Kinked

SIXTEEN

Stalking through the dark, silent halls of the palace’s underbelly was like a video game gone bad. Any moment now Quentin felt like they were going to run into a water trap populated with piranhas, while logs swung to and fro overhead and shadow wolves jumped out of nooks to attack them.

He rubbed his face and forcibly banished the image from his mind. He wasn’t quite as bad off as any of the others, but he needed to get some rest, and soon.

He said to Linwe, “Be sure to memorize the way back in case you need to run it by yourself.”

“Aw, damn it,” she said miserably. “I’m not going to need to.”

He was terrible at dates, birthdays and such, but he thought Linwe had to be around thirty or so, which was quite young for an Elven adult. Making any kind of direct age-to-adulthood correlation to shorter-lived races, such as humankind, didn’t compute, for she had already lived as a responsible adult for several years, yet she still retained the liveliness of youth.

He remembered her as a little girl, with her wide, naughty grin and eyes sparking with some kind of mischief. She had been adorable and adored, and had pretty much run wild in Lirithriel Wood for the first fifteen years of her life. He hadn’t visited the Wood often, but he remembered once she had run up to him with a laugh that was bigger than she was. She must have been all of five years old. When she had reached him, he’d picked her up and swung her high, setting her on his shoulder.

An echo of the burning pain came back in his chest. He couldn’t let anything happen to her. Not her too, on top of all the massive losses the Elves had already suffered. He grabbed her by the arm, hauled her close and hugged her fiercely. After her first twitch of surprise, her arms came around his waist, and she hugged him back so hard her slight body shook with the strain.

He bent his head and said in her ear, “You will run if I tell you to. Do you hear me, young lady?”

“Quentin, that’s not my job …” she said.

“Linwe.” He injected all the command he could into his voice. “You don’t have the magical aptitude for this kind of fight. And you. Will. Run.”

“Fine!”

He pressed a kiss to her forehead. He knew he was being overbearing and patronizing, and he didn’t give a shit. They all had to react to stress in their own way. This way was his.

He let her go, and they moved on.

After climbing a few staircases and another fifteen minutes or so of searching, they found the kitchens, which were as large as Quentin had expected. Linwe ran to the water pump over a large basin, and pumped out enough water to immerse her head in. While she drank and splashed water on herself, he located the pantries. He checked to make sure he wasn’t near any windows, then he spelled a small ball of light and began collecting supplies.

The pantry held massive amounts of anything he could have hoped to find: wayfarer bread, nuts, dried fruits, jerky, cured meats and dried fish, wheels of cheese, apples, honey, jars of jellies and jams, olives, pickled vegetables and pickled eel, along with potatoes and other tubers, spices, oil and huge sacks of grains.

One pantry held barrels of wine, barley beer, and bottles of liquor, along with wineskins. Given the size of the palace, there were probably other storerooms full of both wine and the foods that were suitable for long storage, but the contents of these pantries alone would be enough to feed the four of them for a few months.

Not that they would need to be here for that long. He gave a quick thought for how differently time might be passing on Earth, then dismissed it. That was a reality to face at another time. It bore no relevance to their immediate situation.

He opened one wineskin, tilted it up and poured wine into his open mouth, then corked it again. It was criminal to waste Elven wine in almost any kind of circumstance except this one. He handed the wineskin over to Linwe along with five more. “Empty those and fill them with water, while I pack some food.”

She took the skins and headed back to the water pump. He started throwing a selection of everything into four large canvas bags. Theoretically what he packed should be enough to feed them all for a week, except that he wasn’t sure how much food the Elves would need to eat to replenish their strength. He knew for sure that he and Aryal would eat a significant amount of food, especially protein. He tucked some apple brandy into the sack he intended to keep for himself.

The food and water were essentials, but he really wanted a few weapons and he wouldn’t turn down a blanket or two. He was also starting to twitch about how long he and Linwe had been gone from the others, so he banished the light, waited a few moments for his eyesight to adjust, and then scoured the kitchen for knives and linen tablecloths.

The tablecloths he found were long and heavily embroidered, which added to their thickness. They would make weird but effective blankets. After that, he stacked all of his finds on a table and waited for Linwe to join him.

She finished filling the last wineskin, slipped over to him and appeared to study the supplies he had gathered. “I shoulda set a limit on your credit card,” she said, with a ghost of her normal good cheer.

He ruffled her hair. “I know this loads us down, but it does cover all the basics.”

“I’m not complaining,” she told him. “It’s all I can do to keep from eating everything in one of those canvas bags right now.”

He dug into one of the bags and handed her an apple. While she took quick bites, they gathered up all the supplies and headed back down to the cell block. Determined to catch the first hint of any of the shadow wolves’ presence, he kept his awareness hyperextended, but they had a quiet, uneventful trip.

As soon as they pulled open the cell block door, Linwe called softly, “It’s us. We’re back.”

Aralorn and Caerreth met them at the door. Quentin kept a skin of water, the canvas sack with the largest amount of meat and the apple brandy, two of the tablecloths and most of the knives, and let the others sort out the rest. He took a few moments to pick the lock shut on the cell block door, and he told the others, “Set watches.”

Then he went in search of Aryal.

He found her in the cell he had been locked in, curled into a tight ball, and the coil of tension that had been wound so tightly in his gut eased. Still, as depleted as she was, she could be dangerous if she was startled out of a sound sleep.

To warn her of his presence, he said, “Hi honey, I’m home.”

She didn’t move, but he knew somewhere inside of her, her animal form had heard him. He walked over to her, sat down and set the knives within easy reach. Then he told her, “I’m going to put a hand on your shoulder now. Don’t bite me.”

He curled a hand along the point of her shoulder. He could tell she was chilled, because tiny goose bumps were raised along her skin. He shook her gently and told her, “I have water, apple brandy and meat. Which do you want?”

She uncurled slowly, moving as though her whole body ached. She mumbled, “Brandy.”

“Okay, but you can only have half of it.” He was not quite lying, just withholding information. He had a second bottle in the sack. He uncorked the first bottle and set it into her groping hand.

Then he placed one of the folded tablecloths in her lap, and he pulled out the different kinds of food, setting it out in front of them. He chose a hunk of cured meat and tore into it caveman-style, washing down the dry bites with swallows of water. Exhaustion pulled at his bones. With one part of his attention, he noticed how Aryal drank the brandy but didn’t reach for any of the food.

Various reactions occurred to him. He considered each one and set them aside.

Finally he said, “You want to hunt the bitch, you’ve got to eat properly and get more rest, because, sunshine, you can barely sit up straight. I’m not going to take you with me or have you as a fighting partner if you’re going to be a liability.”

The silence in the cell was sour. Then she reached forward to slap her hand down randomly on a pile of food. “Oh gods, you brought more wayfarer bread.”

“All you got is bitching and whining?” he said irritably. “That’s not all I brought. Most of it is meat.”

He sensed her leaning further, feeling over the offerings. She picked up a jar and shook it. “What’s this?”

“Pickled eel,” he told her. “If you don’t like it, I’ll eat it.”

She said, her voice slow and tired, “Pickled eel and apple brandy. Huh.”

For some reason that made him laugh. “Put that way, it sounds pretty awful.” He paused, then reached for the bottle. She put up a token resistance but let him take it. He drank, and the light, fiery liquor sliding down his throat was one of the few good things that had happened that whole, gods-cursed day.

In the other hall, the Elves talked quietly together. Already they sounded more animated. Hope and carbohydrates were a powerful combination.

When the hollowed-out feeling in his gut had eased, he said quietly, “After we eat and get some sleep, I want to send the others back. They aren’t equipped to hunt the witch. They can cross back over to the Bohemian Forest and stand guard as per their original orders, and maybe send someone out to update Ferion and Dragos.”

Aryal was silent for a while. She said, “If Galya reaches the passageway, you’re setting them up for a bad confrontation.”

“They don’t have to engage. They can let her go, and she can be tracked down to wherever she lives in Russia.” Tired of the dryness of the cured meat, he set it aside and reached for a wheel of cheese and a small jar of olives, set with a honeycomb wax seal. “Besides,” he said, “we’re not going to let her reach the passageway.”

He sliced off a piece of cheese and handed it to her, then sliced off some for himself and broke open the jar of olives. As she chewed, Aryal said, “I want one of these bars.”

He didn’t understand that. He hadn’t brought any food that came in bars. “What?”

The indirect moonlight from the single window was so faint, for many races the cell would be in total darkness, but his eyes were especially suited to the night. He saw her gesture to the cell door that stood wide open. “These bars. I want one of them with the dampening spell still on it so I can stab her with it.”

His eyebrows rose as he considered that. “That’s actually an awesome idea,” he said. “Unfortunately, the cells are so well constructed that I don’t think it’s feasible. We’d need a blacksmith, and by the time the smith separated one of the bars, probably the dampening spell would be broken.”

“A girl can dream, you know,” she said. She had sounded bad before, and now she sounded utterly exhausted. “Give me that bottle again.”

He passed it over to her. “So, who do you love?”

She drank from the bottle and wiped her mouth. “Excuse me?”

“Name somebody you love.”

“Why?” She sounded baffled.

Impulse was driving him, and he didn’t want to try to explain it. “Just because,” he said. “You’re friends with Niniane. Do you love her?”

“Ye-es.” Now she sounded cautious.

“Suppose Niniane was in trouble, and it was bad.” She nudged his arm with the bottle and, surprised she offered, he took it and drank. “Suppose,” he said, “someone Powerful that you didn’t know had threatened her.”

“Are you telling me that you know some plot against Niniane?” she asked suspiciously. “And you’re only just now bringing it up?”

“No! I’m creating a hypothetical scenario.”

“I’m back to ‘why’ again.” She wrapped the tablecloth around her shoulders and lay down. “But go on.”

He felt filthy and the cat in him was offended, but there was nothing to be done about it for the moment. He put the folded tablecloth he’d kept for himself on the floor to use as padding for his naked back. Then he lay down on it beside Aryal and stared at the ceiling.

“Suppose,” he whispered, “you tried to help your friend by trapping the person who threatened her. And suppose your plan backfired, and you ended up hurting both of them. What would you do?”

She coughed out a chuckle. “Feel bad. Is this about what happened when you decided to mend the error of your ways and gave up smuggling?”

The stone floor made a wretched bed. The only way he could be more uncomfortable was if he were still bleeding. He said, “Yep.”

Aside from the quiet sounds of the Elves settling to sleep, silence pressed down on them. Aryal whispered, “What did you do, Quentin?”

He closed his eyes. “When Dragos went after Pia last year, and the Elves shot him with the poisoned arrow, did you know that Pia had been staying at my house at Folly Beach?” She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even appear to be breathing. He continued, “I traded the information to Urien in exchange for his promise to let Pia go. Urien didn’t keep his end of the bargain.”

After a moment, she said, “Why the fuck did you tell me that now, when I’m so tired I can hardly breathe?”

Aside from exasperation, she also sounded genuinely mystified. He muttered, “I figured that would be a good thing. Less opportunity for you to go ballistic before you had a chance to think.”

More time passed. She whispered, “You manipulative bastard. Why did you tell me at all? You didn’t have to. Nobody is bothering to ask questions about that anymore. You got away with it.”

“Nobody else knew about it. That doesn’t mean I got away with anything.” He rested a forearm over his eyes.

She turned onto her side until she was facing him. “It’s been eating away at you all this time.”

“Kinda,” he muttered.

She smacked him on the shoulder with the back of her hand, and he jumped. “What the hell, Quentin?” she said between her teeth. “Did I not just get done telling you the other day that I would go after your ass if you did anything to hurt anyone I cared about? Did you really make the very best decision you could have made after hearing someone say something like that to you?”

He couldn’t help himself and started to smile. “What are you going to do about it?”

She smacked him again. “I don’t know. I can’t believe you made me mad at you after being so—so nice to me today. What is wrong with you?”

“There’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I mean that literally. You figure out what’s wrong with me, and I’ll pay you sixty-four thousand dollars.” He rolled onto his side to face her. She jerked her tablecloth closer around her shoulders, muttering under her breath. He stroked her hair, and she froze. Somehow the darkness made it easier for him to admit, “It sickens me to think I hurt Pia the way I did, and I still don’t like Dragos, but I’m growing to respect him. I’m sorry I did it.”

She reached up to pull his hand away from her hair, and then she didn’t let go of it. “You still haven’t said why you told me.”

“Beats the hell out of me,” he said, in a tone of confession.

She lifted up her head. She accused, “You’re lying.”

“Am I?”

“And that was prevarication.” She sounded more betrayed at that than when he had told her what he’d done.

“Was it?”

“You suck!” She pinched him hard in the bicep. “Give me a straight answer, or I swear somehow I’ll find the energy to kick your ass right now.”

“Ouch!” He knocked her hand away and leaned forward so that they were nose to nose. “Maybe,” he whispered, “working with you is starting to feel like a partnership, and maybe I’m shocked at how good that feels. I mean you, for God’s sake, are the last person on the planet I would have ever expected to feel that way about. Six days ago we were trying to kill each other in the Tower.”

“Gods, has it only been six days?” she muttered. “It feels like forever.”

He decided to ignore that. “So maybe I told you the truth because I don’t trust how this feels. And maybe I told you the truth because that’s what real partners do—at least that’s what I’ve heard they do anyway. Maybe real partners know how to say to each other, ‘yeah, you fucked up and now it’s okay to move on,’ and maybe I would like to hear somebody say that to me just once, sometime in my life. So now it’s up to you, sunshine. Polish your vendetta if that’s what you really want. Just keep in mind, you need me to take down that witch. Let me know what comes after that.”

As aggressive sounding as the words were, saying them still left him feeling raw and wide open. Man, he had a gods-given talent for self-destruction. He rolled away, putting his back to her, and rubbed his chest where that burning pain had settled.

Aryal said, sounding exceedingly aggrieved, “You’re like some kind of high-maintenance girlfriend. I have one of the worst days of my life. Hell, I might be crippled. I might never fly again. That’s beyond my worst nightmare. I don’t know if I can live with it, and yet somehow tonight has become all about you. What about what I need?”

“What do you need?” he whispered.

She said tiredly, “I could use a hug. And you’re the only person around who can give me one. So put out, will you?”

It shocked him immensely, that she would be so open and frank enough to say it. It shocked him even further to discover he could really use a hug too.

He rolled back and reached for her, and she came into his arms, hugging him back. “I’m sorry about the bad timing,” he whispered. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Shut up,” she said. “I’m so mad at you I can hardly think straight.”

“Of course you are.” He sighed. Even their conversations were twisted. “You’re not crippled. You’re just not healed yet.”

Her chest convulsed silently. He never would have known if he hadn’t been holding her. “The joint is crushed. I felt it.”

“You’re going to fly again.” He pushed all the conviction he had into the words. “You will, Aryal. Healers can do miraculous things with joint repair these days. If all else fails, there’s joint replacement. You’re going to fly again. I swear it.”

He knew he might not be right, but she didn’t need that kind of honesty right now. She needed optimism and belief, and he put everything he had into giving it to her.

Her chest convulsed again. He kissed her temple. She didn’t cry easily and wouldn’t let go. It felt like it was wrenched out of her, and she fought it every step of the way. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.”

Funny how while he was comforting her, for some reason, the burning pain in his chest had eased.

“I can’t believe what a drama queen you are,” she told him.

“Me?” He was genuinely astonished.

“You made a mistake. Sure, it was a bad mistake, but nobody died except the bad guys. What are you going to do, cry ‘mea culpa’ and beat your chest for the next ten years? Everybody’s over what happened but you. I am not saying this because you wanted somebody to. I’m saying it because it’s true. Move the fuck on already.”

Her words were rough, but they were sincere. He went from burning to lightness. It might have gone to his head a bit, because he rolled her over onto her back, and he came up over her to kiss her.

She made a muffled noise against his lips. She sounded incredibly grumpy. Then she kissed him back.

They were both filthy, blood streaked, and the cold floor was making him nuts. None of it mattered. This wasn’t about sexual passion. Or maybe it was, but it was about something else too, something that was more important.

That made him suspicious. He didn’t know what to call that important, unknown thing, but whatever it was, it felt necessary and right. He teased her lips and she licked at him. Then he deepened the kiss until their tongues met and caressed. She tasted of apple brandy, heady and light.

The sensation went to his head. He eased over her more fully, pressing one leg between hers. The friction of denim cloth from their jeans was a quiet sound interspersed with the sound of their deepening breath. She ran her hands up his back, her touch on the expanse of naked skin sending a shudder through him.

He couldn’t believe he hadn’t been inside of her yet. He needed to know her response to that most basic and primitive joining. Her long lean body was a match for his. It felt amazing to stretch out along her and revel in her feminine strength, like it unlocked a previously unacknowledged part of him.

Somewhere inside of him, that wild, dangerous part that he kept so tightly leashed broke loose and started running unfettered again. He had just enough presence of mind to wonder where the hell it was going, and why it needed to get there so urgently.

Neither one of them was capable of consummating a goddamn thing, yet still they kissed and kissed. He ran his fingers up her torso, underneath her ruined T-shirt to stroke at the graceful swell of one breast. He played with her soft, distended nipple as she cupped the back of his head, holding him down to her mouth.

Finally he pulled away enough to kiss the corner of her lips, and he leaned his forehead against hers. She stroked his hair, and it felt like a miracle.

He sighed. “Okay, when you’re not making me batshit crazy, I guess maybe I like you after all. But if you tell anybody that, I’m going to have to throttle you again.”

A soft explosion came out of her nose. She said, “An hour.”

“What’s an hour?” He fingered a strand of her soft hair.

“I want to renegotiate our bargain, to be consummated at some future date when neither one has had the shit kicked out of us.” A thread of humor laced her words. “Unless that happens for purely recreational purposes, of course.”

He paused to listen inwardly to his own reaction. The loudest part was relief and respect. After admitting to how devastated she was, she had not only mustered humor and genuine emotion, but now she had taken the first step to making plans beyond taking revenge on the witch.

Underneath all of those reactions though, ran a bloodred pulse of hunger, coursing in a subterranean river through his arteries and filling him with greed.

An hour was an eyeblink, a mere moment in time. He had squandered more time than that when deciding where he wanted to go for dinner on a boring day. An hour was woefully inadequate considering all the things he wanted to do to her, and with her.

Considering all the things that she would do to him. Somehow he had gone from enduring that thought to wondering.

And wanting.

He said, “No hour. A night, from dusk to dawn. You get one, and I get one. No stopwatches, no alarms going off, no hourglasses.” The wild part of him ran harder, and his voice deepened. “No rules.”

A shudder ran through her, and the feel of it thrilled him. “You would do that, give up total control for that long.”

“I totally would do that, if you would.” He put his mouth over hers to feel her warm, moist breath. “Do you dare?”

She started to laugh almost silently. The uneven puffs of air against his lips were like bubbles of champagne. He breathed them down and felt them enter his bloodstream, coursing with his greed. She told him, “You know asking a harpy if she dares to do something is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

“I had hoped,” he admitted.

Even as he said the last word, she spoke over him. “Yes.”

Triumph roared through him, and with it came an epiphany.

This thing with Aryal wasn’t aberrant. Those things in his nature that she showed him weren’t aberrant. They were a part of him that he didn’t know existed until Aryal brought a light to shine on them. This wasn’t sexual tourism. It was sexual discovery.

He barely heard over his internal realization what she said next. “You know other people—any other people—would think we were crazy.”

He understood exactly what she meant. Hell, they didn’t even do BDSM in any straightforward fashion, and they certainly didn’t follow the norm or any of the suggested guidelines. He didn’t think there were any subculture groups who would approve of the rampant disregard either he or Aryal gave for safety checks.

He didn’t want a safe word, and she didn’t ask for one. They were both dominant, and he knew for a fact he wouldn’t be a switch—someone who switched the dominant role with the submissive role—for anybody else but her. And he was almost certain she wouldn’t either.

She quieted that internal whip that drove him because she became the whip, her soul as sharp as a knife.

He could cut himself on her, wrap her in his arms and be her buffer. Heal her from herself, bruise himself on her.

Let her heal him. Let her be his buffer.

They were so unapologetic, so kinked.

He said, “We’re perfect.”