Oh, thank the gods; she’d forgotten about Lia’s ass. “Yes, your majesty. I’ve devised a way to make lovely jewelry like that of the humans, but without enough metal to hurt our skin. Your ladies of court can touch it with their bare hands.”
The queen snorted even as she slipped the ruby necklace over her head. “Florian, she is entirely too clever. Clever girls are dangerous. Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a beautiful, stupid girl?”
The prince stepped up beside Lia and wrapped a protective right arm around her waist. Her sense of safety was short-lived, however, as he then clapped his left hand over her left breast and squeezed hard enough to make her wince. “These will be worth it, nice and firm. Not flat and useless like those of pure fae women. I’ve admired them for a while as she’d come and go from her father’s business. Besides, it’s only for a year.”
“A year?” Lia hoped her voice didn’t sound as squeaky and horrified as she felt. She didn’t want to spend a minute with this man.
“Of course, you lucky peasant girl. I have chosen you as my annual consort. After that, you’ll be available to pleasure the men and women of my court for a year, perhaps two if your amorous talents prove popular. Then you can go back to being as clever as you wish, with a bonus commensurate with the amount of pleasure you afford me and my courtiers.”
“Consort?” Lia tried to plaster a delighted expression on her face but it felt like a grimace. “But—”
Florian pulled Lia to him and pressed his lips against hers. He smelled of a sweet summer meadow and flowers, and her first real kiss might have been enjoyable but for the audience of a lascivious old witch and the sudden parting of the prince’s lips. The intrusion of his tongue felt as if a giant retruvian eel, found only in the deepest lagoons of Faerie, were trying to wriggle its way down Lia’s throat.
He pulled away and blinked those brilliant green eyes. “She kisses like a virgin. We’ll have to work on that.” He slid both hands down to grasp Lia’s waist and pulled her against him, earning a gasp she couldn’t stop from escaping. She had much bigger problems than Florian’s giant retruvian eel tongue.
“We’ll try things here”—he slid a hand down the crevice of Lia’s backside, earning another gasp. “It’s not misshapen at all. And of course here.” At the crevice of her thighs, from the front, he clutched a handful of fabric and, through it, the tender skin beneath. He rubbed a few times and squeezed hard.
She couldn’t even gasp at the intrusion of his fabric-covered fingers; she was frozen and mute.
“Hm. I must include a three-month reversion clause in the contract with her father.” Florian retrieved his hands, and Lia took a shaky breath. “She isn’t as clever as she looks. If she can’t learn to please me in that time, I’ll reclaim my horse and she can move on to service the courtiers. Some of them enjoy working with a cold woman until she melts from the heat.”
Lia had to get out of this situation, but she had to be smart about it—or half as clever as they’d accused her of being. “I’m sure I will learn quickly how to please you well, Prince Florian. Forgive me; I was simply taken by surprise. My father”—her traitorous father—“did not tell me the purpose of my summons.” She dropped her gaze in an attempt to appear meek. “Might I return home for a few personal items before we...?”
She had no idea how to finish that question. Before you ruin my life and impale me in private places with more than your giant eel-sized tongue?
“That’s a much better attitude.” Florian gave a slight nod. “Apology accepted. I’ll have a driver take you to your home to make preparations. He can also deliver the foal and the paperwork for your father.”
Why had Lia thought those green eyes were summery and warm? They were as icy and hard as the cheap faux emeralds worn by the women of her own class in their plastic imitation jewelry. “I’ll expect you in my chambers at the Summer Palace tonight, washed and oiled and prepared for me by nine. Do you understand?”
“Of course, sir.” She even gave him a damned curtsy, wondering what being oiled entailed. “I won’t disappoint you.”
Lia wouldn’t disappoint him because—somehow—she wasn’t going to be there.
3
“BOSS, BETTER GET to the forest.”
Faulkner Hearne finished filling a frosted stein with beer and shoved it across the bar toward one of his regulars. He turned to Romy, his assistant manager at New Orleans’ exclusive The Hunt Club, not to mention his most trusted friend. “What’s wrong?”
“Hunt scene’s gone wrong. I think the woman changed her mind.”
“Damn.” He wiped off his hands on a small towel and tossed it in the bin beneath the polished mahogany bar. “Watch the front for me.”
The bad thing about operating a bar that catered to the Fae Hunters and humans: illusion scenes could get screwed up fast. Faulk strode to the room at the end of the narrow hallway, the club’s most popular of his five fantasy rooms and the only one with a permanent illusion: The Hunt.
When he opened the door and slipped inside, the pounding rhythm of the music that permeated the bar gave way to the quiet of a deep forest. Dense trees and foliage stretched before him, and a cool mist of fog blanketed the ground. An owl hooted in the distance.
As always when he entered this room, Faulk felt a rush of homesickness followed by a swell of pride. He’d created a fine magical illusion here, real enough for even the pickiest of the Fae Hunters who wanted to play at the Wild Hunt in a realistic setting.
A scream broke his reverie, followed by a roar that eons of Fae Hunters before him had uttered upon obtaining their quarry. That was Part A: the finding of the prey. He had to move fast before Part B began: the claiming of the prey. “Claiming” could be several things. In a real Hunt, the claiming could be death; punishing, rough sex; a simple arrest; or a combination of those options. The Hunter always chose.
In the fantasy rooms, it always went the rough sex route, but it had to be consensual. Faulk didn’t tolerate rape from his Hunters, no matter the history and legend surrounding their past. Not with make-believe prey in his illusion rooms and not with real prey when his men and women were conducting the enforcement of Faerie law on the human side of the veil.
Faulk broke into a small, moss-covered clearing just as a tall, muscular man in distressed leathers shoved a sobbing woman to the ground and began pulling off his heavy gauntlets. Her wrists had been bound behind her back, and a silvery-green long scarf—the scarf unique to the Fae Hunters—had been tied around her head as a blindfold.
“Methier, stop.” Faulk dropped his voice. He didn’t need to shout. As Captain of the Fae Hunters, as well as the elder brother of the reigning Prince of Autumn, his word was law among all the fae on this side of the veil. Even before the death of his father five years ago, he’d chosen this calling rather than sit on the Autumn throne, and he was damned good at it.
The Hunter, who’d only been out of training a few months, struggled to control his ragged breathing. Faulk crossed his arms, waiting while the man brought his adrenaline levels down with great effort. His leathers weren’t tight enough to hide his hard-on; he’d been ready for his claiming. He’d survive.
“She agreed to the game, sir,” Methier said. “She agreed to the terms. She signed the papers.”
“I know she did.” Faulk drew Methier aside and dropped his voice further. “But she is human and sometimes they don’t fully understand what playing at the Hunt means. She got scared and changed her mind.”
“How can you tell?” Methier, an inch shorter than Faulk but broader and fair-haired, looked over his shoulder at the woman, who seemed to sense that the immediate danger had passed. She sat up and had almost gotten the tears under control except for an occasional hiccup. Mascara streaked down her cheeks from beneath the scarf like vertical zebra stripes.
“You’re new to being human-side, Methier. You’ll learn.” Faulk walked over to the woman and made soothing sounds while he tugged off the scarf and handed it back to the Hunter. He
pulled the short, curvy redhead to her feet and gently untied her wrists, rubbing the circulation back into them before releasing her. The rope, a fine, lightweight faery weave favored by the Hunters, he handed back to Methier as well.
“Go home,” Faulk told the woman. “I’d suggest you not come back here for a while.”
“No worries about that.” She wasted no time in rushing toward the door, but paused with her hand on the knob. “My purse?”
“Find it, and then be on your way. My apologies for the misunderstanding.”
She nodded, disappeared into the forest for a moment, then fled through the doorway back into the hall—going home, Faulk hoped, and not to the police.
As soon as the door closed, Faulk put a hand on Methier’s shoulder. “Look, reading humans is hard, especially women. But a lot of times they agree to something like a Hunt, thinking it sounds like fun. You have to learn how to recognize when they’re pretending to be afraid and when they’re truly fearful.”
It wasn’t that hard. Humans projected fear as if they wore transmitters, and it was like honey to a Hunter ripe for a claiming.
He stepped closer to Methier, invading the man’s personal space to make his point. “When you sense real fear, back the hell off. If you aren’t sure, back the hell off. Nobody does anything the woman doesn’t truly want.” Or the man. Some of the female Hunters were fiercer than the males, and some of the males preferred other males.
“That’s not the way the Hunt works.” Methier stepped back from Faulkner, but he hadn’t figured out how to release his thwarted aggression. The Hunter’s fists remained bunched, tapping on his thighs. “The prey doesn’t have a choice. Those have always been the rules of the Hunt.”
Yeah, well, not any more. “That was true once, but I don’t condone rape from my Hunters under any circumstances. Faeries coming to this side of the veil know they will be hunted, and they know they’ll face punishment. If they fight us, they will die. If they don’t resist, we return them to face the courts of Faerie. Unless it is freely offered, however, my Hunters do not fuck their prey. You got that?”
Methier nodded, but his mouth still turned down in a stubborn pout.
Faulk put his right hand on the man’s neck, knowing the new Hunter would feel the prince’s power like an electrical current through every vein. As a royal, even from one of the low seasons, Faulk could kill him with a touch. Methier’s eyes widened as that truth sank in, and he tried to step farther away. Faulk wrapped strong fingers around one side of the man’s neck and held him in place.
“When they disobey, my Hunters become the hunted. These rules are not negotiable and I don’t tolerate insubordination. Do you understand?”
A quick nod. Methier would no longer meet his gaze.
“Good, then. Go to the bar, have a beer on the house, then get the hell out of here. Go to a gym and hit the bags for a while to get rid of the adrenaline of the Hunt. But don’t think I’ll forget what happened here; I’ll be watching you.”
God knew he’d used the punching-bag tactic himself more than a few times. Hunters were aggressive men and women, which is why they became Hunters. It was why he was better suited to be a Hunter than to be sitting on the throne at the Autumn Palace—his right as the eldest son. His brother Yuri thrived there, however, while Faulk would feel imprisoned.
He took a few minutes to enjoy the ambience and peace of the illusion room. He’d opened The Hunt Club a decade ago, not long after he reached adulthood. Upon the death of their father, he had made his choice to hand the throne to his brother and remain as Captain of the Fae Hunters. While living among humans, the Hunters tracked down escapees and renegades, criminals and miscreants, desperadoes and the plain old desperate. Whoever crossed the veil without a royal decree, in other words.
Over time, the good Fae Hunters—the ones who lasted—learned which prey deserved mercy and which ones didn’t. And the good Hunters—the ones who thrived—didn’t mind playing as rough as the situation called for.
He didn’t think Methier would last. Getting on Faulk’s radar this soon after he crossed the veil didn’t bode well. If he didn’t get himself killed by another Hunter, he’d be sent back to Faerie in disgrace and would end up as a backwater constable.
Better check on your other illusion rooms and get back to work, Falconer.
He took one last look around the forest room to make sure nothing had been disturbed, then headed toward the front. In each of the other four rooms, scenes were in progress. He opened each door slightly to listen for any sound of distress.
He shook his head at the pink nonsense in the first room. Some of the things humans fantasized about made faeries look normal, and Faulk, as he called himself on this side of the veil, had never considered his people anything near normal. But the idea that a Cinderella fantasy had anything to do with faeries or faery tales... ridiculous.
Still, he heard feminine giggles from the interior of the pink palace illusion that had been cast on the room, followed by a male exclamation about slippers. Nothing wrong here, or at least nothing that required his intervention, thank the gods. Perhaps a psychiatrist.
A second room had been turned into a dusty Wild West scene, with the Fae Hunter playing cowboy to the customer’s saloon girl. Nothing amiss in there.
It was clear from the sounds audible through the doors of the remaining two rooms—one a spaceship theme, the other a BDSM playroom—that a very good time was being had by all, so Faulk made his way back into the main barroom. Part of him envied the Hunters’ ability to step outside their roles and play with a human partner, but he didn’t use the fantasy rooms.
One, it wasn’t in his nature.
Two, it was inappropriate for his station in life. In the back of his mind lived the niggling reminder that should anything happen to Yuri, the reign of the Autumn Court would fall to him and he would become Lord of the Hunt in Faerie, a ceremonial occupation.
Three, he hadn’t found anyone enticing enough to overcome numbers one and two.
When he’d made human-side his home, Falconer had adopted a human name and cashed in a fifth of his inheritance in gold to buy this building, located at the end of a dark side alley off Ursulines Street in New Orleans’ French Quarter. He’d never regretted the decision.
Since the barriers between the otherworlds and the human world had grown thinner than ever here in the past decade, it was where most of the renegade fae ended up. Which meant New Orleans also had become home to most of the Fae Hunters, moving in and about the unsuspecting humans who lived here.
He joined Romy at the bar and looked around with satisfaction. Slow-moving bodies eased around the small dance floor as the evening’s music playlist went from frantic to sultry. The ambience outside ensured that the illusion rooms in the back stayed filled. In fact, Romy had just shoved some paperwork across the bar concerning a lust-besotted human male who could barely take his eyes off Gretta, a Fae Huntress. The guy looked away just long enough for his verbal warning, to affirm that he had agreed not to sue if things got out of hand and not to talk about things he shouldn’t. It was Gretta’s job to make sure it was signed and enforced, but Faulk or Romy could override any customer he thought wasn’t ready. Romy had missed the mark with Methier and the redhead.
Faulk wasn’t worried about this one. Gretta was one of his most reliable Hunters, and he gave her a wink when she and her new friend passed on the way to the forest room. She’d illusioned herself into jodhpurs and flourished a wicked-looking riding crop.
She leaned over the bar along the way. “He wants hounds. What should I tell him?”
Faulk raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “The man wants hounds, give him rocks illusioned as hounds. Just don’t share any details. That’s some sick shit.”
She laughed and disappeared into the hallway.
“Did she say hounds? As in dogs?” Romy handed Faulk the signed release forms, and he locked them into the safe beneath the bar.
“She did. Don’t think
about it too much.” Never mind that faeries and dogs made bad companions. Since canines could see through faery glamour, the beasts tended to get easily riled. “It’s way too kinky for me.”
“What would he want the dogs for?” Romy thought about it a moment, shook his head, and grinned. “Never mind. You’re right. I don’t wanna know.”
Faulk couldn’t help but grin back. They’d been best buddies since childhood, and when Faulk moved human-side and chose New Orleans, there was no doubt who his top lieutenant would be.
While he had the safe open, Faulk took out an envelope and held it up. “Let’s go up to the office and look at the new job that came in by courier a few minutes before the near-disaster in the forest.”
“Okay, and sorry about the redhead. I thought she was ready.” Romy called over one of the two waiters to man the bar and followed Faulk up the stairwell tucked behind it. The narrow wooden staircase led to a space that, before Faulk’s redesign, had been the size of a human football field. He’d partitioned it for maximum efficiency. In the front sat a desk, chair and sofa—his business office, at least when he needed privacy. Behind the desk was a bank of monitors showing all the activity in the back rooms, recorded in case evidence was needed for a break-in or, the gods forbid, a scene gone badly that involved human law enforcement.
In the very back, the rear third of the space held his living quarters. Small kitchen, king-sized bed, sound system, home gym. Everything for the modern faery bachelor, in other words.
Taking up most of the front wall of the office was a two-way mirror so he could keep an eye on the main bar area and the front door.
Some of the people he’d sent back to Faerie with particularly harsh punishments wanted to see him dead. Imagine.
He slumped in the black leather chair behind the desk and took the beer Romy offered him from the small fridge in the corner.
“What’ve we got?” Romy took the chair opposite the desk while Faulk opened the envelope and looked at the retrieval order that had arrived about an hour ago.
The Consort: A Fae Hunters Novella (The Fae Hunters Book 1) Page 2