by Reine, SM
“Nathaniel?” Elise whispered.
He lifted the sapling toward her. “I’ve taken good care of it. You don’t need to worry.”
Why would she care about some sapling? This was Nathaniel, the boy that had helped liberate her from Adam’s captivity, the one who had died and been reborn into her arms as an angel. The first angel to have been hatched from Eve’s nursery in years—other than his father, James.
She slid off of the root, crossing the grass to kneel in front of him. The soil was moist and warm under her knees.
“Forget the plant. What about you?” Elise asked, cupping her hands around his. He felt real. He wasn’t a ghost. She wasn’t even all that certain he was a dream.
“I don’t matter anymore,” Nathaniel said. “I’m everything.”
Her fingers brushed a root, and warm recognition flowed up her arms. This wasn’t just a sapling. It was a cutting of the Tree that had been destroyed in the final battle. The Tree whose sap still ran through Elise’s veins.
There was a strange light in Nathaniel’s eyes. That wasn’t a normal ethereal glow. It was something greater and far more terrifying—something that he never should have touched.
“My God,” Elise said.
And he whispered, “Yes.”
Elise, wake up.
He began to fade from her, holding the sapling to his chest as the earth vanished underneath her and the trees bent away.
Consciousness struck.
The pain flooded back all at once—the cramping hunger, the crack in her skull, the heaviness of her muscles. There was sunlight outside. It was daytime. Her skin crawled with electricity as if it were trying to fragment into a million pieces and peel off of the bone.
Elise groaned through gritted teeth, back arching, heels digging into the floor under her.
But there was food nearby. She could hear it the rush of healthy blood through healthy veins.
She just needed to find it.
Shoving herself onto all fours, Elise pressed her forehead against the tile, trembling at the force of daylight outside the walls. It had been so painless in the forest of her dreams, effortless and safe. She wanted to go back. She wanted out of his hellhole.
“Elise,” said a soft voice.
She lifted her head slowly and it was still too fast. It made the room swirl around her.
Through the blur, she pieced together a familiar figure. Not Nathaniel, but his father.
James had come.
He stood a few feet away from her, hands lifted in a gesture of peace that she knew to be meaningless.
Elise got to her feet and she swung a punch at him. She couldn’t focus well enough to hit. Her depth perception was all wrong. Her knuckles only connected with empty air, and he hadn’t even had to step away.
He was probably just projecting himself to the house anyway. He wasn’t stupid enough to have climbed into the cage with the tiger.
“You bastard.” It came out as a ragged rasp. “You trapped me.”
“You attacked Leander. You could have killed him.” He looked so exhausted. “I didn’t want to do this.”
“How long have you been preparing to cage me?”
“It’s for your safety as much as everyone else’s. What you’ve become—it’s not your fault, but I had to stop you.” He stepped aside when she lunged again. James wasn’t fast. She was slow. “We have other problems at hand.”
She slipped to her knees again. Standing was impossible. The edge of the tub swelled into focus, her hand slipped over the edge. She barely kept herself from falling in.
Other problems. Problems like starvation and being poisoned by basandere blood and iron.
James kneeled beside her—and pressed a hand to her forehead.
Shock dragged at her with icy knives. Elise had expected him to be a projection of himself, just as he had been when he visited her in Monterey. She never would have expected him to be stupid enough to actually enter her prison.
“You’re so cold,” James said. Blood pulsed through his palm and fingers with every thump of his heart. She could feel it even through the leather of his glove.
Elise seized his arm in both hands, trying to pull him off balance. She only succeeded in slipping off of her knees. She hit the ground on her hip, and it felt like her skin had become so thin that the bone rubbed directly against the wood floor.
“I’ll kill you,” she whispered.
His expression made it look like he was already dying—the same kind of slow, painful death that Elise was suffering from. “You won’t be the only one attempting it. I came here to escape Stephanie. She’s joined the Apple.”
There was a joke in there somewhere. Elise couldn’t find it. Nothing was funny anymore.
He pulled her away from the tub and checked her arms, which were blank. All of the runes were gone from her skin. “I saw your wound. What happened to you?”
“A basandere attacked me.”
The growing smile vanished. “The demons that have iron chains?” he asked. She nodded. “Stephanie had basandere with her.”
Why was Elise not surprised? “That bitch.”
“How did they get in here?” James asked, looking around the room as if seeing it for the first time.
“They didn’t. This was before I found you. I’m the one that destroyed this place. I tried to free myself with magic, and it didn’t…” Her stomach cramped hard, and Elise bent again, arms folded over her abs.
Bile surged up the back of her throat. She doubled over, vision blurring.
She could see her femurs through her skin.
“The magic is killing me,” Elise said. She only realized it as she said it, but it had to be the truth. She had gone months without feeding before. It wasn’t until she had started coating her body in James’s magic that she started to suffer. Trying to explode her way out of his cage had pushed her over the line, and she was on the brink of death for it. “You did this to me.”
“I had no idea it could hurt you. Ethereal magic isn’t fueled by the caster. It shouldn’t even touch you.”
“But I’m not an angel. I’m a demon.”
Elise had been willfully poisoning herself for weeks.
“I can help you,” James said, his voice sounding distorted, as though he spoke through water. “I can make it all better. I’m surprised the healing spells in the walls haven’t already corrected this.”
He was right—he could help. Even more than he realized. The sound of his voice was fading underneath the slosh of blood forced through his beating heart. Elise gripped his shirt in a fist, partially to steady herself, and partially to feel the powerful throb of the muscle underneath. Just millimeters away.
“I need to feed,” Elise said.
“You destroyed the kitchen. How much did you eat? Did you drink anything?”
Like all she needed to subsist was a protein shake.
Elise lifted her head to meet his eyes for the first time. It was hard to focus, but the pale blue irises were clearer than anything else around her. That color spoke to power. Blood laced with silvery magic.
He would never let her do it. He hated everything about demons.
But she didn’t need his permission.
Elise grabbed his arm in both hands again. He didn’t expect her to be able to hurt him—she had already proven once that she was too weak to pull him down, much less punch, kick, or any other assault he might anticipate.
He wasn’t expecting her to bite.
She sank her teeth into his wrist.
James shouted and jerked his arm free, but not before hot, coppery blood met her tongue. He climbed to his feet, staggered away from her. Elise didn’t try to chase him. She licked the blood from her lips, wiped it off of her chin and sucked her fingers clean, savoring the faint rush of power that each swallow gave her.
His thoughts flooded her mind.
Demon—blood—feeding—not Elise, not like this—
It faded again as quickly as it had co
me.
“What are you doing?” James asked, horror flashing over his eyes.
“I told you,” she said, getting to her feet even as her knees trembled, “I need to feed.”
James wasn’t afraid of her, even now. She couldn’t feed on him as she had fed on Leander. But just the brief taste of his blood had made heat pool in her belly, arousing all kinds of hungers that James would be fine for satisfying.
Elise peeled her shirt off over her head, dropping it to the bathroom tile.
His eyes flicked down to her bare chest. Her nipples had hardened to peaks—not because the air was cold, but because the flavor of his blood had awakened her body. It took visible effort for him to look back at her face.
“Don’t do it,” he said warningly, backing away, clutching at his wrist to stem the flow of blood. The smell flooded the air.
It had been too late the moment that James had entered her cage.
Elise moved in a flash.
She slammed him into the wall, jerked his arm away from his body, and sank her teeth into the wound that was already trying to heal. Elise struck with the speed of a viper.
Their minds crashed together once more.
Elise could see her from his perspective. He had an excellent view of her body, the curves of her breasts, her pinched waist, pale white thighs. He was trapped by a dizzying mix of pain and revulsion and arousal.
The things that he wanted to do to her—none of them had anything to do with blood.
She jammed her elbow into his throat, trying to pin him to the wall as she drank. James pulled her back against his chest instead. He thought for a wild moment that it would somehow give him better leverage—that he might be able to break free of her grip like that.
Elise knew better. He wasn’t fighting her as hard now, and his breath was heavy against her neck.
She dug her fingernails into his arm, working her lips against the wound to break it open, let the blood flow.
His pain was fading, changing. The flow of blood was gathering much lower in his body than his wrist. Elise excited him and he hated himself for it.
They sank to the floor together on their knees. The motions of struggle had grown smaller, but no less tense—the way he grabbed at her hair, trying to pull her head back; the way she used one hand to grip at his hip and dig into his jeans, forcing his body against hers harder so that he couldn’t escape. Their limbs were tangled. Her knee slipped between his thighs. Pulling her hair hurt, but not enough for it to be effective in the way he thought—all it did was make her moan and grab him harder.
He liked that moan.
“Let go,” James panted. “You need to let me go now, before I have to hurt you.”
She peeled her mouth off of his wrist, letting her head loll back against his shoulder as she swallowed, gasped, licked her lips again. “You’re not going to hurt me,” Elise said. He couldn’t cause any more damage than he already had. And she could feel his arousal pressing hard against her back—hurting was the furthest thing from his mind.
James tasted better than anyone that she had ever tasted before. Even Seth with the blood of Adam and the strong-beating heart of youth hadn’t been so intoxicating, hadn’t made every single nerve in her body long for him.
His breath was choppy. So warm on her cheek.
The blood wasn’t enough.
“Fuck me,” she said, digging her fingernails into his thigh, grasping for his fly.
His mind erupted with images—some imagined, some remembered. Naked bodies against the mirrors in a dance studio. A tiny bedroom in rural Russia.
“Jesus, Elise—”“
She twisted to look over her shoulder. “Fuck me, James,” she whispered into his lips, just inches from hers. “Let me feed from you.” Her breath smelled like his blood, but it didn’t disgust him the way that he thought it should.
James made a quiet choking noise, like he was trying to argue only to have it stick in his throat.
His hand slid between them. She heard his belt open, the grind of his zipper.
He pushed his knee roughly between hers, pulling her onto his lap to straddle him. He was already exposed. Already hard and waiting.
Elise wasn’t going to ask for him again. She jerked his arm to her mouth again and bit even harder than before.
At the same moment, he drove his erection inside her body in one long, slow stroke, fighting against her tightness to bury hilt-deep.
Finally.
Elise didn’t know if that was her thought or his.
She groaned deep in her throat, bubbling around the flow of warm blood. God, you feel good, she thought, knowing he would hear it, unwilling to release his arm long enough to say it out loud. And she knew that he felt the same. Without the wards between them, it was impossible to tell which parts belonged to Elise and which to James. They were two halves of a whole. Mind and body, blood and heat.
James moved inside of her, and in a few strokes, she knew that she was on the brink of losing it. She gulped the blood down. Every taste, every motion, brought her closer to the oblivion of climax, and James was going with her.
They were spiraling toward something blindingly dark, an event horizon at the juncture of their bodies.
His fingers rolled between her legs. He knew just the right rhythm to push her toward orgasm.
It hurts, James thought suddenly. Not his arm, but something deep in his chest.
Elise dragged deeper on his energy, sucked harder on the veins, swallowed his blood and his life and felt his skin cooling within her grip.
Neuma had said something about this. She had warned Elise not to fuck anyone without her there to pull her back, to keep her from drawing too deep. But Elise had done this with Neuma a dozen times. She hadn’t killed the half-succubus, and James was surely more powerful.
Either way, it felt too good to stop. The energy was too much, yet not enough. His magic had drained her. Now he was the only thing that could restore her.
She needed more.
She needed it all.
Elise felt something inside her mind break, crack, fragment. She filled the holes with James’s life and soul. His blood poured down her chin, dripped onto her chest, slid over her navel.
They were coming up on something dangerous. Something dizzying and brutal.
I can’t stop, she realized.
His rhythm grew erratic between her legs. He pushed harder against her, gripping her thigh. “Elise,” he groaned against her shoulder, and she didn’t know if it was because he had reached his peak or his death.
They went over the edge together.
Elise woke up in bed. Three years without sleep, and now she had passed out twice in one day. She was going to start getting spoiled.
She pushed herself up onto her elbows, looking around the room. She couldn’t have been unconscious for long. There was still blood all over her face, though someone had wiped it off of her chest and abdomen—probably a good sign that James hadn’t died, either.
Elise still felt relieved when he walked into the room with a damp towel.
He looked like a wreck. There were shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there before they had sex. His hair was tousled, his shirt was bloody, and the hip of his jeans had been torn. That was likely a product of her fingernails. Elise couldn’t manage to feel guilty.
She dropped back on the pillows. Her body felt better than it had in weeks. Better than it had after drinking from Seth. Better than ever.
James sat on the foot of the bed, looking exhausted. She finally noticed that he was wearing a spine scabbard and that the hilt of her steel falchion jutted over one shoulder. He must have been wearing it earlier, but she had been too distracted to care.
“That’s not how I ever wanted it would be,” James said, pressing a dishtowel to his wrist.
Elise lifted an eyebrow. “Been giving it much thought?”
“Not the possibility of…feeding.” His mouth twisted with distaste. “I always meant to be
gentle with you. There’s such violence in your life. You’ve never known anything else. I thought…” James shook his head and fell silent, but she could see the ripple of disgust over his skin. He pushed the towel harder against his wound.
So he was in that kind of mood—the kind where he sank down into a miserable pit of his regrets, of which he should have had very, very many.
Elise didn’t want to go down with him. She hadn’t killed him during sex despite Neuma’s warnings, which meant she had a modicum of self-control and could do it again. Feeding without needing to kill—that was a victory if she’d ever had one. She was almost in a good mood. “Do we have to have this talk now?”
“We didn’t get to talk about us after you killed Adam. You left too quickly. And when else will we get to speak? The next time we’re facing down over the fissure to Hell?”
She rolled her eyes. So the relationship talk was happening whether she wanted it to or not. She was in his cage, after all. “Okay. When, exactly, were you imagining this?” she asked, propping her head up on one arm. She was fine remaining drenched in his blood while he hurried to clean up.
“Always. From the beginning.”
“Hmm,” Elise said. She didn’t need words to tell him that the “always” was strange. They had begun traveling together when she was sixteen and he was twenty-eight.
He must have heard the disapproval. His eyebrows dropped low. “Yes. I know. And you can imagine how much I hated myself for that. I thought that I was sick. Perverse.”
“Well,” she said. No argument there.
James flung the towel into the corner. He had brought bandages with him, too. He started patching up his wrist.
“After we found out about your physical condition—the androgen insensitivity—I couldn’t stop thinking about the implications of it. The fact that you would likely always struggle with intimacy on a physical level, in addition to the emotional aspects of it. The fact that you could never bear children. It seemed so damn unfair that a world that had already plotted against you in so many ways would deal these final, bitter blows. And yes, I entertained the idea that I could be the one to show you that life didn’t need to be like that.”