“Like now?”
“Yeah. Like now.” His tone was amused. Another shiver went through her and pooled between her legs. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Do I want you to?” He wasn’t the same. They weren’t the same. His power was right here—she could practically touch it. Of course she responded to that; it was the nature of her magic to react to a demon’s power.
“Probably not.”
“Ask anyway.”
He was focused on her forearm now. His tongue traced a slow circle on her skin, but he wouldn’t do anything that required her explicit permission. Like biting. Or fingers pressing hard. “I have to make sure I get this right. Something like, maybe, hey, Winters, how’s about I fuck you really hard?”
Words uttered in a sinuous, silken voice. Those words crashed down on her, burying her, consuming her. There was none of that awful sense of obligation or inevitable disaster between them, no worrying that he didn’t really want this with her. If they did give in to wherever this was going, her mind was perfectly clear. She wasn’t a basket case. Maybe for once they wouldn’t hate each other afterward.
His mouth lingered on the inside of her forearm. “Really, really hard.”
Gone. She was gone with lust. She wanted his hands on her, touching, caressing, and more. She tilted her upper body toward him, and Kynan let out a soft sound, something between a sigh and a groan. She moved into his arms and slid her hands underneath his shirt, pushing up and up until he lifted his arms, and she drew the shirt off him. She set both her palms flat against his chest. It had been like this on that first day, before everything went wrong. The same delicious, playful, dirty quiver of arousal between them. “Maybe,” she said.
“Maybe I can ask you that?”
She licked his nipple. Everything she liked was right here. “Maybe that would be a terrible thing to ask.”
“Pity.” He rested a hand on her head while she used her mouth and tongue to explore his naked chest.
“Maybe not, though.” She caressed him. Nothing in the way this time. She kissed his collarbone, and the whole time she let the contact pull her deeper into arousal. “Maybe.” She darted a look at him. “Maybe that would be a wonderful thing to ask me right now.”
He drew his hands up either side of her spine, close to the bottom of her bra. “Which is it?”
“Wonderful. I think it would be wonderful.” His human manifestation was made for encounters like this. She had no illusions about that; in fact, she was here to appreciate and adore every cut of muscle, every shiver that made her body tense with need.
“Good to know.”
“What happens if you bite me now?” She lifted her head but kept her hand on his bare stomach. “When we’re like this? Anything bad?”
He smiled. Full of arrogance as always. “I can control myself, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“That would be a pity.”
His eyes flashed with color not natural for a human. For her, that was the whole point. “Anything you want, Winters.”
She held his gaze. “Bite me,” she said. The corner of her mouth twitched, which spoiled the whole joke.
He laughed, and so did she, because it was so ridiculous, until he took her wrist, and slid the fingers of his other hand loosely around her forearm, from wrist to elbow and back. Then it wasn’t ridiculous at all. Her body responded the way it always did with him. His fingers shifted from normal to talon-tipped claws, just long enough to press against her skin until the prick of pain felt white-hot. “Yes?”
Her heart beat faster, fluttered with anticipation, a heady mix of fear and arousal. “Yes.”
He brought her arm to his mouth, licked once, a second time, and she drew in a sharp breath as his mouth opened and the edges of his teeth pressed against her skin, hard, then harder. He bit slowly because it hurt more and lasted longer. White-hot pain lanced through her, and she relaxed into it with a sigh, her mind stretching into the void that accepted her there, welcomed her, and everything else fell away.
The light from the television flickered across them. His tongue slid across her skin and there was the pressure of him tasting her blood, harder, harder and more. He unfastened the tab of her jeans and tugged down the zipper one-handed. Eager fingers slid down her belly, skin to skin, underneath her panties. Pushing, searching, finding her. He bit her harder until she was right there at the edge of too much.
He lifted his head. “More?”
“Yes.”
“Anywhere I want?”
Yes was required of her. She had to say those words, or he could not continue. She couldn’t conceive of telling him no. There was safety here, in sex with a demon bound to do nothing for which he had not obtained consent. “Yes.”
He pulled off her jeans and let them fall to the floor. She was pretty sure he just vanished her underwear, she didn’t even feel the magic, if that’s how he managed it. He smoothed his hand down the outside of her hip and along the back of her thigh. He withdrew from her arm and unfastened her shirt enough to expose her lacy bra. “Nice,” he said. His tongue darted out and touched her nipple. “So nice.”
“More of that, please.”
“Whatever you want, Maddy,” he whispered, so soft, so full of longing and desire that she opened her eyes. He dropped her shirt, gaze fixed on her body. He whispered her name again, full of lust and longing. “Maddy.”
He set his fingertips to the tops of her shoulders and slowly drew them downward until he reached the bottom of her bra. She arched toward him. He traced the line around the back to the hooks and undid them. The moment her breasts were free of the restraint of undergarments, her breath caught, hitched when his fingers slid underneath, coming to the swell of her. He always touched her with such intense concentration, and a part of her finally, reluctantly, worried that none of that had been just how he fucked. He dropped her bra to the floor, too, and she arched into his hands, surrendering to physical sensation, and that was enough for him to react. Just that small submission.
He leaned closer, his hands tight on her, fingers moving over her nipples, it was like she was mainlining sex. More. More. She wanted more.
“I want to fuck you when I’m not human,” he said. “Doesn’t have to be now, but I want that.” His mouth touched her, nipping softly with just a hint of pain to come. “I could make you feel so good if we did that. So good. Both of us. With the bonds closed, we could do things. I could do things to you, and all you have to do is say yes once.” His mouth hovered above her shoulder. “It can be exactly what you want. What you need.”
She was so wet, so aching for him to be inside her, she could barely think straight, yet there was no question she was in control of herself. Whole. Autonomous. In possession of her will. Even with the bonds closed.
He stretched over her, hands on the sofa above her shoulders. His tongue found the side of her throat. “Here? Right here?”
“Yes.”
There was a moment of white heat, cleansing cold, and she slipped into the spaces in between, still free. Still herself. Herself. She caressed his naked back, feeling the flex and bunch of muscles, his warm skin, and there was none of the messed-up anger and relief of their previous encounters. He was already working at his jeans, and she managed to help without getting in the way.
He stroked her reverently, kissing, touching. In between, there was another bite, another, another, each one harder than before. Touching, sliding fingers over her, followed by his mouth. Time suspended in the way it did for lovers, and he stroked her cheek with the tips of his fingers, a soft and gentle contact as he pressed a finger hard against her sex. Just there at the edge of too hard. Not inside. Not yet.
His eyes turned backlit-bronze. Flecks of gold and green floated across his pupils, his irises and his sclera. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, please.”
She arched when he pushed inside her, and he whispered the whole time. “Mine. Maddy, you belong to me. Mine.”
He took her over
the edge, and she had the oddest sensation that his hand trembled while he stroked her, that the quiver of his coming was from more than pleasure. She gave as good as she got. She wanted him out of his mind with desire for her.
They lay in each other’s arms for a while, him brushing a finger along her arm. Once or twice he kissed her shoulder. “We should get dressed,” she said.
He drew away and gathered up her clothes. She dressed quickly. Sated for now. Happy. Uneasy, yet content.
Right before he put on his shirt he said, “I’m almost done upstairs.” He ducked his head through the collar and yanked down. “I’ll do the basement next, then I’ll be outside.”
She blinked several times. “Wait. There’s a basement?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s no basements in California.”
“There’s one here. Whoever built this house built a basement.”
She put her hands on the sofa, turning over the implications and finding nothing comforting. “Someone built a basement. Okay. All right. There’s a basement. Don’t you think one of us should wonder why?”
“Fucking magekind.”
Maddy stood. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 12
Maddy came to a full stop when Kynan put a restraining hand on her shoulder. Access to his magic was shockingly immediate, and for several seconds she wasn’t sure where she was in time or space.
He said, “Let me go first.”
His voice anchored her. They were on the stairs leading to the basement—she gave him room to move to the front. In situations like this, the strongest demon always went first.
He moved past her, but instead of continuing down the stairs, he faced her. In the dimness, his eyes glowed. Once again, he touched her shoulder. It wasn’t fair that the change in their bonds affected her more than him. Every time he touched her without holding back his power, she fell headfirst into the ocean of his magic. Direct access. Immediate. Wild currents that threatened to sweep her away. While she fought to regain her equilibrium, he tapped his first and second fingers on her temple, a formal request for a psychic connection between them.
Not a good idea. He’d know she was having problems. Except he wouldn’t ask for the link if it weren’t necessary. And it was. She knew that. This basement didn’t belong here. They’d be safer if they were linked. Stronger. Even if it was the last thing she wanted to do.
He waited for her to allow the connection. She was a big girl. She’d linked with Kynan dozens of times in the past, and they’d been fine during and after. He remained bound by his oaths to Nikodemus, after all. She gave a curt nod and opened herself to him. The tug of the connection was magnetic, a thump against her ribs, her mind locked with his.
From a magical standpoint, she and Kynan were better together than apart. They just clicked. And now? Even more so. There were colors, shapes, and textures that had never been there before. With the link going, his sworn surged to life in her, more than voices now. More than an echo of cries for vengeance. Individual personalities whirled through her, pushed into her bonds with Kynan, and temporarily reshaped them. Those three bonds were bright in her awareness. Impossible to ignore. Impossible to deny the way they flexed and adapted.
She saw through to the other side of the bonds, where the heart of his power thrummed steadily, where his sworn lived. The unwary would be scoured to nothing by that sea of magic. No wonder Magellan hadn’t dared to attempt a ritual killing of him. Two sets of thirteen just to take him. Two. The ritual killing of a demon of Kynan’s power could have gone so badly that Magellan himself ending up dead might have been the best possible outcome. Yes, the mage had managed to enslave Kynan Aijan, but he must sometimes have felt the beast’s breath on the back of his neck.
Kynan touched her head again, the pad of his thumb across her forehead, and her link with him widened. Impressions rushed through her. She saw with his eyes, through his eyes. The dimness of the stairwell vanished as he shared his eyesight with her. She braced a palm on the wall until she thought she could safely walk.
Meanwhile, he headed down the stairs as if he hadn’t just given her unprecedented access to him. Despite the risks. Despite her admissions to him. If he could act like this was no big deal, so could she. She caught up with him and stayed close, one hand on his back to keep her balance while she looked with his eyes.
Before they reached the bottom, she knew what they’d find. The resonance of rare metals was too distinctive to miss. There were crushed rubies between the layers of metal, a particular gem that amplified a mage or witch’s power and tended to interfere with the kin’s. A ruby-infused surface meant trained mages and killing rituals.
He pulled back from their connection enough that her normal vision returned. Always disorienting for the first few seconds. The metal layers extended past the doorway to the walls on either side, upward to the ceiling and down to the floor. Whoever did this hadn’t skimped on much. She took the last step down and immediately the bottom of her feet tingled.
The case for Cifai double-crossing his confederates was looking pretty good, and this was Exhibit A in support.
Thoughts and images flashed into her head that didn’t belong to her, snatches of rituals, implements, and accoutrements the magekind used for their horrific murders. Images of a tall slender man with dark hair and eyes. Álvaro Magellan himself? It had to be. Blood—the smell, the coppery taste in the throat, the life that skittered along the substance, the sting of magic ripped away from the physical form of a living demon. The psychic scream of the unending death when a mage took that life force into himself for the power and the years it added to his life.
Maddy’s stomach turned, and she drew a shaky breath as the memories continued. Kynan’s dead sworn whispered to her of horrors she did not want to know, the lives he’d absorbed to prevent Magellan from taking them. She touched his back, and he let out a breath.
“I’m good,” he said softly. “All good.”
The images stopped, but she shuddered from the impact of learning that in the early stages, not all of Magellan’s rituals had gone as planned. Some of the murders still echoed with the despair and desolation of killings gone wrong. Every ritual Kynan had witnessed had been a rehearsal for what Magellan wanted: immortality.
These ruby-insulated walls meant she was better suited than Kynan to the task of assessing what might be on the other side. She stepped to the door and focused. Their link and the rubies helped her concentration. Here in the stairwell at least, there were no remnants of magic, no echoes of magekind, demonkind, or normal humans. She cast through the ruby-enhanced door and did not get the slightest bounce-back.
Kynan wasn’t able to project himself past the layers of metal and ruby. Her magic was bound inside a physical body, while a demon’s manifestation was a magical construct, albeit a realistic one. Rubies interfered with that. With the bonds, though, he could hook into what she was doing.
Variations in the purity of natural rubies caused telltale fluctuations in magic, and that was present here. “Not synthetic. They didn’t cut corners.” She relaxed into their psychic link, giving him full access to her, never mind the danger. His previous indwell meant another would be even easier than the first time.
If he trusted her, then she surely must trust him.
Their connection shivered, then locked in tight. Some magekind believed natural rubies offered a greater power boost, but many born in the age of chemistry favored synthetics for their consistency.
No one’s inside, she said.
Is the door locked? Kynan asked.
Impatient ass.
Kynan reached around her and turned the knob.
No, she thought wryly, knowing he couldn’t miss the sharpness. It’s not locked.
Fuck you, witch.
She didn’t take offense. There was enough humor in his thoughts that she decided against jabbing an elbow into his ribs.
He slid in front of her as he opened the door, but she stayed close. He
might be less vulnerable to fatal injury than she was, but whatever was inside that room, the interior had been constructed to enhance her abilities and interfere with his. Killing magic left a dark and indelible scar whenever it was used. A room in which one of the kin had been ritually murdered could never be cleansed of the residue. This killing room was typical in its pervasive reek of death. Kynan’s sworn fell silent.
Lights faded on in the ceiling fixtures and a strip of tiny lights installed along the floorboards. Soft white, then brighter white. Kynan’s memories supplied additional stomach-turning images of the ritual Magellan had invented and refined to an art. She had her own memories of the aftermath of such unspeakable acts, of rituals interrupted at varying steps along they way. All of them gave her nightmares. His experiences went beyond horrendous.
She stood beside him, a hand on his upper back, sharing in the horror, wishing there was more she could do for him. If it were possible to heal someone of that sort of damage, she would.
As with every killing room, the central feature was a narrow wooden table covered with a steel plate. Typical, too, was the white tile floor that sloped to a drain in one corner. All the surfaces contained a substrate of crushed rubies. In this case, natural rubies rather than lab-grown. Wherever there was space, the walls were covered with Latin and Greek curses against the demonborn and any who opposed what went on here. Scattered among the curses she could read were lines in an Arabic-like script she didn’t recognize.
Along the wall opposite the door were a glass-doored steel cabinet, a refrigerator, and a hydroponics unit used to grow the plants required to support ritual magic and the taking of magehelds. Tucked into the corner was a closed up wooden box for fungi. The cabinet looked to be fully stocked. One shelf held several dozen small objects suitable for making talismans. None of them registered as active, meaning no demons were trapped inside. The oddity in this otherwise typical room was the steel door on the opposite side of the basement entrance. A single door was easier to secure, a fact that had been pounded into her during her training.
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