"Yes."
Relief stripped him naked. She'd never seen his face so raw with feeling. "May I... is it all right to hold you?"
She didn't bother with words. Arms were better, and hers slid around him as naturally as if they were already lovers. His arms answered, wrapping her breath-stealingly tight for a second, then loosening. He ran his hands up and down her back, buried his nose in her hair. "I have wanted this," he said fiercely. "For so long, I have wanted..." His breath shuddered out.
Silence wrapped itself around them then - a silence of heartbeats and breaths settling into a shared rhythm. Kai closed her eyes so she could absorb the feel of him through muscle, scent, and skin.
Which wasn't touching his, dammit. Though the way their bodies were touching, she knew he wasn't sexually indifferent to her. Not anymore. "I've wanted, too," she said softly. "I still do."
He raised his head. She saw his throat work as he swallowed. "Kai." He said her name the way he smiled - as if he'd just found it, just this moment wrapped his lips around the sound. He ran both hands along her hair. "I can't... if I'm to keep you safe, I can't be distracted."
"You're turning me down."
He grimaced. "I'm turning us both down, but it's hard." His eyebrows lifted in brief surprise. "That was a pun, wasn't it?"
Actually, it wasn't hard. Not anymore. "Ah... did you do something just now? Because you aren't... things changed."
"I control my body. I've been controlling it around you from the first day we met. The wanting is still there, but it isn't reinforced physically."
Well. He'd been controlling his desire from the time they met? That struck her as a good news, bad news deal. He'd wanted her all along, but he didn't want to want her... because sex was too lonely without a bond, he'd said.
But friendship was a bond, a strong one. That tipped things to the good news side, she decided. "Who's this queen that sent you here?"
"I'll tell you." With a sigh he released her. "Sit with me and I'll tell you whatever you want to know."
Chapter 11
When Nathan was sent to Earth to find a renegade mage, a redheaded queen was sitting on England's throne. The Spaniards had just founded the first European settlement in North America at St. Augustine, and William Shakespeare hadn't yet set foot on a London stage. In Italy, a young man named Galileo Galilei was disappointing his father by studying pendulums and other nonsense instead of medicine. And the Purge was just beginning.
For thirty-two years, Nathan had tracked the mage. When he finished his hunt, both Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth were dead; Jamestown had been established; and the Purge was over, with thousands of Gifted dead at the hands of the Inquisition, their governments, or their own neighbors. And Nathan had been stranded, cut off from all he knew, even from his proper shape.
"Ilke had violated many laws, committed many sins," Nathan said, "but the queens don't intervene in lesser matters. But he crossed one line too many when he practiced death magic."
Kai lay against Nathan's chest, listening to his heartbeat as well as his voice. His arms were around her; his colors swam with hers. In front of them the mage light burned steadily like a heatless campfire. "Death magic, huh? He' must have been a major bad guy."
She heard a smile in his voice. "Hellhounds aren't set on the trail of jaywalkers. You are... okay with this? That my purpose was to hunt and kill those who broke the queens' laws?"
"I'm okay with policemen and soldiers. Your role was something like theirs."
He fell silent, toying absently with the ends of her hair in a way she found most distracting. Not that she wanted him to stop. Finally he said, "I haven't killed only at my queen's command. When I was stranded here... an able-bodied man can't simply decide to never again use his hands and arms. Common sense and instinct will defeat him. That's how it is for a hound and the hunt. I couldn't simply decide not to hunt, but it was hard, very hard, to learn how to choose my own hunts. The queen never loosed me lightly, so I tried to choose as she might have, but at first I didn't understand human society. Death isn't always a solution. Even when the prey is causing obvious harm, killing can spread ill instead of containing it."
"Have you... here in Midland, I mean. Have you hunted here?"
"Not a true hunt. Not to the death, except for the ghoul. I've learned to take satisfaction in lesser hunts, though. I couldn't be a law officer otherwise."
"Ghoul? You mean there was - No, never mind." She set that aside for another time. "I'm having trouble getting my mind around this. I know you, know your colors, the shapes of your thoughts. I've never known anyone with less anger. You aren't a violent man."
"Anger is too big a response for most things. It gets in the way. You haven't seen me on a true hunt. I am violent then, Kai."
He wasn't apologizing. He was stating a fact.
She didn't say anything for several minutes. She wasn't sure how she felt. Nathan killed according to rules she didn't know, but he'd spent years - lifetimes, maybe, by her way of measuring - evolving those rules. He didn't just come from a different culture, but from a different species.
Was she bothered by the violence in him, or did she just think she ought to be? His arms still felt right around her; his heartbeat still soothed her. She didn't understand, no, but maybe - right this moment - she didn't have to. "It took you years to understand how to choose your hunts," she said at last. "It may take me awhile to understand, but I hope it won't be years."
His voice was soft. "You don't regret our bond."
"No. I don't regret it." Though she wished she knew what it meant to him. Kai shifted so she could look at him. "How did this mage - Ilke, you called him. How did Ilke end up here?"
"He knew his crimes had been uncovered to the two queens and fled. Because he was part sidhe and strengthened by death magic, he was able to leave Faerie entirely, hoping my queen would not set me on his trail once he was beyond her territory. Only a hellhound could track him, you see."
"Sometimes you say queen singular, sometimes queens, plural. Which is it?"
"I told you that a few High Sidhe take an interest in governing. The Summer Queen and the Winter Queen are... eh, you don't have the right words. Call them the High Lords of the thirteen realms. They don't operate a government, a bureaucracy, such as you're used to, but each queen has her court, her dominion. Each steps in when she sees a need."
"Do they rule together?"
"Not precisely. Their dominions overlap at times. When this happens they discuss the matter and decide which of them will act. For them to act together... that hasn't happened in my lifetime."
And how long was that? She decided not to ask. Not yet. "But you speak of 'my queen.' Singular."
"Hellhounds are the Huntsman's to command, and so I was, at first. But the Huntsman is brother to Winter and lover to Summer... I saw both queens often, and one day I knew I must go with zan Al'aran. With the Winter Queen." A hint of longing underlay the words. "So I became hers, and she became mine. It's hard, being queen. Harder for Winter than Summer, because who doesn't love Summer? She'll have been lonely without me."
Kai felt like squirming. It was pointless to be jealous of an immortal - and no doubt supernally beautiful - elfin queen. But she was. Oh, she was. She tried to take the high road. "I imagine she was upset when the realms shifted and you couldn't return."
"The realms didn't shift then. That happened centuries ago, after the Great War. After that your realm was hard to reach, requiring great power. The magic here wasn't replenished, so by the time I arrived there was little left." He sighed. "The hunt took too long. Over the years my own power lessened because there was less for me to draw on, to absorb. By the time I killed Ilke, I couldn't go home."
"Couldn't your queen have brought you back? If she's so powerful - "
"It doesn't work that way. Hellhounds travel between realms without a gate. It's inborn, that skill, and common to many of the wild sidhe. But to bring someone to you from another realm, you must open a gate. After the Great War, the Old Ones forbade opening gates to Earth."
"Old Ones?"
He nodded. "Strange beings, on the whole. I think they're like unicorns."
"I'm getting seriously dizzy here."
"Unicorns have that effect on me, too."
Kai found herself smiling. Unicorns, Old Ones, elfin queens, renegade mages... it all sounded fantastic, even absurd. She accepted that these things were true because Nathan said so, and he didn't lie. But the reality she understood was the warmth of his hand, the chill of the winter air, and the slow, sad song of the wind outside.
Also a steadily glowing mage light. "Did you know you'd be stranded?" she asked quietly. "When your queen set you to track Ilke, did you know you wouldn't be able to return?"
"I knew it was possible, yet I didn't. Not really." His thoughts, usually slow, turned busy - silvery minnows struggling to find a fit as he hunted words. "Hellhounds are sentients, but our brains shape our thoughts, and hellhound brains are not human. What I knew as a hound was different from what I can know as a man. Lesser in some ways, greater in others. I knew I could be trapped here, but that was so apart from my reality that it had no meaning until it happened."
She nodded. "Like unicorns. You tell me they're real and I believe you, but I can't grasp it."
He found one of his smiles, this one holding equal parts sweet and sad. "Yes. The queen told me I could be lost here and I accepted that it was true, but didn't grasp that truth."