Curse the Dawn

by Karen Chance

  He didn’t say anything, and he was sweating and trembling by the time I got a pad secured around his leg. It didn’t look like it was doing much to staunch the flow. It didn’t help that there were other wounds rending his flesh in several places that I hadn’t even noticed; courtesy of the chase, I assumed. But the leg was what had chills running up my arms, making my hands clumsy, churning my stomach.

  “Pritkin,” I said carefully. “Why hasn’t the bleeding stopped?”

  Perspiration gleamed in the hollow of his throat as he breathed faster and more shallow than usual. But there wasn’t a flicker of emotion in his voice when he spoke. “As soon as you are able, shift back to Jonas. Get him out of here and do not leave his side. You can protect each other until the issue with the Circle is—”

  “What do you mean, when I shift back?” I demanded, the cold feeling in my stomach growing exponentially.

  “Listen to me; we don’t have much time—”

  “Before what?”

  “Stop asking questions for once and pay attention. Don’t rely on the vampires to protect you from Saunders. There are too many tricks they don’t know and won’t be able to counter. And tell Jonas . . . tell Jonas he needs to—”

  “Stop giving me orders!” I hissed, glaring at him.

  That was less than satisfying since I couldn’t see him very well. What little light there was in the room seemed to fall at an angle to him, skirting his edges. I moved in front of him so I could grab his arms, so I could get in his face.

  “You said you could heal this. So do it!” He wouldn’t look at me. “Stop the bleeding, Pritkin,” I pleaded, my fingers digging into his arms. “Stop it and I’ll do whatever you want.”

  He licked his lips. “My energy level is . . . lower than usual. Healing will take time.”

  Yeah. Time he didn’t have. I stared at him in utter disbelief. “You tricked me! You wanted me to switch back because you knew—” I couldn’t even say it.

  I stared at him, unable to believe this was happening. That he could just disappear, along with everything rich and strange he’d brought into my life. Vanished, like magic.

  “You can’t do this,” he said, finally meeting my eyes. And if I’d had any doubts that he was serious, that look would have dispelled them. “You can’t tear yourself up every time you lose someone. War—”

  “Don’t give me some stupid lecture about war when the person we’re talking about losing is you!” I said, surprised by the savagery in my tone. At least my voice didn’t shake.

  His face blurred and I tasted salt on my lips. It was warm, warm like Pritkin’s hands coming up and framing my face, his thumbs brushing over my eyelids, soft as his fingers in my hair. “One person is not so important in the scheme of things,” he said, and his voice was gentle, gentle when it never was, and that almost broke me.

  But you are important, I thought. And yet he couldn’t see that. In Pritkin’s mind, he was an experiment gone wrong, a child cast out, a man valued by his peers only for his ability to kill the things they feared. Just once, I wished he could see what I did.

  “Then neither is this,” I said, leaning in and pressing my mouth to his, the kiss lightened by desperation and weighted down by everything he meant to me.

  His bloody fingers tightened on my face, but he kissed me back with a tenderness, a reined-in need that contrasted painfully with his passion in Marsden’s kitchen. There was no spark of electricity this time, no cool breeze rolling up my body, ecstatic and draining, no—

  No power loss.

  I tore away and stared at him. “Wait. What was . . . You healed earlier—back in Marsden’s kitchen. A scratch on your arm. I saw it!” Pritkin didn’t say anything. “You’re half incubus—you can feed from my power,” I said, slowly catching up. His ability must be spiritual rather than physical, like my power. That was why I could still shift, even in his body.

  Like he could still heal.

  “You don’t have any power to spare!” he told me.

  “I have more than you!” I gripped his arms. “Pritkin, you can use my power to heal—” I stopped because he was wearing an expression that I’d never seen before. It looked a little like terror.

  “This is precisely what happened last time!” he said harshly, his eyes skittering to the wall, the monitors, the wastebasket in the corner. Everywhere but my face. “You saw the house. It was even more isolated then, with nothing for miles but fields and water and forest. There was no one to help, no one to hear her scream!”

  And it suddenly occurred to me that it wasn’t his own death that had him looking like he wanted to bolt. It was mine. He drew in air, his face strained, and a flush darkened the skin of his neck. “You don’t understand the risk,” he said more calmly.

  “Your father tried to kill me. Believe me, I understand.” It had been added to my regular nightmare list, that horrible, sucking, draining sensation that had my flesh wanting to shudder off the bone. But that had been Rosier. Pritkin hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. He’d lost control with his wife because no one had warned him about what might happen. But he knew the risk now.

  Which is why he wasn’t going to take it.

  It was written in the glint in his eyes, the flare of his nostrils, the jut of his chin. “I can’t lose you!” I told him, feeling defiant and miserable and furious all at once.

  “I promise—you won’t. I’ll follow you. But you and Jonas have to—”

  “I didn’t want to do this,” I said, cutting through the obvious lie. “But you’re not leaving me a lot of choice. This is my call and I’m making it. Do what you need to heal.”

  “Yours?” It was if he’d put all the frustration he felt into a single glare. “How precisely is it yours?”

  “Oh. So suddenly I’m not Pythia?”

  “That has nothing to do with this!”

  “It has everything to do with it! You’re a war mage sworn to my service who thinks he doesn’t have to actually do anything I tell you! And yes,” I said, as he opened his mouth, “I know you have a lot more knowledge and experience, which is why I listen to you most of the time. But you’re wrong about this because you’re too emotional to see that the risk has to be taken. So I’m making the decision—which, since I’m Pythia and it’s my body, is my right.”

  I set my hand against his thigh, surprised by the heat of skin on skin. Pritkin twitched and looked at me, lips parted and eyes a little wild. “I warned you once before what someone looks like when an incubus has drained them completely. Do you truly want to risk that?”

  “I’m a big fan of safe,” I told him quietly. “I really prefer it to sorry. But in this case, yeah. I’m willing to risk it.”

  “I don’t know that I am,” he said thickly.

  And I just couldn’t take it anymore. I closed the distance between us, slammed him back against the chair and kissed him, holding his head still with both my hands buried in that stupid, stupid hair. I half expected more resistance, because Pritkin had never met an argument he didn’t like. So it was a shock when he ran his hands down my sides, cupped my hips and slid us both to the floor.

  “I’m going straight to hell for this,” he muttered.

  “At least you’ll know a lot of people,” I said breathlessly. And then I couldn’t talk at all because his mouth had settled hot and fierce over mine.

  I pulled his shirt off over his head and then let my hands wander. I wrapped one around his neck, running fingers into his hair. It was soft and silky—always a surprise—and slightly damp, like the skin below. I used the other to smooth down that powerful body, strong and filigreed with black ink and silver scars. It was almost as familiar as my own, and yet suddenly, it felt very different.

  I followed a ripple of solid muscle over the hard chest to the flat belly, and then dropped to the light dusting of hair that pointed to even more interesting areas. But Pritkin intercepted my hand, pulling it away from him. “Don’t,” he said roughly.

  “Why?”

>   “Because I have to remain in control, Miss Palmer, or this will go very bad, very quickly.”

  “If you call me that one more time,” I said seriously, and then forgot where I was going with it when his mouth moved to my neck. His lips trailed a line down the side of my throat and along the curve of my shoulder before closing over a spot he liked and starting to suck.

  I was quickly reminded of how determined Pritkin could be. Once he got his mind set on something, he was quite . . . single-minded, and right then, he was focused on driving me crazy. He was doing a pretty good job, somehow managing to get my shirt off and my bra unhooked one-handed, a calloused thumb lightly brushing a nipple.

  I returned the favor, raking my nails through the dark blond hair on his chest, finding a little nub that went hard under my fingertips. I played with it until he pushed that hand away, too. I gave a moan of frustration and moved on, my hands sliding over bare, hot skin, finding the smooth punctuation of scars, pressing fingers bruise-hard into muscle and bone. There was no softness anywhere, except the velvet of his skin, the touch of his mouth.

  My lips slid down the edge of one of the old, pale scars on his shoulder, feeling the faint ridge under my tongue. “Please,” Pritkin said hoarsely, and I smiled against his skin. “Don’t,” he added, and my patience broke.

  “Pritkin! Sex pretty much requires losing control, at least a little!”

  “This isn’t sex.”

  I blinked. “Oh. Then what is it?”

  “An emergency!”

  I started to argue and then thought twice about it. Considering what Mircea would do to Pritkin if he ever found out about this . . . Yeah. Emergency sounded good.

  But something I said must have gotten through, because hands, big and warm and rough, slowly slid down my sides. And something about their touch had changed. His fingers on my skin were as exquisite as a mouth, sizzling my nerves into overload, every touch sending spikes and waves of pleasure through me. I felt him strip away my capris and I didn’t care.

  A chill breeze swept through the windowless room and he groaned, low and deep in his throat, and started kissing a path up my body. My heart gave an odd little skip in time with the fear and longing that spiked behind my ribs. He kissed my knee and then a line up my inner leg, applying suction as he reached the crease between thigh and groin, and I shivered at the feel of stubble against delicate skin.

  His technique was magic—which I totally should have expected, I thought, torn between tears and hysterical amusement. “Is it sex yet?” I asked unevenly right before a warm, wet mouth closed over me. The laughter died in my throat.

  It was perfect, perfect, a slick hot tongue tracing patterns that might have been runes against the thin cotton, but I was already too far gone to tell. He painted me with his breath, alternating between sketching patterns with soft exhalations and tracing them with the very tip of his tongue. A moment with nothing but the whisper of air against me was followed by a delicate, moist stroke, over and over until my vision was blurring with tears and my panting breath was on the verge of sobs.

  That barely there sensation had my heart racing and my skin flushed and my body craving more like a drug. Every movement sent spikes of pleasure arcing up my spine, turning my muscles soft and helpless. I barely noticed when the breeze intensified into a skin-tingling, hair-raising rush. But it was impossible to ignore when his skin went burning hot.

  I slid a hand under the edge of his ruined khakis. My fingertips skidded over a crust of dried blood, but it flaked away when I brushed at it. And beneath, there was only soft skin and hard muscle that tightened under my touch. He’d healed, I realized, so relieved I was almost giddy.

  “Pritkin! I think—”

  A strong hand gripped the back of my neck, a thigh pressed hard between my own, and an unmistakable firmness pressed against me. I looked up to find myself staring into ravenous, alien eyes. Black and burning, there was only the thinnest rim of green around the pupil.

  He kissed me, and on the surface, nothing had changed. The feel of his hair between my fingers was the same, cool, silky, irrepressible. The way he was so intent on the kiss that he forgot to breathe was the same, too, leaving us both gasping. But suddenly, what had been a breeze became a torrent, a freezing blast of power that swept over me, leaving my muscles weak as water behind it.

  Unlike Rosier’s horrible leeching presence, it didn’t hurt, but it was a power drain nonetheless. A big one. Pritkin was still feeding.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  For a heartbeat, I felt a blind panic constrict my throat, knowing what this meant in my bones. But before I could protest, everything stopped, fingers and mouth sliding abruptly away from me. I looked up to see Pritkin motionless above me, sweat running off his muscles, his thighs trembling with the effort of staying still. He drew in air, his lips pressed tight together as if fighting for control.

  Those alien eyes met mine, and there was horror in them, but it was quickly being overtaken by something else—raw hunger. “Go!”

  I didn’t need to be told twice. I scrambled away from him, not even taking the time to get to my feet, just scuttling backwards on all fours through the ward. I fell down the small step and landed on the tile floor of Dee’s dressing room, panting and panicking, because my capris had twisted around my thighs, momentarily trapping me. But Pritkin didn’t come through the ward.

  I wasn’t sure if he was going to be okay, or if he was fighting to give me a head start. I really didn’t want to find out what would happen if he totally lost control, but what was the alternative? Running into a casino full of war mages? Ones who no longer seemed all that concerned about capturing rather than killing me?

  I was still fighting with my clothes and trying to think when the door opened and Dee came in. She paused when she saw me, and one painted eyebrow headed north. I felt a hot blush creeping up my neck. “It isn’t what it looks like,” I blurted.

  “Relax, honey,” she said, tugging her mile of rose-covered train inside the door. “We’ve all ended up with our panties around our ankles at some point.”

  “My panties are exactly where they should be!” I told her indignantly, trying to stand. But the capris tripped me up and I went sprawling, just as an announcement blared through the bar. “Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that there has been a bomb threat against the hotel. For your safety, we are evacuating the premises while a team of experts evaluates the situation. Please exit in an orderly manner through the lobby to the street.”

  “They’re looking for us,” I told Dee, trying not to lose it. “If we leave with the crowd, we’ll be spotted, and if we don’t, a search won’t take long to find us! Not in an empty hotel!”

  Dee looked thoughtful, but she didn’t demand any explanations. “Can your friend do a glamourie?”

  “Yes, but they’re war mages. They’d sense it!” Besides, I didn’t think Pritkin was up to doing too many fancy spells right now.

  “I may have an idea,” she said. “Gimme a minute.” She went back out into the club.

  I sat in her abandoned chair and got my clothes rearranged, which was harder than usual with hands that kept wanting to shake. I’d barely managed it when she was back. “It’s okay with the girls—they’re pissed at the Circle for ruining opening night anyway. Now we just have to convince your friend.”

  “Convince him of what?”

  Dee told me. I was still staring at her in shock when Pritkin emerged from the ward. His color was high, but otherwise, he looked fairly composed.

  That didn’t last long.

  “No.” He said it flatly, a muscle twitching in his cheek, when Dee had gone through it a second time.

  “You absolutely have the body for it,” she wheedled, holding a silver-spangled sheath in front of him.

  “I am not wearing a dress!”

  She pursed her lips, which were currently Day-Glo orange, and grabbed something flashy and purple from the rack behind her.

  “There
’s always the catsuit. Of course, it’s skin tight, so we’ll have to hide the candy, but I can help with—”

  I managed to grab Pritkin’s arm before the catsuit ended up in pieces. “They know what you look like,” I pointed out while pulling on my own disguise. “And even if they didn’t, you’re covered in blood. You can’t go out there like that!”

  “If I’m going to die tonight, I would prefer it to be with a little dignity!”

  “I don’t get you,” I said, leaning against the wall for support. My five-inch, fire-engine-red, glitter-covered Mary Janes were just as hard on the ankles as they looked. “You just spent over a day in a woman’s body—”

  “Not by choice!”

  “—and you’re hundreds of years old. Didn’t men once wear makeup and—”

  “Court fops, perhaps. I wasn’t one!”

  “Then expand your horizons,” I told him, throwing a boa around his neck. “And pick something.”

  Pritkin eyed the selection Dee had provided with loathing. She noticed and crossed her arms over her massive chest. “You’re cute, but you’re getting on my last gay nerve.”

  “I’m never going to live this down,” Pritkin muttered, snatching up an opera-length cape made of a profusion of gold lamé ruffles. It must have been designed with platforms and towering wigs in mind, because it swept the floor after him and the hood covered his head and face. I decided it would do.

  A few minutes later, three sequined and bejeweled visions glided out of the club and into the middle of the crush on Main Street. Dee was in front, providing distraction, her massive breasts jutting out in front of her like the prow on a ship. Pritkin and I followed behind. I was kind of short for a drag queen, even in the platforms, but the rainbow-sequined jumpsuit and towering Marilyn Monroe wig more than made up for it.

  The mages were everywhere, their eyes scanning the exiting crowd. Yet most barely glanced at us, despite the spectacle we made. And those who did quickly looked away when Dee blew them kisses or flashed a little thigh. It looked like hiding in plain sight might work after all. I’d barely had the thought when a vision crashed into me with all of the subtlety of a baseball bat to the head. It knocked the breath out of me and dropped me to my knees. It was like nothing I’d experienced before, vivid and crystal clear, and so solid that I couldn’t even see the street anymore.