Lord of the Dark Read online

  Tears and the falling water misted Gideon’s vision as he led Rhiannon out from beneath the pulsating flow. Cupping her face in his hand, he gazed into her eyes. They were dilated with desire—desire he had awakened in her. What had he done to her, this beautiful creature whom the storm had cast up on his beach? What had he done to them both?

  Swooping down, he gathered her hard against him again, as if his life depended upon it, and took her lips in a smothering kiss. It was volatile, but brief, before leaving her there veiled in spindrift, like a bride, without speaking the words his heart was screaming, but he dared not speak, not now—not ever.

  8

  Rhiannon remained in the pool a while. He had left her so abruptly, but he had loved her so well. Did this mean she could stay? He hadn’t said a word. But then, neither had she. He had rendered her speechless. His dynamic body, so powerful and anxious, had opened her like the petals of a rose, layer upon silken layer to pleasures she never dreamed imaginable. And yet, he had taken her tenderly, for penetration had been difficult. Her virgin skin was thick, the slit beneath narrow, and his sex was enormous, not only in length, but in thickness. The gods had endowed him well. How they could have done that and then punished him for using it was unfathomable to her.

  Stroking through the steamy mineral water, Rhiannon spiraled on her back; working her legs like scissors, she opened them to the spindrift, rather than the pulsating flow, to let the fine, luminous mist soothe her sore vagina. But something unexpected happened. Thinking of Gideon, and how he had pleasured her, she became aroused all over again.

  She closed her eyes as she floated there. The pulse beat deep inside at the core of her sex and began to thrum a steady rhythm, calling her hand to her mons area, where the root of his rock-hard sex had bruised her. Needing to explore, for he had changed her, and she wanted to see how, her fingers crawled through the V of honey-colored pubic curls and delved deeper, finding the hard nub of her clitoris. Probing deeper still, she parted her swollen nether lips, so sensitive to the touch after Gideon had loved her, and touched the place where her virgin skin had been. Her breath caught in her throat as her fingers slipped inside. How hot the flesh was, still slick with traces of his seed and the dew of her release.

  She could see him gazing down at her, his dilated eyes hooded with desire. Her fingers remembered the tactile feel of his soft, silver-white feathers, and what happened inside her when she touched them—how he exploded, pumping her full of his seed—his primitive, bestial groan resonating through her body as he kissed her so deeply, their tongues conjoined.

  She was touching places he had touched, places no one else had touched—not even herself until he made it possible. She was his. She was all his, but did he want her? She beat those thoughts back trying to duplicate the ecstasy of Gideon’s embrace, trying to feel what he’d felt as her sex seized the fingers she’d slipped inside her.

  Groaning, Rhiannon moved closer to the little fall, opening her legs to the flow as she’d done once before. The clouds of diaphanous mist covered her body. Creaming white water suds played upon her breasts, her belly and thighs, stinging, seeking the pleasure points, hardening the tawny buds of her nipples to tall, dimpled peaks as she opened herself to the flow. On the verge of climax, she let the water lave her, let the cascade take her as Gideon had done. The water was her lover then, and she embraced it, just as she’d embraced Gideon. But it wasn’t lover enough. It wasn’t him. Nothing would ever be enough again—nothing but him.

  Did he want her? Would he keep her? Or would he send her away? Rhiannon had to know, and she had to know right now. Climbing out of the pool, she dried herself on the soft towel, wriggled into the nightshift, and went straight to Gideon’s chamber. But his sleeping alcove was empty. Gideon was gone.

  Gideon didn’t go to his chamber. He needed to be alone then. The gods only knew he was certainly conditioned to that. It was the presence of a certain passionate little female, part tigress, part virgin still, that he’d just deflowered and left naked in his pool that drove him out of his cave. He couldn’t trust himself not to turn around and ravish her again, and again, until he’d sated himself. But that was the trouble. He could ravish her for eons and not have his fill. Already he was hard again. And he had just emptied himself in her—filled her with the life of his body to overflowing.

  He hadn’t stopped to collect his eel skin when he left her, or to fetch his spare. Half expecting to be struck down the minute he stepped outside, he’d burst out into the darkness and soared off. The night air was like balm upon his damp skin. A pity it turned his traitorous wings into instruments of sexual torture.

  He should have said something to her when he left her. But what could he have said, that he had conducted a little test, and that he had passed it, but it made no difference? Could he have told her he’d ruined her for naught, spoiled her for a mate who could keep her—love and cherish her? Could he have told her that it would be only a matter of time before a watcher would find out and banish him yet again? Could he have warned her that such a watcher would surely mete out some dreadful retribution he couldn’t imagine that might well overflow onto her as well? What would happen to her then, alone, her virtue gone, cast out among strangers? They would make a whore of her. What else could she be, the castoff consort of Gideon, Lord of the Dark, fallen archangel of the gods, condemned to wander the Arcan wilderness alone forevermore—even to Outer Darkness? For that was what he was courting, what surely would be the next plateau of his punishment, to be cast into the Netherworld abyss, where night prevailed and there was no light of day. No fallen ever returned from the halls of Outer Darkness, or human either, come to that. On his present course, it was only a matter of time.

  The wind whipped tears in Gideon’s eyes as he streaked through the starry night sky. How good it was in Rhiannon’s arms. How warm and sweet and willing she was under his caress. If she had only fought him from the start, it might have been easier. But no, she wanted him just as he wanted her. They were perfectly matched, and already he did not know how he could ever bring himself to part with such an exquisite woman who surrendered so totally to his passions and shared his same appetites.

  He had awakened her to pleasures of the flesh unknown to her. Could he have become so calloused as to have done such a thing with no promise of a future in the offing? No, never that, but it is just exactly what he’d done nonetheless. He hadn’t thought it through. All he wanted was to see if it could be done, if he could dupe the watchers and have the love of a woman—this woman. Now that he knew he could, he dared not, else what was blossoming between them become full blown, making separation unbearable. And yet…there was that little voice at the back of his brain reminding him Rhiannon was a gift of the gods and telling him to have what he’d taken while he could.

  Flying through the clouds, his cock grew harder as the wind grew stronger, sighing through his wings like a woman in coitus. Other voices were speaking then. He’d heard them before, but never in a conscious state. They had always come to him before in dreams, or on the shadowy edge of consciousness…

  What say you now? the first voice said. Shall we take him before more harm is done?

  Not…yet, the other replied. That option will always exist if needs must. The runes have been cast…the fates decreed. It must play out as it is designed.

  Gideon strained his ears to hear more, but all he heard was the wail of the banshee wind. “Who are you?” he called out. “What do you want? Take me where?”

  Now look what you’ve done, the first voice said. He heard you! No more while he wakes…

  “Who is there?” Gideon demanded. “Speak!”

  But there was no answer. The voices had stilled, but for a rumble of incoherent mumbling, though he called to them again and again.

  Gideon lost altitude straining to hear, and began to spiral downward out of control. The wind ripping through his wings as he plummeted toward the bay beneath him tugged at the chord rooted deep in his sex. The c
limax was riveting, throwing him off balance even more, as his seed left his body in involuntary spurts. But there was no pleasure in it happening so swiftly, only pain.

  He had nearly reached the surface of the water when he finally pulled out of the tailspin. That hadn’t happened to him in eons, but then he hadn’t been this distracted in eons. He needed to touch down somewhere and rest a while. Already the tingling had begun as new currents buoyed his wings. He raised his fist to the heavens in a silent blasphemy. He needed his wings. If only the gods had left him that, but they had not. They had turned his very anatomy into his enemy when they cursed him with libidinous lust.

  His head ached from the sudden spiral downward. His heart was pounding in his chest. It felt as if it would burst through his ribs and fall into the bay. His throat was parched and dry from gulping rapid air that dried his throat and nostrils, not to mention the unbridled sensations ripping through his cock all over again.

  What had the voices said? He wracked his brain trying to remember what he had heard before self-preservation took over his senses and he lost the thread of their strange disembodied speech. The runes have been cast…That was all he could remember. The rune caster! Maybe she was the answer. Gideon hadn’t visited the rune caster since before he fell, when the woman he loved was so gravely ill. The rune caster was always a last resort, for she did not have the favor of the gods, since they took a dim view of divination. Visiting her again would bring back those dark times, but there was no other alternative. He’d heard those words: The runes have been cast. And whether a real voice had delivered them or his subconscious, he had to heed them, and he changed direction.

  The rune caster’s dwelling stood on a rocky little islet swathed in mist on the edge of what the Arcans believed to be Outer Darkness, for no man had ever gone beyond it and returned. Tales abounded about the Netherworld, about the Poison Sea that bordered it, and about the gateway beyond the last of the archipelago’s string of enchanted islands. But Gideon knew well what lay beyond the great stone arch that marked the channel. It was the gateway to hell.

  Halfway there, he wondered at the wisdom of making the visit. The rune caster was a woman to be reckoned with, and he had no tribute to bring her, naked as he was. That had been enough the last time, but who knew what would be expected now.

  The worst of it was no one ever knew what incarnation they would find her in when they visited her rocky islet. She was a shape-shifter, able to transform into many guises. No one really knew which incarnation was her true one, and some were terrifying. The last time, he found her in the form of a beautiful, voluptuous woman, and seduction was her price for augur that was true enough but brought him sorrow. What would her price be this time? And how would she extract it?

  Thinking these thoughts, he almost turned back. What good would it do to visit her? What could she tell him that he didn’t already know deep down in the depths of his soul? He was doomed to suffer the wrath of the gods through all eternity, unless there was some way for him to have what he had just tasted with Rhiannon.

  A she-wolf met him on the rocks when he touched down, a sleek, black wolf, with eyes like fire. Was it a minion or the woman herself? There was no way of knowing. It disappeared in a fog pocket as Gideon scaled the rocky islet and made his way to the rune caster’s thatched roof cottage in a little hollow, steeped in mist. The door was open. Stooping down, for he was much too tall to pass through it upright, Gideon entered, his sharp eyes darting about the perimeter.

  At first, he thought the one-room cottage was empty, until a great raven strafed him soaring past to disappear in the mist outside. Sorceress glamour, he had no doubt. The formidable creature left a mark upon his cheek when whizzing past, drawing his hand to the wound. His fingers came away smeared with blood.

  “Mica’s arse!” he trumpeted, wiping his cheek again.

  A burst of giddy laughter from behind spun him around to face the woman he’d come to see, Lavilia, the rune caster, in a different incarnation than she’d appeared to him so many ages ago. This time she was old and withered, her sour-smelling hair, a matted snarl of wiry gray matter that resembled frayed hemp, fanned out about her head like a misshapen halo. She wasn’t naked now. Instead, she wore a metal collar, from which long ropes of seaweed hung, sparing him the sight of her grotesque body beneath.

  “You ought to cage that vulture!” he snapped at her, still soothing his face.

  “He doesn’t like intruders,” the woman cackled.

  “I am hardly that,” Gideon said.

  “You may as well be, Lord of the Dark.” She nodded toward his wound. “That there is your punishment.”

  “Will there never be an end to punishments?” Gideon railed.

  “Is that a question,” she returned. “You may have only three, and it wouldn’t be wise to waste them. That I even ask is a courtesy I need not extend. You are too long a stranger, Gideon.”

  “It is a complaint,” he sallied, “nothing more.”

  She nodded. “Very well, then…To what…or whom do I owe the honor of this visit?”

  “Three questions, you say?” he queried. “Cast your runes then.”

  She drew a leather pouch from the folds of her seaweed costume, flashing glimpses of her faded nipples, which he was certain was not accidental.

  “Your price?” he asked, nodding toward the gray sagging breasts.

  “Not this time, dark lord,” she said. “What I want from you is far more precious than that cock I see there standing at attention, but we will get to that.”

  “Just cast your runes, old one,” said Gideon. “I want none of your riddles.”

  The woman sank to the floor cross-legged and emptied the bag of small carved pebbles on the floor in front of her. “I knew you would come,” she said. “I saw it here. I have been waiting for you. You have met another…”

  Gideon nodded. “I have met one I would keep…if I can. Is it possible?”

  The crone studied the runes. “It is possible,” she said at last, “but not the way you wish.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “Another question, dark one?” She asked. “You only have two left….”

  “No, damn you!”

  “You haven’t the power to damn me, dark one. Take care. You can ill afford to evoke my wrath. You do not know what you deal with in me.”

  “I have precious little left to lose,” Gideon said. “Do your worst!”

  “You have your soul!” she shot back, rising to her feet. “Come!”

  Gideon followed the woman out into the prevailing mist, for he had never seen the islet other than as it was now, cloaked in white. They climbed upward to a pinnacle that gave a panoramic view of the vista beyond through rocky shoals. There, a gateway was marked by phallic stones rising from the rockbound ledges. The standing stones were joined by a capstone that bridged the span. Some said the gods had fashioned the arch, and that it led to Outer Darkness. Others said the shamans of old raised it to hold sway over the Arcan Isles. There was no way to know, since the shamans were no more. Custody of the key to whatever lay beyond the gateway had fallen to the rune caster.

  “The gateway?” Gideon queried. “Passage to the Netherworld, or shamans’ folly, eh? I fear it not. After the way the gods have cursed me, I have no fear of Outer Darkness, old woman. I carry inner darkness with me waking and sleeping. I am Lord of the Dark, remember?”

  “You are a fool, Gideon. You have much to fear. Please the gods you see it soon enough. I keep the gate, dark one. Those whom I send through it never return. The gods cursed you, yes, but spared you this. Take care how you anger them now.”

  “I have two more questions,” Gideon reminded her, changing the subject. “I’ve left her alone too long. I must get back before she grows impatient.”

  “Oh, it is far too late for that,” the woman tittered.

  Gideon’s scalp drew taut, and cold chills riddled him until he nearly lost his footing. Something in her coal-black eyes and
odious cackle smacked of catastrophe, and his heart began to pound.

  “Why did you come?” she queried. “What made you risk leaving her to come here now?”

  “I heard a voice,” Gideon said. “I’ve heard voices before, when I’m drifting off usually, but what they say makes no sense…”

  “What did it say, your voice?”

  “It said ‘the runes have been cast…the fates decreed…’”

  The woman’s posture clenched. “You must get back,” she said. “That much I tell you for free.”

  “Your price?” he urged.

  “Three feathers from those magnificent wings of yours, dark one,” she said. “They hold great magic for one such as I, and you shan’t miss a one.”

  “Have them, then!”

  The rune caster approached and plucked three feathers from the soft underside of Gideon’s wings. A thrill coursed through his body as she pulled them out, and the places she’d plucked them from remembered their presence for some time after, punishing him with stinging, pulsating waves of orgasmic fire. He shrugged the feeling off as best he could, though it called his hand to his burgeoning cock. No one had ever pulled his feathers out before. It was not a comfortable thing.

  “You will have them back one day…when needs must,” the woman said, tucking the feathers beneath her seaweed garment.

  “What of my other two questions?” he asked her.

  “Another time,” she said. “I’ll not cheat you, dark one. Now, get thee gone, lest you have your answers before you can ask your precious questions!”

  9

  Gideon reached the Dark Isle in the wee hours and burst into the cave, the rune caster’s words ringing in his ears, and went straight to Rhiannon’s chamber. To his great relief, she lay curled on her side sound asleep. One rush candle flickering in its bracket cast a golden aura about her pale face and shone in the long, ginger-colored hair fanned out about her from a loose plait. How beautiful she was lying there so peacefully—so still. The rune caster must have been mistaken. Everything seemed as it should be.