Mistrals Kiss   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

The gardens were simply dead now, and the sky overhead was only bare, empty rock.

I heard someone say, “How?” Then those lines of color flared bright: crimson, neon blue, emerald green in the dark. It forced cries from the dark, and sent Abeloec’s mouth back between my legs. Mistral’s mouth pressed into mine, his hands eager on my body. It was a sweet trap, but trap it was, laid for us by something that cared little for what we wanted. The magic of faerie held us, and we would not be free until that magic was satisfied.

I tried to be afraid, but I couldn’t. There was nothing but the feel of Abeloec’s and Mistral’s bodies on mine, and the push of the dead earth underneath me.



CHAPTER 3

ABELOEC’S TONGUE MADE LONG, SURE STROKES AROUND THE edge of my opening, then a caress at the top as he moved downward again. Mistral’s hands played with my breasts in the same way he kissed, as if he could not fill his hands with enough of my body, as if the sensation was something that he had to have. He rolled my nipples between his fingers, and finally moved his mouth from mine to join his hands at my breasts. He took one breast into his mouth, as far as he could, as if he would truly eat my flesh. He sucked hard, and harder, until his teeth began to press into me.

Abeloec moved up to that sweet place at the top of my opening and began to roll his tongue over and around it. Mistral’s teeth pressed in slowly, as if he were waiting for me to say stop, but I didn’t. The combination of Abeloec’s mouth, sure and gentle between my legs, and the inexorable pressure of Mistral’s mouth on my breast, tight and tighter, was exquisite.

A soft breeze danced across my skin. A trickle of wind pushed strands of Mistral’s hair across my body, pulling strands free from his long ponytail. His teeth continued their relentless press. He was crushing my breast between his teeth, and it felt so good. Abeloec’s tongue flicked fast and faster over that one sweet point.

The wind blew harder, sending dead leaves skittering across our bodies.

Mistral’s teeth were almost met in my breast, and it hurt now. I opened my mouth to tell him to stop, but in that moment Abeloec flicked that one last time I needed. He brought me screaming, my hands flinging outward, upward, searching for something to hold on to, while Abeloec built the orgasm with tongue and mouth.

My hands found Mistral. I dug nails into his bare arms, and only when one of my hands reached for his thigh did he grab my wrist. To do it, he had to release my breast from the prison of his mouth. He pinned my hands into the dry earth, while I screamed and strained to reach him with nails and teeth. He stayed just above me, pressing my wrists into the ground. He stared down at me with eyes flickering with light. My last sight of his eyes, before Abeloec made me fling my head from side to side, fighting against the pleasure, was that they were full of lightning, flickering, dancing, so bright it made shadows on the glow of my skin.

Abeloec’s hands dug into my thighs, holding me in place, while I struggled to break free. It felt so good — so good — that I thought I would lose my mind if he didn’t stop. So good that I wanted him both to stop, and never to stop.

The wind blew harder. Dried, woody vines screeched in the growing wind, and trees creaked with protest, as if their dead limbs would not last the wind.

The lines of color that fed out from Abeloec, red and blue and green, grew brighter with the wind. The colors pulsed bright and brighter. Maybe because the light was so intensely colored, it didn’t so much push back the darkness as make the darkness glow — as if the endless night had been brushed with neon lights.

Abeloec let go of my thighs, and the moment he did the lights dimmed, just a little. He knelt between my legs and began unlacing his breeches. His modern clothes had been ruined in last night’s assassination attempt, and he, like most of the men who rarely left faerie, had few things with zippers or metal buttons.

I started to say no, because he hadn’t asked, and because the magic was receding. I could think again, as if the orgasm had cleared my mind.

I was supposed to be having as much sex as I could, for if I didn’t get with child soon, not only would I never be queen, but I’d probably be dead. If my cousin Cel got someone with child before I got pregnant, he would be king, and he would kill me, and all who were loyal to me. It was an incentive to fuck that no aphrodisiac could match.

But there was something sharp under my back, and more smaller pains up and down my body. Dead branches and bits of plant poking and biting at me. I hadn’t noticed it until after the orgasm, when the endorphins were receding at a rapid rate. There’d been almost no afterglow, just mind-blowing orgasm, and then this feeling of fading, of being aware of every discomfort. If Abeloec had missionary position in mind, we needed a blanket.

It wasn’t like me to lose interest so quickly. If Abeloec was as talented with other things as he was with his mouth, then he was someone I wanted to bed, just for sheer pleasure. So why did I suddenly find myself with no upon my lips and a desire to get up off the ground?

THEN A VOICE CAME OUT OF THE GROWING DARK AS THE LINES of color faded — a voice that froze us all where we were and sent my heart pounding into my throat. “Well, well, well, I call for my captain of the guard, Mistral, and he is nowhere to be found. My healer tells me that you all vanished from the bedroom. I searched for you in the dark, and here you are.” Andais, Queen of Air and Darkness, stepped out from the far wall. Her pale skin was a whiteness in the growing dark, but there was light around her, light as if black could be a flame and give illumination.

“If you had stood in the light, I would have not found you, but you stand in the dark, the deep dark of the dead gardens. You cannot hide from me here, Mistral.”

“No one was hiding from you, my queen,” Doyle said — the first any of us had spoken since we’d all been brought here.

She waved him silent and walked over the dry grass. The wind that had been whipping the leaves was dying now, as the colors died.

The last of the wind fluttered the hem of her black robe. “Wind?” She made it a question. “There has not been wind in here for centuries.”

Mistral had left me to drop to his knees before her. His skin faded as he moved away from me and Abeloec. I wondered if his eyes still flashed with lightning, but was betting they did not.