Chapter Five
O ur lips met, and he immediately deepened the kiss. I made a little sound and started trying to figure out how to get the damp shirt off of those broad shoulders. It was the last one I’d bought him, the one that said “I may look calm, but in my head I’ve killed you five times” and I didn’t want to tear it.
But before I could get it over his head, he picked me up, I assumed to lay me on the bed, but he appeared to have a different destination in mind.
“Is the smell really that bad?” I asked as we crossed the room and entered what I guessed was a bathroom.
“No. But I thought you might prefer not to have an audience.”
I didn’t know who he was talking about until one of the Horror Twins gave out a screech of what might have been approval. Or absolutely anything else since their language made nails on a chalkboard sound soothing. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about them already.
But they didn’t follow us inside, although there would have been plenty of space. The bathroom was big, black, and weird, with half the size of the expansive outer room but without the windows that lightened things up. Instead, there was a plunge pool almost big enough for somebody’s backyard, surrounded by plants and mist that didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere but was wafting among the leaves. There were also small lights in all that, like fairy lights on a string only without the string, and possibly made out of real fairies.
I wanted to poke one, just in case, but couldn’t reach it.
There was another archway to the left, which I guessed led to the facilities or a closet, and a large, black stone area on the far, right-hand side down a short hall that looked like it might be a shower, although there were no nozzles for the water. Just a jutting piece of black rock that looked naturally occurring but probably wasn’t, that formed a sort of bench. On which Pritkin sat down after carrying me over there since it was the only option.
I was disappointed, as the bed would have been more comfortable. But I could make do, I decided, and finally got the damned shirt off. And then everything else before straddling him, still dressed myself because I was in too much of a hurry to worry about me.
“Take it easy,” he said, as I accidentally bit his lip.
“This from an incubus?”
“Half incubus, and one who doesn’t want to get stabbed by—what is this?” he demanded, and I looked down to find out that my dress was morphing back and forth from pretty evening wear to a set of full-on, medieval-and-then-some, silver scale armor. It seemed confused, and then so was I as I looked about.
Because this shower wasn’t like any I’d ever seen.
“What’s happening?” I whispered, wondering if we’d triggered a ward.
Pritkin chuckled, his bad mood momentarily forgotten, maybe because he’d just figured out how to collapse the top half of my suit into the base, leaving me topless. And trying to think past the hands, lips, and tongue that immediately took advantage of that fact wasn’t easy. But my eyes nonetheless kept following the floating water globules that were suddenly everywhere.
I didn’t know why or how they were floating about as weightlessly as if they were on the space station. But there they were, with an iridescence that showed me back my clueless face as I stared at them in surprise. Some of them were larger than my head.
They kept coming from all directions, even the floor, starting small but then fusing together to make floating puddles or shattering apart into fragments by collisions. There were a lot of the latter because they were coming fast and furious, until it was less like being caught in a rainstorm and more like swimming with occasional air pockets. It left me trying to breathe between getting punched in the face by the latest water-balloon-sized burst.
Until I miscalculated and breathed in when I should have exhaled and choked.
Pritkin paused what he was doing to make a slash at the air with his hand, and suddenly, the watery smacks became more like caresses as the globules slowed way, way down. I found myself in a wonderland of vaguely green and pink-tinted bubbles that had an iridescence on them I hadn’t noticed before. Some kind of soap . . .
I turned toward Pritkin, a vaguely pink puddle balanced on one hand, grinning delightedly, and caught him looking at me with a strange expression. It was a cross between wonder and terror, which quickly morphed into a frown when he noticed me noticing. I sighed.
And kissed his neck because I wanted to kiss his neck. It tasted like salt, sweat, and soap because he had been getting smacked, too. But mostly, it tasted like him.
It tasted wonderful.
“You act like we’ve decided something. We haven’t decided anything,” he informed me sternly. I mouthed his Adam’s apple, one of my favorite bits on a smorgasbord of delicacies, and felt him shiver. “I know what you’re trying to do,” he added as if there was any doubt.
“Hope so. Didn’t think I was being subtle,” I murmured and bit down.
“Damn it, Cassie!”
I managed to get my armor to collapse a bit further, to the point that it looked like I was wearing dragon scale thigh highs, which . . .
Badass, I decided, and from Pritkin’s expression, he seemed to feel the same. He swallowed and then did it again when I grabbed him, getting an almost comically confused expression on his face. I guessed because it was hard to be stern with a blond trying to sit on your dick.
And succeeding, I thought, groaning loudly enough to drown out whatever stupidity he was spouting because yes, this, this right . . . freaking . . . here, I thought, panting a little as I took all of him, because he was a big boy and I couldn’t always do that immediately.
But I was hungry tonight; no, I was starving , and I guessed he was, too. A moment later, when I was still trying to find a good seat, he helped me out, making me groan as he grabbed my bare backside and shifted my position. And then kissed me, and it told me everything I needed to know.
That he was as starved as I was, that he had missed me, too, so much, that whatever his mouth was saying, his body was glad I was here—
Make that very glad, I thought, screaming a little as he started to thrust. And how the hell he managed to get into a rhythm while being straddled on a narrow rock shelf, which was probably meant for toiletries, and slapped in the face by soap-laden water bubbles, I didn’t know. But damned if he didn’t make it work.
And, of course, I couldn’t let that pass, so I stepped up my game. And would have done even more, but I was too emotional to think straight. I had visualized this moment so many times over the last month while healing from my latest brush with death, and then all the time I was at the dark fey court, which had been a mind trip all on its own, and then during the mad rush to get here, but it had never been like this.
I didn’t care. A prince of the incubi makes damned sure you don’t care, that you can’t think, that your eyes keep wanting to cross and simultaneously roll up into your head and sometimes do. And that your throat is so busy groaning and yelling and shrieking and then laughing as you bounce on his lap and come again and again, as the world slings around you, and as pretty pink water balloons burst in your face so that you can’t even speak.
But my body could. And incubi know that language better than any other. It grabbed him, even while I was still giggling my way through orgasm number three, hard enough to make him gasp for a change. And then groan and laugh as I found a rhythm of my own.
I wrung his pleasure right out of him with wriggles and writhing circles and inner squeezes that I was proud to see had his eyes rolling back into his head. Twice; they did it twice. I was about to go for three, an all-time best, when he had enough of my antics, grabbed my ass, and squeezed while I laughed and squealed and giggled into the skin of his neck.
And even the ripping, tearing noises from outside, where I guessed the requested venison had finally been delivered by a couple of probably scandalized fey, didn’t faze me.
“Think they’re eating the deer or the waiters?” I gasped at Pritkin, who only laughed and kissed me. And kept on doing so while finishing up, to the point that I was breathless and energized and tingly and satiated before my butt hit the plunge pool.
I supposed it said something about the whole experience that I hadn’t even noticed we were moving.
I floated in a post-coital haze in a fey jacuzzi while my new demon pets tore something to pieces next door. Wasn’t how I really thought my life was gonna go, but I’d take it, I thought. And glanced over at Pritkin, who was looking more serene than I could remember in a long time.
I’d take it all day.
But we didn’t have all day, so I was happy that the pool seemed designed to clean off all that soap. It felt like little fingers were running over my skin, stripping away the remains of the last few days’ worth of sweat and grime and finally getting me clean. It was amazing.
“I could get used to this place,” I murmured, sinking lower so the bubbles could do their thing on my scalp.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I could absolutely stay here for a while, enjoying the fey version of a spa. Only Pritkin didn’t seem to agree.
“You won’t find everything so enjoyable,” he said grimly. “I know how stubborn you are, but you need to consider—”
“Leaving you here to fight alone?” I considered it. “Nope.”
“Don’t be so flippant! You don’t know what’s ahead!”
“Like we ever do?” I cracked an eye because he was harshing my buzz, and it was a good one.
“I’m serious. You don’t understand what—”
I gave up, sat up, and put a finger to his lips. Which he instant grabbed in a fist because he was determined not to be distracted this time. Unfortunately for him, so was I.
“Among the many lessons of the past eight months or so,” I told him, seriously because he’d asked for it, “one stands above the rest: enjoy the downtimes. They don’t come along often, and if you spend them uselessly arguing, you’ll regret it when the pressure builds up and you explode.”
He kissed the finger before releasing it. “I’m more concerned about you exploding.”
I sighed and sank back into the evil, evil bubbles. The fey might have finally found a way to trap me. Right now, I didn’t care if I ever got out.
“Okay, you send me away,” I said. “And you lose because there are tons of them and only one of you, and they don’t care if they cheat. And then we lose, all of us, ‘cause Faerie wouldn’t have sent us here if she thought we could win this without the Green Fey. Then the gods come back and kill us all, including me.
“So, I get to spend the last few weeks or months of my life wracked with guilt and fear and mourning your loss.
“Thanks for that.”
Pritkin didn’t reply for a moment, and his voice sounded different when he did. “You’ve changed.”
I sucked in some bubbles, then spluttered and coughed them out again while flapping a hand at him to let him know I was okay. “You think?” I gasped.
I blinked water out of my eyes to see him regarding me soberly. “I wouldn’t have—I didn’t want this for you,” he finally said.
“This?”
“This fear. This pressure. The constant weight of the world on your shoulders, any number of worlds. That ridiculous happy-face T-shirt you wore the first time I saw you—that’s what I wanted for you.”
His hand cupped my cheek, and I smiled at him wearily. “Pythias don’t wear happy-faced Tee’s.”
“They don’t smile much, either. Lady Phemonoe rarely did, and her predecessor wasn’t much better from what I could tell.”
“Gertie smiled,” I said, remembering my old mentor fondly.
“Name once.”
I could name several, but one stuck out. “After a training mission on the Devon coast. She’d set Agnes and me the same job: find the item she’d buried with a time signature that showed it wasn’t from our era.”
“Not from your era?” Pritkin’s brow wrinkled, maybe because he didn’t know Gertie, who had been the Victorian/early Edwardian Pythia. I’d had to go back that far to find someone willing to train me.
I nodded. “Doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes a naughty witch or wizard trying a time spell actually survives and has to be hunted down. But of course, they know we’ll be after them and cast spells to make themselves hard to find. One way to get around that is to zero in on an object they dropped.”
“What kind of object?’’
“Doesn’t matter. You start with the easy things to spot, the kind of stuff that anybody might lose—a handkerchief, a piece of jewelry, even a hairpin—and eventually progress to harder items like a leaf caught on their shoe.
“They all feel . . . different, wrong, out of place, like a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit. The Pythian power knows that whatever it is doesn’t belong in that time and sends up an alert—”
“And you do a locator charm to take you right to them,” Pritkin finished. Because while he might not know Pythian magic, he knew just about everything else.
“That’s the idea. Only no time traveler had dropped this particular object. Gertie put it there to give Agnes a test and sent me along to add an extra layer of difficulty because she was running out of things to challenge her with. Agnes was a bitch, but she was a talented bitch.”
“Another layer of difficulty?”
I smiled slightly. “There was only one object and two of us.”
“Ah.”
“I ended up covered in rotten seaweed, thanks to Agnes shifting me into a pile on the beach. But roughly the same time, my spell caught her and flung her half a mile into a mountain of fish remains beside a pier where the fisherman cleaned their catch.”
Pritkin didn’t say anything but blinked slightly as if he’d thought Pythian training was full of tea parties and tarot readings. Not that there hadn’t been some of those, but there’d been a lot more stuff like Devon. Because our enemies were like the fey, they didn’t play fair, so we had to be prepared for anything.
Including knickers full of seaweed.
Or a really, really pissed-off heir.
“Agnes dropped the object—a lady’s hand mirror—which she’d stolen from me when my spell hit her,” I continued. “I thrashed my way out of the seaweed, grabbed it, and shifted the hell out of there before she could recover. It was a Pyrrhic victory, considering the state of my dress and the fact that I was likely to smell like a corpse for a week, not to mention that I kept making myself gag. But it was a victory nonetheless.”
“Of course it was,” Pritkin said. “You’re a demigoddess.”
I huffed out a laugh. “Yeah, and she was Agnes. I limped back to court, dripping and towing a couple of strands of blackish-green rot, like toilet paper that had gotten attached to my shoe. But before I’d even gotten across the front hall, there she was, snorting like a dray horse and covered in fish guts. And still clutching one of the seagulls, which I guessed had attacked her when she landed in the middle of its dinner.”
Pritkin blinked again like he was having difficulty imagining the elegant lady he’d known that way.
He had no idea.
“It got loose,” I said, “or maybe she threw it at me; I was never really sure. But it flew squawking around the front hall, setting the chandelier swaying and the initiates screaming and me ducking, just before that bitch grabbed me.”
“What happened?” He actually looked interested.
“She was a savage, is what happened. Almost pulled me bald and practically beat me to death trying to get that mirror away from me.”
“Did she succeed?”
I shot him a look. “What do you think?”
Pritkin looked confused. “And Lady Herophile didn’t intervene?” he asked, using Gertie’s reign title.
“Do you remember how we started this subject?” I demanded. “She was laughing so hard she could barely stay upright. Had to clutch the balcony railing so as not to fall off!”
Agnes hadn’t been the only bitch in town.
“But my point in telling you all this was that I spoke the truth earlier. I can hold my own.”
The grin that had been spreading over his face faded. “You shouldn’t have to.”
“None of us should. But that isn’t how life works, is it?”
He grasped the back of my head with one strong hand. “If you stay, you’re going to be careful.”
“I’m always—”
“ Really careful.” Stern green eyes looked into mine, and my stomach, so satisfied a moment ago, started fluttering again. “If it comes down to it, and it’s me or you, you let me take the hit—”
As if!
“—or you go home now. I will have your word, Cassie.”
He looked like he meant it. Which did not make him right! “You always act like I’m the
most important one in this fight,” I said. “While you and Mircea—”
“Right now.”
“—and a lot of other people have played major roles in this war! If you die, how do you
know it won’t be just as devastating to—”
But Pritkin wasn’t listening. “Or you can leave immediately.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I’ll remove myself from this contest, and both you and Faerie can find another champion.”
I glared at him, but he meant it. His eyes never wavered. “You know, you’re being a complete and utter—”
“Your. Word.”
He let me go and stuck out a hand like we were in a boardroom instead of naked and wet and bubbling. But something about the man made me take him seriously anyway, and he looked like he was taking me the same way. There was a time when I would have given a lot for that, for him to trust me, even respect me.
Now wasn’t one of those times.
But I took his hand because I wasn’t leaving. And because Gertie had taught me something else that I hadn’t mentioned. “A Pythia’s word is a complex thing,” she’d mused one night over tea. “Others don’t know what we know or experience what we experience. When they ask for my word, I want to ask them, in what world? At what time? Under what circumstances?
“Those that you would understand, in this one, flat plane of existence that you inhabit, or in the realms that I do? For me, a yes may mean no, and a no yes, for time distorts everything and plays havoc with what we think we know. And frequently leaves all our good intentions in the dust.
“But I don’t tell them that, for they wouldn’t understand. But you. . . Forget about words, Cassie, demanded from you or otherwise. Follow your heart; you have a good one. And do what it tells you.
“It’s the closest thing to truth you’re going to get in this life.”
So, yeah, I took Pritkin’s hand. And shook it. And when he said, “Deal?”
My voice was steady, and my eyes were clear when I answered.
“Deal.”