by Anne Malcom
His body didn’t flinch with my words, yet his eyes turned liquid and his emotions became a swirl of contradictions. Anger. Hate. Lust.
He was silent for a long while. I waited.
“Why do you do it?” he asked softly. Dangerously.
“Narrow it down there, Buffy. I do a lot of different things for a lot of different reasons.” I thought on it a moment. “Scratch that. I do most things for one simple reason—because I can.”
His face stayed impassive. Unreadable. It unnerved me because he was a child, an infant human, yet he disguised his emotions better than a two-hundred-year-old immortal. In fact, everything about him rebelled against the fact that he was a human, that he wasn’t as old as some of my handbags.
“Kill monsters. Survive on them,” he clarified.
His line of questioning was unexpected, but I rolled with it.
I gave him a look. “Haven’t you heard? I am a monster. It takes one to know one, and it certainly takes one to kill one. And darling, I may be encased in an attractive package that nature designed to communicate the contrary, but I am a monster. You’d do well to remember that.”
My words contradicted my earlier statement, but if I reminded him of what likely had been beaten into him since he was born, maybe he would do the right thing and leave. Me? I always did the wrong thing. Like pray he didn’t walk out that door.
He was across the balcony at the start of my response, perhaps even at the end of it. Then he wasn’t. Then he was right up in my space, pressing me against the railing of the balcony, his fire imprinting on my cold skin, chasing away the chill that was natural to me.
His form was tight but humming with something. Something dangerous, similar to the hum I was fighting. Every inch of his body held mine in its thrall. I couldn’t move even if I desired to.
“No,” he rasped, gray eyes searching my face. “I used to think that. But I was wrong. I’m not ashamed to admit it.” His finger was a ghost as it trailed down my cheek. “In fact, I’ve never been happier to have been as wrong as I was about you.” He paused. “But never have things been more complicated than they are now. Beliefs that’ve been in place for centuries have been changed because of what you did tonight.”
I laughed. “Yeah, and I just royally fucked myself over for that. Damned myself in the eyes of my race irrevocably. Not that I’m losing sleep over that. Let’s just hope the oncoming war makes that little transgression slip through the cracks and keep me here for a little longer, at least.”
He gripped my neck. “You’re not going anywhere,” he promised.
I raised my brow. “You don’t have the power to make those kinds of statements,” I replied, wishing I was wrong, for once. “There’s a war coming. It’s been brewing for centuries. Been fought in the shadows until there was no choice but to bring it to light. I don’t know my fate in it, but the odds are stacked against me. There’s nothing you can do to change that.”
He glared at me. “There’s everything you can do to change that,” he challenged.
“No. I’ve solidified my fate. I’m involved to the end, most likely. I don’t run and I’ve got a vested interest in winning this battle, if not the war.” If I could find a way to expose my family and then have them executed, I considered that a victory.
“So have I,” Thorne growled, eyes on me.
“No,” I argued harshly. “You don’t. It’s past time for us to end this madness. For you to actually try to act like you hold some value over your own life.” I tried to struggle from his grasp but he stopped me. I could’ve have broken away but I was selfish and decided to bathe in the feeling until it was nothing more than a shadow. For it would be. Soon. “There is no place for humans in this war.” I eyed him. “There is no place for you, anywhere in this life. My life. My deathless life. Other than a hole in a ground and a gravestone. And I’m not having that on my shoulders.”
“You’re not dismissing me like that. Like I’m nothing. Like we’re nothing.”
“It’s what we should be,” I argued.
“Should be, maybe,” he agreed. “But not what we are. Not what you are to me. And you’re mine.” He brushed my mouth with his thumb. “This tells me all the truth I need to know—that I’m your man.” He trailed his fingers down my chin, my neck, to settle over my chest. The vibration of his heart through his hands gave me the illusion that mine was beating.
I didn’t have time for illusions.
“I can’t have a man,” I hissed.
“You don’t need a man,” he agreed, his hand never leaving my chest, his eyes never leaving mine. “You’re a storm, a volcano, a fucking battle. Every day with you is a fight against an unstoppable force. Beauty.” He stroked a tendril of my hair. “To possess that beauty, one cannot merely be a man, because you come with a fight. A war. So you need a fucking warrior who won’t fight battles for you, but who will fight the battle that is you. The man who will get bloody and broken and make good fuckin’ friends with the reaper who knocks at the door every day he’s with you. He’ll do all that with a smile on his face and fire in his belly, because a true warrior craves the ultimate battle. That’s what you are, Isla—the ultimate battle. My ultimate battle.” He rested his head against mine. “And I don’t surrender. To anyone. Not for you. Not even to you. So fight us as much as you want. You may be stronger than me, but you won’t win unless you end it.”
It was a challenge, an unwavering one that would have taken me a second to take up. To win. Despite whatever puzzling strength he had to keep me in place, to keep himself alive despite all odds, he was right. I was stronger.
In theory.
I wasn’t strong enough to do what I should’ve done and snap his neck. I could no sooner do that than snap my own.
“We have to end it,” I whispered against the weathering gale of his emotions. “I can’t….” I searched for the word. The one I swore I’d never use.
“Love me?” he finished for me.
I blinked against the surety of his words. His willingness to utter them. “Because you do. I know it ’cause despite it all, I love you, Isla. You can’t change that. You’ve just got to live with it, or die with it.”
His words filled the dawn and swallowed the sun, or at least they seemed to.
“Where do you think this can go, Thorne?” I hissed. “What do you think we do here? I’m not going to let this love be the anchor that yanks me into the abyss and damns us all. I’m already damned, but even I have to draw the line somewhere. And I think this, whatever this is, isn’t just damnation, but destruction. For both of us.” I never let my gaze fall from his. “You want a life that’s violent and short just because of that useless organ in your chest? You want pain and suffering to follow you as long as you clutch this romantic notion that love conquers all? Newsflash, buddy—it will conquer all. Everything. You, me, everyone you care about. Because it’s a bitter battle against everything both of our races stand for. A vampire and a slayer isn’t romantic, or soulful. It’s death. Pain. Ugliness. And I’m not ready for any of those. And I’m most certainly not willing to give you the curse that my love will give.”
I restrained the urge to gulp in a huge breath with the tidal wave of my words, staying still in his thrall. In his glare.
“That’s why?” he said finally. “Why you resist me? Because you’re focused on my mortality being a death sentence for this, for us?”
I gave his smoldering glare an even look. “Is that not enough?” I scoffed.
He surged forward. “What if that wasn’t an issue?”
I glared at him. “What-ifs are for imbeciles and Republicans.”
“Jesus, Isla. Answer the question,” he growled.
I jutted my chin up. “I won’t answer the ridiculous question because it is an issue. You’re mortal. I’m not. The point is moot.”
He let out a sigh of impatience, then cupped my face, bringing our faces together. “What if I could tell you that wasn’t the case? What if mortality was
a thing we weren’t both plagued with?”
Something bloomed in my stomach. Something hot and uncomfortable.
Hope.
I frowned at him. “I would ask for the details,” I replied.
He narrowed his brows. “I can’t give you that,” he clipped. “Not now. Not yet.” He stroked my cheek with an unwavering gentleness. “I’m askin’ you to trust me.”
I steeled myself against the touch, the blossoming hope in my stomach, the way his presence burned away the rest of the world. “I don’t trust anyone. You get dead by doing that,” I said finally.
He clutched my chin, gentleness gone, replaced by a brutal urgency. “I’m not asking you to trust anyone,” he growled. “I’m asking you to trust me.”
The words hung in the air like an omen. Like an open door that if I stepped through, there was no going back. But perhaps I’d already stepped through that door the second I’d decided not to kill him in that alley. Maybe I was too far gone already. Walking a road that had an end. Finally.
“Okay,” I whispered, the word flinging that door shut and slamming the deadbolt home. “I will. Not for good. Not even for a really long time. Or a short one,” I added. “I’m not patient.”
His eyes were liquid quicksilver. “I’ve noticed,” he said dryly.
I stroked the pulsing vein at his neck idly. “But for the record, we’re saying that you can’t die?”
He clutched my wrist roughly, turning my palm in his hand to bring it to his mouth. “Everyone can die, Isla. Even you,” he replied, voice thick. “I’m saying that it’s tougher to send me to the grave than most. That I’ve been around for longer than you think, and that now, in the years that I’ve been on this earth, I’ve never had more to live for.”
I wanted to ask a lot of questions. A lot. How long had he been on this earth? What were the semantics of his vague declaration at a hint of immortality? He breathed. His heart beat. He could be hurt almost as easily as a human, yet he healed quickly. I wanted to know precisely what he was.
But the questions died on my tongue when he took it for his own, thrusting his mouth over mine.
The urgency to cement whatever had just been declared on that balcony was beyond anything I’d ever experienced. We were a clash of wills, of nature, fighting each other for the upper hand.
I ripped off Thorne’s jacket, sending it fluttering to the ground before I raked my hand down his back, the bare skin flexing and pulsing under my touch.
He growled in his throat as he detached his mouth from mine and wrenched my top off, the air kissing my exposed breasts.
The tee went flying off the balcony, hurtling down thirty stories as Thorne attached himself to my breast, his hands the back of my neck.
I ran my fingers through his inky hair as he moved down, quickly divesting me of my cotton shorts and panties so I stood naked on my balcony.
I reasoned an early riser having their morning coffee on any number of the building surrounding mine could have seen us. I simply didn’t care. My only need was to rip Thorne’s shirt from his body, which was exactly what I did, exposing the wide, scarred, and muscled expanse of his chest. I longed to explore the ridges of his abs with my lips, but the second his shirt was off, Thorne yanked me to him, plastering his mouth to mine once more, lifting me.
I wrapped my legs around his waist, surrendering all control to him as he pressed my back lightly against the railing.
He used one hand to free himself from his jeans, his naked torso pressing into mine, the fire and ice of our bodies meeting in a fatal harmony.
He stayed poised at my entrance, lips hovering over mine, eyes glued on me. “Do you trust me?” he rasped, clutching me to him. I was at his mercy, hovering at the edge of the balcony with only his arms around me stopping me from falling.
I didn’t hesitate. “With my death.”
He attached his lips to mine and surged into me.
“We agreed on sinful, not demonic,” Rick murmured in my ear as we glided through the party. “The Devil himself might rise up and decide to take you for his queen, and I’d have to fight him for that honor.”
“Queen?” I repeated sarcastically. “I think a crown would slip right off my shiny head.”
I swallowed my grin at the variety of undead jaws in danger of hitting the ground. The vampiric elite exceled at hiding emotions under their pale and mostly beautiful faces; my theory was because they didn’t have them. But they betrayed themselves that evening, though I had to hand it to them, as the last place I expected to be was on the arm of the king at one of these things.
But there I was.
Weren’t surprises great?
“Plus, the devil’s already here,” I added, nodding to the corner of the room. The one I needed to be focused on instead of rehashing the events of earlier that day. I was there for a purpose, namely not to get dead. Preferably to set about the demise of the woman I was looking at right then. “And it’s a she. Unfortunately the she who birthed me.”
I hadn’t seen a lot of expressions on my mother’s face. In fact, until that moment I hadn’t been sure she’d been able to communicate anything but loathing and indifference.
But there we were, watching the shock ripple over her usually carefully schooled and deceptively youthful features. The way she gripped her flute of blood had me thinking she wasn’t quite sure whether to be glad that the daughter she hated was on the arm of the king, or furious.
It all hung on whether she was indeed involved in the plot to murder said king, and by proxy me. Though my death would likely screw up her promises of having me raped for breeding purposes.
Rick followed my eyes. “Well even if she is doing the job of hiding her crown as the queen of Hades, there’s another king downstairs who’d love to replace your mother with the newer and decidedly more interesting model,” he murmured, his mouth touching my ear.
“Oh, I’d hate you to fight the Devil for little old me,” I responded. “Whoever comes out on top would be severely disappointed when they realized that regardless of bloody victory, I’m not a trophy that can be snatched up as the spoils of war. I’m likely to give more a fight than the Devil himself if anyone tries to possess me. And honey, I’d win.” I gave him a challenging gaze.
My words weren’t exactly true. The Devil or the king of vampires may not be able to possess me, but a human slayer did. Body and soul. He’d made sure of that when he spent all day imprinting himself on me, neither us coming up for air, though one of us actually needed it to survive.
Not much talking was done, so the semantics of his own deathless life were not discussed.
And when it came time for him to leave, he’d cupped my face and those eyes radiated concern that I’d never experienced. No one worried about a vampire. Until him.
“This party, will it be dangerous?” he’d asked.
“Hopefully,” I’d answered. “Otherwise, it’d be horribly dull.”
His mouth thinned. “You’re immortal, but not invincible. Remember that,” he ordered, stroking my face. “And you’re important. Remember that too. Your life is not something to be risked easily.” He pressed his lips to mine fiercely. “You’ll be coming to mine when you’re done.”
I’d blinked away the warmth of his kiss while I battled the call of his blood. “I thought we’d established that I didn’t like to be ordered around.”
His eyes darkened. “No. After today, we’ve established how much you love to be ordered around.” He’d stuck around for a beat more, then left.
“Half the men in this room are considering treason to rip you out of my arms,” the king continued, bringing me back to the present. His lips were at my ear to make sure no one could catch the conversation.
“The other half, I’m guessing, were already considering treason and they will most likely still rip me out of your arms, just long enough to execute me,” I murmured back.
His hand tightened on mine. “Oh, even the ones with the most burning hatred in their
veins for you couldn’t bring themselves to end your life before ripping that dress off your body and defiling you in every way possible.”
I was wearing red. Blood-red. It hugged every curve like a second skin, its straps doing well to hold my girls in despite the thin fabric. It was simple but moved with my body instead of constraining it, and the split that went up my thigh and almost to my waist made it very apparent that I wasn’t wearing underwear. Only some deftly placed tape maintained my modesty. Or it would have, if I had any.
As it were, it would be perfect in a fight, my best weapon being distraction.
I sighed. “Oh, sire, Shakespeare had nothing on you. Your words are sonnets.”
He chuckled, his chest vibrating as he did.
The sound bounced off the walls and cut through the fake conversation.
Even I had a moment of shock before I regained my poker face. The king did not chuckle. Or laugh. I would have bet the ability had been drained out of him at birth. The shadows of smiles I’d seen since he’d made my acquaintance were unusual enough, but at that kind of event, he was more likely to spear someone through the heart than laugh.
But the night was still young.
Mother glided over, nodding demurely at those who encountered her, looking like the cat that got the cream. Or the blood. Her daughter who had once shamed her had hooked the whale.
In her eyes, at least.
“Defcon level one,” I muttered to Rick. “Brace yourself.”