TravelersKiss
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Traveler’s Kiss
Sherri L. King
Horde Wars, Book Six
He walks between shadow and light, in the hesitations between thought and motion. Seen stars fade and moons break, witnessed supernovae and the birth of galaxies. He is Grimm The Traveler, no part of the universe barred to him—save one. The woman he desires…always just beyond reach.
Raine was a prisoner of the Daemon Horde. Now free of their clutches, her mind is shattered, her powers exponentially grown but unpredictable. Her greatest fear is harming the only person who matters to her—Grimm. She’ll do anything to protect him. Even make a deal with the devil.
Lord Daemon isn’t to be trusted but he’s the only one capable of understanding Raine’s unique abilities. To save her love and restore a universe in chaos, Raine must forge an alliance that will either end the Horde War forever or empower Lord Daemon with might immeasurable.
Win it all. Or lose everything. Raine’s always known there’s no turning back from The Traveler’s kiss.
A Romantica® paranormal erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave
Traveler’s Kiss
Sherri L. King
Dedication
To Martha Punches…
You keep me going when I think my brain is going to explode. You remind me why I write, why I keep on doing what I do, even when I feel like calling for the white coats to come and take me away. You never, ever let me give up on myself. Creative people need someone like you in their lives, just to stay sane.
Martha, you have asked me for this book since our first meeting at the EC Christmas party in 2004. Hon, I think the first words you said to me were not, “Nice to meet you”, but “When is Grimm’s book coming out, woman?” You fielded customer service queries about this title for years and never once threatened to kill me (only maim a little, and gently at that). Thank you for doing so.
Your impatience—I mean, enthusiasm (yeah, that’s the word!)—has finally paid off. I hope I don’t disappoint. Lots of love, straight from my heart, no punch line, no joke, just love.
Acknowledgements
This book, like all my books, would never have happened if it weren’t for the inspiration of my wonderful, talented and über creative husband, Darrell. This book’s hero is especially dear to me, since Grimm was very much D’s mind bomb in the first place. D, you’re brilliant and I’m the luckiest woman alive. Watermelon on a stick!!
With endless thanks to my dear friends Brandi and Oscar Valdez. You built a bonfire for us to gather ’round and set this whole damn thing ablaze. Without you, this would not be the story it is and I’m doubtful I ever would have finished it. I am blessed in my friendships, inspired at every turn and most grateful for it.
Kelli K, my own personal Word Ninja of Darkness. For many years you have slaved over my books with only the occasional (silent) breakdown—which takes great strength or deep-seated madness, but either will do just fine for me. Kelli, you are a badass, no matter what I have to say here; it’s one of those absolute rules of science, which is reassuring in this topsy-turvy world we live in, if you ask me. Thank you for so many things, but mostly, thank you for being an excellent guide on this crazy journey of ours.
For Doc Schmeiser—thanks for the long talks and deep thoughts. Now get to work on your own novel!
Above all, I very much wish to thank all the wonderful readers who’ve stuck with me, who’ve sent me emails, Facebook posts, IMs, mobile texts and letters, asking about the status of Traveler’s Kiss. To those of you who have chatted with me at every author meet and greet or convention I’ve attended over the years, it’s lovely to have had the privilege of interacting with all of you and I treasure every second we get to spend together. It’s so amazing that even after all this time, you continue to support me and cheer me on and assure me that you still eagerly await Grimm’s story. Your faith keeps me humble and determined to work past the hurdles that life sets in my path. To all of you wonderful souls, I give oceans of thanks. I needed every word of encouragement you imparted so freely. Please enjoy the story you now have in your hands (or on your computer screen) and know that every word I wrote, I wrote for you, because of you and your priceless enthusiasm. Namaste.
At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And, softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
—Edgar Allen Poe, The Sleeper
Chapter One
She was a Möbius strip, cast into gray by the brilliance of the flames, spat out from some unknowable past into this unnamable present. No beginning, no end, just so. For a moment she wasn’t certain of her name, wasn’t even sure she needed one. She was crouched like a beast—what was a beast, and how was it different from herself?—in front of a flame. That much she knew. The fire blinded her, heating the blood in her eyes until she thought they might burst and run a molten river down her cheeks. The flames, the roots in the coals, the lifelines mapping their way through the char mesmerized her. Here was the great taproot of the conflagration. In the coals, far deeper than the flames, down below the cheerful glow of the fire that was one of nature’s great lies, lurked the true danger in the heat.
The tracery of veins in the embers moved like molten serpents. Unlike the undulating tongues of fire that would burn out all too soon, the coals would last. They endured. If tended, they would never die. It was a simple immortality but it came with a price, for if one coal escaped, one tiny shimmer of heat could reshape the landscape of entire cities. It could transform a verdant forest to poisoned ash. The sleeping fire must always be cared after, it must never be forgotten or the consequences could be devastating. Such raw, untapped power in the coals thrilled her with possibilities. What must it be like to wield that strength and never doubt that you must master its intent? Such responsibility lent divinity.
It seduced her, drew her in. She reached out to touch that flickering magic. To hold it. Perhaps wield it herself and become something more than whatever empty, aimless thing she was now.
“Stop.”
As if the command was a physical touch, her hand immediately stilled less than an inch away from the flame. The heat chewed at the nerves in her fingertips. The pain was not unpleasant.
“Raine.” Her name—she had a name!—riding the timbre of an alien voice shivered through her like a drug, until her veins glowed inside her skin. “You understand the fire will burn you, do you not?”
She swallowed hard, hating this puerile question posed to her in such a tepid tone—she wasn’t stupid, of course she knew the fire would injure her. But what was a little pain compared to seizing the primal root of that flame and holding it in her grasp?
“Do you understand my words?”
There was no condescension in the tone, she realized then. The question demanded an honest answer, asked in the deep timbre of a melodious, vibrant baritone.
Baritone…the word resonated in the empty corners of her mind with the reverberations of a depth charge. Its significance haunted her like something sacred, hallowed.
Her lashes shielded her eyes from the glare and the heat of the fire. Raine nodded, not trusting herself to speak, not knowing if she could. For a terrifying instant she wondered what language she used when, if, she did speak.
A movement stirred the air behind her. A shivery rustle of heavy fabric told her where the voice’s owner loomed. True darkness approached, she could feel it as concretely as if she’d seen it with her naked eyes. The darkness towered behind her and she dreaded it with every primal fiber that formed her. Ra
ine might have screamed when the shadow fell over her—if she’d had a voice.
A long, graceful hand extended from out of that shadow and banished a specter she’d been unconsciously fearful of, a many-tentacled thing wrought of hatred and hunger that feasted on nightmares and hope. It was his hand banishing the specter. His hand reaching through darkness, bringing her into the light.
His elegant fingers closed gently on hers to pull her away from the fire. He was eating up her space, her air. He drew her closer to him and folded her arm in until his own was cradled beneath her breasts, threading his fingers through hers. His chest completed a solid cage that trapped her and forbade any opportunity of escape.
Caught by him this way, all of Raine’s senses came alive, as if she’d climbed up from the depths of a great, long slumber.
“You have been quiet a long while,” he murmured intimately through the layers of her hair. For a dizzying moment this stranger’s lips brushed the shell of her ear. Her stomach dropped to her feet, her blood bubbled at a boil to the top of her head and she couldn’t remember how to swallow. “Is your mind troubled?”
Until he asked, she would have said no. But suddenly she realized she was troubled, very much indeed. Raine realized with no small dismay that she didn’t recognize this place or how she’d come to be here. She didn’t even know this man, though he sure acted as though he knew her well enough. His name escaped her completely, her mind alarmingly blank where he should be. It didn’t help ease her discomfort that she couldn’t see his face in the gloom behind her.
The warm sigh of his breath was a whisper of heady perfume, reminiscent of so many emotions. Longing, hope, despair, triumph, need, lust, passion and overwhelming grief. Scent was the mother of memory and his scent seemed determined to give birth to hers. It resonated in the empty cellar of her mind, spawning disconnected images that had no immediate meaning and were therefore useless to her. Faces without names, places she did not recognize and voices she had never heard before came at her from the dark corners of her subconscious like giant spiders, pouncing on prey—consuming everything.
He tightened his hold and she became aware that she had cried out, the evidence unmistakable in the echo of her voice on the unseen walls of the room, bouncing back at her again and again.
A strange, glittering dust fell from the ceiling high overhead, tickling her forehead and cheeks like tears.
Raine darted a glance down to the strong, dark-sleeved arm enfolding hers beneath the wild pounding of her heart. For a split second she recalled the shape of his face but then it was gone before she could commit it to her present anamnesis, leaving no trace of his identity behind. There was the prescient certainty that he wore a shadowy hood and a voluminous cloak that moved when there was no breeze to stir its fibers, but these details inspired no epiphany, they only confused and unsettled her further.
He’s the Reaper Man and deals in souls for currencies. Oh cheese and rice…
“Am I dead?” Her voice shivered through the silence, barely a whisper that longed to be a scream. A voice she barely recognized as her own. “Are you Death?”
The pause stretched between them like a river. Perhaps he was Charon, waiting to ferry her across the river Styx on his raft of bleached bone. He answered her and his sure, bedrock voice banished her mad imaginings like a curl of vapor in high wind, leaving her feeling foolish for having had them.
“No, Raine.” His words were indigo ink that stained the air, casting shadows where none should be. They vibrated up from his chest like the hum of some exotic instrument and she felt them, warm where her spine was pressed against him. “You are alive and you are safe.”
“Who are you?” Who am I?
“A friend.” A delicate pause. “Do you remember nothing at all then?”
“I don’t remember you.” Or did she? His hair would be black as old sackcloth, but also red as pooled blood in a certain slant of light—how could she know this and not know him? “I’m confused.” She was ashamed to hear the dissident warble in her words, a betrayal of the depth of her self-doubt and insecurity.
“Perhaps if you looked at me, your memories might stir.” Something in his tone assured her he would not force her to do anything, though it was clear he cared how she chose to proceed. “Will you look at me?”
Raine turned her head…and her mind fell blank like the night sky wiped clear before the coming of the dawn. She knew nothing, had no memory, no worry…he was, in that moment in time, her entire world.
His shadowed hood had been removed; the better to reveal his perfectly formed features to the firelight. Raine wasn’t sure if she should feel grateful or terrified that she was being granted such an unguarded view of him without being prepared for it first.
He was the most breathtaking thing she had ever seen.
Was he beautiful? She had only just relearned the art of speech, regained her comprehension of such ridiculous things as words, and yet she knew that beautiful was a stupid description that did him no justice at all. It didn’t suit him. Beautiful was a meaningless adjective overused to describe mundane things like the mountains, oceans or great works of art. He was certainly not that.
He wasmusic made flesh.
Raine knew music—she remembered it, lived it, breathed it. She was a musician. That was a fundamental truth she could never forget…and this creature was the living symphony of sound, every perfect note ever made brought together. The sound of the angels sent to Earth, sent here to her…
Was he an angel then? A god?
Raine hadn’t known she’d spoken her thoughts aloud until he answered blithely, “No. Nor am I a devil. And before you can ask, I am most definitely real.” He looked into her eyes and she felt moisture pool at their corners, hot, stinging tears, because meeting his night-filled gaze caused her to weep in an agony of rapture. “Can you recall my name, now that you have seen my face?”
Her head hurt when she tried to remember. “N-no.” That one utterance conveyed so much of what she would rather have kept hidden. Shame, loneliness and disappointment in herself, because if she had been told his name, she damn well should have made a point to remember it.
The bitter taste of Lethe’s waters was heavy on the back of her tongue…forgetfulness.
He put a finger beneath her chin to still its trembling. “Have no worries. Your memories will return with time. Perhaps we can start you on the path to recollection with a simple introduction—I am Grimm.”
“Grimm.” She frowned, taken aback, startled out of a wondrous moment of sensation. “Are you serious? Really? That’s your name?”
“It is.” His eyes were almost completely black. She couldn’t hold his gaze for too long. It unnerved her on a genetic level she couldn’t bring herself to examine too closely.
She hid her nervousness behind a very fragile façade of sarcasm. “That’s not a name, that’s an adjective. It’s like saying you’re sinister or morbid.” She dearly wanted him to release her. She hated the dangerous heat that surged in her blood simply from being in this proximity to him. The wild thrill of his stare made her skin flush and her stomach practice gymnastics—it bordered on mortifying and she prayed he didn’t sense her emotional upheaval.
“G-r-i-m-m,” he clarified patiently. She looked up to see that his perfect features were patient despite the amused twinkle in his eyes and lilt to his rich baritone voice.
Had she thought his eyes black? They were, but not entirely. She looked closer, careful not to fall in too deep. In the fathoms she beheld the glittering light of stars surfacing. Swimming. Raine had not known until now that witnessing the mere visage of a divine creature could cause insanity, but her mind twisted in on itself to protect her from the full impact of his glorious features. Yet still madness tore at the edges of her consciousness.
“Not g-r-i-m,” he continued. His voice was deliberately gentle. She wondered what he must think of her to exercise such caution. There was a certainty in her troubled mind that he could s
hout down the moon if he chose, though she could base this knowledge on nothing concrete in her memory. It was a feeling, but also something more urgent. It was instinct. He was being careful with her. For anyone else this might have been cause for gratitude. Not so for Raine. Suspicion and unease were her immediate concerns. The question that begged asking was “why”. He was obviously the one in control of this odd situation—why use caution at all?
“I am not a villain, Raine.” She was startled to hear him address her thoughts as easily as if she had spoken them aloud. Their gazes clashed again and Raine felt a phantom knot of anxiety unwind at her center. “I want only to help you remember who you are and what you are to me.”
She pounced on his words, her body jolted as if struck by lightning. “And what am I to you?” Her voice was barely more than breath.
His mouth curved. “Everything.”
Raine’s blood seized up in her veins. Speechless, she could only watch with wide eyes as he casually released her, turned and, with an iron poker produced from the shadows beside the hearth, he stoked the fire until the flames grew higher and the wood cracked in the anticipatory silence. His nonchalant manner did not mask the near alien fluidity of his movements, nor did it assuage the shock his words evoked in her.
“I have given you my name.” He continued facing the fire, his back to her, allowing her a moment to collect herself if she could. The hem of his garments fluttered eerily in the dim light. “You know your own. Now you must tell me—I need to know. What is the last thing you remember?”
Raine’s gaze drifted once more to the mesmerizing flames as she cast her mind back into itself and dove into the deep, green sea of waiting memories…
Chapter Two
Then…
With some disorientation and a few false starts, Raine realized that she was in her car and it was not in the proper alignment for conventional travel, unless one could drive upside down, with the roof acting as a sled in place of wheels. As bizarre as this situation was, for several delusional moments Raine fancied that might actually be a viable method of travel given the proper circumstances. She frowned and blinked around a haze of blood when suddenly, understanding set her mind on fire and all her senses came alive.