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“Cassie,” his fingers tightened. “Like you mean it.”
And then he was kissing me, lips soft and slightly chapped on mine, the scratch of a three-day old beard against my skin, the smoothness of teeth, of tongue. He tasted like coffee and electricity and power, so much power. It filled my mouth like whiskey, like the best drink I’d ever had. It flowed down my throat, burned along every limb, snapping nerves back to life, filling veins, sending my heart racing in my chest.
Suddenly, I could breathe again, not shallowly, but fully, deeply. Only I didn’t want to breathe. I wanted him. My hands came up, burying in his hair, holding him, drinking from him, desperate and sloppy and greedy and ravenous. All warm and good and power and, God, oh, God, so good.
I groaned and rolled on top of him, so hungry, so hungry. His hands settled on my waist, not stroking, barely touching. Just holding me in place as I took what I needed. I could see it in my mind, like I saw the Pythian power sometimes, a glittering golden stream flooding out of him and into me, so good. And then his hands were clenching, holding me, bruisingly hard, for one last, brief instant—
And then there were people, people everywhere, running and yelling and pulling—on me. Pulling us apart. I tried to fight them and my limbs actually seemed to work now, to respond to my commands. But they were vampires and so strong and—
And he was gone. The hillside was spinning, people’s faces and the streamers of smoke and the rain all blurring together into a kaleidoscope of don’t care, because I didn’t want them; I wanted Pritkin. I struggled up, and someone tried to push me back down, and I snarled at them and they let me go.
I stumbled to my feet, naked
and muddy and bloody and half crazy, but he wasn’t there, he wasn’t there. And in a flash, I knew why. He’d told me himself—human or demon varieties. I’d given him power to save his life, and now he’d returned it. And while that didn’t mean anything in human terms, except emergency and necessity and the only possible way out, in demon terms it meant—
It meant—
“What have you done?” I screamed to no one, because he wasn’t there.
I dropped to my knees, screaming in fury, and the earth shook. A time wave boiled under the soil, causing roots to fly out of the ground, pushing up boulders, sending a cascade of mud and debris spilling down the hill and forcing several vamps to jump wildly out of the way. So much power, I thought dully.
And it did me no good, it did me no good, it did me no good.
“Now zat,” someone said approvingly, “is a Pythia.”
And then blackness.
Epilogue
I woke up in bed to find a vampire in my room.
He was sitting in the chair in the corner, flipping through a newspaper. The front page was turned to me, and the headline was a little hard to miss. One word, in huge black letters: GODDESS.
I stared at it for a long minute, feeling empty, feeling nothing. The vampire turned over another page. “You’re not supposed to be here,” I told Marco roughly.
A pair of bushy eyebrows appeared over the paper. “You kicking me out?”
“No,” I said. And then I burst into tears.
He came over and gathered me up. He was big and warm and smart enough not to say anything. I cried his shirt wet. I was hard on his shirts.
“I got more,” he told me, and gave me a handkerchief. It was big, like everything about him. I just held it.
I didn’t give a shit what I looked like.
“What happened?” I asked, after a while.
Marco’s big chest rose and lowered in a sigh. “Well, as I understand it, you showed up to your coronation naked, rolled around in some mud, dusted a dragon and then made out with the mage. Nobody really knows what happened, but it impressed the shit out of the senates. They signed the alliance early this morning.”
“Okay.”
“Also, they caught that thing that attacked you. You know, the Morrigan?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She claims she was forced into it because the Green Fey invaded and kidnapped her husband. Guess they’re working for the bad guys now, only nobody seems to really know. Anyway, she said she’s willing to let bygones be bygones if we help her get him back.”
“How generous.”
