by Anna Windsor
Camille wanted to believe him. She really did.
“Start watching your trash again, people,” Creed Lowell said, his dark ponytail spread across one shoulder. “Discarded personal items and in-container food products are the most common ways of targeting Asmodai.”
Blackmore took over again, stressing, “These demons are without human properties. Terminate on sight, but be careful about the blowback, especially from the fire Asmodai. Sibyls weather it pretty well, but the flameout can scar or kill humans who aren’t wearing protective gear.”
Camille watched everyone in the room get tenser, even Legion war veterans who knew this drill. She tried not to focus on everyone else’s worries, since she had so many of her own, but it was hard not to. The briefing droned on for a time, but she hardly heard the details. More and more, she just wanted to be alone with John and sleep, not necessarily in that order, and not necessarily without intervening events.
She held back a sigh and closed her eyes for a few seconds. She had to find some way to really rest, to relax and focus and think. After what had happened in the meadow, it was obvious that this round with the Asmodai and the Rakshasa and whoever else might be involved was going to demand more of everybody. Moreover, Camille and her quad had something to offer in this war, something more than low-average elemental talents, good fighting skills, and excellent demon tracking. They had to get better with their projective talents, and Camille knew she was the one who had to help them all get better.
Yet Ona’s words haunted her, about how dangerous their sentient gifts might be.
Were Ona’s warnings overblown?
What were the real dangers, other than exhaustion to the point of falling out, or maybe even dying? Camille had to know, and apparently Ona was the only person on earth who could tell her.
“You still with me, beautiful?” John’s sexy voice jerked her out of her obsessing, and she opened her eyes. The room felt even more stuffy, Blackmore was still talking, and she’d had about all she could take. She had to get out. Go. She didn’t even know where.
She smiled at John so he wouldn’t worry, then loosened her hand from his. “I’m fine, but I need some air.”
To Dio she murmured, “Don’t hurt anybody, okay? If the meeting ends, play nice and go home.”
For once, Dio didn’t crack back with anything. She eyed Camille like she could sense the jumpy agitation building in Camille’s chest, and she just nodded.
Camille excused herself as quietly as possible, slipping through all the standing and sitting people until she made it to the door, then out into the hallway. She almost headed outside, but opted out of that because the meeting might let out and flood her with people all over again.
Instead, she walked across the hall to the door to the basement gym and headed down, into the earth and stone most fire Sibyls abhorred. The second she hit the stairs, the cool air started to relieve her and help her think, and she almost ran the rest of the way down, through the gym door and into the big, empty stone space. There was equipment spread everywhere, with weights and mats and balls and machines, but there was a lot of open space, too.
She had only switched on one light, so the space seemed candlelit, and that was just fine by her. She went to the middle of the room, and for a time she just sat on the soothing, cold stone, breathing in the earthy, rocky smell of the place. Hints of rubber and sweat, light shades of cleanser—the gym smelled alive and fertile, energized yet completely relaxed. She needed to match that combination, but it wasn’t easy.
After a time centering herself, she said, “Ona?”
No idea why. Just hoping.
No answer.
“Ona, if you can hear me, I need to know more.” Tears collected in Camille’s eyes. “I need to know everything, and I know you can tell me.”
She waited.
Still nothing.
Of course there was nothing. Camille let her head roll forward to her chest. Ona wasn’t some ghost or invisible Astaroth lurking in the unseen shadows. If Camille wanted to talk to her, she’d have to use communication channels, but she definitely didn’t want to go through platforms and mirrors where everybody would know. She need to talk to Ona the way Ona had tried to teach her—the old way. Ona would probably say the real way.
Camille got up and took off her shoes, letting her bare feet touch the stone. She tried to imagine communication channels, large and small, running everywhere all around her. Ona’s diagram had shown the channels flowing away from the Sibyl, but Camille couldn’t wrap her consciousness around how that would work. She’d have to rely on the older models.
She remembered what had worked in the lab the few times she had been successful at getting some energy flowing, and she closed her eyes and got her feet moving. The dance came easily enough this time, faster and faster, flowing out of her like it did when she got on the platforms and worked the mirrors.
Camille put out her arms and started to spin, something she didn’t often have to do, but it built the fire energy flowing out of her, agitated it, and helped it join the ambient energy in the room, in the rock, and seemingly everywhere in the air. She imagined Ona hiding out in one of the tunnels in Motherhouse Ireland, maybe even the hollow little space where Camille first encountered her. In her mind, she reached out to the fire in the channels she imagined around her, and envisioned herself connected to Ona. The dinar around her neck warmed her chest and hummed, like she was feeding it exactly what it liked.
Her left foot came down, and she sensed a flexing burst in the fire, a sensation like the actual channels grinding open, only not so violent and total. This opening was just enough, just right, and she thought maybe, maybe, she could send a word through, and her right foot came down—
On dirt instead of stone.
The air changed so abruptly Camille felt it like thunder in her belly, beating out her breath. She stopped spinning so fast she almost fell on her face, and when her hands touched the wall in front of her, she froze stock-still with absolute shock.
She wasn’t in the townhouse gym in New York City anymore.
She knew exactly where she was, only she couldn’t let herself believe it.
I know this place, her rational mind insisted. I know every stone in this castle, better than I know my own reflection.
She was in Motherhouse Ireland. She was down in the tunnels, in the exact spot where she had been standing the day she met Ona.
Oh. My. Goddess.
Her heart lurched into her throat and she covered her mouth to keep from screaming.
Energy radiated away from her and dissipated in the elemental protections coating every inch of the Motherhouse, and Camille felt the castle’s immense bulk looming above her, a sentinel, a soldier in its own right. As her own energy cleared, she felt something fractured and tenuous coming from behind her, deeper in the tunnels, down in the dark.
When she was a child, the energy had terrified her, but now she knew it. She couldn’t say she understood it, but she at least knew what to call it.
“Ona,” she said, but her only answer was soft, broken sobs.
Camille dusted her hands off on her jeans, still dizzy from where she was and how she’d gotten here, but she pulled herself together as fast as she could and headed into the blackness to find the person she’d come to talk to.
Ona was huddled on a cot in a room at the end of a hallway Camille had rarely traversed. A single candle lit the room, which smelled faintly of sage and the fresh bowl of stew Ona hadn’t touched. Camille glanced at the room’s rough ceiling, thinking of the adepts and Mothers above. Somebody was looking after Ona, just as they always looked after the infirm. She was one of the broken, but no, not really forgotten. Just tended to and left to find her own way back if she could.
When Camille saw Ona as she was, tiny and fetal, a rough woolen blanket pulled up so high only the top of her bald head peeked out, she was struck by memories of herself. She’d been in much the same shape after Bette and Alisa died. She
had come back to the castle, to an old nun’s cell just like this, and she’d done much of what Ona was doing. She had checked out. She had stayed checked out until Bela came to get her—but Camille didn’t have any illusions that she could just reach out and claim Ona the way Bela had claimed her.
This woman was well and truly damaged.
Camille’s heart hurt. She approached the cot quietly and settled on her knees beside it.
“I’m here,” she told Ona in a soft voice, so she wouldn’t startle her. “I came the way you taught me. Thank you.”
Ona kept her face turned to the wall and didn’t respond except with a strangled, shuddering sob.
Camille reached out and stroked her head, so aged that even the scars had gone smooth.
“Don’t touch me,” Ona rasped, though she didn’t pull away. “You—you don’t know what I’ve done.”
“Tell me,” Camille urged.
But Ona just cried and cried, and Camille sensed that her presence was disrupting whatever fragment of peace Ona had managed to claim since she fled the brownstone. She could feel Ona’s fragility, feel her instability deep, deep inside, and she knew it all too well.
This is me, Camille thought. If I don’t learn, if I don’t understand, if I start running away from what hurts me again, this is me. She caressed Ona’s head a little longer, wishing she had something to give her to help her, but coming up empty. This is my future if I don’t change it.
“It’s okay,” Camille whispered, understanding at last that whatever answers awaited her, Ona likely wouldn’t be supplying them. She had given Camille her gifts in what she’d already taught her and shown her, and she was finished; Camille had to let that be enough or hurt the old woman even more. “I won’t ask you any more questions. If you ever want to come see me again—if you want to talk, or stay with me, or just be there—you’re always welcome.”
Ona pulled away from her, and Camille let her go. For a while, she just sat in the room saying nothing, hoping her presence made a difference.
( 28 )
Sometime later, Camille walked back to the place where she’d come into the Motherhouse, and this time it only took her a few spins to work up the state of mind, the right energy, and the right imagery to get herself home. She even stepped into the gym instead of falling in, and this time she didn’t freak and almost start screaming.
Until she saw the big guy standing with his back to her, about two feet away.
Camille slammed her hand over her mouth, but about that fast she realized it was John, come hunting for her since she hadn’t made it back to the meeting. His attention was riveted by the shoes she’d left behind when she took her little unscheduled transcontinental flight.
“Hey,” she said. “Looking for me?”
He turned, his face going slack with surprise when he saw her. Camille let him fill her senses because he looked so good and smelled so good, and she knew when she touched him that all the jumbled thoughts and emotions she couldn’t settle would ease—at least until she let him go. She could tell he wanted to talk, but she had to kiss him first, and once she had kissed him, she wouldn’t want to talk at all.
John read her, understood without asking, and his arms took her in and shut her off from all the craziness outside the two of them. His lips moved on hers, gentle and demanding, yet giving—how could such a rough man feel so soft? Her whole being responded to him, tensing in all the right ways. He tasted hot and male with a whisper of mint, and she didn’t want anything else in the world but more of that, more of him, more of them together.
I want him inside me. I want him deep, and I don’t want him to stop.
The image was so stark and consuming she had to pull away for a breath, and she saw that his chest was heaving. So was hers. He studied her like he was counting freckles and making a chart, then like he was trying to find exactly the right words for what he wanted to say, or the exact route to her heart and the way to make it his forever.
“I’ve been thinking, beautiful, about what you asked me.” He touched her face, keeping the distance between them even though she felt like he was sharing half her soul already. “About after. After this is over.”
Camille’s belly did a little flip. “Yeah?”
His fingers traced her cheek, from eye to chin and back again, sending delicious shocks all over her body.
“I don’t have a lot of answers yet, but whatever after looks like, I want you in it.”
Camille let that rush through her like prairie fire, warming all the dark corners inside her. She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no, because she couldn’t talk, but she could smile at him, and that seemed to be enough for the moment.
“Did I say too much?” he asked, sounding careful and earnest, not like he was about to pull away from her or act wounded.
“No,” she whispered, loving the feel of his fingertips stroking her face. Her eyelids fluttered closed from the sensation, but she knew he was waiting for the rest of the answer, so she tried to give it to him.
“I … just want there to be an after.” Tears suddenly rushed into her eyes, and she couldn’t stop them. “John, I’m so stupid—I don’t just want an after, I want happily ever after, for us, for all the people we love.”
“It can happen.” He kissed her like he was trying to convince her, and if anyone could make her believe, this was the man.
She raised her fingers to his chin, then slid them between their mouths so she could talk. “We both know how war works, John.”
He pulled away a few inches and gave her an even deeper look. His voice dropped impossibly lower, getting impossibly sexier. “Happily ever after can happen.”
His lips took hers again, cutting off her arguments, cutting off her worries. The world swirled away from her and she let it go, back to wanting nothing but him inside her, nothing but him for hours.
It was hard, but she let him turn her loose, and she waited while he locked the gym door and pulled over two thick mats for them to use.
It was a lot easier to let him undress her slow and easy, sliding her jeans over her hips, then hooking his fingers in her underwear and getting rid of them, too, all the while kissing her and telling her she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
He raised her sweater over her head and discarded it, then stroked her sides until he brought chills across every inch of her body. “I could look at you for days,” he murmured, kissing the hollow between her neck and chest as he unfastened her bra and finally, finally, she was naked, nothing on her body except the dinar. Excitement coursed through her, heating her like liquid fire, and she wanted his hands and mouth everywhere at the same time. Could there ever be anything more erotic than standing in the wide, cool basement, totally vulnerable to anything John wanted to do?
And he wasn’t even undressed yet.
She rubbed herself against his jeans and sweatshirt, letting the rough fabric tease her breasts, her belly, her thighs as he cupped her ass and pulled her closer, kissing her with his entire body. When the coin around her neck made contact with him, it vibrated. She met his tongue, groaning already, knowing she had to have him soon or the want would kill her.
“I could touch you for days,” he whispered. “Weeks.”
Camille got more warm shivers from his edgy tone. She leaned back into his grip just enough to run her hands over her own nipples while he watched, his eyes going wide when she pinched. Before he could react, she moved her hand down to the damp red curls between her legs and touched herself there, too, making sure he could see.
“Come on,” she said, surprised at the tease in her voice. “You told me you never walk away from challenges.”
“Never.” He grabbed her wrists and pulled her to the mat with him, holding her hands above her head as he settled on top of her. The sudden move caught her off guard and made her heart pound in the most delicious way as he stared at her, his eyes going dark and heavy with desire.
Captive …
“Can y
ou take what I have to give?” he asked, sounding serious and five steps past dangerous.
His challenge right back to her—and his was better. She felt every word, in all the places that mattered. “Yes.”
He moved his knee between her legs, hitting her sweet spot and making her moan.
“You sure about that, Camille?”
She couldn’t breathe. How could she speak? He kept up the pressure, moving his knee back and forth, making her buck from the exquisite pressure, and she knew he wouldn’t stop until she said something or exploded, whichever came first.
“Positive,” she said, a rasp, not really a word at all.
John kept her hands trapped and kissed her so fiercely Camille thought she might never recover. His knee kept moving, his jeans sliding against her sex, rough and fast. Her pulse pounded and more warm shivers shook her. Already building. How was that possible?
“You’re mine now,” John said, and then his mouth claimed her so completely she couldn’t argue.
He eased the pressure between her legs, refusing her any release as his lips traveled from her mouth to her jaw and lower, tracing and nibbling, letting his stubbled chin brush across her skin. She groaned at the fire of his teeth on her flesh, biting her neck, biting what ached, all the way down to her chest, to the top of her breasts. Her nipples throbbed, waiting, waiting, but he was taking his time.
“I asked for this, didn’t I?” She said that through her teeth even though she tried to sound casual.
His only response was a laugh—and more waiting.
Camille twisted against his grip, pressing her breasts closer to his mouth, but John wouldn’t let her free. Her breathing got faster and faster, and she tried again to push toward what she wanted.
John chuckled against her nipple, keeping his lips closed, and the vibration doubled the heat at Camille’s center.
“Impatient, aren’t we.” He kissed the tip of her breast. She moaned from the contact, straining toward him, and mercy came. His mouth found her aching nipple and fastened on, sucking deeply. When his tongue raked against the tight, beaded flesh, Camille cried out, wishing he would touch her between her legs—or let her touch herself.
