Addai rose onto an elbow, lifting away from her only far enough so he could watch her as she slept and trace her lips with his fingertip as his cock softened in her channel. He didn’t need to see the angelic script written above her heart to know where the incantation had weakened, where parts of it had faded and disappeared, leaving openings, like cracks in a vase, allowing what it contained to leak out. He could feel the breaks against his skin, the fiery core of her Djinn nature burning away the icy angelic sigils.
Wielding what the humans called spell magic wasn’t his gift. He was thankful he wasn’t faced with the choice of whether or not to restore the bindings. It was hard enough knowing that with a word he could free her of them.
He didn’t dare. Though satisfaction and joy pulsed through him at how much ground he’d gained with her on their first day together, he couldn’t allow her to be unrestrained by form, couldn’t trust her to remain with him instead of searching for the scion during the night.
There were places he couldn’t follow her should she choose to leave him behind. The water held only death for him. It was a place of darkness, with impenetrable depths that defied the light. Long before the humans added nightmare creatures to it, the kraken and leviathan called it home, and still did.
Freed of human form, she’d soon draw the attention of one of his kind. He couldn’t allow that to happen.
He leaned down, brushing his lips against her forehead, her skin warm despite the ocean air. He doubted she felt the cold very often, wondered if she’d noticed the change in herself. The Djinn were creatures of fire.
The night deepened. Time to a being whose existence spanned eternity was meaningless, but because of Sajia, he marked the minutes and hours. She anchored him to them, filled them with intense emotion and sweet sensation.
Dawn was hours away when he felt the change in her. Her skin grew more heated, becoming so hot he was forced away from her.
He rolled to his feet just as her Djinn spirit escaped its prison of human flesh. In a shimmer, like heat rising from the desert, she became a nighthawk and took flight, going to the door and beating ineffectively against it in an attempt to escape.
Addai gave up his physical form, turning his will, his essence into a cage made of light and power. A gift rarely used but one he was glad to possess in that instant.
She threw herself against the unseen barrier, growing more agitated with each attempt until finally choosing another form. Feathers morphed to hard golden carapace as she became a scorpion and struck at the walls of her prison with a poison-charged tail.
When that didn’t work, she changed again, and again, morphing from one shape into another until exhaustion claimed her and she collapsed, feathered once again, the dove she’d so often chosen when they lived as man and wife.
Addai took form then, freeing her from the cage. A step took him to her, and once again the air shimmered.
Feathers gave way to tanned skin and sleek female curves, the vampire scars restored like camouflage, preserved by the strength of the angelic spell placed on her. He lifted Sajia and returned her to the bed, settling down next to her for what remained of the night.
SEVEN
Dawn arrived with the cry of seagulls and the slap of water against the sides of the boat. Though Sajia was cocooned in warmth, held securely against a hard masculine body, she woke chilled and clammy, as if crawling from some dark, cold oubliette.
Her heart began racing and panic set in. She had the sense of having been awake for a long stretch of night, yet her last memories were of sexual satisfaction.
The blackouts were getting worse, lasting longer if she was right about spending most of the night awake but unaware. If she’d managed to get out of the cabin—
A hard shiver went through her at remembering the times she’d come to in a different room or outside the Tucci estate, the times she’d found herself close to a cousin’s home, as if in thinking about them just before blacking out, she’d set a course for unconscious travel.
Had this happened to her in the past? Was this somehow related to the rebirth of her spirit?
The answer might lie behind her, his lips delivering soft kisses along her shoulder and neck as his cock grew hard against her buttocks. “Easy, beloved,” he murmured. “I’m here with you.”
A shiver of a different sort moved through her when the hand splayed across her stomach stroked upward to cup her breast. “I will never allow any harm to come to you.”
He took the tender nipple between his fingers, squeezing as he placed a love bite where her neck met her shoulder. She moaned in reaction, maneuvered so her opening was pressed against his cock head in wanton invitation.
Her questions and fears melted away as he entered her, filled her in a slow slide of hot, hard flesh. His penis throbbed inside her like a second heartbeat, offering a different type of reassurance, a different type of comfort.
“That feels so good,” she whispered, closing her eyes, laughing softly when it occurred to her that given his innate arrogance, she probably shouldn’t stroke his ego too often.
“I heard that,” he said, biting her shoulder in teasing rebuke.
Whether he meant her laughter or her thoughts, she didn’t know. Didn’t care as his hand abandoned her nipple to smooth over her belly and settle on her clit.
He stroked the underside of it with his fingers. Grasped and tugged. Tormented her with the back-and-forth rub of his thumb over the tiny naked head, the sharp spikes of pleasure streaking downward to make her toes curl.
She pushed backward, pressed swollen folds against his skin. “I could make you beg again,” he said, his voice purring in threat.
The impulse to engage in sensual battle rose and fell with a thrust. “Please,” she said, giving him victory with the needy sound of her voice uttering a single word.
It was his turn to laugh softly, in masculine satisfaction. “You are mine,” he murmured, lips delivering kisses and sucking bites to her skin, cock moving in and out in a slow, intimate show of possession.
He said her name, whispered for her ears though she heard it in her mind as well. One word, and yet it translated to so much more, expanded only to condense into Lover. Wife. Mine.
Sajia closed her eyes, surrendering to the pleasure as he brought her to an orgasm that left her wanting to stay in bed all day and engage in nothing but lovemaking. For long moments she was able to linger in contentment, but reality wouldn’t be held off.
The cry of seagulls and slap of water were a call to get up, to continue the search for Corinne, bringing Sajia full cycle to her waking fear. “Did I try to leave the cabin last night?”
The sudden tension in Addai’s body answered her question. “What do you remember?”
She turned in his arms, the motion making him sigh in protest as his cock left her channel. “Nothing. I never do.”
His expression didn’t change. And that was yet another answer, though it begged the question. “Do you know what’s happening to me?”
Trust. It had never been one of Addai’s strong points.
The one glaring example of not trusting in the love they shared, not fully committing to it had ended in indescribable pain and thousands of years of loss.
Tell her. Free her, an internal voice urged.
His gaze dropped to the scorpion pendant against her skin, sigils inscribed into it, holding information about the Djinn. From there his focus shifted to the vampire marks on her arm. In her true form she would be free of the scars, but their loss wouldn’t undo the chains binding her to the human family she’d been willing to die for. It wouldn’t rid her of whatever loyalty she felt to the Tucci scion.
“Does it have something to do with my being reincarnated?” she asked, unknowingly providing him a way to escape the turmoil of choice.
“It has everything to do with it.”
Anticipating her next question, heading it off, he said, “The periods of blacking out and not remembering what happened will pass.”
The script on her skin glowed like an accusation. Coward!
Addai denied the charge. It was too soon to free her, too risky right now, when she might choose to hunt for Corinne on her own if the situation became dangerous and he decided to end her participation in it.
“We should get up and begin searching for the boat,” she said.
“When this is over, promise you’ll go willingly to our home.”
She leaned forward, touching her lips to his, fingers stroking where his wing merged with his back and sending a shudder of pleasure through him. “I have obligations to the Tucci.”
Her answer convinced him of the rightness of his decision to hold off releasing her from the angelic bindings keeping her human. “The Tuccis won’t stand in the way of my desire to have you.”
It was the wrong thing to say. In implying threat to the vampires, he’d reminded her of the repercussions to her family. Sajia grew still.
Not wanting to lose what he already had with her, he said, “They’ll free you from your oath in a bargain that will satisfy all of us. You’re my wife. Your place is with me.”
Her eyes flashed with fire. She sat, taking the heat of her skin and her soft curves from him. “Maybe the woman you once knew was content to let you order her life as you saw fit, but I am not that woman. If you think otherwise, then you love a memory, not who I am. My place is wherever I choose it to be.”
Pride and masculine arrogance demanded he prove the truth of his claim. He acted on it, tumbling her backward and lying on top of her, pinning her to the mattress. A quick thrust and he was inside her. “Tell me you’d choose to be apart from me. Tell me your soul calls out for any other but mine.”
The soft yielding of her body and the heated, tight clasp of her channel on his cock made it impossible for her to lie. His wings settled against her thighs, brushed in sensuous reminder of how erotic she found them when they made love.
Sajia shivered. Her eyes closed as she gathered strength. Opened as she said, “I won’t exchange one type of servitude for another, despite our games of dominance and submission. Despite what we once had. If I’m to love you as deeply as I did then, it will be because you treat me as an equal in our relationship. Not as your prize or your reward, but as a wife who is both joined to you and separate from you.”
He wanted to rail against her demands, against hearing her say out loud what he already knew, that she didn’t yet love him in the way he so desperately craved. He wanted to tie her to the bed again until she was mindless with pleasure, her will bent so thoroughly to his that they were one person, bound so intimately together that they wouldn’t exist apart. But some small, rational part of him accepted an irrevocable truth: she wasn’t the same woman he’d loved before, though he loved her no less for it. Her soul was more thoroughly Scorpion, honed in the fiery birthplace of the Djinn so she could survive in a world that had been changed forever by what the humans had done to it.
He could put none of his thoughts into words. Could do nothing to change their immediate future. That left him with only the moment, and the pervasive need to have her clinging to him, crying out his name in sobbed release.
If anything could ease him, it was how readily she gave him those things, even as she wrung out his surrender in equal measure. Making his buttocks clench and his breathing become labored, his skin grow slick and his thoughts scatter as he came in a lava-hot rush of semen.
They left the bed a short time later, remaining in the cabin only long enough to wash and eat a breakfast of bread and fruit. Then they resumed their search, using the Constellation’s powerful engines instead of its sails.
Lunch was eaten on the deck, with the vastness of the ocean spread out around them. In the distance several cargo ships were visible, two leaving the bay and three heading toward it.
Dotting the blue were fishing boats, large and small, populated with men working their nets or using poles and lines. It had been time-consuming getting close enough to each of them in order to eliminate it from their search.
Sunset was approaching when Sajia spotted a boat with a red lantern to the right of the cabin doorway and a blue on the left. Addai slowed the Constellation. He’d not thought it possible to feel what a human would feel, the knotting of his stomach that came with fear.
He couldn’t be in two places at once. Couldn’t will himself to the boat and guard her at the same time.
Free her from the bindings, the internal voice advised. And he denied it once again.
“Get in the cabin, Sajia, while I take the Constellation closer.”
Resistance flared in her. A refusal he saw her fight to suppress as she remembered her earlier promise. She obeyed, though she left the door open and hovered just out of sight beyond it.
Three men were visible. All three rested their hands on their knives when he changed the Constellation’s course and headed directly toward them.
He kept the speed steady, calculating the distance and the point at which he would be close enough to use his voice as a weapon. And when it arrived, he said, “Lie down on the deck and you will be spared.”
They lay down as ordered, docile in the promise of death and damnation he carried with him.
Truth or trap?
The doorway leading to the cabin was open. Addai reached beyond the three men and found terror and hope in the cabin, entreaties for rescue, not from only one human, but from two.
He sensed none of his kind. Sensed nothing other than the five humans onboard.
“I believe the scion is here,” he said, drawing Sajia out with his words.
It took only a few moments to guide the Constellation alongside the other boat and secure them so they couldn’t drift apart. Addai kept himself positioned between Sajia and the prone men, looking away from them only long enough to glance in and see the cabin’s occupants: a homely girl, her wrists bleeding from the ropes securing them, and a boy, perhaps only a year older than the girl, his face badly bruised and his clothing dirty and torn.
Sajia drew her knives and entered to free the scions. A moment later, Addai heard Corinne’s heartfelt sob, then her babbled apologies for not confiding in Sajia, followed by her identifying the boy as Sebastian, a scion of the Tassone family.
Satisfaction surged through Addai at learning who the boy was. Wariness followed as he thought of the message that accompanied the one sending him to Sajia. This had all the markings of something arranged by the Djinn. He wondered if the witch lied about Caphriel’s involvement, then shook off his misgivings, telling himself that regardless of intent, finding Sebastian Tassone here gave him a bargaining tool to free Sajia from her oath and ensure her family could be made safe.
“Let’s go,” he said, moving as it became unbearable to have Sajia out of his sight, suddenly anxious to be done with vampire business and begin their life together.
“We need to get Corinne and Sebastian home,” Sajia said, guessing at his intention to let the scions take the Constellation. “I need to speak with the Tucci master about my oath and my family.”
He chafed at the necessary delay, but said to the Tassone scion, “Take off the charm hiding you from your family so they’ll come for you.”
The boy’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down before he gathered his courage and stood taller. “I won’t let Corinne be sent to Los Angeles.” A blush crept up his face. “She might already carry a Tassone scion.”
Sajia was torn between laughing and crying and raging. “Was that your plan? To run away and hide until she got pregnant?”
Sebastian’s chin lifted. “If Corinne is sent to the Gairdens, she’ll die. Their scions survive the transition less often than the Tucci do.”
Tears spilled down Corinne’s cheeks. “It was the only way we could think of to be together.”
Sajia felt herself soften with pity and sympathy. She didn’t need to ask why the teens hadn’t petitioned Draven Tassone. There was nothing the Tucci could offer that would be worth weakening the Tas
sone bloodline for, no reason to form an alliance with a family so far beneath the Tassone in power.
“Take off the token,” Addai told Sebastian again. “And when your family arrives to collect you, allow me to bargain on your behalf.”
Sebastian’s eyes met Corinne’s in silent communication first, then he nodded, accepting Addai’s offer, though he fumbled as he removed a coinlike token from his pocket and handed it to Corinne for safekeeping. She did the same, handing him the token she carried.
Sajia smiled at that. They might be scions, but they were still teens who thought they’d somehow manage to use the tokens to sneak away again.
“Where did you get them?” she asked.
“Maliq,” Sebastian answered, naming the man the Wainwright witch had. “I met him in the occult shop. It’s one of the places I visit every day as part of my schooling.”
And probably how he’d met Corinne, Sajia guessed, or at least how they managed to slip messages back and forth without anyone becoming aware of the relationship.
“And the fishermen?” she asked, thinking not just of the ones who lay in peaceful surrender onboard the boat, but of the one who’d been drained of blood by the Tucci.
Sebastian looked out through the cabin door, and his expression hardened beyond his years. “Maliq arranged for a man to take us to Oakland and for a hiding place, but he must have sold us out. These three jumped us in the red zone.”
Impatience rubbed over Addai’s skin like an unpleasant breeze. The ocean grated on his nerves with its endless lap of water and its ever-present danger.
“Come out on deck,” he said, anticipating the swift arrival of the Tassone and wanting them to see that their scion was safe.
Sajia left the cabin first. Corinne next.
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