Merry Gentry 03 - Seduced by Moonlight by Laurell K. Hamilton Page A

were brown. He looked the most human of all the guards, when you couldn't see the wing-shaped marks on the back of his body, like the world's most elegant tattoo. There but for genetics Nicca would have had real wings. He apologized for being on this side of the door, but Maeve had clung to him a little too forcefully. She hadn't exactly made a pass, but she probably would have responded to one. Nicca thought discretion the better part of valor. I didn't blame him.
    Maeve had been a goddess of love and spring. She was still more than capable of turning the charm on. Charm in the original sense of the word, a magic. She was alone in her big bed for the first time in decades. She was lonely, and she was a being of heat, the new life after the long winter. You can fight your basic nature, but under stress, it gets harder. Maeve was under a lot of stress.
    The sound of her soft crying filled the room. I walked barefoot toward her. I'd tied my red peekaboo robe tight but hadn't taken time to change. Doyle and Rhys had stayed at the guesthouse to dress and help Kitto clean up. It left me with Frost standing rigid by the door, but he wouldn't come near the bed unless I made him. He didn't care for Maeve's teasing. Frost had been celibate for eight hundred years, give or take. He had coped with that punishment by not flirting, not playing any games. He'd been his namesake, cold, icy, frost.
    Galen also stood by the door, but he was at ease, smiling. If Maeve had made polite overtures to him, he hadn't mentioned it. Either she'd started on Nicca only when they were alone in her bedroom, or Galen just didn't think it was important. I agreed with him. Nicca's panic had been odd, come to think of it.
    I was beside the bed before I thought to wonder why Nicca had been so upset, or what she might have done. I said her name softly: "Maeve." I repeated it twice more, and there was no reaction. I touched her shoulder, and the crying increased, growing from something quiet to something that shook her shoulders, made her body quiver with its force.
    I bent over her, hugging her, resting my cheek against the silk of her hair. "It's all right, Maeve, it's all right."
    She twisted against me, turning so that I had to draw back to see her face. She'd dropped some of her glamour, because her eyes weren't the human blue that the movies saw, but the brilliant tricolor that was real. The wide outer edges were rich deep blue, and there were two thin circles around her pupils: one melted copper, the other liquid gold. But what made her eyes like no others was that the gold and copper trailed out across the blue of her irises like streaks of metallic lightning. Her eyes were lightning-kissed, as if the Goddess Herself had decreed she would have the most beautiful eyes in the world.
    I stood by the bed, staring down into those eyes, lost for a moment in the wonder of them. Her tear-stained face looked almost desperate. Had she lost control of her own glamour; had she not meant to show her eyes?
    She grabbed my wrist, and I could feel the pulse in the tip of each of her fingers like tiny separate hearts, beating against my skin. I suddenly knew why Nicca had panicked. Maeve rose to her knees, hand still wrapped around my wrist. On her knees she was tall enough to bring our faces close together. I stood there immobile, frozen, not with indecision, but with power. Maeve's power.
    It was as if a warm spring breeze trailed across my skin. I threw my head back and let that wind blow my hair away from my face. I opened my eyes and gazed down at Maeve, and watched the rest of her glamour fade away, as if the golden glow of her skin rose through her body. Her suddenly white-blond hair danced in the warmth of her power. Those glittering lines in her eyes flashed like a spring storm come to blow away the winter's sloth. It was as if my very skin lifted away like an old coat grown too tight. I felt like some animal that had shed its shape for something lighter,