She arched into his next intrusion, taking him deeper and squeezing.
“Mercy, woman.”
“Then give me what I want.”
“What we want.” He braced his weight above her, kissing her urgently as he nudged inside. Her groan filled his mouth. He stopped.
She scored his back with her nails. “More.”
“Fay.” The warning was too late. Her desire snapped his leash. He thrust once, completely entering her. “Hell damn.” Tension shook him as he forced himself to still. “Fay?”
“You’re big.”
“Damn it, I know. Did I hurt you?”
“First time.” She breathed quietly beneath him, adjusting to the odd rightness of being stretched and filled so intimately. She traced the line of his spine. There was less pain than she’d anticipated. More a sense of accepting an irrevocable change. Steve was part of her, literally. She kissed him. “Continue.”
He shuddered and thrust. “Have to. Rohi.”
“My soul.” She encircled his shoulders as the power of his beautiful body imposed the rhythm of loving. It was hard, demanding and primitive. Tender. She moved with him, testing her own demands and finding them overwhelming.
“Please, please, please, Steve.” She wrapped her legs around him. The position rubbed him against her in new sensitivity. It was too much. She screamed as her climax exploded.
“Hell, yes.” He followed her into the darkness.
“I thought first times were meant to be traumatic.” Fay lay with her head on Steve’s shoulder.
His hand stroke her hip, his own satisfaction evident in the relaxed sprawl of his body and low lazy voice. “How do you feel?”
“Euphoric.”
“I aim to please.”
She tugged at his chest hair to punish that degree of arrogant male pride. “It was a mutual effort.”
“Very mutual.” He found her breasts.
She shifted to grant him better access. There was something hedonistic in simply lying back, enjoying his appreciation of her body. Later she would explore his body. Her muscles ached pleasantly at the memory of his power. She kissed his shoulder, licked at the salt.
“You want to play?” His rough voice teased. He slid down her body, kissing, biting, shaping her with his hands. “I love the taste of you, the scent of you on my skin. You’re strong and soft, so soft.” He nuzzled her stomach.
“Steve.”
He let her drag him back to her mouth. She feasted with new hunger, aware of the tension growing between them, feeding it.
“You’ll be sore,” he reminded them both.
“No.” Not enough to stop the fever in her blood. “You feel amazing inside me. So big. You move and everything goes crazy. All I can feel is you, more and more of you.”
“Fuck, Fay. I’m hard as a rock.”
“A menhir.” She nipped his ear as he settled between her thighs.
“We’ll go slowly this time.”
“Who are you telling?”
“Myself. And you, witch.”
Her laugh ended in a gasp as he entered her. Delicious slow strokes in and out so that she shuddered helplessly, willingly.
“Now do you appreciate slow?” Muscles stood out on his body, mute evidence of the control he exerted.
“Ye-es.” Her head moved restlessly.
“Then we’ll continue.”
She gripped his shoulders as he thrust within her, raising her hips to meet him, digging her heels into the mattress.
“Easy.” He coaxed her down with caresses and kisses and the slow ride built in waves till his shout of completion joined her own.
She smiled. Loving was mind-shattering.
Chapter 15
Dinner the next night was enjoyable. For a start, Fay had stopped blushing. Of course, she looked too often at Steve and smiled too fatuously, but he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he smiled more than she’d ever seen him do. Happiness suited him.
“Are you really a were?” Linda asked. The old lady was wearing a purple dress and clanking with silver jewelry.
“I’m a leopard.”
“More like a sabre-tooth tiger,” Fay said.
“Oh, you’ve seen him in animal form?” Linda’s bright-eyed gaze transferred to her.
“Yes.” Not in the best of circumstances, but…“He’s gorgeous.”
The smug curve of his lips was distinctly feline. “Thanks, darling.”
“Pass the potatoes.” Jim concentrated on his meal.
Yolanthe handed him the bowl of mashed potato. “What is it you do, Steve? Your job?”
A mercenary. Fay was new to the whole mother-daughter dynamic, but she had a feeling “mercenary” would go down like a lead balloon.
“I have an engineering degree and specialize in logistics.” All true. Steve adroitly navigated the minefield of maternal anxieties, but it was a selective truth.
“He has a lovely apartment in New York,” Fay said.
“New York.” From Yolanthe’s tone, it was a city filled with zombies and bubonic plague. Or Richard and the Collegium.
“I’m based in Cyprus,” Steve said.
Jim frowned. “The nearest portal is Alexandria.”
“My grandfather lives there. I’ll live there, too, one day.” His glance lingered on Fay. “Maybe sooner than I’d planned.”
“Have you visited the new Library of Alexandria?” Esse asked. The sixth diner and quietest of the boardinghouse residents so seldom spoke at the table that they all stared at her. Her narrow face flushed at the attention and she readjusted her glasses.
“My goodness,” Linda exclaimed. “Never say they’ve dared fate. People are so foolish. Imagine rebuilding such a mythical place.”
“It was real enough in its day.” Steve smiled at Esse. “The new Bibliotheca Alexandrina is pretty amazing. Far more than a library. If you visit, you’ll want to spend a few days or weeks.”
“I like the smell of old libraries,” Yolanthe said.
“Dust, silverfish, mold.” Jim grinned, provocative on purpose. “Give me a nice clean digital book any day.”
Yolanthe wrinkled her nose at him. “Philistine.”
“Luddite.”
The conversation flowed with casual informality.
“Mango and ice-cream for dessert,” Jim said.
Fay pushed back her chair to collect their plates. “Sounds good.”
She dropped back in her chair as the mosquito protection spell she’d cast days ago pinged and tore. It slapped against her skin like sunburn.
“What the hell?” Jim started for the front door. Power surged from the portal, slamming through the protections that guarded the boardinghouse, re-enforcing them.
Too late.
Collegium guardians broke through doors and windows, all dressed in black and grey camo gear, the first bullets tearing through the air. Fay recognized their leader, Ethan. Her ex-almost lover. The man who’d used her.
His gun shifted, pointing at Steve.
The power of the portal thundered, shimmering visibly, physically holding the intruders frozen for the space of five breaths. Then Jim groaned, clutched his chest and collapsed.
But he’d won Fay enough time to knock the bullets from the air, to recognize them as silver and to melt the barrels of the weapons. It took silver to stop a were. The guardians had come prepared to kill Steve.
The stink of demons filled the room.
Fay’s rage leapt higher. Someone was using demons as Angus had tried, using demons to attack humans.
Steve blinked to leopard and lunged. The dining table crashed aside, knocking three guardians off their feet. There was no roar, no wasted time or movement. He was all predator, enraged, protective and lethal. Claws sliced the air. The guardians had only a moment to throw themselves backward, out of reach.
Linda hit the one nearest her with her handbag. Unbelievably, he went down.
“Jim!” Yolanthe was scrambling across the room, intent on reaching her h
usband.
Steve cleared the path. The guardians had recognized the uselessness of their weapons after Fay’s intervention, and they flung them aside and reached for their magic. In their haste, they forgot it had no effect on weres. Steve deflected the spells, moving through them, slashing and slamming bodies.
Fay turned her attention to the demons. There were two, insubstantial but lending power to the guardians’ attack, enabling them to defy the protective defenses of Jim’s portal. The demons’ signatures were present in their stench. Fay concentrated and traced the binding on them back to the demonologists controlling them.
Idiots and cowards! They were near, very near, but outside. Safe—they thought. Lurking outside, channeling the demons’ power to attack her and those she loved.
They’d learn that no distance was safe.
The temptation was fierce: to loose the demons. The first people they’d turn on would be their handlers. But then she’d have to bind or exorcise the demons to protect Yolanthe and Jim’s neighbors, and she wasn’t sure she’d have the time or energy.
As much as she intended to bring the battle to the demonologists, it would have to be another way. She gathered power from the air, from the portal’s broken protections and the guardians’ failed spells. Then she sent it back along the invisible chains of demon-channeled power.
Like a heat-seeking missile, her power slammed along the chains and exploded around the amulets binding the demons. Amulets that the demonologists held. Their concentration broke.
The portal’s protections snapped back into place, and an instant later the guardian intruders screamed as flames flared from their clothes. The flames licked against the dining room furniture without scorching it.
“Out,” Ethan shouted the order to retreat.
Steve batted aside a guardian and lunged for Ethan, who ducked out the door. Steve roared.
Outside, the demonologists recovered fractionally and directed their attention at Fay. She felt the ooze of demon drool on her face. Illusion, but nearly true. Even with the demons amulet-bound, the demonologists were losing control. They had overstretched themselves, thinking demon-channeled power could take out a portal and Fay.
Steve blinked back to human form and jumped through the nearest exit—the dining room windows—after the guardians.
Fay followed.
Around the corner of the house, in the narrow street, a van waited. The two demonologists stood with their backs to it, arms outstretched, under the skinny leaves of a twisted peppermint tree. The shadows were appropriate. The amulets they held pulsed an ominous blood red.
The bound demons weren’t as strong as Oran, the demon Fay had exorcised in New York, but they were too strong for the demonologists. Too strong and too clever. They whispered to Fay, promising that they would share revenge with her. Two puny humans, they would eat them as appetizers. She could play with their bones.
“Shut up.” She had to think, had to concentrate. The fight was far from over; only now it was outside, in public.
The demons shrieked with glee. Don’t think. Give us freedom. We’ll suck the marrow from their bones.
“No.” She thrust the intrusive voices from her mind, re-enforcing her personal protections, and barely in time.
As soon as the guardians stumbled off the property onto the road, the punishing flames of the portal’s protections vanished. Flames gone, the guardians regrouped. Knives appeared, singing through the air at Fay and Steve.
She gritted her teeth, aware that magic as well as skill guided the knives, and she had to concentrate on the demons because even as the demonologists attempted to use the demons’ power, the demons were gnawing through the bindings of their amulets. She had to control them.
But the more immediate threat could kill her first. The guardians’ knives flashed, glinting in the light from the open front door.
Steve snatched up a chair from the veranda and held it as a shield in front of them.
The first knife barely thudded into the chair, when it—and all the knives—changed suddenly into hornets, spun and darted after their owners.
Fay blinked and looked behind her, uncertain of the source of the timely back up. It hadn’t felt like Jim’s portal power.
Esse, the quiet boardinghouse guest, waved from the doorway. The magic was hers.
Van doors slammed as maddened knife-hornets butted and dented the paintwork and fractured the glass trying to get at the guardians, who had retreated to safety. They hadn’t cared about their demonologist allies, though.
The two demonologists pounded on the outside of the van.
Fay frowned in disapproval as well as anger as she strode forward. The knife-hornets weren’t attacking the demonologists, so the two mages had no excuse for their panic. Survival meant controlling the demons, yet the demonologists’ self-control was frayed to a thread. This was the caliber of person the Collegium trusted with demons?
Angus, the late Chief of Demonology, had failed in more ways than one.
Fay couldn’t fail now. Inside the van, the guardians would be re-grouping. “Let’s end this.” She still lived by one Collegium rule: don’t terrorize the mundane. If this insanity continued, they would attract attention. Outside the boardinghouse, Jim’s privacy portal spells couldn’t hide magic or screams.
The demonologists had tied the amulets to them with blood. So by blood she’d free them. Then the demons, amulets and all, could be sent to hell. That was what her training said to do, but she shook with the demon-fed raw need to send the whole team, guardians and demonologists, to damnation. They had dared to attack her family.
She drew her ironwood knife and cut reality, gashing an opening to hell.
“I need their blood,” she said to Steve.
He pounced. Sharp claws slashed vindictively, one line each from the demonologists’ right eyes. He dropped the sobbing idiots at her feet.
“Thanks.” She took the amulets from them as the demonologists scrabbled up and ran sobbing to the van. This time its door opened. The demons shrieked in her ears. “No. You’re going to hell.”
They were nowhere near as strong as Oran, nor had they been fed on death. She stabbed the amulets with her blade and threw the severed spellwork through the rip in reality. The rough and ready exorcism worked. The demons fell cursing into hell and the rip sealed. A fresh ocean breeze blew away the stench of damnation.
The Collegium van revved and halted as Steve grabbed the tow bar. That was the measure of his were strength and his rage. The smash of his fist shattered the back window.
“Let them go.” Fay put her hand on his back.
“I warned them what would happen if they came after you. I’m going to paint the street with their yellow livers.”
“Animal.” The curse came from the van. Ethan had no brains.
Fay found a rush of exasperation-fuelled power. The van and its occupants vanished.
“Where?” Steve’s question was a snarl, a man deprived of rightful prey.
“Ocean. A mile out. Hopefully they can’t swim.”
“Maybe sharks will eat them.” They jogged back into the house.
Jim met them, leaning against the dining room doorframe with Yolanthe hovering. Linda and Esse waited in the background. Jim waved aside Fay and Steve’s concern. “Power burn, not a heart attack.”
“Are they gone?” Yolanthe asked.
“Yes, and they won’t be back. I’m sorry I brought this trouble to you.” Fay met Steve’s gaze and they shared the thought: the Collegium’s senior members had had a chance to resolve the situation quietly. They’d failed. Now, Fay and Steve would deliver justice. “We need to use the portal.”
Chapter 16
“I shouldn’t have let it go,” Fay fretted as she waited for Jim to climb cautiously down the ladder to the portal. They needed him, as porter, to contact Cynthia. “I shouldn’t have let the senior members get away with that half-assed response.”
Yesterday the Collegium members had rea
d her and Steve’s report, and ignored him, although he was the next Suzerain, and given her a brush-off sharp as a slap. “Your father denies your accusations. But given the seriousness of the charges, we are looking into the matter. Angus is dead.”
“Who killed Angus?” She steadied Jim as he wobbled down the last step.
“Does it matter?” he wheezed.
“It does. Those were guardians who attacked us. Angus was head of the Demonology Department. He knew the shifts of power within the Collegium. Someone killed him and if they hung the suspicion of guilt on me—”
“On us,” Steve interjected.
She nodded. “That suspicion could be spun as a reason to attack us.”
Steve growled. “And if you died ‘resisting apprehension’…”
Her smile was sharp, promising vengeance. “Someone would be delighted.”
“Relieved,” Jim said. “You scare them, kiddo.”
“With reason,” she vowed and clasped Steve’s hand. No one would hurt her family again.
His firm grip said he was with her on that.
“Cynthia.” Jim contacted the other porter. “I’m sending through Fay and her friend, Steve. It’s urgent.”
“Jim, what’s happened?” Cynthia’s voice echoed through the portal on a high note, shrill with worry. “Your portal shook.”
“Someone attempted to break my protections. Don’t panic. The portal’s still mine. I’m sending Fay through. She’ll deal with the mess.” He glanced at Fay, who nodded. He tagged her, then Steve, with the blue light of his portal and handed them both shell tokens. “Explanations later, Cyn.”
“Be careful,” Yolanthe said from the top of the ladder. The cellar was too small for her to add to the crowd.
Careful? No. Avenging furies weren’t careful. Fay swallowed, not wanting her voice to reveal her reckless determination—and worry Yolanthe. “Bye, Mom.”
“I’ll be with her,” Steve said. His voice held all the menace Fay had tried to hide. Hell was about to open for those who’d threatened her.
They stepped into the portal.
Cynthia found them in three steps, dabbed them with green light and hauled them out. “Explain.”
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