“Never had a woman refuse an orgasm.”
“You know that this is more than that. All the power you had over me, those times you made me come and held yourself back. This is me, holding myself back, and you just have to accept it.”
Nicodemus understood. He’d taken her control and she needed to know he could give it back. He didn’t know when it started to matter what she needed, but it did.
He eased to his side so his weight didn’t crush her and she moved with him, unwilling to let him go.
There were blades of grass and leaves in her hair, wild strands having been tugged free of her ponytail. Her face was cherries and cream, pale but for where she was still flushed from their exertions and her lips still swollen from his kisses. She was warm and beautiful. Unlike the frigid goddess she’d been so long ago.
“The Black Eros has certainly done its job well, hasn’t it?” he asked quietly, ghosting his thumb across the smoothness of her cheek.
She pursed her lips. “Yes, it has.” Esme stroked down his biceps and back up again. “I wonder what it will feel like when it’s gone. Will we remember everything that happened? Will I still get wet just thinking about you?”
“I don’t know. Did you get wet thinking about me before the Eros?”
Her lashes fluttered down and he knew that she had. That knowledge sparked conflicting emotions in him. “Really?” He had to know more. “So those fantasies our first time in the Eros plane, those were genuine? Not just to fuck with me?”
She buried her face in his shoulder. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg, Nicodemus.”
The sound of his name on her tongue was like a caress over his whole body. “Tell me.”
“No, it’s always me spilling my guts.”
“You’ve been in my head, Esme. Unescorted. Who knows what you’ve seen?”
“That night in your room. With her. You told her that no matter whose ring she wore, she belonged to you.”
“Ah, see? I’m just as exposed as you.”
“Hmm, well my fantasies about you are about…” She seemed to be searching for the right word. “You.” She shrugged. “I’m playing with you like my own fuck-me Ken doll. And your memories of me aren’t really me. Not who I am now. There’s a big difference.”
“Will you tell me the first fantasy you had about me? Surely that’s not too much to ask.”
“Surely it is. Your ego has its own gravitational pull.”
“Come on, Esme. How can I keep pleasing you in the real world if I don’t know what goes on in your fantasies?”
She jerked her head up so fast she almost crashed into his chin. “You want to please me?”
“I’d think that’s a given, wench. Like you said, my ego has its own gravitational pull. Tell me one and I’ll show you something that no one alive has seen.”
She bit her lip, the prospect obviously exciting her. “Fine, but you can’t make fun of me or throw it back in face. And you can’t tell me things won’t end up that way, because I already know that. This is fantasy, and I was only fourteen.”
“You’d dressed me up as some kind of hero at fourteen?” Something new and warm moved through him. It was uncomfortable. He didn’t like it…but somehow he wanted more of it too. He didn’t understand these feelings.
“Shut up if you want me to tell you.” She blushed hard.
“You were in the village square dressed in a lord’s finery. The first thing I saw was your hair; it was gilt and silver in the sunlight, tied back with a blue ribbon at the nape of your neck. It matched your coat, that deep royal blue with the silver buttons. Your breeches and knee boots completed the picture and you were so dashing. I imagined you could slay dragons and you were a prince right out of the stories my grandmother used to tell. My fantasy was that you saw me that day and carried me off to be queen in a land far away, where you adored me forever and ever.” She laughed. “I suppose now it’s fitting that the castle was made of crystals. Maybe my soul memory of your home.”
Her soul remembered him. Associated him with love and Happily Ever After. Oh, this was so fucked up. All of this was so fucked up and he didn’t know how to fix it.
“It’s a good thing I didn’t see you, Esme. I was there to find you and kill you.”
“Maybe it would have been better if you had. I haven’t really had much of a life, though Goddess knows why I keep fighting for more of it. If you’d held out your hand to me, I would have taken it and followed anywhere you led.”
He didn’t know how to respond to that, what words he was supposed to say. But she saved him.
“Anyway, I confessed. Told you my first fantasy about you. Your turn. You said you had something to show me.”
“There’s a creek over this way, follow me.” He got up and padded naked only a few feet away to a small drop-off, where he slipped down into water that was waist deep.
She followed after him, a pleasantly warm current swirling around them both. “Okay, what am I supposed to see?”
“Just wait.”
He hadn’t done this in a long time. Nicodemus pictured his homeland, the eternal winter that was in his blood, and the water dropped several degrees. When he opened his eyes, he was rewarded with the sight of Esme’s suddenly erect nipples. He pushed another flash of cold through the water and they puckered further. He grinned.
“You did that?” Esme waded over to him and draped her arms around his neck. “Remind me to call you the next time my a/c goes out.” She kissed him. “So why has no one alive seen it?”
“Because it works with blood just as well as water. I can kill with a touch.” She shivered and he wondered if maybe he shouldn’t have told her that, but he hadn’t had anything else he was ready to divulge.
“You’re so powerful. I don’t think anyone could ever defeat you,” she purred.
He swelled with pride when he realized no one ever had. Except her. “You did.”
She snorted. “Please, Frost. I ran. And look where I am. Exactly where you wanted me.”
“And you’re getting the rest of your life—that’s not a boon I’ve ever given.”
She studied him for a long moment before she spoke. “You may change your mind on that once the Black Eros is gone. I’d rather just assume I’m done than feel betrayed later. I’ve had a certain freedom to enjoy everything more fully because I didn’t think I’d be around to suffer the consequences.”
“I swear to you, Esme, I’ll let you go after Galatea.”
“Don’t make me believe in you, Frost. It would fuck with my worldview. We already know how this ends.” She kissed him again…and this time she tasted of sorrow.
Chapter Eight
She didn’t dare give breath to the hope that he meant what he said. It was just the Eros talking. After all these years hating her, hunting her, he’d just let her go? No, it had to be some kind of trick to lull her into complacency—even thought she’d confessed to him she was already there.
The hours since her attack had been a fantasy come true, better than anything she could have imagined in all the sordid scenes in her head. This was real. Or as real as anything could be under the Eros. She wasn’t moving him and posing him around like a fuck toy; he’d kissed her, touched her in the ways he wanted. Ways that made him hot—not just to bend her to his will.
Esme had said nothing the whole long way here because she was afraid if she spoke, it would all shatter to dust. He’d given of himself to mend her—her greatest enemy had eased her pain. Held her while she’d slept and healed. No one had ever done that for her.
Granted, it had all been so they could catch whoever had attacked her, but she’d never had anything that someone wanted so badly.
How had this fucking happened? When she saw the man behind the façade, she was supposed to not feel this. He wasn’t supposed to be the dark prince charming she’d imagined as a child and yet he was.
He was like the beast in a fairy tale. He was tortured, haunted—and by a things she had do
ne. All the darkness in him had been because of her. Knowing those dreams she’d had of him as a child were real, those she’d “made up” and those that had come to her in the darkness of sleep, caused a fissure inside her that splintered into her bones.
“It’s been a long day, little witch. It will be dark soon and we’ll leave before dawn. We should get some rest.” Frost heaved himself out of the water in one smooth motion and went to the Jeep.
She shivered. “Yeah, I’m cold. I can’t use my magick to keep warm since I don’t have it.” Esme gave a tiny laugh as she climbed out of the water.
He threw a towel at her and she caught it, quickly wrapping it around herself.
“The object is to dry with it and I’ll keep you warm.” He tugged his fatigues on.
Everything about this was completely insane. Something incredibly shitty had to happen in the next five minutes or she wouldn’t believe this was real.
And it seemed as if the universe heard her and obeyed.
The air behind the Jeep shimmered as a glamour spell faded, orange and green sparks flickering in the air. An invisibility spell. Then Scar Alder stood on the other side of the Jeep, her car parked behind her. Her hands were crusted in salt and held out before her.
She was prepared to break a spell.
“I really thought you both would have done your jobs by now. That somebody would be dead. But no. All this confession and feelings,” she sneered. “I keep waiting for you to tell me where you registered and that your wedding colors are going to be sunshine-out-my-fucking-ass and unicorn-shit blue.”
She swiftly muttered something in Latin. “There, Esme. Don’t say I never gave you anything. Now maybe shit can get back to normal.”
“What did you do?” Esme demanded.
“What do you think? I undid the Black Eros.” She turned and stomped back to her car, leaving them staring dumbly after her as she wiped her hands on her jeans before leaning into the vehicle.
Then she pulled out a 9mm and, without hesitation, shot Frost in the stomach.
Esme watched, frozen, as surprise crossed Frost’s face and he crumpled. His veins swelled in black ridges under his alabaster skin, his body began to spasm.
She ran to Nic, there was blood everywhere. “Cold,” he mouthed.
“I’ll get a blanket,” she said dumbly, still only wrapped in a towel.
“No. Need cold,” he managed before his eyes rolled back in his head.
Esme felt helpless, lost, weak, all the things she despised and reviled. If Esme had her magick, she would have blasted Scar to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
“You should pay closer attention to current events. They’ve unearthed his brother’s sarcophagus on a dig in Nordvik. I pulled the dagger out of his chest months ago and had it made into that bullet.” Scar looked exceptionally pleased with herself.
“It’s only fair that I take your man the way you took mine. Now I just need to carve up your pretty face and I guess we’ll be even. But I’ll let you think about that. I like imagining you always looking over your shoulder, staying up nights wondering which shadow is going to be me. When you’ll lose that face that made Sebastian want you,” Scar said as she slid into her car. “I’ll be seeing you, Esme,” she threatened, before closing the door and leaving Esme with the mess she’d made.
But Esme didn’t care about Scar’s ominous promise; all she could think about was Nicodemus. She had to get him somewhere cold. She thought about that gas station where they’d stopped in Briar Ridge. It had a cooler. She wondered if it would be cold enough.
She hooked her hands under his shoulders and tried to drag him, but he was too heavy. Esme needed her magick or Nic was going to die. She wouldn’t be the cause of the end of his line—the last of his people.
Adrenaline gave her strength and she hauled him into the Jeep somehow. She tried to remember the things she’d learned as a good witch but couldn’t. Esme knew how to make healing potions, but they took weeks to brew properly. She needed something now.
Esme slammed the Jeep into gear and took off back the way they’d come. Every change in the terrain and bump in the road jostled Nic, but he was unconscious. She could drive fast or she could drive carefully. So, fast it was. She sped back toward the town, the speedometer buried in the red.
It wasn’t long before the city limits were in sight and she barreled around the few cars that happened to get in her way, finally skidding to a stop in the gas station parking lot. She had no idea what to say to the clerk or what she was going to do if he wouldn’t let them use the walk-in cooler.
She ran inside the store. “I need help! My friend’s been hurt, I need ice.”
The clerk didn’t even look up from his magazine. “We’re about to close, dude.”
“Look at me.” She growled like a rabid dog getting ready to attack.
He did—and realized she meant business.
“I’m wearing a fucking towel. I have blood on my hands. And I need your goddamn walk-in!”
“Fifty bucks.”
“Fine, whatever. Come help me with my friend.”
“That’ll make it a hundred.”
“Mercenary little fucker, aren’t you? How about I give you the fifty and I don’t shoot you in the fucking face with that 12-gauge you’ve got under the counter? I’ll lock up when I’m done and you can go smoke reefer with your buddy waiting outside.”
“Deal,” he said, flashing a toker grin.
The kid helped her carry Frost inside to the walk-in. “I think your friend is fucked.”
“Yeah, he is.”
“If he dies, don’t leave him in the store. My boss’ll kill me.”
“I weep for the future,” she sighed.
“Whaaat?”
“Nothing.” She paid the kid, dragged her bag out of the Jeep and went back inside to stack bags of ice over Frost’s wound.
Esme was freezing, but attended to Frost before getting dressed. His veins were still black and stark against his skin but the bleeding had stopped. She gingerly lifted one of the slowly melting bags of ice to peer at his abdominals where the bullet had entered and could see the glint of the metal inside the wound.
Oh Goddess, did she dare try to pull it out?
She wondered if she could pull him down into the Eros plane and— Fuck. No, she couldn’t do that because Scar had taken it away. She should have expected it. Esme, after all, was the one who’d warned her that Nic would kill her to break the spell.
What would he want?
He’d want her to dig it out. The answer echoed in her brain like a gong, almost as if Nic himself had demanded she do it. It wasn’t too far in there. She could do this. She’d seen plenty of wounds when she’d been training to use her magick. Service, her grandmother had taught her, was of the utmost importance.
The gas station had an aisle of touristy needs like Q-tips, tampons and even tweezers. She grabbed a new pair of tweezers and a bottle of vodka from behind the counter.
Esme removed one of the bags and poured vodka on the wound. He didn’t move. She couldn’t help but think he was already dead.
“Don’t you leave me, you bastard. We’re not done yet.” She tore open the tweezers and dumped vodka them too, then on her hands before setting to work on his wound.
She pulled out the bullet with little to no trouble—it was a strange thing, glinting green then silver then blue in the light. Almost like the aurora borealis that had been trapped in the chandelier lights when she’d been immersed in his memory.
The wound began to close slowly, first one dark, ropy tendon shot forward and jerked the skin closer. Then another. And still another, until she realized they weren’t tendons, but something else. Some kind of filaments or fibers that worked through his fascia, knitting his wound closed.
“Witch?” he managed in a strangled voice.
“Yeah?”
“Where are you?”
She smoothed her palm over his forehead, pushing hair back from his face. “
I’m here. Right here, Nic.”
“You didn’t leave me.”
“No,” she answered, reassuring him.
They were silent again for what seemed like forever as his body processed the cold and used it to heal himself.
“I’m sorry it’s not colder. You’d already be mended, wouldn’t you?”
“You did well, Esme.”
Silence reigned again but he dragged himself into her lap, his head on her thighs, and Esme was content to have him there, pushing her fingers through his hair.
“No one has ever done anything like that for me before,” he said quietly.
“You healed me. What else could I do?”
“You could have left me. Scar lifted the curse.”
“And I don’t feel any different,” she blurted.
“Neither do I. Except there’s this emptiness inside. Like a hole. In my gut.”
“Smartass. You’re not fucking funny.”
“Yeah, I think I am.”
She slapped his shoulder. “You could have died.”
“I could have. But I didn’t. Besides, I know why you saved me.” He sounded irredeemably smug.
“Why is that?”
“You need me to get your magick back.”
“There is that. And I think you’ve ruined me sexually.”
“Good.” He was still smug but she found it endearing. Goddess, she wanted to puke. She was acting like some love-struck, calf-eyed idiot.
“What do we do, Frost?”
“Give me an hour and we’ll get on the road.”
“No, I meant about this thing between us. After we catch this guy and get my magick back, do we forget about it and go on with our lives? Do we meet up, fuck and go about our business? What do we do?”
“Scar said they’ve unearthed my brother’s sarcophagus. Do you know what that means for me? We didn’t part well—I’m the one who put the dagger in his chest. I have to go to Nordvik. I have to know if my brother lives again. ”
“Oh. I didn’t think you heard that part.” She bit her lip. Why had she even asked the fucking question? Of course they were going to forget about everything and get on with their lives.
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