by Alyssa Day
Tiernan’s hand trembled a little, and the water in the glass rippled. “Whatever you are, stay out.”
As if it heard her, the fog froze to utter stillness, then receded. In the space of two of her rapid heartbeats, it vanished entirely from the window.
“This is where the stupid person walks over to the window to look out, and the zombie breaks the glass and eats her brains,” she muttered, putting the glass down with a little too much force on the counter. “If zombies could float.
“A brilliant investigative reporter, however, calls for help.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and took a step toward the door. But then she dropped the phone from nerveless fingers to the perfectly ordinary carpet in her perfectly ordinary hotel room as the fog, or mist, or whatever the heck it was—not perfectly ordinary, oh, no, not at all ordinary—streamed into her room through the nonexistent cracks in the seam between the window and the sill.
Her reporter’s brain toggled over to its “superobservant” setting, and she took in every detail, shaking her head back and forth, whether in denial or disbelief she had no idea.
The fog coalesced into a sparkling, shimmering shape—a large and broad shape—the shape of a man. The golden light from the lamps reflected off of tiny particles in the water, projecting a cascade of mini-rainbows across every flat surface in a brilliant light show. Then the cloud of mist exploded outward as if triumphantly hailing the man who stepped from it.
The man. The man who, mere seconds before, had been nothing but a cloud. A fog. The man who now stood in the center of her hotel room, breathing hard, staring at her with his ice-green eyes.
Except they weren’t as icy as she remembered. No, this man’s eyes were pure green fire, and every inch of her skin burned as the heat of his gaze swept her from head to toe and then back, lingering on her neck.
“Brennan?” His name came out in a whisper, but he snapped his head up and stared straight into her eyes when she spoke. A brief whisper of danger sent a chill down her spine, and her senses translated the deadly stillness in his pose as that of a feral animal crouching to leap.
Feral and primitive. Wild and beautiful. His silky black hair fell in waves around a face that would cause the highest-paid TV anchor to weep with jealousy. Pure masculine beauty, with dark brows over those amazing green eyes. The cheekbones and bone structure all the Atlanteans she’d met had shared, as if they alone had posed for the most magnificent of the ancient Greek statues. And his mouth . . . oh, his mouth. How could a simple combination of lips and teeth make her wonder what it would be like to taste him?
As reality crumpled around her, some vestige of control snapped into place and Tiernan managed to force words from her suddenly dust-dry throat. “I’m guessing I missed a pretty spectacular entrance back in Boston when I was hiding behind that couch. I had wondered how you guys busted through that window so high off the ground, but I was more thinking ropes coming down from the roof.”
“You are Tiernan?” he demanded, ignoring her nervous chatter. “Tell me. Now.”
“Yes, I’m Tiernan. You know me. We—”
She gasped a little and stopped talking as he took a single step toward her, then another, his large, muscled body leaning forward as if he were stalking her. “He dared to touch you,” he growled, the words nearly unintelligible. “He put his mouth on you. I will kill him.”
She backed away, but the motion seemed to infuriate him even further, because he dove across the several feet separating them as if he really were that wild animal leaping for its prey.
“Brennan, stop! I don’t know what this is about, but you need to calm down so we can—” Memories of his crazed wildness the first time he’d seen her flashed into her mind, shutting down her powers of speech as he took the final step and slammed his hands flat against the wall on either side of her head, caging her against his body.
He wasn’t going to listen to her. She was in danger. Rick had been right. She should have listened, but no, she had to be tough, and now for the second time in an hour she was facing a predator.
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to be prey for a vampire or anybody else,” she shouted, shoving at his chest as he leaned farther toward her. It was like shoving a brick wall. A hot, hard brick wall that smelled like salt and sea and man.
He froze in place, then tilted his head to one side, pinning her with a long, considering stare. “Not his prey,” he finally said, his deep voice sizzling across her nerve endings.
She caught her breath, but before she could speak he lifted one hand from the wall to touch the side of her face.
“Not his prey,” he repeated, bending his face down to hers. “Mine.”
Chapter 4
She’d been partially hidden; blocked by the door that had stood between them. The door that he would have ripped from its frame with his bare hands. But as Brennan had transformed back from mist into his body, the woman had stepped out into the room and he’d seen her face clearly. The face from the newspaper clipping he yet carried in his pocket. The face from those fragments of nearly forgotten dreams. He saw her face, and the entire world jolted and fell out of orbit. There was no sun. There was only her.
Tiernan.
She was so very beautiful. Waves of dark hair framed her face, a perfect frame for her enormous dark brown eyes. The curve of her cheek must have inspired poetry. The curve of her lips must have inspired song.
The curves of her body—well. Those inspired something entirely different. He’d felt his heart pounding in his chest as his body reacted suddenly and fiercely, every inch of him going hard and ready.
She’d stared up at him, defiance and caution mingling in those dark, dark eyes as she met his gaze. That’s all it took. A single glance, and he was done. He was hers.
Then she’d spoken his name, and his calm had shattered. He’d leapt at her, desperate to touch her. To taste her. To take her and make her his and never, ever let her leave him.
She’d said something, shouted something, but only one word penetrated. Prey? Who would dare to make his woman prey? Not prey.
“Mine,” he repeated, almost snarling the word, daring her to defy him. Didn’t she know? Didn’t she understand?
Her eyes widened as if in fear, and something cracked in his heart. How could she be afraid of him? He was hers; had always been hers, would always be hers. The tide of need dragged him under and he lost the thought, trapped in the wanting.
“Would die for you,” he managed to say, but then she gasped a little and he could no longer speak. Could no longer think. Had to taste her. Just once. Just the first of thousands, millions of times.
He bent his head and captured her mouth with his own, and the heat of her, the taste of her, the sheer glory of finally holding her blew through him with the force of a percussive blast. He lifted his head and staggered a few steps back, sure that Poseidon himself must have shot a bolt of power at him from the Trident. A shock wave of pain smashed into and through him, and he had little warning before the curse took over and tried to fulfill its directive: his total destruction.
This could not be emotion—was it? No. It was pain. More pain than he had ever known. The universe exploded in Brennan’s soul as sanity fractured. He yanked his daggers from their sheaths—instinct driving him to defend himself in the only way he knew how—but it was useless. Futile. Weapons couldn’t defend against this enemy. He dropped the daggers and fell to the floor, clutching his chest as the tsunami of emotion ripped through him. Shattered two thousands of years of barrenness—drenched the arid wasteland of his soul with pain.
Anguish and unbearable sadness crushed his heart under the implacable weight of it. Thousands of years of loss striking him all at once. Pains never suffered. Deaths never mourned. Never felt. Oh, Poseidon—feeling—such a puny word for the pain, the unending agony. Dying would be easier.
Dying would be preferable.
“Please, by all the mercy of the gods, just let me die,” he groaned, clenchin
g his teeth, grinding them, his jaw aching as he threw his head back, slamming it against the floor, over and over, mindlessly seeking unconsciousness. Relief. Surcease from the pain. He cried out, or at least he thought he did, as grief claimed him, dragging him down under a riptide of agony to feast on his flesh. On his sanity.
On his soul.
A sound caught his attention, somehow, whispering its way through the pain roaring in his ears. He forced his eyes to open and there she was. Tiernan. Crouching down next to him, hesitantly reaching a hand out. He rolled away from her, unable to bear it. Unable to let her touch him. Maybe it was contagious, maybe she would be caught in the black maelstrom of anguish.
No.
Not her. He could never cause her pain.
When she touched his arm, he realized that pain and loss were not the only forfeited emotions returning to him. Oh, no. There were others.
Desire. Need. Pure, driving lust.
Hunger.
He wanted her with the power of a fierce ocean storm, with a primal need so dark and desperate that it was as if thousands of years of abstinence had all caught up with him at once, demanding to be sated.
Demanding her. Now.
He snapped up into a crouch, catching her wrist in a vise-like grip. Tried to find the words to make her understand. “Tiernan, I have need of you. My body and soul ache for you.”
Emotions raced across her expressive face, and he watched her anger battle her fear and conquer it. Good. She should never fear him. Especially not when he needed so badly to touch her creamy skin. Bury his face in the long dark waves of her hair. Remove every bit of her clothing to discover if her skin could possibly be as silky soft on every inch of her body as he expected it to be. If the tips of her breasts would flush and harden at the touch of his fingers. His lips. His tongue.
His cock hardened to the point of physical pain, and some distant part of his mind that still retained the tiniest bit of rationality wondered at the feeling. Hot, pure desire, after centuries—no, millennia—of none.
“Your body and soul can just let go of me and step back, my friend, or I’ll kick you right in your Atlantean nuts,” she threatened, yanking her arm away from his grasp.
He allowed her to escape, because he realized that yet another emotion was bubbling up inside him in the face of her defiance. Joy. It swirled like a waterspout, filling in the parched and corroded corners of his heart and soul with light and music. Happiness.
A sound worked its way up through his chest and burst from his throat. Laughter. Rusty, after so long unused, but definitely laughter. Joy sliced through Brennan, sharp as the blades of his daggers, honed on the sharpening stone of absence and abandonment. It was bliss, it was joy, it was ecstasy beyond the hopes of the gods themselves. All of the elation he should have experienced over thousands of moments during the course of his emotionally barren existence sprang to life inside him all at once.
Joy, so much joy, thousands of years of experiences that should have brought him delight, but had not. Those lost moments cascaded through him, image after image, speeding up until he was delirious from the panorama of memories that crashed through his mind, filtered through the emotion pounding on every inch of his body; nerve, bone, and sinew.
This, then, was the devious nature of the curse. He would regain his emotions, and they would drive him insane. But he lost the clarity of that realization as she opened her lovely, lovely mouth to speak.
“Brennan,” she said again, his name and something else, and her voice was cool water to a parched warrior who’d battled long and hard in the desert wastes of Persia; warmth and softness to one who’d survived weeks hunting vampire warlords in the frozen heights of Siberia. Her voice was joy made into sound, but her words were meaningless.
He needed her. Only Tiernan could ride the torrent of emotion with him and help him tame it. She was his, and he was hers, and he had waited for her for all the long years of his life. If only he could climb inside the cool, serene center of her, he would be restored. She had to understand. He had to make her understand.
He pushed himself off the floor in a sudden, explosive movement and caught her silken hair in his rough and calloused hands. Warriors’ hands. Hands that had no right . . . But the thought disappeared, crushed under the spiking drive of need. He had to make her understand. She was his life and sanity.
She was his everything.
He pulled her to him, ripping at the clothing that formed a barrier between them, desperate to feel her skin, her radiant, translucent, beautiful skin. Closer, closer. She struggled and the pain stabbed at him, joy turning to despair. Would she really try to leave him? Abandon him to a barren existence yet again?
Poseidon’s curse roared through his memory. Cursed to forget her. No. Never. The idea of it drove him to a panic that clutched him in its sharpened claws and ate at his soul. Thousands of years of enforced solitude shattered around him, and his barren and desperate heart lurched like a hideous creature, squinting, into the light.
“Mine,” he snarled. “You will never, ever leave me again.” Tearing at the cloth that dared block her from his touch. Burying his face in the warmth between her lovely round breasts, marveling at the contrast of his sun-darkened hand against her creamy skin.
“Lonely,” he managed, wondering why the lace covering her from his sight was darkening with wetness, why his mind had gone hot and black. “Help me.”
She made a sound, said more words, but though the meaning of the words was lost to him, the meaning of the sound was clear. Pain. Fear.
He was scaring her. Maybe hurting her.
The realization cut through the fog of madness as nothing else could have done. No. He would never hurt her. Oh, by all the gods, what had he done?
What was he still doing?
He threw himself back and away from her, forcing himself to find a semblance of calm. Forcing himself to hear and understand what she was saying.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she said, her face so white he thought she would surely faint from shock or terror at any moment. “Brennan. Brennan, we’re supposed to be allies. What happened? Did the vamps get to you, too?”
She thought he was enthralled? But . . . he needed to tell her. He needed to explain.
“So long,” he began, the words nearly choking him. “So long, and the curse. So lonely.” A burst of wild laughter surged up from his chest, cutting off whatever he’d been about to say. How to explain an ancient curse to a modern journalist? She’d think him a liar or, worse, insane. He probably was insane.
But he had to try. He slowly stood and backed farther away until he was standing against the window of the small room. “Tiernan. I—Oh, gods, it hurts.” He doubled over for an instant, then forced himself upright again. “I cannot . . . cannot begin to apologize enough for my . . . my behavior. I can only beg your forgiveness and hope you will give me the chance to explain.”
She jumped to her feet and ran to the door, never stopping until her hand was on the handle. “Are you nuts? After that? I’m going to call the police and . . .”
As her words trailed off, he fought for some measure of rational thought and managed to realize what she must be thinking. “A few moments, please,” he whispered, but she seemed to hear him. An eternity passed as she considered his words, but finally she nodded, and he bent over and inhaled long, slow, deep breaths, practicing the calming exercises he had not used since he was a novice warrior. At first he thought it was in vain; that the simple act of drawing breath could not begin to conquer the madness of so many years of returning feelings.
In. Out. In. Out. Finally, tens or hundreds of breaths later, he achieved what he hoped was at least a temporary leash on the raging emotions, and he was able to recall the reason behind their presence.
“If you call the police, our mission here will be ruined,” he said quietly. “We cannot afford to draw that kind of attention to ourselves if we wish to discover the truth behind these scientific experiments on shift
er and human brains. I can never apologize enough for what happened, but I can attempt to explain.”
She hesitated, and then nodded.
A bolt of hope shot through him, threatening to take him to his knees, but he ruthlessly stamped it down. “You are now afraid to remain anywhere near me, however, and with very good reason.”
She nodded again, narrowing her beautiful dark eyes but still remaining silent.
“Then perhaps you will do me the very undeserved honor of listening to me for a short time, while I tell you a tale from long ago. All I ask, though it will be almost impossible, is that you try to believe that I am telling you the absolute truth.”
She considered that for several long moments in silence, her hand still on the door handle and her body still poised for flight. Finally she apparently came to a decision, because she gave a brief nod. “All right. I’ll listen to you. For Susannah. But remember what you said about truth. Trust me, I will know the difference.”
Darkness shuttered her expression, almost as if the burden of truth somehow pained her. Brennan shook off the fanciful impression and sat down in a chair in the corner farthest from her, so as not to threaten her any more than he already had. He refused to admit, even to himself, that his legs felt as if they would no longer hold him up. Shame swamped him and he was unable to meet her eyes, terrified of the condemnation he’d see in them. That he deserved.
“Let us begin, then, with an unforgivable truth that occurred more than two thousand years ago,” he said, steeling himself against the disgust he knew she’d feel for his debauched existence and the deaths he had caused. She was the one—she must be the one—and now he would destroy any hope that she would ever have any feelings for him other than fear, revulsion, and condemnation.
After Corelia and the babe, though, he had known he could never deserve a chance at happiness. It had been an eternity since he’d even thought the state possible.
Poseidon had won. Finally and irrevocably. Brennan would tell his story, she would order him from her, and he would welcome death. There could be no going back from this, once it began.