Red Demon (7 page)

Ari’s tongue swirled deeper, teasing her, tempting her. She kept her eyes closed, lost in him. In the sensation of being alive. She had always believed he would come back for her, and maybe it had taken a few more years than she would have liked, but he finally had.

She clung to Ari even harder, tears burning beneath her closed lids as he kissed her with increasing ardor, one hand sliding along her lower back, teasing. Seeking gifts she’d never given him in life.

But this body wasn’t hers; the moment wasn’t real. A sob built inside her chest.

She ran her hands across his shoulders, thrilling at the thick bands of muscle, powerful as always, as strong as oak. She’d always known this man would protect her from any destructive force, any soul that sought to harm her.

In a last desperate surge, she deepened the kiss. Ari’s hands were all over her back, and he pinioned her even harder against his own body. Then, with a gasp, he tore his mouth away from hers, murmuring, “I always wanted to believe you were mine.”

She felt his tears then, salty as she pressed her mouth closer, needing to kiss him again.

She didn’t see the furious fist coming, not until it connected with Aristos’s jaw, knocking him back against the wall with a loud, snapping sound.

“River!” She heard the word bubble past her own lips. “Stop it; that’s Ari you’re hitting.” Juliana touched her mouth, only to remember that it wasn’t hers at all, nor was the body. Nothing was real, not even those arousing, sensual kisses.

Nothing was alive, or true, except one thing. Aristos—and her love for him. That had never ended, she thought, drifting out of Emma’s skin and up toward the ceiling.

Weightless, nothing.
She
was nothing . . . but dead.

F
or some reason, Ari thought vaguely, he was floating. One minute he’d been kissing Juliana; the next, everything had gone black. Now he seemed to be as unmoored from physical reality as Juliana had been.

Where had the slamming pain in his head come from? He rubbed a hand across his aching jaw, unsure about the source of the godsforsaken pounding in his skull. Blinking slowly, he finally focused on a familiar, concerned face.

Emma.
Emma was leaning over him, looking into his eyes and stroking his hair. “He’s coming around,” she announced, appearing relieved.

Someone had punched him, knocking his blasted head against the wall—hard. “Who clocked me?” Even talking was a problem, creating an answering swell of nausea in his belly.

River appeared in his line of vision, kneeling beside Emma. “You were kissing her,” he explained guiltily. “What else was I supposed to do when my best pal had his tongue halfway down my wife’s throat?”

Ari groaned, the room wavering like a gyroscope. “I wasn’t kissing Emma. I was holding Juliana.” He tried sitting up, but his pounding skull and the answering roll of nausea forced him back down.

Thank God someone had thought to wedge a pillow beneath his throbbing head.

He’d been kissing Juliana, and it had felt . . . disturbing. Arousing. As if time did not exist at all. Panicked, he glanced about the parlor for some sign of her, almost expecting to see her tall, willowy form looming over him.

“Where is she? Where did Juliana go?” He gestured toward his chest. “I had her in my arms, damn it.”

Emma continued stroking his hair very gently. “She was never here, sweetie. Not physically.”

Ari sank deeper into the pillow with another groan. “I know, I know, but I need to apologize. I was such a nasty bastard. She’s got to be here still.”

“I no longer sense her presence,” Cecilia answered, staring down at him sympathetically. “With a kiss like that, I’m amazed that you stayed away from here five minutes, much less two months.
That
was your proof.”

“And you wondered why I slugged you?” River muttered.

Ari looked up at Emma, who continued petting his hair in a soothing gesture. “Em, you knew the score, didn’t you? That I wasn’t really kissing
you
, right?”

Emma’s blush told him everything; so did the way she glanced away, her hand pausing against his temple. “I . . . well, I was still in there,” she said. “It was my body, you know?”

“I wouldn’t put the moves on my best pal’s wife.” He scrubbed a trembling hand over his eyes. “Wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, Em.”

River folded his arms across his chest, unyielding. “From my position, can I just say that it appeared you wanted to swallow Emma whole?”

“That wasn’t bloody well my fault, was it?” Ari shot back.

“O-kay,” Emma said. “He’s speaking with a British accent now. That’s just . . . weird.”

River turned to Emma. “We lived in the British Isles for years,” he explained, then bent lower, peering down into Ari’s face, concerned for real. “Seeing stars? Room spinning?”

Ari studied the rotating ceiling, swallowing down the bile that filled his throat. “Vertigo. Really bad case of vertigo.”

River sighed, and this time he was the one who began stroking Ari’s brow. “I’m sorry, buddy.”

“For hitting me like I was a piñata?” Ari asked, vaguely aware that his words remained precise, accented as if he were a West Londoner.

“No, Aristos.” River sighed again. “For giving you what appears to be a concussion.”

Ari groaned as another wave of pain rolled from his skull to his stomach. “So fix it. Do your thing.” River had healed them all of stab wounds, sword slices, and even ingrown toenails. A concussion was small-time stuff for the man.

River leaned back on his heels, shaking his head. “Definitely a concussion. You’ve forgotten that I can’t heal you anymore. I gave my power to you, remember?”

Ari closed his eyes. “My best friend gave me a concussion, and I have no idea how to heal myself. Bloody brilliant.”

Emma resumed stroking his hair, her gentle touch at least somewhat comforting. “Ari, do me a favor? Please use your normal
Greek
accent. The whole Brit thing is starting to wig me out. I need to know that you’re all right.”

“This from a medium who just channeled a dead woman? You’re hardly a reliable judge of the bizarre.”

“Ari, please,” Emma tried again. “Let us know that you don’t have some kind of serious head trauma. Okay? Talk like you.”

Ari cleared his throat and tried to think like a Greek man. All that came out of his mouth, however, was a string of atrocious Greek curses, followed by the keen desire to punch his best friend in the nose. Retaliation, Spartan style.

River placed a comforting hand on his chest, laughing. “Thanks, Petrakos,” he said. “There are times I’d like to do the same to you myself.”

To that smart reply, Ari only cursed more rudely, calling River every profane name in his ancient Greek dictionary. Ari noticed something then, a nifty little fact that hit his awareness on a twenty-second delay. Emma’s eyes had grown surprisingly wide, as if she actually understood his foul accusations.

Ari sat up, swatting at the stars that swam in front of his eyes. “What?”

“I guess you’ve forgotten that River’s been teaching me Greek.”

River grinned. “It’s fun to coach her on the nasty bits.”

“Fucking awesome,” Ari said, sliding back down onto the pillow.

“Maybe Sophie can help him,” River volunteered.

“Yeah, she fixed Sable,” he groaned. “She got rid of those spikes . . . the ones Ares put on his body.”

“Not all of them,” Emma corrected. “And she hasn’t figured out how to use the ability again.”

“Get . . . me . . . Sophie,” Ari ground out. “And some ibuprofen. Stat.”

 

Juliana blew down the street, struggling to gain some kind of physical anchor. One moment, she’d been rooted inside of Emma; the next, that fist had knocked into Aristos—and she’d been released, unable to remain inside the woman. She’d been discharged against the walls of her own brownstone like inhuman scattershot.

She’d hurled through the air and dimensions, nearly landing on the sidewalk outside, but then the wind had gusted, catching her in its tumbleweed hold. Until the low branch of a live oak had snagged her ghostly hair, capturing her like a wayward butterfly. Hers was an in-between state, not quite physical, not fully spiritual—enough that a low-borne tree could trap her, even though she wasn’t visible to passing mortals.

She clung to that branch, which was like a protector, resisting the wind’s force lest she end up blocks away from home. She had no idea how long she’d been tangled up in the limb’s fragile grasp, and kept praying that she hadn’t lost her own hold. The one she had over Aristos, her true love.

And still that wind blew, thrashing her thin essence, beating her against the trunk of the old live oak.

She hated stormy nights; they brought back painful emotions. A night like this one had spelled the end of her relationship with Aristos, but she could never seem to re-create the details, only the physical sensation of the wind. And that heavy, crashing water, waves upon waves of it.

Ari obviously knew she was dead—he’d proclaimed as much. Why was it that she so often forgot the fact? Perhaps because she did not want to accept that fate, but even so, her mind and memories fluctuated. Sometimes, as she stared about Savannah, she
knew
this was not her own time. The physical proof assaulted her undeniably: the very fast carriages, lit by the odd lanterns at night. The hard, darkly paved streets. The women hurrying past without proper escorts, never seeing her and dressed as Emma had been tonight, in men’s attire.

Other times, she saw nothing, lost only in a circular maze of memory, reliving her final moments with Aristos. How could he believe that she would ever, in any lifetime or place, have left him willingly?

On any other night, she’d have simply let nature have its forceful way, would have landed wherever fate dictated and then worked her way back to West Jones Street. But not this time, because then she might miss seeing Aristos when he left the brownstone. He’d be walking down those steps soon, just as he had the night they’d first met.

But this next sighting of him might be her final one, for certainly their last encounter had not gone as she’d expected. He had been so furious with her, a reaction she never could have anticipated.

I am naught but a dead woman
, she reminded herself.
That is all he thinks of me. He believes that I abandoned him, found him horrifying.

Oh, but his wings had been
mesmerizing
. A welcome explanation after a courtship where she’d known he wasn’t human but never learned enough about what he
truly
was. Until he’d landed on her balcony the night when they had planned to give themselves to each other. She’d known nothing yet understood everything about him in a moment.

He was far more glorious than she’d even imagined. With that, another voice ripped into her memories, one that didn’t belong to Aristos, but she could not hear it clearly enough to identify the speaker. Closing her eyes, she forced herself to recall what had happened next. She could see Aristos, there on her balcony, waiting, and then . . . Someone had blocked her from him; someone had pulled her back as she’d gone to open the French doors.

She’d cried out to him, but he’d already been turning away, believing her terrified of
him
. Yes, that was it! But who had been in her room that night, and what had that person done or said to keep her from Ari, filling her with such terror that he would forever believe she’d rejected him?

Oh, why could she not remember? She worked at the memories, trying to unravel them as she twined her insubstantial fingers through the branches. But no matter how hard she puzzled over them, the memories remained as vague as a river mist.

E
ros dipped his red- feathered quill into the inkpot; smiling in anticipation, he began scrawling conjured words of romance upon the parchment. His pen moved quickly, yet even so, he could not keep pace with the agile movements of his sensual imagination.

Dominick slid a palm against Adrianne’s ripe, swelling flesh, his fingertips alive with need
, he wrote with a flourish
. Moving his mouth lower, dangerously so, Dominick brushed a kiss upon his beloved’s mound, urging her aggressively, tantalizingly, hungrily . . .

He hesitated, frustrated by his inability to convey the eager passion he felt thrumming in his god’s veins.
Too many adverbs; not precise enough.

He tossed down the quill in disgust; he, lord of all love, reduced to this! Penning a dull, lifeless imitation of what he could easily create with one strategic aim of his bow, all because of a dare his father had issued.
No, not a dare
, he thought,
a test of strength.
His father had wagered that Eros could not go a month, much less six, without creating passion between mortals.

Dominick and Adrianne weren’t even well written, much less a reflection of his true skill. He’d only begun scribing their imaginary courtship as an outlet of sorts, a salve to the heat of his unanswered addiction. As proof to Ares that he lived off more than love and lust and tupping.

His father had sworn such discipline impossible. “You are obsessed,” he’d scoffed. “You have no other outlet for slaking your need than to meddle in the affairs of mortal hearts.”

Ares despised what he, his own son, treasured. Love, in all its giddy, charming sensation. Although Eros did not limit his craft to sensual love. He dispensed doses of brotherly affection; enjoyed occasionally besotting wayward fathers with their deserving offspring; adored creating bonds between fellow soldiers. One particular favorite was sorority rush season, weaving those bonds of deep sisterhood between young women, the kind that lasted lifetimes.

Yet courtly love, in all its forms and enthrallments, remained Eros’s true intoxication.