for the pinning move and then he felt her
fingers tug the lace knots of his jerkin. She got fed up after a second and he felt them part under a blade. Then her hands
were inside his shirt, emitting faint pulses of deep low-frequency sound as she ran them across his chest and shoulders. The
crates leaned and he had to keep his hand on the wall or crash to the floor as his body arched in pleasure involuntarily.
‘That demon was a good teacher,’ he muttered through closed jaws as she bent close to him and he felt her lips on his neck.
He meant Teazle, their pureblood demon husband, who had been with her in her fall through Faery and after. ‘Fifty year—’
‘It was
weeks
,’ she hissed and he heard the ache and anger in her voice. Between hot kisses that ran up to his ears she breathed, ‘It was
only weeks and we waited for you and we didn’t know if you were alive or dead and we had no idea what to do,
no idea at all
.’ Her hands flared with hot and cold pulses, with bursts of specific vibrations tuned to the channels of aether that ran
in him and he lost control of his aether body. Black spilled out in clouds around both of them, swallowing the pathetic remains
of the light. With his free hand he found her waist, tiny and taut with power not far above his own. As he touched the dress
he felt it slither away from his grasp with an eel-like shiver, cotton turning to satin the better to slip away from him,
even though threads of it curled lasciviously around his fingers as it did so. It parted, unstitching itself, sliding away
from her so that shemade a sound of surprise as the faery thing escaped and his hand found her naked skin. He let it rest for a moment, feeling
the texture of her, cool on the surface, hot underneath, soft and silky, dry enough for him to slide his palms on her with
the same skimming ease she used on him.
He remembered his other hands, without regrets, their thick, three-fingered gloves that were overstuffed with the remnants
from the weaving of the three fey sisters. For fifty years they’d left him able to feel almost nothing, were so clumsy he
couldn’t have picked up a spoon to feed himself; not that there had been a need for food, or anything else in that time-lost
place. His hungers now were savage in retaliation.
With anger he pushed the unwanted image away, feeling his rage direct itself at the skirts of the dress, now trailing themselves
like waterweeds around his wrist and elbow, teasing him in their own inscrutable way. He had brought this dress to Lila, armour
as it was then. He didn’t know what he’d done in that gesture. He hadn’t known what it was. He couldn’t tell if its complicity
in getting Lila to jump the fifty-year penalty of his ‘death’ was a blessing or a curse, he didn’t know if it meant her harm
or good or if, like any faery, it would change its intentions with limitless caprice. He didn’t want its strange flirtation
now. He focused his shadow body on it and
pulled
.
With the speed of lightning a charge of aether shocked through him with such enormous force that he thought he’d killed himself.
For the split second of its possession of him it interpenetrated every part of his being in a way he hadn’t felt since the
day that the three weird sisters had pulled him from the cloth. It was not simple, inert charge. With it he felt the faery
herself – a feral intelligence, as peculiar as anything he had ever encountered – searching him. Then she was gone and only
the energy he had sucked out of her remained with him. He felt her understand that he only wanted her out of the way to be
alone with Lila and in that moment the tendrils of soft fabric around his arm became suddenly a thick rope wound there, binding
him, then in a second instant he felt the slide of silk sateen as a python’s coils slipped around him, letting him go. There
was a hiss of heavy rich fabric falling to the floor off to