by Jory Strong
The stench of death surrounded her. Blood and feces and urine.
Goose bumps pimpled her skin, making her realize how cold she was.
Her shirt was soaked in blood, both hers and her enemies’.
But the Dji—Malahel hadn’t lied. She was whole. Healed. Strong.
Araña found her knives among scattered bones and leaves. She got to her feet, sheathing them, taking a last look at Jurgen and the Were.
The soft sound of sobbing and whispered prayers reached her. She retraced her earlier steps, going to the place where the remaining guardsman, Salim, who she knew only from the vision she’d changed with her visit to the witches’ house, cried in a cocoon of silk. There were twenty or thirty spiders around him, protecting their prey as others scurried along the branches on either side of the path, anchoring the threads that would allow them to lift their meal and suspend it where other predators couldn’t get it.
The spiders let her approach, parting to create a path through their midst, those displaced climbing onto the cocoon.
Perhaps he deserved this fate. Perhaps he didn’t. But Araña couldn’t walk away and leave him to die slowly.
She drew the knife, and the spiders converged on him, completely covering him. They lifted the front part of their bodies, telling her by their action they would protect their prize even from her.
Use your gifts wisely. Use all of them.
If there’d been fire here, she could have used it as a weapon. But in doing it, she would have betrayed a gift of trust, a birthright forged for her in the womb of Earth’s fire, where her nature was chosen.
Instinctively she willed the mark to her hand, then concentrated on the spiders, asking them with pictures if they’d let her cut away the silky threads of the cocoon.
They answered with movement, parting again but only enough to reveal a small patch of silk above the guardsman’s heart.
His fate was out of her hands. But she could grant him mercy.
Araña drove the knife in, accepting the spiders’ offering.
Then she turned away, racing the nightfall and hurrying toward the Constellation — and Tir.
THE scent of blood made Tir’s heart stop beating for an instant as he entered the boat’s cabin.
The air was heavy with it.
Were.
Human.
Araña’s.
She was safe. Alive.
The sound of the shower was testament to it. The way terror had morphed into relief as he ran, making him stumble and nearly fall, had told him, but until he saw her, held her…
A faucet was turned and the water stopped. A moment later, the door separating them opened.
She was naked. Beautiful. Her skin glistening, as if she’d known he was waiting and been in such a hurry to get to him that she had only allowed herself a cursory sweep of the towel over wet flesh.
Dark, dark eyes consumed him and made him burn as though he’d stepped into the heart of a primal fire.
He shed his clothes without being aware of doing it. Closed the distance between them, helpless against his need to hold her, to touch his skin to hers.
“Love me,” she whispered. Command and plea. Inescapable desire stripping away any thought he might have other than to obey.
Tir lifted her into his arms, his mouth against hers, their tongues rubbing and twining in carnal bliss, in a ravenous joining of breath and soul.
His cock strained upward toward her, licking across his belly as each step toward the bed brushed the wet tip of it across his abdomen.
It was more than lust. More than the sating of physical desire.
If he’d lost her…
Her fingers touched the collar enslaving him, transmitting regret. Worry for him. Fear only barely masking a deeper terror.
“Don’t,” he said against her lips, wanting to lose himself in her, to become a willing prisoner to the passion that eradicated all reality other than the touch of flesh to flesh, soul to soul.
Tir placed her on the mattress and followed her down, no longer content to taste only her lips. He trailed wet, hungry kisses to her breast and reveled in the way her back arched, thrusting hardened nipples against his mouth, her body begging for him to suckle with the same fervor her words did.
He laved. Bit. Sucked. And grew more aroused as she writhed, pressing her heated cunt to his belly, adding her honeyed arousal to his own.
She cried out when he left her breast and kissed downward. But when he lifted his head after tormenting her with the shallow thrusting of his tongue into her navel, he erred in underestimating her, in forgetting how ruthless a warrior she was in her own right.
“I want to put my mouth on you at the same time,” she said, wriggling out from under him, making his hips buck. The erotic images suddenly bombarding him hardened his cock further, leaving his testicles burning with the need for release.
Savage, feral determination swept through him when she would have pushed him to his back and taken the dominant position, crawling down his body and tormenting him before pleasuring him.
He grabbed her and pulled her underneath him, not allowing her to linger over his chest or nipples, not allowing her to tease. His forearms pinned her thighs to the mattress, holding her open so he could breathe her in, savor the sight of her glistening folds.
Even as he watched, the color of her aroused flesh darkened, beckoned. And it was all he could do to resist its call. He’d be lost as soon as he buried his face against her cunt, helpless against anything she wanted of him.
“Now, Araña,” he said, commanding rather than begging, forcing steel into his spine as her lips and tongue found his cock.
Pleasure rippled through Araña, his so easily becoming hers as she willingly obeyed him by pressing her mouth to his rigid penis and measuring its length with kisses and sinuous rubs of her tongue against hardened flesh.
Tir was everything to her. Unlike the truth of the spider mark, it hadn’t taken death for her to accept how important he was to her. Part of her had known from the very first, in the heart of the flame when she’d touched the strand of her life to his.
There’d never been any other choice for her but to fall in love with him, to need only his touch, crave it with a desperation that made it easy to turn away from the promise of power and a home among the Djinn.
His cock pulsed, wept for her just as her cunt throbbed and cried for him. She wanted him, ached for all of him, his body as well as his heart, his present as well as his future.
Fear clawed at her, but she forced it away, refusing to consider what lay ahead just as she’d refused to seek his image among those battling and slaughtering her kind in a past mankind no longer remembered.
His hips bucked when she took him into her mouth. She sucked, only to stop and once again tease along his length with her lips and tongue and teeth, fighting against taking him completely until he touched her in the same way.
Each lash was erotic agony. Each caress a test of Tir’s strength and resolve.
Death had come for her in a heartbeat, and for a while, as he ran, he’d thought it had taken her. Now he wanted to savor his victory over it. He wanted to hold her beneath him and soak in the heat of her, to fill himself with her cries of pleasure, with the taste and scent and essence of her.
But he was powerless against the punishing ecstasy of lips and tongue and teeth on his cock. He couldn’t resist her pleading with him to love her by putting his mouth on her.
Tir relented and lowered his lips to her heated flesh. He took her erect clit and thrilled at the way her hips jerked, bucked as she fucked the tiny organ into his mouth in the same rhythm as his cock slid into hers.
Satisfaction buffered the raw edge of his passion—until she swallowed, taking him deeper, sucking him harder.
With a growl he left her clit. He lapped his tongue through the silky moisture of her slit, plunged it hard and deep between her swollen cunt lips.
The bond that sent her emotions swirling into him
, that had nearly destroyed his sanity in the moment she almost died, allowed him to feel her pleasure, the ecstasy she found in his touch— only his touch.
He wouldn’t part with her. Couldn’t. Even the thought of it burned away what remained of his control.
Tir fucked her with his tongue. Shoved it into her tight channel as he held her open, his cock doing the same to her mouth. And even when she came, it wasn’t enough of a claiming.
He pulled from her mouth before he spewed his seed. He forced her onto her elbows and knees, though she went willingly, provocatively spreading her thighs, offering herself to him, feeding a bestial urge to mate.
He covered her. Thrust into her.
Rutted like the stud his captors had so often tried to make of him. Her moans and panted pleas sent him into a frenzy. Had him convulsing in exquisite victory as jets of semen rushed through his cock in a lava-hot rush to her womb.
He wouldn’t lose her again. Now and forever, she was his.
Tir collapsed, his arms locking her to him, holding her back to his chest as his penis remained inside her, trapping his seed in her sultry depths. She shivered against him, but he knew it was in pleasure, in reaction to the intensity of their lovemaking.
He pressed a kiss to her shoulder, her neck. A question forced its way through the aftermath of desire. “What happened?”
She shivered again. And this time he knew she was remembering. Fear tried to chase away the heated remnants of lust. He tugged a blanket over them.
“What happened?” Tir repeated, his arms tightening around Araña in a silent warning he wouldn’t let her avoid his question.
Araña closed her eyes, savoring the heat of Tir’s body, the protective, possessive feel of his arms around her, the intimacy of having his cock still lodged inside her.
What should she tell him? What could she tell him?
Nothing about the Djinn. She didn’t doubt The Prince would send Scorpion assassins as terrifying and deadly as Abijah if she spoke about her kind.
“I led the guardsman who sold me to the maze into a copse of trees near where I escaped from it. He was with two others. Another guardsman and the Were from the trapper’s truck.”
“Raoul,” Tir growled. “They’re dead?”
“Yes.” She delayed the moment when they would need to talk about going into Anton’s house by rubbing her palm over the tattoos on his arm. “What do the glyphs mean?”
“They’re prayers to use with my blood.”
She heard the savage anger in Tir’s voice. “For healing?”
“Yes.”
She ached to tell him Abijah held the key to freeing him from the collar. But just as she couldn’t tell him what she’d learned of her own heritage, she feared what he would do with the knowledge.
Abijah might be bound, but he was no less powerful or deadly for it, while Tir was vulnerable. Fear stuttered through her chest as she thought about what tomorrow would bring— and the choice awaiting her if they managed to get into the maze and then into Anton’s house.
Malahel’s warnings whispered through her mind, along with the words Tir had spoken before they’d come to Oakland. Keep your secrets as long as they don’t involve me. But remember this, if I find they make you my enemy, not even the sweet temptation of your body will save you from my vengeance.
Araña took a steadying breath and forged ahead with the plan she hoped would lead to Tir’s freedom without putting him in the path of the Djinn who’d enslaved him. “When I was held at the maze, Anton summoned the demon and ordered him to bring me to the front of the cage. The demon didn’t move to obey and Anton commanded him again, in a language I didn’t understand.
“It made me realize the demon wasn’t a willing participant in the maze. Later the demon refused to answer a question until Anton repeated it three times. When he did answer it, Anton’s assistant Farold suggested a caveat be added to whatever command the demon has to obey when it comes to those running the maze. He suggested the demon be told not to intentionally kill me unless I was escaping the maze. If I’m breaking in, and the demon sees an opportunity to be free if I can kill Anton—”
“Don’t think you’re going in alone.”
“It’s our best chance.”
His teeth found her shoulder and administered a rebuke. “If I thought you’d agree to leaving Oakland and forgetting your promise to the vampires, I’d force myself out of the tight heaven of your channel and head for the bay and open waters right now.”
There was an edge of truth in Tir’s comment, as if he’d contemplated forcing her to leave. “I can’t,” she said, the image of Erik and Matthew rising from the black sea of the ghostlands pressing in on her.
Araña entwined her fingers with Tir’s and regrouped, her heart racing as she remembered the hungry pull of the flames, the desire to reunite with them and the shimmering promise of the Djinn Kingdom.
“I was dying,” she said. “You saved me. You healed me.”
Tir’s fingers tightened on hers. “And promised myself that from now on I wouldn’t let my vigilance waver, even for a moment. You’re so very mortal. So vulnerable. A blink and you could be gone from my life forever.”
Her heart thundered in her chest at what his words implied. She turned in his arms, putting aside the need to convince him to let her face Abijah alone, at least for the moment.
Araña smiled when Tir grunted in protest at having his cock forced from her body. Even now, after all they’d done together, she found him too beautiful to look at and yet so enthralling she couldn’t look away. He was masculine perfection, the epitome of unfathomable power.
If he remembered his past, would he look on her with hatred and revulsion? Would he regret touching her, lying with her?
A fist squeezed her heart, sending pain spiking through her chest at the thought of losing him. She refused to believe he would kill her if he learned she was Djinn, but she couldn’t stop herself from stroking a fingertip over the collar.
“I nearly died today in my hunger for revenge. If I asked it of you, would you turn away from seeking vengeance against the one who put this on you?”
“Don’t ask it of me,” he warned.
“I can’t promise I won’t.”
And because she wanted him to have the words, she added, “I love you.”
Tir rolled so she was underneath him, his cock once again buried deep in her heated channel. Her emotions flowed into him, fierce and aching, compelling. Devastating in their intensity. He touched his lips to hers, whispered against her mouth as his hips moved, beginning a slow climb to shared ecstasy. “Love doesn’t begin to encompass all I feel for you.”
Twenty-four
RELIEF spread through Rebekka as Levi came into sight. Seeing him made her escape from the Iberá compound more real than the chauffeured drive or the moments she’d spent in the room off the foyer with Annalise Wainwright. Seeing him allowed her to believe life would return to normal—an illusion that lasted until the witch standing next to her on the porch said, “The matriarch thought you and the Were would be more comfortable staying elsewhere tonight. She’s arranged for an escort to the shamaness’s house. It’s safe to speak in front of him, but don’t ask his name.”
The comment took Rebekka’s eyes off Levi, and she startled at the man now standing where moments ago there’d been nothing but shadows and a raven perched in a tree just beyond the gate marking the boundary of the Wainwright property.
Shapeshifter, she thought, but even from a distance, she knew he was nothing ordinary. He was clothed, where a true shapeshifter wouldn’t have been. More telling, eyes the color of a dense forest blazed with inhuman fire, while a stylized raven marked his cheek.
“If all goes well,” Annalise said, “I will speak with you again in the future. You may keep the token in the Were’s possession as a symbol of alliance; it no longer holds a spell capable of bringing help.”
Rebekka nodded and Annalise went inside, leaving Rebekka free to hurry
into Levi’s hug and barrage of questions. Before she answered the first of them, she glanced at the stranger who leaned against the oak tree where he’d once been perched.
Levi stiffened. A low growl emerged, only to be met by a laugh.
The man pushed away from the deep shadow and approached. “That’s hardly the appropriate greeting for the poor escort and messenger boy charged with ensuring you spend the night in a place free of trouble.”
“Who are you?” Levi asked, making Rebekka cringe.
“You’ll have to trust the little healer when she tells you I mean you no harm, though as a courtesy to Aisling and her prince of a mate, it would be best if we appeared on her doorstep before full dark arrives.”
Rebekka gave Levi another quick hug then disengaged, saying, “We can talk as we walk.”
Lion gold eyes issued another warning to their escort before Levi took up a position next to her. And as they walked, she told him what had happened since they parted upon seeing the guardsmen and Gulzar near the Mission.
When she reached the part where Aziel had appeared, Levi produced the blackened token and handed it to her. He stopped in his tracks when, moments later, she got to the end of her story, telling him, “Annalise prophecies a war between supernatural beings. She claims healers will emerge who are able to do what I can’t for those trapped between forms.”
“What you can’t do yet,” their raven-marked guide said, causing them both to look at him, though he neither looked back nor stopped walking.
Levi let the stranger advance a block before he took a step. Rebekka doubted even ten blocks would be enough distance to keep their escort from hearing their conversation.
“Is he right?” Levi asked.
“Yes.”
“What do the witches want from you?”
She curled her fingers around his arm. “They didn’t ask anything.”
