Lucinda, Darkly

by Sunny

  Heat built within him, seared him. Flashed up within him with bursting light, opening his mouth in a soundless scream. But the agony he felt was too vivid to express in mere sound. He started to glow, and it was not light that was pulled out from pleasure or taken in from Basking. No. The lunar glow gushed from him as if something were chasing it out . . . or trying to take it over. That light, that pure iridescent light that was him, that was Monère, changed, darkened, hazed, and became red. Red like spilling blood.

  “Mother of Darkness,” Lucinda gasped softly, and Nico realized that what he was seeing was true, that his vision had not hazed from the searing, wrenching pain that roped him tight. That, indeed, he glowed with a color that no child of the moon ever possessed.

  Had Nico been able to think, to breathe, he would have been afraid. But there was no room to be afraid, not when pain and cramping ache and heat was your entire world, and that world was on fire, blazing within you, and all you could do was try to not go up in flames with it.

  He thought he had felt pain before. That it had become almost like a familiar, comforting friend in these last few years as he had grown stronger and Mona SiGuri had grown crueler, punishing him more, dancing that line, closer and closer each time, to killing him. What he felt now made all the punishing pain he had experienced under her hand pale like a petty lantern before the sun.

  Now this was true pain. Unbearable, knotting, aching agony. Unescapable. And that’s all you wanted to do—escape. Even if the only way to do so was through death.

  But it was a merciless heat. It licked you alive, did not consume you. Just filled you. Spilled from you. And all you wanted to do was scream, and you could not even do that. No breath, no power of motion. Just a silent, frozen rictus of unbearable, sundering torment that felt as if it were tearing you up into little shreds, flaying you alive, with no end in sight to the suffering.

  “Sweet Mother, his skin is hot. He’s burning up,” Stefan said, looking at Lucinda with fear in his eyes. Heat was the one thing that Monères could not withstand. They were cold-blooded creatures, children of the night, and heat, the sun, destroyed them. “We have to cool him down.”

  Lucinda did not answer. In fact, she did not move. Her skin was a color Stefan would not have believed possible for her—an almost ashen paleness beneath the tawny brown surface. Her body was held with that same rigid immobility that gripped Nico, and an echo of that silent agony screamed from her eyes.

  A quick glance at Talon showed that the same pain echoed in his black eyes. That the same rigidity locked his body tight and unmoving.

  “Goddess help us,” Stefan muttered. “They’re all caught up in the same suffering.”

  He released Nico’s arm, scrambled across that bloodred blaze of light that streamed out from the warrior, and pried Lucinda’s hands free from their tight grip around Nico’s wrist. He pushed her back away from Nico, shoving her between a row of seats until her body was no longer in contact with the Monère warrior she had bonded with.

  Lucinda gasped, her body loosened, and she fell back limply against the wall. “So much pain,” she whispered.

  “Jonnie, get Talon away from him,” Stefan barked and heard movement behind him as Jonnie struggled to do as he said.

  “I still feel it,” Lucinda said, her body rippling with tremors, “echoes of his pain.” She crawled out between the seats until she could see the two others who shared her bond. Talon rested limply, his body trembling like hers, propped against the edge of a seat, Jonnie round-eyed beside him. Nico, though, was still caught in that frozen silent rictus, with Hell’s own moonlight shining darkly from him.

  “Why is his light red like that?” Stefan asked.

  “Our third moon shines that color in Hell,” Lucinda said, and some of the appalled astonishment she was feeling was reflected in her voice, her eyes.

  “Why does it shine within him?”

  “Because I carry a small flicker of that light within me when I call forth heat. Now it is within him, too.”

  “It will kill him unless you do something.”

  “What? What can I do?” Her dark brown eyes churned even darker until they became almost black.

  It was Talon who made the next suggestion.

  “Suck part of his essence down into you as you did with the other warrior.”

  Hearing his high tenor voice, so bell-tinkling sweet and melodious, suggesting something so vile, so evil, made Lucinda flinch.

  “Not all of him,” Talon said, as if he’d caught the echo of her thoughts, or felt them. “Just enough to cool him down. To take away some of that heat.”

  What he suggested . . .

  “No,” Lucinda said, shaking her head.

  “Not to kill him. To save him,” Talon said. “And if you do kill him . . .” His voice grew hushed. “I think he would prefer that rather than continuing in this agony.”

  But it was not that easy now.

  “If he dies,” Lucinda said. “If I kill him, we may all die.”

  “If the heat continues to consume him, he will die shortly anyway . . . and perhaps take you two with him,” Stefan said. He cupped her cheek, turned her face to look at him. “Is there a chance that this can work?”

  “Yes,” Lucinda whispered, and gave this man who held her heart the full ugly truth. “But what I do . . . what you are asking me to do may take away not just this life, but his afterlife.” She shook her head. “He may still have a chance at afterlife. I don’t want to take that from him.”

  “He’s crying,” Talon said, pulling their attention back to Nico. It was hard to look down at the fallen warrior, to see such obvious suffering etched so deep and frozen upon that face. Even more unsettling to look full upon that eerie crimson glow that poured out of him.

  Stefan would not have seen it had Talon not called their attention to it. A drop of liquid fell from the corners of Nico’s eyes, tracking slow twin paths down his face. It was not clear and transparent as human and Monère tears were. It was colored red. And the faint, unmistakable scent wafting from it confirmed what it was. Mother Moon help him . . . Nico was crying tears of blood. As demons were rumored to do.

  As they watched, Nico’s lips moved slightly. Moved again with great trembling effort.

  He whispered one word. “Please.”

  “Oh, Nico.” Lucinda’s voice broke upon the utterance of his name.

  Stefan looked up to see matching streaks of redness tracking down Lucinda’s face, confirming true what the old legends whispered of.

  Lucinda bowed her head. Then with bleak resolve did as Nico had begged her to do. She opened her mouth, opened her power, and began to breathe him in. She pulled that eerie light into her. Literally drank it down. It swirled tight and thin, a funnel of unearthly light pulled from Nico, down her mouth, into her skin, the darkly tanned flesh absorbing it all.

  She drank down Nico’s essence, his heat, his light. And yet still that terrible tension gripped his body, did not let go. She drank even more with deep even breathing, in rhyme with his heartbeat, with her eyes closed as if asleep, as if lost in a dream. Finally, he muted.

  When the light spilling from Nico was dimmed, when his power felt faint and his presence even fainter, she stopped. The light hovered before her mouth, licked over her lips like a knowing, living entity seeking a way into her. When it found no ingress, it returned from whence it came, reluctantly seeping back into Nico.

  When the last of the crimson glow faded into him, that muscle-clenching tension finally released its hold over him.

  Nico took in a great shuddering breath. Weak, so weak. Where that searing roping rigidity had gripped him before, now a sweet, almost floating lassitude lifted him up, pulling him from the heaviness of his body.

  “He’s ghosting,” Nico heard Stefan say, and dimly realized they were talking about him.

  Is that what’s happening to me? Nico wondered, and found it not so bad a thing. A relief, almost, after that terrible unrelenting anguish.

/>   Then hands touched him, nails sank into him sharply at his wrist, another piercing bite at his ankles. Blood spilled from him and pain sang through him, chasing away some of that floating lethargy, pulling him back. Pain and something else . . . a twin pulse of power, a pulling from two ends.

  Nico hovered there in that hazy floating state he was half in and half out of, and realized it was Lucinda and Talon who held him back.

  Let me go, he thought. It doesn’t hurt anymore.

  The answering echoes of two thoughts, of two entwined wills, came back to him. No. If you go, you take us with you. Stay with us.

  But though they bound him, partly held him, Nico knew that he could still float free. And take them with him.

  If you die, we go with you, those twin wills whispered.

  It was the word die that jarred Nico, shook him free a bit more from that floating lassitude. Die. Such an ugly word for such a beautiful feeling, that cessation of pain. For himself, perhaps, he might wish it, but not for the other two. Not for Lucinda or for Talon. With regret, with a deep mental sigh, Nico stopped fighting them, and let them pull him back into the heavy weariness of his body.

  Back into pain.

  TWENTY-ONE

  NICO GASPED IN air, his heart beating once more, and I wanted to cry. In happiness, in sadness, in relief. All of it.

  He shivered uncontrollably, his body trembling, ours trembling along with his. Talon fallen across Nico’s feet. I splayed across Nico’s chest, my nails dug into his wrist, slick with his blood. With a quickness that was more kind than slowness would have been, I pulled my nails out from his pierced flesh. And conscious, so conscious of Stefan’s gaze upon me, I licked those puncture wounds clean until blood no longer flowed from Nico’s wrist. Then I licked my own nails spotless as I pressed my body against Nico’s. Pressed down on him, and within, held him to us with the force of my will.

  “I’m here,” Nico muttered, his voice weak and faint. “Not going anywhere.”

  I wondered if he commented on my physical hold or on my tight mental grasp upon him. Below, Talon clung to Nico’s legs, daintily licking his own nails clean.

  Blood bonded us—Nico’s blood—and more. I felt in Talon’s mind a fierce determination to keep Nico with us. Mine, his mind whispered, then amended, ours, as I hastily withdrew my mental probe, something I had unknowingly done. I curled up around Nico, shivering almost as much as he.

  Sweet Hades. What had we done? To ourselves and to poor Nico?

  “His skin’s cool,” Stefan said with frank relief as he pressed his hand to Nico’s face and neck. An almost paternal touch he must have learned from caring for Jonnie, his young Mixed Blood ward. “He should be better,” Stefan said frowning. “Why is he shivering?”

  “Perhaps,” I said, my own teeth starting to chatter. “Perhaps his body temperature needs to be warmer now.” Warmer like a demon or a Floradëur.

  Stefan’s cool hand brushed my cheek softly, and I almost closed my eyes in relief . . . that he touched me voluntarily, willingly. That he did not shun me because of fear or disgust after he’d seen what I was capable of doing. Then his words broke the illusion. “You’re cool, too. Cooler than you should be.”

  He’d only been checking my temperature.

  “I think all three of us are cooler than we should be,” I replied, my voice even, as if I were not crying inside. “It took great effort to bring Nico back.” And to continue to anchor him to us.

  “Your mind,” Nico chattered, the edges of his teeth clicking together. “No need . . . to hold me so tightly.”

  “There is every need. I took too much of you, your living essence.” And the essence of that Other. “What remains is too fragile.”

  “Darling,” Nico said. He may have been shivering, but a very male, very roguish smile curved his lips. “You took . . . just enough of me,” he said, sexual innuendo heavily coating those words.

  “Jonnie,” Stefan said abruptly. “Bring me all the blankets you can find.”

  When he had done so, Stefan sent the Mixed Blood up front to the cockpit to sit with the pilot. “To give them some privacy,” Stefan told the boy.

  I watched as Jonnie moved with slow caution down the aisle, reminding me once more of the Mixed Blood’s recent injuries. “Is Jonnie all right?”

  Stefan nodded. “His stitches are holding, and he is not bleeding.” With that same cool efficiency with which he had assessed our temperatures, he began unbuttoning my shirt.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, shaking from cold, trembling from weakness, my body playing a variation of the same theme over and over again: shake, shake, tremble, shudder. And repeat.

  “You’re weak,” Stefan said, “and weakening yourself even more by continuing to exert mental energy. Am I correct?”

  My silence confirmed his guess.

  “Bare skin,” Stefan said calmly, stripping the shirt efficiently from me. “You need more skin-to-skin contact with each other. The bond between you should be strengthened with that physical connection, and you can all share body heat.”

  He lifted me from Nico briefly to peel off the Monère’s shirt, and then lowered me back onto Nico’s naked torso. The moment our bare skins touched, the shivering eased. A second later, I felt Talon’s bare chest spoon against my back. I stiffened but did not protest. Because the moment we all touched—not just Talon and I touching Nico, but Talon and I touching each other as well—the shaking subsided almost completely. Blankets covered us, and our bodies, initially cool, quickly heated beneath the covers with shared warmth.

  Stefan was right. Touching made the bonds stronger, and I expended less energy holding Nico mentally. Didn’t need to. With physical touch between us all, it was as if all the bridges were suddenly connected, and the circuit running between us built up energy instead of consuming it. The flicker of Nico’s life force strengthened into a small and steady flame, and I relaxed my hold on him. He maintained his vitality on his own.

  I blinked once, twice, with sleepy languor. Lethargy assailed me, and I let it seep into me.

  With warmth behind me and beneath me, with Nico’s reassuring heartbeat reverberating in my ear, and the gentle rising and falling rhythm of his chest rocking us all, I fell asleep.

  TWENTY-TWO

  WHEN THE PLANE started to descend, the whine of the en-W gines, and the scream of the air changing its pitch awoke me. I was enveloped in men, beneath and behind me. But it was the man who didn’t touch me at all that drew my eyes, my heart. Stefan sat on the floor less than a foot away, his long length folded up tight between two seats, his head resting on bent knees. If I reached out my hand, I could touch him. But I didn’t.

  He was sleeping, the long sweep of his lashes looking both dark and delicately soft. Something you wanted to run your fingertips over just to feel the faint, tickling brush of it against your skin. His hair fell forward in silky straightness about his face, a wash of inky darkness. A lovely contrast against the alabaster white of his skin, the ruby redness of his mouth, the velvet softness of those lips. As beautiful as a man could be. But it was his inner beauty that drew me most. His goodness, his self-sacrifice, his care for a boy that was not his own. Even his extraordinary forbearing with the humans who had hunted him, with the man who had shot both Jonnie and him. A man that I would have killed.

  The darkness in me was drawn to that goodness. Wanted to wrap it around me so that I could be as good, as pure, as kind. And a tiny part of me was like that. But an even greater part of me was not. Odd that it was this smallest part of me that yearned most for him . . . and felt most constrained by him.

  It was Stefan’s presence that had almost made me refuse to draw Nico’s essence into me. I had not wanted Stefan to know of this one, most ugly thing I could do.

  Even more than wanting to hide that other side of me from him, my demon beast, this was the one thing I had never wanted Stefan to see. But he had, and I wondered now what he thought of me. What I would see in his eyes?

>   I made no sound or movement. Only my gaze touched Stefan, but he felt it somehow. Those long, sooty lashes lifted, and his eyes met mine. I concentrated on the little things instead of the confusion I felt inside. Surface details like the color of his eyes fresh from sleep, neither blue nor green but a magical color caught in between.

  It was he who reached out to touch me. A gentle brush of fingers against my cheek, a tender reassuring caress that squeezed my heart painfully. That could not be mistaken for anything as mundane or impersonal as checking the temperature of my skin, though he noted that, too.

  “You’re warmer,” he whispered, the barest sound. “How do you feel?”

  “Better. How long did we sleep?”

  “Several hours.”

  I tried to slip out gently from between my two sleeping men, but my movements awakened them both.

  Nico blinked his eyes open as I seized a couple of blankets, wrapped them around me, and sat up. Were it just the two of them, Nico and Stefan, I would not have minded my nakedness. Perhaps would have even flaunted it, but it was not just them. Talon’s small hand, which had wrapped around my waist in sleep, slipped limply down to my hip as I sat up. I felt his fingers suddenly tense as he roused from slumber. That small hand retreated, leaving me free, and I stood and stepped away from them, retrieved my clothes where they had been draped over a seat. Turning my back, I dropped the blankets and dressed, listening to my men rustle and stir behind me. I had no need to ask how they felt, I could feel it. They were like me, rested, somewhat recharged, as much as we could in this realm. The greater healing and replenishing would only occur when I returned to Hell. My thoughts thus distracted, I did not see what my men saw when I turned around.

  “Your wounds are healed,” Nico said. With his thick chest white and bare amidst the blue sea of blankets that overflowed the aisle, he looked like a pale lustrous pearl. Talon, dark beside him, like a rare cousin, an exotic black pearl found in China’s deepest seas.