His gaze focused on her mouth. She had a kind of strong femininity that was completely unlike the bright artifice and colors that so many modern women employed. No makeup, no jewelry, no fancy stuff done to her hair, and no floaty, flouncy clothes. Nothing about her looks took after conventional beauty, but her mouth was exquisitely formed, the bold lines of her lips softened by generous, curving flesh.
We all recognize something of our own wildness in you. Who had said that? Grym. Her lover.
“You and Grym can’t be mates,” he growled. “Someone would have said something if you were.” She would have been much more stressed at the thought of a month’s banishment from New York. Mates did not thrive well without each other.
If anything, she laughed harder. “You’re still an idiot.”
He had to do something to shut her up, or he really was going to kill her. The pure, hot flame of his fury shifted. The extreme emotion had torn him wide open, and a maelstrom of sexual aggression screamed in. The muscles in his body felt paper-thin, barely able to contain the emotion.
Shifting his hands to fist them in the thick, silken hair at the back of her head, he lunged down to conquer her reckless, anarchistic mouth.
He felt the surprise jolt through her body as his lips locked over hers. She lay flat underneath him where she belonged, and he didn’t coax, tease or entice as he would have with any other woman. He took. Breathing heavily, he forced her mouth open and plunged deep inside with his hardened tongue. His body, his mind, were all on fire. Dimly, a small part of him, the cool intellectual part that wasn’t wholly driven by his internal whip, grew a little thoughtful about his lack of control.
Aryal growled, a husky wild note that shuddered over his skin and went straight for his cock, and she kissed him back savagely. They ate at each other as if they were still fighting.
Their surroundings could hardly be any worse. It was chill, damp, and they were sprawled on the hard pavement and out in the open. Anyone could come along and see them at any time.
None of it mattered. Images ran through his mind like molten lava. He wanted to flip her over, get her in a head-lock and hold her there, strip down her jeans and take her in the ass.
Hard and rough, baby. No holds barred, no ritualized courtesy and no safe word, just pure animal rut. He wanted to dominate the shit out of her and make her scream while she lost everything to her own climax.
She shifted the hand from his throat to grip the back of his head.
He knocked her hand away and snarled against her lips, “Don’t touch me.”
Her eyes flashed. She bit his lip hard, and he reared his head back. A thin, warm trickle tickled his skin. She’d drawn blood.
“What’s the matter with me touching you?” she asked. Her gaze turned challenging. “Do you like it too much?”
She was too accurate. She saw too much.
She was a demon, Lucy Ricardo on crack.
“Hate sex,” he said. He didn’t recognize the sound of his own voice.
Get it out of his system. Exorcise her from his mind and body.
Fuck yeah.
“You want it,” she said.
He became aware of what they were doing. She had wrapped those long legs of hers around his waist so that their pelvises aligned through the layers of their clothing. She had wrapped her Power around him too, and it felt hot and keen like a slicing, summer wind. They were rocking together in a pagan rhythm that echoed the coursing in his blood. He had palmed one of her breasts, gripping the slight, high mound through her sweater.
His eyes narrowed. “You want it too.”
Her expression mocked him. “Don’t let it go to your head. Just your penis.”
He almost laughed, but the verbal sparring had brought his thinking back online and he remembered his rage instead. He thrust away from her with a muttered curse. Her legs loosened from around his waist, and he rolled to his feet.
Aryal stood too, shaking off the snow from her back and stamping her boots. He watched as she walked over to a clean patch of snow and scooped a little into her hands. She gritted her teeth as she washed the blood from her fingers. The cuts were already closed, but they looked angry and red, and she moved her hands like they pained her.
Served her right. Driving her talons through a metal door? He shook his head and strangled the impulse to be impressed, as he swiped at his knees, knocking snow off too. Some had melted, and his jeans had two wet patches that felt cold and clammy. She would have wet patches all down her back.
Then he anchored his hands on his hips. Instead of murdering her, he had determined to actually try to have things out with her once and for all, but by gods, she didn’t make anything easy.
“I’m back to my original question,” he growled.
“Are you?” The glance she gave him was full of indifference. “That’s probably not very pleasant.”
“What the fuck? Seriously, just answer me. You owe me that. For so long you have been riding my ass every which way you could. When I finally say screw it and tell you what you’ve been angling to hear all this time, the only response you’ve got is to say, ‘meh, don’t care.’ All of this is after making so much racket about me being a career criminal. Believe me, I’m used to you being crazy, but that has a disconnect that makes no sense even for you.”
“Not at all,” she said. She finished cleaning her hands, shook off the snow and turned to face him, mirroring his stance. The thing was, when he looked into her eyes, the whack-job harpy appeared to be quite lucid. At the moment she looked amused again. “You being a criminal—that was important, because that was how I was going to trap you. I don’t actually care that you broke the law, Quentin. I don’t actually care much about the law, period.”
He raised his eyebrows skeptically. “You have a funny way of showing it.”
She twitched her shoulders, as if shaking off an irritating fly. “What I care about is whether or not you have endangered the Wyr demesne. Smuggling some high-dollar luxury items? So we didn’t get some tax revenue we should have gotten. Big fucking deal. If you go after Dragos—if you do anything to actively try to hurt any of the people I care about—that’s when I will come after you, and I won’t stop until I hurt you bad, or you end up dead, or maybe even both of those things. That’s my bottom line. It’s really quite simple.”
He spun away from her sharply to stare out over the abandoned area without really seeing it, his explosive rage easing back down to a simmer. One way or another, it always came back to Dragos. She would hate to know what he had done last year, and he had no intention of telling her.
“Why Dragos?” he murmured, almost to himself. “He and the Wyr demesne are two different things. Dragos could die and the demesne would go on.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “I’m speaking theoretically.”
“Some form of the demesne would go on,” she said. She shook her head. “It wouldn’t be the same. And it wouldn’t be as strong. I will never forget what Dragos did when he united the Wyr. No one else could have done it. I’m well aware that you don’t like him, but whatever else you may say, no one else can do the job he does. He’s got the strength, the ambition and ruthlessness, and he’s got the financial acumen. Forcefulness and prosperity. That’s a hell of a combination. Hell, you were there this morning too. We’re two of the best Wyr fighters in the world, and he stomped our asses.”
That he had.
Somehow they had managed to move away from the craziness, the violence and the sex, and they were almost having a rational conversation. Quentin wasn’t sure what to make of it, except he was a long way from trusting it, or her. He rubbed his aching jaw where she had punched him and laughed under his breath.
He had to give it to her, she’d made some moves he hadn’t seen coming. He wasn’t about to underestimate her again. He tilted his head as he turned back to her, and he gave her a catlike smile. “Listen to us,” he said. “If someone didn’t know any better, they might think we were almost close to making a t
ruce.”
An evil gleam crept into her narrowed gaze. “A truce?” she said. “Just because we smacked each other around, did a little bump and grind and exchanged more than three words at a time? Fuck, no.”
That internal whip that drove him?
Sometimes it felt good.
He purred, “There we go.”
She still refused to let him drive, even though he knew she didn’t care about the rental policy. There was nothing more infuriating than someone who was being pedantic about something you know they don’t give a damn about.
She drove back to the highway entrance, and in a matter of moments they were moving southwest toward the Bohemian Forest. He made a mistake once. He didn’t make it twice. He wasn’t about to ride shotgun without a seat belt on while she was in the driver’s seat.
Prague and the immediate surrounding area were densely urban, but once they traveled beyond a certain point they were surrounded by scenes of almost desolate beauty, the countryside washed of all its colors in the wintry day. It was as if a giant, unseen hand had taken all the smog from the industrialized area and smeared it over the landscape.
Quentin knew better. He had traveled through the Czech Republic in finer weather and remembered the blue skies, green fields and richly hued lakes.
They traveled in silence for a while. Neither one of them reached to turn on the radio. The heat from their earlier passion lingered, like half-seen coals in a banked fireplace. Images of what happened kept flashing in his mind’s eye. The way she had tricked him and pinned him against the metal door, her lean body pressed against his. The way he had slammed her into the ground and held her, hands around her throat.
His hand on her breast. Her thighs clamped on his. Her body undulating underneath him.
It disturbed him, but not because they were so violent.
Because he wanted to do it again.
He felt like something dark at his core, something that he had kept leashed all his life, had broken loose and was running renegade. He, who took control whenever he could, didn’t feel in control of himself at all. He shifted restlessly in his seat. When he glanced at her Aryal was frowning, lost deep in thought.
She broke the silence first. “Dragos had said that to the best of his knowledge, Numenlaur had only one crossover passageway, the one that led here to Earth that was barred so long ago. But the Numenlaurian army was in the Lirithriel Elves’ Other land when we confronted them, so is there really only one crossover passageway from Numenlaur or does it connect to that Other land as well?”
When the Earth had been formed, time and space had buckled, creating Other lands that were connected to Earth and sometimes to each other by dimensional crossover passageways. They were magic-rich places where combustible technologies didn’t work, and where time ran differently than it did on what Quentin liked to think of as the mainland.
Sometimes the Other lands were immense, as was the Dark Fae land of Adriyel, and they had several crossover passageways to other places. Sometimes the Other lands were mere pockets of space that led nowhere.
Quentin’s eyes still felt dry from the sleepless night and the long flight. He rubbed them as he said, “Dragos is right. Numenlaur does only have one passageway.”
She sent him a frowning glance. “You know this for sure, how?”
“I talked to Ferion when I went to get supplies,” he told her. As she turned her head to look at him fully, he added irritably, “Don’t get pissy about it, and keep your eyes on the road. I wasn’t selling state secrets. Dragos never said anything about keeping our assignment under wraps.”
She looked like he had stuffed a slice of lemon in her mouth, but after a moment she grumbled, “Fair enough. I wasn’t aware that you had a personal connection to the new High Lord.”
“It’s not a close connection,” he said. “We’re family by marriage.”
“It’s close enough that you were able to get him on the phone,” she pointed out.
He pressed his thumb and forefinger against his closed eyelids until he saw red stars. “When I was younger, we spent some time together, took vacations and went hunting, that sort of thing. Now that he’s become the High Lord, I think getting him on the phone is going to become harder and harder to do over time.”
She mulled that over. “I’ve heard that Ferion was the late High Lord Calondir’s son, but is he Beluviel’s son too? It takes two to make a baby, and the woman has the more significant role in the process by far, but at some point Beluviel always disappears from the conversation.”
“Ferion is not Beluviel’s son,” he said. “He was born a long time ago. I don’t know the whole story, other than Beluviel and Calondir hadn’t always gotten along. They had been living separate lives when Ferion was born. Later, they came back together when the Elven demesne was formed in what became the United States, and they stayed a strong partnership ever since, at least in a public and political sense. I can’t speak to the reality in their private lives.”
Aryal pursed her lips. “Since Beluviel was Calondir’s consort, why didn’t she become the High Lady, or whatever she would have been called?”
He shrugged. “Like I said, I’m not on the inside of that family circle, but from what I’ve heard, Beluviel didn’t want to become Lady of the Lirithriel Elves.”
“Pity,” she said. “I don’t have anything against Ferion, but I’ve always liked Beluviel.” She glanced at him. “So what did he say when you talked to him?”
“Dragos was right, Ferion’s overextended. He has thought of Numenlaur but has not had a chance to do anything more than send a small party of Elves to guard the passageway. He also sent some trackers over Lirithriel’s Other land to trace the path of the Numenlaurian army back to its source.”
“Why?”
“He wanted to make sure that Gaeleval hadn’t abandoned any enthralled Elves who might have been too sick or injured to keep up with the rest of the army.”
Aryal winced. “Do you know if they found anybody?”
“Nobody alive,” he said grimly.
She swore quietly.
Quentin took a deep breath. “Anyway, Numenlaur isn’t the only crossover passageway in the Bohemian Forest. There’s one that leads to the Lirithriel Other land too.”
Aryal frowned. “I guess I’m not surprised. There may be even more than those two passageways. The Bohemian Forest is a very old and witchy place. Not sentient like Lirithriel Wood was before it burned, just witchy.”
Quentin understood what she meant. The Bohemian Forest, called Šumava by the Czechs, was actually a low mountain range that extended from the Czech Republic to Austria and Germany, and the area held one of the oldest forests in the world.
Quentin had spent some time hiking there when he was younger. At first he had gone to look where the fabled Numenlaurian passageway was rumored to have stood, but the magic used in barring the passageway hid it from outside eyes and he was never certain he had found where it was supposed to have been located.
He told her, “Well, Gaeleval took advantage of the proximity of the two passageways. He marched his army out of Numenlaur, through the forest, and then into the Lirithriel Other land through the second passageway. Nobody here on Earth knew a thing.”
“If Ferion’s got Elven guards on the Numenlaurian passageway, then our assignment is little more than in name only,” Aryal said. She blew out a sigh. “Well, the main part the assignment isn’t. More than half the reason Dragos sent us here was to get rid of us.”
Quentin angled out his jaw. He couldn’t deny it. He looked sideways at the same moment Aryal did. He was immensely surprised when they both burst out laughing at the same time.
It felt strange, almost good, like they shared a moment of camaraderie. His laughter faded and he scowled at the thought. “We may not be doing any of this for Ferion, but he’s glad we’re going to check on the passageway. He asked me to give him an update when we get back. There’s no cell phone reception in the forest, and he hasn??
?t heard anything from the guards since they went in.”
Her eyebrows rose. “How long ago was that?”
“He didn’t say exactly, but from the gist of the conversation, I think it had to have been at least three weeks ago.” Quentin tried to straighten his legs as much as he could. His muscles were protesting sitting for so long in such confined spaces.
“And he hasn’t heard from them since?” She shook her head. “Sloppy. They should have sent someone out with an update by now.”
He sighed. “Yes, an update would have been good, but you don’t know that it was sloppy. They might have found some need to cross over to Numenlaur. If that happened, then you’ve got to factor in time slippage from the Other land. Ferion didn’t sound too worried. He’ll just be glad to hear how things are going.”
After that they fell silent again, as if talking with some kind of civility had been enough of a strain that they couldn’t sustain it any longer. Just over an hour into the journey, a bit south of Plze, they switched highways to continue in a more southern direction that would take them to the northern edge of the Forest. After passing through another urban cluster, they passed quickly into countryside again.
The Forest was growing in popularity as a vacation destination, and it had several camping grounds along with ski resorts. They would be able to drive in a fair distance before they would have to park and hike.
Still, Aryal had to slow the Peugeot as the roads grew narrow and winding. The amount of traffic dropped to almost nonexistent. Even though the low surrounding mountains were streaked with patches of white, probably both ski resorts and campgrounds were all but deserted. The weather was too warm for satisfactory snow cover for skiing, but too cold and damp for all but the hardiest of campers.
Aryal spoke, disrupting the long silence. “If I was on my own, I would have taken to the air by now, and I would scout for the passageways by feeling for land magic.”