Anyway, the point of this experiment was not crashing into the ground. Her instincts should kick in, her procedural memory should take over. All right. She filled her lungs with a deep breath, and gave a small prayer that it wouldn’t be smashed out of her at the bottom.
Gathering her body, using the tree trunk as a spring, she leapt out over the clearing . . . and began to fall. Quickly. Oh, shit. Something needed to happen here, her wings needed to pop out and—
The muscles of her back suddenly locked. Ash cried out in surprise. Sensation exploded through her, strange and new, in places she’d never felt anything before. Places that hadn’t been there before. Cold air rushed over wide expanses of skin. New muscles strained against the onslaught of the wind. From the corner of her eye, she saw one of her wings. Black and leathery, it stretched over a thin frame, like a bat’s wing.
How did she move them? Why weren’t they flapping? Ash rolled her shoulder, tried to flex the new muscles. Pain ripped along the frame. She’d pushed something the wrong way, and like a fragile kite folding beneath a strong wind, her wing seemed to collapse. Unbalanced, she flipped over, went into a flat spin.
Oh, God.
Ash slammed into the snow. White erupted around her, a bit of a cushion but not enough. The impact smacked the breath from her lungs in a painful slap, a punch to the belly, and she didn’t want to fly anymore but just curl up and not move again for a while, but she couldn’t even manage that yet. Everything still spun and she couldn’t quite focus.
Now the cold surrounded her. The pain wasn’t the same but she could almost hear the screaming—
No. Not now. She wasn’t going there.
More rhythmic thuds. Nicholas? These were different, not the sound of an axe, but boots smashing through the snow toward her. Dizzy shock began to fade into awareness.
Strong hands gripped her shoulders. “Ash!”
Her wings had already vanished again. Moving still hurt too much. So did breathing. She groaned an answer instead, and Nicholas swore.
“I’m going to turn you over. Tell me if I hurt you.”
He didn’t hurt her. Everything just hurt. He pulled her against him, half-propped up against his leg, and she opened her eyes. Tiny snow clumps clung to her lashes, framing her view with white flakes before they melted from the heat of her skin. His face taut, Nicholas brushed more snow from her hair, her jacket.
“What the hell were you doing? Trying to kill yourself?”
“No.” Her voice came out thin and hoarse, but her chest was working again. “Trying to fly. But I only managed the worst belly flop ever.”
He didn’t laugh. His lips thinned, paled with anger. “Do you have any idea what it was like watching that? I can’t even—God.”
His fingers tightened in her hair. He stared into her eyes, wild emotions chasing across his expression, each one too fleeting for Ash to catch.
Then he bent his head, and captured her mouth in a kiss.
Surprise held Ash motionless, then flooded away the pain in a sweet rush. Oh, she’d waited for this. Wanted this. His lips parted over hers, searching out her response. Shuddering, she opened for him.
He swept in, taking possession. Oh, God. This was nothing like his first kiss. That had been controlled, and this was all searing hunger unleashed with teeth and tongue. Ash’s fingers curled into his sleeves, holding on as his need fed hers, until she was moaning low in her throat, desperate for more.
But he must have mistaken the sound for pain. He lifted his head—and no, she couldn’t grab him, pull him back down. She couldn’t follow him up and take what she needed. And now that she’d had it, now that she knew the feel of him, the sweetness, the heat, only the fear of death and breaking the damned Rules held her back. She’d have crawled across the frozen field for more of this.
She could only ask. “More.”
“No. I shouldn’t have—” Nicholas broke off. Looking almost shaken, he drew back. “I’ll help you inside. Are you still hurting?”
“Not really,” she said.
He pulled her up, so close, and when she looked up, the world stilled again. Would he kiss her? She watched the struggle play across his face, the war between what he wanted and what he believed.
Belief won. He didn’t put distance between them this time, but he might as well have. His expression hardened—not cold now, but solid . . . and effective.
Now she was hurting again, pain centered near her heart. Throat aching, she started back to the cabin.
Nicholas trudged through the snow beside her. “So what the hell were you doing?”
“We’re here to train. But if I’m going to do it right, I need to fly.”
“So you just decided to jump?”
“Yes. I needed to be fast, so we worked that out. Now I need to know how to make my wings appear, and if I can force them through some survival instinct, maybe eventually I’ll just be able to control them—just like I can be fast whenever I like now.”
“So you’ll keep jumping?”
“Yes.”
“God.” A heavy breath clouded the air. “Tell me next time, then. So I can be there.”
“I would have this time, but I thought you’d try to stop me.” His smile was grim. “I probably would have.”
They reached the porch. Nicholas paused to stomp the snow off his boots. Ash’s were already clean and dry. She didn’t know how they did that. Sometimes she thought about what she’d like them to be, then looked down, and they were.
“There’s something else,” she said, and waiting for him to glance up. “They weren’t familiar.”
“What weren’t?”
“My wings. They’re completely new to me.”
He frowned. “Do you mean you just don’t remember—”
“No. There’s familiar, and there’s not. The wings were not familiar.” And not in the same way the Boyles’ picture had been unfamiliar. There had been no surprise when she’d seen them, no sense of something new. “And I was falling, falling . . . but I didn’t know how to fly. It’s not in my procedural memory. Just as fighting isn’t, even though I supposedly fought in a war in Heaven. You’d think that would leave a stamp on someone’s memory, wouldn’t it?”
Nicholas’s brows drew together. “So you don’t remember that. All right.”
“No. I’m saying that being a demon is new to me. How can I put in a security code or drive but not know how to fly? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t,” he agreed, but she could see by the cold front coming in that the explanation that first occurred to him was: If it doesn’t make sense, then maybe the demon is lying. Even if he did agree, even if he believed her, Nicholas was reminding himself that he shouldn’t.
Disappointment weighed on her chest. God, she was an idiot. Disappointment meant expectations, and that meant she’d expected something different from him.
That had to be stupider than jumping from a tree.
With a sigh, she left him standing on the porch and pushed open the cabin door, but stopped halfway through. She faced him again.
The expression he wore was familiar. Battling himself again. Well, she wasn’t stupid enough to get involved in that fight.
“Do you know what else wasn’t familiar? The way you kissed me. But maybe you can come up with an explanation for that, since I can’t.” The ache filled her chest again. “And because even if I could, you wouldn’t believe it, anyway.”
This wasn’t working anymore.
Nicholas closed his eyes, forced himself not to go in after her. In the dark behind his lids, he could see her again: her wings twisting around, falling out of control, her wild spin straight into the ground. God. He couldn’t stand this. He couldn’t stand seeing her hurt like that, over and over again.
And she was right: She had no instinctive knowledge. Her fighting had improved, but only because they trained their asses off, until Nicholas dropped from exhaustion into the bed every night. She’d become astonishingly proficient with the shotgu
n—her boomstick, as she called it—but her ability hadn’t come from some long-lost memory. She was building it, a single day at a time.
But she was still no match for Madelyn. That demon in Duluth had snatched her up so quickly—and although Ash might be fast enough to avoid that now, she couldn’t wield a sword. She wouldn’t last a second against either demon or Guardian. If Madelyn came, the shotgun and hellhound venom might give her a chance . . . but Nicholas was getting to the point where he wasn’t sure he wanted to take that chance. To the point where he thought that running from Madelyn and protecting Ash was the far better choice.
Which was more important to him, revenge or Ash? A week ago in Duluth, that answer had been an easy one. It wasn’t easy any longer. He wanted revenge. More than that, he wanted Ash to be safe.
And fuck it all, he wanted to kiss her again. Kiss her until it wasn’t just familiar, but the taste and feel of him had been branded into her memory—as hers was branded into his.
He’d kissed her before, but he knew why this one hadn’t been familiar: He’d never kissed any woman like that. Not without calculation, not without considering the consequences or as a means to an end. He hadn’t given a thought to anything but the need to have her mouth open to his, to know the heat and taste of her. To reassure himself that she was alive, unhurt.
But although she’d quickly healed, Nicholas wasn’t so certain she was unhurt.
Something had changed in her. He realized now that the Ash he’d met in London might have very well fit the nurses’ description of a flat affect, a lack of emotion. By the time they’d reached Duluth, however, there’d already been more—amusement, irritation, joy—all clear and easily readable, and all of them unaffected by what anyone else said or did to her, and always unoffended.
He didn’t think that was the case any longer. Nicholas had begun to believe that her capability for emotion had expanded, deepened. He’d begun to believe that she could be hurt now.
And then he always wondered if that was what she wanted him to believe.
Jesus Christ, he was so fucked up. Perhaps that was Madelyn’s legacy: He’d never be able to trust anyone, anything, even if he wanted to. Even if he knew that it was hurting Ash that he couldn’t let himself trust her, that he couldn’t let himself believe her.
Then again, maybe he was right not to.
God, this would all drive him mad—if seeing her dive out of the sky didn’t do it first.
But whether he went mad didn’t matter. All that mattered was protecting her, keeping her safe—and if safe meant watching her jump over and over, until she had the ability to fly away from a demon or a Guardian as fast as she could, then by God he would help her do it.
They still had hours of daylight left. Maybe she could be flying by the end of it.
She didn’t look up when he came into the cabin. Sitting at the small table, she had the shotgun on her lap, cleaning the barrel with an oily rag.
“Do you want to try the tree again?”
“There’s no point. I don’t know how to fly. I’ll just fall and fall and fall again.” She popped open the chamber and removed a cartridge, replacing it with one of the shells prepared with hellhound venom. So she didn’t intend to practice shooting, either. “You know what I want to learn, more than anything?”
“Tell me.” And he’d do anything he could to help her.
“I want to know how to get around the damn Rules.”
Shit. Nicholas couldn’t do that. And the only being that could change those Rules hadn’t been on Nicholas’s side for a while now. “That requires a higher power than we have.”
“No. I don’t mean ‘how can I break the Rules with no consequences.’ I mean, how to get free, how to move without breaking them.” She set the shotgun aside and stood. “Like before, on the floor. I didn’t really try to get out from beneath you. I want to try again and see if I can think of a way to get you off of me without breaking the Rules.”
“You want to get on the floor again?” With her body beneath him. It would be torture. But he’d suffer through it. “All right.”
“Right here is good enough.” Ash leaned forward, placed her hands in the middle of the table. “Grab my wrists like you did before.”
Nicholas approached the opposite side of the table and pushed the chair out of the way with his foot. She wasn’t a small woman, but his hands easily encircled her wrists. Her pulse pounded beneath his fingers, her skin hot against his palms.
Her hair slid forward over her shoulder as she studied their hands. “I can’t lift up, because your will is to hold my hands down like this.”
“Yes.” Though he’d really like to hold her a lot closer than this.
If she heard the wry note in his voice, she didn’t acknowledge it. “If I was human, what would I do? I’d pull, I’d try to scratch, I’d kick you in the balls. I can’t do any of that.”
“No.” And thank God for the lack of ball kicking, at least.
Frustration flattened her mouth. Her gaze left their hands to search the tabletop. “Okay. But what if I’m not trying to get away? What if I’m not trying to impede your free will . . . I’m just making it difficult for you to keep holding me?”
“Make it so that you aren’t stopping me from holding you, but so that I want to let go?”
“Yes.”
“That would work. How would you do it?”
Her mouth twisted into a small, ironic smile. “If I could fly, I’d say: ‘You can hold on to me if you like, but I’m going up.’ It would be different than trying to lift your hands, because then I’m trying to break your hold. But flying, I wouldn’t be trying to break your hold, I’d just be warning you that you’d be in trouble if you can’t hold on when I’m a thousand feet high. Then if you let go—before or after I’m in the air—it’s your choice.”
The intention made a difference, he realized. That made a hell of a lot of sense. And good for him to know, too, if he ever did get ahold of Madelyn.
“But I can’t fly,” she said. “Here, I could say . . . I’m going to fall, Nicholas. Hold on to me if you like, but if you do, you might get hurt.”
That might work next to a cliff. But here? “Where would you—”
With a crash, the table collapsed toward her. The support for her hands gone, Ash’s weight suddenly pulled hard on him, hauling him off-balance. Oh, fuck. He couldn’t compensate, not at this angle.
He held on anyway.
His gut slammed into the edge of the upended table, his arms stretched over the top, pulled halfway over by Ash’s dead weight. She lay on the floor on her stomach, her torso lifted by the hold he still had on her wrists.
She hadn’t gotten away, but she was laughing, triumphant. “Did you see? That was close.”
“Close.” It came out as a wheeze.
Her smile faded a little. “Are you all right?”
“Fine.” Fucking proud of her, actually. A lot of people would have let her go.
“I’ll fix the table. I kicked out the legs on my side.” She got her knees beneath her, easing the pressure of her weight on his arms. She studied their positions, Nicholas overbalanced and bent over the upended table, her own proximity to the wall. By the time she spoke again, he’d gotten his wind back. “I think this would be the same thing: I’m going to fall backward. You can hold on to me, but that’s probably going to pull you and tip the table right over.”
“On top of you,” Nicholas pointed out.
“Your head might smash into the wall.”
He glanced at the wall. Yeah, it might. That would hurt like a fucker. “All right. Go.”
She didn’t, not right away. She was looking up at him, her bottom lip between her teeth. “Are you planning to let go?”
“No.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you bluffing? Seeing if I’ll do it?”
“I hope you’ll do it. Because if you’re in this situation with some asshole human, you damn well better.”
“I am in t
his situation with an asshole human.”
His laugh hurt his bruised stomach. God. He couldn’t argue that.
Her smile faded, replaced by determination. “Nicholas, I’m going to.”
She held his eyes. He could almost feel her willing him to let go as she slowly tipped backward—not actively doing anything, just not supporting her own weight anymore. He tightened his grip when she fell back as far as she could go without tipping the table over, and he hung there, suspended for an endless moment—wondering if her weight wouldn’t be enough to bring him over anyway. Then her heels skidded. Her weight suddenly shifted, yanking him over. He twisted as he tipped, trying to avoid the wall, avoid smashing her. She gave a yelp of surprise as he crashed into the floor on his side.
Still holding on to her wrists.
“Dammit,” she spat. Her breath came in short bursts. Her fangs had appeared. “Why can’t you let go?”
A million reasons. “You want me to make it easy?”
Her anger was gone, that quickly. Frustration remained—not directed at him, but at the situation, he recognized. At the Rules keeping her there.
“No.” Her eyes closed briefly. When she opened them again, she was back to studying their hands. They both lay on their sides, facing each other, Nicholas’s fingers locked around her wrists. “All right. There’s nowhere left to fall. So there has to be something else to make you want to let go.”
“An exchange?” Nicholas suggested.
She considered that before shaking her head. “With someone else, maybe. If they’re greedy, I could offer money.”
“You could lie and offer anything,” he reminded her. “Say you’ll do something and don’t. Unless it’s a real bargain—a demon’s bargain—you can lie.”
“Trick them?”
“Yes. Maybe they’ll believe you.”
“And if it’s someone like you, who doesn’t trust demons? Who believes everything I say is a lie?”
That was a punch to the gut . . . but true. “You’d have to come up with something else.”
“Something that they fear. Something that makes them sick, makes them want to get away.” She looked at her arm. “I could start chewing on it. Blood all over. Ripping away the meat—Oh, God.”
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