Theta Waves Box Set: The Complete Trilogy (Books 1-3) (Theta Waves Trilogy)

by Thea Atkinson

  Two of his fingers tucked themselves into her hair, curling strands of it around her ear. "Do you understand? I would rather not hurt you, but you need to know that's not going to stop me."

  All she could do was nod. It was futile to try to pretend she didn't want him like she wanted a smear, more than she wanted a smear, that her need for him scared her...

  With a deep, resonant groan, his mouth lowered onto hers, claiming it, his tongue invading the space so aggressively, she believed she knew exactly how deep he would bury himself inside her. She couldn't mask her own response from him and when he sensed it, he trapped her lip between his teeth, giving her time to catch her breath, letting her realize that she wanted it as badly as he did. He gave her enough time to pull him back down, to dip her tongue deep into the well of his mouth, before he molded himself against her, tangling his legs in hers.

  "Fuck," he said against her mouth. "You're a fucking addiction. I can't stop thinking about you. I can't stop wanting you." Supported by one arm, he let the other hand travel the length of her body, slipping between her legs and parting them. He sent two fingers deep into her core, curling them upward, stroking her G-spot. She moaned beneath him, unable, despite the soreness of her ribs, to keep still. She knew how wet she was, how ready for him, because she was seeping onto his palm, smearing over her sex.

  "Just fuck me," she said into his ear. "Don't make me wait any more." Even as she said it, she had the vague sense of déjà vu that sent her mind instantly to a lifetime they shared so many hundreds of years ago in Germany. It had gone badly then, devastatingly bad. She didn't want to think about that. It wasn't the time for that. She wrestled the memory back into its place.

  "I don't care if you hurt me," she said. "Just do it."

  "I'm a big man, Minou. You need to be ready."

  "I am ready," she said, thinking it was an understatement. She wanted him so badly she thought she could spread over him twice.

  He needed no more encouragement. With practiced ease, he shifted position, pushing his hands upon the mattress so that they rested beneath her head, his thumbs in front of her ears, holding her there trapped between his massive hands. His cock sought entrance, and she winced at the pain as it speared her sex. She gritted her teeth, recoiling instinctively, trying to twist her head to the side in escape.

  "No," he said, and forced her to face him. "Take me."

  It was a command her body didn't dare refuse as he sent inch after pulsing inch deep inside her. It seemed he drove in mercilessly, taking her with a ferocity that her body urged from his in equal measure.

  "Ah, sweet fuck," he said and then repeated it as he withdrew and plunged again and again, opening her wider, making her meet each thrust just as insatiably. "Sweet fuck, you're perfect for me. Made for me." He drove so deep, so hard then, that she felt as though she was being compressed between his hands and his cock, and the feel of him, so thick against her insides that she could feel each pulse it made as he released his seed, made her cry out.

  She knew her orgasm was coming; she felt it build deep in her core, each stroke driving her flesh to suction against him, eagerly pulling him deeper. She felt him grind against the entrance to her womb as he came, and her womb grasped him greedily, shuddering against the girth in such rapid waves that she lost her breath and gasped against his shoulder.

  He stayed planted within her until he shrank, and even then he was mindful not to collapse on her, but eased himself to her side, cradling her head against his chest.

  "I'm beginning to understand why you fix," he said with a chuckle.

  "Godspit's nothing like that," she said.

  "I'm not sure whether I should take that as an insult or a compliment."

  She kissed his earlobe. "That's the best compliment I can give."

  "Then I'll take it," he said and adjusted the blankets around her, tucking them in to her sides as he curled around her. For the first time in a dozen years, Theda could say she felt truly safe. From a sense of long ingrained habit, she almost sent a prayer of gratitude, but caught herself as it formed in her mind. He had saved her; he, Pale Rider. Not the god. The god had left her here, left her to the Beast, left her to the good doctor and his torture, left her to Sal, and Blanche, and Sasha, left her to the vagrants who decided to take what they wanted from her when she was incapacitated from her drug high. Left her with the need to fix in the first place.

  "Back in the sanitorium," she whispered, thinking that if he was still awake he would answer. "Ezekiel?"

  His murmur was more a groggy moan than a word.

  "You bled for me," she said.

  It took him a long time to answer, and when he did he reached over her waist to place his hand over hers. He squeezed. "Did you taste it?"

  She shook her head, knowing he could feel her answer. "There wasn't time."

  He ran his lips over her hair. "Maybe it doesn't matter," he said.

  "What doesn't matter?"

  "The visions," he said.

  "You're having visions?" she said, alarmed.

  "Only the ones you gave me."

  "I only gave you one. And you took it from me, I didn't give it. Remember? Back at the capitol building; big bad mayor and big bad executioner. You hid me in the spitters'den." She couldn't believe he was playing dumb.

  "I remember," he said thickly and after a long pause said, "but I have the feeling you don't."

  "I remember it vividly." She was actually insulted.

  "I'm guessing not so vividly. Because if you did remember, you would know that you walked me through a hundred lifetimes."

  That wasn't correct; it couldn't be. There had been one and only one. One solid, horrific remembrance where she'd done terrible things to him, made him suffer for hurting her. "You're wrong."

  "I thought you knew," he said. "I thought you saw them all with me."

  She was beginning to panic now. Starting to feel as though she was falling from a great height. Familiar as the feeling was, she hated it. She'd always hated it. It was what had driven her to the godspit in the first place, that sense that she was out of control, that things were rushing past her before she could grasp onto them and hold herself tight.

  "You're lying," she said, feeling a lurking sense that a betrayal was coming. "You have to be."

  "Minou," he said. "You walked me right straight back to my creation."

  "Creation," she repeated. Such a strange word to use.

  "Yes. My creation. Back when the god made me, back when the god made the light and called it Lucifer, and when--"

  "And?" She urged, hearing the tension in his voice, thinking the rest of it was too painful for him to say out loud. "And then what?"

  "And then I fell."

  Chapter 15

  Theda tried to twist in his arms, to face him so that she could feel for his face in the dark. It was difficult, and painful enough that he had to help her. He eased her closer and she settled against him, easing her legs between his. She felt so puny against him, like a bird in his hands. She thought of her grotto where he'd found her, the three walls of concrete from the fallen bits of bridge, and she imagined him as those walls. Immovable, Impenetrable. Secret.

  "I don't understand," she said, but she had the horrible feeling that she did. She understood the term right away. It was a simple enough word, but it carried the weight of centuries of dogma. Eons, is what Cain had said when he described how long Ezekiel had known Kat. He'd known her once eons ago. "What does that mean, you fell?" There were only so many uses for the word and she wasn't ignorant enough to believe he tripped. Even so, she needed him to be clear. She needed to actually hear it.

  "You're a smart girl, Minou. I'm sure you know what it means."

  "Only a religion monger would use that word in that context."

  "Do you think the good doctor will want to lobotomize me?"

  "That's not funny."

  "I didn't mean it to be."

  She sighed, running through all the things that had happ
ened, seeking evidence that what he said could possibly be true. Nothing peeked out from dark corners. Nothing waved at her, trying to get her attention, and she would know wouldn't she? The daughter of a preacher. She stared up at the shadows and the ceiling, thinking something might present itself as an explanation.

  "You're making this up."

  "Am I?" He touched her chin with his thumb. "Do you doubt the power of your own gift?"

  "My gift showed me one lifetime. It showed me what a horrible person I was. It showed me how horrible I was to you. You forgave me. That's it. We move on."

  "I forgave you because you needed it," he murmured, dropping a light kiss on her temple. "It was more than that. You know it was."

  "No," she said. "I saw only one."

  "You're stubborn," he said. "I'll give you that."

  "Not stubborn," she corrected. "Tenacious. You don't live as I've lived and not cultivate certain survival skills."

  "You spin past lives for people, you've witnessed the god's return, lived through the Beast's war, and you doubt what I tell you I am?"

  "Because it's ludicrous," she said.

  "Ludicrous because you don't want to believe it or ludicrous because you don't want me to believe it."

  "Ludicrous because the god was losing and he got mad and took his damn ball and he went the fuck home."

  She didn't like the bitterness in her own tone, but there it was, just the same. Eight months of living hand to mouth as a derelict in an even more derelict society tended to smother any hope of something better. Of something different. Of even a spark of thought that there might be some rational explanation for why she was still here when she'd seen the worst people she'd ever known phase into something beautiful and go to meet the god. When people like Ami could be left here, when people like Cain. No. It had nothing to do with religion; it had to do with a selfish god withdrawing his favorites and leaving the earth to its own devices.

  She went rigid against him. How dare he try to explain all of this away with dogma. How dare he make her question the proof of her own eyes, of the things she'd seen, of the things she'd done all this time after the apocalypse. If she knew one thing after the war, she knew that religion was finished. All notions of it, good and evil. Now everything was just at its most primal. There was no more to it than that. There was no greater, hidden agenda. There was just a Beast and a world that realized how badly the idea of religion could tear it apart. If what remained was to survive, all hope had to be smothered. She understood that now. She realized exactly why the Beast had to be so ruthless.

  "Poor Minou," he murmured against her ear. "So much anger," he said.

  "Damned straight," she said.

  "Your anger doesn't change the fact that you showed me much more. Maybe you didn't see it all because you were under the influence."

  Even though there was no judgment in his tone, she couldn't help feeling he was chastising her. She thought about all of the tricks she'd turned on her small street corner in the western part of the super-city. She thought about Henrik and his vision, the one the Beast wanted to know, the one she refused to think about. He'd begged her not to divulge the contents, and she never had, because he'd looked so terrified, because he'd told her how many thousands of people would die for that vision. Because thinking about it made her realize that the one thing she'd had to do to survive also cost the lives of everyone she'd tricked, and yet she did it anyway. Because even keeping the vision secret, people died. And she was to blame.

  It had been so easy, then. She'd known that she might be accused of religion mongering, but she'd never truly believed that was what she was doing. They were just tricks. Just a means to an end. And now that she was acutely clean of the only thing that had offered her relief from life, she was being told that what she'd been doing all along really did have a basis in religion. That she was a religion monger. Her tongue felt thick with want of a smear. Her chest felt the panic of knowing she wouldn't get one.

  She'd been just hours out of a double godspit fix for Henrik's vision. In fact, every trick she turned after him she'd done just hours after a fix. Even so, his had been one vision, like every other vision she'd offered. She would swear it.

  Lying here with the Pale Rider next to her, feeling his palm on her hip, his elbow beneath her head, she wondered if she'd been dulling her own reception. Maybe each one of those johns had seen more than she'd thought they had. Maybe that was why they were always so overcome. Maybe that's why their rides were so life-changing that they were hunted down as religion mongers afterwards, why the worst enemy the Beast could conjure was a slip of a girl addicted to godspit.

  "No," she murmured. "It can't be like that. It took me years to perfect the gift, to learn to control it. And I did learn to control it. I could use it so easily it came without concentration." Even as she spoke, she knew she was free-falling. She knew she wanted to jerk herself from the bed, stumble across the room, find a godspit smear and forget everything. It would be the only thing able to keep her heart from bursting out of her chest.

  "You're wrong." She didn't know why she wanted him to be wrong, but she did.

  "We can test it," he said delicately. "If you don't believe me. We can test it right here."

  "No."

  "Why not? Don't you want to know for sure?"

  "It's too painful. I can't go back there. I can't see what I did to you, again, what I did to all of those others. I just can't live it again."

  "It was just one life out of a hundred, Minou. And it's over. I'm here with you. I'm here. With you."

  "The life I see here has been painful enough, thank you," she said, turning it all back on him, wishing her mind wouldn't return to his betrayal. She couldn't change the fact that he'd had the Beast's throat beneath his knife at Sasha's. All he'd had to do was slip the blade across the Beast's throat and all this would be done.

  "You mean the torture chamber. You mean Sasha and the spitters'den and the sanitorium." His voice was chocked with regret.

  She imagined him the way she'd seen him in Sasha's torture chamber. She'd been racked by Daniel, the General who Ezekiel had given a smear to, the one who had laid it on her tongue to deaden the pain of the Beast's questioning. He, Ezekiel, Bridget, even Eddie from Sasha's den, had waited like automatons for the Beast's orders. But Ezekiel hadn't. He'd slipped his knife over the Beast's throat, she knew he had. She'd seen it before her eyes shuttered closed in ecstasy. And then she'd awoken in the sanitorium with Ezekiel saying he had to put her there for her own safety. He'd told her he'd killed everyone. But not the Beast. Not the one man whose flesh waited beneath his knife.

  "Why didn't you kill him, Ezekiel.? I saw you. I saw how close you were."

  "I couldn't."

  Something other than regret: guilt? shame? Theda wasn't sure, but her own deep-seated anger, her own fears drove her on.

  "You killed Daniel. You killed Bridget. You killed dozens of others. Why not him?"

  He recoiled like she'd slapped him. "I didn't kill Bridget. I told you." He pulled away from her, leaving a draft between their skin that had nothing to do with absence of touch.

  "I know. You said the Beast has her. But that doesn't change the fact that you thought you killed her in that chamber." She tried to reach for his waist, to pull him closer. As badly as she was hurting, she had to press forward. She needed his touch, knew somewhere within, he needed hers. While he didn't pull further away, he didn't move into her hand either. Progress, if just a little.

  "Help me understand."

  "Take my blood," he said. "Then you'll understand."

  Back to that then.

  "And what if I do see them all? What if I take you back to each of them? Can you stand that?"

  "I would do worse for you," he said.

  There was something behind his words that unnerved her. Something that made the addict in her lift its head and poise to run. Just sensing it, she knew what she should do.

  "You're right," she said. "Maybe it do
esn't matter."

  "You're afraid."

  "Aren't you?"

  "Me? I already saw it; I lived it." He sounded angry; his voice took on a gritty tone she was unaccustomed to, and that decided her. She wouldn't subject him to it again, wouldn't subject herself to it.

  "There's no point."

  "Whatever you say," he whispered. "So long as you accept me as I am."

  "I would think that you understood that," she said. "I would think me being here with you, letting you--"

  He stopped her with a kiss that stole her breath. He labored over her mouth, nipping at her, punishing her, she thought. When he trailed a finger across her bare chest, walking them down to her navel, she began to think he was urging her to punish him, not the other way round. His words sealed the belief.

  "I can't take anything for granted," he whispered. "If you saw what I was... what I did to them all..."

  "I see what you are. I see it all."

  While she could only make out shadows at best, she did think he was letting her examine his features. And when he thought she had enough time, he lowered his mouth to hers again. He took her mouth the way he'd taken her sex earlier, probing his tongue so deeply she believed he wanted to fill her completely. That he wanted every inch of every part of his body inside her.

  "You don't," he said miserably. "You don't see it all."

  In answer, she pulled him onto her hips, reaching down for his cock and guiding it inside. She gasped as he parted the folds of skin, the head of it assaulting her, trying to remind her of its size and failing for a moment, so she had to focus on relaxing, tell herself that he belonged there, that she belonged to him. That no matter how sore she was from his last entrance, she would take him as he wanted her, and her body would obey.

  He took her twice more just before morning, and each time was more frenzied than the last. It felt to Theda like desperation, and there was a tinge of anger in the last few moments, just before he came again. And when he rolled off for the last time, just as the sun was sending prying fingers between the curtains, she thought she could hear him murmuring to himself when he curled around her back, cradling her head on his elbow.