Read Chained (Brides of the Kindred) for Free Online Page B

the little brook. Then she tilted it carefully into
his mouth…or tried to anyway. Because try as she might, the water wouldn’t go
past his lips. It slid past his mouth and over his cheeks but something always seemed
to keep it from going in. Maggie tried again and again until he shook his head.
    “No use. Must…break the barrier.”
    “There’s a barrier around your mouth?”
Then she remembered what the evil Lady Pope’nose had said. “Of course, it’s
this damn dust, isn’t it?”
    She stopped trying to tilt the water into
his mouth. Instead, she scooped up a handful of water and tried to wash the
verium dust off his face.
    It didn’t work. Though she tried first
with her hand and then with one of her dress's ridiculously trailing sleeves
soaked in water, the silver-gray dust wouldn’t come off.
    “What the hell is going on?” she muttered
at last in frustration. “Why won’t this damn stuff come off?”
    “Told you…must break the barrier.”
    To her alarm, his voice sounded weaker
again and his eyes were fluttering closed.
    “Break the barrier? But how?” she begged,
patting his cheek. “Hey, come back to me. Tell me how to help you!”
    His eyes opened again, their strange, oval
pupils so much like a cat’s looking into hers. “Kiss…of life.”
    “I don’t understand. You want me to kiss
you? Why?”
    “Must give water…mouth to mouth. Only skin
unpolluted…by the varium… can disrupt its field.”
    “Mouth to mouth? You mean you want me to
take a mouthful of water and then…” Maggie couldn’t finish.
    He nodded weakly. “It’s…only way.
Please…so thirsty.”
    It seemed like an incredibly strange and
intimate act to be performing with a stranger but Maggie didn’t know what else
to do. Kneeling down, she got a big mouthful of the cold, clear water. Then she
pillowed the prisoner’s head in her lap—which wasn’t easy because all of
him was heavy—and pressed her lips to his.
    The moment she let the water rush from her
mouth to his, she could tell it was working. He drank from her thirstily and not
a single drop was spilled from the side of his mouth.
    When she finally pulled away from the
strange kiss, he looked up at her, his eyes blazing and whispered, “More.”
    “Of course," Maggie whispered.
    She did it again, taking another mouthful
and sealing her lips to his. And then again and again. It occurred to her after
the fourth or fifth time that if the seal was broken, she should probably give
him water from her cupped hands instead. But by that time she was kind of
enjoying herself. It had been a long time since she’d kissed anyone—Donald
considered the activity unsanitary and unnecessary—and she’d never kissed
anyone even remotely like the prisoner.
    Her heart beat harder and her lips tingled
when she pressed them to his. His mouth tasted faintly of cinnamon or maybe
some other exotic spice. Plus he was so huge and yet so helpless with his head
still pillowed in her lap. If he’d been standing up or even kneeling, she would
have felt intimidated by his size and muscular physique. As it was, she felt
perfectly confident and also protective of him. I have to do this—I have to
save him, she told herself. There's no choice if I want him to live.
    Maggie wasn’t sure when her life-giving
gesture—what the prisoner had called the kiss of life—turned into an actual kiss.
She only knew that one minute she was sealing her lips to his to give him
water…and the next his tongue was stroking lightly over hers.
    Her eyes drifted closed and she cradled
his head closer, forgetting to go back for more water. Instead, she concentrated
on the warm, cinnamon taste of his mouth and the feel of his tongue exploring
her.
    The prisoner seemed to be enjoying the
kiss too. He made a low, approving growl at the back of his throat that seemed
to vibrate through her entire body.
    The sound shook Maggie out of the strange
trance she’d somehow fallen into. With a little gasp, she