“That doesn’t seem healthy.”
He nodded at the painting, his brows flickering. “Your sunrise.”
Her fragile resistance began to melt. “I need to go home.”
“You are home. This is the only home that matters.”
Ravenna tossed her head back and gasped as her vampire’s lips found her throat again, his tongue laving the bite mark he’d given her their first night. Arousal tugged at her gut, and she felt herself drench his fingers with desire. Then his hand abandoned her center and the head of his erection nudged her sensitive folds, pressing into her body with slow intensity that had her insides swirling into an unconquerable storm.
The only home that mattered.
The home she had with Nicolai.
“Come on, sweetheart,” Nicolai gasped, thrusting himself all the way home. “Watch the sunrise with me. The one you painted.”
She was drowning in his eyes.
“Raven…my Raven…”
“Oh…”
“Please. Please…”
And then there was no question. None at all. The clouds parted and the stars pierced through the darkness, allowing an instant of perfect clarity, of unbreakable understanding. No matter the price, this seemed worth anything. If she could have this—have Nicolai—for always. She wanted to live her life rather than watch others live around her. She wanted to live.
She had love now. She had a reason for living beyond the monotony of her duty and the perilous certainty of her eventual death.
If she allowed him to claim her, link their blood forever, an end would finally be in sight. Their paths would merge, tied together forever by a sacred exchange of words. Taking his blood into her body meant she owned a part of him. It meant she accepted him for what he was. It was an ancient vampiric practice, not unlike the modern concept of marriage, only a completed claim couldn’t be broken. She and Nicolai would always be able to feel each other, regardless of what distance separated them.
It would also ensure her immortality. Granted, she wouldn’t be immune to death if it came knocking in the form of an axe or some ugly beast’s hungry teeth, but her body would cease aging. As long as Nicolai lived, she lived.
He couldn’t turn her, but he could take her with him through eternity.
“Yes,” she gasped, arching her hips off the mattress in desperation. “Yes, Nicolai.”
Awe overpowered him. “Raven?”
“Make me yours.”
She heard his gasp and saw his fangs, and then her body was plunged into ecstasy beyond grasp. He thrust into her with raw need, need that surpassed tenderness. The air around them exploded into the illicit smacks of their bodies rocking together, the wet suctioning sound that slurped through the air every time he tried to pull himself away from her pussy. He drank hard and deep, commanding every part of her that she had to give.
“Mine,” Nicolai growled against her bloodied flesh. “You’re mine.”
“Oh yes.”
“Oh God. God…” He pulled back and smashed his mouth to hers, too much in need to shake his demon away. His fangs nicked her lips, but she didn’t care. She felt drunk on his taste, lost in the sensations that he sent racing through her body. Pain and pleasure often went hand-in-hand with him, and even if it rendered her hellbound, there was nothing about being with Nicolai that she would trade or change. Not for anything. “Raven? Please…”
She needed no direction. Ravenna snapped to herself and lodged her teeth in his throat, clamping down until her tongue was bathed in the undeniable taste of blood. His blood. Her lover’s blood.
And after this…after tonight…
Mate.
“Mine,” she whispered, licking delicately at the mark she’d made. “Nicolai…”
“God, yes. Yours. Always yours.”
Her vision blurred, pleasure seizing her every cell. “I love you.”
“I love you. God, how I love you.”
“Yours.”
Nicolai nodded hard and kissed her again, his hips still rocking desperately against hers. “Always. My girl. Mine.”
It was done, then. It was complete.
She was one with him. She was whole.
No going back.
Chapter 9
Present Day
“You’re not in the history books.”
Raven glanced up from polishing her favorite sword, brows perked. She felt glad for the distraction. Her mind kept running her in circles, and if she didn’t watch her step, she’d end up as loopy as people who wore those special jackets and slept in padded rooms.
“What?”
“Neither you or a vampire named Nicolai are in the history books. Believe me, I know my history backwards and forwards, and if anyone bearing your name had been One of the Few before, I’d know.” Dexter held up a volume. “Not above looking again, but I thought I’d mention that.”
She licked her lips. “How long has it been since you did your homework?”
“That’s beside the point.”
“I was different.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Maybe the history was erased.”
After years under Dexter’s care, Raven considered herself rather schooled in the many expressions of an overly-analytical Guardian. Never had she expected to fall witness to the entire catalogue in one sitting. Raven inhaled sharply and quickly averted her eyes. It would help if she could find a little sign that Dexter believed any part of her story.
Finally he broke with a pointed clearing of his throat. “I still don’t believe you.”
So much for that.
She shuffled uncomfortably. “I know. I know it’s a lot to take in, but I’m not crazy.”
Dexter nodded hard and took a step back. “Of course you’re not crazy.”
“You seemed to think I was.”
“When?”
“When you said I was crazy.”
He winced and ran a hand over his jaw. “You misread that.”
“I misread, ‘Raven, you’re crazy’?”
Dexter nodded. “I just thought you…perhaps…I thought you…”
“You think—”
“I thought—think—you might be confused.”
“I’m not confused.” Raven shuffled again and heaved a long sigh. “Really, I’m not. And I know how it sounds.”
“I don’t think you can.”
“No, I do.” She paused. “And maybe if I wasn’t absolutely certain that this is what happened, it’d be different. But it’s not different, because my memories are crystal clear, Dexter. I might as well have been there yesterday.”
“Yes, well…” The Guardian exhaled, turning a quick corner around the coffee table toward the bookshelf to retrieve one of his many aged texts. “Hallucinations can be very convincing.”
He began flipping through pages, and Raven’s temper grew short. If she didn’t watch out, she would lose what little patience she had left.
The period for understanding had ended, and it seemed time for Dexter to take her at her word. While she knew that her story did have its gaping holes, she felt reasonably certain it wasn’t the strangest thing that had ever happened, especially in the world they lived in.
Raven remembered so many things. She remembered how she felt making the deal, how she’d trembled while sealing her fate, while her blood poured over Paimon’s quill and the clouds above her head crashed together in frenzied foreboding. She hadn’t minded the price then. She hadn’t cared. At the time, it seemed merely the cost of doing business. Signing over the part of herself she had come to view as a burden rather than a blessing. Signing over the part of herself that had sealed Nicolai’s fate.
The part of herself that, at the moment, still belonged to her.
Paimon hadn’t shown his head once. Not once. In the years she’d been slaying demons, fighting vampires, and abiding the laws of the Few, she hadn’t once crossed paths with the Hell King or his legion.
The knowledge unnerved her. Had P
aimon intended for her to remember him and their deal before he came to collect? Did he plan to collect in person, or would she just wake up one morning with an essential piece of herself missing? If he hadn’t intended for her to remember anything, how did she?
A fluke.
A mystical happenstance that only occurred because of her birthday.
God, she didn’t know. Not knowing would drive her mad.
Then there existed Nicholas. Nicholas, who likely felt confused and furious and a thousand other things she didn’t wish to consider. She’d sold herself to come and find him, to give him life again so that they might be together, and he lived in the world, void of her memory. No matter how drawn to her he felt, she couldn’t continue fooling herself. He looked and acted the same, but Nicholas wasn’t Nicolai. He’d had a very different upbringing than the man she remembered. Pretending otherwise did no one any good.
When she’d known him, he’d lived alone most of his life. He’d tumbled into her village and everything had changed for both of them. She’d felt so lonely—so miserable and isolated from others that she truly forgot, at times, that she was more than just a living weapon. She felt more than a girl saddled as One of the Few.
She was a woman, someone to be loved and respected.
At least Nicolai had loved her. He’d given her so much and asked for so little. He’d wanted forever with her, and she’d happily acquiesced. Only she hadn’t felt brave enough to take the final step, the part that could have saved his life.
She hadn’t run. Kenneth had found them in the end.
Had she run, had she had the courage to toss all else aside for him, she wouldn’t be here. Raven didn’t know why she hadn’t acted. The life she’d had with Kenneth seemed meaningless, but a part of her had clung to it. After all, it’d been all she had before Nicolai barreled into her life.
Even when he asked her to trust him, she’d been reluctant to sever the last essential tie.
She’d failed him in that sense.
If she hadn’t failed him, she wouldn’t be here now. She’d live with Nicolai. There never would have existed a bargain with a demon, a death, a rebirth, and this damnable separation. Instead, Paimon had strategically placed them at opposite ends of the universe. He’d made sure that Nicolai grew up as he had, of course, and while Raven knew without question that Nicholas embodied completely the man she loved, she also knew that consequences had changed the circumstances.
She could handle it if he wasn’t the same. She’d hate it, but she could handle it.
Yet she’d seen him, touched him, and he seemed the same.
She sniffed hard, her eyes filling with tears.
How had she lived twenty-one years of a life she’d bartered for without knowing it until now?
How had she not remembered the man who had saved her from herself?
They had claimed each other as mates. It was allegedly one of the strongest ancient bonds, more powerful than any spell or incantation and stronger than any demon power in this or any other world. A union forged with blood and held together with love. True, there stood much danger in binding oneself with a vampire. Even other vampires, according to Nicolai, rarely enacted the practice because they were, by definition, mutinous creatures. So few of them cared for the frailties of human emotion, especially love. Those vampires who did live to protect the human race rarely allowed themselves to feel human emotion. Even they viewed it as a weakness.
Vampires typically didn’t feel love, not love like what she and Nicolai had shared.
He’d wanted eternity with her, and she’d given it to him. They had linked to each other with blood.
Yet she hadn’t remembered him. She’d sacrificed so much for him, but she hadn’t remembered him. Yes, a part of him had called to her, just as she was certain a part of her had called to him, but she hadn’t recognized him as she should have, not even after seeing his face.
It occurred to her that she’d been very quiet for a very long time. With a hard sniff, Raven looked up and met her Guardian’s worried, compassion-filled eyes. Not for the first time, she felt herself swelling with sisterly love and gratitude.
Dexter was the one good thing Paimon’s deal had brought her—the only good thing.
God, if only he’d lived three centuries prior. If only he’d served as her Guardian then.
“I know it’s crazy,” she said slowly. “I really do. But it’s real, Dexter. It’s very, very real. All of it. But you don’t know this demon I summoned. He wasn’t a garden variety guy. He was powerful. Is powerful. One of the most powerful demon-lords in the history of those kinda guys.”
“What was he called?” Dexter asked, flipping through his book. “The demon?”
Raven bit her lip and wiggled guiltily.
“Raven…”
“He’s bad news.”
“And if…” Dexter sighed his exasperation. “If I believe that you made a deal with this demon, we need to know all we can about him and his powers so we have a way to stand up to him whenever he comes to collect whatever it is that you bargained.”
She swallowed hard and rubbed her suddenly chilled arms with her hands, desperate for some friction. “I don’t think it’ll work,” she replied. “What I signed is a tablet. A stone tablet. With blood. I don’t think this is the sort of bargain where you can just ring up an attorney and try to find a loophole.”
“I still think it best to know what we’re dealing with if it comes down to it.”
Raven inhaled sharply. “I don’t wanna.”
“What?”
“I don’t wanna tell you. You’ll get all…” She shifted again, feeling all at once very itchy. “It’s something…” He would definitely flip out over it, and given the fact that she’d made the deal while she mourned and in a different century, she didn’t feel up to getting an earful from a man who hadn’t even existed then. “I plead the fifth?”
He sighed. “Raven—”
She needed a distraction and fast. “Who was the ward?”
A long pause was followed by an equally long blink. “I beg your pardon?”
“Kenneth’s ward. His ward during the time when I should have been his ward. I mean, I might not be there but another warrior would have been, right?” Her brow furrowed, her mind playing a rapid game of catch-up. “Who do the history books list as being under Kenneth Mal? If not me, Paimon had to—”
Dexter’s perked up, his face draining of color. “Paimon?”
Rats.
“Um…”
“The Hell King? That Paimon?”
Raven smiled uneasily. “Unless you know of another one.” Her stomach dropped when her Guardian met her eyes, and cold invaded her skin. “He has the kind of power to make the universe his playground, right?”
Dexter swallowed audibly and nodded, every inch of his expression wholly frozen. “He does.”
“He had to do some major mojo, then, to make it so that One of the Few wasn’t me and to make sure that Nicolai was born to his mother and me to mine.” Raven’s eyes dropped again, a long shudder commanding her tired body. “He never wanted me to remember, Dexter. He did what he said he’d do. He put me in this world and he put Nicolai here, too, but we were never supposed to cross paths. Never.”
Dexter frowned. “Never?”
“If he had,” she reasoned, “we would have remembered. It wouldn’t have just happened.”
“That’s speculation. You can’t know that.”
Nothing would move her certainty. “But I do,” Raven said. “I was too warped when it happened. Too focused. I only wanted him back. Paimon’s an agent of Hell. He wouldn’t just give something over. No, he gave me everything I asked for, but only what I asked for. Everything else, he did to fit his own agenda and to get what he wanted.” A pause. “Nicolai was never supposed to remember.”
The numbed look on her Guardian’s face slowly thawed into something more encouraging. “But you did,” he said swiftly. “Cross paths. If Paimon was playi
ng another angle, then his plan was thwarted by Nicholas’s coming here.”
Raven glanced up slowly, her heart thundering with hope. “Dexter, you’re talking like you believe me.” She paused. “Do you believe me?”
“I…” He flushed. “You know Paimon. You know the name. That much makes me…it lends you credibility. We’ll leave it at that.”
She rolled her eyes but couldn’t contain her relieved smile if she tried. “Gee, thanks.”
“You have to admit, Raven, books and demon names are not your specialty.”
“I still managed to woo the High Council and earn the award that is you, didn’t I?”
“Five years ago, and by the skin of your teeth. You’re more of a learn it and ditch it kind of girl.”
A long, dry laugh rumbled through her throat. If she didn’t pace herself she might laugh until she cried. The wealth of what she could tell Dexter now would have his jaw permanently stranded on the floor. The things Kenneth had made her remember. Recite. Memorize in seven different languages. Oh Lord. She could teach Dexter a thing or two now. She could become the Guardian.
Thankfully, the conversation rolled onward before she could reveal as much. She didn’t want to give her surrogate brother a complex. Not now.
“Something went amiss,” Dexter mused. “In Paimon’s scheming, there was something he wasn’t banking on. Something that threw Nicholas into your path again.”
Raven nodded slowly, the wheels in her head at last beginning to turn. “Yeah. You’re right. If Paimon never intended for me and Nicolai to get back together, to find each other, then—”
“But you said he doesn’t remember you. Nicholas doesn’t, I mean.”
“No, he doesn’t, but there was something. When we were together, there was something.” Raven worried a lip between her teeth, her brain desperately pulling on fact and theory, trying to make sense out of a senseless world. She wanted something concrete, something she could grasp and hold to give her some form of hope. “Dexter, he could’ve killed me last night. I was completely defenseless. I thought he knew exactly who I was. I thought he was just lost and confused like me. I mistook the confusion and stuff for, well, confusion of a different kind. There was a part of him that recognized me. Not a big part, but enough of a part, and he got all protective of me when you showed up. There was something about me that he knew.”
Ripples Through Time Page 10
