became louder, but I didn’t care, because you try to stop it when he’s—and then he—and oh, yeah, oh yeah, right there, right there.
“No, go back! Go back!” I shrieked, when he deliberately strayed off target. And it was deliberate. The wicked little glint in his eye gave it away, as well as the fact that he went back to the exact spot as soon as I said something, finding it with no problem whatsoever, the bastard.
And, all right, there might have been a little screaming going on at the end, but I can’t be sure because I think I black out for a second. When I came around, he had a self-satisfied look on his face and my body was quivering and shaking and moaning in a way that would have been embarrassing, but I was way past that. Way past.
“In case you were wondering,” he breathed in my ear. “Darkly dangerous, seductive red lips, sleek dark hair, black stilettos and a thin, barely-there dress that flashed open now and then to reveal a stake. At a vampire ball.”
I cleared my throat and tried to remember how to talk. “Well, I wasn’t going to go in unarmed—”
He laughed suddenly, full throated and genuine, and his cheek came to rest on my stomach. His eyes met mine. “I do love you.”
I’d been about to point out that he hadn’t been unarmed, either, but at that, I stopped. I found that I couldn’t speak, suddenly. My fingers found his hair, and I let them comb through it until his eyes closed and his breathing evened out, and the powerful limbs went slack. And then I kept on doing it anyway, just because I could.
“I love you, too,” I whispered, and finally went to sleep.
Chapter Six
Dorina, Faerie
“Augggghhhhh!”
Somebody was screaming.
I did not think that it was me. It was hard to tell over the sound of the portal roaring like a hurricane in my ears, and the violent green of all that swirling power searing my vision. I had many ways to see, but the raging energy of the line negated most of them.
That was all right.
I did not need to see my attackers to kill them.
Their scent was strange in my nose, and their bodies showed up as cool spaces in my mind’s eye against all that pulsing power. They did not seem to have the same ease at detecting me, however. Several were turned in completely the wrong direction, while others were moving about with their arms out, trying to locate me after I tore away from them in the initial confusion.
I helped them out with that, slitting the first creature’s throat before he knew I was there and then had two more jump me, zeroing in on his aborted cry. I whirled, dancing away from one and slashing another with my blade, where it stuck in the bone of his arm. I tried to cut through and then I tried to pull out, either of which would have worked easily with a human. But he wasn’t one, and my blade stayed trapped.
We circled each other, him trying to get a knife in me while I tried to free myself. I finally cracked through the bone with sheer brute force. But instead of falling away into the electric tunnel we were traveling through, the severed arm began orbiting us, like a piece of clothing thumping about the laundry machine back home.
There were other body parts tumbling around, too, one of which was still screaming. It was part of the small vampire that Dory liked. He must have been close enough when the portal opened to have been swept inside along with us.
My eyes were adjusting now, to the point that I could see the fey as dark shadows silhouetted against all that leaping color. I still couldn’t make out any details, but the vampire . . . yes, I could see him. Because he is family, I thought, and smiled.
I cut off a fey’s head and offered him the bleeding stump, but he only stared at me. Another fey jumped onto my back while a second grabbed my wrist—the one with the scimitar in it. I dropped the body of their compatriot, and snatched a tumbling arm as it fell past.
“Is this yours?” I asked the vampire.
“What?” He stared at me some more.
“Does this belong to you?”
“No?”
“Good.” I used the jagged femur to stab the fey on my back through the eye. And when he let go, I slashed it across