He had a reputation to keep.
He was Death, dammit.
But she smiled so softly and brushed at his tears with her thumbs, and just this once, he was too weak to stop her.
He yanked her to him so hard that he felt her wings pop, like the cracking of a spine, but she didn’t fight him. Instead, she leaned her head upon his chest and sighed.
He pressed kisses into the crown of her head, smelling her sweet scent of jasmine and power, and he knew then that so long as Pandora still believed in him, he could succeed.
He could win this.
That Tenebris could overcome her mother’s deadly allure.
He kept nearly all his power in check, never wanting to hurt Pandora. There were reasons why he’d never made a move on her. And he’d always told himself it was because she had a lover.
But Asher could go hang for all Dean cared. He hadn’t saved Asher because he was such a good man and couldn’t bear the thought of Pandora’s lover dying on that battlefield. So what? He was selfish enough to know that it would have saved him a hell of a lot of anguish if he’d just let the bastard die as he should have.
No. No, Dean had saved Asher for one reason and one reason alone. Because Pandora had loved him far more than she could ever love Dean. And she still did.
Pandora could not have survived the loss of her other half, and Dean could have her no other way. He’d needed her like he’d needed nothing before in his life, and to have her, he’d been forced to bring back her lover too.
But the truth was that he could never truly be with Pandora. Not in the way he needed to be with another. His powers unleashed were too much for her, even immortal as he’d created her to be.
And she was his creation. His deadly touch could and would still kill her if he left himself unchecked.
And he could never do that. For the first time in his life, he would admit to himself and himself only what he’d never admit to another living soul.
He loved her.
With all his damn, dark heart. And he would kill anyone, even the mother of his child, to see that Pandora always stayed safe.
“You know what we must do,” she said softly, looking at him with grave tenderness. “The time for games is done. War is coming with guns blazing, so it’s time to show Tenebris who you really are.”
He swallowed hard but nodded, knowing she was right. Pandora was always right. Damn her anyway.
He would let her go now. Release her. He’d held on too long. But just this once...
He tipped her chin up, and she gasped but didn’t fight him. He lowered his face, and she rose up to meet him, so yielding was she.
Pandora was a killer too. Just like his daughter, she, too, had been a death bringer. But she’d won her battle and had forever pledged her fealty to him afterward.
It was a crippling torture for Dean to see her so happy with another, but she was loyal. It was part of why he loved her so. Because she’d been willing to go the distance for what she believed in, even going so far as to sacrifice herself if it meant keeping those she loved safe. Her loyalty to Asher was what kept him from making a move, but the damn irony was that if she abandoned Asher for Dean, his own regard for her would diminish greatly. Fucking catch-22.
He desperately wanted to kiss her.
But he would not place that sin upon her shoulders. She loved Asher and always would.
“Dean,” she whispered, clenching her fingers into his shirt. There was pain, but also acceptance. It would cost her dearly to betray Asher’s trust this way, but she would if he forced the issue.
His smile was full of regret as he gently traced the line of her jaw with his thumb. He squeezed his eyes shut but let her go, feeling the lack of her like a knife to his soul.
Her breath trembled from her, and he sensed her move back on her heels.
When he opened his eyes again, he’d shifted once more into a man that Scarlett trusted.
The catalyst had begun.
“God above, she will hate me,” he said, staring down at the weathered hands of Silver Creek’s junker, Harlen Morte. Even his voice was altered.
He’d chosen this form for Scarlett because only a true immortal could gaze upon his true form. And his Dean form, that of a slick and suave, attractively dressed Satan in Gucci heels, felt too dirty for his daughter. He’d done too much harm in that body.
But Harlen... Harlen was a good man, a redeemed one. At least for her.
Pandora’s touch was so featherlight that he almost thought he’d imagined it until he saw her hand moving away. His brows furrowed.
“She won’t hate you, but this will be a lot. The Alpha Council already moves. Soon, they will draw her and her mate to Georgia. She must go prepared.”
“Tenebris is so wild. Reckless. What if she’s not strong enough to—”
Pandora chuckled. “Have you met Tenebris’s father? Because I have. She comes from the very best stock, my friend.”
He tried not to flinch at those words, but he did and sighed heavily afterward.
Pandora stood and held her hand out to him. “Where you go, I’ll follow. We are a mighty team, you and I, and don’t you ever forget it.”
He looked up at her, so many words left unsaid, words that would never be heard by another. But he thought his Pandora smart enough to know them already.
She and he—they moved on a completely different wavelength from anyone or anything else around them. In their own way, they were already deeply intimate lovers. Their affair was emotional, but it was everything to the both of them.
It was how it would always be.
And it was enough.
With a weary shake of his head, he took her soft hand in his and allowed her to help him stand.
“You ready for war?”
He chuckled roughly. “Do I have a choice?”
“No.” She chuckled in return. “None at all.”
Chapter 3
Scarlett
Mercer had just finished tucking Steven into bed when he came out and joined me on the porch swing.
Neither one of us had really talked about moving in together after we’d mated. It’d just happened, as if it was meant to be.
He’d shown up the next day at my place, all his bags packed and Steven’s, too, and that’d been that. Our transition to “married” life had been seamless.
But I was sure that was the only time it would be.
I scratched at my biceps, feeling itchy in my own skin, knowing it had nothing to do with allergies and everything to do with the sands of time running out for us both. Tomorrow night at the latest, they’d be back, and this beautiful dream would all be over.
“I hear your thoughts tonight as if they were my own,” he said gruffly as he took a seat beside me and wrapped an arm around my shoulder.
I sighed, laying my head on his chest and closing my eyes, listening to his heartbeat. It was my favorite music.
His thumb brushed lazily over my bare bicep, and I broke out in a wash of goosebumps.
The night was rich with the scent of earth after a long, hard rain. Crickets sang a symphony, and a light fog rolled through the woods beyond my property line. The moon was big and full, a golden-white color that showed all the crevices and valleys upon its rocky face. It was the kind of night made for lovers. Soon, the sun would rise. Already, I could feel the cool of night dissipating, becoming lusher with the humidity of day.
I clenched my back teeth.
“Hey,” he said and tipped my chin up. “I’m right here, Scar. I’m not going anywhere.”
I shook my head, not wanting to go down this same road again. I hated that our honeymoon period had been nothing but me feeling desperate with lust on the one hand and full of grief for what was to come on the other.
I sniffed and wiped my nose on my wrist. “Steven asleep finally?”
Nodding, Mercer leaned back, using his long legs to glide us gently back and forth. Years ago, almost immediately after I’d been turned int
o a vampire and adopted by Mercer into his pack, he’d built this place for me. With his own hands, he’d put up the walls and sheet rock, wired the electricity, laid down the pipes for plumbing. All of it.
At the time, I’d just thought him a good guy, hospitable and charitable to a poor loser like me. I’d never figured it was love for me that had caused him to do it. That his wolf had bonded with me from the very first second he’d clapped eyes on me, even while I’d still been human.
But looking back, I could see now what I’d not seen then. Mercer had always been my champion and friend. But more than that, he’d been completely devoted to me in all ways.
I brushed my nose along his chest, inhaling his spicy, warm scent of peppery autumn leaves.
One of his big hands palmed the back of my head, holding me close to him. I felt his chest heave with his breath, as though he were inhaling me too.
Most days, I could read Mercer’s mind as easily he could read mine, and I knew what he wasn’t saying. He felt it, too, as keenly as a blade to his chest. He was scared. Terrified out of his mind. For me. But he was my male, my protector, and for some reason in his wolfy brain, that meant he had to put up a front, thinking, I guess, that it would help settle me to see him calm.
But it didn’t because, in some twisted way, I needed to know that he also shared this suffering with me. That in all ways, we were really one.
I swallowed hard, refusing to say the words. But he said them for me, reading me as easily as a book. A heavy sigh spilled off his tongue as he glanced down at me.
“If you need to hear it, then fine. I’m scared, Scar. I’m fucking terrified out of my head that I’m going to lose you. I can’t... I couldn’t...” He growled. The sound was low and full of heat. “I want to kill something just thinking about it,” he said as he curled a hand into a fist, causing his knuckles to crack.
I leaned back so I could look up at him fully, giving him completely open body language. Turquoise eyes rimmed in neon green glared at me. His upper lip was pulled back, revealing his still-human incisors.
I smiled softly and leaned out from beneath his arm. He whined in wolf, letting me know he didn’t appreciate losing the comfort of my body. But I wasn’t going anywhere. I climbed onto his lap, straddling his hips, and framed his square, bristled jaw in my small hands.
His nostrils flared, reminding me more of his wolf than his man. His emotions were surfacing, causing his primal side to supersede the man.
I wiggled my hips, and his hands landed on them, digging his fingers into my hipbones and holding me fast. I trembled, in awe of the male I could now call mine.
“I just need you to promise me something,” I said low and for his ears only.
His brows dropped, but he nodded.
“Promise me that, no matter what happens, you won’t quit on me. On us. Promise me, wolf.”
His brows gathered. “Scarlett, you mean everything to me. Don’t you know that yet? What more do I have to do to prove to you that I lo—”
I shook my head because he was misunderstanding me. Placing a finger over his warm mouth, I whispered in a broken voice, “That’s not what I mean. Mother is coming. War is not done with me yet, and I was fool to behave as though she was.”
I wasn’t sure it was me talking, but I wasn’t sure it wasn’t me, either. Darkness and I were so joined that sometimes, I couldn’t remember where I ended and she began. I saw her in a whole new light, not something to be fought, but something to embrace. Completely. Wholeheartedly.
The only hope, our only chance at salvation, wasn’t in fighting her. Maybe that’s why all the other worlds had perished in her destruction, because she was always outside of everything. A pariah. A leper. Part of, but never truly belonging.
She’d never learned how to deal with her emotions properly. In so many ways, she was like a child, with a child’s thoughts and reactions. If something hurt her, her impulse was to kill. If she was happy, sad, or angry, burn it with fire. No one had ever taught her there were other ways to be.
No one had ever accepted her as easily as Mercer had.
Once, before I’d died a second death in the vampire’s castle, I might have been jealous of his obvious affection for someone that wasn’t me. But I felt bonded to my darkness now.
She was me.
I was her.
We were one. The three of us.
He grabbed my wrist gently, thumb rubbing circles along the prominent vein. I shuddered.
“My silver flower,” he said in a thick, gravelly burr.
That pet name wasn’t for me. It was for her. I did not know her name, her true name. Neither did Merc, but when the darkness would manifest for us, when we actually saw her, there was something beguilingly dark but almost delicate about her. I understood why he loved her. I loved her too. She’d saved me so many times that I owed her a debt that could never be repaid.
She was like a sister to me, or even a soulmate in a completely different way than Mercer was to us. None of us could survive without the other. It was weird and complicated and as crazy as the beings she called parents, but it worked for us.
The soul of her quickened inside me, and I shivered as I felt her run like silver mercury through my veins. She was as obsessed with Mercer as I was.
“If it’s a promise you would have me make, then let us do it the right and proper way. I vow it to the darkness that—”
I sucked in my breath, covering his hand with my mouth, shaking my head violently. “Don’t, Merc. Don’t say that. Don’t do that.”
His eyes glowed like neon, but his touch was gentle as he moved my hand away.
“I love you, silver flower. And you, my Scar. You are not a wolf, and you do not fully understand a wolf’s ways, but that mark is my claim on you. And this”—he shoved aside the collar of his shirt, revealing the mark I’d given him—“is your permanent claim on me. But with or without it, my heart and soul have always belonged to you and you alone. And that is a magick more powerful than anything a Horseman can throw at us.”
The darkness quivered. She was violence incarnate, cruel and bloodthirsty. So one would think it would be Mercer’s animal aggression that would call to her, but it had never been that for her. It was his tenderness that drew her in, that kept her loyal to him and kept her constantly intrigued.
She knew all about the darkness. She’d been intimate with it all her life. But what she’d always lacked, what she’d never known, had been tenderness, love. So when I tipped my neck forward and closed my eyes, and he kissed me, moving his lips over mine in a reverent prayer, she sighed deeply. Flutterings stole all the way through me, washing over me like black silk, only serving to ratchet up my own desires and wants.
Merc wrapped his meaty palm around my slender neck, spreading his fingers wide, and I sighed. When he touched us this way, it was so easy to forget, let go, and just be.
It was only when he stopped holding me, when he stopped kissing and fucking me, that I feared.
He pulled back, resting his forehead on mine.
“I swear to the darkness that binds and with all that I am, I will fight for us. I will always fight for you, my silver flower and my dearest love.”
We stayed like that for I wasn’t sure how long. I knew that soon I’d be forced to return to my bedroom to keep sheltered from the sun, but all I wanted was to live in this moment and just be with him.
Darkness had the power to freeze time, to halt it in its tracks, she was that powerful. But not even she was strong enough to hold back destiny’s reckoning. Whether we wanted to or not, the final battle was coming for us, and there was nothing we could do to stop War’s machinations.
For the past several nights, darkness had revealed to me in dreams just how War had manufactured the end in all the other timelines and worlds. I knew her mother was devious and not above killing anything and anyone that dared to get in the way of her end game, which was the complete and total annihilation of all worlds and peoples. Men. Women. Chil
dren. Even animals weren’t safe from War’s wrath. Her obsession was without ceasing or end.
Death had maneuvered valiantly and had won several matches with other beings War had used to see her end game fulfilled. But since the darkness was created, War had prevailed time and again. This was the last world, the last shot, and I wasn’t sure Death could win this one either.
I was just about to ask Mercer to come join me in slumber when I felt the shift of air.
Mercer felt it, too, and immediately jumped to his feet, lifting me off his lap and transferring me to the swing seat with the ease and grace only a shifter could display. He towered in front of me, holding his arms wide, as his terrible and deadly rumbles reverberated off his chest.
I could handle myself, but even I knew not to push it with an enraged Alpha male. He was my mate and would never harm me, but that didn’t mean anyone else would be safe from his wrath. Laying my hand against his bunched muscles, I peeked around his shoulder. Mercer leaned into my touch, and already, I could feel the tension in him beginning to slack. It was always a little humbling to me just how much control I had over him.
I blinked and shook my head when I finally saw who’d shown up. Dumbfounded by what I saw, I frowned.
It was just Harlen and the winged female he never seemed to be far from.
The old man stood at the base of my steps, looking up at Mercer with a raised, shaggy white brow, as if to say, “Fucking wolves.” He aimed an unimpressed look at my mate’s impressive and towering frame. I almost chuckled. Harlen was not your average bear; that was for sure.
Just like I always did, I felt the prickle of unbelievable power rolling off a man who, for all intents and purposes, was only human. I’d never been able to get a handle on Harlen, and it bothered me that I didn’t know what he really was.
“Harlen?” I asked, patting Mercer so that he’d step aside.
He did, but very reluctantly. His arm immediately wrapped around my waist. He hauled me in to him and trembled.
His reaction was extreme, and even though I usually had no problem reading him anymore, his thoughts and emotions were too chaotic for me to identify.
The Vampire Went Down to Georgia Page 4