I scraped my nails up his spine as he spread my legs. "Love me!"
"I cannot," he swore, his eyes a deep brilliant blue that burned deep into my soul a scant moment before his hips flexed. Like a brand he seared a path deep into my body, filling me, possessing me, completing me. The red hunger swelled in him, blending with his desire to join with me until it was a piercing white need that consumed me even as his mouth lowered to my shoulder. Pain sharp and hot faded into pleasure as his teeth sank into the base of my neck. The pleasure in the act of him taking life from me was almost as great as the orgasm I teetered on the brink of, his body moving against me with more and more force, our minds joined, his pleasure feeding mine until I honestly thought I would just simply die from the ecstasy of it all. In that moment, in that shining, brilliant moment of clarity I knew we were joined in a way more fundamental than a mere joining of bodies. We were meant to be together, and nothing he could say would change that.
Tell me you didn't feel that. Tell me that wasn't the greatest thing you've ever experienced. Tell me I'm not your Beloved.
His tongue lapped at my neck as he rolled over, holding me tight against him so we were still locked together intimately. Within him the pleasure faded, the blackness returning as sorrow and anguish banished the joy of our joining.
A cold chill clutched my heart. Tell me, Adrian!
His breath was harsh on my ears, his chest heaving beneath me, the sweet, salty taste of him filling my mouth as I kissed his collarbone. I wanted to weep for him, weep for us both. Please tell me.
An agony of truth filled his mind, spilling over into mine. I felt it. You are my life. You are my breath. You are the beat of my heart. You are my Beloved.
I smiled into his neck and relaxed against him, my body still trembling with little aftershocks of pleasure. I didn't want to put a name to what I was feeling for him, I just wanted to enjoy it.
May God have mercy on you, Beloved, for you will find none in me.
"I'm not going to grow fangs now, am I?"
"No."
"Good." I traced a swirly pattern idly across the curse that bound Adrian's chest, admiring both the strength he possessed and the gentleness he'd shown me. "I don't think I could cope with a bloodlust, although I have to admit I find it incredibly sexy when you… you know… dine on me. But I can do without the fang issue. So, any guesses as to why yours suddenly went retractable?"
He opened one eye and gave me an outraged look.
"Oh, right. Recovery time. Sorry. I forgot that men don't like to chat right away. You rest. I'll just lay here snuggly warm and remember how wonderful it felt when we merged together."
He groaned as my hand slid down over his belly. "Is there any reason you feel the need to draw wards on me?"
I propped myself up on my elbow and looked at his chest and stomach in growing horror. "I didn't… I mean, I don't remember how… I've never really drawn wards before."
"You drew a binding ward on Sebastian," he answered, both eyes open now, his irises a speculative light blue. Glimmering faintly in the dim gray light that seeped in through the curtains, an intricate pattern of green spread across his chest and down over his stomach. Beneath the swirls and curves and dips of the pattern, the harsh, sharp lines of the curse glowed red. "It takes a strong ward to hold a Dark One."
"I know I did it, but I don't know how! It just happened!"
His disbelief was strong in my mind. I shook out the mental welcome mat and allowed him in to see the truth for himself. "You must have had some sort of training. People do not just draw powerful binding wards by accident."
"It's kind of odd having you in my head," I mused, running my finger along one silky auburn eyebrow, smoothing out the frown that had formed. "I'm not quite sure I like it. Except when we… you know. Then it's really fabulous. And before you say what I know you're going to say, no, I haven't forgotten any Charmer training. I was never trained. Not formally. I met with a Wiccan a couple of times, that's all."
"But something happened to you, something so horrible you will not allow me access to the memory." His fingers touched my left cheek. What happened to you, Hasi? What happened, to leave the left side of your body weak, and a dark place of sorrow in your heart?
I looked away, biting my lip against the unexpectedness of his endearment (Hasi, a literal translation of "bunny," is a German term often used by lovers), and needing to pull away from his questions.
"I'm not allowed to ask?" His voice was a deep velvet rumble along my skin that had me shivering in sensual delight.
"No, you can ask. It's only fair, since you've put up with me asking you all sorts of personal questions." I took a deep breath, reminded myself that I'd been more intimate with him than with any other person, and looked him dead in the eye. "I killed my best friend when I was twenty. I had a stroke after that."
He stared at me, plainly waiting for more. I curled up on his chest, hiding myself so his cerulean eyes couldn't see into my soul.
"That is all you are going to say? That is all the explanation you are going to give me?"
"The stroke is why my smile is crooked, and why my left side isn't as strong as the right," I said to his nipple. Beneath my cheek, his chest rose and fell, warm and strong and alive, and I wondered how anyone could think of a Dark One as the undead.
It is a matter of some misconception, the silky voice whispered through my mind. Why did you kill your friend?
I heaved a mental sigh and knew I wasn't going to get away with not explaining the whole of my painful past. I stroked along his chest, feeling the slight tingle of the curse as my fingers crossed the path of its pattern. "I told you I couldn't charm the curse that binds you. That's not only because I don't exactly know how to charm, but because the one time I did try, my roommate ended up dead, and I spent three months in the hospital after having fried my brain."
Adrian's mind curled itself around mine as memory of that horrible night filled me, images dancing before my mind's eye of Beth's smiling face as she urged me to try to untangle the curse woven into an altar cloth said to have been owned by Tomas de Torquemada, the infamous Spanish inquisitor.
"Come on, Nellie," Beth had said with a hushed giggle that night so long ago as she unlocked the door to the antiquities room in the university museum where she did her work-study time. "Aunt Li said the curse is right up your alley. All you have to do is unmake it like a ward."
"And I'll say the same thing I said to your aunt, Beth: I don't know a thing about wards and curses. It's all Greek to me. Just because she thinks I'm adorable—"
"A Charmer, not adorable, you idiot," she replied fondly, flipping on her flashlight before hurrying to a tall locked cabinet on the far side of the room. "And Aunt Li should know."
"So she's a big noise in the Chinese Wiccan society—that doesn't mean she knows everything, Beth. She was remarkably vague when it came to explaining to me just why she felt I was going to be able to undo a curse. And as for those wards, she only showed me a couple. I can't even remember what they were for."
Beth sorted through a collection of keys on a ring as big as my wrist, selecting one to open the cabinet. "Well, you're really good with getting knots untied. How hard can a curse be?"
I laughed softly as she pulled a small wooden box from the cabinet, opening it to reveal a soiled, tattered piece of blue wool material. Beth seemed oddly reluctant to touch the cloth, instead shoving the box at me, gesturing for me to sit on the floor. I touched a finger to a rent in the material, noticing that despite its age, the gold embroidery on the cloth was remarkably preserved. "So this is it? The famous cursed altar cloth?"
"That's what Dr. Avery says. What do you think?"
I examined the material, trying to remember everything I'd learned thus far in my European history classes. "Mmm. It's old."
She rolled her eyes as she dropped down next to me, watching as I pulled the cloth from the box. "Duh! I meant, what do you think about the curse? Can you un-curse it?"
>
"No. I didn't understand anything that your aunt rattled off about curses, and how they were supposed to look like patterns or something. It just doesn't make sense! How can a curse look like a pat…" My voice came to a halt as I realized that my fingers, of their own accord, had been tracing an intricate, curved path along the altar cloth. I squinted at it, noticing for the first time the odd pattern of weft that had been woven into the rough cloth. It swooped and swirled, sometimes spiraling back on itself into tight coils, a detailed and beautiful maze of pattern. I'd always loved mazes, taking no little pride in my ability to solve even the most complex maze in a fraction of the time it took others. "Wow. Someone really had some skill. Look what's woven into the material."
"What?" Beth leaned her dark head close to mine to peer at the pattern my finger traced.
"That. See the red thread? It's very fine—probably silk or something—but it's woven into the cloth."
"Maybe it's the curse," she suggested, her voice strangely hushed. A joking response to such a silly suggestion died on my lips as a little shiver went down my back at the strained note in her voice. For a moment I was very aware that we were the only two people in the administration section of the museum, alone in the dense darkness. Just my best friend, a strange piece of cloth that reputedly witnessed some of the most horrific atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition, and me.
I tried to ignore the sense of foreboding that seemed to seep into my bones, shivering as I shook out the cloth to examine the pattern. "If it is a curse, then it will be a piece of cake to uncurse. It's nothing more than a really complex maze."
"That's what Aunt Li said about the wards she showed us earlier—that they were nothing more than intention and a pattern."
"Mmm." I spread the cloth out on the carpeted floor, crawling on my knees around it, directing Beth's flashlight as I tried to find the starting point of the strange pattern of red thread. "I think this is it. What did your aunt say I had to do?"
"I don't know! You were the one who was supposed to be listening."
"You're the Wiccan-in-training—you should have paid attention!"
"Wiccan, not Charmer." Beth's face loomed pale in the darkness. "I think she just said you had to unravel the curse to destroy it."
"OK." I took a deep breath, curving my lips into what I hoped was a confident smile. "Here goes nothing!"
I put my finger on a tiny knot of the thin red silk, tracing the intricate design, following the complex trail as it worked from the left center of the cloth outward.
"It's glowing," Beth said, her voice high and excited. "Look, Nellie! Where you touch it, it glows bright red, like it's neon or something."
A chill shivered down my spine. The thin red thread of the pattern I had already traced was indeed glowing softly in the darkness of the room, as if my touch gave it energy, the light from it growing brighter as my finger curved and swooped along the cloth.
The frigid foreboding that had been within me ever since we stepped into the room grew so great that it was almost a tangible thing weighing me down.
"Something's wrong," I said, my teeth chattering, my heart pounding faster and faster as my finger followed the red thread unerringly along its labyrinthine weave. "I think I should stop."
"This is so cool!" Beth leaned over the cloth, her nose a few inches away as my finger swept past. "My God, the glow really is coming from your touch. I've never seen anything so amazing."
"No," I said, trying to quell the dread that suddenly roiled in my stomach. "This is wrong. Something is not right with this. I'm going to stop."
Beth glanced up at me, her eyes bright with excitement. "What's wrong, Nell? You look like you're going to be sick or something."
"It's this cloth," I said, horror crawling up my back as I struggled to pull my finger from the material. "I can't… I can't… dammit, Beth, I can't stop following the thread!"
"What?" She looked down to where my finger was swirling through a series of complex loops. "What you do you mean, you can't stop following it?"
"I mean I can't stop!" I gritted my teeth, grabbing my wrist with my left hand, trying to physically pull my arm back. I was so cold, my fingers had gone numb. "It's like I'm locked to the horrible thing! Help me stop it!"
"Maybe you are supposed to destroy it," she suggested, sitting back on her heels, seemingly oblivious to my distress. Despite the iciness that filled me, sweat beaded on my forehead, my skin all but twitching with growing fear. "Maybe that's why you can't stop," she said. "Oh, wow! Look at that! It's sparking!"
My finger dragged over to trace out the pattern as it moved to the right corner. Behind me, the part of the material I had traced over was not just glowing red, now little flecks of yellow light were starting to drift upward from the cloth like a burst of embers spat out of a bonfire on a cold winter's night. "Help… me… stop…" I ground out through my teeth, throwing my entire body behind the attempt to pull myself from the cloth.
"It's so beautiful," Beth breathed, running her hand across the glitter of yellow floating upward. "I've never seen anything so amazing in my life. It's like little fireflies! Don't stop, Nell, don't stop!"
"I have to," I yelled, the blood pounding in my ears making her voice distant and thin. I swear my eyeballs started to frost up. "This isn't right, Beth. Something's seriously wrong here. Please, help me stop it!"
"So beautiful," she cooed, her face a mask of pleasure as she fluttered both hands through the yellow sparks.
I watched with horror as my finger approached the center of the cloth, knowing instinctively that the heart of the curse lay there, a heart that I was suddenly sure was just as alive as the organ pounding wildly in my chest. As if drawn inexorably on, my finger swirled tighter and tighter toward the center, my soul filling with a blackness I knew would consume me. A voice whimpered pathetically, "Beth, please—"
As my finger touched the heart of the curse, Beth screamed, her voice cutting through my body as a blinding light burst inside my head. Before me rose the image of a creature so terrible, just to look on it tore bits from my soul. It held Beth in its arms, her body twisted and mutilated as she screamed and fought against it. The monster, the thing, the atrocity against nature, turned its attention to me, and for a moment I knew I could save my friend if I sacrificed myself.
The light and the monster—demon, devil, I had no idea what it was other than it was made up of the purest form of evil—slid into blissful nothingness as my mind made the decision I was too cowardly to consciously make, shutting itself off, leaving me floating senseless down into a bottomless abyss of sorrow.
Tears streaked my face as slow awareness brought me back to the present. I lay sobbing in Adrian's arms, comforted by his warmth and strength despite the guilt that wracked me, my body shaking with the remembered horror of my foolish arrogance in tampering with something I knew nothing about, torn with the knowledge that I had failed my friend when she needed me.
Adrian's embrace never lessened, his body cradling mine as I cried, clutching him, soundlessly begging for understanding, the gentle, warm touch of his mind more comforting even than the solid body that protected me.
Chapter Eight
"Nell. You must wake up now. It is time to leave."
I burrowed deeper into the thin linens of the bed, burying my face in the pillow Adrian had used, breathing in the faint scent of him.
"Nell, you must come. We have little time." I pulled the blankets over my head, the full memory of the time we had passed together coming back to me with amazing clarity. I had told him my secret, bared my soul to him—how could I ever face him now that he knew what I was? A murderer, a weak, pathetic woman who had chosen to sacrifice her friend rather than herself.
You are not to blame for your friend's death, Hasi. His voice was soft with comfort in my head. The monster you inadvertently challenged was Asmodeus, one of the seven princes of hell. Even the most experienced of Charmers would hesitate to confront him.
I could hav
e saved her, I wailed silently. If I had done something, he would have let her go, released her and taken me instead.
Cold air hit my back as the blanket was peeled off me, the bed lurching to the side with Adrian's weight. His hand stroked up my spine, causing shivers that had nothing to do with the chill of the room. There was nothing you could do, Nell. You had not the knowledge nor the power to save your friend from Asmodeus. It is a miracle you saved yourself. Lesser Charmers would not have been able to do even that.
I pulled my face from the pillow and turned to look at the man who sat at my side. He was dressed once again in black, his hair loose around his shoulders, his eyes a bright ice blue. "It's my fault Beth died. If I hadn't agreed to try to unmake that curse, I wouldn't have drawn Asmodeus's attention, and she wouldn't have been caught."
He nodded gravely. "That is true. If you had not attempted to charm the curse, your friend would not have died, and you would not have had the stroke. I have not the ability to see the future to know which of my actions I will later regret, but I do not punish myself for that lack."
"Yeah, but how many people have died as a result of your lack of foresight?" I muttered to the bed, forgetting for a moment to whom I was speaking.
His fingers were warm on my chin as he lifted it. You have seen into me, Hasi. You know that I am damned by those I have destroyed. You know that I am just as much a monster as the demon lord who struck you down.
"No," I snarled, throwing myself on him, pushing him back onto the bed so I loomed over him, my lips brushing against his as I sank effortlessly into his mind. The raging emptiness inside him whirled around me, sucking me in, threatening to tear me apart in its fury. "You are not a monster! You are not like Asmodeus! You are bound by a curse, Adrian, that's all."
"That doesn't excuse what I have done. I have ruined lives, Hasi. I have handed my own people over to Asmodeus knowing they would not survive. You do not see clearly when you look at me. You see only what you want to see."
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