Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale (8 page)

“Did the witnesses talk to anyone other than the police?”
Rafe asked.

“A couple of tabloids, a PI or two.
Those reports aren’t much better, though.”
She snapped her notebook shut.
“That’s why I had intended to start redoing interviews myself.
I need to talk to the witnesses firsthand if I’m going to get to the bottom of anything.”

Luc nodded.
“Great.
Then that’s what I will do.”

“Um, excuse me?”
Corinne looked at him dubiously.
“What do you mean what
you’ll
do?”

“Agreeing to share your contact information is helpful to the Council’s efforts to contain the story, but I need to be the one interviewing these witnesses.
I must be able to follow every trail before it goes cold if I’m going to find Seoc and drag him back to Faerie.”

“You know, enough with the talk about dragging.
Have you ever considered just telling the guy what you’re worried about and
asking
him to head back home?”

“Seoc knew he wasn’t supposed to be here when he slipped through a door that he’d been forbidden to use.
He knew he was supposed to return to Faerie when the Queen commanded him to do so.
He’s not late for his curfew, for Lady’s sake, he’s sparking an interdimensional incident of epic proportions!”

Corinne drew back from Luc’s vehement roar and glanced over at Rafe to see if he’d noticed the little display of temper, but Mr.
Cowardly Lion had decided to examine his manicure.

“All right.
Sheesh.
No need to go ballistic.
It was just a question.”

“You have no idea how badly I wish I could just put you under a sleep spell,” he said, his hands clenching into fists at his sides.
“It would make my life so much easier.”

“Except, of course, that it would make it very difficult for her to help us find the Queen’s nephew,” Rafe cautioned, giving Luc a firm look.

Corinne blinked.
The idea that the Fae warrior could cast spells had never occurred to her.
Of course, she’d never known anyone from Faerie before, so she really didn’t know what they could or couldn’t do.
“You could do that?
Just put someone to sleep?”

“Not you, unfortunately,” he grumbled.

“But you can do it to other people.”

“To some other people, but to humans, absolutely.
Which is one of the reasons why I need to conduct these interviews.
I’ll be able to tell if the witnesses are lying.
I might even be able to help them with details they can’t consciously recall.”

“I can see where that would come in handy.”
She shoved her notebook back into her satchel and stood.
“I guess you can come along, then.”

“Come along?”
Luc shook his head.
“You misunderstand.
I will take the contact information you provide and do the interviews myself.
Alone.”

“No, you won’t.”
Seeing him about to howl a protest, Corinne held up a hand.
God, men could be so stubborn.
“Look, whether or not you get any useful information from these people, I still need to talk to them to do my story.
My editor gave me the assignment, and he’ll know something’s wrong if I suddenly do a shitty job as a reporter.
I’m not saying I’ll put anything I learn in the article I turn in, but I have to do my due diligence.
Don’t you think it will stir up a lot less interest in this whole story if we do the interviews together instead of separately?”

She saw that Luc wanted to argue the point with her, just as she saw that he could find no good reason to do so.
Satisfied, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a business card.
Scribbling the address of interview number one on the back, she held it out to him.
“This is the first place I’ll be going tomorrow.
Meet me there at ten am, and we’ll see what we can find out.”

He glanced down at the address and his eyes narrowed.
“This is where we’re going to find someone who spotted Seoc?”

“Yeah, why?”

Luc passed the card to Rafe, whose eyes widened considerably.
“Who did you say these witnesses are?”

“A rabbi, three models, a sex shop owner, and a bartender.”

Rafe snorted.
“Walk into a bar, or are stranded on a desert island?”

Corinne rolled her eyes.
“I know it sounds like the setup to a bad joke, but I’m totally serious.
Those are the witnesses of record to the elf sightings.
Although one of them did call him a leprechaun.
I’m not sure who, though.
Probably not the bartender.”

Luc snorted.
“Someone thought he was a leprechaun?”

“What?”
she asked.
“Is that one imaginary creature that really is imaginary?”

“No, they’re real,” Luc assured her, “but they’re short, ugly, foul-tempered little bastards.
You can’t mistake one for Fae.”

“Yeah, well, the witness must have missed that day of Things That Don’t Exist One-Oh-One.”

Rafe cleared his throat and handed the card back to Luc.
“So tomorrow the two of you will be hitting The Pink Pillow?”

Corinne tried very hard not to think about the way that sounded.
She also tried very hard to push away the images it conjured of her and the Faerie prince over there tangled up on rose-colored bedsheets.

“Yes, I agree that it’s a ridiculous name,” she managed, after a small cough, “but that’s where our first witness is.
He’s the owner.”

“Ah, the sex shop owner.
I’m really glad it isn’t the rabbi.”

Corinne refused to laugh.

“Ten o’clock,” she repeated, moving back toward the office door.

Luc blocked her way.
“Why wait until tomorrow?
It’s a sex shop.
They must have evening hours.
Why don’t we go tonight?”

Corinne lifted her chin and met his gaze defiantly.
“Because I have other plans for tonight.
I’m sure no one will be fleeing town before sunrise.
We can start tomorrow.”

He scowled down at her.
“You think a date is more important than these interviews?
Didn’t we just go over what’s at stake if we don’t find Seoc as soon as possible?”

“I didn’t say I had a date,” she snapped, refusing to be intimidated by the sheer bulk of him looming over her.
Corinne had never considered herself short, but this guy made her feel tiny.
“I have some more background research to do, and I thought it would be smart to get it out of the way before we start in on the witnesses.
Not that I think I need to explain to you how I do my job.”

“You do if you’re doing it stupidly.”

Rafe stood and looked very much as if he’d rather be somewhere else.
“Ah, children—”

“Not now.”

“Sod off.”

The Felix nodded.
“Right.
I’ll just head home then.
I’m certain the two of you can find your own way out.”

Neither of them noticed him leave or the door clicking shut behind him.

“Men don’t get to call me stupid,” Corinne growled, poking a finger into the layer of granite muscle over Luc’s sternum.
“And you sure as hell don’t get to call me anything on the basis of a twenty-minute acquaintance.
Don’t they teach kids growing up in Faerie not piss off people they need in order to accomplish their goals?”

“Don’t they teach little girls in
Ithir
not to pull on the tiger’s tail?”

She didn’t get to answer.
Instead, she got a mouthful of hot, angry, aroused man.

Luc grabbed and lifted her before she could so much as squeak in protest, and forget squeaking once his mouth slammed down on hers, punishing, devouring, claiming, and cherishing in an unfathomable deluge of sensation.
Hell, forget thinking.
All Corinne could do was feel, and she felt things for this aggravating, non-human warrior that she’d never felt for another man in her life.

Electricity seemed to arc between them, surging through her body in a current that could have resurrected Frankenstein’s monster.
A force this intense could power a star, not to mention start a heart beating.
Corinne feared it might have stopped her own.

She couldn’t catch her breath.
She could only breathe in Luc, the heat and strength and musk of him.
He filled her head until she forgot all about being called stupid, forgot what they had been fighting about, forgot her own damned name.
All she could remember was that male and female bodies fit together like puzzle pieces and she wanted this man’s to fit to hers.
Right now.

She wrapped her arms around him, would have wrapped her legs around him, too, she was so far gone with lust, but Luc tore his mouth from hers and set her down, holding her at arm’s length and shaking her until she opened her eyes.
Damn it, she didn’t even remember closing them.

“Now,” he growled, staring down at her with green eyes that seemed to glow with intensity.
“Tell me where
we
are going tonight.”

Corinne grumbled something about how it was unfair to pump her for information while she was clearly not thinking straight, but Luc ignored it.
Partly because he couldn’t regret a tactic that had yielded the desired result, but mostly because if she thought he’d had an unfair advantage after that kiss, she was out of her mind.
She had gone to his head faster than Faerie wine.
Faster than moonlight.
The woman had nearly brought him to his knees.
But he saw absolutely no good reason why he should tell her that.

In exchange, he had to tolerate her not-so-subtle grousing about unfair tactics and arrogant bastards while they walked from Vircolac to the appointment Corinne hadn’t wanted to admit having at her friend Ava’s apartment a few blocks away in Yorkville.
He could only hope that the relatively cooler night air would help blow away the inconvenient remnants of lust that still thrummed through him.

That kiss might have gotten Corinne to stop arguing and take him along on her research trip, but in the grander scheme of things it might still turn out to be a very big mistake.
Luc had a job to do.
He had no time to waste getting involved with a woman, especially not a human woman.

No matter how good she tasted.

Corinne finally deigned to speak to him again as she paused before a large old mansion just on the edge of the neighborhood at the border of the Upper East Side.

“Ava lives inside,” she informed him, crossing her arms over her chest to favor him with a challenging look.
“I’ll admit you made it through seven blocks without anyone wondering why you have that thing strapped to your back, but I have a feeling the doorman is going to want to know about it.
He doesn’t know you from Adam, and he might know me, but I don’t usually come here armed.
So before we go in, you’re going to have to do something about that.”

She gestured impatiently to his shoulder, where the hilt of his sword poked out from behind him.
Only she shouldn’t have been able to see it.

Luc froze, tearing his gaze from its idle inspection of the facade of the converted old home and turning it with new intensity onto his companion.
There was no way she knew he was carrying a sword.
Before they had left Vircolac, he had cast a glamour over himself and his weapon.
All Fae possessed glamour before all other magics, the simplest and yet most potent power they wielded.
By casting a glamour on himself, a Fae could alter his appearance in the eyes of any living being—even other Fae if he had particularly strong talents.

Luc hadn’t used a glamour to enhance his looks, just to disguise them.
Knowing what a stir Seoc’s appearances had caused among humanity, Lac hadn’t wanted to take the chance of being seen as Other out on the streets of the city.
He hadn’t used a big spell, just a few simple incantations that reshaped his ears into a less pointed form, softened some of the sharper angles of his features, and disguised the glow of enchantment all Fae wore like a visible aura.
And, of course, he’d bespelled his weapon to make it invisible to human eyes.
He hadn’t been about to leave it at the club; a guardsman never went about unarmed.
But as far as any human was concerned—and most Others, too, incidentally—he wore nothing on his back beyond the thin fabric of a close-fitting black T-shirt.
Only another Fae or one of a very select handful of other beings should have known the sword even existed.
Corinne D’Alessandro could not possibly have numbered among those exceptions.

“Do something about what?”
he asked carefully.

She looked at him as if he were a drooling idiot.
“About the three-foot sword strapped to your back, Einstein.
I didn’t say anything about it before, because…” She trailed off, blushing, and he felt a moment of satisfaction that the kiss had shaken her up so much, even if the moment had apparently passed.
“Well, because I wasn’t thinking.
Clearly.
But even if everyone else we passed assumed you were an extra in some kind of movie or on your way to a costume party, I can guarantee you that Ava Markham is not going to make the same mistake.
Provided the doorman doesn’t call the cops before you make it to the elevators.
Which I sincerely doubt is going to happen.”

“What makes you think I’m carrying a sword?”

“Duh!
I can see it, asshole.
And so will Bruno, the doorman, as soon as we walk up those steps.”

“Describe it to me.”

“What?”

Her expression went from telling Luc he was an idiot to telling him to go commit anatomically impossible acts in his own company, but he persisted.
The human woman could
not
be seeing through his glamour.
It wasn’t possible.

“Describe it to me,” he repeated forcefully.

“Fuck you,” she bit out.
“It’s a sword.
It’s long and pointy and metal.
And I can’t describe it, because you’ve got it in some kind of harness contraption that covers at least half the damned thing.
I’m assuming the sheath thingy has that cutout in front so it doesn’t get hung up when you pull it out over your shoulder.”

Luc shook his head, but his denial held no force of conviction.
Her description was entirely accurate, and not something she should know.
He couldn’t deny its significance, no matter how much he wished to.
And no matter how hard he tried to push the word from his mind, it swooped in and rooted there, bright and glowing like a blinking neon sign:

Heartmate.

Corinne appeared unfazed by his dazed reaction.
She kept right on snarling at him.
“I’ll bet that’s what it’s for, too.
You’re in the Queen’s Guard.
You probably think that makes you some kind of medieval action hero.
But who the hell thinks about that kind of thing?
And who the hell do you think you are, telling me what to do?
I don’t take orders from you, and if we’re going to do these interviews together, that’s something you’re going to have to understand.
Clearly.”

Luc understood only too well.
In fact he understood things Corinne knew nothing about, and damned if this wasn’t the worst of all possibilities.
The last thing he wanted—or needed—while he was stuck in
Ithir
looking for the Queen’s nephew was to find his heartmate.
But here she was, and apparently no happier about it than him.

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: an ordinary stroll with a human had become the first time he’d ever spent alone 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.
No one was able to see Luc’s real appearance—not even another Fae—once the magic had been cast.
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 found his true love, their hearts would be irrevocably bound, and the Fae’s power of 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 manipulate this investigation to suit his own intentions; nor was the affair he’d been contemplating from the first moment he’d touched her still a possibility.
He could never have an affair with her now—at least, not the kind that ended with a peck and a thank-you as he hied himself back to Faerie.
This woman was his now, and leaving her—ever—had ceased to be an option.

Even if she still stood on the sidewalk and glared at him as if she’d like to rip the sword off his back and beat him with it.

Luc held up a hand and willed it not to tremble.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a voice much calmer than he should have managed.
“I didn’t mean to be insulting.
I just—I needed to know what you saw so I could deal with the situation.
I can use magic to hide the sword.
I can’t leave it behind—a guardsman never travels without his weapon—but I can make it so that no one else will be able to see it.
Call it a compromise.”

She eyed him for another moment, her mouth set in a firm and decidedly unhappy line.
Then she gave a short nod.
“Fine.
Go ahead.
Make it disappear.”

He really wished she hadn’t made it sound like a challenge.
Since he’d already cast the glamour she’d just dared him to perform, he now had to think of a way to explain to her why it was already done but she was somehow seeing through it.
Now, he judged, was not the time for that particular conversation.
He’d always hoped his heartmate would at least like him a little before learning she was stuck with him.

Closing his eyes, Luc drew a deep breath and hoped Corinne would see it as a signal of intense concentration.
He waited for several heartbeats before lifting his lids and offering her a weak smile.
“All right, then.
Ready to go up?”

Corinne made an is-that-it?
gesture with one hand and shot her chin forward belligerently.
“What about this spell of yours?”

“Already done.”

“Really?”

He nodded.

“So how come I can still see the sword?”

Luc shifted slightly.
“The intention is to hide it from other people,” he hedged.
“You already know it’s there, so I don’t need to hide it from you.
Right?”

“I guess,” she said, clearly unconvinced.
“So you’re telling me that no one else can see your huge, honkin’ sword at the moment, but I can?”

“Yes.”

Corinne snorted and turned to the front steps with an amused shake of her head.
“Fine.
It’s your felony conviction.
Let’s go say hello to Bruno.”

The multipaned art deco doors swung open before they reached the top step.
An older man, stocky but impeccably groomed in a plain black suit, stood back to invite them in with a wide smile.
“Good evening, Miss Corinne.
Is it Ms.
Markham’s turn to host your Girls’ Night festivities?”

Corinne smiled back and stopped in the foyer—deliberately, Luc had no doubt—to give the man a good look at both of them.
“Hey, Bruno.
No, actually, it’s just me tonight.
Well, me and my…friend.
We stopped by to talk to Ava for a bit.
Luc, this is Bruno Mueller.
Bruno, Luci—”

“Luc Macanaw.”
Luc stepped forward before she could finish and took the older fellow’s hand, shaking it firmly.
“How are you, Mr.
Mueller?”

“Oh, not so bad,” Bruno said.
He wore a pleasant smile on his creased and jowled face, but his black eyes were sharp and piercing as they sized him up.
“So you’re a friend of Miss Corinne’s, eh?
I haven’t seen you with her before.”

“I’m not from around here.”
Luc deliberately gave the doorman a good look at his left shoulder and side where the un-glamoured sword would have been easily visible.
It also had the advantage of placing him partially in front of Corinne, making it difficult for her to answer Bruno’s questions on Luc’s behalf.
She’d wanted the doorman to get a good look at Luc.
Luc had no problem with that, but he saw no need to allow the little troublemaker to throw gasoline on the fire.