Bitten by Ecstasy: 2 (Dark Judgment) (24 page)

Searing agony. Numbing ice.

Her breath expelled from her lungs and her heart sped as if in the desperate last leg of a race. She refused to look down. Afraid if she saw the lethal wound she would freeze. Afraid the pain would swallow her whole.

Not yet. Not just fucking yet.

Fighting the lethargy already creeping in on the edges of her consciousness, Sinéad planted her boot in Lara’s abdomen and shoved.

Fresh pain exploded as she unskewered herself from the vampire’s claws. A primal scream rose in her throat and burst past her lips. Strength borne of desperation, fury and love propelled Sinéad forward into the other female’s space. Sinéad spun, slashing her arms down.

The
regina
didn’t utter a sound as her head and left shoulder slid to the floor. Followed by the rest of her body.

Silence drowned the room right before her sword clattered to the floor.

Triumph and a crushing sadness brought her to her knees, her life’s blood flowing from her wound, drenching her.

They’d done it. They’d won.

A wail rose inside her, but didn’t get past her throat. The muscles spasmed in a last-ditch effort to drag air into her chest.

Bastien.

She forced her eyes open, needing her last glimpse to be his beautiful warrior face.

As the dark drank her down with greedy gulps, she smiled, taking his image with her.

* * * * *

“Sinéad.”

In his head, her name was a thunderous roar. But it came out a hoarse whisper.

A plea.

“Baby.” He dropped next to her crumpled figure, disregarding Lara’s blood as it seeped into the knees of his pants. Grief—crushing, caving grief—strangled him. Gently, he lifted her, cradled her against his chest. “Baby,” he whispered. Placing his lips to her forehead stained with rusty streaks, he rocked her. Breathed her in.

The howl slammed against the walls, bounced off the high ceiling. It clawed from the depths of his soul, razed a path up his throat and left him raw, hurting. Tears scalded his eyes and cheeks as he brushed a knuckle down her still-warm cheek.

Warm.

Still. Fucking. Warm.

He shot to his feet, Sinéad in his arms. Frantic, he scanned the room. Lit on Ryn.

“Where is it?” he barked, charging toward the vampire. “The Blood Cross? Where is it?”

Ryn didn’t hesitate. His black gaze dipping to Sinéad’s still form and back to Bastien, he whipped around and, stepping over the bloody carnage, strode across the marble floor toward the dais.

He flew up the short steps, Bastien on his heels. The vampire paused before the wall to the left of the chaise. He pressed a palm to the cream-and-gold papered wall and a section silently slid open. Without waiting to see if Bastien followed, Ryn disappeared into the dark hole. Bastien bolted after him.

Darkness closed in around them, but he had no problem discerning the steep decline of the narrow staircase. When they hit the bottom step, the dank air settled on his skin like a damp, weighty blanket. He waded through it, keeping Ryn’s back in sight.

Time trickled through his fingers as quickly as Sinéad’s blood drained from her body. His hippogryph raged inside him, furious it was trapped and not unleashed to protect its mate. Bastien fought the change prowling so close to the surface.

“Here.”

The jeweled relic gleamed on top of the plain brown stand it’d been placed upon. Blood-red rubies gleamed, throbbed with life and emanated a heat that beat back the stygian shadows. If he closed his eyes, Bastien swore he would hear the faint pulse of the life-giving fluid captured within.

The Blood Cross.

“Let me hold her,” Ryn urged. Bastien jerked his attention away from the mythical artifact and stared at the vampire, certain
you’re-out of-your-fucking-mind
was written all over his face. The male shook his head. “You have to activate it. Give her to me. I won’t hurt her. I promise.”

His beast snarled
No!
But the vampire was right. Even now, Sinéad’s breath rattled in her chest like a death knell. Carefully, he transferred her slight weight to Ryn, passing a tender caress over her hair.

“Tell me what to do,” he demanded, approaching the Cross.

“Touch it,” Ryn murmured. “And don’t remove your hands until the blood flows.”

Trembling, Bastien cupped the arms of the relic. Power surged up his arms, over his shoulders and converged in his chest. Like a great vortex, the magical force swirled and eddied, threatening to suck him down into its electrical depths before swelling and surfing back to the Blood Cross.

Blood bubbled, frothing from the rubies like a scene in a horror movie. The sticky liquid flowed over his hands and streamed to the iron bowl poised at the bottom of the relic. Dark-red and heavy, the heady scent nailed him in the gut like a two-by-four. Saliva flooded his mouth and a hunger that exceeded all he’d known in the past five months gnawed at his stomach, tore at his chest in frenzied demand.

Sinéad
. The whisper of her name didn’t ease the craving, but it stroked his sanity. Reminded him why he was in the bowels of a mansion trusting a vampire with his woman. His bondmate.

Slowly, he released the Cross and, cradling the small basin, lifted it. Reverently, he carried it over to her.

Drink
, an insidious voice urged.
One drink and you’ll never know this pain again. One drink and the enslaving addiction will be a memory. One drink and you will be normal again.

One drink and he would die. Because the female who owned the other half of his heart—his soul—would die. And without her, he didn’t have a reason to breathe, to heal, to be. He’d rather exist in this world an abomination, forever craving the silken call of blood than whole, healed and empty.

“Sinéad.”
He stroked her cheek, rubbed her bottom lip.
“Sinéad. Don’t leave me. Come back to me.”

A faint flutter of thick lashes. A minute parting of cracked lips.

A trickle of hope.

Bringing the bowl to her lips, he gripped her jaw between his fingers, forced her teeth open and tipped the blood into her mouth. Despair tried to swell within him when she didn’t swallow, but he slapped the grief back down. Releasing her chin, he placed his thumb over her throat, massaged the column even as he poured more blood between her lips.

“Come on, sweetheart.”
He stroked her throat muscle.
“Fight. Fight for us.”

When the touch came, he almost believed he’d imagined the featherlight caress—believed he wanted it so much his need conjured the weak flicker in his mind.

But the familiar flutter against the walls of his head came again. Stronger. Brighter.

Her blood-stained slender fingers cupped the basin, held it to her mouth. A moan hummed against his hand and welled from her throat as she swallowed in greedy gulps.

Bastien seized Sinéad from Ryn, needing to feel her close—
alive
and close. He murmured nonsensical words against her hair, stroking her braid as she downed the last of the bowl’s contents. Lifting his head, he didn’t care if the other male noticed the moisture burning his eyes.

“Thank you,” he rasped.

A small, sad smile curved the vampire’s lips. “No thanks necessary, hippogryph. If not for—” He broke off as pain spasmed across his features. In the end, he didn’t complete the sentence, just shook his head. “No thanks necessary.”

With a final nod, Ryn slipped into the darkness.

“I want to hate him.”

Bastien glanced down. Joy lit him like a torch as he met beautiful, silver eyes. Eyes he’d feared he’d never see open again.

“You can’t,” he scolded lightly. He was unable to stop touching her. A graze of fingertips over her brows. A soft caress over her cheekbone.

“I know,” she said, voice hoarse. And petulant. “I still want to.”

He tipped his head back on his shoulders. And laughed.

Laughed until tears flowed down his face.

Laughed until his sides pinched.

Laughed until Sinéad covered his mouth with hers and promised him forever.

One month later…

“Hippogryph?”

“Cruxim?”

Sinéad laughed, delight tinkling through her like a babbling waterfall. Joy and happiness—
Lady
, they were as much a part of her as the midnight wings keeping her airborne. The encompassing elation was strange, but strange in the way one would stare at a newborn young, awed by the love that created such a tiny, new life.

It was wondrous.

“Care to join me up here for a run?”
She sent the question along the mental path only she and Bastien shared.

“Hmmm. Depends,”
he drawled.
“Is ‘run’ a clever euphemism for wild, naked hippogryph sex?”

She snorted.
“You have a one-track mind.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

A blast of air surged past her in the wake of a crimson black-and-white blur. Inside her hippogryph, Sinéad grinned as Bastien swooped down and delicately trailed his talons across her back before climbing higher into the sky.

With a burst of power, she followed him. She curled dark-brown talons into her breast and folded silver wings dipped in gold to her eagle’s body, the tips brushing her equestrian hindquarters as she cleaved through the wind after her bondmate.

Another amazement, this hippogryph body.

The new form had taken getting used to. In the last six months, she’d been cruxim, human and now a melding of both Black Angel and hippogryph. Her biology had been a crazy Tilt-a-Whirl, leaving her reeling. But happy. So damn happy she sometimes awoke, afraid her life with a male she adored was all a vivid dream. Yet she’d glance down at the strong arm wrapped around her waist, peer over her shoulder at the blond giant behind her and know. She’d know this was her existence, her mate.
Hers
.

Not long after she, Bastien and the four hippogryphs had left the ruins of the Cardei estate and returned the Blood Cross to the next cruxim in line for guarding, Bastien had explained the mating process. Initially, she’d hesitated. He’d spoken words with foreign meanings—bondmate, gifts, acceptance, change,
don’t know
.

Of his entire explanation, the last two had sent a shiver of apprehension rippling through her. They were bondmates—a male and female who shared gifts and loved deeply. By accepting him as the other half of her soul and Bastien spilling his seed inside her, they would be mated for life, closer than spouses, a bond deeper than marriage. Linked forever. And the link would spark a transformation from the inside out. She would share her body and spirit with a beast. Would she be cruxim any longer? Bastien couldn’t give her a definite answer. He hadn’t known as she and he were the first mated pair of their kind.

It’d left her with a choice.

Remain with Bastien but refuse the mating that would change her into a creature she didn’t recognize just when she’d been granted the return of her immortality.

Or sacrifice the identity she’d recovered in the secret room of the Cardei
castel
and become this new creature with powers and abilities she and Bastien would discover day by day.

The decision hadn’t been one at all.

He was already her life so she’d taken him as her bondmate.

Kind of fitting, she supposed on a spurt of amusement. A cruxim-hippogryph hybrid mated to a hippogryph-no-idea-what-he-was crossbreed.

Bastien’s wings snapped out and he veered across the pre-dawn sky, his distinctive feathers vivid against the gray, purple and orange hues bruising the horizon. With a piercing caw, he dared Sinéad to try to keep up with him.

“As if I can’t
,” she scoffed, darting behind him. She may be new to eagle wings, but she’d been flying for three hundred years.

They played, enjoying the “welcome home” ritual they indulged in every morning after she returned from a night of hunting and he from an evening at the clinic he’d established and ran for immortals of any race who needed healing.

Pride filled her chest. Though he’d decided to remain this unknown hybrid in exchange for Sinéad’s life—and she adored him no matter what blood coursed through his veins—the doctor and researcher in him couldn’t resign the need to discover exactly what he was.

When not patching up immortals, he spent hours in the clinic’s laboratory, analyzing and studying samples. Still, the bitter, resentful male who’d tracked her down in Dublin no longer existed. He’d come to terms with the beast that resided inside him alongside his hippogryph. Yet Bastien had decided not to return to his homeland, understanding his king and people wouldn’t accept him as he was—as he’d chosen to be in exchange for Sinéad’s life. They would view Bastien as an abomination. She considered him a miracle.

The sacrifice only made her love him more.

And want to eradicate in bloody, excruciating torture anyone or anything that dared hurt him.

“You’re too slow.” Bastien laughed, having shifted except for the widespread black-and-white wings. He hadn’t bothered to clothe his body but flew naked, displaying his delicious, scarred form to her.

Sinéad assumed her cruxim form—with clothes. The familiarity of her black wings and the silver hair she’d ceased dying was another boon to her healing soul.

“You wish,” she taunted. “I just like to make you feel all big and manly.” She arched a brow. “So I let you win.”

“Really.” A grin widened his full, sensual lips as white-blond strands whipped around his shoulders and face. He closed in on her, slow, predatory. Stalking her across the dawn.

Without warning, he dove for her, clasped her against his chest and took her mouth in a kiss. She sighed and forgot about games, teasing and winning. With his smooth, hard nakedness pressed to her and his tongue mimicking an erotic dance of what was to come, she surrendered. Wholly and willingly.

Twining her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips, Sinéad didn’t flinch when a talon slowly ripped the soft sheath she’d conjured with her magic. She moaned and then cried out as he slid into her pussy, filling her, stretching her in a tender burn she’d come to crave.

Gently, Bastien rolled them over, covering her, the clouds the softest mattress imaginable. He pumped into her core, riding her as together they coasted along the wind. Pleasure swirled and dipped in her belly.
Sweet Lady
, it didn’t take long with him. It never did.

He lowered his head to her breast, his hips maintaining their sweet, torturous rhythm. His lips closed over her nipple, suckled, and a spear of desire arrowed to her pussy, making her muscles quiver and clench around his cock. Bastien growled against her flesh and responded with a hard thrust, propelling her closer to the edge of orgasm.

His tongue lapped at her taut peak then the swell of her breast. Sinéad knew what was coming. Welcomed it. And as his fangs pierced her skin and his lips drew on her flesh, she exploded. His cock thrusting deep within her, his arms closed tight around her and his mouth feeding from her…

It was joy.

It was perfect.

It was ecstasy.