Fae Touched Read online

  Fae Touched

  Northern Creatures Book Five

  Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Contents

  The Worlds of

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Death Kissed

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  The Worlds of

  About the Author

  The Worlds of

  Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Smart Urban Fantasy:

  * * *

  Northern Creatures

  Monster Born

  Vampire Cursed

  Elf Raised

  Wolf Hunted

  Fae Touched

  Death Kissed

  God Forsaken

  Magic Scorned (coming soon)

  Genre-bending Science Fiction about

  love, family, and dragons:

  * * *

  World on Fire

  Series one

  Fate Fire Shifter Dragon

  Games of Fate

  Flux of Skin

  Fifth of Blood

  Bonds Broken & Silent

  All But Human

  Men and Beasts

  The Burning World

  * * *

  Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories

  * * *

  Series Two

  Witch of the Midnight Blade

  Witch of the Midnight Blade Part One

  Witch of the Midnight Blade Part Two

  Witch of the Midnight Blade Part Three

  * * *

  Witch of the Midnight Blade: The Complete Series

  * * *

  Series Three

  World on Fire

  Call of the Dragonslayer (coming soon)

  Hot Contemporary Romance:

  * * *

  The Quidell Brothers

  Thomas’s Muse

  Daniel’s Fire

  Robert’s Soul

  Thomas’s Need

  * * *

  Quidell Brothers Box Set

  Includes:

  Thomas’s Muse

  Daniel’s Fire

  Roberts’s Soul

  Copyright 2020 Kris Austen Radcliffe

  All rights reserved.

  * * *

  Published by

  Six Talon Sign Fantasy & Futuristic Romance

  * * *

  Edited by Annetta Ribken

  Copyedited by Juli Lilly

  “Northern Creatures” artwork created by Christina Rausch

  Cover to be designed by Covers by Christian

  Plus a special thanks to my Proofing Crew.

  * * *

  Copyright notice: All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events, programs, services, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  For requests, please e-mail: [email protected].

  * * *

  First electronic edition, January 2020

  Version: 4.15.2021

  * * *

  ISBN: 978-1-939730-73-2

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  Chapter 1

  It took a full fifty years beyond my rebirth before I was able to pass as a man. Some changes stemmed from elven magic spurring my body to heal. Some happened on their own as my more living parts grew into my more dead. But mostly the changes happened because I left my father behind.

  He found a ship after I left him on the Arctic ice, and fed the captain a sad tale of pity and victimhood. Years later, the elves found records. I learned the day before I left to join the Union Army that my father had pinned several murders on me, the son he called vile and monstrous.

  I never murdered. Nor was I eight feet tall, or as ugly as he described. All were lies he manufactured as a way to strike at me from beyond his grave.

  Those lies were the reason I used the Civil War to test the limits of my invulnerability—and the limits of my personal misanthropy, all of which culminated in my attempted suicide-by-witch.

  That moment ended when Rose wrapped her toddler arms around my neck. She didn’t believe my father’s lies, so for her, I set them aside.

  Yet every morning, I was corpse-cold. The elves tattooed over my scars with their beauty, but underneath, my body continued to hitch and halt.

  Sally came more for Rose than for me, and I came more for whiskey than for Sally. She said she didn’t mind my cold touch, but she did. Then she left.

  Benta wanted a wall of misery, and I was happy to oblige.

  At one hundred fifty years past my father, I made an effort to live. University reminded me that I was more than my cold flesh. Kindness is its own beauty, and for the first time in my life, women found me acceptable. But Annie was a pixie of a woman, fine-boned and tiny, and I am an ogre of a man. We did not fit together. Not physically. She cried. I cried. And our relationship was no more. Savannah, whom I also loved, tolerated my morning corpse-likeness until I refused to use my intimidating bulk to further her family’s automobile dealership fortune. I returned to Alfheim, richer in worldly experience, but poorer of heart.

  The eighties and nineties allowed for some easing of my loneliness. I could pass as a professional athlete, and as long as I was warm, I did not lack company.

  I still missed Annie. And Sally. And I occasionally wondered what would have happened if my father had not destroyed the female companion he had promised me. We could have commiserated in our ugliness. But instead of a sister, he built a brother more monstrous than I. What if he’d inflicted his horror on a woman? It’s best that I am now an only child.

  My father told me that I did not deserve someone to ease my suffering. I did not deserve anyone who might listen and offer a touch. I’d had more than two centuries of the universe demonstrating to me that even though Victor Frankenstein was more of a monster than I, though he had lied and manipulated, he had—that one time—told the truth.

  Yet some part of me still hoped. Which part, I did not know. The spirits of the men from whom I was molded had long ago entered The Land of the Dead. But something remained. That hope wanted to set aside the self-loathing and the rage. And that hope fell fully, utterly in love.

 
I am not a fool. Falling in love is simply the discovery of connection. Staying in love is the motion of life. Motion takes work. It takes sacrifice, the kind and quantity of which is determined by the quality of that initial fall. Yet I hope.

  When Ellie Jones wrapped her arms around my ice-cold neck, when she cried against my shoulder in the frozen blizzard winds, when she whispered “You’re here,” that hope blossomed into need. We had common ground in sacrifice, Ellie and I. We had common ground in loneliness. We had each other.

  And I would fight every mundane and magical on Earth to keep her safe.

  Chapter 2

  “I remember everything,” I said. Every blink and blush when she noticed me noticing her. The pain radiating from the tight, stiff bruise on her leg. Her enjoyment of the spaghetti dinner I made. Her semi-confusion when she told me her cottage had once manifested amongst the kangaroos of Alice Springs. Her willingness to help not only me, but the elves, even though not one knew she existed. The loneliness in her eyes when she said I would forget her each evening.

  Every night, the boulder of her world came crashing down into her life. Every morning, she fought to roll it back up the same forgotten hill.

  This time, she wasn’t alone. I carried her through the snow toward the candles and the warmth of her cottage, and my hound who waited inside.

  She shook in my arms.

  “You’re shivering.” I crossed the blizzard-swept yard toward her home. I needed to set her down. I was…

  … then my foot crossed the threshold of her cottage’s door.

  I hadn’t seen the magic. How had I missed the magic? But I knew—the blizzard. My focus on Ellie. The distraction of my dog. It was here in silky aurora sheets, the green-red magic of the fae. Of things living and alive and bursting with creation. All that breathed on this world—air, water, fire, or ice—all that walked or swam, flew or fluttered, unfurled and reached for the sky, was here on the surface of the bubble surrounding Ellie’s cottage.

  And for a flash of a split-second, my most feral moments: I hunted hare under the blinding Arctic sun. The raw heat of my sunburn combined with the biting frost of the northern wind and I was the air. The ice. The crackling gravel under my boots. I drank it in. I gnawed on the land’s dry peat. I growled as my semi-corpse body tested the hollow limits of hunger. I reveled in the bone-deep need to howl with the wolves.

  Feral magic made of tooth and bone, stem and leaf. Magic that was love and power and sex. It all roiled through me, body and soul.

  I shook more violently than Ellie’s shivers. My head swam. I swayed through the full balance of nature, its weight and its transitions between seasons of birth and death.

  Marcus Aurelius barked. Ellie yelped and clung to my neck as if she gripped a floating log on a stormy sea.

  I somehow managed not to trip.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I…” Never in my life had I come up against such overwhelming magic. I set her down. “The door…”

  I was completely through the bubble. My head now reeled in a post-shock kind of way, not actively adding to the spinning but more slowing down after the initial spin.

  “Coming inside never affected Chihiro.” We’d come into a small foyer area with a stone floor and a lovely ornate wax-rubbed sideboard. An umbrella stand of woven reeds and vines rested in the corner, and wall-mounted hooks held a couple of coats.

  Ellie touched my chest. “We’ll figure it out.”

  I looked down just as she reached to close the door behind us. She stretched around me, still shivering but unwilling to move far enough away to allow the cottage to warm her body, and the neckline of her nightgown swung away from her chest.

  The entire gown billowed out in front of her and all that soft pale cotton lifted off her breasts.

  I stand just under seven feet tall. I always look down at everyone around me, even the elves. And it wasn’t as if I’d never seen breasts before.

  My brain locked up. Just for a second. I realized a truth I think I’d understood every evening right before I forgot about her. The same truth I felt in my bones every single time I realized I was battling concealment enchantments: The enchantments reset nothing. All they did was disguise the labels I used to think about my memories. Without those labels, without those words, I couldn’t find in my own head my focus.

  So it brewed unfettered and unchained, unconsidered and primal; much the same way I’d been when I awoke on that table in my father’s faraway lab.

  But this time, my body wasn’t full of pain and rage. This time, I’d walked through a fae portal that was all things alive.

  I lifted her so high her head almost touched the ceiling and buried my face between her wonderfully soft breasts.

  Part of me, the part I trained up after the elves found me—that rational muscle I’d worked and processed and given every psychological tool I found in magical ways and mundane books—yelled No! You are huge. You are terrifying. You’re ugly and a monster and outside normal and you damned well better make sure that at every step along this journey the woman you’re with has an escape route.

  I never asked for touch. I always made it clear that I was available if a woman wished to touch me.

  But I needed Ellie. I—

  “Frank.” Her voice was husky and vibrant and she kissed my forehead and my cheek as she wrapped herself around ice-cold me as if she was the morning sun come to warm life back into my bones. She pointed into the cottage. “Bed,” she said, and…

  My hound chose that moment to shake off the snow. Ice flew everywhere, hitting me in the face, bouncing down the neck of Ellie’s gown, clinking against the glass of the cottage’s big window, even flying so far into the little house it landed as loud pops in the fireplace.

  “Marcus Aurelius!” I pulled my face away from the sweet warmth of Ellie’s neck. “Do you mind?”

  Ellie giggled.

  My dog woofed as he padded toward the stone hearth, open both front and back, that dominated the main room. On the other side of the hearth, I saw the outline of a bathtub. On this side, a settee and a couple of upholstered chairs had been pushed against the wall to make room for the mattress that took up most of the space in front of the fire.

  Ellie shivered. I’d let the fae magic uncork the genie under my rational brain and now the woman I loved was shaking because I wasn’t making the heat of a living man.

  I set her down. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m cold.”

  Her mouth opened, then snapped shut. Her eyes narrowed slightly. “You were in the blizzard.”

  “The fire will help.” I reached for her hand but pulled back when I realized what I was doing. “You’re shivering.”

  She looked over her shoulder at the fire. When she looked back at me, her face clearly showed that she was processing all this.

  Not that she was confused. Or annoyed. Or even that she was surprised. Only that this was not what she’d expected—or wanted, more likely—and that sorting how to deal with my chilly body was something she now had to do.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I always said I was sorry when a woman became fully aware of my lack-of-heat. When it sunk in that it wasn’t simply a little chilled flesh in the mornings, or cold fingers after coming in from outside.

  This was baked into my bones, though “baked” wasn’t the best term. More like freeze-dried.

  Her lips thinned. “I’ll get towels.” She kissed my chin and darted toward the corner that must lead into the bathroom.

  I got a quick jab-like impression that the magic wanted me to move away from the door. “What?” I asked. Was the cottage talking to me? Like Sal?

  No response.

  The whole moment felt odd, and distracted, and full of an embarrassed me. And a cold Ellie. An Ellie who had thought she’d have a warm me with her tonight.

  My head—my heart, my body—were reeling.

  Our canine emperor circled three times then curled up on a big cushion between the fire and the mattre
ss that took up most of the main room’s floor space. Cold leaked through the big window as small, whistling rattles. The wall with the sideboard opened into an arch leading into a kitchen. On the other side of the cottage, to the side of the hearth, a rickety-looking spiral staircase wound up into the shadows.

  Ellie’s home wasn’t all that different than my cabin. Smaller. Less modern, but it did its job.

  I pulled off my soaked boots and jacket, and picked my way through the pillows, blankets, cushions, magazines, books, and a wooden chest or two surrounding the mattress.

  The fire crackled. I breathed and did my best to calm the lightheadedness caused by the fae magic swimming in my mind.

  Maybe I shouldn’t fight it, I thought. Or maybe I should. I didn’t know. But wasn’t that the point of life?

  The pile of blankets shimmered in lovely greens and blues as if I’d found the freshest, clearest lake. Several more wooden boxes lined the head of the mattress like an uneven mountain range of painted and carved wonder. A vase of lovely pink roses sat on one, and Ellie’s melon-sized camera seer-stone on another.