Asher took my wrist from Remy, and my fear erupted at his touch. Even through the fabric, his humming energy called to me, threatening to open something inside of me. What would come out if that part of me answered his call? No, I didn’t want to know.
I jerked backward, breaking free of him. Strangled by panic, I only made it a few running steps toward the door before Remy snatched me up and clamped me to his ginormous chest. “Let me go, please!” A sob burst out of me as I kicked and bowed my back to get away, but he just held me tighter.
“Brah?” Remy said hesitantly. “May you give her a minute, yeah?”
Asher sighed. “Prolonging her wait isn’t going to help. This has to be done. You know it does.”
“Then why I feel sick while she cry?”
“Just bring her to me and go.”
Remy held me tighter for a few seconds before carrying me forward and setting me down. “Real sorry, kolohe. Like Sophia say, Asher take care of you. You see.”
“Liar,” I said, turning to watch him fade into the Shift while he stared at his giant shoes. When Asher grabbed my glove-covered wrist, I pulled back, ending up closer to him when he yanked me forward. “Don’t do this,” I said.
He met my gaze, his ripe with conflict as he squeezed my wrist tighter. “I have to. And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry, too.”
Huh. For some reason I believed him. Not that it changed anything, not really, but I stopped fighting his hold on me.
When the great beating heart swelled around us, I closed my eyes, screaming inside my head as dizziness engulfed me. When the dizziness passed, he took his hand off me. “Now that you’re here, I’ve asked the Shift to keep you in this room until you’ve been initiated.”
Adrenaline burned through my bloodstream. Where had he taken us? What would he do to me? My inner chicken finally had enough when I found the nerve to crack a lid and saw the furniture in the new room solidifying around us.
The room had sacrificial chamber written all over it, with ancient carved circular rock walls, a stone floor with a drain in the center, shelves upon shelves heavy with old things I had no name for, and the last, a stone object I could only call an altar. Honest to goodness shackles hung from either end of it. A freakin’ altar, and me in my virgin sacrifice outfit.
Asher stood on the far side of said altar. Something glinted in his hand. He tried to slip it behind his back, but not before I made out the roughly honed glass blade of a ceremonial dagger poking out of his palm. Oh, sweet Jesus.
“What are you doing with that?” I asked, my mind a snarled twist of oh-hell-nos. “You aren’t actually going to make me immortal, right? That’s just another way you’re trying to scare me.”
His head tilted forward, his dark hair sweeping down to shadow his eyes. “Come here, Addison.”
“I’m not just going to let you shackle me down and stab me. How can you just take my life away like this? I won’t survive being what you are. Why can’t you just teach me how to keep the wraiths away and let me go?”
Silence stretched through the dim room, thick enough to lean on. Asher stared at me, the ice in his eyes melting away to leave them conflicted. A low, heavy breath leaked out of him. He raised his hands out to his sides and slowly came around the table. His knife glinted in the single light shining down upon the altar, the blade made of black glass—obsidian? “You belong in the Machine, Addison. Your growing list of abilities has made me more certain than ever, not to mention you can see the wraiths when no others can. It’s in your blood, and even if I wanted to, I can’t change what you are with any memory-wipe. If you leave now, the wraiths will hunt you for the rest of your life and will use everyone you love against you. If the wraiths make a doorway out of you, this world will come to an end. And I know this whole scene looks frightening, but I’m not going to hurt you.”
I rushed left to keep the solid table between us, trying to ignore the weight he’d just placed on my shoulders. “Coming at me with a dagger is not the way to make me believe that.”
He stared at his hand as if surprised to find the dagger blade extending out of his fist. Slowly, he placed the knife flat on the stone and backed away, arms out. A cautious smile curled his lips. “Witty even under duress. It’s a useful skill in our line of work.”
“I don’t want to be eighteen forever.” And how could I survive without being able to touch anyone? Without touching him? Even now, with everything else I should have been thinking about, the need to slip my hands under his shirt rose to the forefront.
“I need you to listen to me, now.” He began a slow shuffle around the altar. “Your mind will still mature like everyone else, and if you have to choose an age to be stuck at, yours is a good one. And I’m really not going to hurt you the way you think I am.”
“You don’t pick up a dagger like that near a rune-covered altar with shackles on it unless you intend to carve me up like a sacrificial lamb, so cut the crap, Asher.” I palmed away the wetness from my eyes. “Teachers don’t threaten and kidnap and cut up their freakin’ students. I mean … you are a teacher, right?”
He stopped at the long side of the altar, hands flat on the surface. The muscles in his neck tensed a moment before he went over the top like a gymnast over a pommel horse. I pushed back hard, tripped on the heels, and landed on my rear. Unwilling to take my eyes off him, I crab-walked backward. My lungs refused to work, going into spasms as I kept trying to gulp air. I met with the wall hard, jarring my head up at a severe angle. Back pressed against the wall, I hugged myself as he came to crouch in front of me, hands out as if showing me he was unarmed.
“I think we both know you don’t need that knife to hurt me,” I said, my chin quivering.
He sighed, and this one sounded like it hurt. “I think maybe Sophia was right. I need to change my methods with you.”
“What does that mean?”
He shook his head as if trying to dispel some unwanted thought that haunted him. “Doesn’t matter. I thought it would be easier on you if you knew less, so you wouldn’t worry about it until the time came. Most come willingly here, eager, because they see it as being part of something important, and they want to be important. I’m not sure what it is you want, but it’s not power or status or anything so cold as that.” He tipped his face up in line with mine, then, and his features were softer, welcoming. “What is it you want, Addison? How can I convince you that this is your destiny, maybe more so than the rest of us? I need—I mean we need you with us.”
I blinked at him, afraid to believe the man before me. He seemed too real, too genuine, too … unsociopathic-like. Since I had no answers for him, I asked a question of my own. “How do you just turn off the coldness like that? Ten seconds ago, just the look on your face made my belly tight, and not in a good way, and now … now you just look sad. I want to believe you’re my safe place, but if you can flip your own switch like that, you’re probably a really good liar.” I shrugged, wiping away a fresh tear rolling down my cheek. “Not that it matters, I guess. You’re going to do this anyway, and if this really is the only way I can make sure Dad doesn’t get eaten by a wraith, then I don’t have any choice. Besides, ants don’t get much say in what boots do to them.”
His gruff chuckle gave me a case of the shivers. “I think you give yourself too little credit. You’ve been seeing black holes in your ceiling since you were six. Even then, standing there in Mrs. Clancy’s class, you knew the others wouldn’t understand. They couldn’t sense what you did, and you knew not to scare them. You were terrified, yet you kept going, kept surviving. You are a resilient woman.” He gave my hair a playful tug, then watched it slide through his fingers.
When I finished preening at his shocking praise of me, I asked, “Wait, how do you know that? You talk like you were there. But if that was true, then you wouldn’t have had to ask me when I started sensing the rifts back in your office. And you wouldn’t have been surprised that I could see them.”
His smile turned sheepis
h. “I’ve been keeping an eye on you for a long time. I used my initial question to ease you into the conversation. As for the seeing, I couldn’t see them and I never could understand why you always looked up when I felt the cold coming on. I just thought it was habit.”
He’d been watching over me? A nice warm tingle spread through my chest, and I couldn’t help but smile back at him. “So how did you find me the first time?”
“I think our founder led me to you all those years ago so I could eventually bring you here. Your spirit rippled through the Shift and demanded my attention, like the scent of a warm apple pie drawing me to a window—which has never happened before. I can manipulate the Shift in ways others can’t, so I kept the wraiths away from you as much as I could, but with the increasing number of them, I wasn’t always there.” He wrung his hands together. Did he want to touch me again? “Our founder, or the Shift, or whatever it is that makes this all possible, wants you in the Machine. That’s what I told the Colonel that changed his mind. I kept it from all of the other guardians because I had the feeling I was supposed to. I also had the feeling that day in the lecture hall that the time had come to bring you in.”
I considered questioning his “feelings,” but since I had a few of my own, I shut up. “But why not let me finish school? And where is this founder person? Or if it’s the Shift that was guiding you, how can false realities lead you anywhere?”
“I’m not sure how to explain.” He stared at the floor for a second before continuing. “I don’t think the Shift is just a bunch of empty worlds. I think it’s tied to our founder, sentient somehow, and I also think it gave us our abilities. The founder doesn’t speak to me, but I get these urges to do things and go places.” When he met my gaze, a sense of purpose had settled into his posture. “The wraiths have been getting more brazen. They used to come through once in a while, and usually in the same places where they’ve already weakened the veil. Now they’ve started coming through all over the world in new places, spread out to make it harder for us to hunt them. They’re getting smarter, and I’m afraid if we don’t step up our game, they’re going to figure out how to combine their energy to bring down the entire veil all at once. Something terrible is coming, Addison, and I think the Shift wants you here for it—that urge to bring you here was so strong I couldn’t deny it. You are the key to our survival—and everyone’s survival for that matter—I know it.”
My pulse took off at a trot as I let that sink in. “But I could never kill someone, no matter what urges you or this Shift thing have. You can threaten me all you like, but I won’t do it.”
“I’m not sure what your role in the Machine will be, but my gut tells me you will be something extraordinary. Sixty-five years ago, the Machine was all but wiped out when a traitor somehow locked up most of the guardians in one place together and fed them to the wraiths. Only a handful of soldiers survived, who then had to cleanse the Machine. All of our knowledge was lost, most of the pages ripped out of the bible. We were broken, and we still are. If we don’t start becoming more efficient at sending the wraiths back to the other side, we’re going to be overrun, and soon. The Colonel said you may be the cog that makes me—us work again, and I’ve had that feeling all along.” He cleared his throat, taking interest in a crack in the floor.
Had that just been a slip of the tongue? What was I to him? Probably nothing. I wasn’t sure what to do with his utter faith in me, so I considered what he said, even as farfetched as it sounded. “I don’t have the nerve to go hunting the wraiths—my dive over the seats in the AL should have told you that. If it hadn’t been for Dad, I’m not sure I’d have kept myself sane this long. How can I just walk away from him? It would break his heart if I just disappeared from his life like my mom did. And I’m just one person. What can I do?”
Asher sat in front of me, arms looped around his knees. It made him appear younger, more approachable, and I had a burning itch to rub my hands along the soft fabric of his pants. “What if you’re the one who stops the wraith who would go on a killing spree in your hometown? What if you’re the one who stops the wraith who would possess the military leader who has access to nuclear weapons?” He seemed to be urging me to extend that further, but the icy knot in my stomach kept distracting me. That could happen? How close had the human race come to being annihilated by the wraiths?
Could I make a difference? Glancing around the room, I noticed artifacts lining shelves everywhere. Did my fascination with old stuff come along with my curse? I didn’t really believe in destiny, but maybe the universe or the Shift or whatever force let me see the rifts had pegged me as a sucker and designed me for this. Could I really save Dad? Others? Maybe. I wasn’t brave, but I was resourceful.
Thinking about myself sitting in a cubicle crunching numbers always made me break out in a cold sweat. Thinking about hunting wraiths—notice I said hunting, not killing—gave me a little thrill of excitement. Weird. I didn’t know what it would mean for me. I couldn’t let myself think too hard about it. “I’m never going to be an accountant, am I?” I asked.
He laughed again, and it was a warm, inviting laugh that tickled me down to my bones. I could have shed my clothes and bathed in that laugh as if it were sunlight. He’d been gorgeous before in a deadly hands-off sort of way, but now he was real, touchable, and my heart gave a kick at the sight of his iced jade eyes bright with humor. “No, you’re not going to be an accountant. I think you’re going to be something much, much more.”
“Said the devil to the girl about to sign away her mortal soul on the dotted line.”
“Sorry to burst your image, but your ticket was punched a long time ago. Though, this life is far from hell.”
“If you say so.” I’d believe I’d be something more when I saw it. If I lived long enough to find out. For some reason, that didn’t scare me as much as it did half an hour ago. “Then I guess you’d better get this Cinderella ready for the ball, fairy godfather.”
He laughed harder, and I wasn’t scared anymore.
Chapter 14
Asher stood, brushed off the back of his pants, and offered me a hand up. I extended my gloved hand, startled by the strength in his grip. He pulled a little too hard, and I wobbled on the stupid heels, stumbling into him.
“Whoa,” he said, shooting his hands out to my waist to steady me. My palms pressed against his firm chest. His heartbeat sped as I tilted my chin up in line with his. We were so close his warm, sweet breath fanned across my lips. I watched a gauntlet of emotions flit through his spectacular eyes that seemed to glow brighter. Conflict, desire, fear, it was all in there.
He jerked away and went to the altar, moving the dagger to the far edge before pressing his fists down on the stone, head hung forward. He’d made space for me to be shackled there.
I suddenly remembered why I’d been afraid. I yanked the gloves off and smoothed my hands over the dress, but the fabric did nothing to soothe me. I’d have given anything for my blanket or … would he let me? “I’m still technically a regular mortal, right?” I asked. “I know I have to do this, but I’m still scared, and … you’re the only thing in this room that isn’t made of stone.”
After tonight, I’d never be able to touch him again. My heart hurt as I considered spending an eternity beside him and never knowing what his hair felt like in my fingers, or knowing the curve of his brow. “Just two minutes. Please?”
A small eternity passed before he straightened and stared at me as if I’d asked him for his soul. As I waited, his apparent fear made a shift to what I hoped was acceptance, and he came to stand before me. “If that will help you through this night, then I guess it’s not too much to ask.” One corner of his lips quirked. “You have thirty seconds to cop a feel, and then it’s show time.”
He agreed? I hadn’t really expected him to. I couldn’t seem to move, staring at the smorgasbord of tactile treats suddenly available to me.
“Addison,” he said, snapping me out of my ogling.
What the hell was I waiting for, Christmas? One step took me close enough that I could run my hands up his chest, mildly calmer. Leaving one palm to stroke down his arm, noting every bump of the embroidered runes, I raised my other hand to trace my finger over his brow, along his temple. His sentinel energy hummed beneath his skin, but it didn’t hurt or burn, only seemed to sink deep into me, inviting something in me to answer.
He clamped his lids down and took shallow breaths as I combed my fingers through the silk of his hair. A moan escaped both of us in unison. I had a little “knowing” of my own, that he could awaken me in more ways than one, and I could awaken him. He wanted me to, I knew it.
Inhaling his delicious spicy scent, I pressed my cheek to his, my hand sweeping around to grip his nape and get as close to a hug as I dared for. I sighed, melting against his warmth. Nothing had ever been as right, and if he ever let me go, nothing would be right again.
He trembled for a moment before a growl crawled up his throat, and he wrapped his arm around me, clamping me tight against him.
Oh. My. God. My whole body came alive with heat and wants that would have made me blush if I hadn’t been so caught up in the moment. If I died right this second, I’d go out full of bliss and without a regret in the world.
Making little helpless sounds, he snarled fingers in my hair and buried his face behind my ear. His hot breath fanned out across my neck and over my shoulder. Shivers started a non-stop parade down my spine and caused deeper places to stir, awaken, and beg for more.
He raised his hands to cup my face, that surge of power in him pulsing beneath his skin like a giant heartbeat. Those luscious lips smelling of coconut and mild hints of whiskey hovered a mere breath away from mine, his lids still sealed shut.
I waited in utter agony for him to close that last inch. This had been the most perfect moment I’d ever known, and even motionless in his arms, I felt right in my skin for the first time in my life. Right and real and … alive.
Darkside Sun (Entangled Embrace) Page 12