0449474001339292671 4 fighting faer (17 page)

“That would leave me very displeased.”

“I know.”

Corinne watched as the Faerie Queen and the Captain of her Guard eyed each other warily from across the worlds. Any second now she expected to hear a haunting whistle and see a tumbleweed blow past.

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Finally, Mab spoke.

“The door,” she snapped. “I can tell you where it is, but it will be up to you to reach it before Seoc. And I can tell you that I feel he is very close. By moonrise tomorrow, it will be too late to stop him.”

“Then we’ll get to him before that.”

“Very well.” Mab pursed her lips, looked from Luc to Corinne and back again. “You should consider yourself very lucky I cannot take back the gift I have given you, Lucifer, for I begin to doubt whether you truly deserve it.”

“It is already mine,” he growled, “and you are the least of the dangers I would risk to keep it.” Corinne thought she saw a smile tease the corners of the Queen’s mouth, but then the woman in the vision lifted her chin and schooled her face into a haughty mask. “Remember you said that, my Lucifer, for I know that I will. The door waits for now at the Old Stone Gate. I expect you to find it before my nephew does.”

While Corinne stared in fascination, the Queen turned her back on them and the vision shimmered before smoothing out, until nothing but clear air appeared where it had been. Blinking rapidly to adjust her eyes, Corinne wished she knew a technique to adjust her brain as well, but she had a feeling it was already much too late for that. Still feeling a bit dazed, she followed Luc out of the room.

Fergus and Rafe were waiting outside the door, putting the kibosh on any chance Corinne might have had to ask Luc the questions that spun through her mind. The foremost of which happened to be something like, “What the hell?”

“So?” Rafe drawled, not bothering to straighten from his lazy slouch against the wall.

Fergus put things a bit more bluntly. “Where’s the door?” Corinne smirked and waved. “And here I thought you’d never ask. Bye now! Don’t remember to write!”

Luc growled.

“Oh, fine.” Corinne crossed her arms peevishly. “He can be uncivil all by himself then, and I’ll just take it like a good little martyr.”

Rafe stepped forward, putting his arm around Corinne’s shoulders and leading her back down the hall to the living room. She could hear Luc’s growls get louder ever over the chuckling purr Rafe was making.

Could none of these men behave even halfway normally?

“Just ignore him,” Rafe said. “He’ll get over himself soon enough.”

“Fergus or Luc?”

He hummed. “Both, I imagine.”

“Yeah, that’d be great,” she said, “but we still have the tiny problem of having to work together until we find Seoc.”

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“But that won’t be a problem on either count.” The problem with not looking at Fergus was that she could still hear him. “Now that we know where the door is, we can just go there and wait for him, and now since we don’t need a human getting in the way, you can just go home and we’ll work just fine without you.”

Corinne turned just in time to see Luc yank the other Fae to a stop by the braid. “The next time you speak that way to her, I’m going to break something. Probably your pretty nose,” he growled. “So
stop
.

Now.”

Fergus whined. “She started it.”

“And she has now stopped.” He raised an eyebrow at Corinne. “Haven’t you?” Ooh. So she got to play the moral superiority angle without actually having to be superior? Fabulous!

“Absolutely. My lips are sealed.”

“Good. Keep them sealed. Both of you.” He released Fergus’s braid, stepped forward, peeled Rafe’s arm off of Corinne’s shoulder and replaced it with his own. “Let’s get back to the others. I only want to go through this once.”

“Sounds like more than enough for me,” she mumbled.

She didn’t say another word while he dragged her back into the living room and pushed her down onto the love seat. She even refrained from commenting during his retelling of the conversation with Mab. She was very proud of herself.

When he finished, Graham was frowning. “The Old Stone Gate? Is that supposed to be here in Manhattan? Because I’ve never heard of it.”

“I have.” Dmitri shifted Reggie in his lap and leaned forward. “I thought it was an old legend, and I cannot say I don’t still think it is. It is supposed to be a hidden gate, more powerful than anything the Fae wanted known about, here in the city in an old wooded grove. I had heard that more than the Fae used it at one time, to travel between further flung places than Faerie and Ithir.”

“But it can’t still be standing, can it?” Reggie asked. “I mean, Manhattan hasn’t exactly remained unchanged for centuries or anything. It must have been torn down or built over or something, right?” Missy chimed in. “Yeah. It would have to be long gone, wouldn’t it? There are no real woods left here.

Even Central Park was landscaped and planted to be the way it looks now. You’d have to go off the island to get a grove that’s been around long enough for the Fae to consider it old.”

“Not true,” Graham said, an expression of slow understanding beginning to light his face. “There is one place on the island that contains original woodland.”

“Inwood Hill Park.” Corinne spoke the epiphany aloud. “It’s where Peter What’sHisFace supposedly bought the island from the Indians for a pile of souvenirs, at the northernmost tip of the island.” She frowned. “But I don’t remember any old stone gates up there. It’s all hiking trails and stuff. A gate wouldn’t have remained hidden for long from all the joggers and dog walkers. I mean, it’s not as busy as Central Park, but it’s hardly desolate, either.”

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Rafe shook his head. “It wouldn’t need to be. If the Fae considered it to be a hidden gate, then likely it wouldn’t be recognized as anything at all to anyone else. It could be nothing more than a crevice in some rock.”

“Well, there’s plenty of rock up there, so I suppose anything is possible.” Luc nodded. “That’s likely where we’ll need to be then.” Chapter Fourteen

Fergus wanted to head to Inwood immediately, because he was apparently a big fan of the abject failure scenario. Corinne almost bit through her tongue keeping that observation in check, but she really was trying to be good, so she kept silent and let Luc explain that tomorrow would be a better bet.

“The moon will be new. He’ll need that extra help if he’s going to undo Mab’s seals. He’s too smart to try tonight, only to end up failing.”

When she later asked him to explain that without making her brain hurt, he summed it up as, “Magic. If you’re trying to get rid of magic things—in this case, the seals on the door—it’s easier when the moon is new. You want to create things, it’s better when the moon is full.” She didn’t pretend she really understood that, but at least he’d used simple words, so she just nodded and moved on.

She really
wanted
to move on to her apartment, her bed and her very own REM sleep cycle. She got as far as standing up from the loveseat before Luc grabbed her. “Where are you going?” She sighed. “Home. To bed. I don’t know about you, but it’s been a long day and I’m exhausted. You just said we wouldn’t be able to go to the park until sundown tomorrow, so I’m going to spend every available hour between now and then unconscious.”

He tugged her hand, trying to get her to sit back down. “Okay, but I can’t leave until I go over a few more things with Fergus and Rafe and the others.”

“That’s nice.” She pulled her hand away. “But since I’m sure you don’t need me around for the strategy stuff, I can. And I plan to. Witness me leaving.”

He snatched up her hand again and yanked, sending her tumbling down onto his lap in a heap. “No. I’ll go with you, but you have to give me a few more minutes to make arrangements for tomorrow.”

“Luc, what are you doing? Let me up” She tried really hard not pretend she didn’t notice the room full of people watching her with avid curiosity, but the heat in her cheeks told her about how well that worked.

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“No.” He tightened his arms and frowned down at her. “I don’t want you to leave without me. If you give me fifteen more minutes, I’ll be done here, and we can go home together.” She blinked. “Did I invite you home with me?”

“Did you think you would have to?”

“Perhaps if we met in the morning to talk,” Dmitri offered through a smile that Corinne felt she was better off ignoring. “Since you had so little sleep last night. That way you need not waste fifteen minutes of, ah…sleeping time.”

Reggie punched her husband in the ribs, not that he so much as flinched. “Misha, don’t help him. He doesn’t need it. Corinne is the one we should be trying to rescue.”

“I don’t need to be rescued.”

“She doesn’t need to be rescued.”

They spoke both at once and Corinne rolled her eyes, pushing off Luc’s lap to stand in front of him and face her interfering friends. “Look, it’s not that I don’t appreciate your concern,” she said, “but I really don’t need an intervention.”

Reggie scowled. “I got an intervention.”

“You got bit by a vampire. No one is going to be sucking my blood and turning me into a creature of the night.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re not right to be concerned,” Missy said, sounding as sweet and stern as when she told her class of five-year-olds to settle down for nap time.

“Like I was concerned when my best friend told me she was marrying a werewolf and having a cub?

And let’s see if I remember how said friend reacted to my concern…” Corinne blinked innocently for a second before she held up a finger in mock realization. “Oh, yeah! She told me to mind my own damned business and to make sure the baby gift was unisex.”

At least Missy had the grace to blush. Reggie just charged ahead. Or at least, she tried to. “Rinnie, you don’t under—”

That’s as far as she got before Dmitri put one hand over her mouth and flashed Corinne a grin. “Since I can guarantee my charming love is about three seconds from sinking her fangs into my hand, I suggest you take advantage of the silence to leave while you can.” Reggie’s eyes narrowed and her jaw clenched and Dmitri’s grin turned into a wince. “There, you see? Go away and have a good night.” Luc chuckled and stood, wrapping one arm about Corinne’s waist and steering her toward the door.

“We will. Let’s all meet back here tomorrow afternoon around three. We can decide how to best deal with Seoc’s capture then.”

Rafe nodded and rose to walk them to the front door. “Of course. My home is at your disposal. And just because I love you, I will even keep our friend Fergus for the night. It would upset our plans if we had to spend all evening trying to stop Corinne from killing him.”
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* * * * *

Several minutes passed in silence while she sat with her cheek pillowed on his chest and his cheek resting against her hair. Finally she stirred, tilting her head until she could see his face. “Do you have a plan for tomorrow night?”

“I don’t think it requires a better mousetrap, just stealth and speed,” he said, snuggling her closer against him. “With the Lupines, Rafe, and Dmitri and Reggie on our side, we’ll have that in abundance.”

“So we just hide near the gate until he shows, and then jump him?” He smiled at the incredulity in her voice. “You expected something a bit more elaborate?”

“I guess. It just seems so…” she shrugged. “Anticlimactic.” He chuckled. “A good many things are.”

And then again, a good many things aren’t, she thought and pressed her legs together against the involuntary ripple in her cunt. She seemed to have developed a reflex action to the thought of Luc and climaxes occurring within a thousand synapses of each other.

She fell silent again and stayed that way until they paid the cab driver and headed up to her apartment.

When she unlocked the door and led him inside, she felt almost like she’d been stuck by déjà vu, but this time when Luc shut the door behind them, he reached for her immediately.

His lips settled on hers like rain, and she soaked him up as quickly as the desert floor. In fact, she got about half a second away from drowning before the niggling in the back of her mind turned into a pounding and she pulled away on a groan.

“Wait,” she said, bracing her hands against his chest to keep him further than lip-length away from her.

“You and I have some talking to do.”

Luc groaned against her throat as he laved it with his oh-so clever tongue. “We can talk later.”

“Right,” she scoffed. “Like we’re really going to have the energy to talk after we screw each other into a couple of senseless puddles of goo. I can see that happening.”

“I have no problem with goo,” he muttered, scraping his teeth against her collarbone. “That sounds fine to me. Let’s aim for goo.”

“No.” She pushed him firmly away and squirmed out of his arms, walking around the back of the sofa to keep some sort of barrier between them. If he touched her again, she knew darned well the only things coming out of her mouth would be cries for more. “I said I wanted to talk.” He groaned and reached down to adjust the fit of his jeans. “Fine,” he said. “Just do me a favor and try
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and talk fast, okay?”

“Fine. I’ve really only got one question for you.” She crossed her arms and braced herself. “What is a heartmate?”