Neon Blue by E Frost (best big ereader .TXT) 📕

“Where’d you pick ‘em up, a garage sale? I swear, I’m out of it for one day and you fall back into the fashion abyss.”

I’m about to argue, but then he finally succeeds in uncovering my breasts, and his hot mouth closes on my nipple. Oooh. I stop pushing at him. Slide my hands down his back. No one but you cares what I wear anyway.

Right now what I mostly care about is gettin’ you naked. He tugs on the pants that are half-way down my thighs. I obligingly lift my hips so he can slide my pants off. He immediately settles over me. Onto and into me. Not giving me any opportunity to escape. I pull him closer, curling my fingers into the big muscles of his back, and let his familiar heat and power fill me.

An hour later, I leave him sleeping and slip downstairs to call the Squire.

I love the woods. The Squire’s horse has taken us to the Estabrook Woods in Concord, which after years of gathering I know better than I know my own yard. I’m comfortable in these woods. The moonlight picks out trails for me to follow. Frog-song and the calls of night-birds lead me from place to place. Black cohosh and spikenard, which I use in the magic milk, are plentiful. Small fae inhabit Estabrook, and they’ll often call me to smokeberry, one of the rarest magical herbs, which grows in their dancing rings.

Except tonight. Tonight I lumber through the woods. I can’t find any of the usual paths and I keep crashing through bracken that tangles my skirt and slashes the backs of my hands. The woods are full of noises, but I can’t read any of them. Nothing calls to me. I stumble through a thicket and end up ankle-deep in mud before I realize I’ve hit the edge of Rose Meadow Swamp.

“Damn.”

The Squire silently and somberly offers me a hand out of the mud. He stands a slight distance away while I scrape off my boots. He looks the way he always looks, patient and watchful, his gauntlet resting lightly on the pommel of his sword, his helmet turning slightly as he surveys the woods around us. These woods are safer since he eliminated the pack of barghasts that haunted the old Pilgrim road, but there are still wild and unfriendly things here. So he’s watchful, but he’s also, I sense, laughing a little at me.

I kick mud off my boot with a wet spatter and grimace as a lot of it lands on my skirt instead of the leaves. “I’m not doing very well tonight, am I?”

The dark slit of his visor swivels back to me.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’” I sigh heavily. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Well, that’s not true. I do.” I pause while I hunt around for a stump. On top of feeling completely disconnected from the woods, my legs and back are aching from all the unaccustomed . . . activity lately. Fortunately for my temper and my muscles, I find a dry stump and sink down on it. “These things.”

I hold my wrists out in front of me. Slouch over them. Where I could see a shadow of the bindings at twilight, now I can’t see anything. But I can feel them. That spiderweb sense of constriction. The compulsion to return to the demon. The binding that’s worked its way under my skin, which is slowly separating me from my world. Making me feel less and less a part of the Earth. More and more a part of Him. And even without him in my mind, I know that if he called me, I’d be compelled to answer. No matter where he was. No matter where I am. This is a deep binding, deeper than anything I’ve ever heard of. And it scares the shit out of me.

The Squire kneels in the damp leaves without a rustle. He takes one of my wrists in his gauntleted hands and examines it gravely, his helmet bent over me. I can feel the warm puff of his breath on the skin of my inner wrist. The touch of his chain mail glove is as light and soft as the brush of feathers.

He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t seem to do anything, but I feel him call power. It ruffles across my skin, bringing the small hairs on my neck to attention. Around us, the woods fall silent. Except for a little breeze that swirls over and around us, carrying the faint tinkle of bells.

Around my wrists, the demon’s intricate knotwork appears, shading in from nothingness. It hovers just on the edge of my vision. If I look squarely at my arm, there’s nothing, just moonlight and leaf-shadow shifting over my skin. But if I look away, out of the corner of my eye, I can see the cords that loop over and around my wrists and trail down to the ground.

The better to tie me to the headboard with.

The Squire runs one finger over the binding, following the long blue vein in my wrist. I shiver.

“I’d really like to be able to take it off,” I whisper.

He bobs his armored head and draws a long knife from somewhere.

“Wait.” I touch his glove just before he slides the tip of the knife under the bottom edge of the knotwork. “He’ll know if the binding is broken.” He may not be in my mind right now, but the binding is linked to him at a deeper level. I want to be free, but not at the cost of pissing off the demon.

The Squire nods gravely and puts his other glove over his heart. Trust me.

I do. Where the demon protects me because he wants to use me, the Squire protects me because it’s what he is. He’s never let me down, and he never will. There’s a lot of comfort in that thought. “Yes, okay, go ahead.”

He carefully slides the knife between the binding