A Caress Of Twilight

Chapter 28

He fluttered down off my hand toward my breasts. I put my other arm between him and my body. He ended up on my other wrist, which I moved out from my body in order to see him more easily. I raised the sheet over my chest with my other hand.

He looked disgusted. "Will you deny me heart blood?"

"I saw what your kind did to my knight. I would be foolish to let you near such tender flesh before I see exactly how gently you feed."

He sat down on my wrist, ankles crossed, hands on either side to steady him. He seemed to weigh more sitting down; not much more, but it was noticeable.

"I would be ever so gentle, fair lady." His voice was the sound of chimes in a warm summer breeze. Had his lips been like a tiny crimson flower but a moment ago? He touched that flower-soft mouth to my hand, his body reclined along my arm as I would have reclined upon a couch. He ran his tiny mouth and hands over the minute hairs on my arm. Where a larger lover would have smoothed them with his mouth or fingertips, Sage played with them as if he was making music along my skin — soundless music that only he could hear, but I could feel it. It played along my skin, my arm, as if it were all larger, more than was actually happening.

I flung him sharply into the air, where he buzzed at me like an angry bee. "Why did you do that? We were having so much fun."

"No glamour, remember," I said, scowling up at him, clutching my sheet.

"Without glamour the feeding will not be nearly so pleasant for you." He shrugged his thin shoulders, the movement making him dip in midair. "For me it is much the same, for Niceven's purposes it is much the same, but for you, fair princess, it is not the same. Let me save you some pain and discomfort, and let this be a friendly sharing."

If he'd caught me on another day when Kitto's bite didn't still ache, I might have told him no, just to take his queen's blood and be done with it. Goblins could not do glamour of any kind, so Kitto had had no choice; without the natural glamour of sex to soften his feeding, there was nothing he could do magically. Sage was offering me a choice.

I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then nodded. "Just enough glamour to make it pleasant, but that's all, Sage. If you try for more than that, I'll call for the guards and you won't like what they'll do to you."

He made a sound that would have been rude, except that it came out like a tiny trumpet, as if a butterfly could make an ass's bray. "Darkness has been waiting centuries for me to put a foot out of line, Princess. I know well, perhaps better than you, what he owes me."

"I noticed it seemed personal between you, more than with the others."

"Personal? You could say that." He smiled, and it managed to be pleasant and evil at the same time, as if he was imagining terrible things that would be a great deal of fun to do.

I could have asked Sage what was so personal, but I didn't. Either Doyle would explain or I would never know. I didn't think Doyle would take kindly to me prying his secrets from a fey he hated. It was one thing to gain information from one friend about another friend, but you didn't talk to people's enemies about your friends, and you didn't let those enemies talk to you behind your friends' backs. It just wasn't kosher.

"You may feed, Sage, and you may use a little glamour to keep it from being so unpleasant. But mind your manners."

"Do you need to look so far for protection? You have your goblin there beside you. Will he not reach up and snatch me from the air and grind my bones if I play you false?"

"Goblins have little chance against strong glamour, and well you know it."

He put his hands on his chest, widened his eyes. "But I am but a demi-fey. I cannot have the glamour of a sidhe lord. Why should any goblin fear the likes of me?"

"The demi-fey of every description have powerful glamour and well you know that. They have led travelers and the unwary astray for centuries."

"A little swamp water never hurt anyone," Sage said, hovering closer toward me.

"Unless there happens to be quicksand or sucking mud under that water. You are Unseelie fey, which means if the traveler falls through the murk to his death, so much more the fun."

He crossed his arms, which were thinner than a pencil was round, over his chest. "And what happens when a Seelie will-o'-the-wisp guides travelers into marshy land, and they fall to quicksand? Do not tell me that they then run for help and grab a rope. They may weep pretty tears for a poor mortal, but as soon as his last breath bubbles up from the swamp, they're away, giggling to themselves, looking for another traveler to lead astray. They may avoid that particular patch of swamp, but they won't stop their game simply because it led to some unfortunate's death."

He landed on my sheet-covered knee. "And is it so unfair to lead some net-waving butterfly collector to his death, when if he caught me, he would throw me in a killing jar and mount me with a pin through my heart?"

"You have glamour enough to keep away from that fate," I said.

"Yes, but my gentler brethren, the butterflies and insects that we demi-fey mimic, what of them? One fool with a net can devastate a summer meadow."

Put that way, he had a point, or seemed to. "Are you using glamour now?"

"A sidhe princess should know when she's being tricksied about with," he said, arms still crossed.

I sighed. "Fine, it's not glamour, but I can't agree that you're within your rights to lead an entomologist to his death just because he's collecting butterflies."

"Ah," Sage said, gazing up at me, "but you do agree a little at least, or you wouldn't have asked about the glamour."

I sighed again. I had made the terrible mistake of taking entomology in college. I hadn't understood that you had to kill insects to pass the course. I remembered a carousel of butterflies trapped in a killing jar. It was one of the most lovely things I'd ever seen. Alive they were magical; dead they were like tissue paper and sticks. I'd finally asked how many insects I had to collect for a D, and I'd collected that many and no more. There had been no point to collecting the insects when the college had a complete collection of almost everything the class was killing. It was the last biology class I took where you had to collect anything.

I stared at the little butterfly-winged man on my knee and couldn't find an argument that didn't make me feel like a hypocrite. I wouldn't kill someone for collecting butterflies, but if I had butterfly wings on my back and spent most of my life out among them fluttering from flower to flower, maybe I'd see the death of one butterfly on a different scale. Maybe, if you were the size of a Barbie doll, killing the small creatures was every bit as horrible as killing people. Maybe. Maybe not. But I didn't feel sure enough of my ground to argue.