My Wicked Enemy (21 page)

“Don’t you dare,” she said, all wild-eyed and panting.

“You sure?” he asked. “’Cause I think you’re going to come apart. Are you? Wouldn’t that be bad, coming apart in my arms?” He shifted his body down and blew on her heated skin, right there on the very spot. He had a hand cupped over her bare ass, soft, so incredibly soft. “I think maybe one little—”

She tasted good. And oh, yeah. She shattered, and she was still so deep in his head, he shattered, too.

Her heartbeat slowed and throbbed in time with his. Two beats. One heart. He pulled himself over her, wanting this never to end. He hadn’t been this intimate with a human in longer than he could recall. One hand skimmed the outside of her arm, and his fingertips sizzled with the heat of the magic flowing out. He’d forgotten just how exhilarating it was to be possessed like this.

Carson opened her eyes, and he found himself looking into them, still resonating with magic, still connected, the two of them. She whispered, “That was incredible.”

“No shit.”

Her eyes were dark green, with thick ebony lashes, and Nikodemus could see all the way inside. She groaned, a soft sound, breathy and redolent with desire. One of her hands touched his chest. His magic flowed into her, twined inside her, and he pulled more until his body was taut with it and their skin crackled with energy. He slid inside her, into heat and wetness. Her eyes opened wider, head thrown back. She clutched his arms and pushed herself toward him.

“More,” she said.

He had to concentrate to maintain his form. He filled her with his body and slid further into pleasure. “You’re not ready for what I am,” he said. A reminder to himself, more than something she needed to know. She fit him tightly. With one hand on the bed beside her shoulder he moved. The pleasure belonged to them both. Carson arched her back. His free hand slid around her waist to the place where her spine curved, underneath so that his fingers slid over her skin, skimming the layer of warmth. He fell a little deeper into her head, took on a little more magic. He could feel the magic in her, but it was the human part of her that pulled him in.

His fingertips danced along her spine, along skin warm and pliant and smooth, and he could feel passion rising in her, another trait of humans that called to his kind. The scent of her arousal, the sheer physicality of her rising desire, curled around him. He was at flash point, the edge of his ability to maintain the corporeal form that allowed her to see him as human.

He went deep in Carson’s head, past the barriers, inside, touching her, surrounding himself with the pulse of her life force. He dipped his head, and his mouth found the hollow at the base of her throat, the place where he could feel her pulse, hear it, pulse with it, taste it. Her body radiated heat. He opened his mouth and tasted her skin, touching the tip of his tongue to her. He came out of her because he wanted to last longer. He kissed her shoulder, turning her onto her stomach. He found the scratch on her shoulder, and he sent a pulse into it so that the blood welled up.

Only a little. Such a sweet, bitter tang against his tongue. The skin across his back rippled. He was so deep in Carson’s head he never wanted to come out. She was dark and sweet, and her magic tainted everything. He flexed his hips, and the slide into her racheted his pleasure again. She made a little sound in the back of her throat. “Carson,” he whispered.

He could drink her forever, stay in her forever. She moved her hips again.

“Carson, I need you not to move.”

She groaned. She was as gone as he was, and that just—you know, what male didn’t get extra turned on when a women lost it with him? He wasn’t going to, but he got her turned around and he went into her from behind. For quite a while he thought he was safe, that her backside against his belly was enough, that sliding into her again and again like this was enough. But it wasn’t. It just wasn’t. He slid backward off the bed, shaking. He was so close. So close to changing because his body and soul wanted her. If he did, it would feel good. Beyond good. She turned over, eyes questioning.

Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.
The words became a roar in his head.

She held out her arms.

“I’m not supposed to do this with a human. We want it,” he said. “We all do, but—”

“What?”

“Something wicked,” he said. His cock ached to be inside her. But if this was going to end here, he needed to be in control. “Something bad. Something very bad. Something you might not like.”
She’s human,
he thought. And the wickedness of his urges cranked him even higher. “Otherwise, we have to stop. I’m sorry.”

She tipped her head and considered him, and their connection attenuated.

He swallowed hard. “I am not walking away from you. And I’m not lying.” She misunderstood what was happening to him. She thought he was abandoning her, cutting her off again. “I’m trying to keep you safe.”

She sat up, and he waited. He wasn’t any better off. His fucked-up and depraved desire was still there, and he was working hard to keep her safe. “Safe,” she said. “From what? I know what you are, Nikodemus.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing to me.” Idiot that he was, he walked back to the bed.

“I know you make me feel good. I know you’re different. Not human. Not like me.” Her hair fell over her ears, and she was drop-dead sexy, the way she looked at him all shy and with her mouth so thoroughly kissed. He started to lose it. His body came to flash point. “Don’t let it end like this. Not when I know there’s more.”

“Carson—I can’t promise you won’t get pregnant. Not like this.”

“I could be dead by tomorrow. And we don’t even know what I am now.”

She ran a hand along his flank to his hip, and in his head he was seeing the two of them again, her all small and pale and him not human anymore, and she was working him. “Please, Nikodemus. I need you.” He lost his sense of human shape when she looked at him from under her lashes and he got a full dose of her green eyes. “Don’t say no,” she said. “Please?”

“I don’t want to frighten you,” he said, thinking maybe there was still some way to avoid this fiasco. Although, actually, maybe he wouldn’t mind it if she was afraid, just a little. “But I can’t maintain. This form. I”m sorry, I just can’t. If you don’t want that, we have to stop—” His words stopped on a gasp because she’d just touched his thigh high up enough that maybe the location qualified as his groin. “—now.”

“I’m not afraid of you, Nikodemus.” She touched his hip again. “I’m not afraid of you at all.”

Okay.

Well.

Just fuck it, then.

“I’m going to take away the light.” He said it slowly, giving her time to find a
no,
in case it was in her and she just needed time. “You won’t be able to see me. Are you all right with that?”

She nodded.

The lights winked out. He took away all the light. All of it. His magic had always been dark-edged, and he embraced it because this was his source, the essence of his nature. His back rippled, and he shifted.

Yes
.

Slowly, he became aware of his body and its state of arousal, and then hers. He saw perfectly in the dark. The human shape of her, her eyes staring hard, unable to penetrate the blackness. He smelled her skin and her arousal, and he caught the tangy scent of blood from the accidental cut on her shoulder. He knew she felt his shift. They were standing too close for her not to have felt the push of his magic. But she couldn’t see him.

He lowered himself onto the mattress, over her. His perceptions always changed when he shifted; his experiences were rawer, harsher. A little fear wouldn’t be a bad thing to feel. Just a little. Just enough to wind him up. Her palms brushed him, stilled, then moved, and she drew in a breath. A gasp. He let her feel the difference of texture and heat. And oh, there it was. Fear, dancing along her skin as her sense of touch fed her information about what he was. A growl pooled in the back of his throat, a bass vibrato.

Her palms followed the outside of his arms. Since he had his weight on his hands, his muscles were taut. She got to his elbows, and her hands drifted to his back. There was no way she didn’t feel the difference in size. “I’m not afraid of you,” she whispered.

That was one big fat lie. She was afraid, but she was dealing with it, and if he thought he was hard before, he was wrong. His cock hurt, he was so wound up. She let her head fall back. His mouth followed, finding the cut and letting her feel teeth that were sharper than before.

And then he did it. He slid his inhuman body inside her human one and it was perfect. Raw. Primal. He thrust into her, again and again, and it was incredible, doing her like this, knowing she was feeling the difference in his body, the changed texture of his skin. Human body under him. Human skin under his fingertips, touching him, a human woman’s breasts cupped in his palms. He could see the difference between them. He didn’t need to imagine anymore. He wrapped his arms around her and rolled until he was on his back.

Carson arched, breathing in hard as he went deeper inside her, and the sound did it for him. A breath and a gasp at once. Her desire mingling with his magic, calling him, pulling him deep into their connection. His desire meeting hers, power and desire tangling. He touched her everywhere he could reach.

Click.

He swore even as the wave of passion came over him. His leg came up, his inner thigh pressing against her side because he was holding her down on him now, then pushing back, arching into her downthrust. Setting in deep every way he could. His fingers touched her belly, and she felt the prick of his nails, jumped at the contact. His senses spread out, interlocked with hers. His experience of the world turned sharp and visceral. He had a fiend’s receptivity to emotion, and she had the thoughts and physical experiences of a human.

Her fingers trailed along his shoulders and sent a shiver of arousal through him. Right to his balls. And then she opened up to the energy that gave a fiend power over the physical realm.

He sat up, keeping her on him, and she threw her arms around him to stay balanced. Without even thinking what he was doing, he lowered his head to her shoulder and scored her cut a little deeper. She flinched. She was much, much smaller than he was now. Distracted, she couldn’t feel him tracing more lines across and along her body, in this position, her spine, too, so human, lovely, soft. No point holding back. They were well past anything acceptable.

“I want to see,” she said into the darkness.

“Are you sure?” He leaned her back until her shoulders were on the mattress. He angled his hips. It didn’t take her long to lock her thighs behind him. More lines. More sparks of pale gold into her skin. His mark on her. He was done kidding himself about that. They were permanent.

“Oh,” she said. And it was a sound of passion. He’d stroked her just right, hit just the right spot inside her.

He gripped her hips and rose up to go deep inside her, and he loosened his hold on the lights. Carson’s eyes opened. Blinked. Focused. She didn’t recoil, which he didn’t expect, anyway, but he got the jolt of her reaction. What caught him off guard was his response to knowing she could see him, see what was inside her human body.

God help him, he kept his eyes on her and said, “Fuck me harder, Carson.”

The attic was cool and clean. Dim, too, since the windows were shuttered from the inside. She yanked on the dangling lightbulb chain. Ah.
Clean
was perhaps somewhat relative. Cobwebs adorned the ceiling and clouded the windows, but at least the dust wasn’t too bad. A Persian rug covered most of the floor and cut the chill, too. Not that she felt the cold much lately. By now, she was starting to figure out that Harsh liked to indulge his champagne tastes. A fifty-thousand-dollar rug in an attic was just about typical. Like the thousand dollars he’d dropped on a pair of fancy oxfords.

Cardboard storage boxes were stacked to the ceiling on one side and crates over in the other corner, next to a wooden bed frame and a dresser with a broken mirror. Interesting; someone was using the place to get away from it all. A wool blanket and a pillow were laid out on the rug with a stack of paperbacks beside them. A dog-eared U.S. Army and Marine Corps
Counterinsurgency Field Manual
was on the top of the pile. A little light reading there.

She crossed the room to open the window. She ran hot ever since the talisman, a degree or two above normal. Harsh was constantly checking her temp. She was almost never cold. Moonlight poured through the window, scattering pale beams across the rug and walls. Outside, barn owls hooted.

She headed for the crates, which was where Harsh said he’d last seen the guns, and pried the top off the first. Whoa. Harsh hadn’t been kidding when he said he had weapons. Heckler & Koch. Another of the crates was filled with ammo, packed in coffee grounds. Something in her head tickled, almost a vibration. She was still getting used to the ways she’d changed since the talisman, and her awareness of fiends was one of them. The sensations tended to come and go, but some of the freakier side effects seemed like they were permanent. Not needing to sleep as much. Or getting an icy sensation in her head when there was a fiend around. She turned.

Iskander stood with his hands on either side of the doorway. Right. She glanced at the blanket and pillow. Iskander wasn’t sleeping with his sister anymore. He was staying here.

She was used to being outsized. Most everyone was taller than she was. Iskander, though, was a big man. Taller than Nikodemus and heavier with muscle, too. Xia’s size. He kept his hands above his head, and with his short sleeves there wasn’t any missing the muscles of his arms. He looked like he could throw a semi. She wasn’t wild about being alone with him. Fen she could take or leave, but Iskander freaked her out sometimes. She reacted to him a lot like the way she’d reacted to Xia.

“You,” she said and was relieved that she didn’t get any weird vibes from him. With her luck, Fen would be up here any minute, threatening to take her head off for being in the same air space as her brother. “I’m not going to save you when Fen finds you here with the big bad dangerous witch.”

The lines down his face glowed, as if they’d been tattooed with phosphorescent ink, which was almost as unsettling as her awareness of him flaring even hotter than usual. But then, he was broken, like her. “Magellan’s witch,” he said. His voice sounded rusty.

Her skin jumped all down her back, because usually the cobalt stripes down his cheek were more alive than his eyes, but right now, his eyes glowed, too. He left the doorway and walked inside, into one of the shafts of moonlight. Carson stood up, wiping her hands off on her thighs. “What do you want, Iskander?”

Their gazes met and
wham!
She lost her sense of perspective again. The corners of the attic blended in with the floor and the ceiling, and the colors all ran together. She shook her head. Her breath caught in her lungs. Her body felt electrified. She blinked, and her vision stopped streaking with color. Iskander’s hand gripped one of the support posts. With her vision going out on her, she couldn’t be sure, but she thought his fingers looked longer than they ought to be, with talons instead of nails. She tried to track his hand as it slid slowly down the post. A thick splinter sliced his index finger. He flinched, and the weird connection between them wavered and then vanished.

The room went back to normal, and so did Iskander. A normal man, if normal meant six-four and 230 pounds of muscle. But not everything was normal. The sliver had opened a bleeding cut. The scent of his blood hollowed out her stomach, and she couldn’t move. That was another change to cope with, the way certain things set her off. Like Nikodemus shifted. Like the scent or sight of blood. Bright, bright red and such an intense scent.

In all her life, she’d never seen such a beautiful red, or smelled anything as rich and deep as Iskander’s blood. She walked to him, a matter of three or four feet. “You need a bandage,” she whispered. She held on to normal as hard as she could, but she wanted a taste of his blood, and that wasn’t normal. Not at all.

“Witch,” he said, and it was a sneer.

The same interior light that made his tattoos glow lit his eyes. Blue streaked across the black behind her eyes. The streaks solidified and became the pattern etched onto Iskander’s face. Straight through the blue-black of his pupil. His striped eye filled her head. She was losing her sense of balance again, and she had to fight to hold on to the shape of the room and keep everything in three dimensions.

Whatever else was going on, she recognized that she’d fallen into this exact state of hyperawareness with Xia. With the mageheld fiend, she just
saw
how to sever him from Rasmus. She saw Iskander in much the same way now. All she had to do was call up his magic, bring it up from deep within those cobalt lines, and touch it. Touch his magic with hers, and he wouldn’t be broken anymore. She focused on the stripes on his face and fell into the space between the stripes. The sound of barn owls hooting disappeared. The wind stopped rattling the windows. Her mental sense of Harsh and Nikodemus dampened.

Her ears felt full, and she swallowed hard to clear them. They popped, and the pressure returned to normal. But the attic remained dead still. She could almost touch the magic that had wanted to sever Xia. She was aware, then, of another magic, magic she couldn’t touch. What filled her now was different, its source not mageborn but fiend, dark and deep and touchable. She reached across that wide, vast pool that had opened up for her with Xia.

Iskander’s eyes flickered from dark blue to cobalt and then back to pale blue. She smelled his body, the earthy outdoor scent of ashes and wood smoke. Hunger rose in her, a sharp and gnawing need to have Iskander belong to her. The sensation come at her hard, flowing over her, through her, a river of need. Her skin sizzled, the tips of her fingers vibrated. She reached out and pressed her palm flat against Iskander’s chest.

Yes.

A current of magic, electrified and searing hot, leapt from her, and she followed it because only Iskander would satisfy the hunger. The fiend’s eyes went wide. Outside herself, she heard him make a soft exclamation. The sound meant nothing to her.

His body bowed toward her, his head back, throat tense, muscle and sinew stretched taut. She moved forward, closer, opening herself to the power. An image formed in her head, of her in Iskander’s arms, her drinking from him, tasting him, touching his magic. She knelt, and Iskander came with her as she followed the connection outside herself and into him. She held his head between her hands, and Iskander tipped his chin toward her, eyes open. His irises were sky-blue, the left one bisected by the first line of color down his face. With a greedy joy, she saw exactly how to make him hers.

She set the fingers of her right hand to the top of each stripe. Slowly, she drew her hand down, following the lines, modulating her magic on nothing but instinct. The stripes turned from ashy gray to faint blue, deepening to cobalt. She saw the nature of his binding, the tie to Fen and through Fen, something else. Someone? Something that didn’t belong. Something that threatened his sanity. She understood now what Nikodemus had been talking about with Harsh. Iskander had been blocked from his kind for too long. Like Harsh, he’d been slowly dying from the isolation with no hope of release.

He wasn’t mageheld, she knew that much now. She’d felt several mageheld fiends when Rasmus and Magellan were at the mall, and Kynan and Xia had given her an up-close and too-personal shot of what a mageheld fiend felt like. Iskander didn’t feel like that. She went deeper. His body, still taut, had relaxed enough that she didn’t feel like she was touching a statue. His skin was warm, and now he was leaning into her, staring at her, past the lines and into her eyes. A live connection to him sizzled through her. The room whirled, dizzied her, and then Iskander was there. Fully present in her head and so real she could barely hold on.

She reached into him, quivering with power and the need to make him hers. His bond with Fen pulsed, edged with something bleak and poisonous: the source of whatever was wrong with him. When she breathed in, the air smelled bitter. A metallic taste coated her tongue. Iskander was cut off from everything but this one remnant of his sister. And even there, he’d built a wall between him and his twin, between him and the poison that leaked back. Carson caught flashes of what he’d been like before his bond with Fen had changed. Making love with her, touching her fiery red hair, his twin’s sleek body arching under him, the perfect melding of their minds and their power. Harsh was in his memories, too, touching him, caressing, kissing, three minds and bodies intertwined. When they had been whole.

Carson sent her magic into him, and like some idiot savant who didn’t understand yet possessed the knowledge, she saw what she needed to do and how to do it. She severed his link with Fen. Mercilessly. Without remorse or hesitation. He was free of the poison and all that remained was for her to bind him to her. If she didn’t stop, Iskander would be hers the way Kynan belonged to Magellan.

How wonderful to have all that power at her command.

Could she really do something that ugly to another living being?

Her ears rang, a painful, shattering howl, caroming around the inside of her head. When it stopped, Iskander’s hands were pressed to her temples, covering her ears, and she was shaking. Normal now. The war in her was over, and she had managed not to destroy herself or Iskander.

She touched the stripes on his face, traced them one at a time. His mouth parted, and Carson touched his lips with the side of her finger, top then bottom. She didn’t feel his magic at all, yet his cobalt blue irises sparked with life, fully aware for the first time since she’d come here. The lines down his cheek sizzled with the same unearthly blue.

He raised his gaze to hers, and she got a jolt when she tried to disengage and couldn’t. Iskander touched his neck, drawing a finger along the pulse of his vein. Blood gathered on his fingertip. A ripple of cold air slid past her, lifting the hair on her arms. She leaned away, but he held her in an iron grip.

The blood-twin’s magic was coming back, and she was caught in some kind of psychic knot with him. No matter what she tried, she couldn’t break the connection. Her bones went cold as his magic folded around them both, full and dark and overpowering.

Carson was dreadfully, horribly aware of Iskander in her head, every minute growing darker and more resonant. He was coming to grips with his altered physical and mental state. No longer a blood-twin, but no longer broken, either. What was it Nikodemus had called them? Psychotic. Unstable.

And she’d just unleashed him without anybody to back her up.