I moved furtively forward and added a fourth note to my mental agenda: new footwear. Tennis shoes. Rare are the boots crafted for stealth, and mine weren’t.
Midway across the anteroom, I stopped. To my left was a wide flight of marble stairs, swathed by a carpeted runner that descended to tall double doors exiting the church.
To my right was the entrance to the chapel. Even beyond its closed doors, I could smell the inner sanctum, the faint, cloying scent of incense and that other, elusive, spicy scent that disturbed and intrigued me. In the dim light of the hushed morning, the white doors of the oratory seemed to glow with a soft, unspoken invitation.
I could turn left, and head out into Dublin’s streets, or go right, and take a few moments to confer with a God I’d not spoken to much in my life. Was he listening today? Or had he shaken his head, packed up his Creation Kit, and headed off for a less screwed-up world late last night? What would I talk about? How cheated I felt by Alina’s death? How angry I was at being alone?
I turned left. There were easier monsters to deal with in the streets.
At the top of the stair, lust blasted me, incinerated my will, awakening exotic, excruciating sexual need. For a change, I welcomed it.
“V’lane!” I exclaimed, yanking my hand from the top button of my jeans. I could feel him outside the church. He was moving toward me, down the sidewalk, up the outer stairs, about to enter. He’d found me! I caught myself thanking the God I’d just refused to talk to.
The doors opened and I was blinded by sunlight. My pupils constricted to pinpoints. Framed in the entrance, V’lane’s hair shimmered a dozen shades of gold, bronze, and copper. He looked every inch the avenging angel in a way Barrons never could. There was that unusual scent; the one that beckoned and bedeviled me. Rolling off his skin. Did he always smell this way, and I could only pick it up now because I had Unseelie-heightened senses?
Spiked by his dark brethren, I wasn’t sensing V’lane as a Fae. I felt no nausea. His appearance had been preceded only by his lethal sexuality. He was impacting me as he would any woman. It was no wonder heads turned when we went places. His allure was even stronger with my sidhe-seer senses dead, as if some special quality in my blood normally shielded me from his full effect, but couldn’t when my veins ran with Fae.
Whatever the reason, his impact was formidable today. It was even more intense than the first time I’d encountered him, when I’d had no idea what he was. My legs felt weak. My breasts were heavy, aching, and my nipples burned. I wanted sex, needed sex. Violently. Had to have it. Didn’t care about repercussions. I wanted to fuck and fuck until I couldn’t move. Hadn’t he said he could give it to me without hurting me? Mute himself, protect me from being harmed or changed?
“Turn it off,” I forced myself to say, but I was smiling when I said it, and my command lacked heat.
I was so relieved to see him!
My sweater was on the floor. I bent to pick it up.
He moved from the shaft of brilliant sunlight and glided up the stairs. “Sidhe-seer,” he said.
As the door closed behind him, and the anteroom returned to its dimly lit state, my pupils dilated, adjusted, and I realized my error. Gasping, I took a step back. “You’re not V’lane!”
The exotic prince’s gaze fixed on my breasts, sculpted by a lacy bra. I pressed my sweater to my chest. He made a sound deep in his throat and my knees buckled with sexual anticipation. Only with immense effort did I remain standing. I wanted to be on my knees. I should be on my knees. He wanted me on my knees. And hands. My head was vacuumed of thought. My lips and legs moved apart.
He stepped closer.
I fought a frantic battle with myself, managed to step back.
“No,” he said. “I am not.” Lids lowered over alien, ancient eyes, lifted. “Whatever that is.”
“Wh-who are you?” I stammered.
He took another step forward.
I took another step back. There went my sweater again. Shit.
“The end,” he said simply.
The doors leading to the inner sanctum opened behind me. I felt the draft of passage, and more of the strange, disturbing scent filled my nostrils.
Lust sledgehammered me, front and rear.
“We are all the end,” a cold voice floated over my shoulder. “And beginning. Soon. Later. After.”
“Time. Irrelevant,” the other replied. “Round is round.”
“We are always. You are not.”
They might as well have been speaking a foreign language. I turned, hardly able to breathe. There was a lacy bra lying on the floor at my feet. It was mine. Shit again. The air was cool on my flushed skin. I would not ask “after what?” There were two of them. Two death-by-sex Fae. Two princes. Could I outrun them? Could I survive them? They could sift. I was between them. Could I Null them? Oh, God, not with my sidhe-seer abilities dead! “Do you know V’lane? He’s a Seelie Prince,” I managed to get out through lips that ached for touch, for fullness that had only been hinted at by the sensation of V’lane’s name piercing my tongue. I wanted to drown in men. I wanted to be stuffed plumper than a sausage. Lips would do. So would other things. I looked from one of their crotches to the next. I shook my head, violently. My mouth was parched, my head spinning. “He protects me.” Maybe they were friends of his. Maybe they could summon him. Maybe they feared him and would back off.
I wouldn’t have been surprised by villainous laughs, sneers, ribald comments—after all, I was standing there naked from the waist up. I expected some comment, some expression, any expression, but they merely rotated their heads on their necks with eerie smoothness, and examined me in a manner so far from human that my blood ran cold and I stopped breathing.
I knew who they were. They were no friends of V’lane’s. That alien gesture had given them away.
When I breathed again it was a great, sucking inhalation.
These were the Unseelie Princes. Fae that had never had the opportunity to study us, learn our habits, perfect glamour through mimicry; Fae that could employ our language but only void of reference or metaphor; that had learned about our world from a great distance, by proxy; that probably didn’t even grasp the basic Fae concepts of stasis and change. Fae that had never been free, never drunk from the cauldron, never had sex with a human woman.
But they planned to have sex with me. It was pouring off them in immense, hungry, dark waves. Lust laced the room, explosive as dynamite, its fuse dangerously short. The air reeked of it. I was drawing it in with every breath, feeding an unquenchable, exquisite Fae fever.
A third one glided into the church.
What had Christian said? Myth equates the heads of those four houses, the dark princes, with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Pestilence joined Death and Famine in God’s house. Now only War remained unaccounted for. I hoped he would stay that way.
They closed in on me, a circle of three, morphing from one shape to the next as they came. Shifting shapes, colors, and. something else that might have been a dimensional nature. I see 3-D, not 4 or 5. My eyes couldn’t explain to my brain what they were seeing so they just settled for pretending they weren’t seeing it. V’lane said the Fae have never revealed their true face to us. That may have been what I glimpsed.