Dream Lover (26 page)

She remembered:

His hand touched her hair. Lifting it, he inhaled, and the dark curtain of his own long hair swept around her, with the sweet smell of rain, perhaps, or wind. She shivered as she felt his breath on her neck, his soft voice in her ear. Her will drained away.

“One night,” he whispered into their suddenly private world. Her bones went soft with the caressing of his voice. “One night of peace, one night of pleasure. That is all I ask, and you will never see me again, I will bring you back safe, only give me this one night.”

Lele felt the muscle under his clothes, where her hands pressed against his belly; felt the hard strength in his arms where they caught her and held her, and even in the near darkness, she could see the beauty in him, despite the ruin of scars woven across the side of his face, despite the patch that covered one eye.

Even more, there was a sadness that hung over him, palpable and poignant, that drew her.

And where did she have to go? No family, no home, no job, no purpose…

“Who are you?” she asked.

By way of answer, he kissed her, making a sound deep in his chest, a growling sigh, and everything she had been afraid of melted away. Lost in him, she wound her arms around his neck and kissed him, wildly, desperately.

He pulled back. “I have dreamt of you, even when I willed not to. I have watched you, though you have never seen me. I am Kieran.”

The way his gaze burned into hers, the love she saw there, the sweetness of his words, and her own loneliness, all swirled together. Her heart pounded in her chest. The world felt suddenly unreal.

“My name is Lele,” she whispered.

“Make love to me, Lele,” he said, still intent on her face. “This one night…”

His fingers lifted to her face, he whispered words against her skin, words she couldn’t understand, soft and sweet and compelling.

She melted against him, in a liquid rush of longing. She let her head fall back and sighed when his lips found her throat, whispered back to him, “Yes. One night…” Her head swam strangely.

“Only, you lied, didn’t you?” Lele here and now glared at him across the table, still smiling, challenging him with the truth.

He didn’t answer, only stared back at her, a look on his face, his heartbreakingly beautiful face, of love, of surety, of passion.

 

She remembered:

He gave a glad laugh, lifted her in his arms, kissing her again and again. She wound her hands behind his neck, her heart pounding, half terrified and half entranced. He smiled down at her, kissed her again…

…and then he stepped backward.

The world changed. She choked back a scream as she saw the moonrise, the sea, the beach through a wavering curtain of watery light.

He called out. A horse came toward them out of the misty light, bright chestnut, red as fire.

The horse stood still, waited while he lifted her up onto its back, while he mounted behind her. He wrapped one arm around her waist, bending to kiss her again, which she returned, but she was frightened at how fast he had moved, frightened of what was happening.

Frightened, Lele grew angry…

 

They locked eyes over the table.

“You think you deserve me?” she said, a wicked smile lighting her eyes, her voice soft and dangerous. There was mischief in her now, and no telling what she’d do.

“Yes,” he said, answering from that part of him that was predator first and always, all his focus narrowing down to a pinpoint with Lele at the center, because she challenged him, and he would not suffer challenges lightly.

“Prove it…”

She grabbed at the small table as she surged to her feet, heaved, overturned it on him.

Honey and apples, oatcakes and tea flew.

She turned, laughing, unrepentant, and fled for the edge of the balcony, not afraid, never afraid, choosing to show him she could still be angry over the manner of her arrival here, and that even now, she would not give him one inch, and what he would have from her, he would have to earn a thousand times over.

He had thrown himself backward when she flipped the table at him, but he was barely a step behind her as she dove off the ledge, her hands aiming for and catching a tree branch which she swung around, bringing her legs up and over so that his hand missed her foot by a hair’s breadth and he fell through the branches himself, catching not the one he intended but crashing down through the tree limbs until he stretched to his utmost, caught a branch and stopped his fall.

He threw himself upward after her, furious and laughing, wholly in love with her insanity, watched her disappear over the edge of the roof, her long brown hair flying behind her.

The chase went on; she led, he followed, around the house, out into the sunlight. She could twist and turn, but in a flat run, she was never his match. Catch her he did, at the edge of the meadow in which his tree stood, and dragged her under the eaves of the wood, to the side of the stream that ran there, threw her down to the flat rock, with the blood pounding in his ears, his erection immense and painful.

He tore the clothes from her, her bare breasts moving deliciously under his hands as she laughed and struggled.

He caught her wrists, pinned her down, moved his weight over her, not sparing her his strength as he took her. She looked up into his eyes with ferocity, daring him to it, every inch as
strong as he, every bit as much a warrior. She wrapped her legs around his thighs, met his thrusts with equal violence, the sweat glistening on her skin, her hair spread around her like the rays of the sun.

He watched the passion build in her eyes, saw what he did to her, what he
could
do to her; saw into her depths, into every feeling, every thought she had, and that was the gift he had of her that had humbled him finally into love.

She hid not the smallest part of herself, or lied or gave him less than the full measure of her being.

He watched her head fall back, felt her fingers biting into his arms, felt her body contract around him as her orgasm took her. Seeing her pleasure, receiving the gift of her whole being, he lost control, exploding into a climax so powerful, pleasure so overwhelming it bordered on pain….

He collapsed onto the rock beside her, struggling for breath. Softly, he laid his head on her breast, wrapped his arms around her small waist.

Neither of them spoke for a long time.

“It
can
be killed, can’t it?” she asked finally, into the quiet of birds and the gentle voice of the water over the rocks, the wind through the leaves overhead.

“No,” he said. “No, it cannot.”

 

Kieran woke to find the demon perched on the end of his bed. He had grown used to its shape by now, terrible as that was to contemplate. He sat up, rubbed his face, asked, “What do you want, foulness? Here to gloat?”

“To gloat, of course,” the thing said. “Its time is drawing short. Does it understand this? It seems too calm to understand.” It flapped its tattered wings for balance, a terrible thing to look at, all ruin and deformity and bloody open sores. It could be
beautiful if it chose, he knew. It had taken great care to appear beautiful once.

Kieran leaned back on his arms. “I know.” He slid his right hand under his pillow, searching for his dagger. He found it, gripped it tight.

The demon sprang down, hopped across the blankets, leaving a trail of mud, blood, and whatever other unspeakable things it had dragged itself through.

He almost gagged, but he forced himself still as stone, the consummate hunter.

The demon perched between his knees. Kieran shuddered. The bile rose in his throat. A bit closer, he thought, clenching his jaw. Only a little closer…

The thing reached out a claw, tapped Kieran’s chest, ran the claw down his belly. “What sweet meat it will make,” it crooned, trailing its claw lower still. “Many are the demons who will clamor for the privilege of using the Daoine Sidhe, of seeing the great elf warlord brought low. Does it enjoy that thought? Will it savor the endless rape that awaits it? Will it cry out for…”

Kieran lunged forward, lightning fast, his dagger flashing across the thing’s putrid body, and then as the creature staggered back across the entangling sheets, keening wildly, he plunged the dagger into its chest. It cried and thrashed with insane strength.

Kieran threw himself naked from his bed, caught up with his sword, dragged off the sheath, hacked at the demon, still shrieking and convulsing in the now blood-soaked bed, until it was silent and still.

Heart pounding, he stood back, watching the mangled lump of flesh. Hope stirred.

The bloody ruin twitched, and his heart fell. Another twitch, a gruesome cracking of bone, the lump of flesh heaved in the gore at the middle of the bed.

Hope died.

A voice bubbled from somewhere in the middle of the torn flesh, a croak of laughter gurgling through the blood. “Does it think the heart of a demon is kept in its body, where anyone may pluck it out? Does it? Poor, sad fool…”

Kieran’s sword fell from his fingers as he watched the creature’s body, cracking and groaning, rebuild itself.

 

“Wait,” Lele said. “Its heart?”

“Yes.”

“Then to kill it, we have to find its heart?”

Kieran raised himself up on one elbow beside her, and his free hand began again that slow tracing across her skin. She smiled; he didn’t even realize he did it anymore, just reached out for her body like an anchor to sanity, like the ultimate worry bead….

“There’s no knowing” he said, “where the thing keeps its heart, or even what it looks like.”

“I won’t lose you,” she said, focusing every fiber of her being on that one thought. “I will not. It’s going to have to go through me.”

Fear came into his eyes, the first time she could remember seeing him afraid of anything. “Gods,
no
! You think I want that?”

“Hell is something humans created.” She was angry. “Humans sin. Humans hate and kill and rape and steal!” She struggled with the words. “You can’t go to Hell. You’re not even supposed to die….”

“What,” he asked carefully, “do you suppose we are, love?”

“Elves! Like the stories I heard as a kid, beautiful people who love the trees and give them names, who shine in the starlight….” Lele let her head fall back, scrubbed at hot tears with the palms of her hands. “You’re mine. It can’t have you.”

Kieran lowered his forehead against hers and said sadly, “I was a fool to take you, Lele. I should have had the courage to face this alone.”

“No,” she said. “No. No one should have to face this alone.”

He leaned back. “Do not suppose me better than I am, nor any of us,” he whispered. “I brought this on myself, for a pointless quarrel between warring clans over land we could easily have split. I wanted glory. The demon came to me in a beautiful form, purely evil but it looked beautiful then, and it offered me an eye of pearl to replace the one I had lost. It kills, Lele. The eye kills, and I did not listen when the demon told me its price.” His face was bleak.

“It will happen now,” he said, looking up at the light through the leaves. “We have no more time.”

 

They walked naked back to the house; there never were people of any race in the wood, but for Kieran in his exile. They climbed the stairs to his room, neither speaking.

Kieran turned and held out his hands to her. She took them, and was not surprised to find them cold. She looked up at his suddenly colorless face.

Her heart cried out like a child, but she kept her face easy and full of her love, helped him to the bed, and there she made love to him, kissing him, tasting him, exploring his body that she already knew better than her own, riding him when he had not the strength to move in her. His release, when it came, was gentle, rolling through him while she sat watching him, and when his eyes closed afterward, honest sleep but frightening nonetheless, only then did she let herself cry, her heart more broken than she had thought it possible to survive.

Kieran woke sometime after the moon had risen, whole and round outside the window, and reached out for her. Lele caught his hand, kissing it, holding it to her cheek.

“There is a box there,” he pointed to the table by the wall, and she turned to look, jumped to get it, held it out to him.

He opened it, and she gasped, for there was the eye of pearl, glinting in the light of the single candle she had lit, a beautiful thing.

He wrapped one hand around it, “For I will not leave it where it may damn another.”

He reached out for her again, and when she moved close, he let his hand fall to her belly. She pulled open the robe she wore so that his fingers could trace across her skin.

“I had hoped to give you a child,” he whispered. “Was that selfish? A part of me, at least, to live on, perhaps a lovely flower like her mother…”