Dockalfar (16 page)

“She’s beautiful.”

“As beautiful as I?” She turned her attention fully back to him, her eyes suddenly magnetic. He drew a breath and tried to think of all the politically correct things to say. But her breasts were spilling out of her décolleté and her face was mesmerizing. Words failed him. He felt vaguely pressed, as if she were forcing something from him that he did not wish to give.

“No,” he finally whispered, thoughts reeling. He was having a hard time remembering exactly where they were and what they were about.

She smiled. “So sweet of you.” She filled a goblet for him and daintily picked at the sweetmeats in the basket. The wine made him dizzy. He should have declined, but it was so hard to deny Leanan anything she wanted and she wanted him to drink it.

He feared that his scant ability with the horse would be diminished completely with the drink. He tried to tell her so, but she laughed and promised not to let him fall. He honestly did not see how she might prevent it.

He leaned against the tree, his cheek against soft moss, and watched the sidhe.

A pair of lovers had shed their robes and twined in the cradle of tree roots.

Undulating bodies, male and male and both disturbingly beautiful. Not far from them, a sidhe lord was caressing a favorite slave. A fragile fairy that could have been male, could have been female.

It responded to the touches as if they were its lifeblood. On a bed of clover two males and a female twined, devouring each other as if particular body parts were succulent fruits.

Alex was too drunk to blush. Too high to remember human values. Human values meant nothing here. Morality was a word that the sidhe put their own definition to. To observe was sensual and darkly exhilarating. Without the strength of the wine to back him, he could never have looked on so calmly.

“What do you see?” Leanan leaned close to him, whispered in his ear.

“I see two men sharing a woman,” he felt inclined to whisper back.

“Maybe she’s sharing them,” Leanan suggested. “Do you like it?”

He turned slowly to look at her, scant inches from him. He furrowed his brow, trying to remember something important. It slipped away from him elusively.

“I don’t know.” He felt confused now. And a little angry at the bewilderment. “Do you?”

She kissed him in answer. She curled her fingers in his hair and pulled him forward. She tasted of wine and honey.

All velvet and silk when her small tongue won its way past his teeth. Sensation was all he could feel or think. The pure sensation of her. He melted into her, fingers in her hair. He pushed her back against the tree. Some part of him was surprised at the languor that infested him.

Not wild excitement or furious need, but a slow, all encompassing lazy desire that was content to revel in the pure feel of her mouth and body. It was almost as if they weren’t his emotions at all.

She pulled away abruptly, leaving him dazed. He barely noticed the sidhe moving towards their mounts, only peripherally aware of the excitement in the air. Leanan pulled him to his feet, beckoning him forward with her eyes. The hunt was beginning. It passed in a blur.

They spread through the wood like a plague of color. They raised melodic voices in war cries and pursued something huge and forest colored. It fought them on its terms. Mundane and animal fierce, and they protected themselves magically.

Invisible armor that the thing could not pierce. He never got close enough to see it while it lived. Just glimpses through the trees of something lichen covered and swift. True to tell, he was not thinking overly much about it. Thoughts were centered on Leanan and nothing else could get a grip to intrude. His mount joined the others around the carcass when it was over, and he stared dumbly at it. At a wound that could have been made by a thirty millimeter shell in a hide as broad as a mammoth. God knew what had made that since they carried no weapons save for silver daggers. They were jubilant, the sidhe. They rejoiced and laughed and planned a fabulous homecoming. They left the attendants to skin the carcass and the majority of them rode for home. Azeral opened holes in reality and they danced through them until the keep stood before them, outlined against the moon.

Leanan took him by the hand and led him through the revelers. A few hands reached out to touch him. Bold enough to caress Azeral’s human in the adrenaline high of a successful hunt. Could any hunt not be successful? She took him to his room and followed him in. Wordlessly wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. He was sinking again. Helplessly caught in her web. Not caring. It was so warm and electrifying, to have her hands on him. To feel her fingers on his flesh as she disrobed him and pushed him down into the pillows. She touched him everywhere. With her fingers, her lips, her sharp teeth. His mind flooded with images of her…with Leanan herself. She invaded him there in the most private of places while she brought him physically to life and urged him to invade her. He did. With abandon. There was nothing but Leanan. If there had ever been anything else, she did not allow him to remember.

He reached his climax too quickly, but she would not let him release. She held him in check with her body and her magic while she sought her own pleasure.

He wanted to scream with the delicious frustration, the exquisite pleasure. She smothered it with her mouth, pulling him down and binding him to her with her slender arms. She kept the movement, never stopping, never letting him descend from the pinnacle she had brought them to.

It almost hurt. Body and mind cried for release. He felt her in his head, beautiful, graceful, erotic beyond belief. She beckoned him to join her there. Whispered encouragement when he struggled ineffectually to free mental restraints and soar with her in that new manner. She wrapped her legs around him and thrusting upwards hard, she let the physical climax come and he gasped in joy. And something ruptured.

Something in his mind ripped and tore free. He could see her now, inside him, a bright beautiful bird that danced about his sluggish self. He reached out mental hands and touched her. He could feel her. Her warmth, her presence. She led him on, coupling with him and it was more than the physical sex could ever have been. She led him outside of the sweating bodies, drew him up into the sky and let him fly. He cried in awe. He cried at the world as he had never seen it before. The stars were white lights in the darkness, the moon a bulbous globe that beckoned. He could fly to the moon. She held him from trying with a caress. She demanded that he pour the newfound joy into her, pulled it from him. Desperately he grabbed to stop the theft, but she was too strong, too clever for him. So he searched for more.

He opened a cleft and it poured in faster than she could take it from him. He was content to share with her. He was content to lie in her embrace exposed and besotted by what she had awakened. He trusted her. She told him he could trust her. No barriers between them. He had no notion how to raise the unnatural defense and she gently crumbled natural ones, insisting that it was for his own good, that he needed her guidance. He could do naught but believe in her. Let her walk the paths of his most secret inner self. She found his innermost fears and made light of them, banished them with a flick of her will. Traveled his memories, his cherished pictures of home and childhood and friendships gone by, and she made them inconsequential. She discovered his passions and his loves and they were nothing next to the glory that was Leanan.

She made him forget and he let her.

Then there was another. He started at the unfamiliar intrusion, reflexively snapping to attention and trying to force it out. But it was in him, and too powerful to oust. It made Leanan look tiny and pale. It was not gentle nor did it make excuses for its trespass. It ripped to shreds the walls Leanan had gently lowered and imprinted its will on his own. He cried out, struggling, shocked into hesitation and stupor. That was all it took. There was no fighting it. Only panic and fear, and the suffocation of free will. There was no will but the will of that power. He cried in desperation one last time, appealing to Leanan. But she watched impassively. A speck of light in the blackness that was descending like a great hand crushing the breath from him. Then nothing. Nothing.

~~~

Azeral crouched in the darkness, hair falling over his shoulders. Two naked bodies lay before him. The pale skin of his daughter against the darker of the human. She smiled up at him, arms wrapped about her lover whose tear-streaked face was pressed to her breast.

“You did well,” he complimented her, placing a hand on her hip.

“It was not so distasteful a task,” she purred. The look of fulfillment was in her eyes. He looked at the boy. Not displeasing, for a lesser creature. Humans had always been a fascination of Sidhe.

He ran a hand down skin that was not as soft as sidhe skin, but smooth and taut and covering lean muscles. And his. Leanan had opened the channel to earthly magic and had laid defenses bare and Azeral had swooped down for the kill, binding mind and will to him.

It could not have been done once the boy realized the power and learned even some small degree of skill with it. The binding had to be done at the first discovery of magic, at the climax of mental release when he was defenseless against intrusion. Sex was the easiest path to that defenselessness for men. The moment when they felt most powerful and were most vulnerable. The moment when the woman held mercy in her hands and so skillfully and gratifyingly pretended that she was the receiver, the weaker of sexes.

The boy belonged to him now, and Azeral had experienced a pinnacle of his own upon that realization, upon the feel of earthly magic that had been forever out of his reach filling a vessel that he held control over. The human could draw the unused magic of earth. Azeral could draw the power of the human.

He would have to be careful. His binding was complete, and there were no natural defenses that he had left whole. It would be too easy to burn the vessel out.

It was too valuable to risk that. Careful tutoring, careful training was what was required.

He sat down beside them, calming his breathing. Leanan continued to look at him, stroking her human’s back. He leaned over the boy to kiss her lips, then whispered against them.

“I give him to your care, daughter. Be careful with him. He’s fragile and precious.”

“Trust me,” she smiled and he sat back thinking she was too much like him and not enough like her mother, who could very well be trusted. But of course, her mother hated him and would be surely content if he were dead. He thought that fine lady would be aghast at the new power he had claimed for his own. It was a pleasing thought.

He kissed the boy’s slack lips, tasting his daughter upon them and she laughed softly, pressing against his shoulder, twining her fingers in his as they explored his new possession more thoroughly.

~~~

The wind had picked up and gained an ally in the form of a light rain. It pattered softly on the leaves above, occasionally hitting Victoria as she walked the forest path. It was almost sunrise. Another sunrise in this land. She was alone. She was not frightened by the fact. She was tired, drained. Both emotionally and physically. Magically, she did not know how she was. Or what.

She thought she might have been a monster. An anomaly, like Jackal and Hyde. A crazed, wild thing overcome by her own power. She felt corrupted. Dirty. She had used up all the tears in her long ago, when she had first fled. Tears of shame and horror at what she had become.

What had she become? That she could create such beauty and yet plummet to such depths of moral taboo.

That she could want something not even of her own race. No! Not her. She, Victoria, had not desired him. It had been the power driving her. Like some scheming split personality that took over her own. She despised him for driving her to it. She hoped him dead. But she knew he was not. She knew in her heart with a clenching certainty of dread that he would not give up so easily.

A racking sob that she had no tears to give up to escaped her.
Oh, Alex. Where
are you. I need you!

She needed to explain. To have him tell her he understood that she had not been at fault. To have him tell her she was not a freak. Just to hold her. She needed that more than anything. She needed to know he was all right. With all this newfound power of hers, it seemed reasonable that she might find him. That she might call out to him as she had the sprites and the fairy. But she was terrified to use it. If she called it forth it would consume her again and she would cease to be Victoria and become the wild creature whose primal urges controlled her. She could not risk that again. She had to keep the thing coiling inside her tightly leashed.

So she walked through the forest, desolate. Hating herself, but unafraid. For the first time in her life she had no fear of physical harm. Mentally she was terrified.

God, yes! But nothing that might attack her from the forest raised doubt. She came to the edge of the forest and paused in the lush undergrowth, staring at the rolling plain land. They went on forever. There was no telling where the sidhe might be.

To walk them, without cover seemed foolish. If any sidhe lived under the hills, they would not open their dwellings to her, a human woman. And there were no berries or fruits to find on the plains. She sat down, under a tree and pulled her knees up to her chest. There was such pain there. Too much agonizing. Too little sleep.

~~~

The fairies, those not huddling in the far corners of the Alkeri’na in terror, were greatly distraught. They chattered in agitation that was in no wise normal fairy behavior. No few of them wilted from unaccustomed worry. Most of them had done nothing other than dance and cavort about the endless reaches of the great wood for the duration of their immortal lives. Very few had ever seen death, other than what nature and its predators inflicted upon the unwary denizens of the forest.

Most certainly none had ever touched death. Very few had seen one of their own kind struck down with violence. They had done both of those impossible things in the period of one night. Most could not cope.