I half-expected the sight of her lips to cool the heat between us, but even the slight frisson of anxiety I felt when she tilted her face toward mine only served to heighten the anticipation that shuddered up my spine.
"I think," I whispered, my lips bare centimeters from hers, "that I might be discovering I'm a masochist."
She grinned, and her words fluttered against my skin. "I don't think it'll hurt this time."
"Let's find out."
With a last shiver, I captured her mouth with my own, pulling her tight against me. She whimpered deep in her throat and opened her lips to me. Our tongues tangled, tiny sparks of electricity flying between us, and she was right—it didn't hurt.
It felt glorious.
She drew away from me long enough to cross her arms at her waist and pull her tank top off. With a single, swift motion, I pushed her shorts down, and she kicked them off, even as she followed suit with my own boxers.
As she stretched out against me, she murmured against my lips. "Oh, gods. You are so warm." Her hands fluttered up and down my chest as she dove into my mouth, this kiss as different from the last as it was possible to be.
This time, power flowed between us, rolling through our bodies, back and forth, reaching into all the spaces our earlier kiss had emptied out, and making me harder than I had imagined possible.
I pushed her back onto the mattress, leaning down to flick my tongue against her nipples—first one, then the other, as she moaned.
Gently, I ran my mouth along her stomach, tracing the path my fingers had taken earlier, down to the line where her waistband had been. As I ran my tongue along her waist, her breath shuddered in her abdomen.
Power still rolled between us, building in intensity as she spread her legs to welcome me.
She tasted like she smelled—of the salt and sea, sun and warmth—and she tilted toward me as I circled the swollen nub of her clit, her hands clutching the sheets by her hips as she began rocking back and forth.
I slipped one finger inside her and she gasped, tightening around it in a way that made me ache to bury myself in her. Instead, I licked her faster, moving my finger back and forth and sliding my other hand up to squeeze her breasts. The energy between us sparkled brighter as she began to rock against me, her breath coming harder and harder, until the force building inside the mermaid in my bed erupted against my mouth and hands.
Kirka
As the swells of pleasure trembled away through the muscles of my still-new legs, I collapsed back against the pillow, uncertain when I had arched up away from it.
With a self-satisfied chuckle that was all male, Zale moved back up beside me. "Maybe not so much of a masochist, after all," he said, running his slightly calloused fingertips up and down along my side. All I could do was blink and nod, my breath still coming too fast for words.
Just as the power draw in the library had been entirely new to me, this sexualized energy exchange was like nothing I had ever experienced before.
And I wanted more.
After only a moment, I sat up and pushed one hand against his shoulder until he lay down on his back. His dark eyes burned into me. The force of the connection between us smoldered in that gaze, and for an instant, it felt as if he might bring me to orgasm again through nothing more than a look.
The fire of our touch threatened to steam away all of me that was ocean, much as it had tried to burn out all of him that was land when I first kissed him. But then the blaze steadied, the power sliding back and forth finding a balance as I ran my hand down his muscular abdomen to the hard length of him, like iron under silk.
It had been ages since I had taken a human lover, and never had I connected to one like this. "I don't want to wait," I whispered.
"Then don't," he rasped, grasping my hips and lifting me to set me atop him.
Even as slick as I was from his attentions, the hot length of him sliding into me stretched and filled me to my limit, and I moaned. His breath caught in his chest, and he stilled, fighting for control.
I rocked back and forth, sliding up, and then back down, plunging him into me. Around us, the magic we had been passing back and forth started to glow, every point of contact shining a blue-white light, brighter and brighter, as we stared into one another's eyes, moving in and around each other.
I came first, clenching around him in trembling waves of pleasure that set off his own orgasm. The feel of him swelling inside me, then exploding in a rush of heat, made my head spin with pleasure, and for a moment, I lost myself in him.
When I came back to my senses, I had collapsed onto his chest. A soft glow still surrounded us.
Magic coursed through both our bodies, running through me like blood in my veins, and also connecting me to Zale.
Our lovemaking had joined us more strongly than any magic spell could have done. And I couldn't even claim, given our earlier kiss, that I hadn't guessed it might happen. I had, and I had climbed into bed with him anyway, knowing that most mortal men wouldn't be able to resist a Siren, even if I didn't sing.
Truthfully, almost as much as he had wanted me, I had wanted him.
The thought frightened me.
But it also made me feel strong.
"So," said the human man to whom I had tied myself. "You ready to go take down more Titans?" He paused. "After we get something to eat."
* * *
"How many Titans will we need to contain?" Zale asked as we sat at our table in The Hotel's single restaurant, finishing our meals.
"The only truthful answer to that is, 'all of them'."
He rolled his eyes at me.
"Honestly, we don't know how many there are. There were a limited number when we contained them originally, but we don't know if those numbers have grown larger or smaller. For a long time, we assumed that only the original, first-generation Titans would have the power to attempt to break through the walls of their prison."
"What changed your mind?" He pushed his plate away and leaned back.
"My song-sister Skyla and your partner Clay contained the first attack, and it came from Epimetheus, Titan of Afterthought. He's one of the least powerful of the Old Gods, yet he almost broke through in Athens."
"But the one in New York yesterday was one of the major players?"
I nodded.
"Where do you we go next?" Zale leaned on his elbows, staring into my eyes. I couldn't help but smile when even a look sent power zinging along my skin.
With a shrug, I pushed back from the table. "The Hotel directed us to New York, you took us to the library. Perhaps we can follow the same pattern?"
Zale nodded, and we stood. As we headed down the stairs toward the lobby, I glanced around. Selena had said that the attacks were connected to The Hotel itself in some way. I hoped she was wrong—I didn't know how to begin searching for trouble within the hotel itself.
If it came down to it, though, I was willing to try.
As we stepped off the final stair to the lobby floor, however, I caught a glimpse of a familiar figure out of the corner of my eye.
Amphitrite?
I spun around just in time to see the elevator door close behind her.
What was the queen of the mer-folk doing here?
As far as I knew, she never left Atlantis.
My mind flashed back to the last conversation I'd had with Amphitrite, immediately before I left Atlantis.
The one where I had told her I was going to Athens, and she had been relieved.
Oh, sweet River Styx.
"I know what's going on," I said, grabbing Zale's hand. "Come on."
I punched the button to call the elevator back to us, then marched to the front desk, manned this morning by Ava.
"Ava, has Amphitrite been here rather a lot lately?" I demanded.
The mousy clerk bit her lip. "I'm not allowed to give out guests' information." Wringing her hands worriedly, she stared at me for a long moment, then gave a single,
sharp nod. She didn't look up at me again. If asked, I suspected she would deny the motion had been a response at all.
That was fine. If The Hotel really wanted us to discover who had been using it as a base to aid the Titans, it would let the transgression pass.
* * *
When we stepped off the elevator moments later, I was certain Ava would be fine. All along the hallway, statues pointed emphatically toward one room.
The Hotel was definitely on our side. The door swung open without even a push.
In the center of the chamber, a single marble statue stood at the edge of a pool, its hand outstretched gracefully to point toward the water. A circle of ripples showed where someone had dived in.
On the way up on the elevator with Zale, I had explained what I suspected—that for some reason, the queen of the mer was attempting to free the Titans.
Now, I would have to tell him the rest.
I took a deep breath. "This isn't the room I usually use to enter and exit The Hotel, but it's a door to Atlantis. I'm sure of it. If you want to come with me, you'll have to embrace your own magic entirely." I stared at the man who had already come so far with me to reach this point. "You'll have to shift to a mer-shape." I paused. "This won't be like passing magic back and forth between us. If you go with me now, there may be no coming back."
Zale frowned. "You shift back and forth all the time. Surely you could teach me."
I laughed. Here it was. The deepest, darkest secret of the mer, become a training point for the man who might or might not be able to save us from our worst enemies. "I can change back and forth from human to mer because I'm a shapeshifter."
Zale stared at me, uncomprehending. "Okay?"
"A shapeshifter by species. Like a werewolf." I tried to impress upon him the distinction just through the strength I put behind my words.
"Okay. So you can shift back and forth. But … you said that Clay is in Atlantis as a merman right now. Clearly we can shift, too."
"Clay's change was because of a magical spell."
"And mine would be too, right? That's what you've been telling me—that I have access to magic, that I can use it to help you?"
I blew out a breath. This was harder to get across than I had anticipated. Centuries of prejudice meant that the words that would have conveyed my meaning to another mer in mere seconds meant almost nothing to Zale.
"I'm trying to figure out what it is you're saying, Kirka, but I'm not getting it. Take it slow and trace out all the implications for me, okay? I'll listen with my cop senses, but you've got to explain all the pieces."
With a nod, I started again. "You are completely human. Even with your access to some of the magics the ancient humans had, you are still only, at best, partially a magical creature. It would be the equivalent of finding that you shared some DNA with a sea-slug. Which you do, by the way. That shared DNA—in this case, magical DNA—doesn't make you any less human.
"Got it."
"I, on the other hand, am only about half human. The other half of my DNA is shapeshifter, specifically of the fish variety."
"What does that mean in practical terms?"
"In practical terms, I can always switch back and forth between human and fish, because in a sense, the magic spell to do so is written into my DNA. You, however, might switch once, and never become human again, because only the magic is in your DNA, not the specific spell."
Zale stood perfectly still for a long moment. "What about Clay?" he finally asked. "Will he be able to change back to a human, or will he be stuck down there forever?"
I shrugged. "It wasn't my spell. I wish I knew."
"But that's definitely where the Titans are heading?"
"If I'm right about Amphitrite trying to set them free? Then yes, almost certainly."
He took a long, deep breath. "I can't leave Clay down there, in a form he didn't choose, taking part in a fight he didn't agree to." He glared up at me, his dark eyes fierce under his eyebrows. "And as much as I would love to walk away from all of you right now, I can't do that, either."
When I spoke, my voice was almost a whisper, and the light from my eyes had shut down to virtually nothing. "So you want to do this?"
"I'm going to do this, whether or I want to or not." He began stripping off his clothes angrily, his motions sharp and violent as he folded them into precise squares. For a moment he stopped, pinning me with his stare. "And when this is over, you do every single gods-be-damned thing you can to get my friend back up to the surface. You do not allow him to become an unwitting casualty of the war you and your kind couldn't keep in your own world."
His words sliced at my midsection, but I worked not to show how they affected me.
Not my war.
I could almost hear myself saying it to him.
But it would be wrong.
From the first moment I had allowed Poseidon to fool our people into believing they were better than other shifters, I had allowed it to become my war.
I had benefitted from the quiet racism that proliferated under the oceans.
And when we had decided to sink Atlantis—when I had realized that Poseidon and Amphitrite planned to move us to another world entirely—I had allowed it to happen. I had never used my knowledge to make mer-kind better.
I had stood by, watching.
So now we stood on the brink of a war that threatened to destroy not only Atlantis, but also our original home world, and perhaps every world surrounding us.
And if Zale was right, the ripples echoing throughout those worlds would rip apart all of reality as we knew it.
Who was I to allow that to happen simply in order to reveal my love for one man—one human male with perhaps just enough to magic to protect reality, even if it meant destroying himself in the process?
A tear slipped out from under my lashes, and I turned to begin my own shift, as well.
No.
I wouldn't tell him.
Not unless we survived.
And I was beginning to think that might not happen.
Zale
I had seen Kirka shift. I thought I had realized that this was going to hurt.
When she had shed her fin, the flesh had cracked and peeled.
Growing a fin, however, was a very different affair. It didn't hurt, so much as it encased me, smothering who I was in who I was to become.
I followed her lead, dropping into the water and allowing the magic to slide around my body. There was a moment of sheer terror as I felt my legs fuse together. Everything grew colder, and more distant, and for a long moment, I seemed to forget how to breathe—but as my panic faded, so did my care about that. Then the gills in the side of my neck feathered out and I didn't need to remember. I pushed water in and out, and that was enough.
There is a kind of peace to the sea that humans sense—it's like we yearn for it, knowing that we can never quite reach it, never understand what it means to be part of something that vast and alive.
It's why sailors drown themselves in search of the Sirens' songs.
For a moment, I almost touched it, a blue eternity stretching out before me, wild and free and strong.
But in the end, even the mer-folk don't hold that power. They never belong entirely to one world or the other.
Kirka speaks of her curse as one of knowledge.
I think I know what she means.
I've changed from one form to another, and I don't think I'll ever be the same—no matter which form I end up living out my life in.
When the shift was over, I drifted aimlessly in the pool of seawater, dizzy.
"You ready?" Kirka asked, and I blinked at the sound of her voice under the water, muted and full of bubbles.
I didn't even try to answer verbally, merely nodded and gave her a thumbs' up I didn't feel.
The path to Atlantis was disconcertingly similar to the other hotel hallways, all things considered. The walls were seemingly carved directl
y out of rock, and the color scheme—blue, of course—was picked out by living décor: a small school of electric blue fish flashing by a porthole-sized hole in the wall, a blue-white coral growth against a wall, a stand of blue-green seaweed alongside the opposite wall farther down. But it was clearly decorated in the same vein as the rest of the insane, living Hotel we'd been moving through over the last few days.
And we went down, down, down, the water around us growing darker and darker as we descended. My eyes compensated, shining a bright, purplish light that I was certain indicated nothing good about my mood. At the bottom of the deep ocean well, we came to an oval door set into the rock.
I had half-expected it to require a hand-wheel, like a door on a submarine, but this door had no handle at all. Kirka merely pushed at it, and it swung open easily. The water on the other side looked much the same as the water on The Hotel side—but then again, the air hadn't seemed to change from one side of surface doors to the other, either. If there was a difference, I couldn't sense it. I made a mental note to try to remember to ask Kirka if she could tell a difference.
On the way down, I had been acclimating to the use of my fin. The lower half of my body was muscular and sleek, strong in a way I wasn't used to. Now, I gave a single flip of the tailfin, and overshot my goal by quite a bit, in part because of the sudden shift in gravity, despite my new ocean-aided buoyancy.
We had been travelling down.
When we came through the door, we popped out of the roof of a building and, my reeling senses eventually told me, were headed up.
I had seen magic, used it, touched it—met creatures from myths, had explosions form from nothing in my own hands, watched monsters punching holes through reality, had even changed into a half-freakin'-fish-man, but this was what finally made me a believer in Kirka's claim that there were many, multiple, parallel universes: everything turning upside down as I crossed the boundary from one world to the next.
When I finally got my bearings again, I discovered I was in a gorgeous underwater city much like the oldest parts of Athens, built against a cliff towering over the city on the ocean floor. Bluish lights fluoresced against the walls, reminding me of those deep-underwater fish with the lanterns hanging off their foreheads. In this case, though, the oddly biological lights connected to the wall with no visible signs of power.
Siren's Curse (Hotel Paranormal) Page 8