She grinned at him. “Well, it worked.”
He held out his hand. “Come on, honey. We can just walk and talk.”
She regarded him suspiciously. “Just walk and talk. That isn’t code for some other weird activity, is it?”
Darius actually laughed. His fingers tangled with hers, captured her hand, and brought it against the heat of his body. “Where do you come up with your nonsense?”
Her emerald eyes sparkled at him. “I can get worse. Much worse.”
“You are trying to scare me away.”
She laughed in spite of herself. “I think you do a better job at scaring people than I do. You win hands down. No contest.”
His arm slid around her waist to lift her smoothly over a fallen log. He didn’t miss a stride, and she couldn’t stop herself from comparing him to the jungle cat she now knew he could become. He moved in the same silence, with the same grace. “What does it feel like to change like that?”
“Into a leopard?” Darius wondered at her question. He hadn’t thought of what it felt like in hundreds of years. The mystery. The beauty. How wondrous it was to shape-shift. Her question brought up the total exhilaration, the awe he’d felt as a child experimenting until he perfected the art, until he could shift in midair, on the run, even when using preternatural speed. “It is an incredible feeling of power and beauty to experience the essence of the animal, its speed and energy and stealth, all miraculously in my own body.”
Tempest moved with his rhythm, ambling nowhere in particular. He was so perfectly proportioned, his body its own miracle, strength and power in every muscle, every cell, and he carried it with a casual ease of which he didn’t even seem to be aware. “It’s fascinating when I communicate with an animal,” she admitted. “I would love to be able to actually see things through their eyes, smell and hear things as they do. Can you do that? Or are you still really you?”
“I am both. I can use their senses, their abilities, yet I can also reason, as long as nothing triggers an overwhelming instinct.”
“Like a survival instinct.”
Darius glanced down at the top of her head. The moonlight was spilling through the trees, touching the red-gold of her hair to turn it to flame. She was so beautiful, he had no choice but to run a caressing hand over the silken strands. “That is what you are to me. A survival instinct. You feel it, too.”
Her long lashes lifted enough for him to catch a glimpse of vivid green before she looked away. “I don’t know what I feel.” She pulled her hand away and sent him a quick look of censure. “We aren’t going there, remember? You stay a foot away from me, and you don’t do any one of those things I mentioned to you before.”
His husky answering laughter sent flames dancing in her blood. She glared at him. “Laughing is out, too.”
He caught her small waist and lifted her easily to the top of an enormous downed log, so that the two of them stood close, his hands resting lightly on her hips as she looked down. Ferns grew abundantly on the forest floor, shades of green carpeting the area in a curious aqua in the blue of the night.
The scenery was so beautiful that she couldn’t find her voice, not even to reprimand Darius for forgetting to measure the inches between them. She tried not to be aware of his hands on her, touching her as if she belonged to him. He leaned his dark head so close that her breath caught in her throat. Her neck throbbed in anticipation, and the flames began to crackle and sizzle, threatening to consume her. She felt the heat of his breath exactly over her telltale pulse.
“Listen to the night. It is speaking to us,” he said softly.
For a moment she could hear only the beating of her own heart. It pounded in her ears, drowning out every other sound. He carefully turned her around and drew her back against the shelter of his body. “Be still. Be calm. It is there in your mind, Tempest. Find the stillness first. It is there that you begin to learn.” His voice whispered over her skin like black velvet. Mesmerizing and perfect. Sheer magic.
Darius was casting a spell, weaving it tightly around her, not simply with the hypnotic power of his voice, or the hard strength of his body but with the night itself. She had never noticed that the darkness had such vivid colors of its own. The moon was shining through the canopy of trees, bathing the world in a soft, iridescent silver. The leaves glistened like gems as the breeze blew gently through them.
The low sigh of the wind was the first sound she could identify clearly after that of her own heart. Darius’s arms tightened around her, locking her against his much larger frame. Tempest had an aversion to tight spaces, and she always avoided being too close to men, especially when she was alone and they were strong. However, instead of making her feel threatened, Darius made her feel safe and protected.
“Really listen to it, Tempest, with your heart and mind as well as your ears. The wind is singing softly, whispering tales. There, very close to us—do you hear it? The wind has carried to us the sound of fox kits.”
She tilted her chin, straining to catch a single note of what he could hear. Fox kits. Could he really know that? As if reading her mind, Darius placed his lips against her ear. “There are three of them. They must be very young; they’re barely moving around.”
Tempest felt his lips move in her hair, as if he had accidentally, not by design, brushed against the strands. Self-preservation finally took over, and she attempted to step away from him. But her foot hovered over empty space. She had forgotten she was atop a log. Only Darius’s arms kept her from a fall.
He laughed softly, that infuriating, male, mocking amusement. “I was right. You need me. You need a keeper.”
“I wouldn’t if you weren’t driving me insane all the time,” she accused him, but she was clutching at him all the same.
“Allow me to merge my mind more fully with yours. I can teach you to listen, to hear the true sounds of the night. My world, Tempest.” He glanced down at the slender fingers curled around the thickness of his arm. She was so fragile, so delicate, a small but hugely courageous woman. She was bom for him. His heart and mind, his very soul recognized hers. Every cell in his body reached for her, needing, hungry, with an intensity that would never be assuaged.
Darius could feel her slight body trembling against the hardness of his. A fierce, protective instinct rose in him, swamping him with the sheer force of it. He wanted to carry her off to his lair, keep her safe from the everyday dangers of the world around them, keep her close and protected at all times. But he realized that, no matter how strong his feelings, she was mortal, and she had grown up in a different world, one he could never go back and change for her. It had shaped her character as surely as the ages and dangers he had faced had shaped his. He could not move her too fast. The demands of his body and soul had to take second place to her fears, groundless though they might be.
“If you merge your mind fully with mine, will you be able to read my every thought?” she asked anxiously.
He ruffled her hair, affection in the caress. “You mean as I already do?”
Her emerald eyes flashed at him. “You can’t read
every
thought I have,” she said decisively.
There was a short, telling silence. She tilted her head back to look at him. “Can you?” This time her voice definitely wobbled.
Darius wanted to kiss that worried look right off her face. “Of course I can.”
Her teeth tugged at her lower lip. “You couldn’t before. I don’t think you can, Darius.”
“You merge with me every time you communicate mentally with me. It may have taken me a few times to figure out your differences from others, but once I did, it allowed me to slip in and out of your mind at will.” His fingers curled lovingly around the nape of her neck. “If you like, I could share some of your memories with you. The little alley you favored behind a Chinese restaurant. You were fond of its unusual cobblestones.”
This time Tempest made a lunge to break free, but Darius caught her firmly, imprisoning he
r within the circle of his arms. “Not so fast, honey. You were the one implying I was telling you falsehoods.”
She stood stiffly. “Nobody says
falsehoods
anymore. Your age is showing.”
He laughed again, amazed that after centuries of loneliness and utter lack of emotion, he could find himself laughing so readily. There was joy in the night itself, joy in the world, in the very act of living. “That was not nice, Tempest,” he scolded her, but his voice was so gentle, it turned her heart over.
“No merging, Darius. I think we should do something semi-normal. Say, just talking. Talking is good. Not anything strange, just the usual. Tell me about your childhood. What were your parents like?”
“My father was a very powerful man. He was often referred to as the Dark One. He was a great healer among our people. I understand that my elder brother has since taken his place among our kind. My mother was gentle and loving. I remember her smile. She had a spectacular smile.” The words conjured up the memory for him, the rush of warmth.
“She must have been wonderful.”
“Yes. I was only six when she was killed.”
Her fingers tightened on his arm in sympathy. “I’m so sorry, Darius. I didn’t mean to bring up a sad memory.”
“No memory of my mother could be bad, Tempest. When I was six, the Ottoman Turks overran the village near our home and murdered nearly everyone. I was able to get out”—he gestured in the general direction of the campsite—”with a few others. My sister, Desari, along with Syndil, Barack, Dayan, and one other. After that, we were cut off from the rest of our people.”
“At six years of age? Darius, what did you do? How did you survive?”
“I learned to hunt from the animals around me. I learned to feed the others. It was a time of great hardship. I made so many mistakes, yet every day was a new, exciting experience.”
“How did you get separated from your parents, your people?”
“There was a war. Human villages were being wiped out—people our families considered friends. Our adults decided to stand with the humans. But the soldiers attacked after the sun had risen, when Carpathians are at their most vulnerable, when they need to go to ground. And there were so many soldiers, vicious and cruel, determined to wipe out the entire region, to rid themselves of all of us, as they considered us vermin, vampires. Unfortunately, adults of our species have no power, no strength, when the sun is high, so it was a slaughter, a useless waste of lives. So many died that day, humans and Carpathians alike, women and children. Many of our race were subjected to ritual ‘vampire’ killings—beheaded and staked through the heart, my parents among them.”
Darius’s voice was soft, melancholy, distant, as if part of him was centuries away from her. In his arms, Tempest turned to reach up and touch his mouth with her fingertips. “I’m so sorry, Darius. How terrible for you.” Tears were glistening on her long lashes, making her eyes luminous. Sorrow for him, for his lost parents, for the boy he had been, throbbed in her heart.
Darius touched a teardrop, catching it on the end of his finger. “Do not weep for me, Tempest. I never want to bring tears to your heart. Your life has been a hard one, too. At least before I lost emotion and color, mine was filled with the love of my old family, and then of my new family for hundreds of years. The boat I and the others escaped our war-torn homeland in took us across the ocean before going down in a violent storm. We were on our own, I the oldest, but we made it to the shores of Africa, and we had great adventures in those years and since—before the darkness gathered in me and spread across my soul.”
She watched him bring his finger to his mouth to taste her shimmering teardrop, his black eyes sensual, his perfect lips alarmingly enticing. She swallowed convulsively, afraid she might fling herself into his arms just to taste his mouth again and be forever lost in the burning intensity of his eyes. “What darkness, Darius? What are you talking about?”
“I have felt nothing these last long centuries. After a certain point, evidently a Carpathian male loses his emotions and is in danger of turning vampire. Because I had others depending on me, I fought off the beast within me. But for eons now I have seen no colors, felt no joy, no need for a woman, no laughter, and no love. I have not even felt guilt over necessary killing. Only my hunger was in me. Strong and terrible and always upon me. The beast in me grew until he was always fighting for freedom, raging for release. Then, into that darkness, you came, bringing me color and light and life.” Darius said it softly, honestly, meaning every word. His hand came up to capture her mass of red-gold hair, to crush it to his face so that he might inhale the fragrance of her. “I have more need of you than does any other in this world. My body claims yours as its own. My heart recognizes yours. My soul cries out for yours, and my mind seeks the touch of your mind. You are the only woman who can tame the beast and hold me to this earth, to the path of goodness and light. The only one who can keep me from destroying mortals and immortals alike.”
Tempest bit at her lower lip again. The things he said to her were almost more than she could comprehend. They made her nervous, even as he made her more aware of herself as a desirable woman than anyone ever had. “Let’s not get carried away, Darius. I’ve agreed to travel with the band for a while, but saving the world is a little beyond my specialties. I wield a mean wrench and all, but relationships totally elude me.”
She could be flippant with her answers, but her heart had melted at his every word. His Old-World elegance and charm somehow seemed to provide a balance to the danger clinging to him like a second skin. Sexual magnetism was also second nature to Darius, and Tempest didn’t try to delude herself into thinking she was immune.
“It will be in the best interests of all concerned that you remain free from any other relationships,” he said softly.
Her emerald eyes flashed a brilliant green before she turned away from him again, too tempted by his perfect mouth to stare at it for long. “Let’s walk, Darius. I think it’s safer than standing here on a log over looking a cliff. Much safer.”
His arm curved around her waist, and he bent forward, his warm breath caressing the nape of her neck. “Run if you must, baby, but there is nowhere to go except back to me.”
She firmly removed the thick band of his arm from around her waist, proud of her decisiveness. If his body continued to
be
in contact with hers, they were both going to go up in flames. The only sane thing to do was to put an ocean or a glacier between them. Maybe the entire polar ice cap.
His infuriating laughter followed her as she jumped off the log and began stalking away. “Reading your mind is becoming very interesting, honey. We could always settle down in an igloo.”
“Not a chance. You’d melt the darn thing. Then where would we be? I told you, none of that mesmerizing-eyes thing. And maybe you should try wearing a mask.” His sexy laughter had to go, also. Definitely had to go. It was wreaking havoc with her bloodstream. Making it hot, molten, so thick and heavy that she was going to throw herself at him and beg for relief if he didn’t stop. Then he’d be sorry. Yeah.
She turned around and glared at him. “Okay. Do the lizard thing.”
He studied her face. “The lizard thing?” he echoed. Then an unholy smile touched his sensuous mouth. “Lick your skin? With pleasure. Just tell me where.” Deliberately he bent close to the pulse in her throat, his eyes all at once burning, the laughter fading.
Tempest shoved him, hard. If the velvet rasp of his tongue touched her skin, she would be lost. “Get away from me.” She took two running steps in growing alarm. “I mean it, Darius. Or we’ll have to get a chaperone.”
“You said you wanted the lizard thing.” His hand shackled her wrist, chaining her to his side.
“I meant scales. You need scales. If you were a little crawly thing, I wouldn’t feel I was risking my honor walking in the woods with you.” She was laughing in spite of herself.
“If I shape-shifted i
nto a lizard, you would run screaming back to camp.” Darius knew that Julian and Desari had already departed in the touring bus with the cats. Dayan, Syndil and Barack were at that very moment cramming themselves into the fast little car Barack loved so much. He could hear Barack pleading with Syndil to talk to him, trying to convince her that he wasn’t really a rat.
Darius took advantage of Tempest’s momentary pause to gain possession of her hand. His fingers laced firmly through hers and drew her beneath the protection of his shoulder. “If I changed, I would want to show off and do a Komodo dragon for you.”
Tempest allowed several heartbeats to go by while her imagination digested that one. “Don’t we have to go somewhere tonight? I thought you had a tight schedule to keep. Let’s leave Komodo dragons out of the picture. You’re scary enough in human form.”
They were drifting back toward camp, walking through the layer of fog that was thickening along the forest floor. It was eerie and beautiful, making the woods a magical, mystical place. Tempest liked the feeling of strength in Darius’s hand, the heat of his body warming hers, the easy, fluid way he moved with the suggestion of tightly leashed power. Most of all she loved the way his eyes burned possessively over her, the way his chiseled, perfect mouth tempted her.
Darius stopped so abruptly, she ran into him. He had turned to face her, his features dark and sensual in the moonlight spilling through the canopy of trees. He looked what he was, a lord of power, a sorcerer without compare. Tempest could only stare up at his masculine beauty, lost in the hunger in his eyes.
She couldn’t breathe when he was so close to her. His eyes darkened until they were merciless with hunger, with raw need. His hands slid down her arms to rest on her hips, to urge her body even closer to his. The midnight blue of the air mixed with the silvery sheen of the moon and came together with the white bank of fog, surrounding them, cutting them off from the rest of the world.
Dark Fire (Dark Series - book 6) Page 11
