Glanadorh, Coromór, Farthor
Lasair frowned, probing carefully the one spot Bryce didn’t want him to touch and desperately needed him to touch, the dark scar under his rubs marking the spot where Janek’s knife had carved out a cozy little nest for a piece of the Marfach. “It feels inflamed.”
“The fucker’s getting closer. Has to be.”
The Fae leaned forward and brushed a kiss over Bryce’s cheek. “Tell me what you need me to do.”
Bryce let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding in a long unsteady sigh. “What you always do.”
Lasair really got a raw deal. Bryce tried to banish the thought, as his Fae lover bent over him and kissed the scar Janek’s knife had left. How he could stand to do that, Bryce couldn’t imagine—going by his own sensations, what Lasair was doing had to be like sucking from a sewer pipe.
But it helped. The cramping, the feverish cold crawling sensation lessened, every second those incredible lips were on his body. Bryce could breathe again. His head fell back on the pillow, giving him a great view of the hotel room’s antique stamped-tin ceiling.
Lasair’s fingertips stroked Bryce’s ribs, gently but firmly.
The pillow next to Bryce’s head dropped suddenly, as if a weight had fallen on it. There was also an unmistakeable scent of sulfur in the air.
Bryce sighed. “Your dog farted again.”
Setanta’s tail swished frantically across the pillow—faster at the sound of Lasair’s chuckle. “He’s not farting, sumiúl. It’s hormones.”
“Great, we really need a doggy teenager—hey!” Something very cold and wet landed on Bryce’s forehead.
Lasair wasn’t even trying not to laugh. Which was okay, actually—as long as the Fae was pressed up against Bryce’s body, Bryce was perfectly okay with him laughing all he wanted. But the Fade-hound puppy took Lasair’s laughter for approval, and he was wagging his whole puppy butt now.
“You’re forgetting how slowly Fade-hounds grow, sumiúl.” A gentle nip at the rim of Bryce’s navel was followed by a long, soothing lick. “We have at least a half-century before Setanta is anything like a teenager. But I think he may be teething.”
“One piece of good news after another.” This time, Bryce’s sour tone was a joke, and everyone present knew it. He’d learned how to adore the puppy even before he’d learned how to adore his scair-anam. In fact, he had a sneaking suspicion that he might not have figured out the one without the other. “What did he just...”
Answering his own question, Bryce reached up and grabbed the icy wet washcloth Setanta had dropped on his forehead. “Where did you get this, brimstone-butt?”
The butt-wagging increased in tempo and intensity, as did Lasair’s laughter. “I set it out in an ice bucket to get cold when I came in and found you sick. I know it helps.”
“Looks like someone else figured it out, too.”
The blind puppy flopped down on the bed, his whiskered chin resting on Bryce’s shoulder, his tail still fanning the pillow.
“Shall I continue?” Not waiting for an answer, Lasair resumed his stroking, his kissing—activities that would have felt a hell of a lot like foreplay, if only Bryce were feeling better.
Bryce desperately wanted to feel better.
“Close your eyes, sumiúl, relax, let me work.”
A shock of febrile heat churned Bryce’s side, deep under the skin where nothing was supposed to be. He gasped, his head coming up off the bed. Lasair’s head came up, too; the Fae checked to make sure Bryce was all right, before glaring at the now-throbbing dark puckered scar, to the accompaniment of a low growl from Setanta. Well, a low puppy growl.
“Couldn’t it let you rest for a few hours?” Those perfect hands urged Bryce to lie back down; Setanta helped, too, resting his chin on Bryce’s shoulder and pushing.
“I don’t think it gives a shit about making me uncomfortable,” Bryce mumbled.
* * *
#growling# #pawing at nose# #sneezing#
i think newmaster is laughing. firstmaster smells like frowning. at me?
#whines#
i smell death, death magick. taste it.
#bares teeth#
i want to hunt. but the only death magick is in newmaster. how can i hunt newmaster? no chasing, no delicious fear, no blood, no meat and full belly, not newmaster!
firstmaster says i am too small for that anyway. someday i will show him he is wrong.
“Hey, pup. I was only kidding about the brimstone.”
#tail thumping# #love# #ear licking#
“Settle, tréan-cú.”
#grumbling# firstmaster will not let me even try to hunt.
so I will do what I can.
#ear licking#
#ear nipping#
#love#
* * *
Medellín, Colombia
A white-hot bloom of pain in her head shocked the female to consciousness. A wash of brown blood trickled down the side of her face; magick flooded into the wound as the echoes of a gunshot faded.
I believe we have been shot, she mused.
No one answered.
“Pendejos,” a male voice snarled. “This is your reward for cheating Cicatrizado.”
Soft gasping sobs, two heavy sets of footsteps, the slamming of a door.
Silence, deep and weighty. Except for the sobs.
The female opened her eyes, and beheld beautiful carnage.
Directly in her line of sight lay a dark-haired, dark-skinned human male, most of his face missing. The female suspected from his position that she would find most of his brain soiling her robe. What was left of a child of perhaps six or seven years lay atop the adult; gunfire had nearly bisected the small body.
What little of the sweetness of death remained in father and child was rapidly dissipating; only a trace was left, a trace the female consumed almost instantly.
No fucking way is that enough, the male grumbled. We spent more than that on healing. If you’d bestirred your pert aristocratic ass ten seconds earlier—
“Be silent, idiot.” The female licked blood daintily from her fingertips, to the accompaniment of labored breathing, choking sobs. Blood like the finest wine.
The female pushed herself up to her knees. Two more bodies lay beside the first two, a woman and the girl-child she had obviously tried to shield with her own body. A plastic-wrapped brick of white powder had burst open and been scattered over her body, along with what looked like currency—although it was now so soaked with blood as to be almost beyond recognition.
Pain and death flowed from the mother in nearly equal measure; from the child came only pain and fear.
None of it was enough to satiate them, not even after the full measure of pain and fear and slow death had been retrieved from the child.
But two lives, and the promise of the feasting to come, would suffice for the next leg of their journey.