Healer's Touch (15 page)

Her hands went to the buttons of his trousers.

“Let's fuck,” she whispered against his lips, her hand slipping inside his open fly and encircling his shaft.

He grabbed her shoulders and held her at arm's length, but she wiggled from his grasp, dropping to her knees and wrapping her hands around him.

“Hell and blood!” he gasped, twisting one hand in her hair. For a moment he was torn between making her stop and pulling her onto his aching cock. Damnable Kurgan honor won out in the end. Jerking her head back, he used his free hand to stuff himself back in his pants. “Salgrim's prick, Viera!”

She laughed, scrambling to her feet. “I'm not interested in the god's prick, Karal, I'd rather have yours.” Running her hands up her torso, she pulled her bodice back down to expose her breasts, then tugged her jutting nipples. Her face was flushed, half from arousal, half from hanging upside down, and her red-painted lips parted on an inviting smile.

Fucking hell.

“Viera, I'm not here to purchase your services.”

She winked at him, hiking up her skirts to show off her triangle of curls. “That's good, because today I'm not charging for them.”

He stared, unable to do else, as she began to stroke herself with one hand.

“How many men have you had tonight?” he croaked, forcing his eyes to her face.

Her fingers kept rubbing, quick and clever. “None yet, Karal. Not a one. Now come here and give me that gorgeous prick of yours.”

He shook his head, his cock clamoring for release. Maybe just the one time? No one would hold him in blame. He was only fucking human, after all. And she was…unbelievable. Magnificent. A shabby goddess come to earth to claim men's souls.

“I came to talk,” he said, fastening his trousers while his resolve remained.

She sidled closer. “We can talk after.”

His cock responded, salivating like a hungry dog at the smell of steak. He had to fucking do something or in a minute he'd be bending her over the goddamn table and giving it to her just the way she wanted.

“I'm no longer interested in what a hundred men have had,” he told her, cringing even as he said it.

Her face changed. One moment she was all heat, the next she was an icicle with auburn hair. She dropped her bunched skirts and her hand flew, connecting with his cheek. “Get out.”

He just stood there, glaring down at her as blood rushed into the skin where she'd slapped him, watching her start to fall apart. She hit him a second time, then a third. He didn't move.

“Get out!”
she shrieked, shoving against his chest.

He grabbed her wrists and held them fast while she screamed and thrashed. It went on for rather a long time, during which she managed to slam her head into his chin, splitting the skin, as well as drive the heel of her boot down on his instep. Biting back a string of profanity, he just held her immobile and let her get it all out until at last she collapsed against him.

He hugged her, patting her back awkwardly as her sobs gradually lessened and then stopped. Goddamn women. It was a mental illness is what it was. Bending, he slung one arm behind her knees and lifted her. Her apartment was sparse—just the bed, a settee and a table with two chairs.

Salgrim's balls, he might be a fool but he was smart enough not to take her to the bed.

He carried her to the settee and sank into the cushions, settling her in his lap. She snuggled into him, wedging her head under his sore chin. His cock lay quiescent for now, thank the god.

“Inella told me Aru sent you away,” he said. “She asked me to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About why you can never be with him.”

 

Viera felt herself bristle slightly at his words, but she was just too comfortable curled up in his lap with his arms around her to do anything about it. It had been a very long time since she'd simply been held by a man. Ages. She'd almost forgotten how nice it could be.

“Inella says you love him.” Karal's voice rumbled against her skin where her brow nestled in the crook of his neck. “Is that true?”

“Yes.”

His arms tightened around her. “Does he love you?”

She drew in a ragged breath. “I think he does.”

“Tell me. How did it come to this?”

And she told him. All of it. In stilted bursts punctuated by brief bouts of tears, she relayed the details of Inella's nearly botched healing and how they'd quarreled after. She told him of Aru's first visit to her room that night, and her own to his the next, and then her recruitment of Inella to her cause. Everything, everything, right up to the culmination last night, when he'd taken possession of Inella's body and finally touched Viera as he wanted so desperately to do.

Karal stiffened. “He took over her body?”

She heard the disapproval in his tone and shook her head. “She said it wasn't like that. She said it was…consensual.”

“Only because he chose to make it so,” Karal growled. “He could have taken her will, forced her to do all manner of terrible things. He could have made her cut her own throat if he wanted, and neither of you could have stopped him.”

She started to get angry again, but then remembered Aru's own words. It has gone too far. I cannot trust myself.

“He would never do such a thing…” she said, needing to believe it.

“He's not Darjhian, Viera,” Karal snapped. “He's Omahru-azhi. He would have you believe his Power was taken away when he fell, but that simply isn't true. It changed as he did. It…fell. That's why he can't heal without aid. He can no longer use his Power to give life—only to take it.”

She swallowed past the knot of unease in her throat. The aftereffects of too much drink and the wildness of the last few hours combined with her dread had set her stomach churning. “How do you know this?”

“I saw things during the war.” His hand came up to stroke her hair. “I was at the siege of Barrago's Hold. There were six thousand of us, fifty thousand Bal-shar. The Hold was built for war, surrounded on three sides by unscalable cliffs. Its curtain wall is ten feet thick and fifty high, easily defended by the fifteen hundred Andun who sheltered behind it. Lord Martin had turned its approach into a maze of kill-zones. Any enemy foolish enough to attack the fortress would take hundreds, thousands of losses before they even made it to the walls. But we didn't need to attack. The week before, Lord Martin had sent all of his small-folk north, and nearly all the rations with them. The men in the keep were soldiers out of Stonehall, and they'd brought with them only as much as they could readily carry. Food for a week—two if they stretched it. Once we poisoned the water source, they knew there was nothing for it. All we had to do was wait.”

“I didn't know you were a soldier.”

“The Oath made soldiers of us all, every man, woman and child.” His hand crept to her nape, idly massaging the muscles there. “I took up my first sword before I learned how to hold a quill, but I'd never seen real combat before. Mordraghil had emptied the whole of the Dragon's Head for the offensive, all of us, from spot-faced adolescents to graybeards to women round with child. We'd already taken heavy losses. The Anduni garrison had booby-trapped Stonehall's keep with our own munitions. The explosion took out over four hundred of our men and thousands of Bal-shar. Up to that point, it was all going our way, but Stonehall shattered our confidence. When we pinned the bastards in Barrago's Hold, we all figured luck was back on our side. There was no easy way to get in the keep, but no way for them to get out, either. All we had to do was set up a barricade and patrol the surrounding country to repel siege-breakers. We had more than enough men left for that.

“The third night everything went to shite” he said, his voice lowering until she had to strain to hear him. “They came on us without warning. From the west, where we had not thought to post a watch. We never expected the Protected Lands to be a threat. Why would we? No man with an ounce of Anduni blood could pass their Net of Warding, and the Darjhi were harmless…or so we believed. These warriors, though, they were Darjhian, but…not. We didn't know what to call them then. It wasn't until much later that we learned the name Omahru-azhi. Learned to fear it.”

“Cael's Four Thousand,” Viera said, thinking of the songs. “They say he lost not one man.”

“No one really believes that,” he said softly. “But I saw it with my own eyes. Saw what fell arts they employed to survive that battle. For the first while, we thought we had them. They were faster and stronger than us, but our Kurgan troops alone had them outnumbered by half, and we'd been starving the Bal-shar for days, whetting their appetite for blood. But it wasn't long before they'd cut a swath through the Bal-shar, hacking them down like saplings. Then they were on us. I took one of the fiends with my sword, sliced his belly wide open. And he just…shrugged it off. One moment his guts were spilling out, the next he was swinging his blade once more, as fierce as ever. But…he'd changed. Withered. When I looked at his shrunken face I thought him a cadaver.”

“The walking dead,” Viera whispered, not wanting to hear the rest, not wanting to know what Aru was.

“The walking dead,” Karal agreed. “Each wound he took aged him more until he was nothing but a skeleton with ragged leather for skin. And yet he was as strong as ever. He slashed my thigh to the bone—I almost bled to death on that field. I lay there, waiting for him to finish me, but he only kept hewing and hewing at the men around me until finally he cut one across the throat. Poor bastard fell right beside me, blood bubbling from his wound. And the fiend dropped down on him like a carrion bird on a carcass and I saw what he did then.”

He fell silent and Viera pushed away from him, leaned back to look at his face. His eyes were closed, his brows drawn together over them. He had gone pale, sweat beading on his forehead and upper lip. Viera swallowed hard, looking him up and down from his rough-hewn face to his muscled arms and chest. She could not imagine a tougher-looking man, yet at the moment he was like a young boy revisiting a nightmare.

Reaching up, she laid her hand on his cheek, felt the muscles working under her palm. He opened his eyes and looked at her. His face softened, his gaze turning incongruously tender, an emotion she had never seen in him. “I was told later that they take the spark, not the soul, but at the time all I could think was that these walking dead, not the Bal-shar, were the true children of Gorgorn. Eaters of Souls. I saw him conjure up the dying man's spirit and devour it. The light passed into him and he grew young before my eyes, and then he breathed out a thin, trailing mist and it was done. He stood and began to fight once more. By then our men had begun to realize we could not win, that these ghouls possessed some devilry and could not be killed. Someone grabbed me under my arms and dragged me away. They threw me across a saddle and we rode. Barely a thousand of us left that battle alive, and not a single Bal-shar. And Cael of the Omahru-azhi lost not one single man.”

Viera rose and went to her small pantry, wobbling a little from all the wine she'd drunk. She found her bottle of absinthe and poured two generous measures. Karal took his and nodded his thanks before tossing it back. Viera didn't have the stomach to sip hers just yet. Sinking slowly down, she perched on the edge of the cushions beside him. She felt numb inside, as if all her nerve endings had frozen and broken off.

They take the spark, not the soul. She repeated this to herself, tried to let it comfort her. “I always thought Aru held himself apart because of his wife. Because he would not break his vow to her. I never thought it was something like this. Has he ever…?”

“Not to my knowledge. But how would anyone know? The Omahru-azhi have laws governing this conduct. They act in secret and take only Andun or Kurgae'in already on the bitter edge of death. That was why the one I fought did not take me. He could not do so until my death was a certainty.”

Viera frowned at him. “But you were the enemy. It was war. Why wouldn't he have killed you? Who would have held him in blame for that?”

He shook his head. “They were there to aid the Andun against Mordraghil. They did only what they must to drive us off. They could have annihilated us, had they wished. Our retreat might as well have been a rout, but they didn't even follow.”

“So they have no blood-thirst.” She held to that until he pulled it ruthlessly from her grasp.

“I didn't say that.” He scowled at his empty cup. “Twelve years ago, when I lived in Sylphae, one of them went rogue. Defied their law and took a healthy child. When his crime was discovered, he fled south from Harweald to Sylphae, killing as he went. Cael's own son was sent to stop him. By the time it was over, he had left more than a hundred Anduni dead in his wake, most of them children, and was so powerful for it, it was all Oren sur-Cael could do to put him down. All that youth, all that life…wasted to feed a monster. That is the fear of every Omahru-azhi. That is Aru's fear. That his hunger for more life will be too powerful to control. That one day he will become a monster, a ravening beast that must be put down.”

She stared at the cup she still held in her shaking hand, feeling her insides go hollow. All of a sudden she realized how she must look—her hair a mess, her clothes stained and face-paint streaked with sweat and tears. She thought of the things she had done in that tavern—the things she had been prepared to do if Karal had not come when he did—and her mind flinched away from the memory. She didn't want to imagine what Karal must think of her. Her throat felt thick with vomit and she tossed back her absinthe, letting its burning sweetness cleanse her.

“I want to thank you for telling me this,” she whispered. “And for…finding me tonight. For being there.”

He gave her his customary wordless grunt, rubbing his hands up and down his face. “What will you do?”