to get any words out. “I’ll want the things I left with you, as soon as you can get them to me.”
“Of course,” she said. She bowed to me as well, and took several steps back into the mist, until it swallowed her whole.
And I was alone with Queen Mab.
“So,” I said into the silence. “I guess there’s . . . there’s a ceremony of some kind to go through.”
Mab stepped closer to me. She wasn’t an enormous, imposing figure. She was considerably shorter than me. Slender. But she walked with such perfect confidence that the role of predator and prey was clear to both of us. I edged back from her. It was pure instinct, and I could no more stop from doing it than I could have stopped shivering against the cold.
“Going to be hard for us to exchange oaths if you can’t talk, huh,” I said. My voice sounded thin and shaky, even to me. “Um. Maybe it’s paperwork or something.”
Pale hands slipped up from the dark cloak and drew her hood back. She shook her head left and right, and pale, silken tresses, whiter than moonlight or Lloyd Slate’s dead flesh, spilled forth.
My voice stopped working for a second. My bare thighs hit the Stone Table behind me, and I wound up sitting on it.
Mab kept pacing toward me, one slightly swaying step at a time. The cloak slid from her shoulders, down, down, down.
“Y-you, uh,” I said, looking away. “You m-must be cold.”
A throaty little laugh bubbled up out of her frozen-berry lips. Mab’s voice, touched with anger, could cause physical damage to living flesh. Her voice filled with simmering desire . . . did other things.
And the cold was suddenly the least of my concerns.
Her mouth closed on mine, and I gave up even trying to speak. This wasn’t a ceremony so much as a rite, and one as ancient as beasts and birds, earth and sky.
My memory gets shaky after the kiss.
I remember her body gleaming brightly above me, cold, soft, feminine perfection. I don’t have the words to describe it. Inhuman beauty. Elfin grace. Animal sensuality. And when her body was atop mine, our breaths mingled, cold sweetness with human imperfection. I could feel the rhythm of her form, her breath, her heart. I could feel the stone of the table, the ancient hill of the mound, the very earth of the valley around us pulsing in time to Mab’s rhythm. Clouds raced over the sky, and as she moved more quickly she grew brighter, and brighter, until I realized that the eerie luminescence around us all evening had been nothing but a dim, muffled reflection of Mab’s loveliness, veiled for the sake of the mortal mind it could have unmade.
She did not veil it as her breathing mounted. And it burned me, it was so pure.
What we did wasn’t sex, regardless of what it appeared to be. You can’t have sex with a thunderstorm, an earthquake, a furious winter gale. You can’t make love to a mountain, a lake of ice, a freezing wind.
For a few moments, I saw the breadth and depth of Mab’s power—and for a fleeting instant, the barest, tiniest glimpse of her purpose, as well, as our entwined bodies thrashed toward completion. I was screaming. I had been for a while.
Then Mab’s cry joined mine, our voices blending together. Her nails dug into my chest, chips of ice sliding beneath my skin. I saw her body drawn into an arch of pleasure, and then her green cat eyes opened and bored into—
Her mouth opened, and her voice hissed, “MINE.”
Absolute truth made my body vibrate like the plucked string of a guitar, and I jerked into a brief, violent contortion.
Mab’s hands slid down my ribs, and I could suddenly feel the fire of the cracked bones again, until those icy hands tightened as again she said, “MINE.”
Again, my body bowed into a violent bow, every muscle trying to tear its way off of my bones.
Mab hissed in eagerness as her hands slid around my waist, covering the numb spot where my spine had probably been broken. I felt myself screaming and struggling, with no control whatsoever over my body.
Mab’s feline eyes captured my own gaze, trapping my attention within their frozen beauty as again a jolt of terrible, sweet cold flowed out from her fingertips and she whispered, her voice a velvet caress, “. . . mine . . .”
“Again!” screamed a voice I vaguely recognized.
Something cold and