Page 56 of Obsidian Prince

"How is it different?"

"It is an expression of emotional attachment, just as sex can be. Sharing venom is how a spider seer binds her mate to her. Seer magic affects the paths of fate. Once we share venom, our fates will be linked. When we have shared venom for a long time," Liliana hesitated. She didn't want to mention the extension of his life but needed him to know as much else about it as possible. "Our lives will be bound to one another forever."

"I’ll never let anyone put a binding spell on me, Liliana."

"It's not like a wizard's binding spell. The effects are far more subtle. There is no element of coercion. Fate will simply make our life paths intersect frequently. We will often meet unexpectedly. We will find ourselves in endeavors where we will be more successful together than apart. Things will happen that make it easier or more advantageous for us to spend time together." The non-physical effects of venom were subtle enough that most people thought they were coincidental. That made it difficult to explain. "Have you known people who desired each other, but never seemed to get together at the right time, or who got jobs on opposite sides of the country and never saw each other again, as if fate were against them being together?"

Alexander nodded. "I’ve seen that happen."

"Venom causes the opposite effect. It will never force us to be together, but it will make being together easier. It will make it so that if we choose to stay together, that choice will not be sabotaged by chance events. Chance will instead flow in our favor."

"You bit Pete. How has it affected him?"

Liliana looked down. "My life and his have been closely intertwined since I bit him. It might not have been so strong an effect if I bit him only once, but I bit him again, with his permission, to save his life when the widow spider venom nearly killed him. If we do not share venom again, the effect will eventually wear off. For now, though, even though his heart belongs to Ben Harper, Pete is also mine."

Alexander leaned forward. He smiled his small, pleased smile. "You want to bite me so you can claim me as yours."

"I have seen inside you. You want to claim me as yours as well. You want to use sex to do it. I want to use venom."

"So, you don't want to have sex with me after all?" His eyes sparkled with amusement. He was teasing her.

"I want sex with you so much I can barely think of anything else." She grinned back at him. "But I also very much want to bite you."

"I'll consider it."

"I'll be patient."

The tapenade arrived. Liliana cheerfully bit into the crunchy toast, wondering how hard it would be to make this at home. The difficult part would be getting the olives that grew so well in Greece and Italy imported here. The flavors reminded her of green islands and sea so blue it almost hurt to look at.

She would enjoy having it more often.

She saw the same enjoyment on Alexander’s face.

Liliana remembered a piece of advice that Janice gave her about dating. She had been answering questions all evening, like she was accustomed to, but that meant her own life had been the main subject of discussion. Janice advised her to ask her date questions, to get him talking about his own life. She said that men preferred to talk about themselves. If she thought about it, there were a lot of things she wanted to know about Alexander.

"You have European Fae court manners, you speak French as if it were native to you, but you said your family is from North Carolina for generations." It wasn't quite a question, but it put into words some of what she wondered about him.

"My father was career military. He went into the diplomatic corps after he put in his thirty years." Alexander crunched and swallowed a small round of crusty bread coated in colorful olive paste. "I grew up speaking French as much as English. My father was stationed in Algeria for a while, then Switzerland. He had a diplomatic post for many years in Belgium after he retired from the service. I went to school there. I've spent some time on the ground in Chad, as well. We have French, German and Arabic in common. I'm also fluent in Russian, Pashto, and Swahili, and I speak enough Spanish to get by."

"When did your father meet your mother?"

Liliana saw a muscle jump as Alexander's jaw clenched. "They got together when he was still active military, posted in Poland. When the Queen of Air and Darkness dallied with a mortal, as she had done hundreds of times before, she never expected to get pregnant. Fae have children so rarely." He drank half a glass of wine at once. "She wanted nothing to do with a mortal child who would die in less than a century."

The spider seer reached across the table. She held Alexander's hand, rubbing his fingers the way he had done hers.

He looked up suddenly as if she startled him but didn't pull his hand away.

Liliana thought Janice might have been wrong about that piece of dating advice. Her prince seemed far more comfortable when her life was the subject of conversation, not his. She should steer the conversation onto less painful ground, as he had done for her, but there was one more thing she really wanted to know. "Did your father know who she was?"

He shook his head. "He knew she was Fae. His best friend in the service was beast-kin, so he knew about Others. He knew what a Fae was, but he didn't know ..." His grip on Liliana's hand tightened a little. "They killed him for having a queen's son, and he never even knew. She was just a beautiful Fae he had a fling with once. A few months later, she handed him a baby and told him it was his."

"I'm sorry," Liliana said. "How old were you when he was killed?"

"Sixteen." He smiled at her, a broad, entirely false smile, shrugged as if it didn't matter, and pulled his hand away from hers to pour himself some more wine. "It was a long time ago."

Even Liliana could understand such a blatant attempt to change the subject. She tried to think of something to ask that would follow logically in the flow of conversation but would not pry at the painful subject of his father's death when he was an adolescent. "How old are you now?" was the best she could come up with.

His smile faded to something a little more genuine. "Isn't there a social rule against asking that?" He was teasing her by using her own phrasing back at her.

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