What Sleeps Within the Cove, page 26
His eyes darkened as he stared down at me, the shadows in his gaze swirling around the blue of his irises. He stilled my touch with a hand on my wrist, the grip tighter than he had ever dared before. Not treating me like I was made of glass any longer, I realized, smirking up at him as he guided me down to where his length was hard as rock and curved up toward his stomach. He trailed the backs of my knuckles over him, controlling my touch when I wanted to take charge of the moment. I pressed closer, until my belly slid against our hands, and I felt the heat of his arousal against me.
He growled a warning, leaning forward to trail his nose up the side of my neck. He breathed deep, inhaling my scent in a way that was all feral and territorial. It raised the hair on my arms as I shivered, turning to smile at him in a move that made his gaze narrow in on the more pointed teeth at the corners of my mouth. A flicker of surprise crossed his face as he studied them, as if he could sense all the changes in me that weren’t physical as well.
“You can play with me another time, min asteren,” he murmured, the words soft against my skin. Another shiver wracked through my body, as if his voice reached deep into my soul and stroked it through my flesh.
He spun me to face the stone where I’d sat on the edge, leaving me with little choice but to raise my hands to catch myself against the rough surface. I stumbled forward a step, finding grooves in the stone and a ledge at the bottom. Caldris guided me up onto it, clearly having discovered it when he’d buried his face between my thighs. It accommodated some of the difference in height between us as I stepped up, letting my mate shove my legs apart slightly. Pressing into my rear, I felt the hard length of him against my lower back, his balls heavy against the swell of my ass.
“What if I want to play with you now?” I asked, my voice breathy. In another time, I would have been horrified by the want that was so blatant in my tone. I would have been appalled to give anyone enough power over me to know how desperately I wanted them. The human sense of shame would have interfered with that desire, but as I thought back to that girl now, I could find no trace of her. The human mentality about sex and sin was gone from me, leaving me to embrace the primal connection I felt to the male behind me.
Nothing we did together could be wrong.
“The next time you take me in your mouth, you’ll be mine,” Caldris said, lining himself up with my core. He stroked his length through the tight space between my thighs, rubbing himself through me slowly with gentle, teasing rocks of his hips. He stretched over my shoulder, taking the knife he’d deposited on the edge into his hand. He teased the edge of the blade over my arm, dragging it up to the side of my neck in a move that should have brought me fear. It should have given me that bitter tinge of distrust, of wondering if I was about to be betrayed, but Caldris could never do such a thing to me. He loved me more than he loved himself, and I felt that love pulse down our nearly complete bond. “Until chaos reigns,” he said, but there was a question in that touch of his knife at the side of my neck.
I didn’t speak as I reached up, covering his left hand with mine. I guided the blade across the side of my neck where it met my shoulder, cutting deep into the flesh there so that my blood flowed in a slow, steady flow and slid down my breast. Taking the knife from his hand, I let the knowledge of the ancients fill me. Aella knew things Estrella did not, and she knew what the next step to this consummation would be. I brought it around the front as Caldris held his right hand out before me. I sliced the blade through his wrist at the exact moment that he entwined the fingers of his left hand with mine, wrenching it behind my back. He pinned my left arm there, his viniculum joining with mine.
Golden light flashed as I tossed the blade to the stone, guiding Caldris’s wrist to my mouth. The taste of his blood coated my tongue, sweet and warm, in spite of the distinct reminder of winter that lingered at the back of my palate. His mouth dropped to my shoulder as he drew my blood into his mouth in the same way, bending his knees and angling his hips. He drove inside me without preamble, connecting us in more than just the physical.
Our viniculum pulsed, the white tendrils filling with the golden light of fate as Caldris’s very being crashed into me. We collided at the center of our bond, our thoughts melding into one. I’d thought I’d known what it would be to be bonded in truth, thought I understood the implication of having another soul exist within the confines of my mind, but I hadn’t had a clue.
Before, Caldris had ended where I began. Our threads had run as if in two segments of a line, meeting in the middle. In this, they intertwined, twisting around one another so fully they formed a knotted mess that would never be able to untangle. I did not know what was him and what was me, only recognizing the smooth glide of him through my flesh.
His pleasure blended with mine, as if we could feel both sides of our pleasure. I felt him draw back and then plunge forward, testing the new feeling of sex as a mated pair, but I also felt his immense completion. I felt what it was to be him, the tight, wet press of me as I parted for him and the vicelike grip of my pussy against his cock. I felt what it was to be both man and woman, and in the intensity of our first moments as a pair, I no longer knew who I was as an individual.
The power of the bond was all-encompassing, our pairing taking all that we were as people and making us somehow more as a collective.
“Min asteren,” his voice in my head was the same as if he’d spoken, but I felt it like a whisper against my mind, instead of a whisper against my skin. His mouth still pulled blood from my wound, drawing in deep gulps that only brought us closer.
“Min oscura,” I thought back. Whereas before, he may have questioned the choice to use the Old Tongue, he understood in the same way I did now. He understood that the Old Tongue was as much a part of me as the new. “I see you now, my shadows.”
“A shadow cannot exist without his light,” he thought, unpinning my arm. He kept our hands joined as he pulled his mouth from my neck finally, the wound healing as I released his wrist. With our bond complete, he continued to move inside me as he raised our arms so that I could see the shimmering gold of our viniculum. His lit with mine, a matching gold that glimmered off the surface of the water and illuminated the cave. I took my hand from his, watching and waiting for the moment that the magic faded from his Fae Marks, but it remained even without mine to touch his.
My magic was a part of him now, existing fully within the confines of his body as much as mine. Placing that hand on the stone beside the other, I leaned into it and bent forward, giving Caldris better access to my body as his hands dropped to my hips. He grasped them firmly, his fingertips pressing in to the point of bruising. I reveled in the roughness of it, loved every moment of the lack of control when he snapped his hips back and drove in hard.
Gone was any and all trace of gentleness, his body driving into mine with an uninhibited aggression that he couldn’t have fucked me with before. He struck deep with each thrust, setting a punishing rhythm that he accentuated with a slow roll of his hips when he was fully sheathed inside me. “Fuck,” he groaned. “I wanted to make love to you, not fuck you.”
I pressed back into him, meeting him thrust for thrust as the water surrounding us splashed against the stone. “Our love isn’t gentle or kind. It’s rough and all-consuming; it’s a raging inferno that destroys the world in its wake.” The words felt truer than I dared to admit as I thought them, feeling Caldris shudder behind me as they filled his head. The thread of our bond glowed with golden light, unbreakable with the force of a violent storm.
“I waited centuries for you. Waited centuries for this, and you still somehow manage to exceed every hope and dream I had.” The words warmed me from the inside as he dropped a hand to my clit, stroking me as he fucked me. I wouldn’t last long with both our pleasures swirling about as one, with that wicked finger working magic on my body while his cock worked inside.
“Caldris,” I thought, tossing my head back to drape against his shoulder. He covered my throat with his left hand, and the searing pain of my viniculum spreading overwhelmed me. It was blinding, all-consuming as I felt Caldris’s rise to match. He groaned through it, his cock twitching inside me as we both shattered over the edge of our orgasms in unison. He filled me, driving deep into me and pausing at the end as the Fae Marks worked over the front of our chests. The tendrils of black and gold combined into a swirling mass, forming an eight-pointed star just above my heart. It glowed with golden light at the center, shadows working through the light so that they formed one being.
My skin felt sensitive in the aftermath of the mark shifting, and Caldris drew me away from the wall to sink into the pool with him. The cool water was soothing against the wound as Caldris turned me to face him, touching his mouth to mine. It was the first kiss we’d shared since completion, the first time we shared breath, and I sank into the comfort of it.
The comfort of him. He shuddered as I ran my fingers over the new star on his chest, finding immense satisfaction in the added mark.
I was his star, and now his flesh was marked with the reminder of my ownership for the rest of his life.
Caldris was mine and mine alone.
FORTY-FOUR
NILA
Shadows pressed at the corners of the throne room, Mab’s anger rising with every moment that passed. Caldris had not yet answered the summons she placed on him, and the men she’d sent to retrieve him had returned alone with hesitant apologies that he was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t help the distinct feeling that he’d found a way to get to Estrella, that he’d managed to sneak past the daemons guarding the cove and dive into Tartarus. I knew he would stop at nothing to help his mate, and I hoped he’d managed to defy all odds to do it.
It might have been a small victory, one that came at the expense of those he’d left behind to face Mab’s wrath in his absence, but it was only through those small victories that we would gain any kind of advantage against the Queen of Air and Darkness. For centuries, she had been a plague on this world. For centuries, I had forced myself to remain silent in the face of her wrath and kept out of sight and out of mind. I’d avoided her notice, done everything my father would have wanted of me after she took me from his home.
My father was dead, had been for more years than I could count now. The only tenuous connection I had to him had been through Rheaghan, the King my father had so greatly admired and been honored to serve as his adviser.
But she’d taken him, too, slaughtered him with no appreciation for the good man he was or the family lines that should have bound them together in love. I would have given anything to have my family back, to be reunited with my parents who had been taken far too soon. And yet there she stood, uncaring that she’d murdered her only remaining family in cold blood.
That she’d taken him from those of us who still loved him, and I wanted nothing more than to join him in the afterlife, to hope that I could be brave enough in my final moments for the father to grant me eternity in Valhalla after a lifetime of cowardice.
“Where is he?!” Mab screamed, her shrill voice lost to the depths of her madness. It echoed through the throne room as she paced at the top of her dais. The stone atop her crown pulsed with green light as if goading her on, contributing to the unhinged rage that would only worsen with time. No one knew who her mate had been or what had happened to him after Mab had managed to birth her heir, but the Queen had not fallen pregnant again after Fallon had vanished from her crib. In centuries of desperate preparations for the moment she could venture into the human realm beyond the Veil, she’d never attempted to replace Fallon with another child. Given her disdain for her own blood ties, it couldn’t be due to any emotional attachment she felt for her daughter. She’d proven that theory in the time since Fallon returned from Nothrek.
Mab’s mate was dead by her own hand, and the type of evil that took was incomprehensible. To lose a mate was to descend into madness slowly, to be the one who killed them …
If she felt no remorse for the life of her mate, for the other half of her soul, then the rest of us truly stood no chance of surviving her reign. Caldris and Estrella were our only hope, and now that she’d bound them both to her will, even that was a distant, impossible dream.
I pushed off the stone wall at my back, the red of my Fae Marks writhing like flames. They were as angry as I was, as deeply affected by the hole within me that would not fill again. Where I’d once felt the distant mark of another half within me, now there was just nothing. The secret we’d kept had been designed to protect me, to keep me safe from Mab’s wrath.
Rheaghan believed in waiting out the evil that possessed his sister. He believed that his life could only truly begin once the stone was ripped from the top of her head.
Now he would never have the chance. He wouldn’t be able to know what it was to hold his mate in his arms. He wouldn’t know what it was to take me to our marriage bed. He wouldn’t ever know the joy of children and watching them grow.
He’d never live.
I was determined to make it so that she didn’t either.
A hand landed atop my arm, stopping me from taking the first steps to the dais where Mab had taken to marring the latest messenger to return with news of Caldris’s absence.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Eryx asked, holding me firmly. The messenger scurried off, retreating to the crowd at the back of the throne room as one of Mab’s daemons stepped up to the foot of the dais. She glared down at him, descending the steps with haphazard steps. She moved as if she stumbled with each one, and it was as she lifted her dress out of her way that I realized she was barefoot upon the stone floor. Her hair was disheveled as she stepped beneath one of the torches hanging from the ceiling, pulled back into a braid that appeared as if she’d raked her hair through it. Stray strands of black stuck out from her head, deep circles etched into the lines of her too-beautiful face. I’d never seen her look so desperate, so lost.
“You let him escape!” she screamed, stretching her arm up as high as she could. She struck the daemon across the face, its figure unmoving in spite of the power I knew must have been in that slap.
“Nila, he wouldn’t want this,” Eryx said, making me turn my attention to him. His words were so similar to Dravenor’s that for a brief moment, I felt the slick viscous coating of his blood on my hands all over again.
I didn’t know how they knew, how they’d both seen through the deception that no one else seemed to spot. We’d been so careful, keeping our distance from one another. Never in the same room unless forced to be, never making eye contact or daring to look at one another when Mab forced us to be. He continued with his escapades and affairs, tearing my heart in two with every story that reached the Court of Shadows. It hurt even worse to know that he gave his body to others, that he shared it all while he hated himself for doing it, all because my father’s final request had been that Rheaghan protect me in his absence.
He was not alone in the affairs, in the physical part of our deception that was agonizing. It was how I knew the pain he felt deep in his center with every person he took to his bed, because I felt the same every time I did the same. No mated pairs would bed another. No mated pairs would tolerate the scent of another on their loved one’s skin.
Rheaghan bore it all to keep me safe, and somehow Eryx saw right through that to the pain tearing me in two.
“He did not suffer your absence all these years just to have you throw your life away now,” Eryx whispered, not even looking at me as he said the words. It was too low for anyone else to hear, and his attention was so rapt on the scene playing out with Mab and the daemon that had knelt at her feet that none would suspect he spoke of anything but the scene before us.
“He did not pass, my Queen,” the daemon said, his voice unnaturally deep and twisted into something dark and menacing.
“And what kind of life do I have? She won’t just let me go now that he’s dead. I’m her prisoner,” I snapped, my throat tight with the burn of tears. Nothing in this life was worth having, not so long as Mab lived and breathed.
“As are we all,” Eryx reminded me. He may have been free to return to the Autumn Court when Mab gave the go-ahead, but they just existed in a more distant cage. All who lived were condemned to this fate.
Even the humans in Nothrek were no longer safe from Mab’s rule.
“Where is Twyla?!” Mab shouted, shoving the daemon back as she turned her attention to the group that had formed in the back. We all tried to hide from Mab’s attention, but the Queen of Winter could not hide her bright, silver hair within the darkness of Tar Mesa. It was so like her son’s, the silver more gleaming and bright than the dark-tinged silver that the God of the Dead possessed, but the similarities were undeniable in it. That was where the similarities stopped however, her skin brown where his was more golden. She stepped forward, a pale blue dress trailing behind her. She was all ice and sharp edges, poised and proper in the face of Mab’s madness.
I couldn’t shake the horror of the coming altercation. Of the centuries this moment had been in the making. Twyla’s mate had been Mab’s husband, but whereas any other Fae would release their spouse from the marriage bond, Mab had refused to allow Sephtis to be with his mate. They’d come together for one night, and that alone had been enough to conceive Caelum. It was a miracle where the witches’ curse usually meant fertility struggles, and I’d believed that had been for a reason.
So many of us believed it was the Fates’ hands twisting the threads to make it so, particularly when Caldris came into his power and revealed himself to be the only second-generation God in existence. That could not be for nothing, even if Mab had stolen him and bound him to her will.
“I am here, my Queen,” Twyla said, curtsying to the other Queen in a show of respect she did not deserve. I remained back against the wall, letting Eryx’s words offer me solace. I may not have been powerful, and I may not have had much to offer, but I could be there when Estrella emerged from Tartarus. I could offer her my assistance.
