and I don't use the word lightly. The worst thing you can do to a goblin is show him something he wants and deny it to him. Showing Kurag his wildest desire when he knows he can't have it, it'll drive him mad."

  "Or make him so angry he walks away from the negotiations," Frost said.

  "No, Frost, if we make Kurag lose control that badly, he won't walk away. He'll respect the fact that we beat him this round. He'll try to find something else to distract us for next time, but he won't hold it against us. Goblins love a good game of one-upmanship. He'll be flattered that we went to the trouble."

  "I do not understand the goblins," Frost said.

  "You don't have to," I said. "My father made sure I did."

  Frost looked at me, and there was something I couldn't read on his face. "Prince Essus raised you as if he was grooming you to rule the courts, yet he knew that Cel was heir, and not you. If Cel had produced even one child, the queen would never have offered you this chance."

  "You're right on that."

  "Why do you think he taught you to rule, if you were never going to mount the throne?"

  "My father was secondborn and never going to rule, yet his father raised him to be a ruler. I think he raised me the only way he knew how."

  "Perhaps," Frost said, "or perhaps, Prince Essus did not lose all his propheti
c abilities when the rest of us did."

  I shrugged. "I don't know, and I don't have time to worry about it."

  Doyle came to the front of the hallway. "Kurag is willing to talk to you, Meredith, but he is not happy about it."

  "I didn't expect him to be."

  "He fears your enemies," Frost said.

  "That makes two of us," I said.

  "Three," Rhys said.

  "Four," Doyle said.

  Frost shook his head, his hair glittering like a curtain of Christmas tree tinsel. "Five. I fear for your safety. If we lose the goblins' threat, Cel's allies will move against us."

  "Then we're agreed," I said.

  Doyle was looking from one to the other of us. "What have we agreed to?"

  "I'm going to play hors d'oeuvre for the Goblin King," Rhys said.

  Doyle's black-on-black eyebrows raised up nearly to his hairline. "I have missed something."

  "Rhys is going to help me negotiate with Kurag," I said.

  "Help how?" Doyle asked.

  Rhys dropped the robe off one pale shoulder, flashing down to one tight nipple. He grinned and shrugged back into the robe.

  Doyle raised dark eyebrows. "Do not take this in a spirit in which it is not meant, but you have been a stumbling block to our work with Kurag. He has chided you, fully clothed, and you have practically foamed at the mouth like an ill-used dog. What makes you believe you can do..." He seemed to be searching for a word. He finally settled for, "What makes you believe you can stand up to Kurag's teasing on this day?"

  "Today, I'll be teasing back. Merry said that Kurag is like a schoolyard bully, and she's right. Besides, if Merry can do it, so can I." He looked suddenly fierce again. All the humor had gone, leaving his face bleak. "Though I'd much rather kill goblins than negotiate with them."

  "Funny," Doyle said, "that's exactly what King Kurag said about the sidhe only moments ago."

  "Perfect," I said. "Let's all go and irritate each other."

  Doyle led the way down the hallway. He looked terribly nude from the back. I realized that Kurag would have more than just Rhys and I to ogle. I wondered if Doyle thought of himself as a potential sex partner, or as a meal? I guess that all depended on how Kurag felt about sidhe men, and if he preferred dark meat to light.

  CHAPTER 3

  I heard Kitto's voice in the hallway long before we got to the bedroom. I couldn't hear everything he said, but the tone was pleading, and the voice that answered him wasn't Kurag's. It was Kurag's queen, Creeda. Over the last month I'd learned to truly dislike her.

  Kitto stood in front of the mirrored dresser, drawn up to every inch of his four-foot height. He was the only man I'd ever taken to my bed who made me feel tall. The bare back he showed us was perfectly masculine, with a swell of shoulders, chest, a narrow waist, just done small. From the front he looked human enough, but from the back, without his shirt, you could see the scales. They were bright and iridescent, a glittering rainbow of color that ran down the middle of his back on either side of his spine. I knew that they spread out onto either side of his very upper buttocks. The rest of him was a white perfection of skin like mother-of-pearl. His Seelie mother had been raped by a snake goblin in the last great goblin war.

  I noticed that his curly black hair had grown long enough to trail over his neck where the scales began. He'd need a haircut soon if he were to maintain the goblin tradition of doing nothing to hide his deformities.

  He was saying, as we entered, "Please, Goblin Queen, do not make me do this."

  She sat in the mirror, not a reflection, but as clear as if she sat just in front of us. She wasn't much taller than Kitto, and her hair was long and black, but where his hair was silken, hers looked as dry and harsh as it truly was. She had more eyes scattered about her face than I could count. That along with a nest of arms around her middle gave her the look of some great spider. A smile split the wide lipless mouth and flashed fangs enough to make any spider proud. She had only two legs and two breasts. If those had been multiples, she'd have been the epitome of goblin beauty.

  Seeing the female goblins always made me wonder why the goblin men wanted sidhe women. Maybe it was more of a power thing than a sex thing, like most rapes.

  The queen, Creeda, leaned toward her side of the mirror, filling our vision with her dozens of eyes and that oddly off-center mouth. There was a nose in there somewhere, but it was so overwhelmed by everything else that you had to concentrate to notice it. "You will do what ye're told," she said, and her voice had taken on that whining growl we'd all begun to dread.

  Kitto's small hands went to the top of his shorts, and he began to slide them down.

  "Stop, Kitto," I said, making sure my voice was clear and cheerful, and that my face didn't show how much I disliked Creeda.

  Kitto pulled his shorts back into place and turned to me, the gratitude on his face so plain that I hurried to make sure he wouldn't turn toward the mirror again. I drew him against the side of my body with one arm and placed my other hand against his soft hair. I pressed his face gently into the curve of my neck and shoulder so he wouldn't turn and look at Creeda. If she once understood how truly afraid of her he was, she'd make the Summerlands into a wasteland to have him at her mercy.

  "You have interrupted," she whined.

  I smiled, and knew my face was pleasant, even bright and shiny. I'd been relearning a lifetime of polite lies that had kept me alive as a child in the faerie courts. You had to be able to lie with your face, your eyes, your entire body language, to maneuver through the politics of the courts. I wasn't always perfect at it, but the goblins were less noticing of such things. The true test was always my aunt, the Queen of Air and Darkness: She noticed everything.

  "Greetings, Goblin Queen. I am so sorry that I have kept you waiting."

  She snarled at me, flashing a mouth full of fangs, as if she had more of them than she needed, like she had eyes. I wondered if she had trouble eating without molars. I knew beyond doubt that her bite was poisonous. Of course, so was Kitto's, but his one pair of fangs were retractable. Creeda's were not.

  Her face was a mask of fury as she mouthed her pleasantries. "Greetings, Meredith, Princess of the Sidhe, I have enjoyed my wait. Truly, if you have other things to do, Kitto and I will be busy for a little while longer." She shifted most of her eyes to stare at Kitto with a hungry look. But there were too many eyes, and they were too randomly placed for her to turn all of them his way. Some moved independently to watch as Rhys and Doyle entered the room behind me.

  I smiled harder. "Whatever do you mean?"

  "If he is truly sidhe, as you claim, I want to see him nude and shining."

  A deep voice spoke off camera, as it were, out of sight of the mirror. "All our talking hinges on Kitto being sidhe. There are creatures of faerie who do not glow with magic during sex. Goblins are one of those creatures." Kurag moved into view. He wasn't as tall as most sidhe, but he was broader. His shoulders were nearly as wide as Doyle was tall. Some of the bigger goblins are among the bulkiest of the fey. After looking at the queen, Kurag's three eyes seemed underdone. His skin was the old yellow of bad wounds; of paper when it's rotten enough to break in your hands. He was covered in lumps, bumps, and warts, each considered a beauty mark among the goblins.

  One large lump on his right shoulder held an eye. A wandering eye, the goblins called it, because it wandered away from the face. Kurag's other eyes were a yellow that bordered on orange, but the eye at his shoulder was lavender, with a spill of black lashes to frame it. There was a mouth on his chest, to one side, that matched that lavender eye, lovely lips, and straight, almost human-looking teeth. The small pair of arms on the side of his body near the eye and mouth waved at me.

  I waved back and said, "Greetings, Kurag, Goblin King. Greetings also to Kurag's twin, Goblin King's Flesh." The stray bits were part of a parasitic twin trapped in the goblin's body. The mouth could breathe, but not speak. The eyes and hands moved independently of Kurag. When I was a chil
d, I'd played cards with the hands while my father and Kurag did business. I was sixteen before I realized that it was a whole separate person trapped inside the other male's body. At sixteen Kurag had shown me both his own manhood and that of his twin. He'd thought the idea of two penises would impress me. He'd been wrong.

  I'd never truly been comfortable around Kurag after that. The thought of one thinking being trapped in the body of another, unable to speak or choose his own way, or even his own sexual partners, had filled me with a horror that no other trick of genetics among the fey had ever quite exceeded.

  From the night I'd realized that the extra bits were a different person, I'd greeted them both. To my knowledge, I was the only person who did so.

  "Greetings, Merry, Princess of the Sidhe." He looked at his queen, and she scampered clown from the great wooden chair. She made sure he didn't have to look at her twice. Kurag was not above hitting her if she was slow to do his bidding. In fact, he wasn't slow to hurt anyone who displeased him. The goblins feared him, and they feared little.

  He settled himself into the chair. It creaked under his thick bulk. I don't mean to imply that Kurag was fat; he was not. He was just solid. "We have talked and maneuvered this last moon span, but it was Creeda who said it. If Kitto is not truly sidhe, then we talk for nothing."

  "We have told you he is sidhe. The sidhe may try to trick, but we are forbidden to lie outright."

  "Let us say we wish to see it with our own eyes." He wore that look that said he was a lot smarter than he appeared, and a lot less ruled by his desires. There was a shrewd mind in that powerful body. Most of the time he hid it, but today he seemed strangely serious, business-like. I wondered what had happened to take the teasing out of Kurag.

  I almost asked, then knew it would have been a mistake. One fey does not admit to another that he is so easy to read. It simply isn't done, especially if one of them happens to be king. It is never wise to let any king know that you see too deeply into him.

  "What did you have in mind, Kurag?"