Merry Gentry 03 - Seduced by Moonlight Read Online Free PDF Page A

when he called cold, his eyes filled with snow. Sometimes I thought that if I gazed into those grey, snow-flecked eyes long enough I'd see a landscape done small, see the place where he'd begun, see a time before I was born.
    I looked away. My nerve broke every time, because I wasn't entirely sure where those winter eyes would lead me, or what secrets they might reveal. There was something in the snow that frightened me. There was no reason for it. No logic to it, but I did not like the snow.
    If I'd been human I'd have accused myself of being unnerved by the strangeness of it, but I wasn't human enough for that, and Goddess knows I'd seen stranger things than snow fall in someone's eyes.
    I was already warmer. The cold never lasted long, but I didn't like it. He had used it as foreplay once in our lovemaking, and though interesting, I didn't want to repeat it. To hide the fact that I was unnerved by his magic in a most un-sidhe-like way, I said, "Why is it that only Rhys's magic bemuses me like that?" I didn't meet his eyes as I asked. Eventually, his eyes would return to their normal grey.
    "None of us had lost as much as Rhys, and he was once a deity to rival any."
    That made me look up. His eyes held a sense of movement, but were grey again. "None of you talks about what it was like before."
    "It is hard to speak of that which is lost, and can never be regained."
    "Are you saying that Rhys was more powerful than any of the rest of you?"
    "He was the Lord of Death himself. Death followed at his step, if he willed it. When he was great among us, Meredith, none could withstand us."
    "Then why didn't the Unseelie destroy the Seelie?"
    "Rhys was not always Unseelie."
    That surprised me. "He was Seelie Court?"
    Frost nodded, then frowned. He frowned so much that if he'd been able to wrinkle, he would have had grooves in his forehead and around his mouth by now, but his face was smooth and flawless, and always would be. "Rhys was a power apart. He was the ruler of the land of the dead, and that is not truly Unseelie or Seelie. He was welcome at the shining court, but he was truly a thing apart, as were some of the rest of us. The system of two courts of the sidhe is relatively recent. Once there were many courts. The humans chose to call those of the fey who were beautiful and did them no harm Seelie. Those they found ugly, or harmed them, they named Unseelie. But it was not so clean a line."
    "Like the goblins and the sluagh, now?"
    "More like the goblins. The King of the Sluagh is a noble of the Unseelie Court. They are no longer truly separate. King Kurag holds no title among us; nor does any sidhe hold title in his court."
    Rhys came back in with a white terry-cloth robe belted around his body. It was long enough that it came nearly to his ankles. It would have draped the floor on me. His white curls looked darker against the white of the robe, the difference between fresh snow and ivory. Shades of white.
    He held the robe that matched my bikini. It was red, and meant more to decorate the body than to cover, so that most of the robe was sheer, like seeing your skin through a haze of fire.
    Rhys looked from one to the other of us. "Why do you both look so solemn? Nobody died while I was gone, did they?"
    I shook my head. "Not that I know of." I took the robe and slipped in between the patches of silk and the scratchier sheerness. The next robe I got was going to be just silk, or satin, something that didn't feel like it was catching on my skin as I moved.
    "So what do you want me to do once we're in talking to Kurag?" Rhys asked.
    "Just flaunt yourself—maybe flash your ass or upper thigh. They're supposed to be two of the prime cuts of meat that you can carve off our bodies."
    Rhys put his head to one side, as if thinking. "Will it bother him to see meat he can't taste?"
    "It will be a little bit of torture, and I don't use the word lightly. The worst thing you can do to a goblin is show him something he wants and deny it to