Zelli shrugged, hoping it disguised his nervousness. “So far, it simply happens when it happens, for me. I think my family—my other family—can choose. They can, after all, choose to look more human when they want to, if you believe the stories of fae in disguise. And I don’t think anyone should doubt those, even if I’ve never seen proof of them. Other than the inconvenience of it, my real concern with it all is that it makes the other fae stories feel more true—I must assume the possibility of pregnancy exists when I am like that. Which… was only a distant possibility before.”
“Less distant now?” Tahlen wondered, his voice almost back to its usual smoothness. “Because you have a lover?”
Zelli squirmed and forcibly removed his hands from his chest. “I don’t know if I’m ready for such a thing or would ever be. It sounds terrifying, and there is so much else going on with my body, and with the country for that matter.”
Tahlen’s lips twitched up again but his gaze was intense. He resumed tracing Zelli’s markings, heading back up to Zelli’s ears. “So, if that were to happen to you while you’re with me, you’d like me not to touch you there?”
“In the future?” Zelli asked, so delighted he was dizzy with it. Or maybe that was his absurdly large cock swelling with excitement and leaving him lightheaded. Tahlen cleared his throat. Zelli turned his cheek into Tahlen’s hand. “You could touch it a little?” he suggested. “I usually do. Although now that I know how you feel elsewhere inside me, I’m going to wonder how you’d feel inside my cunt too.”
“The colors are back,” Tahlen revealed, yanking Zelli out of his sudden fantasy of Tahlen tupping him in that manner as well. “And your eyes are black, as black as your horns.”
“Black eyes?” Zelli touched his eyelids as if that would tell him anything. “Horns?” He reached up to where two nubs of gleaming onyx usually grew near the crown of his head. The nubs were now two small horns. “That is….” He blinked at Tahlen. “Black eyes as well? Colors? You mean like before? In my skin?”
“Pink—light, then darker, and purple again, and blue, sometimes, before it fades. This is new?” Tahlen bent over him to consider Zelli with an air of faint alarm. “That’s a lot of changes in a few days.”
“Yes,” Zelli agreed faintly. “It must mean something, though I have no idea what. Perhaps I am nearly done growing, as Grandmother suggested. Not by human accounting, but by how the fae grow. Maybe I’ll stay this way.” He closed his eyes and tried not to tremble. His parent had not been able to bear life with odd hair and odder ears. Zelli might have more than even that.
“Does this change usually happen so close to your other problem?” Tahlen was not any less alarmed, although he resumed stroking soft fur in already soft places.
A shiver went through Zelli before he opened his eyes. He curled his fingers around the rowan tree at his throat, then shook his head. “Grandmother also suggested the difference the past few days is you.”
“This is for me?” Tahlen’s eyebrows went up, then lowered to knit together. “Done by you?”
Zelli briefly bit his lip. “I have no control over these things that I’m aware of. But… it’s usually easy to hide. Now black eyes… and these horns.” Zelli felt them again. “For years, I could keep them buried in my hair. Then a hood would do. These are going to be difficult to conceal.”
“And the ears?”
His ears would now be pointed, with more fuzz along the back that disappeared into the rest of Zelli’s hair.
“I also used to hide those in my hair. My parent cut theirs in order to look more like everyone else. It’s hard to be a Tialttyrin, even here. Maybe here more than elsewhere. I don’t know.”
“With these markings, you almost look like a baby deer,” Tahlen observed. “Except for the teeth and your eyes.”
Zelli scoffed. “Some mountain wolf.”
Tahlen’s gaze sharpened. “The outguard, the one who said that, who had dealt with the fae before. What did he say? They watch over you, and for a reason, even if you don’t know the reason at first?”
“They watch over you too,” Zelli told him, suspecting Tahlen would dismiss the point but needing it said. “They must think highly of you, your strength and your intentions, and whatever it is that guides you.”
“And for that, they remind me here, in the privacy of your room, that it is one of their own that I have taken into my bed—your bed?” Tahlen put the tip of one finger against Zelli’s mouth, lighting up when Zelli bit it. “You were pretty before, but now you look…” Zelli tensed. Tahlen sighed heavily. “Alluring but dangerous. As though you will taste my blood this time.”
He did not scream and flee the bed. He did not back away. He pressed his fingertip against the edges of Zelli’s cutter teeth and caught his breath.
“Do you want me to taste your blood?” Zelli also did not run away at the thought. He wriggled and stretched against the bedding, warm again without any fever. Tahlen’s attention fell to Zelli’s current cock, then came up to Zelli’s nipples, then back to his mouth. “You’re wonderful, Tahlen, and I’d like to reward you in a way that pleases us both.”
“Your eyes can’t show purple,” Tahlen remarked, tossing aside any blankets near him so he could climb over Zelli. “They’ve been purple every other time you’ve been…”
“Aroused by you?” Zelli guessed, less concerned with his eye color now with Tahlen on top of him. “Well, I am, as you will feel if you keep moving as you are and…” He gasped, then ducked his head under Tahlen’s chin. Tahlen flinched out of the way.
They stared at each other.
“One more thing for us to be careful of, that’s all,” Tahlen said at last, leaning down to press a kiss to one of the horns, which must end in wicked points.
Zelli could not feel Tahlen’s lips there but the gesture warmed him. He fell back down to stare somewhat grumpily at the canopy above the bed. “I cannot even be close to you how I want to. I’m getting used to kisses, and being held by you, and getting to hold you, and now this.”
Tahlen sat back, straddling Zelli without putting much weight on him.
Zelli could hardly stand to meet his eyes. “I keep getting stranger and more inconvenient for you. I’m sorry. At least I don’t have to ride a horse today and can finally be tupped again. It has been a whole night and day since I last remember having you.”
