Dani Harper - Storm Bound

Still kneeling, she smiled radiantly at him, and suddenly it seemed as if her beauty had intensified somehow. “I think I like you much better like this,” she said, and every word was an unwanted caress. The filmy material that had only enhanced her nakedness rather than covered it disappeared, and she leaned down to rub her breasts over his thick fur. “Think of what you might have had, dear Aidan, what bliss you might have known,” she purred, and then plunged her fingers into the silvery triangle between her legs. She pleasured herself there in front of him, her head thrown back, her pale nipples erect, and her pelvis rocking to meet her own touch. He closed his eyes against her mockery, sickened by her. Some strange new instinct told him plainly that she was playacting, pretending to be intensely excited when she felt only the barest shadow of it, and somehow that made her all the more repellent.

There was something else. With his new senses, he could smell her—and as he expected, Celynnen’s scent was not that of a human woman. Strangely it was not that of a fae either. Instead it was something entirely new—as if he had turned over a rock and could smell the dank, cold earth beneath it. He could suddenly recall all the scents he had breathed in while captive here. She smelled like none of them …

Eventually, Celynnen tired of her game and left. In the same moment that she vanished, he was freed from whatever magic had held him helpless, and he rose slowly to his feet.

He was no dog.

Massive and powerful, Aidan ap Llanfor was as far from a pet as a dragon was from a house cat. Celynnen had made him one of the most feared creatures in Welsh legend. He was a grim , the gwyllgi of stories told round the fire, the barghest of lore: a monstrous black hound charged with one errand only—to be an omen of death to those unlucky enough to see him.

Within moments he felt the tug and pull of some invisible force. He could sense impending death on the human plane above, and it drew him upwards, impelling him to begin his woeful task.

Now—whenever now was—Aidan had become much like the Black Mountains themselves. They cared not for the kingdom that lay far beneath them and its flamboyant court. They were blind and deaf to its complex intrigues, spared no thought for its many conspiracies, and ignored its comings and goings in general. Most of all, the mountains felt nothing—but that was a state that Aidan had yet to achieve.

He certainly felt very little. No hunger or weariness or physical pain. Heat and cold were the same to him. Memories had been the hardest. At first, they had been traps, whirlpools of unbearable grief and loss, but they had faded all too quickly. Thanks to the magic that both created and ruled this realm, he no longer knew the way to his own past. Except for his name, which he repeated to himself endlessly, when he was in the faery realm he remembered little of what it was like to be human. No matter how hard he’d tried to retain them, the faces of his family, his friends, had gradually dissipated until he could not recall if he had even had any. Gone, all gone.

Sometimes, however, something brushed across his mind like a caress, something that said he’d once had a lover, but what she looked like, how she had felt or sounded, he couldn’t say. Even her name was lost to him. He knew only that he had grieved for her, mourned until the very last nuance of her memory vanished from his grasp.

All he had left was a dull throbbing ache in his chest, as if his heart and all its roots had been extracted like a tooth, leaving a gaping void.

It was part of the enchantment of this kingdom that most of the simple joys and struggles that made up mortal life dissolved into nothingness here. He would have forgotten completely that he had ever had a life before this one—except his morbid task took him into the human world regularly. There he could not help but recall broken fragments of his previous life, small temporary remembrances, even as he watched mortal joys pass him by.

Mortal sorrow was not so kind. Whichever realm he was in, pain was with him every moment. In the human world above, he remembered some of what caused his anguish. Once he returned to the fae kingdom below, however, all he knew was the pain. And that pain spurred the only other emotions he could still summon. Wrath. Fury. Rage.

All the shades of anger were banked like embers and glowed deep down within him, like a volcano biding its time. And with them simmered the desire to turn the cruel injustices he’d suffered back upon the one who had inflicted them. A servant to Celynnen, an orange-eyed crymbil, had once whispered to him that the Tylwyth Teg craved sensation and envied mortals their ability to feel passion and experience emotion. Celynnen desired to feel? He remembered her naked performance when he was newly turned, pretending to enjoy her own stroking fingers when, in truth, neither her body nor her heart had been stirred. Aidan wanted to see the cold-blooded female experience for herself the misery that she’d inflicted on him—and yet he knew that was a vain and foolish dream.

How could the heartless be made to feel heartbreak?

What might be possible, however, was to make her afraid. Somehow or other, Aidan would find a way to make her suffer fear. She cared for no one and nothing but herself, so surely she could feel fear for her life? Perhaps she would fear even more for her beauty. A single drop of his mortal blood had been enough to wound her hand. The mark had scarcely been the size of a barley grain, and a healer had erased it as if it had never been. But what would several drops do? A cup? A pint?

Unfortunately, he did not even have that weapon at his disposal. The powerful canine body he inhabited was a fae creation, and when it was in solid form, it bled blue, just like every other living thing in this realm.

Should he ever regain his mortal form, however, he would find a way to make Celynnen afraid, to make her fear him enough to set things aright, frightened enough to return him to the life she had so callously torn from him.

Right before he killed her.

Ar y gair , he thought. Speak of the devil.

Aidan’s awareness sharpened as the blackness that surrounded him lightened to charcoal and then to gray. It was a false dawn that approached, one that showed up all too often in his view, and as the light grew stronger, so did his ire.

A pulsing white orb appeared, driving away each and every shadow as it expanded to reveal Celynnen.

She stood before him, smiling like an angel, her hands outstretched as if welcoming supplications, as if eager to bestow blessings.

Aidan knew better.

Deliberately ignoring her presence, he rose and stretched, sneezed and yawned, then shook himself all over. He’d much rather lunge and tear out her throat than greet her. Better yet, if he’d been a mortal creature, he’d lift a leg and piss on the hem of her richly embroidered dress. Sadly, outright hostility was ineffective. Ever since a droplet of his blood had spattered the princess’s hand, a shield of powerful magic protected her from any action of his, from any physical expression of the roiling anger that churned in his gut at her presence. Words could still penetrate, of course, but he was denied even that. Only human forms could articulate verbal arrows.

He had learned, however, that feigned indifference annoyed the proud fae beings, particularly Celynnen, who was accustomed to being the center of attention. Out of the corner of his eye he witnessed the tiny spark of indignation in hers. Of course, her face remained a saintlike mask, still smiling.

“Dearest Aidan, must we go through the motions yet again? Why do you not rejoice that I have come for you? Surely you will not choose to remain a lapdog when your human form is so pleasing to the eye.”