Lord of the Dark Read online

  What was it in the siren’s song that made men run mad? Rhiannon didn’t know. She had always thought legends of the beautiful sea creatures luring sailors to a watery grave were nursery tales…until now. Outside, the haunting music rose above the howl of the wind, and the crew had been under its spell since the storm began. The singer almost sounded angry. Why couldn’t these bewitched men hear the rage in the siren’s voice? Or was that something only another woman could detect?

  The pounding came again at the cabin door. Rhiannon backed away, watching the seasoned wood shudder under the first mate’s fist, as his hoarse voice demanded she let him in. There was no question of his intent. Fearful, though resigned that her father was more than likely dead, she accepted that she was alone. If only the siren would stop singing. It was as if everyone aboard had gone mad since her eerie music began.

  The ship was being driven nearly horizontal in the water toward the shoals that marked the mysterious enchanted isles. Through the porthole, Rhiannon could see a slice of sea and sky that seemed impaled upon serrated rocks, like wolf’s teeth chomping at the white-capped swells and the ship’s hull as it sidled through them. Clinging to the bunk post with one arm, she groped the air in mad circles, reaching for her mantle on a wall hook alongside, for she was wearing only her sleeping shift and she was nearly naked in it. The cloak was just out of reach. Making matters worse, she hadn’t finished plaiting her long, ginger-colored hair before the siren’s song began. As it was, it fell down her back to just inches above the hem of her shift. It was her greatest asset, and now her greatest hindrance, for it threw her off balance.

  The pounding came again. The shuddering door caved in, and Rolf careened into the cabin dripping water from his slicker. Staggering over the cabin floor negotiating the pitch and roll of the hull, he seized Rhiannon’s arm.

  “Little fool!” he snarled. “Do you want to die shut up in here?”

  Rhiannon strained against his grip. “Let go of me!” she shrilled. “Where is my father?”

  “Drowned, with half the crew when we crossed the bar,” the first mate said. “And the captain’s under the siren’s spell. We’ll never make it through the shoals. You’re coming with me!”

  His eyes, heavy-lidded with lascivious lust, were riveted to her breasts, to the tawny nipples straining against the thin gauze shift. Rhiannon pretended not to notice. She could feel the ship’s hull shudder beneath her bare feet as it grazed the rocks. He was right about one thing. She had to get out of that cabin…but not with him.

  “Wait, my cloak!” she cried, reaching toward it. “I will not go above decks like this!”

  Rolf relaxed his grip enough for her to reach the mantle, but instead of wrapping it around her shoulders, she flung it over his head, kicked him in the groin, and fled the cabin just as the ship struck the rocks again, pitching it bow downward into the belly of a swirling vortex. This time it was a fatal blow. Water rushed at her from all directions. The ship groaned like a woman as it died, then nothing, nothing but the howl of the wind and the plaintive siren’s song.

  It wasn’t the dawn that woke Gideon in the sleeping alcove, it was the lightning spearing down, reminding him of another lightning strike. Muttering a string of oaths, he left the alcove, stalked out of the cave, and went to the beach to assess the situation.

  It was still several hours until dawn. The black volcanic sand was like marble beneath his bare feet, where the rain had beaten it down. Siren song rode the wind from as far off as the Pavilion. Was it Muriel’s voice he was hearing? It could well be; there was anger in the sound. More than one ship would flounder on the Arcan shoals this night. Simeon would need help. On such a night as this, the Lord of the Deep would be blessing many dead. It was Gideon’s custom on such occasions to see to the living, however many he could save from drowning in the sea and bays, and from the jaws of the treacherous shoals. This was one advantage of his mighty wings, and one of the ways he justified his meager existence as guardian of the Dark Isle.

  He wouldn’t go back to the cave for his eel skin. It was still sopping wet, and he only had one dry one. The prospect of struggling into a wet eel skin was not a palatable one; neither was soaking his only dry one in such a maelstrom. He was not Simeon, Lord of the Deep, whose natural state was being wet. Gideon relished his creature comforts, for he was permitted so few. His skin could be dried a great deal quicker than eel skin. Besides, there was something very sensual about flying naked through the wind and rain. It stirred his feathers, making him hard, and the punishing hail scourging his erect cock was excruciating ecstasy, prolonging the only climax he was allowed—that which did not involve the sweet, willing flesh of a woman, or any other entity, for that matter. He was cursed with a solitary existence. He was, being immortal, impervious to lightning, the watchers’ weapon. It could inflict great pain, but it would not kill him.

  Without a second thought, he spread his wings and soared upward into the stinging rain splinters, instantly aroused. A hot, hard cock was a difficult thing to ignore, but the sight that met his eyes once he’d gotten aloft was enough to rival the curse that kept him in a nearly constant state of arousal. More than one ship had been impaled upon the shoals thus far. The wreckage was spread clear to the Forest Isle already, and the eye of the cyclone hadn’t yet passed over. It would reach Lord Vane’s Fire Isle by dawn at this rate. If only the siren song would cease, but it seemed louder still, and Gideon felt somewhat responsible for that. If only he hadn’t provoked Muriel’s ire, precious lives might have been saved. That it was the watcher’s lightning that set the siren off mattered not. Gideon had a conscience, and as he saw it, if it wasn’t for the curse he’d brought down upon his own head, there would have been no watcher.

  He was over the Forest Isle, and he circled low. It was moon dark, but he could clearly see Marius, Lord of the Forest, in the clearing at the edge of the strand, lit in the lightning’s glare. Marius had become the centaur again, just as he always did during the dark of the moon. That was the curse of the Prince of the Green, a strikingly handsome man until the moon went dark. Then, the creature would emerge, with all of Marius’s dark good looks and broad, muscled trunk and arms, but the body and legs of a feather-footed black stallion. And thus he would stay for the three-and-a-half days of moon darkness until the new cycle moon appeared in the indigo vault and set him free.

  With the help of what looked to Gideon like a vine lasso, the Lord of the Forest was trying to drag some who had washed up on shore to higher ground and the protection of the great enchanted forest, no mean task for a man who was half horse.

  Gideon touched down alongside. “Let me,” he said, taking over the chore.

  “Thank you, my friend,” Marius said, pawing the ground with his feathered forefeet. “I am not at my most powerful for such a chore in my present state.”

  Gideon grunted in reply. He never wasted words. One by one, he turned the bodies that had washed up on shore over, seeking a pulse. He shook his head. “Do not waste your pains,” he said of the ones nearest. “These here are dead.”

  “And those others?” Marius asked him, pointing several yards off.

  Gideon stalked over the strand to several more bodies sprawled on the beach. “This one in the slicker here lives,” he observed, “these others, no.”

  “We cannot leave them here to rot on the strand,” Marius said.

  “By your leave, I will load them on your back and help you consign them to the deep, that Simeon might bless them for their journey to the afterlife.”

  “As needs must,” the centaur said.

  Between them in the teeming rain, they put the dead back into the bay, and Gideon lifted the lone survivor. “Looks like a crew member,” he observed. “Where do you want him, at the cottage?”

  “No,” Marius said. “We shall put him in the sod house. My faun will tend him. I do not take strangers into my home. These are dangerous times, old friend.”

  Hefting the inert seaman, Gideon strode into
the forest with the centaur following. There, the rain did not penetrate so severely, though the trees’ fragrant pine boughs and leafy arms reached out to stroke and caress him as he passed. For these were ancient tree spirits to whom he had always been friend.

  Gideon hadn’t visited the Forest Isle in some time. As he passed among the trees now, their embraces grew stronger. They leaned toward him narrowing the forest path, encroaching upon it as the trees genuflected before him. They all but rose up out of the ground tethering him with their roots and vines and tendrils. The forest was lush with burgeoning species clinging to the trees’ trunks and branches. When several leafy arms began fondling his wings, Gideon stiffened.

  “Do not touch my wings!” he admonished the trees. He was aroused to begin with, and the fondling was driving him mad.

  The centaur laughed. “They worship you,” he said “They waste their worship,” Gideon grumbled.

  Marius gestured toward the obvious. “That there is long sore for wanting,” he said. “It’s virtually purple with unshed come. They know your curse. What harm to let them pleasure you?”

  “What? And have the watchers shear off their limbs with great lightning bolts?” What the centaur was suggesting was something Gideon had never done, though he’d seen the Ancient Ones pleasure others over the years.

  “They are spirit,” Marius reminded him, “not women, and they seem willing to take the chance. What harm to let them relieve you?”

  “While you stand there pawing the ground with those great hooves grinning like a satyr, eh?” He slung the dead weight he’d been carrying in the person of the unconscious sailor over the centaur’s back none too gently. “Enough!”

  “You need to take what harmless pleasures come your way when they are offered, old friend,” the centaur said, prancing in place with the added weight on his sleek black body.

  “Oh? And I suppose you let these overgrown weeds pleasure you?” Gideon scorned.

  Marius shrugged. “Sometimes,” he said. “I am not so different than you in that the gods have cursed me also. Where am I to get a willing mate like this?”

  “Ahh, but you are not like ‘this’ every hour of every cursed day, only three days out of a month. My curse is perpetual, and I am growing tired of dodging the watchers’ fireballs.”

  “Umm,” the centaur hummed. “I take it back. We are not so alike after all. I have not forgotten how to smile. I often wondered what it is about that handsome face of yours that spoils it. You have no laugh lines by your mouth! A smile would likely shatter it like glass.”

  “And what, pray, have I to smile at, Prince of the Green? The wind blows on my wings and my cock grows hot and hard. The slightest touch upon those damned feathers and I am on the verge of climax, but no climax comes! Stubble that look! They are damned, these traitorous feathers. That is no blasphemy, ’tis fact! Look at me! And you want me to go about with a stupefied smile on my face?” He slapped the centaur’s rump, setting him in motion. “Get on with you, before that crewman you’re carrying expires as well. Go find your faun. Where the devil is he anyway? He should be helping you here, not me.”

  “You know fauns are a lazy lot,” the centaur called over his shoulder. “They always wander off when there’s work to be done. Remember what I said…You have championed these spirits since time out of mind. There is no sin in letting them repay the favors in kind….”

  If Marius said more, Gideon didn’t hear. The forest lord’s constant companion, a great, noisy magpie, with a long tail and black and white plumage, swooped down and followed the centaur into the forest, where they both disappeared among the trees.

  “Aggh, sin!” Gideon ground out in disgust. “Smile, indeed!” But when he turned back toward the strand, he was surrounded by leafy branches and graceful pine boughs.

  “Ancient Ones…” he addressed the tree spirits, “you must let me pass. I am needed elsewhere.” But the trees hovered still, edging closer. “No,” Gideon protested. “You do not understand. What you propose could bring lightning bolts from the gods down upon you. I am cursed. You cannot…help me…”

  Pine and ash, rowan and oak formed a canopy above Gideon’s head in reply to that. He was cocooned beneath a virtual bower of different species of tree, both sapling and ancient.

  “Damn Marius and his lecherous trees!” he muttered under his breath, regretting it at once, for they were not lecherous at all. They were reverencing him, wanting naught in return but the privilege of his release. Of all the curiosities in the enchanted isles, the Ancient Ones and Marius, their enigmatic keeper, were the most mystifying.

  Fully expecting lightning strikes, Gideon groaned. Soft, fragrant pine needles brushed his hard, muscled chest, lingering upon the turgid nipples. He had always liked his nipples stroked, but this experience was new. Pinesap from the needles mingled with the misty rain leaking through the entwined branches overhead and sent riveting tongues of searing fire coursing through his loins. The intoxicating scent had his pulse racing, the blood pounding through his temples to the rhythm of the throbbing in his rigid cock.

  The ground shifted beneath his bare feet. Something gripped his ankle, then the other, and his eyes flashed toward them. In the eerie green darkness capturing reflected light from some unknown source, he watched the hairy tendrils of young roots that had broken through the mulch on the forest floor creep up his legs. Like gentle fingers, they groped higher, and he gritted his teeth, fully expecting the watchers’ missiles to cancel the delicious sensations riveting his loins as the tendrils gripped his shaft.

  At first the tenuous threads seemed only to explore, like curious fingers, touching the distended veins, thick root, and pronounced ridge that wreathed the mushroom head of his penis. The sensations those fingers caused were like none he had ever experienced before. It was as if silken threads were seeking the sexual stream that knitted him together and had joined with it. The effect was almost more than Gideon could bear.

  Another tendril flicked over the purple head of his engorged cock. How cool it felt against his hot, moist flesh. Instinct made him reach to replace the roots with his hand, but sturdy branches held his arms, and he was at the mercy of the tree spirits, as another root tendril seized his testicles and squeezed them gently.

  Gideon’s breath was growing short, and his heart felt as if it were about to leap out of his breast. The first root tendril began to tighten around his shaft and pump him in a spiraling motion that nearly stopped his heart; meanwhile, the delicate pressure of foliage-laden branches began stroking his magnificent wings. Folded close against his naked body until then, the silvery white appendages now began to steadily unfurl. It was happening. Gideon’s pulse pounded in his ears. He gave a bestial growl that he scarcely recognized as his own voice. His hips jerked forward and the riveting climax ripped through his loins. He was helpless to prevent the steady stream of his pearly seed spurting out of him as the root tendrils glided up and down his shaft, milking him dry.

  Shuddering aftershocks of involuntary contractions buckled Gideon’s knees. After a moment, the ground shifted beneath his feet once more, and the tenuous roots receded back beneath the mulch as if they had never emerged from it. For a moment, the leafy branches covered him. It was a tender embrace, before the trees returned to their natural places, and the vaulted ceiling their uppermost branches had created parted, letting in the rain and the wind and the siren’s song again.

  Gideon raked the dark hair back from his moist brow and drew a ragged breath, spreading his great wings wide. A quick glance about at the trees standing silent now in the rain showed him that the spirits had receded deeply inside their ancient shells as if they’d never left them.

  Sketching a silent bow, Gideon sprang into the air and soared skyward. He’d scarcely cleared the treetops when the lightning bolt hit him, pitching him out of the forest and onto the wet packed berm at the top of the strand. He’d struck it hard. Loosing a string of expletives, he dragged himself upright and spread his smoking
wings only to be hit by another fireball, like a writhing snake stabbing down from the watcher’s outstretched hands. It lifted him off his feet and flung him down in the crashing surf at the water’s edge.

  Gideon shook himself like a wet dog in a vain attempt to clear his vision. He would pay for his moment of ecstasy, but the Ancient Ones had been spared, for they were powerful beings and had the sanction of the gods. They were as gods themselves in their domain, and all who visited the Forest Isle were duty bound to pay them homage or suffer the consequences. It had been thus since time began. But it wasn’t until that moment dodging towering waves and lightning bolts that Gideon really understood their power or realized how great a privilege it was to have received their favor.

  Raising his fists toward the hovering watcher earned him another lightning strike, which spiraled him into the rearing head of a high-curling comber racing toward shore.

  Roaring like a lion, Gideon soared straight toward the watcher, but the entity had vanished when he reached it, and he roared again, spinning off to disappear in the fast falling curtain of rain.

  3

  Rhiannon wasn’t a strong swimmer, and she was terrified of deep water, but she was determined not to die in the roiling tempest of sea and razor-tooth rocks that had torn the Pegasus apart. The current was driving the wreckage toward the isles, and once she’d passed the jagged shoals, she grabbed fast to a plank and let it buoy her toward shore.