But Gray had gone silent. She wouldn’t even look at me. Just swept up her Tarot cards, stacked them all back up in a neat little pile on the table, and bailed, leaving me alone with my booze and a big-ass pile of steaming hot guilt.
My gaze landed on the basket of stones again.
You can never really know love until you know yourself.
Yeah. More like, you can never really know love until you stop acting like a flaming bag of dicks.
Thirty-Eight
Gray
As much as I would’ve loved to slam my door, Ronan had torn it half off the hinges in his mad rush to save me from my nightmare with claws.
So I did the next best thing and changed into my PJs, turned off all the lights, climbed under my blankets, and pulled them up over my head, blotting out the rest of the world.
But even tucked away like that, I could still feel Asher’s damn presence in my house. His heat. It hovered around me like a fine mist coating my skin, making me hot and sticky and completely wound up.
It wasn’t even his incubus vibe, or whatever they called it. He’d given me a taste of that the first time we’d met, and it’d felt like a physical pull, like an elastic band snapping back together.
No, this was all me and my stupid Benedict Arnold sex drive.
I didn’t know what the hell was up with me lately—why after coasting for the past seven years on cruise control, my libido had suddenly kicked into hyper-drive, right along with my magic—but it was becoming a serious nuisance.
Now was not the time for indulging in fantasies. Certainly not about that cocky, infuriating, crazy-making, asshole excuse for a demon—excuse me,incubus—snoring away in my living room.
Yet half an hour later, when my hand drifted lazily down my belly and slipped inside the front of my sweats, the name on my lips wasn’t Ronan or Darius, and the eyes I imagined glazing with lust as they watched me trace slow circles over my clit weren’t hazel or honey.
They were the fathomless, hypnotic blue of the deepest part of the ocean.
Thirty-Nine
Gray
I was still awake when I felt it—the magic tingling across my palms. My heart rate spiked, sweat breaking out across my forehead, but I didn’t resist this time, didn’t allow the fear to take hold.
Not even when the oily black smoke swirled around the end of my bed, slithering up my sheets in the moonlight, dragging me down, down, down…
Just breathe…
When I opened my eyes, I found myself in the meadow, lying in the grass beside the stone pedestal. A shadow crossed my face, and I sat up fast.
“Shall I assume this means you’re ready to accept your true nature?” Death stood before me, his dark, shadowy presence blotting out the stars in the sky.
Again, I refused to let the fear take hold.
After all, why should I fear him? He wasn’t my enemy. He was a force of nature.Theforce. As much as we were taught to cower in his presence, to believe we might outrun our inevitable end, Death himself was not that ending. He was the great transformer, the renewer. Just like the Death card in Sophie’s deck, the child sought to crawl back into its mother’s womb, but it couldn’t. It had already changed, and she was already pregnant with new life.
In that way, maybe nothing ever truly ended. It just transformed.
For the first time since our acquaintance, I looked up at him and grinned. “Hi there.”
Death said nothing. Did nothing. Showed no signs of acknowledgment. Just stared down at me with those eery glowing blue eyes.
I rose from the ground, dusting off my palms. The whole cloak-and-dagger bit was getting a little old. “So, Death. Listen. No offense, but…” I reached out and touched the edge of his robe. It was more substantial than a shadow, but not quite as solid as real fabric. It felt almost like a spiderweb. “Do you ever wear anything… normal?”
He looked down at my fingers, still visible through the sheer blackness of his garb. “Normal?”
“As in, less creepy?”
