All that yoga and meditation is paying off, she thought hysterically.
Just keep climbing.
The urging was superfluous; Adora clawed her way over the top of the ramp. Instead of a second ramp down, she was faced with a broken wall. Ahead of her was a crevice tight and dark with a rim of fractured teeth. Aside from the hole, the only place to go was up, and up was so far away that she couldn’t make out the top.
Oh, no.
Just climb.
I am not the Scarlet Pimpernel, she thought with asperity. I don’t scramble over turrets and swashbuckle on castle heights.
You do now. It’s that or the hole.
Adora stared up at the ceiling and then into the crack, trying not to breathe. The crack looked like a mouth, a gullet, waiting to swallow her. It was not an attractive hole but it had one thing going for it— it was too tight to let the larger beast in.
Why don’t I ever get an easy choice, like the lady and the tiger? she complained.
Behind her, the beast howled and started digging into the mountain of shale. Blocked by stone, its words were unintelligible. Its anger was clear, though. Joy began to whimper.
Stop it! Adora almost shouted, and Joy froze midsniffe. You have to help me.
Admittedly, I would rather a tiger than either of our two choices, Joy answered. But since that isn’t one of our options . . .
It looks slimy in there—glowing.
It’s slimy in the monster’s mouth too.
You have a point . . . and I really don’t like heights.
Just go.
Adora used a string of words that she had only uttered twice in her life, and then she bent down. She took a last breath and forced her head between the stony teeth. She kept her mouth and eyes shut against the tentacles of dripping slime that left stinging trails on her skin.
Dark, dark, Joy whispered.
Adora hit her head once when the tunnel narrowed into a tight jackknife turn, and she bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. But the sound of giant claws ripping through the loose stone of the ramp helped her convulse her protesting body into the turn. A few more feet . . . just a few more and she’d be safe. Surely it couldn’t follow her into the tunnel. Its body was too big and the tunnel too narrow.
Joy? Joy! But there was no answer. Her friend had eventually curled up in a fetal position and would be no help.
The monster wasn’t in her brain yet, but she felt him surrounding her, trying to cut her off before she could reach Kris. His presence was like maggots crawling on her skin, trying to chew their way inside. Within her mind, she screamed for the only person who cared enough to help her. She cried out for Kris. She cried forever as the slime ate at her skin.
Adora? She finally heard him. Relief made her weak
Kris? Help me! What is that thing?
Another assassin. I’m close, love—keep moving. You’re almost out.
But it was hard. There was no air and she felt so sick and dizzy, and the tunnel seemed to be getting tighter, strangling her like a python. Just when it got unbearable in the cruel dark, warm hands grabbed her, pulling her from her strangling hole and banishing the monster from her head. Adora blinked rapidly, unable to believe that she was in Kris’s arms, safe from the fiend.
And looking over Kris’s shoulder was a concerned Mugshottz. His hard face had never looked so good.
And someone else was there: Abrial Nightdemon, the Executioner. . . .
She knew the title somehow, had plucked it from Kris’s head. The fact that she could do this almost without effort underlined the fact that they were now mentally connected.
The Executioner will take care of that thing. Joy’s voice was back and more vindictive than Adora had ever heard. Look at the claws on him!
Good, and I hope he guts him like a . . . Adora began to answer, but then felt Kris’s hands tighten, and a thread of ozone streaked through the air where it curled around them. Joy immediately retreated, taking her anger with her. Something about Kris frightened her even more than the monster.
Though a part of Adora wanted to follow the transforming Abrial as his winged and clawed body slithered back down the hole she had just escaped, and to watch as he did something awful to the creature who had tormented her, she did not allow herself to do anything more than wish the worst upon the evil thing.
“Adora.” Kris’s voice was low and rough. “Don’t. You have every right, but . . . just don’t. Please. I can feel your rage and it’s making me crazy.”
“But—”
She watched, fascinated and horrified, as black ink spilled over into the whites of Kris’s eyes and small bolts of lighting appeared in that darkness. As disturbing, she could smell ozone rising rapidly around them: It was about to storm again. That seemed highly dangerous, confined as they were to a small cavern.
“Boss! Let go!” Mugshottz reached for her, but Adora waved him away though Kris’s touch was now fire on her skin. The bodyguard added urgently, “Kris, hit me if you need to. I’m half gargoyle. I like lightning. Just don’t hurt her.”
“Hurt her?” He said the words like they held no meaning. “I don’t want to hurt her.”
Eat my heart. Drink my soul. Love me to death.
She knew what was happening—that there was a growing danger. It was happening to her too. Kris was feeling Abrial’s rage, perhaps even experiencing the creature’s death at the nightdemon’s hands. Adora could feel it as well, and it was calling up her own dark magic, the part that wanted to burn everything that frightened her before she could be hurt again.
“Kris,” she said gently, pushing down her emotions. It took several seconds to corral the fear Joy had let loose in her psyche. When she was calmer, she called to him again, this time with her mind. His black eyes, shards of night, flicked over her.
“Don’t go there. Don’t feel it. Be with me here,” she said. She paused; then, putting her lips to his throat, she added, “I have my answer now, and I think it will make you happy.”
And she did. She wanted Kris. Being near him now made her shiver with delight. Something inside her had ripened and was ready for harvest. She could almost picture him laying hands on her and calling this sweet fruit of desire up through her skin.
“Are you in pain?” she asked softly, laying a hand against his cheek. Small electric shocks danced over her skin. She and Kris were both too hot, too charged with energy. “Does the goblin lair make you feel ill?”
Kris cleared his throat. “Ill? Not exactly. Being near the goblin assassin and his plans of murder only makes me stronger. Don’t forget what I am. The energy feeds me and is redoubled.”
“But . . . is that good?” she asked, remembering what Zayn had told her.
“It depends entirely on what I do with it.”
“You could kill?” she asked tentatively.
He laughed. “Oh, yes—on a massive scale. All I have to think is die and every living thing will. Even you would obey. But, Adora, I don’t kill. Ever.”
Mugshottz shifted his weight, clearly as nervous as ever.
“It’s tempting, though,” Kris admitted. “And why I stay away from war zones. It isn’t cowardice, as some have thought. Such death is like a drug in my system.” He rolled his head slowly, like a sprinter loosening up before a run. Adora hoped it was her imagination that made his eyes take on an eerie silver glow and made his hair appear to flutter in some breeze she couldn’t feel. The smell of ozone remained strong.
Mugshottz continued to look anxious, and Adora understood why. She was catching some of Kris’s confused subconscious thoughts: He must not falter, could not give in to the urge to just let fly, to dump all his stored-up rage on the goblins.
Kris also sensed the other feys had doubts about his plan, but he didn’t know how to address them. Logic could only carry a person so far, and then they had to rely on emotional intuition or faith, neither of which were as strong in him as before the goblins’ poison had weakened his links to Gaia.
&
nbsp; Pain shot through him at this thought, reminding him of his promise. Gaia. His task was left undone, his work dangerously delayed by goblin poison and by the death of all the pureblood feys in the Great Drought. The difficulties had multiplied in his absence, making his task seem almost impossible. Usually it was enough that he appear for awhile, a bulwark of hope and faith against Nature or a changing social tide, protecting humans as Nature or politicians altered their world. But that would not suffice now. There was nearly two centuries’ worth of damage to undo—and he could barely keep control of himself when exposed to a single creature of evil.
The other problem was that his memory was at once too full and too fractured to be of much help, especially in light of the long catalogue of losses he and his brethren had endured. Though he resisted, Kris had begun to look at these losses collectively rather than as individual events, and the big picture was depressing. Eventually they would erode his confidence and make him and the others too weak to be effective. He needed help, a spiritual bandage to bind up his ailing heart while his mind finished healing. He needed Adora—but she needed time. Perhaps lots of it. He had to give that to her.
“You have given it to me,” she whispered.
“I know that my path sounds indirect and painfully slow,” Kris said abruptly, his voice low. “But it’s the only one I can take that won’t bring destruction on all of us. O Goddess! My gift is my curse. And how I long to use it.” He shook his head and swayed. Though nervous, Adora reached for him with her body and mind, pressing as close as he would allow. “Kris! Stay with me. Use me as an anchor.”
“War and death are odd things.” His voice was low and rough, his eyes still focused somewhere else. “They have no memory and therefore learn nothing. They just consume. It wouldn’t be so bad if they grew old and eventually died, but they don’t. Hate and avarice are eternal—and supplied with ever-deadlier weapons, they just get stronger, more determined. And what have my poor children had to defend themselves with while I was gone? They have been forced to use the devil’s weapons.”
“Kris,” Adora said again, trying to bring his focus back to the present. His eyes were now like lasers and his hair writhed like ribbons in a current of spiraling wind.
“We need to leave here,” he whispered. “I’ve tried to stop it, but something inside me is calling to Death. And if He hears the summons, He will come. And once called, He will not stop his harvest until ten thousand years of deaths are collected.”
“This . . . this thing is retroactive?” she asked, appalled. Lightning was beginning to dance over her skin in painful arcs, but she didn’t pull away. She sensed that she was a lightning rod, the only thing drawing the rage away from Kris.
“Yes. It’s like I told you: Everything— everything—comes at a price. Except love,” he added to himself. “That is always there. Always. Even when we can’t seem to find it.”
Gaia again. Adora still didn’t feel any of that great cosmic love that Kris believed in, but something had to be done. It was time to take the leap of faith and trust that she had been avoiding.
“Yes, there is love,” Adora agreed, and then, though it frightened her, she stood up on her tiptoes and pressed her mouth against Kris’s.
As quickly as that, he was back with her, focused. His eyes stopped their strange display, and the scent of ozone began to subside. The small electric tingles diminished on her skin. But that didn’t mean that their connection lessened. Not at all. Inside, that feeling of sweet emotion was coming to a boil.
“You bleed.” His lashes were black fans against his pale cheeks when he turned his gaze downward. She could feel that her blood both excited and appalled him. The hands that gripped her felt larger than before, and her clothing less substantial.
“Only a little.”
He ran his tongue over the wound on her lip. The sting of this strange kiss was quick and shocking, and it tightened her entire body and sped her heart to dangerous rhythms. The kiss said he wanted to devour her.
“Adora?” he asked.
“Yes.” She looked into his eyes, which remained wild, stripped of all humanity. It took effort to say, “I’m ready. I have faith. The answer is yes.”
Kris made a noise at the back of his throat and scooped her up in his arms. His hair made a silver curtain around them.
They moved quickly through the slowly brightening tunnels and, gradually, his eyes began to dim. The worst of the murderous tension drained away, leaving behind what Adora recognized as a kind of lust, though she had never encountered anything like it before. Kris wanted so much more than her body.
They stopped suddenly. When she looked up, she found that they were in Kris’s bedchamber, alone with just his portrait and the many piles of books that stood as testimony to his avid desire to learn about her age.
“You’re here,” he said softly. His voice was a caress.
She realized that a part of her had been close to Kris for a while—perhaps from the beginning. It had been love at first hearing, she thought, though she also found pleasure in the way Kris moved: confident, graceful, as if he had dominion over everything. Really, he was all that she was not and yet longed to be.
He kissed her roughly, interrupting her thoughts. She kissed him back—harder—and knew when he again tasted the blood from her bitten lips. Her hands tightened on his face in case he thought of pulling back.
No, he said inside her head, his words a balm. Not now. It’s far too late for retreat.
And she believed him, because she could feel his sex growing between their tightly pressed bodies, growing ridiculously. And then he deepened their kiss, maybe excited by the blood from a wound she could no longer feel, and she forgot to think about anything else except that her flesh began to cry out for more of his touch.
She broke away to pull his shirt over his head, wanting to feel him closer, to lay his skin against her own, perhaps to use some arcane magic to make them one. As she looked again into his eyes, a new primal urge flickered and then flamed into life. For an instant, her resolution wavered. But this was Kris and she was certain—fairly certain—that he would never hurt her.
Still, danger floated in the air around them—and heat.Too much heat. They should be cautious, but neither of them pulled back, though their breaths and touch almost seared the skin everywhere their flesh met.
Faith. She had faith. Didn’t she?
Kris grunted once and then tossed her on the bed. He jumped up himself, straddling her like a mother bear protecting her cub. Except it wasn’t maternal protection she saw in his eyes or read in his body. His torso was a long column of icy white, every muscle tensed as he looked down at her with unblinking eyes.
“Adora, I need the words. Now.”
Adora stared up at him. She knew the words he wanted her to say—Eat my heart. Drink my soul. Love me to death. But she couldn’t say them. Not yet. It would be an act of final surrender, and her faith wasn’t that strong. Instead, the words that came from her in a whisper were, “Kiss me. Help me. Love me.” And when Kris hesitated, she added passionately, “Kiss me—because my heart has hurt forever and only that will heal me. Help me—my soul is chained and I can’t get free to know this love you speak of. Love me, or it’s death in every way that matters. . . .”
Something moved through his eyes. The urge for bloodshed had been restricted, confined, but the heat of those emotions was still there. And the hunger.
Adora spoke gently, as she would to a wild animal. “Kris, I don’t know how else to be with you when I’m still afraid. Please—kiss me so that I can remember what love should be. And kiss me so I can forget what has been.”
Kris made a low noise in his throat and dropped down on her. He moved so quickly that he was little more than a silver blur. He pulled her close for a third time, looking deep into her eyes as his groin pressed into hers.
“So shall it be,” he said in a low voice that was almost a growl. It sent vibrations deep into her body and made her shudder.
And then they kissed. This time it was different. Pouring into her mouth and down her throat came a stream of emotions Adora could not identify. They filled her up and left her pliant and stunned.
Kris removed her clothes with ungentle hands, and her skin as well, or so it seemed, leaving her nerves and emotions naked. His touch was delicate but still devastating, and he explored, proving desire of a degree she had never even imagined existed. Even now, a part of her wanted to hide from him, but she didn’t flinch or shut her eyes.
Was this love?
Who could say? Certainly not she. But whatever strange emotion she was feeling, it was accompanied by a longing that reached to her very bones. More than breath, more than life, she wanted Kris inside her.
Not sure how she got there, Adora found herself pressed against his belly, her cheek pillowed against his groin, the thick ridge of his sex on her cheek. The slight gap in memory gave her a moment’s pause. She lifted up slowly and studied Kris with interest, wondering if he varied from other men in ways other than size.
He was beautiful, alabaster and pure spun silver. But not cold, she thought, kissing him lightly. Nothing about him was cold.
Her gaze traveled upward over his muscled torso, still lightly scarred but its beauty in no way compromised. His shoulders were wider than she remembered, his arms more muscled, and his silver hair glowed as if bathed in moonlight. She knew every strand was waiting for her touch.
“It’s been a day of revelations,” she said at last, turning her head the rest of the way and facing him. His gaze was direct, heated, but now controlled. She knew hers was too. She let him see the hunger in her, the need to be touched—touched in a way that she had been deprived of all her life.
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