“I don’t think it’s a reflex for the others. They just speed up when they want to. Can you move fast on purpose?”
“Faster than anyone I know.”
“I’ve seen that,” he agreed. “But that’s the problem: I’ve seen it. What about now? Bring to me a book from the shelf there.”
He pointed across the room. Ash raced for it, slapped it into his hand.
“See? That was only a second.”
“And I saw you. I couldn’t see the other demon move, or I just saw a blur at other times. You weren’t a blur.”
Ash narrowed her eyes at him. “I can be a blur. I’m a demon.”
“Then take the book from me,” he challenged.
Too easy. Wondering if it was some kind of trap, she snatched her hand out. He jerked the book away from beneath her fingers.
His grin irritated her. “Lucky timing,” she said.
“Then prove it. Grab it.”
Her hand shot out. He moved the book just in time. Her nails scraped over the cover.
She felt the points of her fangs digging into the inside of her bottom lip. “So you’ve got good reflexes,” she hissed.
“Ha! Look at you. Can’t take it from me, demon.”
Fuck that. Determined, she reached for it again. He jerked it back . . . and slowed. She snatched the book before he’d moved it an inch.
And for good measure, raced across the room.
Nicholas blinked, looking at the spot she’d been standing. He looked down at his hand, then found her standing by the stove. “Better,” he said. “Now come back here, and we’ll try a few jabs again. Don’t you let me hit you. Either move or block every one.”
She did—blocking most of them, just for an excuse to touch him, to catch his fist against her palm and slide her fingers against the backs of his. In the space of a half hour, using that different perception became almost natural. It wasn’t so much that everything slowed, she realized; she just reacted more quickly. So quickly that it didn’t matter when he changed up the hits he threw, faster and faster . . . getting his own workout, she realized. Well, this had worked out well for both of—
He spun and dropped, sweeping her legs with a kick. Ash shrieked and crashed to the floor onto her stomach. Prepared, Nicholas grabbed her wrists, pinned them over her head. His body came hard over hers, smashing her flat.
“No more permission,” he rasped in her ear. Winded from the workout, probably boiling in that sweater, his chest worked like a bellows against her shoulders. “The Rules are in effect again. But try to get out, anyway.”
And what if she didn’t want to? He lay on top of her, and she could feel each hard muscle through her clothes.
Please let them disappear, she prayed. And his, too.
Apparently, God wasn’t listening. Her clothes remained on.
Nicholas’s grip relaxed slightly. “Ash? Are you okay?”
“Fine,” she said, and realized too late that she shouldn’t have replied. If he was determined to make her get out of this despite the Rules, pretending to be hurt would have done it. And it would have been pretty evil, too.
Next time, she thought, and then couldn’t think at all when he shifted his weight slightly, lifting off her torso and trapping her thighs with his legs. As if he’d suddenly forgotten that she didn’t need to breathe—or recognized a weak spot in his hold.
But she could have told him that there were no weak spots. Not a single inch of hard flesh against hers felt weak at all.
“Ash?”
“I’m thinking.”
About Nicholas sliding her jeans down. About his thighs slipping between hers and pushing them wide. About him slamming forward, taking possession, filling her slick flesh with explosive pressure and heat.
She closed her eyes. Oh, God. She tried to open her legs, let his weight settle in between—but she couldn’t. Her thighs pressed against his and if she moved him against his will, without permission, the Guardians would come and kill her.
Frustration bit, sharp and deep. Though she was strong, she couldn’t move her hands. Though she was strong, she couldn’t lift him off her. Though she was strong, she was trapped here, because she couldn’t throw him off and she couldn’t touch him even though he could do any damn thing he pleased . . . even not touch her when she so desperately, desperately wanted it.
Fuck this. And she knew exactly how to make him let go.
She opened her eyes, and crimson light shined through the blond hairs curtained over her face, a glow against the wooden floor. “I want to have sex now.”
Nicholas stiffened above her. His grip on her wrists tightened.
“I don’t have sex with demons.”
She knew. But suddenly, she also realized why she couldn’t feel him everywhere. He’d shifted his weight, adjusted his legs, braced his knees. Why had he lifted part of his weight off her? She didn’t need to breathe. But he liked to conceal information.
“But you want to. Your cock’s as hard as steel right now, because you were up against me, and you liked it. And you started thinking about fucking me.”
Only a guess, but the right one. He released her hands, let her up. Before she’d even gotten her feet under her, he’d stalked across the room. Putting distance between them.
And it had worked. Her breath came out as a sudden laugh.
He turned at the sound—and God yes, she’d been right about his erection, too. Confined behind denim, his penis might not have been monstrous, but that thick bulge looked exactly the right size to her.
She glanced up. Nicholas was staring at her in surprise, but also a reluctant admiration.
“So that was—”
“A plot, yes.”
And now there was something else sweeping across his expression. Disappointment?
“But I do want to have sex,” she added.
“Demon,” he said, before joining her in the middle of the room again. “That wouldn’t have worked against one. They wouldn’t have felt anything.”
“I think you’re wrong about that.” Because she sure as hell felt something. Her nipples hadn’t just spontaneously hardened and she wasn’t wet through to her core for no reason at all.
“Try it on a demon,” he offered. “We’ll see who’s right, and who is dead. Demons can make their dicks hard, too, you understand? But they don’t want it. And teasing them won’t scare them off.”
Ash didn’t want a demon, anyway. “All right. Accepted. It won’t work against anyone but you.”
His lips thinned, but at least he didn’t lie and say it wouldn’t work on him, either. He turned and walked away. To put space between them again? But no, just to shake off the frustration. By the time he circled the room, he had his serious face back on.
“All right,” he said. “You weren’t ready for me to drop. So we’ll do the sweeps again, and this time you avoid having your feet knocked out from under you.”
Avoid it? Maybe not if he got on top of her again. “And the Rules?”
“Same as before. No injuries.”
Well. She could just turn it around, then.
Ash dropped, sweeping her leg around just as she’d seen him do. He went down, hard—but no injuries, because she caught him, cushioned his fall with a hand behind the back of his head.
Before he could react, before his heart pumped another beat, she pinned his wrists, straddled his stomach. She lowered her face to his, and was looking into his eyes when she saw him realize what she’d done.
“Goddammit. That was . . .” His gaze fell, fixed on her lips. His throat worked as he swallowed. “Nicely executed. Good job.”
“Thank you.” Ash grinned, sliding her fingers down to grip his hands. She easily hauled him to his feet again. “Do you want to practice avoiding the superfast demon again?”
She did. This had become her only way of gaining permission to touch him. If he wanted to, she’d practice this all night and day.
Nicholas’s jaw clenched, and she watched th
e struggle that played through him. He did want to. He didn’t want to. But she knew which would eventually win, because only one would leave him better prepared to face Madelyn.
Finally, he nodded. “Yes.”
But his answer didn’t please her quite as much as Ash thought it would have. Maybe because Yes wasn’t enough. Because although it was what she wanted him to say . . . she wanted him to say it because he enjoyed her touching him, too.
So maybe she was beginning to feel a little frustration, after all.
CHAPTER 12
Lying on his side, Nicholas half opened his eyes to a dark room. Sleep still heavy on him, he almost fell into it again before the noise that must have woken him came again: the opening of the stove, the low thud of wood being tossed in.
A familiar sound, and for a moment he was sixteen again, listening to his grandfather stir up the morning fire. Maybe Ash, then, starting early. She always had it roaring by the time he awoke, and the kettle on to boil. In the past week, she’d gotten into the habit of taking coffee when he did, sitting at the table and reading while he ate breakfast.
He’d gotten into the habit of looking forward to her company. Maybe too much.
But hell, who was he kidding? Now that he’d woken, he’d be out of the room within minutes, just so that she’d look up and smile at him a little earlier.
He rolled over, switched off the alarm on the windup clock. No need to have it now. And—hell, it was really fucking early.
The blanket slid to his lap when he sat up. Though his chest was bare, he didn’t feel the nip of cold. A toasty warm room. He was used to that upon waking, because she always started up the fire well before the alarm got him out of bed. In the past week he’d come to appreciate that. Unlike when he’d stayed with his grandfather, his toes didn’t freeze into ice pops before he could drag a pair of wool socks on.
He didn’t need socks now. The floorboards weren’t cold at all. And it was two in the fucking morning. God.
Scrubbing the remainder of sleep from his face, he opened the door. It took him a second to see her through the dark—sitting in the rocking chair near the window. Pale moonlight gleamed on the pages of the book she held, her blond hair, the barrel of the shotgun tucked beside her.
Then, as if she’d struck a light, her own crimson glow began shining from her eyes, washing her features in red. “Did the wolves wake you?”
That glow lit his way across the room. He struck a match to the table lamp, faced her again.
“What wolves?”
She tilted her head, eyes still glowing. “I can hear them. You can’t?”
“No.”
“Sometimes it’s almost as loud as the city here. It’s just loud in a different way. Not as many people noises.”
“I heard people noises. And now I understand why the woodpile has been disappearing faster than it should have been.” His grandfather would have skinned him. “You don’t have to keep it hot in here at night. That’s what the blankets are for.”
The shining in her eyes dimmed, left only blue—human, and amused. “Not everything is about you, Nicholas. The fire is for me.”
“And you could lie out on a glacier for twenty years, then get up and walk away without feeling any the worse for it. You’re burning through our fuel—which I need if we’re going to live out here—twice as fast as we should. And we didn’t spend the summer stockpiling it.”
She shrugged. “So I’ll chop more.”
“You don’t need to,” he pointed out. “So why?”
With a sigh, she set her book aside. “I don’t like being cold.”
“You also said that like and dislike don’t matter. Only familiar does.”
“The cold is familiar. Not the kind of cold out there, but colder. It’s enough to be familiar, though, and I don’t like it.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s different. Those other things that are familiar, when I feel them I want to chase them down. I want to find out where the familiarity came from. I want to know what memory I’m missing.” As if suddenly agitated, she rocked up out of the chair, stood looking out of the window before turning to face him again. “With the cold, I don’t want to chase down what’s at the root of it. And I have memories, real memories that frighten me, and that I don’t want to revisit—a memory of Lucifer cutting these symbols into me. The memory of that Guardian looking at me. When I do think of them, I’ll shake a little. But when I think about the cold . . . I feel like if I ever reach the end of that memory, if I ever remember why it’s familiar, I’ll start screaming and screaming and I’ll never, never stop—”
Her voice cracked. God. He didn’t know what to say. He wanted to go to her, hold her. He didn’t trust himself to.
“Ash?”
Shaking her head, she pushed her hands into the pockets of her hoodie. Wearing it, even inside. She always wore it, he suddenly realized. Despite the T-shirt beneath, despite the heat of the room and her own body. She took off her jacket sometimes, and he would see it tossed over the back of a chair, but then it would disappear until the next time he saw her wearing it again.
Hell, she was always fully dressed. Except for the time she’d stripped off in front of him, he’d never seen her boots come off. Like her jeans, they seemed to change now and then, especially if she’d ripped them during their training or they’d been soaked in melted snow or mud. She didn’t launder them; they simply became new.
Maybe because they were familiar, too. And comforting, unlike the cold.
“Anyway,” she said. “We train outside all day, and I make myself ignore that feeling as much as possible. But it’s always there. So at night, I keep warm.”
He could keep her warm. She didn’t sleep, but she could read in the dark. The bed wasn’t all that big. If she slid in right next to him, he’d keep her warm all night.
And she’d be hot. So fucking hot next to him. He could discover how hot she became, how wet, how loud when he buried himself inside all of that heat.
Or he could chop some damn wood, bring it in, and let it start drying out.
“Was she that bad?”
“Who?” Confused, Nicholas followed the direction of her gaze, realized she was finally seeing him naked. Or half-naked, at least.
And that he was just fine with that.
“Madelyn. Your wrists.”
Oh. He couldn’t remember why it had seemed so important to hide those scars from her.
“Yes,” he said. “She was.”
Her gaze returned to his face. A fierce emotion lit her eyes. “I’d help you find her even without the bargain.”
She would help him find Madelyn just by being here, because Madelyn had some use for her. That was good enough. But he sure as hell wasn’t going to release her, and risk having her leave or running straight into the Guardians again. Or maybe even chasing after Madelyn, if she discovered anything about Steve Johnson’s ghost—which she would discover, as soon as she returned to make his life hell.
No. There wasn’t a chance he was letting her go. “You’re not getting away that easily, demon.”
She smiled, and he drank in the sight of it before realizing that he was about two seconds from asking her to return to the bed with him. Jesus, what was he thinking? He needed to sleep this off.
Her voice caught him as he turned away. “Nicholas?”
He stopped, waited.
“What I said before, about like and dislike—I didn’t lie. It was true then, they didn’t matter. But they do now.”
She’d also claimed that she liked him. That shouldn’t matter to him. And so that’s what he said.
“Whether you do or not doesn’t make any difference to me.”
But goddammit, it did. Too much.
Had she always been this stupid? Ash couldn’t remember.
The slender tree top swayed beneath her weight. Maybe she shouldn’t have climbed so near the top, but she’d wanted to have the longest drop possible, the longest time for he
r reflexes to kick in. She’d learned to use her speed that way; she’d also learn to fly.
She gripped the trunk tighter when a breeze slid through the firs, bending the tree top toward the ground. If it broke, the end result wouldn’t be any different than what she’d planned, but Ash preferred to control when she fell. It might be the only thing she controlled in this experiment.
As soon as she got up the courage. Until then, she could at least enjoy the view.
She’d chosen the tallest tree at the edge of the clearing that surrounded the cabin. In the distance, the mountains rose against a clear blue sky. Gorgeous. The sun shone from directly overhead. The cold never felt familiar with the heat of the sun against her skin, and she lifted her face to it, soaking in the warmth.
The birds must have been enjoying the sunshine, as well. Though usually quiet, today they were twittering away in the trees around her. Grizzly bears inhabited this area, but she hadn’t seen one yet—she supposed they were all in hibernation at this time of year. Ash was almost sorry for that. She’d have liked to have heard one, as she often heard the wolves.
A continuous, almost rhythmic thud was coming from beside the shed—Nicholas, chopping wood. Ash had volunteered to do it instead. She didn’t tire, and strong as she was, the effort would go more quickly, but he’d grunted something that apparently passed for words in man-chops-wood language, looking disgruntled and almost offended, and so Ash had left him to it. From her vantage point, she could only see his back. He hadn’t turned around yet, hadn’t seen her climb the tree. Probably a good thing.
Oh, and now she was just delaying. She glanced down at the clearing, trying to choose the best landing spot. Tracks crisscrossed the deep snow, mostly from their training sessions, and she tried to recall if any one area had seemed softer than the others. Even if it wasn’t, maybe it didn’t matter. The demon had dropped her from a similar height, and it hadn’t hurt too much. Of course, he’d also broken her neck, so she hadn’t felt anything at all.
And maybe that wasn’t the best thing to think about right now.
Demon Marked Page 19
