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Until I took it, or thought I did, and ran away. But to what? Years of paranoia, of living with the idea that that madman would find me again, any minute. Of watching everything I said and everything I did and still jumping at shadows, because he might be in them.
I hadn’t even been able to dance at the club where I worked part-time, because I had to keep an eye on the door. Tons of people my age came every night to laugh and talk and enjoy themselves. And to let loose, just for a little while . . . but not me. Never me. What if I let loose and it was the night one of Tony’s boys showed up? What if I got too carried away and didn’t see him? What if he saw me first? What if, what if, what if?
I’d been young, but I couldn’t act like it; I’d been free but only in name.
God, I really had been the perfect Pythian candidate, hadn’t I?
Warm breath ghosted over me, heating me in ways breath had no right to. Stop him, some still slightly rational part of my brain was demanding. Stop him now!
But then Agnes’ apartment flashed across my mind, so perfect, so pristine. Of course it was. There’d been no husband there to come home and kick off his shoes, had there? To throw his jacket and whatever all over the sofa. No children to scatter mess around, and leave toys in the middle of the floor for everybody to trip over. Not even a dog. Just a perfectly kept apartment full of exactly no one, not even quiet-voiced initiates half the time.
Where were the others? Where was her life?
But then, Pythias didn’t get a life, did they? Pythias got responsibilities and protocol and politics and the job. And I suddenly didn’t know if I could live like that, not again, not forever.
Of course, I didn’t really have a choice, did I?
Only, suddenly, I did.
And I didn’t want him to stop.
And for some reason, that little revelation shocked me to my core. Or no—I guess that had been surprise. Shock was when a mouth suddenly closed over me.
Not a mouth, some small voice corrected. His mouth. Warm and wet and echoed by an identical one at my breast. And so very different from that other time, the one I’d tried really hard to forget. That desperate, life-or-death time when he’d been so careful, deliberately holding himself back.
He wasn’t being careful now.
He wasn’t being careful at all, I thought, arching up. And why would he be? None of the stuff that had messed him up had happened yet. Hell, maybe he didn’t even know what he was doing, didn’t know what he was. Probably just thought it felt good and gave his power a boost, and it wasn’t like I was screaming and running up the riverbank—
Okay, I wasn’t running up the riverbank, I corrected, and sank my teeth into my lower lip to stop the noises I’d been making.
But he didn’t seem to like that. Or maybe he took it as a challenge. He growled against my skin, against me, and a rush of sensation flooded over my body, another of those warm tidal waves. A tongue swept around me, hands clenched beneath me, and the prick of fangs scraped across—
Fangs?
I looked down the length of my body, blinking, and dark, dark eyes lifted to meet mine.
“You have an interesting fantasy life, dulceat¸a?.”
I stared back for a heart-stopping second, and then a surge of panic hit me, like a bucket of ice water. The cocooning warmth receded into cold, stark terror, the languor became agitated thrashing, and a moment later I almost drowned in the tub I guess I’d fallen asleep in. Because I surfaced gasping and panting and making weird squeaky noises at Roy and the group of vamps that burst in through the door a second later.
And who didn’t get an explanation before I threw the loofah at them and yelled, “Shut the door!”
• • •
Okay, it took me a little longer to calm down that time. I’d managed to rinse off, to wash the bubbles out of my hair, and to drain the tub before I was calm enough to think. And to tell myself that I was being ridiculous, that it was just a dream. A mish-mash of that scene in Wales, fear of ending up like Agnes, and incubus-induced horniness that, yeah, was about the last thing I needed right now.
It all made sense, as much as dreams ever did.
Wide, worried blue eyes stared back at me out of the brand-new bathroom mirror. They didn’t look like they believed me. They kind of looked spooked, which was ironic considering that I was a clairvoyant and dealt with ghosts all the time.
“It was a dream,” I told my reflection out loud, and started rubbing cold cream onto my face. Those hadn’t been Mircea’s eyes at the end, hadn’t been his voice, hadn’t been anything except my overactive imagination. Just my brain playing tricks on me. Although why that particular trick, I didn’t know.
Mircea wasn’t worried about Pritkin. Why should he be? When Pritkin wasn’t getting dragged off to hell or back through time, he was my bodyguard. And self-appointed drill sergeant. And official nag. He yelled at me about what I ate, how much I exercised, and anytime I ended up in danger, even if it wasn’t my fault. He frequently gave Marco a run for his money in the let’s-pile-on-Cassie department; he sure as hell wasn’t whispering sweet nothings into my ear.
I wasn’t even sure the man I knew remembered how. In fact, most of the incubi I’d met had badly needed a dose of charm school—why they didn’t all starve was beyond me. And, of course, Pritkin did; he didn’t have a choice, thanks to his father’s prohibition.
But that was before he was dragged off to hell, a sly inner voice corrected. His father was able to snatch him back because he broke their deal. And had demon sex with you.
