Authors: Elizabeth Amber
“Why are you reciting these texts? What does it mean?” asked Vincent.
“Mean,” she said calmly. “I have discovered my purpose.”
She lifted both arms high, hands clasping silver. And then in a single, fel swoop, she stabbed the blade of the ancient dagger she held into the
mattress where Vincent would normal y lie in sleep.
“Death.” Violet met sapphire. “Yours.”
Then she burst into tears.
11
“W
here were you?” Landon asked him over Cara’s head a few moments later. Vincent had just removed the knife and discarded it, and Landon sat on
the mattress, holding her on his lap.
“Downstairs in the study,” said Vincent. “Preparing for my journey to Else World.”
Both looked at Cara as she began speaking gibberish. “Bottle, bottle. No.”
Vincent grabbed her shoulder, shaking it. “Stop that. Speak properly so we can understand. So we can help.” His tone was gruff with worry.
“Words here,” she said, tapping her temple. “Sometimes not come,” she said, tapping her mouth.
“I think the ‘taking’ experience may be garbling her speech for a time after it happens,” Landon suggested.
Vincent took her shoulders urgently, wil ing her to help them. “Cara. What did the men who ‘took’ you look like?”
“Nutcracker.”
“Both?”
She shook her head. “One had olive skin and red eyes.”
Vincent and Landon exchanged alarmed glances.
“A demon?” Landon hazarded in disbelief.
“But he merged himself with the other one,” said Cara, her voice rising. “Now both are the nutcracker!” She put a hand on Vincent’s arm. “They
wish to stop you from reaching your goals. Law. I am to help.”
“What else?”
“A gold coin. He worships it.” She put two fingers to her lips, remembering its cold hardness.
“What does it look like?”
“Grapevines on one side, Bacchus on the other,” she told him.
“The amulet,” both men said at once.
“Gods! If the demons have found it, they’l be resurrected regardless of the demonhand,” said Landon. “Dominic wil have to go back to his world,
to his old way of life. And then Rose…The fighting. Hel s.”
“Even worse, if the Feroce succeed in sealing the gate, Dominic and Rose wil die on this side.” He stood. “I’m due in Else World soon. I’m taking
Cara with me to see if she can point to her abusers. And I think the faction leaders wil find what she has to tel them quite interesting.”
“I’m coming,” said Landon.
Vincent nodded, having expected his words.
Else World
“Go back,” a stern voice ordered.
The trio had hardly crossed the gate into Else World when they were stopped in the tunnel by a hoard of guards who awaited, their every weapon
trained menacingly toward them.
Immediately spotting one of her persecutors, Cara backed away, pointing. “Nutcracker.”
Because the word had become her favorite euphemism for al things unacceptable, Vincent and Landon didn’t at first realize what she meant.
“Julius!” Vincent cal ed.
Why was he speaking to her enemy in such a familiar tone?
“Nutcracker!” she insisted.
“
He’s
your nutcracker?” asked Landon, final y understanding.
“Kurr, actual y,” the creature said, speaking in the nutcracker’s voice. He stepped into the circle of light emitted by the portal through which they’d
just passed, and Vincent gasped, seeming to recognize him yet be put off by his appearance.
His skin was a mottled olive-green color, his eyes flashing ruby and silver, his mustache and boots pitch black. A blend of two males—just the way
she remembered.
“You must turn back,” one of the guards insisted. “We’re under orders. The gate is to be sealed today, by command of the Feroce. There wil be no
treaty. No more passage between worlds.”
“Julius, listen to me,” said Vincent, speaking to the nutcracker. “Once the demons have everything they want from you, they’l kil you and take
another host.”
“He doesn’t hear. He’s ours now,” the nutcracker replied. “The amulet led your brother to us only recently, though he found it years ago, not long
after it was lost. He was weak, easily taken as a disciple and then a host. And even better, he has now given me the opportunity to take something from
you. From your family, who have done my kind so much harm.”
His clawed fingers reached out, beckoning her. “Come.”
In a fury of muscles and curses, Vincent and Landon lunged toward her, trying to stop him from taking her. Guards wrestled with them, and it took
five of them to restrain each of her protectors.
She stared at the nutcracker’s clawed hand like it was a viper.
No!
she wanted to scream. But, dreamlike, she left her companions and went to
him.
“Cara!” Vincent’s enraged, worried voice seemed distant.
Her arms hung limp at her sides as her nemesis enfolded her and held her to him, pressing her face into his vest and stroking her hair. “She
comes with me. You see, something of your brother does remain within me.” He thumped his chest in emphasis. “His jealousy of you. Because the gate is
to be sealed, I’ve decided there’s no need to kil you after al . I’d rather think of you in your world, worrying over her.”
His face bent to hers, and he kissed her throat with lips that were dry and fleshy. Abhorrent. Ruby eyes watched Vincent over her head, relishing
his jealous anger.
Vincent and Landon thrashed within the holds of their captors, who struggled valiantly to control them. In the confusion, Cara’s fingers crept up
crimson satin and stealthily dipped into her captor’s vest pocket, finding what was secreted within. Stealing. But she doubted Vincent would mind this
time.
Above her, the nutcracker’s laughter taunted him. “How does it feel to want something so badly your very entrails ache for it? But for once a
woman prefers me over you, brother. After the gate is sealed, know that she’l be fucking me. Servicing me. Every day and every night.” With an arm
around her, he turned to lead her away, to his world.
“No,” she whispered, finding her voice and her wil . “No.”
He paused at that, and those hideous eyes looked down at her, mildly surprised. “You can’t say no to me. You’re an insentient. Not meant to control
your own destiny.”
“No!” Wrenching away, she pivoted and hurled the powerful amulet she held safely through the gate. As she tried to reach Vincent and Landon,
sharp claws raked her back. Stinging. Poisonous. She fel , dizzy.
Behind her, the demon shrieked as his last hope of resurrection fel into enemy hands. Fal ing to his knees he began to writhe and convulse,
spewing vile curses and impotent enchantments. Then he went limp and slowly, very slowly he fizzled into benign nothingness.
Having lost their leader, the guards let Vincent and Landon go, uncertain what they were to do next. As none from Else-World could permeate the
portal from this direction without an invitation, they simply stood there, confused.
“Cara!” Vincent lifted her in his arms, and Landon watched his back, ensuring that their passage through the gate was a safe one. On the other
side the two men turned homeward, where they assured her over and over they would find an antidote for whatever poison the demon had imparted.
Violet eyes opened, gazing into sapphire, and Cara began speaking in a rush, quoting yet another verse of
The Pit and The Pendulum
.
“I had swooned; but stil wil not say that al of consciousness was lost. What of it there remained I wil not attempt to define, or even to describe; yet
al was not lost. In the deepest slumber—no! In delirium—no! In a swoon—no! In death—no! even in the grave al is not lost. Else there is no immortality for
man. Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have
been) we remember not that we have dreamed.”
She blinked up at him. “I have discovered the problem with being real,” she said, a slight smile curving her lips. “Pain.”
Then she fainted, lying unconscious for the next day and a half.
12
Satyr Estate in Tuscany, Italy
Earth World, 1850
T
he front door of the
villa
slammed.
“In here!” Vincent shouted in answer to Landon’s hail.
Downstairs, footsteps thundered toward the base of the grand staircase.
“Boots off!” Cara cal ed.
The steps paused. They heard two clumps as a pair of boots struck the marble floor.
Her eyes alight with wry humor, Cara twisted to smile back at Vincent from her seated perch atop him. “It’s taking Landon a considerable time to
accustom himself to the fact that yours is no longer a bachelor household. I’ve told him that when he returns from the vineyard, he must endeavor to leave
the muck outside.”
He’d taken her feminine channel from behind this time, and though his cock twitched inside her, eager to get on with the business of fucking,
Vincent ignored it for the moment and returned her smile. “Old ways die hard.”
He and Landon had wed Cara one week ago today in an ancient ceremony that was attended by al the Earth World family and even some
dignitaries from Else World.
The footsteps drew closer, and Cara turned around again, affording him a view of a slim back draped with silken moon-colored tresses that
tumbled past her hips to dust his bel y. Four thin stripes that were several inches long marred her shoulder, reminders of the demon attack. They were
largely healed, but the sight of them never failed to send a chil through Vincent at the thought that he’d almost lost her.
She was watching the door to the corridor, which lay to their left, and pursed her lips in disappointment when the footfal s beyond it only continued
down the hal .
“Here!” Vincent cal ed out.
Almost instantly, the door burst open. Wearing his usual garb of leather trousers and a dark linen shirt, Landon appeared, looking shocked to see
them in his room. In his bed.
Vincent had wondered if it would anger him that they’d chosen to invade his private sanctum for the first time.
But the emotion smoldering in Landon’s eyes wasn’t anger. Instead he stood in the doorway, beholding them with a poignant sort of awe, as
though he wanted to savor every detail of the loving scene before he became part of it.
Vincent lay there with his head on Landon’s pil ow and his hands on their wife’s ass, letting him look. Her body already rode his, her back to him
and her shapely legs bent alongside his outer thighs. Lodged as deep inside her feminine throat as it was possible to go, his cock was an eager iron fist
of quivering nerve endings.
Though she was undeniably Human now, Cara stil retained much of her Shimmerskin intuition when it came to carnal matters. And now, as if she
knew precisely how best to prolong Vincent’s ecstatic agony, she chose that moment to tease both men. Flattening her hands on the mattress between
his thighs, she rose onto al fours, keeping her knees so widespread on either side of his hips that she released only a few of the eleven inches he had
recently worked so hard to plow inside her.
Vincent glanced downward between them. Framed in the inverted vee of her thighs was the length she’d relinquished. Though his crown was stil
safely nestled inside her, six or seven inches of ruddy cock stood exposed between them. High and glossy with her juices, it poled up into her, connecting
their bodies like an erotic umbilical cord. Her nether lips were stretched wide, embracing its exceptional circumference with a trembling, openmouthed
kiss.
Vincent’s hands found her hip bones, and he gritted his teeth, forcing himself not to return her bottom to its former seat. He’d have her again soon
enough.
Her face was stil turned toward Landon, where he lingered in the entrance to his own room. She’d angled her jaw toward Vincent as wel , ensuring
that he would witness her rapt expression as she gazed at the other man.
A pink tongue peeked out, wetting her lips.
His eyes shot to Landon, who was staring at her like some sort of ravenous beast.
“As you can see, the timing of your homecoming is excel ent,” Vincent informed him.
At his words, Landon abruptly snapped out of the concupiscent thral in which Cara had held him and sprang into action. Flinging off his jacket, he
didn’t bother with the buttons of his shirt but only crossed his bent arms overhead to grip the fabric at his shoulder blades and strip it off as he came
toward them. At the bedside, his hand fel to the placket at the front of his trousers.
Cara watched those long fingers rip at the fastenings of his pants, and Vincent saw a smug, feminine smile curve her lips. She was wel aware that
though their male bodies might be larger and more dominant, she possessed an equal measure of control in these matters of the flesh.
Landon made short work of his final garment and moved to join them on his bed.
“Come, husband,” she beckoned. Her hand reached out, running over Landon’s sculpted chest, her thumb teasing a flat nipple. Even as she did
so, Vincent felt her nether throat slide lower on his prick to encase another inch of him. Then she released half of that measure, beginning a stroke that
would eventual y have her retaking al of him. No matter whose bed they lay in, she never forgot that her love was for both men.
The far end of the mattress depressed under Landon’s knee.
Letting him take some of her weight, Cara slid her palms upward along the center of his ribs, over breastbone and col arbone, where they
diverged to clasp his nape and pul his lips down to hers.
As their embrace deepened, Landon’s hands smoothed down her back on either side of her sleek spine. Grasping the twin globes of her rear, he