“What’s that?”
Maelduin’s cheeks went pink. He looked adorable. “The ‘human dance,’ I suppose you would say. It was one of the names Fae had for sex with humans, when our two worlds were one.”
“You don’t have to choose between them. Between being held and... dancing. If you really want to stay, I mean.”
Terry wanted the words back even before they were all out of his mouth. Yes, I really just reminded him that he doesn’t have to stay. Merde. Maybe I am still jinxed. Or just amazingly inept.
“Why would I want anything else?” Maelduin traced over Terry’s lips with a fingertip. “Your world is my home, you have my soul, and you love me as no other ever has. You opened your home and shared your bed with a clumsy amad’n who could have tripped over his own shadow.”
“I think maybe you did, once or twice.” Terry couldn’t help smiling. “As if that would have been a reason not to love you.”
“You had some reason, though, that seemed good to you at the time.” Maelduin’s gaze dropped briefly.
Terry winced. “I have… kind of a history of bad choices. It got to the point where I assumed any choice I made would be bad. So if I wanted you—and I did, believe me—it had to have been a terrible idea.”
Strangely, Maelduin looked up at this, and smiled. “And I believed Fae could not love, and I was cursed above all other Fae. So whatever I felt for you could not be love.” He kissed the tip of Terry’s nose. “We are two shoes cast by the same horse, you and I.”
Believing it’s better to be right than happy. “I think you’re right.”
Maelduin raised himself up just enough to let him start unbuttoning Terry’s shirt. “May I suggest, lán’ghrásta, that we stop giving each other reasons not to love, and start loving?”
* * *
The row of tiny buttons proved more difficult to manage than Maelduin had expected. Not that he was still clumsy—but the utterly delicious way Terry was wriggling underneath him, trying to help him, was a distraction almost beyond bearing.
“Is something wrong?”
Terry’s clear-eyed innocence made Maelduin suspect the effect might not be accidental. “Not yet,” he growled, quietly delighted at the way the sound of his voice made Terry’s eyes go wide. “But soon, if you continue to make it impossible for me to concentrate…”
No, that was not an innocent smile. “You think you’ve got problems? I may be the first man ever circumcised by the zipper of his own jeans.”
The flood of images touched off by Terry’s unfamiliar words took Maelduin several seconds to process; the processing left him no less confused than he had been, and slightly appalled. Terry’s laughter—at his expression, no doubt—recalled his attention to what he was supposed to be doing, and also begged for a kiss, which he was happy to provide.
“I suspect we’re not going to get me out of anything with you still lying on me,” Terry ventured, once Maelduin let him speak again.
“You have a point.” Maelduin rolled off Terry and stretched out on his back to watch his human disrobe—and, since tormenting was a game most profitably played by two, he gave his erection a few lazy strokes as he enjoyed the sight.
“Oh, fuck me.” Terry ignored the last few buttons, whether accidentally or on purpose, Maelduin had no idea, ripping the shirt off and sending tiny projectiles flying.
“I thought that was the idea.”
“What happened to my solemn, formal Fae? And I just hope I’m not out of lube.”
Maelduin reached for the button of Terry’s jeans, turning aside briefly to hide a grin. “Your solemn, formal Fae wants you too much to stand on ceremony, and even at the best of times is only patient when waiting for an opening to present itself in combat. Which this is not, not exactly.”
“Point to you.” Terry grinned and leaned back on his elbows, letting Maelduin undo the button and slipping a hand into his jeans to shield his evident erection as Maelduin slid the zipper down.
Kneeling astride Terry’s knees, Maelduin started working his jeans down, but quickly encountered two unexpected obstacles: Terry’s formidable thigh muscles and the dampness of the heavy fabric, no doubt the product of Antarctic ice-melt. A few frustrated tugs were all he had patience for; moving Terry’s hand aside, he took his cock into his mouth, nearly to the root, and groaned with delight as Terry gasped and arched upward.
“Merde,” Terry whispered, gripping the sheets in his fists.
Maelduin pulled back, enough to give himself room to slide his tongue around the rim of Terry’s head and tease the nerve bundle underneath. He was instantly rewarded with the taste he remembered, musk and the tang of salt, bead after bead.
And he straightened, eyes wide with startled arousal. Ripples of sweetest pressure massaged his own erect cock, and a trickle of fluid like liquid glass ran down the side and gleamed in the short curly nest of hair at the base.
“Jesus.” Terry’s head was pillowed on one arm, and he was staring, rapt. “I want… oh, fuck, I want…”
“What?” Curious, Maelduin gripped himself, milking more of the crystal fluid that was an Earth Fae’s seed from his aching cock, and watching Terry’s. Terry’s cock jerked, darkened, compressed, and wept one pearl after another.
“What’s happening?” Terry could barely whisper; sweat trickled from his forehead, down his temples.
Maelduin swallowed hard. “I feel what you feel. You feel what I feel. M’anam-sciar. And what is it you want?”
“Being able to stay conscious for the next few minutes would be great.” Terry’s voice had mostly deserted him, but his smile had not. “This is going to be fucking incredible.”
“Few minutes?” Maelduin leaned forward, covering Terry’s body with his own, holding himself up with one arm just enough to let him reach between the two of them with his other hand and encircle both of their cocks. “You underestimate a Fae, lán’ghrásta.”
“Oh, dear God.” Terry’s fingers sank into Maelduin’s ass; he wrapped his legs around Maelduin’s, letting Maelduin feel the strength of the thighs that had let Terry soar in the beautiful pictures Maelduin had admired. “I hope the smile on my face makes the coroner jealous as hell.”
“You…” Maelduin gave up trying to understand his human. Testing the boundaries of this new bond they shared was definitely more interesting than either coroners or—fiánn sachant!—circumcision. “Less talk, please. More…”
“Pleasure?” Terry nipped Maelduin’s throat, licked delicately.
Pleasure?
Time hung suspended, as two worlds rearranged themselves, Maelduin and his scair-anam at their hearts. Two males, one soul, discovering in the other what one had thought lost, and the other had been sure never existed.
“Love,” Maelduin replied, kissing Terry deeply, tasting his faint unsteady cry. “And pleasure,” he added, as their bodies started to move together—because he was, after all, Fae.
Love, and pleasure… and magick. Maelduin could feel it, could see it, swirling across his skin, spilling onto Terry, caressing him. It was rejected no more.
No more am I.
Maelduin hadn’t expected the abrupt intensity of their shared sensations, the swift crest of desire. Fae took pride in drawing out every joining, driving a partner or partners to fever pitch, only to draw back from the sweet abyss and approach it again. And again, and preferably again. But the increasing heat and pressure in his sac, the delicious soft friction of cock against cock and the brush of short wiry hair, and Terry’s undulating body and increasingly frantic moans — all experienced twice over—made it evident that release was going to come far too soon.
“Sorry.” His voice was tight, hoarse.
“Sorry?” Terry’s fist tangled in Maelduin’s hair, pulling him down into a kiss that turned into a moan that turned into a curse. “We’re going to be—merde, merde, merde—” Terry’s body tensed, trembling, his thighs locked around Maelduin’s hips.
We’re going to be fucking pe
rfect—
They came together, perfectly, so perfectly Maelduin forgot to breathe. His body strained against Terry’s, his cock pulsed alongside Terry’s. And living magick poured from him into his human, heightening and prolonging pleasure past anything he had ever experienced. Both of them were quickly slick, the scent of Fae and human musk heavy in the air, luscious wet sounds accompanying their gradually slowing thrusts.
“We’re going to be doing this for the rest of our lives.” Terry’s arms curved up and around Maelduin, as if they were infinitely heavy. Slowly, his legs relaxed, dropped to the bed.
“This, and other things.” He traced the curve of Terry’s ear with his tongue, loving the way Terry shivered.
“S-such as?”
Maelduin slid his forearms under Terry’s neck and looked down at him, a curtain of his own hair shutting out the room around them. He didn’t need to see, though, to remember the beautiful pictures, the joyful soaring that had found its way into a Fae’s heart.
“Teach me to fly…”
Chapter Thirty-One
Cuinn would have laughed at the way Conall was trying to wedge himself into a corner of the nexus chamber, if hadn’t been close to doing the same thing himself. “So bring me up to speed, Twinklebritches. Why does the wellspring look like a school of miniature magical piranhas and feel like it wants to take me apart atom by atom?”
“Piranhas?” Conall squinted into the foam of silver-blue light. “I was thinking more along the lines of nightmare nest-floss.”
“Poetic of you. What’s happened?”
Conall sat back on his heels with a sigh. “Hard to be sure, without any word from the Realm. And no, there hasn’t been any—about the only reason I dare come down here anymore is to check and see whether anyone’s left a message.”
“Give me your best guess, then, draoi ríoga.”
The ginger mage grimaced. “You asked for it.” He squared his shoulders, and in the simple movement went from a fidgeting twink to a master mage taking up a weight no one else, Cuinn most emphatically included, was up to bearing. “Having a single entry point into the Realm for all of this world’s ley energy, going through the nexus and the Pattern, isn’t sustainable. The pressure’s too great, and what we’re seeing here is magick flowing back in our direction, with so much force that it’s coming untethered from the wellsprings.”
“Fuck us all in sequence.” Cuinn stared at the wayward living magick—and past it, to the Great Nexus linking the human world and the Realm. A link that was too fucking dangerous to use any more. “What happens if everyone’s favorite nemesis of all that’s good and light encounters one of these new and improved wellsprings before we can find it and cap it off?”
“First, I’m not even sure they can be capped any more. Using as much magick around them as a Marfach-proof ward would take could just as easily set them off, and I don’t think any god in the human pantheon would venture a guess as to what would happen next.”
“‘First’ implies a ‘second.’”
“Cheery, aren’t you? Second, the Marfach can feed off any magick it finds, tethered or un-. And frankly, I don’t know if it would dive into a wellspring and try to swim back to the Realm, or treat it as a refueling stop and come straight for the source.” He nodded toward the whirlpool of the nexus. “Needless to say, either option is untenable.”
“You mages and your big words. Remember, I’m just a simple Royal consort, in the employ of our Highness’ pleasure.”
“I’m starting to wonder why Coinneach gave you your voice back.” Conall rolled his eyes, peridot-green gleaming in the wellspring-light.
“You missed me, admit it.” The urge to tease the mage faded as Cuinn gazed into the shifting magickal light. “What the hell do we do?”
Conall ground the heels of his hands into his eyes, then let his head fall back. “I can only think of one answer, and if you can come up with a better one I’m all ears. But I think…” He drew a deep, shuddering breath. “In order to take the pressure off, the nexus has to stop being the only source of ley energy for the Realm. Which means the Pattern, the conduit on the Realm side, has to come down. The worlds have to come back together, the way they were before the Sundering.”
“But what about the…”
“The Marfach has to die.”
* * *
Where the fuck are we?
Janek would have snarled, if he’d had the energy. He’d hoped he was finally dead. Bad enough to be proved wrong—having the proof be the male’s hoarse voice was a whole extra level of suckage.
His eyes opened. Two eyes. What the fuck? He could see they were all occupying the bitch’s body, but even when the four of them weren’t using Janek’s physical body, whatever was left of him only saw things through the one eye Guaire had left him.
The female gasped and started crab-walking backward. Janek was stuck with seeing only what she wanted to look at, and she didn’t want to look at whatever was freaking her out, but he managed to catch a glimpse of ocean, waves and spray. And rocks. Not ice. Thank fuck. Rocks covered with green slimy weeds. The female was trying to back their body away from the water, slipping and catching herself; Janek couldn’t feel the rocks under her, but he was used to that too.
At least we aren’t stuck to the ice any more. The male thought that was funny. Janek thought the male could shove a broken baseball bat up his ass. Not that Meat’s going to miss a pound or two of flesh. Am I right, Meat?
Apparently they were all forgetting about if-you-die-you-die. One big bitchy family again. I can think of a couple of pounds you’d be better off without, but then you wouldn’t have anything to do with your fucking hands. Janek waited, bracing himself for the mental bitchslap that was coming.
Meat?
Right here, asscrumb.
Silence. Janek thought he could hear the crash of waves.
Meat?
He could feel the female smiling. “We are not breathing.” She put a hand to her chest, then to her neck. “We have no heartbeat.”
Like fuck we don’t.
The male was smiling, too. Don’t look now, but I think we got lucky.
“Yes. Our poor meat wagon is finally dead.”
AND YET WE LIVE.
They shuddered at the abomination’s grating voice. All of them, the late unlamented Janek O’Halloran included.
IT IS TIME FOR US TO GO HOME.
An Excerpt from
Back Door into Purgatory
Book Nine of the SoulShares Series
Chapter One
November 15, 2013 (human reckoning)
The Realm
The soft chiming of Aine's water-clock, three hours before dawn, found her in the empty, echoing space between sleep and wakefulness. No sleeping-draught, and no channeling, would have let her sleep soundly tonight, not when she knew what was happening not five minutes' walk from her bower. She was no longer part of the Loremasters' conclaves, but something within her still moved to their rhythm.
Yawning, she sat up and reached for the sheer robe draped across the end of her sleeping-couch; as she settled the robe over her shoulders, she ran a quick channeling through her thick red hair. Nothing elaborate, just enough so as not to arrive at the Pattern-tower looking as if she'd turned and tossed the entire night.
Her fellow Loremasters would know, though. They always did.
Picking up parchment and quill and inkstone, she stepped down from her bower. The grass was cool against her bare feet, the breeze gentle and scented with night-blooming flowers. The light of floating Fire-flies was enough to light her path, but a sliver of the full moon was already showing itself above the distant hills to the east.
Aine shuddered at the reminders of what was to come.
Once, I could have walked between the worlds, as easily as I cross this greensward. Centuries ago, before the Fae and human worlds were sundered, before the Pattern blocked every road from world to world, a Fae who knew the way could step from one world into
the next—easily, in the places where the walls between worlds were thin. But a Loremaster could walk where she would, in those days.
Light shone through the window-slits of the tower, clear white light, beckoning her. She was the only one of the tower's denizens who needed such, of course: a courtesy to her altered state.
When she Faded into the tower, Dúlánc's tabhse was waiting for her, kneeling in a meditative pose near the center of the web of the Pattern. ‘Ghost’ was, of course, not what the eldest Loremaster's image was at all—what Aine saw was a projection of the embodiment of his soul, both body and soul caught in the silver-blue lines of the Pattern beneath her feet. Calling him his own tabhse was simply a concession to his sense of humor.
She knelt facing the elderly Fae, setting aside her writing implements and arranging the skirts of her robe and night-dress as carefully as if they were the finest gown and she were his guest at a wine-tasting. Only when every last fold was settled to her liking did she meet his gaze. “Is it done?”
His eyes were his answer; his nod merely confirmed it. “The Foreseeing is complete.”
“And?” Aine wished she could be as calm as Dúlánc seemed to be, but she had never been much good at that. She was more like Cuinn, the youngest of them—though Cuinn was, of course, a law unto himself—and could not quite keep the edge of her fear from her voice.
“The endgame has begun.” The Loremaster sighed deeply, soundlessly. “There are many paths forward for those who must fight; all but one end in chaos, and blood, and two worlds begging in vain to have the twisted evil of the Marfach’s tainted magick removed from them.”
“All but one?” Aine arched a brow. “And where does that one path end?”
“Darkness. The darkness of our own unknowing.” Dúlánc shrugged, a tight little gesture. “One path would not reveal its end to us, no matter how we pressed.”
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