Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale

by Christine Warren

  Mab looked back toward Luc and frowned. If she weren’t the Faerie Queen and a powerful magical force, Corinne might have come to hate her for being able to do that and still look gorgeous. Scary, but gorgeous.

  “Do not speak to me as if I do not grasp the situation, my Lucifer. I am well aware of all that is at stake, as I am well aware that I ordered you to take care of it.”

  Corinne could actually hear Luc gritting his teeth.

  “I am doing my best, my Queen, but I am afraid Seoc had too long to plan his attack before we became aware of it. I fear that if you cannot provide us with the information we need, I will be too late to stop him from opening the door permanently.”

  “That would leave me very displeased.”

  “I know.”

  Corinne watched as the Faerie Queen and the Captain of her Guard eyed each other warily from across the worlds. Any second now she expected to hear a haunting whistle and see a tumbleweed blow past. Finally, Mab spoke.

  “The door,” she snapped. “I can tell you where it is, but it will be up to you to reach it before Seoc. And I can tell you that I feel he is very close. By moonrise tomorrow, it will be too late to stop him.”

  “Then we’ll get to him before that.”

  “Very well.” Mab pursed her lips, looked from Luc to Corinne and back again. “You should consider yourself very lucky I cannot take back the gift I have given you, Lucifer, for I begin to doubt whether you truly deserve it.”

  “It is already mine,” he growled, “and you are the least of the dangers I would risk to keep it.”

  Corinne thought she saw a smile tease the corners of the Queen’s mouth, but then the woman in the vision lifted her chin and schooled her face into a haughty mask. “Remember you said that, my Lucifer, for I know that I will. The door waits for now at the Old Stone Gate. I expect you to find it before my nephew does.”

  While Corinne stared in fascination, the Queen turned her back on them and the vision shimmered before smoothing out, until nothing but quiet, colored glass remained where it had been. Blinking rapidly to adjust her eyes, Corinne wished she knew a technique to adjust her brain as well, but she had a feeling it was already much too late for that. Still feeling a bit dazed, she followed Luc out of the room.

  Fergus and Rafe were waiting outside the door, putting the kibosh on any chance Corinne might have had to ask Luc the questions that spun through her mind. The foremost of which happened to be something like, What the hell?

  “So?” Rafe drawled, not bothering to straighten from his lazy slouch against the wall.

  Fergus put things a bit more bluntly. “Where’s the door?”

  Corinne smirked and waved. “And here I thought you’d never ask. Bye now! Don’t remember to write!”

  Luc growled.

  “Oh, fine.” Corinne crossed her arms peevishly. “He can be uncivil all by himself then, and I’ll just take it like a good little martyr.”

  Rafe stepped forward, putting an arm around Corinne’s shoulders and leading her back down the hall to the living room. She could hear Luc’s growls get louder even over the chuckling purr Rafe was making. Could none of these men behave even halfway normally?

  “Just ignore him,” Rafe said. “He’ll get over himself soon enough.”

  “Fergus or Luc?”

  He hummed. “Both, I imagine.”

  “Yeah, that’d be great,” she said, “but we still have the tiny problem of having to work together until we find Seoc.”

  “But that won’t be a problem on either count.” The problem with not looking at Fergus was that she could still hear him. “Now that we know where the door is, we can just go there and wait for him, and since we don’t need a human getting in the way, you can go home and we’ll work just fine without you.”

  Corinne turned just in time to see Luc yank the other Fae to a stop by the braid. “The next time you speak that way to her, I’m going to break something. Probably your pretty nose,” he growled. “So stop. Now.”

  Fergus whined. “She started it.”

  “And she has now stopped.” He raised an eyebrow at Corinne. “Haven’t you?”

  Ooh. So she got to play the moral superiority angle without actually having to be superior? Fabulous! “Absolutely. My lips are sealed.”

  “Good. Keep them sealed. Both of you.” He released Fergus’s braid, stepped forward, peeled Rafe’s arm off Corinne’s shoulder, and replaced it with his own. “Let’s get back to the others. I only want to go through this once.”

  “Sounds like more than enough for me,” she mumbled.

  She didn’t say another word while he dragged her back into the living room and pushed her down onto the love seat. She even refrained from commenting during his retelling of the conversation with Mab. She was very proud of herself.

  When he finished, Graham was frowning. “The Old Stone Gate? Is that supposed to be here in Manhattan? Because I’ve never heard of it.”

  “I have.” Dmitri shifted Reggie in his lap and leaned forward. “I thought it was an old legend, and I cannot say I don’t still think it is. It is supposed to be a hidden gate, more powerful than anything the Fae wanted known about, here in the city in an old wooded grove. I heard that more than the Fae used it at one time, to travel between farther-flung places than Faerie and Ithir.”

  “But it can’t still be standing, can it?” Reggie asked. “I mean, Manhattan hasn’t exactly remained unchanged for centuries or anything. It must have been torn down or built over or something, right?”

  Missy chimed in. “Yeah. It would have to be long gone, wouldn’t it? There are no real woods left here. Even Central Park was landscaped and planted to be the way it looks now. You’d have to go off the island to get a grove that’s been around long enough for the Fae to consider it old.”

  “Not true,” Graham said, an expression of slow understanding beginning to light his face. “There is one place on the island that contains original woodland.”

  “Inwood Hill Park.” Corinne spoke the epiphany aloud. “It’s where Peter What’s-His-Face supposedly bought the island from the Indians for a pile of souvenirs, at the northernmost tip of the island.” She frowned. “But I don’t remember any old stone gates up there. It’s all hiking trails and stuff. A gate wouldn’t have remained hidden for long from all the joggers and dog walkers. I mean, it’s not as busy as Central Park, but it’s hardly desolate, either.”

  Rafe shook his head. “It wouldn’t need to be. If the Fae considered it a hidden gate, then likely it wouldn’t be recognized as anything at all to anyone else. It could be nothing more than a crevice in some rock.”

  “Well, there’s plenty of rock up there, so I suppose anything is possible.”

  Luc nodded. “That’s likely where we’ll need to be then.”

  FIFTEEN

  Fergus wanted to head to Inwood immediately, because he was apparently a big fan of the abject-failure scenario. Corinne almost bit through her tongue keeping that observation in check, but she really was trying to be good, so she kept silent and let Luc explain that tomorrow would be a better bet.

  “The moon will be new. He’ll need that extra help if he’s going to undo Mab’s seals. He’s too smart to try tonight, only to end up failing.”

  When she later asked him to explain that without making her brain hurt, he summed it up as, “Magic. If you’re trying to get rid of magic things—in this case, the seals on the door—it’s easier when the moon is new. You want to create things, it’s better when the moon is full.”

  She didn’t pretend she really understood that, but at least he’d used simple words, so she just nodded and moved on.

  She really wanted to move on to her apartment, her bed, and her very own REM sleep cycle. She got as far as standing up from the love seat before Luc grabbed her. “Where are you going?”

  She sighed. “Home. To bed. I don’t know about you, but it’s been a long day and I’m exhausted. You just said we wouldn’t be able to go to the park
until sundown tomorrow, so I’m going to spend every available hour between now and then unconscious.”

  He tugged her hand, trying to get her to sit back down. “Okay, but I can’t leave until I go over a few more things with Fergus and Rafe and the others.”

  “That’s nice.” She pulled her hand away. “But since I’m sure you don’t need me around for the strategy stuff, I cango. And I plan to. Witness me leaving.”

  He snatched up her hand again and yanked, sending her tumbling down onto his lap in a heap. “No. I’ll go with you, but you have to give me a few more minutes to make arrangements for tomorrow.”

  “Luc, what are you doing? Let me up!” She tried really hard to pretend she didn’t notice the roomful of people watching her with avid curiosity, but the heat in her cheeks told her about how well that worked.

  “No.” He tightened his arms and frowned down at her. “I don’t want you to leave without me. If you give me fifteen more minutes, I’ll be done here, and we can go home together.”

  She blinked. “Did I invite you home with me?”

  “Did you think you would have to?”

  “Perhaps we could meet in the morning to talk,” Dmitri offered through a smile that Corinne felt she was better off ignoring. “Since you had so little sleep last night. That way you need not waste fifteen minutes of, ah…sleeping time.”

  Reggie punched her husband in the ribs, not that he so much as flinched. “Misha, don’t help him. He doesn’t need it. Corinne is the one we should be trying to rescue.”

  “I don’t need to be rescued.”

  “She doesn’t need to be rescued.”

  They spoke both at once and Corinne rolled her eyes, pushing off Luc’s lap to stand in front of him and face her interfering friends. “Look, it’s not that I don’t appreciate your concern,” she said, “but I really don’t need an intervention.”

  Reggie scowled. “I got an intervention.”

  “You got bit by a vampire. No one is going to be sucking my blood and turning me into a creature of the night.”

  “That doesn’t mean we’re not right to be concerned,” Missy said, sounding as sweet and stern as when she told her class of five-year-olds to settle down for nap time.

  “Like I was concerned when my best friend told me she was marrying a werewolf and having a cub? And let’s see if I remember how said friend reacted to my concern…” Corinne blinked innocently for a second before she held up a finger in mock realization. “Oh, yeah! She told me to mind my own damned business and to make sure the baby gift was unisex.”

  At least Missy had the grace to blush. Reggie just charged ahead. Or at least, she tried to. “Rinne, you don’t under—”

  That’s as far as she got before Dmitri put one hand over her mouth and flashed Corinne a grin. “Since I can guarantee my charming love is about three seconds from sinking her fangs into my hand, I suggest you take advantage of the silence to leave while you can.” Reggie’s eyes narrowed and her jaw clenched, and Dmitri’s grin turned into a wince. “There, you see? Go away and have a good night.”

  Luc chuckled and stood, wrapping one arm about Corinne’s waist and steering her toward the door. “We will. Let’s all meet back here tomorrow afternoon around three. We can decide how to best deal with Seoc’s capture then.”

  Rafe nodded and rose to walk them to the front door. “Of course. My home is at your disposal. And just because I love you, I will even keep our friend Fergus for the night. It would upset our plans if we had to spend all evening trying to stop Corinne from killing him.”

  They took a cab back to Corinne’s, and she didn’t even bother to pull away when he laced their fingers together and held their joined hands against his thigh. Instead, she actually leaned her head against his shoulder and watched the city roll past the windows.

  Several minutes passed in silence while she sat with her cheek pillowed on his chest and his cheek resting against her hair. Finally she stirred, tilting her head until she could see his face. “Do you have a plan for tomorrow night?”

  “I don’t think it requires a better mousetrap, just stealth and speed,” he said, snuggling her closer against him. “With the Lupines, Rafe, and Dmitri and Reggie on our side, we’ll have that in abundance.”

  “So we just hide near the gate until he shows, and then jump him?”

  He smiled at the incredulity in her voice. “You expected something a bit more elaborate?”

  “I guess. It just seems so…” She shrugged. “Anticlimactic.”

  He chuckled. “A good many things are.”

  And then again, a good many things aren’t,she thought and pressed her legs together against the involuntary ripple in her core. She seemed to have developed a reflex action, with the thought Lucand climaxleading to the thought within a thousand synapses or so.

  She fell silent again and stayed that way until they paid the cabdriver and headed up to her apartment. When she unlocked the door and led him inside, she felt almost like she’d been stuck by déjà vu, but this time when Luc shut the door behind them he reached for her immediately.

  His lips settled on hers like rain, and she soaked him up as quickly as the desert floor. In fact, she was about half a second from drowning when the niggling in the back of her mind turned into a pounding and she pulled away on a groan.

  “Wait,” she said, bracing her hands against his chest to keep him farther than lip-length away from her. “You and I have some talking to do.”

  Luc groaned against her throat as he laved it with his oh-so-clever tongue. “We can talk later.”

  “Right,” she scoffed. “Like we’re really going to have the energy to talk after we screw each other into a couple of senseless puddles of goo. I can see that happening.”

  “I have no problem with goo,” he muttered, scraping his teeth against her collarbone. “That sounds fine to me. Let’s aim for goo.”

  “No.” She pushed him firmly away and squirmed out of his arms, walking around the back of the sofa to keep some sort of barrier between them. If he touched her again, she knew darned well the only things coming out of her mouth would be cries for more. “I said I wanted to talk.”

  He groaned and let his arms drop to his sides. But he didn’t look happy about it. “Fine,” he said. “Just do me a favor and try and talk fast, okay?”

  “Fine. I’ve really only got one question for you.” She crossed her arms and braced herself. “What is a heartmate?”

  She saw Luc tense, heard him swear, and then watched while he collapsed into an armchair and closed his eyes on a sigh.

  “Luc?”

  He didn’t say anything, but she saw him rubbing his hands over his face, so she knew he was still conscious.

  “Luc,” she prodded, “answer me. Tell me what the Queen meant when she called you my heartmate.”

  He shook his head. “Corinne, that’s…I really…it’s just too much to go into right now. It’s complicated.”

  “So simplify it for me.”

  She watched his face carefully, noticed the wary expression in his eyes when he finally opened them to look up at her. “Baby—”

  “Don’t baby me. Tell me what the Queen was talking about.” When he continued to hesitate, she sighed and sat down on the arm of his chair. He looked so wary and tired and vulnerable that she couldn’t manage to keep up the über-bitch routine. She stroked a hand over his tousled hair. “Look at it this way. You might as well tell me now, when I’m all tired and ready for bed. If you wait until I’m alert, I’ll just have that much more energy for being mad at you.”

  “You have a point.” He took her free hand in his and brushed a kiss over her fingertips. “But you don’t really need me to tell you what you already know. It’s a sort of self-explanatory term.”

  She slid off the arm of the chair and into his lap. “Then it’s the same sort of thing as when Graham calls Missy his mate. It’s like a…like a…wife?”

  He rested his cheek against the top of her head and
wrapped his arms around her, cuddling her close. “In a way. The Fae don’t have any formal marriage ceremonies. Couples stay together because they want to stay together. If they change their minds, they go their separate ways.”

  “Does that mean you might change your mind about us?”

  She heard the smile in his voice. “Never. I can’t. To have a mate in Faerie is one thing, but to have a heartmate is entirely different. A mate is a companion you choose and discard as it suits the both of you. A heartmate is the other part of your spirit. Fate chooses for you, and the bonds last forever. It doesn’t happen for all Fae, but when it does, it’s seen as a blessing from the goddess Anu.”

  She was silent for a few minutes, listening to the echo of his heart beating beneath her ear and his words swirling in her mind. “Forever, huh?”

  He nodded.

  “And you’re sure that’s what’s happened to us. It’s not just the companion thing?”

  Corinne heard the note of vulnerability in her voice and winced. She didn’t want to turn into the weepy, clingy, needy type, but damn, this was hard. It tied her thoughts in a tangle and her stomach in knots and her heart in a butterfly net. She tried to at least keep her head down so he couldn’t read her expression, but he touched his knuckles to her chin and gently raised it until he could look into her eyes.

  “I’m more than sure,” he said, his green eyes deep and solemn and potent. “A heartmate can see through glamours to the truth that lies beneath so that deception can never interfere with Love’s Truth. The minute you saw through my human disguise, I knew you were my heartmate. Not even the gods can change that now.”

  She held his gaze for the span of a dozen heartbeats before she felt her mouth begin to curve in an irrepressible smile. “All right, then,” she said, laying her head back against his chest. “I’ll take your word for it. For now.”

  He chuckled. “And what will it take before you’re fully convinced?”

  “Not much. Only a decade or two.”

  SIXTEEN