Fury's Kiss

Page 5

The earthquake stopped.
A few seconds later, a gnarled, scarred hand, big as a bucket, squeezed around the doorframe. It was careful, because little things like solid oak doors are notoriously flimsy. But then it stopped without actually coming in.
The pain in my head was fairly astonishing, but it didn’t stop me from recognizing the hand. It belonged to one of my roommates, because my living situation isn’t any more normal than the rest of my life. Ymsi, the donator of daisies, had the slight disadvantage of being a troll. Not that it was a disadvantage to him, by all appearances, but it did cause the rest of us problems from time to time.
Like when he decided to wake us up by gently knocking on a door.
“Come in,” I croaked, only to have nothing happen.
I hung my head. Of course not.
Ymsi had the usual troll love of beauty, and for some reason, he had decided that I fit the bill. And although he and his twin brother, Sven, had been on earth for a while now, they were still getting their feet wet when it came to the odder facets of human culture. Like the whole privacy thing.
This had resulted in my looking up in the middle of a bath one day to find Ymsi standing hunched in the doorway, staring at me with the same rapt look on his face that he used when encountering a new kind of flower. Or playing with the baby squirrel he had rescued from the backyard after a storm and kept as a pet. Or being introduced to the wonders of chocolate for the first time.
Apparently, in troll terms, that sort of thing was considered endearing.
Unfortunately for Ymsi, I am not a troll.
And I guess my reaction had been memorable. Or maybe Olga, a friend who was also of the troll persuasion, had had a talk with him. Because he had suddenly acquired a Victorian-era level of prudery where women were concerned. These days, he wouldn’t dare to enter a lady’s bedroom, my heavens no. Meaning that if I wanted to know what the deal was, I was going to have to get to the door.
Somehow.
I ended up crawling through daisy runoff, because it just seemed easier. I thought about trying to pull myself up by the knob, to answer the door like a normal person, but who the hell was I kidding? I settled for kicking it open with a foot instead, only to be confronted by a solid mountain of…well, mountain.
The acre or so of troll flesh not concealed by a tattered pair of shorts and a homespun shirt was greeny brown, with the consistency of caked earth if it had somehow petrified over time. I poked it—in the knee, which was as high as I could reach. The skin didn’t do anything as normal as dimple, but the mountain did shuffle back a few feet, allowing a huge head to peer in the doorway.
It had floppy blond hair that fell over a prominent forehead, a nose the size and shape of a head of cauliflower, and small blue-pebble eyes. They squinted at me myopically.
“Yes?”
Ymsi didn’t say anything.
I sighed and leaned my head against the wall.
Conversations with the twins could stretch over hours if not days, to the point that I often forgot what we’d been talking about. I sometimes wondered if the old legends were true, the ones that said that ancient folk in Scandinavia had sometimes been taken by surprise when the small hill they were camped beside suddenly got up and lumbered off. It had been a troll, waiting for a friend to show up, and slowly being covered by moss and grass in the meantime.
But Ymsi hadn’t just clammed up. He’d also averted his eyes, which I found fairly odd. Until I looked down.
And saw what I was wearing.
With my brain trying to hammer its way through my skull and all, I hadn’t noticed before, despite the fact that it was a lot nicer than my usual nightwear. Hell, it was nicer than my usual daywear, except I couldn’t recall ever owning anything in that particular shade of…that kind of washed-out…that sort of not quite…Oh, hell. Who was I kidding?
It was pink.
For some god-awful reason, I was wearing a shell pink nightie.
I blinked blearily at it, but it didn’t go away. It was still pink, still silky, and still frothy with what looked like handmade lace around the deep vee of the neckline. It had transparent sleeves, chiffon or something, big and voluminous and liberally tipped with lace. It also had a big floppy satin pussy bow under the vee, because 99.999 on the girlie meter had obviously not been good enough.
Did I mention it was pink?
I would have suspected that it belonged to my old roommate, Claire, who had been visiting for the past few weeks. Except that she was a redhead and hated pink in all its varied hues almost as much as I did. But it sure as hell wasn’t mine.
It was, however, rather thin and rather short, which explained Ymsi’s reaction. I snatched my old gray bathrobe off the back of the door, covered my wantonness, and tried again. “You wanted something?”
“Olga wants,” Ymsi corrected, daring a glance at me.
I waited, but nothing else was forthcoming.
“Olga wants what?” I finally asked, but got nowhere. Ymsi’s tiny eyes had fixated on the small amount of ankle I’d left exposed, with the scandalized expression of a nineteenth-century nanny. I quickly flipped over a bit of velour. “Ymsi, what about Olga?”
The eyes returned to mine, but no more information was forthcoming. Which was fair, since he’d already used up a week’s worth of words for a troll. “You come,” he added, in a grand display of loquaciousness, before rumbling back down the corridor, shaking a few pictures off the walls in the process.
I closed the door and slumped against it.
Olga clearly wanted something, but I had no idea what. And right then, I didn’t care. The room was swimming in and out, I felt like I’d fallen down a set of stairs backward and my stomach was threatening an uprising. Worst of all, I couldn’t seem to remember how I got this way.
Fey wine, at a guess. The lethal concoction from Faerie was the only thing I’d ever found that could knock even a dhampir squarely on her ass. I’d discovered this after my first-ever hangover a little over a week ago, which you’d think would have prevented the second.
But apparently not.
And this one was worse, because my memory hadn’t been affected last time. Which was ironic, since dhampirs black out on a regular basis. Every time the train goes to crazy town, we lose all recall of what happened, waking up hours or days later, often in a bad way and usually surrounded by people in a worse one. Only I didn’t think that was what had happened here. Because I didn’t recall anything leading up to the blackout, either. In fact, I was drawing a blank on most of yesterday, which was pretty damned sad.
Five hundred years old is a hell of a time to discover that you can’t hold your liquor.
I just lay there for a minute, staring at the one black sock I was wearing for some reason, and contemplated getting up. The floor was hard, but I didn’t really feel like moving. Or breathing or living, not that I could do much about the last two. So I settled for fishing out the tag on my finery.
It wasn’t doing anything so crass as to scratch my neck, of course, because it was silky, too. Which was what you’d expect from something bearing the name of a Parisian designer. A very famous Parisian designer who I hadn’t even known made nighties, but I guess so.
I thought about that for a moment, and then panicked at the thought that I might easily have hurled all over something that probably cost more than my car.
I snatched it off and threw it on the bed, where it pulsed in and out with the rest of the room, looking a little surreal next to my well-washed duvet. But at least it covered up the oil stain from the last time I cleaned my guns. I supposed that was something.
There was no need to wonder where it had come from. It might as well have had Louis-Cesare’s name embroidered on it, only they probably wouldn’t have because that would be tacky. In the way that giant satin pussy bows weren’t, apparently.
I stared at it blankly for another few moments, head pounding, gut churning. And decided that I was completely unable to handle the implications of the world’s most awesome nightie right now. I crawled off to the bathroom instead, where I hugged porcelain and waited on my stomach to join the fun.
It was being a lazy little bastard today, content to just twist around under my ribs. But the light was dimmer in here, thanks to my forgetting to flip the switch when I came in. And while the tile was cold, the bathroom rug was thick and comfy and the robe I’d dragged in with me made a nice warm heap at my feet. My forehead found a cool spot along the rim that it liked and, overall, I decided, things were looking slightly—
“Dory!”
“Augghh!” I reacted before I thought, proving that split-second timing wasn’t always a good thing. Like when it resulted in my leaping up and slamming another roommate against the bathroom wall.
Claire’s wide green eyes regarded me over the arm I had shoved against her windpipe, but she didn’t look afraid. Possibly because the slight redhead was perfectly capable of reversing our positions anytime she felt like it. “Are you all right?”
Considering that she was the one pinned to the wall, I thought that an odd question. But I wasn’t having a great day, so I decided maybe it was me. “You startled me,” I told her, letting go.
Claire did not seem to like this answer. “Ymsi said you’re hurt!”
“What? No, just—” I stopped myself, barely in time, because Claire was not a fan of fey wine. Claire was, in fact, leaning heavily toward prohibition these days, so explaining that I’d somehow fallen off the wagon wasn’t likely to result in my day getting any better.
“Just what?” she demanded.
“Just a little stiff,” I substituted.
“A little stiff? You’re black and blue!”
I looked down. And then I snatched up a towel, cursing my metabolism, which should have already smoothed out the evidence of whatever had happened last night. Fast healing was one of the few perks in a condition with a hell of a lot of negatives, only it was kind of hard to tell that at the moment.
“Well?” Claire demanded.
“Um,” I said because my brain was still half baked.