Shadowfever Read online

Page 175

 

  Now I thaw. Now I stand and look at him and realize why I never turned it all back on.

  I would have destroyed the world for him.

  And I couldn’t face that. Couldn’t stand what it said about me.

  I want to slow this moment down. Once before, I ended up in bed with him inside me, but I was Pri-ya—it happened so quickly and without conscious choice that it was over before it began. I want this to happen in slow motion. I want to live every second like it’s my last. I’ve chosen this. It feels incredible. “Wait. ”

  His demeanor changes instantly, his eyes haze with crimson. “I haven’t waited long enough?” His chest rattles. His hands are at his sides, curling, flexing. He breathes hard and fast.

  In the flickering light, his skin begins to darken.

  I stare at him. Just like that, lust to fury. I think he might launch himself on me, take me down, shredding my clothes as we go, and shove inside me before we even hit the floor.

  “I’d never take it. ” His eyes narrow. Crimson stains the white, bleeds into them with tiny rivers. Suddenly his eyes are black on red, no whites at all. “But I won’t tell you I haven’t thought about it. ”

  I inhale deeply.

  “You’re here. In my bedroom. You have no fucking idea what that does to me. If a woman comes to this place, she dies. If I don’t kill her, my men do. ”

  “Has a woman ever come to this place?”

  “Once. ”

  “Did she find her own way in? Or did you bring her?”

  “I brought her. ”

  “And?”

  “I made love to her. ”

  I jerk, turning with him, staring into his eyes. That he says those words about another woman makes me feel like launching myself at him, tearing off my clothes, and slamming him home inside me before we reach the floor. Erasing her. He wants to fuck me. He made love to her.

  He’s watching me closely. He seems to like what he sees.

  “And?”

  “When I was done I killed her. ”

  He says it without emotion, but I see more in his eyes. He hated himself for killing her. He believed he had no choice. He succumbed to a moment of wanting someone in his bed, in his home, in his world. He wanted to feel … normal for a night. And she paid for it with her life.

  “I’m not the hero, Mac. Never have been. Never will be. Let us be perfectly clear: I’m not the antihero, either, so quit waiting to discover my hidden potential. There’s nothing to redeem me. ”

  I want him anyway.

  It’s what he wanted to know.

  I exhale impatiently and shove hair from my face. “Are you going to talk me to death or fuck me, Jericho Barrons?”

  “Say it again. The last part. ”

  I do.

  “They’ll try to kill you. ”

  “Good thing I’m hard to kill. ” Only one thing concerned me. “Will you?”

  “Never. I’m the one who will always watch over you. Always be there to fuck you back to your senses when you need it, the one who will never let you die. ”

  I pull my shirt over my head and kick off my shoes. “What more could a woman ask?” I skinny out of my jeans but get a foot tangled up trying to get out of my underwear. I stumble.

  He’s on me before I hit the floor.

  Since the moment I laid eyes on Jericho Barrons, I wanted him. I wanted him to do things to me that pink and clueless MacKayla Lane was shocked and appalled and … okay, yeah, well, utterly fascinated to find herself thinking about.

  I admitted none of it to myself. How could a peacock lust for a lion?

  I’d been as fancy as one of the proud males, in my useless plumage. I’d strutted around, stealing glances at the king of the jungle, denying what I felt. I’d assessed my tail and his killing claws and understood that if the lion were ever to lay down with the peacock—it would only be on a nest of bloody feathers.

  It hadn’t stopped me from wanting him.

  It made me grow claws.

  As I fall to the floor beneath him, I think, here I am now: a featherless peacock with claws. My lovely tail lost, in one ordeal or the other. I look in the mirror and have no idea what I am. Don’t care. Perhaps I’ll grow a mane.

  Relief floods me when his body slams into mine. Barrons moves like a sudden dark wind. He’s not only on me but pushing in me before we hit the floor.

  Oh, God, yes, finally! My head slams back into wood but I barely feel it. My neck and back arch, my legs spread. My ankles are on his shoulders and I suffer no conflicts. There is only need and the answer to it all shoving inside me—sleek, hard, animal dressed up in the skin of a man.

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  I look up at him and he’s part beast. His face is mahogany, his fangs are out. His eyes are Barrons. The look in them isn’t. It makes me wild. I can be whatever I want to be with him. No inhibitions. I feel him growing harder, longer inside me.

  “You can do that?” I gasp. The beast was bigger than the man.

  He laughs, and it is definitely not a human sound.

  I moan, I whimper, I writhe. It’s incredible. He’s filling me up, gliding deep and deliciously inside me where I’ve never felt a man before. Oh, God! I come. I explode. I hear someone roaring.

  It’s me. I laugh and keep coming. I think I scream. I use my claws and he bucks in me, sudden and rapid. He makes that sound in the back of his throat I’m so crazy about. I love that sound.

  I’d walk through hell and back, smiling, as long as he was beside me. As long as I could glance over at him and our eyes would meet and we’d share one of those wordless looks.

  “You haven’t lost your feathers. ” His words are strange, guttural, forced out around fangs.

  I’d snort, but then his tongue is in my mouth, my jaws are wide, and I can’t breathe, and he’s right. One day you do meet a man who kisses you and you can’t breathe around it and you realize you don’t need air. Oxygen is trivial. Desire makes life happen. Makes it matter. Makes everything worth it. Desire is life. Hunger to see the next sunrise or sunset, to touch the one you love, to try again.

  “Hell would be waking up and wanting nothing,” he agrees. He knows what I’m thinking. Always. We’re connected. The atoms between us ferry messages back and forth.

  “Harder. Deeper. Come on, Barrons. More. ” I feel violent. I am unbreakable. I am elastic around him. Insatiable. His hand is on the side of my neck, around my throat, half cupping my face. His eyes bore into mine. He watches every nuance, every detail of every expression, as if his existence depends on it. He fucks with the single-minded devotion of a dying man hunting God.

  As he fills me, I wonder if—in the same way that sex makes its own unique perfume—we don’t really “make” love. As in create, manufacture, evoke an independent element in the air around us, and if enough of us did it really well, for real, not just for the hell of it, we could change the world. Because when he’s in me, I feel the space around us changing, charging, and it seems to set off some kind of feedback loop, where the more he touches me, the more I need him to. Having sex with Barrons sates my need. Then feeds it. Sates, then feeds. It’s a never-ending cycle. I get out of bed with him, frantic to be back in it again. And I—

  “—hated you for it,” he says gently.

  That was my line.

  “I never get enough, Mac. Drives me bug-fuck. I should kill you for what you make me feel. ”

  I understand perfectly. He is my vulnerability. I would become Shiva, the world-eater, for him.

  He withdraws and I nearly scream from the emptiness.

  Then he’s lifting me into his arms and I’m on the bed, and he’s spreading me over the mound of pillows, nudging my legs wide, and when he pushes into me from behind, I sob with relief. I’m whole, I’m alive, I’m—

  I close my eyes and ride the mindless bliss. It’s all I can do. Be. F
eel. Live.

  I’m Pri-ya again.

  I always will be with this man.

  Much later, I look up at him. He’s on top of me, barely inside me. I’m swollen, hot, and fiercely alive. My hands are over my head. He likes to tease, an inch, maybe two, until I’m crazy with need, then drive it home hard. It undoes me every time.

  I know part of what turns me on so hard, makes me so violent with lust, is that he’s dangerous. I fell for the bad guy. I’m crazy about the one who’s trouble. The alpha that doesn’t play well with others and doesn’t take orders from anyone.

  What else would I expect? It’s possible I’m part of the ancient creator of the Unseelie race.

  He’s kissing me. V’lane’s name is long gone from my tongue. There’s only him, and he’s right: No other man would fit.

  “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with you at all, Mac,” he says. “Maybe you’re exactly what you’re supposed to be, and the only reason you feel so conflicted about it is that you keep trying to bat for the wrong team. ” He thrusts deep, rocks his hips forward with a muscle I’d be willing to bet no human man had.

  I arch my back. “Are you saying you think I’m evil?”

  “Evil isn’t a state of being. It’s a choice. ”

  “I don’t think—”

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  My mouth is suddenly busy. By the time I get around to finishing my sentence, I have no idea what I was going to say.

  We end up in the shower, an enormous affair of Italian marble and shower heads on all walls. A dozen feet long, six feet wide, it has a bench that’s just the right height. I think we stay in there for days. He brings in food and I eat in the shower. I wash him, slide my hands over his beautiful body.

  “When you die, do your tattoos disappear?” Wet, his hair is darker, glossy, his skin a deep bronze. Water runs over muscle, sprays off his erection. He’s always hard.

  “Yes. ”

  “That’s why they were different. ” I frown. “Do you come back exactly how you were when you died the first time?”

  “Were you Pri-ya the entire time?”

  I gasp and try to duck my head so he can’t see my eyes. My eyes betray me sometimes, no matter how hard I try, especially when my feelings are intense.

  He grabs my head and holds it with two fistfuls of my hair, forcing me to look at him.

  “I knew it—you weren’t!” His mouth is on mine, he has me against the wall. I can’t breathe and I don’t care. He is exultant. “How long?” he demands.

  “What happens when you die?” I counter.

  “I come back. ”

  “Duh, obviously. How? Where? Do you eventually just stand up from your ashes again or something?”

  I hear a rattle and suddenly he’s on the floor, head back, muscles rippling, fighting to remain a man. He’s losing the battle. He has talons. Black fangs slide from his mouth, gouging into his skin. I can tell he doesn’t want to turn, but something I asked him has made him frenzied.

  I can’t stand watching him struggle. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to help Barrons. I answer, talk to him to keep him grounded in the here and now. “I knew what was happening from the moment you asked me what I wore to the prom. ” I drop to my knees beside him, take his head in my arms and cradle him at my breast. His face is half beast, half man. “I began to surface. It was like I was there but trying not to be there. I’m here, Jericho. Stay with me. ”

  Later we sleep. Or I do. I don’t know what he does. I’m exhausted and warm and feel safe for the first time in a long time, drifting off in Barrons’ underground world, next to the king of beasts.

  I wake to him pushing into me from behind. We’ve had sex so many times, so many ways, I can barely move. I’ve come so many times I think it’s impossible for me to even want to come again, but then he’s inside me and my body tells a different story. I need so badly I ache. I slip my hand down and, as soon as I touch myself, I come. He shoves into me deep, rocking into my climax. I’m on my side. He’s tucked me into his body, spooned close. His arms are around me, his lips on my neck. Teeth graze my skin. When I stop shuddering, he pulls out and immediately I want him again. I push back with my rump and he’s back. He goes slow, so slow it’s torture. He thrusts, I clench. He withdraws, I lay tense, waiting. Neither of us says a word. I barely breathe. He stops and stays perfectly still for a while but not to tease. He likes being hard inside me. Connected, we lie there in silence. I don’t want the moment to end.

  But it does, and when we’re separate, we don’t speak for a long time. I watch the shadows flickering on a famous painting on the wall. He’s not asleep. I can feel him back there, aware.

  “Do you ever sleep?”

  “No. ”

  “That must be hell. ” I love sleeping. Curling up, napping, dreaming. I need to dream.

  “I dream,” he says coolly.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Never pity me, Ms. Lane. I like what I am. ”

  I roll over in his arms, touch his face. I let myself be tender. Trace his features, slide my fingers into his hair. He seems both put off and entranced by the way I’m touching him. I rearrange my head to accommodate the advantages of never sleeping. There are a lot. “How do you dream if you don’t sleep?”

  “I drift. Humans need to shut down to let go. Meditation accomplishes the same thing, lets the subconscious play. That’s all you need. ”

  “What happened to your son?”

  “Aren’t you question girl?” he mocks.

  “He’s why you want the Sinsar Dubh. ”

  I feel the sudden violence in his body. It gusts like a sirocco, and just like that I’m inside his head and we’re in a desert and I wonder with a strange sense of duality in which I am him and I am me why it always seems to come back to this place for him. Then …

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  I’m Barrons, and I’m on my knees in the sand.

  The wind is kicking up; the storm comes.

  I was stupid, so stupid.

  Death for hire. I laughed. I drank. I fucked. Nothing mattered. I swaggered through life, a god. Grown men screamed when they saw me coming.

  I was born today. I opened my eyes for the first time.

  It all looks so different now that it’s too late. What a grand fucking joke on me. I should never have come here. This is one battle-for-hire I should never have taken.

  I hold my son and I weep.

  The sky opens, letting the storm free. Sand comes, so thick it turns day into night.

  One by one, my men fall around me.

  I curse the heavens as I die. They curse me back.

  There is black. Only black. I wait for the light. The Old Ones say there is light when you die. They say to run for it. If it goes away, you drift the earth forever.

  No light comes to me.

  I wait all night in the dark.

  I’m dead yet I can feel the desert beneath my corpse, the abrasion of sand on my skin, up my nostrils. Scorpions sting my hands, my feet. Open, dead eyes crusted with sand watch the night sky as the stars pop and vanish, one by one. The darkness is absolute. I wait and wonder. The light will come. I wait, I wait.

  The only light that comes for me is dawn.

  I stand up, and my men stand up and we stare uneasily at one another.

  Then my son stands up and I don’t care. I spare no thought for the strange night that shouldn’t have been. The universe is a mystery. The gods are fickle. I am and he is and that is enough. I toss him on my horse and leave my men behind.

  “My son was killed two days later. ”

  I open my eyes, blinking. I can still taste sand, feel the grit in my eyes. Scorpions crawl at my feet.

  “It was an accident. His body disappeared before we could bury it. ”

  “I don’t understand. Did you die in the desert or not? Did he?”

  �
��We died. It was only later that I pieced it together. Things rarely make sense while they’re unfolding. After my son died the second time, he died many more times, simply trying to get back to me and come home. He was deep in the desert without conveyance or water. ”

  I stare. “What are you saying? That every time he died, he came back in the same place he’d died that first time with you?”

  “At dawn the next day. ”

  “Over and over? He would try to make it out, die of heatstroke or something, then have to start all over again?”

  “Far from home. We didn’t know. None of us died for a long time. We knew we were different, but we didn’t know about the dying. That came later. ”

  I watch him and wait for him to speak again. This is the crux of Barrons. I want to know. I won’t push.

  “That wasn’t the end of his hell. I had rivals who rode the desert, too. Death for hire. Many were the times we’d thinned each other’s pack. One day, they found him walking the sands. They played with him. ” He looks away. “They tortured and killed him. ”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because when I finally put things together, I tortured and killed a few of them and they talked while they died. ” His lips smile; his eyes are cold, merciless. “They set up camp not too far from where he was reborn every dawn and found him the next day. Once they realized what was happening, they believed he was demon spawn. They tortured and killed him over and over. The more he came back, the more determined they were to destroy him. I don’t know how many times they killed him. Too many. They never let him live long enough to change. They didn’t know what he was, nor did he. Just that he kept coming back. One day another band attacked, and they didn’t have time to kill him. He was left alone, tied up in a tent for days. He got hungry enough that he turned. He never turned back. It was a year before we were hired to hunt the beast that was scouring the country, ripping out the throats and hearts of men. ”