by Lan Chan
Andrei sliced the front of my T-shirt open. His blue eyes bled into brightest crimson. It matched the patchy landscape of bruising that had appeared on my skin. I clutched at my chest and felt my heart beating too close to the surface. Andrei ripped my hands away, searching as though he could see something I couldn’t. His mouth opened wide, teeth turning sharp at the tips.
“Shit!” he spat.
The phantom hand tugged once more, sending me sprawling forward. My cries were no longer audible. My jaw ached and my vision became bathed in red. I was bleeding from my eyes. Andrei cleared everything away from the space between the couches because I was convulsing so badly it was as though I was having an epileptic fit. He tried to roll me over onto my side so I couldn’t swallow my own tongue. A spark of bone magic raced across my skin and leaped onto his hand. He yelped as it singed him.
The potion had reached my blood stream and was slowly making its way to the chamber where my magic resided. Sharpness pressed against my heart. The rest of my internal organs screamed as they were squished together. My head pounded from lack of oxygen. Andrei appeared in front of me in triplicate. The middle Andrei slapped his hands on my cheeks, holding my head in place. “Spit it out.” he ordered.
The compulsion feathered against my thoughts. My back arched into the first strains of a vomit reaction, but it didn’t take. His hysteria mounted in the increasing vulgarity of his swearing. I shook so violently that even his superior strength couldn’t hold me still.
Behind his back, a shadow blossomed. Hell no! Wards my ass!
I tried to open my mouth to warn him, but my throat was too full of blood. Andrei’s head whipped around, alerted by his own vampiric senses. Black smoke hissed and rose to the ceiling. A swirl of green angelfire traced a circle in the air. My ears popped as Kai shattered the wards around the penthouse. He appeared in a shower of mystical smoke and forest-green angelfire.
Andrei whipped around only for Kai to catch him by his throat. The vampire went airborne. Kai tossed him with such force he sailed across the apartment and hit the window at breakneck speed. Glass shattered against his back. He hung suspended in the air outside for the briefest second before gravity snatched him and he fell out of sight.
Blood gurgled out the side of my mouth when I tried to scream. It came out an incoherent gargle. My eyelids were almost sealed shut with congealed blood. I felt weightless all of a sudden. The world faded and I found myself sitting up. The Ley sight rose up around me in softer pastel colours than what I usually saw. Kai stomped down beside me. Angelfire coated his right hand. He reached out and his hand slipped through my chest. I gasped thinking I might have phased by accident, but his frantic movements made me look down. Everything stood still as I stared into my own bloated face and unmoving body. Not again! I really couldn’t make a habit of dying. Kai blasted angelfire into my chest repeatedly. The Ley sight faded. Fatigue clawed at me, urging me to close my eyes. I fell backwards.
The last thing I saw was a blurry shadow ringed in green before a hand pressed on my forehead and I passed out.
43
For the longest time before I woke, I seemed to hover in a suspended state between life and death. Between pain and numbness. I heard the slamming of doors and felt the scrape of unknown but somehow familiar magic rolling against my skin.
My breath came in shallow gasps, sucking any oxygen through a blocked nose. Soft pressure blanketed my face. A spiral of green magic swept gently over my face, breaking down the crusted blood and easing my struggling lungs. Cleared of obstructions, my breathing evened out.
And then came the pain. The tarred potion was slathered along my trachea. It had seeped into my blood and raced to my heart where it had bonded with my cells. As predicted by everybody who warned me against the potion, it had backfired. A potion meant to rid me of my feelings for Kai had actually tried to literally rip out my heart.
Angelfire flared once more and the world went dark. The next time I woke, the darkness was illuminated only by the light of the moon coming through the window above where I lay. My whole body ached but it was a muted pain. The kind of thing I had felt after being healed.
One by one, my senses came back. The smell of citrus and fresh linen. The warmth of cosy bed sheets against my skin. The comforting rise and fall of a breath taken without pain. Relief flooded through me. When I tried to push myself up on my elbows, a hand shot out of the dark and clamped around my left wrist.
“Don’t move,” Kai snarled.
Eyes snapping open, I found myself lying helpless at the mercy of a predator. He sat in an armchair to the left of the bed. The way the moonlight cut through the curtain cast that side of the room in shadow. My night vision had yet to kick in. All I could really discern were those green, night-glow eyes that burned with such lethal intensity. I never knew Nephilim could turn their headlights on the same way as shifters.
And then he moved forward into the light. He might have his civilised face on, but what stalked me behind those deceptively calm green eyes was feral. Possessive. It was nothing compared to the merciless rage that he kept chained to his side of the bond. Even contained, I felt the bleeding edge of it like a lick of fire against my skin.
I tracked him back, my prey instinct screaming at me to run and hide. Amazement was a stone in my throat as I traced my gaze along his bare, heavily muscled shoulders down to the taut planes on his chest.
Swallowing hard, I tried to tug my hand free. It was like trying to push at a brick wall. “Let go of me.”
Rather than do as I asked, Kai surged forward. One minute he was a solid presence in the chair. The next, the bed dipped as he caged me in it, his palms on either side of my head, my wrist still shackled in his hold. The lean repositioned his torso, dragging the material of his sweatpants precariously low on his hips. I became startlingly aware that my T-shirt was missing.
The scene inside the penthouse raced back with blinding clarity. Andrei! That kind of drop would be fatal to a human. “What happened to Andrei?” I hissed.
The darkest blue drenched Kai’s eyes, turning the green into almost black. Andrei’s name was not safe to use. Safety was the last thing on my mind at the moment. “You better not have killed him.”
His face pressed dangerously close. “When I get through with him, he’ll wish he was dead. So will Eugenia. And that thug who sold you the potion. And any other person who had anything to do with this.”
I wanted to smile at how predictably reliable he was. Even when he was having homicidal tendencies. Unable to move my arms, I had every intention of kneeing him in the ribs. Intentions were great and all, but execution really was the key to success. Sadly, my lethargic body meant I was sorely lacking in the execution department.
“What did you do to me?”
All civility fled from his features. The face that looked back at me was pure, unadulterated death.
“What did I do to you?” Calm. Too much calm in his voice. Mayday. Red flags waving. Finding a smidgen of strength, I tried to wriggle out of his hold. It did nothing but make him latch on harder. Reaching inside, I found my pool of magics serene beneath the protective layer of the bond. Calling to it, I tried to grab on for a boost of power. It kept rippling gently without so much as a swirl to indicate it had sensed me.
“Seriously,” I whined. “Let me go, now!”
“No. I’m never letting you go again.”
Red flashed across my eyes. “Beg your pardon?”
“You’re done treating me like a chew toy and spitting me out whenever you get scared that this might be too much to handle.”
“What the ever loving hell are you talking about?”
My left wrist was freed only for his hand to settle over the column of my throat. The calluses of his fingertips pressed against the overly sensitive skin beneath my ear. My pulse beat wildly as he ran his thumb along the artery. My eyes rolled back in my head, lids closing involuntarily. A cold sweat kissed my skin. I swear it turned to steam against his scalding touch. He lea
ned down, his head so close if I dared move, I’d be in trouble.
“What did you think was going to happen after I found you dead, Blue?” he asked in a hot scrape of words against my ear.
“I wasn’t dyi –”
His teeth snapped, jaw gritting at what he thought was an outright lie. “I wasn’t! The potion –”
Kai’s free fist slammed against the bed, pushing the mattress off balance and sending me bouncing. “You were choking on your own blood when I found you. Your heart was double its normal size! If I was thirty seconds later...”
He blinked slowly, taking in a shuddering breath. He had always been able to force a measure of calm, even if it was pretend. But the residue of fury was still eating at him. What frightened me was that everything else about him became terrifying in its precision. Right now, all of his senses were firing on a level I couldn’t possibly fathom. Fear had shaped his childhood and honed him into a merciless weapon.
I hated that his life had been one big stretch of violence and loss. When I had decided to take the potion, I told myself I had made peace with the fact that Kai would feel my loss while the potion made me oblivious. Staring into his molten green eyes now, my conviction wavered.
So did his grip. For a second, I thought maybe he’d come to his senses. Then he curled his arm around my back, lifting me up and pressing me tight to his chest. He sat down heavily on the bed, forcing me into his lap and locking his right arm around me. With his left, he tipped me chin up so I couldn’t look away.
“What were you going to do?” he said. “Just take this potion and hope that it would erode the bond? I’m a healer for goodness sake!”
“That’s why I had to take it!” I screamed at him, sick of feeling like every option was a bad one.
“And then what? Go on your merry way and forget about us? While this side of the bond drives me out of my mind?”
“Nobody asked you to bond with me in the first place! If you weren’t such an impossibly arrogant jackass, we could have avoided this whole thing.”
“Am I?” he bit out. “Am I arrogant in thinking that I want you? That you want me? That we’re supposed to be a team, and if things go bad, we’re meant to work it out together instead of running in the other direction. I don’t get you, Blue. If there’s a demon within a kilometre, you’ll do everything in your power to crash tackle it. But we hit a small snag and the first thing you do is bolt.”
I almost spat my lungs out. “A small snag? You call not being able to have children a small snag? You call my magic eroding a small snag?”
“Anything short of imminent death is fixable.”
I deflated. “How much more imminent do you need?”
“If we bond –”
Never before had I been so close to actually throwing a tantrum. “You’re insane.”
“Only because you make me insane.”
“Don’t blame this on me.” I poked him in the chest. “I’m sure you came out of the Nephilim factory this way. Woodchips for brains.”
His hands slid down the small of my back, sending shivers up my spine that made me arch into his chest. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask,” he murmured against my temple. “If I thought I had a choice, I wouldn’t have done it.”
No. This wasn’t happening. I could deal with a snapping, snarling jackass. But I had no defences against this softer side of him. I had just dragged an apology out of Malachi Pendragon. It was a hollow victory. He hadn’t done anything wrong. My already stretched heart ached for him in more ways than one. Holding fast to my resolve, I forced out words I didn’t mean.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. We could never work.”
“If you don’t want it,” he seethed, “just deny the bond and it’ll retract. The seraphim are meticulous about this free will thing. If you’re so desperate to get rid of me, just say the word.”
I couldn’t bring myself to speak. Instead, I inverted my attention and looked inside me. Just say the word. It sounded so easy. Go away, I prodded weakly. I don’t want to be bonded.
I wasn’t sure where it originated, but there was definitely laughter in my head. My eyes opened.
“It doesn’t work,” I pouted. “Clearly this free will thing is complete bullshit.”
“Right. So it works when you tell the seraphim to stay out of your head but not when you want to get rid of a simple bond.”
“It’s hardly simple! And the seraphim need to keep their mouths shut. What? They can’t get in my head so they go running to you? If they didn’t create this mess in the first place, I wouldn’t have to –”
I stopped short, the notion deflating. It didn’t matter.
The flash of fury in his eyes said it mattered to him. “You wouldn’t have to what?”
“None of your business.”
“The hell it isn’t.”
Here came the sandpaper. “No, it’s not. I don’t understand why you think you’ve got some kind of rights to butt into my life, but this isn’t a negotiation.”
“You want to try that again while you’re not sitting in my lap, Blue?”
Steam came out my nostrils. “Move your damn arms and I wouldn’t be here.”
He called my bluff and dropped his arms.
I was free. Why didn’t I move?
A muscle in Kai’s cheek jerked. A split second was all it took. I had the option of running. He’d given it to me no holds barred. “You’ve had enough chances.”
He claimed my mouth in a hot, demanding kiss full of possessiveness. I should have pushed back but my brain fried on contact. I clenched his shoulders, wrapping my arms around his neck and pulling him closer. His tongue swept over mine in tantalising arches that made my back bow, his bare skin scorching against mine. He nibbled at my bottom lip, running his tongue over the plump curve. He kissed me as though starved for human contact. As though fearing I would disappear.
Wasn’t that exactly what would happen? I was living on borrowed time. I knew it. Kai knew it. He just refused to accept it.
The thought punctured through the haze of desire, throwing ice water on me. I shoved away, bracing my hands on his shoulders. Blinking rapidly, I tried to clear my thoughts. Kai dipped his head and ran his teeth gently along the sensitive skin beneath my ear. I whimpered, locking my elbows so I wouldn’t melt.
“Blue,” he rasped in my ear. His voice sent delicious vibrations over my skin. I stared into his earnest gaze and time stood still. “I know what I am. I can’t live my life in quiet. I won’t. I don’t have a clue what will happen tomorrow. I just know that I don’t want to spend the time we have left arguing with you.”
Something about the way he spoke about time made my insides cold. The bond opened up and showed me that Kai didn’t think he would survive this war either. He believed he would die defending the people he loved. Defending me. So whether I was able to have kids or not was not worth worrying about.
Vehemence burned in my chest. I couldn’t fathom a world where Kai didn’t exist. To my dying breath, I wouldn’t allow that to happen. It was time for this fairytale to end. The bond flickered. Locking away my emotions so he wouldn’t worry, my turbulent thoughts suddenly calmed. I was holding on to him because I wanted him so badly it hurt. But if I could prevent his death and that of the people I cared about, I would have to let him go.
Decision made, I was suddenly starving for him.
I kissed him, my lips sealing over his, my hands grabbing at his short hair. He parted my mouth with his tongue. I opened up to him, deepening the kiss and borrowing his strength. Kai clenched me to him, holding me so tight I could hardly breathe. Still, it wasn’t enough. I tapped at his shoulder. He relaxed his twined fingers a fraction to allow me to ease away an inch.
His face went slack when I reached back and unclipped my bra. “Blue.” It snagged in his throat.
“I’m okay.”
He cupped my face. “Blue.” This time it was almost a lament. “Don’t rush into –”
“I love you, Ma
lachi Pendragon.”
He was right. He had wings but he certainly wasn’t an angel. But he was unflinchingly gentle with me as he pushed aside the sheets and lay me down on the bed. Until he didn’t need to be anymore.
In typical fashion, he tried to blunt the pain with his magic when I gasped. “Don’t,” I rasped against his mouth.
“It’ll hurt.”
“Good. That’s how I know it’s real.”
I kissed his mouth, his throat, the tattoo on his shoulder, holding him close, branding his memory into my soul.
Afterwards, I fell asleep in his arms and woke in the same place, peaceful and safe. Kai’s breath was even warmth on my shoulder. The rise and fall of his chest against my back was bliss. I allowed myself a minute to hold on to this. And then, I had to shatter the bubble. Phasing out of his arms so I wouldn’t wake him, I got dressed in a half-wraith state. But while I was slipping my socks on, he snagged me around the waist and dragged me back onto the bed.
“Going somewhere?” His eyes were at half-mast. He smiled at me like a satisfied cat. I traced my finger over the scar on his brow that I could never get enough of.
“Have I told you that I love you?” I asked. Despite my best effort, grief sliced through the bond.
His gaze sharpened. “Blue?”
I shook my head. “Never in a million years did I think I could be this lucky.”
“It’s not luck,” he snapped, voice razor sharp, eyes darting as he tried to figure out where the threat was lurking. “You –”
It was now or never. With all my heart, I wished it was never. But I wasn’t made for happy endings.
My finger trailed on his chest over his heart. Oblivisah. Forget.
Kai’s entire body convulsed. He latched on to my hand, the bond whipping out urgently in an attempt to counteract the Angelical command. White light engulfed the connection, burning it away faster than Kai could restablish it. His grip one my wrist was so tight I thought it was going to break. More than the constricting pain, it was his loss of control that shattered my heart into tiny pieces.
