Lethal Rider

by Larissa Ione

  Where was he, anyway? The other side of the bed was undisturbed.

  I guess it’s no surprise that you recognized betrayal before I did.

  Well, that explained why he wasn’t in bed. She’d really thought, when he held her so tenderly and didn’t jump on the offer to kill her for the sake of the baby, that his hatred had eased. When her agony had been at its worst, she’d taken comfort in his change of heart.

  Clearly, she was a fool.

  Sighing, she sat up and drew a startled breath when she saw him in the corner chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his arms folded across his bare chest, an open book cradled in his hands. His eyes were closed, but on his arm, Styx was tossing his head. Maybe the stallion was as impatient to be fed as the baby was.

  Wait…did Styx even eat?

  With as much grace as she could muster, she stood on feet that were swollen and would no longer fit into her shoes.

  As she padded over to Thanatos, the floor was as freezing as an ice rink on the soles of her feet, but after the agonizing fever from the poison she welcomed the cold.

  “Thanatos?” She knelt next to the chair, but he didn’t stir. Styx bucked… maybe he’d heard her? Very gently, she stroked her fingertip over the stallion’s shoulder. The horse stopped tossing his head, but as she traced the line of his back, he stomped his foot. Did that mean he was annoyed? He was as hard to read as his master.

  She drew away from the horse, letting her finger drift up Than’s arm. His body was covered in tattoos, most of which he hadn’t allowed her to touch. Probably a good thing, since she felt emotion in ink… and Thanatos’s tattoos were emotion transferred to skin.

  Maybe… maybe this was how she could begin to make things right between them and show him that while he might not care about her, she cared about him and had since before that awful night. If she could learn more about him, learn what he wanted and needed …

  Tentatively, she put the tip of her finger to an outline of a skull engulfed by flames above his right pec. Instantly, heat licked up her hand, and as she opened herself to her gift, images swamped her brain. Thanatos, in pain as fiery arrows punched through his armor and into his body. Demons came at him from across an open, grassy plain that was soaked in blood and littered with human and demon corpses. Thanatos’s thoughts raced through her… his unimaginable agony, his fury as he swung his blade, his regret at having released all the souls in his armor, leaving him vulnerable to the fire-arrows.

  She recoiled, her skin burning, as if sympathizing with what he’d gone through. She’d always assumed he was immune to harm and physical pain, but he’d experienced his flesh burning all the way to the bone, and his misery had been genuine.

  “Oh, Thanatos,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  Her hand quivered a little as she moved it to his left pec and feathered her fingertips over the exquisite hellhound design. As if she’d been dropped into a movie, nasty snarls rang in her ears and razor-sharp teeth snapped in her face. Thanatos was in a dark cavern, surrounded by a pack of hellhounds. His souls had already killed a dozen of them, and another dozen lay in pieces on the ground, victims of Than’s massive sword. Behind him, a mountain of bones and bodies formed a grotesque feeding station, and Regan’s stomach heaved.

  She shuddered and braced herself to touch the tip of a Celtic-designed sword dripping with icicles on his breastbone. A faint vibration shimmered along her skin, and icy cold seeped into her bones. A stark, wintery landscape opened up before her, and rage… so much rage, rushed through her veins. In the distance, a bizarre forest rose up out of the ice. What kind of trees were those? She squinted, and when the truth hit her, bile washed into her mouth. Not trees—giant wooden stakes, each impaling a body. Good God, hundreds—no, thousands—of men, women, and children had been skewered.

  Between the stakes were more dead—soldiers, hacked to death and lying in pools of blood.

  “You went too far, Thanatos. Too far.” Gethel stood nearby, her eyes sad as she looked from Thanatos to the forest of dead.

  But Than was beyond reason, and with a roar, he launched at the angel, his bloody sword flashing in the streaks of sunlight that penetrated the clouds. Gethel flashed away in a flicker of golden light, but another voice came from behind, and he whirled, sinking his blade into the belly of a female Regan swore hadn’t been there a moment before.

  The female demon gasped, her blue lips and frosty skin going even paler. Regan didn’t know her species, but she was definitely a demon.

  A silver tear dripped from one gray-blue eye as she looked at Thanatos in shock. “Than …”

  Thanatos let loose another angry roar, and in one smooth, powerful move, he jerked the sword out of her body and swung it in a massive arc, separating her head from her body.

  Thanatos stood silently, staring at the dead demon as her body disintegrated the way most of them did when they died in the human realm.

  And then, as Thanatos’s murderous fury melted away, the reality of what he’d done sunk in. Horror replaced the anger. Sorrow and pain clenched at Regan’s heart as his emotions became hers. The demon had been his friend. In his death-haze, he’d killed his friend.

  Tears stung Regan’s eyes. She pulled away from Than, unable to take any more. Cold surrounded her like a chilled blanket, and she made her way to the fire, grateful that his servants had kept it burning through the night.

  “Did you see everything you wanted to see?” His low voice drifted to her, and she closed her eyes. She should have known he wasn’t asleep. “Did you like violating me again?”

  She spun around. “What? I didn’t—”

  “You looked into my past without permission. You took something without asking. This is a habit with you, isn’t it?”

  Oh, God, she hadn’t thought of it that way. If someone opened up her mind and did the same, she’d be pissed as hell. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “Telling you no doesn’t seem to work.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, even though she knew he viewed her words as hollow. “I just…”

  “You don’t think of me as a person.”

  “No—” She broke off, because yes, that was it. Except it wasn’t that she didn’t think of him as a living, breathing person with feelings … it was that she thought of him as too powerful and larger-than-life to be bothered by anything. Before she dug a hole any deeper, she turned back to the fire. “Who was she?”

  “Rowlari. She was my best friend for a thousand years. I’d always warned her to stay away from me when I was taken over by death, but she thought I’d never hurt her.”

  “And those people…did you…” She couldn’t continue.

  “What do you think?”

  She focused on his face, seeking clues in the hard line of his jaw, the severe set of his mouth, the shuttered darkness in his eyes, but there was nothing in his expression that could give her an answer.

  “Honestly, I don’t know what to think.”

  Her stomach rumbled and the baby kicked simultaneously, reminding her that she needed to feed them both despite the fact that she no longer felt like eating. The things Thanatos had gone through—some of them because of her—left her thinking that food was going to be a little tasteless right now.

  He said nothing, and her mind went back to the horrors she’d witnessed through his tattoos. “How do you live with it all? Everything you’ve seen? How are you still sane?”

  “I read a lot.” He held up the book he’d had lying on his chest. “Keeps my mind busy. And when I’m not reading, I’m looking for more old books.”

  “Like?”

  His long, tapered fingers skimmed the book’s spine, and it was probably pathetic that she was jealous of the thing. “I scour the Earth and Sheoul for anything that relates to Lilith and Yenrieth.” He laid the book gently on the end table next to the chair. “This is the second of three in the chronicles of a succubus who claimed to have been Lilith’s sister. I’m missing the third
. Been hunting it for centuries. See? I keep busy. Like you, I always work.”

  Odd that they both seemed to fill their time by chasing demons. She wasn’t exactly in a position to hunt them right now, but maybe there was something she could do for him. She’d have to give Kynan a call.

  “So reading and hunting books keeps you sane? After all you’ve seen?”

  His hands came down on her shoulders, startling her. How had he moved so fast and so silently? She stood frozen to the floor, a tremor of fear making her muscles quiver. She didn’t think he’d hurt her, not physically, but his words could be sharper than any blade.

  “No. It’s why I have the tattoos. When the tats are inked onto my skin, the strongest emotions are inked into them, too.”

  “So the emotions are erased?”

  “Not erased. Diluted. But I still remember everything.”

  Talk about your alternative therapies. “That’s cheating, you know.”

  “How so?”

  “The rest of us have to live with what we’ve done and what we’ve seen. We learn from it. How can you learn if how you feel is watered down?”

  “I learn. Trust me, I learn.” He dropped his hands. “Or do you think I live alone in the middle of nowhere because I like the snow?”

  “Well, then, maybe you should hit up your tattoo artist to get rid of what we did the night of Limos’s wedding.”

  “Trust me, that’s next on my list.” Pivoting, he started for the door, but she grabbed his arm.

  “Seriously?” She felt like she’d been slapped hard enough to make her numb.

  “I’d think you’d be happy to have everything about our relationship muted.”

  If she was smart, yes, she’d be happy. But she’d never done things the easy way. “We need to work things out, Horseman. We need to do it naturally, not through some artificial cheat.”

  “And why do we need to do that?”

  “Because like it or not, we’ll always be connected through this baby.”

  “A baby you planned to give away. A baby you don’t want.”

  “Dammit, Thanatos,” she snapped. “Do you really want this baby? If we’d come to you and asked you to make a baby with me, what would you have said?”

  He rounded on her. “I’d have said yes,” he barked. “Sex was out of the question, given what I believed about my Seal, but this is the damned twenty-first century. Doctors could have made it happen.”

  “We couldn’t take that chance. The wording in the document was pretty specific about a physical joining and the fact that it had to be secret.” Now they knew the scroll’s details had been laid out to trick The Aegis into taking Than’s virginity, but at the time, her colleagues had been desperate to follow it to the letter. “And what if you’d said no? Obviously Limos couldn’t do it, and we were pretty damned sure Ares wasn’t going to cast aside Cara to have sex with me.”

  Thanatos snarled. “That would not have happened.”

  “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  His voice grew gravelly. “You still should have come to me.”

  God, he was so stubborn. “We did what we thought we had to do. The fate of the entire freaking world was at stake.”

  He frowned. “So the end justifies the means. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, as Spock would say.”

  “In this case, yes.” She wrapped her arms around her, feeling a chill despite the fire. “But don’t think I don’t have some regrets. Some of us can’t just purge emotions through a tattoo. We need to talk.”

  His frown deepened. “No, you need to talk. And you’re jealous that you can’t get rid of your guilt with a simple visit to a tattoo artist. It’s not my job to make you feel better about what you’ve done, Regan.” His words rained down on her like blows, but she stood her ground.

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to not take the easy way out of something?”

  In a smooth, lithe surge, he backed her against the wall, his face in hers, his eyes burning with regret. “You think my life has been easy? Did you ever watch everyone in the village you grew up in die at the hands of demons? Did you kill the man you called father because you were insane from the death and destruction caused by said demons? Have you slaughtered your best friend? Murdered thousands of people? Seen the carnage left behind over and over from so many wars that they all blur together? No? Well, until you have, don’t talk to me about easy.”

  She didn’t know why she did what she did next. Maybe it was because his pain was so fresh in her mind. Maybe it was because his hard body felt so good against hers. Maybe it was because his mouth was so close. Whatever it was, it made her do something that shocked them both.

  She kissed him.

  Sixteen

  She was kissing him. Not just a peck on the cheek or even on the lips. Regan had thrust her hand into his hair and brought his mouth to hers. Her tongue slipped between his lips to clash with his, and heat sparked so fast that Thanatos’s mind flipped from surprise to lust in the span of a heartbeat.

  Holy hell, she made him nuts, made him angry and horny, spun him so hard he didn’t know up from down. It was getting harder and harder to remember why he was so angry with her. He’d told her he was going to get a new tat to purge himself of that anger, but he wasn’t sure it was necessary. Not when she was kissing him the way she was, one hand tangled in his hair and the other clinging to his biceps.

  He hauled her against him, careful not to put too much pressure on her belly. A soft moan escaped her, and he swallowed it with one of his own. Her body felt good on his, and even her extra curves fit him well.

  There was a pounding on the door, followed by Ares’s gruff, “Yo, Than.”

  Reluctantly, or maybe gratefully, Thanatos broke off the kiss and shouted at his brother. “Hold on.”

  He fumbled in his back pocket for the leather-wrapped blade he’d tucked away last night and shoved it unceremoniously into Regan’s hands.

  “My dagger?”

  He nodded. “It might not be of use against Pestilence. He’s apparently built up a tolerance against the hellhound venom you coated it with. But it’s better than nothing. And it should work if—”

  “If your Seal breaks.”

  “Yeah. And Regan… don’t be afraid to use it against me.” Her eyes flipped up to meet his, the gravity of his words clearly setting in. “I have to go.”

  “To get your tattoo?” Her voice was both breathless and bitter.

  “No,” he said, just as bitterly. “To do things that will require more ink.”

  That took the wind out of her sails. “I’m sorry.” She glanced down at the floor, and fuck, didn’t Eidolon just tell him to not upset her? And what had he done at his first opportunity?

  “No, I’m sorry,” he muttered.

  Regan’s eyes flared, and her mouth fell open. Wasn’t it awesome that he was such a dick that an apology shocked the hell out of someone?

  “Dammit,” he breathed. “I have to go, but I won’t …” He looked up at the wood ceiling beams as if they could help him out here. “I won’t get the tat.” More awesome, he’d turned into a chick.

  “Really?” She sounded so hopeful that it completely threw him off balance.

  “Yeah. Whatever you want.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Why? You’re being way too nice.”

  “Maybe I feel bad about not believing you about being in danger from my vampires.” And actually, yeah, he did.

  He shouldn’t have written off her Guardian instincts so easily… she was a Guardian for a reason, and as much as he hated The Aegis, he couldn’t deny that it had been around for centuries because its members weren’t complete idiots. Not all of them, anyway.

  “Who did it?” she asked.

  Thanatos bit down on a snarl. “Dariq. He’s been with me for almost nine hundred years.”

  The daywalker had barely awakened from his turning, had been confused and starving, when Than had given him the choice of serving him or dy
ing. Dariq had chosen death.

  Instead of killing Dariq, Than had taken pity on the new vamp and brought him back to his keep so the other daywalkers could teach him how to live.

  Obviously, Thanatos’s rare moment of compassion had been a mistake. Was the asshole paying Thanatos back for keeping him alive, or was this truly about killing Thanatos’s son and starting the Apocalypse?

  Time to get to the bottom of this.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Regan asked, with such sincerity that he had the sudden urge to gather her in his arms and thank her.

  He was so addled. “Just stay safe,” he said gruffly.

  “I’d be safer if there were Guardians here with me.”

  “You won’t need them. I’m arranging for extra protection. That’s why Ares is here.”

  She sighed. “It’s not just about protection. It’s about having a friendly face around here. Someone who’s on my side.”

  As if he were the enemy. “I’m on your side.”

  “No,” she said softly, “you’re on the baby’s side. I’d like…you know…a friend.” Her voice cracked at that last part, and Decker’s image popped into his head.

  The scorpion tattoo on his throat undulated, the stinger jabbing at him with a vengeance. “Who?”

  Her mouth opened, but nothing came out, as if she didn’t know the answer to his question. And too late, he remembered what she’d said at dinner about keeping busy and having no social life. Oh, and her colleagues calling her shitspawn. Her reaction pretty much confirmed his suspicions that she had no friends.

  They were both such outsiders, weren’t they?

  Finally, she muttered, “Never mind.”

  Ares pounded on the door again. “I don’t have all day. Some of us have an Apocalypse to go to.”

  Strangely torn between wanting to make Regan feel better—even if he didn’t know how—and getting the hell away from her before he did more damage, Than hesitated. “Regan—”

  “Go,” she said. “I need to call Kynan anyway. And I have things I can do in your library.”

  Feeling as if he’d been dismissed—she was good at that—Than opened the bedroom door to find Ares standing in the hall accompanied by two hellhounds, their claws digging into the stone floor.