A Lady of the Realm (10 page)

His smile deepened as that last observation crossed my mind without a filter. I frowned at the slip.

“Where are you living?”

“In the Keys. I’m a water baby. You’ll have to visit sometime.”

“Florida?” I asked skeptically. I heard the food down there sucked.

“Yep. I can’t go to you. It’s too dangerous in that city.”

“I’m still alive,” I answered icily. No one scorned my city.

“By sheer luck. It’s a good thing that Alek found you first, and that you were useful. But, Beth … be careful. He’s dangerous. No one can ever be sure what his motivations are or where his allegiance lies.”

“He’d never hurt me,” I said assuredly. At least I was positive he wouldn’t kill me.

“You believe that?” Ian asked skeptically.

“I know that,” I said, anger clouding my vision in a pink haze.

We stared at each other, neither wanting to be the first to break away. The sulfurous smell of anger stung my nose.

“It’ll be okay, Ian. I’ve got to go. Give me a number in case I want to talk,” I said.

His lips twitched slightly and fell into a grimace. “I can’t.”

“Fuck you, too,” I said and turned away. The flowers in the meadow were amazing and a good distraction from my cousin.

I had a black thumb, killing anything before it had a chance to sprout. I bent down to pick a yellow bloom from the ground. It was large, mustard gold, with blue dots speckling the edges. Blackish-purple bulbs, drops of dew clinging on the velvety petals, caught my eye. I walked farther away from Ian, reaching for more colorful blossoms.

“Beth.”

He grabbed my free hand and pulled me up into a bear hug. He was solid muscle under his clothes. I could feel them ripple as he hugged me even tighter.

“Be safe.”

He was gone before I registered the goodbye. I rolled my eyes and returned to the colorful blossoms. Odd as it was to meet him in the parallel dimension, I wasn’t excited. I wasn’t even surprised. I sat down by the stream, inhaling the scent from the posy of blossoms in my hands, and closed my eyes. It was so quiet. No birds chirped. The wind, if there was one, wasn’t audible.

I sat up abruptly, Sasha’s voice whisking me back to the human dimension.

“Bethany, are you all right?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” I blinked several times in an effort to focus. The bleary edges became Sasha. His expression was odd, as if I had asked what the answer to one plus one was.

“You’ve been out for a long time,” he said. He rocked on his heels and settled into an indentation on the foam mattress, a glass full of his favorite green poison in his hand.

“Guess I was really tired.” I stifled a yawn back and stretched.

“Tired enough to sleep in a comatose state for nearly 24 hours?” he asked. His hand tightened upon the tumbler.

“What are you talking about? I just rested my eyes for a moment.”

I rolled over to where he sat and placed my head in his lap. The grandfather clock chimed the hour as I looked up into his eyes. Eminem played in the background, the bass drumming persistently as he looked searchingly in my eyes.

“24 hours, Minx.”

“Damn, what time is it?” I asked, briskly rubbing my eyes.

“I have to leave,” he said. He started to rise.

“I want to come with you,” I said, scrambling up after him.

“Not this time.” He walked towards the breakfast bar, placing his glass down softly on the counter. He didn’t turn around to face me, his dark profile almost concealed by his black garments.

“Sasha, I’ve got a bad feeling about tonight,” I said.

I was up off the bed, turning in circles looking for my shoes. I peeked under the bed and sighed in relief to see my hi-tops. I swapped jeans and grabbed a reasonably clean t-shirt off the floor. I spotted my keys and some crumpled bills on the nightstand and stuffed them in my pocket as well. Sasha still hadn’t turned around when I sat on the bed.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t have the luxury of time to indulge your fantasy of equality,” Sasha said.

I was lacing my sneakers as quickly as possible. “What if something happens to you?” I asked.

I was unprepared for the wave of energy that blasted throughout the room. It tumbled books and knick-knacks off the shelves. Pictures and paintings came crashing down off the walls. Sasha turned around, his eyes dark purple while all other color was sucked out of him.

“That, pet, is precisely why you can’t be there. There’ll be no one in the cemetery but Lilith and me. You’re too human. If I should lose, Lilith will be able to kill you.”

“Sasha, please,” I said. I rose to meet his enraged glare. He just wasn’t feeling the same sense of urgency I felt.

“Bloody hell.” In a lightning quick move, his fist slammed into the wall above my head, leaving a sizable hole in the drywall.

“You won’t stop me,” I hissed back.

His laugh was harsh, the air quivering with anger. I was suddenly wary. Self-preservation cautioned me to be afraid. Very afraid. I scooted away from him as his anger reached the point of violence.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “Aren’t you always preaching restraint?”

“You’ll follow my orders. That was part of our agreement. Now is not the time to renegotiate.” He came towards me in furious strides.

I danced away from his reach, anger quickly replacing the fear.

“Give me a fucking reason, asshole.” My hands began to tingle as my sight blurred with a wave of pink dots.

“I know where you’ve been.”

The change of topic had me baffled. “What?” I asked. The sudden blast of sulfurous energy left me the distinct impression that he was about to strike me.

“I know you were in the Realm, Minx. Don’t you realize that as an elf, the trees talk to me? No, you wouldn’t.” He gulped in air as he hit the wall again to punctuate his sentence. “They told me about your rendezvous with the warlock. They told me how you held hands. How he held on to you before he left. Do you take me for a fool?” He swiped at a table in his way.

“It’s not what you think. I didn’t go there on purpose, Sasha. Stop,” I said between angry breaths. I reached for a lamp and swung it at his advancing body. It shattered on his forehead, a trickle of blood forming on his hairline and falling, drop by drop, onto his shirt. It didn’t even slow him down.

“It’s never what I bloody well think.” He spat on the floor, inches from my feet.

“Why can’t you believe me? Let me explain.” I held my hands out, angry welts forming on my fingertips. Something wasn’t right. My vision was pink and red; a tingling, numbing sensation was spreading out from my lower back. Sasha’s profile was hazy, and his voice floated in angry waves between us.

“Explain what? Do you know what’s going on? No, you don’t. You must trust me implicitly. This isn’t a fairy tale.” He bellowed avoiding my red, glowing hands.

“Are you jealous?” I asked.

Jealousy. That was the emotion I was picking up from him. I’d felt it before, from customers in the bar. Licorice, sickly, sweet. How absurd.

He pinned me against the wall, his eyes trained on the floor. He moved in closer, his head resting on my own.

“Jealousy is a human emotion,” he said.

I inhaled deeply, nudging him with my knee. “Then why are you acting like this?” I asked.

He looked down into my eyes. There wasn’t a trace of color in the black orbs. I could see my angry expression reflected in his onyx eyes as I heaved in air. He released me, pushing off the wall and turning around.

I didn’t move as he began lashing out on the furnishings. He shuddered with each step as he systematically destroyed everything in sight. Trystyn materialized from thin air, a look of utter amazement on his face. Sasha must’ve known he was there, but he didn’t stop until every piece of furniture in the room was in pieces.

With a sigh of contentment, Sasha clutched my arms tightly. His nose touched mine, his breath caressing my lips.

“We’ll talk later.”

Trystyn came forward and Sasha turned. “Do… not… interfere.” He said each word slowly as a wave of energy hit Trystyn, sending him sprawling across the room.

“Oh for all that’s holy, Alek, think,” Trystyn said as he gave me an appraising glance.

“I am. Be gone, I don’t have much time left.”

Trystyn shrugged and popped back out, leaving me once again, alone with an angry elf.

Chapter Nine
:
The Lonely Road

Sasha murmured “pet” right before we shifted. It wasn’t as unpleasant as it had been that first time. Or even the second time.

I noticed with clinical detachment that as we shifted, we passed through the Realm. The shift seemed simple. A portal opened under us, a sea of color swallowing us up. Ian was right; time was different in the second dimension. Once in the Realm, Sasha caressed me roughly. He kissed me madly for minutes. I was weeping, not knowing what was happening. He didn’t say anything as he rubbed my back and hitched me up onto his body. Above us, another portal opened up. This one came down and swallowed us up in a black sea. It took my breath away as it squeezed my torso in a giant vice grip.

We materialized in a room. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell where the room was. In it, I noticed three things simultaneously: A sturdy Victorian chair, some thick yellow nylon rope, and three unfriendly looking dogs. I started hyperventilating immediately; my pulse quickening as I realized just what he thought was going to keep me out of the way. The sweet scent of fear poured from my pores.

“I know … but I won’t be long,” he said. He pushed me towards the middle of the room where the chair stood.

“Sasha, you can’t do this,” I cajoled. “You’ve got to trust me.” I said angrily not understanding a goddamn thing since the moment I woke up.

“I do trust you, Bethany, I do not, alas, trust Lilith. If I take you, she’d kill you just out of perverseness, and I want you around for a while longer.” He chucked my chin up to meet his eyes.

“Where’s Malachi?” I was grasping at straws. I didn’t know what Malachi was up to tonight, but anything had to be better than this.

“He’s busy,” he said as he traced a finger down the length of the necklace.

I kicked him as hard as I could manage, and threw a roundhouse towards his temple. I ended up bruising my knuckles and rolling on the floor. Sasha pinned me within seconds.

“Don’t make me hurt you,” he snarled into my ear.

He picked me up, still kicking and screaming, pushed me onto the chair, tied me up as if he knew every knot ever tied, and didn’t bat an eye as I wept angry tears. He even had the audacity of kissing me softly, sweetly, and brushing the tears from my cheeks as he breathed in my scent.

“I’ll be back, pet; I don’t plan on dying tonight.”

“You fucking, asshole. I’ll never forgive you for this. Do you hear me, Sasha?” I screamed, straining against the ropes. That was a bad idea. The knots tightened, cutting off the limited circulation to my wrists and straining my shoulders back.

He grinned. “We’ll see.”

He shifted once more, and I was alone. Alone and tied to a chair. A comfortable chair but you couldn’t appreciate the fact when you were tied to it. I was also alone, tied to a chair, and facing three ugly dogs.

One was some kind of Rottweiler mix. But whatever he or she was mixed with was a long hair breed. The second dog was a classic mutt. Every mutt looked like this one. Some kind of black Labrador mix.

The third dog was a pure bred. I had a phobia of dogs and knew all the breeds. I had once attempted to get help by going to a psychotherapist who insisted that watching dog shows was a guaranteed cure. That one went a tad better than the attempt to go to Barkus, the dog parade.

Anyway, I had a good knowledge of breeds, and this one had pedigree. It was a beautiful brindle color. It was squat low to the ground, the back legs turned slightly in, no tail to talk of, or if there was one, it was really corkscrewed. The bottom teeth protruded slightly through the folds of the facial skin. The eyes were black, the sign of a good bloodline.

The fact that the dog seemed to have breathing problems proclaimed it an English bulldog. With the face that only a mother could love. Okay, I was stuck here, for it seemed a very long time to come. I assumed that the dogs had instructions and wouldn’t eat me alive but really, how could he do this? Tears escaped and trickled down my cheeks. I closed my eyes and thought about Ian. I should’ve demanded answers when I had the chance.

I settled back to meditate. If I couldn’t be there, I could still make out what was happening through Sasha’s mental leak. Thank goodness for his leaky mind. Right now, there was nothing going on. Only the soft tendrils of guilt wafted through the link. Good.

As I devised plans of paybacks and calculated how much I was going to charge him for tonight, a subtle change began. It was delicate, tiptoeing into my mind one tendril at a time. He wasn’t exactly afraid, more like expectant. Of what? The upcoming reckoning? I always suspected he was a closet masochist not just a sadist.

I shook my head trying to clear it of the cobwebs that had gathered in the last thirty seconds. Masochism wasn’t exactly it. What started to filter through my mind made me gasp in shock.

I concentrated and my anger grew. It twisted in vivid color, spiraling out of control. For the first time in my life, the pink haze that warned me I was about to lose my temper became red. I was seeing blood. I was seeing his blood.

Three distinct voices swirled inside the tiny prison of the room and disturbed my vivid fantasy of castrating the elf.

“I told you she wouldn’t like it. How would you like it if you were tied up?”

“I was tied up before the new master came.”

“I’ve never been tied up to anything; how you mongrels can handle that is beyond me.”

“Shut up you overweight, short, ugly bitch. You’re not even good enough to have a litter. Useless, for all that you’re a pure bred.”

“There’s no need for you to be ugly. Don’t you think we should free the girl?”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do.”