Chapter Fourty
Royal might have been embarrassed about his Queen's lack of manners, but he couldn't hide the fact that he wanted to be with me. Of course, in fey culture to hide the fact that you found someone attractive, especially if they were trying to be attractive, was an insult. I wasn't exactly trying to be attractive, but I wasn't trying not to be either.
I lay in the white robe against all the pale creams and gold of the bed. Royal floated above me on his wings of red and black and gray. They were a blur of color, and even though the wings were the wings of a moth, they moved more like those of a dragonfly, or a bee, much faster than the moth he resembled. He lowered himself slowly toward me until his wings blew my hair across the pillow in a red wave. He landed in the middle of my chest. His weight was not so much that I minded, but solid enough that I knew he was there. He knelt between the mounds of my breasts, his knees touching some of that soft flesh. He was wearing one of the gauzy loincloths that some of the demi-fey were fond of. It was the grown-up real version of the clothes that the killer had put on the demi-fey at the first crime scene.
He folded his wings behind his back, so that the darker and plainer outer coverings slipped over the startling brightness of the red-and-black stripes. He gazed up at me, and with a face that small with bobbing black antennae he should have been cute or silly even, but Royal had always managed to be neither of those things, from the first moment I met him.
"You look solemn, Princess. Are you well? I heard you were ill earlier."
"And if I said I was ill, what would that change?" I asked.
He lowered his head and sighed. "I would still feed, but I would be sorry for it." Even as he said it one tiny hand traced the edge of my breast where it touched the edge of the robe.
"Your actions give lie to your words, Royal."
"I am not lying, but I have never lied to you about the fact that I find you beautiful. I would have to be blind and unable to touch the silk of your skin not to want you, Princess Meredith."
I told the truth. "I feel well enough now, but I am tired, and I think sleep would do me good."
"If I could make love to you for real I would make it last all night, but since I can only do what the Glimmer does, I will make it enjoyable but not take so long."
"Glimmer. What does that mean?"
He looked uncomfortable. "You will not like the answer."
"I still want to know."
"There are humans who have a fetish for the small folk such as me, and there are even demi-fey who have the same interest for the big folk. I have seen the images on the computer and am told there are films."
"But ... how? I mean, the size difference."
"Not intercourse," he said, "but mutual masturbation, or the demi-fey rub themselves on the man's penis until they both go. That seems to be the most popular image on the computer." He seemed very serious as he told it, and not intrigued by it, as if it was just fact and not about sex at all.
"And it's called Glimmer?"
"A Glimmer Fetish if it's a big person liking a demi-fey."
"What's it called if the demi-fey likes the big person?"
He lay down on his stomach between my breasts so that his head was just above them and his feet just below them. "Wishful thinking," he said.
That made me laugh, which made my chest rise and fall and slid the robe a little to both sides so that he was suddenly lying with more of my bare breasts on either side of him, not quite to nipples showing, but the mounds of my breasts framed him. He put a hand out to either side. "May I use glamour now?"
Royal was one of the demi-fey who was very good at glamour, so we'd worked out a system between us. He had to ask before he could pull his glamour on me. I wanted to know the moment my mind was clouded, because he was good enough that I couldn't always tell. Some of the men had shared my bed when Royal fed for his queen, and he was good enough at the glamour that it worked on them, too. They didn't like it, and he was the only demi-fey to act as Niceven's surrogate who had me to himself, because the men found him disturbing, or the men who didn't find Royal disturbing disturbed Royal. Doyle was willing to stay, but the demi-fey didn't like him, none of them. It was the same for all the men who could throw off the glamour. The demi-fey found it hard to concentrate around them enough to feed. So, Royal and I had the feeding to ourselves with the knowledge that at a prescribed time one of the guards would knock on the door and interrupt.
Niceven's original plan had been to have one of her surrogates who could shift to nearly my own height make a bid to get me pregnant and try to be king of the Unseelie, but I was already pregnant and Royal didn't have a bigger form.
"May I use my glamour now so that we will enjoy the feeding as much as we can?"
I sighed and again it made him rise and fall on my breasts. He caressed his hands on the soft mounds of them almost like a swimmer. He laid his head against my chest and said, "I love the sound of your heart like this."
"Whatever fetish this is, I think you have it."
He raised his head and looked at me. "Only for you."
I gave him the suspicious look that comment deserved.
"Must I take oath for you to believe me?" he asked.
"No," I said, "and yes, you may use glamour, but behave yourself."
He grinned at me and there should have been no heat possible in a man his size. He should have looked more like a cat curled between my breasts, sexless, and pretty, but a cat couldn't look at you like that. And then he dropped his shields much as I had in the lab, but where my shields kept me from seeing magic everywhere Royal's shields kept him from befuddling the world with his magic.
One moment I was puzzled by how a man the size of a doll could make me nervous and the next he was sliding down the side of my body, spilling back my robe until he bared my breasts. I'd always kept him away from intimate things, but tonight I'd forgotten to negotiate as firmly as usual. I knew vaguely that there was a reason not to let him put that tiny rosebud of a mouth on one of my nipples, but while I was still trying to form the thought of why, he set his mouth around me, and from the moment he began to suck I couldn't remember why he wasn't supposed to do it, or rather, I no longer cared.
I'd had demi-fey suck fingertips, and from such innocent kisses they could make you feel as if they were sucking on much more intimate things. Now he was on something intimate and it was as if there was a line from there all the way to that most intimate of places where a man can suck on a woman. But it was more than that; it was as if I could feel his body all along the edge of mine. Royal could use his glamour to give the illusion that he was bigger. I could feel the weight of him against the side of my body, so warm, so real, as he sucked on my breast.
I had to put my hand on the delicate brush of his wings to make certain he was only so big and no more. He flicked his wings against my fingers and suddenly they, too, felt bigger, as if they rose above his back like sails on a ship, but sails that were brushed with velvet scales and flicked delicate and beautiful against my hand.
He bit me just enough to make me cry out for him and suddenly the world smelled of roses. Wild roses and summer heat filled the world. I had to open my eyes to make certain we were still in the pale bedroom with its satin and silk. Rose petals began to fall from nowhere onto the bed.
His hands cupped my breast, mounding it up so he could get a better seal on my nipple, and his hands felt bigger, his mouth kissing me hard and harder as he drew my nipple out to one long, harsh line, but the pain was just right, just what I needed to cry out for him again. I thought it was his glamour when he was suddenly staring down at me, his body on top of mine. I'd felt his glamour make him seem big enough to do all that. I opened my eyes to find his wings rising above us both in a spill of color and movement. His face was still a delicate triangle, but it was as big as my own, and he was still beautiful, but as I watched him lean in for a kiss I realized it wasn't illusion.
Rose petals fell on him, framing him in a rain of pink and white as he kissed me - a real kiss with lips big enough to do it right. One of my hands found the back of his neck and the curls of his hair while my other hand traced the line of his back until I found where his wings joined his body, and we kissed, gently and long, and his body settled closer to mine. I realized that he had grown bigger but his clothing had not. He was nude against my body and I was nude under the robe as we kissed.
He rose from the kiss enough to say, "Please, Merry, please. I may never get my wish again."
"What did you wish?"
"You know what I wished." His hand slid down between our bodies until his fingers found my opening. He slid a finger inside me and even that small entering made me catch my breath and writhe for him. He smiled down at me. "You're wet."
I nodded. "Yes." I slid my own hand between our bodies and found him hard and long and big enough to please any woman. I wrapped my hand around him until he shuddered above me.
"Please," he said.
"Yes," I said, and I let go of him and moved my hips up to meet his body.
He opened his eyes and gazed down at me. "Yes?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
He smiled and then he raised his body enough and used his hand to guide himself to my opening. I lifted my hips to help him find his way and suddenly he was sliding inside me. "So tight, but so wet." He rose on his arms so he could push a little more with his lower body. The movement gave me a clear view down the line of our bodies so I could see him pushing his way inside me, see his body going inside mine for the first time.
I cried out, "Goddess!" The rain of petals thickened like soft, perfumed snow except this snow was warm and silken against our bare skin.
Royal pushed his way inside me until our bodies met and then he shuddered above me, his wings fanning out to frame the pale beauty of his body. He looked down at me and said, "You're lying in a bed of rose petals." And then he began to make love to me, his body going in and out of mine. He put one of my legs up over his shoulder to get a slightly deeper, slightly different angle and it was as if he'd known that would help him hit that spot just inside me. He began to glide himself over and over that spot as he rose above me, his wings flicking out to their widest as he buried himself the deepest in my body.
My breathing sped up, and I felt that heavy sweet sensation growing inside me. His breathing was faster, his body getting more frantic. I breathed out, "Almost, almost there."
He nodded as if he'd understood or even heard me. He fought his body, his breathing, everything to push himself in and out of me just a few more strokes, and between one and the next he spilled me over the edge and I was screaming his name, my hands finding his sides, his back, holding on to him, as he brought me writhing and shrieking underneath him.
My skin glowed brightly enough to paint his winged shadow against the ceiling. He cried out above me, and thrust himself one last time inside me. We screamed together and then he held himself on his arms, his head down like a winded horse. His wings began to fold back behind him.
I saw movement in the room and realized that Mistral and Frost had seen at least the end of our lovemaking. Royal collapsed slowly on top of me, and it was only as he folded in against me so warm, and his head touched the pillow beside my head that I realized that in this form he was taller than Kitto. He was my height.
I held him, my hands careful with the edge of his wings as we both waited for our heartbeats to slow. I felt something cooler than the body fluid we'd just shared and it was on my shoulder. I petted his curls and he raised his face enough to look at me. He was crying. It was his tears against my skin.
I did the only thing I could think of to do. I kissed him, and we held each other until we could move enough to clean up in the bathroom. We'd been debating who would share my bed along with Mistral tonight. I knew who had my vote, if the storm lord would allow it, and maybe if he wouldn't. Maybe as with Barinthus it was time for me to stop being nice to everyone and ask for what I wanted, and in that moment I couldn't think of anything I wanted more than to keep Royal with me. Maybe it was his own glamour, or maybe it was the Goddess with her fall of rose petals, but whatever the reason, he was one of the men I wanted beside me as I slept tonight.
Chapter Fourty-one
I had fallen asleep with Royal on one side, sleeping on his stomach as you had to do when you had moth wings on your back. Mistral wouldn't share the bed with him, not even with the rose petals still on the sheets to prove that it was the Goddess who had decreed that Royal was supposed to be brought into a larger form. It wasn't really Mistral's fault, but I'd had enough of trying to make everyone feel good about themselves at the expense of my own feelings. There was no way to be fair about it. Either I cast Royal out with the afterglow of the amazing sex, his new form, and the blessing of the Goddess still riding both of us, which made me sad to think about, or I told Mistral either he shared with whom I wanted to share with, or he slept without me. He wouldn't relent, and I was left, as with Barinthus, to stand my ground.
The bed was big enough so that Frost and Doyle slept on one side and Royal on the other. They both saw Royal being brought into his larger form as another blessing. So did most of the men, but for Mistral it was two days without me and then the demi-fey got the sex that he somehow thought was his right. I'd informed him that I wasn't up to his level of rough sex that night, and that hadn't gone over well either.
I'd woken to Frost beside me, one arm flung out and his silver hair flung across the bed so that Royal's wings flickered awake in a pool of silver as if his wings were a piece of exotic jewelry set in a base of melted silver. Doyle was on the other side of Frost, propped up on one elbow watching me when I opened my eyes. He'd put Frost next to me the night before saying, "Rhys wasn't touching your skin directly. I'm thinking that may be why he was awake to guard your dreaming vision. I will give up the chance to touch you this one night to guard your safety."
Frost had tried to protest that he wanted to help guard me, but Doyle had been insistent, and as in most things, when the Darkness was insistent he got his way with the other men. Mistral and Barinthus were the two exceptions to that rule and even they usually let him persuade them.
I lay there covered in silver hair cradled between the warmth of Frost and Royal and watched over by my Darkness. It was a good way to wake up, and I was glad I hadn't vision-traveled to the desert again. The news was already traveling about a mysterious black Humvee that was showing up and helping our troops. The media were speculating that it was a new special forces Hummer that was impervious to bullets and bigger things. The black coach was doing what I'd asked it to do. Maybe that's why I didn't have to rescue anyone else personally.
I wrapped the happy waking around me like a comforting blanket on a cold night even though the early California morning wasn't actually cold, but rather chilly at best. But what Lucy wanted me to come see so bright and early made me feel cold down to my bones.
It was a small rose garden in the back of an older home. The rose bushes were all hybrid teas and were planted in a perfect circle, with only one small archway leading into it, a bench to one side for sitting and admiring, and a small musical fountain in the very center of it. I would have been happy to sit on the bench and listen to the water's song, letting the scent of roses wash over me, except that under the perfume of roses were other smells, ones that I hadn't wanted to smell again. The smell of roses would still remind me of the blessings of the Goddess, but this memory would pair it with blood and the smell of fear as the dead had given up their last moments of life, so that there was about the rose-scented morning a hint of charnel and outhouse.
Lucy said, "If they were human sized it would be a massacre, but they're so tiny that even twenty of them doesn't seem as real."
I wasn't sure I agreed, but I let her statement stand. But if the bodies had been bigger the killers wouldn't have been able to hang them between the roses like some macabre clothesline. The dead demi-fey hadn't even begun to change color yet. They were all pale and perfect like little dolls, except that what child would tie their dolls up by their wrists and string them up between rosebushes so that the bound bodies formed a circle with the roses? But the killers had left the archway open so that people could walk back and forth without stooping. There was a demi-fey male hanging from the archway's top like some gruesome ornament. Their throats were pale and whole, untouched.
"There's not as much blood. How did they die?" I asked.
"Look at their chests," she said.
I started to say that I didn't want to, but I squared my shoulders and bent closer to one of the female victims. She had a cloud of pale blond hair like spun sunshine. Her tiny eyes were a blue as bright as the sky above us, but beginning to cloud a little. I forced myself to look at the gauzy purple dress she was wearing and there was a pin through her chest. It was one of those long slender pins like you'd use for pinning a butterfly to a mount as you waited for it to die and for rigor mortis to give you the fanned wings and perfect display you wanted.
I stepped back from the body and looked at the double row of hanging victims. They were dressed like the first demi-fey victims in the gauzy dresses or kilts, depending on the sex of the fey in question, but they were the children's book versions of the gauzy clothes covering everything. I knew, from very recent experience, that the demi-fey were very grown-up, and most of them liked to show more skin. Standing here in the cool morning air seeing the lifeless bodies with their wings flared out behind their bodies it was hard not think about Royal and how he'd risen above me with his wings framing him. I wondered if any of these demi-fey had been able to grow bigger?
"We have some hints that one of the killers is a demi-fey, but how could another demi-fey do this to their own kind?" Lucy asked.
"Whoever it is hates being a demi-fey. The pin through the heart like they were really the butterflies they resemble and not people shows a real hatred, or disdain," I said.
She nodded and handed me the plastic-wrapped illustration. It was a scene from Peter Pan where his shadow is hanging up. It was not exact, not even close. "This one's different," I said.
"It's not a close copy," Lucy said.
"It's almost as if the killers wanted to do this murder, this way, and searched for an image that would justify it, but the murders came first in the plan, not the picture."
"Maybe," she said.
I nodded. She was right; I was guessing. "If you don't want my guesses then why am I here, Lucy?"
"You have somewhere better to be?" she asked, and there was an edge of hostility to it.
"I know you're tired," I said, "but you called me, remember?"
"I'm sorry, Merry, but the press is crucifying us, saying we aren't working hard enough because the victims aren't human."
"I know that's not true," I said.
"You know it, but the fey community is scared. They want someone to blame, and if we can't give them a killer then they'll blame us. It didn't help that we had to arrest Gilda on charges of magical malfeasance."
"Bad timing," I said.
She nodded. "The worst."
"Did she give up the name of the person who made her wand?"
Lucy shook her head. "We offered to drop the charges if she'd give up the name but she seems to think that if we can't find the manufacturer, we won't be able to prove what the wand did."
"It is hard to prove magic in a court. Your wizards will only be able to explain the magic on this one. Magic is easier to prove when you can demonstrate it for the jury."
"Yeah, but there's nothing to see when someone sucks some of your magic, or at least that's what the wizards tell me," Lucy said.
Rhys joined us in the circle. "Not the way I wanted to start the day," he said.
"None of us wanted this," Lucy snapped at him.
He held up his hands as if to say "ease up." "Sorry, Detective, just making conversation."
"Don't just make conversation, Rhys, tell me something that will help catch this bastard."
"Well, from Jordan we know it's bastards, plural," he said.
"Tell me something we don't know," she said.
"The elderly lady who lives here lets the demi-fey come and dance in her rose circle at least once a month. She sits in the garden and watches them."
"I thought it was against the rules for them to let humans watch," Lucy said.
"Apparently her husband was part fey so technically they counted as fey."
"What kind of fey was he?" I asked.
"I'm not sure he was, but the woman believes it, and who am I to tell her that there's a difference between being a little bit fey as in artistic or crazy and being descended from the fey?"
"Is she senile?" I asked.
"A touch, but not badly. She believes what her beloved husband told her, that he was the product of a fey lover whom his mother had for a brief time."
"Why can't it be true?" Lucy asked.
Rhys gave her a look. "I've just spent the last hour looking at pictures of him. If he was part fey it was way back in the family tree, nothing recent."
"You can tell just by looking?" she asked.
He nodded.
"It leaves a mark," I said.
"So it's another circle where people would know the demi-fey came regularly."
"Jordan said that there was something with wings at the murder scene, and the brownie who died had thought whatever was flying was beautiful."
"A lot of pretty things fly," Lucy said.
"Yes, but look at them. When they were alive they were beautiful."
"You keep saying that maybe a demi-fey did this, but even if one of these guys hated themselves enough to do this, they couldn't get twenty of them to hold still while they did all this." She didn't try to keep the disbelief out of her voice.
"Don't underestimate the demi-fey, Lucy. They have some of the most powerful glamour left to us, and they're insanely strong for their size, more so than any other type of fey."
"How strong?" she asked.
Rhys answered, "They could toss you around."
"I don't believe that."
"It's true," he said.
"One of them could knock you on your ass," I said.
"But could a pair of them do this?"
"I think they'd need at least one half of the pair to be regular size," I said.
"And they could control this many demi-fey, control them enough to do this to them?" she asked.
I sighed, and then tried to breathe less deeply. "I don't know. Honestly, Lucy, I don't know anyone powerful enough to make this many fey of any kind allow themselves to be tied up and murdered like this, but if they were dead before the pins went in, dead by magic somehow, I know some fey powerful enough to kill this many at once."
I leaned in and spoke quietly to Rhys. "Could a Fear Dearg do this?"
He shook his head. "They never had enough glamour to work the demi-fey like this. It's one of the reasons they liked humans so much. It made them feel powerful."
"Don't whisper. Share with the class," Lucy said.
I moved closer to her, just in case one of the many police in the garden overheard and made problems with her for failing to do another part of her job. "Have you found Bittersweet yet?"
"No."
"I'm sorry you lost her because of what happened with the reporters."
"It's not your fault Merry."
"I'm still sorry."
"Why did they go so far from the illustration this time? There's only one shadow hanging up and there are twenty of them here."
"Maybe they wanted to kill more of them," Rhys said.
"Why?"
He shook his head. "I have no idea."
"Neither do I, damn it," she said.
To that the only thing I could add was "Me either." It wasn't helpful, and until we found Bittersweet to help give us an eyewitness account we were stuck.