Demons Undone: The Sons of Gulielmus Series (79 page)

“She was cheerful in spite of it.”

“Total opposite of me, then. I’ve never been the bubbly type,” she said.

“Well, I hate to admit it, but your attitude is growing on me.”

“That so?”

“Bit by bit.” He shrugged. “It’s getting more and more difficult imagining you anything but sassy.”

Without realizing she’d moved them, her own hands were on his back, and creeping down farther. Now that they were there, though, she figured she’d have a little fun. His ass was perfect for clawing.

He skimmed his lips along her hairline and ground his thickening erection against her belly, whispering, “So, you can climb poles. Do you have any other useful tricks I should know about?”

“A few.”

“Like what?”

“Why don’t you tell me about some of yours …”

He trailed hot lips down the side of her neck and lingered just over the crook before setting his teeth into it.

She gasped and pushed up onto her toes, insinuating her body even closer to his. Heat radiated down her chest and formed a ball at her sex, making her throb, making her wet.

She pitched her head back and hooked her right leg around his thighs, increasing his cock’s press to her apex.

And he did it again on the other side, pressing his teeth into the flesh of her neck, and that same lustful surge radiated down into her body, tightening her nipples and curling her toes.

It was twenty minutes of foreplay in twenty seconds.

He eased back from her, and she grabbed his collar in her fist and yanked. If he thought he was going to leave her high and dry after showing off his neat little magic trick, then maybe he really
had
been born evil.

His grin was downright predatory before his mouth found hers. He nipped at her lips and sought out her tongue with his.

She closed her eyes, groaning into his mouth, and patted blindly for the button of his jeans. It seemed sweet, tender sex was never going to be a part of their repertoire and at the moment, she wasn’t certain she cared. There was something so sexy about throwing propriety to the wind and behaving like the starved mammals they were. It didn’t matter that her sister was asleep at the kitchen table downstairs and that half the household was probably in earshot at the moment.

Whenever Claude was around, none of those things mattered, and she had a hard time mustering up her righteousness.

“What do you want?” he whispered.

She wanted the kind of sex she’d need to shower off—the kind of sex that made lovers lose track of time and keep people waiting.

For the moment, she’d settle for a hard, fast come.

“Here. Right here.”

“Yeah?”

She nodded and scraped her fingers down his belly, pawing at his button.

“I’ll get it.”

He reached between them and did quick one-handed unfastening of his button and fly that sent his jeans falling to the floor.

She didn’t even give him time to step out of them. She shimmied her own pants down, heeled them off, and grabbed the back of his head. Pulling his mouth down to hers, she darted her tongue between his lips and demonstrated what she would have him do to her body. She thrust it fast and hard, barely giving his tongue time to respond in kind.

He grunted and grabbed her under the ass, hauling her up to the counter. “
Fuck
.”

“Yes. Let’s. Right now, unless doing it standing up is outside of your skill set.”

“You talk a lot of shit, and one day I’m going to make you pay for it,” he growled as he thrust into her in one hard, fast stroke that made her gasp. Oh yes, she liked getting into this kind of trouble.

“You should have known what you were getting when you came sniffing around.” She clamped down on him, making him curl his fingers into the meat of her ass.

In return, he picked her up and wrapped strong as steel arms around her back, holding her up before forcing her down onto his cock again and again.

“I could do this all day,” he said in a flat voice as she cried out and tightened her legs around his core.

He nipped at her breasts through her T-shirt as he pistoned in and out of her. “To me …”
Nip
. “You weigh nothing.”
Nip
. “Strength is no issue.”
Nip
. “Your endurance is.”

She had no retort. Her lips had begun quivering and where she should have been seeing white plaster on the bathroom ceiling, she was seeing stars and entire constellations.

With every thrust, she whimpered and imagined she sounded like a marathon runner at the end of a long race.

Already, fullness gathered between her legs and her body shook with the mounting orgasm, and she could do nothing to stave it off. There were no mental gymnastics she could do, except for one thing.

She swept a shaking hand toward the door and managed the one spell that hadn’t failed her since learning it at sixteen. She erected an insulating bubble of air around them that stifled the shrieks of her orgasm and softened the ensuing bangs against the door when Claude pushed her back against it.

He didn’t wait for her to come down from her orgasm, but kept thrusting, harder now, while whispering to her in that patois she couldn’t make sense of.

If he were asking her to do something—to assist him in some way—he was shit out of luck. She was having a hard enough time feeling the limbs that were attached to her body. Her brain was in that delirious place between ecstasy and desperation where nothing she wanted of him was reasonable or sane.

She wanted this to be their
forever
—this passionate coupling of two people so attracted to each other, but with enough differences to get angry on occasion. She knew they were going to fight, probably more than most other couples, but they’d do it because they cared not just about each other, but about their own sense of self. People couldn’t give everything away in a relationship. If they didn’t retain what made them so attractive to each other in the first place, the passion would flee, and the relationship would fall apart right after that.

Was that what they had? A
relationship
?

Gail wasn’t sure, but she knew one thing for certain. This wasn’t going to be like the marriage that had crumbled so quickly after burning hot and fast.

Never again would she lose herself to a man who saw her as noting more than a trainable object allowed no opinions of her own.

She may not have been very strong or have any useful social connections, but she was worth something. If not to Claude, then to herself.

He shuddered against her, and slowly let her legs down. He held her until her body stopped shaking, and whispered more of that soft French to her.

She didn’t realize she was crying until he dragged his thumbs beneath her eyes to wipe the wetness away.

“What has made you so sad,
ma reine
?”

She laced her fingers through his curls and pulled his head down so their foreheads met. She wouldn’t have him thinking it was something he’d done, when it was her own hang-ups rising to the surface the longer they engaged.

“Me,” she whispered. “Just me.”

Agatha and Mark teleported into Clarissa’s living room in a flash of white light that temporarily blinded Gail and scalded her insides.

Damn
.

“Show-offs,” someone mumbled, and she couldn’t tell if was John or Claude. She rubbed her eyes until her vision cleared to find Mark adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses and Agatha standing in the corner near the front door, spine straight and nose held high.

Clarissa waved them toward the sectional. “Sit. Y’all want something to eat?”

Agatha shook her head.

“As if I’d say no,” Mark said.

Sweetie popped up, saying, “I’ll get it!” with far too much enthusiasm for a woman who hadn’t slept in a day. She bounded into the kitchen, and Gail caught Ellery pushing an eyebrow up.

Gail put up a hand in a
don’t-go-there
fashion.

Ellery still had crinkles on her cheek from her impromptu nap and she’d mashed her messy hair flat on one side. She probably knew and didn’t care. Gail didn’t blame her. It’d been a pretty fucked-up morning.

“Is it book club day and I somehow managed to miss the memo?” Agatha asked flatly.

“Don’t be coy,” Claude said. “Are you really going to pretend that Gail and Ellery didn’t see you at the warehouse?”

“Tact, Claude.” Clarissa sighed and sat on the ottoman near the door.

“Someone needed to say it. Might as well have been me.”

“He’s as powerful as me. I don’t scare him,” Agatha said. She crossed her arms over her chest and drummed her fingers against her bare arms. She’d lost her hooded coat and now wore a cream-colored sleeveless shell more befitting of the scorching summer temperatures.

She was an interesting-looking woman. Her shoulder-length hair was a shiny silver hue that should have marked her as being at least fifty, had she been human, but her face gave few clues of her age. She could have been thirty. Forty. Fifty might have been pushing it. Like her clothes and hair, her brows were impeccably groomed, but she didn’t bother with makeup. She didn’t need it. Her skin was clear, lips full, and her charcoal gray eyes stole the show. Even when her face said so little, her eyes said so much.

At the moment, they scanned the room as if she were taking an accounting of everyone present—as if she’d make them all pay for this indulgence later.

Gail looked at Claude, wondering if he’d caught that little comment about his power, but he didn’t seem surprised by it. At least, if he was, he didn’t respond.

Sweetie returned with a bowl of chili and a hunk of baguette stuck to the side. “Only nutballs like us eat chili in the middle of the summer.”

Mark set the bowl on his lap and grinned up at Sweetie. “I bet providing protein for all you vicious carnivores is a full-time job.”

Clarissa sighed. “No kidding. That reminds me. I’ve got chickens I need to roast, so if I have to excuse myself, don’t take it as rudeness.”

“What exactly would you need to excuse yourself from?” Agatha asked.

She really was going to play that stuck-on-stupid game, and maybe that was fine. Gail didn’t really want to confront her, and Ellery sure as shit didn’t seem to want to, either. Whose idea was this, anyway?

“It’s just a little Q&A,” Clarissa said. “I think it’s up to you to tell these children—”

Claude cleared his throat, and Gail could guess why. It was so easy to forget that Claude was more than a century older than Clarissa, especially when they looked about the same age. Gail wouldn’t mind having a sip of that immortality juice.

Clarissa sighed. “Fine. My apologies to Mr. Fortier. Our merry band of miscreants would like to know certain things about you, and although I can speculate about why you behave the way you do, I was raised the old way. We didn’t stick our noses into other people’s secrets, because they’re secrets for a reason. I imagine your secrets exist for very similar reasons that the ones in my family do.”

Agatha didn’t say anything for a long while, but then she shifted her weight from one Ferragamo pump to the other and eyed the empty sofa seat beside Ellery.

Ellery waved her over. “Come on. Take a load off.”

Agatha cleared her throat quietly and eased her tall form through the gap, around the coffee table, and settled onto the cushion. She crossed one long leg over her knee and folded her hands atop her thigh. “My, this room’s crowded.”

“I’m extraneous. I can go,” John said, standing.

“Sit,” Agatha snapped, and John sat at if a rope at his waist yanked him down. “If I’m going to lay it all out, I’m only going to do it once. I’ve already broken the rules and relinquished my neutral status because of what I did earlier, so I suppose it’s best if I forego any further attempts at secrecy.”

Neutral status? Gail must have looked confused, because Clarissa mouthed, “I’ll tell you later.”

“Longer ago than I care to precisely recall, I broke the rules beings like me were bound to live by. I hate to sound clinical about it, but I conceived a child by a human man. At the time, I had two choices. Relinquish the child to his father after the birth and have no further contact with either, or raise the child myself and give up my status in the pantheon. My choice was the latter, however I didn’t know at the time the caveats that came with that. You see, back then, gods and goddesses quibbled over such small things. Having children was always a contentious thing for us, because we could never predict what sort of beings they’d turn out to be.”

“What do you mean?” John asked.

“Well, my dear angel-mutt, most people aside of the angelic and demonic that are even a touch supernatural got their gifts from gods and goddesses like me. That’s why there’s no one skill set for a witch and why there are different types of shape-shifters. The witches of my line have an affinity to the air.” A lump traveled down her throat. “Weather. Wind. Electricity.”

It took a moment for realization to settle into Gail, and obviously she was the last to get it. Everyone, save Ellery, was staring at Gail. Ellery was staring open-mouthed at Agatha.

“I had the baby and ran,” Agatha continued, but they went back on their word when they saw what the baby was and that it had power.

“They took your baby?” Claude asked.

She shook her head. “No. I ended up giving him up anyway because a sympathetic sister warned me they’d be coming. She worked it so that the child would be hidden by magic as long as I didn’t try to seek him out. When my family, those bullies, caught up to me, I had to lie and tell them I killed the child. Because of that, they accepted me back into the pantheon, but only on the condition that I be celibate from there out.”

If cringes had a sound, the noise in the room would have been deafening.

“There aren’t very many of you,” Agatha said quietly, and it was clear whom she was referring to. “There never were. The line has never really rooted as it should, and nearly died out more times than my heart should have been able to take.”

“If you couldn’t seek out the child, how would you know that?” Gail asked.

“Because I know when he died,” Agatha said, and her usually emotionless voice had gone solemn. “Every cell in my body screamed out when his soul ripped free from him. It was when the spell was broken. He was gone, and with him, my secret. It took me a while to find his little family. This was in what’s now Belarus. I found them, and I was going to go to them, but I was followed and it wasn’t hard to put two and two together. I made a deal with my father to keep my distance, and I nearly broke my word many times over the centuries. I had to watch wars and disease nearly kill them off, and I imagined many of those blights were courtesy of my peers. I’d paid my penance, but there are always going to be some who think the punishment wasn’t strict enough. They try to make up the difference.”