He was losing his mind.
Losing control. Of his voice, his arms, his . . . self.
Christ. The word lashed like a bright crack of lightning along his abused nerves.
Iestyn sat trapped on the toilet seat, trapped in his unresponsive body, fat, fiery ripples of power coursing through his veins and along his bones, coiling in his heart and bowels, as the demon burrowed and twined deeper, farther, into its host.
“Iestyn?” Shock in Lara’s voice.
Horror in her eyes.
Freed from hiding, the demon who had been held captive by the heth’s power tightened his borrowed arms around Lara’s hips, enjoying her panicked struggle to be free—free, free, after days of concealment, of confine-ment—savoring the soft, yielding flesh of her belly against his stubbled jaw. His cock swelled. Twitched. He wanted to turn his face and bite her, fuck her, eat her, have her, while she jerked and bled and moaned.
No.
No.
Iestyn loosed his arms.
Lara stumbled back a step, reaching behind her for the support of the tiled wall. “Iestyn, what’s wrong? What happened?”
Silly bitch. He could smell her fear. She knew. She had to know.
Iestyn exerted control, fighting for his voice. “Get away from me.” A guttural growl.
“What is it?” Shaking, Lara stood her ground. “Let me help.
Let me help you.”
“Can’t.” The word burst from Iestyn’s throat. “Go. Now.”
“What happened to you?”
Angels and their fucking explanations.
A great wave of love and despair swept over him. His head throbbed. He couldn’t think. The demon hammered iron spikes into his brain, punishment for his disobedience.
He could feel his skull splitting, his mind yielding, his identity failing and falling away like ice chunks dropping from a glacier, caving into the sea. Lost . . .
“Demon. You may call me Cudd. ” Iestyn shivered. Had he said that out loud? He licked his lips. “Inside me. In Norfolk.”
Lara’s back pressed the wall. “How?”
Cudd fed on her disbelief, fed on her fear.
“You know what they say.” The demon jerked Iestyn’s mouth into a grin. “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.
He really shouldn’t have passed out on a dead man after our little alley fight.”
“But in the car . . .”
“Wasn’t I clever?” Spinning, weaving, plotting, planning, biding his fucking time. “Or perhaps you were just very dumb. We wanted to get inside Rockhaven. Inside the wards.
Our merfolk friend’s shields provided the means. And you provided the way.”
Iestyn heard the demon’s words coming out of his mouth, his throat. He flailed inside his head, trapped inside his own body. He couldn’t move. His strength was drying up.
Like a beached whale, beyond help or hope of the sea.
“Zayin . . .” He forced the name through stiff lips.
Damn him, curse him, eat him. “Bound it.”
The demon’s spite flared. Like being in a box, blind, deaf, dumb. Hate it. Hate him. Hate.
Iestyn spasmed and went rigid.
Cudd shook his borrowed body like a dog, once more in control. “But I’m here now. I’m free. Thanks to you. The merfolk aren’t quite as attractive a target as the nephilim, of course. But still, my master will be pleased.”
“Why?” Lara asked.
Why didn’t she run? Run, thought Iestyn.
“Their wards have been nearly as inconvenient as yours. I must reward you for that. Although perhaps you won’t enjoy your reward. You’re such a good girl, Lara,” the demon crooned. “But that just makes it more delicious for me.”
Her face went white.
“No,” Iestyn said simply and stood.
This son of a bitch would not touch her. He would not touch her.
Not while he lived.
“Go,” he said clearly. “Get away.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I can’t leave. You need me.”
Need you to be safe, he thought. Need you to go.
“Get help. Get . . .” He searched through the haze of pain, the stink of decay and death rising from his brain. “Dylan.”
But instead of moving away, she took a step toward him.
“There’s no time.”
No time, he accepted. No guarantees, no hope.
“Iestyn.” Another step closer. He could smell her hair, sweet as lilies over the stink of blood. He clenched his fists.
“Do you trust me?”
He met her eyes, deep shining gray like the sea at sunset or the sky at dawn.
“Yes,” he said.
*
Lara’s heart slammed against her ribs. Her stomach was trying to crawl up her throat.
She didn’t kid herself she knew what she was doing. But Simon wasn’t going to rescue her this time. Rescue them.
She knew the damage a thwarted demon could inflict on a reluctant host, wreck his body, scramble his brains. She couldn’t run away and let that happen. Not to anybody. Not to Iestyn.
Her knees shook.
Maybe, if he believed in her, it didn’t matter so much that she had so little faith in herself. Maybe together . . .
She thought she understood what had happened. By opening himself to Lara, by allowing her to tap his elemental energy, Iestyn had left himself vulnerable to the demon trapped inside him. When their conjoined magics shattered the heth, Cudd had rushed along the open channels of power to take swift possession of his host. With the demon already lodged inside him, Iestyn could not tear free of Cudd’s control. Not alone.
A frisson of uncertainty shook her spine. She was drained and sore, tired and afraid. She didn’t have the training or the power for what she was about to attempt. She didn’t have an anchor.
She didn’t have a choice.
Framing Iestyn’s face in her bloody hands, she pressed her mouth to his mouth. A fetid whiff of demon made her pause.
But under it, she could taste Iestyn, his flavor, rich, salty, reassuring.
What must be . . .
Closing her eyes, she poured out her soul, spirit casting into his body.
*
Hot. Bright. Like swallowing the sun. Light burst in Iestyn’s skull, burned behind his eyes. He could not see. An enormous ball of gaseous energy seethed inside him. It radiated from the center of his chest, shoving aside his internal organs, spleen, liver, lungs. He was stretched ful , what was left of his mind and will stretched as thin as the latex of a balloon.
If he so much as breathed in, Iestyn thought, he would pop.
His boundaries wavered. He could not feel the limits of his body, could not find his fingers and toes.
But he felt Lara, moving inside him, offering up her strength for his use, giving shape to his body, giving form to the brightness. Lara, breathing with his lungs. Lara, seeing out of his eyes.
He squinted. Focused.
And saw Lara’s body crumpled against the wall, her black hair spread on the white tile.
The sight snapped him back to himself.
What had she done? Was she dead?
But he could feel her with him. Inside him. With the demon.
He was in the bathroom. They were. Lara and the demon, inside his body, naked, in the bathroom.
He looked at the shell of her body, motionless on the floor.
Not dead, not dead. But empty. She had emptied herself for him.
A dull throbbing filled his head, like feet rushing up the stairs, like fists pounding at the door, like the beating of his own heart.
Cudd raged inside him like a fever, evil, virulent, shooting out lines of sticky fire. But the demon was no match for them, for Iestyn’s strength and Lara’s words and their combined power.
“Unclean spirit!” Iestyn shouted as the door to the suite burst open. “I cast you out!”
<
br /> And the fire ripped from his brain and heart and loins and erupted into the room.
He barely noticed.
He crawled across the floor to Lara. She looked like Hell.
Like death. Her face was the color of melted wax, her lashes dark against her pale cheeks.
“Lara.”
A wind whipped through the open door. The fire shrieked and shot toward the ceiling. Heat singed his legs.
Iestyn threw himself over Lara’s limp body, wrapping protectively around her to shield her from the reaching, greedy flames.
Someone shouted, a deep command.
The fire flickered and died.
Shaking, Iestyn pulled Lara’s body into his arms, cradling her against his naked chest. One blood-streaked hand slipped to the tile, fingers curled upward like the petals of a lily. He pressed his lips to her brow, her cheek, her unresponsive mouth. Not dead, please God, not . . .
“Lara.” A cry from his heart. A prayer, breathed against the smoke and silence.
When her eyes opened, he buried his face in her hair.
Footsteps crossed the outer room. A light flicked on, slanting across the threshold.
“Well, well.” A male voice, vaguely familiar, almost amused.
A man’s legs in the corner of his vision. “Somebody’s been having fun.”
Stunned, Iestyn raised his head.
And saw Dylan Hunter standing at the bathroom door.
*
They made, Lara was forced to admit, quite an impression.
Lucy Hunter’s brother Dylan, lean and dark, with brooding black eyes and a pirate’s ponytail. And Morgan Bressay, the finfolk lord—she wasn’t quite sure what finfolk were, and no one bothered to explain—with Iestyn’s eyes in his brutal Viking face. The wardens of World’s End.
Under any other circumstances she would have been even more impressed.
At the moment she was mostly just exhausted.
She’d managed to stay alert and more or less on her feet during the introductions. But after Iestyn had dragged on his jeans and settled back against the headboard of their bed, she’d allowed herself to be coaxed against his side.
Now she drifted, safe and deliciously warm, his chest for her pillow, his arms holding her close, the murmur of masculine voices rising and falling around her like the sound of the sea.
“—must have triggered the wards.”
“—could account for your burn.”
“—knew . . . a breach somewhere.”
Iestyn’s fingers feathered gently through her hair. She closed her eyes. Just for a moment, she promised herself.
They were silent awhile, or maybe she dozed.
“—what to do with her,” someone was saying.
She stirred.
“—be here without Lara.” Iestyn’s voice was firm.
“The angel,” Dylan said dryly.
“Fallen angel,” Morgan said.
A knock at the door. Lara opened her eyes. And caught them staring at her, these strangers who knew Iestyn. She was suddenly conscious of the fact that she was lying practically across his lap wearing nothing but his T-shirt.
She tugged the hem down over her thighs.
“That would be my wife,” Morgan said and went to open the door.
Elizabeth Bressay had sleek brown hair, intelligent brown eyes, and a reassuring manner. She cleaned and irrigated Lara’s hand, applied ointment and a butterfly closure.
“There doesn’t seem to be any sensory or vascular damage,” she said. “But we’ll want to keep an eye on it for infection.”
Don’t ask, Lara told herself. It doesn’t matter. And a moment later heard herself say, “I’m sorry, but are you . . .”
“A real medical doctor?” Elizabeth smiled. “Yes.”
“She wants to know if you are one of us,” Morgan said over his wife’s shoulder.
Lara flushed.
“Oh. I see.” Elizabeth glanced from Lara to Iestyn and back again. But whatever she saw, she kept to herself. “No, I’m human. Quite ordinary.”
“Not ordinary at all,” her husband murmured.
A look passed between them, intimate as a kiss, before Elizabeth turned back to Lara. “Date of last tetanus shot?”
she asked briskly.
“I’m not sure,” Lara confessed.
“Well, stop by the clinic tomorrow and we’ll take care of that. You, too,” she said to Iestyn. “Although Lucy can do more for you than I can.”
Iestyn’s face was suddenly raw and young. “Lucy.”
“Yes, didn’t they tell you? Men.” Elizabeth shook her head. Smiled at Iestyn with maternal warmth. “Lucy and Conn are on their way here. To World’s End. We’re expecting them tomorrow.”
*
Lara stood with Iestyn on the private dock that jutted out from the fingers of rock and the shelter of pines. Dylan and Regina’s house perched on a patch of short, sandy lawn above the bay, a traditional New England saltbox with a sturdy central chimney. The spare lines of the house were softened by tubs of blooming flowers and curtains blowing in the open windows. Cars and trucks parked haphazardly in the drive. Three boats were tied to the dock. Cats and children wandered underfoot, of both sexes and various ages, from teenagers to toddlers. She did her best to sort them out, to keep them straight, to match siblings to spouses to children, but they flowed together, sweeping around Iestyn and Lara in a warm, welcoming, undisciplined wave, merfolk and human.
For a people with a low birth rate, there certainly were a lot of them.
Confused and overwhelmed, Lara stuck close by Iestyn’s side, the one familiar face in this sea of friendly strangers.
She had always thought of him as someone fundamentally alone. Like her. Hadn’t he done his best to make her see him that way?
Two lost souls.
She bit her lip, the tiny pain a counterpoint to the pang at her heart.
She knew all about the importance of community. All along, she’d wanted to restore Iestyn to his own kind, to the protection of his people.
But what they’d actually found was different. Unlike the nephilim at Rockhaven, the people in this house weren’t bound together by the need for self-preservation or some quest for self-improvement. It was disconcerting to realize that Iestyn had more than a community willing to reclaim him. This was a family waiting to embrace him.
Any doubt she might have harbored about that disappeared when the last boat tied at the dock and three passengers disembarked.
Lara squinted, her heart quickening as she recognized the figures from her dream. Iestyn’s dream. A man with eyes like rain, a girl with hair like straw, a dog . . .
“Is that . . .”
Conn ap Llyr, the sea lord, and his consort, Lucy.
Iestyn stiffened beside her. Under her hand, his arm muscles were rigid. His face was white with emotion.
“Go on,” Lara murmured and released his arm. “Go see them.”
With one bright, backward glance like a boy’s, he left her, striding down the sun-bleached dock, not quite running to meet them.
The dog, a massive, graying beast, barked.
The woman raised her head. Lara was close enough to see the emotions flit across her face. Shock. Relief. Delight.
Lucy held out her arms and Iestyn went into them.
*
He was taller than Lucy now, Iestyn realized. The top of her head almost clipped his chin before she hugged him tight. “Iestyn,” she whispered. And again, as if she couldn’t believe it, “Iestyn.”
He adjusted his arms around her, her face warm and wet against his shirtfront. She was crying over him, which made him feel really good and bad at the same time. Awkwardly, he patted her back, looking over her head to meet Conn’s gaze.
The sea lord regarded their embrace, his cool, austere face as unreadable as always. His silver eyes blazed with unidentifiable emotion.
Iestyn’s throa
t tightened. His heart clenched like a fist in the center of his chest. Everything he had done and failed to do in the past seven years crashed on him like a wave.
“Sorry about the boat,” he blurted out.
Lucy lifted her head from his chest. “The boat? Honestly, Iestyn—”
Conn did not waste time on scoldings or reassurances.
He reached Iestyn in one quick stride and pulled him into his arms, holding him hard in a wordless embrace.
Tears burned Iestyn’s throat. Closing his eyes, he bowed his head to the prince’s shoulder.
Finally— finally—home.
*
Lara blinked back tears. She could feel the force of their connection. She recognized the love in the woman’s welcome, the naked look in the prince’s eyes. Her heart softened and yearned. But she kept away, wistful and more than a little envious, unwilling to intrude on their private moment.
“Here.” A thin woman with chopped black hair thrust a tray at Lara. Her hostess, Regina Hunter, mother of Nick, Grace, and . . . Lara’s mind fumbled. Jacob? Noah?
Regina smiled warmly. “Come have some wine while they get through the big reunion scene. They’ll come up to the house when they’re ready.”
Grateful for direction, for a distraction, Lara followed Regina into the large, surprisingly modern kitchen. The sleek refrigerator was covered in children’s artwork. Pots steamed on the massive stove. Lara recognized the brusque restaurant cook cutting watermelon at the kitchen table.
The dark-eyed busboy stood beside a teenage girl with a halo of soft black curls, slicing bread on the counter.
“My mother, Antonia,” Regina introduced them. “My son, Nick. And the pretty girl with the knife is Elizabeth and Morgan’s daughter Emily.”
Antonia nodded at Lara. “We met,” she said in a smoker’s rasp, low and surprisingly sexy. “Welcome to chaos.”
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