by Ron C. Nieto
Troy laughed, and the Librarian’s wry smile returned.
“If only I did not have to brave the court every time I visit your shelves,” said Troy, shaking his head.
“You would still be scarce. You love your rivers and your wilderness too much to settle for reading about it.”
“Perhaps.” Taking another bread roll, Troy grinned and meandered away, pointedly checking the old tomes as he walked and leaving silence in his wake.
Lily sipped her milk and wondered if she should start reading, or if she should eat first. Regardless of the Librarian’s words, it felt wrong to risk crumbs and grease on the old pages. Still, she wanted to read and she needed to eat.
I had almost forgotten what mundane hard choices looked like.
She made her choice, grabbed a roll, and took a tiny bite out of it. “I hadn’t realized the two of you were good friends,” she said, swallowing the moan of pleasure that threatened to escape when the soft, sweet taste of the roll hit her.
“Likewise.”
The comment found her off guard, and she chased the last of the delicacy with honeyed milk. A denial perched on the tip of her tongue, but she held it there. Perhaps this notion of friendship acted as a shield, and if so, she wasn’t willing to give it up.
She didn’t want to tip her hand by lying outright either, so she couldn’t confirm the Librarian’s words, just in case they were a test.
“I’m just human,” she settled for saying.
The Librarian snorted. “You do not say.”
If she had hoped to tease something out of the Librarian, some mad assurance about how special she was for Troy regardless, or some snide remark that would strengthen her resolve to do what she must, she was disappointed.
“I should get to reading,” she said after a moment of silence, finishing off the glass of milk and wishing it had been a cup of tea instead.
“Yes, you should, or else you shall never be done with it.” Hiding his hands inside his ample sleeves, the Librarian gave her a minute bow of the head before turning around in a swirl of crimson robes. “If you require to research any other topic, or decide to give up on your current tomes and request something simpler, be sure to let me know.” Not giving Lily a chance to reply, he strode purposely down the same aisle Troy had wandered, and pretty soon his imposing figure disappeared between bookshelves and reading nooks.
Lily sagged, tension she hadn’t been entirely aware off seeping from her bones. Taking into account that he was a faerie, and an Unseelie one at that, the Librarian was quite an okay fellow to be around, and the fact Troy seemed to be more at ease around him than around other faeries should be another mark in his favor. Unfortunately, from what she had observed, Troy was always more at ease here than he had been in the Seelie court—the Librarian and Marast, he had treated them as old friends, and he had failed to issue any grim warning regarding Hevana.
Of course. He’s Unseelie, too. The fact that he’s more comfortable around his own kind doesn’t mean I am safer.
She left the second sweet roll untouched and climbed to the reading table where her books waited since her last visit. The ancient pages and the convoluted writing should be enough to take her mind off the faeries.
Sitting down, she opened one of the books to the chapter she had been working her way through, On the truthfulness of omens, and fought the urge to laugh at herself.
Of course. Take your mind off faeries by reading all about them.
However ridiculous, though, the logic worked for a while. With all her attention focused on deciphering Middle English, there was little of her mind Lily could devote to thinking about Troy, about the Librarian, about her plans . . . She could only put one word after the other, wrestling the meaning out of them.
“And so, all omens must come to pass, regardless of the preparations one makes beforehand.”
Lily sighed. There was only so much distraction she could find in learning when the text seemed to be mocking her very efforts.
“There is however a universal right claimed by a few, the right to protect oneself against unfavorable signs.”
Did that mean that you could protect yourself from the omen, or that you could try to avoid the omen? The idea that not hearing the deadly lament of a Gercu might protect against the imminent death it announced seemed preposterous . . . But then again, there wasn’t anything very rational about a phantom black dog living in the graveyard and howling its lungs out whenever someone was about to die.
Closing the book, Lily rubbed her eyes. Perhaps the smart thing to do would be to read about stuff I can affect and not about stuff that’s already happened, one way or the other. Cadowain told me he knows where Grandma is, and as a sidhe faerie, he can’t lie. Which means Grandma is somewhere, and I can find that place. Perhaps that’s all that matters. Perhaps I should stop worrying about Gercu wails, Bean-Nighe washed clothes, and other assorted signs of Very Bad Things and stick to what I can do now.
Putting the tome on omens aside, she reached for the one about names. It was under the one on Scottish myth and legend, and her fingers lingered a bit on the cover of that one.
Troy was dry and warm this morning. What does that mean?
The question nagged at the back of her head, but she had already read the entry on Kelpie. There was nothing there about him being wet, or dry, or anything in between, even when she had a gut feeling telling her it mattered.
He was wet again when we came to the library. Not as much as usual, but definitely damp.
The Librarian said to ask him about any new topic, didn’t he? She snorted. Yeah, right. That’ll go over well: “Please, give me a book to figure out our common friend, so I know what I can use when dealing with him.”
Impossible. He had already volunteering a book on kelpies, warning her of how fictitious it was, and he was unlikely to give her another, accurate one.
Although both Troy and the Librarian had pointed out the different sections of the library during her first visit.
Where would that sort of information be classified?
Right beside the notebook where some human had thought to write the secrets and the weak spots of a selkie, of course. After all, she sought the same thing, if only applied to a different species.
Her heart hammering in her dry throat, Lily pushed away from the table and tried to remember where the Librarian had picked that notebook from.
There. Up that set of stairs, second balcony to the left, somewhere around the middle shelves.
Casting a look back over her shoulder to make sure she was alone, Lily walked as silent as a mouse and began climbing the spiral stairs, stopping every few steps to check that no Librarian and no Troy had materialized themselves at her elbow.
Technically speaking, this was a library and she sought information, so it shouldn’t be a problem that it related to one of them.
She didn’t wish to discover how technicalities affected miffed faeries anyway.
When she reached what she thought was the right shelf, she suppressed a groan. Most of the books didn’t have the title written in the spine, some of those that did weren’t in Modern English, and to make matters worse, there was no way to know how the book on Kelpie would be titled, even if it did exist.
Not your brightest idea, Lily.
Still, she had made her way up there, so she might as well check. Perhaps there was something like Kelpie for dummies: all the secrets you ever wanted to unveil.
Her fingers found the selkie notebook and she checked the title.
Nothing.
Of course not. These were the private notes of a greedy woman, not something meant to hit the bookstores.
Still, the Librarian must’ve classified it somehow, right?
It could’ve been by topic, by year, by author, by region of origin . . . Lily suddenly wished she had paid more attention to that one class she’d had about how to use a public library for research on school papers. It might have helped.
School papers b
elong to another world now.
And a rather useless one, too.
She decided the library was organized by topic. After all, roughly speaking, the different sections Troy and the Librarian had pointed out could have been called categories, right?
So, topic then.
From Selkie to Kelpie.
Trailing backwards, she hoped to find something that gave her a clue, and even though she wasn’t sure what she looked for, sh knew she had found it two shelves up and to the left.
The book sat a little crooked, its spine out of line with its neighbors, and it looked old as time in a place where time held no meaning. The cover was tenuously attached to the rest of the book, and faded letters said Faeries of the Water Realms. Lily picked it up as quickly as she dared and cracked it open, searching for an index or table of contents. The book was written by hand and it had nothing of the sort, but that didn’t dampen her excitement because she knew she had struck gold the moment she began reading the introduction.
“Through this book, thou shall be educat'd in the history and roles of all water fay, be the ally 'r foe, and thou shall learn how to appeal to these creatures and how to ward and compel—”
Ink bled through the page and the ancient words slithered upon parchment like snakes, blackness twisting and engulfing the page, the book, the room. With a gasp, Lily dropped the tome—
But found she could not. Her fingers kept holding it, despite what her mind ordered them to do.
Her lungs refused to scream, too. Her legs didn’t run.
After the briefest moment, she forgot why she wanted to escape.
A few heartbeats more, and it didn’t matter.
C H A P T E R XIX
Coming to when one hadn’t realized one had been knocked out was a strange sensation. Much like waking from a dream, the first thing Lily noticed was the soft, plump surface where she rested. Her fingers twitched and she clenched her eyes shut, bright light hurting her eyes through her closed eyelids. The minute movement caused a swish of fabric.
Silk, her mind supplied.
Where am I?
Her nose caught the scent of some flower or other mixed with the cool touch of running water.
Silk, perfume, nature. Her brow furrowed. It should smell . . . of dust. Why?
“You awaken,” said a voice in low tones over her prone figure. A delicate touch upon her cheek followed, the fingers long and slender, and it left a trail of water drops behind.
She tried to open her eyes, but the light hurt too much so she ended up fluttering her lashes like an idiot. The voice had been familiar, and it kept nagging at the back of her mind, but she couldn’t quite place it.
“Come now, Lily,” the voice coaxed, fingers sliding to tunnel in her hair and cup the side of her face. She shifted, or someone shifted, and the fabric beneath her rustled again as she concentrated on placing that voice, that cool, damp touch on her skin.
And the scent. She kept scenting the wilderness of the Highlands while she kept expecting dust and leather.
And ink.
Why?
“Wake up, Lily Boyd.” The voice remained soft, the words were gently uttered, and the comforting touch never left her. Still, her True Name whipped her soul like a scourge, forcing her eyes open on a gasping breath as everything snapped together.
The library. The smell she missed was that of old tomes and silent knowledge, and that’s where she had been the last time she could recall. After studying a book on whether her grandmother could be alive after having had her death foretold and finding she could make neither head nor tails of the text, she had moved to more distracting topics.
Like kelpie secrets.
By some miracle, she had managed to find a book on water faeries, hadn’t she? And then—then—
She swallowed, her body tensing.
She was in her guest room. The soft mattress dipped under her weight combined with Troy’s, and every movement made the covers slide and rustle.
Troy. The voice, the fingers on her skin had been Troy’s. Still were, massaging the back of her neck while bright emerald eyes studied every single twitch of hers as he leaned in over her, his features all she could see of the room.
“Are you cognizant?” he murmured, not backing off an inch.
“Looks like it,” she croaked. Her voice was just a rasp and her throat ached to form the words, as if she had swallowed ground glass.
“Good.”
Lily tried to offer a smile, but Troy’s expression made her freeze. The faerie mask, as she called his bland, amused expression, dropped altogether, and she caught his features bleeding emotion before he looked down, hiding his relief.
Because that’s what she had seen, wasn’t it? Relief.
Yeah, it was. “Good,” he said, and he meant it.
Awkwardly, she struggled to raise a hand to his bent head, pushing back the messy strands. Just touching him back. Just running her fingers through his fine, silky locks and trying to catch another look into his eyes.
He let her.
There was no trace of an ancient, trickster faerie in that gaze. The expression was hard to decipher, perhaps because it was so naked when he always guarded them so well.
He looks lost. Weary. Innocent? Yeah, innocent. Except that’s not the word, not really.
Oh God, he’s so human.
And that was it, wasn’t it? He was a man at that moment, nothing else. A man who had been worried for her, who was relieved to see her awake, who perched over her lying in bed and cradled the side of her face with tenderness.
Lily tightened her fingers in his hair, pulling him closer, and again he let her.
She closed her eyes when she felt his breath ghosting over her skin, tilted her head just so and brushed dry, chapped lips over his.
Troy froze, every line of his body radiating tension, quivering as a wild animal startled by a hunter’s sudden move, and Lily felt panic spearing through her addled mind.
Too much, too soon, she thought frantically, dropping her head back to the pillows. She’d been caught in the spell of the moment, believed she could read him, and perhaps she could, yes, perhaps he had been receptive, but then she had hurried things up, taken a step without thinking, just feeling, and she had messed up, and—
And Troy followed her down, his cool lips gentle, almost hesitating as they brushed hers, mimicking her. Thoughts of her plan unraveled in Lily’s head and she could only reach out with her free hand to touch the side of his face, wanting to keep him close, encouraging—begging—him to do it again.
He did, withdrawing just a hair before repeating the gesture, gentle brushes and soft caresses, the tentative kisses of a learning boy wearing the body of an immortal man.
It felt good. Natural. Perfect, even, and the next time he pressed down, Lily flicked her tongue without thought, catching at last the taste of his damp skin.
Fresh rain, cool Highland air, and him.
She didn’t have time to figure out what exactly made up that elusive him taste because this time he followed her lead with no hesitation, the tip of his tongue painting the seam of her lips and sending electric jolts through her body. Her hand clenched in his hair and she matched the gentle dance of his tongue with hers, inviting him, daring him to slant his mouth on hers and take more.
Troy shifted to lean his weight on his elbow, the covers rustling as he lied over her, and then he obliged, letting her set the pace but copying every sweep of her tongue, every brush of lips, every nip of teeth again and again, until the motions blended seamlessly together into an endless perfect kiss that clenched her insides and made her forget the need for air.
More.
God forgive her, but plan or no plan, she wanted more.
Lily clung to his body, now stretched out and hovering just an inch above hers, and felt the wetness of his shirt dampening her dress, wrenching a shiver from her, both cold and hot, as the fabric dragged against her skin and her flesh molded to his lean, muscled form from hip t
o chest.
She felt him tense again, the fingers he had tunneled in her hair twitching, and then he pulled away from the kiss. He didn’t go far, just a bit to the side, his cheek almost touching hers and his lips close to her shoulder, but it was enough for reason to claw its way back into Lily’s head. Out of her corner of her eye, she saw his lids closed, his head bent. A little further up, his free hand clenched into a fist. His body, tight against hers, heaved a deep breath and little by little, Lily relaxed the grip she had on him.
Control. Yes, it sounded like a good idea.
“I don’t regret that,” she croaked after a few long moments, words still breathless on top of raspy and broken.
The corners of his lips kicked up in a small smile and he nodded minutely, either in acknowledgment or in agreement. Either way, she felt him relax a little, the coiled power of his tense muscles dissipating as they eased back into known territory.
“What happened?” she asked, forcing herself to form the words and to fully return to reality.
After another moment of stillness during which Lily could ascertain that, yes, she had sounded like a cawing crow, Troy straightened and Lily’s hand fell to her side. “Your throat requires some water. Here,” he said, walking over to pour a glass.
He sat on the bed again, his back against the headboard, much like they had slept that night, and helped Lily up, propping her against his chest. His movements were careful, as if he were handling a china doll, and Lily wanted to tell him to quit it, that she was fine and nothing hurt, but the truth was that, now that she was awake and the endorphin rush was over, her body did feel weak, tired. Battered.
Troy raised the glass to her lips and she sipped, grateful when the sensation of having ground glass lodged in her throat began to fade.
“You’re evading again,” she said when she was done.
“Successfully, might I add,” he replied, mimicking their conversation from the previous night without any heat. Then, before Lily had time to continue their banter, he went on. “What do you remember?”
Lily told him.