Chapter 7

Chapter7

“Janneth,” the queen calls.

I’m off the dais now, and so I have to look up at her on her throne. The antlers twisting from the back of the throne stretch behind her, and from this angle, they look like they’re part of her crown and maybe like they’re a part of her. It’s unnerving.

It’s beautiful too.

She doesn’t speak for a moment, and I barely know this woman or this place, and so I have no idea if she’ll speak to forbid me from doing something stupid or if she’ll goad me into doing something even stupider.

But when she speaks, it’s neither warning nor encouragement. “Your dress,” she says.

I look down and see the edge of my hem has dragged against the small lake of green blood on the floor. It’s grown even darker since it first spilled, nearly black at its perimeter, and now the blush-colored fabric of my dress is stained with it.

I have a moment of—well, blankness is the wrong word. But so is horror.

It is the space where horror should go, I think, where disgust and terror should twist together, but instead there is nothing, an emptiness. Just the feeling that I should be more upset than I am. That I should not already be turning around and continuing to the platform.

That I should not already be thinking of mouths and hands and spread thighs…

But here I am at the edge of the platform, my dress wet with blood, my heart thumping against my chest not with fear but with lust. Or perhaps the fear is still there, but it’s feeding the lust too, because there is something thrilling, however sick, in feeling afraid and aroused at the same time.

I’m about to crawl right into the fray—the few sex parties I’ve been to have taught me the valuable lesson that there’s a time and a place for shyness, and orgies are not it—when I feel a finger run over my shoulder. A moth flits above the moaning pile atop the platform.

I turn to see Idalia, dressed in silver, her moths no longer around her neck but high above her pewter head like a cloud. And then behind me, I feel another presence. Maynard.

“Pretty things should be played with,” Idalia murmurs, coming closer. She leans down to speak in my ear, her lips warm against my skin. “Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” I murmur back. I mean, I wasn’t about to climb into an orgy to ask about skin-care routines.

“Both of us will play with you, if you’ll have us,” Idalia purrs, a hand trailing down my back to find the laces of the dress’s corset. “Right here, in front of the queen.”

“Do I—is there—” I’ve never needed to have this conversation with people who weren’t human before. And I’m not worried about contraception—I just had my shot last week, but there are other things to worry about it. “When fairies and humans are together…I mean, to be safe—”

Idalia nips at the lobe of my ear. “Fairies and humans can’t pass infections to each other, if that’s what you’re wondering. But you might have to think about what else you’d like safe to mean. For example, does safe mean no pain?” She sinks her teeth into the place between my neck and my shoulder now. I shudder, the pain streaking through my body like rain, washing me clean. Leaving me hot and shivery.

“Or does safe mean no shame?” Maynard says in my other ear, his rich voice turning the last word into a melody of lust. His hand has joined Idalia’s on the back of my dress, and the laces are being loosened, loosened, until I feel the front of the dress start to gape and sag in front.

“I like both of those things,” I say, a little breathlessly.

“You need only cry mercy,” Maynard says, “and we will give it. But mortals so rarely ask for mercy, do they? Especially if they’ve already tasted what we can offer…”

Tasted.

I wonder if he means the fairy fruit. Thank god I’m not foolish enough to eat any while I’m here.

Maynard’s words have distracted me from the work of his fingers, and I’m surprised at the brush of cool air on my breasts as the bodice slips down to my waist. Idalia is kissing my neck now, and I’m being guided to sit on the edge of the platform, and then Maynard is kissing my neck too, while the fairies behind us move to greet me, more kisses trailing along the bare skin between my shoulder blades, hands languorous on my hips.

Idalia’s fingers find my nipples—erect and sensitive—and roll them cleverly between her fingertips. Heat sparks at her touch, those sparks tracing down like falling fireworks to my cunt, and it’s only then that I lift my head to see if the queen is watching.

She is.

She is watching.

She seems as remote as ever on her throne—there’s still no reading those black eyes or that elegant mouth—but there is something alert in her posture that wasn’t there before. As if her motionlessness now is intentional rather than habitual.

Her eyes are on mine as Maynard and Idalia together ruck up my skirt. I’m grateful that I’m wearing my usual black boy shorts today—comfortable but cute—and that I chose this dress, which pools around my waist in pretty, filmy layers as the two fairies push my skirt higher and higher. Some people have princess fantasies—I have fantasies about getting railed in a princess dress. To each their own, I guess.

“What a picture,” Maynard says, stroking over the colorful tattoo on my thigh. I look down to see his fingertip skate over the inked folds of the Belle Dame’s red dress. “And here you’ve been pretending to be ignorant of all to do with our kind.”

“The tales she hears are hardly real knowledge, Maynard,” Idalia says. Her fingers join his over the tattoo. “Whatever germs of truth may lie dormant inside them.”

“I got it years ago,” I say, although I’m not sure why it matters. Nothing matters except the long-fingered caresses on my thigh, nothing matters except the queen watching me from her throne.

“I’m curious,” Maynard says, “when you look at this picture, who do you wish to be? The merciless woman, vain and beautiful? Or her bewitched lover, doomed as he may be?”

I am sitting with my breasts bared and my skirt up to my waist, and still I flush. I fear the answer will reveal more about myself than I’d like.

“No need to answer,” Idalia says, a smile curling her silver-painted lips. “The queen already knows.”

“But there is plenty she does not know yet,” Maynard says, and then he pushes my thighs apart.

Someone’s touch skates over the soft fabric of my underwear, light as a feather, and I catch my breath. I want to rock my hips into the sensation, but the fairies behind me hold my hips in place as they kiss my back and neck.

My hair is swept out of the way so they can kiss more of me; Maynard teases a stiff nipple where it juts through the hair tossed over my shoulder.

“What lovely little shivers you make,” Idalia says. “And we haven’t even gotten to my favorite part.”

“What’s your—” But I don’t need to finish the question. She and Maynard are already tugging my panties down. It’s over before I can worry about how awkward it is, how inelegant. How the queen probably doesn’t have to wriggle out of a cotton-Lycra blend in order to be touched.

“This,” Idalia says as I’m bared completely to view and Maynard’s large hands keep my thighs prised apart. “This is my favorite part.”

No one is touching my cunt, but I’m already quivering like they are, I’m already trying to arch and seek. The hands on my hips won’t let me, though, and the more I try to squirm, the more Maynard pulls his hands away from my breasts.

“No, no,” he scolds. “This isn’t for you.”

I’m being stripped down and held open, kissed along my back and neck and shoulders—how can it not be for me?

But then I look up again and see the queen on her throne, her eyes dark and inscrutable, and I realize Maynard is right. This isn’t for me.

I marched over to prove something to her, to show her I knew better than she did, but I feel like I’m the one being shown instead.

Not that it makes any material difference: her doing this to me, having her courtiers spread me like a butterfly and expose me to her gaze, makes it even hotter.

Maynard is the first to touch my pussy, and the difference between careful and teasing is evident in the wickedness of his expression as he sands his fingertips over my curls. I try to arch again, but it’s futile. I am held in place, forced to endure the torture of his slow exploration.

Idalia bends her head and pulls the furled tip of my breast between her lips. The shock of her hot, wet mouth around such a sensitive part of me makes me gasp. Maynard responds by running a finger up the center of me—and I knew I was aroused, but even I’m surprised to feel how wet I am when he touches me.

Up on the dais, the queen doesn’t move, doesn’t seem to react at all, but neither can I tear my gaze away from hers as Maynard finds the swollen part of me and teases it with his middle finger. As I writhe against the many hands holding me in place, I am also held fast by the queen’s attention, by the way she watches me like I’m the only person in the teeming hall.

It’s only when her stare drops from my face down to my breasts and then to my cunt that I feel released from her hold, but I still don’t feel entirely free of her. In fact, maybe I’m more in her thrall than before, watching her as she watches me, as she observes Maynard and Idalia expertly coaxing me into breathless pleasure.

It’s been months since I’ve been fucked by someone—even longer since I’ve been properly fucked—and it’s an embarrassingly short journey from my panties coming off to everything pulling tight and hot below my navel, a shimmering knot tied around my clit that is ready to unravel at the slightest touch.

The fairies behind us—the ones kissing and nuzzling me—slide their hands past my hips to my thighs, which they now hold open for Maynard and the queen. And with me pinned and peeled like fruit, Maynard finally rubs my clit the way I need, with hard circles and presses. Between his touch and Idalia’s wicked mouth toying with my nipple, I’m done for, but with the queen watching, I’m extra gone. I want her to see me come. I want her to make me come. I want her to heap more of everything on top me—pain, humiliation, sheer obscenity—and I want her to see how I can take it, how I was born to drink it all down, swallow every last drop.

“Isn’t she pretty?” Idalia says, pulling back to brush my hair from my flushed face. Her own face is hauntingly beautiful in the mingled gold and silver glow of the chandeliers and mycelium threads. High, rounded cheekbones, a full mouth in the shape of a heart and painted bright silver. Long lashes and eyes a deep, deep brown. Her pewter dress is thin enough that I can see the press of her own nipples against the fabric.

“She is,” Maynard agrees. His hand has gentled between my legs now, but it doesn’t feel like it’s out of kindness or care for how sensitive I am after coming. It’s so he can study me, so he can observe which caresses make me strain against the hands holding me in place and which give me time to breathe and compose myself.

Then he looks back to the queen, who lifts her fingers from the arm of her throne. I don’t know what the gesture means until I do: Idalia’s hand joins Maynard’s, and I feel the warm slide of her fingers inside me at the same time as Maynard starts thumbing my clit without mercy.

I peak even faster this time, my body trying so hard to curl around itself, a cry spilling from my lips as my pussy squeezes around Idalia’s fingers and my heart hammers against my chest. The orgasm abates, but as usual, it leaves hunger in its wake. Hunger for more, always more. The kind of more that tires out lovers and kinksters and entire rooms of partners.

Except tire seems to be the last verb I’d use in this room—far from it. My little demonstration seems to have energized the banquet; the music is louder, the fucking at the tables more vigorous. Even the languid orgy behind me has changed: I can feel the pants and rocks of the fairies holding my thighs and kissing my back as they’re fucked from behind, feel the eager way they fondle and lick at me.

The queen lifts her fingers again, and this time, Maynard moves off the platform to kneel in front of me. His mouth is at the level of my sex. A thick erection presses against his breeches.

Idalia reaches down and spreads my intimate flesh as much as it can be spread, until I know my erect clit and glistening entrance must be painfully available for viewing. The sheer lewdness of it is arousing, the shame of it like a drug I’ve been searching for my entire life.

The queen is still sitting as regally as ever, but I see the rise and fall of her chest, even from the platform some ways away from the throne. She’s breathing harder. And her hand—where it rests on the arm of the throne, it’s now curling into a tight fist.

Maynard leans in and gives me a long, savoring lick, slick and ticklish, and then wastes no time getting to business. He dips his face low and starts feasting on my pussy, with laves and circles that have my toes curling in my slippers. Pleasure twines through my belly once more, stoked by shame and the wonderful, horrible feeling of being spread and on display, and it’s too much to take in, not only the fucking around me and right behind me, but Maynard’s head moving between my legs, the sight of all those hands on my thighs, the bloodstained skirt of my fairy-tale dress shoved up to my waist to make room for it all.

Idalia takes hold of my jaw with the hand that was inside me just a moment ago and forces me to look straight ahead.

At the queen.

“Eyes up, Janneth,” Idalia purrs. “Eyes on your queen.”

My queen.

It doesn’t sound wrong at all, and that’s what I’d essentially promised, right? To be the queen’s in exchange for her keeping me safe until my release? And once again, I think about how it’s not that bad a deal when it’s all said and done…I mean, I would rather have not been kidnapped at all, but all things considered, there are worse fates than being a fairy queen’s sex pet.

The queen’s stare trails up from where Maynard’s head moves between my legs up to my face, and then our eyes meet and lock. Her eyes are as wet and black as the sea at night as she watches me, and when the next climax rolls through my body, brought on by Maynard’s clever mouth and her cool appraisal, I feel something almost like awe, like reverence.

Like relief.

The rolling waves of pleasure push their way out from my center to the soles of my feet and the tips of my fingers, and I am past soft cries and bitten-off moans now, I am whimpering, I am keening, I am making noises that should embarrass me—that do embarrass me but that also feed the sweet, hungry shame that makes all of this so much closer to my fantasies than anything I’ve found in the real world.

The climax recedes, and though I know I could happily take more (and more still), I’m also shivering and spent in the arms of the fairies holding me.

For the first time since I entered the hall, the queen stands. She descends the dais with eerie grace and strides to the platform, where I am half-undressed, wet, and restrained not by cuffs or bonds but by hands. Hands that sometimes have too many knuckles or claws instead of nails. Hands that seem to have acted with her will and at her behest.

The queen stops just in front of me, the silk of her gown swishing against the rush mats on the floor. Though she seems as remote as ever, up close I see the thrum of her pulse in her neck. The rose bloom of color on her cheeks.

She lowers a hand and then runs her fingers through the wet mess of my cunt. Her touch is curious but also laden with prerogative. I’m hers to touch as she pleases now.

I start panting, as much at that thought as at the actual touch.

Without a word, she presses her fingers—slick with me—to my lips, and when I open for her, she pushes her fingers into my mouth.

I suck, obediently, instinctively, and though it’s a tiny, tiny thing, I see her swallow.

“Fine, then, Janneth Carter,” she says, pulling her fingers free and leaving my mouth too cold and too empty. “You have my agreement. You shall be my pet, my everything, until the final night of Samhain, and you will not be harmed until you leave Faerie.”

She steps back, and to the rest of the hall, she says, “This is my consort, a mortal worthy of a stag’s heart and a stag’s kiss. So too shall she be worthy of a stag’s fate. Feast her well.”

Cheers resound around the room, as if I’m being welcomed into a sexy but proud family, and she touches my face with wet fingers.

“You’ve done well,” she says softly. “And I greatly look forward to seeing you on the morrow for the hunt.”

And then she sweeps away with her guards and leaves the fairies to their dark, dangerous revels without her supervision.