“ ‘When you too long stare into the abyss . . . ,’ ” she quoted.
“Damn it, no Nietzsche. I’m the nihilist around here.”
The darkness belled up to meet her, and she saw herself reflected in Archer’s bronze eyes. “I wasn’t even looking into the pendant.”
“It’s not the damn rock. The last stage of possession is coming to complete the link between you and the demon. When it’s over, I want you on this side of the Veil. So stop drifting on me.”
“I wanted to hold on.” She tightened her fingers around his wrists.
He sat beside her on the daybed. He twisted his hands so he mirrored her grasp in a rescue hold. “Yes. Hold on.”
“To the other side.”
“No,” he said with strained patience. “To this side. Not to the past, not death, not damnation. Life. Now.”
“Why?”
He lifted one eyebrow.
“You’re the nihilist,” she reminded him.
“I thought you were unconscious. Only people who aren’t thinking quote Nietzsche.”
She grimaced and released him. Her palms slid past his as he let her go, his callused skin rasping on hers.
As their clasped hands parted, every molecule in her screamed as if torn asunder. She felt her essence shred like mist in the wind. The world faded again in a haze of ice on ash on starlight on cold, wet stone.
She clawed upward, icy fear swamping the air from her lungs.
Archer’s hands tightened on her shoulders. “Sera?”
“I keep going and coming back.” She tried to keep her tone level, but she heard the hitch in her voice, almost a sob.
“Stay with me.”
“Maybe it’d be easier if I just went away.” Had her mother been right all along? “You wouldn’t have to—”
“Now you want easy?” His fingers dug into her flesh. When she whimpered, he loosened his grip.
And the ice crept back. She tasted ash on her tongue. The twinkle lights seemed very far away.
“Ferris,” she cried out.
His arm snaked behind her shoulders, dragging her up against his chest. “Stop it.” His fingers under her chin forced her gaze to his. “Stop wavering.”
She clung to his solid bulk. “The last time I almost died, after the car accident, I almost wanted to.” She feared the void inside her would pull him down too, unless she could fill it.
“Your soul stays here,” he commanded. “Flawed maybe, but fight for it.”
“Not black and white. Gray.” As if she’d conjured it,
the gray crept up again. She gasped for breath as the otherworldly chill spread. If she could see her soul, would it be rimed with ice, flaking ash, winking out like an ancient star?
“Sera.”
“I can’t. . . .” The cold reached her heart.
Archer cradled her and whispered her name again. His breath on her skin stopped the chill. She echoed his whisper with his name.
His mouth over hers spread heat in an almost-painful wave, branching out along her nerves in sudden desire. Desire for warmth. Life. Desire for him.
The kiss the feralis interrupted had been angry, challenging. This kiss tasted of desperation.
For a heartbeat, she longed for a touch mild and sweet as spring in this pretend garden, tinted with roses and laughter. Then his lips slanted against hers, delving deep, and her thoughts upended in a violet-tinged haze.
Anything but gray.
She clutched the open edges of his coat. The row of buttons cut into her palm. With an impatient moan, she shoved at the opening.
The leather resisted, but his shirt ripped to his navel.
She blinked in surprise. She hadn’t meant . . .
Hell, whatever. She reached around the width of his chest, while reveling in the heave of his breath, the shudder in his muscles, the scalding heat of his skin.
The chill lifted, burning away like fog, the dismal flavor of ash lost to the wild spark of his tongue rimming the inside of her lips and the edges of her teeth.
She should pull away—regain some space and her senses. But she felt the void all around them, between the leaves and lights. Even in this serene jungle lay shadows of death.
So she kept her gaze and hands on Archer, anything to hold on.
His hips pressed hard against hers, forcing her into
the daybed, but he reared back to look at her. He spiked his fingers through her hair to pin her in place.
“What is this?” His voice was a harsh rasp. For the first time, she saw uncertainty in his eyes.
Sure, he’d face down ferales or malice, but ask for a little foreplay. . . .
“Last hurrah.” She curled her fingers into the muscles of his back and urged him closer.
He resisted. “When I may have to kill you later?”
“I’ve always hated that awkward, breakfast small talk.”
The violet sheen she knew was the demon gleamed in his eyes. “Unfair.”
She hesitated. He was right. What she was asking . . .
“If I were your lover,” he added, “you wouldn’t be talking the next morning. And not because I’d killed you.”
An arrogant assassin. Better than an uncertain one, she supposed. She tightened her grip. This time he relented, lowering himself so that each inch of him found a resting place against her and squeezed out any place for the void.
“Don’t let go,” he warned.
She wouldn’t, but before she could answer, he kissed her again, hard. The pendant had slipped behind her—the stone ground into her spine between the shoulder blades, the cord tight around her neck. She squirmed, and the friction of her body against his made her gasp.
She arched her back, less pressure on her neck, more on her hips. He took it as an invitation to skim her T-shirt over her head.
She wasn’t well-endowed enough to always require a bra, a sometime regret of hers. But now it saved time, time she wasn’t sure she had anyway.
Archer’s fingers grazed her skin. She caught a deep breath, raising herself to fill his hand.
His breath left in an explosive burst. She would have laughed—if she hadn’t been breathless herself.
His thumb stroked the ruched flesh around her nipple, and sensation pooled through her veins, driving back every thought of the void. Only this, now.
It had been so long. She craved the raw silk touch of skin on skin. Not cold steel flensing tissues, not impersonal latex hands describing range of motion.
She was strong and alive. At the moment anyway. She wanted this.
The cool leather of his coat draped around her, but the heat off his skin scalded her as she buried her hands in his shirt. She pushed the material back, baring his shoulders, and trapped his arms against his sides.
He wrenched back, as if reluctant to be restrained. She followed him up and pressed a kiss to the base of his throat, then flicked her tongue into the hollow. She heard his groan, felt the vibration under her mouth. She traced her hand down the crinkle of hair at his chest to the button of his jeans. With a flick of her thumb, the button popped open.
He pushed her back, eyes wide enough to fill with the gleam of little white lights.
In the second heartbeat, he was shucking out of his coat and ripped shirt, tossing both onto the ground.
For a moment, she feared the separation would leave her floating again in the demon realm. But the sight of him, all hard muscle and hot skin, seemed enough to keep the otherworldly chill at bay.
He sat back on his haunches, his expression harder than his abs, which, she thought, was saying something. “I am mad.”
“Just possessed,” she corrected.
His gaze swept her. Her nipples tightened under the almost-tangible sweep of his dark eyes. She stretched.
He growled and lunged forward. She didn’t flinch as he buried both fists with a thud in the pillows next
to her head. From the corner of her eye, the
reven
on his forearm was a black curl touched in violet. When he leaned forward to nuzzle her neck, his teeth scraped on the cord of her necklace.
“It has been so long.” His low growl in her ear, the Southern drawl more pronounced with his tension, made her nerves dance. “What possessed me to . . . ?”
“Like I’d know.”
“You should.” His hands were busy at the fly of her jeans. He grabbed both flayed edges and yanked upward, bringing them hip to hip.
She gasped. In retaliation, she tucked her hands inside his waistband. He sucked in a harsh breath, giving her room to delve a little deeper past the top of his boxers.
His zipper parted with a resigned sigh that was lost in his groan as her fingers grazed the length of his raging erection.
His turn for revenge. Tit for tat, she thought hazily, as his mouth closed over the curve of her breast.
The damp warmth of his lips urging her nipple to a peak drew an answering moisture lower down, his big hand coaxing her. For a moment, she thought she’d drifted again, because when her senses returned, her jeans were gone, as were his.
Poltergeists or passion, she didn’t care. She wanted only for him to push back the void, with that big hand, his big other parts.
With her fingers, she measured him, teased a pearl of wet from his tip. His long, inhaled gasp made her smile. She traced the pearl down his length. Hard as that part was, the rest of him trembled like the leaves above them.
She folded her legs around him. For a single instant, her spine, hips, and thighs seized, locked as if in ice, a cruel reminder of her accident. Then the hot insistence
of him was burning at her core, melting the ice that froze her.
“Now,” she whispered.
He hesitated.
“Right now.”
Fighting and dancing, he’d been all lethal grace. Now he flowed like winter molasses, slow and sweet. She wanted to scream, but she lost her breath as he eased into her, filled her.
He started to move with sure and steady strokes. She clamped her hands around his forearms braced beside her head, her fingers digging into his flesh, distorting the lines of the
reven
. Her vision blurred, starred, and she was dazzled by half-unseen auroral lights that limned his body where they touched.
Pleasure bordering on torture radiated endlessly outward from the center of their joining. She moved as if through an illuminated hall of mirrors—each lit glass reflecting an infinite cascade of feeling back at her, completely opposite the cold, vague demon realm that beckoned her.
He plunged into her, faster and deeper now. A new abyss threatened. With each rising caress, she moved nearer the edge. And she welcomed it.
Over her own panting breath, she barely heard his chant beside her ear, speeding in time to his rhythm. Her name, a whispered endearment, a hoarse command that she come, come now.
With jackknife violence, she did.
Eyes wide, she stared up, met his dark gaze, and saw nothing of violet. There was only the brilliant bronze glaze of his desire as he followed his own suggestion, driving her into another bone-deep contraction of ferocious pleasure that curled through her pelvis and thighs, incinerating the memory of her wounds, blazing high as she reveled in every sensation, and then swept away on
Archer’s half-strangled shout as he spent himself inside her.
He rolled as he collapsed, taking her over with him onto her side, still joined, her head nestled against his cheek. In the shadow between their bodies, the pendant slipped to the pillow and glimmered with faint rainbows of color.
She closed her eyes as their heaving breaths synchronized and slowed. The slick stickiness of their skin sent fresh shivers through her with each inadvertent touch.
His hand drifted down her side, from shoulder to waist, and came to rest on her hip.
The quiver in her skin chased the caress, and she glanced down to follow the path.
The bleak lines on his hand lost themselves in the demon mark that traced her body from hip bone to thigh in whorls of deepest black.
Her possession was complete.
CHAPTER 9
Archer drifted on the rhythm of her breath, every facet of his being—plus a few the demon had loaned him—replete with male satisfaction. He couldn’t hold back a regretful groan when she eased away.
The green leaves reflected in her wide eyes. “Ready to pass judgment?”
He levered himself up on one elbow. “Mind-blowing. Staggering. Really, really good.”
Her lips twitched. “Thanks for the movie poster highlights, but . . .” She pointed.
He studied the quiescent
reven
. “Does it hurt?”
She shook her head. “Maybe a little. Before. But I wasn’t really paying attention, since . . . Anyway, it doesn’t hurt now. Should it? Would that mean bad things? Or good?”
He remembered his own agony, heard the note of hope in her voice. “I don’t think pain is indicative either way. I just wondered how you felt.”
“Oh. Fine. No sudden urges to desecrate holy sites or spin my head around three-sixty.” She nibbled at her red lip. “Actually—who would’ve guessed?—this
is
more awkward than typical mornings-after. Since you’re not
surreptitiously groping around for your monster axe, I take it my demon is one of the reformed, and you’re not going to kill me.”
At the reminder of the grim promise between them, he rolled to the side. If the talyan pairing hinted at in the old text was always born from this threat of execution, no wonder the bond had been broken. “Not reformed. Repentant. And I’m not entirely certain.”
She watched him warily as he gathered his boxers. “Not certain?”
“The pattern isn’t djinn. But it’s far more complex than any I’ve seen.” He invited her inspection by holding out his hand. The bold lines on his skin were hardly simplistic, but they couldn’t match the fractal patterning that spun out asymmetrically from the small of her back over her hips to wrap her upper thighs.
He wondered how intimately those delicate lines traced upward.
Before the thought showed up on his face, or other parts of him, he hastily added, “We’ll compare your mark to others on record, but guessing by the convoluted patterning, your demon is enigma-class.” That would explain her ability to confound him from the moment they’d met on the bridge with an unbound demon trailing behind her. “Enigma-class demons spawned the stories of riddlers like the Greek sphinx, who threatened to decimate a city if its question wasn’t answered.”