by Nina Bruhns
With a wet Red Sea sponge, he gently cleansed the blood from her face and throat, taking extra care around the puncture marks. Even so, she gasped in pleasure as he passed the sponge over them. The bite of a vampire was infected with a spell of erotic sensation that lasted several weeks. Every time the wounds were touched, she would experience a jolt of orgasmic pleasure.
He dropped his gaze to her breasts. He’d also bitten her there, as he’d suckled on her nipples. Two tiny red punctures sat above each pretty, rosy tip, further proof of his loss of control. Merciful Osiris. When had he last done that?
And yet, an unwilling spill of desire rippled over him at the sight of his marks upon her flesh. Without thinking, he rolled out from under her and canted over her. Lifting her upper body from the water, he put his mouth to one lush breast. He tongued the nipple and it reacted instantly, coming to pert attention. Pleased, he did the same for the other.
She moaned and unconsciously lifted up, offering them to him. He shouldn’t, but he couldn’t resist the temptation. He covered one and sucked, licking and teasing it until her moans turned throaty. He switched again, this time sending the sensations of his tongue down between her legs along with her breasts. It was a magic spell every shemsu woman he knew enjoyed tremendously.
Josslyn did, too. Her thighs fell open, and her hands reached for him, her fingers grasping his hair for purchase. Her cries became more urgent.
He brought her to the brink and then swept the tip of his tongue over the bite marks. She shattered. Her body convulsed, making at least the dozenth climax of the night. He could make them go on till dawn if he wished, so much mastery did he have over a woman’s body.
The discomfort of his own unfulfilled need was small enough payment. This was the only reward he could give her for her sacrifice. He would take no relief for himself, but he was, after all, a gentleman.
At length her body quieted, and he felt her swallow. He lifted his head just in time to see her awaken and gasp, and start to scramble backward in the tub, water sloshing. Then suddenly she seemed to remember everything and halted in mid-scramble.
“Oh!” she cried out breathily.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. He sat up, giving her space, running his hands through his wet hair to get it out of his eyes.
She watched him, her own eyes like full moons, and licked her lips. “I think you probably know,” she said.
“Better than you’ve ever felt in your life?”
She nibbled her bottom lip as she thought about that. “I’m not sure,” she finally said, reaching up to touch her neck.
He grabbed her hand. “I wouldn’t.” More water sloshed.
She looked spooked. “Why not?”
He chose his words. “Let’s just say…there are ramifications of a vampire bite.”
She blinked. “Such as?”
He figured a demonstration would illustrate his point best. He lowered his hand to her breast, and before she could scoot away, he brushed his thumb slowly and deliberately across the two tiny wounds.
She gasped and instantly dissolved into another orgasm.
He teased it out, and made it good for her, solely using his touch on the bites.
When her body calmed and she opened her eyes again, she looked stricken. “My God,” she whispered. “That’s—”
He leaned back. “Yes. I know.”
“Is this… Is it permanent?”
“Regretfully—” he paused “—or possibly mercifully, no. A few weeks normally.”
She sat up and glanced down to scan her body. “Did you…are there more?”
“No,” he answered. “Just those, and your neck. A bandage usually protects them fairly well against the reaction, if you are bothered by it.”
“Who wouldn’t be?” she murmured hoarsely.
He just smiled. He rarely indulged in blood-play of the variety Haru-Re enjoyed so much—biting a woman just for the sensual pleasure of it. He was only compelled to feed once a year, and that’s what he did. He wasn’t interested in the unpredictable complications of hedonistic excesses. Such as those his own sister suffered because of Ray’s indiscriminate lust.
Seth had, however, often enjoyed a woman’s company beyond her sacrifice, and he hadn’t found one yet who wasn’t enthralled by the after-effects of his bite.
“Indeed,” he said, and noticed Josslyn had caught sight of his rampant arousal, rising from the water like a stubborn column from a temple ruin. Her cheeks blossomed like opium poppies.
Her gaze shot to his, the obvious question burning in them.
“No,” he said. “We didn’t have sex.” He lifted a shoulder with a wry smile. “At least I didn’t.”
She bit her lip again.
“And no,” he anticipated her next question. “I don’t want to.” His cock might want to, but it would survive the deprivation.
He rose from the water, not bothering with modesty. He was proud of his close-to-perfect body, so why hide it? And if she grew a little covetous, well, so much the better. A man was allowed his vanity, wasn’t he? If nothing else.
He shook the water from his hair and flicked his fingers at his robe, which flew to him and slid onto his body. “Stay as long as you wish,” he told her. “I’ll have clothes laid out for you.”
He was on his way out of the bath chamber when she called after him, “Wait. What about my sisters?”
Ah. So very single-minded. He turned back to her. “Your sisters are free to move about the country as they please. You’ll find Gemma with Sheikh Shahin at his oasis encampment, where they live. Gillian, I’m afraid, is not here. She’s in Petru, situated about fifty kilometers to the north, on the east bank of the Nile, living with her lover, Rhys Kilpatrick, and your parents.”
She surged up so fast a deluge of water splashed from the tub. “My parents?” she exclaimed, her expression stunned.
He frowned, instantly regretful. “I’m sorry. How thoughtless of me. Of course you didn’t know. You must ask Gemma when you see her. It’s best she tell you.”
“They’re alive?” Josslyn asked in shock. “Both of them?”
“I believe so. As I said, better speak to Gemma about it. I really only know the sketchiest details.”
“My God,” she breathed. “So it’s really true?” She looked overwhelmed. Tears filled her eyes, and a reluctant tenderness for her tugged at his heart. Sitting there in the middle of the huge bathtub she looked small and fragile, like a beautiful abandoned waif in the body of a woman.
The ends of her flaxen-colored hair hung in wet strands on her back, but the tangled curls around her head were dry, surrounding her face like an intricate golden halo.
He wanted to go to her and hold her in his arms, give her comfort in her emotional chaos.
“Can I see them?” she whispered hopefully.
Which soundly crushed the ill-advised impulse. “If that is what you wish,” he said. Haru-Re would no doubt be thrilled to have her at Petru. Despite his earlier resolve of indifference, the thought sent a stab of anger through him. “In either case, I am finished with you,” he stated, briefly wondering with no little irritation if it was more to convince himself than her.
He turned and walked out, but not before he saw her lips part in surprise. “So I’m free to go?” she called hesitantly after him. He heard the water swish.
“Whenever you like,” he said over his shoulder.
As far as Shahin’s oasis, at any rate. If she and Gemma decided to flee to Petru, good riddance to them. In the meantime, he could count on Shahin to see that Josslyn didn’t go anywhere in the outside world where she might reveal their secrets. Yes, and to retrieve those incriminating letters she’d sent.
Eventually Seth would have to decide on her final disposition—shemsu or shabti. But at the moment he had more important things to see to, now that his strength had returned.
“I’ll have one of the guards take you to your sister at the oasis,” he called back to her.
&
nbsp; She appeared at the bath chamber door, rivulets of water running down her lovely body, her brilliant blue eyes uncertain. She lifted her wrists. “What about these?”
He stared at them for a moment, irrationally unwilling to remove the silver cuffs and chain, the indisputable claim of his ownership over her.
He did not want her in his bed. But against all reason, he didn’t want her in any other man’s bed, either. As long as she stayed inside Khepesh, that was a distinct possibility. Every immortal was allowed to bed anyone in the per netjer, given mutual consent. Josslyn Haliday was a beautiful, sensual woman. He had no doubt there would be many of the shemsu men, and probably some women, who would be delighted to invite her to linger awhile in the palace.
Not a good idea. He wanted her out of his sight. Out of the reach of temptation.
“The cuffs will disappear when you leave Khepesh,” he told her, casting a spell to make it so.
Then he walked away, doing his best to ignore the lost expression on her face as he left her standing there alone.
Chapter 10
Josslyn recognized a dismissal when she heard one.
It vaguely surprised her, but to be honest, she was so overwhelmed by everything that had happened to her today, along with the incredible news of her parents’ still being alive, that Seth-Aziz leaving her was a blessing.
She needed time to absorb it all.
Her head was spinning with questions and confusion, strange physical feelings and a landslide of unfamiliar emotions.
Or maybe it was just loss of blood. She was tired. So damn tired.
She found a towel and dried herself and managed to make it to the bed before she collapsed. Seth, or more likely a servant, had somehow found time to change the sheets before he left. They were now midnight-blue, neatly tucked in, covered by a satiny duvet in a subtle pattern of stars. She crawled under it and rolled herself in a ball, feeling small and insignificant in the massive bed and the huge, high-ceilinged room.
She slept. And she dreamed of him. Naturally.
Broad-shouldered and handsome as ever, Seth-Aziz was twice as tall as she, and cold as ice as he stared angrily down at her. Malevolence poured off him as he told her over and over in an endless loop that he didn’t want to have sex with her.
“All right already!” she cried, slapping her hands over her ears to keep from hearing the disdain in his voice. “You don’t want me. I get it, okay?”
She awoke with a lurch and found herself sitting up in bed, her chest heaving with a desperate mix of anguish and mortification, her hands still covering her ears.
There were more candles lit, and a few sconces burned on the walls, making the room much lighter than before. She jerked her hands from her ears and heard her sister’s anxious voice. “What the hell went on here between you two?” Gemma asked. “I thought you’d never wake up!”
Joss snapped around. Her sister was sitting on the edge of a chair, watching her with worried eyes.
“Gemma!” she cried and reached out for her. With a look of relief, her sister leapt up and onto the bed, and they hugged fiercely. “Oh, Gem! Am I glad to see you!”
“You have no earthly idea. I’ve been so worried about you, sis! You’ve slept for hours and hours. Are you okay?” Gemma pulled back, holding her arms, examining her for— “Omigod. He really did it.” Her sister’s gaze had fastened on her neck. “Does it hurt? Is it…” Her question broke off, and her eyes darted for a nanosecond to her own wrist. “Never mind. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” She pulled her into another hug. “Shahin wanted to take me back to the oasis, but I wouldn’t go until I saw for myself that you’re all right. And I wanted to say I’m sorry for not being able to talk to you earlier. It really was horrible of Seth to put that spell of silence on me, and he’s going to hear about it, believe me. But thank God you’re finally here with us and out of danger.”
It was always tough to get a word in edgewise when Gemma got on a roll, but that last bit grabbed Joss’s attention. “Danger?” she cut in, pulling back. “So you know what happened to me? At the hotel? You know that guy?”
Gemma froze in alarm. “Something happened to you? What guy?”
Joss rubbed her hands up and down her bare arms in a sudden chill. Gemma saw it, noted her nakedness and slid off the bed to fetch a dress that was hanging on an armoire across the room while Joss told her about the encounter in the hotel room with Harold Ray. And about his final warning.
“I knew the bastard would find you. But don’t worry about him,” Gemma assured her, handing her the long, flowing dress. “Seth will protect you from Haru-Re now that you’re here.”
Joss wasn’t so sure about that. “Haru-Re?” she asked.
“He’s a demigod, a vampire like Seth,” Gemma explained. “High priest of the Sun God, Re-Horakhti. His real name is Haru-Re, but he likes being called Ray.” She rolled her eyes at the double meaning. “How on earth did you get away from him?”
Joss pulled on the dress and told her about the knock at the hotel room door that came in the nick of time, and the copper-colored cat she’d seen in the corridor afterward. It made no sense then, but after today…
“Nephtys,” Gemma declared, blowing out a breath of recognition. “Thank God she found you at the hotel.”
Joss blinked, sitting back on the bed, recalling— “Good grief,” she said. “There was a cat at the tomb, too. It was wearing an amulet around its neck. When Nephtys appeared moments later wearing the same one, I thought I’d started hallucinating.”
Gemma smiled. “It was her, all right. Her Set-animal is a temple cat.”
“Set-animal?” More shape-shifting? The memory of seeing the man, Shahin, change from a hawk to a human sent a shiver down Joss’s arms.
“Shape-shifting is part of the deal when you become one of the shemsu, an immortal,” Gemma said. “You get to choose the animal you’d like to share your ba with.”
Joss knew about the ancient Egyptian belief that each person possessed three different souls: the ba, the ka, and the akh. The ka carried one’s earthly spirit, or creative spark, while the ba was more bound up in the physical, existing in its own body and able to take on any shape it wished as it traveled between the mortal realm and the underworld. As a guide to the living, a person’s ba directed his words and actions toward “maât,” or truth and goodness, keeping him on the path to heaven. Upon death, the two souls joined to become the akh, the person’s essence that lived on in the afterlife.
Joss stared at her sister in stark disbelief. So she was saying this stuff was really true? That these people had somehow found a way to harness the powers of their ba and… No. It was too incredible. If she didn’t know better, she’d think Gemma had gone stark, raving mad.
And yet…she’d seen it with her own eyes. Shahin had shifted. How else to explain that?
Gemma waved a hand as if the whole shape-shifting thing were inconsequential. “You’ll learn about all that stuff later.” She frowned. “Although I’m not sure how, now that Khepesh no longer has a priestess. That was Nephtys’s job. Before she…” For a second, Gemma looked troubled.
“Khepesh?” Joss asked, not about to let her get off-track.
“Here,” Gemma said, indicating their surroundings with an all-encompassing gesture. “Khepesh is the name of our palace. Our per netjer.”
Joss didn’t miss Gemma’s use of the word our. Twice.
Joss was also fluent in hieroglyphics, so she knew what per netjer meant without asking. Home of the god. And the word Khepesh bore a complicated circular meaning involving the foreleg of an ox, a type of scimitar, the connotation “strong of arm” and the Great Bear star constellation—known to ancient Egyptians as “the foreleg of Set-Sutekh.” An appropriate name for the abode of the god himself.
If he existed.
Josslyn was more than skeptical when it came to pagan gods, despite the undeniably strange goings on here at Khepesh. She was strictly a one-God kind o
f person. So were Gemma and Gillian, which was why she couldn’t understand what either one of them was doing here. And yet, Joss had definitely seen signs of supernatural goings-on. Heard things that made her believe. Hell, definitely felt the power here. How could she deny what her own senses were telling her?
Still, accepting the existence of vampires and shape-shifters in the world was a far cry from attributing that presence to the manifestation of some ancient pagan god. Or even a demigod.
Gemma had obviously accepted it all. But then, she always was a bit woo-woo, like their mother had been.
Joss gazed at her sister, a thousand new questions assaulting her like a hoard of insects—on top of the million questions she already had pinging around in her brain like pinballs.
“Gem,” she said carefully. “What the hell is this place? And how did we end up here? Seth-Aziz told me Mom and Dad are alive, and Gillian is living with them in some place called Petru. For God’s sake, I’ve just been bitten by a freaking vampire! Yet here you sit, looking happier than I’ve ever seen you. Please, Gem, tell me what’s going on here, before my head explodes!”
Seth had spent the entire afternoon arguing with the six other members of the Great Council of Khepesh. About how to get Nephtys back. About whether to take the offensive in the war with Haru-Re instead of sitting back and waiting to be attacked. About the council sticking their noses in where they damn well didn’t belong.
The council had actually ordered him to bring Josslyn Haliday to the council chambers so they could speak with her! When he’d told them he’d sent her away to Shahin’s oasis, they’d even intimated that he had made a grave error, rebuking him for going against Nephtys’s vision of the future and not immediately taking Josslyn as his consort.
The bunch of superstitious old goats.
It was an outrage!
He would decide with whom he would or would not spend the rest of eternity, with no help from his meddling sister or the Great Council!
