Spiked by his dark brethren, I wasn’t sensing V’lane as a Fae. I felt no nausea. His appearance had been preceded only by his lethal sexuality. He was impacting me as he would any woman. It was no wonder heads turned when we went places. His allure was even stronger with my sidhe-seer senses dead, as if some special quality in my blood normally shielded me from his full effect, but couldn’t when my veins ran with Fae.

Whatever the reason, his impact was formidable today. It was even more intense than the first time I’d encountered him, when I’d had no idea what he was. My legs felt weak. My breasts were heavy, aching, and my nipples burned. I wanted sex, needed sex. Violently. Had to have it. Didn’t care about repercussions. I wanted to fuck and fuck until I couldn’t move. Hadn’t he said he could give it to me without hurting me? Mute himself, protect me from being harmed or changed?

“Turn it off,” I forced myself to say, but I was smiling when I said it, and my command lacked heat.

I was so relieved to see him!

My sweater was on the floor. I bent to pick it up.

He moved from the shaft of brilliant sunlight and glided up the stairs. “Sidhe-seer,” he said.

As the door closed behind him, and the anteroom returned to its dimly lit state, my pupils dilated, adjusted, and I realized my error. Gasping, I took a step back. “You’re not V’lane!”

The exotic prince’s gaze fixed on my breasts, sculpted by a lacy bra. I pressed my sweater to my chest. He made a sound deep in his throat and my knees buckled with sexual anticipation. Only with immense effort did I remain standing. I wanted to be on my knees. I should be on my knees. He wanted me on my knees. And hands. My head was vacuumed of thought. My lips and legs moved apart.

He stepped closer.

I fought a frantic battle with myself, managed to step back.

“No,” he said. “I am not.” Lids lowered over alien, ancient eyes, lifted. “Whatever that is.”

“Wh-who are you?” I stammered.

He took another step forward.

I took another step back. There went my sweater again. Shit.

“The end,” he said simply.

The doors leading to the inner sanctum opened behind me. I felt the draft of passage, and more of the strange, disturbing scent filled my nostrils.

Lust sledgehammered me, front and rear.

“We are all the end,” a cold voice floated over my shoulder. “And beginning. Soon. Later. After.”

“Time. Irrelevant,” the other replied. “Round is round.”

“We are always. You are not.”

They might as well have been speaking a foreign language. I turned, hardly able to breathe. There was a lacy bra lying on the floor at my feet. It was mine. Shit again. The air was cool on my flushed skin. I would not ask “after what?” There were two of them. Two death-by-sex Fae. Two princes. Could I outrun them? Could I survive them? They could sift. I was between them. Could I Null them? Oh, God, not with my sidhe-seer abilities dead! “Do you know V’lane? He’s a Seelie Prince,” I managed to get out through lips that ached for touch, for fullness that had only been hinted at by the sensation of V’lane’s name piercing my tongue. I wanted to drown in men. I wanted to be stuffed plumper than a sausage. Lips would do. So would other things. I looked from one of their crotches to the next. I shook my head, violently. My mouth was parched, my head spinning. “He protects me.” Maybe they were friends of his. Maybe they could summon him. Maybe they feared him and would back off.

I wouldn’t have been surprised by villainous laughs, sneers, ribald comments—after all, I was standing there naked from the waist up. I expected some comment, some expression, any expression, but they merely rotated their heads on their necks with eerie smoothness, and examined me in a manner so far from human that my blood ran cold and I stopped breathing.

I knew who they were. They were no friends of V’lane’s. That alien gesture had given them away.

When I breathed again it was a great, sucking inhalation.

These were the Unseelie Princes. Fae that had never had the opportunity to study us, learn our habits, perfect glamour through mimicry; Fae that could employ our language but only void of reference or metaphor; that had learned about our world from a great distance, by proxy; that probably didn’t even grasp the basic Fae concepts of stasis and change. Fae that had never been free, never drunk from the cauldron, never had sex with a human woman.

But they planned to have sex with me. It was pouring off them in immense, hungry, dark waves. Lust laced the room, explosive as dynamite, its fuse dangerously short. The air reeked of it. I was drawing it in with every breath, feeding an unquenchable, exquisite Fae fever.