by Mindy Klasky
A long time later, I opened my eyes and looked up, automatically searching for familiar sprays of stars. But the sky was different here. Oh, the stars were there—the Hunter and the Badger and the Stag. But I couldn’t make out the sixth star in the Badger’s stripe, and the Hunter’s bow was reduced to an arc of three. The Stag was missing half a dozen stars in the tangle of his antlers.
The sky glowed yellow-orange-red, instead of the inky velvet I was accustomed to seeing in the Thousand-Oak Grove. The same thing happened in London, of course. The light from the city around me diluted the glow of stars.
I should hate that. I was a fae. All my life had been tied to the natural world.
But the city offered more than the Thousand-Oak Grove. It was a power, a presence. The glow softening the sky in the middle of the night meant that people surrounded me, living their lives, exploring their worlds, experiencing all manner of new things.
Speaking of which…
I trailed my fingers across Jonathan’s chest. He lay beside me, his right hand cupped behind his head, his right knee raised. His eyes were closed in peaceful imitation of sleep.
When my first foray went unanswered, I sent my hand exploring once again. This time, I took care to keep my touch light enough to tickle as I ghosted over the lines of his ribs.
Vampires, though, seemed immune to the frisson of a light touch. At least, the vampire lying beside me was immune.
Never one to let a challenge go unanswered, I propped myself up on one elbow. My free fingers seemed to move of their own accord, dancing past the angle of Jonathan’s hips. He caught my wrist just before I could test his resistance to a broader range of carefully applied stimuli.
“Are all fae princesses as insatiable as you?” he asked, opening one eye to stare up at me.
“With the proper…inspiration.” I demonstrated a little of my intention with my free hand. Jonathan caught it as well, rolling with the motion to pin both my wrists above my head.
I squealed in mock protest, rocking my body against his to emphasize my point. That evoked the response I’d anticipated, and Jonathan proceeded to make his own demonstration—of his strength and his creativity and his world-class mastery of deferred gratification. He deferred to me twice, in fact, before he finally freed my fingers to do their worst.
“No wonder you fae were banned from the Empire,” Jonathan grunted afterward.
“And I thought it was because we played one too many Games,” I quipped.
I regretted my words the instant they were out of my mouth. He stilled immediately, every fiber of his beautiful, relaxed body turning to stone.
I wanted to touch him. I wanted to trace the lines of his muscles, caress the smooth arc of his rib cage and cup the line of his jaw. I wanted to tease him back to life for another round of the passion that had left me breathless and pulsing and screaming for more.
But none of that was right. None of that was fair.
I pushed myself upright and tugged on the top of my blue scrubs. Only when my skin was shielded from the moonlight did I force myself to meet Jonathan’s gaze.
“We’ll get Abigail,” I said. “The night of the full moon, I promise. And that will be a Game Oberon Blackthorne will never forget.”
He nodded once, the tight acknowledgment of one conspirator to another. But he said, “No Games.”
“No Games?” He might have been speaking ancient Elvish for all I understood of those two words.
“We can fight your Oberon. We can turn him over to the legal authorities. We can blast his magic circle with a water cannon, set his world on fire, feed him to his dogs. But I won’t be a part of any Game.”
I pulled away, equal parts charmed by his bloodthirsty punishments for Oberon and repulsed by his rejection of basic fae interaction.
“Fine,” I said after an uncomfortable silence. “You don’t have to play a Game. I’ll do whatever playing must be done.”
“No.”
One word. One syllable. But Jonathan said it with such finality that I knew he’d never be moved.
“You don’t have the right to say what I can and cannot do,” I protested. “And why can you possibly care if I choose to play a Game? What sort of vampire control thing is that?”
For a moment, I thought he wouldn’t answer. When he did speak, the words rattled like cold iron chains. “I’ve seen the harm your Games can do.”
He was a vampire, not a fae. He couldn’t understand what Games meant to my people, how we learned them in our cradles, how they kept us fit to fight our foes.
He couldn’t even have been the victim of a fae Game—my people had not occupied the Empire for generations.
He couldn’t understand me, but I could fight to understand him. “Who played a Game on you?”
His jaw set, and for a moment, I thought he wouldn’t say. But then he looked at the tangled blue pants he’d peeled from my body. He rubbed his fingers against his throat, where a love bite I’d given him had already healed, vanquished by his vampire blood.
He ran his fingers through his hair, and he said, “Clarice. Abigail’s mother. My wife. Ex-wife.”
I could see what those words cost him. I sat as still as if I were waiting for a high brown fritillary to settle on my palm.
“She was an accountant,” he said at last. “A CPA. While I was in med school, before…this—” He gestured to himself, to his vampire body. “She supported us. She handled the accounts for a couple of dozen clients—entrepreneurs, small business owners. Her specialty was helping companies that were large enough for complicated returns but small enough not to need a full-time financial officer.”
He hated the words he was saying. Each one pushed him deeper into his stony shell.
“We ran into unexpected expenses. Abby had colic, and some nights she screamed till dawn. The landlord threw us out, refusing to return our security deposit. We needed to find a new place, first and last month’s rent, a new deposit, doubled because of the baby.”
Even as he said the words, his face was stark with longing. The times he described were terrible, but he missed them. He missed his daughter. But not Clarice. Not the woman who had been his wife.
“I graduated, and my student loans came due. Clarice was in a car crash, T-boned just around the corner from our apartment. The car was totaled, but insurance didn’t pay enough to buy anything we felt safe putting the baby in. My father died, out in California, and we needed to scrape together airfare for the funeral. Every month there was something new, something unanticipated, something that turned our careful household budget upside down.”
I understood every word he said, each individual syllable, but I couldn’t truly comprehend the disaster he described. The Seelie Court never bothered with loans and insurance, with cross-country flight. But from the tight lines by Jonathan’s eyes, I could see what it all had cost him.
“At first, I didn’t know what Clarice was doing. She said one client paid her a holiday bonus. Another time she won the lottery—not one of the big payouts, but enough to cover rent. She found a couple hundred dollars she’d hidden in the back of her sock drawer, a rainy-day fund she’d forgotten about.”
The more he talked, the sharper his voice became. His memories were soaked in vinegar; they stung like salt in an open wound as he came closer to his point.
“Lies,” he said. “All lies. She was stealing from her clients. When I caught her—no one inherits fortunes from two aunts she’d never met before—she said it was a game. She used funds from one client to pay off another, siphoning a little each and every time.”
He shook his head. “She said that when I finished my residency, when I got my first job, we could pay off the account left holding the bag. We’d be free and clear, and we could laugh about how terrified we’d been.”
He swallowed, hard enough for me to hear his throat close around the lie. His eyes were hard, his jaw so tight I was surprised he could push words past.
“I told her to work out a
payment plan. We had to come clean. She wasn’t herself, wasn’t the woman I’d fallen in love with. Maybe it was postpartum depression, maybe I’d put too much pressure on her while I was in school, maybe… She told me to wait, to let her make one more transfer. The client she’d just borrowed from was a scary guy—her words.”
Now he wasn’t telling me the story for my sake, not any longer. He was exorcising some demon from his own past, reciting his history like a charm against disaster.
But disaster had already struck.
“I put my foot down. I said I’d go to this client if she didn’t. And so I made an appointment to meet the guy—at his home, some mansion off Foxhall Road. I could only make it after a double-shift in the ER, but that was fine; the client was happy to see me after hours.”
He fell silent for so long that I thought he’d changed his mind. He wasn’t going to finish his story. When he finally spoke, his voice was so low I had to catch my breath to hear his words.
“He turned me.” Jonathan shrugged, as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened. “He was a vampire, and he turned me. He only meant to feed, maybe drink me dry. But I fought back.” His rueful laugh didn’t hold a hint of humor. “I bit him after he drank my blood.”
He shuddered, closing his eyes against some memory too dark to share. I tried to think of something, anything, to say but the words wouldn’t come. A long time later, he opened his eyes and spared me an exhausted smile.
“So, sure, think of this as a vampire control thing. But it’s more than that. It’s a moral control thing. I can’t be with a woman who plays games. Not the way Clarice did. Not the way you do.”
Be with a woman. What did that mean? What was he proposing?
And did it even matter? I couldn’t be with a man who controlled me. That was a fae princess thing. But it was a woman thing, too. I had to respect myself.
I didn’t want to walk away from this man.
It wasn’t just the sex—although that had been pretty spectacular. It was the way he’d confronted Oberon. It was the way he was devoted to his daughter. It was the way he’d answered each and every challenge I’d cast his way since I’d shown up on his doorstep.
He couldn’t control me. I wouldn’t let him. But I could make decisions for myself.
“Fine,” I said.
“Fine?”
“I won’t play Games.” The words felt like jagged rocks in my mouth. I hurried on. “But you have to promise me something in exchange.”
“What?”
“You won’t control me. You won’t try to take away my choice, my decisions about how I live my life.”
He thought about it for longer than I’d expected. But when he cupped my jaw with the palm of his hand, I knew he wasn’t taking my demand idly. “I promise,” he said.
I swallowed hard. I was the one who had to look away first.
His laugh was a low rumble beside me. “But is it controlling, if I do this?” He brushed my hair back over my ear and leaned in to nuzzle the tender spot at the top of my jaw.
“N—no,” I gasped.
“And how about this?” He pressed his hand against my belly, taking full advantage of my loose blue scrubs blouse.
“Th-that’s okay,” I stammered.
“And what about this?” His fingers trailed down, finding the V at the top of my legs, where they tickled and teased and made me bite my tongue to keep from begging for release right then and there.
“Mmm,” I managed, not trusting my words. But I answered him with my thighs and my hands and my lips, in a language any man could understand.
We’d reached a perfect agreement.
12
The next night, Jonathan said, “What will we do about Oberon?”
I wondered if he could read my mind. The water in the fountain tinkled as we lay on the grass. I’d counted three shooting stars, and I’d wished on every one. Let Oberon leave us alone. Let Oberon leave us alone. Let Oberon leave us alone.
I said, “He’ll never leave us alone.”
“Aren’t there other fae princesses he can drag to the altar?”
“Marriage has nothing to do with it. Not anymore. I took something that belongs to him. His pride. His reputation. He’ll never give those up without a fight.”
Jonathan twined a lock of my hair around his fingers. “He should be fighting for you.”
“He’s never cared about me. I’m a means to an end. Nothing more.”
“He’s an idiot.” He sounded like he’d been chewing on a lemon rind.
“He’ll never leave us alone…” I repeated.
He reacted to my tone. “You’re planning something.”
“It might not work.” I’d thought about it all day, when I was supposed to be sleeping.
It might not work. But it might. If I struck the perfect tone. If I called on all our fae traditions. If I edged Oberon into a corner and didn’t give him a chance to slip away…
It was a plan worthy of a fae princess.
I climbed to my feet, ignoring Jonathan’s grunt of protest. “I need paper,” I said. “Parchment if you can get it. And ink made from the galls of oak trees. And crimson wax to seal a message from the Seelie Court.”
“You can’t get a message out of here, remember? We’re still blocked in by your ley lines.”
I had forgotten—that’s how taken I was by my plan. But I wasn’t about to be defeated by an impenetrable magical blockade.
“You can use your computer to send a message, right? And Cerberus can deliver it.”
He followed me into the hospital—not that I gave him much of an option. The emergency room was deserted, courtesy of the ley-wall blocking all ingress.
I sat in front of a computer and waited impatiently for Jonathan to type something, a password or some sort of command. When we stared at a plain white screen, I started narrating, spinning out words as fast as he could type.
“Oberon will never agree to this,” Jonathan said, when my dictation was complete. “Not on the night of the next full moon. Even I know that night will mark the height of your powers.”
“He doesn’t have a choice. He’s bound by the rules of chivalry.”
“He hasn’t exactly been chivalrous yet—chasing you halfway around the world to force you into a marriage you don’t want.”
“That the thing. Chivalry requires me to submit to his will, at least after our parents entered into their arrangement. And chivalry allows him to come after me. But chivalry says a man must always defer to a woman in the setting of a social engagement.”
Jonathan eyed the screen. “That isn’t a social engagement.”
“He won’t have the nerve to say otherwise. Because no gentleman would ever seek to fight with a lady.”
Jonathan shook his head slowly. “You don’t take any prisoners, do you?”
“I’m a fae princess,” I said. “Why should I? Now hurry up and send that to someone at Cerberus. I want it delivered by midnight.”
To His Royal Highness, Oberon Blackthorne, Prince of the Unseelie Court:
In light of your various unseemly behaviors at court, including the seduction and wanton discard of numerous Ladies and the transformation of a Company of Men into Swine, and the conversion of my Kitten, Fluffy, into an umbrella stand, I hereby challenge you to to a duel at midnight on the eve of the next full moon.
In keeping with the rules of Chivalry, you may name the place of our meeting and you may name our weapons.
We will drink a cup of mead, in the tradition of our people, before one of us emerges the victor for now and for all time.
With all due honor and respect, etc., etc.,
Her Royal Highness, Titania Silveroak, Princess of the Seelie Court.
To Her Royal Highness, Titania Silveroak, Princess of the Seelie Court:
You have clearly taken ill here in the wilds of the Eastern Empire. Submit to me immediately, and I will see you carried safely home to the healers of our people.
W
ith all due honor and respect, etc., etc.
His Royal Highness, Oberon Blackthorne, Prince of the Unseelie Court
To His Royal Highness, Oberon Blackthorne, Prince of the Unseelie Court:
During your sojourn from the Thousand-Oak Grove, you seem to have forgotten the basic boundaries of chivalric honor. I repeat my invitation to meet you in a duel.
Her Royal Highness, Titania Silveroak, Princess of the Seelie Court.
To Her Royal Highness, Titania Silveroak, Princess of the Seelie Court:
I admit nothing of the sort. The time you have spent with vampires, witches, and other common creatures has clearly led you to lose all reason. Or at least to lose your dignity.
While no other fae would ever deign to sully his name by linking it with yours, I am merciful enough to give you one last chance to come to your senses. Kneel before me at midnight on the next full moon and all will be forgiven. Otherwise, prepare to have your name held up for generations as a model for all fae daughters to avoid.
His Royal Highness, Oberon Blackthorne, Prince of the Unseelie Court
To Oberon Blackthorne, Prince of the Unseelie Court:
You admit, then, that you are afraid to fight a woman. I will send immediate notice to all fae resident in the Thousand-Oak Grove.
Her Royal Highness, Titania Silveroak, Princess of the Seelie Court.
To Titania Silveroak, Princess of the Seelie Court:
The place shall be my circle on the grounds before the Smithsonian Castle.
The weapon shall be swords.
But I will not drink mead on the shores of this rat-infested backwater, lest I accidentally be grounded here forever.
And I’ll only fight your champion, not you. I will not raise weapon against a woman. Especially a woman whom I will use in bed for many years to come.
His Royal Highness, Oberon Blackthorne, Prince of the Unseelie Court
To Oberon Blackthorne:
No mead, then. Coca-Cola instead.