My breathing sped up, and I felt that heavy sweet sensation growing inside me. His breathing was faster, his body getting more frantic. I breathed out, "Almost, almost there."
He nodded as if he'd understood or even heard me. He fought his body, his breathing, everything to push himself in and out of me just a few more strokes, and between one and the next he spilled me over the edge and I was screaming his name, my hands finding his sides, his back, holding on to him, as he brought me writhing and shrieking underneath him.
My skin glowed brightly enough to paint his winged shadow against the ceiling. He cried out above me, and thrust himself one last time inside me. We screamed together and then he held himself on his arms, his head down like a winded horse. His wings began to fold back behind him.
I saw movement in the room and realized that Mistral and Frost had seen at least the end of our lovemaking. Royal collapsed slowly on top of me, and it was only as he folded in against me so warm, and his head touched the pillow beside my head that I realized that in this form he was taller than Kitto. He was my height.
I held him, my hands careful with the edge of his wings as we both waited for our heartbeats to slow. I felt something cooler than the body fluid we'd just shared and it was on my shoulder. I petted his curls and he raised his face enough to look at me. He was crying. It was his tears against my skin.
I did the only thing I could think of to do. I kissed him, and we held each other until we could move enough to clean up in the bathroom. We'd been debating who would share my bed along with Mistral tonight. I knew who had my vote, if the storm lord would allow it, and maybe if he wouldn't. Maybe as with Barinthus it was time for me to stop being nice to everyone and ask for what I wanted, and in that moment I couldn't think of anything I wanted more than to keep Royal with me. Maybe it was his own glamour, or maybe it was the Goddess with her fall of rose petals, but whatever the reason, he was one of the men I wanted beside me as I slept tonight.
Chapter Fourty-one
I had fallen asleep with Royal on one side, sleeping on his stomach as you had to do when you had moth wings on your back. Mistral wouldn't share the bed with him, not even with the rose petals still on the sheets to prove that it was the Goddess who had decreed that Royal was supposed to be brought into a larger form. It wasn't really Mistral's fault, but I'd had enough of trying to make everyone feel good about themselves at the expense of my own feelings. There was no way to be fair about it. Either I cast Royal out with the afterglow of the amazing sex, his new form, and the blessing of the Goddess still riding both of us, which made me sad to think about, or I told Mistral either he shared with whom I wanted to share with, or he slept without me. He wouldn't relent, and I was left, as with Barinthus, to stand my ground.
The bed was big enough so that Frost and Doyle slept on one side and Royal on the other. They both saw Royal being brought into his larger form as another blessing. So did most of the men, but for Mistral it was two days without me and then the demi-fey got the sex that he somehow thought was his right. I'd informed him that I wasn't up to his level of rough sex that night, and that hadn't gone over well either.
I'd woken to Frost beside me, one arm flung out and his silver hair flung across the bed so that Royal's wings flickered awake in a pool of silver as if his wings were a piece of exotic jewelry set in a base of melted silver. Doyle was on the other side of Frost, propped up on one elbow watching me when I opened my eyes. He'd put Frost next to me the night before saying, "Rhys wasn't touching your skin directly. I'm thinking that may be why he was awake to guard your dreaming vision. I will give up the chance to touch you this one night to guard your safety."
Frost had tried to protest that he wanted to help guard me, but Doyle had been insistent, and as in most things, when the Darkness was insistent he got his way with the other men. Mistral and Barinthus were the two exceptions to that rule and even they usually let him persuade them.
I lay there covered in silver hair cradled between the warmth of Frost and Royal and watched over by my Darkness. It was a good way to wake up, and I was glad I hadn't vision-traveled to the desert again. The news was already traveling about a mysterious black Humvee that was showing up and helping our troops. The media were speculating that it was a new special forces Hummer that was impervious to bullets and bigger things. The black coach was doing what I'd asked it to do. Maybe that's why I didn't have to rescue anyone else personally.
I wrapped the happy waking around me like a comforting blanket on a cold night even though the early California morning wasn't actually cold, but rather chilly at best. But what Lucy wanted me to come see so bright and early made me feel cold down to my bones.
It was a small rose garden in the back of an older home. The rose bushes were all hybrid teas and were planted in a perfect circle, with only one small archway leading into it, a bench to one side for sitting and admiring, and a small musical fountain in the very center of it. I would have been happy to sit on the bench and listen to the water's song, letting the scent of roses wash over me, except that under the perfume of roses were other smells, ones that I hadn't wanted to smell again. The smell of roses would still remind me of the blessings of the Goddess, but this memory would pair it with blood and the smell of fear as the dead had given up their last moments of life, so that there was about the rose-scented morning a hint of charnel and outhouse.
Lucy said, "If they were human sized it would be a massacre, but they're so tiny that even twenty of them doesn't seem as real."
I wasn't sure I agreed, but I let her statement stand. But if the bodies had been bigger the killers wouldn't have been able to hang them between the roses like some macabre clothesline. The dead demi-fey hadn't even begun to change color yet. They were all pale and perfect like little dolls, except that what child would tie their dolls up by their wrists and string them up between rosebushes so that the bound bodies formed a circle with the roses? But the killers had left the archway open so that people could walk back and forth without stooping. There was a demi-fey male hanging from the archway's top like some gruesome ornament. Their throats were pale and whole, untouched.