The Thrice Marked

by Liddie Cain

  He nodded and stroked my cheek before he left me in the hallway and went toward his bedroom. The office door hadn’t closed completely behind him so I could see Mac leaning against the front of his desk. Meredith’s back was to me, but her words caught my attention.

  “We could run this district you know, the two of us.”

  She stepped forward and flared power around them. Mac was surprised and his back bowed. It wasn’t pain on his face though.

  “Devina has given you power well beyond your years, Mac. You’ll only grow stronger from here,” she continued. Her hands were on his chest, sliding down across his ribs in a soft caress.

  “Meredith, it is flattering. But you know Rozalyn and I are involved.”

  “Drink from me, Macory,” she whispered as she pulled her shirt up over her head. Her large breasts were bare underneath. I felt stirrings of anger, but not from jealousy. I had not asked any of my partners to be exclusive to me. I knew Mac took blood from other women and that would of course turn sexual. But Mac was not enjoying himself.

  Her topless body was pressed into him. She turned her head and lay the long lean line of her neck open for him to take. Her fingers stroked down his face, urging him. “Take my blood and become one of mine.”

  “Meredith,” he whispered. She took his hands and placed them over her breasts, moaning and stretching her neck to his face.

  “I must know Felix’s fate before I could do this.” Mac did not push her away although his words were firm.

  “Felix cannot give you what I can even if he isn’t dead. We could be a powerful force.”

  She started to undo his pants and I took a step towards the door. Destiny was suddenly grabbing me and setting me back behind her. I made a surprised gasp and Meredith’s face snapped around to us. An expression of gloating amusement crossed her features. Destiny did not hesitate, she stepped through the office door and walked straight to her.

  “Leave him alone. He does not want you either, just like Enrique didn’t when you lured him away from me and Alonna.”

  “Still so angry I disrupted your little coven.”

  “No, I think it’s time everyone knew how you destroyed it.”

  Meredith’s face grew darker. “I can’t help what Devina ruled should happen to your old boyfriend, Destiny.”

  “It was you that did it and if the lower realms knew--”

  I didn’t see the movement or flash of blade until it was already embedded in Destiny’s chest. The awareness came across her face in stages; surprise to look down and find it there, anger that it had happened and finally a hopeless acceptance of that fate. Blood poured from the wound then bubbled up across her lips. I was screaming her name when Mac lifted me against his chest. I saw Destiny’s body breaking into fire as she fell to the floor. The ashes that marked the ending of her undead life had already started breaking away from her lovely face.

  Tears blurred my vision as Mac propelled me away from the room and then the house. I held onto him and cried as the roads and woods whipped past us at head spinning speeds. We came to a stop on the porch of Darby and Sylvia’s house and he held me still. Sylvia came out the front door and before she asked Mac said, “Meredith just executed Destiny.”

  “But why?”

  I could hear the pain in Sylvia’s question. Darby was there a moment later and Mac let me step into her arms as he spoke to Sylvia. “I think Meredith must have broken some rules when she had Destiny’s old coven terminated. Her ex-boyfriend was killed by Devina’s order. But none of you will mention this to her, do you understand?”

  “What are we going to do, Mac?”

  “Find Felix. I’ll do my best to keep her occupied until then.”

  Darby was stroking my hair but I had managed to get a hold of my grief as he spoke. Destiny was my friend and she hadn’t deserved what had just happened to her. I knew that I would see the downfall of Meredith in that moment. My feelings about Felix might have been mixed but I was resolved more than ever to find him and bring the end to her time here.

  Mac continued, his voice serious, “I want everyone out of Meredith’s line of sight as much as possible. Roz and Darby will be leaving with Barden soon. Sylvia, you stick with Roz’s parents until I can figure somewhere safe for them. Jason is on his way and will be here with Roz and Darby until they leave for the Neodrach.”

  He grasped my face then, his green gaze intently searching mine as his fangs strayed across his lips, flashing freely with his anger. “Meredith has been trying to convince me to be her lover and I am going to need to play into that until we get Felix back. I need to hear you tell me you know it is an act.”

  “Of course, Mac. I know you.”

  Then his lips were pressing against me, but carefully so he did not damage my lips with the sharp points of his fangs. He drew back and pressed his fangs into his own bottom lip. Blood welled up on the puncture marks and I didn’t need him to explain. He wanted me to take his blood so that he would be able to sense me more completely while we were apart.

  I trailed my fingers up his jaw and back into his hair. “Be careful.” I brought his mouth to mine with a tug against his hair. That blood tainted kiss poured into my mouth and evaporated in a flood of honeyed power. It swept through me warm and filling. My skin tingled and the light grew brighter as his blood elevated my senses beyond their mortal levels.

  I drew back and looked up at his darkened expression. There was a hunger to complete what that power promised between us but there was no time now. He held me tenderly but that yearning in his body echoed in mine and made me shiver. Jason pulled up into the driveway in my car and Mac gave me one more kiss.

  “I’ll call you soon.”

  “Okay. I’ll be here.”

  He lifted his eyes to Sylvia and nodded at her, then he disappeared in a blur of movement. Jason walked up onto the porch with us and took my hand. I could see the sadness in his eyes but he was in business mode as he ushered us into the house.

  “I spoke with Conall after what happened. He suggested that we have your parents come be his guest for once they return from their trip.”

  “Dad will be thrilled,” I replied, the thought making me smile. “I will call them.”

  “He and Barden will be ready to meet all of you tomorrow night. That is when your parents are supposed to get back home, right?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. With Mac’s blood flowing through me I could feel Jason’s anxiety mixed with that anger. He was worried about Darby and I leaving the human realm and going to a place he could not follow. Vampires were a power against nature and had no place in Fairy.

  It was a mission that only my mortal blood qualified for, which meant I was a lot easier to kill. It made us both nervous.

  Jason pulled me back against his chest on my bed. We had come to my room because I wanted to be held after everything that had happened that day. He seemed to want some comforting just as much as I did. He wasn’t as tall as Mac or Felix, so our bodies fit together the best.

  “I’m so sorry you had to see that happen to Destiny.”

  “I don’t think it will ever fade,” I admitted. I blew out a breath and turned onto my back so I could look at his face. “I’m so angry. She was my friend and I couldn’t help her. It was like I felt powers jump to my hands like I could do as an angel and I wanted to use them so badly.”

  “Did you try?”

  “No,” I answered, then frowned at him. “I’m human.”

  “Baby, if you felt power leap within you then I would imagine there is some you can call. None that would have saved Destiny, that’s not what I’m saying. Your reflexes are still human and Meredith would have moved too quickly for you to even see.”

  “I was a guardian angel, pretty low in the heavenly pecking order. I could not stand against an archdemon like her.”

  “She is one of the more powerful ones,” he said as he rubbed his hand up and down my leg. “But baby, you are something more than human.”
>
  “Trying to tell me that I am an angel?” I asked teasingly.

  He met that with a lifted eyebrow. “One that is sharing the bed with a devil,” he spoke with his voice dropped into a low growl and made me laugh at him. As the laugh faded, I let my face show him that I needed him then. I needed to feel his love and his comfort. Jason had fallen in love with me as I was now. He hadn’t known me in a past life like Felix or been my high school sweetheart like Mac. He was so compelled to be a good person even if he was a vampire. I fell in love with his goodness and it moved me that he loved a quality like that in me with none of the sentimentality of my past.

  He brought his mouth to mine and kissed me tenderly. When he opened his kiss and drawed my lips apart I found that his fangs were extended. I traced my tongue across them carefully. He sighed happily and his large hands started roaming across more of my body.

  I let him pull my shirt up over my head and then immediately pulled his off of him as well. The sight of his perfectly sculpted abdomen pushed aside thoughts of comfort or goodness for a moment. Nobody that I shared my bed with was as chiseled as Jason. Mac was more slender and lean muscled. Felix was far more broad and muscular but not with the precise definition that Jason had.

  I dropped my mouth to his abs and kissed my way down them. He ran his fingers back through my hair and watched me, a hint of a smile growing as my hands went to the button of his jeans. We both slid out of the rest of our clothes and he brought me back into the circle of his arms again to kiss me skin against skin.

  There was no hurry to his actions. He held me as if I were the only thing that mattered and made my heart flutter at the same time he was turning me on. I lingered in that embrace and his kiss, rubbing my leg up over his and feeling my arousal grow more and more. His own arousal was very obvious against me. I broke from his mouth and kissed my way down his body.

  I grasped the hard length of him and pulled him into my mouth. That sound a man makes when you put your mouth on him will never get old. He pulled in that deep breath with a low moan of pleasure. With my lips and tongue, I caressed him up and down and listened to every sound he made. He grabbed a handful of hair and held my head still, pushing himself further into my mouth with a slow lift of his hips.

  I sucked down on him harder and made him bow his back up off of the bed. He jerked me up into his arms again after that and made me chuckle.

  “Trying to get me to lose it already,” he growled against my ear.

  “Me?” I asked with a sweet voice.

  He scored his fangs along my shoulder while I grinned at him. Then he rolled over on top of me and wiped my grin away. He pulled my nipple into his mouth and drew it deeper, deeper, until I could feel the bite of fang against my breast. I whimpered at that tortuous pleasure and writhed my body below him. His tongue circled that nipple he had pulled so taught and it felt as if he were licking things lower and deeper in my body.

  “Jason,” I whispered as I pushed myself up against his hardness. He bit down on my breast, lightly so that his fangs did not break the skin but just enough to make me cry out for him.

  He released me and leaned up, taking my hips in his big hands and pulling me closer. Then he entered me. My head arched backward at the sensation of him stretching his way in. He drew out, only to shove himself back inside forcefully and make me arch off of the bed and cry out.

  I ran my hands across his chest then gripped my fingers into his ribs. He leaned down over me, going deeper as his angle changed and hitting the end of me with every thrust. My legs wrapped up around his waist as his lips found mine. Mac and Felix were too tall to kiss me in the missionary position. I loved that Jason could and I kissed him deeply and maybe a little too hard because he drew back to keep me from cutting myself. He buried his face into my neck which still bore the marks where Mac had fed from me.

  Then he lifted me, fast enough to make my head spin, and held me upright against him as he sat on the edge of the bed. I moved for him, riding his body with my arms on his shoulders and my grip against the back of his neck. His large hands trailed up and down my sides, over my breasts, then back down to cup my buttocks and slam me up and down onto him. He brought his mouth to mine again right as I reached my climax and I cried out into his mouth. With a low growl he followed me, jerking my body up and down him as he spilled himself into me.

  He laid on his back and cradled me against his chest with his body still inside of mine. I laid there breathing heavily and happy in his arms. But I felt him tense and looked up at him in question.

  “I hear Darby crying,” he responded.

  I scrambled off the bed and got dressed again, pausing to give him one more loving kiss before throwing my shirt back on. He pointed towards Darby’s room to let me know where he was hearing it come from before saying, “I’m going to go downstairs and call Rose.”

  I nodded. Destiny had been the closest to Rose out of any of us. “Will you help her while I am gone? She doesn’t have to open the spa unless she feels like it.”

  “Of course. Me and Sylvie will stick close to her since you and Darby won’t be here.”

  “Thank you. Let me go see what’s up with Darby.”

  He gave me a peck on the lips before heading downstairs with his phone in his hand. I went to Darby’s room and lightly tapped on the door. No one called out for me not to enter so I slowly opened the door and leaned in. I was surprised to find Darby alone and sitting on her bed. She glanced up at me as I sat down on the bed beside her.

  “Why are you upset, Darb?”

  “Sylvia told me what Meredith had said about Felix was too powerful to be held against his will. She’s not completely wrong, you know. There are not a lot of things that would keep Felix gone unless he just wanted to be gone.”

  “He loves you. He would never leave his sister on purpose.”

  “Yeah, the sister who caused his death.”

  When Darby had negotiated with Devina after we had discovered Felix’s betrayal, her plea had been for me to no longer grieve him and that he not hurt me again. Devina had taken that plea and twisted it to try and take his soul to keep. She had killed him right there in front of us. Darby’s angelic life had ended thinking that she had been the reason her brother had died.

  “He knows that's not what you wanted.”

  “I hope so,” she replied as she was wiping at her tears, “he didn’t give me a chance to talk to him about it before he left.”

  “We will find him and the two of you can fight about it just like the old days.”

  It made her give me a brief smile. We hugged each other. Her doubts echoed my own and she knew it. So when I also started wiping at my own tears, Darby just hugged me tighter.

  ***

  Sylvia returned with Lear as me and Darby were eating some Chinese takeout and being lazy on the couch. She walked over and leaned over the back of it, laying her pink lipstick lips against Darby’s and kissing her briefly. I got a bonus kiss on the top of my head before she turned and started to unload some paperwork she had brought in with her. I knew it was records that Destiny had used for the vampires in the donation program. Seeing it made me want to dissolve into tears again but Sylvia was determined to distract us.

  “Ariel sent both of you angel marks. They were sitting on Mac’s bed when he went back to the room after he brought Roz over here.”

  She sat a small box down on Darby’s lap and turned back to Destiny’s folders and left the room with them to get them out of sight. Lear was picking up the boxes of take-out and sniffing them, making a disgusted face and sitting them back down again. I smirked and gestured for Darby to watch him. She looked at him and gave a soft laugh.

  He noticed us watching him then and stepped away from the counter as if he wasn’t doing anything.

  “I haven’t met him yet,” Darby told me, amusement still coloring her voice.

  “Oh right. Lear, this is my best friend Darby.”

  “Hello, Lear,” she greeted him.

&nbs
p; “Hello,” his tone was pleasant, but as before, his face remained neutral. I had the feeling that Lear was used to keeping to himself. He didn’t mind people but he also was not going to seek out a close friendship.

  Darby gave him one more smile before she looked down at the box in her lap and lifted the lid. Two small white feathers sat in the box. They looked like any ordinary white feather, but they would have been plucked from Ariel’s own wings. She picked one of them up and swept it across the palm of her opposite hand.

  “Where would you like yours?” Darby asked me.

  Lear was suddenly standing beside us with interest in his expression. “Real angel feathers?”

  Darby nodded, “My mother’s feathers.”

  “I had been told. But seeing the feathers makes it real. I’ve never actually met an angel.”

  “Technically, you’re talking to two of them,” I replied with a laugh. He actually smiled back at me.

  “True. You’re both so human it’s easy to dismiss it I think.”

  “Until you drink Roz’s blood. You wouldn’t forget after that, so I’m told.”

  Sylvia strolled back into the living room. She had changed into a floral sundress that was a bright turquoise and looked great against her light cocoa skin.

  “You look pretty in that dress, Sylvie,” I told her.

  Her smile showed some fang, which meant she was needing to feed, but she didn’t appear stressed by it at the moment.

  “Thank you,” she looked at Lear and continued, “I’ve never personally had the pleasure, but Roz’s blood definitely packs a punch. Mac has powers that rival an archdemon when he drinks from her.”

  Lear regarded me carefully before saying, “I had been told, and I admit to it being a temptation.”

  I didn’t know him well and him admitting to the temptation did make me a little nervous. I watched his face for a moment. His eyes kept mine. Only when Sylvia and Darby started discussing her mark placement did we finally break our gaze.

  “It shouldn’t interfere with me touching you. It would only react if a vampire intended to harm you,” Sylvia was saying.