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But not most of it. I cried out, desperate for something, and I didn’t even know what it was. What was wrong with me?
Pritkin was saying something, but I could no longer concentrate well enough to understand him. I only knew that he got up to leave, probably to get help, and I panicked and grabbed on to his sleeve. And then something strange happened—stranger than anything on this very weird day.
Because someone else turned to look back at me.
It was Pritkin’s face, but not his eyes. These were greener, brighter, almost incandescent. They were also familiar.
I’d seen them once before, on that battlefield in Wales. Ares h
ad been trying to rip open the sky, the wind had been howling and sparks had been flying, and two great armies had been clashing together in the distance. Yet the most riveting thing to me had been those same eyes.
Pritkin’s incubus nature, long starved and half-dead, had peered out of his face for the first time in more than a century. And it had been looking at me. I stared back at it now, wondering if it remembered what had followed, how we’d come together in desperation, just wanting to feel something at the end of the world, and instead had ended up saving it.
Because the power we’d generated that night from the incubus feedback loop had been so great that neither of us could contain it. Pritkin’s incubus had been so starved, and thus so empty, that it had been able to hold far more of the Pythian power than it normally could. And had therefore been able to send back so much more, after its nature magnified what I’d given, that it had almost torn me apart. But instead, it had torn the fabric between worlds, when I used it to let the ghost of Apollo loose onto the battlefield.
But that had only been possible because Pritkin had gone without sex for a century. I didn’t think we’d make nearly so much power this time, but I didn’t care if we did. I didn’t care about anything but filling that terrible ache inside me, the one I finally recognized not as cold but as hunger. I was starving, and he was the only one who could give me what I needed.
But he didn’t want to.
I didn’t understand why, but it was in the set of his shoulders and biceps, rock hard and resisting my attempts to pull him closer. It was in the white-knuckled grip of his fingers on the side of the tub, in the protruding tendons of his neck, in the stubborn set of his jaw. I knew Pritkin; I knew he didn’t want this for some reason I didn’t understand.
But someone else did.
He finished turning back around, and his head dipped down, to find the cheek I’d just turned to him, because I didn’t understand this. I just knew Pritkin didn’t want it, so neither did I—right up until his mouth touched my skin. Since I’d turned my head, it was nothing more than a chaste kiss on the cheek, the kind you’d give a friend or a relative, just nothing at all. But it didn’t feel that way.
His lips were chapped and a little cold. There was melted snow on his face, and the scent of winter—cold air, coal fires, and damp wool—hung about him. His hair was hard and scratchy, like inverted icicles, spearing up everywhere. But it was the eyes—it was always the eyes—that gripped me when I turned into the kiss. So close, so very close, and so alien—
Only not. Because the creature gazing out at me was part of Pritkin, too, no matter how much he hated his demon side. Clear green eyes stared back into mine, not like emeralds this time but like glass, as if I could look through and see his soul. And maybe I could, but if so, his soul wanted the same thing I did. He was hungry.
When our lips touched, it was as if a firework exploded, only that’s too tame. It was more like a bomb went off. There was none of the playful teasing of the mountaintop, none of the normal human hunger of our night at Dante’s. This was a desperate coming together of two aching souls that could only find aid and comfort in each other.
And comfort there was. Pritkin shed his clothes while we tried to eat each other alive, and the next moment he was crawling into the tub alongside me. And that changed everything.
Suddenly, the water wasn’t hot, it was scalding. Suddenly, I wasn’t starving, I was ravenous. Suddenly, the room was alight with magic, maybe his, maybe mine, I didn’t know. But I could see it everywhere.
The lamplight felt solid and real, like the beams were caressing my skin. The water sloshing about me was silk, sliding sensuously along my body. Even the dust motes in the air had power, hovering around us like sparks off a bonfire—
And then I was back there again, in that tent on the battlefield, because yes, he knew; yes, he remembered. That other part of Pritkin knew what we’d done together, knew what we could do again. And he was grateful—God, so grateful. I saw it in his eyes, felt it in his kiss when his lips caught mine again. Felt all those long years of waiting, the desperate need to fulfill his true potential but always denied, denied, denied.
The little sips of power he’d obtained through the years, from this or that random encounter, had barely been enough to sustain him. And most of that he’d given back in service of his master, boosting his power, sharpening his senses, widening his focus. But it had never mattered, it had never been enough to prove himself. Never close to enough—
And then came that terrible night a century ago, with the master’s wife.
I didn’t know how we were communicating, if it was mind to mind or soul to soul, but I felt it, just as he had. Abrupt, sudden, unexpected joy. He was feeding! He was finally being allowed to feed! Not in little bits and pieces but fully, completely, for the first time ever. It caused a rush of joy so bright, so overwhelming, that it blinded him to what was happening—and to what he was doing. He didn’t understand until the beautiful power abruptly cut out, until he looked about in confusion and loss . . . and slowly, in mounting horror, realized what they held in their arms.
No! No, he couldn’t have done that! He recoiled, even as his master roared in pain and grief. He hid, deep inside, terrified, appalled, sickened by the realization that he’d destroyed his master’s one chance for happiness, and his only chance to ever again feel that wondrous power in his veins.
He’d never be let out now. He saw that with perfect clarity. He’d never live, never thrive, never be allowed to do his only duty, because if he’d been hated before, it was nothing to this! Nothing to the scorn and self-loathing his master felt, that he felt, because they really were one, no matter how much he’d come to think of them as separate beings.
There was no actual divide, but there may as well have been, because the two halves of his nature would never meet after this. He knew that with a certainty he’d never had before. And that one, tiny spark of hope he’d cultivated through all the long years died.
What was there to hope for, to live for, now? He was like a vestigial organ, there but unwanted, unused, a relic from another age. And he deserved it.
He felt that with burning shame, knew it had all been his fault. He’d carried the guilt close to his heart, knowing that his penance was just and right. That he didn’t deserve to taste that flood of life-giving energy, that he should be boarded up, forgotten, left in a cell of his own pain to slowly starve.
And so it had been, day after day, week after week, year after long, lonely year. No respite, no hope, no slight reprieves like in the past, because his master was completely celibate now. There was nothing to feed from, nothing at all, and he had felt life slipping away from him, a slow, steady drip, drip, drip as whatever power he’d once had faded into nothingness.
He was waiting to die.
