by Kimbra Swain
“Uncle Levi,” she said sleepily.
“Yeah, Winnie?” I said, leaning over to kiss her forehead.
“You should play a lullaby for Miss Riley. She would love it like me,” she muttered.
“Sleep. I’ll see you in the morning,” I said.
“Night, night,” she said.
Flicking off the lights, I stepped into the hallway. I slipped the guitar back in the case. I had to go see Riley with nothing to offer. All the pestering her about Valentines, and I’d come up empty. All she wanted was the physical contact. I could at least give her that if it was what she truly wanted. I just wanted to make her happy.
The lights were off in the main room, but Grace stood at the kitchen counter watching me. She put her finger to her lips. “I’m sorry,” she said.
I shook my head in response. Grace, as always, was just protecting me.
“Winnie is right, Dublin,” she said.
“About what?” I asked.
“The power you carry can seduce even me. And if you were going to give me a gift, I mean, if I was Riley, I would want you to use that thing on me.” She nodded to my guitar.
My eyes widened. Even in the dark, I saw the dark blush cross her cheeks. “You are saying I should force her?”
“She already wants to fuck you. There is no force in it. You are just taking control. Doing it on your own terms. Trust me. It will drive her wild.” A devious smile crossed her face, and a light twinkled in her turquoise eyes. The tone flickered in the darkness. I loved it. I hoped that she never changed them back to brown. She knew my thoughts and smiled.
“Thank you, Grace.”
“You are welcome, Dublin.”
“Tell him.”
“I did.” Her eyes darkened. “It’s okay. Go enjoy your date.”
Dylan and Grace always fought. Most of the time it was joking, but sometimes, it wasn’t. I felt it in her tone. I saw it in her eyes. He was pissed at her for leaving the trailer without telling him. Deeper than that, I imagined he would keep a closer eye on her from now on, but he knew as well as I did, that Grace did whatever she wanted. I hated myself for being mad at her, too. There was no need for both of us to be angry with her. She’d left the trailer for me.
Each day that went by, my power grew, but I was even more hesitant to use it. She knew it but urged me on. Grace trusted me more than anyone in this world. Even more than Dylan. Part of me hated that, but there was a part of me, deep inside, that relished it. She watched as my mind flowed through all these thoughts. Her gaze never wavered or faltered.
In that moment, I wanted to say so many things to her. About how much she meant to me, because it was Valentine’s Day, and Dylan shouldn’t be mad at her. They should be making love.
“Dublin, it’s fine. Go!” Her voice rattled through my bones. It wasn’t a command, but for a moment, I thought it was. She laughed, covering her mouth.
I nodded, taking in what she said about Riley and the guitar. It was true that Riley was always in control, and I was happy to give it to her. Even if I used my guitar, she was powerful and could deny my use of magic on her. I’d felt it between us so many times. I sucked in a breath, determined to follow Grace’s suggestion. She was always right whether I liked to admit it or not.
37
When I arrived at Riley’s house, the windows were dark. I slipped in the front door. She wasn’t home. I had a few minutes to psych myself up for this. I’d know pretty quickly if she was into it or not. I didn’t turn on the lights but made my way up the stairs to her bedroom. Sitting in the chair beside her bed, I lit a couple of candles on the nightstand and drew my guitar out of the case. I tested a few tunes on the strings focusing on the things I wanted to sing to her. No written song would do, but I sucked at lyrics. In what may have been the best or worst decision of my life, I decided to wing it.
Riley’s car pulled into the garage, and I heard the familiar rumble of the garage door closing. I listened carefully for the kitchen door from the garage to open. When it did, I ran my fingers across the strings. Tension filled the air in the house. As the sound reverberated around the rooms, it echoed around her body like a sonar. I could see her clearly through the music. She stiffened, and her keys dropped to the floor. A smile crossed my face as I began to play.
“Come to me, I’m waiting in the dark for you.“
Slowly she began to take steps toward the stairs. I focused on her breathing which sucked in and out heavily.
“Did you expect anything else?
What did you think I would do?“
Her feet hit the steps one by one as the sound of my power caressed her skin. I burned my will into her desire, and she lit up like a candle in the darkness. As she reached the top step, her eyes glittered with passion.
“You wanted to play a game,
And not take my heart to be true.
So, I’ll play, but you’ll be mine to tame.”
She lowered her eyes to me in a mock protest. Her body betrayed her as sweat formed anticipatory beads all along her skin.
The dress she wore slid to the floor.
“All you have to do is protest
if you don’t want me.
But I see your eyes, you are obsessed.”
Long arms wrapped around the bedpost, arching her back and swaying her hips for me. Her auburn hair cascaded around her shoulders. My own little striptease. A smirk crossed her face, knowing I was getting everything I wanted out of her. My words sang the song, but my power gave the direction. She willingly gave in to me.
“This way we both get what we desire,
But my needs are fulfilled by your consent,
In turn, I will set your body on fire.”
I sat the guitar on the floor next to the chair but kept the music flowing in the room picking the notes from the previous ones I played as they floated around the room, which was very visible to me. She sauntered up to me, trying to kiss me, but I turned my head from her.
“No, I’m not done with you, yet,
Lick your lips, and prepare for me,
I’m going to make you sweat.”
A low animal groan escaped her lips as she quickly worked the buttons on my shirt. She ran her nails down my chest. The sensation almost caused me to lose my concentration on the magic. I spun her around against the wall, taking her hands and pinning them above her head. I held my body away from her. She whined, rolling her hips to try to make contact with me. I laughed at her efforts and the intense sparkle in her eye. Leaning into her, I took her bottom lip between my teeth and pulled. She tried to jerk her hands out of mine, but I gripped her tightly.
“Levi,” my name passed her lips, and I couldn’t hold back anymore. I scooped her up over my shoulder throwing her on the bed. I climbed up over her and gave her the last verse.
“I have the power to do what I want to do,
You will comply,
I whispered the last line.
Come for me, I’m waiting in the dark for you.”
Without even touching her, she came undone beneath me. She bit her lip as her hips shuddered with the release. “Oh, fuck,” she muttered. Her breasts heaved. It was a beautiful sight.
I traced my finger across her cheek. Her eyes hazed with the sexual high. “Good?” I breathed in her ear. Chills erupted across her skin.
“Did you just command me to orgasm?” she asked.
“If you have to ask, perhaps you need another demonstration,” I said.
“Yes, again please,” she begged.
In the early morning hours, Riley lay asleep on my chest. I watched dawn break across the field next to her house. The warm colors filled the room. I calmed my mind from the power I’d used. It surprised me at the strength within me that it took to control her. I knew in my heart that this was just a fun game with a willing partner, but in the grand scheme, I could force anyone to bend to my will through music if I wanted. It felt like a corruption of something pure. I vowed not to use it in a way that would
harm the innocent. I needed someone to hold me accountable for that, and I knew exactly who that would be.
I didn’t fully understand our bond until that moment.
“Well done, Bard,” her voice echoed through my mind.
“Thank you, Grace,” I returned.
“Levi Rearden, you would never hurt a soul. You don’t need me to watch over you,” she said. It astonished me that even over the distance, she knew. Perhaps she always knew my hesitation was in the fact that the sheer magnitude of what I felt I could do scared the living crap out of me.
“Maybe not, but I’m glad to know you are there just in case,” I replied.
“I will always be here,” Grace replied. I felt her presence pull away from me.
I looked at the beauty sleeping in my arms. Enjoying every moment with her while it lasted. I knew that one day Riley MacKenzie would tire of me. It wasn’t love, but it was enough. For now.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Kimbra Swain
Swapping Gravy: Fairy Tales of a Trailer Park Queen, Valentine Short Story
©2018, Kimbra Swain / Crimson Sun Press, LLC
[email protected]
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.
Note from the Author
LEVI’S STORY IN WINTER
TAKES PLACE AT THE END OF GULLY WASHER TO THE END OF HOTTER THAN BLUE BLAZES
BEFORE READING THIS STORY, I SUGGEST READING CHAPTER 13 OF SIGHT FOR SORE EYES
Introduction
This story was hard to write, but I had to write it. I knew that telling Grace everything that happened between Dylan and me in the Otherworld wasn’t enough. She needed to feel the words in her hands and let them sink into her heart.
I regret every day the final choice I made. I’d made a different choice every single day of my captivity. It wasn’t until that last day that I made a different decision. That decision brought me home to her. It freed little Winnie from the clutches of Brockton and his witches. It severed a friendship that I wasn’t likely to find in my lifetime. It broke every part of my soul, and I knew I’d never be free again.
-Levi
38
My heart ached as I peeled each finger from my wrist. I felt her panic, her despair, but I also felt the life inside of her. Dylan’s son. Which was why I had to let her go. I’d find a way back from the Otherworld.
Brock’s soldiers had grabbed her. But when I wrenched the last finger from my wrist, I felt her body fly backward into the portal of the tree.
“I love you,” I said to her just before the way closed.
“You will pay for that,” one of the soldiers warned.
“Worth it,” I snarled at him.
A woman I didn’t know walked up to me, wearing a dark blue cloak. Her skin was wrinkled and spotted with age. Wisps of white hair danced around her face. I felt the power and magic inside of her. A cold, dark that I’d only felt once inside Grace. She waved her hand over my face, and I promptly passed out.
As a Texan, I didn’t know much about cold winters. Not the bitter chill that sinks into your bones and makes them feel brittle. We had a snow now and again, but nothing like the Winter Otherworld. The cold crawled over my skin like a thousand spiders, taunting me with the last moments of warmth. It bit deep into my body. My hands went numb first, then my toes. I prayed that they wouldn’t break off when I occasionally moved. My captors offered me no relief. Not even a straw bed or ratty blanket. A fire would have been out of the question.
Jagged grey stones lined my cell, but they might as well have been blocks of ice. The guards had removed my shoes and my shirt, laughing as they did. I started shivering from the moment I’d entered the dungeon of the castle in Winter. I knew that Grace was to become Queen of this realm at some point, but I would advise her not to bother when I returned.
If I returned.
I’d managed to get her back into the human world as Brockton’s trollish troops closed in on us after we’d escaped the swamp swallowing the trailer park. The green skinned guards snapped shackles on my wrists the moment they captured me. The steel rings glowed with a perversion of Winter power, and they restrained my gifts. All of them. I had no connection to magic at all. No music. No winter. No love talker. I was dead in the water. Frozen.
They’d thrown me in this cell several days ago. Or was it a week? I’d lost all sense of time. Grace had warned me that the Otherworld had that ability. It had seemed like I was in Summer forever when it had only been a short time. Now, I wasn’t sure if I’d been in this hell hole for a week or more.
The cold cut me like a knife. Tiny daggers slicing into my skin and burning down through my muscles to my bones. The chill wracked my system. I couldn’t drink or eat, which was fine since they’d offered me nothing more than slushy water since I’d arrived. My stomach growled for a couple of days, but beyond that I didn’t remember being hungry.
No one spoke to me. I didn’t see the current lord of the realm or any of his red cloaked minions or the unknown blue cloaked woman. The other cells around me were empty, except for unused cots and blankets which taunted me. Seven cells in all surrounded the circular room with only one door leading out of the dungeon. Barred doors blocked the entrance to each cell. I’d studied the metal, because I had nothing better to do. They weren’t iron. Grace had once told me that metal that was mined inside the Otherworld wouldn’t burn a fairy’s skin. This had to be some form of that fairy metal. In the center of the floor, a stone carving featured the head of a stag. The symbol of Oberon’s reign. I’d seen it before on Finley’s battle armor. Someone had taken a sharp object and cut deep scores across the face of the stag, marring the once noble symbol.
Hours slipped by. Maybe days. I sat alone, shivering in the cold. Even the trolls didn’t speak when they brought me slush. Except for one of them. I called him Wart, because he had a giant brown wart with black hairs on his enormous bulb of a nose. Wart always spoke.
“You eat,” he would grumble, then smack his fist into his hand. I wanted to inform him that water slush wasn’t food, but by this point, my tongue didn’t work. I was forced to keep my snarky comments to myself, which might have hurt worse than the cold. Yeah, no, it didn’t. I vowed that if I ever got out of this forsaken realm that I’d never return.
My mind drifted to Grace in every weak moment. When I felt like laying down and allowing the cold to take me, I thought of her smile and warmth despite being a Winter Queen. No one loved as truly and as deeply as she did. I needed to get back, because she said they had taken Dylan. She was alone and pregnant with his child. That in itself should have deterred any feelings I had for her, but it didn’t. They wanted a child so badly, and they had finally done it. My joy kept me warm. My fear for her life kept me alive. My desire to see her again kept me focused. I refused to allow the cold to take me. I defied it out of sheer will, but I’d learn soon enough that my will wasn’t strong enough.
Winter would and did break me.
39
Like I said, I don’t know how many days it was when I was finally visited by someone of importance.
Footsteps approached my cell as I shivered in a fetal position. Deciding that I’d take whatever came my way as a man, I straightened up on the stone floor and waited. The door swung open to allow four green-skinned guards
to enter. One of them was Wart. I twiddled my numb and frozen fingers at him and winked. He snarled behind his large tusks. Then, Brockton stepped through with the blue cloaked witch. He wore a navy velvet tunic embroidered in silver filigree. He certainly looked the royal part, even if he was a usurper. He’d always been a handsome man, but the evil underneath spoiled his countenance. A thin circlet of silver sat on his head. It certainly wasn’t as grand as Oberon’s crown or as flashy as Grace’s.
“Good day, Levi Rearden,” he said.
I grunted at him, and he laughed. The witch produced a black bladed dagger. Dark swirls of magic floated around it. My eyes widened at the power surrounding it.
“Is it day? Or night? You forgot to put a window in my cell,” I mumbled with a frozen tongue.
He chuckled lightly and paced the floor in front of me. “I see that you still have a sense of defiance. That’s good. It will make breaking you a pleasure for me. If, and I do mean if, you survive, I’ll send you back to Gloriana as a shattered soul. Even she won’t be able to restore you.”
“I think you underestimate me. I am a Texan,” I replied.