Chapter 78: Kidnapped

Maybe it was irritation at being used as Miss Moneybags for a Viking throwback or maybe it was essentially being compared to someone with syphilis, but Shannon’s anger punched through her inhibitions and she lifted her chin and said, “I think I’d like it.”

The feylord, who had turned to look at the now-cheerful fishermen celebrating around the tables, swiveled back to her with a frown. “Like what?”

Immediately, Shannon felt herself flush. Ultimately, her admittedly naïve sexual fantasies were nonetheless a nasty little secret that she’d always held close to her chest, one that was completely at odds with her fear of naked people, and warred with everything she hated about her parents. But the idea of being tied up had always…creepily fascinated her. As did having a man completely at her mercy, subject to her every whim. Sure, being attacked and subdued by paramilitary zealots had somewhat put the damper on that, but being kidnapped by a romantic interest had always historically appealed to her—hence her last six years of fastidious, in-depth study of Scottish and Early Americas romance novels.

The ‘dog’s’ raised brow was enough to know he’d gotten the ‘memo.’

“Goddamn it,” Shannon muttered. She dropped her head into her hands again. “Just kill me now.”

The feylord scooted closer to her chair. “So what fascinates you about being tied up and kidnapped?” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen pried, leaning in and putting his paws on his knee.

“I’m not fascinated by being tied up and kidnapped.”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen, who had been smiling that big doggy grin, gave her a flat look—the kind of look that told her he was a natural mind reader and she might as well have screamed it in his ear and she was wasting both of their time.

“Ugh!” Shannon cried. “All of it, okay?”

“Can you be more specific?” he insisted, getting way too interested.

Shannon flushed hard, and was acutely aware she was discussing kinky sex with a dog-man in the middle of a faux Viking funeral, surrounding by loud and cheering outdoorsmen that were halfway to being completely shitfaced drunk. “There aren’t a lot of specifics,” she grated.

“Are you kidding?” the feylord cried. “I spent the first hundred years of my life isolated on a villa with no women I could legally engage with because my father literally wanted my dick to wither and fall off. I had my fantasies detailed out to the second.”

Which was…true. After not being able to be around boys without getting physically ill at the thought they’d randomly take their shirts off or, gee, try to get in her pants, Shannon had gotten pretty specific, right down to the fact that he liked to have sex fully clothed.

The feylord was like a cat with a mouse now. “How so?”

Flustered, Shannon said, “Maybe being tied up, maybe the other way around… I dunno, as long as it wasn’t someone like Björn, I’d try whatever.” Then she remembered she was having this conversation with a man who looked like a dog and she made a face. Belatedly, she added, “Well, maybe not whatever.”

“Thanks. That makes me feel so much better.” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen sighed and leaned back against the gravel, still watching her. “So, seeing how you’re probably—as long as you can put together your harem before someone harvests you or kills you—destined to be a very old, very powerful lady of this realm, much as the lords and ladies of my homeland, what do you think you’ll do to find release, once the power of your station becomes overwhelming?”

“Ha!” Shannon cried, stunned he was even contemplating life more than three days in advance. “Right now, I’m just thinking about ‘survive another day’.”

“I’d say you’ve got a good start on that,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen said. “A barghest, a feylord, a yatagarasu, and a vampire lord? Those four powers, together, could defeat almost any foe.”

“Too bad they’re scattered who the fuck knows where,” Shannon muttered, scowling out at Björn again.

“Indeed.” He glanced at her sideways. “So what’s your fantasy, vampire queen?”

Watching the barghest’s big silhouette against the flames, thinking about how physically appealing he was, which was immediately shattered by how he was going to demand to strip when she fed on him, she muttered, “I don’t have one.”

“Bullshit.”

“I don’t,” Shannon said, careful not to think of it. “Can’t.”

The feylord gave her a long look, then sighed and said, “My fantasy is rather simple. It’s childish, really, but I’ve had it for quite some time…” He waited to see if she was paying attention.

“And?” Shannon prodded, curious despite herself.

“Ball-gags aren’t my only interest,” he muttered reluctantly. “Punishment is…scarce…for creatures of my…stature.”

Now that was interesting. “So, what, whips and chains?”

The feylord looked uncomfortable. “Basically, yes.”

“Like…” Shannon hesitated. “You wanna be spanked?”

He gave her a long, considering look, then said, “Considering my current state of mental dress, you probably don’t want to hear it.”

“I do, actually.”

He gave her a lingering timid look before sighing, deeply, and seeming to relent. “Fine. I want a woman to dominate me so completely and overwhelmingly that, try as I might, I completely forget who I am.” He hesitated, visibly debating how much to tell her. Then, when she didn’t mock him, he apparently decided to plunge ahead. “If you want to get even more specific, I want this woman to force me to submit in such a way that I find release in the total helplessness of my situation. I want ball gags, I want whips and chains and spreader bars and cuffs and, fuck, maybe even strapons and dick restraints. I want even the threat of her punishment to make my balls ache and my dick so hard it hurts. I want to cum from the thrill of her power over me, with or without her approval, and I want to be punished for my missteps. I want to be her slave, heart and soul. I want her to make me forget I’m a feylord and make me feel…human. A powerless, uneducated, drooling human savage whose most complex thoughts are how much his balls hurt because his mistress is refusing to let him find release. A human whose only power is a desire to please someone more powerful in the hopes they'll allow him enough pleasure to keep him from losing his mind with lust. That is my fantasy, vampire queen. Now tell me yours.”

Shannon had the insanely strong urge to blurt out her sexual fantasies before she put the mental breaks on his suggestion and ground her teeth. “Goddamn it I told you—”

“Sorry,” the feylord muttered, actually sounding contrite. “I really can’t do anything about my voice. My training was denied me by my father, and it’s quite possible that even trained, I wouldn’t be able to contain the suggestions. My uncle claimed I was a natural. They’re rare…but dangerous and inconvenient.” He gave her a sad look. “And very hard to make friends. Once most people figure out what I’m doing—even if it’s on accident—they want nothing to do with me.”

She still felt a little ruffled, but was somewhat mollified. “Your father wouldn’t train you?”

He waved a dismissive hand. “He wanted my brother Kesani'aan to succeed him, not I.”

“Why?”

Again, he seemed reluctant to answer. “I’m…deformed.”

She hadn’t seen anything deformed about him, the couple times she’d seen him. “I take it you’re not talking about the dog thing?”

He gave a spontaneous laugh that was pained. “No,” he said. He sucked in a huge breath and let it out slowly, his eyes flickering back to her face. “I’m…discolored. It shows my…verdant…heritage.”

“So?” Shannon, who didn’t know anything about feylords, had simply assumed green was the color they came in.

“Oh no,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen laughed. “No. My kinsmen are very proud of their bloodlines—we have whole halls devoted to recording family histories.” He idly fidgeted with a rounded white quartz crystal on the gravel bank. “Normally, their skin has the tone of the indigenous peoples of this world. But my family line has a dirty secret, an old one, one that they had managed to hide until I slipped from my mother’s womb looking like a sack of rotting lettuce.” He tossed the rock with his paw before looking at her. “I’m the proof that my ancestors, at one time, interbred with lesser species.”

“Something green,” she said.

“Indeed.” He sighed. “The way our culture works, it calls into question the legitimacy of my father’s claim to his seat on the Council—hell, the legitimacy of the entire Sky Clan line. They can’t take it from him, of course, but it puts him in an awkward place if it’s common knowledge that he and his progeny carry the blood of the peasant class.”

“Which is why he cursed you to look like a dog and packed you up for a trip to the First Realm?” Shannon offered.

He gave her a tired look. “I’m actually surprised they haven’t tried to assassinate me yet. Normally, that would be the next step.”

There was a sad moment of silence where Shannon digested that. As asshole and criminal as her parents were, she had always felt like they appreciated her, if only because she was the living proof that their genetics were walking and talking. It was a very self-absorbed, narcissistic way to look at raising a child, but at least, in their own weird way, they cared. Hell, they had died trying to secure her a vampire lord to help her survive her awakening. Even after a lifetime of witnessing their sadism, she couldn’t imagine having a parent that hated her so much he plotted to kill her.

Meanwhile, the feylord—even trapped in the guise of a dog—looked despondent and hopeless. He was fiddling aimlessly with stones beside his leg, lost in thought.

In part to get his mind off the sad situation of his childhood, she said, “You really want to know my fantasy?” She hadn’t told anyone her fantasies before. In fact, she’d always thought they were stupid, and that they’d never, ever come true because this was America and people didn’t do that crap in America.

He stopped digging his fingers through the stones and looked up.

Shannon coughed uncomfortably. “Okay, so, uh, it goes like this. I’m just doing something really normal someday when some hot guy basically just walks up behind me, grabs me, ties me up, and transports me to this remote island where he had a nice house, and uh…” Her face was flushing so much it felt like it would explode.

“Go on,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen urged. Then, just as the suggestion was lodging into her head, he quickly amended, “I mean, if you want to.”

“Um…” Shannon glanced at the fishermen ‘making merry’ nearby. None of them were listening to them, but their presence still made her uncomfortable. Besides, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen was a man, and she couldn’t tell a man…

“Gay, remember?” the feylord insisted. He chuckled. “Hell, when it comes to you, at the moment, I’m so incredibly gay I might as well be wearing rainbows.”

Shannon narrowed her eyes. “You don’t find me attractive at all?”

“Ummm, in this case, my brain is overriding my balls, so no. No I don’t.” He gave her a jowly grin. “What’s your fantasy?”

“Pretty much like yours,” she muttered. “Being forced to orgasm, no way out.”

“Oh, interesting.”

“Thanks.”

“Restrained?” he insisted, like they were discussing the flavor of daiquiris at the beach.

Shannon squinted. “Maybe?”

“Well, I mean, how else is someone going to force you to orgasm?”

“Okay, so maybe a little?”

“Like what kind of restraints?” he asked. “Rope, leather, steel?”

It had been rope. And, the moment she had the thought, she saw the feylord’s eyes narrow as he caught the thought and she suddenly felt like a worm trapped on a hook, unwittingly skewered by his attention. “Look, I really didn’t want to turn this into a debate topic,” she said, feeling her neck heat. “It was just a stupid idea I had as a kid that isn’t really—”

“What about your partner?” he insisted.

“Huh?”

“What do you want your partner to be doing?” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen asked. At her continued stare, he offered, “There are many ways to bring a woman to orgasm. What did you imagine him doing?” He hesitated. “Hands or mouth or…?”

And then, Shannon realized what was happening. “You’re prepping me!”

He grinned so hard his jowls parted. “I’d consider it more of a pre-play interview, but sure.”

And…Shannon didn’t know how to handle that. She was at once thrilled by the idea of someone willing to act out her fantasies…and at the same time terrified beyond all reason. Which made it even more thrilling to think that he’d be willing to do them. The feedback loop between fear, anxiety, and excitement made her brain twitch.

The feylord grinned slowly, watching her. “You mind if I show you something?”

“Show me what?” Shannon asked warily.

“We feylords have this…thing…we can do. Being mind-magi and all. We don’t do it often—it takes a lot of concentration—but it’s fun.”

Squinting at him warily, Shannon said, “O…kaaay.”

“Then I can show you?”

“Sure.”

He leaned closer again and lifted a paw towards her face, hesitating at the last minute to meet her eyes. “I’m going to have to touch your head.”

“What, like a Vulcan mind-meld?” she demanded.

Instead of not knowing what a Vulcan mind-meld was, the feylord grinned a jowly grin. “Exactly.”

“I dunno…” Shannon took another look at Björn, saw that the barghest was still busy setting fire to a two million dollar pile of gold, and immediately wanted to punch something.

“It’s very distracting,” he offered.

“Fine, whatever,” Shannon said, wrenching her attention from the pyre before she tried throttling the guy who had knocked over her house with his foot. “Yeah. Yes. Distract me. Quick.”

The feylord immediately reached the rest of the way and touched her temple with a paw…

There was a sudden explosive whomph of green light and the world shifted. In the space of a heartbeat, Shannon found herself standing on the gritty gray beach of a Northern island, the cold waves lapping at her stiletto-covered feet.

“How’s that for getting kidnapped?” the feylord’s voice asked from behind her with a chuckle.

Shannon spun… And found a tall, exotically-dressed green-skinned man standing behind her, his emerald eyes twinkling. His clothes were unlike anything she’d ever seen… Yellow silk and embroidered with so much detail they looked like living tapestries draped over his body.

He raised a brow at the rocky outcroppings around them. “I hope you meant an Alaskan island, not a Bahamas island, but that could be adjusted.” When his green eyes came back to level on her once more, there was deep amusement there.

Shannon’s mouth fell open. “You…” Her words trailed off when she realized she’d shoved a riding crop at him threateningly. Then she realized what she was wearing—high-heeled, tight-laced knee-high boots and a black leather corset—and she gasped.

“So…” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen said, grinning at her over his crossed arms, “…I guess it’s time we find out what you’re willing to do to get back home, vampire.” He cocked his head at her. “You want top or bottom?”