Wicked Paradise (4 page)

Another eerie scream split the air, flinging him back to the present. Acrid fear floated from the woody depths, attacked his senses, gripped his soul. Ryan increased his pace. Twigs snapped to his left within a copse of sandalwoods. Loud gasps following the scream raked a nervous thrill up his body. As he shifted direction, he caught sight of midnight black hair flowing down the back of a curvy, petite woman. She crashed through dense shrubbery, shoving aside bracken to clear a narrow escape route.

Ryan raced toward her, sensing her panic in his blood. Afraid to startle her further, he called to her in a low, even tone, “Hey! You okay?” Her self-destructive fright propelled her further away from him into the unyielding jungle. If he didn’t halt her, she’d end up shredded alive. “Stop,” he yelled louder, gaining on her.

Not letting up on her relentless tear through the jungle, the woman swung her head around, her long tangled hair veiling half her face. “No, no,” she cried, bursting through an opening in the vegetation, emerging onto a craggy clearing. Terror ravaged her pale face. Wild hair stuck to her temples, cascaded over her shoulders.

Too late, he recognized the false hilltop. He flung away his spear and dove for her ankles, missing her by a hair as she disappeared off the cliff. His chest slammed against a grassy knoll, the wind all but knocked out of him. The woman’s deathly cries echoed in the cliffs bordering the cove. Her body hit the water, a muted splash squelching her screeches.

Ryan vaulted up and leaped off the hill into the churning sea. He bent into a dive, slicing through the dangerous water. The sea cooled his sweaty body, but didn’t temper the heat of his fear. Or the burgeoning flames of hope. Whipping hair out of his eyes, he searched for the woman beyond the exposed rocks along the reef she’d missed by mere feet. Ryan dove under the water, shoving aside meandering seaweed, scanning the murky depths. He spied her small body floating toward the surface. She appeared dead, but Ryan knew she lived. His blood sang her tune. Magic ebbed and swelled around them, unstoppable even by his iron defenses.

With sure strokes, he knifed through the water and caught her in his arms. He stood to his full height, the water leveling just beneath his chest, and carried her out of the sea. His searching gaze swept over the woman he’d seduced in his head during the night. Shock riddled him and she suddenly became dead weight in his arms.

“What the hell?” He whistled, tightening his hold on her before he dropped her. Kneeling on the beach, he cradled her slender, wet body to his chest, offering her the last of his body heat. As she lay limp and frigid in his arms, he scanned the length of her body.

“No blood. Good.” Relief unclenched the fist around his heart. Seaweed knotted in her black hair, a dark blanket covering the pristine white sand. Fear stung his eyes and he pressed his fingers to the pulse in her neck. The vein beat life against his fingers. He pushed out another sigh. Thick black lashes flickered against her pale face. Taut skin stretched over high cheekbones, and her petite nose twitched above bow-shaped lips.

“You’re safe now.” He hoped she heard him. “I won’t let anything harm you.”

Tenderly, Ryan stretched her out on the damp strip of beach between the tide and the baking dry sand. Concentrating on reviving her, he forced himself not to stare hungrily at the clinging blouse accentuating her rounded breasts. Troubled by the physical awareness of the woman from his dream, he ignored the prickly confusion curling in his ribcage.

He positioned his palms on her chest and started resuscitation efforts. His mouth met her lips, and he wanted nothing more than to give her the life from his lungs, as she had once done for him—the day his sailboat capsized and a bizarre squall had tossed him onto the island. He hadn’t recognized her at the time, had only felt a niggle of magic in her breath before oblivion claimed him. He believed it a hallucination. Until now. The vision pushed through his mind in a senseless stream. Was Fomorian black magic screwing with him?

Ryan brushed a speck of seaweed off her nose, his warm fingertips pressing into her cold cheeks as if to pop answers out of her mouth. For the first time since he’d sailed away from New Angeles two weeks ago for a safe day of peace on the Pacific, he might find answers to the million questions warring in his brain. “I won’t let you die,” he growled.

Unbelievably, the world had deposited this treasure in his lap when he believed he’d lost it all again. Vibrant and alive like the island he’d come to both despise for his loneliness and love for its lush life.

“Come on, breathe,” he demanded. “Wake up!”

He pinched her nose closed, puffed air into her mouth. “Breathe, damn it.”

His thumb caressed the creamy damp skin above her breasts, stroked over rough scars welting her flat stomach. Slow and steady, her heart tapped a triumphant rhythm beneath his palm. Her mouth compressed and she sputtered against his lips. Ryan gently turned her head to the side.

Salt water gushed between her ashen lips, and a final clearing cough heaved up her chest. Then her eyelashes fluttered up, exotic green eyes rounded wide. She croaked out, “By the Goddess, it
is
you!” Cringing against the sand, her face flushed. Frantically, she tugged at her soaked blouse, crossing her arms over her exquisite breasts. “What monster of insanity has invaded my body,” she murmured in a voice he strained to hear—in a tantalizing British lilt.

She attempted to rise, but he held her down with a light hand on her shoulder. “Hold on. You’re not going anywhere.” The intense need to protect her from whatever sent her streaking through the jungle soared across his suspicion. To assess further damage, he methodically pressed his hands gently over her wet body. Her skin awakened, growing warm beneath his fingers. Expression wary, mouth gaping, she froze.

“Do you hurt anywhere?” He combed his fingers into her gritty tresses, picked seaweed out of the tangles.

Eerily familiar magic teased his power, infused his senses. He detected more than a mortal Druid’s magic within her. It felt pure, from an ancient well of the earth’s nascent energy. It surrounded him, flirted evocatively with the negligible amount of magic he emitted. Defensively, he threw up his internal shields, locking her magic out. Had a Druid or Fomorian placed a spell on him before he sailed away from L.A.? She might not be an evil being with magic like his, but was she Fomorian-wrought? Regardless, he couldn’t drop his guard again for anything.

The blood thrumming in his body sang a different song, though. The mysterious woman represented a seedling’s drop of moisture in the bone-dry hell of his life. And he wanted to lick every trace of water from her beautiful face and down her lush body, to hydrate the desert he’d become. The instinct to claim her roared through him in the blood rushing straight to his groin. The force stunned him. In a day’s span, his life had flipped upside down, flipped again, and splattered him like demon-kill.

A flock of blue and white seagulls swooped overhead. Their shrill cries cut through his insane thoughts, scattering them into the ether. The young woman blinked cagey eyes at him. Blood electrified his nerve endings as he struggled to purge his lust.

He hadn’t felt this aware and alive since...hell, ever.

Chapter 4

Time killed everything. Healing came at the end, because there could be no healing without death. Truly, he had all the time in the world to kill, to heal, to forget the sins of a millennium. Or did he? Laughter filled WindWraith’s memory, an unwieldy noise that didn’t penetrate the cave, remaining only in his mind.

WindWraith circled the inside perimeter of the cavern, loose ebony particles dripping off his form, filling the dead space. The bits sizzled, turned amber as they tumbled into the rivers of fire. Thin spirals of smoke evaporated as the lava incinerated the fragments.

The ancient being screeched and howled, pulling his expansive corpus into the shape of a man. His solid body was faltering and he must retain the deteriorating cells. Although his magical strength escalated, he also knew his memories were vanishing. Little remained of his early years as an ordinary Druid sorcerer. What remained were the dark years of adulthood, the black magic, the evil that encompassed him entirely. Without his memories schooling him, he couldn’t breach the human bodies. Or the host body he desired most.

Holding his mass into a concentrated human shape, he cast a calling to the world that shunned him, to an era after the old mage’s death—the great one who sentenced him to die. The veil between this island and Avalon was thinner than ever. It had grown so fragile the crystal barrier the bastard mage had erected around the island was disintegrating in tandem. The island’s magic weakened, while WindWraith’s power intensified. Soon his magical endurance would surpass the dwindling strength of the prison locks. Already, his magic leaked through a crack in the veil, latching onto the bands of energy connected to him, feeding the mind of the one who mattered most...the one who called to him from a great span of time and space.

For now, he allowed his mind to travel the distance to his homeland. Within a moment, his magic bounced against a powerful protective wall. Startled, his body splintered and he exerted force to maintain his cohesive shape. The heavenly magic he butted against contained aspects of home and infinitely more. Human perfection. Ancient Druid blood coursed through the body, possessing fire magic that excelled even his abilities in his prime. The unfamiliar body contained great strength, vast magic. It held a blood element absent in the other host bodies WindWraith had lured to his island prison. An almost perfect body tied to another unknown sorcerer of equal vigor, both created from the necessary elemental magic to return WindWraith to the living.

Excitement shimmied over WindWraith and he lost his tenuous tie to the land of his birth. Gray, stormy clouds shaped like arms extended from his body, and he heaved the leg bone of a long dead fire sorcerer into the boiling river.

“Useless!” The soundless scream tore a hole in his chest cavity.

The bone of his last sacrificial host popped in the fiery liquid before the river consumed every trace. The Druid’s magic had empowered the man to travel between a future world and the island, but the weakling sorcerer wasn’t strong enough for WindWraith’s ancient spirit. The moment his soul invaded the fire sorcerer, he knew the sorcerer missed a necessary element of nature. The body had thrust WindWraith out faster than blood from a heart wound. It took a month for WindWraith to recover the energy he expended...even after absorbing the other magical elements from the weakling Druid. An hour to deplete the Druid’s power. Two hours of fire-eating pain before the Druid sorcerer passed out, never to awaken again.

WindWraith had stored those memories into the small container he managed to bring to the surface and not lose to the entrails of time. He howled a blustery, screaming laughter that swept through the cavern, wafted up to the pinpoint of light in the high ceiling.

Life would be different from this time forward. He may have found the perfect host body. Of a certainty, he had also discovered another method to absorb the power he needed from the crystals without the melting radiance.

Strength had found him at last.

Chapter 5

Morgan watched the nearly naked man scrutinize her from soaked boots to wet, stringy hair. His expression shifted from fear to concern then from lust to wariness. Her skin tingled where he touched her, and the intense need to lay her hands upon his broad chest overwhelmed her to distraction. Surreptitiously, she pinched her thigh, feeling the throb radiate down her leg, proof that she wasn’t dreaming...or dead. After all, she had foretold her death many moons ago.
Surely, the Afterlife didn’t include near drowning, did it?
Throwing her predicament into the refreshing sea winds, she boldly assessed the sorcerer who had haunted her awake twice that day.

Silent, he traded stares with her, his square jaw tensing in an arrogant sun-bronzed face. Moisture clung to his forehead and cheeks, glistening in the sunlight beaming from a sky so clear and blue one would think she had indeed died and gone to the Afterlife. The man’s strong, golden body hovering over her heated up her water-chilled flesh. Magic radiated from his warm hands, almost becoming one with her, a spark frolicking with her fire element. She had no doubt—he was real and her dreams had sprouted to life. Was he the Druid assassin Gwilym had mentioned? Is that why she dreamed of him?
Holy Mother of Satan.

The magnitude of this new reality set her heart racing again. Her head fell upon the damp sand. Her life had ceased to exist on Avalon and begun anew on a nameless, deserted island. Deserted, except for an unknown sorcerer—possible assassin—who appeared ready to pick her up and toss her back into the sea. Deserted, except for the world’s oldest and nastiest Fomorian she had to hunt down and slay before it stole the powerful magic from her body and left her carcass for hungry island beasts.

As the sorcerer leaned over her, his vivid blue gaze flitted from her mouth to her eyes. “Are you okay? Did you hit your head on the rocks?” Lyrical and cultured, his deep voice held an odd accent, yet it echoed in her head with a pleasant cadence.

Despite his lovely voice, her head throbbed maddeningly. She recalled thrashing her forehead against a tree branch in her frenzied dash through the woods. Even the ache of traveling through space left a gnawing cavity in her entire being as though parts of her body hadn’t fully aligned. Goddess alive, her insane notions made her sound like a human puzzle.

Wincing, Morgan scraped sandy, sodden hair off her face. She rubbed her temple, feeling a growing lump and the slow seep of thick, warm liquid. She eyed the crimson stain on her fingers. “I am well enough. Thank you.”

The fair-haired man muttered an oath, brushed her hair aside to inspect her injury. Careful not to touch the scraped skin, he examined the rest of her head, gently sifting through strands of hair.