My Darkest Passion (13 page)

She snuck a look at the warlord and forced herself not to snarl at him just because. He wasn’t doing anything except standing there. “You said you knew Bejar.”

He glanced at her. “A long time ago.”

“What was he like?”

“What difference does it make?”

Harsh stopped sunning himself and lazily opened his eyes to give Kynan one of his patented
you are in big trouble
glares. “Answer her.”

“Why?”

“It’s a reasonable question. If you were in her position, you’d be asking the same question.”

“I’m not in her position.”

“Answer her. Now.”

She made the mistake of giving Kynan a sweet smile. Satisfying, oh hell yes, but it didn’t get her what she wanted, which was three of Kynan’s fingers pressed to his forehead in that gesture she knew meant,
I respect the hell out of you because you could whip my ass without trying
.

“Would you two stop?” Harsh pushed to his feet and stood in a patch of sun that happened to be not so far from Kynan. She knew, now, that however calm Harsh was from the outside, he was the same as Kynan inside. A demon. Deadly. She’d seen him in action, and she wasn’t going to ever forget that. Kynan just gave into the mayhem that lived in him, and he’d loved every minute of it. Harsh, on the other hand, had called on an ice-cold calculus and killed another living creature with full awareness of his choices. No remorse in either case.

Kynan made an odd gesture with one hand—not the one she wanted, unfortunately. More like an abortive flip of the bird. “He was a warlord. We didn’t get along.”

She couldn’t help herself. “He was stronger than you, right?”

“Fuck you. No. We didn’t get along because he was an asshole.”

She made a face at Kynan and then went all innocent when she caught Harsh watching her.

“When I knew him, he was free. A lot of kin were sworn to him.” Kynan had his own patented glare of doom. Very effective. “More were sworn to me. A lot more.”

Harsh reached out and rapped the back of Kynan’s head with the flat of his palm. “How old are you? Suck it up, warlord, and answer her.”

Without taking his attention off her, he extended a middle finger to Harsh. “I never heard he wasn’t good for his oath-bound kin. They stayed sworn to him, unlike others I could tell you about, so he couldn’t have been a total asshole. He was just a regular everyday boring asshole.”

What she wanted, needed, desperately, to know was everything she could find out about the demon whose life was now her. Not just a part of her, but her. The new Addison O’Henry. So she did what Harsh had told Kynan to do, and sucked it up. “How did he end up enslaved to Giuseppe Infante?”

“Dunno.” He shrugged, but she knew she wasn’t imagining the blankness in his eyes. Her heart thumped because she recognized the emptiness. There was a lot more to Kynan’s story, but she wasn’t going to push for it when she wasn’t willing to share the things that emptied her out the same way. “There was a time we didn’t know the magekind could do that. Took a while for the word to get out. A lot of the warlords went down in those early days. They didn’t believe it could happen to them.”

Maybe he did put her on edge, but she wasn’t going to bust him over this. Out of respect, she kept her eyes focused past his shoulder. He didn’t need her feeding that ridiculous competition between them. Not over this. Even if it killed her that he might think for a minute she was conceding anything.

“The only thing you need to know about Bejar is he didn’t want what happened anymore than you did.”

“Yeah.” She picked up a twig and drew lines in the dirt. Something to do to keep her from looking at Kynan. Or at Harsh and thinking about how someone who’d spent his life learning how to save lives could turn that same knowledge on edge to take one.

“He was from the Dashed-e Kavir desert. Iran.”

She nodded.

Harsh lifted a hand to interrupt. “Most of the surviving free kin of the Entelechy originated in desert areas. Nikodemus from the Gobi, for example. Kynan from the Thar desert.”

“Are you one of them?” She bet he was. He might not outrank Kynan, but there were times she wondered if he was like that on purpose. Holding back something of what he was.

But Harsh laughed. “No.”

“So what does that mean for me, that Bejar was one of the Entelechy?”

Harsh cocked his head and made a face. “Unclear. To my knowledge, this has never happened before. Kynan?”

“All I know is she needs to deal with what she is now, and she’s not doing it.”

She put her hands on her knees. “Why don’t you try having your life destroyed and see how you like it?”

“I guess I’ll just do that one of these days.”

She opened her mouth to make another bitchy remark when it hit her that both Harsh and Kynan had been magehelds. Enslaved to a mage. Maybe they didn’t understand her exact situation, but they had a damn good idea of what she’d endured. “I have flashbacks,” she said. “I see Bejar and. . .all those feelings. Like a waking dream. Most of the time Bejar cuts out my heart while Infante stands in the background laughing. Sometimes he gives it to Infante to eat.”

“That’s disgusting.” Kynan turned his head and spat like he had a bad taste in his mouth.

“I can’t unsee it,” she said.

Harsh opened himself to her, and this time she understood what he was doing and why, and she was grateful that he thought of it. Because it helped, having that low-level link going like that. When he did that, it was like touching cool, clear water on a blazing hot day. “I dream about giving birth to a monster, or giving birth to a beautiful, perfect baby and then misplacing it. Or else the baby dies and my life goes on as if nothing happened. Or I die in birth.”

“If you don’t get a handle on yourself, it’s going to get worse.”

“You’re just full of sunshine, aren’t you?”

Harsh looked to Kynan again, but he didn’t say anything. “Eventually,” Harsh said. “The dreams will fade.”

“Just not any time soon, right?”

“You need to take responsibility for what you are.” Kynan stood in front of her with his arm crossed over his chest and being careful, she thought, not to look her in the eye. Good on him, because if he did, they’d end up in yet another staring contest, and she, inevitably, would end up feeling like winning that contest was all that mattered. What kind of way was that to live? If she was right that Harsh was holding back so he didn’t have to deal with that kind of bullshit, then that was a choice she could make, too.

“That’s what you keep saying,” she said. She just couldn’t help mouthing off to him at least a little. Anything he said, she had to top. “I’m still not listening.”

He flipped her off.

“Fuck you,” she said.

“Would you two stop?”

She couldn’t help smirking when Kynan flipped Harsh off, too.

“Addison. Kynan is right.” She ignored Kynan and his smug expression, but right now, she’d prefer one of Harsh’s silent moods. “What do you want to do? You need to decide.”

“What do I want? I want my life back. That’s what I want.” Tears burned in her eyes, but she was not going to cry. Except she did, and it happened a lot. She tried to keep her breakdowns to herself, but it wasn’t easy when you spent all your time around creatures who thrived off shared mental space. She rapped her hand on the weathered stairs, then gripped the edge of the step as hard as she could while she rocked back and forth.

“You’re hurting yourself.” Harsh lifted a hand as if he were going to touch her shoulder. He didn’t, though.

“You’re not my mother.” She, too, lifted a hand. To push him away. “Believe me, I’ve heard all that before. ‘Make up your mind, Addison.’” Then she ruined the illusion that she was in control of herself by sniffling.

“Your mother was right.” He sat beside her and touched the back of her near hand. “But that is not what I meant. Let me see.”

“What?” The moment he touched her, a zing raced from her hand to the center of her body. She wished she was dead to that sort of reaction, too.

“Your hand.” His voice was ripe with shadows, rich. Compelling. She wondered if that was a part of the whole thing with his kind. The whole, I’m sexy so you’ll want me long enough for me to get you knocked up. Kynan had been kind enough to enlighten her about that. “Please.”

She released the step and turned her hand to him, palm up, and, what do you know? A very large splinter pierced the meaty part at the base of her thumb. Blood seeped from the entry point, bright, bright red. Slivers dotted her palm and the lower joints of her fingers. There was nothing normal about her now. Nothing. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“Kynan, would you get the first aid kit?”

The minute Kynan went into the house, she calmed down. Like magic. “It’s not just you.” Harsh picked a few of the larger splinters out of her hand. “He affects a lot of us that way. It would be easier for you both if you were sworn to Nikodemus.”

“You keep saying that. Why?”

He plucked out another splinter. “Because he’s Kynan Aijan, that’s why. Because an unaligned warlord is a threat, and that, Addison, is what you are. All of us have a responsibility to protect Nikodemus from threats like you. Kynan in particular.”

“Why?”

He swiped a finger across the blood on her palm. Casually, like it was nothing, he licked the smear off his skin, and she shivered. He didn’t notice. He didn’t think anything of what he’d done, and it felt so intimate, that he’d done that. “Kynan has a talent for mayhem. A gift, you might say. Nikodemus channels that as best he can.”

She wondered what his blood would taste like. Rich probably. Sweet. Crazy sweet. Which was just one more item on a long list of things that were messed up about her now; insane thoughts like that. She lifted her eyes and found Harsh watching her again.

“Not crazy at all.”

“Sure feels like it.”

He extended his hand, and with one finger of his other hand, made a quick slash at the base of his palm. A bright red line appeared on his skin. As the line thickened and the liquid oozed along the valleys of his hand, the smell made every nerve she had quiver. “Go.”

She touched the back of his hand, fascinated by her reaction, the way she resonated, the quickening beat of her heart, a pull toward him. He raised his arm, palm up, fingers down, and when she bent to that welling line of crimson the scent gripped her. She touched her tongue to Harsh’s blood and her body clenched. Their link went from low-level to blazing hot. The taste was tangy, vivid, like nothing she could have anticipated, and it drew her directly into the heat that was Harsh Marit.

When she looked up after that taste, their eyes connected, and the vast stillness of him held her in thrall. His oath to Nikodemus resonated in him and a part of her resented that. Deep in her chest, something turned over.

She wanted. That. Him. The reaction had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with whatever had happened to her because of Bejar.

With his free hand, he brushed her temple. “So much power.”

Somewhere in the house, Kynan looped into their connection.

13

A
ddison looked away when Kynan came back with the first aid kit. Harsh licked away the rest of the blood and she felt the pull on her and wished she’d tasted the rest. She wanted to find out what was at the end of that sensation.

“Hey.” Kynan held out the first aid kit. He glanced from Harsh to her, but, for once, he didn’t say anything. “Next time you want to play doctor, get it yourself.”

“Thank you. Sit down, Addison.”

She did, and Harsh sat beside her. Too close. Maybe not close enough. He used his fingers to remove the bigger splinters and a pair of tweezers to extract the ones he couldn’t just brush away. And magic. He used magic. A little. Almost nothing, but she felt the tug. “I’ve made a few calls recently,” he said as he worked. He’d been Dr. Marit once, and some mage had come along and ruined his life the way Infante had ruined hers. “It’s not unusual for an assimilation to result in some degree of anesthesia.”

He meant her continued inability to feel pain. “Sometimes, if I fall asleep, when I wake up, I hurt. But then it goes away.”

“From everything I’ve heard, it should pass.”

“I hope not.” He glanced at her and went back to work. She stared at her hand and it hit her, in this strange, distant way, that it was not normal for her to have a handful of splinters and to feel nothing. “It’s convenient.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Why?” With that same detachment, she saw the hole left by the largest splinter was already healed. He’d probably helped that along, but she healed faster than normal now. That gash on her arm, the one he’d stitched up, that was already nearly healed. A few scabs remained at the deepest parts of the injury, but there was shiny pink skin, and the perimeter got smaller every time she remembered to look.

She
felt
different, too. There were times when she locked into that space where she knew what Harsh or Kynan were thinking or feeling, and it was a lot like the rush of magic. Intense enough to be dangerous. A jolt of concentrated energy.

Harsh put a hand on the back of her shoulder, and she reacted to that the way she had when he touched her hand. There was this
thing
that happened to her when she was around Harsh and Kynan. She had this whole other way of experiencing the world, a new set of instincts that were just
there
. In her brain. She knew things. Did things. She did crazy, I-need-a-tinfoil-hat-insane things like moving objects with the power of her mind. Or killing a demon enslaved to a mage. Bat-shit crazy.

He disinfected her hand and shouldn’t that have stung? It didn’t. Convenient, sure. But worrisome, too. He moved to sit on her other side. Her left hand was full of splinters, too, yet she didn’t feel a bit of pain. She hadn’t felt one damn thing.

Harsh glanced at her. “I understand—”

“You don’t understand shit.”

“—that you want to go home.” He held her hand in his. “But even if you swore fealty to Nikodemus right now, I’m not sure it would be safe.”