Secret Worlds (119 page)

“Those were already there,” she answered, blushing. “I must have scraped up against something at the shop. Don’t you need to get that medicine on me?”

Kheelan shook his head. She was hiding something, but now was not the time to push it. Upset as he was, he couldn’t help noticing the matching lacy pink bra and the iron medallion he’d given her earlier, nestled in the vee of her breasts. Some protection it turned out to be. He tore his eyes from her cleavage, and his fingers trembled slightly as he set about removing the shards on her right arm. Once the wounds were clean, he took out the ointment.

“What’s in that?” Skye asked.

He figured conversation would keep her mind from worry, and his mind from sex.

“This is the actual antidote. The wound cleaner was lobelia mixed in apple cider vinegar. The ointment is made of plantain, chickweed and burdock root. Annwynn swears by it.”

“Annwynn?”

“My childhood Guardian.”

“I hope she was nothing like Finvorra.”

As gently as possible, he meticulously applied the ointment to every wound on her arm and leg. After finishing, he sat back on his heels and surveyed his handwork with a skeptical frown.

“I feel a little better already.” Skye tucked a strand of hair behind his ears. “The stings are fading a bit.”

He ran a finger down her thigh, checking one last time to see if he might have missed anything.

Skye drew in a raspy breath.

“Did I hurt you?” He leaned in closer and examined her skin.

“It’s not that,” she answered breathlessly.

She sounded funny. Kheelan glanced up and caught the stark hunger in her green eyes. Sexual hunger.

Need slammed into his gut like a heavy weight punch, constricting his airways, commanding all his attention. His fingers reversed path and trailed upward toward the red patch of hair visible through her pink panties. He cupped her and she pressed into his palm. The silk lace was smooth and damp.

Skye whimpered and the sound of her passion spurred him on.
Just a little taste
. He lowered his head and rained kisses on the soft flesh of her thighs before placing his mouth over her core. His tongue slid into the hot folds of her womanhood and he feasted on her essence. Exquisite. The bit of lace added to the texture and excitement, more sensuous than if she had been laid bare.

Her hands pressed down on the top of his head, driving him deeper, telling him she wanted more. Kheelan slipped a finger inside the elastic lining and thrust finger inside. Skye moaned and her insides clinched and squeezed against it.

A clattering of shattered glass exploded from the hallway. A sound Kheelan well recognized. Damn Finvorra. He’d stumbled again and dropped a glass of whiskey on the floor.

Skye scrambled to a seating position and crossed her hands over her breasts. Hastily, Kheelan grabbed an afghan from the back of the sofa and threw it over her body.

“Be right back,” he promised. With any luck, he’d get to Finvorra before his guardian stumbled into the den, demanding that he clean up the mess.

Kheelan hurried into the hallway where Finvorra leaned against a wall staring stupidly down at the wreckage. Kheelan ushered him into his recliner, cleaned up the spill and broken glass, and retrieved more medicine from the pantry.

In the den, Skye was already back in her jeans and slipping on her sneakers. She wrinkled her nose at the vile looking container of sludgy, black liquid he held.

“What the hell is that?”

“A little something for pain.”

“No thanks. I’ll take some ibuprofen like a normal, twenty-first century person.” She hastily began buttoning her shirt, casting anxious looks at the door as if afraid Finvorra might burst through.

Kheelan winced at the word ‘normal.’ Neither one of them were, her because of her half-fae nature, and him because of his stolen childhood. While human children were raised with Fairy Tales, he had been read Mortal Tales on the ignorant and strange ways of humans. The stories only served to make him more of an outsider with the fairy children. If it hadn’t been for Ealdun and Hefeydd, he would have had no one to play with or talk to.

He started, aware Skye was waving a hand in front of his face. “Hey, you. What were you thinking?”

“About normalcy.” He helped her put on her jacket. “Did you read fairy tales as a kid?”

“Loved them, still do.” She froze, one arm in the coat, the other out. “Did the fairies read them to you?”

“We read Mortal Tales. Only instead of Happy-Ever-Afters they had SEAs.”

“Meaning?”

“Stupidly-Ever-Afters where humans lived in dwellings cut off from the world of nature. They do stupid things like fall in love and get married, actually choosing to mate with one person an entire lifetime, and even worse, they’re usually too blind to see the fairies dancing right in front of their noses.”

“And what about you, Kheelan?” Her words were so soft he leaned in to catch them. “Do you believe in love?”

He scratched the back of his neck. He should tell her ‘yes,’ lead her on. If he told Skye he loved her, she would be more willing to help him even after the attack tonight. But he couldn’t do it. All he knew was that he cared way too much for this human girl, and that scared him more than the Dark Fae ever could.

He cleared his throat. “Are you really feeling better?”

Her shoulders sank. “Positive. It’s getting late, I just want to go home, get some studying in, and then crash.” She buttoned her coat and he followed her out. They headed to the truck.

“Call me if you run a fever or start to get worse. If you’re still swollen in the morning, you need to see a real doctor. “ He pushed down the feeling of guilt for getting her into this mess.

“Sure was lucky you were driving a truck tonight and not your motorcycle.”

She said it casually. A little too casually.

“Until Samhain is over, I thought it would be for the best. The Unseelie Fae have a field day this time of year.”

She regarded him with an expression he couldn’t quite pin down. Part assessing, part thoughtful, and entirely serious. Her green eyes were the darkest he had ever seen them and the light frosting of freckles on her nose contrasted sharply with her paler-than-usual skin. The purple streaks of hair framing her face appeared more prominent too.

His chest squeezed in sudden realization. She had the look of the Fae about her tonight.

Skye latched the door shut with relief. Home at last.

She flung her purse on the nearest chair. Without turning on the lights, she risked pulling aside a bit of the drapes to see if they were still out there.

Dozens of supernatural eyes were focused on the window. She drew the drapes tight and rubbed her scalp where a particularly bold goblin had snatched and pulled out a chunk of hair as she climbed up the apartment steps. Skye frowned. Come to think of it, dozens of arms had been reaching for her hair. It was where the fairies eyes always focused. You would think they’d never seen red hair before.

Either the elf poisoning or the ointment medicine from Kheelan made Skye’s mind synapses sizzle disjointedly as she searched for patterns in everything that happened today. Images flashed: blood oozing from her back, black-gloved hands torturing the pixies, the Unseelie fairy attacks, Finvorra’s drunken leer, and the sting of poison arrows But always the images returned to Kheelan, to his dark eyes with their unusual topaz flecks that lit with passion. Skye sank onto the sofa, weak and dizzy from elf poison.

She had no idea what she was in for when she first agreed to help Kheelan. Her life was at risk. Did Kheelan know it was this dangerous when he sought her out? And, more importantly, did she still want to help him?

Skye remembered the hagstone and stood. The sudden movement made her sway and a shooting pain shot up her spine. She grasped the edge of the chair, steadied herself, then turned on her salt lamp to find the stone she’d put on the end table. She needed to see the good fairies again, a reminder of what was at stake.

The hagstone tingled with energy as she ran her fingers over its water-smoothed surface. It probably wouldn’t work inside but she decided to hold it to the window and gaze outside at the oak tree by her bedroom. She squinted through the stone’s small aperture and was rewarded to see a cluster of dancing pricks of pastel-colored lights in the oak’s outermost branches.

Utterly amazing. She had to help them in this battle. After tonight, only three days remained until Samhain. She could hang on for three more days. In the morning, she would cast a series of protections spells, something she would have done earlier had she known she was in personal danger. Too bad she didn’t inherit her mother’s incredible supernatural abilities. But she could call Callie and ask her advice.

For the first time in the long day, her body sagged in relief. She should have called Callie days ago. At any rate, she was taking action and that made her feel more in control. She went back to the living room and studied her spreadsheets. She was way, way behind in schoolwork. She would revise her spreadsheet after Samhain to make up for the lost time.

Cheered, she went to the bathroom and splashed her face with water and brushed her hair.
Good grief
. Skye dropped the brush. More purple highlights had sprouted at the crown and temples. It was bad enough when the first purple streaks announced themselves overnight when she turned sixteen. She’d heard of people turning prematurely gray, but purple?

Skye would never forget the look on her mother’s face when she walked into the kitchen the morning of her sixteenth birthday, pointing to her hair, and screaming ‘look at this.’ Mom had turned from the stove, a pan of scrambled eggs in one hand. One look at her daughter’s hair and the pan clattered to the floor, yellow globules of eggs spreading over the black and red checked linoleum. Michael walked in and hooted with laughter. “What the heck did you to do your hair?”

“Nothing,” she’d protested.

“Next time you want highlights, buy a box of Clairol,” her mom said, cleaning up the spilled eggs with trembling hands.

“I didn’t do it.” Skye pulled at the purple streaks in hysterics. Mom placed her hands on her daughter’s head, bent over and whispered in her ear. “It’s okay.” No matter how much Skye pleaded, her mom refused to ever discuss it again. She knew something, of that Skye was certain.

She took a deep breath and stared in the mirror. “Add ‘call Mom’ on my to-do list tomorrow,” she muttered. This time she would demand an answer to this bizarre hair phenomenon. Either that, or she might one day end up with troll doll hair sprouting all over her scalp. She checked out the wounded flesh, relieved to see the swelling had subsided. She desperately wanted a bath, but decided it wasn’t worth washing off the antidote medicine too soon. It could wait until morning.

Normally she lay in bed in her deep indigo blue bedroom imagining she was a magical mermaid enveloped in a warm sea. But now the day’s images swirled in a vortex of confusion. Her mind kept looping through the Unseelie preying on the pixies, then turning their attention to her. Tonight wasn’t random, she was being singled out. It couldn’t only be for helping Kheelan. The Fae hadn’t seemed all that interested in him this evening. Only her.

She was too tired to think. Blackness descended like a veil of peace. Her body sank in its vacuum, then rose and floated in the void. Effortless. She swam in black velvet, now punctuated with a few sparkling stars above. Her skin felt pleasantly cool and Skye gazed at her arms and legs, pale as lace in the moonlight and perfect – no burning punctures, no bleeding sores on her spine.

She soared in the blackness then descended to the top of the tree lines. The nearly full red-orange moon illuminated a landscape of silver and gray shadows. The silence gave way to familiar noises – wind swirls of rustling leaves and scraping branches, dogs howling in the distance. Ever lower, she flew between the trees and in and out of branches with unerring night vision. Faster, slower, up, down, even backwards, she maneuvered with a freedom and grace impossible when two-footed on land.

Ethereal visions came into focus. Beginning as balls of brilliant light they crystallized into beings of beauty and grace as she drew near. They came in every size and color under the rainbow. Some were tiny with baby pink skin and clothes made of flower petals. Others were several feet tall, with olive complexions and either red or green caps. Most sported delicately veined butterfly wings of blue, silver, purple and green. The females had long, flowing hair streaked in every shade imaginable.

She drifted low to the ground. A mistake. A couple of young schoolchildren pointed and ran toward her with open mason jars. It took her a moment to figure out their game—they meant to trap her as she had once unknowingly trapped fairies as a child.

Skye flew away from her innocent predators, directionless until she heard the sound of singing with voices that tinkled like crystal. The sweetness and clarity of the notes drew her until she hovered spellbound above fairies and elves. They danced and paid her no notice. Midway through one of the Scottish reels, the fiddle-playing elves looked just past her right shoulder, terror in their neon eyes. The fiddles came to an abrupt, discordant stop. Curious, Skye turned to see what had scared them so.

Columns of wispy fog twisted in the night breeze, forming a wailing trio of banshee spirits with bodies as tall as the surrounding trees. Their long hair was a cascade of grayish-green Spanish moss and their gowns were of the whitest lace. It was hard to tell where their shroud gowns ended and their elongated arms began, so fair was their skin. Against starkly alabaster faces shone maroon eyes that shed black tears.

They opened their mouths and began their wailing laments, wordless and high-pitched. It made her think of death and pain. Helpless, she couldn’t move as they fixed that deathly stare directly at her. A breeze drifted them closer and the three banshees held out their arms, beckoning her to come to them in a deadly embrace.

No, she wouldn’t, she couldn’t. Wake up, wake
up
. Skye struggled to escape the nightmare. She closed her eyes to the banshees and with supreme effort, shook movement into her paralyzed arms and legs. Ever so slightly, she drifted higher, the wind propelling her to a low-lying oak tree limb.