Page 10

Chapter Ten

I kicked my shoes off as soon as we walked through the front door. Cassandra, after seeing what I was wearing, had sent us home after a few questions. Maia had stayed with her to help with the cleanup.

I was getting sick of being sent home while the big kids finished the job, but my feet were damned happy to be out of the shoes. Low heeled or not, they weren’t designed for afrit hunting. I headed on autopilot toward our bathroom, where I could ditch the dress, shower to get the smoke scent out of my hair, and finally get to bed. I was struggling with the clasp of my necklace when Damon appeared behind me, the mirror showing him frowning down at his datapad.

More than a ‘we just chased an afrit’ frown.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, freezing with my hands behind my neck, wondering if this night was about to get worse.

He held up the screen to me and tapped it.

I squinted, then sighed when I recognized the security feed from the garden. Dim blobs of plants moving in the night air. “What am I looking at?”

“Wait.”

And I saw it. A flicker of two tails going behind a bush. Another nixling. Not Lianith. She’d had her collar on while the glam squad worked on me and I’d left it on when we headed out.

I groaned, dropping my hands. “Another one.”

“Yep,” Damon said.

“Is it still here?”

“No, watch.”

I kept watching. After another thirty seconds or so, Lianith came tearing into view, her faux-Maine coon tail fluffed in outrage. The nixling bolted and Lianith chased it out of frame.

“I should talk to Lianith,” I said. I put my hands on the edge of the sink, resisting the urge to bang my head against the marble counter. My kingdom for one uninterrupted night. Or Damon’s maybe. My kingdom was tiny.

I straightened with a sigh. “I take it Mitch already knows?”

“Yes. Do you want to call Callum?”

“If it’s already gone, I’m not sure there’s much point.” I hesitated, considering. Callum and Gráinne were hunters. It was possible they could track the nixling and find out where it had run to. I took the datapad and replayed the footage. It was high quality, but even the best night footage was still mostly shades of gray in low light. The nixling was dark like the others but I couldn’t see enough detail as it fled to know if it was one that had visited us before.

“I’ll send Callum a message. He can decide what he wants to do. I need to get out of this dress and shower. Then I’ll talk to Lianith”

“Alternatively, wait to send the message, and I’ll help you out of the dress. And in the shower.” He pulled me close for a second, pressing his lips to my temple.

Which I was pretty sure smelled like fried afrit, but it didn’t seem to bother him.

“I don’t like when you go running off to kill random demon creatures,” he muttered.

“I don’t love it either,” I admitted, resting my head against his chest. Then I pulled back, frowning up at him. “You shouldn’t have followed me. That was…not optimal.” There. More diplomatic than ‘kind of dumb’.

“It was fine.”

“It could have been very not fine if there’d been more of them.”

He dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “There weren’t, so stop worrying. Turn around and I’ll see if I can pry you out of this thing. Is there a zip somewhere?”

“Nope, just buttons.”

He sighed. Buttons took time. “Go get Lianith. Talk to her while I unbutton. I want to shower in peace.”

Good idea. I started to pick up the skirt of my dress to turn around, then stopped. Maybe Lianith could hear me without me leaving the bathroom.

“ Hael ,” I sent in the direction of the guest room.

The response was almost immediate. “ Returned .”

“ Yes .” I switched to English. “ You chased off another nixling ?”

“ Yes .”

“ Did it talk? ”

“ No. It ran. ” She added something I thought might be coward in Fae, her tone distinctly unimpressed.

“ Any idea where it’s from? ”

“ Not time . Couldn’t tell much. Not Lady. ”

“Okay, thank you.” She hadn’t learned anything but she’d done her job.

Damon was watching me with an odd expression.

“What?”

“Were you talking to her?”

“Yes.”

“Weird,” he muttered. “What did she say?”

“It ran when she chased it. She didn’t get anything out of it. But hey, it might spread the word that she’s here now and we won’t get any more visitors.”

He didn’t look convinced.

“Let me message Callum.”

He grunted a ‘yes’, then gestured for me to turn around so he could start on the buttons.

Typing the message to Callum didn’t take long, and an answer pinged back. He would come by in the morning. It was already closing in on two a.m., so fine by me. I put the datapad on the counter and worked on unpinning my hair while Damon worked on the buttons. I finished before he did, but not by much. The last button came free and the weight of the gown pulled it down to the floor.

I let out a groan of pleasure. “I tell you what. All those women back in the day must have been fit hauling all this around every day.” My fingers were already working the fastenings on the petticoats, and I stepped out of those as well to find Damon watching me with a glint in his eye that made my fingers suddenly unsteady. I stopped what I was doing. “Something you wanted to say?”

“Maybe I have a thing for petticoats,” he said.

He moved around me, trailed a finger across my collarbones and back. I shivered happily. “Well, you’ll have to be happy with just me. I’m not going to be voluntarily climbing into another gown anytime soon.” Without the petticoats, I was left wearing only stockings, a garter belt and panties. The dress’s boning had ruled out the need for a bra. I bent to release the first clip on my stockings.

“Let me.” Damon dropped to his knees, his hands moving mine out of the way. He pressed his lips to the small, reddened mark on my skin where the clip had pressed into it. Heat bloomed in the wake of his kiss and when he moved his mouth a little higher I was very tempted to let him keep going. But both of us smelled like barbecued afrit, which was ruining the moment.

“Stick to the task at hand,” I said. “I want my shower.”

“More than this?” He kissed my thigh again.

“Yes. I love you, but the eau de afrit is killing the vibe.”

He laughed. “Can’t argue with that.”

He stopped with the kisses, which made me regret my life choices. But I held firm while he flicked each fastener open in turn before rolling the stockings down my legs and shoving them into the pocket of his tux jacket.

Damon in a tux. My favorite thing. Other than naked Damon. “Why don’t you go turn on the shower. Get rid of your own clothes.”

Tuxedos were faster to remove than ball gowns. I’d barely peeled off what remained of my underwear when naked Damon gestured at the shower.

“Ready when you are,” he said with an inviting grin.

I scanned him from head to toe. One of my favorite parts of him was definitely ready. But it would have to be patient until we were both clean.

The warmth of the water pounding down on me was so good, I wanted to cry. I stood there, letting it soak me, unable to move.

“You’re tired,” Damon said, pressing a kiss to my shoulder.

“Frying afrit is hard work.” It hadn’t been that much magic, but it had been a long day.

“Let me wash your hair.”

I wasn’t going to say no. He had magic fingers when it came to head massages. And other things. But right now I was interested in the head massage. And the clean-hair part. “Thank you, that sounds divine.”

For a moment, he pulled me back against him, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. His erection pressed against me but he didn’t try to do anything about it. He didn’t even try to kiss me. We breathed together, both of us needing the reassurance that everything was fine. That, once again, we’d survived.

We stood for several minutes before Damon reached for the shampoo and set to work. I tipped my head back, letting his touch ease the tension out of my body, then handed him the conditioner for the second round.

Once my hair was clean, I reached for the shower gel and let the spice-scented suds get rid of the last lingering smells of afrit before washing my makeup off as well.

Then I turned back to Damon, who was still too quiet as he stood watching me, water cascading down every gorgeous muscle and plane of his body. I knew what he was thinking.

“I’m okay,” I said, “ We’re okay.”

His blue eyes watched me, the expression in them turning soft. Almost wondering. “Always,” he said, and lifted me out of the shower.

He wrapped me in soft warm towels and carried me into the bedroom. And then he pulled me close again, one hand stroking my cheek, before he kissed me so softly that at first it felt like I was imagining it. We kissed for a long time, making out like teenagers. I wanted nothing more than the taste of his lips on mine, his breath, his hands in my damp hair. We were trying to find each other, lost in each other, telling each other the things we sometimes couldn’t bring ourselves to say out loud. That we were both still there and what we had was more important than any heat-of-the-moment arguments about who should be doing what in dangerous situations.

Our lives were never going to be simple. But this—the love and the need and the undeniable something that drew us back together every time—this could be simple.

As simple as breaking our kiss and pushing his head down. As letting my legs fall open as he kissed his way down my body. As giving in to the swooping rush as his tongue touched my clit and he did his best to set me alight and the world closed in to the sensation of his mouth on me, of the sounds he drew from me with his tongue and fingers, driving me higher and higher, the weight of him keeping me anchored as I twisted and arched and begged him for more and more and more.

I never knew what I said. Incoherent and needy. Wanting this burning, consuming pleasure only he could give me. He pushed me up and up and then over the edge, but tonight he was hungry, too. I had no time to catch my breath, to come back to myself. He pushed my legs wider and then drove himself home, the feel of him so hard and strong inside me, while I was still half-coming, nearly pushing me immediately over the edge again.

“Wait for me,” he growled. “This time. Wait for me.”

My head was spinning, my heart pounding as the need clawed through me, but his words were their own brand of magic. I wanted only to do as he said, to give him the same fierce satisfaction he gave me. I wrapped my legs around his hips as he thrust and growled heated praise against my neck and my lips and whichever parts of me he was kissing, until his words broke into pieces that stopped making much sense until he rumbled ‘now’ as his blue eyes burned into mine and I arched and broke beneath him as he cried out my name.

I woke when something landed with a thump on my bed. I almost screamed before I realized it was Lianith, not an afrit or worse.

“Madge, lights,” I croaked, mouth gone dry from fright. The lights blinked on. The nixling was perched on the space between me and the edge of the bed, golden eyes wide, one paw raised as though she had been about to tap my face if I hadn’t woken up. Damon was nowhere in sight. I’d crashed early, before he’d come home. Two days had passed since we’d killed the afrit and he’d been burning the midnight oil. He might still be at the office. I gave myself a few seconds to calm down.

“What is it?” I asked, stomach sinking. Lianith had so far proven to be an excellent house guest. She spent her nights since chasing off the first nixling patrolling the grounds and most of the days sleeping inside. According to Callum, nixlings leaned nocturnal anyway.

I kept practicing talking to her, but the process was slow and the conversation so far had to be simple. But she said she was happy. When she wasn’t sleeping or stalking through the garden, she usually came and sat somewhere near Damon or me, watching us curiously.

Humans were odd but interesting, was the only opinion she shared. I’d had to ask Callum what the words she used were and he’d laughed for at least a minute before seconding her sentiment.

Her head swiveled back toward the door and my stomach clenched. “Something you want to show me?”

Her response was to jump back down off the bed, looking over her shoulder as though to say, ‘come along’. I’d learned to see through the illusion—so I could see the tips of her tails twitching in different directions—but it worked wonders for anyone without magic. Certainly, Amy and the gardeners hadn’t reacted to her appearance, taking our story that we were cat sitting for a friend of mine at face value.

I shoved my feet into the closest pair of sneakers, thankful I’d gone to bed in pajamas. “All right, show me.”

I followed Lianith through the house to the gym. I had a fair idea of what I was about to see. Lianith hadn’t interrupted us sleeping since she’d arrived.

Sure enough, there was a nixling sitting on the deck staring back at us through the window.

Well, crap . After a lack of nocturnal visitors, I’d started to hope that whoever had sent the first two had decided to give up.

“Is this the same one as before?”

Lianith jumped up to balance on the handrail of the treadmill, her tails twitching. Fae I was learning. The intricacies of nixling tail gestures might take me longer. “ Same ?” I sent.

A smidge of Fae floated into my head, faint and hard to make out, but I thought it was a ‘no’.

I concentrated, waiting to see if she was going to add anything else. But nope, apparently Lianith understood ‘no’ was a complete sentence. Right. So. Not the same nixling. Which made it number three? Or was it four?

Regardless of the number, it was starting to piss me off.

Lianith made an impatient sound and I dragged my thoughts back to the present. The nixling on the deck hadn’t moved. Its tails twitched, long fur ruffling with the movement.

“Some of us want to sleep,” I said to it. “You should leave.” I made a shooing motion. It stared back at me, unmoved.

Irritation sparked through me. I was sleep-deprived and cranky. “Right,” I said to Lianith. “Let’s do this.”

Her answering chirp sounded pleased. She sat back on her hind legs, reaching a paw toward the door in the windows.

“We’ll go out the front. Otherwise it might just run.”

She dropped back to all fours, grumbling, but she followed me when I headed to Damon’s office to grab my gun. I didn’t want to shoot a nixling, but I would if this went badly.

But I hoped it wouldn’t. Much like with the afrit, I didn’t want the security team to come running, which they would if I fired my weapon. Mitch had reluctantly agreed to let Lianith and I deal with another nixling, should one appear, so they wouldn’t intervene unless I asked. Madge had ears on the entire property. She’d hear if I yelled for help.

Lianith walked ahead of me on the path, picking her way silently, tails up. So far, reading her body language like a cat’s had worked well enough, so I figured she wasn’t particularly worried about confronting the other nixling. Maybe I shouldn’t be either.

Still, I kept a tight grip on my gun as we came around the back of the house. The nixling had descended from the deck, sitting at the base of the stairs waiting for us.

Lianith walked until she was about three feet away from it and then made one of her chirping noises at it, this one sounding like a demand, with an edge of something closer to a snarl. The other nixling—which, like the first two, was darker than her—didn’t reply, and I waited to see what would happen next.

“ Stranger, ” Lianith’s voice came a little louder in my head this time. “ Should go .”

“ Do you know where it’s from? ”

“ Nichtkin .”

Ugh. Not what I wanted to hear. “Can you ask it who sent it?”

She made another, more aggressive noise, tails twitching.

The nixling spat something back and Lianith hissed, taking a half step forward, fur bristling.

This was not going as smoothly as I’d hoped. Callum had said Lianith could handle other nixlings, but I didn’t want her to actually fight and get injured.

So I decided to join the discussion. I took a full step closer, so I was slightly in front of Lianith. I kept my eyes on the strange nixling. Its eyes flicked back and forth between us, as though it couldn’t decide who was the bigger threat.

I straightened my shoulders. Make yourself look big. Wasn’t that what cats did? “This is my territory and Lianith’s. You are not welcome here. I cede no loyalty to the Nichtkin. I am allied with Lady Cerridwen. If someone has sent you here, tell them they can speak to her or me directly. But I will not have my territory invaded. There will be consequences for the next one of you who shows up.” I emphasized that last word by drawing a flame to my hand, letting it dance there.

The nixling flinched back at the sight of the flame.

“Yes, I have magic of my own. I can defend this territory, and I will defend it.” I let the flame flare for a few seconds before pulling it back. Lianith bared her teeth.

The nixling didn’t move, though its tails were twice the size they had been. I didn’t want to set it on fire, particularly not after spending a few days with Lianith and learning how cute nixlings were, but I wasn’t going to be pushed around in my own house. I took a step closer, let the flame brighten slightly, and the nixling backed up to the next step.

Lianith let out a noise that was far more a growl than previously. That seemed to be the deciding factor.

The nixling turned, bolted up the steps and across the deck, diving off the other side.

Lianith gave chase but returned within a minute or so. “ Gone, ” her voice said in my head loudly enough that I had no trouble hearing a certain degree of smug satisfaction in the statement.

I allowed myself a fist pump. “ Thank you. ” Hopefully the nixling would return to the realm and report back to whoever had sent it. If it was from Usuriel’s territory, well, I’d deal with what happened next. If he was trying to see if he could push me around…well, yes, he was scary, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to push back.