by Abigail Owen
Without warning, instead of reaching for his most potent ability of electricity, Alasdair spoke the words that would awaken the wards in the house. Wards his father hadn’t had a chance to engage the night he’d died.
Instantly, the cement floor rose up like fists and wrapped around Belial’s feet. At the same time, the tongues of flame from the fireplace reached out and wrapped around the demon’s wrists. But Belial laughed and then disappeared, becoming the black smoke that a physical world could not contain.
The smoke shot forward, coming for Alasdair, who summoned a bubble of glass around himself. The smoke bumped up against his glass container, curling back on itself. Then it coalesced and condensed and the demon solidified and manifested a club—solid black and shiny, like onyx. With one swing, Alasdair’s glass protection shattered.
Needing space for what he’d do next, Alasdair hurled a bolt of lightning so strong, the boom of sound deafened him for a second. The thunderbolt struck Belial in the chest, throwing the demon backward, legs and arms flailing. It slammed into the stone wall, which seemed to reach out and wrap around him, yanking his body into the masonry of the house. This time, Belial uttered a single word—the secret word that turned off the wards in the house, something only Alasdair’s family was supposed to know—and the wall released him. Spat him back out into the room, whole and sneering and smug.
Alasdair scowled, recognizing that the demon, in possession of his body, was using his own powers and knowledge against him. This was getting him nowhere. He couldn’t defeat this thing. Not on his own. Not trapped inside himself like this.
Together.
Delilah was here with him, inside him, in this room with him where she’d asked just today if anyone had thought to give him a hug that horrible night. He could feel her, in his blood, in his soul.
Alasdair knew what he had to do.
A whispered spell and in his hands appeared a relic, a weapon like the rope he’d used on Agnes, that his father had hidden within this house. The very weapon he’d used to help kill his father and the demon inside him as a child. Chains with shackles at the end, ones that had once held a saint in prison. He threw the chains at the demon, another spell shooting them across the room, binding them to Belial’s wrists and ankles and dragging the demon across the room to chain it to the wall.
Immediately, the demon thrashed and screamed in agony, the putrid scent of decay and rot filling the room, but that wasn’t enough. The chains had killed the demon in his father, but Delilah had said Belial was a sentinel. Stronger.
Alasdair closed his eyes and reached out. Reached not for his powers, which the demon had taken equal control of, or the demon’s blood now flowing through his veins. Instead, he reached for the gift her father had given…angel’s blood.
Light filled his vision, and warmth seeped into every pore in his body, as Alasdair started to chant. A simple spell. The words seemed to flow into him, as though guided by an unseen force. The light pulled away from him, coalescing as a ball, floating in front of him, and the demon’s eyes widened. Even in those black pits, fear was visible.
Now it was Alasdair’s turn to smile.
With a whisper of a spell, he sent the light careening into the demon’s chest. Chained as it was, nothing it did could deflect the orb. The second the light touched it, the demon screamed. It didn’t stop screeching as it disintegrated into the black smoke it had been. But the light didn’t stop, penetrating every piece of darkness inside the mirrored room Alasdair had created, the glow blinding.
The cries of agony cut off abruptly as the last wisp of smoke was obliterated, and Alasdair pitched forward, hands on his knees, breathing hard.
He’d killed the demon. Decimated it. Belial would never come for him again.
He didn’t have time to celebrate—Delilah and his people still fought for their own souls.
In a blink, he returned to himself, right in the moment Delilah had brought that blade to her throat, as though time had stood still while he battled.
She went to slice her jugular, only Alasdair grabbed her by the arm. “Not yet.”
…
That was the real him speaking, and Delilah sucked in a sharp breath as his eyes cleared, turning piercingly blue, even in the dark of the night. Then tingling swept through her blood, flowing to every part of her. The demon trying to take her over syphoned out of her in a damn hurry, becoming shadow once again, writhing on the ground in swirls of contorted darkness, as though in pain.
“Hold onto me,” Alasdair told her. “And say these words with me.”
Without question, she clung to his solid form and listened, then started to repeat the spell he was chanting. Words of angels and demons. A spell of…light. A spell using their combined powers, but especially calling upon her father’s angel blood now inside them both.
She could feel the power coming. The tingling turning to a building rush, and pressure, as though her blood was turning to crashing waves in her veins. The spell inside them both built and built until, a cry tearing up her throat, gripping him hard and locked in arms that turned to steel bands around her, they both threw their heads back and light burst from them, filling the night sky until the world turned sunlight bright.
A terrible cacophony of shrieks rose up around them, and Delilah managed to force her gaze to the side, watching in her frozen state as the light bursting from her and Alasdair passed from person to person, connecting them all in a web of purity. Every mage surrounding them froze in the same posture, backs arched, and heads tilted to the sky as illumination poured from them.
Then, as fast as the magic struck, it disappeared.
Delilah’s knees crumpled out from under her, but Alasdair managed to hold onto her and keep them both upright, though his body shook so hard with the effort it rattled them both. Slowly that shaking subsided.
“What—” Her voice came out as a croak. She cleared her throat and tried again. “What just happened?”
She should be exhausted. Drained. Dead even, after that much magic poured from her. Alasdair too. But instead, her body was energized like she’d been plugged into an electric socket. Buzzing with it.
“They’re…gone.” His voice held a note of incredulity.
She blinked, looking around them. Not a black eye nor a whiff of smoke or shadow to be seen. Just the peaceful darkness of the night. In the distance an owl hooted, as though the forested mountains themselves were telling them all was well.
Alasdair’s arms tightened around her, and she raised her head to find him watching her with a heady combination of awe and heat in his eyes.
With a groan, he dropped his head and claimed her lips, kissing her as though tomorrow wouldn’t happen, even though they both now knew it would. A whimper of need escaping her, Delilah gave herself over to the moment. The sheer bliss of kissing him back, of giving herself to him while taking her own pleasure in each frantic kiss.
“Alasdair?” a woman’s voice called from nearby, vaguely insinuating itself into her consciousness. They both ignored it, too wrapped up in each other, and the relief, and the sheer, carnal need building and pulsing between them.
A throat cleared, and the woman tried again. “Alasdair.” His sister, if Delilah wasn’t mistaken.
He lifted his head but didn’t look away, staring into Delilah’s eyes as though the answers to all the questions of the universe could be found there. “Hestia, get everyone back inside. Make sure this is over. I’ll be in touch…after.”
After? Delilah cocked her head in question. After what?
Chapter Ten
Relief and triumph and a soul-stirring need threatened to pull Alasdair under, and he had only one thing on his mind. Claiming this woman once and for all.
Body on fire for her, Alasdair whispered the spell that whipped them away from his people to the footsteps of the one place he never thought he’d want to re
turn to.
He looked down into Delilah’s face as she tilted it up to him. “Here?” she asked. No fear, no wariness, not a wall keeping him out or a snowflake of ice in sight. Just trust…and an answering need that reflected his own.
“My home.” He lifted a hand to trace the curves and angles of her face. “I took it back tonight.”
Giving a shiver, possibly from the chill of the winter air, a soft smile bowed her lips but disappeared quickly. She stared at him with glittering eyes, lips parted, need radiating from every part of her, answering his own. “You should go back to your people.”
Only the frown tugging at her delicate brows told him she hated that idea as much as he did. Even if she was right.
“I need you first,” he said in a voice gone gruff.
There were a thousand and one things he should be doing. Working with his people to assure themselves all the demons had been exorcised. Determining how to prevent this from happening again. Hell, just explaining to the other members of the Syndicate what the fuck just happened would be a good place to start.
But Delilah was in his arms. Safe. His people were safe. And he was buzzing with the aftereffects of the battle, and winning against terrible odds, and her blood inside him, and the fact that she’d been willing to sacrifice herself. For him. For his people.
From deep in a dark, cold place, he’d watched in panic as she’d sliced open their wrists. But then warmth had reached him inside his mind, opening up power. Just in time to keep her from killing them both.
Even now, residual apprehension wrapped around his heart and squeezed like a constrictor. Unconsciously, he tightened his hold on her, but that only served to rub her body against his, press her against him, and blood surged south in pumping, thrumming need.
Delilah blinked at him, then raised her eyebrows, sudden mischief dancing in her eyes. Though something lingered in those soft, dark depths that gave him pause.
“You know,” she said, lifting her arms to twine them around his neck, “I still haven’t gotten my turn to taste you, yet.”
“Thank the powers.” Laying claim to those lush lips once more, he swept her up in his arms, carrying her inside. The door was never locked. Not here. His house was spelled to know him. By the time he got them to his room, they were both gasping and only halfway undressed.
Too many clothes. He needed to see all of her.
Lips not leaving hers, obsessed with that hint of cherries, he skimmed his hands over her curves and around behind to slowly unzip her skirt, something about the rasp of that sound in his bedroom, where he’d pictured her more times than he’d wanted to admit to himself this past year, and a wave of possessive tenderness about took his knees out from under him.
He let the skirt slide down her thighs to pool at her feet, lifting his hands to cup her face so he could look at her. Drink in her beauty.
“If you’d died tonight…” Mother goddess, they might as well have buried his body in the same grave.
Delilah bit her lip, brows furrowed with a worry incongruous to the moment. Or didn’t she feel this between them the way he did?
He was so far gone, he couldn’t picture moving forward without her.
Somewhere along the way, he’d fallen in love with this woman, the seeds sewn well before this day finally reaching into the light, thanks to what they’d shared. Until this morning, their flagrantly different lives, his responsibilities, and her visible dislike had kept him from seeing his growing feelings for anything beyond an extraordinary physical need.
He knew better now.
She loves me. I know she loves me.
With only the idea of soothing that look from her eyes, he brushed a tender kiss across her lips, then nibbled his way along her jaw to her ear.
“I want you,” he whispered, and smiled as her shiver of reaction teased his palms.
“Then we’d better do something about that,” she whispered back.
Not what he’d meant exactly, but her hands were at the button of his pants, and suddenly the frantic surge of need took them both over again. With a curse, he whispered a spell that took care of the rest of their clothes.
Delilah gasped then chuckled. “Impatient?”
“Yes.” He couldn’t even laugh about it, the urgency gripping him so hard, tightening everything about him painfully.
A twinkle lit her eyes as she cocked her head. Then, before he knew what she was about, she dropped to her knees, fisted the base of his pulsing cock. “My turn to taste,” she said, and slid her mouth down his shaft.
The sight short-circuited his brain as sensation took over his entire focus, the rest of the world drifting away as she worked his body. He speared his hands into her hair, watching in fascination as she slipped her lush lips up and down. Then she sucked hard and he came damn close to embarrassing himself.
With a grunt between pain and panic, he picked her up, swinging her into his arms. “I want to take my time,” he said in a voice he hardly recognized. Amazing what this woman could do to him with just a touch. “I have a goddess in my bed. I want to enjoy every fucking second.”
…
In the course of a single day, that nickname had turned from a minor annoyance into an ignition point, lighting her blood, which was already on fire for him.
She would have to walk away after tonight. His people would never accept what she was. Dangerous to them. A lightning rod, especially after breaking her vow. Demons would see her as a traitor. They’d keep coming.
You should tell him that with your blood mixed, your lives are linked. She ignored the voice, assuring herself that she would tell him. Tomorrow. Now was not the time.
She could have this first. Have the illusion, the dream of tonight and a future filled with him.
Alasdair laid her across the bed so tenderly, with such reverence in his expression that she came close to crying. Tears stung her eyes. Emotions, usually held at bay, were almost overwhelming in their intensity. She took him by the hand and laid a series of kisses across the scar-pocked skin of his arm where fighting his father’s demon had burned him, willing away that past pain.
With the softest of touches, his face a study of awe yet still tight with eagerness, he traced the lines of her collarbone, the outer swell of her breast, the dip of her waist. He lingered over the sensitive jut of her hip bone.
Then he followed that path with his lips, and she kept her gaze on him, trying to memorize this moment, to be brought out and lovingly examined in the small hours of the nights to come without him.
He left no part of her unexplored, lingering anytime her breathing hitched. The backs of her knees, her belly just under her navel, her shoulders, the back of her neck. Somehow, without touching the most erogenous areas of her body, he painstakingly built need inside her until every heartbeat, every rush of blood through her body, was exquisite torture.
Until she was begging for more.
Delilah wasn’t passive. Exploring the planes and ridges of his body, the dusting of hair over his chest, learning that sucking on his earlobes made him shudder. That a brush of her lips over his hip bone made him fist his hands in her hair.
With arms that shook—a stark reaction he didn’t try to keep from her—he rolled her so that he lay between her legs, his hot, velvet and steel shaft pressed against that bundle of nerves that throbbed harder at the pressure and the heat.
Alasdair stared down into her face, hiding nothing from her. “I need you to be mine.”
For tonight. For always, she thought. But she didn’t voice the words, just nodded, unable to tear her gaze away. Wanting to remember every precious second.
He whispered a spell that protected them both, one of the best parts of sex with a warlock. Then he was there at her entrance, sliding slowly, beautifully, into her body until he was balls deep, filling her.
Delilah swallowed back a
cry of loss, shaken to the core at how, even with him embedded inside her, she was already missing him, her heart cracking and bleeding internally.
Alasdair ran a finger down the side of her face. “Okay?” he asked with a small frown.
Delilah nodded, hair spilling across the pillow. “Perfect.”
Wonderful. Beautiful. Glorious.
He smiled and drew out of her as slowly as he’d entered her, then slid, just as unhurriedly, back home. Penetration like a claiming.
He gazed into her eyes as he controlled the pace, driving her already thundering body to a level that sent her into a hazy world where all that existed for her was the throb between her legs, the pulse of his body penetrating hers, and a pair of wicked blue eyes filled with everything she’d ever wanted to reach for.
But she couldn’t let herself. For his sake.
He increased the pace and she lifted her legs, wrapping them around his waist, sending him deeper, their twin moans mingling in the night. His control snapped in that moment, blue eyes turning glitteringly bright as he surged inside her, his body shaking over hers even as she trembled beneath him until tingling gathered at the base of her spine.
Pressure pooled and collected and grew until it burst outward, sucking her into a vortex of pure bliss as violent as the whirlpool to hell that had tried to take her. And every second, she looked into Alasdair’s eyes, memorizing the way his face contorted as his climax washed through him, the way his hands, fingers threaded through her own, gripped hers harder, the light in his eyes that she could almost fool herself into believing meant more.
They came down from the high together, chests heaving, sated and lethargic, the loving arms of slumber already wrapping themselves around her.
“Merry Christmas,” he whispered against her lips, making her smile even as sadness slid tendrils of worry through this moment that should have been sheer contentment.
Alasdair shifted them so he lay on his back, her head on his chest, the slowing thud of his heartbeat the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard as they both drifted into oblivion. But even as she fell into that blissful sleep, Delilah knew it couldn’t last.
