Dweller on the Threshold (26 page)

Something warm flitted through those nearly-black eyes of his and I felt an answering flutter in my stomach which surprised me, considering the pain racking my poor body. I tightened my arm briefly and tried not to burst into tears at the wet slide of my fingers over the blood on his side.

Nikolos’s arm squeezed lightly when I stumbled.

“Maybe you should let go before I pull us both to the ground,” I muttered.

I almost did fall when he leaned to whisper in my ear. “I’m sorry about earlier. We’ll talk. And so you know, I’ve changed my mind. I will take you to the ground someday, but not until we are both well enough to enjoy it.”

Now my stomach was fluttery again. My pulse spiked. And damn it, I was too tired and hurting too much to come up with a saucy reply. Truth was, I wanted the man to take me to the ground for his reasons. Wanted it pretty badly. Heat flushed in low places. I needed to get my mind off it.

“Fred, you said you couldn’t see what I was fighting but I was in your realm, right? You looked solid there.”

He moved beside me. “It was mine.”

“How do you think I got there?”

“You’ve been in there during sleep plenty of times.”

“Do I need to point out that I wasn’t asleep?”

“Your sarcasm warms my heart more than you know.”

“So, what could you see?”

“I saw you twisting your cord in the air above the demon’s head. I could tell you looked at something I couldn’t see.” He glanced over my shoulder. “Could you see it Phro?”

“No.”

We reached the front door. Nikolos opened it and held it as I walked through. Blythe swept past me to get her bag. My legs felt suddenly weak and I slumped against the wall for a second.

Nikolos put his hand on my shoulder and leaned down until his face was directly in my line of vision. “I could carry you.”

“You’re in worse shape than I am.”

“I’m healing fast.”

“I saw the wound yesterday—was it just yesterday?—on your back. You don’t heal that fast.” I couldn’t help it—I stopped, placed a hand on his chest. “This thing happening between us…I know you don’t want it.” I whispered the statement, not making it a question since I already knew the answer. “But just so you know, it scares me, too.”

He didn’t say anything, merely touched my cheek with the tip of one finger and took my hand to pull me toward his private rooms. He called out for Blythe to meet us in his bathroom. I followed him through the maze of hallways, past the beautiful central room he’d built around the spring. The room he’d built for a big family whether he knew it or not.

We passed his bedroom with that room off to the side and its heartbreaking paintings on the wall and finally stopped when we reached his bathroom.

My arm was numb from the new wound. My head hurt from all of it. I still gasped when I saw this room. “Bathroom” didn’t begin to cover it. The tub, built into the floor, looked like it would seat six. Stone benches had been crafted around the sides and there were four spouts so it wouldn’t take hours to fill. He was a big man who apparently liked big tubs so he’d made one to fit him.

I had a sudden image of us in that tub. Together. Naked. Searing heat flooded my body and I had to grope the wall and find a place to sit. This was getting out of hand. It was like I’d been sucked into mating season or something. I almost chuckled over the thought of being in heat. Would have, but I was just too tired.

I sat on a low stone bench. This one had red cushions with geometric shapes on them. Matching pottery filled a few shelves and on the large shelf that dominated one entire wall, a stunning, bell-shaped female figurine stood, arms stretched above her head in feminine elegance. A thick, sinuous snake wrapped her body from the chest down.

My attention was pulled to the doorway as Blythe came in. She didn’t look at either of us, just opened her bag and began laying out supplies on the stone counter that stretched one wall.

Nikolos was going to insist on me being treated first this time. I was too exhausted to argue. I closed my eyes and laid the back of my head to the wall. Blythe started unwrapping my arm.

“Nikolos, could you see what I fought?” I asked.

“No. I could see you, though. You looked as they do.” I opened my eyes to see him point at the guides who were busy inspecting the room. Except for Phro. She’d already snooped. Instead, she was eyeballing the things Blythe had laid out across the counter.

“I looked like a spirit guide?”

He shook his head. “More like a ghost. I was too busy to see exactly what you had in your hands, though. It looked like a rope. Did you kill the demon with a rope?”

“Sort of. It’s my cord.”

He lifted an eyebrow.

“I know how that sounds. Listen, have you ever read anything on astral projection?”

“Yes, dimensional travelers have been around forever. There were several on Aegenia. I didn’t know you were one.”

“I didn’t either. I’ve done it before in my sleep, but never like that.”

“You can carry a rope with you?”

Phro snorted. Even I had to laugh and that was hard considering Blythe had laid my wound open. I still hadn’t looked at it again. I remembered what had happened during the fight when I had. I’d already thrown up in front of the man. I didn’t want to add fainting to that. “It’s not exactly a rope. If you read about astral projection, they all talk about a thin, silvery cord that keeps the metaphysical body attached to the physical one. It’s just that mine is a little more solid and well, in the past it’s always been really annoying. Gets tangled up in trees and stuff.”

“You strangled the demon’s soul with your astral projection cord.”

“I suppose.” I bit my lip and tried not to scream when Blythe poured something over my arm. Poor thing was muttering a litany of apologies. “You think I strangled a soul? How can demons have souls?”

Fred spoke up. “I told you before your ideas of Hell are those you got from some of the sillier religions here. Demons have souls. They are creatures like any other. These Dweller Demons are unfamiliar to me, though I imagine they have the very thing that gives them life just as everything else.”

Even Nikolos looked surprised by this. He sat on the bench several feet from me. His breathing had gone labored. He leaned back and closed his eyes. “I can’t believe you strangled it with your cord,” he muttered.

“You think I find it easy to understand?”

Blythe wiped something on my cheek which caused my eyes to water. Blinking, I took a deep breath and promptly coughed as fumes filled my throat. “What is that?”

“Peroxide.”

“What happened to the magic stuff?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute,” she said. “There’s a lot of dirt and other, more disgusting stuff from that demon mixed into your wounds. I don’t want to take the time to research the best herbs and since this demon gunk is an unknown, I guessed the peroxide would kill whatever it was doing. Remember what happened last time?”

“It was yesterday, Blythe.”

She stopped dabbing. “Yes, I know.” She bit her lip. “Maybe you should both strip and get in that tub. There’s so much of this stuff all over you and I can’t find all the wounds.”

I looked down to see that I was just as covered in blood as Nikolos. The bath was probably the best idea. But the thought of stripping naked with Nikolos and getting into that tub when I’d so recently imagined that very thing sent heat spinning through my body. My face felt flushed and I knew it was when Blythe’s grin turned naughty.

“I doubt either of you are up for sex. Shouldn’t be long though. The way you two look at each other?”

“Oh man.” I closed my eyes. I was so not getting into that tub with him in front of an audience. I heard him stand and my eyes flew open. I expected to see him stripping. Instead, he walked toward the door.

“There are several bathrooms in this house. You take the tub. I will shower and come back when your guide tells me you’re dressed.” He stopped and pointed to Phro. “Might as well send that one since she watched me in the shower earlier.”

Chapter Thirteen

Blythe could kick ass on a computer.

I watched her fingers fly, knowing my shock was stamped on my face in bright, and living color. Her spirit guide stood guard beside her chair.

We were back in the big room with the spring. We’d showered, dressed wounds and Blythe had quickly learned that the ley line did change her spells. We weren’t healed, of course, but the wounds hurt so much less than they would normally.

If I hadn’t been dealing with that internal worry over Elsa, I could have enjoyed this room. The sound of trickling water from the fountain would have been soothing if my ears weren’t still ringing from the squeal Blythe had released when Nikolos moved aside a beautiful hand-painted divider. It had been partially hidden behind a swath of potted palm trees, but behind it, he had a wicked computer set-up similar to the one in his office. I’d never seen wall-mounted multiple screens and now I’d seen them twice in one day.

I leaned closer to one of the monitors. “What are you doing now?”

Windows rapidly opened and closed across the screens as Blythe’s head tilted this way and that. The clicking from her fingers was just as fast. “I’ve been looking at different medical news sites. No one knows what’s causing the comas, but the media has nicknamed it SS for Somatic Slumber.” She shot me an apologetic glance. “Somatic is another word for mortal. They believe the comas to be irreversible.”

“They’re not.” Of course, I didn’t know that. But I
had
to believe it. “And that’s a stupid name.”

Blythe tapped a screen to her left. “These are pandemic pages. They have maps of every case reported. I’m bringing up as many maps as I can on all these lovely screens. Aren’t they just wonderful?”

She went back to typing and I watched the flashing color, the shifting of windows from one screen to the next. “How can you possibly take in information at this speed?”

She giggled, small fingers nearly blurring. “Everything is color-coded. I’m just looking for the biggest spot of red.” She pointed to another screen. “Like this one.”

I leaned forward and nearly bit the end of my tongue off when I moved my arm. Yeah, I should be flat with pain, and Blythe had shared her mojo and made it better, but the ache was still pretty intense when I moved. The kick from the demon had sprained two of my fingers and since it was the hand on the same arm as the re-opened wound, I was miserable.

I looked at the map of the United States and saw small dots of red sprinkled throughout, but it was pretty obvious where this originated by what resembled a thick, spreading bloodstain across the bottom right side. “It’s here. In Florida.”

Nodding, she pointed north to a place with a smaller, but growing area of red. “It’s getting worse in other states, too, but nothing like it is here.”

My stomach clenched hard. “It’s worse than I thought.”

“The weird thing is I haven’t read anything about demon attacks on any of the news sites. Not the legitimate ones anyway. There are a few on the paranormal trackers’ sites but all the other ones are being attributed to wild animals. But the majority of Somatic Slumber sufferers are here. Which makes sense if you think about it. I mean, we’re here.”

I thought about it and no, her logic didn’t click. Shaking my head, I smiled and just let it go. I was fast learning that her explanations were sometimes worse than just not knowing. Entertaining, but still worse. “This Dweller Nikolos talks about is obviously sending these things to stop us, so we must be some sort of threat.” I turned to Nikolos.

He was sitting at the table where he’d laid out Blythe’s spell book, paper and a couple of other books—for help in translation, he’d said. A faint green outlined the unnatural-looking pastiness of his face. Nikolos’s chair creaked as he shifted slowly, still reading. His hair was just now drying after his shower. Like mine, it took a while. He’d left it down and it draped the sides of his face, swinging with his movements in a silky slide that had me watching him more often than what Blythe was doing on the Internet. He tucked a strand behind his ear. The gesture should have looked feminine. It didn’t.

What would that hair feel like if he sent it slithering along my naked flesh?

Blythe giggled again and elbowed my side lightly. I looked down to find her attention completely on me.

“Do I need to leave you two alone?”

“Shut up,” I muttered, grumpy that I was so freaking transparent.

Nikolos picked that moment to look up and once again, I felt that weird crawly feeling in my chest when our eyes met. He did bad things to my lungs, this man. “How did you track the host the first time around?” I asked. “You said you went looking. Where?”

He leaned back in his chair, his burgundy long-sleeved T-shirt stretching over his chest. The heavy bandage wrapping his ribs was easily visible under the thin cotton. “The unconscious people grew to two out of every five people in Aegenia. But we received word through the ships that possibly more were ailing on the other islands and on the mainland. I was sent with my army to get more information.”

“You said a goddess sent you.”

He nodded. “Ariadne. But she was wrong. We spent a long time tracking.” He looked down at the book.