A Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K. Hamilton Page A

piece of cloth was too much. I wanted him inside me, wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything or anyone.
    Then something floated down from the mirror. It was a tiny black speck, but it held my attention, compelled it. It got closer, and I could see that it was a small spider, hanging from a silken thread. I watched the spider float slowly to Alistair’s shoulder. The spider was small and black and shiny like patent leather. My body was cooler, my head clearer. Jeremy had managed to get something through to me. I knew now that the magician on the other end of the spell had kept them all trapped outside the house.
    I felt the smooth head of Alistair’s penis slip around the edge of the panties, touching my swollen wetness. It made me cry out, but I could still talk, still think. Now if I couldn’t get away, it really was going to be rape. “Stop it, Alistair, stop it!” I struggled to get out from under him, but he was too big, too heavy. I was trapped. He started to push inside me. I got a hand between his groin and mine. He could have penetrated me, but it seemed to distract him. He fumbled at my hand, trying to move it, so he could finish.
    I screamed, “Jeremy!”
    Alistair and I fought over where my hands were, and I glimpsed the mirror. It was full of grey, swirling fog. It shivered, rippling like water. It bowed out like a bubble. It was only then that I knew that the magician was sidhe. He or she was hiding themselves from me, but the mirrors, that was sidhe magic. Then Alistair won the fight and slid the tip of himself inside me. I cried out, and it was half protest and half pleasure. My mind didn’t want this, but the oil still rode my body. I screamed, “No!” but my hips twitched under him, trying to help him slide inside me. I wanted, needed him to be inside me, to feel his naked body inside of mine. Still, I screamed, “No!”
    Alistair flinched and pulled out of me the small distance he’d won, rising to his knees, brushing at his back. He came away with a small smear of crimson. He’d crushed the spider. Another small black spider crawled down his arm. He batted it away. Two more spiders crawled over his shoulders. He tried to touch the middle of his own back and turned like a dog chasing its tail, and I saw his back. The skin had split open, and a wave of tiny black spiders poured out. They swarmed over him like black water, a moving, biting second skin. He screamed, clawing at his back, crushing some of them, but there were always more, until he was a moving mass of them. They poured into his open mouth as he shrieked, and he choked, and still he screamed.
    All the mirrors were pulsing, breathing, the glass stretching out and in like something elastic and alive. I heard a man’s voice in my head: “Get under the bed, now.” I didn’t argue. I rolled off the bed and crawled under it. The red sheets spilled down over the edge, hiding everything but a thin sliver of light.
    There was a sound of breaking glass, like a thousand windows breaking all at once. Alistair’s screams vanished under the sound of falling glass. The glass burst on the carpet like brittle hail, a tinkling, sharp sound.
    Silence filled the room by degrees, as the glass settled over the room. There was a sound of splintering wood. I couldn’t see it, but I thought it was the door. “Merry, Merry!” It was Jeremy.
    Roane yelled, “Merry, dear God.”
    I crawled to the edge of the bed and lifted the rim of the sheet to see the floor glittering silver. I called, “I’m here. I’m here.” I reached my hand out from under the bed, waving it, but unable to move farther without getting cut on the glass.
    A hand gripped mine, and someone laid a suit jacket over the glass so that Roane could pull me out from under the bed. It wasn’t until he was cradling me in his arms that I realized I was still covered in Branwyn’s Tears, and