by Sunny
“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.<
br />
“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 engines, 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.
“What?” I said with surprise.
“Your wounds are healed,” Nico repeated.
I looked down at my wrists. The ugly burnt flesh I expected to see was not there. In its place was flawless healed skin. It so shocked me that I ran my fingertips over the smooth skin, not believing what my eyes beheld until my touch confirmed it. I had healed.
“How can that be?” I whispered.
“Why are you so surprised?” Nico asked.
“Because I cannot heal here, not in this realm.”
“You just did.”
“Yes.” My gaze flew to my men, looked at them with new and different eyes. “Your wounds are gone as well.”
They glanced down at themselves. Nico murmured, “Well that was a little fast.” But Talon looked as astounded as I.
“Do you normally heal this fast, Talon?”
“No, mistress. It usually takes me weeks.”
“Your wounds were unchanged two hours ago,” Stefan said, perched sideways on a seat, “and now they have disappeared. Even Monères don’t heal that fast. Do you heal that quickly down in your realm?”
I shook my head. “It would have taken me two days, not two hours, for those burn wounds to repair. This came from our binding.” Then, even more specifically. “This came from Ta
lon.”
“Me?” Talon said with surprise.
I nodded. “Floradëurs are known to heal quickly.”
“But I don’t.”
“In Hell you do. That is one of your gifts.”
“There is so much I do not know of my kind,” Talon murmured.
“You will know more, soon enough,” I promised him. “But first we go to High Court.”
Excitement and fear shone in those pure black eyes. Talon had home to look forward to afterward. But in Stefan and Nico, I sensed only fear.
“The Queen Mother. High Court,” Nico muttered. “Why go to all that effort to save me if you were just going to toss me to the Council?”
My eyes touched upon both Nico and Stefan. “Do not worry, you are no longer rogues. We will be welcome there. Well,” I drawled, compelled to be truthful, “at least by some. Not all. But no harm will come to you there.”
We descended down through layers of clouds, landing softly on a narrow airstrip surrounded by wild forest. We deplaned and watched from the lighted tarmac as the jet propelled itself quickly airborne again. Robert, the pilot, had been quite relieved to see me conscious once more.
“The pilot asked no questions,” Stefan said, standing beside me.
“He has been with me for many years. And he took me—us—to where I had instructed him to go, were I ever wounded.”
Just leave me there and fly away had been my mandate.
In this quiet pocket of time before the others descended upon us, I took the opportunity to give my men some important instructions as well. “Speak of our binding to no one else.”
“Why?” asked Jonnie.
“While it gives us strength, it also entails weakness that our enemies might seek to exploit if they knew of it.”
“What weakness?” Jonnie asked.
“That if you kill one, you might kill all of us.”
“Oh. I guess that is a pretty big weakness,” he said.
“We will not say anything to others,” Stefan said. “Will you tell your brother?”
I nodded. “And the High Lord; they will have to know. The only one in this realm who I will inform will be the Queen Mother.”