by Karen Chance
I lay my head back against Pritkin’s chest and watched the snow fall. It was getting lighter now; either the spell was giving out or somebody had found a way to counter it. But it was still pretty.
And he was warm. His legs were up around mine as well as his arms, so it was almost like I had my very own, war mage shaped chaise. I could stay here all night, I thought.
“Tobias probably saved my life,” Pritkin said, after another pause. “I had a morning shift one day with nothing to do afterward, and went to a bar topside to get a pint or two. Which evolved into a shot or two, and then three and four and eventually I lost count. I made it back here—damned if I know how—completely wasted and calling for more. The pub had tossed me out, but I wasn’t done yet. I told Tobias to bring up a bottle.”
“Did he?”
I felt Pritkin nod behind me. “He did—of a hangover remedy. I remember that it included hot sauce and a couple of raw eggs, and looked as vile as it tasted. I instructed him to take it back and bring me what I’d asked for. He refused, and I took a swing at him.”
“Did you hurt him?” I asked, mildly alarmed that we’d just eaten the man’s pizza.
Pritkin huffed out a laugh that ruffled my hair. “No. I couldn’t even see straight. He put me on my ass, and quite right, too. But then he did something odd.
“He stayed with me.”
“He probably wanted to make sure that you didn’t throw up and choke to death.”
“Possibly. I don’t really know what his reasoning was; he never said. He’s not a big talker, unless he’s dressing down some of his cooks. I think he saves his voice for them.”
I remembered some of the inventive curses I’d heard earlier, being bellowed out of the depths of the kitchen. “It sounded like it.”
“But he is a good listener. I have hazy memories of that night, but I’m fairly sure that I told him more than I should have. I may have told him all of it, or enough for him to guess what I am—”
“Pritkin!"
“—which essentially told him who I am. But he never said a thing to anyone.”
“You’re very lucky!” I said, turning around to look at him.
“Yes, I was. I’m normally more careful, but I had some idea of ending it all that night. Not out of any existential dread, you understand; there just didn’t seem to be any reason to go on. It made everything, even secrecy, seem less important.”
“There were reasons!” I said furiously.
“Yes, but I couldn’t see that then. I was under interdict by the demon council with very little likelihood of ever getting out of it. My father wanted me to come home and prostitute myself for the good of the family, and should I ever break my parole, that was where I’d be sent. My wife was dead at my hands, and while her demon status meant that the human authorities weren’t going to investigate, the guilt. . .”
He shook his head. “I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I wanted out.”
I didn’t say anything, although my hands clenched on his thighs, reassuring myself that he was still there.
“Tobias dragged me up here. We lay on the ground, right over there,” he pointed to a space by the cliff’s edge, “partly to watch the stars and partly due to me being too drunk to stand up. Everything was spinning rather alarmingly, as I recall.”
“And then what?” I asked, after a while, because Pritkin had stopped talking. Probably remembering.
“Nothing. We went back down again. He made me drink his terrible concoction, and I went to bed. It didn’t work, by the way. I threw up hot sauce all the next day, instead of gin. Or maybe along with the gin; I don’t really recall. My throat burned for days.
“But that was the only injury I suffered, thanks to him. It turned out that I didn’t need a bunch of platitudes, which is all anyone else would have given me. I just needed someone to give a damn. I won’t say I was out of the weeds after that, not for years, but I never came that close again.
“I left the Corps shortly thereafter—for a while—but I never forgot Tobias, and the lesson he taught me.”
“What lesson?”
“That it doesn’t matter how strong you are, or think you are. Everyone can stumble. And everyone needs someone to catch them when they fall.”
I started to get the picture. “I have someone,” I reminded him.
“And yet you travel alone.”
“Plenty of Pythias have—”
“Plenty of Pythias weren’t at war. They faced an occasional dark mage. You face . . . monsters.”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
“It doesn’t matter how powerful you are,” he repeated. “Anyone can fall.”
His fingers deftly found the knot on my head, courtesy of a rock in old Romania. He must have noticed it in the shower but hadn’t said anything. He still didn’t, but those skillful fingers played over it gently, tracing the outline of something that should have been far worse. That had been, until a mysterious woman saved me with healing abilities she shouldn’t have had.
“We were a good team once, weren’t we?” he asked, after a while.
“You know we were.”
“Then why not again?” I didn’t answer and he regarded me soberly, turning my face so that he could see my eyes. “You seem to want me to return, to go back to court, yet at the same time, you push me away. You must have a reason.”
I frowned at him. “You know why.”
“No, I don’t.”
I got up, both because I’d finally gotten too cold to sit still, and because I was agitated. Unlike Pritkin on that long-ago night, I hadn’t drunk nearly enough for this! But it seemed to be the designated place for soul bearing around here.
At least it was pretty.
“I want you back,” I told him. “Fuck Jonas—he’s had you long enough.”
“But.”
“But I want you safe. That’s why I didn’t object when he wanted to borrow you. I made him swear that you wouldn’t be going with the invasion. That you’d be an advisor only—”
“Ah.”
“Yes, ah!” I stared down at him, my arms crossed, defiant. “I don’t care if you’re mad at me, do you understand? I don’t care! I’ve lost too many. I don’t want to lose anyone else!”
“I did wonder why they didn’t even ask.”
“Well, now you know.”
Pritkin stood up, too. “Then I’m to return to be what? A lap dog?”
It felt like a slap. “You know I don’t see you that way!”
“But you want to—”
“I don’t!”
“Then what do you want?”
“I told you! I thought I’d lost you—” I stopped and stared at him silently for a moment, because I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to cry!
It took me a minute to get back in control, but Pritkin waited me out. He had a quietness about him, a stillness that I wasn’t used to seeing. And that was a stark contrast to the enraged man in the interrogation room, throwing a chair through a window to get within an arm’s length of his prey.
And then something occurred to me.
“Would you have killed him?” I asked. “If you’d reached him?”
“Who?”
“Who else? Jonathan.”
“That was the general idea.” It was dry.
“Why not just sling a spell, then? You could have taken him out from across the room.”
Pritkin shook his head. “He had too many mages around him. It would have been deflected.”
“So you had to do it the old-fashioned way.”
“Essentially.”
“And if you’d succeeded? What then?”
“He would be dead, and you would be—” Pritkin stopped, and then just regarded me for a minute. And while it might have been a trick of the light, I thought I saw a gleam of respect in his eyes. It almost made up for the smile that quirked at his lips.
“Touché.”
“You wanted to protect me,” I said, “once y
ou realized what Jonathan intended to do. And you didn’t stop to think about the cost to yourself. How many years would you have gotten for that? How many decades?”
Pritkin crossed his own arms. “Possibly none. He’s a senior dark mage and one of the leaders on the other side. The Corps has wanted him for a while.”
“But they want him alive. They can mine him for information. They can trade him for another high value prisoner—”
“They’ll never trade him.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But they don’t want him dead. I’m surprised you’re not still locked up.”
“If I wasn’t important to you, I might be,” he confessed.
“And if I wasn’t important to you, you wouldn’t have tried it.”
We stood there, looking at each other, for a long moment.
“What’s the takeaway?” Pritkin finally asked. “I want you safe; you want me safe. Yet we both have jobs to do.”
“You just quit yours.”
I got a half smile that time. “Perhaps. Or perhaps they’ll come back in a week or two, telling me that I can keep my rank and stay at court, as long as I do whatever insane thing they need at the time.”
“And will you?”
“No.” It was stark. “I meant what I said. You’re my priority. But I am coming back to court to help you, not to stay behind whilst you put yourself in danger.”
I stared at him, because going into danger with Pritkin scared me more than going alone. A lot more. I’d missed him—so damned much—this past month, but I’d also been fiercely glad that I didn’t have to worry about him.
That trip the damned demon council had forced me on, chasing after his soul, had fucked me up to the point that I almost preferred handling things on my own. Knowing that he was back here, probably hip deep in paperwork, had been a comfort. I didn’t want to lose that.
But I was going to have to, wasn’t I?
“I’m afraid,” I confessed, and bit my lip. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”
“Then don’t lose me.”
I laughed a little at that; I couldn’t help it. “You’re a hard man to keep up with!”
“And you’re a hard woman to love. But here we are.”
“But here we are,” I whispered.
And then I said to hell with it and threw myself into his arms.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
His lips were cold, like his cheeks, and wet with melting snow. But his mouth was warm, honey sweet and spicy, with an overlay of bitterness from the coffee. It suited him, I thought, thinking about the complex, mercurial, often contradictory man I knew. One whose passionate nature was concealed by a gruff, no nonsense exterior that few ever saw beneath.
But once you cracked that shell, a completely different person lived inside. One whose hands came up to frame my face, stroking my cheeks gently with his thumbs, before pulling me close and kissing me back. For a moment, his lips moved softly against my skin, and his tongue twined warm and silky around mine. And then something flared between us, and golden warmth spread throughout my body, banishing the cold.
I made a sound low in my throat, half sob, half desire, and the kiss went from sweet to fiery in an instant. And then explosive, like a match thrown onto gasoline. It swept us back down the stairs, along the path and into the room below. Snow scattered, clothes went flying, and somebody squealed—pretty sure that was me—before naked skin dove under the mound of blankets.
“You need rest,” Pritkin told me, looking conflicted, when I jerked his shirt open.
“I need you.”
He swore, which was not the response I’d been expecting. But then his mouth came down on mine, and I forgot everything else. I forgot my name, because a kiss from an incubus who isn’t holding back is almost literally mind blowing.
And he wasn’t holding back. I’d almost gotten used to that: passionate, but careful lovemaking, as if he was afraid to cut loose and be who and what he was. Which was probably the case, frankly.
I’d always known that Pritkin hated his demon half; that he’d repressed and starved it for years had come as more of a shock. From what little he’d said, I’d gathered that he worried about it taking over, and changing him if he used its power. As a result, our intimate moments had been of the distinctly human variety.
Until now.
I don’t know what prompted the difference. Maybe the same emotion that trembled my hands and caused my kiss to be clumsier than normal, because I didn’t know what I wanted to touch first. It felt like the first time, all over again, only more so, as if we were finally being honest with each other in some fundamental way that we never had before. Two guarded, mentally messed up people who had long ago learned to hide their hearts away, finally daring to trust.
And it changed everything.
The silver moonlight flooding the room suddenly felt like a silken caress. A lantern on a small table sent golden motes of light floating into the air, swirling and dancing around the bed. And when he jerked up another blanket, they scattered like fireflies, disturbed by the air currents.
I laughed, forgetting everything else in the wonder of the moment. I’d seen something similar in Wales, the only other time Pritkin had used his incubus abilities, which had turned an ugly, terrifying battlefield into a magical fairyland. It turned out to be even more powerful when I didn’t have the god of war bearing down on me.
But no less intense, I thought, arching up as a warm mouth captured a nipple.
Even without his extra abilities, Pritkin knew just how to touch me. He always had, as if it was instinctive. He did everything I liked, kissing down my stomach and then stroking my sides as he pleasured me, while his mouth was the perfect combination of forceful and gentle. Every stroke, every pull, every movement felt like it echoed throughout my entire body. It left me weak to the bones, and set flames of desire licking along my spine, pooling deep inside, causing me to writhe and gasp and then groan in pleasure.
Almost too much of it.
Too much sensation, with every move, every sigh, every shudder magnified by his abilities. Time seemed to slow with no help from me, with a dragging, languid feeling in the air as if every moment was reluctant to leave. It allowed me to experience everything in exquisite detail, from the warm smoothness of his tongue to the roughness of his calluses, from the slightly wet hair leaking melted snow in little drips onto my stomach, to the scratch of his beard.
Too much beauty, with the silver drenched room bisected by golden lamplight. It gilded the man above me: the curve of his brow, the lids of his half-closed eyes, and the thick, gold-tipped lashes. It highlighted the hypnotic movement of well-toned muscles under flawless skin, darker gold at his neck and hands, but fading to pure cream on the parts of his body that clothes usually covered. And the utter concentration on his face, as if this was the most important thing in the world.
Too much emotion, because he’d been right. I wanted to drag him closer; I wanted to push him away. I wanted him by my side; I wanted him far from danger. I wanted—things that didn’t matter because this wasn’t up to me. I couldn’t control Pritkin anymore than I could the swirl of events around us. All I could do was hold on, and hope we were both standing at the end.
And, suddenly, it was too much everything and I cried out, my hands searching for purchase on the headboard that I didn’t find, because I couldn’t concentrate enough.
I felt like a ship on a storm-tossed sea, with the waves of sensation that should have been ripples more like a tsunami. One that had me shuddering towards release from this, just this. And when Pritkin finally entered me, the sensation was so intense that I cried out, and couldn’t have said if it was from pleasure or pain.
He was murmuring things I couldn’t understand as he moved inside me, but I didn’t need to. His actions spoke volumes, all on their own, whole libraries of thought and emotion. And so did mine, my arms finally finding purchase around his neck, my legs wrapping around him, my body moving in a rhythm as
old as time as we approached climax together.
It didn’t take long. In moments, it felt like the motes of firelight in the air had soaked into my skin like sunlight, heating up my core like a sauna, pushing aside all doubt, all worry, all pain. Until there was only this, only joy, only fire running through my veins, causing me to buck and gasp and cry out—
As my whole body blossomed with heat and light and love.
There were so many obstacles to us being together: politics, the war, our own insecurities, that it seemed like an insurmountable mountain sometimes. One that I’d sometimes wondered if I’d helped to put in place myself, because then I didn’t have to risk loving anybody this much. But that ship had sailed, so I supposed we were going to have to figure something out.
And we will, I thought, holding him as he collapsed against me afterward, still shuddering through his own release.
Somehow, we’d find a way.
~~~
My eyes came open what felt like hours later, to see Pritkin’s leg draped over mine and the blankets pulled up to his nose. The room was quiet and dark, with the snow falling gently outside. It veiled most of the illumination from the windows, leaving only faint lamplight to haze the scene.
I’d been so sleepy earlier, after the release of all that long-held tension, that I’d gone out like a light while he was still cleaning us up. But I was wide awake now and staring into the darkness, I had no idea why. But my heart was racing a little too fast, and that was never a good thing.
I sat up on one elbow and looked around.
Nothing moved except for the wick in the lamp, dancing along with the little flame there. It made shadows flicker on the walls, almost as if the chest of drawers, the old-fashioned washstand, and the bedposts with their embroidered hangings were moving. But they weren’t. And there was no sound, except for the faint creak of the bedsprings and Pritkin’s heavy breathing.