Damien (38 page)

Keep the magic going with ELIJAH,
in stores now from Zebra…

The cold of another breeze rushed up from behind her, blowing at the brief skirt of her dress and whipping through her hair. It surrounded her, engulfed her, forcing her to come to a halt just as muscled arms appeared around her waist.

Siena sucked in a startled breath as the cold vanished, replaced by the warmth, the heat, of a familiar male body. She was drawn back against his chest, his hands splaying out over her flat belly and pushing her deeper into the planes of his hard body.

“Elijah,” she whispered, her eyes closing as a sensation of remarkable relief flooded through her entire body. Every nerve and hormone in her body surged to life just to be held in his embrace, and she was light-headed with the power of it all.

He put hands on her hips, using them to spin her full around to face him. The warrior dragged her back to his body, seizing her mouth with savage hunger just as she was reaching for his kiss. She could not have helped herself. Not after the deprivation of all these days. But still, the weakness stung her painfully, leaving frustrated tears in her eyes.

It was all just as she remembered it. The vividness of the memories of their touches and kisses had never once faded to less than what it truly was. It was all heat and musk and the delicious flavor of his bold, demanding mouth. His hands were on her backside, drawing her up into his body with movement she could only label as desperation.

Elijah had not meant to attack her in this manner, but the moment he had sensed her nearness, smelled the perfume of her skin and hair, he could not do anything else. He devoured the cinnamon taste of her mouth relentlessly, groaning with relief and pleasure as her hands curled around the fabric of his shirt and her incredible body molded to his with perfection. He pulled her hips directly to his own, leaving no question about how hard and fast her effect on him was. He felt her swinging perfectly with the onslaught of his pressing body and adamant kisses.

Everything was perfection. Top to bottom, beginning to end, and he had been starving without her. He also knew she had been just as famished without him.

She was the first to put any distance between them, by breaking away from his mouth, letting her head fall back as far as it could as she drew for breath hard and quick.

“Oh no,” she groaned huskily, shaking her head so her hair brushed over the arms around her waist.

Even those strands betrayed her, reaching eagerly to coil around his wrists and forearms, trapping him around her effectively, just in case of the outrageous scenario that he might want to move away from her. She lifted her head and opened her eyes, their golden depths full of her desire, and her anguish.

“I did not want this,” she whispered to him, her forehead dropping onto his chest when the heat in his eyes proved too intense for her to bear. “Why will you not let me go?”

“Because I can’t,” he said, disentangling one hand from her hair so he could take her chin in hand and force her to look at him. “No more than you can.”

“I hate this,” she said painfully, her eyes blinking rapidly as they smarted with tears of frustration. “I hate not being able to control my own body. My own will. If this is what it means to be Imprinted, it is a weakness I will abhor with my last breath.”

Then she pushed away, defying every nerve in her body that screamed at her to step back into his embrace. She could only backtrack a couple of steps, however, because her hair remained locked tight around his upraised wrist, pulling him along with her…as if he wouldn’t have followed her anyway.

When she realized her back was to a window, she felt a moment of panic. However, she realized no one was likely to see them, because they were over three stories up from the houses and people below.

“You call it weakness, and yet as affected as I am by it myself, I choose to call it strength.”

His rich baritone voice echoed around her, making her heart leap in alarm. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him farther down the hallway, the dark shadows enclosing them as they reduced the potential for echoes.

“Why are you here? And do not blame it on a holy day that will not arrive for two days.”

“I do not intend to ‘blame’ anything. I don’t believe I need an excuse to see you, Siena.” He reached for her face, but she jerked back and dodged him. “And it is because of that holy day two nights from now that I am here. We need a little bit of resolution between us before that night comes, Siena.”

“I am not in need of resolution. If you are, you must come to it on your own.”

She turned to walk away from him, but she forgot he was just as quick as she was. No one could outrun the wind. His hand closed easily around her forearm, pulling her back…and snapping the temper and pain she had been holding in tenuous control for days.

She released the cry of a wounded animal and flew at him. He saw the flash of claws and felt the sharp sting of their cut as they scored his face. Shocked by the attack for all of a second, Elijah reacted on instinct. He had her by her hair in a heartbeat, wrapping it around his fist in a single motion, turning her around so her back was to him and her claws pointed in a safer direction. She grunted softly and then screamed in frustration as she found herself trapped face first against the stonecutter’s art.

His enormous body was immediately flush against her back, securing her to the unforgiving stone as he caught one hand and pushed it against the stone as well.

“Let go of me!” She struggled in vain, unable to move a micron in any direction. “You’ll have hands full of a spitting-mad cougar if you do not release me this instant!”

“I highly doubt that,” he purred easily into her ear, his mouth brushing over the lobe of it in a way that made her shiver involuntarily.

And here’s a sneak peek at NOAH,
coming in September from Zebra…

“Noah.”

He felt Corrine’s hands on his back, her empathy all too apparent in the tenderness of her touch. Noah could not bear the comfort. He did not want to be comforted. He shrugged her off hard enough to make her stumble backwards away from him.

“She’s dead,” he said, his voice far rougher with his unspeakable emotion than he would have liked. He ran cold fingers down his soiled face, focusing straight ahead until the detail of the velveteen fabric before him came more and more into visual clarity. The truths of his words were devastating to him, and on so many levels. He laughed mirthlessly at the capricious nature of fate. “Now I know why I have not dreamed of her in a week. Those dreams are…” He swallowed hard, trying to tamp down emotion far too violent to express in front of gentle friends. “They were a connection that needed both sides to be completed. And now I just stood here and let it happen again!” He turned sharply to look down at the red-headed Druid. “You were right. I was so stupid to wait. I wasted six months. If I had come to you when this started, she would have been safe under my protection!”

Corrine closed her eyes, fighting back her sympathetic tears.

“I don’t understand any of this myself, Noah. You can’t be sure—”

“I am damn sure, Corrine. Did you look out the windows? The sky went from noon to dawn, moving time backward to the moment this thing occurred. Backward to what I am guessing was a week ago. And do not tell me there was nothing I could do to change it. I felt that carpet beneath my foot! I could have…I should have done something! I could smell the difference between this room and that one. I felt the energy of an entire city. For that moment, that place in time was as real as this place is right now.”

The monarch finally took a good look at the tall redhead who, in spite of a sordid layer of soiling, seemed to emanate with power. She had done a potent and amazing thing, a feat beyond all expectations of her abilities, and the aftermath showed in over-bright, forest green eyes and an aura that glowed like a Christmas tree.

“Consider,” he said, this time more gently. “How would Kane feel if Isabella had found you too late, Corrine? I have a right to grieve a loss of such magnitude.” Noah said this in that way he had that promptly ended any open avenues of discussion on a matter. The room vibrated with pain and tension, the silent noise punctuated with the occasional cough of Corrine’s niece.

“Yuck,” the child declared. She licked her hand and rubbed it on her clothes in an attempt to clean the soiled palm. Leah was fastidious about cleanliness, though clearly not as much so about the nature of germs.

Wordlessly, Noah crossed to Kane and plucked his charge out of her blood uncle’s hands, carrying her across the room. He held the child to his chest with one massive hand, and she instantly hooked her small, skinny legs around his waist, her head dropping onto his shoulder with contentment and the security that her Uncle Noah would help her. The way he held her, however, grabbed at Corrine’s heart somehow. She was hooked around him as if she were some sort of bulletproof vest, protecting his all too vulnerable heart.

Kane moved to hold his distraught wife when her thoughts and emotions impacted him fully. He followed her gaze, which was affixed on the door to the room as if Noah were standing on its threshold, instead of having already passed through it.

“Shh, sweetness,” he soothed softly, leaning to kiss a dirt streaked cheek sympathetically. “You will see. He will be fine in time. Like any death, this will be grieved and then it will be put aside.”

“I wish I could believe that,” Corrine whispered to him on a fast, nervous breath. “The last time someone learned of the death of her potential Druid mate, it drove the girl mad.”

“Mary?
Ruth
drove Mary mad, Corrine. From the minute that child was born she was spoiled, sheltered and held far more above her station by Ruth than was warranted. The mother was to blame for her daughter’s actions because of her carelessness in Mary’s upbringing. That can never happen to Noah. Noah comes from a upbringing that defies explanation and a place I couldn’t even begin to put in plain words for you.” Kane shook his head when he felt her puzzled expression. “Not a physical place. A metaphysical one. Noah was born with something none of the rest of us could ever lay claim to. It is why he, above all others, is King.”

“That’s why he, above all others, deserved a complimentary Queen,” Corrine sighed.

Noah knew on some level of instinct that it was the child he was now watching play contentedly before his fire who was responsible for what had happened.

The Prophecy had been clear and unmistakable. The Enforcers would give life to the child who would be the very first of their kind to have the power to manipulate the element of Time. Though she was only a little over two years old, Leah clearly had shown her first evidence of her ability. An astounding development even had it been a known element. Even his power had not come to him this early.

Of course, she had no idea what she had done and no clue as to the significance of the part she had played. Suddenly certain things began to make sense to him. Noah spent enormous amounts of time with this special child. Though she’d had no conscious control of what she was doing, somehow Leah had formed the conduit through time for him. Perhaps it was simply a child’s desire to please that had triggered the subconscious ability. Leah loved her Uncle Noah with incredible devotion. She strived to do things that would please him. Combine this with the power of his and Corrine’s wills, their need to be successful in their hunt, and it had made the perfect catalyst for a child with an untried power who wanted nothing more but to give him what he wanted. What he needed.

And for a terrible moment, Noah wanted to use her for exactly that reason. The King was a scholar, so he full well knew what all the infinite implications to altering time, and a person’s presence in time, could theoretically mean. However, he could not bring himself to care for that long second of self-indulgent thought.

Noah stood up abruptly, pacing over the playing toddler in order to lean close against the mantle. Normally the proximity to such intense heat would comfort him, but this time it did not.

He wanted to burn. Oh, yes, he was impervious to any and every form of flame or molten fire that the natural world could offer up; but this was not what he meant. In his dreams,
she
had made him burn. Kestra Irons. He laughed with the dry irony of her last name. The metal iron was toxic to Demon-kind. It burned on contact. Just like Kestra.

The fire of passion was no stranger to him; he manipulated it well and with arrogant skill, and he had more than one lover in his history who would attest to that with a longing sigh of remembrance. This thing with the woman who had pervaded his sleeping world was out of reach of all of that. It was lacking cohesion and transient, and yet somehow all the more real. Now made unreal and inescapably out of reach for all the rest of time as he knew it.

Unless…

Noah shivered. He was unused to selfish thought. He was a man who lived every moment of his existence with the well-being of so many others as his first priority. Family. When not family, Council. When not family or Council, the multitude of his subjects. If none of them, then the races of others with which they associated. That was the essence of a good monarch. Everyone else must come first, especially those you loved best.

In that moment, all he wanted was to put himself first.

Whatever the cost.

No matter who paid the price.