by Slade, Jessa
“Then let me do this.”
She noted he did not say “Trust me.” Just as well. Fear made her voice prickly even if she didn’t have her claws. “Will you ruin my skin like yours?”
His thumb danced over her pulse point again. “Never. That would be a sin not even the phae would condone. The mark will fade. But—” He glanced up and she caught a glimmer in his eye, like there-and-gone-again heat lightning high in a storm cloud. “Something tells me your heart is as scarred as my flesh.”
If he’d threatened to plunge his knife through her breastbone right then, she was too shocked to have stopped him. He thought he could see inside her? In comparison, the touch of the blade parting her skin was less invasive.
He traced an X so shallow she scarcely felt the sting before he set the knife aside. The X spiraled, as if stirred by an invisible force to leave a mark hardly larger than a thumbprint and nearly as elaborate. Raze scooped a fingerful of goop from the bowl and smoothed the ointment over the small wound.
She sucked in a breath at the sudden cold, but just as quickly, it mellowed into a pleasant warmth. Too pleasant. The sensation spread until her fingertips tingled. All those whiskeys she’d been downing at Beck’s bar hadn’t had this effect.
She clenched her fist until her nails—bitten shorter than her tigress would have approved—nipped at her palms. “Did you drug me?”
“That would seem unwise. An intoxicated tigress might be too much even for me to handle.”
From the amused gleam in his gray eyes, she thought he probably thought he was lying when he said he wasn’t sure he could handle her. She also guessed he had drugged her, or whatever the fairy equivalent was. The sparkling dust he’d scraped off the rock and spread into the wound made the geas seem to shift in her skin.... No, it was shifting. Her heartbeat soared for a moment as she hoped the change was the first sign of the verita luna, and she held her breath. But nothing else happened.
Raze tugged her closer to frown at the marking. “The spell reveals hidden barriers. It should show me what is blocking...” He angled his face to scowl into hers. “You.”
Distracted as she was by the simmering power in his grip—perhaps he would indeed be able to handle her if she slipped over the il-luna edge—she was slow to react to the accusation in his tone.
“Me?” She tugged halfheartedly at his grasp, but he only tightened his hold, and the strange zinging in her blood quickened.
“You blocked the verita luna, and you are keeping me from locking that portal.”
“What?” She sputtered, frustration pushing the fizz in her blood up into her throat. “I’m not getting in the way of your gate. I didn’t even know it was there. You think I’m blocking myself?”
“You fell into the phaedrealii because you can’t bear to see yourself revealed truly in the sunlit realm.”
The ring of steely truth—spoken by a lying fairy, no less—pushed her over the edge. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You werelings might have more refined senses, but you are as willfully obtuse as the humans. If you don’t want to see what is right in front of you, then...” He flicked open his fingers in a negligently graceful gesture, setting her loose as he walked toward a curtain of flowstone.
How dare he promise an answer and then turn away, jerking the answer above her head like a teasing toy?
She’d show him what came of tempting a tigress.
Shedding the confines of his borrowed cloak, she leapt at his back.
What she lacked without her cat’s strength and speed, she more than made up for in recklessness. His eyes widened in surprise as he spun to face her attack. If he’d had his knife, he might have had a chance. But she pounced with her legs ready to tangle over his, her fingers wrapping at his throat.
He stumbled under her weight, his back crashing into the stone curtain. His hands rose to wrap around her wrists. The geas he’d carved in her skin flared with sudden light that turned his stunned gray eyes to silver.
“What I see,” she hissed, “is a phae who cannot lie, skin-to-skin.”
She only meant to challenge him with that unfortunate-for-him quirk in phae nature, but her own nature welled up as she clung to him. As long as it had been since she changed, it had been longer still since she’d found someone to ease the equally vital wereling need for touch. Werelings were creatures of sensation, of emotion, but she’d quelled such simple longings to focus on her idealistic quest.
The Amur council had ruled her half sisters unfit, their control of the verita luna shift too tenuous to risk exposure in front of oblivious humans. Their exile was final. Unless Yelena could win them clemency. If she could show the council how she and other werelings like Beck were earning a place among humans, that might open a way for her sisters to walk free in either shape.
Instead, with her own loss of the verita luna, she was only proving the council’s case. Her sudden, inexplicable shift coming to the phae court was the closest she’d come to finding an answer for her problem.
And close was the key.
She anchored her thighs around Raze’s hips, her knees bumping the smooth stone behind him. Keenly aware of her own bare skin every place their bodies connected, she swallowed hard. She had faced worse than this in her quest to help her sisters; why did she hesitate now?
She stared down at his utterly still face, his chiseled cheekbones and flexed jaw as petrified as the rock behind him. Except he did not look afraid, and the heat of his body between her legs was anything but stony. Well, part of him was rock-hard, which she noticed as her hips aligned with his.
Her voice rasped with more uncertainty than she wanted to reveal. “I crossed into this realm in one shape, changed to another, and changed yet again when you touched me. Tell me how.”
He took a breath that expanded his chest against her braced forearms. “If I knew, I would be eliminating that weakness now instead of wrestling with you.”
She grimaced. Well, she’d wondered if skin contact with a phae actually made them tell the truth. Apparently so.
Disappointed at his lack of answers, she loosened her fingers locked around his neck.
His words rumbled in her fingertips. “But I think I could do it again.”
* * *
Raze winced when Yelena’s grip on his throat retightened. He was as surprised as she was at his offer. Like most phae, he did not try to mix magic with truth—truths were too often confused with facts—but he’d never experienced the compulsion of skin-to-skin.
It was unsettling. Without his gloves, there was no place he could touch her that would not result in putting his hand to her supple flesh.
“Do it again?” Her golden gaze bored into his like an ember smoldering through ash. “How?”
He repeated her words back to her. “You changed when I touched you.”
The gold narrowed to darker bronze in wariness. “I’m touching you right now.”
“Without the same...intensity.”
She laughed once, then cut herself off when he didn’t reciprocate. “Shall I attack you again?”
That did startle a smile out of him. Which was even more unsettling than speaking the truth inadvertently. Was the silky slide of her skin changing him?
He could not lie even to himself: he wanted more of her touch.
Slowly, he eased his hands down from where he’d held her wrists to keep her from throttling him, down the sharp points of her elbows, skipping to her bare hips. She stiffened, her knees around his flanks gripping him tighter.
He wanted more of that too.
So he shifted his grasp to the muscular globes of her backside and nestled her closer.
She stared down at him, her pupils a wild blackness with only a thin ring of gold. The salve he’d spread over the geas he’d marked on her w
as taking hold. Nothing too powerful—a pinch of ginseng, a drop of honey made from the nectar of particularly suggestive flowers, essence of mating musk left behind by a creature most humans believed had never existed. He’d only intended the loosening of inhibitions to enhance the spell, to reveal what had been locked away.
He hadn’t anticipated that she would remove the borrowed robe too.
She was the locus of the trouble if she’d been so strongly affected by the unlocking spell, and she must’ve already been close to the breaking point.
Now, if he could just find how her wanton energy had triggered the opening of the gate.
He tightened his hold on her haunches, his fingers pressing into her lush flesh. “The salve is laced with an aphrodisiac,” he admitted under the compulsion of her skin.
She made a soft sound, not quite a growl. “There is no such thing as an aphrodisiac, just damn good marketing by chocolatiers. And wishful thinking.”
“You are in the phae court. Where do you think wishes come from?”
She brought her face closer to his. “You ain’t no fairy godmother.”
Holding her with the strength of one arm, he let his free hand roam the small of her back, spanning the vulnerable space with his widespread fingers and making her arch into him. “Did you ever want to be a princess?”
“No.” Definitely a growl this time that vibrated through him where she pressed tight against his belly. “A tigress.”
“Then show me how a tigress gets what she wants.”
Her hands slipped upward to frame his jaw, almost as fierce as her hold on his neck had been. Except for her thumb, which brushed softly over his bottom lip. The caress roused a possessive instinct he’d never felt, not even for the time he’d held the glory and might of the phaedrealii in his hands. “You said intense,” she murmured. “Is that what you want?”
“Yes.” He shouldn’t have said it. Nothing good could come of this riot in his pulse that sent a heavy surge of blood and urgency to his loins. Such passionate turmoil had nearly wiped out the phae once and would again, if he didn’t finish locking the portals. But first he needed to master this wereling’s wild magic that was undoing his wards.
And threatening to Undo him.
With her thumb, Yelena levered down his jaw. He had time for one shocked gasp before her mouth came down on his.
No testing caress of lips, no teasing stroke of tongue, she took him with predatory intent. She hiked herself higher against his chest—a hot friction of flesh—using both hands to shove his tunic off his shoulders, exposing more of his skin to hers.
Another shock went through him, hungry and bone-deep. He almost expected to hear a sizzle. He staggered under the force of her push and the overwhelming rush of coursing excitement. Her breath filled his body, and her scent—musky and aroused—filled his mind, leaving room for nothing but her.
An obstacle hit the back of his thighs and he tumbled backward. She rode him down, though she lifted her head, breaking the rough kiss with a surprised oath.
Instead of slamming onto stone, they bounced lightly on the wide cushion woven from the threads of a million spiderling phae.
He never lost his grip on the sumptuous handfuls of her backside. “You were showing me something...?”
But the golden haze in her eyes cleared slightly as she glanced around. To a creature of the sunlit realm, he knew the setting must seem very stark. A grouping of slender columns had once framed a huge central pillar, and when that pillar had cracked and fallen, taking out a few of its smaller companions, it left a partly enclosed chamber with the sheered-off base in the center, now softened by the spiderling cushion.
“How convenient we’ve ended up in your bed.” She directed a glare down at him. “Did you glamour this out of nothing?”
Though he willed himself to silence, or at least prevarication, her touch tore the truth from him. “I can’t waste my power on illusion. What you see is what you get.” And all she would see was a scarred gray phae.
Her scowl deepened. “So you maneuvered us in here when I was distracted. Intensely distracted.”
While she was attacking him with that deep, open-mouthed kiss. Unable to stop himself—apparently there were irresistible truths of the flesh as well as of words—Raze skimmed his hands up her body. “Which bothers you less? That this is an illusion, or that I brought you to my real bed?”
She grumbled low in her throat. The opal-like glow from the ammolite crystals slanted between the stalactites, crisscrossing her with tiger stripes of light. “It’s been almost a year—too long—since I changed. But for some reason, the verita luna found me here, with you, and I won’t—” her grip tightened on him, almost ferocious, “—I won’t let it get away again.”
“I wasn’t planning on going anywhere,” he murmured. Nowhere at all once he locked the gates permanently.
Despite his words, he bucked his hips up between her thighs and rolled her to her back in one smooth motion. She tensed as if to fight him, so he kissed her again. For a heartbeat, she resisted, her mouth tight under his. He let his lips glide as lightly as the stroke of the athame, trusting in the magic, and she opened to him with a soft moan.
She tasted of cold water and burning desire, with a hint of the honey and ginseng he’d spread on the geas and the spirits she’d consumed in the sunlit realm. The unexpected sweetness and earthy bite startled him. The aphrodisiac must have seeped throughout her body as it sought the source of what blocked her.
Which meant a little of it was now in him.
Really, that thought should worry him more.
Instead, he stroked his tongue over the smooth inner flesh of her lips, savoring her with long-repressed craving. Her teeth were so close, but he found himself even more aroused by the awareness of danger. Her restlessness as she moved under him made him feel...alive.
That too should have been a concern. He’d exhausted most of his power building walls to protect the phae from the perils of rampant passion—and from themselves. And here he was, forgetting entire centuries in the tangle of her long limbs.
She twined her arms up around his neck, anchoring him to deepen the kiss while her hips nudged his in needy circles, like a demanding little puss wanting to be pet. But when he reached down between their bodies to oblige, she twisted to avoid him, breaking the kiss. He grunted. Just like a cat to change her mind.
“Take off your clothes.” She shoved at his tunic again, her hands almost rough with her urgency.
Male satisfaction at her eagerness made him allow the disrobing, although he’d never chosen to be naked before a lover. Scarred and gray... “More skin won’t give you any more power.”
Her golden eyes gleamed. “Won’t it?”
Not deigning to reply—indeed, the words had been less a question than a challenge, a challenge he intended to answer with more than words—he rocked back on his haunches to peel the tunic over his head.
He sucked in his breath when her fingertips trailed down his chest to the loose waistband of his trousers. Just below her hand, his flesh leapt toward her touch.
But the gold in her eyes dimmed as she traced his geasa. “When I saw the marks on your arms, I thought it was a glamour, but these are real, aren’t they?”
With her fingers poised on the muscles of his abdomen, he could not lie. “Yes.”
“Will they fade, like mine?”
“Not when I keep carving them anew.” But his magic was not endless, and the wards—even fueled by his blood—were failing. Until he could blast the gates shut with one overwhelming flood of his own power.
Her brow furrowed. “Why—?”
He stripped off his trousers with an angry, awkward yank, tearing through the spiderling silk and cutting off her question just as effectively. “You are the one who wishes to change, not I.”
> Her gaze lowered, taking his temper with it, or so it felt to him as the throb in his temples refocused in his rampant erection. That part of him, at least, had no geas markings. He would do anything for the phaedrealii. Anything except carve into his cock.
And he was fiercely glad for that private rebellion as she closed her hand over him, setting off sparks of sensation in every unscathed nerve ending. His head tipped back as she smoothed her hand up his length, tilting him inexorably toward her. An unexpected heat lingered, and he realized she’d lubricated her fingers with the salve.
With effort, he opened his eyes which had drifted shut and met her dazzling gaze. She looked like a tiger. A hungry tiger.
Oh yes, he really should be more worried.
Instead, he dropped to all fours to cage her with his body. She shifted her encircled fingers around him and gave another milking squeeze. He shuddered, every fiber of his being suddenly eager to race toward her touch, as if to escape his control.
“Soft and hard,” she said. “I want both.”
“Then take it.”
Chapter Five
Yelena gasped as the blunt heat of his arousal nudged into her. He was hard as a rock but smoothed with her juices. When had she gotten so wet? It was as if she’d been holding her breath for exactly this moment since she fell through the lake.
She wedged her heels behind his thighs, tilting her hips to guide him deeper. The excited pulse of her blood, the rushing sensitivity of her skin, felt like the stirrings of the verita luna, but she hoped the change would hold off just a little longer. It had been almost a year since she shifted, but it had been even longer since she’d done this.
And all that hot, hard male power shuddering between her legs made her feel strong in a way even the tigress couldn’t. This elementally erotic feeling was her, all her, and no one could take that away. Not even after what had happened...
“Stay with me,” Raze murmured.
She couldn’t leave anyway, not until she figured out why coming here had finally induced the verita luna. To banish her useless thoughts, she anchored her hands on the edges of his hipbones. The myriad scars tickled her palms as she yanked him flush, a scorching brand to melt the lingering ice within.