«Why can we feel it when he touches you?» Nicca asked.
«I don't know.»
«I know,» Sage said, sliding his body down my hand until he sat straddling my wrist, «but I'm not telling.»
He wrapped his legs around my wrist and I was suddenly aware that he wore nothing under his gossamer skirt. He was tiny, but the touch of that bit of sex felt more intimate than it should have, more important than it should ever have been.
I was suddenly aware of the pulse between his legs. The throb and ebb of the blood on either side of his thighs beat against the pulse in my wrist like a second heartbeat, as if the very beat of my blood would answer to the beat of his small body.
«Your hand, gwynfor, now I will take it.»
It took Rhys a moment to focus, to understand. One of his hands was still half pinned under my body, and he held his free hand against his stomach, almost as if he was afraid of being hurt.
«A little blood, a little taste, nothing more, gwynfor, nothing more.»
«Stop calling me that,» Rhys said.
«But you are the white lord,» Sage said, «and the white lord, the hand of ecstasy and death, feared nothing and no one.»
Rhys reached out toward the tiny fey, slowly, reluctantly, his face already half-lost to the sensual call of the other's magic. The wager was lost before Sage ever touched him.
Sage stayed pressed to my wrist, like one of those old wooden carvings of the tiny fairies riding broomstraw, except my wrist was the whisk of a plant and his power did ride me, rode me like the wingless fey were supposed to ride the small flowering plants. Were the flowers as joyful to be ridden? Did it feel good to them to be torn away from their roots and plunged through the night sky?
Sage wrapped his tiny hands around Rhys's finger. He laid his small red mouth against the tip of his finger, like a tiny swollen rosebud. I felt Rhys's pulse like a distant line of music, a bass rhythm that you heard only through the walls at night, as you lay in your bed, and wondered where it was coming from. Sage opened his mouth, his lips still pressed against Rhys's skin.
Rhys actually said, «No, no.»
Sage drew back enough to roll the glittering black of his eyes up to the much larger man. «Will you be forsworn, white lord? Will your courage fail you in the face of a mere demi-fey?»
I could see Rhys's pulse thundering against the skin of his throat, and his voice came rough around it. «I'd forgotten what you were.»
«Forgotten what?» Sage asked, his mouth still hovering over Rhys's fingertip.
Rhys had to swallow to speak again. «Once, you were a court of your own, and size mattered not in power.»
Sage gave a small laugh. «Do you remember what else we could do?»
«Your glamour could roll us, like a drunk on a Saturday night.»
«Yes, white lord, it's what saved us from being destroyed by both courts.» His mouth moved slowly back toward Rhys's finger, and the next words were spoken with his lips so close that they shivered along Rhys's skin: «The Nameless has given back a great deal, to all of us.» He sank his teeth into Rhys's flesh.
Rhys's spine bowed, his head thrown back, eye closed. I felt that quick pain only lightly, a distant stab of pleasure.
Nicca writhed, climbing my body until his face almost touched Sage's leg. His arm convulsed around my waist, holding on as if he was afraid, or eager. I knew just from the press of his body that he was getting the hints of pleasure and pain, just as I was.
Sage began to suck at the wound, and distantly, I felt the pull. I'd had it often enough for myself to know that it felt as if that tiny mouth had a long, thin line directly from the tip of a finger to the groin. With every suck Sage pulled on things that shouldn't have been touchable from a small wound in a finger.
Sage's pulse between his legs beat against the pulse in my wrist, fast, faster, hard, harder, and I felt a third pulse. It was as if Sage had pulled Rhys's heart into his hand, and Sage was swallowing around the thick, meaty, pulse of Rhys's heartbeat. I felt Rhys's heart beating down Sage's body, as if the smaller man were a tuning fork, a vibrating, trembling path from one throbbing heartbeat to another.
Rhys's body pressed tighter against the side of me. His groin was pressed against the curve of my hip, and almost against his will, it seemed, his body began to move against mine. I could feel him large and hard, rubbing against my hip. A rhythm began between the two of them. I felt Sage suck on Rhys, and with every suck Rhys pressed himself into my hip, buried the hard shaft of himself along my skin as if he were seeking another way inside me.
Rhys began to glow with that white light he held inside. His tricolored eye glowed like blue neon as he gazed down at me. His lips were half parted and he bent down to lay his mouth across mine, and the moment he kissed me, my power spilled upward, so that as he pulled back from my lips, magic trailed between us like the glow of stars. My body pulsed white as if I'd swallowed the moon, and it was spilling out through my skin.
Sage sat between us like a small golden doll, the veins in his wings shining like stained glass in a fall of sunlight. He wasn't sidhe, but power is power. For a moment I saw his red mouth pulse, as if he truly did hold Rhys's heartbeat in his mouth.
Nicca had begun to glow softly, the wing tattoo on his back pulsing faint traces of pink and blue and cream, and black. It was only the beginnings of his power, the first promise.
Rhys's hand under my shoulders convulsed, his fingers digging into my skin, and I felt him fight to close his other fist on Sage's fragile body. Rhys's breathing came fast, faster, until he threw his head back, his body arching against me. Something luminous and nearly liquid moved underneath his skin, like watching glowing clouds across the sky break apart, spilling like burning phosphorus. His white curls swirled around his face in the wind of his own power, and his hair ran shining with power, as if someone had traced a glowing wand in streaks through his curls. He opened his eye, and I had a moment to see its neon blue circles begin to swirl like a storm about to break over me, over all of us. Then he ground himself into my flesh, so hard that it hurt, and that brought me back to his body and chased back the power, just enough. He screamed, a second before he spilled over me in a scalding wave that flowed and dripped down my hip.
The feel of it bowed my back, flung my free hand skyward, writhed me over the bed, but I couldn't move, I was trapped between the thrust of Rhys's body and Nicca still wound around my waist and legs.
Rhys's heart beat inside my veins, faded, then was gone so abruptly that it scared me. I had to open my eyes and see that he was still there, still alive. It was strange because I could still feel him pressed along the length of my body, but it had been the taste of his pulse in my body that I had ridden. He lay collapsed beside me, hair scattered across his face, his neck bare and smooth, and his pulse thudded against the thin skin of his neck like something trapped. His power faded like the moon lost behind clouds.
I started to ask if he was all right, but the pulse of Sage's body froze the words in my mouth, and I turned to meet that tiny, glittering black gaze. His golden luminescence hadn't faded; if anything, he glowed brighter than ever, his wings like colored fire framing the central flame of his body. There was more of fierceness, of triumph, of power, than lust on his face. «Whatever my lady wishes, so shall it be,» he whispered.
Nicca held a shaking hand up and Sage laughed. «So eager, I like that.»
«No gloating, Sage,» I said, my voice still uncertain, as if I wasn't quite sure it was my voice.
«Oh, but Merry, I must. The donnan has paid me a high compliment.»
«Donnan?» Nicca made it a question, then shook his head. «I was no one's chief, little, brown, or otherwise, Sage.» His voice was shaky, but through the haze of glamour with Rhys and I beginning to fade like the moon sinking behind the trees, Nicca seemed determined not to be called what he had never been.
«As you will, then, Nicca,» Sage said. He grabbed Nicca's fingers and pulled his hand across mine, so that Nicca's hand was cradled between Sage's body and my fingers. The back of his hand was hot—gliding across my fingers and palm. That one simple touch brought the fading light in my skin back to a glow as if the moon had decided to rise twice that night.
Sage dragged Nicca's hand across his own lap until he bent his tiny, swollen mouth over the wrist. He laid that red kiss against Nicca's wrist, where the blue vein pulsed just under the skin, so close to the surface it was like an eager lover waiting to be taken.