Winter's Tale (8 page)

December cursed silently. The girl had to
mean Hans’s middle and last names. They were the only ones December
could have revealed while she was sleeping.

The librarian crossed her arms. “You know I
need four before my reward is guaranteed. Now I have to call the
queen for more dream potion. Worse, your behavior made the girl
suspicious.”

“God, Mom, why does it matter? You can’t
force that man to love you. Even if you could do it magically, it
wouldn’t be real love. Don’t you realize your plan is effed
up?”

December hadn’t known Brianne had the nerve
for this sort of speech . . . or the intelligence. Her mother
wasn’t going to thank her for it. Her eyes narrowed with hot scorn.
“You’re an idiot,” she said.

More than her mother’s glare caused Brianne
to back away. “Please,” she said, trying to retreat but stopped by
a reading table. “Can’t you summon the queen by yourself?”

“You know I wouldn’t have to do this if you’d
been able to attract Hans.
You
could have gotten his names
for me. Since you were hopeless at that, the least you can do is
help with the ritual.”

December couldn’t believe what she was
hearing. Mrs. Blake had wanted her daughter to seduce Hans in order
to nab him for herself? That was effed up, all right. But maybe now
wasn’t the moment to dwell on that. Doing a ritual sounded ominous.
She gnawed her lip as Mrs. Blake walked behind her fancy carved
checkout desk. From the shelf where she stored her scrapbook, she
drew a large milky rock. The hunk of quartz filled her arms like a
baby. It must have been heavy. She set it on the counter with a
loud
thunk
.

This had to be the crystal Miss Westin
mentioned in her sticky note. December had been picturing a cute
quartz point on a chain. This crystal wasn’t cute. This crystal
meant business.

“Get the chalk to draw the circles,” Mrs.
Blake ordered her daughter. “We need Araun here and gone before
first light.”

Brianne was staring at the quartz like it
horrified her.

“Chop, chop,” Mrs. Blake prompted.

Her stupor broken and her courage spent,
Brianne dashed off. As she did, the librarian came around the desk
to roll back the worn carpet. December stood on her toes to see
better. Old chalk smears marked the dun gray linoleum under it. She
shuddered as she made out a pentagram. Didn’t people use them to
protect themselves from demons? Was this Queen Araun so evil she
needed to be trapped?

Still working on rolling away the carpet,
Mrs. Blake made creaky-joint, out-of-breath noises. She hardly
seemed up to controlling a faerie queen. The librarian wasn’t
stupid, but neither was she a genius. Hell, her teenage daughter
was her flunky. That didn’t strike December as a sign of
competence.

More like she was a bully.

I have to warn Hans
, she thought.
Before Araun shows u
p.

December suspected the queen who cursed him
had her own reasons for answering Mrs. Blake’s summons.

~

Maybe because of what she’d just learned, the
cemetery seemed spookier. The moon was bright, but wispy clouds
blurred it. Shadows that seemed to have no source flickered past
the edges of her vision.

“Rest in peace,” she muttered to the bodies
she hurried over, fighting shivers from more than the temperature.
In her present mood, even the stone ducks on little Buster’s grave
appeared menacing.

When a growl trickled through the darkness
she understood what people meant by jumping out of their skins. She
froze and looked around but didn’t see anything.

She’d probably just heard a branch creaking.
Or a seriously pissed off squirrel.

She jogged faster, having spotted Hans’s
statue up ahead. Was it silly to feel safer because of that? He was
stone after all. He couldn’t save her from killer ducks.

She’d braced for the sugary white marble to
glow like it had the first night. Maybe she shouldn’t have. Of all
the monuments she’d passed, his seemed the most lifeless.

“Hans,” she whispered, as if she could draw
his attention with a hiss.

She stepped closer, unaccountably gripped by
dread.

“Oh no!” she cried when she got a clear look
at him.

His stone was cracked. A jagged fissure had
crawled up his slightly bent right leg. The split extended from his
ankle to halfway through his thigh muscle.

She moaned in horror, falling to her knees in
front of him.

Had her doubt done this to him?

“I believe in you,” she whispered, gingerly
touching his cold calves. “Don’t give up, Hans. Please try one more
time for me.”

Nothing changed. The statue remained dead
stone. Could her dream self get through to him? She didn’t see how
she’d fall asleep in the frigid air—and certainly not on short
notice. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been so quick to flush Brianne’s
disgusting apple. At least the potion in it had worked.

Don’t regret what you can’t undo
, she
told herself, advice she’d had occasion to use before.

Her knees were melting the frost beneath
them, dampening tonight’s gray-and-white striped pajamas. She
pushed to her feet and looked into Hans’s sad-lovely face. Never
mind Helen of Troy. A thousand ships would be privileged to sink
for him.

With a silent prayer that she wouldn’t make
the crack worse, she stepped onto his pedestal.

“I’m here,” she murmured, stroking his cold
smooth cheek. “I haven’t given up.”

She pressed her mouth to his sculpted lips.
They didn’t warm even a little. Ignoring how her heart sank at
that, she closed her eyes and played her last card.

Hans,
she thought.
Hans William
Winter. It’s December Worth. I ask that you hear me.

The gust that blew across the grass sounded
more like simple wind than a sigh.
I need you in my life
,
she insisted.
Don’t leave me alone out here
.

Another cracking noise rang out. December
sucked in a breath as a chunk of stone fell from Han’s front. It
hit and broke on the surface between her feet.

“Damn it,” she said, trembling all over.

She was terrified to look down to check for
damage. Actually, she was afraid to move.

She did, though, and found the only thing
that had fallen was his fig leaf. His cock and balls were
uncovered. His shaft was thick, its length curving as it hung. If
he’d been sculpted for real, she’d have said the artist exaggerated
his manly charms. Few males had quite this heft when they were at
rest.

She remembered her impression from the first
time she’d kissed him: that she’d left his statue with a slight
boner.

“Um,” she said, peering into the marble face.
“Is this supposed to be a hint?”

The motionless stone features weren’t giving
her any clues.

Not knowing what else to try and aware time
was of the essence, December stepped off the low pedestal to the
ground. She ran her hand down his side, from the graceful curve of
his ribs to the tempting
V
of his Adonis belt muscles. She
wished she’d asked his dream self if his statue could feel kisses.
Sadly, she’d been too busy rolling around on his blue blanket.

“Do you feel this?” she asked softly. “Do you
know how beautiful you are to me?”

She rubbed his hip and the silky bulk of his
thigh muscle. Her knees were sensitive, so maybe his were too. She
trailed her touch around his stone kneecap, her thumb and
fingertips ever so gently squeezing them. Thank the Lord nothing
more crumbled. A shadow flickered between his legs—a trick of the
light or maybe this was working.

Time to bring out the big guns
, she
thought. She gave her hair a hasty couple of plaits to keep it
behind her shoulders, trying her best not to dwell on the craziness
of this plan.

If anyone came out here with a camera phone,
she’d be viral on YouTube before she could say
Robert
Pattinson
.

She soothed herself that no one was here but
her and Hans. And she’d better act fast before that changed. Who
knew how long it took to summon an evil queen?

She rolled one last glance to Hans’s
face.

“If my tongue freezes to your penis, I’ll
make you pay,” she promised.

Only half kidding, she experimented with a
quick lick on his shaft. Her tongue didn’t stick. Hans’s stone skin
was cool but not icy.

If he were aware of what she did, this would
be the most tormenting sexual tease ever.

An unexpected wave of heat rolled through
her. She guessed she liked the idea of pleasuring a lover who
couldn’t move one muscle.

She licked again, this time at greater
length, then dragged her face across his package. Her cheeks and
mouth brushed surfaces as satiny as skin. She tongued up one side
of his hanging organ and down the other. A subtle tingle, one she
hoped she wasn’t imagining, shot from the marble phallus into her
lips.

She eased back, her heart pounding. Weren’t
the veins in his shaft thicker? Wasn’t the head more lifted, and
didn’t the crest flare wider?

Knowing he’d feel her there if he felt her
anywhere, she lapped that most sensitive of curves.

She could swear the slit was deeper as she
dragged her tongue over it. She brought her hands up to cup his
balls, their roundness inviting her to rub. Her thumbs found the
back of his penis. As they stroked the length of his raphe, her
body tightened with arousal.

It was as if her flesh responded to the
pleasure that she gave his.

She backed her mouth off to consider this.
Maybe Hans couldn’t bear for her to stop. His stone cock jerked, a
definite twitch of movement that brought it to half-mast—as if it
were sitting up and begging for more kisses.

“Oh yes,” she crooned throatily. “That’s what
I need from you.”

She drove her lips slowly up his shaft. A
little pulse woke inside, his strut now parallel to the ground. He
couldn’t thrust. He could only take what she gave. December kept
her mouth on him now, pushing in, pulling back, warming him with
her tongue and lips and his own helpless responses. She sensed him
straining to get more without being able to move at all.

She came as close to deep-throating a man’s
erection as she had in her life so far.

One hand seemed sufficient to play with his
plumped-up balls. That decided, she ran the other back over his
buttocks.

Though they didn’t give, they seemed to
vibrate as she squeezed them. Still sucking him with her mouth, she
tickled her finger along the crack between his butt cheeks. Up and
down she went, from the dimples at the top, down between his legs,
and forward to his balls.

How he must have wanted to clench his
muscles, to push his cock farther toward her throat. Or maybe he
wished he could relax. The pad of her middle finger found the tight
creases of his anus. She bet he’d like her to give it more than a
glancing rub, bet he’d love her to push it in to the first knuckle.
He enjoyed her stimulating what she could. She couldn’t have said
exactly when his shaft moved, but it stood higher than horizontal
now.

She might, just maybe, be tasting the faint
sweetness of pre-cum.

The hint increased as she sealed her lips
beneath the flare and fluttered her tongue across. A groan echoed
in her head that she didn’t think was hers.

Come alive for me
, she thought.
Let
me prove how much I care
.

The veins in his penis suddenly stood out
more. She felt them like little rivers beneath her lips. An image
came to her of hands fisting in her curls, pulling her back from
him. He wanted more than she was giving him. Uncertain if the
thought came from him or her, she knew she had to tear her clothes
off or go crazy.

She was too overheated to hesitate, gripped
by the fever of wanting him. The buttons of her top seemed to fly
open.

Belatedly she remembered why she’d come
here.

“Hans,” she said. “The school librarian has
your names. Her daughter overheard me repeating them in my sleep.
They’ve got a crystal and they’re summoning Queen Araun.”

Every sound around her fell silent. The wind
dropped away, and the forest creatures stilled. The trees
themselves seemed to hold their breath while he considered this
development.

“Should I try to stop them?” she asked. “Bang
on the window or throw a rock through it?”

She wished she’d thought of this before. If
she disrupted their ritual, they couldn’t summon his enemy. She’d
buy time until she could come up with a more permanent
solution.

Hans didn’t agree. An image of herself being
chucked out of Rackham in her pajamas sprang to life in her mind.
Tall iron gates shut behind her with a clang. Locked out, she
clutched the bars forlornly.

“I’d find a way back,” she insisted. “I’m
resourceful. I wouldn’t abandon you.”

Leaves rustled, followed by another picture
of her tearing off her clothes and climbing onto him.

“Hans, we don’t have time for that.”

The night seemed to gather closer, as if Hans
were calling every scrap of magic in it to him. The sound of stone
grating across stone stood her hair on end. The left leg of his
statue shifted six inches in one lurch, planting his bare foot in a
wider stance on the pedestal. Though she had faith he was in there,
the movement stunned her formerly solid sense of reality.

“You’re damaged,” she said breathily. “I
don’t know if you can tell, but your statue’s right leg is cracked.
I don’t want to put stress on it.”

This time she saw an image of a princess
throwing a snakeskin onto a fire.

“I have no idea what that means,” she said in
frustration.

December Worth
, came his voice in her
mind.
I call you to desire me
.

A wall of excitation crashed over her, like
she’d stepped under the Niagara Falls of arousal. She whimpered at
the strength of it, at the ache that expanded through her pussy. It
was all she could do not to grab her crotch and rub.
Hard up
didn’t cover it. This was the longing
he
felt, a craving to
come so huge no one could have withstood it.