Chapter 16
Frying Pans and Fires
Oh, how Cha wanted to tell Sunshine every little thing. But… thank all the stars, some shred of wit jumped up and down and screamed in the back of her mind about the danger she was in.
Don’t tell her about Azul. Don’t tell her about Azul. Don’t tell her about Azul.
Azul. An image of her prince charming billowed into her mind, much as his chartreuse silk cloak had ballooned around him when he first leapt into Katu and urged her to speed away.
His intense indigo blue eyes staring into hers.
Those wings. That had been real. He was real and this… This was not. This was a trap.
Cha tried to gather her sex-scattered thoughts.
Azul was why she was here. Because he was here, in need of rescue, and—though it was unforgivably stupid of her—she’d fallen in love with him and his enchanting ways, not this Citrine fae woman who’d very nearly seduced her into bamboozlement.
Way too very nearly.
Stupid stupid stupid. And now here she was in the web with the spider wrapping her up in silky threads, already within reach of those fangs.
She was insanely lucky that Sunshine had decided to interrogate her first, rather than delivering the bite to begin digesting her while she lay paralyzed with sexual longing.
Manipulated and used—just as she’d always feared Azul had weaponized to use on her.
Well, at least now she knew what that felt like when a fae really put the whammy on you. The question was, how to extract herself from the jaws of death. Or from a short life as this fae’s human pet. She knew which she’d pick.
Sunshine, growing impatient, pricked Cha’s lip with a sharp nail. “Speak, pretty one. I’m eager to hear tales of your adventures.” She wiggled a little, so those dangling breasts bounced, nipples like ripe berries for biting.
Yeah, that would go over well.
“I wanted to race the high yellow ley lines,” Cha answered honestly, hoping the earnest truth would buy her a little time.
It was a fae trick, to dance around the truth without actually lying, and thus risky because the fae might be more likely to detect the ruse and guess the truth.
But some intuition whispered that Sunshine would know if she lied too wildly.
“How did you get through Moonstone?” Sunshine pressed, clearly suspicious.
“Darkened windows and wore my shades.” Cha grinned in a way that human men, at least, seemed to find provocative, and reached up to slide her sunglasses off her head and down to cover her eyes.
As she’d hoped, they helped to reduce the overwhelming glamour of the fae a few notches.
Cha actually missed Warg’s grounding presence, which told you exactly how desperate she was.
And desperate she was, indeed, because she couldn’t seem to make herself move beyond that.
She ordered herself to get up, to move away from that sweetly scented flesh, an odor that now reminded her more of the kind of sickly sweet that rotting flesh emits.
She didn’t like thinking about what that leak through the glamour indicated about the fae’s true appearance.
“So you risked life and limb simply to ride the Citrine ley lines?” the fae pressed, clearly unconvinced.
“I love to go fast,” Cha answered. Because she felt giddy—probably the adrenaline rush from being terrified—she hooted and made a zooming motion with her hand.
“Vroom! My carriage cat likes to go fast too. Where is he?” She craned her neck to look, but though Katu had initially laid down under the tree with them, she hadn’t glimpsed or heard him since.
“Never mind your jaguar.” Sunshine pressed a hand to Cha’s forehead, her brain obediently swimming back into confused lust. “Tell me about coming to the castle. If you only wanted to race on the leys, why did you breach the wall?”
To find Azul. The words rushed to fill her mouth, banging against her teeth like trapped flies.
She gritted those teeth, trying to swallow back the damning words.
Sunshine noticed, her frown gathering. “Surely you’re not trying to avoid telling me something, are you, beautiful Bandit?
That doesn’t seem at all lovingly obedient of you. ”
She picked up Cha’s hand and placed it on one bountiful breast. “You want to please me, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Cha answered honestly, squeezing the Sunshine’s tit hard enough to make it hurt.
The enchantment urged her to want to please the fae, but she retained just enough of her ornery nature to cause trouble, too.
“Maybe I was looking for a sexy fae to seduce me,” she added, which satisfied the urge to speak the truth. Only he’s purple, she mentally added.
“You weren’t afraid?” the fae prompted, acting as if the grip didn’t cause any noticeable discomfort.
Maybe it didn’t. The “breast” felt weird under Cha’s hand—not that she’d squeezed any before, besides her own, and who did much of that, really?
—and she didn’t like to think about what she was actually touching.
Glamour apparently worked best from a remove, fooling senses like sight, sound, and smell best, and from a distance.
It tended to get wonky with close proximity.
Of course, other magic, like the sort enchanting Cha into being a happy little human sex slave, came into play then and with powerful efficacy.
Oh, yes, she was afraid. Because she wasn’t an idiot. Or, at least, not an idiot about that.
“Sure, I was afraid. Cha answered fervently. “And am. But sometimes a little fear and pain adds the spice to the sex, you know?”
“Oh, I know.” Sunshine smiled, not at all nicely, a shadow of long fangs in extendible jaws, dripping with slime that was surely poisonous, showed through the glamour momentarily. The fae’s control was slipping in her eagerness. And perhaps in her overconfidence. Could be both. Likely was.
And Cha still couldn’t make herself tear away. She was fully fucked, and not in the good way. Where was a sorceress when you needed one?
“Why, hello there,” Dy’s voice came from somewhere off to the right. “I seem to be interrupting some sort of charming picadillo.”
Sunshine’s head snapped up, her shock making the glamour quake.
Her hair hissed unpleasantly and the thigh under Cha’s cheek lost its lush firmness and became nauseatingly mushy.
“Who are you?” the fae demanded. “This seems to be an infestation of humans.” She might as well have said “maggots,” the way disgust dripped from her tongue.
Dy came into view, her teeth bared in a flesh-eating smile. “How distressing for you,” she said, her tone making it clear she didn’t care in the least. “Like locusts. Or a dreadful fungus.”
“Or maggots,” Cha offered helpfully, still unable to move.
Dy eyed her. “Better release the one you’ve got there,” she said to Sunshine.
“Or what, human?” the fae sneered.
“That’s ‘sorceress’ to you,” Dy replied in a deadly voice.
Her magic lashed out, feeling like a lightning bolt cracking too close, a scent like ozone in its wake.
Of course, it wasn’t a real feeling or smell—just how Cha’s poor, unmagical brain chose to interpret the proximity of holy shit magic!
Abruptly, she was thrown free onto the daffodil lawn, temporarily face down with her nose buried in the surprisingly fluffy stuff that tickled so much that she sneezed violently, several times in a row.
So, she missed some of the initial confrontation between the Citrine fae and Dy, but when she struggled to her feet—such a revelation to have her body follow her own commands again—she saw Dy facing down a creature best described as a virulently yellow preying mantis.
Only mushy, with nauseating dollops of unnamable sacs hanging down.
Cha vaguely recalled some biology teacher mentioning how a preying mantis would bite the head off its mate following coitus and figured that could have been her own fate once the creature had finished interrogating her.
She owed Dy, big time. But what else was new.
Dy’s long, blonde curls—a reassuringly natural shade like corn—flew in the whirlwind of her magic, snaking and crackling as she leveled a barrage of fireballs at Sunshine, who seemed to be intent on capturing the sorceress in one of its seven pincers.
A scorpion-like tail lashed overhead, topped by a squiggling set of stingers dripping viscous yellow fluid that looked uncomfortably like old urine.
While Dy fended off the pincers with precisely targeted fireballs that must have stung, given the fae’s reaction, but didn’t seem to be enough to dissuade Sunshine from trying again and again.
Meanwhile, the stinger snaked closer, just outside of Dy’s peripheral vision.
Cha’s head finally—finally!—clearing enough for her to be more than a sexual lap dog, she checked for the Cinnabar sword.
It had been at her hip the entire time. And, sure enough, the MoonRuby wand remained also safely sheathed at her other hip.
Both of those weapons would have been useful in extracting herself from Sunshine’s grip, if only she’d had the wit to do so.
Saving beating herself up for her foolishness for later, Cha left the wand where it was, still not trusting the cursed thing to behave, and drew the Cinnabar sword.
She swung at the immense stinger—and nearly fell on her face as the blade sank into the mushy surface that was much harder than it appeared.