by Larissa Ione
And in red no less. She would never have chosen red. Didn’t many of the fashion experts say redheads shouldn’t wear red? The truth was, red washed her out terribly. She looked wan and sickly. The only thing possibly worse would be orange. But here it was, on her body, and even without being able to see herself, she knew it was beautiful. Beautiful on her, beautiful with her. He had chosen for her far more bravely than she would have chosen for herself and had done an amazing job of it. The narrowed sleeves warmed her wrists, making her seem so thin and fragile. Yet there was vigor in her body for the first time in days. She felt strong and healthy, felt full of energy and life.
She looked back at him and saw he was dressed as well. He had on the same faded denims as before and a shirt made of that same rich fabric as her dress, only in a dark teal he wore very well. Actually, he wore everything well. Would wear anything well, she realized as her gaze ran over him quickly. He was taller than she had realized, longer in the waist, stronger in his stance. Once again she appreciated just how beautiful he was. Breathtakingly beautiful as only a perfectly fashioned male could be. He was almost too handsome.
Then a strong breeze rushed over her again and she realized she was out of doors for the first time in what had to be ages. Days. Too many days. She closed her eyes and turned her face into the wind, taking in the deepest, cleanest breath she could manage. The air smelled so fresh and different, the touch of it carrying the crispness of late autumn in a way that chilled the tip of her nose.
“You’re doing this?” she asked, even though she already knew. “We’re really back in that place, lying next to one another, but you’re doing this with your mind?” She didn’t need to see his nod to know it was the truth. She held her free hand up to her eyes, shielding them against the brilliant light and colors of the waning sun.
“I would not be able to be out in this much daylight if it were real. I would still be sleeping, or very weak. Darkness is my daylight.” Kane squinted his eyes against the fading brightness around him. His eyes, like all Demon eyes, were made for darkness. He could not see nearly as well in sunlight. But he knew the same was not true for her. Not yet, in any event. Humans, he knew, found much beauty in sunrises. And yes, they were lovely, but they had always meant borders to him. Restrictions. Time to rest. Quickly to rest, or he might find himself exposed to the deadly light of day that could kill a Demon as young as he was. He must spend the sunlit hours locked in rest, forced to sleep whether he wanted it or not, forced to wait for the day to hide itself.
But this had always been her world. And just as day was turning to night, now she would have to say farewell to blue skies. If she were to be his mate, she must change her ways to match his. It was a lot, he realized, for her to sacrifice. The truth was, she was sacrificing far more than he was. What was he saying farewell to, besides perhaps the torture of lonely Samhain and Beltane nights?
Corrine looked all around herself, knowing as she breathed it in that there was something foreign in the air around her. Not exotic, just different. But that was easily seen just by looking at the vast green landscape that surrounded her. She was encompassed by a great ocean of manicured green, rolling hills of it sprawling away from her in all directions. In the distance before her was a great stone building, what she could only call a castle. It was wider in body than it was tall, reaching high and then tumbling low, clearly made of a grand central mass that had been added to over time. There had been an attempt at balance, and the engineering of it was remarkable compared to castles that she had seen in pictures. But it was a fortress of stone no matter how you looked at it. Flags flew from its highest points, but there was nothing in the design of those flags that she found familiar. Nothing that hinted at state or country or an affiliation she recognized. There was writing in the crests, but she couldn’t see what it was from this distance and she had a suspicion she wouldn’t be able to read it even if she were closer. There were hedgerows and fountains, great sweeping drives of white stone that reminded her of a great manor from an Austen novel. The oaks that lined the drives waved at her with pale-colored leaves barely hanging on.
“Is this where we are?” she asked him. “Inside of that place?” She recalled the stone room she’d woken up in and how it had reminded her of an old castle room.
“This is the home of the Demon King, Noah. And yes, this is where we are. Somewhere on the third floor, beyond those colored windows. I wanted to show you some of my world from another perspective. Some of who and what we are.”
That was when a cloud of smoke suddenly swirled into her view, several feet before her. It rushed around like a tornado, but it was no bigger than a man. Black and grey and silver streams curled around one another, and then suddenly resolved into the shape of a man made of smoke, and then a man made solid. Corrine’s eyes had seen many special effects on movie screens, but nothing like the reality of what she’d just experienced. Even so, she wanted to reach out and touch him, to prove to herself that he was as real as he looked. How was any of this possible? A man appearing out of thin air? Another man who could read thoughts? It was all fantasy, pure and simple. And yet not. Here it was reality.
“Corrine, I’d like you to meet our King, Noah.”
Corrine drew in a breath as the sunset sped up around her, drawing down dark violet skies and then a cloak of night around the handsome Demon King. He was larger than Kane by far, in height and in musculature, and everything in his bearing screamed of his great position in life. He was powerful, he was responsible for the well-being of an entire people, and he knew it.
But as darkness descended around them, Corrine quickly learned there was far more to him. Noah showed her his palms briefly, and then with a whoosh of sound they were engulfed in flame. Brilliant balls of fire swallowed up his hands to the wrists, and slowly he began to move them, creating bright arcs of light in the darkness as he sketched circles and swirls and arches. Then with a sharp snap of his wrists, fire raced up his arms and quickly engulfed all of his body. Everything inside Corrine that had been trained to respond in the human dimension screamed to see a man on fire. She was breathing so hard, the air cold and warmed all at once in her lungs as she stood there forcing her mind to accept the impossible.
And then, in a rush, the flames burst apart, flying around her in a great circle and touching a ring of torches amidst them that she had not noticed before. After he had lit their way, the Demon King disappeared.
She turned to look at Kane, but only had a moment to open her mouth before he put his finger then to his lips and then pointed forward. Her heart seized in her chest as she eagerly looked in the indicated direction. Another cloud was coalescing in front of her, only this time it seemed to have more weight to it than smoke. After a moment she realized it was dust she was seeing.
Kane grabbed her by her shoulders from behind, pulling Corrine into his warm body as he pressed his lips to the sweet spot just behind her ear.
“Corrine Russ, I’d like you to meet my brother. His name is Jacob, and he is the most powerful Earth Demon ever to walk the world.”
And as he spoke, the man himself appeared. There was so much of Kane’s features in him that she might have known they shared the same blood even if he had not told her so. Jacob’s hair and eyes were as dark as Kane’s, but it was those proud Romanesque features that linked them, from the long nose and strong chin to the sculpture of the full, knowing lips. Yet there was something in Jacob’s eyes that Kane’s lacked. The man behind her, for all the pain and hardship he’d experienced as he laid bound beside her, had an almost carefree quality to his aura.
Jacob did not. Here was a man who carried a great weight on his soul. Corrine had seen it before, in the eyes of young boys who were faced with the lures of gangsters every day, and the painful or deadly alternatives if they resisted. In their world there was no such thing as saying “no.” Not without dreadful consequences. In Jacob’s weighted aura, there was a tremendous responsibility.
Jacob spread his ha
nds wide, his palms turned toward the ground, and suddenly everything around them began to rock and tremble. The earth beneath her feet quaked; then a wall of soil and stone lurched up between her and Jacob. It was so massive and raw that she could smell the loam, see the burrowing creatures that suddenly dangled from roots and such as their protective homes were unearthed. Dirt rained down like a soft summer shower, even as the wave rising before her shifted first to the right and then to the left. And in the next moment the entire monstrosity fell in on itself, rumbling and shaking until it had repacked itself into place. By the time Jacob took a deep, cleansing breath and looked up at her, there wasn’t so much as a speck of dust out of place to bear witness to what had just happened.
“All right,” she breathed. “You’re Demons. Not human. I totally get it.”
“But it is not all about parlor tricks,” Jacob responded. “It is about long-held traditions, a long history of mistakes, and a painful responsibility to ourselves and those we coexist with. We cannot make mistakes. Mistakes cost us too dearly.”
“Wow.” Under her breath she whispered into Kane’s ear. “Is he always so tightly wound?”
“Always,” Kane assured her. “But he’s getting better.” A woman resolved out of thin air at Jacob’s side and Kane’s brother immediately reached to wrap an arm around her curvy hips and draw her flush to his body. It only took an instant for Corrine to recognize who she was.
“That’s my sister! Isabella!” She lurched forward, suddenly needing to feel the steady and familiar irreverence of her sibling, but Kane held her tight.
“Remember, this is all a production of my powers. I don’t know anything about your sister other than what she looks like. She would feel, smell, and act very flat to you, with no dimension. I’ve only met her once in person. I could draw from your memories of her, but the result would not catch all those special nuances that make her the person you love and are familiar with. Not unless I put all of my energy and focus into it and I am not old enough or strong enough to maintain our surroundings and do that as well.”
“So there are limits to what you can do,” Corrine murmured.
“Yes, of course. We are not all powerful. And besides, there’s a bit of an ethical limit too, Corrine. I won’t do things that will end up making you feel like you’ve been manipulated. Having your sister tell you how wonderful everything is for her, how wonderful we are, would be an outright manipulation of your trust and a misuse of your relationship with her. I am doing all of this to orient you to my world, to show you who and what we are, not to run some kind of propaganda gambit.”
“I appreciate that.”
“But even what you are seeing isn’t really right,” he said with no little frustration. “This is just a demonstration of power. It isn’t showing you how truly good we are. How incredibly moral Demons like my brother are.” He sighed. “I’m just not powerful enough or skilled enough.”
Corrine turned around against his body, not taking the opportunity of his loosened grip and lax attention to move away from him.
“On the contrary,” she said softly, reaching up to touch the edge of the wild dark curls lining his temple. “You’ve shown me that and more. If there is one thing I have learned at my job, it’s that those with power like to use it against those without. The fact that this is the first time I’ve even heard of a Demon, in spite of those extraordinary things I just saw them do, proves that you all wield your power with incredible regard for those around you. Your morals are shown in just the way you have restrained yourself from trying to win me over with methods even we humans wouldn’t hesitate to use against one another.”
He looked at her then with such a combination of fascination and true adoration that she bent her head, hiding her face against his breast bone.
“When I first saw you,” he whispered against the top of her head, “I admit it was your outer beauty that fascinated me. All of this glorious, fiery hair and your amazingly pale and perfect complexion. The way your eyes lit when you laughed, the way your curves filled out your clothing. But that was just the lure. As I watched you, as time went by and I saw the way you dealt with those around you . . . that was the hook. Oh, Corrine, that was when I realized you were going to mean more to me than just a passing fancy. It was such a deep, visceral reaction. I knew you were meant for me. Even though every logical part of me understood it was forbidden for a Demon to touch a human being with the intentions that I had formed toward you . . . I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t walk away.”
Corrine went still as his words sank into her brain.
“What do you mean, when you first saw me?” she asked, even though she was already feeling the truth rushing to the front of her mind. Things he had been saying, things that had been happening to her. If his explanation of how a Druid and Demon connection worked was to be understood, then . . . “You’ve met me before all of this. You . . . you touched me before. If what you are saying makes any sense at all, then you touched me long before I actually got sick.” She squirmed in his hold, trying to shrug him off. “Only, I don’t remember ever meeting you before. Ever being touched by you before.”
“Because when I met you, when I touched you, it was wrong of me to do so. It was illegal according to my people’s laws. Jacob stopped me from . . . he made me erase your memory of any contact we had.”
“So you all have been messing with my mind? You stalked me, felt me up or something and then messed with my head so I wouldn’t remember? And now you’re trying to tell me what an up and up and moral society you have?” She pushed him off herself completely, stumbling as she backed away. “And for all I know you’ve got my sister locked up someplace where I’ll never see her. Or . . .” Kane could see the panic welling in her eyes, brimming in her voice. “God, how do I know what’s real anymore? What can I trust anymore?”
He reached out to her, grabbing her by both of her upper arms and giving her a shake to stop the progression of her racing, panicked mind. It forced her wide green gaze up to his, forced her to look into his eyes and into him.
“Nothing I say or do is going to make up for the underhanded ways I have dealt with you in the past, and for that I am incredibly sorry. I know it was wrong. I beg your forgiveness for it. But the truth is I would do it all again. I don’t think I would even have an ounce of free will that could compel me otherwise. Corrine, I am now, and will always be, tied to your side. Destiny laid out a plan for you and me. She predestined that we should walk a powerful path together, that I should, in all things, be devoted to you. If that is shameful in your eyes, if that is something you perceive as nefarious and wrong . . . then I am so sorry. I am . . . heartbroken. I am at a loss as to how to be anything better for you than what I am. And to have failed my one true mate in this life shames me.”
There was no denying the weight of the shame she saw in his eyes. It simply took her breath away. Whatever was truth and whatever was made up by the power of his mind, there was nothing as clear to her as his sincerity in that moment. She should have doubted him. She should have remembered all the games men had played with her all these years as they strove to take one thing or another from her. She should have held him just as accountable for his lies as she did the other males who’d lied to her.
But she didn’t. For all of that history, for all of that mistrust and those painful lessons in deception, they had never touched the true heart of her. She had never stopped wanting forever after and a soul mate. She continued to crave a real partner in life who would support her when she needed it and who would look to her for support when he needed it.
When she looked at Kane, when she collated all he had been telling her and all she had seen and experienced so far, she saw exactly what she had been looking for. However, it would take a huge leap of faith on her part. There was a very fine line between what she craved and the attentions of a psychotic stalker. How would she tell the difference? How did anyone tell the difference?
“They can’t tell the di
fference, to be honest,” Kane said, reminding her how easily he could read her thoughts. “They go purely on faith. They have to trust themselves and what they are feeling. You need to trust yourself. You will make a wise, solid choice based on your intelligence and your instincts.”
“I would,” she breathed, pulling closer to him so she could gaze up into his clean, honest eyes. “But you have to admit, your power is enough to make anyone doubt the workings of their own mind.”
“What can I do to make it better for you? To make it easier? Tell me. Anything. I’ll do it.”
“A promise. A promise that you’ll never manipulate my mind again without asking me first. Even something like this.” She looked up and around at the crisp dark sky filled with the stars. They were sharp, bright, and beautiful. Breathtaking.
“What you’re asking . . . it will be hard for me. Let me explain,” he said hastily when she frowned. “All of my life I’ve been trained to use the powers of my mind in all ways and in all things. Demons use their powers as reflexively as humans draw breath. I will never mean you any harm and I do not intend to lord my power over you, but my need to use power is unthinking. Just as you would thrust your hands out in front of you to break a fall, if I were in danger . . . if you were in danger, I would not be able to help my reaction.”