Trick Of Light by Mary Calmes
ONE
Iwas dozing.
“Jackson,” Cielo Jones, my partner, scolded me in a whisper at the same time something bounced off my chest.
Opening my eyes to slits, checking the floor at my feet, I saw the yellow highlighter. He was trying really hard to look all serious and professional, but there were doodles all over his notepad. Clearly, he was just as bored as I was.
Glancing at the speaker on my desk, making sure the red button was on so I knew it was muted, I picked up the yellow highlighter in my lap and tossed it back at him. I didn’t fling it because I was a warder and far stronger than an average man. I was powerful enough to fight demons and all other creatures from the pit. I didn’t want to accidentally put the highlighter through one of my best friends in the entire world.
“You could have killed me with that,” he grumbled, knowing I could, one of the few people who knew my secret, but also that I would never hurt him. He was the first person I’d ever trusted outside of the clutch of warders that were my family.
“Yes,” I agreed. “But that’s why I lobbed it at you and didn’t hurl it like a shuriken,” I replied snidely.
“Are you still with me, gentlemen?” the CEO of Orion Security asked us.
Cielo quickly unmuted the speaker. “Yes, sir, we’re very interested in hearing more about your offer, and again, we appreciate your interest in acquiring our company.”
Cielo and I ran a small security company in San Francisco. We were a full-service provider and did everything from sending bodyguards out to physically watch over people, to Cielo, a white-hat hacker, one of the few on the NSA’s “good list,” making sure that nothing and no one on the internet could hurt them. That, of course, was relative. Gossip and cyberbullying could still be painful, but we could track it back to your door, which made us better than average. What made us really scary was that, given my paranormal proclivities, I could show up in the bad guy’s living room in Budapest out of thin air. Well, out of a swirling vortex of ice and wind that was the warders’ wormhole equivalent, but it was still impressive. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to use my warder powers to fight anything but demonic evil, but stalking or scaring someone, simply because you could, fell into my evil column.
We also helped clients disappear into the ether if whoever was destroying their lives was far too toxic for regular law enforcement to take care of. We took sons and daughters to rehab, watched over children, and supplied muscle physically, emotionally, and mentally. We even saved a hundred cats once, some that had been stolen from backyards and front porches, from being delivered to a pharmaceutical company that wanted them for research. Our client’s daughter was being chased in a truck loaded with the retrieved cats and kittens, and she had several black SUVs trailing her onto the freeway. Terrified more for the cats than for herself, she made a frantic call to her father, who, just as terrified, called us. He didn’t want her to go to jail, but he couldn’t ask her to surrender the animals either. They ran a rescue; it simply wasn’t possible.
Directing her to one of our many facilities, this one in Burlingame, she drove directly into our garage, and we closed the door behind her. A security detail from the research facility—all in black and packing some serious firepower—came to the door, but the issue was, there was no way to breach our building. When one of our people went out and asked them for a warrant—pretending not to know they weren’t the police—he then pointed out that if they wanted to come in, they had to get one. The thing was, yes, they probably had a whole fleet of lawyers at their disposal and could have taken our client, and us, to court, but that would take time. Since there was no crime that law enforcement had been called about, even if anyone did return, by that time there would be no truck to find and certainly no kittens. We didn’t have a vehicle elevator and an underground tunnel for nothing. It was going to be a clusterfuck if they ended up reporting it, so they left having failed, and didn’t come back.
Our company was a good one, though we skirted the law on many occasions. No one had a better reputation than us, and when Orion lost three consecutive bids to us, which we’d won not on price, but on commitment and quality, it was not a surprise when they came knocking. As we were growing beyond our means—our people needed to be able to work on many fronts at once, which required more space than we currently had—Cielo had thought to take a meeting based not on selling our business, but on a partnership agreement. We would retain our autonomy and acquire their infrastructure. And it turned out that was smart because if I was hearing what I thought I was—and again, I was, in fact, fading in and out—then they wanted us to stay.
My phone pinged with a message, and when I checked, it was from my friend and fellow warder, Ryan Dean. All it said was: Meeting now with Jael.
Reaching out to mute the speaker, I looked at Cielo. “I have to see my sentinel,” I said, instead of the man’s name so my friend would know it was vital.
He nodded. “I’ll take care of it. Just, if you have to go somewhere, leave from here.” He gestured around, letting me know he meant not the room or our offices, but San Francisco. “And I need you to let me know. You can’t disappear. You promised.”
“Of course,” I replied softly, soothing him. “But it’s not like that. I’m sure it’s not like that.”
“We’ll see,” was all he said.
An hour later,I was watching Leith Haas pace. Since out of all of us, he was the logical one, the unflappable one, the one who never, ever showed his emotions to anyone but his hearth, it scared me. I kept one eye on him and one on my sentinel, Jael Ezran.
“Tell me again,” Marcus said slowly, looking at Malic Sunden, another of the four warders in my clutch of five.
We were in Jael’s house on this chilly February afternoon, all of us trying to make sense of the strangeness. And normally it would not have been a problem, which in and of itself was impressive, considering what we did. We were all used to frightening life-and-death supernatural occurrences that would send most people to a room lined in rubber. But we were warders who protected our city, five of us and our leader, our sentinel, who watched over us like a father and big brother and teacher all rolled into one. We were built to handle external nightmares we needed to protect innocent people from. This, however, was not that. This was insidious, a cancer that had been growing inside, right under our noses, that we’d all missed until now.
“Malic?”
Malic looked pained, and I saw it clearly in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders and the furrow of his brows.
“It’s not your fault,” Dylan told him again, having said it, I was certain, a million times in the last few days. His head was leaning against one of Malic’s massive shoulders, and he was holding his hand tightly. I saw the engagement ring on Dylan’s finger, the chunk of diamond Malic had given him almost two months ago, and I thought, as I had the first time I saw it, that no one could ever miss that Dylan Shaw was taken. It was gaudy and expensive and a gesture I would have never thought my fellow warder capable of. But it turned out that Malic Sunden was a big marshmallow for his hearth, the man he loved. As always, looking at them, I was struck by the contrast of the two. Malic was a mountain of hard, chiseled muscle, while Dylan was as delicate and fragile as a bird. They could not be more different, yet no one could miss the love, right there, living, breathing, between them. They were supposed to be married in April, but given what was happening now, I was guessing the big day was going to have to wait.
“It never occurred to me that you would, or could, be attacked, and that barring that…” Malic broke off, clearly distraught.
“That anyone, or anything, would go after my friends,” Dylan finished for him.
“Yes,” Malic croaked out.
They were quiet a moment, doing that communing thing couples did.
“Love,” Dylan said, “how could you have foreseen any of this?”
“If I’d never pulled you into—”
“Don’t say that to me again,” Dylan snapped, adamant. He was heartbroken, yet still trying to soothe the hurt he saw in his warder and future husband. I was touched just bearing witness. I could only imagine how Malic must feel. “You’re my love and my blessing, so please, let’s not second-guess. Let’s just deal with what happened.”
“How can you be so calm?” Malic asked, his voice breaking. He ran his hands through Dylan’s thick chestnut curls, pushing the hair back from his face so he could gaze into the big, warm brown eyes.
“Because now we have to focus our efforts on finding out what happened, and why and how we can prevent any further attacks. That’s the important thing; that’s the only thing we should be focusing on.”
Malic nodded quickly.
“Whoever did this, they meant to hurt me, which in turn hurts you. And it’s about all the warders and their hearths, not just us.”
We all understood what he meant.
It had all started when Dylan was out with his friends. They had crossed a street from where they’d been out dancing in SOMA and taken a shortcut down an alley. It was a blur of claws and teeth after that. The only thing Dylan could recall was that he’d been screaming with his back against the side of a building and his hands out in front of him. Anything that bumped against him shrieked in agony even as they left bruises and scratches on Dylan’s face, chest, and arms. The branding touch of a warder’s hearth had saved him, but his friends were not so fortunate. All three had been eviscerated, and throughout the attack, the demons, which looked to Dylan like a cross between snakes and men, had shrieked his name. He’d tried to move, to reach any of his friends, but the demons’ power, even when unable to touch him, had held him in place. By the time the assault was over and he’d managed to call Malic, Dylan was nearly catatonic.
When the murders hit the news, it was blamed on junkies hopped up on PCP. Dylan had gone to the three funerals, and people treating him like a hero for trying to save the others had created survivor’s guilt in him that was hard to bear. The only thing that got through to him was Malic’s remorse. Malic blamed himself, and Dylan wasn’t about to have that.
A month later, Dylan was upstairs alone one day when he’d let out a high-pitched wail that brought Malic from the first floor to the attic faster than humanly possible. He’d found his hearth in shock and tears, trembling as he held in his hands a photo album of his lost friends, but instead of sadness, Malic was faced with anger. Only later, when we were all together, did Malic find out why.
“We’re going to find out who did this,”Dylan had told all of us, “and we’re going to make them pay.”
There were no more tears after that.
“Tell me again,” Julian Nash, Ryan Dean’s hearth, prodded Malic.
I watched Malic swallow hard, and then he cleared his throat. “I’ve been all over that alley.” He coughed softly. “I checked it that day before the police arrived, and I’ve checked it since, and the only trace of anything out of the ordinary is the smell of perfume.”
“And when he told me that,” Marcus chimed in, “I went with him, and as soon as I walked down to where Dylan was attacked, that perfume hit me, triggering a scent memory. It reminded me of this strange whiff I caught before I fell through the dimensional door the night I got lost.”
None of us had been there to see Marcus fall—that was the sacrifice he’d made at the time, to stand and fight so that the rest of us could get to safety, but none of us could ever forget the moment when we felt the loss as keenly as though he’d died.
What had almost been harder was knowing that he was, in fact, alive—we just didn’t know where. There were infinite hell dimensions, and locating him was completely beyond our capability, our sentinel’s, or the entire Labarum that governed all warders. He was gone for close to a year, all of us knowing he was somewhere, breathing, because his hearth, Joseph Locke, lived in a house that retained the seal of his warder, shielded against demons, and he himself was still in possession of the branding touch.
Any human loved by a warder became imbued with the power to scald a creature from the pit with even the brush of their hand. No paranormal entity could breach the home of a warder; it was protected against any and all non-human intruders. As long as a hearth was loved and shared a home with their warder, the domicile itself was a sanctuary, and the mate of a warder could protect themselves.
So Joe had known, as we all had, that Marcus was among the living, just not anywhere we could reach him. When he’d returned, thanks to my mate, we were overjoyed.
“You’re saying that the scent from the night you were dropped into hell is the same one that’s lingering in that alley?” Leith asked Marcus.
“Yes. And as soon as it hit me, I remembered it.”
“And you think it was…what?”
“I told you,” Marcus replied solemnly. “I think it’s Moira. I think that’s her particular scent, her signature if you want to call it that, and once she manifests in a certain place, it takes a long time for the smell to dissipate.”
“We were all so blind,” Malic told him. “It all started with—”
“Me,” Leith growled at him. “Fuck, Malic, don’t you think I know?”
And Malic combusted, as he’d been poised to do over the terror of nearly losing Dylan and the certainty that he’d failed him when his friends died. He flew across the room, grabbed Leith, and drove him back hard into one of the walls. “You should have checked when you and Ry went back and burned the club to the ground. You should have known Moira wasn’t dead!”
But they were talking about ancient history, before Dylan and Malic were even engaged, moments before Marcus had been lost for nearly a year. They were dredging up events that we all were forced to react to in an instant.
“It’s not his fault,” Ryan yelled at Malic, hurling his body between them. “If you want to hurt someone, Malic, hurt me! I’m the one who thought I killed her!”
“We all thought you killed her!” Marcus shouted, diving into the brawl, big enough and strong enough to separate them, shove them back, putting himself at the center as he always did. “I saw it. We all saw it. But when you went back after, what did you see? I wasn’t there, so I don’t know. I’m relying on you guys, on your memories.”
Ryan’s face scrunched up in pain as he shook his head. “I don’t remember. It was so long ago, and… I can’t recall seeing her or anyone else. I don’t remember there being anything but the debris of the building itself.”
The club, from what Ryan and Leith had reported back, had been mostly burned. They had finished the job and then razed it to the ground.
Marcus rounded on Leith. “Did you, or did you not, find the white ashes that would tell you a blood witch had died? I know there was no body, no bones, but were there ashes?”
There was a silence then as we waited.
“I don’t know,” Leith rasped, shaking his head, and I saw it then, on his face, the pain etched there, that he was the weak link. “I was so angry…because of you.”
Marcus nodded, reached for him, and because it was him and only him, Leith let the hand slip around the back of his neck, allowed the bigger man to draw him close. None of us, myself included, ever pushed Marcus away. It just wasn’t possible.
“It was crazy,” Ryan told Marcus. “I went with Leith, and I don’t remember anything except wanting to kill whatever we found. I was furious…wrathful…and that’s all I was.”
“You assumed,” I said, the first words I’d spoken since I walked in with my mate, Raphael Caliva, two hours before. “You assumed it was Moira who attacked you.”
“Yes,” Ryan husked, his eyes red and raw as he stared at me.
“But you didn’t know for certain; you’d never seen her before.”
Ryan nodded quickly.
“So the woman, creature, that tried to kill you could have simply been a demon sent in her place while the real Moira looked on.”
They were all staring at me now, and I felt my mate’s hand slide between my shoulder blades for comfort.
“You knew Moira was there, in town, because Raph tracked her that far from here, from the city, but he’s the only one of us who knows what she actually looks like.”
“Jesus, that’s right,” Malic gasped, shaken.
“None of us had any way of knowing who, or what, we were fighting,” Marcus summed up with a sigh, as Joe, his hearth, stepped in beside him. Instantly Marcus clutched the smaller man close, just holding him helping to ease his tension. “I assumed Moira would be the one coming at me. It made sense that it would be her, but I never got an answer. Whoever that was never said yes, it’s me. She didn’t do anything but try and gut me.”
Joe trembled, and Marcus gave him a reassuring squeeze, as if to remind his hearth that he was alive and well, that Joe hadn’t lost him.
“When Ryan cut off her head,” Marcus continued, “I assumed the same thing you all did—that she was dead and gone.”
“Yeah,” Malic said, “but you didn’t actually know if it was her or not. You couldn’t say for sure.”
“No. Ryan cut the head off a creature I thought was Moira. I saw him with my own eyes, and she had spoken to me not moments before.”
“But you didn’t really know who you were looking at,” Malic stressed.
“No. You’re right. All we had to go on was what we saw during the fight. To me, to all of you, it looked like the witch was dead, and Shane, Joe’s old friend, the warder, had his memory washed, so he couldn’t corroborate anything either.”
Leith nodded in agreement. “And then, of course, there was a fire.”
We had fought a demon and his minions over a hell dimension, and after Malic was hurt and Leith had to help get him home through a portal, there was only me, Marcus, and Ryan left. We’d done our best, but there were so many creatures, wave after wave of them, and when we were overrun, Marcus, with his great strength, had lifted all three of us high off the floor, near the ceiling, in a move that only he could manage. Ryan’s power, like Leith’s, was in the portal, which took him and me home to safety. Marcus had fallen through the dimensional door, and we’d thought, at the time, that he was lost forever. It took almost a year, but he was finally restored.
“When I killed who I thought was Moira, whether it was her or not, a warder void should have opened and sucked the body through the wormhole and scattered the remains throughout all the planes of hell so the demon, or witch, couldn’t regenerate.”
The void always appeared; it was how we killed demons without raising questions. If there were bodies lying around, it would be hard to keep the warding under wraps.
“Thinking back, I don’t remember if it appeared or not,” Ryan confessed. “I was so focused on other things, on fighting, on finally having killed our enemy, and then on trying to stay alive when the demons surged through the door, that now—”
“Now we don’t know,” Marcus concluded.
“And afterward, when we went back to look through the rubble, after the fire died out, there wasn’t a body in the debris for Raph to look at, and I don’t remember seeing any ash that was different from all the rest,” Leith said miserably.
“Christ,” Malic groaned, “what a fuckin’ mess.”
“Everyone sit down.” Jael’s voice filled the room, and we did as we were told, unable, from years of listening to him—he was our sentinel after all—not to heed any and all of his directions. We sat in twos in his living room, each hearth with his warder, everyone looking up at our sentinel and the stunning woman who joined him, his fiancée, Deidre Macauley, a sentinel from Scotland.
“Let us take stock,” she said, taking a breath, and so, following her lead, we all did as well. It was good, just that moment of calm, of clarity. We’d found out in the last few months that she had a surprisingly soothing effect on all of us, and her smile showed she was pleased with us listening. “So Moira, mate of the demon lord Saudrian that Raph killed, is still very much alive. For whatever reason, probably because his hearth is the youngest, she came after Malic first. But what we need to remember here, is that for her to be in our home—and by that, I’m referring to this plane—means she’s either cast an extremely powerful spell, which, having crossed paths with her many times in the past, I would not have thought her capable of, or some other force is at work.”
“What do you mean by other force?” Dylan asked her. “Like some kind of power?”
“Like some kind of demon,” Raphael corrected him. “She means that a stronger entity has backed Moira’s play to come after this clutch.”
Not a sound in the room.
“What makes you think it’s a demon?” Jael inquired, staring at his fiancée.
“Look at the facts, Jael,” she said solemnly. “To step through a dimensional rift, kill, and then leave nothing behind but a lingering scent? To leave no trace for a warder to follow? That’s powerful magic. Think now: nothing born from the pit has that kind of power.”
He appeared startled. “You think we’re dealing with one of the fallen?”
“Even Saudrian couldn’t cross planes without leaving a residue. Isn’t that so, Raph?”
Raphael nodded. “That’s how I tracked him, and it’s the same way I found Marcus. There’s a signature you can see and feel, and now, in Moira’s case, smell.”
“So this demon or fallen,” Jael said, “they opened a door, allowed her to kill with whatever minion she had with her, and then sealed the rift.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Deidre said. “Moira is a blunt instrument. The creature I know enjoys inflicting pain quickly, gratuitously, meaning that she would have come after you all again and again after failing when you lost Marcus. And that, in and of itself, would have been a wasted opportunity.”
“What do you mean?” Marcus asked.
“I mean, why not kill you when you were alone and vulnerable in a hell dimension? It would have been so easy.”
He nodded in agreement.
“I suspect that whoever is behind this talked her into allowing you to live so that you’re lulled into a false sense of safety. She could have her true revenge now, in this moment.”
“But who hates us besides her?” Leith threw out. “We don’t have these kinds of mortal enemies with long, drawn-out plans of revenge. We play Whac-A-Mole with the demons we fight. They’re here to hunt or possess humans, without any large-scale plans of world domination.”
“That you know of,” Deidre cautioned him, “which I think is the point. Whatever this is, you would have never seen it coming if Moira hadn’t tripped up and left behind her calling card of a scent. You put it together because she made a mistake and got you all thinking about what everyone did, or as it turns out, didn’t, see.”
“If she did, in fact, mess up as you say she did,” Joe chimed in, leaning into Marcus’s side, “then perhaps she herself is next on the chopping block.”
Deidre nodded. “That’s exactly what I was thinking. I’ll bet you she’s either already dead or will soon be.”
“How did Moira even know who I was?” Dylan asked Deidre. “I moved in with Malic before Raph killed Saudrian. I wasn’t on her radar, just like Julian wouldn’t have been. She wasn’t even aware of the clutch until Raph killed Saudrian.”
“True. But I’m sure she circled back once Raph, and all of you, had her attention. Clearly, she’s either had someone watching the clutch or she’s been doing it herself.”
That made sense.
“And ostensibly, she wants vengeance—or that’s what this entity that’s using her thirst for revenge would have you believe.”
“Oh, I have no doubt she wants us all dead,” Jael affirmed. “She wants the clutch destroyed, and then with all of us gone, she would come for Raph, who was the one actually responsible for Saudrian’s demise.”
“You’re saying come for, but you mean kill,” Ryan clarified. “Her main objective here is not to kidnap him or something.”
“She would never come for Raph,” Deidre corrected him. “Why would she engage with the kyrie who killed her mate and almost had her? That’s madness. It’s far easier to take Jackson, imprison him somewhere, and then watch Raph’s life force slowly drain.”
“You lost me,” Malic said.
Her brows furrowed as she regarded him. “If she kills Jackson, Raph will soon follow, and by the slowness of it, he’ll know what pain his mate is being made to endure.”
“What?” I husked, the very idea of the man I loved dying because of what was happening to me, done to me, making my stomach twist into a tight, painful knot. “I don’t—what’re you talking about?”
She looked confused. “Surely you know that a kyrie, bound to a human, should that individual die, so will they. What did you think it meant when you ingested his blood when you first claimed him?”
I’d thought what he’d told me. That if it didn’t work, if he wasn’t supposed to be mine, he’d bleed to death right there in front of me. The fact that he’d kept this new little tidbit from me for the entirety of our relationship was a horrible betrayal of trust.
The room was scary quiet, and as a group we rarely were.
When I looked at my mate, I found him very interested in the rug under the toe of his hiking boot. “Why in the world have you never told me this before?” I asked breathlessly, unable to get any power into my voice.
Nothing.
“Look at me,” I whispered roughly, feeling hollow and cold down to my core.
He turned his head slowly, his eyes flicking to mine.
“You sonofabitch,” I swore, having gone from unsure to furious in seconds.
He pressed his lips together tightly.
“If I die, you die?”
He cleared his throat. “I—”
“Why would you do that?” I ground out the words, utterly wrecked. “Why would you bind yourself to me when I’m human and you’re…you’re… This makes no—”
“It makes perfect sense,” Raphael said hoarsely, swallowing hard. “I refuse to live without you. Ever. Period. End of discussion. Before you, there was nothing. You can’t let me see the sky and then expect me to return to the cave.”
“Great speech,” I choked out.
“Don’t be like that,” he muttered, sounding hurt.
“Raph—”
“It can’t be undone, even if you prefer that it could. You’re my one shot at happiness. If you die—or stop loving me, because that would be the same—I’ll cease to be, simple as that.”
No pressure. God.
It was all suddenly too much. The cold room, all the eyes full of pity, and the overwhelming burden of having his life in my hands.
I got up fast and charged across the room to the door that led onto Jael’s enormous deck overlooking a cliff above the Pacific Ocean. I hurled open the French door, slammed it behind me, and stormed to the railing, holding on to it as tight as I could. I wanted to jump, to see if I could leap all the way to the ocean, but instead I just stood there, shaking with fear and anger. It was chilly outside, but still, it took me several moments to even become aware of the moist bite of the salty sea air.
“Jacks.”
I didn’t turn to look at him.
“Love.”
I felt the muscles in my jaw clench, the sting behind my eyes.
“It’s freezing out here.”
It wasn’t, not to me, and I was far more susceptible to wintry temperatures than he was. Being a kyrie, he was far stronger than me in every area, certainly in tolerance to wind.
“I could go get your trench coat from the car.”
Normally, I wouldn’t have gone outside without it in the winter, and would have thanked him for being thoughtful, but since my plan was never to speak to him again for as long as I lived, I remained silent.
“Or just come back inside.”
I stared at the roiling ocean instead of saying a word.
“Please, Jackson.”
I shivered in the wind because yes, it was February in Northern California, so I was, in fact, on my way to being cold. Not like it had been growing up in Tennessee, but still, biting.
“You’re gonna freeze out here.”
“Hardly,” I growled, annoyed that I’d responded.
“I want you inside where it’s warm.”
I turned to look at him, taking in his dark bronze skin, his perfectly shaped glossy brows, burnished topaz eyes, and the full lips curving into a wicked smile. His thick, wavy brown hair was being tousled in the frigid breeze, and I noticed how tight the Henley he was wearing was stretched across his wide shoulders and broad, muscular chest. Sometimes it hurt to look at him. And he was beautiful, yes, but more than that, he was mine.
“You love me, right?”
I squinted at him.
“Answer,” he prodded, brows furrowing as he stared at me.
“You know I do,” I snapped back, hoping my anger wasn’t lost on him.
“Don’t sound so happy about it,” he groused, scowling for good measure.
“I’m not happy!” I railed, frustrated and hurt and generally pissed off. “Because now I know that if I get hit by a truck tomorrow, somewhere across town you’ll fall to your knees and what? Like, three days later, you’ll just be fuckin’ dead?” I couldn’t think of anything worse than losing him. But then I wouldn’t actually be losing him because I’d already be gone. And of course, given a choice, I would die before him in a heartbeat. The idea of outliving him was something I couldn’t even fathom at this point. But by the same token, knowing he was right behind me, my last thought before I checked out, was not comforting in any way.
“Jackson?”
“I would rather you live, Raph,” I rasped, my throat tightening as I imagined him gone.
“Yeah, but I don’t want that,” he told me, closing the distance between us, not stopping until he had his hands on my face, his eyes locked on mine. “We’re together, you and me. Wherever you go, I follow, and that’s how it is. I will never be parted from you, and you knew that from the jump.”
“No, I—”
“Before you, like I said before, I had nothing. I’m not going back to that. I won’t. You claimed me, I’m yours, end of discussion, so…what the fuck, Jackson?”
What? My hackles went up instantly. “Oh no. No, no, no. You don’t get to turn this around on me and be mad. I’m the one who’s fuckin’ mad!”
“What’re you pissed about? The fact that we’re tied together even tighter, even more permanently than you thought?”
“How dare you assume I’d be upset about that, and how dare you be outraged? I’m the one who’s fuckin’ pissed off and—”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“Oh, for crissakes, I— I just— I can’t even imagine anything happening to you or—”
“And I feel the same,” he stressed, his voice harsh, urgent, vibrating with need for me to hear him and understand. And just below that, there was dread, so thick that I could feel it like a damp blanket of fog wrapping around us. “So please don’t— You can’t use this as a reason to—”
“Shut up,” I growled at him, and the surprise of me being annoyed cut through his distress, his second-guessing of himself, of us, of what had been, and brought him back to the present. “I married you. If I was gonna have second thoughts, I would’ve had them already.”
He didn’t look convinced in the least.
“Do you doubt me or the vow I made?”
His gaze remained locked with mine.
“Do you?” I pressed him.
“No,” he husked.
“Do you have faith in me?”
“Yes. Always.”
“Then?” I rumbled out, waiting.
His grunt told me I had him.
Joe and Marcus had been married last August, a month after Marcus returned to us. It had been a lavish affair, here in Jael’s home.
Malic and Dylan were supposed to get married in April. Of all the horrors I could think of, that would be at the top of my list. Jesus, I’d rather have a root canal than have a wedding. I had no idea what was going to happen with that now, in the face of the new discovery, but I suspected it would go on come hell or high water. Things like birdseed in heart containers and candles with glitter in them had been ordered, after all.
Leith and Simon had medium-sized plans for the fall, somewhere between Halloween and Thanksgiving, that involved Half Moon Bay and standing on a cliff while they spoke their vows. Apparently, Simon had an enormous extended family as well. I had offered to help shuttle people to and from the airport and the hotel. It sounded horrific, and all I was doing was picking up and dropping off.
Ryan and Julian were getting married on December first of this year, and engraved invitations in envelopes so sturdy they could have doubled as a fashionable clutch had gone out last month. When we got ours, Raphael took everything out of it—the map, the RSVP card, the actual invitation envelope that went in, the tissue paper, the invitation itself, the card with the name of the hotel and the name the reservations would be under since Ryan had reserved a block of rooms—and stared at it all spread out on the table.
“There’s glitter on this,” Raphael commented, rubbing the surface as gold snowflakes fell like real ones onto our cherrywood table.
“Get a garbage bag.”
“You know,” Raphael said, testing the weight of the envelope that had been sent inside the heavy-duty cardboard outer one, “I bet you I could wing this at somebody, and with the right momentum, take an eye out.”
“An eye?” I was incredulous. “For fuck’s sake, Raph, you could kill someone with that.”
He shrugged like yes, possibly.
It was horrifying. And yes, to each their own. I had no problem with whatever kind of ceremony anybody wanted, but for me, the smaller the better. Thankfully, Raphael was of the same mind.
We, Raphael and I, didn’t want a fuss.
The two of us had gone to the justice of the peace and gotten married, and it was over and done in fifteen minutes. Forgeries had been made—my partner, Cielo Jones, knew who to contact. A fake social security card, a fake birth certificate, and now Raphael had credentials like a driver’s license and a passport that other kyries had neither a need for nor an interest in. There wouldn’t have been a reason for all that, but Raphael wanted to be the first one called in case of a normal human emergency and be able, here, in my world, to act. We didn’t tell anyone but Cielo, who was our witness. Since in our day-to-day Raphael used a sword, as did I, plus he worked construction, while I, being in security, had to punch people on occasion, we’d opted for heavy solid silver bracelets in lieu of rings. They were oval, conformed comfortably to our wrists, and even with soap or grease or whatever else, could not be removed. Raphael had them forged on another plane—apparently the kyrie I loved knew about this dimension where rings, bracelets, earrings, and chains could be made in pairs, and once put on, they were permanent. When we got home from city hall, we’d sat in our living room and exchanged them. I put mine on and watched it shrink before my eyes, fitting my wrist. It was strange, but when I walked, it fell easily over the bone in my left wrist, yet if I tried to take it off, or if anyone else did, suddenly I could feel it pressed tight against my skin. Raphael’s was the same.
I said they were enchanted.
Raphael preferred the word cursed.
Either way, my hand would need to be amputated to extract the token of my mate’s undying devotion. No one I knew, and none of the warders in my clutch, had given the bangle a second look, which was exactly what we wanted. Eventually we’d tell them, but it wasn’t necessary at the moment.
“Listen,” I grumbled at him, back in the present. “I love you, and I plan to keep you, but the fact of the matter is that you’re going to outlive me and—”
“No,” he growled, grabbing my bicep and dragging me around the side of the house, still on the deck but not where anyone could see us. “I will age right along with you. When you’re old and wrinkled, I will be too. I just won’t lose my sight or my hearing or—”
“Okay, okay, I get it,” I conceded as he knocked me back gently into the wall.
“I will remain here on this plane as long as you, Jackson, and not a moment longer.”
I threw up my hands in defeat because really, arguing with him accomplished squat.
“It’s romantic, yes?”
“It’s psychotic,” I assured him.
He arched one of those gorgeous brows of his and gave me a lethal, sexy grin that basically turned my brain to mush. “It’s devotion,” he murmured, leaning in and taking my mouth in a mauling kiss.
Jesus.
Every time it was the same. With his kiss came a feeling of rightness that rolled through me, spreading heat and desire in its wake, making me want to grab him and keep him close. Once upon a time, before him, I thought I’d been in love. When my boyfriend left me for another, I was gutted. But it turned out, I was on a different path I’d never anticipated.
With Raphael, the epiphany was not some bolt from the blue, but instead the easy, simple, remarkably obvious revelation that I loved him, heart and soul. Raphael, it turned out, was the one for me. Which didn’t mean he didn’t drive me insane on occasion. Our house in Potrero Hill wasn’t big at twenty-five hundred square feet, but since my loft had been half that, it felt like a castle when we moved in. It had been newly remodeled, had an open floor plan, and the best part, to Raphael, was that it was gated. He was amazed at the thought that on one side it was public domain and on the other his alone. Having never had anything that belonged solely to him, he guarded our home with almost the same intensity he guarded me. He was also, surprisingly, a neat freak. And he was insane about coaster usage. We fought and yelled, sometimes a lot or about really stupid crap, and we both complained about whose turn it was to cook. Taken as a whole, it was good. Friends as well as lovers, we never took each other so seriously that we couldn’t laugh. It was, we discovered, the most important thing.
“Tell me,” Raphael demanded, his hands sliding down my sides, beneath the blazer, to my tucked-in dress shirt. He tugged on it quickly, and then I had hard, callused fingers skimming over my skin, the small of my back, my hips, and across my stomach.
I pressed forward, jolting as a digit traced the top of my crease. “Don’t,” I warned him. “I won’t be able to focus on the rest of everything if you get me too hot to think.”
“Then tell me,” he rasped, kissing along my jaw, yanking my shirt to the side, baring the skin and delivering the bite where my neck met my shoulder. His canines pierced deep, but somehow, however it worked with kyries and their mates, there was no pain, only my thrall to him and the taking of my blood. I shivered in his grasp, hands holding me still as he drank from me. He needed it sometimes if he exerted too much energy—he was a kyrie after all, and the nourishment was welcome, but it tethered us as well. He only ever drank from me. Because we were bonded, I was the only one he could take blood from. And I had noticed lately that he was taking it almost daily. Normally it was just a sip, part of sex, until now.
“What––” I gasped. “––do you want to hear?”
He didn’t answer, instead working my belt open, then the button of my jeans and the zipper.
“Raph, we need to go back in and—”
“In a second,” he said gruffly, sliding a hand under the elastic waistband of my briefs and wrapping cold fingers around my already thickening cock.
“Raph,” I moaned, and I suddenly felt his tongue, licking, soothing the wounded skin, and would have fallen on my ass if he didn’t grab and kiss me.
One hand cradled the back of my head, the other milked my cock, and I could taste the blood in his hot, wet mouth. Any second now I would surrender right there, not caring who saw, who knew, just wanting to give myself to my man.
He smiled as he broke the kiss, panting, resting his forehead against mine. “When I take your blood, it feeds every part of me. You know that, right?”
I tried to catch my breath as I nodded.
“I love that you give yourself to me, that you trust me. You’re the only one who ever has, who ever will. It’s why there’s no way I’m staying here without you. It could never happen.”
“Raph…”
He turned me around to face the wall, pressing my cheek there as he shucked my pants and briefs to my knees. “Stay,” he ordered roughly, and I heard the hunger in his voice that was always there, that never left, because I was solely his.
“We can’t just…oh,” I husked as two slippery fingers pushed into my ass. “I see—fuck—that you’re still carrying lube around.”
No answer, just him screwing, drilling his fingers inside me, curling them forward, making me thrash and twitch on the wall before pushing back, trying to get those long, thick digits of his in deeper.
“Hurry,” I begged him, too far gone to do anything but.
The head of his cock was at my entrance for only a second before he pressed inside, breaching me slow but steady, filling me, stretching me, the pain as razor sharp as the pleasure, nearly unbearable until my muscles gave all at once and he slid to the root, his groin flush with my ass. He gave me a moment, a heartbeat of time to breathe, to get my bearings, to adjust to being impaled.
Sometimes I forgot that I lived with a supernatural being and not a man. I was reminded, most often, when he took me.
Without him pulling out, I was yanked off the wall, turned, and bent over, his snarl at me to grab hold the only thing that kept me from rapping my head on the wooden railing.
I clutched it as he withdrew, only to thrust back into me, shoving forward, lifting me to my toes. My shoulders, now held with claws instead of hands, were easily pierced through my jacket and shirt. The jolt of pain made me buck in his hold, push back against him, driving him deeper inside. A claw tangled in my hair, fisted and yanked, bowing my back, lifting my ass, so that pinned there, immobile, he could pound into me, over and over, the rhythm hard and fast, unbreaking, unrelenting, savage.
I rode his thirst for me, his insatiable need that sent heated blood searing through his veins, the possessiveness that demanded that whenever he got scared of losing me, his base animal response was to have me in the most primal way.
I belonged to him, and he would show me.
With most other lovers, I had topped. When I didn’t, I had to have my cock held and worked so I could come. But with Raphael, something about his dominance and my submission, about how he held me, leaving bruises, marks, and sometimes even more damage, drowned out everything else in my head and sent me hurtling toward my release. He was seconds behind me, and we were left panting, him draped over my back, nuzzling his face into the side of my neck.
“We’re supposed to be in there with everybody else,” I muttered, still shivering with aftershocks, my body settling from the high of the give-and-take of sex.
“Stay out here. I’ll run to the car and grab your change of clothes.”
We were supposed to go to dinner with a friend of mine, Gene, who had just gotten engaged, but we were going to have to cancel. I had packed chinos, a long-sleeved shirt, and a cardigan in the car to change into before meeting his fiancée.
“I’ll freeze out here without you,” I assured him as he gently eased free of my body. I gasped at the emptiness, and his smug grunt made me growl.
“You didn’t want me to pull out,” he whispered, his hot breath on my ear and down the side of my neck causing a tremble I couldn’t hide. “Your muscles were holding on pretty damn tight.”
“Go to the car,” I snapped at him.
He rubbed his cheek and chin along my jaw, kissed my ear, my temple, and then turned my head to kiss me.
Impossible to be annoyed at a man who couldn’t keep his mouth and hands off me.
Of course he was cackling as he jumped up on the railing before vaulting up on the roof to walk to the front without anyone seeing. I pulled up my pants, uncomfortable with cum leaking from my ass and slowly dripping down the back of my thighs. I was so classy.
Settling with my back against the wall, I’d just put a finger through the hole in my suit jacket on my left shoulder, when there was throat clearing. Marcus.
“Just don’t,” I grumbled at him.
He scoffed. “You’re a classy guy, you know that?”
I groaned loudly, because Jesus, had I not just been thinking the same exact thing?
“We figured out some other stuff, so we need you two back—where is the other half of the wonder twins?”
“Here,” Raphael said, stepping off the edge of the roof and falling the twelve feet to the patio, landing, as he always did, on straight legs. No crouching necessary.
“That’s impressive,” Marcus said with a nod.
I made a gagging noise that time.
“We’ll be right in,” Raphael informed Marcus. “I just need to make him presentable.”
There was a moment of silence.
“That bite on the side of his neck,” Marcus said, gesturing to his own, “do you chew on him when you take his blood?”
“I suck,” Raphael answered with a leer, “really, really hard.”
“Oh God,” I moaned, hoping I was struck with a bolt of lightning and fried right there. Raphael and I would go out together and not have to face any more humiliation.
Marcus snorted. “I’ll see you two inside,” he said, chuckling, then added, “Shortly.”
“Yes,” Raphael agreed.
“Really?” I whined, pulling off my suit jacket, dropping it on the ground, and starting on the buttons of my shirt.
“What?” He shoved the bag at me, so I had to grab it as he stepped in close and took over the task of unbuttoning. “I think it’s important he knows my hunger for every part of you is boundless.”
I shook my head as he leaned in and kissed me. In moments, his hands were on my neck, holding on as I opened for him, and he ground his mouth over mine, the kiss becoming much more than it should have outside on the back deck of my sentinel’s home.
