Stone Song (19 page)

E
lada started breathing again. He didn’t know quite when he’d stopped, but if she’d banished him from her room, he thought he might have slept outside her door in the hall like a dog.

It was true. Her voice had drawn him, just like Keiran, but the idea of snatching her away and keeping her caged like a songbird repelled him. He didn’t want to just hear her voice; he wanted to know the woman behind it.

So far, he liked everything he had discovered about her. She had returned to the Black Rose to save her friend. That made her loyal and brave. She had practiced her music in secret through long, seemingly unloved years, and that made her resolute. She’d tried to help him against Donal’s followers today, and that made her generous and kind, because no matter what they had shared the night before, he was still Fae, and she’d been given good reason to hate his kind.

“I want to pick up where we left off last night. Although,” she added, “I’m not sure that I’d really like to do everything we talked about last night.”

He smiled. “I think I’ve forgotten most of what we talked about. You’ll have to remind me of all the things you suggested.”

She blushed and shook her head.

“Then how am I supposed to avoid those things?” he teased.

“I’m not good at sex talk without a few supernatural drinks in me,” she shot back.

“How about we start with something I
know
you’ll like.”

Her breath hitched. She was intrigued. That was good. The image of Tommy Carrell’s head between Deirdre’s pale thighs had been burning in his brain all day. He wanted to do that for Sorcha. More. He wanted her to lose herself in it, to enjoy with abandon the way Deirdre had, to thread her fingers through his hair and pull his head down to her pretty pink center.

“How do you
know
I’ll like it?”

He was going to overcome her skepticism. “Because I’m very, very good at it.”

“Very, very good at it by human standards?” she asked, swallowing hard. He wanted to kiss her throat and run his tongue over the muscles there.

“Very, very good by Fae standards. With Fae stamina. Would you like me to demonstrate?”

“Yes, please.”

• • •

She had no idea what
she was asking for, only that she wanted whatever he was offering, and she’d come to trust him last night and today. It was fast, too fast for the kind of emotional engagement she feared giving in to—but not too fast for this. She knew that even in this safe haven, her life was in danger. She might not live to have children, she might not grow old like Gran, because she had let the music inside her out and she now lived in a perilous state, her fate tied to the violent world of the Fae.

He backed her to the bed and pressed her down to sit on the edge of the mattress, dragging pillows from the headboard for her to recline on. Then he knelt between her feet and placed his hands on her knees.

The position felt decadent. With a man like Elada at her feet, she felt like an empress on a throne.

“You told me your fantasies last night,” he said. “This has been mine all day, to have
you
like
this
.”

They had played games last night, but they’d been gentle games, and he’d guided her the whole time, never letting her stray too close to the edge of her comfort zone. Now she wanted to test those boundaries.

“Tell me what happens in your fantasy,” she said.

He smiled. It wasn’t the laconic expression he wore when he teased her about her coffee substitute. This was a Fae smile, full of sensual cunning. “You part your thighs for me,” he said. “And you feel the cool air meet warm flesh.”

She felt it before she did it. He’d told her that his voice wasn’t powerful like Miach’s, that he couldn’t conjure images like Deirdre, but his words were made flesh in her.

“Now,” he said, “you fold your skirt back, just a little, to show me where you want my hands to go.”

His fingers were resting lightly on the insides of her knees, exerting a gentle pressure to keep her legs parted. She folded the wool of her skirt up an inch, and his fingers followed. Another inch, and he moved again, until just the gusset of her panties was visible.

“More,” he said.

She obliged him. His thumbs slipped under the sides of her wispy cotton drawers and pulled them down but not off, so they constricted her knees. He moved between them, so his shoulders kept her spread and her panties prevented her legs from falling all the way open. Bound and displayed for his pleasure.

Sorcha expected him to touch her then, but he didn’t. Instead, he reached into his back pocket. Her mind went immediately to “condom time” with a sense of disappointment. She’d been excited by the idea of having his mouth on her. No one had ever done that for her before.

She didn’t hear the familiar crinkle of a wrapper when he pulled his hand out of his pocket. She heard . . . silver. He held up a ring. It was small and highly polished with smooth round sides.

“To replace the one the Prince took from you.”

“How did you know about that?”

“Tommy told me.”

“Mine was cold iron.”

“You won’t need it anymore. Not once you have full control of your power. And I promise you’ll never need it with me. Other Fae give their lovers gifts of cold iron, so they feel safe. I want you to feel safe with me, even without it.”

It was the sexiest thing he had done yet. “Put it on, please,” she said.

He smiled. “You do it.”

Now she blushed. She didn’t want to handle herself in front of him. “I can’t.”

His expression turned heavy lidded. “Then make your nipple hard for me first.”

She wanted to. The thought of touching herself in front of him was forbidden and all the more alluring for it. She reached a tentative hand toward her breast and covered it through the cloth of her blouse with her palm. It felt good.

“Open your blouse, Sorcha,” said Elada. “I won’t put the ring on until I decide you’ve completed your task.”

His erotic demand sent her pulse racing. She unbuttoned her blouse and let it fall open. Then she circled her empty nipple with a finger, tentatively at first, the material of her bra muting the sensation, but soon she was lost to the pleasure of it, her hips rising and falling and her body aching for his touch.

“Show me your work, Sorcha,” said her Fae lover. She loved the way her name sounded on his lips. She pulled down the cup of her bra with shameless abandon and when he rose up on his knees to thread the ring through her nipple, she almost came from the cool penetration, silver pierced and wanton with it.

“Now make the other one hard,” he instructed, “and keep it that way, or I’ll stop.”

Then his head dipped to her center and his tongue lapped at her. He used his fingers to part her and once she was sobbing and begging for release, he began using them to tease her entrance with gentle intermittent pressure until she was chanting his name alternated with “please, please, please.”

She exploded for him when he plied his fingers and his tongue at once with direct intent, and she was barely conscious when he rolled her to the center of the bed and joined her there, his face still oriented toward her slippery thighs.

She yanked a pillow from the pile and pulled it under her head, then reached for the fly of his trousers. He tensed for only a moment, no doubt contemplating the wisdom of letting a stone singer take him into her mouth, but then she flicked his head with her tongue and he groaned and it was her turn to make him beg.

• • •

Sorcha quickly became used to
the routine of the tense little household. In the morning there was breakfast in silver chafing dishes in the dining room, prepared by Kevin and served and cleared by the housekeeper who was tiny, gray, Irish, and efficient as hell. Deirdre rarely emerged from her studio. Kevin came and went from the house in a sporty antique Mercedes coupe that announced itself with a bass rumble every time the driveway gates opened.

The hours between breakfast and noon were Elada and Sorcha’s to do what they pleased, and they made good use of the time, sharing their favorite books and movies and songs. At first Elada hadn’t wanted her to play for him, because it smacked too much of her servitude with Keiran, but she’d wanted to share her music with him. And the music had been good for Tommy, too, who couldn’t play his fiddle but enjoyed having a good croon before lunch.

By the third morning even Deirdre had grudgingly crept down the stairs to listen.

It was the first Sorcha had seen of the reclusive artist since her arrival. Tommy seemed to regard her with a mix of fear and awe. Elada treated her with deference, and her human lover Kevin treated her . . . the way Elada treated Sorcha. When she walked in the room, he made space for her on the sofa, and it was more than a physical gesture. Sorcha could see that there was a place at Kevin’s side permanently reserved for this woman, no matter what troubled their relationship right now.

The morning belonged to music and sometimes to movies when a song suggested a story. Kevin had opened the cabinets along one wall of the parlor and revealed a state-of-the-art home theater with a dazzling selection of entertainment options. “Deirdre likes movies, but she doesn’t like movie theaters,” he had explained.

The afternoons belonged to Miach. The sorcerer usually arrived just after lunch,
passing
inside the house and appearing in the hall.

“They’re his wards protecting us,” Elada had explained, “so he can
pass
through them.”

She knew that Elada was never far from reach while she trained with Miach, and it was comforting, until the first day Miach asked her to reach for her voice and sing at an object.

“What if I miss?” she asked. “What if I miss and hurt someone?” Panic rose in her. “When I sang at Keiran—”

“When you sang at Keiran,” said the sorcerer, “you were fighting for your life.”

“I can’t do this here,” she said.

Miach considered. “Did you
pass
with the Prince Consort?” he asked.

The horror of it came back to her all at once. “Yes.”

“Then you understand that it is . . . unsettling for humans. Druids are often able to handle it, but not always.”

The choice was staying here and potentially hurting innocent people. “I can handle it.”

“Then we can
pass
someplace isolated. If we stay only a short time, chances are that we won’t be scryed, but we take a risk any time we are out in the open.”

“I’m willing to chance it.”

Miach offered her his hand. “It’s easier if you close your eyes,” he advised.

It wasn’t actually easier, but when she opened her eyes, she was in a green field, at the center of a circle of standing stones, some tall and proud and others blasted in half. The sun was at a different place in the sky than it had been at Deirdre’s, and by the time it set, there were no stones left standing at all.

• • •

When the voices in the
parlor stopped, Elada felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. He’d promised to stay out of the way while Miach worked with Sorcha, but that didn’t mean he had to like it, and it didn’t mean that he was without his suspicions.

Miach had promised Conn of the Hundred Battles that he wouldn’t harm Conn’s lover, the Druid Beth Carter, if there was any other option. But when Donal and the New York Fae had closed in on her, Miach had ordered her killed. And Elada had attempted to carry out his orders.

He hadn’t liked it, but he’d seen the necessity in it. Now he knew that what he’d taken for necessity had been expediency, and he feared that Miach might find it expedient to kill Sorcha if she couldn’t gain control of her power.

Elada had considered the alternatives. He could spirit her away somewhere, go into hiding on the other side of the world with Sorcha Kavanaugh, until the Prince and Donal and Finn lost interest. She’d never learn to control her gift then and, like Deirdre, she’d never feel safe from pursuit.

Miach and Sorcha might have simply gone upstairs. He didn’t have Sorcha’s preternatural hearing, couldn’t locate her that way, so he began searching the house. She wasn’t in the room behind the kitchen with Kevin, where the sometime Olympic athlete was waxing a pair of skis. And she wasn’t with Tommy Carrell, who had installed himself in the second floor parlor that doubled as an office and begun writing music in his spare time—one handed and painstakingly.

There was only Deirdre’s studio left to search.

Deirdre was alone when Elada entered. She was painting, from memory, the Public Garden, but not as humans saw it, and not, perhaps, as it ever existed, but as it might have looked if the Wild Hunt had descended on that urban oasis and transformed it for the Queen’s pleasure.

“She isn’t here, Elada Brightsword,” said Deirdre, without looking up from her canvas.

“How do you know I’m looking for Sorcha?”

“Because you’ve always been looking for her.”

There was something eerie and faraway about Deirdre’s voice, as though she was seeing into another world or another time, and perhaps she was. Elada was a warrior, not an artist. He didn’t see the way Deirdre saw, or hear the way Sorcha heard. That was why he appreciated their gifts, because they could show him things he might not otherwise ever see.

Like the painting she was lost in now. He’d walked through the Public Garden often enough at night. The landmarks were right. The paths wound their way around the ornamental lake, the bridge lights cast constellations on the water, the swan boats were crossing the glassy surface in a wedge.

That was at first glance. On the surface. A second look, and everything changed. The paths didn’t just wind around the lake, they wound into deep forests where lights danced and beckoned. The constellations on the water weren’t a reflection of the lacy iron bridge, they were the sky as it had appeared over that spot two thousand years ago, when the Wild Hunt had roamed free. And the swan boats weren’t boats at all, and they weren’t touching the water, but flying above it, the birds carrying Fae riders on their backs.

“Don’t you ever long for it?” asked Deirdre, breaking the painting’s spell and turning to Elada. “The beauty of the Court? Everything that we lost?”