0449474001339292671 4 fighting faer (7 page)

Corinne growled. “You haven’t addressed the lying.”

“I was getting to that, but I was going to give you the opportunity to behave before I got to the complicated parts.”

She sneered. Into the sofa. Which sort of ruined the effect. “How generous of you.”

“Can it.”

He moved quickly, pulling her up to her knees, shifting her pinned hands in front of her and dropping her onto her ass. At least now she was sitting up, but he still kept a firm grip on her wrists, and now she could see the ticked off expression on his face. She wasn’t ready to admit that he had any reason to be ticked off.

“If you can sit here and listen like an adult, I won’t pin you again, but if you try to run or hit me, you’re going back down. Understood?” He just sat and stared at her, obviously waiting for a response. She managed a disgruntled nod. “Good. Now, about the lying.” She glared up at him. “Yes, let’s discuss the lying.”

“Give it a rest, Corinne. What would you have done? I needed your help and I knew you don’t trust Others. It was the easiest way for all of us.” His beautiful mouth turned down in a frown. “You sure as hell weren’t supposed to find out I’m Fae.”

“You’re what?” Corinne heard the words, but for the life of her, she couldn’t manage to make them make sense. If she’d thought her life was surreal when she’d been in Regina’s nighttime wedding to a vampire business tycoon, that had nothing on her present situation.

“Fae,” Luc repeated. Seeing her blank look, he sighed. “As in Faerie.” Corinne couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing. “Sure, Tinkerbell. Pull the other leg while you’re at it.” He growled. “That’s half the problem with you humans. We leave your world for a couple of thousand years and either you forget all about us, or you reduce us to cheery little balls of pink tutu-clad good cheer.”

Every time she tried to stop laughing, a chuckle escaped. She just couldn’t keep from picturing him two inches tall and wearing pink tights. At least, until she really looked at his face, and then she sobered right up. “You’re serious? You honestly want me to believe you’re a Faerie?”

“No, I want you to believe I’m Fae. Faerie was just the most convenient word I could use to make you understand. Faerie is a place. Fae means a being from Faerie. Calling someone a Faerie is like calling someone a France.”

Corinne nodded, then shook her head, then nodded again. Then she just sat there and felt confused.

“Okay, what kind of crack am
I
smoking? Because this has got to be a hallucination.”
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Shaking his head, Luc sat down next to her and rubbed his hands over his face. “No such luck. For either of us.”

She scowled at him. “What do you mean, ‘for either of us’? You’re not the one who just got sucked into the
Twilight Zone
.”

“Neither are you. Give me a break, Corinne, but this can’t be
that
big a shock. You already knew about vampires and werefolk. What makes the Fae so different?”

“I fucked one.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Being Fae is not contagious.”

She scowled. Again. Maybe her face was going to freeze that way. “But this changes…everything. You don’t understand.”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “I do.”

* * * * *

It didn’t help that she had no idea what was going on and he didn’t have the time to explain. Hell, he didn’t have the energy to explain either, not when the entire thing had broadsided him out of nowhere.

Finding a heartmate didn’t exactly happen every day. As far as he knew, it didn’t even happen every lifetime, so how was he supposed to explain to a human that Fate had determined they were meant to be together for all eternity? The mind boggled.

He could understand her feeling that everything had changed, though, because it had. The minute she had looked at him and seen through his glamour, reality had reshaped itself, from a romp with a human he needed to complete his mission, to the first union with his heartmate. Just like that.

There was no other way she could have seen through the magic. Glamours didn’t fade in a couple of hours, and they didn’t require maintenance. Once cast, they just existed, for weeks or even years until the Fae who cast them called them back. Even another Fae shouldn’t have been able to see Luc’s real appearance once the magic had been cast. No one was supposed to be able to see the truth. Except for a heartmate.

The gods definitely appreciated a little irony.

Anu had. According to legend, the Great Goddess of the Fae had created heartmating. Disappointed by her Fae children and their tendency to hide behind pretty masks and to shape the appearance of things to suit themselves, She had placed them under an enchantment of sorts. According to Anu’s wishes, while the Fae might continue as masters of Illusions, that great power would be balanced by a great vulnerability: Love’s Truth. From the day she first commanded it, each Fae had to recognize that at the moment he mated with his true love, their hearts would be irrevocably bound and the Fae’s power of
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Illusion would never again deceive his heartmate. Even if all the rest of the world believed in the Fae’s spells, his heartmate would see through the magic to the truth.

It made a romantic story to tell the little ones, but it wreaked havoc on Luc’s plans. If Corinne was his heartmate, he wouldn’t be able to charm her into helping him, nor would he be able to leave her with a peck and a thank you when he was finished. She was his now, and leaving her—ever—had ceased to be an option.

He turned to say something, and got a mouthful of denim. Corinne had snagged his jeans from the floor and flung them at his head, probably wishing they were something more like a rock.

“Put something on,” she snapped. “If you’re planning to give me a long-winded explanation about how you didn’t do anything wrong by
lying
to me and
luring
me into
sex
under
false pretenses
, I’d really rather neither of us was naked.”

She pulled her T-shirt on over her head and yanked her shorts up her legs, leaving her bra and underwear on the floor. He swallowed a groan. Right, like knowing about that wasn’t supposed to distract him.

He tugged on his jeans anyway, buttoning up without taking his eyes off her face. “I really don’t think either of us has time to—”

“It’s either start with the truth-telling, or go straight to the apartment-leaving and my-life-getting-out of.” She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him, and he couldn’t help thinking that expression about glaring and daggers might have some basis in fact. He had to stop himself from checking for puncture wounds.

“Fine,” he said, gesturing for her to take a seat on the sofa, “but get comfortable. This is a long story.” Chapter Seven

The story wasn’t that long, but it still left Corinne with the same feeling she’d had after reading
War and
Peace
—the one that went something like, “Du-huh?” She understood the part about his reasons for coming to…well, he kept calling it “Ithir,” but since she wasn’t quite ready to deal with any “alternate realities” stuff, she’d just stick to saying Manhattan. The part about him being a personal Guard to the Faerie Queen and having been assigned to come here and fetch the Queen’s nephew back to…where he’d come from…made a sort of fantasy-novel sense, but after that, he lost her.

“I still don’t get why you didn’t just tell me why you needed my help in the first place.” He rubbed his hand around the back of his neck and raised an eyebrow. “And you would have immediately leapt to my aid and made everything all right?”
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Her mouth twisted. “Well, no. But I probably wouldn’t have hit you.”
I wouldn’t have fucked you,
either
, she thought, but she left that part out.

“I couldn’t risk it. I really do need your help if I’m going to find Seoc before he causes any more trouble.”

Seoc—pronounced “shock” as near as she could tell—sounded like he’d gotten a bum deal from his relatives back home. All he’d apparently done was take a tour of the city, and where was the harm in that? “What’s so dangerous about him being…here? I mean, you’re, er…Fae…and you’re here. The world hasn’t come to an end yet.”

“I’m not trying to make it come to an end. Seoc might be. The problem really isn’t him being here to begin with, it’s that he’s interrupting the flow of reality for mortals.” She felt that “du-huh?” thing coming over her again.

“Okay, look at it this way,” he said. “Why do Graham and Dmitri and the Others work so hard to keep ordinary mortals from becoming aware that they exist?”

“Because they’re afraid of how we’d react, that’d we’d try to exterminate them or put them in a lab and study them or something.”

“Right, because they know that humans are not willing to acknowledge right now that what they think of as the supernatural—as magic—exists.”

Corinne nodded. “Yeah, they think we’re primitive morons.” He sighed. “Compared to most other species, you are. Primitive, not morons. Werefolk were around for millennia before humans appeared on Ithir, and even though vampires were once human, they have a much deeper connection to magic than their human cousins ever did. And Fae…well, we left Ithir about the same time humans started realizing that round things made nifty accessories for the bottoms of their sleds. In relative terms, humans are like infants to us.” She couldn’t decide if she felt confused or just insulted. Or maybe both. “Right. We’re the cosmic equivalent of amoebae. Great. But that doesn’t explain why it’s so important to interrupt this Seoc guy’s tour of Ithir.”

“Actually, it does. The Fae left Ithir because the humans couldn’t wrap their minds around our magic, and rather than hide, like the Others, we removed ourselves from this world and closed the doors after us. But what do you think would happen if someone found the doors and showed everyone where they were?”

Put like that, the idea made Corinne squirm in her seat. She could imagine just what would happen.

People would either be frightened or fascinated. The frightened ones would try to destroy what they didn’t understand, and the fascinated ones would trample it in their eagerness to experience it for themselves.

Luc nodded. “Exactly. A person can learn to cope with a shift in their reality, but
people
, as a group, are a different story. If Seoc keeps this up, he’s going to open those doors. Then Ithir and Faerie will both suffer for it.”

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“Suffer, how?”

“Faerie would be overrun by humans. Some of them would be honestly curious, but some of them would be afraid or greedy or malicious and would destroy the world we’ve spent centuries building for ourselves.”

Yeah, she could see where that would suck. As much as she wanted to defend her fellow humans from being maligned, people did tend to be a hell of a lot stupider and more selfish than a person could ever be. As a reporter, she’d seen enough of the destruction people could create to know that.

She must have hesitated too long for his taste, though, because his eyes narrowed in a glare and he growled his next sentence.

“Then there’s the fact that if the balance between Ithir and Faerie shifts, all of the creatures we took with us when we left would come pouring back into your world. When was the last time you saw a real live nightmare?”

“Do you count?”

Okay, that was a low blow, but damn it, this was
weird
!

“I’m serious, Corinne.” He sounded as if he was scolding her, and she fought the instinct to apologize.

This was
her
world he was turning upside down, not the other way around. “This is bigger than your pique, damn it. Now are you going to be reasonable and help me out, or are you going to hide your frickin’ head in the sand and make me do this on my own?”

“I ought to.” Her teeth clenched so tightly she had to spit the words to get them out. How dare he take her to task for not leaping at the chance to become some sort of comic book crusader? “I ought to just leave you to do this your damned self. If I was dumb enough to be lied to, I must be too dumb to help, right?”

“Has anyone else ever told you that you bring out the urge to commit violent acts?”

“No, it’s just you.” She watched him close his eyes, take three deep, slow breaths, and unclench his fists. She counted to ten along with him.

When his eyes opened again, the glazed look had faded a little and he spoke with excruciating politeness. “Would you please fill me in on what you’ve heard about Seoc? Where he’s been seen, who reported it, that kind of thing.”

She might as well, she decided. He didn’t intend to take no for an answer—she could tell that just by looking at him—and maybe if they put their heads together, they could actually figure out where this Seoc guy had gotten to. Maybe Luc would even see some pattern to the witnesses that she had missed. “A rabbi, three models, a sex shop owner and a bartender.” He scowled. “Walk into a bar, or are stranded on a desert island? I don’t have time for this, Corinne.” Corinne rolled her eyes. “I’m answering your question about what witnesses there have been to the

‘leprechaun’ thing, not setting up a bad joke. “

Luc snorted. “Somehow I’m not convinced there’s a difference.” Pause. “They thought he was a
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leprechaun?”

“What? Is that one imaginary creature who really is imaginary?”