Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows) (40 page)

Sio came...kept coming, as if he'd become unhinged, but he didn't stop moving. He thrust into her, spilling her along his length, working to make room for himself in the liquid vise of her body as the heat between them built to unholy proportions. Tian was gasping, riding him hard, matching his pace, and pushing him inevitably closer to edge of total annihilation. Her grip on the back of his neck was close to snapping it. He rolled his hips, working in steady circles at varying depths, pistoning into her as she arched to accept him.

The friction was perfect ecstatic torture. Tian leaned in, tongue sliding across his jawline. She bit down on his earlobe, sending a static jolt down his spine straight into his balls. He choked out a strangle curse and she groaned. "Harder."

His resolve smashed to pieces and he drove them both to the emerald ground. The binding flared, shooting like burning tracers across his vision, raking his skin with burning barbs. What wasn't being torn to shreds felt like it had been shrink-wrapped. It was unbridled, leveling, sexual agony. As if Tian's acceptance broke him down to the base parts, seared him clean, and remade him into something better than he'd been before. His rhythm faltered as the orgasmic pressure reached devastating proportions. He fought the build-up, waiting for Tian until he thought every atom in his body would explode.

Come for me.

Suddenly she was inside his head, burning up his brain. His eyes snapped up and locked into hers. The Goddess flared like a beacon between them. He could almost see himself echoed from Tian's vantage point. The connection was staggering. The detonation that followed was one he'd never imagined existed. It was a moment of complete benevolence and shocking destruction. 10.0 on the Richter scale. The heat of their combined release was savage and sweet. The wild energy under his skin broke free, shaking the foundations of the earth beneath them, stealing the heat from the air around them, and shattering the picture window facing the garden.

Sio's heart stopped as if he would die.

His vision glazed.

His breath came out as a cloud of steam in the sudden winter and a stream of radiant sparks burst behind his eyes. When they dissolved so did the veil he'd been laboring under. The result was incomprehensible.

"Am I crazy?"

The question made Avery laugh.

"Not too many nut jobs out there are botherin' to ask these days, chief."

Man, humans were entertaining. The inquiry hadn't been addressed to him, but he'd answered because if he fought the imperative to do so he might explode from the boredom of maintaining decorum. Besides the living room was already a grotesque parody of a hospital waiting room and nobody else was talking.

Royal sat in a wingback chair over by the fire place pointedly ignoring Ceyla, who was over by the bar getting sauced to drown out the effect the progeny demon had on her. Xavier, still gorgeous and no less tragic than usual, was pacing in front of the door like he was on a mission to wear a hole through the carpet. And Loren, who wanted to know if he was eligible for a padded room, was slumped in on himself, half absorbed by the voluminous love seat cushions, looking like he'd survived the ass kicking of a life time. The kid was staring at Ceyla, more than a few yards down the path to Sidhe Struck infatuation, poor bastard.

"If I'm not crazy, then how is it that all of this crap exists and nobody knows about it?" Loren was still directing his questions at Ceyla.

"I'd think it was obvious that humanity doesn't rate telling," Royal said without looking up from his copy of "Vogue." The distain was ironic considering the source.

The human focused attention on the demon for the first time since entering the room. Ceyla downed another shot. The awkwardness of the movement screamed that she'd had to concentrate in order to make it happen and Avery jumped in as the tension in the room ratcheted up another couple of notches.

"Rationalization and denial, dude. They're shockingly effective."

Too bad the human was so hung up; he wasn't unattractive for a mundane. In fact, the lack of preternatural pheromone was refreshing, unlike the goods the Progeny were saturating the room in. Whatever
that
hot mess was, Ceyla wasn't the only one affected. Loren glanced back at Avery. "That really the answer you want to go with?"

The human had some spunk...a little fight tucked in there, possibly a little kill, too, if one was inclined to look close enough. Loren reeked of lingering exposure to violence, and that the impression held fast in the set of the kid's jaw saw it more ingrained than a recent run-in with the Slaugh suggested. It didn't change the fact that he had a lifespan like a guppy, but it definitely made his reaction to the recent faerie tale near death experience a more interesting.

Avery grinned. He still had some of Sio's lingering DNA spinning around his system so when he did it half of the room's occupants hit him with a double take. "The ones that find out don't normally live through it. How do you like that answer?"

He had the kid's attention. Loren shrugged like the statement hit closer to home than was comfortable. "Sounds about right."

"Cheers then," Ceyla said, abandoning the shot glass and downing a third of the bottle in her left hand.

Loren shook off the daze and looked at her, expression softening. "That shit'll kill you."

Ceyla shrugged and leaned against the front of the bar. "Yeah well, we're out of gin and drinking jack before two makes me feel like an alcoholic." Her level of nonchalance crossed the line into total bullshit territory.

Royal glanced up from his magazine, eyes lingering on the bottle in her hand. The temperature spiked. "If the shoe fits," he said.

"Shut the fuck up, Royal."

Xavier's response was immediate, as if he'd been running interference for so long the statement was more of a reflex than a conscious effort to keep his demon counterpart in line. The guy didn't even break pace. On a disgusted exhalation the Royal went back to pretending that he had any interest in the latest fashion trends for fall. If Royal cared that the human was staring him down with the kind of stone cold look that would make most hardcore felons flinch he didn't let on.

Ceyla took another mechanical pull on the bottle in her hand like she was about to yak on the carpet. Everyone else let the subject drop. To say anything else would be tantamount to pissing on an electric fence. Not pretty for anyone involved, least of all her. Avery rolled his shoulders. He was having a helluva time sitting still, which was never a good sign, considering the infrequency of the occurrence. He was overly antsy, and it was hard to say whether the agitation came from the energy in the room, the lingering aftershock from his last shift, or something else entirely.

"You look like you could use a shot, kid."

The statement was true, but what he meant was,
Quit mad dogging the big guns, human, you're gonna get yo ass whupped
. No doubt Tian would have said it outright, but she was the only one who ever got away with that kind of shit. A kernel of fear spiked somewhere near the pit of his stomach. There were a lot more ways to die than the physical ones and there wasn't enough left of her soul to put back together if it broke. If they couldn't fix her, The Unmoved would not be pleased. The thought stressed Avery out more than he was willing to admit.

Loren shot a considering glance at the bottle in Ceyla's hand. He swallowed hard and turned a shade of green that wouldn't have been flattering on anything, let alone a living creature. The kid shook his head, and hunched over in abject misery. "Hell, no. I'm pretty sure that would kill me right now."

"Do it, Dinner," Royal said, tossing the magazine onto the coffee table. "At least then the last two hours of my time won't have been a total waste."

"What's your problem?" Loren snapped.

"I'm a demon. You think I need one?" The level of bitterness in Royal's tone was palpable.

Avery took a second to process that surprising tidbit and shook his head. Loren glanced at Ceyla with an expression of dawning horror which she avoided, opting instead to kill the bottle. Avery took the empty on the hand off and dropped it on the coffee table. Ceyla went back to the bar. Loren shook his head as he turned back toward Royal. He leaned into the love seat. "Half demon, right? I'd say that makes you pretty fucking ineffectual."

A muscle at Royal's temple pulsed and he turned to glower across the room. He was staring so fixedly at Ceyla that it was a wonder she didn't burst into flames where she stood. "If you've heard of me, cretin, that hardly makes me ineffectual."

"Then maybe you're just impotent."

Avery flinched. No doubt it was all downhill and Darwin from here.

"Jesus," Xavier swore over by the door. "You're on your own, dummy. I'd kick the piss out of you too."

"What did you say to me, human?"

"He's got no idea whot he's on about, Royal. Let it go." Ceyla said. Her accent was so thick it was close to unintelligible. She wasn't drunk, the alcohol metabolized too fast for that, but with the amount she'd put down she wasn't precision controlling either. That was apparent enough.

"Defend him again," Royal said. His eyes were out of control, burning toxic, a sickly electric green light show over the chiseled planes of that flawless deep tan. Avery slid to the front of the couch, rocking towards the balls of his feet ready to bust up a fight that was about to end bloody.

"I can take care of myself, motherfucker," Loren said. "It's your shortcoming if you can't satisfy her, not her fault. So quit being such an ass about it."

Kid had balls, no common sense walking into a wall of crap he didn't understand, but serious balls. And hell, if he was erring on Ceyla's side...

Royal's laughter was deadly and hard edged. "You're toeing the line, Dinner."

"I don't give a fuck about your lines, blondie, but I guarantee you if Ceyla's interested I'm gonna enjoy every single one of hers."

Royal was across the room in less time than it took to blink. He'd launched himself out of that arm chair like a cartoon shot out of a cannon. The immediacy of the demon's response caught Avery off guard. That Loren had enough coordination and presence of mind to grab the empty bottle of Goose as he was being yanked off the love seat and thrown over the back of the couch was even more shocking.

The kid flew four feet through the air and slammed violently into the back wall. The impact shattered enough of the bottle to lodge several jagged shards into Loren's hand and forearm. The human ignored it, going all Freddy Krueger and shit, slamming the remaining glass bits into the unfazed demon's kidney while he was being viciously pummeled about the face and neck.

Avery hurdled the couch fast enough that the fight wasn't going to have much time to progress. He and Ceyla converged. He took the human down at the knees, yanking him away from Royal's stranglehold while Ceyla drove the demon into the adjacent wall. The first shock wave barreled out of nowhere like a nuclear bomb had gone off. It hit as Ceyla and Royal made contact with the plaster. The second detonation leveled everything. The third saw all objects and entities in the room levitated two feet from the ground. Heat leached from the air at an exponential rate, flash freezing anything unfortunate enough to still be connected to the floor while they were left bloody, panting, and dangling precariously in the brittle quiet.

The level of Faerie power ripping through the room was a bad omen. Avery couldn't remember ever feeling anything remotely close, not even from Eamon, who was one of the most powerful full blood Unseelie in existence. Half dazed, he watched the blood left on the hardwood as it began to thrash and contort, thawing in the stillness, arcing off the ice on the ground as if it were sentient.

The brackish mixture to which everyone but Xavier had contributed grew and elongated, spooling out to every square inch of the floor before curling upward, climbing the walls and chipping away at the building material. Indigo blue orchids sprouted everywhere, bursting from the vines in an alien display. The volume of the damn things nearly distracted from the crows that clawed their way through the cracks in the walls. The flapping preceded a serious drop in cabin pressure, and like that, the room took a nose dive, crashing into the floor. It took a minute for Avery to reorient after face planting.

"What just happened?" Loren sounded as if he was working around a mouth full of plant matter, though it was more likely that Royal had collected a clean half dozen of the bastard's teeth as party favors.

"Funny, human, that was going to be my question."

Avery's muscles tightened at the buttery drawl that rumbled like a lover's caress through the space. A voice like that should have been conducive to an instant hard-on. Instead it sent a spike of ice cold fear through Avery's system the likes of which he hadn't imagined possible. The sound was debilitating. He yanked his head up to acknowledge the speaker, contrary to the screaming warnings of every possible self-preservation instinct in his dome. When he got there, he wished to fuck he hadn't, because what he saw confirmed all of the panicked suspicions in his skull.

A beautiful tattoo-covered Pureblood leaned on the edge of the upended sofa. Next to him dozens of crows converged in a shape that vaguely resembled another Sidhe form. The vertigo sensation in Avery's gut expanded as the crows broke away from one another, leaving Eamon sitting perfect and patrician in their wake. The murder shifted once more, a frenzied swirling chaos of motion, as they reformed, becoming an ivory pale, raven-haired woman in a corseted couture of crow feathers.

Avery had heard that the Morrigan could travel between here and Tir Na Nog on a whim, but he never though he'd become unfortunate enough to see it up close and personal. Hadn't expected her to bring friends either. Nothing broadcast "you're about to die badly" like a visit from the Night Queen's Generals and her recluse Assassin. The Purebloods didn't trouble themselves with slaves, and they sure as shit didn't bring back up.