The Barbed Rose. Gail Dayton

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СКАЧАТЬ it slammed into her with a force that brought her high on her knees, bowing her backward in an impossible arc as she screamed with the near-forgotten pleasure of it.

      The magic swept every inch of her, a storm scouring her end-to-end with delight, blasting open paths that had withered shut over the winter. Creating new ones.

      Dragging her in its wake, the magic roared back into Joh. As Kallista tumbled toes to nose in the wave, there was a sort of wrenching, of something twisting aside or tearing open, and Joh cried out. Goddess, she’d forgotten.

      She reached for him to soothe his pain and he was there, with her, riding the magic. She tasted his fear, breathed in his desperation, his need to make things right. She saw the colors of his soul, though she couldn’t have matched them to any tints she knew—colors of loyalty, passion, loneliness, honesty, deep and agonizing remorse….

      Kallista felt the magic swelling. Something new. She caught Joh tight, wrapping him in her unseen embrace, whispering wordless, voiceless reassurance as the magic whipped across the skin-to-skin contact into Torchay.

      He cried out, knees buckling, though Kallista thought he somehow managed to stay upright. The magic lashed them with pleasure, tearing sounds from three throats, but it had not finished with them. Kallista reached out as Torchay spun past, brought him into the web and knotted him there, adding his booming strength to the harmony they made as the magic swelled yet again.

      It leapt across the gap to Obed, increasing the pleasure fourfold with the addition of the fourth. His shout drowned them all out and he fell to his knees. Kallista barely had time to bind him into their knotted chorus before the magic expanded again, spinning outward until she thought she would leave pieces of her soul scattered across all Adara.

      She fought to keep the men whole. They were helpless and vulnerable without magic of their own and she shielded them with layers of herself.

      Then the magic crashed into yet another, and Kallista tasted Fox. He was cold, worried and falling to his knees in snow as he shoved his fist in his mouth to stifle the shout of delight, but he was alive. Was he in danger? Kallista had no time to tell, barely enough time to pull him safely into the bonds, before the magic poured out of Fox and into Stone. Who fell full length on his face in the snow and shouted loud enough to wake the dead.

      Laughing, Kallista scooped him up, wove him into place with the others, ready now as the magic rolled on to find Aisse. She was sleeping, somewhere dark and smoky but safe, seeming to think she dreamed when the magic first caught her up. She woke only as it spun them tighter in the ecstasy it made.

      Kallista held on fiercely, twining their separate selves into a glorious whole—Torchay’s strength, Obed’s truth, Fox’s order, Stone’s joy, Aisse’s faith, Kallista’s will…Joh’s vision. All her marked ones were there.

      The magic pushed them, pulled, whirled and tumbled them as it rose to explosive heights. Again and again, Kallista hauled it back, building the power and the pleasure with each check of its escape while it bounced again through each one of them. Her pleasure fed theirs, which fed back to her and into the magic which then spilled back through each of them to push the cycle higher still.

      “Goddess!” Someone screamed it, or maybe all of them did. And the magic exploded out of Kallista’s control.

      It blasted through them in a seven-fold sexual climax before it erupted into a cloud of glittering fallout visible to every naitan in Adara who might chance to look toward Arikon. Then it drifted slowly down, folding back into its separate homes.

      Kallista blinked, alone inside her body again, and found herself seated on the floor, her arms draped across Joh’s naked legs, her face buried in his lap. Torchay sat slumped against her, weighing her down, and Obed lay curled on his side a short distance away. She shoved at Torchay and he shifted his weight off her, leaning bonelessly against the chair holding Joh.

      “Beware of what you ask for,” Torchay mumbled through lips that didn’t seem to be working quite right.

      “I asked for nothing.” Obed sounded bitter, his voice choked with some hidden emotion. He’d told her more than once that he wanted nothing to do with sex by magic.

      Kallista wanted to go to him, to bring him closer, but she couldn’t move from her spot. She stretched out her leg, touched him with her bare toes, and he flinched away.

      “I’ll kill him.” Torchay lifted a hand toward the sword hilt over his shoulder, then let it fall again. “Later. When I’ve rested up a bit.”

      “Don’t kill him just yet, please.” Kallista rolled her head to one side and Joh gasped. The chains rattled and she realized his hands were tangled in her hair. He started to pull them back, but Kallista managed to close a hand over his wrist and prevent it.

      “I hope Fox and Stone manage to get themselves out of the snow before they get frostbite,” she said, her mind not quite turning all its gears yet. They were alive. They were safe.

      “What are they doin’ in the snow anyway?” Torchay raised his hand again, and this time managed to push his half-dry curls out of his face by means of lowering his head to meet his hand.

      “Hunting, I think. That was the impression I got.” Her thumb made little circles on the skin inside Joh’s wrist. “I imagine they scared off whatever they were hunting and everything else within hearing distance.”

      “Aye, likely.” Torchay opened an eye, then both of them, meeting Kallista’s gaze. “They seemed well, safe enough.”

      She settled her cheek more comfortably against Joh’s thigh. “They did, didn’t they?” The box full of fear had vanished from her mind.

      Torchay sighed, pushing away from the chair to sit unsupported. “Might as well not have bothered with bathing. Soon as I change my trousers, I’ll get the key from the lieutenant.” He shook his head at her. “Do you always have to pet the new ones?”

      Was she? Kallista lifted her head a fraction and saw her hand stroking over Joh’s thigh, her other caressing his wrist. “I suppose I must.” She slanted a look at Torchay. “Did I not pet you enough when you were first marked?”

      “We were busy escaping from Tsekrish, as I recall.” He leered playfully at her, a bit of Stone rubbed off on him, perhaps. “But if you want to make up for it, I won’t object.”

      She lifted a hand weighted down with invisible rocks and pointed at the suite door. “Go get the key.”

      “After I change.” He crawled to his hands and knees and used Joh’s chair to pull himself to his feet. In silence, Obed hauled himself upright and staggered after him. Kallista bit her lip, watching him go, then put her worry out of her mind. If Obed refused to share what troubled him, she couldn’t resolve it on her own.

      If things didn’t get better, something would have to be done. She didn’t want to let him go. Besides her personal feelings, they needed the magic he carried, but if he couldn’t bear to stay, she would have to do it. That could wait, for now.

      Her neck scarcely seemed strong enough to connect head to body, much less actually raise her head from its very comfortable spot, but she forced it to do so anyway. “Joh?”

      His cheeks were wet with tears that squeezed from beneath his tight-closed eyelids. When she whispered his name, he raised a shoulder and wiped his face across it. “Sweet Goddess—” His voice rasped like СКАЧАТЬ