Merry Gentry 03 - Seduced by Moonlight (24 page)

Frost's hands caught my arms. "Merry, are you all right?"

I opened my eyes, found his face worried. I looked down at his hands where they held my forearms. It was one of the few inches of skin that held no color, so that his hands were still just white. "I'm better than all right, Frost." My voice sounded strange, deeper, almost hollow, as if I had become an empty shell that my voice echoed out of. I drew my arms out of his hands and pulled on the sash of his robe. One firm tug and the sash unwound, the robe beginning to open.

Frost grabbed my hands this time. "I don't want to hurt you."

I laughed, and it had a wild sound to it. "You won't hurt me."

His grip on my hands tightened until it was almost painful. "You are power-ridden, Meredith, but that doesn't mean you aren't still mortal."

"You can only get godhead once, and you've had your turn," I said. "Now it's just extra magic that you have to learn to deal with. It's simply a matter of discipline, practice, and control." I pulled on my hands, and he loosened his grip, enough for me to pull free. I reached into that open edge of robe, found the smaller tie that still held it closed, and pulled on it. The robe fell open, revealing a thin line of pale flesh. "And I know you are disciplined, Frost, controlled," I slid my hands inside that silk, touched the skin underneath, "and if practice makes perfect, that is certainly you."

He laughed then, abrupt and almost startling in its sudden joy. "Why is it that you can make me feel better? I almost killed you today."

I ran my hands up his body, traced the edge of his chest, ran fingers over his nipples, made him catch his breath. "We all got surprised today, Frost. But I seem to be getting better at bringing godhead to the sidhe." I spilled my hands to his shoulders, having to stand on tiptoe, to push the robe off his arms. He drew away from the wall enough for the robe to cascade to the floor, where it lay like a puddle of grey silk at his feet.

"I can see that," he said in a voice that grew ever deeper, ever more breathless.

I gazed upon him nude, and found him as beautiful as the first time I'd seen him. The joy of Frost unclothed never diminished. He was almost too beautiful to gaze upon, as if it hurt my heart to see him.

I laid a kiss on his chest, over his heart. I licked his skin, then gave his nipple a quick flick of movement that made him shudder and laugh at the same time. I gazed up into that laughing face, and thought, this, this was what I wanted from him. More than the sex, more than almost anything, his joy.

He gazed down at me, his grey eyes shining with the edge of his laughter. "I look in your eyes and there's no difference."

I began to kiss my way down his chest. "Difference?" I asked.

"You don't think less of me," he said.

I traced my tongue along the edge of his belly button, bit softly into the skin on either side, let my mouth work lower until I could go no farther without bumping into him, straight and firm, and perfect, pressed against his stomach. I slid my mouth over the velvet tip of him, as I dropped my body to my knees. I fought to swallow along his length, to the base of him. He was really too long for this angle, but I managed. He threw his head back, and closed his eyes. I pulled free of him, just enough to say, "Oh, I think more of you, now, much more."

I slid back over him, using my hands to guide him inside my mouth. I had closed my eyes, giving myself over to the thick, muscled feel of him in my mouth, concentrating on breathing, swallowing, when I felt his magic dance through his skin, jump inside my mouth. I knew without opening my eyes that his skin had begun to glow. I could feel it against my tongue, my lips.

He balled his hand into my hair and drew me back from him, forced me to gaze up and meet his eyes. "You don't think less of me for not being born sidhe."

I tried to kiss his body, but his hand tightened, and drew a small gasp from my lips. It sped my pulse more than taking him into my mouth had. "You were breathed to life by a god, Frost. If that's not special enough, I don't know what is."

He dragged me upward by my hair, pulling me to my feet so abruptly that it hurt, and almost scared me. Not real fear, but the fear that rides the edge of violent sex. He kissed me, and it was fierce, full of probing tongues, eager lips, and teeth; as if he couldn't decide whether to kiss me, or eat me. He pulled back from that kiss, and it left me breathless and dazed.

His eyes glinted like silver ice, and the tips of each strand of hair glittered like frost caught in sunlight. "I want you to cover me in this." He ran his free hand up my shoulder, came away smeared with iridescent blue, green, purple. He smeared it down my face, across my lips, then kissed me again, messy, hungry. He drew back with his mouth and one cheek covered in glittering color, like bits of neon smeared across his skin.

I threw my arms around his neck, and he wrapped his around my waist, lifting me up so that our bodies slid along one another. The movement smeared the neon colors along his skin, and just the sight of it brought a soft moan from me. We kissed, and I wrapped my legs around his waist, pressing the hard length of him against me. The feel of him there made me grind my hips against the hardness of him, rubbing the wetness of me against him. His knees went weak, and only a hand on the bed caught us. He eased us back against the bed, and the moment my hips were solid against the mattress, he pushed himself inside me.

I screamed, head back, eyes closed, and a second scream echoed mine. It wasn't until Frost stopped moving, frozen above me, that I realized it wasn't him who was screaming.

I opened my eyes and saw that his face was turned away from me, looking over the foot of the bed. The scream sounded again, and it was close, masculine, and wordless in its pain.

Frost pushed off me, rolling over the foot of the bed. I scrambled onto all fours, crawling to the foot of the bed. Frost knelt near Doyle's head. Nicca knelt near his feet. Doyle's spine bowed, his hands scrambling at the air. It was as if every muscle in his body were straining at once in different directions. If he'd been human, I'd have thought poison, but you couldn't poison the sidhe, not with strychnine, at least.

Another shriek tore from his mouth, and his body rocked with the force of the spasms. "Help him!"

Frost shook his head. "I don't know what this is."

I spilled over the foot of the bed. Before I could touch him, his skin seemed to split, and his body ran like water, if water could scream, and writhe, and bleed.

I reached out, and Frost grabbed my hand, pulled me back. "We don't know what this is." I didn't fight him, because he was right.

So I clung to his arms and didn't know what to do. I was supposed to be princess of faerie, and all I could do was kneel and stare while that strong body rolled itself into a mess of naked muscles and bone that glistened in the air, wet with blood.

When Doyle screamed again, I screamed with him. The others spilled into the room behind us with guns and swords, and none of it would help. I prayed, prayed as I had for Nicca, but there was no glow from the chalice this time. There was nothing but Doyle writhing on the floor, and the blood that crept outward like a widening dark pool on the carpet.

Frost walked backward on his knees, moving us away from that spreading wetness. He stumbled when he did it, and that one small movement freed one of my hands. It made no sense —in fact, it was the opposite of good sense—but I had to do it. I had to touch what was lying on the carpet, because it couldn't be Doyle. That writhing mass of muscle, bones, and tissue could not be my tall, handsome, Darkness. It wasn't possible.

My fingertips found wet, warm flesh, no skin. Whatever I touched in the second before Frost jerked me back was something deep within Doyle's body, something never meant to be caressed by human hand.

Frost held my wrist and seemed horrified by the red blood on my fingertips. "Don't do that again, Merry."

"Is that fur?" Rhys asked the question, pointing a pale finger.

I looked back at what was left of Doyle, and at first I didn't see it. Then, among all the dark flesh, I saw an equally dark wash of fur, flowing like slow water to coat the naked meat that had once been a man. The bare glistening bones sank into that fur, and once hidden away they began to reform with a sound like stones grinding together. A mouth formed out of that fur and bone, and it screamed, and it sounded human, but it wasn't.

When it was over, a huge black dog lay panting on its side amid the blood and fluids. My eyes tried to make sense of it, tried to see Doyle in that furred shape, but it was all dog. A huge black mastiff-type dog. I remembered the shadow dogs in my vision. What lay before us was a twin of the dogs that had formed from the shadows under the trees.

The great shaggy head tried to rise, but fell back as if exhausted. I tried to reach out to pet it, and Frost wouldn't let me. "Let me go, Frost," I said.

Rhys knelt on one knee near the dog's hind legs. "It's Doyle's dog form. I thought never to see it again." He reached out with the hand that wasn't holding a gun, and stroked down that furred side.

The dog raised its head and looked at him, then again fell back against the carpet, as if the effort had taken too much.

I stared at that furred form and was so happy that he was alive, not a disintegrating mass of flesh, that I didn't care if he was a dog. At that moment, it was so much better than what I'd feared. He wasn't dead. I'd learned long ago that with life, there is hope. With death, there is none. I believed sincerely in reincarnation. I knew that in another lifetime I might see the dead again, but it had been cold comfort at eighteen when my father died. It would have been very cold comfort if Doyle had turned into something that couldn't be healed, but only killed as a mercy. "Let go of me, Frost."

He released me reluctantly.

"Doyle, can you hear me?" I asked.

"It is still me, Merry." Doyle's voice was deeper, more growling, but it was definitely his voice.

I crawled to him, my knees sinking into the wet carpet. The blood was already cooling. I touched one of the long silken ears. Doyle nuzzled his great head against my hand.

Rhys stroked his hand down the furred side. "I always half envied you shape-shifters. Thought it must be cool to be an animal, some of the time." He laid his hand over Doyle's chest, over his heart, as if he could feel more than just the heavy thud of it. "But I've never seen a change that violent."

I brushed my hand down the warm and strangely dry fur, as if all that fur hadn't come through a wash of blood. Of course, maybe it hadn't. I didn't know that much about the mechanics of shifting form; no one really did. One of the first things to be lost when the fey left faerie in Europe was shape-shifting. Those of us who had fled to America, but kept to our hollow hills, had retained more of some abilities, but most of us were a backward lot and didn't trust or sometimes even believe in modern science. So there were no scientific studies of the phenomenon.

The fur was so soft, so thick under my hand. "Changes this violent only happen when one sidhe tries to force another into shifting against his will." My hand slid down the fur until my hand touched Rhys's fingertips. That one small touch thrilled along my arm up into my shoulder, my chest, a spasm of muscles and skin that was both pleasure and pain. It stole my breath, made me stare wide-eyed into Rhys's face.

Doyle's chest rose and fell under our hands, his heart like a great, thick drum.

"The magic isn't gone yet." Rhys's voice was hoarse.

Doyle rolled onto his back, his great muzzle opening wide, flashing a gleam of teeth like small white knives. Both Rhys and I pulled our hands back from him, just in case. He'd spoken only once. Some retained more of themselves in animal form than others. I'd never seen Doyle as anything but sidhe.

Doyle strained at the air with paws bigger than my hands. He growled, but there were words in it. "I can feel it, growing, growing inside me."

Then it was as if the dog's body split asunder, like a seed, and something huge, and black, and slicker-furred than dog sprang out of him. Rhys and I were left to scramble back. Frost grabbed me around the waist and ran us backward to the wall, giving room to the huge shape growing at the foot of the bed.

It spilled upward like a genie from a bottle, except that the bottle was Doyle's body. A great black horse shape flowed upward, as if something of flesh could be formed of water and smoke, because solid flesh did not push into the air like a fountain, or smoke rising from some great fire.

Maeve and Sage came through the door in time to see the horse become truly solid. The dog form was simply gone, like black smoke that faded around huge dark hooves.

The dog had been the size of a small pony, so the horse was even more massive. It tossed its black head and nearly scraped its nose on the ceiling. The neck was thicker than my waist. It stamped on the carpet with hooves the size of dinner plates. It moved uneasily on its huge legs, and even little movements made everyone back up. All the men were staring. Kitto seemed more frightened than the rest. He had moved back through the crowd so that he stood near the door, and I think only Maeve and Sage blocking the door kept him in the room. Another phobia to add to the list for the goblin.

It was Sage who broke the silence. "I'll be damned."

"Probably," the horse said. It was still Doyle's voice, but instead of the growl of the dog, it was higher-pitched and had lost that near-animal undertone. To say that the horse's voice sounded more human seemed wrong, but was still true.

Doyle shook out a mane as black as his own hair. "I have not been in this form since the first weirding."

Rhys came forward and passed a hand down the side of that smooth neck. The horse's body gleamed like some dark jewel.

I started forward, but Frost held me tighter, pressing the back of my nude body against the front of his, but he wasn't excited to be there. He whispered, "It's not over. Can't you feel it?"

"What?"

"Magic," he breathed.

"Pressed this close to you, all I can feel is you. You all feel like magic to me."