Rogue’s Possession Read online

  “How can life mean so little to you people?”

  “I would ask you why you think it should have meaning. Never mind—charming as it is to debate with you, this is not the time. I promise no harm. Just a minor mental change, so you can see how it’s done. In case you decide your own mortality is more important than someone else’s.”

  “Fine.” I mentally pointed at one of the dragonfly girls, a particularly silly one with powder-blue ringlets. “Make her smarter.”

  He seemed surprised, amused arrogance flickering through his thoughts while he contemplated. Likely he’d only played this game to make people dumber or more obedient—as he’d probably done with those uncanny drudge servants in his castle.

  “Not the same thing at all.” He sounded a little absent now. Only half paying attention. “It is you who should be paying attention. Watch.”

  We descended into the girl’s...presence. That was the only way I could think of it. Almost a magical representation of her. That echo of herself on this other plane of existence, the one where the dragon’s egg did not exist.

  Rogue formed a thought and showed me, the girl being alert and interested, absorbing information. He kept it very low-key, just a smidge of amplified energy, and fed it into her, a gentle shower.

  “That’s as light as I’m capable of. Satisfactory?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now you do it.”

  He guided my mental “hands,” showing me how to layer in just a hint more. I wished her good memory and critical thinking skills. May they serve her well.

  “That’s part two. Now for three.”

  “Is this mental travel gig how you poof yourself about the countryside?”

  His dry amusement rippled around me. “Something like it.”

  “Do I get to learn that?”

  “Maybe someday, once I’m certain you won’t accidentally knock yourself out of existence.”

  Yeah. That would suck. Maybe I’d emulate Dr. McCoy and stick to shuttlecraft.

  We spiraled up, high into the misty twilight sky, into the looming clouds and then into deep darkness. Abruptly I became aware of sensory deprivation—no light, no sound, nothingness. I flailed in panic and Rogue caught me, wrapping tight.

  “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.” He chanted it in my mind, folding tendrils of his presence around me, much as I’d layered my magic into that little horseshoe. It steadied me.

  Then we burst into light and reality again.

  Different entirely. I no longer seemed to float above, observing my fae companions. Instead, I was walking through a pine forest again, but not the one on the hillside around the camp and the cave. This one smelled dry. Normal colors, nothing intensely surreal. My world.

  Through the bright, high-altitude light filtering through the needles, Devils Tower loomed above. Rogue and I walked hand in hand on the path, just past where I’d left the trail that fateful day.

  “Are we really in Wyoming?” My articulated thought spun away into nothingness. Though Rogue’s presence still intertwined with mine, in much the same way as he walked beside me, long fingers interlaced with mine, we couldn’t communicate that way. It was as if I wore a puppet body, only looking through the eyes, hearing through the ears, but otherwise unable to affect the world.

  Most disconcerting.

  Then I saw myself—the old me. Strange to see myself as I had been then, with my dirty blond hair and tight expression. It seemed so long ago now that my petty problems had loomed so large. Breaking up with awful Clive, in retrospect, had been such an obvious, easy thing to do. But no—I couldn’t do the easy thing.

  I—I mean the old me—was walking briskly, glancing over her shoulder with fear on her face. I remembered that moment, feeling watched. Had I felt my own eyes upon me? The eternal conundrum of time travel, if that was truly what this was. The old me plunged off the path.

  And there was the Black Dog, melting out of the deep shadows of the dark face of the tower. It had been there, all along—just as my inner alarms had warned.

  Now I saw what had been invisible to me then, the shimmer of black-and-blue magic runneling down the deep grooves of rock, focusing through the Dog, a living lens, traveler between worlds. As the old me worked her ritual—one I could never have consciously known—the rays’ fae magic connected her to the Dog, to the tower and beyond.

  She swayed on her feet, and I wanted to reach out but could not. The Dog could. It moved in a flash, through and into her.

  And they both were gone.

  We shot up into the air, rising above Devils Tower, the early spring country spreading below, still more brown than green. It suddenly hit me that Isabel would be in this time, very close to this place, and I struggled in Rogue’s folds, trying to tell him about my cat. He resisted, holding tighter.

  “Isabel!” I shouted it into our combined minds.

  But he didn’t listen, just clamped tight and plunged us into blackness.

  I mourned all over again. My heart broke a little more for this one foolish connection. Something Rogue could never understand when he dismissed even most fae as worthless and expendable. What would one nonsentient cat matter? Not at all.

  Except to me. And to her.

  Back in my body, I opened my eyes to the welcome blaze of crystalline light and yanked my hands out of Rogue’s grip.

  He’d reached mad ahead of me, though, glaring at me from under lowered brows, the snaking black lines on the left side of his face sharp and full of thorns.

  “Do you have any idea what would have happened to you if you’d managed to break away from me?” His voice hissed back in sibilant echoes, building uncomfortably though he’d kept it low.

  “Of course I don’t!” My clenched tones wound with his, reverberating. “Do you have any idea what it is to love someone who’s dependent on you? A creature totally vulnerable to the world, who implicitly trusts the promise you gave her that you’d care for her? And then to know that you abandoned that trust, however unwillingly? This is not an idle whim for me, Rogue. If there is any chance at all that I can rescue her, I want it.”

  He raked a hand through his hair, beyond aggravated with me. “I can’t replace everything you’ve lost.”

  “I’m not asking you to. I’ll do it myself.” I folded my arms. “I want to go back. Show me how to get back there.”

  “Absolutely not.” Louder now.

  “Then I’ll do it on my own.”

  “I showed you a fraction of what you need to know to cross the Veil. You may or may not have noticed, foolish Gwynn, that not even I was physically present. How in the name of Titania’s cursed womb do you imagine you’d bring something physical back through—especially a living being?”

  I cringed at the decibel level, but he just glowered at me in righteous fury.

  “The Dog could! Isn’t that what you wanted to show me?”

  He reached out to touch me. Dropped his hand and sighed.

  “I thought to answer some of your questions, in a gesture of good faith, so that you’ll understand both my part and yours in you being here. If I could give you this companion you so long for, don’t you think I would? You think that because more things are possible than you knew before, that everything is possible. But it’s not, my Gwynn. I promise you, it’s not.”

  He sounded world-weary, an edge of defeat in his voice. What had he wanted that was simply not possible for the omnipotent Rogue? I leaned my elbows on my knees and studied the scuffed toes of my shoes, the knotted cords I’d faithfully reproduced from my last memory.

  “I can’t give up wanting this.”

  Now he did touch me, cupping my face in his hands so I had to look at him. “You are a passionate woman. Your wanting, the strength of it, makes you who you are. I would never change that. Just...have a care with how you go about satisfying it.”

  “You’re not usually on the side of urging me to hold back.”

  The left side of his mouth quirked into a smile, the lines
around it coiling. “The irony has not escaped me.”

  The little horseshoe winked golden next to me and I picked it up, stood, then offered Rogue a hand up, as he so often did for me.

  He quirked an eyebrow, took my hand and uncoiled to his feet, watching me study the horseshoe.

  “Where I come from, this is meant to be good luck.”

  “Is it?” A wealth of meaning in that simple question.

  I shrugged, the earrings swinging from my earlobes, a not-so-gentle reminder of our connection. “So now I know how you make these stay on me—a kind of persistence spell.”

  “Yes.”

  “You always say you’re mine as much as I am yours.”

  “Very well then,” he replied, understanding the train of my thoughts. “I’m honored to be marked as yours.”

  The statement stirred me. I had never said anything like it to him and it occurred to me that it might bother him that I hadn’t.

  I pressed the horseshoe to his left earlobe—U-shape up, of course—wishing it to attach and drawing on the streaming crystal amplification to make it stay there. He moved under my touch and I thought perhaps it felt as sensual to him as it did to me.

  When he opened his eyes to meet mine, they burned with feeling. That edgy, part-hopeful, part-desperate desire. The egg timer popped into the air next to us, which didn’t surprise me in the least. Two-hand dispensation, after all.

  He pulled me into his embrace, hands roaming over my body while he kissed me with long, gentle pulls of his lips. He cupped my bottom, palming my curves in the close-fitting jeans. For my part, I buried my hands in his hair, holding to the back of his neck and returning the kiss with a fervent longing that did surprise me. Where had this hunger come from, when I had been so angry with him?

  I just couldn’t think about it, any of it. Only touching and being touched made any sense.

  Much too soon, he broke the kiss and pulled back, hands still on my body. I must have made a little sound of protest, because he cocked his head a little.

  “Are you offering more than one kiss, delicious Gwynn?”

  His dianthus-edge lips were dark and moist in light. The cave had amplified our desire for each other too, I realized. I throbbed for him and marveled at his self-control.

  “I’d better not,” I whispered.

  Those lips twisted in a cynical half smile

  “Of course you think that.” He shook his head but grinned. “For now, it’s enough that you want this too.”

  Chapter Nine

  At the Inn of Seven Moons

  Time slips between realms do not appear to follow any mathematical progression I can determine. The worlds appear to mesh randomly. Perhaps a chaos theoretician would have insight.

  ~Big Book of Fairyland, “Magic”

  By the time we made it back to camp, it had grown late enough for all the human soldiers to be asleep. Starling was waiting up for us but looked so bleary I sent her off to bed. I had barely enough energy to gobble some sort of roasted fowl before I began nodding off myself. Rogue explained that the cave could do that—you felt supercharged while you were in it, then drained after.

  Part of the price you paid for its services.

  I would have been fine with him leaving that part out. Now I felt uncomfortably as if I’d been in the gullet of a gorgeous, crystalline Venus flytrap. Rogue was tired enough not to correct my image, which told you something right there.

  Consequently we slept with no further hanky-panky. Which was just as well as I didn’t think my heart could withstand another onslaught. It was a bad sign that I couldn’t stay mad at him. Lust I could withstand. This slow-growing regard for him...this craving to be with him...bad, bad, bad.

  Worse, in the morning when I woke and he wasn’t there, I missed him. Again. Still. Rogue had become my crack and I needed regular hits or...or what? Nothing. Get up, get dressed, eat your breakfast, mount the horse. Why Rogue couldn’t be bothered to ride along with us, I didn’t know. Too pedestrian, I supposed.

  Starling muttered some caustic remarks about cranky sorceresses and, promising that lunch would put me in a better mood, left me to my own devices while she rode beside her new love-interest.

  At least Darling kept me company, though he seemed uncommonly excited about the midday meal also. I mulled over what I’d learned the night before. More important, I wondered why he’d shown me so much, given me such powerful tools. To organize my thoughts, I made a little list of possible reasons.

  1. Out of the goodness of his heart (ha!)

  2. To equip me with skills to protect myself

  3. To lull me into trusting him

  4. To deceive me with partial information

  5. All of the above

  This was why multiple choice never worked. You could almost always make an argument for “all of the above.” With a sigh I tucked my notepad in the pocket with the dragon’s egg and vial. I’d think about it more after lunch. Which, it turned out, was waiting for us around the next bend. At a classically styled pub.

  It could have been imported from the U.K., every stone and beam faithfully relocated and reassembled, just like the London Bridge moving to Arizona to span Lake Havasu. And with the same sort of startling dissonance.

  The building sat in a curve of the road, as if it had been there hundreds of years, with posts for horses and extensive stables. A cottage garden thrived on one side, flowers nodding in the light breeze. The peaked gables likely housed cozy little rooms with fireplaces, and the wide doors stood open, inviting passersby into the common room. A young boy with coppery bright hair began pumping water for the horses.

  Liam led the soldiers to the horse troughs, where they joked heartily, dismounting and edging the horses aside to splash their faces with water. Darling made a prodigious leap off his riding pad and daintily jumped onto the narrow rim, swiping at a horse that snorted at him. The dragonfly girls danced inside, giggling, and Larch stood at my stirrup, ready to help me down and take Felicity for her own refreshment.

  “The Inn of Seven Moons,” Starling told me, finger-combing her hair, her eyes bright and cheeks a becoming pink. “I love this place.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  She nodded with enthusiasm. “They brew the best lager this side of the Glass Mountains.”

  “These would be the same Glass Mountains where your mother was imprisoned by a dragon?”

  Starling laughed. “Of course! It’s not as if there are two sets of Glass Mountains.”

  “No—of course not. So what’s on the other side of them?” I followed Starling into the cool interior, Darling trotting beside us, sniffing the air. The mullioned windows were thrown open to the lovely day, and window boxes of flowers in all shades of violet and crimson showed through. Starling made a big deal of picking the best table and held a chair for me. Darling settled himself at another, peering expectantly at the empty space of table in front of him.

  “The other side of what?”

  “The Glass Mountains.”

  She looked puzzled. “How would I know? Why do you think there’s something on the other side?”

  “Because,” I explained, in my most patient tone, “you said this is the best lager on this side, which implies there’s another lager—possibly even a better one—on the other side.”

  She pursed her lips and wrinkled her nose at me. “This is that critical thinking thing again, isn’t it?”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “Can’t it just be good beer? Try it!”

  One of the dragonfly girls—with a striking shade of hair a romance novel would call titian—set mugs in front of us and burst into a fit of giggles. The mugs were glass, white with frost, and foam spilled over the sides. Darling got a bowl of it, which he began lapping like milk.

  Starling lifted hers and gave me an encouraging look with her wide brown eyes, waiting for me to lift mine. I did, tapping my mug to hers. “Happy days, as my grandmother would say.”

  Oka
y, the lager was delicious. Reminiscent of Harp, maybe, but with a deep resonance of flavor. They’d chilled it just enough to be refreshing, but not enough to kill any of the rounder notes. The scent, pleasantly yeasty with hints of cinnamon and something of chicory, filled my head along with the pleasant buzz of alcohol hitting my bloodstream on an empty stomach. Once again I’d managed to skip the most important meal of the day. Maybe that wasn’t true in Faerie, since so much else wasn’t.

  “See?” Starling nodded, answering her own question. “Best ever—on either side of the Glass Mountains. So there!”

  I drank deeply, savoring the lager that might, indeed, be the best ever. Another dragonfly girl brought us a basket of honest-to-god chips—the homemade style potato chips like the Welsh pub I frequented in college used to serve—and a vial of what could only be balsamic vinegar.

  “You sprinkle the vinegar on the chips and—”

  “Actually, I know the drill on this one.”

  Bemused, I dashed a little onto one chip and bit in. Absolutely, bizarrely, exactly right. Darling meowed impatiently and I gave him a little pile of his own. He did not want the vinegar, however.

  “How long has this place been here?”

  Starling shrugged, her mouth full of chips. “Forever, I guess.”

  We were the only ones in there. Liam and his men crowded onto long benches at one side of the room, while the Brownies and dragonfly girls sat mostly on the tables by the door. Everyone had chips and beer. No one else was in evidence.

  “Who owns the place?”

  “Oh, Mistress Nancy. You’ll meet her when she brings out the bangers and mash.”

  “Bangers and mash. Really?”

  “With applesauce. It’s the—”

  “Best ever,” I finished with her and she beamed at me.

  “So, where are the Glass Mountains from here?”

  A dragonfly girl brought us new mugs, to replace our drained ones. She gave me a quizzical look and I noticed the powder-blue ringlets. Frowning, she seemed about to say something, but Starling spoke and she wandered off.