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Rogue waited, one eyebrow cocked. Nothing happened for a few minutes, then Darling sent me a purring compliment and showed me the nobles going home. Another victory. Yay me.
“Well done.” Rogue smiled at me, gaze warm, and slid a hand around the back of my neck in a sensual caress. “Let’s continue our discus—”
He broke off when the air seemed to shimmer and gel. A sound like a gong rang through the sand, and the waves quieted, peeling back from each other. Like a perverse Aphrodite rising on sea foam, Titania appeared in the breach.
Lovely, yes, like all of Faerie. Her naked body featureless as a Barbie doll’s, colorless gleaming hair flowing around her, untouched by the surf or rain. Her pale eyes, long-lashed but unnervingly like a white rabbit’s, fixed on us.
“Oh no.” I choked on the words. It hadn’t worked. I’d broken my vow and now here she was, my personal nightmare, come to take her pound of flesh from me. Which could be literal. Or worse.
Rogue edged in front of me, a protective gesture that moved me beyond measure. “This isn’t about you.” He pitched his voice so only I could hear him. “It’s about me. She may not notice you.”
Not likely, but for once I kept my mouth shut and stayed behind Rogue’s tall form. I didn’t know if he was a match for Titania, but I sure as hell wasn’t.
“Lord Rogue, my handsome love,” she cooed in a tinkling child’s voice. “I’ve been looking for you. You left me so precipitously.”
“How can I serve you, Titania?”
I’d never heard Rogue sound obsequious. It chilled me to the bone.
“Who’s your little friend?” She peeked suddenly around Rogue’s arm, quick as a striking snake. My heart skipped several beats and she blew me a little pink kiss. “Just being silly. I remember you, Sorceress—Rogue’s new plaything. Are you enjoying it? He’s a magnificent lover, isn’t he?”
My thoughts fluttered, moths hitting a hot bulb and frying instantly. “Your Highness…” I curtseyed a little, hoping that might appease her. Rogue could say her name out loud, but I couldn’t. With the fae hive mind, they could all refer obliquely to their insanely cruel goddess-queen, which I heard in my head as “Titania”—my internal association for queen of the faeries, thanks to AP English—but when I said it, they heard it as her actual name. Which could invoke her attention. Nasty attention. Like now.
Titania reached out to touch me, her extra-jointed fingers a nest of spider’s legs. My grip tightened on the dagger still in my hand and I longed to slash at her. Rogue shifted slightly, enough to nudge her hand away, and her gaze flashed up to him, the air heating dangerously.
“That’s not in the rules,” he murmured to her, like the lover she claimed he was.
She pouted, smiling up at him coyly. “But I’m so bored,” she complained, sounding like a petulant adolescent. “This is taking too long. Let’s sweeten the pot.”
“I decline,” Rogue replied.
“What do you think, Sorceress?” Titania craned her neck around Rogue’s arm again. “Can I entice you into a little wager?”
“Don’t say a word, Gwynn. Don’t think any, either.”
Usually I balked at Rogue’s high-handed orders, but I took his advice. I had absolutely no idea what Titania was needling Rogue about, but I knew better than to draw more attention to myself. I’d winkle it out of him later. If we survived this encounter. I clamped a stronger shield over my mind, quieting my thoughts as much as I knew how.
Titania’s hopeful expression turned nasty. “Fine,” she snarled, all sweetness gone from her voice. “But I grow weary of this game. I shall find a way to make things more interesting for us all, Lord Rogue, if you don’t pick up the pace. Tick-tock, tick-tock. If you don’t see to this business yourself, I’ll take matters into my own hands.”
She walked back down the sand, her feet leaving no mark. Her presence had emptied the beach of the mob of soldiers. No dragons in sight. No one went near the Queen Bitch if they could help it.
“Oh!” Titania glanced back at me, flipping her ankle-length hair over one shoulder like a diabolical Marcia Brady. “I nearly forgot. I have something that belongs to you, Sorceress. What’s left of it, that is.” With a tinkling giggle, she waved a segmented hand and a crumpled heap appeared on the beach. She nudged it with a toe.
“Tick-tock!”
And she vanished.
I approached the pile on the sand, the awkward twist of pale limbs and shredded flesh. Even destroyed like this, without her wings, she was recognizable. Dragonfly, my erstwhile foolish maidservant. The waves teased at her, dragging the pieces of her broken girlish body into the surf. I swallowed, trying to master the surge of nausea, tossing aside my dagger and reaching out a hand to maybe grab her by the foot to keep her from washing out to sea.
Long fingers wrapped around my wrist. “Let her go,” Rogue said, uncharacteristically gentle. “She’s well past saving.”
“I should bury her, at least. I owe her that much.”
He waved a negligent hand and a wave crawled up, wrapped around the girl’s corpse like a watery fist, and swept her away. “There. She’s buried. Now, we have things to discuss.”
“Okay.” I throttled down my residual terror and rising annoyance at his callousness. “Let’s start with where you’ve been and what the Queen Bitch was talking about. Were you with her?”
Rogue turned the hand holding my wrist to weave his fingers with mine. “Jealous? Did you miss me?”
