Swallowing my fear of the only weapon I had to use against them, I jerked out the spear, dropped the harness, and pivoted in a threatening circle.
“Stay back!” I commanded. “This is a Seelie Hallow. It can kill even princes! Just try me!” I stabbed at the nearest one. He paused, regarded the spear then raised incandescent eyes to mine. He swiveled his head upon his neck, and glanced at the others, then back at the spear in a way that made me look, too.
I discovered with horror that my hand was turning it toward me, slowly, slowly, until the tip, the deadly, flesh-rotting tip was pointing straight at me. I tried to turn it away, to point it at him, but I couldn’t move. My brain was issuing orders my body refused to obey.
Rape was horrific enough. There was no way I was going to die like Mallucé afterwards.
When the tip was a mere quarter inch from my skin, I tried to fling the spear away, hoping I could, and they’d just forget about it. My release mechanism worked as my override had not—a thing that would make sense to me one day—and the spear clattered across the floor, through the door into the chapel. It crashed into the base of the pedestal of holy water with such impact that water sloshed over the side, and hissed and steamed when it hit the spear.
The princes adopted static form, became males so unutterably beautiful that looking at them was a moment of such exquisite perfection that it hurt my soul, and I gibbered wordlessly. They were naked except for glistening black torques that writhed like liquid darkness around their necks. Their supple, golden-skinned bodies were tattooed in brilliant, complicated patterns that rushed over their skin, kaleidoscopic storm clouds across a gilded sky. Lightning flashed in their glittering eyes.
Deep within me, I felt answering thunder.
I couldn’t look at them. They were too much. I turned away but they were there again, forcing me to gaze upon their frightening, fantastic faces. My eyes widened, widened still.
I wept tears of blood that scaled my cheeks. I scrubbed at them with my fingers, and they came away seared, crimson.
Then the princes’ mouths were on my fingertips, with tongues of soothing coolness, and fangs of licking ice, and a beast far more primitive than Savage Mac, and far beyond my control, yawned and stretched her arms above her head, and awakened with a delicious sense of anticipation.
This was what she’d been born for. What she’d been waiting for all this time. Here. Now. Them.
Sex that was worth dying for.
I kicked off my boots. They peeled away my jeans and underwear, and turned me between them, kissing, tasting, licking, taking, feeding from the passion they fed in me, slamming it back at me, taking it, returning it again, and with each transfer between us it grew into something bigger than me, bigger than them, into a beast of its own.
With some distant part of my mind I recognized the horror of what was happening to me. I tasted on their perfect lips the emptiness within them, and understood that beneath the flawless, velvety, golden skin, far beneath the waves of Eros I was drowning in. there was nothing but. an ocean of. me.
I glimpsed, even as I surrendered to it, the true nature of the Unseelie princes. They are voids of what they are not, and crave most: passion, desire, the fire of life, the capacity to feel.
Some essential component in them had been lost long ago, or perhaps frozen out of them by seven hundred thousand years of icy incarceration, or perhaps they’d come into being via the king’s imperfect Song, equally imperfect and empty. Whatever the cause, the most intensely they could feel was through sex. They were maestros of lust, eternally denied music in their realm, surrounded by others also void, without a human’s body to play the melody upon.
But with a human, so long as she felt, so did they, and they would gorge on her song, until the concert hall fell silent, the passion turned to ash, and she died, her body gone as cold as that place inside them where life could never be fully realized.
Empty, they would find another woman to play, and gorge again, giving her sex at its most elemental, at its purest, and most potent, channeling all that it was to be alive out of her, back into her, and out again. My orgasms were not petit mal but repeated births, a re-creation of myself every time I came. It was sex that was life that was blood that was God that filled every empty orifice I had, inside and out.
And it was killing me.
And I knew it.
And I had to have more.
We rolled and slid across the cool marble floor of the anteroom, my three dark princes and I, seeking purchase on the carpeted stairs, one beneath me, one behind, one inside my mouth.
They moved deep in me, filling me with sensations as kaleidoscopic as their tattooed bodies. I narrowed to a tiny blossom, exploded outward, and fragmented again and again into bits of shattered woman. They tasted of nectar, smelled of dark, drugging spices; their bodies were hard and sculpted and perfect, and if every now and then the ice of their black torques and pink tongues and white teeth were sharp nips of frostbite at my skin, it was a small price to pay for what they did inside me.
I felt my mind slipping; moments of my life flashed before my eyes, before dropping away to some forsaken place. I cried out, begging to be freed, but my mouth shaped only words of instruction, and demand: more, harder, faster, there.
My last month in Dublin, with all its hopes and worries and fears, flashed through my mind—and was forgotten. There went the day I’d spent in Faery with Alina, followed by all memory of Mallucé and Christian and the O’Bannions and Fiona and Barrons, and meeting Rowena in the bar, that first night in Ireland. My summer was flying backward past my eyes, falling away. Was there a fourth male kissing me now? Tasting me? Why couldn’t I see him? Who was he?
I pricked myself on the day of Alina’s death, then it was gone, too, and that day hadn’t happened, and my life continued to unfurl backward.
I lost my college years to Pestilence’s kisses. I bade farewell to high school with Famine spurting sweetly in my mouth. I lost my childhood in three Fae Princes’ arms. If there was a fourth, I never saw his face. Only felt the strangeness of another, who wasn’t quite the same.
And then I’d never been born.
I was only now.
This moment. This orgasm. This hunger. This endless emptiness. This mindless need.
I was aware that others had entered the anteroom but I could not see beyond my dark princes. Didn’t care. More was good.
When my princes drew away from me, my body grew so cold I thought I would die. I writhed on the floor, begging for more.
Someone reached for me.
I grasped with both hands for the succor of touch, tossed a tangle of hair from my eyes, and looked up, straight into the face of the Lord Master.
“I think she’ll obey me now,” he murmured.
Obey him?
I’d die for him.
A Note to the Reader
I foreshadowed this moment. And I’ve foreshadowed what’s yet to come, but for those of you with flashlights running low on batteries, who feel the Shades closing in, and fear there’s no hope in sight, consider this:
In Bloodfever Mac says, “Although it may not seem like it, this isn’t a story about darkness. It’s about light. Khalil Gibran says Your joy can fill you only as deeply as your sorrow has carved you. If you’ve never tasted bitterness, sweet is just another pleasant flavor on your tongue. One day I’m going to hold a lot of joy.”
And she will. That was my promise in her words.
For the latest news on Mac, future release dates, and the like, drop by www.karenmoning.com or www.sidhe-seersinc.com.