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elrhiarhodanTitle: The Blood of Helios – Vampire World Chapter V - The Lady And The Tiger
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elrhiarhodan
Fandom: White Collar
Rating: R
Characters: Neal Caffrey, June, Elizabeth Burke, Peter Burke
Spoilers: None
Warnings/Triggers: None
Word Count: ~ 3000
Summary: Vampire Peter, Shapeshifter El and Neal, who is something more than he ever expected to be. Chapter V - In the Summer Queen's Garden
This story is dedicated togyzym who has held my hand and getting the suck-voice to shut up. I couldn’t ask for a better friend. Beta’d by the awesome riazendira. Credit to petronelle for the limerick. All mistakes are mine. Feedback is adored.
Prologue | Chapter I | Chapter II | Chapter III | Chapter IV
______________________
Blood of Helios – Chapter V - The Lady and the Tiger
Elizabeth Burke was a terrifying woman; she watched him like he was prey. He tried charming her and ended up putting his foot so far into his mouth that he could taste the metal of the tracking anklet on the back of his tongue. He started to stammer an apology when he saw her hands and eyes start to change.
“You’re not sidhe - you’re a shapeshifter? Neal was awed. He had never met one - shapeshifters were rarely seen outside of their packs or prides. That one had married a vampire astonished him.
“How did you meet?” Somehow that seemed to be the right thing to say. Elizabeth’s whole face turned mischievous. The tale she told seemed like something out of a book bound in leather and gold, something that Neal would have either illustrated or stolen. Or both.
Elizabeth told him story after story - their strange courtship, how Reese Hughes, the millennia-old Whryccrid master first refused to let Peter marry her. “It was only with the intervention of June…” she bowed her head to the Lady in a gesture of grateful respect “… that Reese allowed Peter and I to wed.”
“Peter has always been my favorite.” June sighed.
“You’ve known Captain Burke for a long time?” Neal was curious.
“I’ve know Peter since my eldest girl was an infant - about three hundred and fifty years, now. He was a raw cadet back then, newly made, but you could see the promise in him.”
Neal looked at Elizabeth - as if seeking confirmation that such a thing could be possible, that the imposing Captain Burke was once not so imposing. Elizabeth shrugged and smiled. “June - tell Neal how you met Peter.”
June poured everyone a fresh cup of coffee, and settled back in her chair. “It was the night before the Summer Solstice, and Byron and I were getting ready to celebrate the birth of our firstborn, Ourania. We went to the cellar to fetch the Champagne my mother had laid down when I was born and we saw this pair of glowing red eyes, a wet, pink snout and a set of tusks hiding behind some casks of Amontillado. This creature started to grunt and I wanted to run, I was so frightened. Byron held me still, and then I realized that the poor thing was just as terrified. It wasn’t grunting, it was saying Whryccrid, Whryccrid, get Whryccrid.”
“What was it?” Neal was practically on the edge of his seat.
“It was Jimmy Squarefoot, poor thing. He works for the Whryccrid Kiss, doing odd jobs, scaring the common folk, collecting tithes. But anyway - Jimmy was hiding in our wine cellar and nothing we could do could make him budge. I contacted Reese and he sent Peter to deal with it.” June smiled at the memory.
“Peter arrived, all fangs and elbows. I think he had just gotten his uniform that day … it was so crisp and new, you could still see the trailing bits of thread on the buttons. He was trying so hard to be stern and purposeful, but you could tell that he was so excited to be sent out on such an ‘important mission’. Neal, if you think you were awkward the other night, you were nothing compared to Peter when he tried to introduce himself to Byron and me.”
Elizabeth chucked. “The way Peter tells it, he cut his lip on his fangs when he called you ‘Highness’.”
June laughed, and the roses on the coffee cups once again bloomed. “He didn’t just cut is lip, he cut is tongue and the inside of his mouth. On his own fangs.” June did her best to contain her giggles. Neal and Elizabeth didn’t bother.
When she caught her breath, June continued her tale. “Once he stopped bleeding, he went down to the cellar and called for Jimmy. The poor thing took one look at Peter, saw the Whryccrid insignia on his jacket and grabbed hold of him like a lost child that just found his father.”
Elizabeth interrupted June. “Jimmy Squarefoot’s older then Reese Hughes, but he’s a gentle soul - all four hundred and fifty very ugly pounds of him. You’ll probably meet him, especially if you end up having to do some collection work. Jimmy’s great for getting the kinsman to pay the tithe, but he’d rather write bawdy poetry than break bones. He is a lot easier to work with than a Jack-in-Irons.”
“So you can just imagine - young Peter Burke trying to comfort this ancient monster.” June’s eyes sparkled at the memory. “He actually patted Jimmy on the head and scratched him behind the ears. The poor thing started to cry in gratitude.”
“What had happened to him?” Neal asked.
“It seemed that Jimmy knocked on the wrong door, and interrupted a trio of boggles bedeviling a moneylender. They gave chase, screaming that they’d use him to hunt truffles.”
“That would be difficult, since only female pigs can find them.” Neal was proud of this bit of practical information. June blinked and Elizabeth just snickered. Neal blushed.
June continued. “No matter what Peter said, Jimmy wasn’t budging from the cellar and he wouldn’t let go of poor Peter. By this time, the sun had risen and Peter couldn’t go anywhere, anyway. Peter valiantly tried to stay awake as the sun rose. It was so touching - Jimmy had worked himself into such a state and Peter awkwardly trying to comfort him while desperately trying not to close his eyes. Do you have any idea how difficult it is for even a fully mature vampire to stay awake on the longest day of the year?”
Neal didn’t, but he filed that information away.
“We did all we could to help Peter stay awake and calm poor Jimmy down. Byron opened the Champagne, Mairead brought Ourania to me and we celebrated the day in our wine cellar, with a vampire and a pig monster. It was one of the best Solstices I can remember. Byron performed legerdemain until he was too drunk to remember in which cuff he hid the coins, Peter told dirty limericks and Jimmy finally calmed enough to counter Peter’s limericks with bawdy sonnets about exceedingly hairy, large breasted women. “
“I was so impressed with Peter – not because he stayed awake through nearly sixteen hours of daylight, but because he treated Jimmy so well. He could have behaved quite arrogantly and neither Byron nor I would have given it a second thought. Instead, he talked to Jimmy Squarefoot like an equal, with such grave courtesy. When Peter left with him, I contacted Hughes, and told him that Peter was to be assigned to my court for the next century.”
June smiled wistfully at the memory. “We were all so young then.”
Neal didn’t want June to slip back into melancholy. “Limericks? I can’t imagine Captain Burke telling limericks, let alone dirty ones. He seems so, well, proper.” Neal shook his head in amazement. “Do you remember any of them?”
June thought for a moment. “Let me see…ah. I think one went like this
Neal couldn’t contain himself, he exploded in gales of laughter, and June and Elizabeth joined him. He laughed so hard his ribs began to ache and he got lightheaded. When he fell out of his out of his chair and landed on his ass, the ladies got hysterical. The limerick wasn’t that funny, but Neal’s reaction to it was. It took a good five minutes before they were all able to contain themselves. And when they recovered, all the flowers and trees in the courtyard were in full bloom in response to June’s unrestrained laughter.
Neal looked around in amazement - he had seen evidence of June’s magic several times over the past few days - but only on depictions of flowers, the roses on the tea cups, the flowers on the wallpaper. Out here, in the courtyard, her magic sang to all of the dormant plants, bringing them to joyous life.
June reached out and stroked Neal’s face. “I think this is your doing, dear boy. I don’t know what it is about you, but I haven’t been able to keep my gardens in bloom for a long time.” Neal ducked his head, unaccustomed to both the praise and the touch of a woman.
Elizabeth got up and started to investigate the plants in the pots. She stopped by one ceramic planter filled with a tall flowering plant and buried her face in the purple buds. When she lifted her head, Neal saw that her eyes had changed again - huge blue orbs with slitted pupils almost fully dilated. She rubbed her hands all over her body, twisting and turning, and when she threw her head back and mewled, Neal saw the magic take over her body. Between one breath and another, the woman became an enormous gold and black striped tiger.
“June - what’s wrong with Elizabeth?” The tiger was not behaving like any cat that Neal had ever seen. She was rubbing her head, rolling around, batting at some invisible ball.
June carefully walked around the big cat and looked at the plant that Elizabeth had been sniffing. “Oh, my, it’s catmint, catnip. Elizabeth stuck her face into catnip. She could be like this for hours ... it affects the preternatural differently than the mortal…and that she ingested it while in her human form is going to make it so much worse.”
“You’ve seen this before?” Neal was now in a state of perpetual astonishment.
“Not this exactly, I’m very allergic to cats – we keep the plant around to deter mosquitoes.” June punctuated the truth of that statement with an emphatic sneeze, and a pair of vines twined around Neal’s ankles. He was able to shake them off, but when June sneezed again, they swiftly grew back.
“But it’s fairly common for certain herbs to have exaggerated effects on the preternatural.” June sneezed again, three times in quick succession, and the vines grew – one around Elizabeth’s hind leg connected to Neal’s waist. Elizabeth stretched her legs, nearly yanking Neal off of his feet. By this time, June was sneezing continuously, and had started to back out of the courtyard.
“Neal, I’m sorry – you’re going to have to stay with Elizabeth.” June practically ran back into the palace, slamming the doors shut behind her. Neal thought he heard the snick of a lock turning.
Neal was relieved, at least with June out of the garden, the vines began to disappear, include the heavy one that tethered him to the tiger. But his relief was short-lived; Tiger-Elizabeth stopped playing with the invisible toys and turned her focus on him. Neal froze – his experience with wild animals was non-existent. Should he run? Should he stand still? As he looked into Elizabeth’s blue eyes – neither human nor tiger – two thoughts occurred, I know the immortal hand and eye that frames your fearful symmetry and What will that immortal do when he discovers that his wife has eaten his new Sunlight Agent?
Neal swallowed his terror and stood still as Elizabeth started rubbing up against him, twining her body against his legs, butting her head against his chest. She got up on her hind legs, draped her forelegs over Neal’s shoulder, and he collapsed under her weight. He found himself with a face full of fur over hard bone and sharp teeth as Elizabeth rubbed her cheeks against him, and her weight pinned him to the ground. As she continued to rub herself against him, Neal tried to extricate himself, but with nearly 300 pounds of chemically excited tiger stretched out over him, Neal couldn’t move.
Captain Burke might be willing to give him some latitude under these rather unusual circumstances, but he didn’t think that lying on the ground with his wife, whatever shape she might be in, was going to get him anything but a one-way ticket back to the cage. If I’m going to go back, I might as well enjoy myself first. He wrapped his arms around her neck, and buried his hands in her fur, caressing and petting as if she was nothing more than a common house cat. When Neal started to stroke her incredibly soft ears, Elizabeth began purr, the vibrations going right through Neal.
As the afternoon sun sunk behind the garden walls, Neal’s internal clock counted the minutes until sunset and the end of his short-lived freedom when Peter Burke eventually showed up to collect his wife.
______________________
As the sun dropped below the horizon, Peter woke up. Unlike the first two risings after he freed Neal, Peter was not sexually excited and blinded by visions of sunlight and Neal Caffrey’s blue eyes. But something else felt wrong – or if not wrong, then just odd.
El? Peter mentally reached out for his wife, but there was no coherent answering thought. All he got was a sense of Neal’s blue eyes and hard ground, and flowers and … arousal? Why would Elizabeth be aroused without him – and with Neal somehow in the picture? Peter grabbed his weapons and went to look for his wife.
It didn’t take him long to determine where she was. Not only had El left him a note that she was going to June’s, there was a message from the Summer Queen herself to present himself at the palace immediately. Peter couldn’t begin to imagine what was going on, but knowing the trouble-attracting capacity of his wife, he figured that it had to be pretty bad.
Given the urgency of the summons, Peter materialized right in the main hall of the Summer Queen’s palace, rather that give her the courtesy of admitting him first.
“Peter – I am so glad you’re here.” June rushed towards him, hands outstretched. “It’s Elizabeth…she accidentally drugged herself on catnip.”
“How? Do you just keep bowls of it just lying around?” He followed the Lady as she walked back to the inner courtyard.
“No – I started laughing and brought everything in the garden into full bloom, including a planter filled with it.”
Peter took hold of June’s arm, turning her to face him. “When did this start?” He knew that much of June’s magic had faded with Byron’s death, so this news was startling.
June looked at Peter’s hand gripping her arm, and he dropped it with an apology. “I think you know when this started, Peter. And why. I thought that you would, at the very least, let me know what I was giving shelter to.” Peter could see that June wasn’t precisely angry, but she was clearly troubled.
“Highness, it was for your own protection.” Peter used her title, which he hadn’t needed to in centuries, as an indicator of his concern and the gravity of the situation. “The fewer who know about Neal, the better. I haven’t even told Elizabeth the full truth.”
June appeared to be mollified. “We’ll talk about this later. You need to deal with your wife and rescue Neal.”
June unlocked the doors to the courtyard and Peter went outside to do just that.
Neal was lying on the ground, weighted down by Elizabeth, who was nuzzling his neck and face. He was petting her, teasing her long, bristling whiskers, bopping her on her broad nose. Neal clearly didn’t hear the door open or see Peter walk into the courtyard, because the expression of guilty horror on his face when he did see Peter was priceless.
“Captain Burke! I…I didn’t do this… She… just…I …”
“Neal, stop babbling and get your hands off of my wife.” Peter struggled to contain his smile as Neal stretched his arms as far away from the big cat as he could. He knelt down next to the pair and drew the same small knife that he had used to draw blood to sign Neal’s contract the other night. Neal’s eyes widened in stark terror. Peter made a shallow cut on the palm of his hand and held it to Elizabeth’s muzzle. She licked his blood and in that instant, the tiger transformed back into a woman.
Peter picked up the still groggy Elizabeth. “Since you’re well enough to roll around on the ground with my wife, you’re well enough to start work. I’ll be by tomorrow night, so you better be ready.”
Peter registered Neal’s confusion. “I’ve decided to change the terms of your contract a bit – you’ll be working within the cadre a few nights a week.” Peter hadn’t planned on making this change quite so soon, but given the effect that Neal was having on everyone he encountered, it would be best to control his contact with preternatural community until he could figure out a way to contain him.
Go to Chapter VI
______________________
Author:
elrhiarhodan Fandom: White Collar
Rating: R
Characters: Neal Caffrey, June, Elizabeth Burke, Peter Burke
Spoilers: None
Warnings/Triggers: None
Word Count: ~ 3000
Summary: Vampire Peter, Shapeshifter El and Neal, who is something more than he ever expected to be. Chapter V - In the Summer Queen's Garden
This story is dedicated to
gyzym who has held my hand and getting the suck-voice to shut up. I couldn’t ask for a better friend. Beta’d by the awesome riazendira. Credit to petronelle for the limerick. All mistakes are mine. Feedback is adored.Prologue | Chapter I | Chapter II | Chapter III | Chapter IV
Elizabeth Burke was a terrifying woman; she watched him like he was prey. He tried charming her and ended up putting his foot so far into his mouth that he could taste the metal of the tracking anklet on the back of his tongue. He started to stammer an apology when he saw her hands and eyes start to change.
“You’re not sidhe - you’re a shapeshifter? Neal was awed. He had never met one - shapeshifters were rarely seen outside of their packs or prides. That one had married a vampire astonished him.
“How did you meet?” Somehow that seemed to be the right thing to say. Elizabeth’s whole face turned mischievous. The tale she told seemed like something out of a book bound in leather and gold, something that Neal would have either illustrated or stolen. Or both.
Elizabeth told him story after story - their strange courtship, how Reese Hughes, the millennia-old Whryccrid master first refused to let Peter marry her. “It was only with the intervention of June…” she bowed her head to the Lady in a gesture of grateful respect “… that Reese allowed Peter and I to wed.”
“Peter has always been my favorite.” June sighed.
“You’ve known Captain Burke for a long time?” Neal was curious.
“I’ve know Peter since my eldest girl was an infant - about three hundred and fifty years, now. He was a raw cadet back then, newly made, but you could see the promise in him.”
Neal looked at Elizabeth - as if seeking confirmation that such a thing could be possible, that the imposing Captain Burke was once not so imposing. Elizabeth shrugged and smiled. “June - tell Neal how you met Peter.”
June poured everyone a fresh cup of coffee, and settled back in her chair. “It was the night before the Summer Solstice, and Byron and I were getting ready to celebrate the birth of our firstborn, Ourania. We went to the cellar to fetch the Champagne my mother had laid down when I was born and we saw this pair of glowing red eyes, a wet, pink snout and a set of tusks hiding behind some casks of Amontillado. This creature started to grunt and I wanted to run, I was so frightened. Byron held me still, and then I realized that the poor thing was just as terrified. It wasn’t grunting, it was saying Whryccrid, Whryccrid, get Whryccrid.”
“What was it?” Neal was practically on the edge of his seat.
“It was Jimmy Squarefoot, poor thing. He works for the Whryccrid Kiss, doing odd jobs, scaring the common folk, collecting tithes. But anyway - Jimmy was hiding in our wine cellar and nothing we could do could make him budge. I contacted Reese and he sent Peter to deal with it.” June smiled at the memory.
“Peter arrived, all fangs and elbows. I think he had just gotten his uniform that day … it was so crisp and new, you could still see the trailing bits of thread on the buttons. He was trying so hard to be stern and purposeful, but you could tell that he was so excited to be sent out on such an ‘important mission’. Neal, if you think you were awkward the other night, you were nothing compared to Peter when he tried to introduce himself to Byron and me.”
Elizabeth chucked. “The way Peter tells it, he cut his lip on his fangs when he called you ‘Highness’.”
June laughed, and the roses on the coffee cups once again bloomed. “He didn’t just cut is lip, he cut is tongue and the inside of his mouth. On his own fangs.” June did her best to contain her giggles. Neal and Elizabeth didn’t bother.
When she caught her breath, June continued her tale. “Once he stopped bleeding, he went down to the cellar and called for Jimmy. The poor thing took one look at Peter, saw the Whryccrid insignia on his jacket and grabbed hold of him like a lost child that just found his father.”
Elizabeth interrupted June. “Jimmy Squarefoot’s older then Reese Hughes, but he’s a gentle soul - all four hundred and fifty very ugly pounds of him. You’ll probably meet him, especially if you end up having to do some collection work. Jimmy’s great for getting the kinsman to pay the tithe, but he’d rather write bawdy poetry than break bones. He is a lot easier to work with than a Jack-in-Irons.”
“So you can just imagine - young Peter Burke trying to comfort this ancient monster.” June’s eyes sparkled at the memory. “He actually patted Jimmy on the head and scratched him behind the ears. The poor thing started to cry in gratitude.”
“What had happened to him?” Neal asked.
“It seemed that Jimmy knocked on the wrong door, and interrupted a trio of boggles bedeviling a moneylender. They gave chase, screaming that they’d use him to hunt truffles.”
“That would be difficult, since only female pigs can find them.” Neal was proud of this bit of practical information. June blinked and Elizabeth just snickered. Neal blushed.
June continued. “No matter what Peter said, Jimmy wasn’t budging from the cellar and he wouldn’t let go of poor Peter. By this time, the sun had risen and Peter couldn’t go anywhere, anyway. Peter valiantly tried to stay awake as the sun rose. It was so touching - Jimmy had worked himself into such a state and Peter awkwardly trying to comfort him while desperately trying not to close his eyes. Do you have any idea how difficult it is for even a fully mature vampire to stay awake on the longest day of the year?”
Neal didn’t, but he filed that information away.
“We did all we could to help Peter stay awake and calm poor Jimmy down. Byron opened the Champagne, Mairead brought Ourania to me and we celebrated the day in our wine cellar, with a vampire and a pig monster. It was one of the best Solstices I can remember. Byron performed legerdemain until he was too drunk to remember in which cuff he hid the coins, Peter told dirty limericks and Jimmy finally calmed enough to counter Peter’s limericks with bawdy sonnets about exceedingly hairy, large breasted women. “
“I was so impressed with Peter – not because he stayed awake through nearly sixteen hours of daylight, but because he treated Jimmy so well. He could have behaved quite arrogantly and neither Byron nor I would have given it a second thought. Instead, he talked to Jimmy Squarefoot like an equal, with such grave courtesy. When Peter left with him, I contacted Hughes, and told him that Peter was to be assigned to my court for the next century.”
June smiled wistfully at the memory. “We were all so young then.”
Neal didn’t want June to slip back into melancholy. “Limericks? I can’t imagine Captain Burke telling limericks, let alone dirty ones. He seems so, well, proper.” Neal shook his head in amazement. “Do you remember any of them?”
June thought for a moment. “Let me see…ah. I think one went like this
If tales of vagina dentata
Don’t scare you, then brother, they oughtta
There’s teeth and there’s teeth
But don’t try that sheath
Or you’ll sing a eunuch’s sonata.“
Don’t scare you, then brother, they oughtta
There’s teeth and there’s teeth
But don’t try that sheath
Or you’ll sing a eunuch’s sonata.“
Neal couldn’t contain himself, he exploded in gales of laughter, and June and Elizabeth joined him. He laughed so hard his ribs began to ache and he got lightheaded. When he fell out of his out of his chair and landed on his ass, the ladies got hysterical. The limerick wasn’t that funny, but Neal’s reaction to it was. It took a good five minutes before they were all able to contain themselves. And when they recovered, all the flowers and trees in the courtyard were in full bloom in response to June’s unrestrained laughter.
Neal looked around in amazement - he had seen evidence of June’s magic several times over the past few days - but only on depictions of flowers, the roses on the tea cups, the flowers on the wallpaper. Out here, in the courtyard, her magic sang to all of the dormant plants, bringing them to joyous life.
June reached out and stroked Neal’s face. “I think this is your doing, dear boy. I don’t know what it is about you, but I haven’t been able to keep my gardens in bloom for a long time.” Neal ducked his head, unaccustomed to both the praise and the touch of a woman.
Elizabeth got up and started to investigate the plants in the pots. She stopped by one ceramic planter filled with a tall flowering plant and buried her face in the purple buds. When she lifted her head, Neal saw that her eyes had changed again - huge blue orbs with slitted pupils almost fully dilated. She rubbed her hands all over her body, twisting and turning, and when she threw her head back and mewled, Neal saw the magic take over her body. Between one breath and another, the woman became an enormous gold and black striped tiger.
“June - what’s wrong with Elizabeth?” The tiger was not behaving like any cat that Neal had ever seen. She was rubbing her head, rolling around, batting at some invisible ball.
June carefully walked around the big cat and looked at the plant that Elizabeth had been sniffing. “Oh, my, it’s catmint, catnip. Elizabeth stuck her face into catnip. She could be like this for hours ... it affects the preternatural differently than the mortal…and that she ingested it while in her human form is going to make it so much worse.”
“You’ve seen this before?” Neal was now in a state of perpetual astonishment.
“Not this exactly, I’m very allergic to cats – we keep the plant around to deter mosquitoes.” June punctuated the truth of that statement with an emphatic sneeze, and a pair of vines twined around Neal’s ankles. He was able to shake them off, but when June sneezed again, they swiftly grew back.
“But it’s fairly common for certain herbs to have exaggerated effects on the preternatural.” June sneezed again, three times in quick succession, and the vines grew – one around Elizabeth’s hind leg connected to Neal’s waist. Elizabeth stretched her legs, nearly yanking Neal off of his feet. By this time, June was sneezing continuously, and had started to back out of the courtyard.
“Neal, I’m sorry – you’re going to have to stay with Elizabeth.” June practically ran back into the palace, slamming the doors shut behind her. Neal thought he heard the snick of a lock turning.
Neal was relieved, at least with June out of the garden, the vines began to disappear, include the heavy one that tethered him to the tiger. But his relief was short-lived; Tiger-Elizabeth stopped playing with the invisible toys and turned her focus on him. Neal froze – his experience with wild animals was non-existent. Should he run? Should he stand still? As he looked into Elizabeth’s blue eyes – neither human nor tiger – two thoughts occurred, I know the immortal hand and eye that frames your fearful symmetry and What will that immortal do when he discovers that his wife has eaten his new Sunlight Agent?
Neal swallowed his terror and stood still as Elizabeth started rubbing up against him, twining her body against his legs, butting her head against his chest. She got up on her hind legs, draped her forelegs over Neal’s shoulder, and he collapsed under her weight. He found himself with a face full of fur over hard bone and sharp teeth as Elizabeth rubbed her cheeks against him, and her weight pinned him to the ground. As she continued to rub herself against him, Neal tried to extricate himself, but with nearly 300 pounds of chemically excited tiger stretched out over him, Neal couldn’t move.
Captain Burke might be willing to give him some latitude under these rather unusual circumstances, but he didn’t think that lying on the ground with his wife, whatever shape she might be in, was going to get him anything but a one-way ticket back to the cage. If I’m going to go back, I might as well enjoy myself first. He wrapped his arms around her neck, and buried his hands in her fur, caressing and petting as if she was nothing more than a common house cat. When Neal started to stroke her incredibly soft ears, Elizabeth began purr, the vibrations going right through Neal.
As the afternoon sun sunk behind the garden walls, Neal’s internal clock counted the minutes until sunset and the end of his short-lived freedom when Peter Burke eventually showed up to collect his wife.
As the sun dropped below the horizon, Peter woke up. Unlike the first two risings after he freed Neal, Peter was not sexually excited and blinded by visions of sunlight and Neal Caffrey’s blue eyes. But something else felt wrong – or if not wrong, then just odd.
El? Peter mentally reached out for his wife, but there was no coherent answering thought. All he got was a sense of Neal’s blue eyes and hard ground, and flowers and … arousal? Why would Elizabeth be aroused without him – and with Neal somehow in the picture? Peter grabbed his weapons and went to look for his wife.
It didn’t take him long to determine where she was. Not only had El left him a note that she was going to June’s, there was a message from the Summer Queen herself to present himself at the palace immediately. Peter couldn’t begin to imagine what was going on, but knowing the trouble-attracting capacity of his wife, he figured that it had to be pretty bad.
Given the urgency of the summons, Peter materialized right in the main hall of the Summer Queen’s palace, rather that give her the courtesy of admitting him first.
“Peter – I am so glad you’re here.” June rushed towards him, hands outstretched. “It’s Elizabeth…she accidentally drugged herself on catnip.”
“How? Do you just keep bowls of it just lying around?” He followed the Lady as she walked back to the inner courtyard.
“No – I started laughing and brought everything in the garden into full bloom, including a planter filled with it.”
Peter took hold of June’s arm, turning her to face him. “When did this start?” He knew that much of June’s magic had faded with Byron’s death, so this news was startling.
June looked at Peter’s hand gripping her arm, and he dropped it with an apology. “I think you know when this started, Peter. And why. I thought that you would, at the very least, let me know what I was giving shelter to.” Peter could see that June wasn’t precisely angry, but she was clearly troubled.
“Highness, it was for your own protection.” Peter used her title, which he hadn’t needed to in centuries, as an indicator of his concern and the gravity of the situation. “The fewer who know about Neal, the better. I haven’t even told Elizabeth the full truth.”
June appeared to be mollified. “We’ll talk about this later. You need to deal with your wife and rescue Neal.”
June unlocked the doors to the courtyard and Peter went outside to do just that.
Neal was lying on the ground, weighted down by Elizabeth, who was nuzzling his neck and face. He was petting her, teasing her long, bristling whiskers, bopping her on her broad nose. Neal clearly didn’t hear the door open or see Peter walk into the courtyard, because the expression of guilty horror on his face when he did see Peter was priceless.
“Captain Burke! I…I didn’t do this… She… just…I …”
“Neal, stop babbling and get your hands off of my wife.” Peter struggled to contain his smile as Neal stretched his arms as far away from the big cat as he could. He knelt down next to the pair and drew the same small knife that he had used to draw blood to sign Neal’s contract the other night. Neal’s eyes widened in stark terror. Peter made a shallow cut on the palm of his hand and held it to Elizabeth’s muzzle. She licked his blood and in that instant, the tiger transformed back into a woman.
Peter picked up the still groggy Elizabeth. “Since you’re well enough to roll around on the ground with my wife, you’re well enough to start work. I’ll be by tomorrow night, so you better be ready.”
Peter registered Neal’s confusion. “I’ve decided to change the terms of your contract a bit – you’ll be working within the cadre a few nights a week.” Peter hadn’t planned on making this change quite so soon, but given the effect that Neal was having on everyone he encountered, it would be best to control his contact with preternatural community until he could figure out a way to contain him.
Go to Chapter VI
