by Ann Vremont
Aideen looked up to find Kean standing over her, one hand resting on her shoulder, concern darkening his features. “What’s wrong, Aideen? Are you ill?”
She brushed his hand and worry away. “Would I have seen this diary?” she asked, hoping she had, indeed, caught some glimpse of it as a child.
Kean gave a hesitant shake of his head in reply. “No, not as young as you were when you left us.”
Aideen felt fresh blood returning to her cheeks as her temper began to rise. “I did not leave anyone,” she said tersely. “I was never willingly a member.”
Kean shrugged and crossed to a locked cabinet. As with the rest of the house, the lock was keyless—a combination of eight numbers opened it. Once the cabinet was unlocked, he pulled out a retractable reading shelf and placed a loose-leaf binder on it.
“Photocopies,” he explained and motioned for her to join him. Kean switched on a reading light in the cabinet and stepped back to allow her a closer look. “We thought, at first, that it must be layered, but nothing…then we thought Cenn’s diary would provide a code key or itself be the answer…” His voice trailed off in an exhausted disappointment.
Aideen took a deep breath. Kean’s scent, like morning dew on grass, filled her. She looked at him, and into him, for a brief second and then turned away. “The book, both books, have served their purpose,” she said. He looked at her, confused but intensely curious. “It’s gotten us to this point.” She delivered her explanation with reluctance, still unwilling to retreat from her earlier position.
The fatigue so evident in Kean’s face seconds before fell from him. “But for what purpose?” he asked.
Aideen ran a fingertip over her left palm and traced the thin white line that hadn’t been there two days before. But for the hand it marred, it was a twin to the scar on Kean’s right hand. She remembered the sensation of Etain’s hand, her left hand, being cut in the joining ceremony with Cenn. Aideen shoved her hands deep in the robe’s folds and shrugged.
“Tell me what you know outside of Etain’s diary. Was there…” she faltered and drew another deep breath. “Was there a child?”
Kean arched one dark eyebrow, surprised at the question. “Yes…a direct ancestor of mine.”
“And Etain raised the child?” She knew this wasn’t the case but did not trust herself to ask what she really wanted to know—what had happened to the child, to her child.
He shook his head. “Nothing is known of Etain outside what she wrote in the diary…before she disappeared, she gathered together those who were closest to Cenn…the guards who had witnessed his death at his mentor’s hands and his rebirth with the stone’s magic…some of the women who had befriended Etain.” He paused, pulling together the threads of his family history he had learned at his mother’s knee. “It was this group of people who formed the temple and educated Etain’s daughter.”
“Daughter?” The question broke from Aideen in a strangled whisper.
“Girls all until I was born,” he answered.
Kean motioned her back to the cabinet. He pulled a sheaf of computer printouts from a manila envelope. “The stone and the diary, we think, were stolen nine years ago when burial mounds in Kenmare were vandalized. Eventually, they fell into Michael Meyrick’s hands—the book only recently.”
Aideen pointed at the long column of numbers and tried to force a joke past her lips, tried to say anything that would stop the questions about Cenn and Etain’s child that clamored in her mind. “You’re getting all that from this?”
“Patience,” he cautioned, the whisper of conspiracy in his voice stoking a small fire in the pit of Aideen’s stomach. “Donald Meyrick had no use for his uncle’s beliefs until he saw the stone. Donald,” he said, the name quickly pushed from his tongue, “is a man of science—a physicist.” At this, Kean tapped the printout. “Michael must have taunted him with the stone. Anyway, Donald had its properties secretly measured.”
“And these are the results?”
Kean nodded. “We’ve always had members at the best museums and labs on the lookout for the unusual.”
“So what got Donald so hot and bothered about the stone?” Aideen asked, although she’d experienced more than enough of the stone’s power to understand why any scientist would be interested in it.
Kean pointed to the row of numbers on the far right, as if they would mean something to her. “It’s seventeen times as dense as lead but only a quarter the weight,” he said in response to her blank stare. “And it’s similar to quartz in that it generates energy but at a magnitude that would suggest the tests were flawed.”
“Suggest?”
“It hasn’t been tested—it’s a vibrational energy and requires an exact combination of pitch and key to release it.”
“And once the energy is released?” Aideen asked, the answer resurfacing in her mind before she finished the question.
“Then the barriers to the dimensions science tells us exist fall away.” His hands moved like a magician’s pulling a bouquet of roses from thin air.
But, if the barriers fell, she knew, the bouquet would be black. She thought back to the confrontation in her store and the pale creature that had been only a few steps behind her and Kean as they fled. “Donald Meyrick’s most recent actions don’t seem like those of a scientist,” she said, half to herself.
Kean stuffed the printout back into the envelope and closed the cabinet. “He’s also a sadist of the highest magnitude. We believe he killed his uncle and an estate agent.” He glanced back to the desk, a slight disbelief showing in his face at his continued possession of the Bloodstone. “It was only through some miracle of incompetence by his uncle’s solicitor that Donald doesn’t have the stone now.”
Aideen collapsed into the chair and reached over to pick up the Bloodstone. Its dark red interior became illuminated at her touch and she drew it to her stomach. Light flared in the stone’s center and Kean perched on the edge of the desk, watching her.
“And I’m supposedly Etain’s ultimate heir?” she asked, despite knowing the answer far better than he did.
Kean cleared his throat before responding. “Yes.”
She looked into his cloud-gray eyes and saw the stone’s light burning in the black pupils. “And you are Cenn’s?” He nodded and her gaze returned to the stone. That he was Cenn, she had more trouble believing. But Cenn had said they were bound forever—through eternity. A pretty thought even if it seemed impossible.
Kean leaned over her and touched the Bloodstone’s top. Heat flowed from the stone, through her hands, up her arms, and into her stomach. She had a trancelike awareness of her nipples hardening, and heated desire, wet and hungry, coiled between her legs. Kean left the desk and knelt on the floor, both hands covering hers as she gripped the stone more tightly to her body. The gray eyes flashed a haunting black-speckled sapphire before he pushed the collar folds of her robe over her shoulders. The movement exposed her breasts, the nipples a hard pink that betrayed her excitement. Another pulse of power erupted from the stone and Aideen sank into Kean’s embrace, the Bloodstone falling to the carpet.
Together, Aideen and Kean tumbled to the floor, his body cushioning her landing. His hands slipped through the centerfold of the robe to play over her hips. She moaned into the hollow of his throat and gave him a hard nip. He bucked against her in pleasured surprise and grabbed her rounded cheeks. She reared up, her legs straddling his hips and her palms pressed flat against his chest. She leaned back, her center gliding over his clothed manhood. Aideen shrugged her way out of the robe and put her hands along the side of his narrowed waist. Kean’s hands traveled in a stroke up her back. They fastened on her shoulders and dragged her down to his mouth for a heated kiss.
He rolled Aideen onto her back. She tugged at his shirt buttons while he feathered her face and neck with kisses. His hand slid between her legs and he thumbed her clit with sharp upward strokes that left her gasping in protest.
“I can’t concentrate,” she
said and fumbled at the buttons. She had only managed to undo the top two. “I’ll never get these undone if you don’t—” Except for the fact that his hands, face and neck were unmarked, his tattoos shouldn’t have surprised her. It was a detail, she realized, that she couldn’t have concocted in her dream.
Kean looked down at where her hands had stopped moving. “They bother you?” he asked, undoing a third button before lifting the shirt over his head.
His chest was a matching canvas to Cenn’s. Aideen reached up and ran a fingertip over the firedrake that curled just below his left nipple.
“Why is your dragon here?” she asked, her voice breaking from the flood of memories and emotions his body invoked.
Kean thumbed her partial tattoo in a soft caress before he answered. “My voice isn’t equal to yours, Aideen.” His hand left her collar and covered the hand she still held against his chest. “When it was time for me to receive my summoner’s mark, it was decided I call my power up from my heart.”
Letting go of her hand, he touched her collar again. “You raise your power from your voice.” He gazed deep into her eyes for a second before repeating his question. “Do they bother you?”
Pushing away thoughts of her father’s tattoos, Aideen ran her hand down Kean’s chest. Between his navel and the belt line of his pants, knobby vines weaved their way into a Wizard’s Star. She spread her fingers until each was touching the five points of the pentacle. He groaned at the firm press of each fingertip against his lower stomach.
Aideen ran her hand back up his stomach, stopping to tease one of his nipples. She clasped both hands around his neck and pulled him to her in a heated kiss.
Finding her body’s response answer enough, Kean returned to teasing Aideen’s clit. He slid a finger deep into her cunt and she released him with a hard growl as she pumped a wide arc in the air. Another blue-black flash of his eyes and he shook his head at her. Resting on his haunches, he spread her thighs and pulled her lower body onto his bent legs. Her ass rested against the base of his still covered cock and her cheeks contracted at its firm press. Aideen wrapped her legs around his waist, her cunt aching at the barrier between their flesh. With his thumbs, he parted her labial folds, the plump lips pinched against his forefingers as his thumbs rolled her pink nub.
Her flesh on fire, she ran her hands over her stomach and breasts and then clasped them to her face as she lifted her ass higher. Kean’s thumbs traveled lower, exposing her rose red center, moist with her need for him. His pads played at the edge, traced maddening circles around the entrance to her cunt, dipping inside her only to retreat a heartbeat later. The same belief at his possession of the Bloodstone patterned his face as he looked down at Aideen’s straining body. In a single, fluid motion he pushed her forward and stretched his legs out behind him. His face centered over her mons, he dove into her, his mouth attacking the sensitive outer lips before his tongue plunged into her. Her hands found the dark curls of his crown and she pulled him more tightly into her, her legs curving around his neck and shoulders as she rode the plunging tongue and questing lips to orgasm.
As her shudders slowed, Kean flipped Aideen onto her stomach. She heard the downward slide of his zipper then felt the thick penetration of his cock. The muscles of her vagina clamped down on the organ and she pushed her upper body higher, her ass locked in a furious rhythm of backward pumps. His hand slid under her stomach, steadied her at the same time he drew deeper into her. She reached out to the chair for support, a groan escaping her as his cock swelled inside her. The knowledge that she had been reduced to this frenzied state only made her wetter, made the walls of her cunt lock him to her as they both raced to climax. Kean shuddered against her, his breath hot on her neck as he gently rested his weight against her. She shattered against the chair in her own climax, her body trembling with exertion and ecstasy. Still inside her, he caressed her breasts, licked the length of her neck while his hands soothed her fiery skin. He reached down beside them, withdrawing from her, and kissed the back of her shoulders before draping the robe over them.
Chapter Seven
Kean lifted Aideen to the chair and finished securing the robe as carefully as if he were dressing a porcelain doll. He pulled a velvet bag from one of the desk’s drawers and wrapped the Bloodstone in it before locking the stone and diary in the cabinet. Her mind a riot of sensations and memory, Aideen remained motionless until he cupped her elbow and led her back down the hall to the bathroom. He started the water running in the shower and leaned Aideen against the bathroom door while he stripped the robe from her and folded it.
Kean coaxed the still somnambulant Aideen into the shower and leaned her against the wall. Giving the showerhead a twist, he removed the nozzle and ran the warm water through her hair and over her shoulders, kissing her mouth and neck as his hands caressed the water over her skin. His soft touch drew Aideen back to the present. Kean saw her return in her eyes and gave a tentative smile before he re-hooked the shower nozzle and began to lather her body with a fragrant soap. Even as her heart shouted that she was betraying Cenn with this near carbon copy, her body responded.
He leaned back to soap her breasts and Aideen felt the tip of his erection firmly tapping against her navel. Her gaze traveled over his chest and muscled stomach, taking in more of the exquisite details she had failed to notice in the study. From his navel, the same blue-black ladder of hair traveled down to the base of his erection. The tip of his penis was a mottled purple that glistened from the soap’s oils. The shaft’s thickness equaled that of the head and Aideen curled her fingers, hand over hand, around its circumference. A heated sigh escaped her when her fingertips refused to meet.
She took the soap from Kean and began lathering his lower body, her hands caressing sudsy circles over his lean ass as his cock pressed more insistently against her stomach. Lightly, she dug her nails into his barely yielding flesh and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. She nipped at his top lip before thrusting her tongue into his mouth and exploring his upper palate with one long, withdrawing swipe. His thickly muscled cheeks contracted and he cupped her ass, lifted her higher. Aideen wrapped her arms around Kean’s neck and spread her legs in invitation for him to lift her higher still.
“Perfection.” Kean’s word was a husky whisper as he slid into her and began to slowly pump himself deeper into her center.
Aideen laved the lobe of his ear, suckled at it in unison with his thrusts and her body’s own contractions as her cunt milked his cock once again. “Yes,” she gasped before her mouth smothered his. “Fill me, please.”
Aideen used her legs to squeeze Kean closer to her, her tongue fucking his mouth in demanding thrusts as her climax claimed the last of her control. Kean pushed her back against the shower walls, his hands pinioning her shoulders against the tile. He dipped his head and his hungry mouth pulled, teased and sucked at her pink-tipped breasts while he pumped her to another climax. His cock contracted inside her and his seed reached into her womb, coating her with its heat and life. Still her body trembled and he wrapped an arm around her waist, and pressed his body against her while he turned the water off and opened the shower door. She collapsed against him. The weight of her relaxed body embedded him more deeply inside her and set off another tremor of orgasm in Aideen.
Kean walked through the house, nuzzling her neck as she rode waves of a climax she couldn’t control. Kicking open a door, he pivoted and sat down on a bed, Aideen over him in the dominant position. Her body still burning, she looked down at him, her need stamped across her face. He reached up and gave her nipple a stroking pinch that had her flinging her head back and grinding her cunt down to the base of his cock.
“There’s so much lost time to make up,” Kean half groaned and grabbed Aideen’s hips as he sought deeper depths. “Let me fill you again, Aideen.”
Chapter Eight
Her sleep troubled by dreams of shadow warriors, their battle cries echoing inside her head, Aideen woke to find that she was alone in the bed. Sh
e touched the mattress where Kean had held her as she drifted into sleep. No trace of his body heat remained. Gathering the coverlet around her, she left the bedroom. Light peeked from beneath the study’s door. She gave the door’s wood paneling a soft rap with her knuckles and then pushed it open. He was sitting in front of the desk. Cenn’s diary and the copy of Etain’s were sitting on the desk, open. Aideen’s notes, complete with samples of the glyphs in Cenn’s diary, filled the space between the two books.
“Still looking for layers?” she asked. She moved around the desk to stand behind him, a hand on each of his shoulders. She leaned over to look at the writings and her chilled nipples kissed the warm skin of his bare back.
Kean shook his head, his stubble tickling Aideen’s ear. His left hand crept up to hold hers. “No, not layers. Do you see this?” He pointed to a glyph in Etain’s diary. She gave him a soft yes and rubbed her cold nose against his ear. “And here,” he asked and pointed to Aideen’s own notes.
“Same glyph,” Aideen answered with the obvious response.
He pointed to a dozen more glyphs contained both in Etain’s diary and Aideen’s notes on Cenn’s diary. “Not just the same glyphs, but written in the same hand, Aideen.” He turned her left hand until he could see her palm. “This hand, Aideen.”
“I don’t write with my left,” she responded, her voice flat. She heard an irritated rush of air leave his body and she kissed his temple.
“You know what I mean.” He traced the outline of her scar. “You weren’t born with yours…like I was born with mine.”
She shifted against him and tried to extract her hand from his insistent grip. “What are you getting at, Kean?”
“You’ve used the Bloodstone…really used it, Aideen. Haven’t you?”
