Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows)

by C. V. Larkin

  Avery coughed and sat up on the table. "Always way easier to come out of it," he said, shaking himself and sitting nude with his thick legs dangling over the side of the table. His light brown curls were in matted disarray all over the crown of his skull. He grinned and rolled his shoulders, one of which was now beginning to scab. "I told you we should have sent Sio."

  "Who's Sio?" Virgil asked inspecting the scab.

  "Sio wouldn't have had to shoot my ass in order to get the receptionist to let us in," Avery persisted.

  "Who's Sio?"

  "I didn't have to shoot you, Avery. Like I said before, you earned that shit."

  "Look." Virgil ripped the scab off of Avery's deltoid. "As much as I enjoy being ignored in my own place of business I want an answer. Did the Cell of Swift Retribution get another playmate? And if so, what does that have to do with me?"

  "Tian did," Avery said with an obnoxious grin. "She kidnapped him." His smile widened until she could practically see his molars.

  Tian focused on Virgil. "Sio is one of the reasons we're here. How are you with bindings?"

  "Depends on what kind," the healer said. He blew a breath into Avery's open wound. Avery's face tightened as the wound began to knit together.

  "What if I said they're Sidhe."

  Both males stared at her.

  "That's..." Virgil shook his head trying for an answer and failing. "That's on you. I don't even know what something of that magnitude would look like."

  "How extensive are you talking about, Tian?" Avery asked. Concern stripped the jovial overlay from his tone.

  "I don't know."

  "You do realize you're gonna have to check, right?"

  "What's the other reason?" Virgil asked, breaking into the increasingly personal conversation.

  "We need you to fix someone else," Tian said. The change of subject was a relief.

  "Is Ceyla okay?"

  "Ceyla's fine," Avery said.

  "Who then?" Virgil folded his arms and leaned back against the side of the exam table. Tian shrugged. What the hell.

  "The other guy I kidnapped."

  "She's been busy," Avery added with wary good humor. He tested his freshly healed shoulder.

  "I don't do human," Virgil said.

  "I don't want you to do him. I want you to fix him."

  "No."

  "Whatever happened to the Hippocratic Oath?" Avery asked.

  Virgil hit them both with an unfriendly glare. "I'm a vet."

  She'd been afraid of that. "Look," Tian said, "If it was just a matter of some stitches and a couple of liters of blood I would have fixed him myself. We had a run-in with the Slaugh and wound up in their Nemed when it came back to life. The experience junked his brain, so I need your help and I'm not leaving till I get it."

  She paused. "Quit looking at me like that. It's been a rough month."

  Virgil recovered first; his voice cracked. "Dulce Madre. I can't fix that, Tian. Something like that requires way more energy than I have to give. It has to come from somewhere."

  "We share, you can pull from me."

  "You can pull from any of us or all of us if you need," Avery said, staring at her as if she were a stranger.

  "This isn't your everyday run of the mill human." Virgil had done his best to make it a statement, but his eyes pleaded with her to confirm the veracity of the question.

  Tian shrugged. "He's about as human as it gets."

  "The whole caring, sharing thing is new for you, female. Contrary to your purpose. It's kind of freaking me out." Virgil looked at her with mixed pride and resentment.

  "Yeah, I'm fucking Gandhi. Now, are you coming or are we doing this the hard way? Maybe the big guy gets to carry you to the car?"

  "The 'big guy' isn't wearing any pants."

  "I never said that you wouldn't be bare assed when we hauled you out."

  She and Virgil stood, locked in standoff while Avery sat on the sidelines waiting for the verdict and trying to keep a straight face. After about a minute of silence, Virgil raised his hands and laced his fingers behind his head, stretching to reinforce the width of his torso.

  "You win, Pequena Muerte. Where'd you park?"

  ****

  Virgil sat in the car wondering what in Tir Na Nog had possessed him to agree to go anywhere with Eamon's Crew. Fucking neutrality, that's what. It was stupid of him; he simply hadn't expected either of them to be so compelling. Now here he was, after twenty minutes worth of brain braiding his receptionist, sitting in the passenger side of an immaculately restored royal blue 1970 Barracuda, deeply aware that no one knew who he was with or where he was going.

  He watched Tian in the rearview as she motored them through the crush of gridlocked urban traffic. He tried to avoid staring at her openly. It wasn't that he was attracted to her, he wasn't, but her presence was captivating, reassuring in a way that was at odds with everything he'd ever heard or known of her. Whatever her intangible qualities were, they had made it impossible for him to tell her to fuck off, which he'd fully intended to do.

  If he was being honest with himself, Virgil could admit that his day to day life had become monotonous. He wondered if agreeing to go with the card carrying members of Swift Retribution was his own version of a quarter millennia crisis. He should have bought a Porsche or banged the receptionist.

  He looked out the window in an attempt to gauge where they were, but the car was moving too fast for him to piece together the muddled collage of shapes before they became a garage. Tian slammed the stick shift into park and hit the e-brake. The car spun out, screeching to a stop with the stench of burning rubber hanging heavy in the air. She looked at him expectantly as he returned her stare with numb detachment. Tian nodded to the now unlocked passenger door.

  "Get out."

  Avery chuckled from the back and smacked him hard on the shoulder. "I'd take her up on that while she's still all nurturing and shit."

  Nurturing... Right.

  The garage was larger than Virgil had anticipated, given the size of the glamour, but he had to admit the idea of using wards to self-perpetuate the illusion was a stroke of genius. The ward in this room was by far the biggest, most intricate he'd ever seen.

  "Who did this for you?" Virgil asked.

  Tian started walking. "I tinker. Are you coming?"

  Damn.

  "Yeah, I'm coming, but from what you said the human'll keep so relax. I'm not your hostage."

  Tian turned and grinned. There was a dangerous edge to her amusement that made him uneasy.

  "What, you want a cappuccino or something?" Avery asked, scooting past him and tossing back a convivial smile.

  After a few hundred years Virgil had come to expect certain things from most of the breed, especially the killers, and this group didn't fit the stereotype. They were clever and it was hard not to notice the ghostly efficiency with which Eamon's Crew went about their business.

  "I'm good, Acho." Virgil turned to Tian. "I'm following you."

  She took him at his word, leading him down a Victorian corridor while Avery tagged along. It had been ages since Virgil had been inside a hollow that straddled both the fae and human planes so effortlessly. Another surprise. He was beginning to feel sheltered, the only home school kid left to fend for himself at an inner city high school. It had been a long time since his life had walked that razor edge between survival and brutality. Too long probably.

  The Morrigan, his own patron, had left him to his own devices for over a century, only dropping by every now and again so he could mend one of her crows. The rest of the time, he dealt with basic faerie ailments and a few injuries resulting from the random magical mishap and lived in whatever manor suited him.

  They rounded a hidden corner and Tian stopped so abruptly he almost ran into her.

  "Sio."

  Virgil noticed a curious hitch in her voice, but his train of thought derailed as he saw the brick shit-house in front of the
m. The guy radiated in a way that ate up every millimeter of space in the hall. Once again Virgil found himself at a loss. No way this colossal bastard was the one with the bindings. There was no way anything Sidhe wrought could be that ineffectual. Power on that scale was inconceivable.

  "Don't worry," Avery said. "We all kinda had that reaction to him. Too much sex appeal shorts out the hardware. You'll get over it."

  "Have you?"

  "I'm working my way out in stages, but in case you hadn't noticed that male's only got eyes for my girl."

  Indeed. Neither Tian nor Sio were paying them the slightest bit of attention. Virgil couldn't see her face, but he could see Sio's and the male was staring at the killers' killer, The Little Death, as if she were his own personal version of heaven. A hard lump caught in Virgil's chest as he wondered if he'd ever look at another female that way again. The idea was devastating and unwelcome.

  Sio braced an arm on the wall in front of Tian and leaned down until his mouth was level with her right ear. "Thank you," he said. The gentle current generated by his breath feathered against an errant strand of hair in its way.

  She turned her head into him and Virgil could practically see the connection sparking. He cleared his throat, not sure how much more he could bear witness to. Sio's hardened gaze pinned him against the wall. Virgil opened his mouth once and closed it when he realized nothing had come out. Those mesmerizing and terrible eyes were the color of bleached winter grass surrounded by a delicate layer of pitch so black that the devouring darkness stirred hungrily in the depths of that fine line. Virgil had seen those eyes before in a painting so long ago it was if he'd dreamt them. Now he stood bared before them as they peered out from the living flesh of another face.

  "Virgil." Avery was shaking his shoulder hard enough to leave a mark. Tian was less tactful as she positioned her body in front of him with her gun drawn and pointed at his face. It was probably only fair...

  "What's your damage?" she asked.

  Virgil took a deep breath, shaking Avery's hand off his shoulder and raising his own palms to face outward, a placating gesture in a pathetic attempt to show that he wasn't about to do anything stupid.

  "Estas corriendo en la chingada! I'm fine. Goddess turned. I'll fix your human, Tian. I'll fix your human, but you need to find out how extensive those bindings are and where they came from or that male is dead and so are we."

  Tian paled, but the expression on her face was the one he'd been expecting when he'd greeted her with the sawed-off in his waiting room. He hadn't been wrong about her. The Little Death kept her nickname because she was a killer.

  Her eyes flicked back to Avery and without a word between them the shifter gripped Virgil's bicep and tugged him down the hall.

  "We'll find you a room, dude, cause I guarantee you're not going anywhere until you explain what just happened." Avery's tone was eerily friendly.

  "Are you always this goddamned pleasant to everyone?"

  "Right up until I break them apart and suck the marrow from their bones," Avery answered, flashing a surprisingly cruel smile.

  Virgil felt his stomach clench as the testosterone roared through his system. "Don't threaten me motherfucker. I'm a healer, not a pacifist."

  Avery stopped and let go of his arm as they turned to face one another. "That's a good thing," he said. "Pacifist half-breeds don't have much of a shelf life."

  There was a heartbeat of silence before Avery disengaged, tossing out another easy going grin and turning away. "Come on, Sleeping Beauty's down the hall."

  Chapter 19

  Bindings

  "I need you to strip."

  Tian was on emotional lockdown again; perfectly climate controlled. She was using the same inflection Sio used to order lunch. It was irritating. He didn't say so, just like he'd kept his mouth shut in the hallway when that guy had looked at him like he was a goddamned ghost and leveled the big time doom and gloom prophecy. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and dropped it on the floor, turning the movement into a strung out confrontation. The tension in the room was palpable. What he really felt, and was trying to avoid examining too closely, was the core of peace he didn't remember having. This new found warm fuzzy was surrounded by an unfamiliar layer.

  "Pants too."

  Hope. It had to be. Jesus, that was terrifying.

  Tian leaned back against an already overburdened work table and folded her arms in front of her. The jumbled outlines of designs that interlocked like hands started at the inside of her clavicle and trailed around and down her right shoulder. They became a sleeve that gleamed silver and white in the light and ended mid forearm. They were new. So were the black and gold tattoos in her wrists. None of it had been there when he'd seen her at The Gates. He would have remembered. He remembered everything about her.

  Sio gripped the chair at his back and cleared his throat. The last thing he needed was another erection he couldn't subdue while she was trying to find out what was wrong with him. He wondered how much of how badly he wanted her had to do with biology. He was still there. He still had that brain-burning urge to strip her down and get inside her any way he could, only now it wasn't just a cruel trick from the pheromone gods. It was personal.

  Tian had seen him. She'd looked at the hell in his life and done the one thing he wouldn't have expected from anyone. That she had chosen to take his place in the Between considering what she'd been through was beyond words. It was monumental, scary beautiful, heroic, heartbreaking, and amazing. He was still trying to wrap his head around it.

  He gestured to the marks on her arm. "What do they mean?"

  Tian smiled. It was a beautiful private expression that made his skin tight. The hard edges were there, but they didn't come off as razor sharp anymore either. She was quiet for a long time.

  "They were a gift. A revelation of the good I've done in the world. For a long time I hadn't really thought there was any."

  "Am I in there?"

  "I don't know." She trailed off, eyes following, his hands as they slid to his waist band.

  "I should be."

  He meant it too. Almost as much as he meant the three words he'd been choking on. His hands hovered around the button at the top of his jeans, plagued by either shyness or indecision. Neither were feelings he was used to.

  "Sio, we don't have to do this tonight."

  "I want to. I just have to warn you..." He wasn't sure how to finish the sentence.

  "About what, your inordinately large ego?" She raised an eyebrow and shot him a dry look that made his cock twitch.

  "Yeah," he said, reaching down to liberate the rabid bastard straining against his fly. Tian blinked. He imagined he could see the pulse hammering in her throat. Sio peeled the jeans down his thighs, kicking them off as casually as he could manage. When he looked up again the stare she hit him with was so blatant and intense she could have burnt paint off the side of a building. He clutched the chair back as if it were a lifeline.

  "What now?"

  Tian shook her head as if she was trying to clear it and squeezed her eyes shut.

  "I don't know. All I can think about is how much I want you inside me." She unfolded her arms as if she were going to touch him, but held back, dragging her hands through her hair, pushing it away from her face in an unconscious gesture.

  The statement registered and Sio bridged the gap while her hands were still behind her head. He caught the front of her jeans with his index finger, sliding it under the waistband. Her skin was burning hot where it came in contact with his own. Sparks shot down his arm. Tian moved toward him, offering no resistance as he tugged. When she was pressed into the line of his body, he leaned in.

  "I need you to touch me," he said. He reluctantly let go of her and went back to white knuckling the chair behind him. Tian made a soft choked sound in the back of her throat and something delicate under all of the chair's leather padding cracked.

  "Please." He was whispering becau
se he couldn't breathe right. Sio was acutely aware that the phrase had never passed his lips in any meaningful way and never in reference to sex.

  Tian's callused finger tips feathered over his lips. They trailed down the front of his chest, sending tremors in their wake. His heart was a jackhammer. She pressed her flattened palm into him with increasing pressure until all thoughts he may have had about self-control got good and ghost.

  Sio trapped that elegant, strangely contradictory hand against the flat planes of his pecs as his other hand burrowed into her hair, balling into a fist and dragging her head forward against his mouth. Tian's sharp inhalation did nothing to help his deteriorating composure. Goddamn, what was he fifteen? He could do better than this. He licked the inside seam of her upper lip and caught her bottom lip between his teeth. He sucked her mouth even as it scalded him and the sensation was exactly what he wanted, pleasure so intense he would happily waste away under its onslaught.

  Tian pressed against his lips, pressed against his body; wrapped her arms around his neck. Her tongue thrust into his mouth, licking a straight line up his own and sending another shot of electric current jolting through his nervous system. They were spilling steam again, the way it had been in the car.

  Sio dropped his hands to the hem of her shirt and came up for air long enough to drag it over her head and pitch it across the room. He slid a thigh between her legs and was struck dumb by the amount of heat she was generating. He grabbed the front of her jeans. There was a loud tearing sound as he jerked her hips closer, ripping the tough material apart. The sound wrenched him back to reality. He was dangerously close to that rough edge where what he wanted met what he could live with.

  Sio railed against the demand burning in his veins. He buried his head on the inside of her neck and was flooded with the desert rain ozone tang of her. Raging fingers were forcibly uncurled from her brutalized jeans. He coerced them away from her clothing by wrapping them around her rib cage. His muscles screamed under the strain of control.