Dark Debt (13 page)

Balthasar grabbed my ankle, and I kicked out with the other.
The strike was good; I nailed him in the shoulder and sent him tumbling backward,
but he righted himself and with that blurring quick speed was suddenly on top of me, hands pinning down my arms with bruising strength, one knee between my thighs, and Ethan’s green eyes staring back at me.

The expression on his face, the gleam of success in his eyes, was nothing like Ethan’s. He smiled, all teeth and fangs, weapons meant to penetrate, rip,
kill
.

He lowered his face to
my neck, and I struggled beneath him, trying for any advantage in strategy, in physics, that would reverse our positions. But in the soft pile of sheets, I couldn’t get purchase. I was trapped, and my heart began to pound like a timpani drum, faster and faster, fear tightening my belly, sweat peppering my arms.

He’d hurt me without remorse to punish Ethan, to hurt him, or to distract him.
Or best yet, all three.

“You will never know him like I know him,” Balthasar said, his face only inches from mine, fangs gleaming. “As long as you may live, as strong as you believe your love to be, you were not there with us. You did not see what made him.”

His gaze dropped to my lips, and his tongue snuck out to moisten his lips. “But, perhaps, we can share what you have now, and we
will all be closer for it.”

“You’ll never know what
we
have,” I countered, trying to force air through my lungs. “No matter what you do to me now, you’ll never have Ethan again. Because he grew up, and you never did.”

He slapped me hard enough to put stars in front of my eyes.

It was the best thing he could have done.

My eyes silvered as fear transmuted into fury, filling me with
a gorgeous and righteous warmth. I used that burgeoning fire, stoked it with thoughts of the pain he’d caused others, the terror,
the deaths. I thought of the humans he’d violated, the misery and tragedy made by his hand.

Balthasar’s eyes widened with pleasure. “Oh,
le chaton
has claws.”

Anger lowered my voice to a growl. “Don’t call me kitten.”

With a scream more animal than human,
I raked nails across Balthasar’s face, clawed at him like a penned animal.

He cursed in French, low, guttural sounds of indignation that I’d dared refuse him.

“You little bitch,” he said, trying to grab my arms. “When I am in control of your House, when I am your Master, we will see how you use those claws.”

“I am not Persephone,” I said, raking nails across his face again. “I’m already
a vampire, and you can’t hurt me!”

“Merit!”

“Stop using his voice!” I screamed it at the top of my lungs, slapped him hard, would have done it again except that I felt a different viselike grip around my wrists, and the sound of another voice, raining down like freezing water.

“Merit! Stop!”

The world rushed suddenly back, covering and choking me as I tried to rise through the
tumult and break the surface.

As suddenly as it had begun, I was back in our bedroom. I sat atop Ethan’s chest, his hands around my wrists, his face striped where I’d raked my fingernails across his skin.

And his eyes were wide with fear.

TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES

I
made an animal sound, tried to pull my wrists away from his grip. “I hurt you. Oh God, I hurt you.
Let go,
” I cried, and his hands flashed open.

I scrambled off the bed, backed toward the corner of the room. I didn’t stop until the wall was cold against my back.

I slid to the floor, hands in my lap, fingers bloodied from scratching him, the stain clear even in the dim light of the lamplit room. I stared at the blood on my hands until my body began to shake with an emotion I couldn’t name. Fear? Violation? Mortification that I’d hurt the man who’d given his life for me?

“Merit, what’s happened?”

My gaze flashed to Ethan. The scrapes had already
begun to fade, but they were still there. Taunting me. Reminding me. “I hurt you.”

“I’m fine,” he said, throwing away the covers and standing up. “What’s happened?”

My hands began to shake, and I crossed my arms, tucked them against my sides. “Balthasar. He was here. I was with him.”

Ethan’s gaze darted around the room. “No one was here. He wouldn’t have been able to get past the ward.”

I shook my head. “He took me somewhere. Together. In a room, an old room, a French room. It was old-fashioned. And then he looked like you.” My voice shook, sounded far away. “He looked like himself, and then he looked like you.”

Ethan looked as though he wanted to touch me, wanted to move forward, but I shook my head.

“Stop. Stay where you are.”

I could feel the panic building
again, filling my chest with iron, squeezing my lungs as if I’d never get a lungful of air again.

“Breathe, Sentinel.”

But I shook my head. Not to disobey, but to protest. My head began to swim, my vision fading at the corners as panic swamped me.

“Sentinel.”
Ethan’s voice, his tone, was like a slap to my mind. “I gave you a direct order, and I expect you to follow it. Take a breath!”

I sucked in air through painfully tight lungs.

He took a step closer, visibly flinched when I pulled back farther.

“Stop.”

“I won’t come any closer,” he promised. “But I’m going to hold out my hand. You can take it when you’re ready. Each time you inhale, you squeeze. Each time you exhale, you squeeze. All right?”

I nodded. Ethan reached out his hand. It took effort, but I slowly
lifted my shaking fingers to meet his.

“Inhale slowly,” he said, and I squeezed his hand as I sucked in air.

Ethan watched me, nodding. “And exhale, slowly.”

I nodded, blew out air through pursed lips.

“Again,” he said softly.

It took time. I don’t know how long. Seconds. Minutes. He stood there the entire time, his arm outstretched, but otherwise making no move to invade the
boundaries I was trying to rebuild. For a man as commanding as Ethan Sullivan, that must have killed him.

When my breathing was finally steady, I drew my hand away, wiped dampness on my pajama bottoms.

Ethan’s scratches had already disappeared, but the fear from his eyes hadn’t.

“You’re all right?” I asked.

“I am scared to my bones.”

I nodded, tried to swallow past the lump
in my throat. “I’m going to just . . . take a minute.” With a hand against the wall for support, I rose slowly, making sure my quaking knees would support my weight, then walked toward the bathroom and turned on the light.

I was always pale, but in the mirror I seemed preternaturally so, with blue shadows beneath my eyes. And across the left side of my face was the faint red flush from Balthasar’s
hand, from where he’d slapped me.

No, not just that—from where he’d
marked
me.

Wherever we’d been, whatever we’d done, he’d been able to touch me. To hurt me. And if I hadn’t found my way out of that place when I had . . .

I shook my head. I was here now. I was here now, and he wasn’t. I’d made it out of wherever I’d been, and now I had to deal with it.

I had to find a way to deal
with it.

First things first: I’d be damned if he’d mark me. I turned on the faucet, confirmed the temperature with my fingers, and
splashed cold water onto my face over and over again until the memory and color had faded again.

I turned off the water, pressed a towel to my face, and when I put it down again, found Ethan standing in the doorway.

The expression on his face was ferociously
possessive, and intensely uneasy. “Tell me what happened.”

I nodded but walked past him into the bedroom, felt a pulse of guilt that I’d avoided touching him. But he didn’t mention it.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, gathered my hands in my lap. Ethan stayed in the doorway but pivoted to face me, an uneasy distance between us.

My head was a jumble of words and thoughts, but I tried
to order the pieces chronologically. “I was in a bed in an old-fashioned room. I think it was supposed to be like a room you’d been in before. With him. An inn, maybe? He was dressed in old-fashioned clothes, and I was, too. He wanted to talk about me, about you, about himself. He tried to be clever, to romance me.” I paused. “And when that didn’t work, he was suddenly you.”

Ethan grew very,
very still, and even the buzz of magic around him seemed to freeze solid.

“He looked like you. Smelled like you.” Tears blossomed again. “I tried to get away, but there weren’t any doors, and the window was barred, and I couldn’t get the brace off.” Panic rose quickly, a shot of cold from stomach to head, and I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to erase the memory of violence at Ethan’s hands.
Get it out,
I told myself
. Get it out, and it’s done, and you won’t have to say it again.

“And he tried to kiss me.” The words flew out and away like startled doves. “He touched me. He tried to . . .” I shook my head, tears dawning again. “Well, he tried.”

Cold magic flashed again. “Did he hurt you, Merit?” Every
word was like the snap of a twig in the dark—a sharp, surprising bite of
sound. And his eyes left no doubt about his intentions: Had Balthasar been in the room with us right now, he wouldn’t have made it out alive.

“No.
No,
” I repeated, when Ethan looked as though he might lunge for the door. “He touched me, but he didn’t . . .” Instinctively, I crossed my arms over my breasts, swallowed past the lump in my throat. “He didn’t hurt me that way. I don’t even know
if he could have, really.”

Ethan struggled to understand. “You mean to say it was a dream?”

“It
wasn’t
a dream.” His voice had been kind, the question well intentioned. But it hit me wrong, and my voice was shaking with defensiveness.

I shook my head, collected myself, found my voice. “It wasn’t a dream,” I said again. “It was real. I don’t know how it was real, but it was.”

He
frowned. “How are you so sure?”

I lifted fingers to my cheek. I didn’t want to tell him what Balthasar had done, incite him just as I suspected Balthasar wanted me to do, but he deserved the truth. And, more important, we needed to figure out what had happened.

“He slapped me. I could see the mark in the bathroom mirror.”

That flash of cold magic again, but Ethan stayed absolutely
silent, clearly holding his temper in check.

I glanced around the bedroom, at the seemingly solid walls, at the fact that I was still in a tank and pajama bottoms, not the white linen shift Balthasar had put me in. But it had felt real. Impossibly real.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter?” His tone was icy now, that fury only barely
banked, his eyes like cold green glass,
nearly translucent and undeniably deadly. “It doesn’t matter that he hurt you? That he assaulted you?”

“To Balthasar,” I clarified. “It doesn’t matter to Balthasar, because I don’t matter to Balthasar. He doesn’t care about me.” I looked up at him. “He’s using me to get to you. To show that he’s powerful. To prove that he can still hurt you. To prove that he could get to me just as he did
Persephone. That he could ruin something else of yours, force your hand against him.”

“Hurting you doesn’t gain him anything.”

“But it does,” I said. “He doesn’t think you’ll run away this time, but that you’ll stay and fight, because you love me more than you loved Persephone. He believes he’ll win, Ethan. That he’ll kill you and stake a claim on the House. He’s decided he wants it, that
he’s owed it, and he’ll take it however he can.”

There was a knock at the door. Ethan moved to answer it. Mallory rushed in, Catcher behind her, both of them in Cadogan T-shirts. She wore pajama bottoms; he wore jeans. Ethan must have called them while I was in the bathroom.

“What happened?” she asked. I could tell she debated whether to touch me, to embrace me, and held herself back.

“Balthasar attacked her. He got to her in this room, in this House, and I want to know how that happened.”

“Attacked her?” She looked me over, eyes wide with concern. “Jesus, Merit. What happened?”

“He got to her,” Ethan repeated, “while she slept in our bed.”

Mallory looked at me, then the room’s exterior wall. Her expression transmuted from horror to utter confusion. “I’m sorry,
but I don’t understand what you mean. There’s no breach in the ward. He couldn’t have gotten in.”

“That’s impossible,” Ethan said. “She said it wasn’t a dream.”

Wordlessly, Mallory rose, turned to the wall, held out her hand. In the space of a heartbeat, with no obvious effort, a glowing yellow orb appeared in her hand. That was something new. Before, it would have taken closed eyes and
concentration for her to achieve. She’d gotten better at harnessing her powers, or at least in making them look effortless.

Mal flicked her fingers, and the orb flew toward the wall like a fastball in a no-hitter. It made contact with an electric sizzle, vibrantly green light shimmering across the wall, across the ward, like dappled sunlight across the bottom of a swimming pool.

When the
light faded, she glanced back at us. “The ward is in place.”

That didn’t seem debatable, but Ethan wasn’t satisfied, and his words were biting and bitter. “If the ward is in place, how did he get past it?”

Catcher took a step forward. “You’re going to want to watch your tone, Sullivan.”

“And you’ll want to make sure your magic functions the way it’s supposed to.”

“For fuck’s sake,”
Catcher said. “You can see the ward as well as she can, and it’s not been breached. Can you not tell that she’s exhausted?”

I looked at Mallory, for the first time saw the dark shadows beneath her eyes.

“A ward for a structure this large doesn’t operate automatically,” Catcher said, quieter now. “It takes energy to maintain it.”

But Ethan couldn’t see past his fear. “If the wards are
in place, how did he get to her? How the fuck did he get to her?”

“Ethan,” I said softly, “he didn’t get past the wards.”

“Maybe it was just a bad dream,” Catcher said. Now Catcher’s protectiveness was making him stupid.

“Do you honestly think I can’t tell the difference between a bad dream and someone in my mind? Someone attacking? Because I have to say, there’s a pretty big difference.”

“All right,” Mallory said, and when Catcher muttered a curse, slugged him in the arm. “I said all right! Everybody take a step back. Something awful has happened here tonight, and you know Merit wouldn’t cry wolf. If she says it happened, then it happened. So instead of griping about it, we figure out what the hell it was. All right?”

When no one answered, she poked Catcher in the arm with
a finger. “All right?”

“All right, all right. Damn, woman.” He took a step backward, ran a hand over his shorn scalp.

Mallory nodded, exhaled heavily. “The wards are in place. And yet Balthasar attacked Merit. So if he didn’t attack her physically . . .”

“The attack had to be primarily psychic,” I said. I hadn’t been in a room in France, and Balthasar certainly hadn’t been in here
with us. Some sort of psychic connection—strong enough to leave a physical mark—was the only other possibility.

“Vampires can’t—” Catcher began to argue, but Mallory cut him off with a look.

“We’ll assume,” she said, “that nobody has heard about that kind of thing happening before. Regardless, it happened tonight, so let’s discuss how.” She looked at Ethan. “I assume you aren’t aware of
him trying this when you two were buddies?”

“We weren’t buddies,” Ethan snapped, but after a glance at me, the anger drained from his face. “And no, I’ve never heard of it happening before, either with him or anyone else.”

“So what’s the range of vampire psychic power?” Mallory said, looking at us.

“Glamour, and the ability to call, to reduce inhibitions,” Ethan said. “Those are relatively
common psychic skills. Lindsey’s skill is somewhat more unusual. She’s empathic. She can read emotions. Translate them, as it were.”

Mallory looked at me. “Was he trying to compel you to do something? To kill Ethan or hand over the House keys, or whatever?”

I thought back. “No. He wanted sex. He didn’t get it, obviously, because I started hitting him, and Ethan called my name, and that’s
when I woke up. He made himself look like Ethan, tried to use that to get under my skin. He wanted to hurt Ethan through me.”