“He’s warm. Almost hot,” Amber said softly, and his eyes, when he lifted them to me, were frightened.
By nature, Monère were cold-blooded creatures, their skins cool, their heartbeats slow. Night was their domain and they slept during the day when the hot sun ruled the sky. As a Mixed Blood, I was different. I could walk the days as well as the nights. I could withstand the sun, the heat, as well as the cool darkness. But Full Bloods could not.
I didn’t know if what was happening was because of me. I didn’t heal this way. My curative process was quick and clean. They were usually miraculously whole right after I channeled energy into them. It had never been like this before, a prolonged, protracted, intensifying process. Nor had anyone continued to glow for so long after I had stopped. Was the human part of my energy flow somehow making him warm? Or was it part of the corruption itself? Most importantly, how long could Beldar’s body tolerate the increased temperature?
He writhed and tossed on the ground in pitiful distress and we could only anchor him by wrists and ankles while he burned. And burned was the word for it. The black light glowing through his chest and abdomen became almost unbearably brilliant and warm. Black shards of light glittered and gleamed through the front of him like the sun pulsing through a dark prism. But as he tossed and moaned, begged and cried in tearful writhing agony, the blackness seemed to grow lighter. He sparkled brilliantly, a harsh black-and-white thing.
Slowly, so slowly that I wasn’t sure if I was seeing the truth of what was, or of what I wished it to be…[ ]slowly that emitting light gained ascendance over the darkness, overpowering it, shining through it…burning it away. The dark edges shrunk, slowly eaten away by the pure cleansing white light.
Beldar simply lay there now, moaning softly and panting, slicked with perspiration as he continued to glow, as light slowly overcame darkness. But it was a cool dampness, not a warm one that drenched his skin.
“It’s burning the corruption away, Beldar,” I said, caressing his wrists in comfort now rather than in restraint. “Soon,” I crooned. “It’s almost done.”
His chest heaved, filling and emptying like a bellow. “I pray that it finishes soon, either way. As long as I never experience that pain again. Dying would be better than going through that again.”
“Hush,” I admonished gently. “You’re not going to die. You’re going to live.” I was certain of it now as the warmth in his skin faded even as the darkness within him disappeared. When the last speck of that rotten blackness vanished in a stunning blaze of glorious white light, the radiance was gone. Like a switch suddenly flipped off, he suddenly stopped glowing, and the light vanished back into Beldar in one quick flash.
I ran my hands gently over the new skin on Beldar’s chest. His flesh was smooth, whole, healed. I felt only solid muscle and untorn skin beneath my palms as I slid my hands lower, over his abdomen. Sensed only wellness through my tingling moles.
“You’re well,” I said, smiling brilliantly.
He lay there on his back, looking completely wrung out. “I feel as if I’ve been to Hell and back.”
“I did that once,” I said quietly. “I felt as if I were being torn apart.”
“That pretty much describes it.” Beldar’s lips curved into a tired smile. “You healed me.”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure that I did. My powers don’t work like that. Maybe it was simply your own lunar light within you. Maybe that healed you once it was brought out.”
“No,” Beldar said with soft surety, “you healed me.”
CHAPTER 6
We ended up taking turns showering. I went first at the men’s insistence, even though I thought Beldar should go before me—the putrid smell still clung to him.
Amber efficiently bagged the comforter and Beldar’s shirt, both stained with slimy blackness, and threw them out. The room smelled much better with them gone. Beldar ended up wearing one of my size large T-shirts, one of the ones I usually wore to bed.
“It smells of you,” he said, his emerald green eyes somehow looking even larger and more brilliant with his damp hair slicked back away from his face.
I didn’t know how to treat him now. Not with the combative banter we usually thrust and parried our words with. We might not have had intercourse, but we’d been intimate, and I discovered that that in and of itself created a bond. Less strong but still there. And somehow, I could read him better now. I saw the sadness that filled those eyes for one brief moment before he slid his usual carefree mask back on, a charming roguish smile once more gracing his lips.
I felt an answering sadness in me that I had to give him back into Mona Sera’s cruel rule. That he couldn’t belong to me.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
The doorbell rang and I went to the door and opened it without looking because I knew by their slow heartbeats who were on the other side of it—Gryphon and Chami. But they weren’t alone. Another, whose heart did not beat, stood beside them. Lucinda. And in front of her was what looked like an amazingly big dog.
I backed up slowly and instinctively away from that big dog because I knew that wasn’t what it really was.
I’d never seen a hellhound before, had only heard their hellish baying, but as I looked into those yellow eyes—not amber but almost a true yellow, like the burning fires of hell, feral and frighteningly intelligent—I knew that that was what stood before me. A hellhound almost as big as me, its head reaching nearly to my shoulders, brindle black and brown in coloration.
It padded silently into my apartment and for one wild moment, I seriously considered giving in to my body’s screaming urges and throwing myself out the window to escape it, even knowing that it was seven stories down to the bottom, a distance I could not survive. It was a gut primal reaction to danger, the desire to flee. These creatures ate big bad demons, gobbled them down. Even the demon dead fled before them. It took a huge straining effort on my part not to run screaming away from it.
I moved slowly backward until I bumped up against Amber. His hands lifted to my shoulders and began to shift me behind him, but I resisted, shaking my head slightly. Beldar was a still, unmoving presence beside Amber, though that wasn’t completely true. He was still in the sense he wasn’t running, but he was moving—trembling. Almost violent tremors shook his entire body.
We were all deathly still, fearful that any sudden moves might trigger violence. Only Lucinda strolled casually into the apartment with swaying lithe ease. Gryphon and Chami entered and closed the door behind them, and the latching sound it made seemed loud and portentous in the harrowing silence.
“You lied to me,” Lucinda said, her eyes cool, wide, and alert. “No one here has been bitten.”
“They didn’t lie,” I said hoarsely. “Beldar was bitten but he’s healed now.”
Lucinda gave an almost evil laugh. Melodious, tinkling even, but with a malice that made your skin creep. “Now I know you surely lie. No one heals a hellhound’s bite.”
Well, hell. How do you argue with a demon dead princess? “It’s the truth. Can’t you smell it, the decaying scent? It lingers still on Beldar.”
Both mistress and beast padded over to Beldar, and he looked as if he didn’t know which to be more frightened of, Lucinda or the hellhound. Beldar’s eyes grew enormous but he didn’t run. More than I could have done, I think, faced with the two of them so close they could touch you, kill you, rip you apart. Or simply bite you again and leave you to die in rotting corruption.
“You must be Beldar,” Lucinda crooned. One long, sharp fingernail scraped down his cheek. He shuddered and I wondered it if was in fear, or in reaction to Lucinda’s sensual voice slithering over him in a tactile caress.
“Yes,” he rasped, a faint sound barely audible. He looked as if he were trying not to breathe too hard. Be still and maybe the beasts before him would not tear him apart.
A long pointy fingernail stroked down Beldar’s chest, slipped under his T-shirt and lifted it up, b
aring his tense, ridged abdomen.
Lucinda’s head lowered and her cheek brushed against Beldar’s nipple. “I do smell something…” She turned her head slowly back and forth, rubbing against him almost like a cat, and drew in a deep breath “…here.”
There was a dazed expression in Beldar’s eyes, helpless and bewildered. Fear was there, yes. But also arousal. Shocking, unexpected, sexual excitement was growing against his will. He hadn’t known what a demon dead could do to him.
Beside Lucinda, the beast’s great jaws yawned wide and open, revealing something no earthly canine possessed—a double row of razor-sharp fangs. As if one row wasn’t already enough. A long pink tongue rolled out and lapped against Beldar’s healed fleshed in the exact spot where he had been bitten, leaving behind a flushing redness, as if sandpaper had scraped across that skin. Beldar looked as if he were about to keel over or throw up.
Lucinda straightened up and captured Beldar’s eyes. “Did Brindell bite you?”
Brindell, apparently, was the hellhound’s name.
“Yes,” Beldar said faintly, his voice dry and crackly. “And Mona Lisa healed me.”
All eyes, including those frightening yellow ones, swung to me.
I never did well being the object of everyone’s scrutiny. Made me want to distract them. “If you can’t heal a hell-[ ]hound’s bite, Lucinda, as you say, then why did you come?” Even without serving as a distraction, it was something I wanted to know.
Something flickered in Lucinda’s eyes. “I was going to kill him. Free him from his pain. Give him a chance to make the transition to Hell before all his energy was completely consumed.”
A mercy kill. That was unexpectedly—kind. More like what Halcyon would have done. Not, I would have thought, something Lucinda would do or even think to do. Perhaps she was more her brother’s sister than she looked. More than her stunning, lushly cruel appearance suggested. Or maybe she simply wanted to clean up her mess, get rid of the evidence, as they say. But then again, when Beldar died—and he would have done that fairly soon—all evidence would have disappeared with him. I didn’t know what to think.
“How did you heal him?” Lucinda demanded, her eyes fixed on me with cool, sharp appraisal.
“I brought forth his light. I think his own light ate away the corruption.”
“Ah, you made him glow, did you, you naughty girl.” She gave a shiver-inducing low chuckle. “His light or your power? Which was it, I wonder.”
Hopefully she wasn’t thinking of conducting an experiment. Like having Brindell bite Beldar again or someone else, then Lucinda making them glow to see if they healed. It was a nasty, nasty thought. I didn’t like having it in my head.
The hellhound glided over to me. I tensed, unable to help myself, as the great brindled beast sniffed my face, lingering around my mouth, and moved downward. I flinched as it sniffed my crotch. Gee, maybe it had more in common with its canine brothers—or would that be sisters?—than just the “hound” at the end of its name.
Satisfied with me, the creature snuffled curiously at Amber, standing behind me, then rolled out its long pink tongue in a knowing doggy grin as if to say: Ah, so that’s who I smell on you.
It seemed uncannily intelligent, those yellow eyes, as if it understood all that had been said. Closing its mouth and those frightening teeth, it swung back to sniff at me once more. How fun.
“Brindell seems to be as fascinated by you as my brother is,” Lucinda murmured, and I didn’t know whether to be outraged or not on Halcyon’s behalf at having his sister compare him to a dog. A hellhound, demon beast, or not, was still essentially a dog. Hell’s version of one, at least.
“Perhaps it is the human blood mixed within your veins,” Lucinda pondered thoughtfully, her hand resting casually on Beldar’s chest, still bared, as if she had forgotten where it lay. “It makes you different. Stronger instead of weakening you as it does to others, so that you have both sides’ strength without the weaknesses.”
Lucinda turned her contemplative eyes back to Beldar, and her gaze fell to the slow bounding pulse in his neck. It sped up beneath her dangerous attention. “I wonder if your blood would taste of her magic. Or would it carry a hint of the corrupting darkness that almost consumed you? What do you say, Beldar? Hmmm? A little sip of your blood, and then Brindell and I shall leave you.”
It was almost funny. With Beldar a head taller than Lucinda, she looked tiny beside him, like something he had to protect instead of something threatening him. But the trapped look in Beldar’s eyes, the frozen stillness he held himself in beneath her hand, said he knew the real situation. The diminutive demon princess was something to be feared.
“The process by which he healed was strange, erratic,” I said, speaking up. “I do not know how his blood would react in you. And I would ask that you not risk it, Lucinda.”
She turned her dangerous, slumberous eyes my way. “You say that in an effort to spare your man.”
“Yes, but it is also out of concern for you, Lucinda. You are Halcyon’s sister,” I said with truthful sincerity. “I would not wish any harm to come to you even inadvertently by my hand.”
Her dark eyes, so like her brother’s, narrowed in inscrutable thought. “How odd you are. No wonder he finds himself so drawn to you.” Then she blinked, as if clearing away her thoughts. “Brindell,” she called softly.
The hellhound swung away from me and padded obediently to her mistress’ side. Without another word, Lucinda and her hellhound departed.
Beldar sagged against Amber as the door closed. I think we all sagged a little. Feeling as if gelatin were holding me up instead of solid bones, I sank shakily down onto the love seat.
“Not one of my best ideas, asking you to bring Lucinda back,” I murmured weakly. “She wouldn’t have been able to save Beldar anyway.”
“No, but you were able to,” Gryphon said. He gazed at Beldar, strode to the other man, and gave him a tight embracing hug. And I realized that Beldar had been Gryphon’s friend, too.
“It is good to have you back, brother,” Gryphon said, stepping back.
“It is good to be whole once more. And to garner a taste of the bounty you and Amber both enjoy.” Beldar’s tone was light, but the emotion shadowing his eyes was not. “You lucky bastards.”
“Yes,” Gryphon said softly, as the three of them turned to look at me—Amber, Gryphon, and Beldar. “Yes, we are. Very, very lucky.”
CHAPTER 7
When night fell again, we sat on that same bench in Rockefeller Plaza where all this had begun, waiting for Mona Sera. I sat in my usual left corner, with Beldar seated on my right. Amber, Gryphon, and Chami stood to my left, slightly behind me. And though Beldar sat on “their” side, versus “ours,” he still felt a part of our group. There was no animosity, no wariness toward him on the men’s part, nor him toward them. Only a touch of sadness.
Beldar was unusually quiet and serious, as if his glib and charming surface skin had burned away with his rotted flesh, leaving him naked and tender. And I…I seemed to be as quiet and serious and as solemn as he. We sat in silence until Beldar broke it.
“I will continue to hope, you know,” he said, his brilliant green eyes fixed on the road in front of us.
“For what, Beldar?” I asked, making myself turn and look at him, something I had been avoiding doing up till now. His long white hair and shocking green eyes were as startling and beautiful as always. But the sight hurt me somehow rather than pleased me. Made my heart ache.
“That one day I, too, will become lucky.”
Simple words, with not so simple meaning. They stabbed me sweetly because I wished it, too, in my heart of hearts—that he belonged to me. But wishing was just that, wishing. It did not make things come true.
“I do not think Mona Sera will ever give you up, Beldar,” I said in a low voice.
His eyes continued to restlessly sweep the cars that passed. An almost-silent sigh lifted his chest. “You are correct. Mona Sera woul
d sooner see me dust and ashes than have you acquire another of her men. She threw Gryphon and Amber away like broken toys, and now pouts like a spoiled child that you troubled to fix them and keep them. And not only that, but make them even better than what they once were. She envies you.”
“Me?” I said. It would have surprised me less had he turned and smacked me across the face. “She envies me, her Mixed Blood bastard child?”
“Yes, she is jealous of Amber’s and Gryphon’s devotion to you. Devotion that she could never inspire. Will never be able to inspire. They served her, a pure Full Blood Queen, out of fear. As do I. As do all of her men. But they serve you, a Mixed Blood Queen, out of love. And they serve you better because of that love. That she will never be able to forgive you for—for making her jealous of you when she considers you less.”
It was an oddly perceptive observation, something I would never have conceived of. And yet that wasn’t what I had meant. “I meant to say that she will not give you up because she values you.”
His lips twisted into a wry smile devoid of humor. “You are correct. She does value me, as you say, or she would have simply let me rot away. Just bringing me to you is unusual care on her part. Yes, she…values me, and shall do so up until the time my threat to her outweighs my usefulness to her. Then she shall kill me without a blink, without a tear from those lovely cold eyes. Shall you mourn me then, Mona Lisa? Will you think of me as I will think of you with my last dying breath? Or will you have forgotten me long before?”
His words and the calm acceptance of his fate shook me. “She may give you to another Queen,” I whispered.
“And risk having another benefit from something she gave up, as what happened with you?” He shook his head. “No, that is not Mona Sera’s way.”
“You must not wish to…[ ]become lucky, Beldar. It is both dangerous and unfair to you because it is unlikely ever to happen. You must be content that Mona Sera does care for you.” In her own twisted, selfish way.
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