by Sunny
I nuzzled Stefan’s throat. Played the sharp tips of my fangs lightly across his pale, white skin.
He groaned, tensing against me. “Lucinda . . .” he murmured as the flow of his blood quickened to an even more tantalizing beat.
I stood and pulled him to his feet.
“No,” he protested. “You’re hungry. Feed from me. I want you to.”
“I want me to, also.” I smiled and pushed him back against the trunk of the tree. “But I want more than just your blood. Loosen your pants for me,” I whispered, and licked my tongue over his beating pulse.
“Lucinda.” He said my name again, but more cautiously. “We don’t have to—”
“I want to,” I said with a smile that kicked up the rhythm of his heart even more.
“We can wait.”
“I don’t want to wait.”
“Maybe you should just take my blood,” he suggested in a strained voice.
“Hush.” I brushed his lips lightly with mine, and removed my clothes, quick and efficient. “Please,” I whispered in his ear, pressing my bare flesh against him, “I need you.”
Laving my tongue over his beating pulse again, I drew the deep rich scent of him into my lungs.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.
“You won’t.”
“Or frighten you.”
“You won’t! Please, Stefan.”
With a tortured groan, he finally nodded, and—glory hallelujah!—loosened his pants. His organ sprang free. When I didn’t shriek or jerk back from him in horror, he kicked off his pants and removed his shirt.
He was gorgeous. Breathtakingly beautiful. All of him. Nothing repulsive, nothing to be frightened of. And he desired me—the bold, rampant length of him, bobbing upright, was irrefutable evidence of that.
He wanted me. He loved me. He didn’t want to frighten me. And that sweet, tender concern softened not only my heart but my body, so that my arousal perfumed the air as wet dew slicked my secret passageway.
I sank my sharp nails down into the bark, caging him against the tree. Out of sight, my claws extended further, embedding into the hard depth of the wood. Pulling myself up, I wrapped my legs around him, and sank down on him, taking him into me with a soft, purring groan.
He ceded control to me, his hands at his sides, his body still and trembling, growing luminescent with light, his heart speeding, his breathing fast and ragged now as I began to move myself slowly up and down his length.
It wasn’t until I bit him, punctured my fangs deep into his tender neck and started drinking down his rich, powerful Monère blood, that he cried out, jerked against me.
I hummed with pleasure, the vibration of my mouth spilling inside him and mixing with the wash of sensation I let flow out of me and into him like an ambrosia splash of ecstasy.
My body stilled as I drank him down, spurring him into motion—a surging dance of his hips moving against me; noises pulled from his throat. Hot washes of sweet blood. Rapture spreading in us both until it crested and he arced and grew still and spilled inside me.
His release triggered my own, a sweet and blissful shattering that pumped through me like the pulse of his blood.
Retracting my claws, I pulled my nails out of the tree, and without my anchoring hold, we slid down until we rested against the base of the trunk, my legs wrapped around Stefan, him still inside me.
The last of Myrddhin’s ghost, one I hadn’t even known had been hiding inside me, drifted out in a wisp of white and dissolved.
And the wound inside of me healed.
TWENTY-SIX
RURIC RAN THE entire eleven miles into town. Bounding through the forest was the easy part, the fun part—sheer exhilarating speed. Concealment was not an issue; he was going too fast for people to see. It was only when he reached town that it became more difficult, especially since it was daylight. He didn’t have Hari’s ability to disappear or Lucinda’s camouflaging gift of glamour. His gift was more of a deflection, a blurring and repelling ability, so that when human eyes landed on him, they skidded away without consciously noting what they had seen. He used that ability now to cloak himself as he moved, tracking Mary’s scent.
It had been over a week since he had seen her. He had unexpectedly missed her—her sweet voice and feisty spirit. The wonderful, casual way she spoke to him, touched him, even hit him, without fear.
He trailed her fresh scent to a small café. She was sitting at a table near the window front, sipping tea, eating a croissant. The sight of her, safe and unharmed, dispelled his disquiet. She looked so peaceful and beautiful, a young and vibrant life.
He could have watched her without making his presence known, but he wanted to be closer to her. Wanted to see her smile at him, or scowl at him, if she wished to. And a thought, a possibility had occurred to him. Something that he needed to confirm or invalidate.
Uncloaking himself, Ruric opened the door and several pairs of human eyes glanced his way, widening. Several customers hastily left, clearly heeding the aura of danger that clung to him. But Mary remained oblivious, even when he stopped by her table and spoke to her, making her aware of his presence.
“You repaired your glasses,” he said in his deep bass rumble.
Mary’s empty gaze swung up and a smile lit her face. “Ruric, is that you?”
He nodded, relieved she no longer seemed upset at him, then remembered she couldn’t see the gesture and said, “Yes.”
“Join me. Sit down.”
Obediently he pulled out a chair and gingerly sat across from her, setting his gloved hands on the table. The chair creaked and groaned in protest but thankfully held his weight.
“It’s been a week since we bumped into each other,” she said with a small smile.
“I had matters to attend to.”
She waited but nothing more was forthcoming. “Wow, you just talk so much I can’t get you to shut up about yourself.”
He flushed. “I do not often have much to say.”
“That’s okay,” she said, her lips quirking. “I can talk enough for the both of us.”
Some of his tension faded beneath her easy manner, and he sensed it then—what he had suspected, hoped for.
Mary was a Mixed Blood.
It was so small a trace it was almost unnoticeable, unless you looked past the surface distraction of her blindness to what lay beneath in her blood. No more than a quarter of her blood was Monère, maybe even less—the reason why none of them had detected it before. But it was there, a faint and unmistakable signature. It explained how she was able to compensate for her blindness so deftly. Her loss of sight had probably triggered her other non-human senses into play. It also explained why she was able to detect everyone but the demon dead among them. Even full-blooded Monère had a hard time sensing demons.
Ruric stood up abruptly, scraping his chair back. “I must go.”
“Oh.” A look of disappointment crossed her face. “More matters you must attend to, I guess.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Well, maybe I’ll bump into you again. Though not literally, I hope,” she said with a small teasing smile.
“Likely not. I do not come often into town,” Ruric said gravely. Not in the daytime, at least. He paused, hesitated, then walked away, heavy with the knowledge that this would probably be the last time he ever spoke to her.
MARY, THE BLIND girl, is a Mixed Blood,” Ruric told the others later that afternoon. Lucinda and Stefan were back. Jonnie had returned a short time after them.
“How do you know?” Nico asked, stretching and yawning. He had just risen from bed, earlier than his usual time, stirred awake by the others’ return.
“I went into town and saw her,” Ruric answered.
Nico frowned. “I didn’t even know you were gone.”
“You went into town?” Lucinda said with surprise.
Ruric’s eyes dropped to the ground. “Forgive me, Princess. I should have asked your permission.”
“Don’t be silly
, Ruric. You don’t need to ask my permission. What you do in your own free time is your business as long as you abide by the rules I set. But we could have dropped you off had we known you wanted to go into town. We were going that way anyway.” The idea of him running outside in sunlight clearly bothered her.
“The possibility of the girl being a Mixed Blood only occurred to me after you had left,” he explained quietly.
“Where did you guys go today?” Jonnie asked curiously.
“To the supermarket,” Lucinda answered. Not a complete lie. They had indeed stopped by to purchase a few quick items on the way back home.
“So what’s so important about her being a Mixed Blood?” Jonnie asked.
“If she’s a Mixed Blood,” Ruric said gravely, “she might be able to be cured of her blindness.”
“How?” Nico asked, intrigued.
“By mixing a few drops of Monère blood with her blood. Like Jonnie.”
There was a moment of stunned silence as they took in what he was suggesting.
“I don’t see how that will help her,” Jonnie said. “The boost in my senses that I gained from Stefan’s blood only lasted a few days before it wore off.”
“Your wounds healed,” Ruric pointed out. “Mary eyes might be able to heal their underlying damage, the way Jonnie’s skin healed without scar or blemish. If so, she would continue to see, even after the enhancement of her senses wore off.”
Stefan considered the idea thoughtfully, “This would have to be done without her awareness.”
“If we go to her at night,” Ruric suggested, “it would be easy for me to keep her in a deep sleep state and heal her wound afterward. There would be no evidence of what we did. If she regained her sight, she would never know the reason why.” Thereby keeping their secret.
Stefan glanced questioningly at Lucinda.
“As long as our secret remains safe,” Lucinda said, “I see no reason not to try this.”
And so it was agreed and carried out that very evening in the late twilight hours of the night. They followed Mary’s scent to a small ground-floor apartment where she lived alone. Using compulsion, Ruric kept her deeply immersed in sleep as he sliced a shallow cut on her arm with his nail.
Nicking the tip of his finger with his dagger, Stefan squeezed a few drops of his blood into her wound.
Ruric waited several seconds to allow the mixing of their blood, then sealed his mouth over the wound and injected the healing agent. A moment later, her skin knit together, smooth and whole.
They slipped out as silently as they had entered.
“Will you see her again?” Stefan asked once they were back inside the car.
“Not if she regains her sight.”
“Why? It’s obvious you care for her.”
“If she regains her sight,” Ruric said slowly, “she can have a normal life, find a human to love. She is . . . too fragile for me.”
Hard to argue with that.
They drove home in silence.
THE NEXT MORNING, Mary opened her eyes, and for the first time in her life saw things with sharp, vivid clarity.
My God, she could see!
She traced the blue and yellow design of her blanket with a trembling finger. Touched the smooth brown wood of her bedside table.
Color. Pattern. Precious detail.
The doctors and specialists Mary eventually saw couldn’t explain the sudden restoration of her sight. They shook their heads and called it a miracle.
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE REAL MIRACLE occurred several days later. I had contacted Mona Cara, a neighboring Queen. My tiny province bordered the western part of her territory. Had been an original part of it, actually, before High Court had broken off that little piece and given it to me.
The previous Queen who had ruled there had been coolly distant and wary of me; we had coexisted by pretty much ignoring each other. She stayed out of my territory, and I passed lightly through hers. This new Queen, Mona Cara, was a nice surprise, readily and graciously agreeing to allow Nico and Stefan to Bask with her and her people. So here we were the night of the full moon.
A tingle passed through me as I walked into their circle of power set deep in the woods and stepped into the clearing where a Queen gathered her people every month to draw down the rich, life-renewing rays of the moon. Oddly, unexpectedly, I could feel the lunar energy soaked into the ground from countless centuries of Basking. Spilled power drawn down by Monère Queens in an unending, unbroken chain.
Mona Cara was much younger than her predecessor had been, and far perkier, if one could say such a thing about a Queen. She smiled at me and my men, which was just Stefan and Nico; we had left the others at home. Didn’t want to scare the nice Queen off the first time Basking by bringing Ruric with us. Ruric had stayed home to baby-sit Jonnie. Pretty much my role tonight also. No way was I going to send Stefan and Nico alone into a strange new Queen’s territory. I might not be as big and scary as Ruric, but I could be as formidable a foe as he, maybe even more because I came clothed in attractive sheepskin. I didn’t look like the big bad demon I was. But if anyone threatened my men, I was more than ready to kick ass. Of course, I didn’t tell Nico and Stefan that. My reasoning to them was that I had wanted to meet and greet this new neighbor Queen, that it wouldn’t be polite to just send them in alone this first time. They thought I was being diplomatic. Hah! Yeah, right.
On second thought, once I got past the knee-jerk rejection, I guess I was being diplomatic. We were all spiffed up and had even come bearing a present: a simple, elegant black dagger made for me by one of Hell’s finest demon craftsman.
Mona Cara was delighted by the present. “It’s lovely,” she said, the amazed expression on her face telling me that she fully realized the significance of the gift. No Monère had ever been gifted with such fine demoncraft before. “I am honored.”
“I am indebted to you for this service to my men,” I returned with a small dip of my head. Gee, maybe I had a future in demon-Monère politics after all. I was being as kiss-ass polite and proper as any official. But hey, she was doing me a huge favor. And it wasn’t as if I was giving her demon blood. Now that was a definite no-no. Anything else was fair game—or gift—as far as I was concerned.
It wasn’t until we gathered within the Basking circle that I grew jittery. It wasn’t so much the large crowd of Monère that gazed nervously upon us, but the fact that I suddenly felt it—the moon. Round and ripe, hanging above us like a giant Christmas tree ornament pinned up in the sky, glowing and shimmering, eagerly waiting to spill down upon us. I had lost that connection, that awareness, of the moon when I had died and become demon dead over six centuries ago. But I felt it now. And when Mona Cara called the light down, I felt it even more: a tugging, pulling sensation deep within me. Different yet similar to what I had once felt as a Monère Queen.
As the lunar light hit her, a tiny bit of it spilled over into me. And that taste, that familiar taste of power and light, opened up something inside of me that connected above with the full, ripe moon. It sensed me, recognized me, and beamed down a separate ray of lunar light that washed into my demon-dark skin with shimmering incandescence, lighting me up until I glowed like a gold lightbulb, filling me up so much until it felt as if it would burst out of me, and then it did, spilling, flowing into Stefan and Nico standing beside me, while next to me Mona Cara bathed her people in another blanket of lunar light. You could see that my Basking light was a different color than hers: dark streaks were mixed within the glowing light.
Then it was done. What came down from heaven, from the moon, was no more, and the bodies that had been lit with incandescent shine—scores upon scores of Monères . . . and one very surprised demon—drank the luminous energy of the light into themselves, and skin became normal skin once more and no longer glowed.
“Well,” Mona Cara said with a breathless, giddy laugh. “I guess you won’t be needing to come here anymore. Can I still keep the present?”
“Absolutely,” I said, feeling as giddy and light-filled as her.
“Sweet Goddess,” Mona Cara said with a crooked smile. “Wait until the other Queens hear about this.”
EPILOGUE
RURICAND I went back to Hell tor echarge—more him than me. I think I could have gone a couple of weeks longer. My battery seemed to be of a different construct now since I had been reborn. Not wholly demon anymore, but not quite Monère either. I seemed to be a mix of both—demon dead tossed with living Monère into one unusual smorgasbord of a salad. My heart beat like a Monère, but I didn’t need to breathe. I still looked like a demon, lacked scent like one, but I had a beating heart. It slowed down quite a bit in Hell, but didn’t still into silence.
Talon was happy to see us. Hari, too, even though he was a bit overwhelmed and frustrated by his new charges.
Talon and Sarai had gotten a chance to know each other better—mother and son bonding. A different sort of tie than what we had but just as strong a connection in its own way.
Speaking of strong, I guess that word could apply quite nicely to Talon’s mother. Hence Hari’s frustration. He and Sarai butted heads loudly and frequently, arguing with each other worse than any mated couple I’d ever seen. With Talon and Brielle, Sarai was gentle and patient. With Hari, or any other male, she was abrasive and rude. Only the High Lord she treated with cool respect. All other males, excepting her son, felt the blisteringly sharp lash of her tongue and temper.
There were tears in the eyes of both mother and son when Talon returned back home with us to the living realm. And maybe even tears in Hari’s eyes, though these were more of the please-don’t leave-me-with-her kind. Because Sarai was talking of returning to her people, not for a happy reunion but rather to seek revenge. Sarai was certain that one of the Floradëurs, maybe even one of her close kin, had betrayed her and her mate into that demon ambush those many years before. Remembering the hostile reception Talon had received from them the last time, and how we had barely escaped with our skins, Hari was vehemently opposed to the idea.