Demon Marked

by Meljean Brook

  She paused as he angled his body to carry her through the door. His face had hardened, as if containing some emotion again. Not hiding, as he often had before—just holding it in. A shudder ran though him when she leaned in to lick his neck.

  At least he did not hold that in anymore.

  “Take me to the bed. We’ll talk more when your penis is inside me.” She tightened her arms around his shoulders. “And you’ll tell me why, when you have such purpose burning inside, you are still here . . . waiting.”

  “I didn’t know why until today. I was waiting for you.”

  The bed creaked when he laid her on it, and again when he climbed in after her, bracing his knees on either side of her thighs. He leaned over, his hands flat beside her shoulders. His lips grazed her cheek in a soft caress.

  That was not enough. Not enough after months.

  “Feel me, Nicholas. Use your fingers to feel me. I’m wet. Already so wet. I only had two thoughts as I flew here: Wondering whether you were all right, and how much of your almost-monstrous penis I can take.”

  Eyes on hers, he slipped his hand down. Ash lifted to his touch, panting in anticipation. He didn’t stop at the first sign of heat and moisture, but delved between her drenched folds, then pushed deep. She cried out, thighs clenching, squeezing his wrist. His groan filled the small room.

  “Ah! Yes.” Her fingers curled into the bedsheet. “Do you remember the bathtub? Do you remember how I tortured you there?”

  A thrust of his fingers answered her. His head bent, his tongue flicking her nipple into turgid arousal.

  “Like that, yes. Except I teased you with water instead of my tongue. And in my mind, I’ve tortured you a hundred times in the same way. But never to finish. Each time, I climb in and fill myself with you, and ride until we are both dying of it. I want to die now.”

  He breathed her name against her skin, rose to take her mouth. Hot and wet, each slow kiss killed her a little more. His hand worked at his belt, his button, his zipper. Ash used her toes to push his jeans down before running her feet up the backs of his heavily muscled thighs.

  She pulled at his hair until he lifted his head. Cool blue light spilled across his cheekbones, glinted in his dark lashes.

  “Why did you know today? What changed?”

  “You came.” His gaze held hers. “And I knew that you are not useful to me, Ash. Not anymore. Except as a reason to get up in the morning—”

  “You don’t sleep anymore,” she reminded him, smiling.

  “Except as a reason to keep breathing—”

  “You don’t need air.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “I’m still new at this Guardian thing. So just shut up, and let me tell you that I love you.”

  All happiness. Her laugh erupted, and she pulled him down for another kiss, but he lowered his body and shoved forward instead, his thick length filling her all at once. Agonizing pleasure lashed her nerves, whipped her muscles tight. Ash cried out, arching her back as her inner muscles clamped around his invading shaft, as deep as she’d wanted him, needed him.

  His hand fisted in her hair, and he ground his hips against hers, until she was squirming against him, crying out for another heavy thrust. He froze, instead.

  “I was waiting for this.” His voice was a tortured groan against her ear. “To know that your feelings hadn’t faded. To know that I was still a man that you’d want—even though I’m a Guardian now, too. I was too afraid to find you, Ash. Too afraid of what I’d see in your eyes, when you saw the change in me . . . even though you’re the reason for it.”

  Her throat tightened. “I would not give you up so easily, Nicholas St. Croix. You should have more faith in yourself than that.”

  “I’ve given you little reason.”

  “You blew yourself up to save me. Which, so you know, tore my heart out. I’ve spent six weeks building a new one, and you are still stamped all over it.” She wriggled her hips, gasped. God. So full. So frustrating. “And we were supposed to talk when you were inside me, but that did not mean you were supposed to stop everything to talk.”

  He levered up on his elbows, the strain of keeping himself motionless visible in the tendons of his neck, the clench of his jaw. “I can’t do both at once.”

  “So you do have another limit.”

  His eyes narrowed. “We’ll see.”

  Ash burst into a laugh. He was so easy. Then her laugh strangled itself on a moan as he slowly withdrew, began an endless thrust inside her again.

  “Oh!” she cried out, and though she couldn’t remember thinking that her toes needed to curl, now they were, and her heels were sliding up to dig into the muscles flexing in his ass. He drove deep again.

  “This, Ash.” His fingers interlocked with hers, he drew her hands over her head, stretching her body upward even as her flesh stretched to receive him. “Deciding what matters. You do, more than anything. Being a Guardian does. But there’s more than that.”

  “I can’t . . .” A long thrust drew the thought to nothing.

  Again, and her only consolation was that his voice was as tortured as hers, his breathing as ragged. “What was that, Ash?”

  “I can’t imagine . . . what more.”

  He dipped his head, and she opened her mouth for a kiss. His tongue swept up the length of a fang. Body bucking upward, she cried his name as the movement drove him deep, hard. He caught her hip up off the bed, thrust again. She couldn’t stand any more.

  Hooking her leg around his, she shoved at his shoulder, pushed him over, and straddled his hips. Sank deep.

  Head thrown back, Nicholas arched his long body, lifting her, driving deeper. His muscles locked in stark relief, he hung there. Ash battled between the need to remain still and absorb the sheer beauty of him and the urgent need to move; urgent need won.

  Hands braced on his chest, she rolled her hips. Nicholas’s breath hissed from between clenched teeth. His fingers gripped her thighs, swept inward. His thumb found her clitoris, began a slow circle.

  “Oh, God.” Fire coiled through her, a heated twist of every nerve. “That’s . . . so evil.”

  “So good,” he countered.

  Yes. She couldn’t stand it. The fire burned hotter, sizzling inside her, white-hot.

  “Nicholas . . . Harder now. Now.”

  The world spun wildly as he turned, pushed her onto her back again. Hooking her leg up over his hip, he drove forward, deep. Ash cried out, her nails digging into his shoulders.

  “Again.”

  “For how long?”

  He had to ask? “Forever,” she said.

  “Please, God,” he groaned, and when he raised his head, his eyes shone full blue. “Because there’s more.”

  Chest heaving, he angled her hips up, thrust hard again. Her body bowed, a scream locked in her throat. How could she survive this?

  Only over and over again.

  “More.” It emerged on a sobbing breath, and he obeyed, until she burned, burned, clinging to him as it raced through her, screaming as it left. Nicholas’s mouth crashed down over hers, and his tongue thrust with the stroke of his body, until he suddenly stilled—shook. Wings erupted from his shoulders in a long, elegant arch. Heavier, suddenly blanketed by feathers, he settled over her. Still inside her, and despite his orgasm, still hard.

  Oh, she could become used to this. She wrapped her arms and legs around him, wouldn’t let him move.

  “I love you,” she said, in case he hadn’t realized it yet. “I came here to tell you, but I was distracted by the sex.”

  His kiss was long and sweet, and muffled her noise of protest when he began to roll over. He didn’t stop kissing her until she lay atop his body—with him still hard inside her, and so she was satisfied.

  “I don’t need to breathe,” she reminded him.

  “That’s not the point.” His new wings vanished, but a single feather lay on the sheets. She picked it up as he said, “I don’t want to ever hold you down in any way.”


  “I think I’d like you to hold me down and just fuck away sometime. We could play ‘demon almost broke the Rules.’”

  “Only if we follow up with ‘Guardian almost broke the Rules,” he said, but the stirring of his flesh told her that a part of him wasn’t averse to her idea now. His expression turned serious, however, so she assumed that wasn’t in store just yet. “That’s not what I meant, though. I can’t bear the idea of you beneath anyone, Ash.”

  She didn’t really want that, either. “Unless I’m beneath you, and you’re inside me.”

  “That’s different. Sex and play are different. But this is . . .” His brow furrowed slightly, as if trying to find the right way to express it. “This is the more, Ash. What I’m waiting for—what I might always be waiting for, but that I’ll do everything I can to get there.”

  “Where?”

  “To become the man who deserves you. Who is worthy of you.” When her mouth fell open, he shook his head, swept his thumb over her lips as if to seal them closed. “You can’t say anything. I’ve hurt you, Ash. I can’t take that back. And you might have forgiven me, or you might say that the grenade made up for it—”

  “I did. I would.”

  “But it’s not yours to give. Not this one. It has to be me, doing my damn best to be the man I think might deserve you—not just some bastard who got lucky enough. As it is, it’s almost impossible, but I’ll spend forever trying.”

  Well, Ash thought that was totally unnecessary, but it obviously made a difference to him, so much that during his explanation, the determination filling his words seemed to fill his physical form, too, shifting and changing his—

  “Oh,” she gasped at the same time his eyes closed, a tortured moan rising from his chest. The feather fell from her suddenly nerveless fingers. “Nicholas, you—I think you shape-shifted. Not much, you just became . . . more.”

  Monstrous.

  Stretching. Almost painful . . . but not. She sat up and cried out as his cock pushed deeper. Her nails dug into his chest.

  His eyes were already shining. His hands moved to her hips, tried to lift her off. “I’m hurting you.”

  “You’re not hurting—” She broke off as he managed to slide her up over his length. Ecstasy shot through her veins, sparking new fires. Her inner muscles clamped around him. Her head swam with the unexpected, overwhelming pleasure of it. “Oh, my God. Stop.”

  He froze. Already needing more, she pushed down, and his entire body clenched, a groan ripping from him. Trembling, she waited for him to recover.

  He looked up at her. She leaned forward, braced her hands, and gave him her wickedest grin.

  “So, Guardian. Let’s see just how long you can hold on.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Nicholas could hold on for a long time, as it turned out. He’d adapted well to his heightened senses, though his glowing eyes and abruptly appearing wings showed the same lack of control that Ash once had.

  She’d never experienced Enthrallment, though, and had only sensed it once, when a novice became fixated on the fragrance of baking bread wafting from a sandwich shop near the warehouse. That Guardian’s psychic scent had gone into a long, slow spin—as if he were dizzy, and the bread formed his only remaining anchor.

  When it happened to Nicholas, that anchor was the taste of her, as if his world had narrowed down to her flavor against his tongue. Ash held onto him through each searching lick, crying out again and again, and though her body remained strong, inexhaustible, by the time he came back to himself she was wrung out with the ecstasy of it.

  Then he lifted his body over hers, pushed deep inside, and wrung her out again.

  When they finally emerged from the bedroom, night had long since fallen and the fire had died down, leaving the cabin stone cold. From her rocking chair, Ash watched him lay the kindling in the stove, the lamplight playing over the muscles of his back.

  He had gotten bigger. Not in any one direction, but overall taller and wider, and proportioned in exactly the same way. Without anyone standing next to him as comparison, the difference was hard to immediately see. The only evidence of it was in the tighter fit of his pajama pants, the higher hem.

  “Unless you figure out how to shape-shift back or make your own clothes in the next few weeks, you’re going to have to buy a new wardrobe.”

  “I’ll hire someone.” He reached for the lighter. “So you already have a penthouse in San Francisco?”

  “It’s awkward masturbating to my fantasies of you in a warehouse full of Guardians with superhearing,” she said. “So I split my time between training and the penthouse, where I’ve been setting up these accounts that Lilith wants, and taking over your company.”

  The icy challenge in the glance he shot her sent a thrill through her blood. “You can try, demon.”

  She would. “You’ll be training, too, but I’d love it if you’d work with me on these investments. I could use another eye and another brain, especially at this stage.”

  “Is sex included?”

  “Yes.”

  “That easy? No negotiation?”

  “I’ll throw in a lot of sex.”

  “Then I’m in.”

  Perfect. “It’s almost like training, anyway. Investing and trying to negotiate with a demon both mean a lot of waiting for the right opportunity, making the right queries to discover what they’re not saying or reporting, and deciding whether the high-risk moves are worth the reward.”

  “I think the last high-risk move that I made was,” he said softly. The kindling began crackling a moment later, and he stood, regarding her with his serious face. “When the training’s over—thirty or so years, I guess—I’ll probably hand Reticle over to you, start fighting full-time.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I won’t leave you, but—”

  “I know, Nicholas.” She’d seen the new purpose in him, and his company wouldn’t serve it the same way the money had supported his revenge. “I’ll hold on to it for when you need a cover or any other reason. As long as we’re together, I’m happy. Especially since I plan to own half the world in the next two or three hundred years, but very few people will know. All that matters is that you’re with me, and you’re impressed by my financial acumen.”

  “Everything about you astonishes me, Ash.”

  “Because you love me.”

  “No, because you love me. I’m coming to you a completely different man than you knew before. I shouldn’t expect anything, and you give me forever.”

  “That’s what I want, too. Anyway, you’re wrong. You weren’t a man when we met. You were like me—essentially a child in many ways. Maybe a teenager.”

  Nicholas shook his head, but she knew he wasn’t disagreeing. He knew himself too well. His life had stopped when he’d decided to pursue his revenge.

  “The essentials are the same, though,” she said. “You sought revenge as a way to right the wrongs Madelyn did to you. Yes, you were myopic and obsessive and incredibly paranoid, but there wasn’t any cruelty in you, just as there isn’t now. And I like to think we grew up a bit together, that week we spent here.”

  “You are amazing.” He bent and kissed her hard. “And fantasies in the warehouse, really?”

  “Only once. What do I care, right? But apparently it makes everyone uncomfortable, so they told me about the spell that can keep anyone from hearing what’s going on inside a room. Did you offend the bears?”

  “I didn’t. I don’t.”

  “Think about me?” Impossible.

  “All the time. But not . . . I can’t.” He turned away, set the lighter on its shelf. “I see Madelyn, walking in on me. Laughing.”

  Oh. When he faced her again, his features were washed in red light.

  “I’m so glad she’s dead,” Ash said, and he gave a short laugh of agreement. “And that reminds me, I have something for you, thanks to Jake the teleporting Guardian. Straight from a brick oven in New York, to his cache, to my cache, and now to your tabl
e—still piping hot. Now you can celebrate the end of Madelyn as you planned.”

  The cardboard box appeared in her hands, bringing with it an explosion of scents: cheese, charred crust, tomato, and spices. Nicholas didn’t even allow her time to open the lid. He tossed the box aside, and it slapped against the floorboards. He hauled her out of the chair, his mouth all over hers, sweet possession, gratitude, and wonder filling his kiss.

  He let her feet touch the floor again, following her down, his forehead against hers and his breath ragged. “I love you. I don’t deserve you, but I won’t let you go. Ever.”

  Another voice answered him—a harmonious voice. “Make sure that you don’t.”

  Khavi. Ash whipped around, boomstick coming to her hand. She froze. Khavi stood near the door, and she’d brought a hellhound with her. Not as big as Sir Pup, but it didn’t matter—the venom in Ash’s shotgun shells wouldn’t affect either of them.

  Human in appearance except for brown eyes that never appeared so ancient in so young a face, Khavi looked at the pizza box. “Oh, I came just in time. You will be very, very glad not to have eaten first.”

  “What do you want, Khavi?” But Ash feared she knew. Vanishing the boomstick, she said, “If this is about the frozen field, I am not exchanging myself for Michael.”

  “I know. Your unwillingness has been noted, and adjustments have been made.” She looked at Nicholas, who watched her warily. “You are finally healed, I see. Strong. And I am very sorry—I intended to wait until your Gift manifested itself naturally, but I cannot any longer. He will pull it from you anyway, just to determine whether you’re useful. When he does, you’ll have to look deep, and see what I cannot.”

  “What does that mean?” Nicholas pushed in front of Ash, shielded her. “Why are you sorry?”

  “Because I have seen. But it must be done.” Determination replaced the regret in her voice. “You need to call Special Investigations, Nicholas. Now, because you will need their help.”

  Dread filled Ash’s chest. “Why?”

  “Because I’m taking you both to Hell and giving you to Lucifer.” Khavi sighed when Ash’s crossbow was suddenly in her hand, aimed at the grigori’s face. “No, no. Do not fight. It is no use—I will easily defeat you. I have already seen it.”