"I appreciate the sentiment, but Tess makes sense. I'm not so sure I'm a specific target. I mean, who could have known I'd be the one using the glass? It could just as easily have been Rafael. More easily, since he's used it before and I'm not actually supposed to be on this side of it."
"Is there any way to find out?" Missy asked. She had to stand on her tiptoes and peer over her husband's shoulder, since he clearly didn't intend to let anything else get a clear shot at his mate. "I don't know a lot about magic, but aren't there ways to tell? Like with tracing the demon?"
"Different kind of spell," Tess broke in. "Demons respond to certain physical signs and objects in a way that isn't necessary for most other kinds of magic. Curses are designed not to leave traces." She grinned. "I know a bit about curses."
Fiona laughed. "Well, that could be helpful, because I don't. At least not about ones that don't last for a few hundred generations, and the one on the glass didn't feel nearly old enough to be a geis."
"No, it didn't. It's interesting, though, that it seemed timed to go off once you'd established a connection with Faerie, not at the moment you activated the mirror. It's almost like it was doing double duty as a burglar alarm, set to go off when you made contact."
"The ethereal branch of ADT?" Missy grinned.
"I wonder if it rings in a police station somewhere in Faerie."
"Right. I can just see the Queen's Guard donning their riot gear." Fiona shook her head and laughed again. "Somehow that doesn't strike me as likely. But I do want to know why someone is deliberately sabotaging the link between this world and Faerie."
"I don't get it, either. It's not like we all spend a lot of time in powwows. I think that glass has been used a total of three times since Mab sent it to us, and all three of them were when she popped up in it to give us hell about something we did or didn't do when one of your folk was visiting."
Fiona wasn't quite sure of the reason, either, but it gave her an uneasy feeling. She shrugged. "That I can't tell you. But the explanation isn't our biggest problem. If we can't get access to Faerie, our choice of ways to identify and track down the demon just got a heck of a lot smaller. I think we're going to have to start knocking on sorcerers' doors."
"I think that's a piss-poor idea." Walker scowled. "It's too dangerous. Like you said before, that could just escalate the violence or drive him into hiding. And what if you bump into him and spook him? He could end up attacking you." Walker shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest, his expression turning mulish. "No. It's out of the question."
Missy and Tess exchanged wide-eyed, knowing glances and fought with equal unsuccess to suppress their grins. They gave up the struggle when Fiona rounded on the werewolf, her spine straightening and regal authority draping over her like a mantle.
"I thought we already had this discussion, Tobias Walker." It freaked her out a little to hear her aunt's voice coming out of her mouth, but somehow she couldn't seem to stop it. "We agreed that I am not some incompetent little fool. I make my own choices, and I am responsible for my own life."
Walker's eyes flashed bright with golden fire, but before he could open his mouth, Missy shot Tess a speaking glance and the witch hurried to defuse the tension. "I don't think it's really the best idea to just go door-to-door and ask every sorcerer you meet if he happens to be summoning demons and then setting them loose on the human populace of Manhattan," she said. "First off, it could be dangerous, and second, it's just inefficient. Let me ask a few very discreet questions of the Witches' Council. Sorcerers are, after all, witches. Just a specialized kind of witch. I'll find out who's safest to approach and give you a couple of names. You can start there and hopefully not have to resort to the kamikaze approach."
Fiona and Walker stared at each other for a long, silent moment before she pursed her lips and nodded regally. "I can accept that. I won't be told what I can or can't do, but I'm not so stubborn that I'm incapable of listening to reason."
"Good, then it's settled," Rafe said, taking up his habitual role of peacemaker. Fiona recalled his mentioning something about how Graham had nearly been head of the Council of Others, and she shuddered at the thought. "Now, I suggest that we've all had enough excitement for the evening, what with the disturbing revelations and the bleeding and all."
At the word "bleeding," Walker's gaze snapped back to Fiona's face and locked on the reddened nick in her cheek. "You're right. We've had enough for one night. Come on." He grabbed Fiona by the hand and towed her toward the door. "We're going to have a doctor take a look at that cut."
Startled, Fiona dug her heels into the carpet and laughed. "Don't be ridiculous. I told you, it's just a scratch." She made a face at him and ran a fingertip along the scratch. It smoothed away, leaving nothing more than a freckle behind. "See?"
He continued to glare at her while their audience watched with obvious fascination. She felt her heart skip a beat before racing ahead on a burst of adrenaline. When he spoke, his voice sounded gruff and deep and so quiet she had to strain to hear it. "Let's see if you can do that same trick on a bright red behind after I get through paddling your reckless little ass."
Her jaw dropped with a nearly audible thud. "What did you just say to me?"
"You heard me." Walker prowled forward while the other occupants in the room struggled to both blend into the woodwork and make sure they had a good view of the action. "You're more in need of a good spanking than any woman I've ever met in my life. The agreement we made was before you got cut up by flying glass. In fact, it involved you understanding that I won't stand by and watch you put yourself into dangerous situations, like chasing after sorcerers who might be trying to kill you!"
Fiona caught herself taking a step backward and stopped, squaring her shoulders. She did not make a habit of backing away from anything. "Our agreement was that you would give me credit for the ability to take care of myself and the brains not to put myself in clearly dangerous situations. I know you feel protective of me, Tobias, but just because you jumped me and got me naked doesn't mean you own me."
Someone made a choking sound, but Fiona wasn't about to take her eyes off Walker to see who it was.
"I didn't jump you."
"Oh, really. What do you call it when you tackle me at the top of the stairs, rip my clothes off, and make my eyes roll back in my head, then? A relaxing little interlude?"
He growled long and low and took another step toward her. "I don't remember you spending a lot of time fighting me off, Princess. You did a little jumping of your own after a while."
"See?" Tess murmured to Missy at the other side of the room. "I told you they wouldn't be able to keep their hands off each other."
Fiona ignored their audience, too riled up now to care who watched them. "I don't deny I did some jumping. I'm not ashamed to jump. Jumping is perfectly healthy and natural, and quite frankly, in Faerie most of us jump as often as we feel like it. But that's not the point."
"What's the point, then?"
She managed a growl of her own. "The point is that you seem to have reverted back to the knee-jerk control-freak stance that we already fought about."
"This is not a knee-jerk reaction, Princess. This is what happens when you volunteer yourself for combat duty without even discussing it with me first!"
One more step had the backs of her knees bumping up against the side of an ottoman. She swallowed a rush of nerves—or was that excitement?—and raised her chin to keep him from noticing. "Why should I discuss it with you? Do you think I shouldn't try to help your friends and your community prevent a disaster while they try and negotiate for their survival among the humans? And here I thought I was doing you a favor."
He swore.
"Besides which, I already told you that I won't be treated as if I'm somehow your responsibility." She was on a roll. "We agreed that I was capable of looking after myself, and I don't see the need to ask your permission or your approval before I decide what needs to be done. Did you think I woul
d just defer to you because of those idiotic protective instincts of yours? Get over them! I'm a princess. I don't defer to anyone."
He pinned her to the ottoman before she got the last snotty word out. She struggled, but even if she'd been fully magically charged, her strength couldn't match an adult male Lupine with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove.
"I don't care if you're the fucking queen of the universe, sweetheart." The golden flames of his eyes burned into hers, and his lips drew back in a fang-baring snarl. "I agreed not to treat you like you're made of glass, but I did not agree to let you put yourself in some maniac's line of fire, and you're crazy if you ever thought I would. I'm not trying to smother you or run your life, but you're my mate, and you'll just have to learn to live with my idiotic protective instincts!"
* * *
CHAPTER 17
The room cleared out in three seconds flat. It took a lot longer than that for Fiona's head to stop spinning and her heart to start beating again. "What did you say?"
"You heard me well enough." Her hands pushed against his shoulders, and he grabbed her wrists to pin them above her head. "I will not stand aside and allow my mate to put herself in danger, Fiona of the Sidhe, whether she tells me she can handle it herself or not."
The buzzing in her ears wasn't going away, and she shook her head as if that could clear it. She couldn't have heard him right. Mate? Her? A royal princess of Faerie the mate of a mortal werewolf? It was impossible.
"You're out of your mind," she finally said, the sound strangled in her throat. "You're completely insane. I am not your mate."
Walker laughed, but he didn't sound amused. "Don't kid yourself, Princess. It's not like either of us got to choose. And it's not like either of us gets to just say, 'No thanks.' "
"That's exactly what I'm saying!" She squirmed beneath him, but with her wrists pinned and her legs dangling off the ottoman, she couldn't get any leverage against him. "There has to be a choice. You don't just get to say I'm your mate and think that makes it true!"
"I don't think saying it makes it true." He shifted both her wrists to one of his large hands and used the other to jerk aside the collar of her shirt until he could see his mark against her skin. "I think that makes it true."
She tried to ignore the way the spot seemed to ache and throb just from his looking at it. The way her heart began to beat faster. She sneered. "That? It's just a hickey. Trust me, I've had them before."
"Right. Does this usually happen when you have a hickey?"
Eyes blazing, he leaned down and drew his tongue in a long, rough line over the mark. It may as well have been over her clit. Her entire body clenched in sudden, debilitating need and a hungry moan broke through her clenched lips. Her head fell back and her breath shuddered out of her chest. She could feel herself going soft and damp in welcome, and she fought desperately to remember the point she'd been trying to make.
"It's… just… chemistry." She panted, but she didn't give in. "Lust. A… shallow physical… reaction."
"Uh-huh."
He shifted and the lick became a nibble that had her heart pounding in time to the throbbing between her legs. Her mind reeled. It was impossible that he could do this to her, make her feel this way without even touching her. Sure, the side of her neck was an erogenous zone, but this was ridiculous.
"Doesn't… prove anything."
His voice sounded muffled against her skin. "Of course not."
The nibbling ceased, and Fiona gasped for air. Goddess, she felt like hot running wax. It had to be lack of oxygen making her this dizzy. She knew about magic, but even magic couldn't do this to her.
She struggled, trying to turn her head or slide out from under him or do anything that would help her return to sanity. This had to stop before he started thinking she believed him about this mate thing.
"Walker, st—"
She never did get the word out. It hovered on the edge of her tongue, ready to tumble off, but he stole it from her along with her breath, her self, and the sound of her scream when he sank his teeth into the mark on her neck and shoved her hard into orgasm.
Her body arched and spasmed, shaking as if a bolt of electricity coursed through her. Stars exploded behind her eyes, blue and yellow and crimson with fire. She went blind, dumb, deaf to everything but the sound of his rumble of satisfaction, the harsh rasp of his breath. Numb to everything but his teeth against her skin, his mark on her body, and the hot, unbearable pulses of ecstasy that turned her mind and her willpower to ashes.
How did he do this to her?
She had no breath to ask, even when she could think well enough to form the question. Walker, though, didn't look interested in answering.
"More," he rasped. "Again."
"Can't."
"Can. Now."
A sound, half a moan, half a sob, tore from her. She had ceased to struggle, had neither the strength nor the will to do it. She lay draped over the ottoman like an offering to a pagan god, and Walker prepared her as such, ripping away her clothing until her skin glowed pale and smooth and naked beneath his devouring gaze.
Face harsh and set, he kneed her legs apart and braced himself over her. His hand raced over her, claiming and heating. It dived between her legs, fingers parting and probing and sinking deep, deep into her tight sheath.
"Now," he repeated, and he pressed his thumb rough and high against her clit, fingertips scraping over her sensitive inner tissues. His teeth sank again into her neck, and she had no choice but to obey.
She fragmented as violently as the stained glass, but her destruction felt more like a blessing than a curse. Free-falling into exaltation, she thought her lungs might burst, knew her heart had. She had become nothing but her pleasure and the knowledge that she pleased him. There was nothing else.
She screamed. It might have been his name. It definitely was a plea. Mercifully, he answered, tearing away his own clothes, lifting and flipping her, arranging her on her belly across the ottoman. She barely had time to register the feel of the rough brocade upholstery against her skin when he grasped her hips and lifted. He fit himself against her, paused for a breathless, aching eternity, and then slammed home.
Goddess. How had she ever lived with the emptiness?
Nothing existed except for her and Walker and the heady, frantic rhythm of his movement inside her. He stretched and filled her, rode her with purpose and hunger and something akin to desperation. Her heart recognized it, and her body, even if her mind refused to work. Her body knew that his existed as another piece of her, too long held apart. Her heart knew that whatever she wanted to believe, he had already laid claim, moved in, and taken over.
Her heart knew Walker was right.
The choice had already been made.
When he tensed and roared and spilled himself into her, she knew. And when her body fractured and tumbled over after him, she almost began to believe.
Walker snuck them out of the back of the club, wrapping her in an afghan he found draped over the sofa because her clothes could no longer cover a gnat with any decency. He carried her because her legs refused to hold her weight. Plenty of other muscles had gone on strike as well, including the ones from the neck up. Her mind remained blank and fuzzy halfway across Manhattan and all the way up into Walker's bed.
Okay, maybe not blank. She did have one thought, a question, that repeated over and over without even a hint of an answer.
How?
Fiona knew magic. She had grown with it, breathed it in, lived with it sparking and glowing and dancing all around her. She was magic. The power flowed in the veins of all Fae as surely as their blood. No one could deny it, and she had never wanted to try.
But this magic—this intense and dark and nearly violent magic that tied her to a mate she hadn't wanted in a way she'd never expected—this magic was something she just couldn't fathom.
The mattress gave beneath Walker's weight as he knelt to lay her down on sheets still rumpled from that morning, still
scented with their loving. She kept her eyes closed. She knew he could tell she hadn't fallen asleep, but she needed some kind of barrier against him, and the darkness behind her eyelids was the best she could manage. He had just taken her grasp on reality, flipped it upside down, and then returned it to her as if everything were perfectly normal, but for Fiona, normal now looked a long way off.
What had happened to her glorious lack of a future? She had never understood the human penchant for planning and organizing and looking toward the path ahead of them. She was Fae. Sidhe. To her, only the path beneath her feet mattered. The feel of dirt and root and stone, the crackle of leaves and twigs, the cool shade cast by trees along the edges of the trail, and the little freckles of sunlight that dripped through the leaves to tease her with the hint of light and warmth. Fae didn't look ahead. They didn't make lifetime commitments or worry about what would happen in a hundred years.
But now all Fiona could think of was that in a hundred years the man lying beside her, stroking those warm, magical hands over her skin, would be dead and her immortality would stretch out before her. Blessing made curse.
"You can pretend I'm not here all night, if you think it will help." He spoke so softly that she felt like a deaf woman, interpreting his speech by the vibration of the sound rather than the meaning of the words. "But it won't, and I'm not going away."
But he would, eventually. That was the problem, wasn't it?
She turned her head away and kept her eyes squeezed shut.
"I apologize for being a jerk to you earlier, Princess, and if I came on too strong just now, I'll apologize again. I admit I seem to have this small problem keeping my temper around you. But I'm not going to apologize for the fact that we're mated," he said, tracing a fingertip over the tendons at the side of her neck, playing with the pale skin. "First, because there's no point, since it can't be undone. Second, because I don't want it undone. And third, because it wasn't my doing."
She's No Faerie Princess Page 16