She held him in place. As if there were anywhere else on earth he would rather be. Though actually, a bed would come in handy at the moment.
Drum started to step forward, intending to steer her to his bedroom without releasing his new favorite treat. The problem with his strategy became apparent when he realized that in abandoning her intention to remove his clothes, Ash had left his jeans hanging just above his knees, effectively hobbling him.
He lifted his head only long enough to strip out of his remaining garments, his fierce expression making clear to the world just how he felt about the interruption. The world excepting for Ash, he realized, when she let out a fierce snarl and attacked him with all the ferocity of an angry tiger.
They tumbled to the floor in a tangle of limbs, one quarter of which still sported an unfortunate amount of fabric covering. Never one to shirk a task, Drum had her boots and jeans stripped away in under thirty seconds.
In less than three more, Ash had him pinned beneath her with his wrists beside his head and her strong, shapely thighs bracketing his hips. If she thought he intended to struggle, she had another think coming.
He responded by stretching upward far enough to capture her lips in a scorching kiss. She had clearly taken to the odd human activity over the last twenty-four hours, because she tangled her tongue with his and gave just as good as she got.
His blood heated to the boiling point, and his erection hardened well past the point of discomfort. He had to get inside her, and it had to be now.
If there had been a little more blood flow directed to his brain instead of to points south, Drum might have spared a concern for the hard wooden floor and potential bruising to Ash’s knees. As it was, he could barely spare the breath for a combination of begging and demanding.
“Let me inside you, mo chaomhnóir,” he panted. “Now. Please.”
She gazed down at him, her skin flushed and glistening in the light from the windows. Her eyes had gone completely black, the eyes of her natural form, and the fire behind them blazed higher than ever before. Her lips parted, and he thought he saw a hint of fang. Instead of frightening him, it only made him hotter.
“Hurry,” he urged.
Her mouth twisted, and she let out a low rumble of frustration. “How?” she demanded. “Show me.”
“Like this.”
He didn’t bother trying to flip their positions. It didn’t matter to him who was on top. He just needed inside her.
She released her grip on his wrists and leaned back. Immediately, his hands shot to her hips, fingers guiding their bodies into alignment. Her hot, wet center dragged along the length of his shaft, making him experience the tortures of the damned, as well as reassuring him that her arousal matched his own. The head of his cock notched into her tight opening, and he felt his eyes roll back into his head.
With firm pressure he tugged her down even as he thrust his way up into perfection. Their bodies joined in one smooth motion, and Ash let out a long, shuddering exclamation of wonder and delight. Drum was too busy trying not to come to make any noises of his own.
Her body closed around him with the most perfect pleasure his body had ever known. He felt it in his soul, the way she stretched to admit him, then closed tighter than a fist around his length. She had taken every last inch of him and thrown her head back as if she couldn’t contain the ecstasy. He knew the feeling, because neither could he, and this was before either of them had started to move.
He was almost afraid to. If this was how it felt just to be inside her, he concluded that when he began to thrust, his heart would explode, his lungs would deflate, and the top of his head would blow clean off. Then Ash’s channel tightened around him, and he knew it would be worth every messy second on his way to the hereafter.
She waited for no further instructions. Guardian instinct, it seemed, was not that different from the human variety. She leaned forward and braced her hands against his belly, her long braid falling forward until the end teased the skin of his chest. Her gaze locked with his, and she began to move.
The torment began with a slow swivel of her hips that had both of them moaning. She experimented with clockwise and counterclockwise rotations, both of which had him clenching his teeth and praying for strength to a merciful God. Then she eased her weight forward, and he felt her thighs tighten against him a split second before she lifted her hips.
She rose until she was in danger of losing him, and the slick slide of her inner walls along his shaft drove him another step closer to the edge. She paused for a heartbeat and then lowered herself again, sheathing him to the hilt. He endured two more of the slow-motion thrusts before his control snapped and he began to wonder which of them was really the beast.
His fingers dug into her hips until he knew he would leave bruises on her fair skin. He couldn’t stop himself. Using the tight grip, he began to push and pull her against him in a fast, pounding rhythm. All the while, he thrust himself up against her with all the force he could muster.
Ash uttered not a sound of protest. Rather she purred like a big cat and answered his movements with equal fervor. Her nails scratched across his chest, adding another layer of sensation to nerves already overloaded with pleasure. He retaliated by jackknifing forward until he could draw a tightly beaded nipple into his hungry mouth. Her keening wail sliced through the night, a desperate female calling to her mate.
Drum thrust in and out, burying himself over and over in her wet heat. It became harder to draw breath, and he let her slip from between his lips to suck in a desperate lungful of air. They moved together like two halves of a great machine, each part wholly dependent on the other, and the entire time their gazes remained locked together in the most intimate part of their embrace.
Ash made the mewling sound of frantic hunger and ground her hips against him, using her weight to drive into his pelvis and provide pressure to her needy clit. Her movements grew jerky, her rhythm floundering as she reached out to grab at her climax.
He helped her, changing the angle of his thrusts so that each deep penetration hit the perfect spot inside her. He felt his own orgasm nearing, felt the tingling in his spine, and the tightening in his balls. He didn’t know how long he could hold out, but he refused to go over without her.
Releasing her hip, he wrapped her braid around one hand and used the other to pinch the tip of one flushed breast. Both hands applied pressure to drag her toward him, inch by steady inch. Her panting turned to high-pitched whimpers as she slowly bowed to his silent demand.
Their bodies continued writhing together as she sank toward him. The grip of his hands hardened, and with a final tug he yanked her down until their lips met.
That’s when the world exploded.
Ash screamed into his mouth as her body contracted tightly around him. Her inner walls squeezed and rippled, massaging his cock until the unbearable sensations set off his own climax. He lacked the breath to scream, but a low groan rumbled in his throat as he poured himself into her depths.
She collapsed onto his chest in a movement that was less graceful than it was endearing. Drum wrapped his arms around her and felt her nuzzle against the hollow of his throat as their breathing began to slow and their skin began to cool.
Exhaustion reached for him and began to drag him under, but his last thought was not for the hard floorboards under his back or the cold night air against his skin. His last thought was that the woman above him had just changed his life forever. After this, he would never have to watch her walk away, because wherever she wanted to go, he would go right behind her.
Chapter Thirteen
Ash opened her eyes and found herself staring into the dark space underneath a battered sofa. She blinked, startled to realize she had drifted into sleep. She hadn’t expected to need rest for a very long time, but apparently Drum had managed to drive her to exhaustion—he a human and she an immortal warrior. Who would have guessed?
She recalled collapsing atop him, wrung out and boneless from pl
easure. At some point while she slept, she had slid to his side and curled against him. She had one leg bent, her knee draped over his thigh, while her head rested against his shoulder and one hand lay on his chest above the steady beating of his heart. A second rush of surprise accompanied her realization that she had no desire to move from the spot. She felt as warm and comfortable as a drowsy cat and could have drifted back into sleep out of sheer contentment.
Except that something had woken her, something that continued to tickle at the edge of her awareness and prick at the skin at the base of her neck. She kept still, suddenly wary of calling attention to the fact that she was alert now to a potential danger.
She remained in place but swept her gaze around the bits of the apartment that she could see without turning her head. They lay on the floor not far inside the entry. They hadn’t been able to wait any longer than that, but it actually gave Ash an advantage. Because while the furniture blocked her from seeing the lower half of the far side of the sitting room, she wasn’t confined behind the bedroom door.
From here she could see the entry to the kitchen, as well as the doors that lead to Drum’s room and the spare room hallway. She could also see most of the windows on the apartment’s back wall and the thin black mist that had begun to seep in around the edges of the casements.
She hissed and shook Drum roughly awake. His eyes snapped open and his gaze immediately focused on her face. He drew the correct conclusion from her expression, because he wasted no time in asking, “What’s wrong?”
“Shadelings.” She drew herself into a crouch just as the mist coalesced into the same sort of misshapen humanoid form that had confronted them in the cavern yesterday. Or this morning. She didn’t exactly have the time to check a clock.
Ash sprang to her feet and shifted to her natural form. The confined space prevented her from spreading her wings, but this shape still possessed the advantages of greater size, strength, speed, and endurance. Plus, it could absorb significantly more damage, the advantage of which could not be understated when she realized that two more shadelings had already formed, and still mist continued to pour into the room.
Knowing her axe to be useless against enemies lacking solid flesh, Ash did not bother to call it forward, and instead simply stepped into a position that kept her body between the windows and her Warden. She could hear Drum cursing behind her as he scrambled to his feet, but she kept her attention on the oncoming threat.
Ash had always counted shadelings among the most minor of the creatures serving the Darkness. Their teeth and claws could slice through mortal flesh like paper, for all that they were made of mist and shadow, but her tough hide deflected all but the most vicious blows. They appeared like something out of a human nightmare, but their lack of intelligence and tendency to appear in packs kept them on par with the hhissih in the minds of most Guardians.
The one thing that elevated the shadeling above a hhissih as a threat was the fact that the shadeling rarely appeared on the mortal plane without the intervention of a nocturni magic user. Sometimes the mage would leave a magical trap that would summon the creature when tripped, but in other cases they manifested in response to a direct summons. Given the present number, Ash suspected this to fall into the latter category.
All of that came from the perspective of an immortal, stone-skinned warrior. While she and her brethren might be immune to the average shadeling attack, the human would not be so lucky. That meant these creatures had not come into the flat seeking to destroy Ash. They sought a more tender piece of prey.
The idea made Ash curl her lip and flash her mouthful of razor-sharp fangs. She braced herself against attack and dug the ends of her talons into the floorboards for better purchase. Any entity seeking to harm her Warden would have to go straight through her to do it. And Ash didn’t give a shit that the shadelings’ incorporeal forms made such a thing possible in theory. In reality, she would do whatever it took to stop them.
She heard a series of thumps behind her and glanced over her shoulder to see Drum hopping in place as he tried to pull on his jeans. She scowled at him. “Stop wasting time! Get out of here! Run!”
He returned the expression with interest. “Not happening! And if the Garda is going to find me torn to bits on the floor of my flat, I don’t want them telling my ma that the first thing they saw when they broke down the door was my bare, white arse.”
Ash scowled and spun back to face their attackers with a growl. “Irrational human,” she muttered.
“I heard that,” Drum called out, “but I’ll let it go if you tell me how we get rid of these things.”
“We do not. They are only vulnerable to magical strikes, so I cannot kill them, but neither can they harm me. You, on the other hand, must flee. Get out, and once you are safe, I will hunt down the sorcerer who set them upon you. Then he will find himself the one torn to bits.”
“Set them on me? You think these things are here for me?”
Ash couldn’t see Drum’s face, but she could hear the incredulity in his voice. Then one of the shadelings made a feint to get past her right side, and she slashed at it with her long, curved talons. The thing hissed and allowed its misty form to evaporate where she would have struck. It fell back, but re-formed quickly and continued to watch her with those burning eyes.
“Not the time for a discussion!” she shouted. “Just leave! Quickly!”
Again, he ignored her advice, stepping forward until he stood just behind her left shoulder. “I already said that wasn’t happening. Besides, if they are here for me, what makes you think they won’t just leave you here and follow me wherever I go?”
She snarled her displeasure and lunged forward to cut off another creature who thought to slip past her. She hated the fact that Drum’s theory made sense. In fact, he was probably right. The shadelings had to be here for him, and that meant that sending him off by himself would only increase the danger. She needed another plan, and fast.
It turned out that fast was already too slow. Before she could think, four of the entities converged on her in a shroud of black shadows. She saw the others fly past toward Drum, and then her sight was cut off by the shadelings’ attack.
They began to circle around her at an ever-increasing pace until they blurred into something like the walls of a miniature cyclone. It was a tactic they employed often to confuse and disorient their unwary victims. Luckily, Ash was neither unwary nor the victim.
She dropped low where the concentration of mist thinned out to almost nothing. Creatures without bodies, after all, didn’t have legs or feet to obscure the view. She was able to see Drum stumble backward away from the shadows streaking toward him and gathered herself to rush to his aid just as he caught himself. She couldn’t make out the look on his face, but she heard the fierce anger in his voice when he raised both hands in front of him and yelled, “Leave us the fuck alone!”
He surprised her a second time by following the command with a stream of bright golden light just as he had in the cavern yesterday. This morning. Whatever. Without training, he should not have been able to gather his magic to him like that, let alone focus it into an effective energy weapon. One time could easily be written off as a fluke, but a second indicated the potential for her Warden to become a gifted combat magic user.
Provided he didn’t get himself killed before they could find someone to train him.
Pressing her lips into a grim line, Ash unfurled just the tips of her wings with a sudden upward thrust. The movement created a quick gust of air that shot through the circling shadelings and interrupted their own rising currents. She heard the screech of protest but she was already rolling out from under their cage shadows.
A second high-pitched wail told her that Drum’s magical blast had found its mark. She surged to her feet just in time to see the black veil in front of him dissolve like a lamp turning on to dispel the darkness. Or the Darkness.
With her wings tucked back into place, Ash raked her glance over him to be
sure he remained uninjured and then placed herself once more between him and the approaching threat. Less than a second later, she felt a rapid ding to the back of her head like a pebble bouncing off her skull. It took her a moment to realize that Drum had smacked her the same way she had seen his sister do to him.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he said, when she jerked her head around to shoot him an incredulous look. “You said yourself you can’t fight these. I can, but not with you standing in the bloody way.”
“I did not,” she protested. “I said I could not kill them. There is a difference.”
“Not a big enough one. Move so I can blast the others. Go do whatever it was you were going to do to find who sent them. I’ve got this.”
Ash hesitated, uncertain whether or not the human’s confidence was misplaced. He still could claim no training in the use of magic. Had his first two shots merely been well-timed examples of good luck?
As if in answer to her unspoken question, Drum cursed and shifted behind her. His hands came up and his elbows came to rest on her shoulders a split second before he released a third stream of golden light at a rush of animated black fog.
“Go!” he shouted, and this time Ash listened.
She charged through the remaining shadelings like a rugby player through a scrum and emerged on the other side to race to the darkened glass of the windows. Her claws scratched at the oak frame as she scrabbled for her grip and threw open the sash. Later she could apologize to Drum, but for now she had a sorcerer to catch.
The narrow opening of the old windows made for a tight squeeze between her size and the bulk of her wings, slowing her down on her way outside. It allowed the figure in the cramped parking area below time to see her coming. She saw the nocturni’s shoulders stiffen beneath the drape of his black robe as he debated whether to turn and run or to stay and face the Guardian. Apparently, this one thought quite a bit of himself, because he lifted his hands and shouted a word of power in the corrupt tongue of his demonic Masters.
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