“Not until the sun’s up,” she reminded him, stroking her fingertips down his hard shaft. The skin there was so soft, the softest thing she’d ever felt, like silk poured over steel.
He shuddered, frowning, and pulled her closer. “Not ever,” he whispered into her ear.
She found a rhythm with her hand, coaxing a response from him, coaxing his hips into that push and pull that she so loved, the masculinity of it, the raw power. He pressed a kiss to her temple, her cheek. She stroked him until his breathing was ragged and he kissed her on the mouth, hard and demanding.
He said something to her in that language of his—musical, magical Portuguese—and her hand slowed. Her fingers gently squeezed and released, exploring, teasing. He groaned, his face turned to her hair.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re driving me
insane
.”
“No, what you just said.” She ran her fingers over a throbbing vein on the underside of his shaft, around and around the full head atop, and he groaned again, louder. Her own breathing grew irregular; she loved him like this. Like putty in her hands.
Hard
putty.
He framed her face in his hands, kissed her again, deeply. “It means,” he said, almost panting, “don’t stop.”
It had been far too long to simply mean “don’t stop,” but she didn’t push it—she was distracted now by his hand on her breast, pinching her nipple, drifting down to stroke the soft wetness between her legs.
She gasped when his finger slid inside her, and she saw the flash of his teeth when he grinned.
“Two can play at this game, love.”
It thrilled her, hearing that word on his lips.
Love.
She hid it by turning her face to his chest and nipping his nipple. He jerked and yelped, “Ow!”
She flicked her tongue out and licked where her teeth had just been, sucking and kissing, stroking with her tongue. He relaxed back against the mattress with a low moan, and she kept on, kissing her way down his chest, running her hands over his skin, rubbing her cheek against his belly, reticulated muscles hard against her face. He shuddered as she kissed him there, brushing her lips across the ridges of his abs, dipping her tongue into his belly button. He slid his hands into her hair, pushed it off her face so he could watch her.
She looked up at him, mischievous. As he watched, stiff and breathless, eyes wide, she trailed her tongue lower, lower, until she felt his heat and hardness against the column of her throat. Holding his gaze, she cupped him in her palm, licked her lips, and watched him tremble.
“Should I keep going?” she whispered, teasing, already knowing what his answer would be before he nodded emphatically
yes
.
She dipped her chin, flicked her tongue out, and slid it over and around that hard, velvet head.
He gasped. Then she lowered her head and took him into her mouth, sucking and greedy and wanting to hear him moan.
He did, loudly. He arched from the mattress, his head kicked back into the pillow, his hands tightened in her hair, trembling, hot. He moaned her name and she loved the sound of it, loved the power she felt, the way he moved, instinctive and helpless in her hands, in her mouth, the taste of him and his heat and smoky scent—
He dragged her atop him and without preliminaries, with only a swift, hard motion of his hips, impaled her so deep their pelvic bones met.
Morgan heard him moan her name again, shuddering beneath her, but she was somewhere else, drunk with pleasure and heat and this new curling hunger that rose up inside her like a wave, like a demon, dark and devouring. She began to move atop him, rocking, making tiny circles with her pelvis, her head tipped back and her eyes closed, the air cool against her burning skin, the smell of rain and lightning in the air. His hands lifted to cup her breasts, he murmured something unintelligible. It sounded like a plea. She didn’t stop; she couldn’t. She was outside herself. She was floating.
He sat up and grasped her around the waist. She grabbed hold of his shoulders and took him even deeper inside, met his thrusts with her own, arched back against his knees, opening to him like a flower. Her hair spilled down his spread legs.
White fire and aching, friction and stroking, the sound of his beautiful voice muffled against her breasts as he kissed her there, urgent, warm lips on her nipples, drawing against her skin. The culmination was rushing at her, bright as a comet, and she was gasping, shaking, saying his name—
“Look at me,” he said, hoarse, and cupped her face in his hands.
Morgan opened her eyes. He was gazing up at her, a look of something like anguish on his beautiful face. “Oh—God—I’m almost—I’m—”
“I want to see you. I want to watch you. Let me watch it happen.” His voice was soft, so soft, almost as tender as his eyes, and it broke her apart.
Half moan, half sob, and she was over the edge, shuddering and shattering and staring down into his face, alarmed at the moisture swimming in her eyes, helpless to stop it.
“Yes, baby, yes,” he whispered, reverent, as her body clenched around his.
He was so beautiful to her then, rapt and wide-eyed at the pleasure he was witnessing—the pleasure he was giving her—that it hurt—it
hurt
. It burned like acid in her throat.
She started to cry.
“Goddammit,” she sobbed, burying her face in his shoulder.
He stilled, tightened his arms around her. “It’s okay,” he whispered, stroking her hair. “It’s going to be okay.”
“No, it’s
not
,” she said, sobbing harder. “It’s
not
going to be okay! Don’t say that! Don’t lie to me!”
“Shhh.”
He cradled her, he rocked her, he stroked his hands down her back and smoothed her hair. All she could do was hide her face and shake in his arms. He was still inside her, still throbbing hot, unrelieved, and though she wanted to run away and hide he was so warm and so strong and so...damn...wonderful.
God, he was wonderful.
“I
h-hate
you,” she sobbed against his shoulder.
“I know,” he murmured, stroking her. He pressed a kiss to her hair. “I know.”
He let her calm down, let the crying slow, then stop. He eased her down onto the mattress and settled beside her, brushed her tears away with his knuckles, kissed her hot cheeks. He gazed deep into her eyes and softly said, “I hate you, too, beautiful girl. So much.” He brushed his lips against hers, barely stroking, tender. “So much.”
She bit her lip, turned away. She couldn’t take it—the emotion was too crushing, too terrible, too
much
. His hand stroked her face, he turned her back to him with gentle fingers beneath her chin.
“Don’t hide from me. You don’t ever have to hide when you’re with me.”
That horrible tightness in her chest again, the welling in her eyes. He kissed the tear that slid over her cheek, caught another with his fingertip and brushed it away. She wanted to turn away again but didn’t, and he saw it, and then there was moisture in his eyes, too.
“
Tu és o amor da minha vida
,” he murmured, his voice breaking. He kissed her with a desperation that took her breath away, a desperation that was matched only by her own. She clung to him, and he moved between her legs and pushed inside her.
“Say it again,” she begged, not knowing what he’d said but
knowing
, feeling as if she would drown. “Say everything. Tell me everything, Xander, tell me now, before it’s too late.”
And he did. His lips on hers, his body moving inside hers, his heartbeat thudding strong and erratic against her chest, he let the words pour out. Soft and broken and in a language she did not understand, it poured out of him and over her and burned her soul to cinders.
Later, much later, as dawn crept pink and lavender over the hills of the Aventine, Xander woke alone.
27
Once upon a time, when she was a little girl no taller than the weathered brick lip of the Drowning Well, Morgan’s mother had told her a story.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” she announced with that faraway look in her eye that sometimes made Morgan slightly afraid for a reason she didn’t understand. The song she’d been singing died on her lips as if the wood fairies had snatched it right out of her mouth.
They were walking hand in hand through hazy morning sunshine, knee-deep in the drifts of wild heather that grew like weeds on the brink of the New Forest, watching tiny white butterflies flit with bumpy grace around bluebells and buttercups, listening to the sweet symphony of birdsong and breezes whisper through pines.
“A thtory,” Morgan whispered, enthralled, with the baby-girl lisp she hadn’t shed until she was six, watching her mother’s coffin being lowered into a rime of hard winter ground. She looked up at her mother—alive still on that verdant spring morning—and saw what she always saw: a fairy-tale princess with skin white as milk and a bittersweet smile and a galaxy of sorrow in her leaf-green eyes.
Even as a small child, Morgan recognized that her mother was beautiful, and very, very sad.
“There once lived a girl named Kalamazoo,” her mother began, and here Morgan giggled, liking the sound of the name. Her mother’s pale gaze slanted down to hers, and she began again, her lips tilted up at the corners. “Kalamazoo,” she said, “was a headstrong girl, ahead of her time, very smart and strong and independent. She was pretty, too—some even said she was blessed by angels on the day she was born, so pretty she was—and curious, and kind.”
Her mother’s voice took on a darker tone. As if the sky itself knew what was coming, a cloud passed over the sun. “But Kalamazoo had one...fatal...flaw.”
They slowed and then stopped beside the huge, rotting trunk of an ancient pine, overgrown with lichen and ivy, felled by some long-ago storm. Her mother lifted her up, set her teetering on its edge so they were almost at eye level with one another, held her hands around her waist to steady her until her little bare feet found their balance over the rough bark. Her mother’s feet were bare too; none of them ever wore shoes in the woods.
“She
wanted
,” her mother said with deep solemnity, gazing into Morgan’s eyes. “She had everything, but she wanted other things, anything she didn’t have. Her hair was dark and she wanted it to be gold, the sky was clear and she wanted it to rain, her home was in the woods and she wanted—
she so badly wanted—to live in the city. She wanted to be a girl who spoke exotic languages and danced the Argentine tango with a handsome stranger in a smoky bar and was able to say blithe, self-
possessed things like, ‘Oh, thank you for the lovely invitation, but I’m jetting off to Cannes this weekend for the festival.’ Kalamazoo dreamed of all the things she didn’t have and went around all the time with her soul lusting so badly after all those unhad things that it hung out from her body like an untucked shirt.
“And that,” said her mother ominously, “is why the goblins were able to get her.”
Morgan’s eyes widened. “Goblinth?” she whispered.
Her mother nodded. “Goblins, you see, aren’t like us. They don’t eat regular food. They have no use for meat and milk and sweets. What they eat...”
Morgan’s little heart pounded in her chest.
Her mother leaned closer. “...are souls.”
Though it was warm, Morgan shivered, wishing she could tuck her soul down somewhere safer inside her where the goblins couldn’t get it.
“But they can’t just
take
our souls. Oh, no, that’s not how it works at all! They have to make us
give
our souls away, freely. And do you know how they do that?”
Morgan stuck her thumb in her mouth and furiously sucked on it.
In an empty, leaden voice, her mother said, “Hope. They prey on our hope. Sweeter than honey and more heady than wine, hope is the lure they use. They whisper in our ears that all those things we so desperately want we can someday have, and so we go around lusting and dreaming and letting our souls drag us around with want until finally we’re so tormented we don’t notice our soul has slid right out of our body like a snail slides out of its shell and we’ve been carved hollow.
“And that’s what happened to the lovely Kalamazoo. Inch by inch, day by day, hope by hope, her soul slipped away and the goblins devoured every last morsel of it. Without her soul, the poor girl quickly wasted away and died, and when they buried her, nothing would grow around her grave, not even a milkweed, because anyone who dies without a soul is cursed forever.”
Imagining the goblins and the grave and the barren ground, Morgan squeaked in terror.
Her mother lifted her up. Morgan nestled trembling against her chest, hid her face in her mother’s soft hair. They began the long walk back to Sommerley.
“Hope is a drug, my love,” her mother murmured gently in her ear. “Hope is a tragedy. It will haunt you with its bittersweet perfume and addle your senses and ultimately drive you mad. Creatures like us cannot afford the insanity of hope, because everything we are and ever will be can be found within fifty miles of where we stand now. There can be no more for us. So watch your soul carefully, sweet girl. Watch that you don’t give the goblins what they hunger for. Watch for hope within yourself and don’t be afraid to do what Kalamazoo didn’t: crush it.”
Morgan had been hardly more than a baby then, but she remembered the story of Kalamazoo as vivid as fireworks against the night sky, and now—sitting cross-legged on the dewy back lawn of the safe house, wretched with Fever and heartbreak, watching the sun rise in a fiery orange ball over the eastern horizon—she knew why her mother had told it.
Because, like her, Morgan
wanted
. Maybe it was a genetic thing, passed down in her DNA, maybe it was just bad luck. But Morgan had been haunted by that old bitch Want all her life, and though her mother had tried to warn her that her very soul was in danger, she hadn’t listened.