No. Not easily cowed, not meek. She sat, shoulders straight, legs crossed, head back so that her hair billowed down her back in a banner of red curls, her eyes trained on the leaf-dappled sky. Her hands were clenched into small fists that she held in her lap.
She would never be going home.
Roughly, Arys said, “I did not handle it well, the telling. I…I handled it badly. Very badly. She could force the Gate to open if she wanted to. None of us here have the power to stop her. Daklin and the elves could keep her from trying, perhaps, with the power the enchanted kingdoms hold inside them. Ronal could hold her mind sway, but only if she were inside his lands, under his power. And either he or Cray could mayhap seduce her—”a growl trickled from Arys’ throat before he could stop it and his nails bit into his hands as he fisted them, the veins bulging out in his forearms as fury raced through him.
“I have only the magick being the Gatekeeper gives me. And simple earth magick any satyr can call. But nothing that could bind hers and keep her from leaving, should she try. And I could never harm her.”
She will not try. Faryn whickered and tossed his head. Her own honor will stop her. Opening a Gate forcefully would not harm one, but many. She would never try to harm an innocent, and she believes you. She may well question you further, but she believes you. Amusement flowed from the ‘corn’s eyes as the stallion slid Arys a narrow look. And besides…neither an angel, fallen or otherwise, nor a vampire are any better at seduction than a satyr, no matter what the tales may say. She is already enthralled with you, and well you know it.
Enthralled? Arys slid the ‘corn a wry glance and muttered, “Not bloody likely. When she meets the other Pillars, then we will see enthrallment. Right now, she’s enjoying her first bit o’ sex. When she sees the fallen black angel, or when Ronal lays his eyes on her and decides he wants to see if she’s a tasty bit, or when the elf wants to take her to the elf kingdoms for magick training, then we shall be seeing enthrallment, and she’ll give me nary a glance.”
And the jealousy was already eating a hole in his gut.
Whirling, he stomped across the iskita and slammed his fist into the wall, then rested his forehead against the wall as he pulled his fist through the shattered wood, dark violet blood trickling down his swarthy skin. “I will never have her, Faryn, and I want her so badly,” he whispered to the fae creature just outside.
Faryn’s answer was merely a soft, comforting whicker, and then he was gone, his silvery hooves silent on the floor of the Satyr’s Wood. Closing his eyes, Arys said softly, to whoever might be listening, “You should not have given her to me, not for just a while. If I cannot keep her, then this is just cruel.”
He heard a familiar chiming and turned to see the black mirror on the opposite wall gleaming. He crossed to it and moved his marked hand over it, sighing as he did so. He had little patience for politics now but something told him he was going to have to handle them. The opaque blackness of the mirror cleared and he met Daklin’s eyes, clear and blue as the summer sky, set in an ivory-pale face. His familiar, handsome face was lit with amusement and his eyes were glowing with it.
“You are in such trouble, my friend,” Daklin said, his voice lilting and musical. His silvery-blond brows peaked and he clucked his tongue. “The Council doesn’t take well to their orders being ignored.”
“Tell that to the Gates. I have no control over when they choose to open—tell that to the bloody Council,” Arys said, plowing a long-fingered hand through his hair, unaware of how agitated he looked to his longtime friend.
Daklin’s eyes widened. “A refugee? A child? Do not tell me we have another broken, wounded one to heal, Arys, please. My heart canna handle another so soon,” he begged, recalling the last child, a tiny girl of only five. Her father—no, he was not going to think of that. Her father had gotten his just reward, not what he deserved, no punishment was great enough. But he had reaped what he sowed. Even though they couldn’t cross the Gates, magick could cross them…and did.
“No. Not a refugee. A…a witch,” Arys said slowly, turning to stare out the window. Pepper was just barely visible from this angle, her head bent low as she stared into the water, her expression pensive. What is she thinking?
“A witch? From the mortal realms? Did she open the Gates?” Daklin asked, moving closer and craning his neck. He couldn’t cross the mirror, but he could damn well see. His blue eyes narrowed as he caught sight of the female and …how very little she wore. “Hmmm, do tell,” he purred in elvish.
“Nay, she did not open the Gate. The Gate opened for her,” he said quietly. “I believe in time, she could have opened it. But it opened for her.”
“Why? Is she in trouble? Is she needed?”
“Trouble? No.”
“Needed?” Daklin persisted.
“Aye,” Arys said, reaching up and absently stroking one horn. “Needed, aye.”
“For what?” Daklin said, rolling his eyes. The satyr was usually not so…reticent.
Arys turned slowly and lifted his troubled eyes to meet the elf’s. “Needed for me, I think. The unicorn Faryn says she is here for me.”
Daklin looked stunned. Briefly. Very briefly. Very little made an elf pause. Then slowly, a wide, wide smile curled his mouth. “Then why in the name of all the Hells are you looking so grim? By this elf’s eyesight, which is pretty sharp, might I add, she looks…delicious.”
Arys gave Daklin a narrow look. “Why in the fuck would a human wish to mate for life with a bloody satyr?”
Daklin lifted one brow. “And why, by the Father and the Heavens, would she be brought here, for you, if she wasn’t likely to do just that?” the elf replied easily. He nodded in the direction of the stream. “She is done with her pondering, I believe.”
“You’re a satyr, Arys, as you were always meant to be. That is not a bloody monster. You are a good and true friend, a good man. By the blood, man, a satyr is sex incarnate, not a demon, a troll, or mongrel whelp—do not listen to what some small-minded bigots still believe. You are known as friend among the elves and humans and the watchers. That should count as more than what bigots believe.”
Daklin touched his fingers to the mirror from his rooms at the Council, and the mirror blackened once more, just as Arys heard Pepper moving toward the door.
“Did I hear voices, besides yours I mean?” she asked quietly, poised at the threshold.
“Oui…yes. A friend,” he said, gesturing to the mirror. “We…ahh…speak through the mirror.”
“Through the Looking Glass,” she said with an odd little smile. “Now I really feel like Alice. I just need a blue dress and a white apron.”
“I will find some clothes—”
“I was being a smart-ass. It’s a book from home about a girl who falls through a mirror into another world, or something like that. I read it a long time ago,” she said, moving closer and peering at the mirror with curious eyes. “I can’t say I’m happy about this. There are things at home that are important. Friends I will miss. I’m mad. I can’t lie about that. And I want to throw a temper tantrum but odd things happen when I do that. So I’d appreciate you showing me a safe place where I can have at it.”
When he looked, really looked, he could see the gleam of temper well-hidden in her two-colored eyes. Her cheeks were high with color, and her eyes were snapping with it.
“I…I sense there is something else…?”
“Yes. A but. There was a ‘but’. Going back—even before you told me I couldn’t—going back meant something that made me feel a little sick inside. I didn’t like the thought of never seeing you again,” she said looking at him squarely, lifting her chin. “I hated the thought of never seeing you again. I don’t even know you. How can I already feel that way?”
Arys couldn’t answer. He had already backed her up against the wall and, with a groan he grabbed her around the waist, covering her mouth with his, thrusting his tongue into the sweet well, gathering her taste and reveling in it as his str
ong agile hands ripped the shirt from her lovely little body.
Pepper gasped with shock as she felt him lift her and pierce her, driving his cock home even as his hands were spreading her thighs, lifting them, guiding them around his waist as his cock forged through the tight, swollen tissues of her pussy.
The silken pelt of his lower body caressed her thighs, driving his thick length inside as he pushed home again, and again, while his mouth ate hungrily at hers.
His cock pulsed inside her, throbbed and swelled as his head lifted and his eyes met hers. “Say it, Pepper. Pretty mine. Again, will you tell me? That you do not wish to leave?”
Gasping for air, she whimpered, “I can’t leave. You’re part of me.”
She felt her control slipping. On her temper. And her magick. Hot licks of lust flooded her, and little bursts of power were starting to leak. Plumes of smoke and mist filled the room. Rainbows danced around the ceiling. And the floor trembled. His mouth left hers and he moved down her neck, biting and licking as he went and driving his cock high and hard, the thick, rounded head rasping over the nerve bed high inside her pussy.
Fire…the heat of it flooded her magick senses and she dampened it, sent it into the fireplace. She heard the muffled roar of it and sobbed with frustration at not being able to lose control completely. Arys sensed something held in check and he growled in warning, setting his teeth into the curve between neck and shoulder, looping his arms under her knees, opening her wide, and pounding into her hard and furiously, sliding his swollen, throbbing length into the slick wet channel of her pussy as her head fell back and she screamed out his name.
Her control slipped, shattered, and she wailed, forcing the wild magick into something she hoped was relatively harmless, hearing the wild booming noises, familiar from childhood, as Arys thrust heavily inside her, his teeth marking her before he moved his mouth up to hers in a line of bruising, biting kisses that stung like fire along her sensitized flesh.
Mine…
Mine…
Mine…
She felt the alien caress on her mind and shook from the absolute possession, the absolute utter need she heard there. His body shifted against hers, and he dragged himself against her clit, his chest caressing the peaked flesh of her nipples and she broke as he rasped against her lips, “Mine…”And it was echoed inside of her…no matter how angry she might be about being uprooted from her home, her life—what life had she had there really? Looping her arms around his neck, she fiercely whispered back, “Mine.”
She sobbed as the tightening in her womb overtook her and broke over her body, rhythmic pulsing sensations in her sheath milking his cock as he started to pump her full of his seed.
Smoke, sulphur, mist and rainbow lights filled the air around them as he opened his large, slanted eyes long moments later, slowly letting her slide her legs to the floor. In a gesture that was slowly coming to be familiar to her, she watched as he absently brushed his hair out of his eyes, and stroked one of his curved, slightly spiraled horns, studying the slowly fading, flickering lights.
“I thought…the earth moved. It truly did.” A slow smile tugged at his mouth.
She sulked. “Told you I was mad. I can’t control my temper and…hmmm, well.”
An all-out grin lit his impossibly exotic face as he pulled out of her and moved just a few inches away. “Disappointed, am I. Wanted badly to make the earth seem to move for you,” he said teasingly. “And here you go, making it well and truly move.” A thoughtful look came over his face. “You make me as once I was. As I am meant to be.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, reaching up, winding a strand of his hair around her finger, loving the silkiness of it.
A tiny grin returned to his mouth. “Playful. Happy. Somber does not become a satyr. I have felt no happiness for so long, I cannot remember. Non. Remember, I do not.” Unwillingly, he cupped her face and said softly, “You will not wish to stay always with me, a satyr. We have many, many wonders in Mythe. Not one of them.”
Pepper arched a brow. “I think you’re wrong,” she said, shrugging a round, naked shoulder. The scent of him clung to her, and intoxicated her. Everywhere he touched her made her burn and ache, and already she wanted him again. “I know you are, but that will take—”
A booming, shattering noise filled the air. “By the Blood,” Arys snapped, jerking her against him and turning his back as the air seemed to shatter and split.
Pepper yelped instinctively, but another instinct surged to the fore and she tried to push away from Arys.
His body was powerful. Deceptively slim. Those wide shoulders should have warned her. He crushed her to his chest as she tried to push away and whispered reassuring, “Hush now, amour. Friends, they are. But they know you not.”
Me, either, she thought, clenching her teeth, closing her eyes and loosing a bit of magick, thinking of shields…stone…lightning… Her eyes opened and when she looked, from what she could see with her face buried against Arys’ firm, heavenly feeling chest, the faint otherworldly glow told her the shield was there. She could feel it, sense it. Nobody else was likely to. Until they tried to approach of course.
Damn, I’m good, she thought smugly. Her beliefs had always been the scapegoat. Her magick was what separated her. She needed no incantations, no secret article or object. All she needed was herself.
Just beyond the barrier, a mist was forming, thickening, and inside it, something else was forming. Or someone else. Elses.
Two men. Both tall. Very tall.
And one had…wings?
The first one to step out…oh, hell, I’ve fallen into Lord of the Rings. He had silvery blond hair with two braids, one at each temple, eyes the color of the sky in winter—clear, cold blue—a handsome, poetically beautiful yet masculine face, a sculpted mouth. He was saved from being too beautiful by the humor and the mischief that danced in his eyes as he studied her, his head cocked to the side. His ears…high curved ears…were elf’s ears, the curve of the right one pierced with a loop of gold. He caught sight of Arys and his eyes lit with amusement, pleasure and mischief as he moved clear of the mist, his every movement as graceful as a dancer’s.
He moved closer to reach out to Arys, but his hand encountered the shield only Pepper’s eyes could see and he bellowed as a white-hot bolt of electrical current shocked him painfully. He backpedaled, his hand held to his chest, his eyes narrowed, glaring at them both.
Arys glanced down at Pepper, who was smiling sweetly. He bent and snatched up the shirt he had pulled from her body and covered her with it as best he could. The buttons were missing, and one sleeve torn, but at least she was covered. “Friends, I said. Friends, they are,” he said, shaking his head. He wasn’t quite able to hide the grin on his face.
“Yours. I don’t know them from Adam,” she said, shaking her head, the tumbled red curls falling into her eyes. Tossing the curls out of her eyes, she said, “A woman has to protect herself.”
Stroking one hand down her arm, he kissed her lightly, and murmured, “I protect what is mine.”
She should have been insulted. She was fully capable of protecting herself. But it sent a thrill down her spine to hear him say that. She slid her eyes back to the men who were watching them with very intense interest. The blond elf was shaking his hand, and eyeing her warily as he scanned the area around them, most likely trying to pinpoint where the barrier lay.
“You can release the shielding,” Arys whispered into her hair. “They are no threat. To allow it to remain may…insult…truly, these are friends. They mean you no harm, they bring no harm here. Closer to me than my own blood, and they would lay down their lives to protect what I hold dear.”
She poked her lip out slightly and rolled her eyes but pulled the magick back inside her, watching as the elf’s eyes widened in appreciation at the slow, subtle flexing of power the act took. “I trust you,” she whispered back to Arys. “And that’s the only reason I did that. I don’t trust many.”
Once more, the elf approached, slowly but confidently, his eyes fixed on her face. He spoke, and the words that fell from his hips were musical like bells, liquid and golden. Then he laughed when Arys replied back, in English, “’Tis rude to speak, Daklin, in a tongue that not all understand, and very well you know this.”
“Pardon, then, I beg,” the man said. “I speak not as well as the satyr. Well enough. Well enough. Daklin, my name is.” He lifted his fingers to his lips, touched them briefly and then touched them to hers. “Greetings, I give you, lady of the mortal realms. A witch, you are? Welcome, here be you.”
Pepper had to tip her head up to stare at him, considering he stood a good foot and a half taller, with wide, wide shoulders, a broad, deep chest that tapered down to a narrow waist with lean hips, muscled legs…oh, yummy, the thought took a brief trip through her mind, and then she settled back with a smile against Arys. Breathing in his scent, she let it fill her head and her lungs as she turned her eyes to the second newcomer. Magick was rumbling through the air and her skin was all but jumping with it, her eyelids twitching, throat tight.
And when she focused those eyes on this newcomer, she nearly swallowed her tongue. Wings. Yes…it had been wings she had seen in the mist, not some trick of light and mist and illusion.
True wings, pearl gray, silver, white, that rose behind his shoulders, the apex jutting just to the top of his head and the bottom of them coming to just above his ankles. Wings. She slid her eyes up the length of his thickly muscled thighs, exposed by the short, kiltlike garment he wore, over a carved abdomen, and a bare chest with powerful muscles…the wings, she wondered? His arms were corded and long, roped with sinewy muscle. She tore her gaze away from his body and met his eyes, deep fathomless pools of silvery, swirling-gray and silver, like his wings, full of magick and curiosity and mystery…and pain…
And then he blinked, drooping heavily-lashed lids over those fantastic eyes, and when he opened them, all that emotion, all that magick was gone. His golden skin was shades lighter than Arys’ and as he moved, all those muscles rippled and flexed.
Mythe & Magick Page 16