Shifters After Dark Box Set

by S M Reine et al.

  Mindful of his unhealed wound, Brinn curled around my brother, offering her secret depths to the pleasure of his lips while she blew warm breath across his risen desire for her. Then she bent her head and all was lost in the shower of her fiery hair.

  I heard my brother’s gasp, saw the shudder of his eyelids as the small, wet sounds of Brinn’s occupation escaped into the air.

  Of its own accord my faltering mast responded.

  As did Pel, who stretched a tentative tongue toward Brinn. At first he seemed at a loss what to do with his hands, but once they found the rounded globes of the fae’s most perfect hips, they pulled her firmly to him and began to knead the sweet flesh within their grasp.

  When she bucked, I knew Pel had found with his tongue the same pleasure core I had earlier stroked to such sweet ecstasy.

  The demon inside me roared. I squeezed shut my eyes, never wanting to see Brinn and Pel together again, only to open my eyes wide again to watch the intense congress being carried out not to ignite my jealousy but to appease their desires.

  I groaned just as Brinn threw back her head with an “Ahhhh” and squeezed hips and thighs tight at my brother’s head.

  Demon be damned! I hardened at her cry, seeing my brother’s state was much the same as mine.

  After a moment, Brinn, her breath still ragged, found me with open eyes and stretched out her hand.

  “Come,” she commanded.

  “Come,” Pel echoed.

  I was already nearly within reach of those long, delicate fingers, but the space between felt as though it offered solid protection from this new sin. Never before had I thought of my brother that way—God knew I didn’t still—and it was a moment till I realized neither she nor he was requesting anything of me from which God would hide His eyes.

  I edged closer to them, then, my palm finding Brinn’s waist, my nose nuzzling into her neck, breathing in the sharp, earthy scent of her. Close enough now to my brother to touch. No, I did not lust after Pel nor would I lie with him in a way God would forbid. But to admire, to touch, to worship him could surely not offend a God who preached brotherly love.

  It wasn’t as though I’d never seen Pel in full arousal before, dreaming at night and spilling his seed impotently into the bedclothes or the dirt around him depending on where we slept. For his part, Pel had seen me as well. Too, we had sat years ago on the edge of his strawed mattress and … compared … as boys will do. He was longer, I was thicker. In that I saw there had been little change.

  Back then our differences didn’t matter; it was a curiosity only with no more meaning than when we stood back-to-back and measured height against each other and looked to the day we might over-tower our father. Now, though … Now I wondered how we would compare in Brinn’s eyes.

  It wasn’t a competition, of course. Still, when I bent my head to the task at hand, I was determined it was me she would appreciate more.

  34. Brinn

  Held between the brothers, hands and lips touching, mingling, parting, only to reconnect in other, even more pleasurable combinations, my body thrummed to the rhythms of their mortality. So earnest they were, each in their different ways. So very alike and yet so individual in the very ways they moved, explored, persisted. Both so generous, vigorous and determined to provide pleasure, yet tentative in the permission given. Neither had much experience, but even so, what woman would be so bold to guide a prince’s hand or lips to those intimate places where pleasure lay?

  I held them at my breasts, twined my legs through Alain’s and caught Pel in my firm clasp. He gasped, and Alain nudged at my hip.

  We had to be careful of Pel’s wound, of course, as we moved within each other’s arms and the brothers sought an ever-closer embrace. Not together, for the taboos there yet held, though as we labored in the setting sun they became freer with each other, less concerned about whose skin their fingers brushed.

  Something in Pel’s approach was sad and fatalistic. Perhaps the way he clung with hands and mouth to me as though I were a wraith to suddenly fade away.

  In contrast, Alain proved the strong and tender caretaker in this as in all else, following my lead and tending to my every need.

  Closing my eyes, I inhaled the musky scent of them. Alain smelled of darkness and rich, fertile earth. Pel of sunlight and the yellow-green moss beneath his bandage. Vibrant and distinct, and I would know their individual scents from a thousand others.

  Pel swirled a finger in my navel, then drooped it lower, luxuriating in the mat of auburn curls he found, then lower still, tracing the folds there until he lighted on the sensitive nub at their core. I jerked at his bold touch, pushing into his hand, slitting my eyes open to find him watching my expression with deep intent.

  “Don’t stop,” I told him, only a hint of the desperation I felt bleeding into my command.

  He settled on stroking me there and I to matching his rhythm with my fingers cupped around him, high and low.

  Alain nuzzled against my cheek.

  “My turn,” he whispered.

  When I turned my head to him, he claimed my mouth with his. A kiss that deepened in less than a breathspace, his tongue plunging in to find mine at the ready. The nudge at my hip turned more demanding, forcing a choice. Release Pel and yield to Alain’s urgency? Give up the hand teasing me into sublimation for the promise of the other full and thick inside of me?

  In the end, it was Alain, first in everything and first in this as well. I opened my legs to him and he met my welcome with swift and aching need. So intense. As though with tomorrow’s dawn we might never lie this way again. How different from Edern who looked with fae eyes on the long stretch of years ahead and slipped with easy comfort from one moment to another.

  I wrapped myself around the core that was Alain, urging him on with soft murmurs and a rhythm as old as the land itself. As stars and moon swept me into their timeless embrace I lost myself, not once but twice, to the mortal prince who thrummed within me.

  And when the whirling stars fixed themselves again in the twilit sky, I felt the rush of void as the prince, spent as I, withdrew.

  “So beautiful,” he whispered to my ear, an assurance as he rolled away it was not from me he fled but the body’s own reflex as it sought respite in the gathering night.

  “That you are,” I murmured back, right before, panting still, I captured Pel, determined to finish what I’d begun at the beginning of this precious night. We could not couple properly, he and I, with his half-healed wound crippling his intent. But this I could do for him as he’d done for me. I looked up only once from my worship of Pel’s proud bloom of life to find Alain watching not me but the rapture in his brother’s face.

  I smiled around my work, knowing just how far Alain had come to give his trust and how far Pel had come to receive it.

  Yet that moment too was bittersweet. As surely as the bones of my ancestors fed each new day, I knew, even then, that in the end, no matter how much I wanted them, no matter how much they would willingly share, it could never be both that I could have.

  I thought blood alone could change the bond between us. Not so. The brothers each had something as vital and precious to life as blood itself. That they shared it so freely and generously with me there in the meadow as evening fell was a gift beyond telling

  Herne had known. Wise Herne who saw the hurt in his son yet freed me to find this freedom on my own.

  “Do you feel it?” I whispered, an arm wrapped about each of them as we lay in the afterglow, their heads upon my breast.

  “Peace?” Pel asked.

  “As though the entire world has opened all its secrets to us?” Alain suggested.

  I smiled, for I’d felt those things, too, and more. “The bond. It’s broken. We are no longer soul-shackled. We are free.”

  “Are we?” Pel asked. He lifted his head to look into my face, a frown furrowing his brow. “Because I’ve never felt so bound to you as I do this moment.”

  Alain elbowed his way up at my
other side and met Pel’s eyes across my breast before he looked up at me and asked, “Do you mean to leave us, then?”

  They both held breath, waiting on my answer. Could they truly fear what I might say after this evening? Knowing the gifts it took to break the bond to begin with?

  “In our beginning, I knew only that the blood of you or your brother could break the bond. That it would take the sacrifice of flesh to be free. In our beginning, I was more than willing to see your blood flow for me. Later, I thought Edern and The Hunt would blood you for me.”

  “But you stopped them,” Alain said, and I could see his thoughts working on the ‘why’ of that.

  “By then, though it took the losing of my intended mate to realize it, your blood had come to mean more than the bond that held me to your mortal world.”

  “Why did you keep this from us?” Alain asked.

  “Before, I feared you’d slay me to ensure I didn’t lead you to your deaths in my quest for blood.” The stricken look, twinned upon both their faces, amused me. “After, I simply did not see need.”

  “And now?” Pel asked, fear and hope warring plainly in his eyes.

  “There is apparently another sacrifice as powerful as blood. The sacrifice of hearts. Of…” I hesitated. Was it too soon to acknowledge what the bond magic already knew?

  “Say it,” Pel urged.

  “Of love.” The word hung stark and bold on the cusp of night. More than any other, love was a truth word. It could not be simply said, but must be felt to carry meaning.

  I knew the truth of it. Did they?

  “Love, life, form, being—you make all things possible within me.” Pel laid his lips on the tip of my breast and kissed me with heartwrenching tenderness.

  “If my father commanded,” Alain said, “I would give him my life. But for you two, I would not need to be asked. Love is too short a word for everything you mean to me.” He nuzzled my neck, then trailed fire to my lips, which he captured with relentless desire. He bent his leg over mine, and I felt the unmistakable stirring as he readied himself to prove his love again.

  At my breast, Pel’s breath flattened into a rhythmic rasp.

  As the moon rose and the stars circled, we sacrificed our hearts, our souls, ourselves one to another for a second, then a third time that night, each moment more sublime than the last.

  Love? Indeed. My heart beat to its pulse and sang with the truth of it.

  Free at last, it was as Pel had said. I was now more bound to them than I had ever been.

  35. Pel

  Things changed after that night as only storied deeds and the days remembered by old men in their cups have power to shift the world.

  My wound healed cleanly from without, and under Brinn’s diligent care not a hint of contagion touched it. From within, though, The Beast’s horn had claimed something permanent of me. I limped now, my gait untrue as it had never been. No loss from fighting from horseback when the need came again, but a small hamper on the ground. And, coupled with the scar that flamed across my thigh, a visible reminder of just how real The Beast had been.

  We were all amazed that it took so little time before I could sit a horse again in comfort. Mostly, I was thankful that my time with Brinn could now be enjoyed to its fullest. I had known the artistry of her hands and lips. Now there were other talents to explore. The first time she invited me to discover the deep, engulfing pleasure she secreted inside, I pressed in with abandon, moving to the cadence of the lifeblood pulsing about me. I dropped my hand from her face to find my balance, found Alain’s arm beside her as his hand fondled at her breast. I clasped his wrist even as I surged inside my dearest fae.

  Even then, not knowing how long this might last, I wrung every joy from every touch, every encounter, dying a little death at each.

  That I could have Brinn and not lose my brother, share one with the other, left me drunk with gratitude.

  “If only father and duty didn’t call,” I sighed. “If only this were all to life.”

  They indulged me with their assent, and for this small time we believed in the foolishness of dreams.

  Eight nights we spent wrapped in the bliss of each other’s arms. Eight nights the world was no bigger than our meadow and our need for one another.

  And on the ninth night the Questing Beast returned.

  It woke me from my slumber, not with the howls it had challenged with before, but with a gentle lowing, a crooning like a siren’s call. No longer the voice of nightmare, but a lover waiting in the dark.

  My breath caught in my throat and blood pounded in my ears, my chest, my loins. The Old Magic, impotent yet, rose within and bade me go to it.

  “No!” I did not realize I had cried the word aloud until Brinn laid her soft hand across my lips.

  “Tonight you can refuse,” she said, “but there will come a day when you must obey.”

  “Never,” I vowed. But the word held no conviction. Somehow, within a fortnight, my relationship to The Beast had changed. “Only—”

  “Yes?” she prompted.

  “It’s lonely.”

  She quirked her brow, and I tried to lose myself in the exquisite shape of her face, the line of her nose, the fullness of her lips. Better that than trying to explain something I could not understand.

  As always, it was she who saved me from myself.

  36. Brinn

  The Beast was not all that drew close again that night. Herne’s horn and the cry of my pack joined in with the frog and cricket songs that pierced the dark. Pel and I clung to one another, awash in the magic that bade much like the siren call of selkies that lured sailors to their deaths.

  Alain recognized the lure and, joining us, recalled us to ourselves with a practicality only he could ground us with. “We’ve dallied here too long, pleasant though it’s been.” He cupped a breast and drew his thumb along its tip. As though I needed assurance of his words.

  “What reason not to dally a few days more?” I pleaded. “Whether we bide here or move elsewhere, they will follow. However much we believe we belong to each other, they believe otherwise.”

  “I thought Edern had spurned you.”

  “He did. But the fae are my kith-kin. Because one has estranged himself doesn’t mean all have forsaken me.”

  “Will you return to them?” He caught his breath, waiting in concern for my answer.

  “In time, yes.”

  His thumb halted its pleasant rhythm. “I had hoped…” He didn’t finish.

  “Such are my hopes, too.” I smiled then. “We fae are long-lived. A lifetime for you is but a dalliance for us.”

  “Is that all I am to you? A dalliance?”

  My smile faltered. “You misconstrue. I meant only the time, not the importance of what we share.”

  He still didn’t look convinced, and I had to remind myself how fragile was each man’s pride.

  “While you both shall breathe, I am yours.” I ringed the tender part of his ear with my finger, then drew his lips to mine. “Never doubt,” I murmured before sealing my oath with a kiss.

  37. Brinn

  Alain was his father’s son, a prince who would never turn his back on duty, a duty that called him again to horse. And where Alain went, Pel and I followed.

  High summer smothered us in its heat, the sun as relentless as our march around the borderlands. Border patrol proved life-sucking in its monotony. Once, I shifted from hound to fae in the middle of the day. “Let me join you in the saddle,” I implored Alain.

  “It’s uncomfortable enough for one,” he pointed out, but relented under the liquid plea in my eyes. Swinging up behind him with his hand my support, I found just how true his words were. The high-backed cantle behind rose nearly to my breast and the angles proved all wrong. Blowing soft into his ear and tickling it with my tongue was the only tease available, but, while pleasant for a bit, did nothing to satisfy my own body’s cravings.

  “Help me around to the front,” I whispered in the ear I’d only
just finished laving.

  Even that proved too difficult an undertaking from astride the horse, and I resorted to dismounting first then remounting from a log by the trail. Sol swung his head around to watch as I eased a leg over his neck and settled to his withers facing Alain, my hips pressed snug against the swell of the fore-cantle.

  In theory, we now had open access, one to the other. In practice, there proved precious enough room for my hips even on Sol’s broad shoulders, and Alain and I were thrown uncomfortably close with little space between to slip a graceful hand.

  Alain quirked an infuriating brow at our predicament. In hound form, I would have bitten him for it.

  “It’s a soldier’s saddle. I don’t think its makers intended it for lovers.”

  “Then let us find a spot that will accommodate us. I need you, Alain. Now.”

  Pel’s horse jostled against us, throwing me even further akilter. Irritated, I glared at Pel, but he ignored my annoyance. In fact, he’d ignored most everything these last few days. The Beast consumed his every sense by day now as much as by night.

  Sol snorted.

  “Men ahead,” Pel whispered curtly.

  Damn. I scrambled down from my perch, shifting to hound even before I landed, annoyed that I’d been too distracted to scent them first.

  One of the stranger horses called challenge. Sol laid back his ears and Alain reached across to grab Lleuad’s reins. Thralled in his saddle by The Beast, Pel responded slowly, trying to shake himself aware to meet whatever danger might lay in wait.

  “Keep him safe,” Alain instructed me as he drew his blade and slipped his buckler free from its knots. Without hesitation, he rode toward the four horsemen who breasted the road ahead.

  My heart fluttered. Were they brigands to attack him all at once, or knights to offer single challenge? Lleuad pawed the ground and threw his head up and down, irritated to be left behind. I used what charms were given me to calm him and to will Pel back into the world, while every bone in me cried to be gone after Alain. In frustration, I snapped at Pel’s leg, using pain to draw him from his thrall. My reward was a fierce glare. I growled back, then curled a paw and pointed the way down the trail to where his brother continued his proud advance.