Claimed by the Elven Brothers: Decision (An Elven King Novella Book 1) (2 page)

Seeing the elven brothers walking side-by-side as they slowly approached
me was a bit of a shock, but in a good, pleasing way. They looked so much
alike, from the narrow lines of their faces to the same shade of golden blond,
shoulder-length wavy hair that I wondered if they were twins.

I stood up immediately, wanting to already be on my feet just in case I
had to make a run for it. They both paused about a meter away from me, the
brother—Locien—looking at me with sharp eyes as though he expected me to bolt
at any moment. As I silently stared back at him, I began to see the differences
between him and Seren. His eyes were a slightly darker shade of green, his
eyebrows slanted a bit higher, and his entire demeanor stiffer, more contained.
It was enough that had they been dressed identically, I could have easily told
them apart.

Just looking at them together made my heart race, but for two very
different reasons. I suddenly felt as though I was in the presence of a couple
of predators, and the feeling both scared and excited me.

“You are afraid,” Locien spoke suddenly, making me jump. His voice was
nearly identical to Seren’s which was kind of weird. “Why?”

“Why?” I repeated a bit incredulously. “I’m standing here looking at a
pair of
elves
straight out of last night’s dream! Why do you think?”

“A dream?” He frowned and turned to Seren. “You are right. Her eyes
have definitely been clouded by another.”

“What do you mean ‘clouded’?” I demanded.

I was really getting tired of all their vague suppositions, especially
when they insinuated that someone had really tampered with my mind. Either
that, or someone had slipped something funny into my drink the last time I went
out with the girls and I was lying in a ditch somewhere having the most screwed
up trip-out in existence.

“Sometimes, when humans stumble into the Inbetween and encounter a
Sidhe
,
they are so frightened that it is impossible to even speak with them,” Seren
explained. “Thus, an enchantment is placed on their minds. It makes things less
certain, dreamlike, if you will. It allows their fears to melt away.”

“In other words, exactly what I described to you earlier,” I said,
taking a step back in rising alarm. “Did you do that to me?”

“No,” Locien said shortly. “When you first saw us, you were curious,
talkative. There was no fear in you at all, so there was no need. Looking at
you now, ready to flee like a rabbit confronted by a pair of wolves, it is as
though we are speaking to a stranger.”

Suddenly, he shot forward and grabbed my upper arms before I could even
cry out in alarm. Then a feeling like a cool breeze washed over my entire body,
and I abruptly found it really hard to think or even to focus on the bastard
elf that had just blindsided me. I had only a split-second to consider kneeing
him in the crotch before even that thought was lost as my head swam beyond all
coherence, and a sense of wellbeing flooded my consciousness completely.

It felt as though I floated within that pleasant state for an eternity
before another sensation penetrated my awareness. There was something warm and
firm pressed against the length of my back. It was another long moment before
my head cleared enough for me to understand that I was staring at a field of
wildflowers as far as the eye could see, marred only by a pair of trees…

“This damn dream again,” I muttered in sudden realization.

I blearily looked to my left, and sure enough, one of the elves was
seated in the grass, one leg stretched out and the other bent up, his arms
resting against his knee as he watched me keenly. I stared back at him mutely
for a few more seconds before I recognized him as Locien.

“Where’s—” I began, then cut off with a startled gasp when I felt
something squeeze my middle.

My eyes shot down and saw a pair of black-clad arms wrapped tightly around
my stomach as well as a pair of long legs also clad in black stretched out in stark
contrast alongside my khakis. Was I
sitting
in Seren’s
lap
? This
was certainly something new. In the previous dreams, I couldn’t recall ever
being this near to either one of them.

Well, I supposed there were worse things to dream about than lying in
the arms of a hot guy, even if that hot guy had pointy ears.

“Do you remember the last thing we talked about yesterday?” Locien
suddenly asked.

I frowned, considering. I remembered us having some of that
weird-tasting elven drink with an even weirder name I could never remember,
much less pronounce correctly. I got the sense that we had talked a lot, that I
had gotten riled up, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recall
anything. Oh well—this was a dream, so it really didn’t matter.

I shrugged. “No clue.” I looked over my shoulder at Seren. “I don’t
even know how we ended up in this position, but I have no complaints.”

I pressed back against him and grinned playfully. My smile widened when
I saw his already large pupils dilate in response. I really hoped I didn’t wake
up anytime soon. This dream seemed to be heading in a really interesting
direction this time.

Locien sighed heavily, capturing my attention again. “There is nothing else
to be done,” he said, a hint of irritation coloring his tone. “The suggestion
is gone, but apparently, so is almost seven days worth of interactions. We
shall simply have to begin again.”

“She seems receptive enough,” Seren said against my ear, the feel of
his breath and the soft vibrations of his voice making me shiver a bit.

“I can be
very
receptive,” I agreed in a low voice, turning
around just enough in Seren’s arms to place a light, teasing kiss against his
exposed neck. Might as well make the most of this dream while I had the chance.

Instead of tightening his embrace as I had expected, Seren went
positively rigid the moment my lips touched his skin. I pulled back immediately
in surprise and looked up at the younger elf’s face, but he wasn’t looking at
me at all.

“Locien! You—” he began, something like anger flashing in his eyes.

“I swear I did not do anything more than remove the suggestion!” Locien
interjected. “You
know
His Majesty would never approve her otherwise, so
why would I even
chance
it now that we have finally come so close?”

They might as well have been speaking some elf language for all I
understood what they were talking about. I was also a little annoyed that this
dream wasn’t going the way I wanted. I couldn’t imagine why my brain wanted to
derail my efforts. It had been a couple months since I had split with my last
boyfriend, so wasn’t it reasonable that I had conjured up a pair of
unrealistically gorgeous men out of a need for some male companionship? Yeah, I
had to admit, a threesome was a bit overboard, but still!

“Then are you certain there was only one suggestion implanted?” Seren
demanded.

Locien nodded. “I looked beyond even her subconscious to her essence,
itself. There was nothing else.”

Apparently, they were intent on talking over my head as though I wasn’t
even there. I needed to do something fast before the flow of the dream changed
again or they disappeared completely. While Seren was distracted, I quickly
twined my arms around his neck and rose up to crush my lips against his
mid-word.

He let out a startled “
mmph
!” and then immediately tore his lips
away before I could really start to appreciate the softness and fullness of
them. The look he gave me was so bewildered that I couldn’t even feel offended
at his instant rebuff.

“You don’t want to?” I asked, wondering why my own mind was insisting
on torturing me like this.

He exchanged a brief, inquisitive look with his brother. “Do you
remember us being intimate before?”

“What difference does it make?” I replied a little sullenly. “They were
different dreams, anyway.”

“Of course,” Locien spoke suddenly.

I looked over to him, and he was looking at me with a crooked grin. In
that moment, he looked so much like Seren that it was uncanny.

“Megan, you think you are dreaming right now, do you not?”

“Of course I’m dreaming,” I scoffed. “I’m in the middle of a huge,
foggy field talking with a couple of
elves
.”

“This is not a dream.”

The absolute gravity lacing Seren’s voice made my heart stutter and
sink to the pit of my stomach. Okay—maybe it was time to wake up because I
didn’t like the direction this dream was now heading. I smacked my hands hard
against both my cheeks and was a bit shocked at how much it had stung. I
couldn’t remember ever feeling any sort of pain no matter what had happened to
me in my dreams.

“This
has
to be a dream,” I said stubbornly as I rubbed one of
my now-throbbing cheeks.

There was probably something seriously wrong with my head if I was now
arguing with what was essentially my own subconscious. I couldn’t for the life
of me understand how I had managed to turn a perfectly good, potential wet
dream into something this convoluted.

“Do you not recall speaking to us earlier near the doorway between this
world and the human realm?” Seren asked.

“I can’t even remember how I ended up lying in your arms. Hell, I don’t
even remember going to bed, or what I did at work today. Everything after
yesterday is a complete blank. What more proof do I need that I’m dreaming than
all of that?”

“Her lost memories today are probably my doing,” Locien said. “They
were intricately connected to the enchantment I lifted from her mind, so I am
not surprised she remembers nothing of our latest meeting. At least now we know
for certain that she somehow came in contact with another
Sidhe
sometime
between when she left us yesterday evening to a couple of marks ago.”

“What do you mean, ‘she’?” I asked, wondering why I was even bothering
to follow this dream’s script any longer.

“It’s the name of our people,” Seren explained.

“Okay, but you are the only elves I have ever dreamed about if that’s
what you’re wondering,” I said, resigned to letting the dream just run its
course until I woke up.

Locien released what sounded like a frustrated sigh. “You were not
quite this obstinate the first time we met. In fact, you were rather certain
that you lacked the imagination required to dream up this world, and my brother
and me especially.”

“I
imagine
that I could practically see
anything
if some
asshole slipped something nasty into my drink,” I retorted. “If this isn’t a
dream, then the only logical explanation is that I’m on some wild trip because supernatural
things like elves and vampires and werewolves aren’t real. Unless—” I sucked in
a sharp breath and instantly leaned away from Seren. Could they be—was this
really—had I just
kissed
a—

“For the last time, we are
not
aliens,” Locien barked before I
could even choke out the word. “We
Sidhe
have been living on this earth
longer than humans have even existed.”

I looked at him skeptically. “Then why is it that we only know about
elves through myths and stories?”

“That is because the elven realm exists within a different dimension of
the same overall space. To use a human phrase, it is the flipside of the same coin,
the coin in this instance being the human realm.”

“So…are you telling me that I’m in the elven realm right now?” I asked
slowly.

Was I really awake? I wasn’t sure I was ready to believe that. This was
all just too crazy.

“This is the Inbetween,” Seren replied, sounding infinitely more
patient than his older brother, “a pocket of existence where both humans and
Sidhe
can meet in our true forms.”

“How in the world did I get here? Did you bring me?”

He shook his head. “We only provided the doorway.” He pointed towards
the two conspicuous trees that lay a few dozen meters away. “You stepped
through all on your own.”

I snorted. “I find that even harder to believe than all of this
craziness being real.”

“The first time you came here, you said you had accidentally stepped
through the doorway while in search of a phone lost as you were jogging.”

“I guess that’s plausible enough,” I said grudgingly, “but why did you
open a ‘doorway’ along a jogging path of all things?”

The smile he directed at me was enigmatic. “
That
is the very reason
why we have been meeting here with you for the past seven days.”

As Seren’s words echoed throughout my mind, an excitement like nothing I
had ever experienced before welled up from somewhere deep within me, and it was
in that moment that I finally believed that all of this—the Inbetween, talking
with a pair of elven brothers—was really happening. There was no way the raw
emotion that was now thundering through me, making my pulse race and my body
tremble, could have been generated by a mere dream. Somewhere, buried within
the lost memories they had spoken of earlier while I had been busy throwing
myself on Seren, I knew the answer to my own question, and the thought of
hearing it again was enough to get my adrenaline pumping.

Still kneeling awkwardly between Seren’s legs, I moved over to sit
cross-legged beside him. Both elves stiffened and watched me with narrowed,
keen eyes, as though they expected me to make a dash to the doorway between the
trees. Maybe I had already tried. I frowned, starting to feel really pissed
that there were parts of my life that were missing. Any number of awful things
could have happened—or good if this inexplicable excitement that filled me was
anything to go by—and here I was confused and clueless about everything.

“Tell me,” I said, looking expectantly between the brothers.

“It’s simple, really,” Locien said. “We are searching for the woman who
will bear the children that will continue our family name.”

For a long moment, all I could do was stare back at him. I don’t know
what I had been expecting him to say, but I could safely say that anything to
do with babies hadn’t even made the list.
This
was the reason for my
sense of excitement? I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I never planned on having
children at all!

“You’re looking for a
wife
?” I asked, not able to hide the
incredulity I was feeling. I glanced over at Seren, who was looking at me with
a rather serious expression. “Both of you?”

“Eventually, yes,” Locien answered. “For now, we seek a mistress
willing to come with us to the elven realm for that eventual purpose.”

“Wait, wait!
Why
in the world would you even want a human for
that?” I demanded.

“Because it is our only choice,” Locien said rather matter-of-factly.

I crossed my arms over my chest in consternation. “You can’t possibly
expect me to believe that there aren’t any female elves left in your world!”

As soon as the last word left my mouth, I cursed my loose tongue when
Locien’s expression visibly darkened. I had a really bad habit of just blurting
out the first thing that popped into my mind when I was worked up, and 99.9% of
the time, it made things not just worse, but a thousand times worse.

“I’m sorry!” I said quickly before either elf could say anything. “That
was a really shitty thing to say, wasn’t it? You don’t have to say anything
else about it…”

“No, for what we are asking of you, you have every right to know the
reasoning behind our actions here,” Seren said. Where Locien looked upset,
Seren’s eyes held a sort of quiet sadness.

What they were asking of me…

It finally sunk in exactly why I was sitting here with them, why they
were even bothering to answer my questions in the first place. If I had been
just some hapless human that had accidentally stumbled into a place I had no
business being, if they really meant no harm, they would have sent me on my
way. Maybe they would have even erased my memories of the whole incident as
they had alluded was something an elf could do.

However, if I believed that I had been coming here for at least a week,
then it must mean that—what? That this was a strange sort of date? An
old-fashioned courtship? Did they expect me to choose one of them sometime
soon? There also had to have been at least a little interest on my part since I
had kept coming back so many times.

“Do I? I don’t remember at all, but…” I said hesitantly as I looked at
both brothers in turn. “…did I make any promises to either one of you?”

“Just that you would consider our proposition,” Locien replied.

“To choose one of you? To go to the elven realm? What?” I persisted,
feeling my mouth go dry with more anxiety than I wanted to admit.

“Not to choose,” Seren said, “but to accept.”

Tilting my head in confusion, I opened my mouth for another question,
but he held up a hand sharply, instantly stilling my tongue before I could even
utter a word.

“For over five hundred years, an elven child had not been born in the
realm. Due to a miscalculation by our distant ancestors, every few thousand
years, our women will begin to be born barren, and eventually, we must mate
with humans not only for the chance to have children again, but to also inherit
the exceptional fertility of the human race.”

“So what you’re saying is that a whole bunch of elven men, including
yourselves, have come to my world to look for wives? I can’t imagine that would
go unnoticed for long. I’m surprised there aren’t already videos of elf
sightings up on YouTube.”

Seren smiled. “It’s nothing like that. Each family must petition King
Sethian, himself, for permission to seek a human bride, and he only grants
permission to a handful of men every year. Even then, it could take years or
even decades to find a suitable bride. Locien and I have been looking for
almost twenty years now.”

“Wait—don’t tell me you two have been sitting in this Inbetween place all
that time waiting for some poor random woman to fall through your doorway like
a couple of spiders in a web waiting to trap a fly!”

Seren wrinkled his nose in obvious distaste. “Hardly. I believe we
would have easily found a suitable bride within the first year had our
circumstances not been so complicated.”

“What do you mean?”

“The king’s law dictates that there can only be one human bride per
family,” Locien cut in. “Normally this does not pose a problem as the
Sidhe
were not a very fertile race even before the problems first began to manifest
in our women. It is not uncommon for only one child to be born per couple,
rarely more than two.”

“Yes, I see what you’re getting at,” I said with a sinking feeling.
“You both want children, but the king would only allow one of you to marry a
human.”

“Correct,” Locien said. “That is why Seren and I have decided to allow
fate to decide.”

Seren reached over and took my hand. The moment I felt his strangely
soft skin against mine, I swear my heart stopped for at least a couple of
beats. No—he wasn’t about to…! Sure I had kissed him earlier, but that was
because I had thought this was all a dream. It sure as hell wasn’t because I
wanted to marry the guy, or elf, or whatever!

“I don’t—” I started to say, my voice pitched slightly higher with
panic, but Seren pressed a finger against my lips, silencing me as effectively
as if he had cast a silencing spell over me.

“Ease your mind,” he said. “We do not expect an answer from you today,
especially now that all of our previous conversations have been lost to you.
What we are asking is extremely unconventional for both the
Sidhe
and
humans, but ultimately, the only course that will leave my brother and me
satisfied in the end. His Majesty has granted us a special permission to bring
a human woman into the elven realm to reside in our household for the time
being as a mistress rather than a wife—a mistress to
both
of us.
Marriage will come later with whoever fathers a child upon the mistress first. This
is why we have yet to find a potential bride. It is a difficult situation to
accept, I know, but one we must try, regardless.”

“Try impossible,” I said, shaking my head. “What you’re asking is for
me to agree to not only go to a place that might as well be on another planet,
but also to sleeping with both of you. While I’ll be the first to admit that
the thought of having two hot lovers sounds like it would be great fun, having
a baby—well, to be blunt, it’s not something I ever wanted.”

Surprisingly, Seren merely smiled at me. “I know, and that is why we
are prepared to spend another seven days, a year, or twenty to change your
mind.”