“I am the life that springs from the seed, Adair. I grow, I feed my people, I die, but am reborn. I wax and I wane. I give light and hide in the dark. I am always, and always will be.”“Goddess,” he whispered. “Danu.”
Our lips met, and he breathed in a rush of warmth through my mouth. It was as if I could inhale the essence of him, his magic.
He drew back from that kiss and magic trailed between our lips like something warm and thick and sweet. He whispered through that sweet power, “Meredith.” I felt his body settle against mine. “Meredith,” he said again. He slid his legs between mine, and I spread my thighs for him. “Meredith.” He whispered my name like heat against my skin, as the thick curve of his body began to push between my legs, seeking. He was so hard that just feeling him thrust against me made me writhe. Made my hips roll toward him, help him find what he sought. He slipped inside me, and I expected him to have to push his way in, for he was not small, but he did not. He entered me like a sword finding, at last, its perfect sheath. The magic seemed to draw back for a moment, like a giant taking a breath. We lay on the bed in that most intimate of embraces, as close as man and woman can be, and it was like coming home. It was as if I had waited lifetimes for this man to hold me, for this body to be inside mine. I saw the same wonder in his face.
I watched the glow at the center of his body begin to spread outward again. I felt the magic begin to swell, the giant was about to exhale, and with the sensation of that rising magic, Adair began to draw himself out of me. He pulled himself out until only the round head of him remained inside me. The magic blazed to life, and a heartbeat before the power took us, he slid himself home deep inside me. He brought my upper body off the bed, screaming, my nails digging into his flesh, trying to hold on to something, anything, while his body, his magic, thrust inside me again and again. Until I was no longer certain which was flesh and which was magic, pounding through my body.
Then the world shifted. Through the blaze of white and yellow light that was our magic, our bodies, I saw a great dark space rearing above us. We were no longer in the queen’s chambers. Doyle, Rhys, and Frost climbed to their feet, and stood watch over us. Part of me wondered where the sithen had taken us, but most of me didn’t care. I cared for nothing in that moment but the feel of Adair between my legs. Our magic shattered the dark into shadows and dancing light, and still Adair thrust between my legs. Still the power pulsed and grew until I thought my skin could no longer hold it. That I would melt away and become the light. I screamed my pleasure into the fire-shadows of our lovemaking, and still it was not done.
I felt my nails tear along his skin, watched his body bleed yellow and gold like sunlight.
The ground underneath my body began to move under the thrust and push of Adair’s body, as if I would sink into the ground as Amatheon had done in vision. The ground boiled and for a moment the earth was water, pouring around my body in a thick, warm tide. The water spilled inside me, so that Adair pushed himself through it, and forced that blood-warm water deep inside me. Hands came out of that warm liquid. Hands and flesh pressed against me, following where the liquid ran. Muscles, skin, a body, whole and real, formed beneath me. I knew who it was before Amatheon raised his face up enough for me to meet his flower-petal eyes. His body was already inside me when it became solid. Inside me, as Adair thrust inside, so that their bodies shared me.
I was glad now that the magic and Adair’s body had worked so long and hard inside me. Even with all they had done, it was a tight fit, with so much stretching, pushing, fighting against each other’s bodies.
I screamed again, and this time it was a mixture of pleasure and pain. They were almost too big, almost too wide for me.
Adair propped up on his arms, and Amatheon’s hands found my breasts.
They found a rhythm together, and it was like having one great member thrusting inside me, as if they had become one, as wide as a young tree. I opened my mouth to scream, to tell them it was too much, and the orgasm was suddenly there, turning pain to pleasure, too much to just right. My body convulsed around them, and I felt their bodies convulse together. Then I could feel them again, two men inside me. And they thrust inside one last time, and they came again. It brought me screaming, tearing at their bodies. Their screams echoed mine.
We lay for a moment exhausted in one another’s arms as the light began to fade. Adair had collapsed on top of me, and I could feel Amatheon’s heart thundering against my back. It was a wonderful thing to lie between them, but almost as soon as I thought it, my body let me know that once the endorphins had faded completely I was going to be hurting, because I was hurting just a little now. Not pain exactly, but aching, and it would only grow worse. They were both still erect, though not as hard as they had been, but I needed them out of me before the endorphins faded completely. Otherwise it was just going to hurt. I wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t going to hurt anyway. The two of them together had been my limit, not beyond it, but definitely at it.
I drew breath to ask them to move, but another voice filled the silence first. “Oh, Meredith, brava.” She clapped, and others clapped with her, because when the queen applauds so do you.
The endorphins left in a rush, tightening my body painfully around the two men, almost as if my body was squeezing them tighter. It brought a small moan of protest from my body. I was going to be sore.
Adair slowly, carefully, began to draw himself out of me, which brought another sound of half-pain from me.
“Meredith,” she said, “I didn’t know you had it in you.” Then she laughed at her joke, and was still laughing when Adair had moved enough of his upper body to reveal her to me.
Andais’s body glinted in the thin light, glinted with fresh, and not so fresh, blood. She was covered in it. Her long hair was plastered along her body with blood and thicker things.
Amatheon tried to move out from inside me, but he was at a bad angle for it. Rhys came to help me, cradling me in his arms, helping give Amatheon a little more room to maneuver.
But it was Rhys’s lifting that got me free of him. He stood with me in his arms, and I was just as glad, for I doubted I could have stood. Frost and Doyle stood by us, not quite guarding me against the queen, but close.
“We were coming to find you, niece. It seems we didn’t need your policemen after all.”
“What do you mean?” I said in a hoarse voice.
“We have a confession to our murders, Meredith, and we did not need forensics to get it.” She bent down near her feet and raised her hand upward; a thick rope trailed down to something on the ground. My eyes saw it before my mind would accept it. There was a body at her feet, curled on its side, so covered in blood and so destroyed that I could not tell if it was man or woman.Andais pulled on the ropes in her hand and the figure screamed. She wasn’t holding ropes. She was holding intestines, and they were still attached.
CHAPTER 39
“DID YOU HEAR ME, MEREDITH? TORTURE HAS SOLVED YOUR crimes before the police could even finish processing their so-called evidence.” She gave another jerk with her hand, and tore a ragged scream from the man’s throat. I was almost certain it was a man.
I cuddled in against Rhys’s chest, and fought to keep my face as blank as I could. I know I did not keep all the horror off of it, because it was too awful. It was simply one of the worst things I’d ever seen, and I could not hide entirely how I felt about it. I fought to hide my feelings, knew I failed, and finally wasn’t certain I cared. Sometimes Andais became angry if you didn’t appreciate her work. I could never enjoy it, so all that was left me was to show her how frightening, how nightmarish I thought her talents could be.
She gave a low throaty laugh. “Such a look, Meredith. Do you find Gwennin’s fate terrible?”
I nodded, huddling in tighter against Rhys. His arms tightened around me. “Yes, aunt, I find it terrible.”
“But you cannot argue with the results, aye?”
I could have, but I chose to be indirect about it. “If you tell me it’s Gwennin, then I will believe you, but in truth I would not have known him.”
“Oh, it is he.” She looked down at the figure at her side, tightening her grip on his body. He moaned, and that did not make her happy enough. She jerked again, and that made him scream again. That pleased her.
“What reason did he give for killing Beatrice?” I asked the question without implying that everyone standing there would have confessed to anything, from the Kennedy assasination to the rape and pillage of Rome, to make the pain stop. No one could have withstood what she had done to him.
“She had come to his bed, then suddenly she began to refuse him.”
“He killed Beatrice because she refused to continue as his lover?” I fought to keep the incredulity out of my voice.
Andais pulled, sharp and sudden, tearing another shriek from his throat. “Tell her what you told me,” she said.
He coughed to clear his throat, and the sound was wet. He spat blood, then finally managed to speak. His voice was as broken as his body, hoarse and raw from screaming. “I did not mean for her to die. She is fey, immortal. I did not use cold iron or steel. It should not have been a killing blow.” He coughed again, and started to fall flatter to the ground, but Andais kept her grip on his intestines, so he struggled to prop himself up on one skinless arm.