Karen Chance, Marjorie M Liu, Yasmine Galenorn, Eileen Wilks

by Inked (lit)

  Nori stepped back. “And now, one thing remains to seal your union. If you do not consummate your relationship now, you will forever be half-bound, weak and hating each other. You must finish the ritual.”

  She and Liliabett excused themselves from the room.

  I turned to Trillian, barely able to stand, the spasms were so intense. But as I tried to sort through the pain, I realized what I was feeling was actually desire—aching, searing lust so strong that it was cramping my body.

  Trillian lifted his head to look at me. Behind the veil of his sky blue eyes, I could see the primal god. The lord of the forest, the lord of the rut, the lord of the horn. He leapt to his feet and for a brief moment I was afraid, but then the cramps hit again and all I could think about was finding a way to ease the gnawing hunger.

  Panting, I stumbled toward the bed and he followed, his gaze never leaving mine. As I danced to one side, he reached out and grasped my waist, his touch firm and demanding.

  “I will have you,” he whispered, his voice almost a grunt.

  Shivering, confused by the flurry of pain, I pulled away and he followed, grabbing my wrist to whirl me around and back me up against the wall.

  “Let me in, Camille. Let me in.” His hands planted on either side of me, he leaned against me. My pulse fluttered as he lowered his lips to mine, and then we were bathed in a silver light as his tongue played over mine and he enfolded me in his arms.

  We began to spin, around and around he twirled me as his chest pressed against my breasts. I gasped, trying to clear my head, then pulled him to the bed. He loomed over me, his lips seeking my breasts as his fingers danced their way onto my clit. As he stroked my fire, I cried out and grasped his shoulders.

  “You’re the golden man,” I whispered. “You taste like honey, sweet and warm and rich and thoroughly fine.”

  “And you’re my queen, and you taste like moonlight and starflowers and the echo of birds at sunset.”

  He lowered himself to the outer lips of my pussy, setting off a string of explosions. Firecrackers sizzled one after another along my body, and all I could think about was that Trillian was about to slide his gorgeous, smooth cock into me and how much I wanted every inch of him, in every possible way.

  “Fuck me,” I begged him. “Don’t make me wait any longer, please fuck me. Hard. Take me hard and rough—I don’t want gentle.”

  Trillian let out a guttural laugh and plunged, driving himself into my core.

  Under a shower of sparks that ricocheted through my body, I moaned and shifted my hips as he picked up the pace, pumping gently at first, then grinding into me, each thrust sending me into a shockwave of pleasure.

  As we rode the wave, I began to notice through the sex haze that my skin was hurting. I glanced at Trillian’s shoulder and gasped. The silver markings had begun to writhe, they were boiling like a swarm of creatures across his body and I knew that my own runes were doing the same. But the friction of our heat pulled my attention back to him.

  I clung to him as he thrust, deep and hard with that silken cock of his. His skin was warm against mine, a perfect fit and in some little corner of my mind, I realized that I’d never had it so good in bed, never felt the same sense of connection before.

  Everybody else saw me as the rock, the anchor, or—in the case of men—just a good fuck to hook up with and leave behind. But Trillian’s eyes gazed at my soul; he was staring down at me and he was seeing me. All of me—both sides of my heritage, and he didn’t flinch, didn’t look away.

  As thought began to slip away, and I came to the edge, the markings on my body began to burn. I let out a sharp cry as Trillian grunted, wincing.

  “What’s happening?” I flailed, unable to stop either the pain or the rush toward orgasm. Every rune had become a flaming brand and with every move, their flames grew brighter.

  “The ritual—it’s part of the ritual,” Trillian gasped out. “Can’t stop…would…kill us…”

  Everything took on the color of violet fire as the magical silver on our bodies burrowed deep beneath the skin, hissing and tattooing themselves through muscle and skin. Goading me with as much pleasure as pain, they pushed me toward the edge, toward the final release.

  And then I looked up at Trillian. But instead of seeing his face, I realized I was looking through his eyes at myself. The braid that had spontaneously bound us had melted into a thick cord of silver and flame and passion and lust. The beating of his heart synchronized with mine, and in that moment, I felt his spirit pass through me and back into himself. Then, in a cascade of silver fire, came release.

  THE pain subsided as we lay there, exhausted. I shivered and Trillian drew the blankets up to cover us. He slid his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. The markings had disappeared from the surface of our skin, but they were there, beneath muscle and bone, tattooed into our spirits, binding us forever.

  “What next?” I asked. “Where will this lead? What’s going to happen now?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I only know that you belong to me. You are mine, Camille. Even if you share yourself with others, you’ll always belong to me. I’m your alpha. I’m your mate.”

  As he spoke, an image flashed through my head. A dragon circled overhead as a fox watched from below. Quickly the images came, and just as quickly, they were gone. I blinked, wiping my eyes. I was tired and spent. But in my heart, I knew that they related to the future—to our future. Just like I knew that a shadow loomed, waiting for me to discover it. And Trillian would be there to help me weather the approaching storm.

  But I left all of that unsaid. Instead, I kissed him back, savoring the taste of his lips on mine. “Yes, I belong to you. And you belong to me. You saved my life, you saved me from humiliation at my boss’s hand. And I think…you saved me from myself.”

  “What do you mean?” His voice was low.

  I let out a long sigh. “I don’t know. But in time I think I’ll understand. And for some reason, the idea of that knowledge makes me very much afraid.”

  “Hush,” he said, tapping me on the nose. “Don’t worry about what might happen. Live for today. There may be no tomorrow, so for now, enjoy what we have and revel in it. I know I’m going to.”

  Trillian sought my lips again, and in the silver fire of his kiss, I forgot about visions and shadows and the future. For now, there was only his touch and my touch, and the merging of souls and bodies.

  human nature

  EILEEN WILKS

  Note: Readers who are following my Lupus series will want to know that the action in “Human Nature” falls at the same time as some of the events of Night Season. While Cynna and Cullen were off having adventures, Lily and Rule had their hands full, too.

  1

  THE blouse was silk, crimson, and new. The blood was crimson, too.

  Lily looked down at her ruined blouse, grimaced, and slid out of her government-issue Ford. She ought to put on her jacket. It was too damned chilly for April, dammit, and the jacket would hide the blood and her shoulder holster. She tried to avoid alarming the neighbors, which both blood and gun were apt to do—but the blood was still damp.

  Bad enough she’d ruined the blouse. She didn’t want to ruin her jacket, too. It wasn’t new, but it fit like a dream.

  Good thing she didn’t have far to go. Wonder of wonders, there had actually been a parking spot only two houses down from the pleasant two-story row house where she was staying while in Washington, D.C…. which had been way too long. She missed San Diego. She missed the heat. She missed her cat, her grandmother, her father. She even missed her sisters. And maybe, though she was sure it was a sign of imminent mental collapse, she actually missed her mother.

  Lily could have parked around back. There was a single-car garage off the alley with room for a second vehicle behind the first if you left the garage door open and didn’t mind having the rear of your car jut slightly into the alley. But then getting the other car out—Rule’s Mercedes—would be a pain,
and she had places to go in that car tonight.

  It was her birthday. She intended to celebrate, dammit.

  Lily stabbed her key into the lock, entered, and shut and locked the door behind her. Rule was at the back of the house. That was one of the cool things about the mate bond: she knew where he was. The direction, anyway, and in a rough sense the distance.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she called as she sped for the stairs. “I need to shower and change, but I’ll hurry.”

  “They’ll hold the reservation.”

  The man who’d spoken came out of the dining room that bridged the parlor with the kitchen. His black dress shirt was unbuttoned at the neck. His black dress slacks broke at just the right point on his black shoes. His hair stopped just short of black, being mink brown, thick, and a bit long for current fashion. He had a lean face, sharp-featured, with a sensuous mouth and eyes the same color as his hair. The dark slashes of his eyebrows mirrored the pitch of his cheekbones.

  Dressing all in black made most men look like Goth wannabes. Not Rule. Maybe it was the excellent body beneath the civilized clothing that made it work. Maybe it was the sheer arrogance of the man. He looked good. He knew it. He would have looked good in tattered jeans, a doorman’s uniform, or in nothing at all.

  He knew that, too. Lily’s heartbeat hitched and she paused without intending to, one hand on the banister, and just looked at him.

  Mine.

  It was a thought, an attitude, Rule wouldn’t have approved. Tough. He was hers and sometimes she just had to revel in that. In him.

  “This is supposed to be dinner, not a race,” Rule said mildly as he walked toward her. “If you…” Those wonderful eyebrows drew down. “Is that your blood?”

  The way she stood, with one foot on the stairs and her back mostly to him, he couldn’t have seen it. Must have smelled it. “Damned gremlins,” she muttered, and turned. “Yes, but it’s a scratch, no more. I was careless.”

  His eyes were getting blacker. Too black.

  “There’s no one for you to kill,” she said firmly. “The surviving imps have already been sent back.”

  “Imps?” His eyes returned to normal and his eyebrows lifted. “I hadn’t heard of an outbreak.”

  “It wasn’t a biggie. Probably be on tonight’s news, but the gist is that a seventeen-year-old idiot in Arlington used a spell from some Internet site to summon a demon. He got a handful of imps instead.”

  The eyebrows went higher. “This spell was on the Internet?”

  She sighed. “So not good news, is it? MCD tries. They have people watching for stuff like that, but they can’t catch everything.” It would be worse, of course, if any of the summoning spells actually worked. This one had been more effective than most, since it actually did summon something.

  Damned imps. “Supposedly the major search engines will wipe out the cache they have for that site, but who knows how many idiots have already seen it? Listen, I need that shower. If you want to hear more—”

  “You need to be tended. Imps’ claws aren’t poisonous, but they probably weren’t clean, either.”

  She waved that aside. “The EMTs already cleaned up the wound. Scratch,” she amended. “It’s long but shallow, honest. I just want to wash off, forget about minor hellspawn, and go eat something fancy by candlelight.”

  “Hmm.” He studied her face, but whatever he saw there seemed to reassure him. “There may be a present involved, also.”

  “Another one?” He’d already given her earrings—exquisitely handmade lilies made from citrine, topaz, garnets, and what she suspected were emeralds. And the way he’d given them to her…well. Rule was big on presentation.

  She grinned and started up the stairs. “Even better.”

  He followed. “I thought the FBI used Wiccans to deal with imps.”

  “They do. We do,” Lily corrected herself. Now and then she still spoke as if she weren’t an FBI agent herself, though it had been almost six months since Ruben Brooks recruited her for his special Unit. Which just proved how weird minds could be, considering the intensive training she’d almost finished at Quantico.

  Training that had been much interrupted. Major upheavals between the realms will do that. “But the teenage idiot did his summoning just as I was headed back from Quantico, which of course Ida knew, since she knows everything, so she sent me. There were a couple patrol officers on-scene, but they aren’t trained for imps. Still, we were able to keep them contained until the coven arrived.”

  “You had help, then.”

  “Sure. Those two uniforms.” She unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it off. “Trash. This is just trash now.” She sighed. The shirt was the perfect shade of red for her, but even if she got the blood out, the silk was ripped.

  He took the shirt from her. “Here, I’ll get rid of it. You and two uniformed officers kept an imp outbreak contained?”

  “It wasn’t an outbreak,” she said, heading for the bathroom. The row house had been built in the nineteen-teens, way before people routinely put in master baths, so there was a single bathroom on each floor. But the bathroom on this floor was the one thing she’d miss when she finally finished her training and went home…marble floor, granite-topped counter with vessel sinks, a glass-walled shower stall, and a huge tub.

  No time for that tub now. She reached into the shower stall and turned on the hot water. “Five of the nasty little creatures don’t constitute an outbreak—just a huge pain in the ass. Good thing Gan’s idea about baiting them with blood worked.”

  She fell silent. Gan—a former demon who’d become a friend in the most unlikely way—was missing. So was Lily’s boss. So were two even dearer friends, Cynna Weaver and Cullen Seabourne. They’d been kidnapped, along with a few others—like a special assistant to the president and a trigger-happy FBI agent Lily had worked with. Not just kidnapped, either, but snatched into another realm. There was no saying if or when they’d return.

  Lily was not naturally an optimist. What cop was? But she was determined to believe they were okay. All of them. They were okay, and sooner or later they’d find a way to come home. She refused to consider other possibilities—at least for six months. That’s the deal she’d made with herself. For six months she’d assume the best instead of the worst.

  Rule took her shoulder, turned her to face him, and kissed her gently on the lips. “They’ll be fine, Lily. Even your obnoxious orange friend.”

  She found a smile. “I think it’s my turn to say that.”

  “Nope.” He skimmed her lips with his again. “Mine. As often as I want it to be.”

  Somehow she and Rule had managed to trade off worry periods. When anxiety about their friends started to choke her, he was feeling steady. When he was hurting, she’d been able to summon enough confidence to reassure or distract him. The thing was, their missing friends mattered to her, but one of them—Cullen Seabourne—mattered hugely to Rule. They were lifelong friends, heart friends, the kind you’d risk your life for…but there was no risk Rule could take that would bring Cullen back.

  So Lily smiled and agreed. “They’ll be back, safe and sound. But worrying is my hobby, remember? Speaking of which…maybe you should call the restaurant, make sure they won’t cancel our reservation?”

  This time his kiss suggested he’d just as soon be even later, but he straightened without following through. “They’ll hold our table. Knowing how unpredictable your job can be, I made it clear they were to hold it if we were late.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “I’m going to take this”—he wiggled the shirt he still held—“to the Dumpster outside. The smell…bothers me.”

  “Because of the blood? Or because it’s my blood?”

  He smiled. “Yes.”

  The shower felt good, if hasty. The EMT had applied a gauze bandage she was supposed to keep dry, so that was a pain, but at least she could lather up and rinse the rest of her. She hadn’t gotten anything nasty in her hair, thank goodness, so she could sk
ip the wash and blow-dry bit.

  When she got out and wrapped up in a towel warmed by the heated towel rack—she loved this bathroom—Rule was downstairs. She heard him talking, probably on the phone. Maybe he’d decided to make sure about the restaurant after all. She hummed quietly as she hurried from the bath to the master bedroom.

  Lily liked things tidy. Her socks were rolled, her bras folded and lined up in a disciplined row, and her jackets all hung together in a color-coded closet. It took only a second to pull out the black silk dress she planned to wear, another second to retrieve hose and bra.

  For some reason, her passion for order did not extend to panties. They did all land in the same drawer—but that drawer was a colorful mess. Lily had a lot of panties, in all sorts of colors, fabrics, and styles. Back in her desperately broke days, a new pair of panties had been the one treat she could almost always afford. She still shopped carefully, sensibly…except when it came to panties.

  So maybe she shouldn’t have noticed the new ones right away—they were jumbled up with the rest—but she did. First she tugged out a silky leopard print bikini. The midnight blue she didn’t recognize turned out to be boy-cut hipsters. There were a couple more bikinis, one in multicolored polka dots, the other an eye-popping chartreuse. Then she spotted a scrap of raspberry lace.

  A thong, she saw, pulling it out.

  Her eyebrows shot up. Ordinarily she didn’t like thongs. But why not? Just for tonight, why not? He’d gotten them for her, tucked them away here as the sneakiest of surprise presents. She’d give him a treat, too.

  She had on her bra and the new thong when she felt Rule coming up the stairs. She didn’t hear him, but then, she seldom did. He moved as quietly as if his alter ego were feline instead of lupine. She paused with the dress over her arm and turned toward the doorway, smiling with pleasure and a touch of mischief.