“For the last time, I do not have a pinchy face! I even smiled at him. I smiled at a talking skeleton wearing a black cloak and paddling me across a fiery lake of the damned! I ate his muffins, for God’s sake! Muffins baked by a talking skeleton in a black cloak, paddling me across a fiery lake of the damned. How is that remotely pretentious? I will have you know I was charming as fuck! What more do you people want from me?” I couldn’t be certain, but steam might have puffed from my nostrils.
“Down, Doctor,” Crixus said. “I was only kidding. As I was saying, Charon mentioned he gave a lift to this beautiful brunette named Dr. Matilda Schmidt after the Scarecrow paid him an assload of cash. This lovely doctor also very unpretentiously agreed to try his muffins.”
“And how long after you knew did you wait to come get me?”
Crixus walked over from the window and looked me square in the eye. “Humans don’t have a measurement for a span of time that short.”
For a moment, with the sun’s glow behind him, I almost believed him to be the guardian angel he presented himself as. I almost forgot the six weeks with not so much as a word. I almost forgot the clients he had purposefully taken from me. I almost forgot Dr. Cinnamon Barbier.
“Well,” I said, folding my arms across my chest, “it was a very nice gesture on your part after what you’ve done.”
“What I’ve done? What do you mean, what I’ve done?”
“It’s bad enough that you’ve damaged my professional reputation. Don’t insult my intelligence.”
Crixus’s brow furrowed in an almost genuine confusion. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Dr. Cinnamon Barbier, the psychiatrist,” I spat. “That’s who I’m talking about.”
“You mind attempting to make even a shred of sense?” Crixus asked. “I’m not usually this slow, but it’s been a hell of a night.”
“You are unbelievable.” I threw back the covers and shoved myself out of the bed. “I know everything, okay? I know you’ve been taking all your assignments to her. I know you’ve been stealing my clients. I know about the baby, Crixus.”
If I had plugged his finger into an electrical transformer, he couldn’t have looked more shocked.
“What baby? I’ve never met anyone named Cinnamon Barbier. And I haven’t had any assignments for the last six weeks. I’ve been on mandated suspension from the fucking BSA for interfering with the ghost pirates who were crashing your vacation.”
I blinked at him, letting this information sink in piece by piece. The BSA, or Bureau of Supernatural Affairs Crixus reported to was responsible for tracking and rectifying any rogue supernaturals in danger of revealing their presence within the human world. Crixus had violated one of their key rules by interfering with ghosts, who were firmly out of Zeus’s jurisdiction.
“But you haven’t called me,” I said. “I haven’t heard a single word from you since—”
“Since you left me standing in your hotel room while you raced off to rescue that murdering son of a bitch you insist on rolling over for at every opportunity?” Anger stormed in Crixus’s eyes, now the gray of waves during a squall. “Exactly how long do you expect me to keep waiting around for you, Doctor? How many times do I have to offer you everything I have, everything I am, and be refused?”
“But Byron said you had referred him to Cinnamon—”
“For the gods’ sake, Doctor. How naïve can you be?” Crixus towered over me, near enough for me to feel the warmth from his skin. “Did you, even for one second, consider that someone else might be to blame? That I wasn’t capable of doing that to you?”
“I—”
“The Scarecrow, for instance. Or someone else who wanted to disillusion you with your life so you would agree to surrender it?”
Hades.
My heart sank into a mire of guilt and regret. “You knew he wanted me?”
“Of course I knew. Why the hell do you think I started bringing cases to you in the first place?”
All the air evaporated from the room. I had to strain to hear him over the pulse pounding in my head.
“I wanted you to discover what you could do,” he continued. “In a way that wouldn’t…break you.”
Break you. Something about these words sent a chill down my spine. My mother. Crixus knew my mother. He had known her longer than he knew me.
“How long?” I stammered. “How long have you known?”
Crixus reached out and took my hands. The touch sent warmth speeding up my arms and straight to my heart. “When your mother started to deteriorate, we knew it was time to—”
I jerked my hands from his. “How could you not tell me? You knew this all along and you said nothing?”
“Matilda, you have to understand. These things have to be done carefully. When people find out too early, or in the wrong way—”
“Oh my God.” I jerked my hands from his and backed away. “I was your assignment. All of the cases you brought to me, all of the clients—”
“Needed your help,” he insisted. “But not as much as you needed to understand that you could help them.”
“I don’t believe you.” I slipped past him toward the armoire and yanked out one drawer, then another, looking for any other clothing I could put on. I needed to get dressed. I needed to get out of here. Wherever here was.
Crixus came up behind me and jammed the drawer shut. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m leaving.”
“No, you’re not.”
Ignoring him, I stalked toward the bathroom. He grabbed my elbow and spun me around.
“For once in a fucking lifetime, we are going to finish something. Even if it’s only a simple conversation.”
I shrugged him off. “This conversation is finished.”
“Not until you listen to me. You owe me that much.”
“I owe you? Do you even hear yourself?”
“If it weren’t for me, you’d still be in Hades, curled in a ball on the bathroom floor.”
“At least Hades was willing to tell me the truth.”
“Would you like me to take you back? I’m sure that can be arranged. You were bound to the Underworld, after all.”
“What do you mean, were? Are you saying I’m not anymore?”
This question stole some force from his blustering tirade.
“No,” he said. “There’s no way I could have taken you otherwise. There are rules about interfering with the realm of the dead, remember?”
“But how did you—”
“That’s not important right now. What’s important is—”
“Crixus. Tell me.”
He searched my face like it alone held the answer to my question. “Hades is many things, but generous isn’t one of them. The only way to bargain for your release was to offer him something of equal value.” He studied the floor, no longer able to look me in the eye. The sadness in his voice stole my breath. “Someone.”
“Someone…took my place?”
He nodded.
“Who?”
When he looked at me again, his eyes were bright with unshed tears. “Your mother.”
*****
My throat filled with cement. Neither sounds nor air escaped my chest. My head jerked side to side, the only form of denial I could manage in this state.
“Matilda—”
“How…” The rest of my question evaporated into the darkness surrounding the edges of my vision. Unseen hands pressed against my ribs. Air struggled in and out of my lungs in irregular rasps.
“I told her what had happened. I gave her the choice.”
I collapsed to my knees, no longer in possession of the strength to give to anything but the swirling maelstrom of thought in my head. “The choice? You gave her the choice? You—an immortal. You used a mentally ill woman—”
“That is not what I did.” His solid shape knelt beside me. “If it had been your daughter—”
“No!” The burst of sudden anger rocked Crixus b
ack on his heels. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to decide what I would have done. You don’t get to project me onto her, or her onto me.”
“Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.”
“We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about my mother. A woman who’s known torment beyond anything you or I can imagine. A woman who doesn’t know who her own daughter is half the time. How could she possibly be equipped to make that kind of choice?” Blood rushed through my head in a steady throb, anger pulsing across my mind’s surface like a lightning storm. “How could she?” My voice broke. “How could you?”
“Torment?” It was little more than a growl. He seized my shoulders, holding me to the power of his words. “You think I know nothing of torment? How about you watch your mother savaged by men, and then by their swords? How about you try to forget what her screams sounded like when she begged for death?”
I stared at him, an icy resolve crystalizing inside me. “No amount of suffering can excuse what you did. I will never forgive you for this. Never.”
Crixus looked as if he’d just arrived on the other side of a battlefield, his eyes bearing the signs of having inflicted wounds as well as having received them. “If I’m to be damned, then I’ll go to it deserving.” His hands tightened on my shoulders. With one brutal motion, he pulled me across the distance separating us.
“Get your hands off me!”
I watched the predator awaken. The warrior. The gladiator. The soldier. The machine of war. The untouchable immortal with eyes of diamond and a heart of brass.
“No.”
We went to the ground in a tangle of limbs. I clawed at his fingers. I swung at his face. I kicked, bit, and scratched, little more than an animal in my feral state of mind.
“Stop!” The full weight of his body came down upon me, his hands capturing my wrists and pinning them to the floor over my head. We strayed into a moment of silence. His face hovered inches above mine. Our chests rose and fell against each other, our panting offset so I drank his exhales and he mine.
We met not on my terms or his, but in the space between. Our mouths crashed together in violent need. I knew he wouldn’t release my hands, nor ease his weight from me just as he knew I would fight, and hard, given the opportunity.
Our struggle didn’t cease, but relocated to our lips, our tongues, our teeth. Pain and pleasure, love and hate, right and wrong. All lines dissolved beneath our relentless assault on each other’s senses.
He ground his hips into me, bruising me with the part of him that couldn’t be answered with words nor denied by argument. I writhed beneath him, opening my legs in invitation only to lock them around his to deny him access.
He filled my mouth with a curse as I bucked and bit his lower lip before moving on to his jaw.
I scraped the hard line with my teeth, tracing it up to his ear. My tongue slid inside the hollow, producing in him a flinch that pressed my face between the smooth skin of his neck and shoulder.
An unexpected area of sensitivity for one as practiced as he.
“Deus.” His gasp was desperate, unstudied. And it was my undoing.
“Do it,” I challenged, letting my words cool the wet hollow of his ear.
The second my hands were released, they went for his pants, jerking the button open and yanking down the zipper. He stripped off his own shirt, then mine, baring me to him.
Never breaking eye contact, he spat in his hand and slicked it along the impossible length poised at the juncture of my thighs. It was vulgar, insulting, and a sign of his desperation.
A wave of dizzying lust pitched through me.
“Open your legs,” he ordered.
I let my knees fall open as much as the tension coiling into a painful knot at my center would allow.
“Wider.” His eyes were almost black beneath their dark lashes.
When my efforts failed to meet his demands, he pulled me toward him by the backs of my knees. I gasped as much from the friction of the floor abrading my back as the sudden impact of his lean hips on the sensitive flesh of my inner thighs.
His hand scooped behind my neck and lifted me face-to-face with him at the exact moment he drove inside me. My mouth fell open as a startled cry escaped.
Neither one of us breathed.
Wild tenderness passed over his features. A kind of untrammeled wonder. A pause after the close of a prayer.
His trembling breath against my throat was the last tenderness I would see. He sank backward with me, my head pillowed against the hand he braced on the floor. The opposite hand found my thigh and lifted it to rest on his hip.
He moved in slow, thorough, punishing strokes—his fullness such that I could not encompass him and breathe at the same time. His hips found a rhythm that set me panting, just on the verge of hyperventilation.
The restraint cost him dearly. From his tense jaw to a brow furrowed in concentration, Crixus’s face was a map of battle. Somewhere in him lived the need to conquer me with the same brutal force that had brought kings and warriors alike to their knees. The muscles of his torso twitched in the way of horseflesh driven to run.
Still the friction built in maddening degrees, never slowing. Never hastening.
Kindled at this pace, the sensations spread to every part of my body. Rolled in waves down my legs, wrapped tendrils of flame around my heart, dug greedy fingers into my soul.
I could no longer stifle the animal grunts of pleasure he hammered out of me. No more than I could keep from clawing at his back, biting into the smooth muscle of his shoulder.
He rose onto his knees then, lifting my hips with him, angling himself downward as his pace quickened.
This time, I was not alone in my unrestrained cry.
The tightening began in my stomach muscles. I reached back for anything I could hold onto, afraid without an anchor I would surely be pulled apart by the force of the storm building inside me.
Crixus fell forward, lacing my fingers with his until his palms anchored mine to the ground. His hips continued in their steady onslaught.
“Look at me,” he whispered. “Look me in the eye while you come.”
I trained my gaze on him, watching him watch me, seeing him observe the changes in my face, at first subtle, then ecstatic. “Oh God,” I begged, only at the beginning of my free fall into oblivion, terrified and hopeful the end would never come.
My whole body became an extension of the pleasure erupting in waves around him. Even then, with me convulsing beneath him, he did not cease.
“Again,” he growled, flipping my slack-limbed body face down on the floor and covering me from behind. His elbows rested on either side of my shoulders, his knees outside mine. He slid between my thighs while his tongue traced an equally hot path up my spine.
He was inside me again. His long, heavy form gliding up my body, pressing me to the earth. His weight across my shoulders was my only care. I squeezed my thighs together, desperate to increase the pressure, to feel every inch of him.
It might have been an oath he panted. It might have been a sound beyond human ken. With its utterance, he hauled me up by my waist and turned me to face him. We were moving, his hands cupping my ass, lifting me for the short trip to the nearest wall. The impact against a hard surface knocked the wind out of me. I stole it back from his mouth. My fingers wound into his hair. I grasped hard and pulled his head backward, relishing his being the cocktail of pain and pleasure instead of my own.
His fingers dug into my hips for traction. He wasted no time, surging upward to fill me once again. I clung to him, wrapping my arms around his neck for support as he drove me higher, and higher still.
“Again.” His hand was at my throat, pressing my cheek against the wall as his pace quickened from brutal to frantic. “Come for me, Doctor.”
My cry died against his palm. I bit down on the flesh pressed to my mouth to muffle the ragged sobs against his redoubled crusade.
The wall disappeared from behind me as Crix
us staggered backward, falling onto the bed with me astride him. He drove into me, plunging blindly with the last surge of his ardor. Arms wrapped around my back, he pulled me down to him, binding me against the broad chest where his heart beat wild and willful. His strong fingers tangled into my hair and drew my ear to his mouth.
The foreign words he murmured might have been an incantation, for the world seemed to drag on its axis. Time slowed around us, though life may have hurried on in its frantic seekings and strivings. We hung back, frozen in this moment of mingled sweat and shared heat.
“Matilda.” With my name, the spell was broken. “Oh, fuck. Fuck!” His hands cupped my face and he gifted me back again what he had taken and more. He looked into my eyes as he leapt inside of me, as his shoulders hunched, the tendons strained in his neck, and his abdominal muscles seized over and over again. He let me drink from the bottomless well of bliss written on his face, and let me know that I alone was its author. The long years of his life were mine as well, and all the joy and sorrow he had known.
We lay there motionless until our breathing slowed, and longer. Wrapped up in each other, in what we had finally done.
It was Crixus who broke the silence at last. “All this time, I’ve been sharing my feelings, baring my soul, swinging for the fence in every way I knew how.”
“And?” I asked.
“And to think.” He pushed himself up on his elbows and turned his face-meltingly charming grin on me. “If I really wanted you, all I had to do is go to hell and back.”
“This doesn’t resolve our issues,” I warned him.
“No?” He rolled me over, pinning me beneath him. “I guess we’ll have to try something else.”
*****
“Hello, Julie! Is Byron Alexander Davenport all ready for his two-week follow up?” I swept through the door after two weeks away from work, laptop bag shouldered and with renewed enthusiasm and appreciation for my limited human life. Having no client list to speak of, I had decided to take some extra time to recuperate from my visit to the Underworld.
Undeadly: The Case Files of Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist (The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist Book 6) Page 8