The light in the house turned silver, then gold, as a tongue of sunlight traced its way across the hall floor in their direction. Sparks raced over Meical’s chest and abdomen. His eyes widened and he gasped and shook again.
No more time. Caroline lay down, wrapped her arms and legs around Meical and rolled them toward the edge. Just as they tumbled into the darkness, she felt him jerk against her. He was dying.
Bumping down the stairs, she let go of Meical to shield her head and roll. When the world stopped rotating, she opened her eyes, flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling of the basement. Just like that night.
She could remember their faces. They hadn’t concealed them. Why bother? She wasn’t going to live to identify them. She had tried to crawl into the corner to get away from them, screaming and crying behind the duct tape they’d put over her mouth.
The darkness weighed her down, squeezing the life out of her. Caroline’s lungs froze. Her stump throbbed like a living reminder, and every ache from her tumble down the stairs woke a memory of pain in her body.
Light poured in from above her and shimmered like an angel through her tears. She wanted the light. She wanted the air. But to Meical that light was death. She had to close that trapdoor. But that would mean she’d be trapped here in the dark. Caroline’s heart pounded so hard that her head ached.
Maybe he was dead already. She might not even be able to help him. Meical would be the first to understand she couldn’t do it. She wanted out. She couldn’t be here.
She clamored to her feet, choking, trying to get her lungs to breathe around the knot of terror in her chest. She dragged herself up the steps. She wouldn’t stay here. She wouldn’t.
Sunlight blinded her, pale and translucent. In another moment, the sun would be all the way up.
She looked down at the pool of silver-blue that fell close enough to Meical’s foot for her to make out the details of the loafers he’d borrowed from John.
Meical had nothing of his own in this world. And no one. Only her—and now the child she carried, a child who would need Meical’s love and protection.
He’d been alone for so long, with no one to love him. There might be nothing she could do for him. But how could she let him die alone, down there in this hole? He had saved her from precisely that, the night of her attack.
How could she live with herself, knowing she would have died alone down here, if not for him, or tell their child how he had saved her, knowing she left him here to die by himself?
She looked up at the crusty adobe walls of the house and the brittle wood floor on her eye level, and watched the light creeping into the house through a hole in the ceiling just above her head.
She couldn’t take the light down with her. She had to bring her own. And that was the light that had restored Meical before. Her light.
She jerked the trapdoor shut just as the house above burst into the light of a new day.
Easing herself down to the bottom step of the stairs, she shut her eyes tight to close out the darkness. In her mind, she built the image of the radiant glow inside her, her shield. She wrapped it around her, gathering it closer like a blanket, and recited her courage words.
I am Caroline. I control my own emotions. This fear is no longer mine. It belongs in the past. I won’t accept it. I’m here and now. I am Caroline.
The faces of her attackers rose and fell, making shadows and gaps of darkness, but she visualized her light closing them out. She didn’t move, scarcely breathed, until she could feel the warmth of that light inside her as clearly as she saw it glistening, downy soft and warm, on her skin. Air rushed into her lungs, but she made herself breathe slowly.
When she opened her eyes, they had adjusted to the darkness well enough for her to make out a face before her. On instinct she probed him. The only thing she could grasp before he shielded himself was that he wasn’t human.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “What do you want?”
The stranger stared at her through matted ebony curls and began to murmur words that made no sense. He started toward her.
Caroline tried to back her way up the stairs, but he snapped his fingers, and every ounce of strength left her body. She opened her mouth to scream, but couldn’t make a sound.
He was practically chanting now, in a language she’d never heard before. Catching her before she tumbled off the stairs, he leaned her back against him. He held out his hand, and the ceiling above opened for a split second, belched her flashlight, and sealed itself. He caught the flashlight, flicked it on and set it on the floor with its beam turned upward.
In the pale wash of blue light, Caroline watched his free hand rise as his voice grew louder, descending slowly to flatten on her belly. Suddenly he was silent. She felt a shudder pass through him.
“I can do nothing to save Meical,” he whispered. “Only you can do that. What I can do is buy him time. But you need to understand, it will halt his transition. He’ll be just as he is now, both incubus and vampire, and as such, he’ll need both your passion and your blood to live. With his dual nature, he should be able to tolerate sunlight, but he will never relinquish his craving for the night. I hope you can live with that.”
As long as she had a chance to save Meical, Caroline didn’t care what it cost her. Whether heaven or hell or somewhere in between, it would be hers to discover with him.
“Forgive me,” he murmured, “but what I’m about to do isn’t for your eyes.”
He blew softly in her ear, and the whole world faded away. Caroline found herself enveloped in her own white light again, spinning and drifting, alone in the warmth and brightness with the tiny life she carried.
The stranger’s hushed voice brought her out of the ocean of white. She opened her eyes in the dim light of the flashlight to find herself propped against the wall.
He stood over her, wiping a rivulet of blood from his wrist. “It’s up to you now. If he survives, tell him Benemerut is safe. This I swear.”
“Wait. Who are you?” she asked.
He gave her a boyish grin. “A fool named Badru.”
Before she could say another word, he dissolved into the floor like a ghost.
Caroline waited for her head to stop turning cartwheels and her strength to return. When her vision cleared and the roar left her ears, she crept closer to Meical’s still form on the floor a few feet away. “Meical? Can you hear me?”
He didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. She touched his bare chest. His skin was icy to the touch.
“Come on, Meical, you know what to do. Just like you did the night I pulled you out of the snow. Remember?” She closed her eyes and reached for his being, trying to pour her love and light into him. “I’m not taking no for an answer. Feel my need for you.”
She waited, attuned to the slightest pull on her soul that would tell her he was trying to take in the warmth she could give him.
Nothing.
She kissed his cold mouth. “Come on, I’m trying so hard.”
She kissed him again.
Under her palm, where it rested on his chest, Caroline felt a pool of warmth. She lifted her mouth from his to look down at him. “Meical?”
She kissed him again. This time his lips were cool, not cold. She kissed him again. And again. Her Sleeping Beauty.
She felt a gentle tug at her soul. Yes! Caroline opened his mouth and swept her tongue around his, kissing him deeply. She filled her mind with her dreams, the power of their devotion and trust, and the pleasure of their lovemaking.
This is what you give me, she whispered to Meical in her heart. This is who we are.
Meical groaned. She lifted her mouth from his and looked down at him. “Oh, Meical, I almost lost you.”
His eyes fluttered open, clear gray eyes with pools of black. “Caroline…”
She kissed him again and smoothed his hair out of his eyes. “I’m here. I’m here.”
“Why aren’t I dead?”
“You had some extra help. I’ll
tell you later. We’ll have some things to work out, but first we need to get through this.”
He lifted a shaking hand to her face. “If we don’t do this right…”
Caroline sat up and pulled off her T-shirt, shivering deliciously as Meical’s gaze swept over her. “Since when have we ever not done this right?”
He sat up with a wince and looked around them. “I’m so sorry. I’ve tried so hard to make it beautiful for you, yet here we are.”
She caught his chin and kissed him again. “Don’t think about that. I’m not.”
He rose up on his knees and pulled her close. Suddenly he was still. He looked left and right, as though searching the shadows around them. “Do you feel someone here with us?”
Caroline ran her tongue over her parched lips. That was, of course, her cue to tell him about the baby. But she had to be sure he was himself first. She couldn’t risk anything going wrong now. “Meical, we don’t have much time.”
“There’s someone here. In this very room.”
He was definitely onto it. But could he handle it?
The silence hung between them while he looked this way and that. Caroline waited, spellbound by the beauty of what he was about to discover. He sat back on his haunches and stared at her abdomen. She wanted to remember the look on his face forever. He was terrified, but his hope shone in his eyes, giving them an unearthly silver gleam. That’s when she knew it was all right.
He dragged in a deep breath and whispered. “Impossible.”
She waited to hear how he was going to try to explain to her. Priceless words. Priceless man. “What?”
He lifted his hand to touch her stomach and closed his eyes, mouth parted, and smiled slowly.
She put her hand over his. When he looked up to meet her gaze, she was sure her tears would give away the fact that she knew, but he was still clueless.
“I’m afraid Neshi’s methods resulted in…um…something neither he nor I anticipated. He must have gone farther than he realized, when he put me back together again.”
“What are you trying to say?” she whispered, unable to maintain her pretense a moment longer.
He straightened his shoulders in an apparent effort to man up. “Caroline, you’re pregnant.”
She grinned and reached down to run her hand through his hair. “Scared?”
His eyes widened. “You know about it already?”
“Neshi told me.” She ran her hand over his forehead. “I suggest we finish what we started.”
He swayed a little, but his hands unerringly found the clasp of her bra. The cool air on Caroline’s bare skin sent a shudder of need through her. His kiss deepened, and she felt waves of his hunger pour out of him and wash over them both.
He dragged in a deep breath and whispered, “Impossible.”
He caught her by the elbows and helped her to her feet, kissed his way over her abdomen. He curled his hand over the back waist of her jeans and panties, and tugged. Before she could find her zipper, he had her unclothed.
Wrapping an arm around her good leg, he lifted her other leg over his shoulder, and mouthed his way over her abdomen again, lower and lower, until tears of anticipation sprang to her eyes.
Caroline cried out at the first touch of his tongue. He groaned against her, rocking her in his grip as he made love to her with his mouth. There was no room in her for fear, no room in her for nightmare memories. She was too full of love and pleasure and need.
He took her right to the edge, then moved away from her. Caroline reached out for him to find him on his feet. He picked her up, wrapped her legs around him and sheathed himself inside her. He moved them together, deep and swift.
Caroline opened her inner eye on a world of color and light she had never seen before. Their oneness flickered between them, blinding white one moment, as red as a nova the next, while all around them, the whirlpool of their combined emotions made a cocoon that separated them from time and place.
The pleasure he needed, the pleasure she longed for, wrapped around the muscles of her hips, delicious weakness that spread through her body. She couldn’t get enough of him.
She gasped out the words. “Deeper, Meical.”
He firmed his grip on her backside and pressed her against the wall. “Oh, yes! This is what I need, all I’ll ever need for as long as I live. Say it, Caroline. Say it now.”
“I love you.”
Caroline wrapped her arms around him and held on, as he took her mouth in a long, hard kiss, hurling them over the edge.
Somewhere between heaven and earth, Caroline felt the darkness relinquish her incubus, and the fear she’d carried with her gave up its hold on her. The haunting memory of this house withered like a weed in the sun, replaced by the memory of their new beginning.
ISBN: 9781408938683
Incubus
© Janet Elizabeth Jones 2011
First Published in Great Britain in 2011
Harlequin (UK) Limited
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