Page 25 of Loved By the Orc

“Please don’t trouble yourself, Harmony. I’m only here to make certain you’re all right,” she said.

“Oh, er…I’m fine. I think,” I said quickly, tugging the blanket a little higher. I wished I could just disappear beneath it and die quietly of embarrassment in peace!

“Sorry—I had to call her over. You really scared me, baby,” Tark said. “First you fainted and then your skin was glowing all over!”

“It was?” I tried to think if I’d felt my skin doing anything weird, but I couldn’t remember anything. Though Ididhave a vague memory of the feeling of something powerful waking up inside me. What hadthatbeen all about?

“You were—glowing all over the fucking place,” Tark assured me earnestly. “So I called for Madam Healer. But by the time she got over here, the glowing had stopped.”

“Er, how long was I out for?” I asked. “And why was I glowing?” I looked at Madam Healer to answer this last question, but she only shrugged her slim shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Harmony, but I don’t know what could have caused the glow. My best guess would be that it has something to do with your magic.”

“My magic?” Other than the strange test Goodie Albright had done on me my first day in Hidden Hollow and the fact that I could draw the magic doors that let me go back and forth between here and the Human Realm, I hadn’t seen any signs of magical abilities yet.

“Yes, the more you come to Hidden Hollow, the more responsive it grows,” Madam Healer said, nodding gravely.

“But…does this mean I’m going to er, get all glowy and faint every time I do anything, uh, intimate?” I asked anxiously. Tark already thought I was too fragile—if he was afraid I might faint every time I came, we would never get to go all the way!

She shook her head.

“I don’t know—I don’t think so. Tark told me you were in the throes of pleasure when the incident occurred. If I had to take a guess, I would think it was simply the intense pleasure coupled with the factthat you were being intimate with a magical being that called to your magic and caused it to manifest.”

“But is it going to happen again? Like every time we, er…” I cleared my throat, unwilling to go on. But of course Madam Healer understood.

“No, I don’t think it will happen every time,” she said, obviously trying to be comforting. “You’re just having growing pains—your magic has been in its infancy all this time and now that you’ve found Hidden Hollow, it’s beginning to stretch and grow.”

“Um…okay. But what good is it? I mean, I don’t even know how to use it!”

“When the time comes, you will know,” she said gravely. “Those with magic in their blood find that it rises to the occasion when they have need of it.”

I nibbled my lower lip.

“Er, thank you, Madam Healer. I’m, uh, sorry you had to see me like this.”

She gave her hissing laugh and her forked tongue flickered between her red lips.

“Please don’t be embarrassed—as a Healer, I see people in all kinds predicaments. One incident in particular comes to mine—a Centaur and a Pixie tried to get together…oh, but I probably shouldn’t tell that.” She laughed again.

“What? But how?” I asked blankly. “I mean, Centaurs are as big as horses and Pixies are as tiny as hummingbirds—at least the ones I’ve seen.”

“Oh, some growth magic for the Pixie was definitely involved,” she assured me. “But they didn’t use enough of it and she started shrinking again er, mid-copulation, if you will.”

“That must have been a fucking mess!” Tark growled.

“Yes, it was. However, Iwasable to get them disentangled,” Madam Healer said. “After that, they decided to just be good friends.” She smiled. “Well, I really must be going now.”

“Thank you for coming over,” Tark said. He was wearing his jeans but his chest was still bare, I noticed. “I’ll walk you to the door.”

“No need—I can let myself out.”

And Madam Healer nodded to us and slithered out the bedroom door.

11

HARMONY

As soon as she was gone, I looked up at Tark.

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