My Immortal Assassin (23 page)
I
n less than four minutes Gray had her things packed in the battered leather satchel Durian gave her. Used to be she had to decide what to pack for a trip. Now, she could dump all her clothes in one carry-on-sized bag and it wasn’t even full when she was done. A quick check of the bathroom confirmed she hadn’t overlooked anything. She glanced in the mirror and ran a hand through her hair. Her dark roots were showing even more.
“All right, then,” she said to the woman in the mirror, impressed with how calm she looked when she was shaking inside. She was intimately aware that Durian was putting himself on the line for her and it made her heart feel too big for her chest. He could have proposed that she allow him to take control of her magic as Nikodemus and Xia had done for the witches they were bonded with. But he hadn’t because he knew she had not been given any choice with Tigran. He did not share himself easily, but he was offering her an access to him that she knew he’d never allow anyone else.
Even without her oath of fealty, she’d follow him to hell and back if he needed that from her.
She picked up her borrowed satchel and joined Durian. He was waiting in the doorway of the bedroom, leaning against the jamb, arms crossed over his chest. Her heart lurched. She smiled but it felt fake. “Let’s go.”
Very casually he took her hand, and Jesus, it made her want to cry, that he’d hold her hand like that. Her heart misgave her and she looked up, blinking to clear her vision. “Is this going to get you in trouble with Nikodemus?”
“Doubtful. If anything, the result will be of benefit to him.”
“We don’t have to do this,” she said. “We can try this another way.” Oh, damn. Those were tears burning in her eyes. “It’s just I want my sister back safe and sound. I want Christophe to never harm anyone else, and I hate that I’m using you to get what I want.”
His eyebrows lifted. He drew her closer and with his free hand ran his fingers through her hair. “More than I am using you, Gray?” His hand ended up touching the side of her face. “I asked for your fealty. And I proposed this to you, if you’ll recall. If anyone should feel used, it’s you.”
“I’m glad you found me instead of someone else when I went after Christophe.” She put her arms around his neck and held on tight, burying her face in his chest. Through his shirt, she kissed his scar. “I’m glad it’s you.”
He was still holding her hand, but his other one snaked around her waist and pulled her tight against him. “For the record, you may use me whenever you like.”
Gray looked at him. He wasn’t holding back the psychic connection anymore, and that meant he was an insistent presence in her head. “I’m going to do that. Just you wait.”
When they walked out, he sent a current of magic into the repaired medallions over the left corner of the door. A
no strangers allowed here
command that spread from that one to the others. He did the same at the hallway door, and they walked out.
In the garage, he threw his bag and hers into the backseat of his car and they were off to, well, she had no idea. They didn’t talk during the drive. She didn’t even ask where they were going or when they would get there. They headed west, across the city. He jacked an iPod into the car stereo and put on some kind of edgy Latin guitar.
She waved a hand at the iPod. “Am I going to end up liking this?”
Without any change in expression he said, “You will acquire my superior taste, of course.”
“How do you know you won’t end up slumming with me?”
“Impossible.”
“You may end up wearing jeans when this is over.”
“You may find you like impractical shoes.”
She laughed, and it felt good to be able to laugh. “Not hardly.”
They ended up in the St. Francis Wood section of the city. Very expensive homes here. Eventually, he made a turn into the driveway of a house with a lawn that was larger than two normal houses. The house itself wasn’t that large, but it was impressive, in a Georgian revival kind of way. He hit a button on a gadget clipped to the visor. They drove inside the garage and parked next to a shiny dark blue Tesla roadster. After a brief tussle over what could be wrong with her carrying her own bag, ten minutes later they were inside a house so clean she wondered if anyone lived here.
Durian threw his keys onto a table and they stood for several seconds, looking at each other. She gripped the strap of her bag and thought about why she was a fool to feel all the air rush out of her body just from eye contact. He was meltingly good-looking. She felt like a high school girl with a crush on the wrong boy. Except she’d had a taste. She’d seen him naked. She’d caressed him, gone down on him, and kissed him in places that got her hot just thinking about it. He hung his jacket in a closet near the door and walked into the main room with her following.
There was furniture here, a relief after that stark entryway. Beautiful antiques, too. Which was no surprise. He had a taste for old and elegant. They ended up in a kitchen where he got them both a glass of ice water.
“Perhaps you’d like time to think about your decision.”
She shook her head. The ice cubes in her cup were tiny little squares. “Just think,” she said. “Next time we do this, we’ll be fighting over who gets which ice cube.” She stuck her finger in her cup and jabbed at one. “Dibs.”
“Enjoy it,” he said without cracking a smile. “That is the last ice cube you will ever call your own.”
She couldn’t help laughing. With that they were five minutes after the storm instead of in the middle of it. This was the right thing to do. For both of them.
“This way.”
They ended up upstairs. Partway down the hall, he took two quick steps ahead of her to open a door.
She walked in. A spray of coppery-red stars arched over the midnight blue wall directly opposite the door. In the light, they seemed to glitter. To the left was an impressive bed; a four poster complete with silk hangings that matched the walls. A gilt-framed still life of lemons in a brass bowl hung on another wall next to a Georgian-era highboy with what looked like the original finish. Her mother collected, so she had years of exposure to very old furniture.
“Nice.”
“Thank you.”
He walked to a curio cabinet and started taking things out of it.
Gray looked around. There wasn’t much furniture, but she was used to less where he was concerned. What he had looked like it belonged in a museum. She knew a Queen Anne chair when she saw one. Like the three around the table there.
He walked out of the room with his arms full of items she couldn’t identify. When he didn’t come back right away she went after him through a small anteroom with nothing in it but tatami mats on the floor. She ended up in a room that was almost devoid of furniture. The walls were the same midnight blue here. His shoes and socks sat beside the doorway so she did the polite thing and removed hers, too.
This next room wasn’t large, maybe ten by ten total. There were no windows. No more doors but the one behind her, and that one wasn’t even a normal door. It stretched floor to ceiling, for one thing. There was no trim and no hardware. Just a quarter-sized medallion in about the same place you’d put a doorknob. Midnight blue on one side, coppery red on the other. She stepped through.
In there the walls were the color of an almost-new penny. The ceiling was brilliant white, the floor tiles a polished black stone that was cool and slick under her feet. Durian stood on the far side of the room, setting up a brazier on a recessed platform built into the wall. There wasn’t much furniture here, either. Just a small couch pushed up against one of the walls and a cherry table with an empty copper vase on it.
“What are you doing?”
“Preparing.” At the moment, the only light in the room came from the open door.
She looked around for a light switch and didn’t see one.
“Please close the door then press the medallion there.”
“Sure.” She reached behind her and pulled the door closed. It clicked shut with the force of its own weight. She pressed the medallion and an electric zing shot up her arm. With no discernable seam, it looked like they were in a room with no way in and no way out.
Durian did something, she felt the magic, and all along the floor the walls shone with just enough light for her to see.
Her belly tightened. She had no reservations about what they were planning to do. None at all. She walked close enough to get a better look at the items he’d taken from the curio cabinet: a brazier, a fat-bellied stoppered jar about two inches high—alabaster, it looked like. There was also a box about the size of his fist that looked like it might be carved from lapis lazuli and various items required to heat the contents of the brazier. While she watched, he got the brazier going. He opened the jar and poured some of the contents into the bowl atop the brazier. The scented viscous material shone with rainbows of oil.
The smell was musty but not unpleasant.
They stood side by side, her shoulder touching his upper arm.
The blue box, it turned out, had no hinges, just an edged lid that snugly fit the bottom. The inside was blue, too, and it contained a golden-yellow substance. He took a pinch of the stuff and scattered it across the oil. Tiny gold sparks appeared on the surface of the liquid in the brazier. Durian bent over and breathed in.
When he straightened his irises were coppery red. Flecks of gold dotted his sclera. He must be holding more magic than she thought for his eyes to have gone straight to copper.
“You’ll forgive me, Gray,” he murmured. In one smooth motion he stripped off his shirt. He continued to strip down. “The ritual is a stressful one. If it happens that I change forms, it’s best if I’m not clothed.”
Her stomach clenched. “What about me?”
Durian folded his clothes and laid them neatly on the floor by what she could only call an altar. She did her best not to stare, but honestly, would she ever be tired of looking at his human form? “Since you cannot change forms, you may remain dressed.”
He reached into the blue box and withdrew a sizeable pinch of the contents. He placed that on his palm, then did so twice more. He made a tight fist and held it for the count of five.
“What is that?”
“This,” he said, unfurling his fingers, “is unrefined copa.” He held his hand at his eye level. The substance had clumped together and was a smaller mass now than it had been. Gold flecks flashed in his eyes. “It’s difficult to preserve in this state, but the experience is deeper. Richer.”
“Isn’t copa dangerous?”
“Not for the kin.” He lowered his hand. “For the magekind, yes; it is eventually quite dangerous.” He put the bolus in his mouth, made a face, then stayed motionless for some moments before he swallowed. His eyes, when they opened again, were even more vividly copper and gold. “Have you taken copa before?”
She shook her head. “At least not that I know of.”
“Good.” He took more copa from the box, less than before, did the same sort of compression with his closed fist and then handed over the portion.
She gave his hand a doubtful look.
“You have so little magic, Gray, that I think we are safe in believing there is no risk in your taking this. In the event, it’s nowhere near the amount you’d need to cause ill effects. Leave it on your tongue until it almost completely dissolves.”
She took the copa and set it on her tongue. The substance was so bitter her breath caught, but she let it dissolve. Before it was gone, the markings on her arm and temple flared hot.
Durian took her face between his hands. His fingers pressed tight to her temples, two of his fingers in contact with the tattoo on her right temple. Their connection came on with a saturated depth that took her breath. Her gaze met his and locked. “Are you ready?”
D
urian watched as the copa darkened her eyes from pale blue to turquoise. The tracery underneath her skin seethed in tight coils that whipped out and curled back. His fingertips sizzled from the contact but he didn’t let go. He didn’t want to. She’d become far more accepting of the kind of physical and mental touch that was so much a part of what the kin were.
She worked her mouth. “This is terrible.”
“Yes.” He was thinking about sex. And not vanilla kind. The kin’s instincts for procreation were always aroused around human women, and that meant not keeping his human form. He had eons of experience in self-control. He told himself he wouldn’t. That he didn’t dare take that risk. For either of them. Her willingness to go there with him didn’t make it safe or right.
She nodded.
“Very well.” Durian lowered his mouth to her throat, pushing her head back enough for him to find the spot he wanted. He breathed in and smelled his shampoo in her hair, the light scent of her body only slightly masked by the scent of his soap. His stomach spiraled into white-hot lust.
There were words to say and to transform with magic so that they resonated with power. Reaching for her magic was easy. He knew her better than he’d known anyone in his long years of living. She was an extraordinary woman. Strong. Mentally tough. Determined. And, hell, when she touched him, he went up in flames.
He worked the magic he pulled up, shaped it, gave it the purpose he needed for the ritual and pushed it through to her. She gasped as the magic came through to her, darker, he knew, than anything he’d let her feel from him.
The pulse of blood through his veins slowed. His kind had been born to this magic. It was his nature to think of inhabiting her body, and having done so once, the lure of doing so again would be all the stronger.
Gray understood what was needed, because she did the same, sending her magic into him. As before, the effect was disorienting. Between those born kin, the magic was expected, the psychic connection practically mundane. With Gray, he was above all else aware of her as human. Other. Female. Beloved.
He breathed in, clearing his head of everything but the ritual he needed to complete. He began a silent chant, a recitation of words that had survived thousands of years and the centuries of depredations by the magekind. So much knowledge had been lost or locked away in mageheld fiends.
Her eyelashes fluttered, the edges of her mouth tightening. Durian stroked her shoulders and focused on maintaining their wide-open connection instead of letting go and simply taking over. He moved a step closer to her. Beneath his fingers her skin was fever-hot. She was reacting to the copa.
Now came the part that most worried him. He needed to adapt the ritual exchange to compensate for the fact that she was human.
“Gray.” He drew a finger along her temple, and the sizzle of her magic took him right to the edge of the cliff. He stood there, poised to fall and praying to gods that no longer existed that he wouldn’t. “I need your consent. For indwell.”
She nodded, but her shoulders went tense and her now-turquoise eyes were wide and unfocused. His body tensed with anticipation. This was dangerous, wanting her so much. He’d regressed to a time when there were no rules about consent yet stood here in the future, expected to deny what he was.
“You have mine.” He told her so there would be no question that he agreed to her indwell of him—if it could be accomplished.
His heart tripped because he didn’t know for sure if he could open himself to her the way he needed to. His tension, the strength he needed to fight his instincts, were a barrier to what needed to happen. Leaving his other hand on her, he reached for the copa and shaped two more boluses. The difference between demonbound and twinned was vast and separated primarily by intent. The copa would, or ought to, relax him, and put him closer to his magic. He took the larger one and gave her the other.
Their minds were so entwined at this point that when she let the copa dissolve, the sharpness spread over his tongue, too. Different for humans than for the kin. Copa didn’t taste as bitter for him as for her. She blinked once. A second time. By the third, the color of her eyes had deepened. His own resistence thinned.
“I can’t see,” she said.
“At all?”
“Not normally.”
“Then it’s now.” His pulse thudded in his ears. “It’s time.” When she nodded, he slid into her mind. The world dropped away for him. This was like sex, the deliberate holding back in order to reach a higher peak. He wanted the shiver of power that came with an indwell. The fever excitement of a mind and body in his control. So much. Too much.
He wanted her with an ache. All of her. Bound to him. For the first time since he could remember, he let the copa take him over. He allowed himself to fall under.
When he opened his eyes, he saw the monochromatic glow of his own magic at the same time that he saw her. This
would
work. This had to work, because the alternative was Leonidas.
And you.
He gave the thoughts to her without speaking.
Now.
He held still, resisting his habit of closing off. She came into his mind. Not softly but with determination because that was Gray. Nothing timid. She touched boldly, accepting what she found. She became a part of his darkness. Just as he was now part of her magic.
Twinned.
He pushed aside her shirt collar and exposed the tender spot that was not quite the back of her neck and yet not the side either. He breathed in. So human. So frail and locked into a single physical manifestation. With the edge of a talon—the most he dared change—he scored her skin until blood ran, thick, red, hot with her life. She trusted him to see this through. Durian was determined not to fail her or himself. This was the only way he could bring out enough magic to complete the bond.
He bent at the same time he pulled her up and hard against him, exquisitely aware that he was male and bigger and stronger than she was. He licked away the trail of crimson from the cut he’d made. The taste of her blood hit his tongue with an explosion of heat and power.
She drew a breath that brought her torso in closer contact with his. He was desperate to have her naked against him. Desperate. How could he not be when he already knew how ferociously she made love? When he knew her private thoughts about him?
Durian reached between them to open her shirt because he needed contact with her as if she were fully kin. He pushed downward with the slice of a taloned finger and separated the buttons from her shirt. He did the same to her bra. He covered her breast with a hand, and his body shivered from the inside out from the first touch. Warm, human skin. Soft female curves. Her nipple grew taut underneath his palm.
Yes.
Was that her desire or his?
Skin to skin. Touching. Tasting. He fit his mouth over the cut and a low growl rose up from his chest. She held onto him, arching toward him. Their bodies touched. He wanted her to be as naked as he was. On her back, her body accepting his. As he was right now. And then more.
He separated from her, but the whole time, his free hand moved over her torso, down to the charm in her navel, the dip at the base of her spine. She let out a breath, soft and low. She accepted the forming bond, let it happen. The desire in the sound rocked him.
He opened a similar cut on his throat. Gray stretched to reach him and he held her, both hands around her waist, bringing her up to him. His head spun when she latched onto him and her magic swept through him like a wave. Her tongue touched the cut he’d made along his neck. Her teeth nipped at him, and—God yes. With the sensation of a lock sliding into position, the blood-bond between them settled into place.
When she released him, he bared his teeth, beyond himself with desire and the sense that he belonged to her. He flashed onto his memory of the day he first saw her. A defiant human woman on the verge of losing control of the magic he thought she’d stolen, and, incredible as it seemed, determined to kill Christophe dit Menart. He could have killed her for her attack on the mage, but he hadn’t.
His instincts, it seemed, were not so untrustworthy as he thought.
He had not, as he had feared, lost sense of himself as an individual. Their psychic and physical boundaries remained. He was able to separate himself from her and yet he remained aware of her with a vividness that defied his ability to describe. At the same time, the distinction between her magic and his blurred. Gray was more alive in his head than anyone ever had been. More, even, than Nikodemus.
Gray slipped an arm around his shoulder. “No,” she said in his ear. “You aren’t alone, Durian.” Her lips brushed his earlobe and then nipped. “Not even when you’re sure you are.”
She drew back. A drop of crimson glistened on her lip. He licked it away, and she pressed forward, and her skin was warm against his and her lust for him so inviting. She’d never been very shy about that, had she? Not even when she knew exactly what he was; a killer. And what he had been; enslaved.
He held out a hand, and she put her fingers on his palm. Without the need for words they used the silence to assess the change. The separation between them consistently blurred, though it was quite possible to keep the boundaries clear.
This
was him, and
that
was her. He suspected learning to do that would take some practice.
She ran a finger along the already healing cut on her throat, and he felt an echo of that touch. Her eyes closed halfway. Her physical sensations continued to mirror in him, and that was indeed something they must learn to deal with. He felt the icy pinch of the cut he’d made in her skin, caught the memory of her physical reaction to the taking of blood. She was not, he discovered, entirely at ease with the process.
She looked up with a steady gaze. “I don’t regret anything.”
He needed a moment to work out which one of them had spoken. A different problem arose when he managed to properly assign the various boundaries between them; the psychic, the magical, and the physical. Once he had placed himself in his body, and in turn, her in hers, his awareness of their differences intensified. Differences of origin, of bodies, of mind, and of gender.
He touched her, stroking her soft skin and feeling the pull of his kind for hers. When he had sex, he was always the one in control. Always. He never desired his partner more than she desired him. He never wanted more. He’d never given more, either. Now, all that changed. He wanted Gray beyond anything in his experience. He leaned in and kissed her.
For about ten seconds, they were fine. Then he was in her head, or maybe she was in his, and all he wanted was her. He undid the knot that held together her shirt and, God, yes. She groaned when his hands found her breasts. Her head fell back, exposing her throat to him again, and he bit her. Not hard, but enough. She gripped his wrists, pulling him toward her, and his desire bubbled up and intermingled with hers, or maybe it was just the opposite.
In the next moment, she was on her back and he’d pulled himself over her and he was taking more blood. One of his hands slid down her belly to work at her pants while his entire body rippled with incipient change. That was him crooning to her, bringing her into his desire. Desperate that she could feel the way he did.
He pulled back and her ice-blue eyes fluttered open and then focused on him, laser sharp. He said, “I have a perfectly acceptable bed.”
“So you do. Let’s go.”
He led the way to the bedroom. Once there, he pushed the door closed and pulled her into his arms so fast he had to lean against the door to keep his balance. They kissed for a ridiculously long time, and he kept his hands busy moving over her, underneath the back of her ruined shirt, back to her navel, over her breasts, down to the charm dangling from her navel.
It was all he could do to maintain his human form. He pushed off her shirt and bra then dropped to his knees, drawing his palms down her body, along her belly until he came to the waist of her jeans. The metal of the button was cold to his touch. He got her fly open, and he pressed his mouth to her navel and tongued the silver skull. She was soft and warm and he was unbearably aroused. He was cracking open, giving himself over to his impulses.
He circled his fingers around her right elbow and moved his fingers down her arm, touching, brushing, sliding along the markings that formed and reformed beneath her skin. His head filled with images of him sliding into her body when he wasn’t human.
“Durian,” she said, and his name was a plea that sent his lust into a tighter spiral. Through the magic that swirled just beneath her skin, he heard the thump of her heart hard against her ribs, her breath quickening, her anticipation. Her need.
He tugged her jeans down, and she helped him get them off, and then he leaned in and nipped her belly with teeth that were perhaps sharper than they ought to be. So close. He was so close to changing, and it was getting hard for him to remember why he shouldn’t change. He picked her up and carried her to the bed.
This was going to happen between them. She understood what that meant for them both. He had her consent, and he was more than willing to accept the consequences. There wasn’t any going back. She was his. Gray stretched on the mattress, arms above her head, toes pointed. Even when she was done stretching, he stayed distracted, arrested by all the curves of her body and what he wanted to do to them and with them.
Durian pulled himself over her and kissed his way down her belly. “If I bought you something for that thing in your navel, would you accept it from me? As a gift?”
She reached down and flipped the skull charm, but looked at him from under her half-closed eyes as she did. “Could we talk about my tastes first?” She smiled at him. “Nothing gaudy.”
“I have a number of loose stones.” He slipped a hand along the inside of her thigh and followed that with kisses, paying a great deal of attention to her reaction so he could savor that and push it higher. “Sapphires. Spinel. A few emeralds. Some fine yellow diamonds. Among others. You choose. I know a jeweler who will make whatever you describe to him.”