Seduced by Moonlight   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

I think he raised me the only way he knew how.»

«Perhaps,» Frost said, «or perhaps, Prince Essus did not lose all his prophetic abilities when the rest of us did.»

I shrugged. «I don't know, and I don't have time to worry about it.»

Doyle came to the front of the hallway. «Kurag is willing to talk to you, Meredith, but he is not happy about it.»

«I didn't expect him to be.»

«He fears your enemies,» Frost said.

«That makes two of us,» I said.

«Three,» Rhys said.

«Four,» Doyle said.

Frost shook his head, his hair glittering like a curtain of Christmas tree tinsel. «Five. I fear for your safety. If we lose the goblins' threat, Cel's allies will move against us.»

«Then we're agreed,» I said.

Doyle was looking from one to the other of us. «What have we agreed to?»

«I'm going to play hors d'oeuvre for the Goblin King,» Rhys said.

Doyle's black-on-black eyebrows raised up nearly to his hairline. «I have missed something.»

«Rhys is going to help me negotiate with Kurag,» I said.

«Help how?» Doyle asked.

Rhys dropped the robe off one pale shoulder, flashing down to one tight nipple. He grinned and shrugged back into the robe.

Doyle raised dark eyebrows. «Do not take this in a spirit in which it is not meant, but you have been a stumbling block to our work with Kurag. He has chided you, fully clothed, and you have practically foamed at the mouth like an ill-used dog. What makes you believe you can do.» He seemed to be searching for a word. He finally settled for, «What makes you believe you can stand up to Kurag's teasing on this day?»

«Today, I'll be teasing back. Merry said that Kurag is like a schoolyard bully, and she's right. Besides, if Merry can do it, so can I.» He looked suddenly fierce again. All the humor had gone, leaving his face bleak. «Though I'd much rather kill goblins than negotiate with them.»

«Funny,» Doyle said, «that's exactly what King Kurag said about the sidhe only moments ago.»

«Perfect,» I said. «Let's all go and irritate each other.»

Doyle led the way down the hallway. He looked terribly nude from the back. I realized that Kurag would have more than just Rhys and I to ogle. I wondered if Doyle thought of himself as a potential sex partner, or as a meal? I guess that all depended on how Kurag felt about sidhe men, and if he preferred dark meat to light.



CHAPTER 3

I heard Kitto's voice in the hallway long before we got to the bedroom. I couldn't hear everything he said, but the tone was pleading, and the voice that answered him wasn't Kurag's. It was Kurag's queen, Creeda. Over the last month I'd learned to truly dislike her.

Kitto stood in front of the mirrored dresser, drawn up to every inch of his four-foot height. He was the only man I'd ever taken to my bed who made me feel tall. The bare back he showed us was perfectly masculine, with a swell of shoulders, chest, a narrow waist, just done small. From the front he looked human enough, but from the back, without his shirt, you could see the scales. They were bright and iridescent, a glittering rainbow of color that ran down the middle of his back on either side of his spine. I knew that they spread out onto either side of his very upper buttocks. The rest of him was a white perfection of skin like mother-of-pearl. His Seelie mother had been raped by a snake goblin in the last great goblin war.

I noticed that his curly black hair had grown long enough to trail over his neck where the scales began. He'd need a haircut soon if he were to maintain the goblin tradition of doing nothing to hide his deformities.

He was saying, as we entered, «Please, Goblin Queen, do not make me do this.»

She sat in the mirror, not a reflection, but as clear as if she sat just in front of us. She wasn't much taller than Kitto, and her hair was long and black, but where his hair was silken, hers looked as dry and harsh as it truly was. She had more eyes scattered about her face than I could count. That along with a nest of arms around her middle gave her the look of some great spider. A smile split the wide lipless mouth and flashed fangs enough to make any spider proud. She had only two legs and two breasts. If those had been multiples, she'd have been the epitome of goblin beauty.

Seeing the female goblins always made me wonder why the goblin men wanted sidhe women. Maybe it was more of a power thing than a sex thing, like most rapes.

The queen, Creeda, leaned toward her side of the mirror, filling our vision with her dozens of eyes and that oddly off-center mouth. There was a nose in there somewhere, but it was so overwhelmed by everything else that you had to concentrate to notice it. «You will do what ye're told,» she said, and her voice had taken on that whining growl we'd all begun to dread.

Kitto's small hands went to the top of his shorts, and he began to slide them down.

«Stop, Kitto,» I said, making sure my voice was clear and cheerful, and that my face didn't show how much I disliked Creeda.

Kitto pulled his shorts back into place and turned to me, the gratitude on his face so plain that I hurried to make sure he wouldn't turn toward the mirror again. I drew him against the side of my body with one arm and placed my other hand against his soft hair. I pressed his face gently into the curve of my neck and shoulder so he wouldn't turn and look at Creeda. If she once understood how truly afraid of her he was, she'd make the Summerlands into a wasteland to have him at her mercy.

«You have interrupted,» she whined.

I smiled, and knew my face was pleasant, even bright and shiny. I'd been relearning a lifetime of polite lies that had kept me alive as a child in the faerie courts. You had to be able to lie with your face, your eyes, your entire body language, to maneuver through the politics of the courts. I wasn't always perfect at it, but the goblins were less noticing of such things. The true test was always my aunt, the Queen of Air and Darkness: She noticed everything.

«Greetings, Goblin Queen. I am so sorry that I have kept you waiting.»

She snarled at me, flashing a mouth full of fangs, as if she had more of them than she needed, like she had eyes. I wondered if she had trouble eating without molars. I knew beyond doubt that her bite was poisonous. Of course, so was Kitto's, but his one pair of fangs were retractable. Creeda's were not.

Her face was a mask of fury as she mouthed her pleasantries. «Greetings, Meredith, Princess of the Sidhe, I have enjoyed my wait. Truly, if you have other things to do, Kitto and I will be busy for a little while longer.