The Banished Gods Box Set: Books 1-3

by L. A. McGinnis

  Aah, but they’d tried that, hadn’t they? And she’d wanted it all back.

  Free will and all of that.

  Fen lathed steaming water over her, even though his hands trembled like a teenager’s, even though her beauty struck him dumb. He’d wondered enough about what she’d look like, had thought and thought about it. But nothing could have prepared him for the reality of what Celine actually looked like naked, so incredibly perfect, that landscape of white, creamy skin floating in crystal clear water, her white hair fanning out like spindrift around her head. But with every handful of water he poured over her, his heart tightened a bit more. That velvet perfection was still marred by coin-sized purple bruising, fingerprints, and the remnants of what had been done to her in that alley.

  Much as her psyche was marred by the memories Mir had just dumped back inside her. And all Fen wanted was to stop her pain, to banish all of those bruises, both inside and out.

  “I’ve got you, Celine. That’s it, I’ve got you.” He thought her face relaxed at his voice, but when her head fell back into the cradle of his hand, her expression was so empty he was sure he’d imagined it. He washed her gently, carefully, until the air in the room smelled fresh and clean, and then lifted her with the same gentleness from the water. Making the transition from one state into another as smooth as he could, wishing all the while he could just put her back into the dream and start all over again.

  He dried her in towels that were like air and dressed her in soft, white clothes, never letting her go, never leaving her, rubbing her hands and feet and when he laid her back into bed. This time he did see a smile curve her lips, and he kissed her forehead and whispered that he’d be right back with food.

  To his surprise, she actually answered. “Not Mickey D’s, K?” Finally, she opened her eyes and looked up at him. They looked purple, as if bruised by the truths they now held. “Okay, Fen? I can’t eat that stuff two days in a row.”

  “Sure baby, no fast food. I’ll get you something else. What do you want?”

  “Anything else.” Her voice might be hollow, but she was finally talking.

  He hurried back with Chinese, it was close and leaving her was the hardest thing he’d ever done. She was fast asleep when he came back, and he hated waking her, but she had to be hungry and he wanted to see her eyes. He had to see how deep the shadows went. If only so he knew how far he’d have to go to pull her back.

  Sleep left her fuzzy again, and she came out of the dreaming so cloudy he could almost pretend things were all right. Until he watched the grip of the memories taking hold, filling her face, forging deep lines down along her mouth, hardening the planes of her face, freezing her eyes.

  Her lips trembled. “Shit, Fen.”

  He stroked his hand along her cheek. Yeah, he knew the feeling.

  “Put it aside, for a moment if you can. Just eat, Celine, while it’s still hot. I got you sweet and sour and chicken and broccoli. I didn’t know what you liked, so I got both. Fried rice too.” Her attempt at a smile was worse than none at all. So he didn’t even bother. The apartment turned into an island in the middle of a big, bad ocean. The bed, a raft the two of them were marooned on, floating adrift. He just had to keep her from drowning.

  “Thanks.” She took the fork he offered with a little laugh. “How do you know I can’t handle chopsticks?”

  “Didn’t but figured this would be easier all the way around.”

  She ate slowly, carefully, and methodically. She was changing, he thought, from what she had been when he’d met her, to what she had been before the attack. Obsessively neat, to compensate for the chaos of her life. Orderly, so she could control her past. He hated that he wanted to throw everything out the window, and now Fen understood exactly how she felt, that wildness, that desperation to wipe it all out and start over. Instead, he just kept watch.

  For a day that’s all she did. Sleep. Eat. Cry. Repeat. He gave her two days. A day to sort through it all. Another day to try to figure out how the people who should have loved her the most had failed her so badly. He didn’t question, he didn’t ask. He was simply there. He watched her, he held her, stroked her face and her hands and her back. Listened to her breathe. Watched her eyes grow dark, then light, then dark again as the feelings roiled through her. And somewhere along the line, Fen realized he’d fallen in love.

  Which was neither complicated nor as problematic as he’d always imagined it would be. Because his life, for all of its twists and turns of fate and general bad fucking luck, had always been missing a center.

  And now that he’d finally found one, his world began to spin in the right direction.

  Chapter 15

  “So I’ve been thinking,” she said quietly.

  Celine had. She’d been thinking a lot. Like a lot a lot.

  As a matter-of-fact, she’d been thinking nonstop since she’d finally stopped sleeping, and the memories had begun to slot themselves into place in her brain. Yup. Every little ugly thing in its place, she thought. She’d almost come to grips with her mother, not that there weren’t still some issues to work out there. Joining the club, she assumed, of every other female on this planet. She had faces to put with the grandparents who’d occasionally fed and housed her. Which was saying something, at least. She hadn’t lived on the streets. Lately.

  Her father, on the other hand, was a darker sort of specter. The kind of thing that brought goosebumps to the surface for no explicable reason. The problem was they weren’t so much memories. More like feelings. Feelings that she didn’t want to examine too often or too closely.

  David Barrows was filed as far back behind everything else as she could. To be dealt with when she had time. If she ever had time. Because damn. There was a lot of baggage to be sorted through.

  “I think I have a handle on some of the memories.” She waved her spoon at Fen. “Thanks for the cereal, by the way. How did you know what I liked?”

  She pretended she hadn’t seen the ten boxes he’d brought back from the convenience store across the street. She pretended that none of this mattered very much when, in fact, she was terrified. By the fact that somehow, Mir had put everything back into her head. By the fact that after being alone for pretty much all of her twenty-two years, this guy, who she hardly even knew, had decided to stay. Which she pretended didn’t matter much, either. When, in fact, it mattered more than everything put together. Which, in turn, terrified her the very most.

  She was stuck in a vicious infinity loop.

  “And before you start on me, I’m not going to ask you how he did it because I don’t think I want to know. Or rather, I really, really want to know, but I’m pretty sure it’s a huge secret, so you can’t tell me, right?” She shot him a crooked smile. “So I’m not going to put you in that spot. Now. What are we going to do about the writing thing?”

  Fenrir gazed down at her. “I think you have things to deal with that are more important than that.” She saw everything behind that depthless gaze. The sheer emotion of it. And got a little more terrified.

  Not by him. Never by him.

  But by what she felt in return.

  “I am dealing with it,” she pointed out. “I did realize something, Fen.” Her smile turned sad at the same time her voice took on a hardness that seemed too brittle for her age. She set the spoon down on her worn table. “Everything that I remember, now? I’ve already dealt with it. I’ve already cried over it, obsessed over it. I’ve gotten pissed off about it, blamed other people for it, hated them for it. I’ve been through these emotions before. Many, many times.” Celine surveyed the cramped apartment and snorted. “Not that my coping mechanisms couldn’t use a little work, but… all those memories? Think of them as yin and yang, balance. Maybe it’s a trade-off, you know? Maybe they made me stronger. Maybe they forged me. Who the hell knows?”

  Infinity loop time again.

  “So, moving on.” She could see that he still didn’t like it, so she walked around and put her hand on his shoulder,
savoring how warm he was, how completely alive. Then, she let herself run it up his neck and through his hair, feeling more reckless and brazen with every move. She’d never had time for boys. Always found them amusing at best, annoying at worst, and in actuality, completely uninteresting. But now she understood. Those had been boys, and this was a man. Maybe more than a man, as Fenrir was something very different from anything she’d ever run across. And when he tensed under her fingers, she hoped she wasn’t the only one feeling all these wonderful confusing feelings.

  “This voice from my dreams. He’s been feeding me information, having me write it down. And I think you know why. I’d like you to explain what’s going on, Fen.”

  When he hesitated, she gave him a second. She knew how trust worked. What an odd sort of currency it was. She understood how hard it was to give, and sometimes, how hard it was to accept. So she waited, her fingers curled into his thick hair.

  “There are a lot of things you don’t understand, Celine.”

  She hummed a little sound of dissention, resuming her cautious exploration of him. “So enlighten me.”

  “We come from different worlds, Celine. So different that I don’t know…” His eyes, which seemed to turn from deep blue to black, like day to night, burned through her, as if wanting her to see. And she wanted to see. She wanted to understand. She felt like she was teetering on the very edge of knowing, and if she took just one more step, she’d be there, she’d see the truth and everything would make perfect sense.

  “Tell me, Fen.” When he hesitated, she pushed harder. “Tell me. Wolf.” He tore away from her, and she stalked after him, eyes locked on him, every bit as much a predator as he was. “You think I can’t take it? Trust me, I can. I’ve seen shit that would make your stomach turn. So don’t hide behind your lame ass excuses and think you’re going to protect me from what’s going on in my own head.”

  When he turned, she stabbed him in the chest with her finger. “This guy is in my goddamned head, remember? Not yours and not Mir’s. Mine. Now tell me what’s going on here. Trust me, my fucked up family’s the least of my problems right now.”

  When Fen’s deep blue eyes locked with hers, the breath froze in her lungs. She was finally going to get some answers. “There’s an old Tuatha De Dannan myth, a legend you might say. One we believe might be about to come true. Somehow, Mir thinks you could be involved.”

  “The Irish Fae? And Mir knows this how?”

  “Because Mir knows everything. He is the keeper of all wisdom.”

  Her eyes widened as breath froze in her lungs, “And when you told me you were different?”

  “We are immortal gods, Celine. We are the ones you’ve learned about in your history classes, the ones in fairy tales and poems and music. There’s nothing else like us on this planet. We are like nothing in this world.”

  So there was something shifting behind his eyes, something moving, something trying to get out. She’d felt it before, but now that she knew for sure. She saw it in there, fighting to escape, like a great, trapped beast.

  Fascinated, she breathed, “Show me what you really are, Fenrir.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not a plaything. In your mortal world, it doesn’t come out gently, it only comes out to hunt. My other side is a beast, Celine, a monster. Do not ever ask me to show him to you, do not ever ask for him to reveal himself to you.” Fen took her by the arms until she listened. “Do you understand me? He would kill you, he would tear you apart, for in this realm, he is a monster and knows only how to kill.”

  “But in my dream?”

  “In different realms, he is a different sort of beast. In that place, calmed under the spell of the Otherworld, he’s safer, more controlled by the layers of magic there. But here? Never, ever call on him. Never, ever ask me to show him to you. Tell me you understand.”

  She nodded.

  He let her go, running his hands apologetically down her arms. “I am sorry, but you can never do that. He would… He would be so dangerous.”

  “So you really are a wolf?”

  He nodded, falling into the chair again. Her smile turned part mischievous, and she teasingly ran a finger across the expanse of his shoulders, listening to his breathing turn ragged. “I love wolves. Have I ever told you that?”

  She circled him, feeling cast adrift, as if he was the anchor and she was a whirlpool, being drawn inexorably inward. Reaching out a hand she traced his arm, chest, shoulder, back, slowing as the gravity of him pulled her in, pulled her to a stop right in front of him.

  “I can’t seem to think straight today, Fen,” She whispered, leaning in. “All I can do is feel. And I’m feeling way too much.” She ran her hands up to cup his face, searching his eyes, that beautiful darkness shining inside of them. Before she changed her mind, she pulled his mouth to hers. She wasn’t sure what he was going to taste like or even what she was going to do, but she wanted to feel those lips against hers, she wanted to feel him against her. She liked how she felt when she was around him.

  Grounded, attached, instead of feeling like she was about to fly off the edge of the world.

  “Celine. Baby.” Since those words made it sound like he was going to try to stop her, she pressed her mouth more firmly to his and found he tasted wonderful, dark and rich, the same way his gaze felt when he was staring after her, or his hair felt when she was running her fingers through it.

  And then his mouth was on hers, searching and hot, and he pressed her lips open and drove his tongue in between her teeth. Brushing it along them, sweetly teasing out ripples of pleasure inside of her that crested to the surface, he made her push her body against him, fit her soft parts into his hard ones. She gasped softly against his mouth as his hands pressed her hips firmly to his, opening her up to fit himself in between her legs. A long, spiraling trail quested its way up through her. This was what she’d been wanting. This was what had mystified her when she’d looked at the boys and girls and wondered.

  It hadn’t been her after all, she’d only been waiting for Fen.

  She’d never thought she’d want to feel like this, never thought she’d enjoy the touch of a man’s hands, not ever. Not after what had happened.

  But now? With this man, it was the only thing she wanted.

  Celine supposed she needed to breathe, but this kiss was simply too good to stop, so she dove in even deeper, seeking his tongue with hers, tracing his teeth with the very tip, feeling the length of them, the sharpness, the keenness of them. When the groan built up in his throat and exploded against her mouth, she felt a sly kind of pleasure, a woman’s satisfaction that she’d made him sound like that, and she wanted to hear him do it again. And again.

  Hands kneading his chest, Celine began pushing him toward the bedroom.

  Oh to get him down on the bed and to be on top of him, or better yet, underneath of him, with all of that lovely weight on top of her. To feel that smooth, expanse of muscle and warm, dusky skin against hers.

  Celine wrapped an arm around his neck to get even closer, and then his arm went behind her knees and she was flying, their lips fused tightly together. The cool sheets hit her back and then Fen was over her, and she stopped feeling anything except for the friction of their warm skin against each other. With a groan, Fen pulled his lips away.

  “Celine, if this is too soon, if it’s not what you want…” He raised himself off her, giving her time to reconsider.

  She undulated beneath him until she heard that wonderful growl rise up in his throat again. Partly male but partly something else that made her toes curl, she slipped her finger inside of his mouth, felt the slight pressure of those teeth as he bit down. “Seriously. Does it seem like I don’t want this?”

  She’d waited a long, long time for Fen. He’d been in her head, in her dreams, and stayed with her during her worst days ever. She definitely wanted him in her bed. “I want this, you just have to show me how.” And knew, when he stilled, that she should have just shut up while she was ahead.<
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  “You’ve never?”

  Debating whether to tell him the truth of it all, she finally settled for simply shaking her head.

  “Christ. And of all people, you picked me.” Fen dropped his head beside hers, and she stayed still, listening to him breathe, ragged and quick, praying he didn’t reconsider.

  After what seemed like minutes, he lifted his head and tilted her chin up until their eyes met. “We go slow. You tell me if you want to stop, and we stop. If you’re not feeling this, then you tell me, got it? Those are the rules.” He nuzzled her until she finally nodded. “All right. Gods, woman, you’re going to be the death of me.”

  In answer, Celine rocked her pelvis against his. “That’s kind of the plan, isn’t it?”

  Fen groaned again, so low and deep that it rumbled through her and pulled out something primitive, the intense feeling so ancient that the sensation rocked her.

  Fen ran his lips over her jaw, up to her ear, over to her mouth. Working his hands beneath her, he cradled her tenderly, kissing her gently until she nipped his lip and laughed, a dark, wild sound of invitation before rolling off the bed. “Enough of this, Fen. I want you to come out and play. Stop teasing. I want to feel you on me. God, I want all of you inside of me.”

  She stripped, letting him watch her, wanting him to watch. Then she pulled off his shirt, marveling at the sight of him, running quick, greedy hands over those hard muscles, his skin flecked with the scars of long ago healed wounds. Fingers slowing over each one, wondering how and when and why. Then there was only Fen and the touch of his lips and his tongue and his teeth and the shadow of him looming over her, eclipsing all else.