Sebastian looked at the basket and winced—a perfectly understandable response to seeing anything that was usually penis-shaped cut up into chunks.
Since she hesitated, he took a chunk of bread and swirled it in the cheese, then nodded for her to do the same. “Careful. The cheese is hot.”
She picked a head out of the basket. Oh, she wouldn’t know what it was, wouldn’t associate its shape with anything male, but as he watched her swirl the head in the cheese, his pants suddenly felt too tight—and his heart gave a hard bump when her tongue darted out to catch the cheese dripping from the end. And when she blew on the head to cool the cheese enough to eat, he thought his skin would burst into flames.
She had no idea what she was doing—and it was killing him.
“This is good,” she said, reaching for another piece.
He stuffed his own piece of bread and cheese in his mouth to keep from saying something erotic, suggestive, lewd. Desperate.
How was he supposed to think when his cock was throbbing and his brain couldn’t get past how her mouth closed over the bread, how her mouth could close over his—
Applause from the other tables startled both of them. Lynnea started to turn in her chair to see what people were responding to, but Philo was back, blocking her view as he set a plate on the table.
“Something to go with the house specialty,” Philo said. “Stuffed Tits.”
“What?” Lynnea raised a protective hand to her chest as she stared at the plate.
“Um…er…” Philo gave Sebastian a panicked look.
Lynnea frowned. “Those look like…mushrooms.”
“Yes,” Philo said quickly. “Stuffed mushrooms. Harmless.”
She continued to study the mushrooms. “They do look like tits, don’t they? Sort of round but pointy with the stuffing.” She took one and put it on her plate. Then she picked up a piece of bread. “What do you call this stuff?”
Beads of sweat popped out on Philo’s forehead. “Ah…Phallic Delights.”
“What’s ‘phallic’?” she asked. Then she hiccuped.
Sebastian closed his eyes and tried not to moan. His little rabbit was sloshed on half a glass of wine, and watching her inhibitions fall away made him feel very peculiar. He should be reveling in how easy this had been. Instead he wanted to get her away from any bad influences. Which was funny, since he was an incubus, this was the Den, and he intended to be the baddest influence she met during this visit.
“It’s a word polite young ladies don’t know,” Philo replied.
“Oh.” Lynnea stared at the bread. “But I’m a bad person, so I can say that word. Phalllllic.”
Someone from another table called, and Philo fled in response.
Sebastian opened his eyes and watched Lynnea swirl the bread in the cheese—and knew he was in trouble.
“Eat your mushroom,” he said. Daylight! Now he sounded like a priggish older brother. What had happened to the desire to hunt, to hurt, to seduce her?
“Stuffed tit,” she replied. Then she giggled.
The sound produced a heat inside him that bewildered him. It was like suddenly standing in a beam of sunlight—and that something inside him that was struggling to survive fed on the sound.
Having lost his appetite for food, he drank his wine while he watched her eat.
Finally she leaned back, took a sip of wine, and looked around. “This is a strange place.”
It’s the Den. “Why did you come here, Lynnea?”
“Wasn’t supposed to. Was…supposed to go to the Landscapers’ School, but Ewan left me on the side of the road, and…” She shuddered. “Don’t want to think about that. Not now.”
“All right,” Sebastian said soothingly. “We won’t talk about that.” Yet. “Tell me how you got to the Den.”
“Went over a bridge. Was trying…” Her eyes filled with tears. “He told me to come to him.”
Sebastian’s heart slammed against his chest. No. It couldn’t be. “Who? Ewan?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. A voice inside my head. After Mam told me I was going to be sent away, I was just thinking, and…”
A tear rolled down her cheek. She whispered, “I just wanted to find a place where I would feel safe, where I wouldn’t be afraid all the time. But I ended up here. So I guess I’m a bad person after all.”
The Landscapers will send me to a bad place. I just want—
What? What do you want?
I want to be safe. I want to be loved. I want to be someplace where I’m not afraid all the time.
Come to me.
Guardians and Guides.
Pushing back his chair, Sebastian helped Lynnea to her feet, then led his jelly-legged little rabbit to the brothel that was on a side street two blocks away from Philo’s. After getting his key from the clerk behind the counter in the lobby, he half carried Lynnea up the stairs and down the corridor to his room on the third floor.
Dark, heavy furniture. Red velvet curtains around the bed and the windows. The room was big enough to have a sitting area as well as the bed. No fireplace, but he had a connecting bathroom that he shared with Teaser, whose room also had a connecting door.
Masculine. Alien. A room designed for seduction and a sexual feast.
And there was Lynnea, with her torn, dirty clothes, looking more like an exhausted child than a woman ripe for a romp. Looking so out of place it made his heart hurt.
“What are you wearing under that?” he asked, gesturing to the tunic and skirt.
“A shift.”
He hoped she was wearing more than that, but he wasn’t going to ask.
He led her to the bathroom door, paused a moment to listen, then pushed the door open.
“An indoor privy,” she said, sounding impressed. “I’d heard everyone has them in the cities now.”
“We may be decadent, but we’re not backward. We even have lektricity for the streetlights and in some parts of the buildings.” And he’d never wondered until now why a place like the Den would have such things.
“I should take a bath.”
She sounded hesitant—not about the bath but about being completely naked with a strange man on the other side of the door.
“You can take a bath later.” When you won’t fall asleep in the tub and drown. “Just take care of your necessaries.”
She blushed. He retreated.
He busied himself by pulling back the bedcovers and fluffing the pillows, keeping his mind focused on the simple tasks until he could get out of that room.
Why did he have to get out? In her current haze of exhaustion and wine, it wouldn’t take much to have her mindless from sensual pleasure, and then he could feed on the emotions produced by thrilling her body.
That was what he wanted. Wasn’t it?
When she came back into the bedroom a few minutes later, her face was clean—and she was wearing nothing but her shift.
Lust swam in his blood as soon as he saw her, but it was flavored by something else, something unfamiliar and delicate. Want and wariness tangled up inside him, making him desperate to get away from her long enough to think.
“Am I supposed to give you sex?” she asked in a small voice. Resigned. As if she expected her body to be used as a commodity.
That made him angry, which made no sense. But nothing was making any sense, so why should this be different?
He wanted to believe she was experienced, wanted to believe she was offering herself, wanted to believe he could unfurl the power of the incubi and feast on the pleasure he could make her feel.
But he couldn’t look at her and believe any of those things. He also couldn’t leave without doing something to ease the need gnawing inside him, so he walked up to her, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her softly.
Warm. Sweet. Innocent, but there was a banked sensuality that just needed encouragement in order to bloom.
But not now.
He tucked her into bed the way Nadia used to tuck him in,
telling him without words that he was safe and welcome.
“Sleep now,” he whispered.
Her eyes drifted shut. She was asleep before he stepped away from the bed.
Returning to Philo’s, he ordered whiskey, then sat staring at the liquid in the glass.
I want to be safe. I want to be loved. I want to be someplace where I’m not afraid all the time.
Come to me.
No one came to the Den by mistake. By accident, certainly, but not by mistake.
Except his little rabbit was right—she didn’t belong here, would never have found the Den if not for him. Because it was that brief connection with him that had drawn her to the Den, had made it resonate in a way that made it possible for her to cross over.
His fault. His responsibility.
Teaser pulled out a chair and flopped into it. “Where’s the country mouse?”
“Sleeping.”
“That was quick.”
Sebastian stared at Teaser until the other incubus stirred uneasily. “You’re going to help me with something. A little game, you could call it.”
“Sebastian, I don’t think the mouse is ready for something more than a solo—”
He held up his hand. “This is what I want you to do.” As he talked, Teaser’s expression changed from uneasy to baffled. “Do you understand?”
“No,” Teaser replied.
“Will you help?”
“Sure, if that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want.”
Teaser studied him, then stood up. “I’ll spread the word.”
It didn’t take long. Even though he couldn’t see it from where he was sitting, he felt the waves of activity washing over the Den.
She was here because of him, and this much he could do for her. If he were a smart man, he would escort her to the Landscapers’ School as soon as she woke up. But he didn’t want to be a smart man. He wanted—needed—this small pocket of time. He had no influence in any other landscape, but here in the Den he could give her a few hours in a place where she wouldn’t be afraid.
After that, he would take her to the school, knowing she would never find her way back to the Den.
Knowing there was something about her that would haunt him the rest of his life.
Chapter Eight
The girl sniffled into a handkerchief and looked up at the two wizards standing in front of her. “He came running down the stairs so fast, I didn’t have a chance to warn him they were wet. And he looked so scared, like something terrible was chasing after him. Then he slipped and one foot got tangled in the wash bucket’s handle and he…” She collapsed into the chair behind her, sobbing.
“What were you doing on the stairs so early in the morning?” Harland asked sternly.
The tears dried up, replaced by a hint of angry pride. “My work, sir. When a stairway needs washing, we do it first so it’s dry before most other folk are up and about.”
“Are you implying that the wizards are lazy?” Harland sounded offended.
“I’m sure that’s not what she meant,” Koltak said. “The servants are aware that we spend the early hours in meditation or study and don’t usually leave our rooms.”
“That’s true, sir,” the girl said, looking earnestly at Harland. “No one’s to come knocking to clean a room until after breakfast, so we take care of other cleaning chores until then.”
“I see,” Harland said, a little mollified.
“Besides,” the girl added, “wizards don’t use that stairway. Just the servants. He shouldn’t have been using those stairs at all.”
“I think that’s all we need to know,” Koltak said. He glanced at Harland, relieved when the head of the Wizards’ Council nodded in agreement.
He led the girl to the door and opened it, not surprised to find the housekeeper hovering in the corridor. She was protective of her girls and had, more than once, publicly berated young wizards for not being able to tell a servant from a slut.
As the housekeeper hurried off with the girl, Koltak closed the door and turned to face Harland. “What do you think?”
Harland stared at the floor. Then he sighed. “The boy had no business on that stairway, but it is a shortcut from the apprentice quarters to the study rooms. So I think you were right about him having a braggart’s tongue. He was probably on his way to tell some companion about delivering a message to me.”
“If it was nothing more than haste that had him rushing down that stairway, he would have seen the girl and the bucket, would have realized the stairs were wet.” Koltak paused. “But the girl said he looked scared.”
Some undefinable look came and went over Harland’s face. “You think a Dark Guide influenced the boy into taking fright?”
“Don’t you believe in the Dark Guides?”
Harland lifted a hand, then let it fall. “If people believe there are Guardians of the Light and Guides of the Heart, how can there not be Dark Guides to provide balance, to grant the darker wishes of the heart? Personally, I think people make their own choices, good and bad. If they find comfort in blaming a hardship on something outside of themselves or that some force heard a wish and granted it, then let them believe.”
“And so a moment at the wrong place and time ends with a young man tumbling down a flight of wet stairs and breaking his neck?” Koltak said. Why was he arguing this, especially with Harland?
“Yes,” Harland said quietly. “Most likely we’ll discover some classmates pulled a prank on the boy that frightened him more than they’d intended, and that, in turn, caused the accident that ended the boy’s life this morning. I don’t think we’ll find anything more sinister than that, Koltak. No Dark Guides, no dark presence. Nothing but human weakness.”
“I know.”
As he went back to his own rooms, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Harland was trying to hide something—that Harland didn’t believe for one moment this morning’s tragedy had been caused by human weakness.
Nigelle ran all the way to her walled garden. Slipping through the gate, she paused to catch her breath and embrace the glee she felt whenever she stood here.
Secrets. Her garden was full of secrets. Dark landscapes carefully hidden so that a quick look by any of the Instructors would cause no alarm. Not that they were doing the usual inspections lately. Too many strange things had been happening.
And she was the only one who knew why.
She hurried to the far end of her garden, then looked around, impatient. Where was he? Surely he’d come. He had to come. He was so splendid, she couldn’t stand not seeing him for a whole day.
She’d tried sex with a couple of the boys studying to be Bridges, but she hadn’t liked it much. But with him… It was devastatingly wonderful. Like drowning in sensations. Like being devoured while she crested again and again. It had gotten so that, if a full day went by without sex, she felt jittery, hot, like her skin was too tight and she needed to peel it off in order to breathe.
She’d have sex with him every hour of every day until it killed her. That was how good it was.
Laughing at herself for being so melodramatic, she rubbed her hands over her arms to ease the jittery, itching feeling.
Where was he?
And it wasn’t just the sex, no matter how wonderful. He was showing her things the Instructors never would have taught her. And he had entrusted her with guarding the darkest, most dangerous landscapes in Ephemera.
Nigelle frowned. Why had he chosen her? If these places were so dangerous and had to be guarded to keep people from stumbling into them, why hadn’t he asked one of the stronger Landscapers for help? Why…?
She looked at the garden in front of the patch of grass she stood on. Directly in front of her was a path that ended at the back wall, separating two of the secret landscapes. To her left, hidden by two shrubs and a bed of tall summer flowers, was a patch of rust-colored sand fanning out from the corner. To her right, also fanning out from the corner, was a pool of murky w
ater. Not deep. Even though he’d warned her to stay away from it, she’d used a stick as a measuring rod one day, so she knew it was barely up to her knees.
She’d never seen anyone create a space in a garden that could hold water without enclosing it on all sides to create a small pond.
Can Belladonna do something like that?
She banished the thought. She didn’t like thinking about Belladonna anymore. And the other day, when he’d asked her about the sealed gardens, she’d told him about Belladonna, the rogue Landscaper who had escaped from the Justice Makers’ magic. But when she’d said she intended to be a Landscaper like Belladonna, he’d gotten the strangest look on his face and murmured, “Perhaps you’re not what I thought you were.”
He left soon after that, and she hadn’t seen him since.
She turned in a slow circle, her eyes scanning every part of her garden. He had to come today. He had to.
Then he was there, appearing on the path in front of her, a handsome, middle-aged man who was carrying a small sack and wearing nothing but a smile.
He pulled her down on the grass, began pulling at her clothes.
“Let me have you,” he said, his dark eyes glittering with a feverish excitement. “Let me fill you.”
She tried to protest. This was crude. Not at all like him. She didn’t like this, even felt…
“Yes,” he said as he rolled on top of her and thrust into her. “Yes, fear is good. Delicious. Intoxicating.”
Then he kissed her. She closed her eyes while that flood of heat and need filled her until all she could think of was having him inside her so she could keep feeling this way.
But things didn’t feel…right. Her breasts felt enclosed by strange mouths that had a dozen little tongues that rasped the delicate skin and sensitized nipples. Painful. And yet she couldn’t bear to have it stop.
And he didn’t feel right inside her. Too thick. Too long. Each thrust hurt her, but the pleasure was also building and building and…