Her overskirt slid open and spread beneath her. It provided another layer of padding on top of the flowers, an impromptu, bohemian quilt of patchwork silk. There could have been shards of glass beneath her and she wouldn’t have noticed. Not when Michael moved his attention from the released fastenings to the skin of her legs that had been fully revealed.
Her fingers trembled on the buttons as she worked to open his shirt while his calloused hand lightly smoothed from the edge of her sheath’s skirt down to her knee and back up again, to find soft warmth between her thighs.
“You’re softer than your namesake’s petals,” he whispered. Then he moaned and closed his eyes again because she’d finally worked all of his buttons open to find the muscled expanse of his chest and the flat plane of his lean stomach. He sucked in air as she caressed softly over the white ridges of his scars, banishing the memory of pain with the current rush of desire.
“Could you walk away now?” Lily asked. He slid his hand under her skirt to cup her hip, and her breath came faster. Her skirt rode up high on his lower arm. She was light-headed with need. Her heartbeat wasn’t isolated to her chest. It had claimed other parts of her as well, thrumming a call for his touch between her legs.
“Would you want me to?” Michael countered. He’d opened his eyes again to watch her as he teased his hand closer and closer to the apex of her thighs.
“No. Don’t go,” Lily gasped.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. It was a low groan, a sensual promise. One Lily opened her legs to encourage. He took advantage of her movement, sliding his hand over the silk underwear she wore beneath her sheath. Silk was no real barrier, but it was too much. She moaned in protest at the thin scrap of material preventing his touch from finding her throbbing clit. “No, Lily. I couldn’t walk away. But it isn’t the Brimstone that rules me. It’s you.”
He pulled her underwear down in a soft, swift move that left her completely bare to his fingers. He tossed the silk to the side and his fingers returned to seek and find the focused point where her pulse throbbed. Lily cried out, swiftly claiming a sharp orgasm against the tender expertise of his calloused fingers under his intense, watchful eyes.
And then he swooped down to devour her cries with his hot, hungry mouth while he continued to pet and play her. There was no rush. They didn’t have forever, but they had tonight with no Rogue threat hunting them down. He took advantage of the decadent hours stretching ahead of them. Gently filling her with thrusting fingers and questing tongue.
Lily luxuriated in the tastes and textures of his mouth—wine-sweetened, rough and smooth—but she also sought further access for her own explorations of his beautiful body—scars and all. She fumbled blindly for his belt and was rewarded by deep groans of approval. She arched her hips against his fingers as they mimicked the connection she craved, but she wasn’t distracted from the need to release his erection. He bulged beneath the trousers she struggled to loosen. His heat called to her. She impatiently unfastened his button and brought his zipper down.
He pulled back from the kiss and they both looked down to where her hand reached to slide his underwear out of the way. His freed cock sprang forward to bump against her mound. But he continued to use his fingers to rhythmically fill her even as his penis teased against her.
She tensed and her intimate folds squeezed his fingers as intense pleasure arched through her again, buoyed on by his attention and the thick, throbbing evidence of his need.
Lily reached for her own top. She shifted and ripped the smooth silk down to expose her breasts. The dress was ruined. She didn’t care. He rewarded her boldness by leaning down to suck one distended nipple and then the other. He bathed the pink tips of both globes with his hot tongue while she reached to grasp his erection in a trembling hand. He arched his back into her grip and Lily held on the best that she could against his enthusiastic thrusts.
The aura of affinity competed with sunlight around them. And Michael’s eyes glowed with twin flames.
“Who we are brings us together—including the legacy in our veins,” Lily whispered. “Don’t deny your Brimstone. You don’t have to resist it or control it. Not with me.”
She urged him closer and his hand slipped away to grasp her hip. She opened for the wider girth of his erection and he settled between her thighs. He was engorged and it was a tight fit, but she was slick and ready, eager for the jerk of his impatient hips as he filled her.
“I can’t resist, Lily. I lied. There’s no controlling this. Not now,” Michael said. Beads of sweat evaporated off his brow as quickly as they rose up on his skin. A slight haze of humidity surrounded his half-naked body as she held on to the frenzied movements of his hips and met them again and again with her own.
“No control. Not now,” Lily repeated against his neck as she nipped his salty skin. Later she would worry about regaining control. Later she would worry about sacrifice. For now she rode the pleasure as it claimed her one more time. She cried out as he buried himself all the way to her womb with a final thrust that brought his own release. His heat filled her and they were closer than they’d ever been for long moments until they fell back down to the reality of crushed flowers and the scent of earth.
* * *
He didn’t care if the wings tried to reject him for the rest of his life. He would wear them for Lily. To protect her. He’d felt the same wholeness when he’d worn them to help her against the stone Rogues. The same satisfaction in finally having a tool to channel the protective instincts that burned in him as surely as his Brimstone burned. That they’d immediately rejected him afterward didn’t matter. He didn’t care if he had to endure the pain of ill-fitting wings. He would wear them and he would convince her that he wanted to. That he accepted the throne. He embraced it even as he embraced her.
She was so warm in his arms. And it was a replete, soft warmth unlike any he’d felt before. He hadn’t been seduced or manipulated. He loved. And if it was as passionate as a daemon loved so be it. He was half-daemon after all.
* * *
Michael’s grip eased only after hours of sleep. Lily watched him as the distant sunlight from another place and time tracked across another world’s sky. He was as miraculous in her garden as the sunshine. It didn’t matter if the kachina had foretold the presence of his father in her life. She would always remember what it had been like to love the warrior angel she’d always loved—in the flesh.
Finally, when twilight settled over the garden, she disengaged herself from his heavy arms and rose. She did the best she could to dress in the crumpled remains of her dress. The torn bodice necessitated her borrowing the tuxedo jacket. He didn’t wake. He slept the deep sleep of the satiated on the lily garden’s ground.
This time she left the key in the lock when she slipped away. She would never visit her sanctuary again. Michael had blessed her with a memory that would have to heat her in its place.
Somehow she wasn’t surprised when she found Grim at the top of the first stairway as if he was keeping watch over their tryst. She was taken aback when he turned and led the way instead of staying with his sleeping master. But she was glad of the company. The staircases and hallways were cold and dark. Far more chilly than she remembered. She didn’t think the sconces provided heat as well as light, so the cool shadows spooked her. Grim padded with sure-footedness toward her rooms. He knew the way. He always knew the way. As long as the destination wasn’t heaven, he could find it.
She avoided looking too closely at the riot of carvings on the walls. When they finally reached hallways where torchlight gleamed, she tried not to jump at shadows on the wall. The chill was probably only a reaction to leaving Michael’s Brimstone heat. She would have to get used to the cold.
Once Grim escorted her to her bedroom door, he sat and waited for her to go inside. He didn’t follow her. He also didn’t walk or fade away.
&nbs
p; “Are you protecting me? Or keeping an eye on me to protect your master?” Lily asked. Grim was more intelligent than an ordinary dog. He could sense and see things that even some humans wouldn’t see. He might understand that her bargain with Ezekiel was still in play. He might not understand that her decision had already been made to thwart the daemon king’s schemes.
“Whatever your reason, I’ll accept a watchdog for tonight,” Lily said. “But beware of cold shadows.”
Grim’s eyes swirled with fire and his tongue lolled from his mouth. Sitting at attention, his head almost came to her shoulders. No wonder he acted like he had little to fear.
Lily slowly entered her rooms and shut the door behind her. She placed Michael’s jacket on her pillow and went into the bathroom to wash away the soil from the garden. Afterward, she pillowed her cheek against the jacket that held Michael’s smoky scent and slept fitfully, less afraid of shadows than she was of the man who might come to find her in her sleep.
* * *
At first Peter was trapped in an endless scream he fought against for hours that seemed to stretch on for an eternity. His entire focus was on closing his wide-open mouth, which had unaccountably turned stiff and unresponsive. His force of will was still strong. Several times a living presence passed him in the darkness and he was enlivened, better able to feel and move.
Finally, he brought his lips together.
Only then, when his focus slowly shifted elsewhere, did he understand where he was.
Peter spent hours ending his first scream as a carving on the walls of the daemon king’s palace in hell. Then he spent several more hours opening his mouth to scream again.
Chapter 22
Michael’s birthday dawned with the hazy glow of purplish sky that lit every day in the hell dimension. But on the day of a special celebration the usual demands of discretion were lifted from the servants in the palace. The hallways and rooms bustled with a constant flow of lesser Loyalist daemons that were rarely seen as they saw to the needs of arriving guests and the decor and amenities necessary to care for them.
Lily avoided conversations.
She might regret not saying goodbye to the daemons that had cared for her for years, but other than a stack of notes she carefully placed in her writing desk to be discovered later, she didn’t intend to acknowledge her plans in any way. She couldn’t risk Ezekiel’s finding out that she was making unusual rounds among the servants. He would never let her go. Of that she was certain.
She did risk discovery when she left her rooms to visit her mother’s grave. Fortunately, the importance of the party preparations kept most too busy to notice her passing. She planned her course along less-traveled halls and used a side entrance that few others utilized.
Before she visited the cemetery, she stopped at the stables. The great stone stalls weren’t made for ordinary mortal horses. Mounts larger than draft horses carried daemons into battle, but most of the stalls were empty now that the Rogues had been driven out of the hell dimension. Lily spoke to all the creatures that nickered at her as she passed. She wasn’t intimidated by their giant bony bodies, sharp teeth or glowing eyes.
Reaper was waiting.
He was the most ferocious of them all, but even though he’d once carried the daemon king on war-torn fields, he took the apple from her hand with careful movements. If anyone had seen her leave the palace, they wouldn’t realize she was visiting the beast to say goodbye.
Once she was clear of curious eyes, she hiked up a craggy hill behind the palace and the stables to the cemetery beneath an ancient willow-like tree. Unusual plants and animals thrived under the lavender light of hell’s skies. Grim followed behind her this time, trailing after her instead of leading the way. Out of respect or uncertainty, she couldn’t be sure. He had stayed smoky and vague inside, but he had fully materialized by the time she reached the black marble tombstone on the crest of the rise.
There were cut desert lilies left to dry on her mother’s headstone. Lily fingered their brittle petals. She hadn’t placed them there, but many of the servants had loved Sophia. Someone could have asked a gardener for the flowers. Sophia had brought a human woman’s passion to the halls of the palace—warmer and softer than its master’s.
Not to mention the laughter of a human child.
Lily had been happy in the hell dimension. Often. She’d been freer in captivity than she’d ever been in the outside world.
“I know you would understand,” she said. “I have to set him free.”
Of course there was no answer. Grim sat in the distance too far away to hear her words, but her heart still pounded in her ears for saying them and her palms grew moist. She took a handful of petals and crushed them in her fingers before sprinkling them over the grave in a flurry of pale gray. She watched them float to the ground.
Her mother had asked to be buried here. Near her daughter, she’d said, but Lily had known she had also wanted to remain close to the daemon king. Did her unrequited love linger here even in death? Or had she found peace?
The hot knot in Lily’s chest said the ache of unfulfilled love was never eased.
She reached into her pockets for the familiar velvet pouch and her warrior angel kachina. Her hands met flute, but not doll, of course. She’d abandoned the doll in the hallway. A lifelong habit was hard to break. She focused on loosening the pouch inside her pocket and pulling the silver flute out into the purple light. Once it was in her hand, she sank down to her knees beside the scattered lilies on her mother’s grave.
Lily had no desire to disturb her mother’s rest if poor Sophia had managed to find it, but she needed to play here and reclaim the memory of the loving lesson times they’d shared. Her breath was weak and soft at first, but the song grew in strength. It was a Hopi lullaby. The first song she remembered and the first one she’d played. She didn’t intend a summoning. She hadn’t brought any of her kachinas. Nevertheless, a cool breeze wafted over the grave, stirring the crumbled flowers into petal dust in the air. Lily watched them flutter and float, hover and fall. The willow-like tree had long draping limbs filled with crinkled leaves. It seemed caught in perpetual winter. The breeze stirred its dry branches into a cacophony of sound. The sibilant hiss of leaves brushing together created whispers whose meaning she couldn’t quite ascertain. The insistent noises skittered along Lily’s senses. The hair on the back of her neck and arms rose to attention.
But she continued to play.
She refused to be too afraid to use the gifts she’d been given. She sought answers and guidance. She might have lost her precious doll, but she still had her flute and the ability to use it to dwell in the aura of her affinity. Eventually, the breeze stilled and a warm energy filled her, called from her own heart. She was Lily Santiago, Samuel and Sophia’s daughter, and she would not be a pawn in Ezekiel’s game to bind his grandson to the throne.
Lily came to the end of the lullaby and allowed the last note to fade. She lowered the flute from her lips. Looking down, she noted that there were no dried petals left on the grave. They had all been swept away.
Grim was a dark shadow behind her. Waiting. Watching. She rose and slid her flute back into the pouch in her pocket.
“One day I’ll see you again, but not here,” she said softly. The headstone that held her mother’s name and the years of her birth and death had a sleek, dark surface. Lily started when her movements mirrored in its surface. Her heart leaped with a quickened beat. She could see a distorted reflection of herself in the obsidian marble. That was all. But she was pale and her hair was wild. Reflected in the grave marker, she was unfamiliar. As if a different woman rose to head back to the palace.
And maybe she was.
She was no longer conflicted.
Desperate. Afraid. Filled with dread.
But determined.
She turned to follow
the path down the hill without noticing the figure of her guardian silhouetted against the purple sky. He looked down on her and the palace from a taller rise as she walked away. Grim paused. He raised his horrible muzzle in the air and nodded at the daemon king before turning to follow Lily Santiago inside.
* * *
Michael woke alone, stiff and dirty and naked. He was confused for several seconds as his mind processed his surroundings. It was definitely daytime, but the sky above was dark. He finally processed the myriad panes of glass and the whistle of a gardener in the distance, thankfully before the gardener came his way.
It was his twenty-first birthday, a day he’d dreaded his whole life, but he didn’t have to ask himself why he hurried to shrug into his clothes.
Lily.
She was bound to hell by the powerful affinity her father had bequeathed her. She wasn’t safe in the outside world and it would never be safe for them to be together anywhere but the hell dimension. This palace was her refuge. Somehow that made it more appealing to him than it had ever been before.
Did it matter that his grandfather might be using Lily to bind Michael to the throne? No one liked to be manipulated, but he had grown up dealing with daemons. Nothing was straightforward. Nothing was simple. Lily was an innocent caught in a web that Ezekiel had been weaving for centuries. Even when she succumbed to the irresistible attraction between them, he could sense her reservations. He was disappointed to wake alone, but he had to admit there was also a rush.
He was the stepson of a hunter. Adam Turov had hunted Rogue daemons for years and helped their victims. Lily might want to run away from Ezekiel’s schemes, but Michael wasn’t prepared to just let her go. The rush he felt was the thrill of the chase. His whole life had been building toward this birthday and this celebration. The palace was abuzz with preparations as he stalked down the stairways that led to his rooms. Servants curtsied or bowed as he passed as if he had already assumed the throne, but Michael had only one thought on this mind: the hunt was on. Tonight wasn’t only about his birthday and the throne. Tonight was about showing Lily that they were meant to be together in spite of all Ezekiel’s manipulations. Not because of them.
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