2. Darkness in the Blood Master copy MS 5 (2 page)

“Make mortality easier on him. Turn him back. E’than’i’el,” he echoed flatly. “Not to teach you or train you. Not to keep you safe. He is the reason you creep through the night while evil hunts you.”

“Please.” I found myself leaning into him, both palms flat against the front of his red leather jacket. Shadows crackled and flared where I touched him. “Please,” I repeated, softer this time.

He stared at my hands. “No mortal woman has touched me since she died.” He covered my Shadow-pulsing hands with his own cold white ones. In a whisper: “I forget. You’re not mortal, and neither was she. Not entirely. But close enough. Enough to be warm.” Suddenly his hands were manacles around mine, his eyes so bright they burned. “Enough to die.”

He clapped one rough hand over my mouth and the other around my waist. Blind Springs Park vanished around us.

***

I’d forgotten how truly disorienting the abrupt spatial displacement could be. It had been months since I’d traveled this way.

Asheroth held me firmly. I sagged against him as I found myself staring at the front door of my apartment, sick and dizzy. His voice against my ear came fast as bullets and just as merciless. “You must learn to protect yourself, Caspia Chastain. Ethan cannot do it for you anymore. You will not accomplish that by chasing lost mad Nephilim in the dark and off the path.” He shook me so hard my teeth rattled. “I know you do not see it, but there are dark things roaming Whitfield. Powerful, ancient evils that would love a soft new thing to play with. Those Shadows you wear like cheap jewelry only call to them. You must be careful. If you let E’than’i’el tempt you into dangerous stupidity one more time I will kill him myself. Do you understand?”

When he let go of my mouth, I hissed at him. “If you touch him, I’ll end you.”

His hold on my waist remained steady. “When you can harm me, I’ll worry about you much less.” He beat on the door, three booming knocks I was sure would wake the entire apartment.

Asheroth worried about me? Right. “What the hell are you doing?” I hissed again. “You’ll wake everybody up!”

“Your dwelling is too well warded for me to enter. Yet another reason why I’d prefer you were inside it this night. And yes, I am rather counting on waking everyone. I think your brother and the other one should know what you’ve been up to. They don’t, do they?” I pulled uselessly on his arm. Shadows crackled and flared against his jacket. “I rather thought not.” He pounded on the door again, even more energetically this time. In fact, he seemed downright cheerful.

Bitter, insane Dark Nephilim.

The door flew open. Logan stood there wearing ratty sweats with a Futurebirds t-shirt hanging loosely from one arm. He’d tried to put it on and given up on the way. His hair had grown just enough to stick up wildly. Dark stubble covered a long red crease mark down the right side of his face. As he blinked rapidly in the bright hall light, his mouth fell open in surprise. “Cas? What the hell?” But then he took in my wild hair, tear-stained face, and the owner of the red leather-clad arm that held me, and surprise melted quickly into anger. He slowly twined the t-shirt around his fist. “Seriously? What. The. Hell.” Logan shook off the last bit of sleep. “Let her go.”

I love my brother. Only he would try to use a t-shirt as a weapon.

“I don’t want her,” Asheroth said haughtily, but I swear he sounded amused. “I found her wandering the park. I am merely returning her to you.”

“I am not a lost dog,” I growled. I knew better than to hit him, but I was so mad I didn’t care. I elbowed him in the ribs and yelped at the shooting pain that was my immediate reward.

“Then why haven’t you released her yet, Asheroth?” Ethan asked coldly as Logan angled himself sideways to make room. His blue green eyes were fever-sharp, but he held himself steady. “She doesn’t appear to want you either.”

“She is right here and quite capable of speaking for herself, thanks,” I snapped as Shadows continued to pulse harmlessly from my hands against Asheroth’s jacket. Logan and Ethan stared; exactly how out-of-control my Shadow-summoning had grown was yet another secret I’d tried to keep. Damn Asheroth, damn him!

“I was waiting for you, E’than’i’el-who-was. You look every bit as terrible as she said you did. I am so glad. Since you are the reason our Caspia decided it was a good idea to go creeping about in the middle of the night, I thought I had better see the extent of the damage for myself.” He pulled me even tighter against him, pushing out all my air. “You were right, dear,” he whispered theatrically. I could feel myself turning white. “Mortality looks quite painful. How terrible to know he did it because he loves you. Perhaps you were right; maybe this really is your fault,” he purred.

Son of a bitch, I thought. I couldn’t breathe.

“Son of a bitch,” Logan said, and rushed us. I felt his warm human fingers close over mine. I wanted to tell him no, to warn him about the Shadows, but I couldn’t find words. My vision was graying out. Bare seconds after he grabbed my hands, the electric cold between us flared so intensely it seemed to burn, and Logan wasn’t holding onto me anymore. I heard a dull thud as his back hit the wall.

Then Ethan was there, cradling my face between his hands. Pale and feverish, he stared straight into my panicked face. “It’s going to be fine, Cas,” he promised. “Asheroth. End this now. I won’t ask again.”

“How do you plan to do that, E’than’i’el-no-more? As much as I would enjoy destroying you, I think it might distress her.”

Ethan never took his eyes off mine. He spoke two words I didn’t know, two words in a language so full of liquid sibilance it was difficult to tell where one word ended and the other began. I didn’t think the human tongue could produce such sounds. I knew instinctively I was listening to the Nephilim language. The effect on Asheroth was electric; he released me immediately, practically throwing me at Ethan with an inhuman snarl.

As Ethan’s warm, strong, human arms opened to catch me, I had time to wonder just what two words had such power over mad fallen angels. I gave myself roughly three seconds to catch my balance before rounding on Asheroth and demanding answers.

There was no sign of him. The hallway was empty except for the three of us. Logan leaned against the wall right next to our apartment door, looking winded and shaky. He waved me off when I started for him. Ethan held me gently by the arm instead. “Caspia,” he said before I could ask about Asheroth. The warning was plain. “Did he speak the truth? Have you been wandering the park by yourself, trying to find help? For me?”

I bit my lip. I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t have to. He tightened his hold and pulled me back against him.

“You,” Logan said severely, “are in so much trouble.”

“I am not a child,” I announced.

My brother ran a hand through his spiky hair. He shook his head in disgust. “I’m going back to bed.” From inside our darkened apartment, he shouted, “You. Trouble. Morning.” His door slammed shut.

Ethan didn’t say anything. His silence stung.

“I can’t stand to see you hurting,” I told the empty doorframe. “You don’t say anything, but I know you are. And when I think about what you gave up…” I didn’t realize I was crying until I felt a warm hand, not my own, brush my cheek. I half-spun on the ball of one foot until I could tuck my head underneath his chin. “You cry out for your… wings. In your sleep. It’s too much. Asheroth only said what I was thinking. It’s all my fault.”

Cocooned in his arms, I felt the bass of his reply through my bones. “It was a gift. I was glad to give it. I would do it again.”

I let myself rest against his soft t-shirt. “How can you say that?”

“It was a selfish gift. I had a lot to gain. You.” He pulled me into the darkened apartment. “Come to bed, Caspia. There’s trouble to be in tomorrow.”

Chapter Two:

Trouble

“Don’t you miss it? Being immortal?” Warm from the shower, I sat cross-legged on the edge of my bed, towel-drying my hair.

He watched me through cat-slitted eyes, considering. “I couldn’t feel you before, in my old skin,” Ethan finally answered, lying on his back. One arm lay folded underneath his neck. The other inched idly towards me, finding the edges of my sleep shirt. “I didn’t understand about skin. How knowable it is.” A corner of his upper lip disappeared into his teeth as his eyes closed, his focus totally on the sensation of my skin under his fingers.

“Knowable?” I echoed, mesmerized by these tiny actions. No one else knew these things about him. They made up a secret Ethan who was totally mine: the single piece of wavy hair that never behaved; the way one eyebrow rose higher than the other when he was surprised; that his back was more sensitive than his stomach.

“It’s like suddenly having an extra sense.” The pads of his fingers settled against the curve of my waist and flexed there, pulsing, fluttering, like a butterfly tasting its environment. “I didn‘t know,” he repeated. “I knew how breakable you were. How easily hurt.” His hand stilled against the swell of my hip. “But not how sensitive skin is.” He swept my hair to one side and touched his lips to my neck. “I was so prepared to lose things. Senses, strength; but this…” He breath was warm and moist. I shivered, arched, and he caught me, folding me against his chest. “How could I prepare for being open to the wind, the rain, the bitter cold?”

“Cold and rain that almost killed you.” I remembered his torn hands and feet, the hypothermia that could have killed him.

 The shape of his smile against my neck had not changed. He had promised me, again and again since returning to me, that it never would. “Being immortal meant strength, but it also meant barriers. To the elements, yes. But also, this.”

Blue green eyes, river-bright above me. Hands spanning mine. The weight of him over me, stealing my breath. Or maybe that was just what happened when Ethan kissed me, now that he didn’t have to hold back because I might break.

“I can’t breathe,” I gasped out after several very long minutes.

“Good,” he said, kissing my neck.

I felt his teeth nip me right at the base of my throat. It was just hard enough to drive what little air I’d managed to siphon right back out of my lungs in a single electric shock.

“This,” he murmured against my throat. “I couldn’t do this. For fear of hurting you.”

“Um.” My hands were in his hair. When did that happen? “Ethan.” It was hard to speak when air was so precious all of a sudden. He had kissed his way up to my jaw.

“Mmm?”

“I’m glad I’m not breakable,” I managed to whisper. “Because then I couldn’t do this.” I wrapped my arms around him and pulled, bringing all the weight of a normal human male right down on top of me. Not the mass of a granite statue, not the killing crushing power of an immortal guardian, but the clumsy collapse of mortal Ethan. He rolled off me, laughing, tangled in the oceans of fabric that smothered my messy bed.

Mine, for one short human lifespan, full of stupid human mistakes and triumphs and losses and love. This one, I thought. I want this one. When we finally fought our way back through the pile of blankets, we held each other so tightly I thought my ribs would crack.

Towards dawn his fingers curled into claws and the muscles in his back spasmed. When he began to fight the blankets in his sleep I crouched over him, my long hair a curtain around us. “Sshh,” I murmured. His skin felt like fire underneath my massaging palms. “Sshh. It will be all right.” But as always, he didn’t hear me, and nothing I did stopped his writhing.

 He talked in his sleep, the same terrible, pain-filled litany: “Gone. All but the burning.” A bitter laugh. “Fire instead of Light.”

Every night, the same ritual, and every morning, I had to face him and know it was my fault.  “I mean it, Ethan,” I whispered as I traced the taut tendons of shoulder and neck. “I will find a way to fix this somehow. I will.” I think he said my name in his sleep, but maybe I just imagined it.

***

The front door snicked open, then shut again. Coffee and baked goods scented the apartment. Logan had cut his morning run short, and he wasn’t even waiting to shower. No doubt about it. I was in big brother trouble. I cast one last longing glance at a sleeping Ethan and inched out of my bed.

Let Fallen angels lie, if only through the morning.

Ethan wasn’t the only one having trouble sleeping. I couldn’t remember the last time I actually rested. My days were powered by coffee and adrenaline, my nights little more than short dark dreams punctuated by periods of watchful worrying. I’d thought of asking Mrs. Alice for my own sleeping draught more than once.

I filled the largest unbreakable mug I could find. “Would you like some coffee?” I asked, tempted to just drink straight from the pot. “How about a muffin?” Logan ignored me, his nose stuck in a newspaper. It wasn’t even Whitfield’s paper. “We have apple butter, from Parson’s,” I tried again. 

No response at all. I slammed the coffee down next to his elbow. Some of it sloshed over the side. He looked up from his paper, startled. “Hey!” He protested. “I’m reading that!

“Well,” I huffed. “Aren’t you going to yell at me? Let’s get it over with.”

Logan shook his head sadly. “Right. You’re mad at me because I’m not madder at you. Really rational, Cas. Have some more coffee.” I resisted the urge to dump it on his head.

“No,” I said, injecting calm into my voice with effort. “I’d just like to get the being yelled at part over with. Before Ethan gets here, if possible.”

Logan drew himself up to his full height, which meant he towered over me by several inches. As if looming wasn’t enough, I could swear he was smirking, too. My temper flared even more. “I assume you know that freak who calls himself a guardian is unstable at the best of times?” I shrugged. “So you knew exactly what you were up against and did it anyway.” I folded my arms across my chest and glared up at him, waiting for him to start yelling. He only sighed. “Look, I had time to think about it. I’m not mad.”

“You’re not?” I asked suspiciously. Maybe he was planning a sneakier, delayed attack.

“Well, ok, I am a little. But mostly, I understand. In fact,” he ran a hand through his spiky brown hair. “You didn’t do anything I haven’t thought about doing myself.”