by Cate Corvin
I slid my tongue over the slick underside of Càel’s cock and looked up at him.
The others withdrew from me slowly, Suraziel’s mouth catching a hard nipple as I crawled towards Càel, pushing him back on the bed. It was my turn to feed.
I sank onto him, making a noise when he stretched me out again, and found that sweet spot on his neck that made his hips buck upwards, driving him deeper into me.
There was no hesitation. I bit down, moaning as his blood filled my mouth. They would all be with me, not just in body, but as a part of me.
I drank deeply, riding him hard the entire time, but even when I was humming with energy and licked his wounds closed, he was still thrusting into me.
The world flipped again, Suraziel’s essence clouding my brain for anything but thirst and sex. I was on my knees. Will was under me, moaning as I laved his throat and found the marks I’d left before.
His blood was sweeter, more innocent, in a way. I pulled hard and Càel pushed into me, his hips pounding against my ass. My pussy tightened around him, on the verge of another soul-wringing orgasm, but he slowed down enough to pull me back from the edge.
Will moaned, his cock hard against me again, and I stroked him with a hand as I drank until he went stiff under me. His hips arched up when he came, painting my hand and himself with come.
I sealed his neck, and Suraziel caught my lips as I licked them clean of blood. He kissed me carefully now, and a distant part of me remembered his warning: if he went too far, I’d literally fuck until I died.
Then he offered me his throat. I held him by the horns, pulling him closer to mark him as mine, all mine forever, and drank the thick, sweet blood from his throat.
He stroked himself, no shame in his game, being an incubus. I forced his head back, exerting strength over him. He groaned openly, his cock pulsing and exploding when I kissed the mark on his throat and growled.
Càel’s cock hardened inside me and he slammed home, holding my shoulders to drive himself deeper. I lapped Suraziel’s throat as Càel groaned, slipping a hand around me to swirl his fingers over my clit until I followed him over that explosive edge.
When I finished shuddering, we all collapsed in a pile. A hot, sweaty, totally satisfied pile.
Energy hummed through me, the blood of all my singers joining in my veins.
“Good rules,” Suraziel said, letting out a sigh. “Good rules.”
Will toyed with my hair, curling a lock around his fingers. “Pretty much the best plan we’ve ever come up with.”
I nodded fervently, almost beyond words.
Outside the Fae door, responsibility waited for us, along with a secret project I’d been working on when they were busy. But here, in a summer sunlit day, everything felt like it’d come to a glorious stop for a little while.
I wasn’t ready to go back yet. I needed a little while longer on the perfect beach they’d made for me. I had everything I wanted right here.
Càel’s hand slid over my stomach, promising more. More, more, more.
I sat up and laid myself across him, already burning with the need for all the more I could handle. “Damn, it’s good to be queen.”
Twenty-Five
Will
I watched the violet flames consume the Solomonic seal. Tori and Sura had come here, their hands linked together like an unbreakable bond, and she’d deliberately thrown the seal into the Fae fire.
There was no compulsion in the bond Sura and I shared. It was purely a bond of brotherhood, linking us together for eternity, making me a vessel for infernal energy.
Càel had told me we were a brotherhood now, all three of us. Knights united under one banner, and that banner had Victoria’s name written all over it.
I didn’t take the blood he offered. It’d been a private conversation, out of Tori’s earshot, when he’d offered to become my Maker.
I declined because she needed me as I was. My body would remain eternally mortal. Bit of an oxymoron, that.
But I’d always be able to be hers, the blood she fed on, the living knight she needed at her side. I was neither here nor there, not slayer nor demon, but a little bit of both. I wondered if this was how the Paladin felt; an amalgam of different creations that didn’t really belong with anyone else.
The Clouded Court wasn’t my home, but Tori was.
I left the throne room, where the seal that’d bound Sura was slowly melting into a puddle of iron and charred bone, and wandered upstairs.
She was easy to find, because she was always in the thick of things. She just couldn’t help herself.
Today there was no sign of Tori. She wasn’t in the training room with Càel, Suraziel was bringing cans of frosting to the pixies alone, and the bars were empty.
It was almost twilight. I wondered if she’d left, sneaking off like she’d been doing the past few weeks.
I wandered back downstairs. The door next to Càel’s room was ajar: the foyer to the liminal gate.
I stepped inside, expecting to see someone there, but it was empty.
The liminal gate was awake, swirling at the edges, a dense black hole at its center. A letter had been pinned to the wall beside it. I read the words in Tori’s handwriting: Come on through, Will.
No sign of where the gate led, but Tori wouldn’t send it somewhere dangerous.
Probably.
I stepped through, my guts lurching as I walked through time and space and came out… at home. Percival’s office (Father, my brain whispered, but I’d gotten good at tuning it out) was untouched, exactly as we’d left it.
Godalming Manor was a ghost town. I wandered through the white halls, distant memories nagging at the back of my mind. Funny how much I’d wanted to take over Percival’s place someday, and now it felt like walking through someone else’s home.
It wasn’t mine anymore. I passed my old room without feeling a single spark of desire to look inside, past the library where I’d hoped against all hope that Tori would accept me again, only months ago… and saw her.
She waited at the bottom of the sweeping spiral staircase, leaning against a bannister and looking just as delicious as ever. The self-appointed Royal Clothier had given her a dark velvet top that exposed her neck and arms to the cold, and black jeans that fit like a second skin.
I couldn’t lie, I imagined peeling them off her right there. So sue me. I knew how to appreciate a hot vampire queen.
“Took you long enough,” she said. That gilded sheen to her amber eyes was stronger than ever. The more blood she drank from us, the stronger it became. Càel’s eyes were taking on the same brilliant look, since he drank from her almost every day.
“I had places to do, people to be.”
Tori smiled, but it faded quickly. She held out her hand for me, still waiting at the bottom as I descended. I thought about making a joke about her sweeping away Cinderella, but there was a serious look on her face that made it clear she had more than jokes on her mind. “What is it, Tori?”
“I have something to show you.” I took her hand, lacing my fingers through hers, and she led me under the staircase and through a dark hall.
We stepped out through the back doors. With the lights of the manor off, the stars spilled across the sky in a massive, glittering arc that painted Tori in silver. “Remember our first day in Libra?”
A tiny spear of guilt drove through me, but Tori would tell me to knock it off if I tried to apologize for the asshole I’d been. I couldn’t go back and change things, just appreciate what I had now. “Of course I do. You were so awed by everything in there.”
More fool me for not seeing what she was then. I’d take her anywhere in the world just to see that awe again.
“You and Sura told me about how Libra used to divide the classes. By elements, morality, so on… and when I got there, we were on lux and tenebris. The great divide. I’ve been thinking about that a little. The expectation that everything comes in pure white or pitch black at the end if you divide it far enough.
”
I followed her lead as she walked. The white gravel trail cut through the dark of the lawn, and while my footsteps crunched on it, Tori walked as silently as ever.
“I don’t think we were meant to understand either side at all,” she said, squeezing my hand. “It wasn’t about understanding the divide. It was about finding the fine line between them, that tiny slice of gray, where everything really exists. Lux and tenebris are opposite concepts, but they don’t apply to any of us, not slayers nor Shadowed Worlders. Nobody is on one side. We all belong in that blurred line between the two.”
“You’re probably the only person this year who figured that out. You deserve an honorary diploma.”
“Do you see it, Will?” Tori paused, her gaze searching my face.
How could I not see it now that she pointed out the obvious? Nobody stood for one thing, both feet on one side of the line. Everyone had a little lux and tenebris in them, but sometimes it just tipped a little more to one side.
“I see it.” I touched her face, still marveling that every wrong step in my life had still brought me here. “We’re in the gray, Tori.”
She gave me a crooked little smile. The first time I’d met her, I couldn’t have guessed that the tough, trash-talking girl was going to kick my ass to hell and back and make me fall in love with her for it.
I definitely couldn’t have guessed that she’d become what she once hated most and would take to it like she’d been born there.
Or that my best friend in the world was my direst enemy in form only.
Or that I’d form a brotherhood with one of the most feared vampires in the world.
Christ, I was going to have a full head of white hair by the time I was thirty if life kept throwing curveballs at us like this. But at least I’d be with Tori, which made white hair a pretty minor inconvenience.
“We’re all in the gray,” she said. “Now we’re going to do something with it. We’ve got millennia ahead of us and the fight’s not over. Sitri isn’t going to let Suraziel go without getting his little revenge.”
“Over my dead body.” That was my best demon-friend, and the Prince of Assholes could piss off.
“Agreed. But I want all of us to go into our happy new lives with our past pains buried and put to rest.”
My stomach flipped when the remains of the chapel came into view. It almost blended with the edges of the night, nothing but a smoldering pile of charred destruction. Somewhere under there, Percival’s bones were so much forgotten dust now. Good riddance. “My past is buried six feet under. In that.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Tori slid her arm around my waist. “I tried to make it right.”
Something white gleamed in the darkness and I felt like I’d been punched in the gut, but in a weirdly good way.
Her name was inscribed on the long marble tomb: MICHÈLE LÉA GODALMING. Against all odds in the cold, twining vines of night-blooming cereus had grown from the base of the tomb to climb over the stone, shining faintly with Faerie light.
“The pixies helped me,” she said, glancing up at me nervously. “I wanted to make up for what I caused.”
My heart felt like a fist was clenched around it. “You didn’t cause anything, Tori. I can lay everything at his doorstep.” She knew exactly who I was talking about. I reached out and rested my hand on the frigid marble of her tomb. “I wish she was here to see what we became. That he didn’t win in the end.”
Tori rested her head on my shoulder. “She knows.”
I looked down at her wordlessly, unable to articulate how I felt that she’d done this. She could’ve gone decades before thinking of my mother again, but she’d been sneaking out to make this, a tomb that would be here as a memory long after the ashes of the chapel were gone.
“I didn’t want to say this in front of Càel yet,” she said quietly. “You know how he gets. He’d raise Thraustila from the dead just so he could kill him again.”
Oh, boy. I just resisted gritted my teeth. I wasn’t going to like whatever I was about to hear.
“I think I died for a second when I was fighting Thraustila.”
Nope. Definitely didn’t like that. She should probably tell Càel when they were standing near some punching bags.
“I saw James,” Tori continued. “And Eluned Ravensbane.”
“How-?” My brain shorted out. “You’ve never met her.”
“I know. How could I possibly know what she looked like? She wasn’t recognizable the one time I saw her. But it was her, Will, I’m sure of it. They knew me. They told me to ‘quit being a quitter’ and to get my ass back up.” Tori laughed. “I think they would’ve liked each other in life. But your mother knows because if they were real, the Kingdom of Heaven is real. It has to be. And that means that she’s proud of what you’ve done and how far we’ve come, and James knows, too.”
“Is vengeance still on your mind?” I asked quietly.
She’d gripped my wrist hard enough to hurt as she spoke, and eased up. “I’m not running off to Satan’s Kingdom anytime soon, if that’s what you mean.” She wrapped her arms around my neck, looking up at me with the kind of love I’d always craved, almost destroyed, and finally worked hard enough to earn. “That’s what I thought I’d do for so many years, but if James is in Heaven, I’d only be doing it for blood. It wouldn’t bring him back or make his memory any clearer. Maybe someday I’ll get the chance and take it, but for now, I want to work on the life I have with all of you. Everything is finally laid to rest.”
“Good thing, that,” a familiar voice called. I felt the tug of the Cords as Sura approached, Càel loping at his side. “Because we’d have to follow you in, and we all know demon intestines are Will’s favorite place.”
For the first time, a part of this place felt like home again, but it wasn’t because of where we were. It was who was here and the linchpin between us: Tori. The bonds of blood and family came in different forms.
“I didn’t think they were so bad.” Càel looked over the tomb and nodded approvingly. “Fine warrior stock. We’ll break you down and make a knight out of you, Godalming. Then I might trust you in Hell.”
A few weeks in very close quarters with Càel meant that I could actually tell when he was joking now. “I can handle myself in Hell and you know it.”
“Do I?” Càel asked innocently.
I knew better than to answer that, too. It could only lead to one place: the training ring, where I’d likely get my ass kicked as often as I dished it out.
I frowned when I realized he wasn’t in his usual half-naked state. “Is that…”
“The Hawaiian Shirt Brotherhood,” Sura said. He had a hibiscus tucked by one of his horns.
“Oh god, you’re wearing palm trees again,” I groaned. Tori shook with silent laughter.
Sura held out a shirt.
“No way.”
He took a step closer.
“Nut-uh.”
Tori looked up at me with those ridiculously long-lashed golden eyes of hers. “Do it for me, Will?”
The last time they’d offered, I’d been too busy drowning in my own worries to have fun. Tori was right. Everything was laid to rest. It was time to lighten the fuck up.
I had millennia of real fun ahead of me.
I took the shirt from Sura and pulled it on over my head. Tori fist-punched the air in victory. “To the beach!” Sura announced.
“Triple Dick Heaven,” Tori corrected. “Not that we can call it that in front of customers. Or do I even want to open the beach to customers? I think I like it being my own. I’m a very selfish monarch.”
Sura and Càel led the way, but Tori hung back with me for a moment. “Are you okay, Will?”
I looked over the marble tomb one more time. It’d still be here whenever I needed to be alone and breathe and think about all the places we’d gone and had yet to go.
Like nude beaches. Nude skiing. Nude slaying- wait, maybe not that.
I scooped her
up with a grin, carrying her back to the liminal gate like a bridegroom. “I’ve never been better. Now let’s go attend your every whim and need, Queen Serpentfang.” I kissed her as I walked. “Sweet code name, by the way.”
“It’s not a code name, it’s a… okay, I guess it’s kind of a code name, yeah.”
I brought her to the beach. Together, we blurred the lines, accepted what we were, found that shade of gray between light and dark.
Tori knighted us on the next full moon. I accepted the vampire sword once held by Eluned and swore with my own blood to defend the queen with my life.
When I looked up, still kneeling before the throne, her eyes widened. She hadn’t seen what was hidden by my collar, a pattern of circles and dots beneath the Godalming clan mark. “You took my clan name, Will,” she said, and Sura raised his head from his own knighthood.
He wore the same pattern. We’d all taken Tori’s clan name, thanks to a suggestion made by Connie the last time we were in Heartfall.
Her head whipped to Càel, finding the same pattern there. “You did this for me? I love you all so much I might explode.”
“Should we check for angels in the vicinity?” Sura asked. “Kidding, kidding. We love you too.”
“We won’t forget what you were, Tori.” I touched her cheek. “Or what you are now.”
Her hand covered mine, and she reached out for Sura and Càel. The White Wolf had done the tattoos himself. “We belong to you as much as you belong to us,” he told her.
“Forever,” she said, an iron promise in her eyes.
We were hers. Forever. Kindness and cruelty. Light and dark. Bound by blood.
Epilogue
PROFESSOR KNIGHTLEY
I stalked through the twisted forest, my knee screaming pain with every step.
The pain was a phantom, easily ignored. It was nothing compared to the other pain a slayer might find here in the warped, mind-wrenching planes of the Sunderlands. Some came to the Sunderlands and were grasped by its beauty. They never saw the beauty for what it was: the snare that lured in complacent prey.