He faced them all. “Neither did I.”
Chapter Twenty
Isela fought her way to consciousness. She inhaled the lingering scent of a home-cooked meal. After all the drama over the phoenix had settled, Beryl announced they would stay for dinner. It was Sunday after all. Evie and Mark headed home, ostensibly to take care of the kids, but Isela suspected her eldest brother still wasn’t okay with her new boyfriend. That didn’t stop Bebe, Tobias, Chris, and Ofelia from staying. Tyler joined them with amazed reports of the phoenix’s continuing recovery. Ito had vanished on a mission for Azrael. She had closed her eyes for what she thought was a few moments and woken up as Azrael shook her gently and steered her to the table.
Food had helped ground her, solidify her. As had looking around the enormous table they’d drafted from another part of the castle at the faces she had begun to trust with her life. Stories were traded. Isela set down her fork as Azrael explained their adventure in the mine, and anxiety crawled its way up her throat. Only seeing him whole, seated across from her, kept her in her chair. Watching his jaw flex and clench at the story of their attack on the bridge, she thought he might have felt the same. But he didn’t go into that steely, dead-eyed silence or confine her to the castle. He praised her bravery and her daring. When Tariq raised an eloquent toast to love, there was not a dry eye at the table.
At last the party wound down and they were alone. She remembered Azrael scooping her up and starting for the stairs. There was an amount of fevered kissing, and the heat of him against her and then nothing. She rolled into the empty pillow beside her own. At least this time the imprint of his body remained. The afternoon sun shot rose-gold arrows between the curtains. She ran her hands down her body, feeling the soft jersey tank top that was her sleep shirt. Most of the time that landed across the room. Her eyes felt dry and fuzzy.
“When I was a boy”—Azrael’s voice preceded him up the stairs—“there was no such thing as coffee. Not in the world as I knew it anyway. I had my first taste of the stuff when I was just a little older than Gregor is now.”
He appeared at the top, showered and dressed, two cups in his hands. His weight settled on the edge of the bed as she blinked and pushed the wild tangle of hair out of her eyes.
“Did you spell me to sleep?” she asked, yawning.
“I stumbled into this hermit’s cave near the Dead Sea,” he said, waiting until she had finished wiggling into a seated position before handing off her cup. “Nice old man. Batshit crazy, as you might say. He brewed me this awful-tasting stuff. I thought my heart was going to explode. It was a good thing I was in the middle of the desert—I turned sand to glass for over half a mile in all directions.”
“It’s good to see you’ve gained some control then,” she said, wrapping her hands around the cup and closing her eyes. She opened them again at the unexpected aroma.
“It took a while, but that cured me of my ennui for another hundred years or so.” He lifted his cup. “The kitchen seems to have underestimated the amount of ginger my consort requires. I hope this is an acceptable substitute for today.”
“Did we, ah, last night?”
He cleared his throat and sipped from the mug in his hand. “Much better, this stuff. Cultivation has done wonders.” He looked at her. “You seemed quite engaged for about two minutes. Then you began snoring.”
She put her face in one hand and sighed. “I am so sorry.”
“You did barely avoid being dissolved into your component molecules.” He touched her forehead, smoothing her eyebrow with his thumb. “It seemed prudent to let you sleep. But I was beginning to wonder if my ability to burn down the bed had lost its appeal.”
She smiled around a sip of coffee. He’d made it sweet and rich with cream. She could get used to this.
“Speaking of,” she began.
“My ennui?” he joked.
“Control,” she said finally. “That fireproof room. It’s not just for ordinary fire, is it?”
“Growth spurts.”
“Come again?”
He smiled. “When we are young and our powers are coming on, they can be somewhat unstable.”
“So unstable you could spontaneously combust?”
“It’s not unheard of,” he said. “Fire is the most immediately dangerous of the elements. Though we once found the corpse of a water necromancer who had cut open her own chest in an attempt to keep herself from drowning in her lungs.”
Isela stared.
Azrael seemed to realize how horrifying the anecdote was and pushed on. “There’s a reason so few of the most powerful survive to maturity—it’s not just infighting among us that poses a danger. Power is difficult to control.”
He let that settle in.
“My adolescence was”—he searched for a word—“challenging. At best, I could have incinerated myself. At worst, I could have taken out a whole city, small as they were in those days.”
“Is that what happened at Iram?” she whispered. “You lost control?”
The lightness left his face, and for a moment she regretted the question. But he didn’t deflect. His voice grew somber. “No. That’s not what happened at Iram.”
She looked away first. “You have control now.”
“We limit our use of power to the necessary.” He nodded. “As you discovered, big spells gone awry can create unpredictable surges. But it appears you are the not the only one who must learn to master new powers. And I have no idea what the dark side of my new ability will be or how it will affect my control.”
He looked troubled for a moment, and she saw it again, the uncertainty. Something else moved behind his face, the flicker of a shadow. There was nothing uncertain about the expression it held. She shivered with the sudden urge to call him back even though he sat a few feet away. “And the fireproof room?”
“Would protect the city,” he said. “Should my powers ever destabilize. But there is no guarantee the wards will hold long or disperse enough power to ameliorate the damage entirely. I’m counting on the castle to take the brunt of the it. If things get bad and I go into that room, it will be up to you to get everyone out of this building—out of the city if possible. If I survive, I will come to you. Now ask. Ask about the monster that destroyed the lost city.”
She gnawed her lower lip. “The Alchemist said you turned it to glass.”
His brows rose. “Circe is full of stories, but for this one she can claim only rumors.” He contemplated her face with such intensity she found herself holding her breath. Still she met his gaze without flinching. “I would have nothing unknown between us, though you may not like what you hear. Would you have me tell the tale?”
She exhaled and nodded.
Sometime around sunset, they’d moved downstairs. He watched her make popcorn in a heavy-bottomed skillet on the stove, intrigued. Then he took a handful of kernels in his cupped palms, shook them, and she hadn’t been able to hide her delight at the sound of popping. He emptied the fluffy white kernels, indistinguishable from her own, into the bowl.
They ended up in the living room overlooking the garden. Sideways on the sofa, Isela faced the garden, her back molding to the side of his chest and shoulder, her knees drawn up to cradle the bowl in her lap. After the separation and the danger they’d faced, she found she craved the reassurance of physical contact. He seemed more than willing to meet that need. He stretched out his legs, crossing his bare feet at the ankles on the coffee table, and angled himself to comfortably drape an arm around her collarbones.
Another ordinary moment, a brief flash of what could be if it weren’t for the necromancers trying to kill them and her own friend abducted.
Gregor and Lysippe were in transit back to the castle. Dante and her brothers were looking into the mud army in the river. Tariq and Gus stepped up patrols of the city with the rest of the Aegis, hunting for any signs of intrusion. Before returning to her coven, Beryl had insisted Isela recover, so Azrael apparently put himself in charge of making
sure she remained in their quarters. She hadn’t needed much persuasion. It was a rare moment of quiet, but she felt the storm coming in her bones.
If she had ever longed for normalcy, she might miss it. Instead, the rarity of these moments made them all the sweeter.
Outside, the first signs of spring showed in the trees. New buds protruded like tiny emerald spears from the mature, winter-darkened branches, braving the remaining weeks of cold for the promise of sun. They had months ahead of them, full of rain and wind, before the long days of summer. Yet they bloomed. That kind of faith took courage, she thought, and hope.
“Tell me,” she said, feeling braver now that Iram was behind them, “about how you came to join the Allegiance.”
Azrael traced her shoulder blade through the heavy black silk of her robe. “I had no interest in an alliance between us, though Róisín always spoke of a day when humans could no longer be trusted not to destroy us all and must be taken to hand. Paolo came first. Then Vanka.”
Isela wiggled some distance away from him, and swung her legs onto his lap. His palm skimmed the bare shin revealed when the split panels of the robe parted up to her thighs. He paused, momentarily distracted by the expanse of skin on display in his immediate vicinity.
“You were her progeny.” Isela opened her mouth and pointed for him to toss a popped kernel.
He obliged with a dubious toss. She caught it, barely, with a wry look of challenge.
“We had parted ways a millennia before,” he said. “While I appreciated her tutelage, I was driven to pursue other aims.”
“Wine, women, and song?” Isela grinned.
“I had no desire for a life acquiring power and the machinations of the others. Lysippe and I, and later Gregor and the rest, pursued the mysteries of our race.”
“So you were like Indiana Jones.” When his face remained blank, Isela sighed. “No time to see a movie in all that dashing around hunting out artifacts, eh? What brought you back?”
He tossed another kernel her way. “When they forged the wall binding the gods from humanity, Róisín called on me and I answered. That was the last time I saw her sane.”
“But when the Allegiance declared itself, you stood with them.”
“Many things happened very quickly after the war ended,” he said, tossing her another kernel. “You are good at this game.”
“I have three brothers—it was learn to catch or not get any popcorn on movie nights.”
He let another kernel fly. “Humanity was at a tipping point. All the great strides of twentieth-century—art, technology, science were about to be lost to chaos. It needed to be stabilized and fast. It was Gola who reached out to me to fill Róisín’s seat.
“The tension for control of Europe in her absence had already begun to split the Allegiance. Vanka wanted it all. Gola and Kadijah wouldn’t have it. As Róisín’s heir, it was my right to challenge. I did.”
“You won.” Isela felt the breath leave her in a wash of relief.
“A draw,” he said, which killed a little bit of her joy. “And the others talked Vanka out of further pursuit on the matter. They needed my power. We fixed things—as much as we could—as quickly as possible. We were ruthless. I never believed Róisín had gone mad, but I had too much to do to spend much time on it.”
“How did you find out?”
“Emma,” he said, naming the necromancer who ruled the island region of Oceania. “She’s a bit different.”
That said a lot. Isela remembered the smoking woman with ropy twists of hair and eyes that were vacant one minute and soul rending the next.
“I think she wanted me to know the truth,” he said idly. “Or she just wanted to see what would happen if I challenged Paolo and Vanka. Hard to tell with her. Her mind works differently.”
Isela leaned forward, scooping up a handful of popped corn, and held a kernel up. Azrael missed his first three. He lunged at the last. Isela yelped in laughter. The bowl clattered to the floor, spilling popcorn everywhere. He opened his mouth, pointing at the fluffy kernel on his tongue.
“Dramatic, but effective,” she said, licking the salt off his fingers. His pupils dilated and she smiled.
“You’re right to fear them,” he said, prowling toward her. “Gola and Emma most of all. They are our elders, and whatever was human in them is dust. We are the boogeymen—and women—Isela. The things that go bump in the night.”
A little smile played at the corner of his mouth, and he traced a finger up her bare knee.
“I’m not afraid of you, necromancer,” she said, fixing her eyes on his. “We have some unfinished business that I’d like to take care of.”
The finger traced a lazy circle on the inside of her thigh. It took her a moment—too long—to recognize the geas in the motion. Her body went still an inhalation later. Her breath and heartbeat continued mostly as usual, quickening in alarm. But she could not so much as turn her head.
Dark lashes lowered over silver eyes. “Perhaps you should be.”
“What is this?” She blinked.
Azrael smiled at her, showing teeth. “You endangered my consort by playing with spells. I warned you that a price would be paid. To get what you want, you’ll have to break it.”
He picked up her hand. She expected the arm to stay fixed, but it unfolded at his touch as if by command. He straightened her arm and pressed his lips to the inside of her elbow. She felt the graze of teeth. A shudder in this state was a peculiar sensation.
Isela struggled against panic at the state of frozenness. The glimmer of gold rose in back of her mind. An offer.
No, she commanded firmly. I can handle this.
Azrael wore the lazy smile of a satisfied conqueror. Broad, masculine hands settled at her knees, bronzed skin a few shades lighter than her own. His thumbs flexed against the sensitive skin at the inside of her thighs, and the impulse to open her legs away from the pressure drove another spasm of pleasure up her legs.
Just to prove he could, he parted her thighs without breaking eye contact.
She focused on what she could do. Swallow. Clear her throat. Speak?
“What did you do?” The distant gasp of her own voice, husky and trembling. “When you found out about Róisín?”
His fingers slid down her calves to the sensitive spot behind her heels. “I vowed to make them pay.”
She wanted to throw back her head and sob when his mouth touched one instep and then the other. He worked a slow, wet path up her calf to the inner knee. Popcorn crunched as he slid off the couch and settled between her thighs.
“Do they know?” she whispered, fighting the sensation that threatened to overtake her as he licked the inside of her thigh.
“Salty,” he said, a new tone in his voice. “I can smell your desire.”
“About your vow,” she insisted.
There had to be a way around this. She set her mind on the geas, untangling her thoughts from the physical response to sensation.
“They’ve always been uneasy with me,” he admitted, sliding open the tie on her robe. “And they know I have a reason to hate them. But perhaps a vow for vengeance is no longer enough. Look at where it got Róisín.”
He sat back on his heels for a long moment. Without the slightest urgency he roved her partially bared body with his gaze. Only once did he reach up to slide the black edge of the robe open. He did it with an intense carelessness, as a curator might make a slight adjustment to better display a piece of art. Then he rested again, simply watching. Awareness of his eyes on her skin brought a flush to the surface.
At one time Isela would have described his expression as cold. She thought of how she had first seen him—a ruthless power capable of terrible acts of violence to keep chaos from taking over his territory. She had questioned if he had ever been human.
Now she knew the small play of muscles and the tautness in the carved lines of his face. She knew the look in his eyes, the burning promise of ecstasy tightly reined with patience driven b
y purpose. He would wait an eternity for her to unravel this geas. The geas was a test and also a gift. Her first lesson in using her power, delivered in the arms of a man who would absorb a thousand blows to keep any harm from touching her.
The arms that had held her while she slept. The hands that stroked her body to passion she had never known. The eyes that claimed her with a simple glance no matter what trouble she managed to bring to his door.
Their door.
This magnificent, terrible being who had walked the earth for two thousand years had seen in her something that made him risk becoming a man again. And with one emotion came all the others.
Disregarding the physical, she experimented with sending out the curling essence of herself as she had so often felt him wrap around her to comfort, soothe, arouse. His eyes flared with surprise.
Connected like this, she truly felt him. Felt the rage that he had leashed for so long and the hunger for vengeance born of injustice. The sense of guilt for not having been able to stop what happened to Róisín and his part in it. The loneliness of being the newest member to a body he could not afford to trust. And hurt at their betrayal. The certainty that he could no longer walk the path he had been placed on but hadn’t found another way.
The room blurred in her vision. A single tear streaked down her cheek. Frustration—sexual blending with a desire to comfort—flared. Before she could check herself, the power surged. It hit him full force. The geas shattered.
She came back to herself with her arms around him, her face nestled in the space between his jaw and collar. Her breath escaped her in ragged gasps. She tried to push away from him, but his arms held her like a vise. She shoved, beating the heels of her hands against his chest. Fear that she had somehow hurt him clogged her throat. It was a moment before she felt his shoulders shaking. His breath hitched. With laughter.
Dancer's Flame (Grace Bloods Book 2) Page 24