When Ellie Jones wrapped her arms around my ice-cold neck, when she cried against my shoulder in the frozen blizzard winds, when she whispered “You’re here,” that hope blossomed into need. We had common ground in sacrifice, Ellie and I. We had common ground in loneliness. We had each other.
And I would fight every mundane and magical on Earth to keep her safe.
Chapter 2
“I remember everything,” I said. Every blink and blush when she noticed me noticing her. The pain radiating from the tight, stiff bruise on her leg. Her enjoyment of the spaghetti dinner I made. Her semi-confusion when she told me her cottage had once manifested amongst the kangaroos of Alice Springs. Her willingness to help not only me, but the elves, even though not one knew she existed. The loneliness in her eyes when she said I would forget her each evening.
Every night, the boulder of her world came crashing down into her life. Every morning, she fought to roll it back up the same forgotten hill.
This time, she wasn’t alone. I carried her through the snow toward the candles and the warmth of her cottage, and my hound who waited inside.
She shook in my arms.
“You’re shivering.” I crossed the blizzard-swept yard toward her home. I needed to set her down. I was…
… then my foot crossed the threshold of her cottage’s door.
I hadn’t seen the magic. How had I missed the magic? But I knew—the blizzard. My focus on Ellie. The distraction of my dog. It was here in silky aurora sheets, the green-red magic of the fae. Of things living and alive and bursting with creation. All that breathed on this world—air, water, fire, or ice—all that walked or swam, flew or fluttered, unfurled and reached for the sky, was here on the surface of the bubble surrounding Ellie’s cottage.
And for a flash of a split-second, my most feral moments: I hunted hare under the blinding Arctic sun. The raw heat of my sunburn combined with the biting frost of the northern wind and I was the air. The ice. The crackling gravel under my boots. I drank it in. I gnawed on the land’s dry peat. I growled as my semi-corpse body tested the hollow limits of hunger. I reveled in the bone-deep need to howl with the wolves.
Feral magic made of tooth and bone, stem and leaf. Magic that was love and power and sex. It all roiled through me, body and soul.
I shook more violently than Ellie’s shivers. My head swam. I swayed through the full balance of nature, its weight and its transitions between seasons of birth and death.
Marcus Aurelius barked. Ellie yelped and clung to my neck as if she gripped a floating log on a stormy sea.
I somehow managed not to trip.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I…” Never in my life had I come up against such overwhelming magic. I set her down. “The door…”
I was completely through the bubble. My head now reeled in a post-shock kind of way, not actively adding to the spinning but more slowing down after the initial spin.
“Coming inside never affected Chihiro.” We’d come into a small foyer area with a stone floor and a lovely ornate wax-rubbed sideboard. An umbrella stand of woven reeds and vines rested in the corner, and wall-mounted hooks held a couple of coats.
Ellie touched my chest. “We’ll figure it out.”
I looked down just as she reached to close the door behind us. She stretched around me, still shivering but unwilling to move far enough away to allow the cottage to warm her body, and the neckline of her nightgown swung away from her chest.
The entire gown billowed out in front of her and all that soft pale cotton lifted off her breasts.
I stand just under seven feet tall. I always look down at everyone around me, even the elves. And it wasn’t as if I’d never seen breasts before.
My brain locked up. Just for a second. I realized a truth I think I’d understood every evening right before I forgot about her. The same truth I felt in my bones every single time I realized I was battling concealment enchantments: The enchantments reset nothing. All they did was disguise the labels I used to think about my memories. Without those labels, without those words, I couldn’t find in my own head my focus.
So it brewed unfettered and unchained, unconsidered and primal; much the same way I’d been when I awoke on that table in my father’s faraway lab.
But this time, my body wasn’t full of pain and rage. This time, I’d walked through a fae portal that was all things alive.
I lifted her so high her head almost touched the ceiling and buried my face between her wonderfully soft breasts.
Part of me, the part I trained up after the elves found me—that rational muscle I’d worked and processed and given every psychological tool I found in magical ways and mundane books—yelled No! You are huge. You are terrifying. You’re ugly and a monster and outside normal and you damned well better make sure that at every step along this journey the woman you’re with has an escape route.
I never asked for touch. I always made it clear that I was available if a woman wished to touch me.
But I needed Ellie. I—
“Frank.” Her voice was husky and vibrant and she kissed my forehead and my cheek as she wrapped herself around ice-cold me as if she was the morning sun come to warm life back into my bones. She pointed into the cottage. “Bed,” she said, and…
My hound chose that moment to shake off the snow. Ice flew everywhere, hitting me in the face, bouncing down the neck of Ellie’s gown, clinking against the glass of the cottage’s big window,
