Chapter 1

Temple of Bacchus
ElseWorld, 1837

“Her name is Emma.”

The Facilitator’s voice echoed off the ancient stone walls, lending his words authority as he directed Dominic’s attention to the large, mirrored disk positioned prominently in the middle of the temple’s bloodied floor.

The image of a woman, who existed somewhere in a neighboring world, was reflected on the disk’s surface like a living portrait. Her countenance was serene, oblivious. For she was unaware she was being watched.

Carved from polished obsidian as black and impenetrable as the night, the six-foot mirror was encircled by nine more disks of lesser circumference. Each was convex and had been shaped from a disparate exotic stone intended to represent one of the lunar phases. All were set at an angle meant to capture the moonlight streaming in through an aperture in the roof and to direct it toward the central mirror where the woman was on view.

“You expect me to rape her,” Dominic stated, his voice flat.

The woman’s hand moved, and a page flipped. She was reading.

“We expect you to do what is necessary. As always,” the Facilitator replied, speaking for himself as well as the two silent Acolytes, who flanked him.

At first glance, the woman appeared to be plain, unremarkable in every way. Dominic judged her to be a quarter of a century old like himself, perhaps a little older. Except for the occasional movement of her hand, she was utterly still. Her head was bent intently over a tome entitled The Fruits of Philosophy, which lay before her upon a polished desk.

She wore spectacles, and her profile was half turned from him, so that the shape of her delicate cheek was limned by flickering candlelight. Tendrils of ash brown hair curled along a vulnerable nape.

The garment she wore was stiff and lengthy, and it almost completely hid her body from view. He’d heard that EarthWorld females sheathed themselves in swaths of fabric impermeable to the masculine eye, but until now had believed this to be only a rumor. Her breasts were full and her figure shapely. Why did she hide it?

“You’ll bow to Our Will in this matter?” prompted the Facilitator.

Dominic grunted a grudging assent. His hard, quicksilver gaze flicked over the woman again. He’d been required to do worse in his life. And he had little choice.

From the corridor behind them came the swishing sound of the votaries’ brooms. Solemnly, they swept the sacred remnants of what had been a colossal statue of Bacchus into vessels that would later be placed in reliquaries.

Rage simmered in him. This hallowed sanctum—his home—had been brutally attacked. And to think that just hours ago he’d been out fighting the very beings, who had taken advantage of his absence to defile it!

He resided here, alone for the most part, sleeping in an alcove with few creature comforts. Like a bird of prey, he swooped down on the enemies of his people by night and returned to the relative protection offered here in the temple to roost by day. But this attack had altered his schedule.

“Seven were killed in the strike here last night,” the Facilitator informed him, though he hadn’t asked. “And the amulet in the statue has gone missing. We can only thank the Gods that the time involved in its removal prevented our enemies from reaching these mirrors.”

“Our enemies,” Dominic mocked, shooting him a cynical look. The stench of demons was everywhere, yet the Facilitator adamantly refrained from referring to them directly as if doing so might somehow raise them in the flesh.

“They weren’t prevented,” he informed his elderly companion. “They came here with specific intentions. They destroyed the statue, but painstakingly hacked its genitals and right hand off. The fact that they left only those pieces undamaged and to be discovered by us in this mess was no accident.”

It had been a message directed at him, for those were his susceptible points.

The Facilitator’s placid gaze didn’t alter.

“It’s widely known that these scrying mirrors allow us to see into the adjoining world,” Dominic persisted. “They were purposely left intact so that we might continue to do so.” He jerked his jaw toward the woman in the mirror. “Let me postpone this new duty until I can find out the reason behind this attack. Until I can hunt down the demons who were responsible.”

The two Acolytes on either side of the Facilitator stirred for the first time, murmuring in distress. Whether in response to his suggestion of postponement or to his profanity in calling the demons by name, he neither knew nor cared.

The Facilitator calmed them with the lift of a hand, then shook his head at Dominic. “No. You will do as We have directed.”

Dominic heaved a frustrated breath and stalked away. Standing in the arched entrance of the chamber, he watched the votives at their work. The twelve marble statues that ringed the room regarded him coldly, unspeaking. Accustomed to their unwavering, brooding gazes, he ignored them.

Slamming the side of his fisted, gloved hand against a limestone column, he felt the familiar bolt of lightening zap up his arm, a cruel reminder of his duty. Free Will was a luxury he had not enjoyed since the age of ten. The three males behind him ruled his sect and he would obey their directive.

“How am I to get through the gate?” he gritted after a moment.

“Ingratiate yourself with her husband. Cajole him into offering you safe passage. He’s one of the EarthWorld Satyr, but he serves here in our regiments.” Dominic’s brows rammed together and he whipped around toward the female in the mirror.

“She’s wed? To one of our fighters?” he demanded. “And you would have me usurp his rights with her?”

Another page flipped under the touch of a feminine hand, reclaiming everyone’s attention. Gold flashed on the woman’s finger. She wore a wedding band.

“She’s not of our blood,” he was hastily assured, as if that would render the unsavory task he’d been assigned perfectly palatable. “Her sister is King Feydon’s offspring. One of the infamous half-Human, half-Fairie brides wed to the three EarthWorld Satyr lords. But this one—” He tapped the mirror with a gnarled finger causing the woman’s image to undulate for a few seconds. “This one doesn’t share the deceased king’s blood.”

“How strong is the blood of her husband?”

“Him? He’s hardly fit to call himself Satyr,” the Facilitator scoffed. “He boasts that he’s a quarter blood, but We believe him to be less. And he doesn’t fight as you assume. No, he serves himself up to the other soldiers in a base manner, as one of the cinaedi. You’ll find him in the regiment camped closest to the gate. He chose to be stationed there so that he might easily return to his world regularly, at Moonful.”

“To fuck his wife,” Dominic conjectured. “As you would have me fuck her. Why?”

The Acolytes whispered again, gently rebuking his plain speaking. The Facilitator overlooked it, preferring as always to gloss over the more sordid details of the sequential duties that made up Dominic’s existence.

“She’s newly plowed. Her husband lay with her last evening,” the elderly man remarked significantly.

At that, Dominic returned to stand before the woman, his eyes dropping to her waist. He opened himself to her for the briefest of intervals, learning what he could.

Her belly was not yet rounded, but even with a world of distance between them, his instincts quickly informed him that she did house another man’s seed within her womb—seed planted there only last night.

On the heels of that realization, another struck him with the impact of a giant fist. He staggered back from the mirror, his accusing gaze flying to his companion.

“Yes,” the Facilitator affirmed, refusing to meet his eyes. “She’s with child.”

A heartbeat of silence passed. Then another and another.

“Not just any child, though, is it?” Dominic demanded with soft menace. His right hand vibrated as if the evil that dwelled in its palm had been agitated by his suspicions. He raised the hand between himself and the other man, and carefully flexed it within its silver-threaded glove.

The Facilitator shifted uncomfortably. Darting a glance at the glove, he subtly distanced himself from it. The Acolytes began to hum. Nervously, they cupped their long-fingered hands together, catching the rays of the moon overhead in their palms—an act believed to ward off demons.

Dominic’s lip curled, cruelly voluptuous. His lashes lowered to shadow the slits of his eyes. And for just a moment, he savored the latent power that made others—even these influential beings—fear him.

“As you . . .” The Facilitator cleared his throat in a rare display of uneasiness. “As you’ve no doubt guessed, the child will be a Chosen One. Your successor.”

A chill crawled up Dominic’s spine. He stared at him, thunderstruck.

“This can come as no surprise,” the Facilitator rambled on. “You were aware your replacement would be selected one day.”

Yes, he’d known. But he’d been too engrossed in the never-ending hunting and killing that comprised his nightly routine to dwell on the matter. This news had taken him completely off guard. Did it imply that his death was imminent?

“Now then, you have four weeks,” the Facilitator informed him crisply. “With the coming of another Moonful, it will be imperative that you mate her in order to endow her child’s powers. Four weeks—is it time enough to find her husband and secure an invitation to his world?”

Dominic nodded slowly, his fascinated gaze returning to the mirror where it resettled on the woman. On the delicate blush of her cheek. On the inviting slope of her shoulder. On her flat belly.

Like his own mother, she would have no inkling she was to bear a Chosen One. Wouldn’t be informed of her child’s destiny until Dominic’s eventual death. His own predecessor had been unknown to him, for the demonhand—quite literally a hand that held demons—didn’t pass to a successor through bloodlines. It selected its hosts seemingly at random, one after another. Only once in a generation was a single child given the power—the curse—that had been bestowed upon him as a boy. A mirrored palm.

Chapter 1

Satyr Estate in Tuscany, Italy
EarthWorld, 1850

Lord Vincent Satyr, firstborn son and heir of Lord Nicholas Satyr and his wife Jane, gripped himself in an urgent fist and kneed apart the pale thighs of the woman who lay beneath him. He groaned as he fed the crown of his cock to the plump lips tucked high between her legs. Teasing himself back and forth, he glossed her erotic mouth with the first milky pearls of his pre-cum.

There was no need to rush this, for the entire night lay ahead, rich with the promise of carnal pleasure. He’d been anticipating his time with her all day. While his nose had been buried in the hefty tomes plucked from his library shelves, he’d been imagining this moment. This pussy. Craving it.

On the morrow he would travel to ElseWorld and gather nine bitter enemies together at one table in an attempt to catalyze peace between them. Negotiations would be delicate. Crucial. Lives and worlds depended upon his skill as a mediator.

When he should’ve been concentrating on the careful construction of the treaty that would unite these disparate ElseWorld factions into a single governing body, he’d been distracted.

With thoughts of this woman.

His hand curved at her jaw and sapphire eyes that were so like his father’s drank in her flawless beauty. Her forearms were lax on the pillow on either side of her head, her elbows bent and her fingers loosely entangled in long waves of shining moon-blonde hair. Pale blue veins at the underside of her wrists pulsed with need.

And with blood that ran cold.

“Watch me open you,” he murmured, though it was unnecessary to say the words aloud. She would sense what he wanted.

The thick fringe of her dark lashes rose to reveal violet eyes that were the same rich color as the Sangiovese grapes he and his brothers cultivated in their vineyard here on the Satyr estates. She looked upon him with adoration, as if he were her entire world. And he was. Still, he avoided those startling eyes as he often did, not wanting to acknowledge that they were vacant, completely void of life.

Her gaze lowered obediently, and he watched her expression as he began his push. Felt her breath hitch and saw her skin flush as her slick furrow began to ease apart for him. For now, he was stingy, offering her only his crown and another inch, enjoying the hug of her plush labia as he rocked back and forth.

Her breasts gave against the hard muscles of his broad chest as he leaned closer. Her head fell back and her long, white throat arched for his mouth.

His lips brushed the skin below her ear. “Do you want all of me inside you, cara?” The question went against one of the primary tenets of successful negotiation. Never ask a question to which the answer required could only be either, “yes” or “no.”

But in this instance, her response was a foregone conclusion. It came as expected, tremulous and sweet.

“Yes, Vincent. Gods, please, yes.” Her soft cheek nuzzled his granite jaw.

At the sound of her voice, an odd panic to drive himself deep inside her swept him. But he forced himself to go slowly. He wanted this to last.

Her fingers bit the bed pillow as he sought to further occupy the haven that was her body. But then, she was delicate. A foot shorter than he when they were standing and ninety pounds lighter.

And he wasn’t a small man by any measure. Everything about him was big—hands, feet, shoulders, intellect. Cock.

It was the latter of these endowments, which rendered him an object of awe, envy, and consternation among his peers. He knew his rod’s measure well. So did half of Italy.

In fact, his dimensions were the stuff of legend—all because of a much-sought-after prostitute he’d visited three years ago. Her bed had been comfortable enough, and after hours of fucking, he’d made the error of falling asleep there. Like some sort of conniving, nocturnal tailor, she had taken advantage of this lapse to measure him. From root to cockslit, she’d pronounced him to be possessed of eleven thick, ruddy, vein-roped inches. In circumference, he boasted seven inches, and his knob even fatter.

She’d been well connected and word of his extraordinary size had spread through European society like wildfire. According to her tale, she’d swallowed the entirety of him in all variety of manners and had brought him to climax eleven times that night, rewarding him for each of his shaft’s inches. Although he recalled matters differently, it made a good story, and he and his prick had become infamous almost overnight.

“It’s good,” his companion whispered as he plowed deeper, “so good.”

Lifting his chest slightly, he fixed his gaze on the perfectly formed, twin mounds that rose and fell in time with her shuddering breath. They were beautiful breasts, lush and high.

Touch them.

He’d barely completed the thought when her hands slid between their bodies. The curves of her palms cupped the undersells of those voluptuous breasts and began an erotic massage meant to tempt him.

She closed her eyes and moaned.

The sound shot a surge of lust straight to his groin, causing him to convulsively sheathe several more inches of himself inside her in one involuntary shove.

Her gasp was muffled by the sharp crack of a log snapping in the immense stone fireplace set in the corner of his bedchamber. Flames sparked higher, drenching her hair with Titian highlights and limning her pearlescent skin with gold.

In this light, she looked almost Human.

But she was not. No, the woman he lay with now was a luminescent, expendable, lovely, necessary counterfeit.

A Shimmerskin.

With little effort on his part, he’d summoned her from the mists of ElseWorld tonight for a single, specific purpose—fornication. She was incapable of complaint or refusal. Incapable of experiencing a myriad of emotions Human women possessed. Anger. Fear. Desire. Love.

And the moment his body tired of this current occupation, she would be as easily dispatched into the ether once again. It was a circumstance he took for granted, for all the Satyr had been accustomed to employing Shimmerskins in this way for centuries.

Transfixed, he watched her hands move on her breasts in an upward sweep that eventually brought thumbs and fingers together to twist and tauten rosy nipples. She could lift those nipples to the kiss of her lips if he Willed her to. Could fondle them with the lap of her pink tongue and suckle them until they were reddened and stiff.

Later perhaps. In his current state, the sight of that would have him shooting off in her before he’d even managed to fully glove himself.

Lingering in the cradle of her thighs, he teased at her, penetrating in slow increments, only to retreat and delve shallowly again. She would need time to adjust to him. And the voyage inside her would be as much a part of the pleasure as the eventual docking would be.

“The rest will go more easily,” he coaxed. He wasn’t sure if he was reassuring the remaining seven inches of himself that, with patience, it would eventually find itself housed inside her. Or if he was reassuring her, as he had so many other females before her, that his sexual appendage would not split her asunder.

Like his brothers, he’d never had any trouble attracting women. Legions of them were intrigued by the sight of his broad shoulders and even more so by the bulge between his thighs. But he had come to dread the moment they first lay eyes upon his manhood in its naked state.

Females almost universally claimed to clamor for a large cock. Yet, present them with one of his intimidating magnitude, and they quickly turned less eager. A few more inches.

Ah, Gods, he was nearly in. Poised at the brink of ecstasy, his pulse thundered erratically. He cupped the rounds of her bottom in his hands, rocking himself deeper and deeper still in quick, staccato pumps.

“Mmm. Yess.” She murmured encouragement, her sexy voice at his ear urging him on.

It was a joy to fuck a female who didn’t grimace as he pierced her, to know for a certainty his impalement wasn’t causing her discomfort. His hands slid down the insides of her thighs, then hooked the backs of her knees, pulling until they were bent high and wide on either side of him. His palms planted themselves on the mattress alongside her so his muscled arms held her legs upward and apart.

As her hips tilted for him, he drove the rest of the way home. Seating himself deep, he luxuriated in the rare pleasure of finding the entirety of his shaft fully encased in a womanly passage.

Ahh . . . heaven.

She was warm. Tight. Slick.

He was hot. Hard. Hungry.

“That’s. . . fuck, that’s good,” he groaned as he ground his groin sensuously over her pubis.

“Good,” she moaned, echoing his words.

Arching his back, he watched his corpulent prick retreat, newly slicked with her juices. Watched it spear her again in a long, determined stroke, thrusting so deep that the inky fur of his genitals embraced and enveloped her hairless ones. As her creator, he had determined that the only hair her body possessed would be eyelashes, eyebrows and that on the top of her head.

He began rutting her in quick, hard strokes, relishing the sensation of repeatedly plundering the full, succulent length of her channel. None had ever brought him more pleasure than the silvery-luminescent figure now under him.

He sought to prolong it.

But his cock had a mind of its own, and it twitched with the need to race on toward its lascivious goal. Hard hips settled into a familiar rhythmic thrust. He let her legs unfold, and her calves hooked themselves around the backs of his thighs. Mindlessly he worked himself in her, glorying in the massage of her inner tissues.

His elbows dug into the mattress and his fingers dove into her luxurious hair, holding her for his kiss. “How can you not be aware, damn you,” he muttered against her lips. “You taste Human, feel Human, look Human—except for that skin.”

Those remarkable eyes only blinked at him, completely devoid of emotion. Ducking his head, he grazed her throat with the rasp of teeth and mouth. It was because she was his favorite that he never looked too deeply into her eyes. He accepted insentience in other Shimmerskins as inevitable. However, something within him needed to foster the illusion that this female was fully alive. That she was capable of enjoying him as thoroughly as he did her.

“I am, Vincent,” she assured him.

Though he knew it was only his unvoiced wish that had prompted her statement, it nevertheless ratcheted his need to a fever pitch. The lustful blood of the ancient Satyr thrummed hotter, a hectic, carnal drumbeat in his veins.

Her tender, unguarded pussy sucked at him, enticed him, nudging him all too quickly toward climax. No!

He wanted this first fuck of the night to last. If he could, he would prolong it indefinitely. If he could, he’d strap her to his chest and keep his cock lodged inside her day and night. If—

Soft fingers grazed his thigh, surprising him, for he hadn’t requested such a caress. Though her touch was butterfly light, it was enough to make him lose the tenuous grip he had on his control.

His strokes turned more vigorous. Lengthened. Strengthened. The muscles of his biceps bulged and his fingers raked into the bed linens on either side of her, crushing and twisting.

Flesh and bone slammed together in loud rhythmic slaps that echoed in the stillness of the darkened room. Cum gathered in his balls, readying.

The sound of her breath as it caught in shallow irregular gasps excited him. But still, he needed more. He needed her to . . .

Want me.

In this silent request, he wasn’t asking that she only want his fucking, but that she want every part of him. Heart, mind, body, and soul. It was a ridiculous, impossible requirement. His brothers already suspected he was addicted to her. He was glad they weren’t here now to witness how right they were. They wouldn’t understand it. He didn’t understand it.

She lifted a hand to his cheek and tried to catch his eyes, and fool that he was, he let her. “Yes, yes, Vincenzo, I want you.”

The sentiment was undoubtedly false, but his body didn’t care. Sapphire tangled with violet as his desire rose to a painful pitch. Climax had come upon him too slowly, yet was here before he was ready for this to end.

With broad hands he gripped her hips and angled her to receive one last, savage penetration that shoved them both a foot across the feather mattress.

Every muscle and tendon in his body wrenched taut as he hung on the precipice of ecstasy for a suspended, blissful moment. Cum frothed, then sizzled its way into the thick duct along his root, scalding up his considerable length. And then finally, finally . . .

A low, primitive sound escaped him at the glorious, indescribable sensation of imparting seed. As it coursed from him, an earthy moan rose in her, erupting from her throat as a joyful, feminine cry.

Like a row of a talented fists aligned along his cock, her tissues milked at him, oiled him with the stimulating aphrodisiac of her body’s cream. Forgotten for the moment was the fact that hers was simply an automatic orgasm response. That a Shimmerskin’s release was infallibly triggered by that of a Satyr male.

He pulled back and drove home again. His body surrounded hers, moved with hers, over hers, and in hers. Again and again he gave his masculine gift to her, in hot, fluid spurts. Distantly, he heard her murmur to him, felt her inner tissues convulse as his seed soaked them, drenched them, flooded them.

Long moments later, he lay sprawled over her, still buried inside her, his lust only momentarily banked. He experienced no belated concern that she might have communicated some vile disease or that she might have conceived his bastard. Her kind were incapable of doing either.

Her fingers played in his hair, combing it lightly, caressing his cheek, his shoulders, the muscles of his back. Again, he fleetingly wondered why she was touching him when he hadn’t specifically Willed it, but for the moment he didn’t care.

He raised on one elbow to gaze down at her, mesmerized by her remarkable beauty. He had only himself to congratulate for it. He’d given extensive consideration to her creation. His brothers rarely spent so much energy designing feminine receptacles for their cum, nor brought forth the same one more than a few times.

He’d first conjured her almost a year ago on his twenty-sixth birthday. Before and since then, he had called forth others of her ilk.

However, she was the only one he had ever summoned repeatedly. The only one who was constantly in his thoughts. By now, he had fucked her dozens of times. Hundreds. He should have grown bored with her.

But he hadn’t.

It worried him on occasion. Sometimes he even denied himself, seeing how long he could go without her, but their eventual reunions only proved all the more urgent because of his abstinence.

He lowered his head, kissing her throat.

“Where do you go when I am done with you?” he whispered against soft, radiant skin.

“Away,” she told him.

“To where? To what place?”

Her reply, when it came, it was barely audible. “To nothing. To nowhere.”

Hours later, he eased from her for a final time and fell exhausted upon the mattress beside her. His satiated penis lay half wilted on his left thigh, drained after countless climaxes. Even in repose, it remained partially tumid and embarrassingly majestic.

It pained him to know his companion would momentarily shimmer away into the ether, now that he no longer had physical need of her. He felt her flutter the coverlet over him as he drifted toward slumber.

“Stay,” he commanded, knowing she would not.