Maelduin spun and dropped into a crouch.
You don’t want to end this.
The dance began again, escalating quickly as Kevin struggled to slow his breathing. He could see why the Fae called it blade-dancing—it really was a dance, a gorgeous lethal dance that made anything in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon look like a child’s first steps. Blow after blow, relentless motion blurring parry into riposte into moves Kevin had no names for and would have sworn were impossible.
Yet… no blood. Sweat, yes, there was plenty of that. Gasping for breath, grunting as breath was jarred from bodies, gritting of dust and sand underfoot… but no blood.
Kevin made himself watch more closely. He was no expert in swordplay, but he’d learned a thing or two from watching Tiernan practice, and from front-row seats at several pitched battles with the Marfach. He had a fairly good idea what a battle to the death between expert swordsmen—swordsFae—was supposed to look like. And it wasn’t supposed to look like this.
Tiernan’s not trying to win. No—he’s trying not to win. Slight missteps, and overcorrections; catching the truesilver blade against his blade of living Stone at just the wrong angle, and straining too hard to push it back from his arm or his throat. His scair-anam was making everything about this fight to the death harder than it had to be, and more dangerous.
He doesn’t want to kill his nephew.
Which would make no sense to a Fae… or at least, it would make no sense to the kind of Fae Tiernan had always claimed to be, cursed and devoid of even the essential Fae capacity for kin-love.
He’s wrong. He’s always been wrong.
And being wrong was going to get Tiernan killed.
* * *
Losing the instincts, the inner balance he had acquired over a lifetime of training had been as close to the ancient legends of humans’ Hell Maelduin had ever come. And right now, he would have given almost anything to be rid of that particular set of skills again. Honed through decades of dances with his comhrac-scátha, his instincts guided his body and sword through every turn and slash and block, watching eagerly for a single opening. That opening would come, surely—Tiernan was the greatest scian-damhsa Maelduin had ever faced, but he made mistakes. Maelduin did not. His instincts refused to let him.
He stalked forward, purposeful and tired of the histrionics of the haricín-form. If Tiernan wanted to close with him, take an advantage for himself, let him. Maelduin and his bloodsworn blade would deal with it.
“This blade has one purpose only, and that purpose my own: to sate itself on the blood of the male who killed my father.” The mage had traced the ancient words of the oath, and Maelduin’s personal geas, on the blade with the tip of a cockatrice’s feather dipped in salt and oil as Maelduin spoke them. “And if it should be used first for any other purpose, may it turn in my hand and slay me where I stand.”
Beautiful, powerful words. However, the words of channelings were themselves blades of a sort; at least, they had the same capacity to turn on one. In fact, the sword was impatient beyond the scope of the oath binding it—in theory, Maelduin should have been able to throw the sword in the ocean, assuming he could find one, or even hide it under the cushions of Terry’s sofa, and all would have been well. But the sword, it seemed, wanted to fulfill his oath, one way or another.
His sword slashed down, catching the tip of Tiernan’s crystal knife an instant before it would have opened up his wrist. Tiernan swept past, turning only when he had gained a narrow space, probably an unfinished hallway, easier to defend with a short blade.
If he fights only to defend, he fights to lose.
Maelduin did not want his uncle to lose. It was as simple, and as strange, as that. His oath had been a lie since it was spoken, and only Tiernan had cared enough to tell him so. He had no desire to kill the only Fae who had ever been truthful with him, for the sake of a lie.
Yet oath and sword had both twisted in his hand. Truesilver was metal which understood its own purpose, and this blade understood too well. If he failed to kill Tiernan, he himself would never be safe—the sword could turn on him at any moment.
Maybe I should take that chance. Maelduin advanced on Tiernan, as slowly as he could without making the invitation to run too obvious to ignore.
Movement off to his right caught his eye. Terry, his face pale and tear-streaked, pressed a fist against his mouth, trying to smother soft sounds of distress still perfectly audible to Fae hearing.
Terry. If Maelduin abandoned his oath, and the sword took him, what would happen to Terry? What happened to a SoulShare when the other half of his soul died?
Something blurred past Maelduin, something that gleamed. Startled, he turned; Tiernan had shifted his long knife to his right hand, and a small, wicked crystal dart appeared in his left hand. From his left hand, from the living Stone of it.
This dart Tiernan threw straight for Maelduin’s eyes. A sword made a terrible shield, but his comhrac-scátha had tried such a thing with ordinary knives, often enough that the counter was instinctive.
Maelduin never saw the third dart, but he felt it tear through his shirt and glance off his ribs. Blood bloomed around the wound; Terry gasped; Kevin took a step forward, halted.
Twice the height of a Fae away, Tiernan stood motionless, expressionless, his gaze locked with Maelduin’s. Maelduin nodded slowly, once. The message of the dart was clear. A scian-damhsa always hit precisely what he aimed at. Maelduin’s heart had been bared, his life forfeit. And his uncle had not taken it.
Tiernan went down on one knee, reached behind himself to clear his hair away from his neck.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, lanan?” Kevin’s voice was low, tightly controlled, but perilously close to breaking for all that.
Tiernan paused and looked up at his scair-anam; Maelduin was unable to read the look that passed between them, but if Tiernan’s intent had been to calm his male, his husband, he had done a terrible job of it; Maelduin was fairly sure Kevin wouldn’t charge him in the next minute or so, but after that what happened would be a cast of the rods.
Then Tiernan’s regard turned to Maelduin, and what Maelduin saw in the blue topaz eyes so like his own in the moment before his uncle ducked his head was nothing like resignation.
“I know the oath you took as well as you do.” Tiernan took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Do what it takes to sate your blade.”
Why was Tiernan drawing his attention to the words of his oath?
“… this blade has one purpose only, and that purpose my own…”
… and my purpose is not to kill.
Maelduin strode forward, his boot heels loud against the concrete floor in the silence. Tiernan slowly turned his head to watch him approach, the hint of a smile touching his lips.
“Give me your hand.”
Tiernan shifted his long knife back into his left hand, reabsorbing the Stone of it into his hand, and held out his empty right hand, palm up, steady.
Maelduin whipped his blade down and across, cutting Tiernan’s palm just deeply enough to draw blood. He held up the sword, searching for and finding the thin red line along its edge, shining in the harsh light.
A scian-damhsa always hit precisely what he aimed at.
“My blade has had its fill of your blood, dre’thair dtuismiorí.”
Quickly he cut his own right palm, using the same spot on the blade. If he was wrong, if his oath demanded Tiernan’s life after all, he would know now.
A line of bright red beads welled up along his palm. Nothing more.
He reached down and clasped bleeding hands with his uncle, raising him to his feet.
An extremely awkward moment passed as the two regarded each other; then, moved by the same impulse, they embraced. “Geal’le’mac.” Tiernan’s voice was muffled in Maelduin’s shoulder and hair. Almost-son.
Kevin cleared his throat. “Don’t get comfortable, lanan, I’m still kind of seriously considering killing you myself.”
/> Yes, this human was a good mate for a Guaire. And perhaps an uncle of a sort to Maelduin, as well.
All three looked around at the sound of Terry slumping against the wall, then sliding to the floor.
Chapter Thirty
“Terry? Lán’ghrásta?”
“You smell nice,” Terry mumbled. It was true, Maelduin smelled amazing. At the moment, though, Terry was mostly fishing for something to talk about other than his tendency to pass out at the sight of blood.
Lips brushed his forehead, and he opened his eyes to find himself looking into Maelduin’s clear blue eyes and relieved smile. Tiernan and Kevin were both crouched behind Maelduin, craning their necks to look over his shoulder.
“You okay?” Kevin rested a hand on Tiernan’s shoulder for balance.
“I’m fine.” Terry blushed. “I… don’t do blood very well. Unless I’m piercing someone, or inking them. Ask Josh, he’ll tell you.”
Tiernan chuckled. “I might do that. He and the others are probably giving birth to mixed litters of puppies and kittens upstairs, wondering what’s happened to us.”
Kevin arched a brow. “And you think their experiments in animal husbandry are more important than…” His gesture took in all four of them, the room, the wellspring.
Tiernan could raise an eyebrow with the best of them, and his had a gold ring in it for accent. Looking from his landlord to his lover, Terry felt like several different kinds of idiot for not having recognized the family resemblance sooner. Although if he’d been asked to guess, he would have assumed Tiernan was the younger of the two by several years. Probably a Fae thing.
“I think our newest scair-anaim would probably appreciate a little alone time.”
Terry didn’t have much attention to spare for the ensuing conversation between Tiernan and Kevin. He was way too preoccupied with the Fae holding his hands, looking into his eyes, shifting his weight to sit down on the floor beside him instead of crouching.
So he was more than a little bemused to find himself in the passenger seat of Kevin’s Mercedes, easing out of a narrow parking space behind the Purgatory construction site, while Tiernan joined everyone else in Conall and Josh’s apartment and Maelduin Faded home ahead of him.
“You really didn’t have to do this.”
Kevin finished fixing his phone in a bracket on the dashboard—the Merc was a lovely beast, but it clearly dated back to well before anyone had thought to build Internet access into a car—and shook his head, chuckling softly. “Oh, but I did. If you’d insisted on the Metro, Maelduin would have insisted on going with you, to make sure you didn’t pass out again on the way home. And I think you’ve seen about how well that would work. Fae and subways aren’t a happy combination.”
“True. Are…” Terry cleared his throat, abruptly and inexplicably shy. “Are all Fae like that?”
“Most of them.” Kevin eased the car to a stop at a light. “Cuinn and Lochlann have had more time than the rest to get over it—they’re both somewhere around 2,500 years old, give or take, and Lochlann in particular had a stretch of maybe five or six centuries when he couldn’t use magick at all, including for Fading. But I don’t think any Fae has ever willingly gotten into a moving enclosed conveyance, if he had any other option.”
Two thousand five hundred years old. “Every time I learn something about Fae, I end up learning there are about a million more things I don’t know.” Garish colors played through the interior of the car, neon lights from storefronts, stoplights, a movie marquee.
“Welcome to the club.” Kevin smiled, but it seemed to Terry that his heart wasn’t in it. “I don’t think that ever stops.”
They made the next few lights in sequence, Terry watching Kevin and trying not to look like he was watching. He didn’t know the lawyer all that well—mostly through encounters at Purgatory, one of which had been memorable due to Kevin’s talents as an amateur stripper and his husband’s delight in persuading him to put those talents on display. It was obvious that Kevin adored his husband—his SoulShare, Terry reminded himself—and would do anything for him.
“That must have been hell for you to watch,” Terry blurted. “Back in the studio.”
“I’m starting to lose track of the number of times I’ve seen hell in the last few years.” Kevin’s profile wasn’t so much grim as distant. Sad, even. “But yeah, it was. I haven’t been able to shake a bad feeling lately, when it comes to Tiernan and swords.” He shrugged, a barely perceptible motion. “A Fae’s gotta do what a Fae’s gotta do, though. And that goes for your Fae as much as it does for mine.”
My Fae. A glance in the car’s side mirror confirmed Terry’s suspicion that he was grinning like an idiot. Not that he cared.
“Is this your building?”
“No—next block, third on the left. You can pull into the alley just past it to turn around, if you want.”
Terry looked up as Kevin waited for the cross traffic to clear. There was a light in his window, and a figure standing there, a shadow against the curtain. By the time the Mercedes was pulled in next to the dumpster, Terry’s heart was pounding. He’s in there. He’s waiting for me.
Kevin laughed softly and released the lock on the passenger door. “If I’d had any doubts you two somehow managed to Share in Antarctica, the look on your face would clear them right up.”
Terry blushed so hard his scalp felt tight. “I… well, we…”
“Get out, already.” The lawyer grinned, then sobered. “And if you think of it, thank Maelduin for not killing my husband when he had the chance.”
“I will.”
Terry let himself into the building, cursing the key for sticking in the lock the way it always did. Not wanting to waste any more time, he took the stairs to the third floor two and three at a time instead of waiting for the elevator — and when was the last time he had done that?
When had he ever done that?
Two nights ago—two nights!—he’d walked Maelduin slowly and carefully up these stairs, afraid to even try putting him on the elevator after what had just happened on the subway. Last night, he’d schlepped Thai take-out food up the stairs, the climb having been a small price to pay to avoid an elevator full of someone’s sodden birthday party making a pit stop between one club and the next.
Now…
Now everything had changed.
Before he could get his keys out of his pocket, the door to his apartment swung open. Maelduin, his Fae, his beloved, his SoulShare, sex-appeal incarnate, blond hair tumbling down around his face and framing blue eyes and a scorching smile, was wrapped in Terry’s bathrobe, an orange velour abomination Terry had bought years ago because it made him laugh.
It had lost none of its magic over the years. Terry clamped his mouth firmly shut against a giggle, but all that did was ensure the sound came out as a snort.
Maelduin was still smiling, but he was also looking more confused by the second. “What is it?”
“Oh, God…” Terry gave up trying to hold in his laughter. “That robe doesn’t even fit me properly… and you’re at least six inches taller than I am!”
The Fae’s puzzled glance down at his knees stole what little remained of Terry’s composure—and then everything became delight as Maelduin’s arms closed around him and drew him into the apartment, as he heard the door click closed behind them.
“I’m sorry.” Terry’s voice was muffled against Maelduin’s chest.
“You do not sound sorry.” Terry couldn’t see the Fae, but he could hear the laughter in his voice. “Laugh. Please. I like it.”
“You said that before.” Terry turned his head to rest his cheek against Maelduin’s chest. “Is that why you put my bathrobe on?”
“No.” Kisses stirred Terry’s hair. “You don’t like blood. I have healed—I was only scratched—but my clothes are bloody.”
“Oh.” The reminder was enough to sober Terry, at least a little. “We can do laundry later. If you want. You’re going to need new clothes, thoug
h—”
“You have had enough worries for any human for one day.” A finger under Terry’s chin tilted his face up. “I am not going to add to those worries.”
As cold as he’d been, not even an hour ago, Terry thought he might melt under Maelduin’s kiss. Only an idiot would spoil a perfect moment like this by trying to talk.
Enter idiot, stage right. “You’re the one who’s had worries. Not me.”
Maelduin’s sigh against Terry’s lips was warm, and sweet, and maybe just a tiny bit exasperated. “Do I have to take you to bed?”
“I’d say yes.”
Terry felt Maelduin’s smile against his lips before he saw it. “As you wish.”
Terry squawked—there really wasn’t any other word that adequately captured his total loss of dignity—as Maelduin picked him up and headed for the bedroom. “Careful!”
Maelduin laughed, and the sound sent abrupt shivers arrowing down Terry’s spine. Light, musical, almost innocent yet completely erotic… he’d never heard any sound like it. And now I get to hear it for the rest of my life…
Maelduin settled Terry on the bed, and covered his body with his own, shrugging out of the bathrobe. Terry tangled his legs with Maelduin’s and wrapped his arms around the Fae’s hard torso, as if he still needed the heat of his lover’s body to drive away the remembered chill of the Antarctic wind.
“Yes,” Maelduin whispered, gently taking Terry’s earlobe between his teeth.
“Yes what?”
“Hold me. Please.” Maelduin kissed and nibbled along Terry’s jaw, down his throat. “When I woke, this morning, in your arms… I had never felt anything like it before. I want more.”
Something in Maelduin’s voice brought a lump to Terry’s throat. He shifted his weight to hold Maelduin closer, wishing he’d had a chance to shuck his clothes before finding himself covered with naked Fae. “Nobody’s ever just held you?”
“No one that I remember.” Maelduin placed a lingering kiss in the hollow at the base of Terry’s throat, then raised his head. “Fae are artists of pleasure, giving and receiving it. But holding someone, like this, is a very different thing.” Maelduin’s smile left Terry short of breath. “Although the choice is difficult—you have already showed me how adept you are at the rinc-daonna.”
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