Seduced by Moonlight (Merry Gentry #3)(44)

“The humans are no longer content with some of the queen’s stories,” Doyle continued. “The ambassador to the courts is most unhappy that they will not show him Prince Cel. He doesn’t believe that Cel is merely away.”
The tabloids had been the first to speculate why Prince Cel, who had been fairly visible in St. Louis and Chicago attending hot nightspots, had suddenly decided to stay home. Where was the prince? Why had he vanished now that Princess Meredith was back in the land of faerie? That last headline had been a little too close to the truth, but there was nothing we could do about it. Because the truth—that Prince Cel was being tortured for six months as an alternative to a death sentence—could not be shared with the human press, or even the politicians.
Among other crimes, Cel had set himself up as a deity to a human cult in California. I think he’d thought it was far enough from home that he wouldn’t get caught. Unfortunately for him, I was in Los Angeles and working as a private detective. If Cel had known that, he would have put his scheme somewhere else, and he’d have tried to kill me sooner. One of the rules that President Thomas Jefferson’s government insisted on was that if the sidhe ever set themselves up as gods in the United States, we would all be expelled from American soil. For that reason alone, any other sidhe would have been executed. But Cel also gave the human wizards the ability to magically ensnare, magically rape fey women. Mostly to humans with fey blood in their ancestry, but you do not give the power of faerie to humans to be used expressly to harm the fey. It isn’t done. He was also sucking the magical energy of the women in question. He shared some of the power with his human followers, but he ate most of it. Magical vampirism is a crime among us. A crime punishable by death, and a nasty death at that. The only exception to the law is a duel. During a duel, or a war, you can do whatever you can get away with, as long as it doesn’t breach your honor. Though some of the fey have an interesting view of honor. Cel should have died for all that, but he was the queen’s only child, coheir to the throne. Most of the court had no clue as to the extent of Cel’s treachery. They thought he was being punished for trying to kill me. Nope. The queen didn’t like me that much.
So instead of death, he’d had the magic he’d given to the humans turned against him. A magic that made your skin crawl with desire and drove you nearly mad to be touched, to be fucked. I’d had it turned on me, so I could speak with some authority. He had been covered with Branwyn’s Tears, one of our last great magicks, and chained in the dark with his need and no way to relieve it. It was a horrible thing to do to anyone. But he wasn’t enduring anything he hadn’t allowed to happen to others, except for the length of the punishment. Six months is a very long time in the dark. He’d endured three months of his punishment, and still had three to go. People were taking bets at the court that his sanity would not survive. They were also taking bets that he’d kill me before I could kill him.
“If the humans do not believe us, there is nothing we can do,” Frost said.
“True, but we can give them less to talk about, not more.” Doyle turned his head to look at Galen. “Touch the ring and see what happens.”
Galen stepped up between the seats. There was heat in his eyes, and a look on his face that brought heat in a rush across my cheeks.
He dropped to his knees beside my chair, and cupped both his hands over mine without touching the ring. He leaned in toward me. “I want the ring to react to my touch.” He spoke the last word with his breath against my mouth. “I want it to sing through me, and bring us both to our knees.” His lips touched mine, and his hands closed tight over mine, in the same moment.The ring flared between us, jerking things low in my body, tingling along my lips, as if I’d tried to kiss something that held electrical current. Galen’s lips were soft and willing, but no matter how hard he pressed his hand into the ring, it did not become the near-overwhelming thing it had been with Rhys and Frost. The ring did continue to beat against us like waves of electricity. I wasn’t fond of electricity on my skin, and I pulled back from the kiss, tried to draw my hand out of his. He wouldn’t let me go.
“Let go, Galen, it’s hurting me.”
He released me slowly, reluctantly.
I sat in the seat, taking deep even breaths, trying to work past the last vestiges of the power. “That hurt. I mean that really hurt.”
“You just don’t like electricity,” Rhys said.
“I like it just fine in lamps, or computers, but not on my skin, thank you.”
“You’re just no fun,” he said.
I frowned at him, but looked back at Galen, still kneeling before me and looking disappointed. I knew part of his look was from the ring not working for him as it had for the others, but that might not have been all of it. “How about you?” I asked him, gently. “Do you like electricity, too?”
He looked puzzled, but said, “I’ve never tried it in anything but small appliances.”
“Did what the ring do just now feel good to you?”
“Yes.”
I made a mental note. Even if I didn’t like electricity as foreplay, if some of the men did, then things could be worked out. I was willing to use it on them for their pleasure, as long as I didn’t have to experience it more than to check the strength of it. You never hook anything up to anyone else that you haven’t let bite your own skin. Just a rule. You don’t have to enjoy it yourself, but you do have to know what it’s doing to the person who does.
“It would seem,” Doyle said, “that the ring has grown in strength in every way.”
I nodded. “I don’t remember it ever giving that strong of a power surge before.”
“But it didn’t do between us what it did with Rhys and Frost,” Galen said, sounding as unhappy as he looked. Whatever emotion flowed through Galen, you always knew it. It filled his face, his eyes. He’d begun to have moments when he could hide his feelings. I’d both been happy to see it and mourned the necessity of it. Galen with every thought clear in his eyes for all to read was damn near a political liability in the courts. He needed to master his outward emotions, but I had not enjoyed watching the process. It felt like we were stealing some of the innocent joy that made Galen, Galen.
I touched his face with my left hand, the hand I didn’t wear the ring on. The queen had always worn the ring on her left hand, and I had first put it on the same hand, out of habit, and found the ring preferred being on my right hand. So it got to be on my right hand. I did not argue with relics of power any more than I could help it. 
I pressed my hand against his cheek. He raised sad green eyes to me. “Rhys and Frost have come into their godhead. I think that’s all the extra sensation between us meant.”
“I’d love to argue,” Rhys said, “but I agree with Merry.”
“You really think so?” Galen asked, the way a child would, trusting that if you said a thing, then it would be true.
I stroked my fingers down the side of his face, from the soft warmth of his temple to the curve of his chin. “I don’t just think it, Galen, I believe it.”
“I believe it as well,” Doyle said. “So as long as Meredith touches the other guards only briefly, it should not be a problem. All of the Unseelie Court knows that the ring is alive once more on her hand. Though perhaps not how very alive it has become.”
“It was growing stronger even before the chalice returned,” I said.
He nodded. “That is why we put it away in a drawer, so it would not discomfort our lovemaking.”
Rhys did an exaggerated pout. “And I was having such fun.”
My hand was still touching Galen, but I said to Rhys, “Do you want to be strapped down and have me run electricity along your skin?”
Rhys reacted as if I’d slapped him. The reaction of just thinking about it shuddering through his body. Watching him respond that strongly to the idea of it made me want to do it. Made me want to give him that much pleasure. “That was a big yes,” I said.
He managed a breathy, “Oh, yes.”
Galen was laughing, softly.
Rhys frowned at him. “What’s so funny, green man?”
Galen was laughing so hard that it took him two tries to say, “You’re a death god.”
“Yeah, so what?” Rhys asked.
Galen sat flat on the floor, his knees tucked up in the smaller space, but turned so he could see Rhys. “I have this image in my head of you hooked up like Frankenstein’s monster.”
Rhys started to get angry, then he couldn’t manage it. He smiled, a little, and the smile just got bigger until he was laughing with Galen.
“Who is Frankenstein’s monster?” Frost asked.
That got them laughing even harder, and spread the laughter through the plane to those who knew the answer. Only Doyle and Frost were left out of the joke. The others had embraced television and all it could offer while in California. Even Kitto was laughing from under his blanket in the back. I don’t know if the joke was that good, or you just had to be there, or if it was tension. I was betting on tension, because when the pilot told us we’d be landing in fifteen minutes, it just didn’t seem that funny anymore.