Blakeshire (25 page)

I felt around the stone basin, looking for a knob or other obvious way to control this art. In the stones, there were large circles the size of saucers. It was easy to spin them, and before long I had all twelve of them off. Inside, I could
not only see the liquid, but smell a seemingly familiar chemical aroma. I didn’t want to touch it, but my curiosity was driving me mad.

Finally, I came to the obvious solution. With my energy, I called what was in the closest cylinder up. When the glow of the fire shined through the liquid, I could see a beautiful shade of lavender. Shocked by my discovery, my energy got away from me and the color moved against the water. The lavender swirled around the dome, creating one of the most beautiful scenes I had ever witnessed.

Curiously, I glanced at the jagged stone floor and walls; creativity struck me then. My energy swayed more of the color into the spring of water, then I guided the colored water to the stone floor and with my eyes I demanded the course I wanted the paint to flow. It looked so edgy, so sharp and unreal that I felt a high absorb my body. I always felt this way just as I lost control on my projects, just before I found a much-needed release.

I beckoned more colors out of their cylinders, had them merge with the spring, then guided them to the ridges on the floor. Curious about the other two basins that made up the triangle of these firewater lamps, I went to undo their lids, finding even more colors to play with.

Before long, every ridge in the floor and walls was marked with its own little valley of paint. I had moved this paint so fast, commanded so many streams of them that more than once I had managed to get in the path of them. Every color was across my bare skin, my tank top, and briefs. I loved the feeling of it, of being one with the art.

The room was no longer laced with royal conformity; it was alive with color, it had become living art. With a glance, I moved one of the rugs over to the floor that had dried almost instantly. I took a stance on that rug, then covered the gray stone floor with a mass of paint. I was far too eager this go around. The paint pooled. Wanting to use it, not to let it waste, I called the pool of color up. It rose up in the form of a small tornado as it spun in place. That high took over once
again. I made more pools of paint just so I could make more funnels of color. It reminded me of a clay pot shaping into some unseen beauty.

I found myself laughing and jumping in place as I managed to control four of them at once.

Somewhere in that madness, I felt fire bloom through my soul. My heart began to thunder long before I turned to glance over my shoulder. Standing just before my closed door was Drake. He had lost his suit jacket. His shirt was rolled up on his strong forearms, unbuttoned so I could see the undershirt he had on that shaped every part of his sculpted chest.

It was a wonder that my funnels of paint didn’t fall to the floor and wave over my feet.

I held his stare as he moved closer to me. I felt my breath catch as I forgot all of the doubt his absence had brought and I remembered our day together.

Still high on my creative flow, I demanded that some of the paint move to him, that it swirl around the perfection that he was. As it teased his approach, a wicked smile came to his lips. He didn’t stop his advance or dodge out of the way of the paint; he let it stain his priceless suit as if it were nothing more than rags.

When he reached me, he held my gaze as he seductively grasped for my neck. His hand slowly rose and pulled out the pin that was still holding my hair back in the proper way I had worn it to dinner. As the long, dark strands fell down my back, he pulled a lock of it forward and bathed it in the wet paint that had pooled near my collarbone. A breathtaking smile came to his image. “You found your paint.”

“Redecorated,” I said under my breath, hoping that he could not hear the thunder in my chest.

“Put us in our own world, Madison Marie,” he whispered as he leaned in and teased my bottom lip with the soft flesh of his. He playfully bit down, and when he did an explosion of passion erupted inside of me. As I pulled him closer to me, I demanded that the paint surround us as we stood on this irreplaceable rug.

I urged his shirt off, then pulled up his undershirt just so my lips could meet his chest. He sighed just before he reached down and picked me up, wrapping me around his body.

All around us, there was a curtain of paint; it was of every color. They never merged, holding fast to their originality as they shielded us in a breathtaking canopy.

I arched up around him, pulling his lips into a deep kiss. I felt his hands rush across my back. When he urged my tank up, I felt the paint on his hands caress my skin. Within the next heartbeat, we had fallen to the floor and the war of who was in control of this passionate embrace began. I would only give in when I needed my breath, when his touch was too enthralling to fight against. When he let me have control, I showed no mercy. I found every weakness on his body and exploited it. I discovered more than once that he was insanely ticklish.

We managed to roll into the wall of paint a time or two, but he would just arch his strong arms around me and pull me back into our canopy. We were both slick with paint; every color of the rainbow collided against our bare skin. I couldn’t have imagined a more sensual way to hold him. One thing was for sure: nothing with Drake Blakeshire was ever ordinary.

Laughing and near breathless, hours later we lay side by side on the rug, which was stained with an array of colors.

“I don’t want to waste the paint,” I said as I pursed my flushed lips. I knew as soon as I let it go that it would pool and never dry. I wanted to freeze it around us, for it to imprison us within its beauty.

“Then don’t,” he murmured as he kissed my forehead.

“Am I missing the obvious?” I asked as I rolled to my side to gaze down at him. I reached to trace the lines that had dried on his face.

“Guide it to where you want it to go,” he said in a deep whisper.

“I have no idea how I’m still holding it up. Telling it to go back home is not going to be an easy feat.”

He leaned up and captured my lips with his as he rolled me to my back. “Close your eyes,” he whispered as his lips left mine and moved to kiss my lids.

I complied with a sly smirk on my face. I felt his strong hand caress the side of my face, along with the tangles the paint had created in my long, dark hair. “Your mind is your power. The only limits you have are the ones you place there. The entire universe is at your command.”

“Spoken like a true philosopher, Mr. Blakeshire.”

I felt the soft flesh of his lips tease my cheek, my lips, my collarbone. “See it. Where do you want it to go?”

I furrowed my brow.

“No peeking,” he breathed as his hands caressed my side.

“Having trouble concentrating.”

He did not stop his pursuit. “Anyone can do this with a calm mind. You have to learn to control your power while you are distracted.” He said as his hand eased down my thigh.

“Is that your excuse?” I taunted.

“Maybe,” he said as a laugh echoed in his words. “But it’s the truth. Create what you want this room to look like—command it.”

I pulled in a deep breath and imagined all of the paint that made up the funnels returning to their cylinders. I imagined that the paint along the ridges of the floor and walls was dried perfectly into place, that my room was now laced with deep purples and blues with sparing shades of yellow and green.

“Beautiful,” I heard him whisper against my temple, which made me question if he was seeing my thoughts. I opened my eyes slowly, then widely. The paint canopy was gone. There were no more pools of paint anywhere, and what was in place was dry, looked like it had been in place for days.

“Did you do that?” I gasped.

He smiled boyishly. “Not my mess to clean up.”

I playfully slapped his shoulder. “It’s art, not a mess.”

“Art is too weak of a word,” he mused as his eyes danced across me. “It is a reflection of how vibrant your soul is…it’s breathtaking.”

“Thought it was a mess?”

His grin grew wider. “Don’t tell me that Madison Marie Blair has forgotten how to take a joke?”

“I really did that?” I asked as I took in the room.

“Within a breath…you are insanely powerful.”

I grimaced on the inside as I remembered Britain saying something close to that, which brought to mind his argument that I had been purposefully drained and would soon be nothing more than a vessel for Drake to place Willow’s soul within.

I breathed in deeply, assuring myself that I could still smell the scent of roses that always emerged when Drake held me. That emotion that I was sure was love was saturating his soul at this moment. The darkest corners of my being dared to tell me that he was seeing Willow, imagining her, but the better part of me convinced my mind that my paranoid thoughts were coming from Britain, that I had let him in.

“Are you hungry?” Drake whispered as he reached to trace my bottom lip.

I could feel the paint tightening against my skin. “Maybe after I clean up. Take a sh—”

Before I managed to get the word ‘shower’ out, a force of energy tightened around me—and the next thing I knew, I was standing in that massive shower.

“How did you do that?” I asked with a gasp. We weren’t lying far from the doorway to the bathroom, but still, moving that fast was unnatural.

He winked as he turned on the water. “I had a meeting tonight, a lot of power in that room. I managed to grasp a few lessons I’d been working on.”
He reached for the soap and slowly poured it across my hands.

“A bad meeting?”

“A meeting with good people discussing bad things.”

“Are you worried?” I pushed, wondering if it was about the explosions and when he was going to scorn me for talking to Donalt alone.

“The only thing I’m worried about right now is getting the paint off these beautiful locks of yours.”

See now, most people would let that last conversation go and relish in the fact that making a mess with Drake Blakeshire was only foreplay compared to the aftermath of cleaning up said mess, but my obsessive mind had seized control of the moment.

“How, though? How are you moving your entire body?” I knew that I could move my soul, appear in another room and look near corporeal, just as my cousins could, and I knew that because of Landen’s background as a Phoenix he could move anywhere in full form. But it seemed like Drake had managed to pick up both those traits in a very small window of time. Deep down, that thrilled me. Something told me that they were all uniting, and if that were the case we would be an unstoppable force. Then again, I was worried that power like that could go to someone’s head, ruin them, the way it had ruined Donalt so long ago.

In an instant, he had moved me across the shower under the largest spray of water. My heart thundered as I felt the power of his energy encasing me. “You know how you sent your energy through the air to guide that paint?” he murmured as he coaxed the water th
rough my hair. “It’s the same way, only you tell your body to go there. Takes a lot of energy.” He winked at me. “But it’s fun.”

“Are you going to teach me that?”

“I think in here,” he said as his hand moved to the center of my chest. “You already know how. It’s like what you do when you go into The Realm.” His eyes moved to mine. “When you meditate and let your soul rise.”

My heart boomed in my chest as I saw desire in his eyes. Merging souls was something I had been told about when Olivia had taught me to rise from my body in deep meditation. She made it very clear to me that it was far more sacred than any physical act if it was done properly. I wasn’t sure I could handle Drake taking me to any new high. He was enough to handle as he stood.

“You tell yourself where to go, and you move…that’s how Landen explained it. I only practiced a few times; this was the furthest I had ever moved, ” he said as he nodded to the bathroom doorway.

“Sounds like something that can help keep you safe,” I said with a sly smile as I began to wash the paint off his chest.

It wasn’t long after that comment that we forgot what we were doing and lost ourselves once more in each other’s arms. Long after the water ran clear of paint, we stayed in that steaming shower, exploring new ways to drive the other mad with passion and desire.

Chapter
Sixteen

~Madison~

Much to my surprise, that massive closet in my room harbored clothes of Drake’s, too. I hadn’t noticed them because they were behind one of the dividers the room was laced with. He slid on dark pants that had to have been pajama bottoms and a white tank top.

I opted for PJs, too, settling into a pair of white cotton shorts and a black tank top.

“Hungry now?” he asked me as he pulled the strings on his pants tight.

“Are we going to make that trip in our pajamas?” I quipped.

“Girl’s gotta eat,” he said with a wink as he pushed his dark hair out of his eyes.

He clasped my hand and pulled me from the closet. He hesitated on the rug and leaned down. When he stood up again, he handed me my locket. I had forgotten that I had lost it hours ago. “Don’t want to lose that,” he said, raising one brow.

I pulled it over my neck as we made our way to the door. I was seriously considering going back for one of those gowns in my closet; I was sure the way I was dressed would be grounds for execution in this world, even if I was with the future king of this damned place.

H
e pulled me to a set of double doors to the left of the hall, and behind them was the most elaborate kitchen I had ever seen. All the appliances were twice the normal size and made of stainless steel. Dark stone made up the counter tops, and bouquets of flowers were arranged on the table and in the nooks of the kitchen.

“What are you hungry for?” he asked as he let go of my hand and made his way to the refrigerator. I raised my hand to my stomach to question if I really was hungry.

“It’s late so something light.” I pursed my lips. “Dessert, maybe?”

“Sundaes it is,” he said as he started to pull out tubs of ice cream, chocolate sauce, and cherries.

“Why didn’t you eat at dinner? Were you just being spiteful?” I asked him as I climbed up on one of the black leather bar stools that had a high enough back that you would have thought it was just a tall chair.

“I never eat what they give me,” he said with a playful smirk. “Never have.”

“Ever?”

He didn’t answer for a second as he sculpted our sundaes. “It was my father’s paranoia, I guess. He brought
my mother and me food every day, or least what we needed to make our food. He didn’t trust Donalt’s cooks.” He shrugged. “Suppose I still have that notion. Besides…” he said as he put a massive bowl of ice cream in front of me. “I like to cook. Tastes better that way.”

“You blow my mind.”

He grinned as he sat down next to me. “In a good way?”

“Yeah…” I toyed with my spoon. “How was your afternoon—early evening?”

“Not as inviting as my morning and early afternoon,” he said as he winked at me and took a massive bite of his ice cream.

“What time is it?”

“Here? Maybe midnight.”

“No way.”

He blushed for no reason. I couldn’t understand why, and when I looked into his mind all I saw was our day together.

“I’m not tired. I must be on a ‘sleep for two days, stay up for two nights’ routine.”

He pointed his spoon at me. “We are going to have to break you of that. That was the longest day of my life.”

“Doubt that,” I said as I glanced at him. Before, when I had danced in his memories, I had seen many days where he lived in peril.

He playfully glared at me as he took another bite of his ice cream.

“Did we make anyone mad when we left dinner?”

He shrugged. “There were some huffs and puffs.” He furrowed his brow. “Did someone near you do something to you?”

I felt my stomach tighten up right about then. “That was Britain. The boy sitting next to me.”

The room grew frigid instantly. “
The
Britain?” he seethed as he dropped his spoon.

“Thought you knew.”

“You thought I knew that your ex was sitting next to you at
my
dinner table!” he fumed. His anger wasn’t directed at me, but at Britain. “Why is he here?”

“He claims that he is working for Xavier. That he is supposed to kill me.”

Drake pushed his chair back and went to charge through the door. I extended my leg to block him. “No.”

“No, what?” he said with a tone that was laced with rage and jealousy.

“No, you are not going to let him steal you from me. This is our moment. Our world. You run off to fight him, and he knows you are not next to me.”

“What did he do to make Aden leave like that?” Those eyes of his were cold, dark, and fierce.

I said nothing.

“Madison Marie.”

“He touched my knee a few times—but listen,” I said, reaching for his arm as I felt him go to move again. “Aden already put him in his place. I mean, hell, before that I almost sliced his neck in two with a blade. He wants us to be wrapped up in his presence. I don’t care. He is not worth the energy.”

“You held a knife to him?” Those eyes of his blazed through me.

“It was in The Realm.”

“He attacked you there?”

“He followed us.”

“What were you doing?”

“Trying to figure out where that dream came from.”

His jaw flinched as anger flared in his soul. “I thought we were chasing your obsessions together?”

“So did I, then you decided to lock me in this wing and go off and do whatever.”

“I didn’t lock you in any room!”

I turned crimson, knowing that was more than likely true. I was just too mad to figure out how to open the freaking door. “I thought you did.”

“I went to figure out what the hell was wrong with Alamos.”

“How’d that go?” I asked as I tried to decide if I wanted to tell him what I had seen and smelled coming from that man when we first came back.

His eyes rapidly moved across my image before he sighed and took his seat once more. “It was odd. He acted like nothing had happened before. Started telling me about obligations I had, meetings he’d had with Xavier and the others.”

“Meetings about draining my energy so you will have a vessel for Willow’s soul.”

“Do what?” he roared.

I took in a deep breath as my eyes rushed over him. I tried to understand what was real and what wasn’t. “Britain’s thoughts. He was there during that conversation. But I didn’t see that in the thoughts of the Alamos that came to tell us about dinner. He was distracting me by telling me about removing a spell from you.”

“In the one that came for you at dinner?”

“Wasn’t the same one that greeted us.”

“Madison Marie...” He thought I was insane. I knew he did.

My eyes filled with sympathy as I stared into him. “The man that was there when we came back had a face made of ink and he reeked of sulfur. I only knew it was Alamos because I recognized his voice. That didn’t happen when I saw him again.”

He raked his fingers th
rough his dark, wayward hair as he glared at the door. “Listen to me,” he said as his eyes met mine. “You need to see me now. You need to look into my mind and understand that I never once was convinced that Willow’s soul should be placed in another body. I told all of them that. I told them no spell would hinder true love. At first they convinced me that she had plotted this in a past life, that all I had to do was tell her that she had a way out. They said that would be her hold out, that she would not kill herself because she loved me too much. I did tell Willow that on the night of the blue moon, along with all the other crap that Donalt told me she would want to hear; obviously, it was all lies,” he breathed out. “Months later, she managed to get her soul stuck in a dying body. Donalt told me she did it on purpose, that she had escaped Landen to be with me. That to save her I had to move her soul into a new vessel. The thought of it made me sick, but she was in so much pain, Madison Marie. She was in agony, and I couldn’t let her suffer like that. Back then, my mind was ravaged with grief over losing my father, discovering a secret family. On top of that, all of Donalt’s words coming true days after he’d spoken them. Rage and grief; those were the only two emotions I was capable of feeling then.”

His eyes rapidly moved across my engaged expression. “I don’t know what the hell Britain heard, but I will gut anyone who ever comes near your soul with my bare hands.”

As he had spoken, I had seen fragments, mere flashes of what he described. Didn’t matter, though. The truth was in his eyes. Donalt had his claws in Drake at the time, and slowly Drake has been fighting for control of his life. For over a month now, he had played out his role as the wronged king, but deep in his eyes, deep within his self-sacrificing moments you could see that he was convinced that I had been stolen. Of course, then he thought Willow
was
me. He could not bear to believe that there were two girls that bore my image.

And when he did, in those all too brief moments when Willow had nearly convinced him that I did exist, that he had been played, instead of joy or relief he felt intense grief. Grief that was born with the idea that he ever
could have been unfaithful to love what was between us.

Now, I had seen these moments before. I had seen them all too clearly
in his mind when I was ‘found.’ Yet, when I judged his emotions, his actions, I judged them with an accusatory stare. I took him at face value. I saw what I wanted to when I wanted to.

Knowing this Drake, feeling this connection to him, it was clear to see that instead of feeling the emotion of jealousy I should be filled with pride. He had clearly displayed how loyal a lover he was for the fact that no matter whose eyes he was looking into, no matter who was in his arms, I was the only one he had ever seen.

That was the simple, obsessive logic of it all. Yet, my Scorpio heart was still stuck on the dark side, was still fragile, unwilling to make herself vulnerable to anyone.

“I see it,” I promised him with a quiver in my voice as my mind and soul pulled me in two different directions.

Relief absorbed him as some of the tension left his shoulders.

“I really am worried that your alliance with Alamos may be failing. I don’t know if he was on stage or not. I just know what I saw when we came back…I don’t get why Xavier’s face didn’t look like that at dinner, but everyone else’s did.”

“Everyone?” he asked, clearly thinking of Britain.

“Britain’s was clear, too.”

He balled his fist as I felt rage waving off him. “I don’t know anything about a meeting between Xavier and Alamos. That is the first thing I’m going to figure out tomorrow.”

“You need to be careful. Xavier is one of the seven.”

“Seven?” he asked, raising his brow, questioning what I had figured out.

“Did Marc tell you about evacuating that city north of here?”

He nodded once. “It’s in the process.”

He was far too casual with that reply.

“Did he tell you where he got that information?”

He furrowed his brow as his eyes questioned me. “Actually, Landen was the one that told me with Marc in the room. He said he was told that was one of three omens, that we had twelve hours, and that I needed to move them north.” He leaned his head back. “I told him that meant we had six and that we should move them in any direction but north.”

“He didn’t tell you where he got that information, though?”

“No...”

“I was the one that told him that, and I was told of that threat by…by Donalt.”

His eyes grew wide as rage consumed him and he balled his fist. “Explain,” he exhaled venomously.

“Aden showed me the looking glass. I wanted to see how deep it went, if it was saltwater, if it led to anywhere else. I dove in.” I reached for his arm when I saw him tense again. “I swam through a channel I found and surfaced in another room. I felt that cold, angry energy and told him to just show himself.”

“Having no fear is no reason to act foolish,” he said with a fair measure of scorn lacing the words.

I let that comment go simply because I knew his fear and anger were speaking at the moment. “Ghosts are disoriented when they manifest. I was safer when he was in that form, but that is not the point. The point is that in this conversation, I managed to get him to tell me that there are seven kings.”

“Kings of what?” he asked in a knowing tone, as if he already knew.

“Emotions, I think. He said he was the King of Fear, and he mentioned a king of shock and obsession. He even confirmed that there were six against one.”

“One?”

“Yeah, and I think it is the King of Anger…I think that is the line you came from.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s all in my head now. I can’t tell you how I came up with it, but I think that the reason you and Draven have been put through hell is that they are after your king; you are ploys in this massive war.”

“And how does Willow fit in? Charlie? You?”