David grimaced. They took turns at the plumbing, then filled canteens and empty plastic Pepsi bottles with water and tossed more dry food into Brian's pack. Brian rigged a quiver full of broad-head hunting arrows through the loops of the pack and adjusted the whole mess on David's back until it hung right and he could draw and loose without fouling on something.
David blinked. "Hey, I didn't put on my jacket first."
"You won't need it. I plan to put us on the edge of the forest, between Dougal's keep and Fiona's garden maze. Neither of them likes rain or winter. Weather is a matter of consensus in the Summer Country."
Speed limits on chemical reactions. Weather by consensus. Mages with the power to control someone else's muscles. David's stomach knotted at the picture.
Magic.
Maureen and Jo, the match, the psychic Super-Glue: none of that really had the impact of feeling skin heal under his fingers. It had a kind of greasy heat to it, sort of like plastic straight from the molding machine. He wanted to wash his hands of the memory.
Brian grabbed his wrist, and they stepped from the kitchen into a darkness full of soft, slimy touches and the faint warmth of breath on his cheek or the back of his neck. David’s nerves twitched at chittering noises on the edge of hearing and moist air warm and slightly foul in his nose. Brian's hand was an iron clamp pulling him through the darkness and into green light.
Chapter Fourteen
Sean smiled at Maureen and nodded. His approval made a good decision better. Not just better, but imperative. She draped her jacket over a branch stub and left it as a puzzle for the squirrels. She felt warm in the forest, and she no longer needed that reminder of ice and slush--would not need it ever again. After all, this was the Summer Country.
She wasn't going back to winter. As for the gun, she had never needed that at all. Sean would protect her.
They walked on into paradise. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou beside me in the wilderness . . . . Who the hell needed the bread and wine?
She clung possessively to Sean's arm, as if the warm damp earth-smells could prove more seductive than her woman-scent. Not that they were any real threat: she felt powerful, secure in her sexuality. She was a woman and he was her man.
Something rustled and the brush parted to reveal great, yellow, slit-pupil eyes in a flat triangle of a head plated with black scales. She glared at the giant lizard, daring it to threaten her lover, and it retreated.
Then she noticed the man next to it, a brown-skinned, brown-clad little man who almost disappeared if she didn't stare right at him. He had the same general look as Brian and that Liam creature, but smaller, leaner, and almost primitive. Somehow, the name "kobold" seemed to fit him, even if he wasn't in a mine.
The apparition spoke grating syllables to the dragon, and it darted its forked tongue at her, testing, tasting, as if it needed to know her smell again. It slithered off into the tangled brush.
"Tha i an so," Sean said to the funny-looking little man, and Maureen heard him say it and also heard "She is here," at the same time.
So Fiona had been right. This warm, green land gave people understanding of another's speech. It even told Maureen that Sean spoke Scots Gaelic with a Galway Irish accent, a feat that would have had her giggling if she could laugh at anything Sean did.
But she could not mock Sean. Not after he had kissed her body awake to a fire of longing and brought her to this beautiful place. She floated in the golden glow of the romance novels she'd snitched from her mother back when she was a kid. She waited impatiently for Sean to draw her away into some grassy bower, longing for him to strip her clothing away in slow delicious torture until he played upon her body like a harp and entered into her to give her release from this tormented ecstasy.
She loved Sean.
She loved him with the unquestioning devotion of a spaniel. He was her god made manifest. Whatever she had felt for Brian faded into ghostly invisibility. She loved Sean and belonged to him, without reservation.
The strange little man studied her. She decided to call him Rumpelstiltskin, a gnome out of fairy tales. He had too large a head on too thin a neck, gnarled muscles showing beyond short-sleeved shirt and shorts, a chest and belly dropping straight from shoulders to hips, dark hair standing out in tufts like some mis-cut field of hay. Scars ran all over him as if he had been built hastily from spare parts. It was such a funny way to make a man. Nothing like Sean's slim beauty.
"Trobhadaibh, the man said. "Come here," she heard.
She stood still. Sean smiled his slow, mocking, lovely smile and shook his head.
"You don't want me to release her yet," Sean said, while her mind stepped between sound and meaning. "This exquisite little kitten has claws and teeth."
He turned to Maureen, and she melted under his gaze. "My dear, allow me to introduce Dougal MacKenzie, self-styled Laird of the Clan MacKenzie. He aspires to be your husband, your lord and master. I wish you joy of each other."
He smiled again, as if mocking Dougal, and her, and even himself.
"But...."
"Bi samhach."
Maureen's heart sank. She wanted Sean, not this strange caricature of a man. But Sean told her to be quiet, so she bit off the words and closed her mouth.
He turned back to Dougal. "She's under a glamour now. Unless you want to take up the reins of it, I would suggest something more substantial to hold her. She can be dangerous."
"I know how to handle dangerous animals," the little man rasped. "Padric, the irons."
Blinking,
