Ah.
Where did that one come from?!
“You're the Warrior?” I asked, crinkling my brow and pausing as my mind shuffled through information. The Horned God, like the Triple Goddess, has three aspects. The Warrior, the Father, and the Sage. That was important. I didn't know why, but it was vital. “You have it then,” I gasped, my voice and body trembling. “The Spear of Lug.”
Arlo's face tightened, and he reached up, curling his fingers around my wrists and prying my hands off of him. With his glamour dropped, his hair was dark and slightly curled, the horns curving up into the shadows, shimmering white as bone. When he touched me, I felt the earth shift and tremble.
“The Spear's been lost for years,” he said, curling the corner of his lip up in a snarl. “You sure seem to know a lot about a lot for somebody with am-fucking-nesia.”
“I'm not lying,” I whimpered as his grip on my wrist tightened. A shard of a memory flashed across my brain, of being bound in iron, of pain. I tried to tug my wrist free but he held tight, pressing me backward onto the bed and pinning my hands above my head.
“No,” he murmured, hovering over me and running his nose down the side of my neck like he was smelling me, “of course you're not. Fae can't lie. But you …” He shifted his face to smell the other side of my neck. “You reek of magic that's not your own.”
His nose brushed lightly down the length of my throat and his hot breath caressed my skin. My skin rippled with a memory un-remembered, something ingrained in my flesh that begged for more.
“Please,” I gasped, unsure if I was begging him not to hurt me, or begging him for something else.
“Don't flatter yourself, Ciarah O'Rourke,” he sneered my name like he didn't believe it, like he suspected I had found a workaround for the fae can't lie rule. “Now, I'm getting in. Are you staying or going?”
His burning gaze raked down my body to where the oversized t-shirt barely covered my borrowed panties, and my breath caught at the sudden, suffocating blast of magic when his glamour snapped back in place.
“Going,” I whispered in a weak sounding voice. I hated it. I hated sounding weak. For all the confusion inside my head, I knew without a doubt that I was not a weak woman.
Arlo's forest green gaze held mine for a long, tense moment before he abruptly released my wrists and pushed up off the bed.
“Then go. Caley is down in the bar drinking with the club whores. Maybe you can go join them.” His emphasis on the word join made it sound like he was calling me a whore, too. Maybe I was. My body certainly remembered the feel of a man's hands upon me. Remembered the feel of being pleasured, dominated, and worshiped. “Don't forget: when dawn rolls around, Fionn will be back and he'll expect answers from you.”
When I reached the door, I paused and looked back at him. Prick, he may be, but I couldn't deny his attractiveness. Now stretched out on his bed in the exact spot I'd just vacated, with arms folded under his head, he watched me like a hawk might watch a mouse.
“How did you lose it?” I asked, chewing my lip nervously. “The Spear of Lug. It was your sacred duty to protect it for all time.”
“My predecessor,” Arlo grunted. His jaw tightened with anger and his green eyes flashed dangerously. “Shut the door behind you, Ciarah O'Rourke.”
Arlo never had given me any direction to the bar where Caley was supposedly drinking with the club whores, so I found myself wandering aimlessly through the quiet building and opening doors at random. After my fourth wrong guess, I gave up trying to find this damn bar, and returned to the kitchen I had already passed. It was dark, and dead still. Shards of moonlight dissected the floor and frogs croaked their nighttime song while my fractured brain coughed up another slice of memory.
Hands tipped with claws made of iron raking through my flesh. Waves of nausea causing bile to rise as the deadly metal poisoned my body. Shadows parting to reveal a face crafted of nightmares and despair. Sobs of terror and sick, twisted laughter.
“You lost here, bebette?” Reece's molasses voice caressed my ears and I snapped from my memory with a gasp. “Somethin' got you spooked, girl? You be paler than a virgin's creamy white thighs.”
“That doesn't make a lick of sense,” I informed him, frowning. “Who says you need to be a virgin to have pale thighs?”
Reece's red-brown eyebrows shot up, obviously not having expected me to reply. My voice was still thin and tight but as Killian had promised, it was improving with use.
“Well now,” Reece grinned, advancing on me as I took a couple of steps backward, “you mighta proved Old Reece wrong, here. Because these thighs are as pale as they come.” His index finger trailed up the inside of one of my exposed thighs, reminding me I'd left my borrowed shorts on the floor of Arlo's bedroom. “But you sure ain't no virgin. Are you, cher?”
His finger brushed lightly over the thin fabric of my panties, igniting a fire that pooled in my belly and caused my nipples to tighten.
“Says who?” I challenged in a breathy voice, trying and failing to keep from pushing my hips forward into his touch. I'd backed up as far as I could go, with my shoulders against the fridge and an enormous Cajun fae in front of me.
“Aw now, bebette, ain't no need for you ta be honte. Old Reece know these things, just as sure as he know you more than you seem, Le Gardien du Voile.” His glamour rippled with a pulse of magic that made my pussy clench and his red-gold skin gleam under the moonlight, before settling back into his human-like appearance.
“I'm not ashamed,” I replied, my elusive memories translating his Cajun words effortlessly. “I'm curious. You said you were dia gnéas, but I don't have any memory of this. Will you show me? What it means to be dia gnéas?”
Reece's brow shot up once more, but his palm cupped me through my unapologetically damp underwear. “Girl, you don't know what you be askin'. When the sidhe come together …” He shook his head, but his eyes gleamed with a wild and primal excitement that I wanted nothing more than to unleash.
“Show me,” I taunted. I'd already forgotten my purpose in coming down here in the first place. It hadn't been to seek out sex, but why not? What was stopping me?
“Hmm,” Reece said, teasing up the evening's memories with his fingers. The rest of my brain may have been a fractured mess, but I had no problem recalling our moment in the bathtub. “Sadhbh might not be happy if I took advantage of da Veil Keeper,” he said, smacking his lips in a way that made the fractured stumps on my back stir, like the beating of long-dead wings.
They might not be visible through my glamour, but I could feel them.
“Sive,” I sounded out, the word rhyming with the number five. It was a name, I thought. Or some part of me did anyway.