Away with the Faeries (Get Your Rocks Off Book 1) Read online

  “They are well shot. You should have no problems selling them.” We just stared. He cleared his throat. “You’re a very capable photographer.”

  “Thanks,” I said, taking a quick look at the shots he was looking at when he turned to order a flat white. Creepy trees, misty wildflowers and rock formations, all fairly bog-standard, inoffensive commercial shots. There were a few that were a bit blurry, one that looked like a rabbit had run across the foreground, but nothing to warrant his expression.

  “We’ll need to be getting back, miss,” Mark said. There was the appearance of deference in his words, but no real indication of it. Jen rolled her eyes, puffing up like some kind of cute little huffy bunny when he said, “Cook wants to go over the menus for the upcoming event.”

  “Oh, yes!” The air seeped out of her, and she reclined against her chair. “Kira, you simply must—”

  “No.”

  “But it—”

  “No.”

  “Kira, please. This is different. This is going to be—!”

  “How will this be different? You’ll have a house full of gorgeous people who are there to dance, which I don’t do, take drugs, which I don’t do, and engage in some very picturesque acts of debauchery, which I can’t do. I get you and I have a peacock-slash-peahen kind of relationship—” She started to interrupt, but I charged on, “And I’m perfectly happy with that when it’s just us, but even I get a little sick of the being the drab little brown bird in the corner sometimes.”

  “You’re only a drab anything if you want to be. Kira, if you saw what I saw—”

  This was a familiar argument, but I realised belatedly we were having it in front of complete strangers, one slightly less complete stranger in particular. Mark stared at me, cup halfway to his lips. Fuck, I was airing my insecurities in front of a hot guy, and what was with all the staring today? Seriously, did I have espresso on my lip or something?

  “I need to get home. I’m still feeling quite fragile,” I said, getting to my feet.

  “We can—” Jen said.

  “It’s OK, and thanks.” I walked around and gave her a big hug, smelling the scent of wildflowers in her hair. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  “Of course, it’s why I’m here. Please think about it anyway, for me? If that’s really how you feel, let my stylist, Marlow, do a makeover. No one will put this Baby in the corner.”

  I groaned. We had spent a considerable part of our teen years watching Dirty Dancing on rote. To this day, shivers went up my spine when I heard the opening bars of “The Time of My Life.”

  “I’ll think about it. When?”

  “This weekend. Seriously, Ki, it’s gonna be a blast! Dad’s bringing down a bunch of his top earners as part of this massive event. Instant Backlash, Jimmy Everly, JJ and the Sing Stars, and The Changelings…what?”

  Ever the observant one, Jen had seen me go still at the mention of The Changelings. My heart felt like it had dropped through the floor. My limbs tingled, and my head started to ache again. She knew I liked the band, since I’d played enough of their music in the car when we went on road trips for her to be able to reluctantly sing along to their most popular songs. What she didn’t know was my relationship with that band was a little more than just a fan.

  Don’t think about him yet, I told myself, struggling to keep that social mask situated.

  I smiled and said, “I’ll see how I’m feeling, OK?”

  “That’s all I ask. Now, we’re dropping you home.”

  “But—”

  “Miss, it’ll be no trouble,” Mark said.

  “Y’see, it’s not often Marky here and I agree. Jump in the car.”

  2

  My parents owned acreage on the outskirts of Gisbourne. Made for hobby farmers and the like, that was probably what Mum and Dad had bought the land for. Now, there was the main house where I’d grown up, Nan’s cottage, and mine. I’d asked Jen to drop me at the gate, but of course, that wouldn’t do, which is how I ended up in front of Nan’s place. I usually came to see her after one of my ‘turns,’ and seeing as I could still feel a flicker at the edges of my perception, I knocked on her door.

  “You’ve seen it?” Nan said, as soon as she opened it. No greeting, no smile, just her eyes flicking over me, looking for signs, but I didn’t know of what.

  “Seen what, Nan?”

  “The creeping people, the shifters in the grass. Those of stone and leaf and wood.”

  The problem was, Nan was kinda crazy.

  “Not sure, Nan, but you’re welcome to take a look at my photos. I need some of your tea.”

  I tried to pass her my camera. While she wasn’t always lucid, she wasn’t prone to dropping things and knew how to scroll through the viewfinder on the back if she had a mind to.

  “Don’t give me that nasty, clicky thing. Trying to capture the light of the world in a box. Hubris, I call it.”

  “Yeah, well, I call it a Canon,” I said, taking off my bag and putting it on the wooden table inside the living room. The thing was half-covered in feathers and twigs, scraps of wool and fabric, and tiny animal skulls.

  “You need a talisman, that’s what you need. Leaving one such as you unprotected. Don’t know what your mother was thinking.”

  I knew exactly what Mum thought, the same as Dad—that I was likely to turn out just like her, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. That I’d need to be on medication my whole life. That I was never going to achieve independence, leave the family farm, or find my own place. That I wouldn’t, shouldn’t, pass this curse on by having a child.

  Nan fussed around and then drew out a funny little bundle. It looked like a stick, some feathers, and a bunch of herbs wrapped clumsily in a strand of red wool. The sort of thing a fey child might make, imagining that the shadows in the grass and the flickers of dappled light coming between the trees hid a myriad of mystical creatures. I knew, because I’d been driven to make them as a kid. Made my mother mad, then sad when she realised what was happening. Nan tried to loop the leather thong holding it all over my neck, but I shook my head.

  “Tea, Nan.”

  “Tea blunts the senses, makes you blind. Not for my—”

  “That’s exactly what I want. Where do I find the tin?”

  “No tin, no tea! You need warding is all. Sharp as a tack, that’s what you need to be. See them as they creep up on you, ready to take…!”

  I retrieved an old purple tin from deep within Nan’s tightly packed kitchen cupboards. I was immediately hit by a wave of bergamot, orange blossom, and rosemary. The residual pain in my head diminished just at the smell of it, though I felt a momentary twist of nausea. Nan blathered on about what I needed and how I shouldn’t drink the tea, waving various bundles and items in my face as I put the kettle on. She always lectured me endlessly about drinking the stuff and refused to tell me the recipe so I could make my own, but the tin was full when I got there. I scooped some of the mix into the old metal tea strainer and swirled it into the hot water once I’d poured it into the cup. I added a splash of cold water from the tap, feeling the shake in my hands, seeing the flicker on the edge of my vision, as if something was fighting to get my attention. It was too hot when I put the cup to my lips, but I sipped it anyway.

  Wet herbs and grass, that’s what it tasted like. Probably because that’s what it was, but I slowly drank it down as I stared out through the big picture window over Nan’s sink. Trees wavered and jumped in the distance, as if the lawn was a hot road and I was looking through the distorted air. This was a bad attack. Usually, a couple of coffees were enough to stop it.

  Why now? I wondered. What mental glitch persisted, despite all my best efforts? I practised good sleep hygiene, made sure to have regular meals of low GI food to stop blood sugar spikes. Everything the neurologist advised, I did.

  “Something’s coming,” Nan said, her voice all raspy, her eyes wide. She made quite the dramatic figure as the light streaming in the window bleache
d her face to white, her brown eyes boring into mine. “Something big. That’s the warnings you’ve been given, and you dismiss them like they’re nothing! Something’s coming for you, Kira!”

  If this was a horror movie, this would be the moment the foolhardy MC was warned by the wise crone, only to later stumble into the horror house or forest or dungeon or whatever. My problem was my Nan had been making these kinds of pronouncements since I was a kid. Used to have me up at all hours, shivering from nightmares until Mum threatened to ban her from seeing me. As her only grandchild that she was allowed access to, she reined it back until I was older.

  “Well, it’d make for a nice change,” I said to the window, to her. My life was one long seamless line of taking photos, working on them in my office-slash-lounge room, having coffees with Jen, and seeing specialists. Maybe it would be a good thing to have Nan’s vague prognostications come true.

  “Nice! Nice!” Her voice got shriller and shriller as I washed out my cup and set it on the draining board, then turned to leave. A heaviness settled over me as soon as half the drink had been consumed. I wasn’t going to be doing much of anything for the rest of the day. I needed to head to bed and sleep whatever this was off.

  “Nan! I’m going to bed!” I snapped as she trailed after me, thrusting bigger and bigger bundles at me as I turned to leave.

  She cringed back. I instantly felt a pang of guilt. She was kept here, under lock and key on the farm, the family too embarrassed to put her into a home but not really knowing what to do with her while she was here. We yelled, that’s what we did. She wouldn’t let things go, yammering on and on about whatever paranormal conspiracy theories she had going at the time until someone did. Then her mouth would shut like a trap, like it just had, and her eyes would shine with unshed tears.

  I stepped in close, placing a kiss on her forehead. I tried to remember how she’d been when I was a kid, this magical figure who could turn a boring old walk through the forest into a swashbuckling adventure. I thought back to the times she’d held me on her knee, paging through beautifully illustrated botanicals and books about faeries, telling me wild story after wild story. This wasn’t her talking, it was the disease, and I needed to remember that.

  “Thank you, Nan,” I said. “I know you just want to keep me safe.”

  She nodded stiffly, then thrust a small bundle into my hand. “Put that over your bed when you sleep.”

  “Sure.”

  I tossed it on the table when I got to my place, then put my camera away in the locked cupboard I kept all my gear in and placed the memory card near my computer and the battery on charge. I washed my face in the bathroom sink, the cool water on my skin now pleasant rather than the ragged claws of sensation I’d experienced earlier, then I slipped into bed. My eyelids felt like stones, dropping down along with my consciousness, until I was swallowed by the darkness.

  He came to me, as he often did, after I’d had a bad day. At first, it was just the press of someone’s lips against mine. Slow, dry, nipping kisses, the sound like the shift of a snake’s scales, then my eyes flickered open and I was staring into his.

  He’d never told me his name, but he was as familiar to me as the whorls on my fingertips, the haphazard lie of my hair, the sound of my own breath. He grinned when he noticed I was awake, a sharp bright thing as effective now as it was the first time I saw it. It was his greeting, his answer when I asked personal questions, and a sadder one, his goodbye when I woke up to lose him again. There he lay, my dream lover. His dirty blond hair spilled over the pillow, soft as silk, and made my hand itch to stroke it. Those grey-blue eyes sparkled with a light that was a little intimidating to meet. Was he laughing with me or at me? I never knew, but it didn’t matter much. He knew I’d stare at them for as long as I could, for the same reason I listened to his music on high rotation, or watch videos of him on social media sites. Liam Hartley, lead singer of The Changelings, visited my dreams every night after I’d had a turn.

  “You’re hurting again.” His brow creased slightly, and he reached out and smoothed my hair back from my face. For a moment, my eyes rolled closed, the stroking sensation, the feel of him close, the wild thyme and sandalwood scent of him, all-consuming. I should question this experience. How come unlike any other dream I’ve ever had, this was a 3D technicolour extravaganza and everything else was always muted and surreal? How come I woke up shocked to not find him next to me, even though my pose, my pillow, my bed were all exactly the same as my dream? That I had to blink several times at the end, let the lonely pall of reality re-situate itself—but I didn’t. I didn’t question his presence, because if lying beside my idol in a dream was a side-effect of my condition or yet another brain glitch, it’s not one I wanted to tamper with.

  I covered his hand with mine, pressing it into my cheek. “It’s OK, I had some of Nan’s tea.”

  “The one that dulls your abilities? You need to stop doing that, Ki.”

  “You say that, but it’s not you that sees the world doubling, tripling, and flickering like a moth on a light globe. Usually Nan’s ‘cures’ are a bunch of dirt and crap, but this actually works. If that’s what it takes to be semi-normal, I’m all for it.”

  “Normal.” His smile twisted into something both scornful and mischievous. “Why on earth would you aspire to something so bloody banal?”

  “Banal sounds terrible to someone like you. Of course, it does. It’s all world tours and groupies. Caviar, champers, and cocaine.”

  “Oh, that gets pretty banal too,” he said, moving in to kiss me again. It was deeper, and when we finally pulled back, we were both breathing heavily. “Not this though.”

  His words were corny and his smile acknowledged that, but it didn’t matter. The heat there, in his eyes and my body, was real, despite them. It felt completely natural for him to roll his body over mine, to grab my hands with his and push them above my head, for his lips to descend, hungrily this time, for the long hard length of his cock to press up between my legs as he thrust against me. I assumed men and women around the world dreamed similar things about Liam every night, and some even lucky enough to experience it, if the tabloids were correct. None of that mattered right now. It was just him and me.

  “Try to hang on,” he rasped. His hands and his body were moving faster. My shirt was shoved up, his tongue trailing over my skin, his lips closing over my nipple. I gasped at the sweet, sore tug of it, and it felt for all the world like something was tugging simultaneously on my clit. He switched from one to the other, until it was all a blur of sensation and we were scrambling free of each other, dragging shirts over our heads, pulling pants off.

  “You’re so beautiful when you’re like this,” he said as he knelt between my bare thighs. His fingers slid through my folds, and then he held them up as evidence. “You get so fucking wet for me. No one else gets like this.” That’s what you have to love about dreams—that a man who had slept his way through the majority of the current pool of supermodels would say I was the most sexually responsive. Logic didn’t matter in the land of the id. “Just hold on, love. I think we both really need this.”

  He crawled over my body, his hair trailing along my skin as he moved, his smile an acknowledgement of my gasp as it brushed over my more sensitive parts. “Open wide, little girl,” he said as he lowered his hips to mine. “I want to be so deep in you, I don’t know where I end and you start.”

  “Liam—”

  I didn’t get to finish my sentence, because his lips slammed down on mine as he worked his way inside me. He swallowed my moans, his body riding mine, and my back began to arch as I felt that delicious stretch.

  “Gods, yes…” he hissed when he was fully seated. “Hold on, love. Hold on.”

  It wasn’t to him he wanted me to grab, though my fingers did wrap around the taut muscles in his hips. He wanted me to hold on to the dream. While I had no other experience with lucid dreaming, I assumed it was all part of my neurological interestingness. I saw shit that wa
sn’t there, my eyesight went weird, and I could control my dreams about the lead singer of my favourite band. But I couldn’t hold tight to the fantasy—clinging too hard, wanting it too badly was a sure way to make me wake up. Which is perhaps why the next thing happened.

  I was swept away in a tide of sensation, listening to the shudder of his breath, smelling the wild scent of him all around me, feeling his mouth and teeth on my neck, when he said the words.

  “Need you so much, Ki. Love you.”

  My eyes snapped open. My body was too caught up in the rapidly cresting wave of pleasure that when he pulled back, resting on his hands above me and gazing down with a look of pure tenderness, all I could do was gasp in surprise and at the feel of him thrusting inside me.

  That’s how I always knew it was a dream. No one had ever said those words to me, ever.

  “Stay with me, Ki,” he said, his brows knotting with concentration, with sweet pain as his strokes grew faster. He raced now, trying to slam his body into mine, grinding into my clit on the down stroke, and it felt so good. Pleasure bloomed like some kind of velvety blossom each time our bodies connected, but it wasn’t enough. He dropped down lower, his lips nipping at mine as I wondered if sex was ever this good in real life, since my previous experiences had always been fumbling, awkward, and uncomfortable affairs.

  “Kira…” he panted as my eyes became transfixed by the shades of blond and brown in his hair. I stroked a strand, and the feel of it slipping through my fingers was somehow more real than the sex.

  “Kira!”

  My focus snapped back to Liam when he pulled my hand away, shoving it down on the bed, his lips now only centimetres from mine.

  “We’re coming for you,” he said. He shifted slowly above me, twisting his spine like a snake, spiking me through with those grey eyes. “Soon.”

  3