He closed his eyes. Held his breath as my hand brushed over his abdomen. “Not only my body, Beri.”
“But…you do remember me now. Completely, right?”
“Mostly. But my thoughts sometimes grow thin and elusive.” He placed his hand over my heart, his fingers against my breast. “My body knows you. My heart knows you.”
“I’m so sorry I gave you that water. I should have realized, should have paid more attention to all the old stories. I promise I will from here on out.”
“I don’t blame you and neither should you. It was inevitable that I’d be given something here that would change me. I’m surprised I can leave at all.” He stared at me. “Something isn’t quite right with me, Beri.”
My chest hurt. Just hurt. “I know,” I whispered. “Something isn’t quite right with me either. Do you…or could you understand the conversation I had with Kampe in that pit?”
He shook his head. “My only memory is fury and blood.” Something raw passed through his eyes. “And your cries of pain.”
I had a feeling we’d both be remembering our cries of pain for a long, long time.
“She said that something is in me, something bad. You should probably run from me as fast and far as you can.” Again, I stroked his skin, surprised when my elbow moved as if it hadn’t been broken. I wondered if something here had healed that part of me. But why not the rest then? “It scares me, Nikolos.”
“You want me to run fast and far from the very woman who came into the underworld to save me?” He rubbed a finger over my cheek. “I may be missing some memories, but I don’t remember being an idiot. A lot has happened in the last year and a half.”
I gave him a sad smile. “It’s only been a couple of months in our world.”
That gave him pause. He frowned, gaze bleak.
“What she was talking about has nothing to do with the last few months. About a year before I met you, Elsa and I were tracking this killer. He turned out to be a black wizard. Kind of young and more than a little stupid. He’d summoned a fire elemental and lost control of it. The night we found them, somehow that elemental got to me.” I closed my eyes at the pain of those raw, black memories. “I don’t remember what happened, but I woke up covered in blood, my arms had…scratches. I killed that wizard and the only thing I know is he fought back. Sometimes—” I broke off, sucked in a ragged breath. “Sorry, I’ve never told anyone this whole story. But sometimes I have these dreams and I see his face frozen in terror, staring at me.” I covered my mouth with one hand, mumbled into my fingers. “And sometimes, in those dreams, I’m smiling—enjoying the spill of his blood over my hands.”
“Dreams can’t hurt you.”
“Oh yeah?” I gave him a half smile. “I dream traveled to you and did plenty of hurting to us both.”
“Your pain hurts me.” He tucked my hair behind my ear. “We’ve all done things we have to live with.”
“You’ve ripped apart a dumb kid with your bare hands?”
He started to shake his head and instead winced again. “No, but I killed a lot of people, including one who might have made this world a better place.”
“There’s more to this. Sometimes I feel it…this darkness inside me. I’m terrified that…” I couldn’t say it. Couldn’t admit aloud that my biggest fear was that I’d inherited this evil from my father. If Castor and I were more than twins, were more like two halves of a whole, and he got all the good…
Nikolos cupped my cheek, amusement making his eyes glitter more. “You have all these thoughts racing through your beautiful head. So many I can almost see them. One of the things that made me fall in love with you is your compassion. I remember this well. You may grouch and stomp about at times, but you always hesitate to kill, you tear up when others are in pain, and you attract followers like the pied piper.” He leaned close enough to kiss me. “More memories are returning. All your followers.”
“Followers?” I shook my head. “You make me sound like a creepy cult leader.”
“Friends then. Or, even more, family. Tell me something. How many are living in our home? I bet even that silly necromancer is there.”
Heat crept up my cheeks. I bit my lip. “I like the way you said ‘our home’,” I said, my voice low because all these nerve endings were flying to life in me and I was finding it harder to think. The feel of his skin against mine, the slide of his calloused palm over my shoulder. His breathing became ragged, his fingers starting to caress. “Nikolos, we are beat all to hell. Our first time was sort of a quickie on the run and our second was good but—” I broke off.
His eyes narrowed.
I knew he was trying to remember and for the second time, the flood of pain that swept over his features made me wish I’d kept my mouth shut.
“I remember,” he murmured, voice raw again. “We made love in that first pit they put me in. Was so long ago.”
“Not for me.”
“My memories aren’t clear. I hurt you, didn’t I?”
“Let’s just go back to that “being” thing from earlier, ’kay?” I put my fingers over his lips when he started to speak again. “I’ve got you back and we’re going home and I’m going to live with you in that big beautiful house. Not just me either. And we are going to figure out how to put all of this behind us. I love you.” I kissed him. “And I want you, I do. But I don’t want our third time to be a wrestling match of mutual pain.”
“Wrestling match?” His chuckle turned into laughter that made him wince. “Beri, how often have you made love in your life?”
Red crept up my chest, to probably blend with the raw skin on my neck. “Before you there was only one other man and he, um, didn’t leave me with any good memories. Most men don’t like a woman who is stronger than they are.”
“That’s just not true. Maybe the weak-minded ones. Sounds like you ended up with the wrong first lover. I plan to show you over and over…” he slid his hand into my hair and pulled me to his lips, whispering against them, “…and over…what making love is truly all about.”
“And you want to start now?” The trembling that started then should have embarrassed me, but all I could feel was the fast rush of heat pouring through my body like lava. “We don’t even know where we are. What if someone comes?”
“I don’t care.” True amusement filtered in to fight with the heat in his face. “But I think the idea is that both of us will.”
“Okay.” I nodded, which only made him chuckle, before all humor left his expression and he stared with a need I felt all the way inside me.
I sat up slowly and straddled his lap as I had done before, still stunned that something that had happened for me so recently had probably been over a year ago for him. I started to lift to take him into my body and he suddenly groaned and shook his head, tightening his fingers on my hips to stop me.
“I knew we were too hurt for this.” I tried to move off him. “Really, cuddling works for me until we get home and heal some.”
Nikolos wouldn’t let me move. He kept his eyes closed, his head going back to the wooden headboard. He did wince then and I remembered the knock on the head I’d given him with that chain. “It’s not that.”
“What is it then?”
“I want you. So much right now, I wasn’t thinking…was just doing.”
I smiled. “I don’t have a problem with doing.”
“We aren’t prepared for this.”
“I think we’re a bit late for that one.”
“A lot of time has passed since that night in the pit. There are ways a man can be coerced. It happened after we were together.”
His eyes opened and the devastation there had me catching my breath and wrapping my arms around his neck. Ignoring my pain, I plastered my entire front against him, squeezed him with my thighs. “Oh, Nikolos. I really, really want to kill a few things before we leave here.” I kissed his neck, pulled back and kissed his cheeks, his chin, his mouth.
“Fortunately, there are oth
er ways until I feel better about that.” His expression, so full of intent, had me shivering in anticipation as he lifted me off his body and stretched me out on the bed. He still moved so, so carefully and I knew his head probably hurt badly.
“I missed you so much,” I whispered.
He rolled against me, feathered light fingers over the bruising on my throat before tracing my lips with his thumb. “I have such a thing for your mouth.”
“Just my mouth?” I lifted one corner of my lips.
“No, not just your mouth.” He tilted my chin up and pressed his lips gently to my neck. “I doubt there’s a place on your body I don’t have a thing for.”
I couldn’t stop touching him, running my hands over every available inch of skin I could reach. “Yeah, I get it.”
He came back to kiss me, opening my lips with his, sliding his warm tongue inside my mouth. I couldn’t stop the faint moan that escaped because this was where I wanted him. Face to face, mouth to mouth, body to body. I was never one to take risks sexually—hell, I’d never really had much of a chance to—but I wanted him with this fierce need that had me burning inside. Again, I felt tears burning my eyes. I was not one to cry—ever—and lately, it was like someone had installed a faucet in my head. I couldn’t stop the hot tears that spilled down my temples as I felt all the new scars on his body.
A thick, knifelike one on his back that spanned at least four inches. Another on his neck where it looked like someone had tried to slit it. I choked on a sob with that one.
Nikolos pulled my fingers from his skin. “Look at me, Beri.”
I did, my breath hitching from all the scary emotions ripping me to shreds.
“I’ve lived centuries and felt more pain than I thought a man could handle. I’ve been in the underworld and fought to keep my life. And now, this beautiful, brave woman who makes me feel like the luckiest man alive is here, in this evil, evil place, where she came to bring me home.” He swallowed. “There are hurts all over my body.” He touched my neck. “There are ones on you from my very own hands.” He took a deep breath. “And yet, here you are in this bed with me, trusting me not to harm you again.”
“Of course you wouldn—”
He stopped me with one touch, the raw agony in that dark gaze making me shut my eyes. “Beri, I don’t know what I’m capable of now and I shouldn’t even entertain the idea of making love with you here, much less going home with you. But I find I’m just selfish enough…or not strong enough to let you go.”
My eyes snapped open and I went to grab his hair, then remembered it was gone. I gripped his shoulders instead. “Don’t you dare think about not coming with me. I don’t care if we have to track down the devil himself to fix whatever is wrong with you. I told you I’ve got problems. We’ll have problems together. I come with baggage—with a pyromaniac witch, a fucking messiah brother and a sister who sleeps with her guns. Life isn’t perfect. It’s messy and it’s hard and you never know if you’ll even wake up the next day.”
I moved my hands to his cheeks. “I want to wake up every day that I can with you. I have things I have to do. Monsters to find. A damned Sumerian god to locate and something called a kapre to keep away from Blythe. Hell, the love of my life jumped into a hell dimension to save the world.” I sucked in a deep breath. “And I have to find a home for a damned vampire sprite.”
He started laughing then. Loud, joyous, the sound of it flowed into me and warmed my heart.
I kissed him. “I’ll sleep with my knife, okay? But you’re going to be next to me. That is, if you want that too.”
“I don’t feel like I deserve this new chance for a life, but I’m going to take it. I love you, Bergdis Hildegun O’Dell, and I’m going to help you with that witch and that messiah and even”—he choked on another laugh—“a vampire sprite who needs a new home.”
I grinned. “Okay, so show me now what you can do with your hands.”
Chapter Seventeen
Phro, Nikolos and I quietly walked out of the arena alone. I don’t know what happened with the lilin and my grandfather never showed back up.
Nikolos limped. Badly. I’d touched the long scar on his inner thigh that went past his knee and worried he had permanent damage inside. Then I thought of this healing god we’d be tracking down—which would be pretty damned soon because Nikolos had freaked when he’d seen the demon wound on my thigh. It was so much worse than my arm—the black had crawled below my knee. We had no idea why his chest wound from the same creature had healed while mine had not. Phro believed it was because he’d received the wounds while the souls had still been attached to him and keeping him alive.
I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like for him to be home. It was now the home of a few and after being in the underworld for so long and alone for so very, very much longer before that, he had an adjustment period ahead of him.
These thoughts plagued me as we trudged through the bleak landscape of this underworld with cannibal spirits dogging our every step. “I could have used your spirit protection in that sport arena,” I told them.
Phro snorted. Then choked, which cracked me up.
“That noise is so much easier when you don’t have a physical body,” she muttered right as she tripped over a dead tree limb.
Nikolos caught her easily and righted her before continuing on.
She stood still, watching him limp ahead of her, and then shook her head. “You humans. Some of you have constitutions that gods should envy. No matter how hard you’re knocked down, you just get back up again.” She looked at me. “And you have a shelf life!”
“Shelf life? Really, Aphrodite?”
“Yes, shelf life. You’re not immortal like me. How do you get up day after day knowing that anything could kill you?”
“Well, until you showed me this place, I thought I’d just go on in another life as someone else.”
“But not as yourself. With your memories and experiences. You just poof out. This personality, this wonderful personality, is just gone. I think if I were human, I couldn’t do this.”
I made a scoffing noise. “You’d rock as a human and you know it. You’d be such a bitch, you’d live well into your hundreds just because people around you would be too damned afraid to let you die.”
She stuck out her lips, nodded slowly. “I think this would be true.”
We walked again and I watched Nikolos who limped ahead of us, his head moving right and left as he looked out for threats. The man would be protective until the day he died—which was hopefully still a long way off. He stopped to look back and check on me and the heat in his gaze made me shiver. Even in the ratty brown pants and tunic he now wore—pants that were ridiculously short for his long, long legs—he was stunning. I didn’t care that he was covered in scars and that his hair was all these weird lengths with a few bald patches in between. He was easily the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to find that Sumerian god for him and for me because I wanted to live. Live and learn all about lovemaking from him.
I shot Phro a grin. “Wonderful personality, huh?”
“Shut up.”
Chuckling, I moved ahead to wrap my arm around Nikolos’s waist. He smiled down at me and I ignored the faint hint of red that crept into his eyes.
I’ll admit to some fear over where we would come up in our dimension. It was possible, the elemental would open the portal in those Alabama woods and then I’d have to follow a crazy-stretched cord all the way to Florida. Of course, I didn’t know if my family and friends had had time to get to Florida yet. They could have my body at the motel still.
So it was a complete relief to see Nikolos’s bedroom when that portal burned open. I ignored the fire elemental, who hissed at me before sharing one of those creepy grins that says it knows something I don’t. I don’t know what kind of hold Tisiphone—or my grandfather or whoever had sent it—had over this particular elemental, but he didn’t try anything, creepy knowing grin or not. And he didn’t burn
the house. At all.
We obviously had a few things to learn about summoning fire elementals.
Not that I wanted to do that ever again.
I snapped back into my body and fought complete disorientation for what felt like forever. I heard Elsa’s gasp, felt her arms squeezing me so hard I cried out.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “I’m so happy to see you. I didn’t think—” She pulled back and gagged. “Oh man, you are nasty.”
“Thanks. Love you too.” Staring at her, I took in her pinched, thinner face, her short haircut. “You cut your hair.”
She patted the blonde cap that didn’t go past her ears. “It got burned pretty badly the last time you were on this side.” She turned her head, pointed to her neck where a two-inch thick burn scar rested just below her ear.
Scar? How could that be a scar? My stomach clenched. “Never seen your hair that short.”
She offered a sad smile. “And it’s grown out a lot.” She looked past me, her eyes flaring wide. “Nikolos!”
He gave her a tired, friendly smile and opened his arms.
She shocked me when she nearly crawled over me to get to him. I’d forgotten they’d been friends, that she’d bought antiques from him. I remembered only her words about what it had been like to be caught in the soul trap he’d carried before we battled the Dweller. Their earlier friendship had completely slipped my mind.
“Oh, it’s good to see you,” she murmured into his neck. “But you both…” She sat back, plopping her butt on her heels. “You both smell bad and you look like shit. So much for that cool medieval costume.” She touched the shredded sleeves. “And Beri, the bruises on your face and neck are awful.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it or anything.” I stretched out because I wasn’t going to be doing anything for a while. I’d brought every damned wound here with me. I looked down at the one on my arm because it throbbed like, well, something had poisoned it. That sleeve on my costume had been ripped away at some point—I didn’t remember it happening.
Blood of an Ancient: A Beri O'Dell Book, Book 2 Page 23