“What change?”
“This world we currently live in, Ashia Hollow, hasn’t always been the way it is now. It wasn’t always as hostile. Fact is, back when Queen Rasha made it, it was…I won’t use the word paradise because the hollow has never compared to back home, my home, Bobi’s and Geraint’s and Aril’s. Still, you could feel the ultimate sacrifice her majesty made to create a safe place for us all to live. After Lord Acura and his army destroyed the barriers between our worlds and his evil sent the whole thing to shit, that is.”
“You knew her,” I said.
“Never met her a day in my life,” Reeps said. “I didn’t move in those, shall we say, exalted circles. I don’t have to have met her. When this world was newly born, Rasha’s sacrifice permeated everything. Back at the beginning, you’d dive into the lagoon and feel her love surround you. Pick a fig off a tree and taste hope. You’d sense the daughter, Ashia, as well, fulfilling her mother’s promise by providing the light and promise this world needed to keep itself going.”
Reeps’ coffee had grown cold. He picked up the cup and placed it in the palm of one hand. Flames flared up around the cup’s base, died down a couple of seconds later, and then steam rose from the strong brown liquid inside.
“But I digress,” he said after taking a satisfying sip. “What I’m trying to say is Ashia Hollow was a nice place.”
“Nice.”
“That’s right. Nice.”
“Maybe for the rich and powerful,” I said.
“For everyone,” he said. “It wasn’t the hateful place it’s grown into since the wars. If you’d been alive as long as I have, or perhaps as long as some of the older humans in the hollow, you’d be able to feel the difference. Something’s wrong and has been for a while. Down there where she’s buried beneath the hollow, sleeping away eternity, Ashia’s energy isn’t…right. Things grow darker by the day. Your misfortune is that you were born too late to enjoy the good. You’ve only known a despoiled Venice.”
“A half-rotted one,” a weak voice added.
We both moved toward the sofa and the fae lying there, golden hair mingling with black pasted to her feverish forehead.
Reeps grinned and despite the night and his gloomy nature, the room brightened. “Well, look at that, Bobi’s not ready for the funeral pyre, after all.”
“The hell you’re going to burn me up,” Bobi said, though she wasn’t strong enough yet to open her eyes. “I want nothing less than a golden sailing ship to escort me to the feast hall of the dead.”
“You wish,” Reeps said. “You’ll get a coracle and a teaspoon as a paddle.”
22
I left the forecabin for the passageway that led to the bathroom and shower. Aril had told me he’d brought my packs down here and stowed them in a cupboard. I had four possibles to choose from and reached for the latch on the first one when the scent tickled my nose.
Frankincense. Masculine as it was beautiful.
Concern tightened the abused muscles in my neck, down along my shoulders.
Where was Aril? Why hadn’t he returned topside like he’d said he would?
“Aril?”
No answer.
I checked the bathroom, knocking first and calling his name without getting a reply before I opened the door. Unoccupied. Next, I reluctantly cracked open the door to the closet altar. Peaceful, yet also empty. Though I did notice the rock I’d picked up was back in its rightful place on the altar. One last door remained, the one to the stateroom.
I leaned close to the door, breathing in the now overpowering scent of the tree resin from which Frankincense is made. I knocked.
“Aril?”
I put my ear to the door, listening for movement. Absolute quiet. I knocked and called his name again, louder this time. Nothing.
I opened the door.
He sprawled unconscious, halfway off the bed, his shirt red across the entire front down into his arm pits and along the inner sides of his sleeves. Blood soaked his jeans deep into his waistband and front pockets.
“Aril!”
I rushed to him. My hands went to his face, which felt cool. Not cold and dead, but not warm either. I didn’t know anything about medical emergencies and wasn’t sure how to check fae for vitals.
“Aril!”
Was he alive? I couldn’t see his chest moving. I held one hand near his mouth and nose and didn’t feel any breath.
“Hold on. I’m getting Reeps.”
I raced for the stateroom door.
“No.”
The voice was rusty and barely audible.
“No Reeps,” he said a little louder, clearer.
Like Bobi, he was too weak to open his eyes.
“You need help,” I said.
“There’s nothing Reeps can do for me, and he knows it.”
“He can stop the bleeding,” I said. “I saw him do it with Bobi.”
“Everyone on this boat can smell the blood,” Aril said. “Reeps would have been in here long before now if he could do something.”
“I only smelled it when I got into the passageway.”
“That’s because you have a birth defect,” Aril said. “You were born human.”
“Not in the mood for jokes,” I said.
He opened his eyes at last.
“Sorry,” he said.
“That conceited little smile says you’re not.”
He tried sitting up, but the massively fit body couldn’t do it. He must have sat on the bottom edge of the bed before collapsing backward, because his feet, still in their swigans, rested on the floor. His arm hung off the side of the mattress, a second pair of the fae boots having slipped from his hand to the floor. I went to him and eased his arm up onto the bed, leaving the swigans jumbled where they were. Why he thought he’d needed to change his shoes first and not attend to his wound or even his clothing escaped me.
“Close the door,” he said.
“Just let me go get Reeps to look at it.”
“Trust me. Even Geraint up on deck can smell it,” he said. “They know. They also know why I’m bleeding. I don’t want them to see how badly. It would…worry them. Please.”
He stared at the stateroom door, still ajar.
“All right.”
I closed it quietly and returned to his side.
“The scar,” I said. “What’s wrong with it? Why won’t it heal?”
“It does for a time.”
“But then starts bleeding again randomly? Why? What does the burnt crown mean?”
He shut me down. “Later,” he said.
He struggled again to sit up. I helped him, amazed he hadn’t bled all over his bed, but it was spotless.
“I need to change,” he said.
I didn’t wait for an invitation, pulling the shirt up over his head. I hesitated when I got to the open wound, worried about disturbing his wound. Aril hooked a thumb under the fabric and pulled it over his head with a ruthlessness that made me cringe in sympathetic pain. He let the shirt drop to the bed where it still refused to stain the coverlet. Magic. It cropped up in the most random places. Ruined shirt. Impossible to stain bedspread.
I crept out to the passageway and opened the bathroom door, pretending not to notice the pause in the conversation in the forecabin when Reeps and Bobi heard me. They couldn’t see me from where they were, so I owed them no explanation.
I returned to the stateroom with two dampened cloths and a towel in my hands. Aril sat hunched over on the edge of the bed with the extra pair of swigans in his hands. Fresh blood dripped from the crown, running over the dried and caking stuff.
“You can change your boots later,” I said.
“They’re not for me. They’re for you.”
“Me? Is that what you came down here for?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t know what to say—other than the obvious, his shoes weren’t going to fit my feet—but I couldn’t form words. It was like I’d told Reeps. No one had ever cared enough
to think of something as simple as that before, that I might need shoes. Should I say thank you? Accept them even though I couldn’t use them? What was the proper reaction?
“They’re not mine. They belonged to…” he trailed off.
I swallowed nervously and edged back a bit.
The fae woman I’d seen while holding the rock. Those were her shoes.
“I…I’m sorry,” I said, apologizing for spying on his private life. “I didn’t mean to…when we…during the ride from Guariti Dolori.”
“Yes, you did,” Aril said. “You’re an explorer. When you go through old buildings, looking for relics from the old human world, you poke those little fingers into everything, pick up anything that interests you.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“Her name was Eolande.”
“Your wife?”
“We were mated. We don’t have marriage the way humans do.”
“She’s…”
“Dead? Yes.”
He stared down at the shoes in his hands, rubbed the soft hide absently with a thumb.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Yes. Well.”
He looked up at me, and tears glittered in his eyes. That pissed look from the day we’d first met on the beach was back, too. I understood now that it was an old, old anger, one that would never go away. Just like the wound on his chest, it might close up, scab over for a while, but he would never heal completely from the loss.
“I don’t want to wear her swigans,” I said. “I know that’s rude, but—”
“But nothing.” Just like that, the show of emotion was gone. “You lost your boots. You can’t go barefoot.”
“I doubt they’ll fit.”
“They’ll fit anyone who puts them on.”
I decided to avoid the subject by doing what I’d intended and walking to the bed with the cloths and towel. Kneeling down in front of him, I started wiping away blood. His body was perfect or, at least, perfect enough for me, every muscle hard and standing out in a chest smooth and broad and begging to be explored. He was right. That’s what I loved to do. Find the new in the old. Aril was several times my age, and if he had known Queen Rasha, he’d lived for centuries, possibly a millennia or more. Where had he been? How many places had this gorgeous body seen? What battles had those muscles fought in? I imagined Aril hefting an ancient sword that weighed almost as much as I did, muscles rippling with each swing of the blade, biceps and shoulders and chest slick with sweat and the blood of his enemies.
He could be ruthless; that much his body told me. His body never forgave, never gave up, endured in resentment and bitterness over something done to him in the past, but it was one capable of moments of tenderness. Why else had a fae named Eolande once looked at him with such adoration? Winked her love at him like a kiss?
Because somewhere under all that carefully reigned in rage was something worth loving. What would it be like to know Aril intimately?
Forget it.
We had nothing in common. A royal fae who, though dark, would likely live centuries or millennia longer, and a socially inept human fae who was fated to burn out at any moment? I was the match someone had already struck. He was the great fire burning forever in the hall of the gods.
Aril withstood my dabbing and gentle scrubbing with the cloth only so long before capturing both my wrists in his hands.
“Stop that.”
I watched the wound suddenly heal, the blood clotting, drying, and flaking away as fresh skin miraculously appeared in its place.
“I’m fine,” he said.
Yet he didn’t let go of me.
He waited. I didn’t understand what for until I lifted my face and met his gaze. Patient are the fae, waiting for you to come to them. He searched my eyes and I, his. What were we both hoping to find? Heat built up in my face with his prolonged touch. My neck flushed. My breath sped up in anticipation.
This was going on too long. I felt uncomfortable and wanted to hide.
I tugged on his grip to free my wrists. Useless. He didn’t let go.
His eyes wouldn’t let mine look anywhere but at his.
A muscle I never knew I owned fluttered and cramped deep in my belly. It wasn’t pain that startled me. It was exquisite pleasure.
Still, he wouldn’t let go.
Wouldn’t.
“Let go,” I told him and wrenched to get my hands back.
In response, he drew me closer.
More urgent, his grasp on my wrists.
He lifted me up to him.
His breathing nearly as fast as mine.
Our mouths nearly touching.
“Don’t…”
Our lips brushed. Skipped away from each other. Came back.
“Don’t let me go,” I said.
He released my wrists, but only to grab my face and pull my mouth to his. I was hungry where no hunger had ever existed and ready to consume every sensation. I couldn’t lie. I’d wondered what it would be like to kiss him, a fae. Would it be different? Would he taste different? Feel different? Act differently? Would magic be a part of it?
What I found was much more elemental, so basic it defied all differences.
Aril needed me.
Regret flavored the seduction in his lips. Longing tempered the mad rush of his tongue to mate with mine and mine with his. That was the wonder and tragedy of it, the restraint and hope in us both.
Because I needed him, too.
I needed someone I couldn’t have, while he needed someone who wouldn’t be here much longer.
What else could I do but drown myself in the wild abandon of the moment, knowing it was probably all I’d get? I pretended we would have more than this. Or maybe that this was one moment was all anyone would ever need to live happily ever after.
He did taste differently, but also as I’d dared to imagine. Like magic. Like things humans couldn’t and would never be. Music moved through his pulse where my fingers crossed it, his connection to the universe and mine to it through him. He pressed his thumb into my face and dragged it slowly along my cheekbone. I felt every centimeter of his naked chest through Reeps’ coat and enjoyed the hell out of that. His kiss elicited a tingling response from every nerve cell I had and wove them into intricate desires that left me quivering.
The more frantic we became to know and find each other in each caress of overly sensitized skin, in kisses that roved along a strong jawline or soft swell of flesh, the stronger the energy we raised between us without our intending it. Memories, some his, some mine, spilled from our lips and were shared by our tongues.
It was like revisiting the island. A teasing bite on the lip produced a burst of hot pulp from a strawberry tree fruit, followed by bitter espresso shared by the campfire. Wet kisses traveling my cheek became cool night air settling on my skin as I slept and he guarded me under a moonless sky.
Gradually though, the memories turned haunting and abstract, with the power to hurt. I experienced with him the fear of losing more of himself each time he killed. He felt me kissing Whisper’s head and the tips of her ears for the last time. We shared the terror that knifed into his heart when he’d seen me dive into the Pool of Peace, my wonder at being given a grape by a mouse in a prison cell, the unstoppable rage inside him that brought a three-headed sea dragon to life to attack La Piazzetta San Marco.
Finally, and most shocking of all, was reliving with Aril the moment he held his dead Eolande in his arms, sobbing as quietly and as unobtrusively as he could, because—
I tore my lips from his, pushed free, and fell back on my ass.
What the living hell?
To have that memory invade the heart of a kiss?
“What was that?” I said.
His arms remained outstretched while shock worked its way through the muscles in his face. He closed his eyes. He sighed. His arms dropped back to his side.
“I’m sorry.”
“Is that what kissing a fae is like?” I said. “That memory show
?”
“Not usually. No.”
“You were thinking of her. Of Eolande.”
“Yes. Briefly.”
What’s more natural than thinking of your dead wife, while making out with someone else?
“And you saw me kissing Whisper goodbye, didn’t you?”
“Your protector?” he asked.
“My what?”
“The little four-legged fae who protected you most of your life.”
“She was a cat.”
“As you say.”
Thank God you didn’t think about Sulla.
Or had he seen that anyway without me having to remember the horrors of age nine?
I’d landed in a graceless heap. The borrowed coat gapped at all the wrong places. Suddenly, I felt more naked than I had since my clothes had been confiscated back at Palazzo Ducale. I got to my feet and reflexively hugged my arms in front of me.
“I didn’t like that,” I said suddenly. “What we just did.”
Liar. There were good parts.
“No,” Aril said, voice subdued.
“I’m going to go take my shower now.”
“Yes,” he said.
I backed out and closed the door.
23
Geraint docked the boat in a different spot than where Aril and I had tied up the last time we were on Oasi.
“We’ll have to pay the mooring fee,” Geraint said after he secured the boat and slid down the companionway hand rails on his forearms. “In case no one noticed, I put a glamour on her before we pulled in, but I also thought it safer here than your own place, Aril.”
Everyone but Bobi and me glanced out a porthole or window and examined the gangway along both sides of the boat.
“We’re an old fishing cruiser now,” Geraint said.
“Nice,” Reeps said. “Just enough rust and barnacles, but not too much to draw attention.”
“The port broker’s human,” Geraint said. “Easier to slip by him if we need to.”
“Good job,” Aril said and tossed Geraint a small, leather pouch, jingling with coins. “Go pay.”
Geraint snatched the pouch easily out of the air and pocketed it.
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 17