“You don’t need to,” he replied, stepping up and putting his arm around me. “I want you to claim me, but collaring… I belong to Rutherglen. Making a statement like that without the Rutherglen’s permission would not be wise.”
“You’ll pay for it,” Billy said when I frowned. “You’ll pay for making a connection with one of his as it is, but you’ll pay more if you act like there’s a bond between you. You could put him with Liam, pass him off as his pet to keep him safe for the night.”
“No.”
“Yes,” Marlow said. “It’d be the smart thing to do.”
“Make a show of bartering with Liam for him. Makes him look strong, and it puts the relationship in a context that people can understand. You’ve still got the stink of humanity on you. There’s a gentleness…” Billy shook his head, shuffling uncomfortably. “We grew up in a fae court, just like your Jen, but we were on the opposite end of the social spectrum. Everything’s about power with fae. Who has it, who doesn’t, and what you can do to get more. We’re predators, Kira.”
I watched Billy make that shift again, whatever it was that lurked inside him swimming up to the surface. He was a gorgeous looking guy, all sharp cheekbones and full lips and beautiful dark brown eyes, and then there was this. His irises darkened, the surface growing harder, shinier, as if to repel any answering gaze. And with that, I looked into the eyes of an animal, one with fucking sharp teeth.
“Even predators care for their pack mates, their young. You can blame behaviour on a lot of things, but what we are isn’t one of them.” I turned to Marlow. “Are you OK with this?”
Say no, say no, please say no, I thought furiously. I found that I could do a fair imitation of a confident woman most of the time—the transition had brought with it some drastic psychological changes along with physical ones—but right now, I was scared. He was the only one in this Machiavellian wet dream that didn’t seem caught up in this bloody network of alliances.
“It’ll be for the best,” Marlow said, moving in and smoothing my hair back from my face, my hands going around his wrists, holding him in place. Those eyes saw it all, what I couldn’t say, and they softened exponentially. “I’ll be here with you tonight. I won’t let anything get between us, I promise.”
My fingers clawed at him as he pulled away, but pull away he did. Fuck this, fuck this whole system that keeps dragging Marlow away from me. I watched him run across the car park towards the steps leading into the rear of the stage.
“Hey.” Jake chucked me under the chin, then smiled down at my sullen face. “Come with me and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination…” He sang the song from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, grabbing my hands and whirling me around. “No? How about something a bit more punk rock?” Then he started in on The Stooge’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” gyrating wildly on the end of the leash.
“He’s fucking mad, isn’t he?” I asked Billy.
“Jake is a creature made for court. He wants everything. Throws himself head first into every damn scenario he can and loves every minute of it. He’s a perfect proxy. He’ll be hard and gasping, no matter what he’s asked to do. But you need to be careful with him. He’s always on the leash at court, for his own safety. He doesn’t know how to say no. You need to do it for him.”
My eyes jerked up to meet Billy’s, warm and brown now. There was even a little sympathy there.
“Don’t worry so much,” he said, slinging an arm around my shoulders and moving us forward. “I’m your babysitter, you’re his. Got it?”
“And who looks after you?” I said as we walked into the night.
His laugh was a twin of the sound the Devil’s Rejects had used to open their show, something alien or feline about it.
“No one looks after me, butterfly. No one can.”
8
Welcome to Wonderland, bitches.
I’m not sure what I expected to see when I walked back into the auditorium, but it wasn’t this. The seating had been removed, packed away somewhere, as were all the instruments and gear, though I couldn’t work out how that had happened so quickly.
Nor this. The space had been transformed from a concert hall to a faerie court. Black walls and wooden floors had given way to long roping vines and twisted columns of old growth trees with bright purple morning glories twining around their lengths. Billy snorted as I stopped and stared, but fuck, the air was filled with tiny golden motes of light, autumn leaves slowly spiralling down to the ground.
“Is this…?”
I jerked my fingers back once I touched the trunk of one tree. It felt both reassuringly alive and throbbing with an alien energy that tugged at me.
“They are power manifested,” Billy said, kneeling down and placing a hand over a patch of nodding bluebells. It was a difficult process to describe, but it was as if he sucked the flowers into his palm, but instead of mashed up vegetation, there was a tiny glittering stone. He gave it to me, his touch warm and then gone again.
“Mmm…” Jake said, straining at the end of his leash, drawing my attention.
A few steps in, and I could see all the people here, milling between the trees in small groups, clustered up together on podiums or inside bowers. Some drank from long flutes or rustic bottles, a few chased each other through the maze of trees, giggling as they passed. Others took sips from great pitcher plants growing on the side of the occasional tree, then danced away, with the kind of loose-limbed careless movement only drugs could provide. Jake drew us deeper and deeper in, and I felt the weight of people’s eyes on us as we passed. Then he stopped.
“Oh,” I said. Because despite all the changes I’d made, I hadn’t changed so much that I wasn’t going to be shocked by the sight of some very pretty, not totally human looking people boning out in public.
The feeling of shock rippled through my whole body, the sound of Billy’s chuckle and Jake’s shuffling footsteps anchoring me in the here and now.
I’ve seen paintings like this, I thought, a random misfiring from my overwhelmed brain.
Looking like some kind of a Rococo painting, I was pinned to the spot as I watched what looked like a human girl recline back on a mossy podium, her skin as pale as milk, her pink nipples swollen and tight. Her legs parted the moment the men moved closer, sliding their hands up her thighs. Her eyes were wide, her breasts heaving as her breath came faster, but the men were slow and considered in their caresses by comparison.
‘Men’ was probably a loose description. These looked like those horned creatures I’d seen before at Jen’s place, and were now naked, their long lean bodies brown as a nut. They touched her almost idly, as if watching the contrast between her skin and theirs was just as satisfying as flicking her clit. They did that as well, ignoring her breathy little moans as their nimble fingers danced all over her.
Jake made an inarticulate sound deep in his throat, drawing the attention of several of the men. They turned as one, looking down at us, silvery, mirror like eyes defying deeper inspection, their very alien visages picked out by the golden light. One man’s nostrils flared, breathing me in, another’s hand dropping down to stroke his cock.