Silken Rapture: Princes of the Underground, Book 2 (21 page)

Isabel blinked her heavy eyelids and tried to sit up, but her limbs felt so heavy she fell back to the cushions.

“This can’t go on. Her appetite has decreased daily since she’s come to Sanctuary, and this lethargy has gone on for well over a week. She’s ill,” Margaret said, sounding angry.

Isabel couldn’t quite grasp on her thoughts, couldn’t quite focus on them. It felt as though she were trying to grab a will-o-wisp in a dense fog. Even through her haze, it struck her distantly that it was strange that Margaret sounded as if she was angrily accusing someone of Isabel’s tiredness, even though there was no one else in the room but her and Royal, and no one was responsible for her laziness but herself.

“It’s okay, Margaret. I’m not sick. I’m just sleepy,” she murmured. Her eyelids closed. She was so comfortable. It was too difficult to stay in the waking world. She only wanted to escape to her dreams…to her beautiful dreams.

“You
must
do something,” Margaret said fiercely.

“I don’t feel li’ doin’ anything but sleeping and seeing ’im again,” she mumbled.

She drifted. Someone pushed up on her shoulders. Her eyelids felt like two bricks rested on them, they were so heavy when she tried to lift them. She saw a blurred image of the elaborate, carved mantel and a cheery fire flickering in the hearth.

Once again, her dreams beckoned. Her muscles went lax.

“Don’t you
dare
go back to sleep,” Margaret said loudly near her right ear. Isabel blinked and turned her head. Even that felt as if it took more energy than swimming in warm, thick honey.

“Here.”

She looked downward, her eyes crossing when she felt a cup press to her lower lip. She sputtered, nearly choking, when Margaret poured a great quantity of black tea into her lax mouth.

“It’s hot!” she shouted, back arching like a scalded cat’s. She glared at the plump, gray-haired woman sitting next to her, her mouth gaping open. She wouldn’t have guessed Margaret had such a nasty streak in her.

“That’s better,” Margaret said grimly. “Here. Drink some more.”

“I will
not
. You practically burned off my tongue,” Isabel complained. She pinched the tip of her scorched tongue beneath her gloved thumb and forefinger to exhibit her point. Her eyes went wide in shock.

“
Bwaise
,” she slurred. Blaise stood there next to the couch, seeming tall as an oak from the perspective of her sitting position. For some reason, it didn’t strike her as strange at all that he wore only a pair of jeans. She saw a thin, supple strap of leather just above the low-riding waistline. She glanced up guiltily into his face when she realized she’d been gawking in fascination, gripping her tongue like an idiot the whole time.

When she met his agate-like eyes, it was as though he’d just shouted a message to her across a wide chasm.

Her legs collapsed beneath her when she stood abruptly, her arms outstretched toward him.

The room was suddenly sweeping past her vision, and she felt stable and in motion at once.

“Here…put her in the bed,” she heard Margaret say from a great distance.

“I will have a human doctor brought to her,” he said.

“Blaise,” she mouthed soundlessly when she heard the deep voice and familiar, rough accent. Her mind couldn’t quite grip on anything solid. The soft mattress and luxurious bedclothes gave beneath her, beckoning her into sleep…but she did not
want
to sleep. Not now.

He was
here
…in the waking world.

She clutched at a hard, rounded shoulder muscle, but her fingers fell away, uselessly.

“You have been taking her blood,” Margaret said accusingly.

“Yes,” came his bleak reply. “But I don’t think that’s what’s weakening her.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s a miracle. I have drunk from her—I could not stop myself. I never took too much, and she is so strong, her vitessence is almost immediately replenished. I’m seeing her life force right now as we speak. Her vitessence is as strong as ever…stronger.”

“Then what’s wrong with her?” Margaret demanded.

Isabel waited for the deep voice she craved, and when it did not come immediately, she drifted.

“Delraven?” Margaret prompted. Isabel shifted her head on the pillow, willing herself to rise into consciousness.

“I have…I have used my ascendancy to make her forget. I have never done it before to someone for nights…weeks. It must be having a negative effect on her. I didn’t mean to hurt her.” This time, Isabel clearly heard the anxiety in his voice and longed to comfort him. “I will leave for Delraven,” he said after a pause, his voice as barren and bleak as a desert at midnight.

“You must,” Margaret said. “This cannot go on.”

Don’t go. Don’t go
. She was too weak to shape the words with her mouth. The plea reverberated around her skull, the message trapped.

It was she who was helpless,
she
who was trapped. She pried her eyes open, the effort costing her more energy than she ever recalled expending.

He glanced up and met her stare, his eyes wells of pain. He
had
heard her silent, desperate pleas.

“I’m harming you, lovely. I’m killing you. My need is too great. I must leave Sanctuary.”

“No!”

She screamed it through a rising sea of hurt and confusion. Everything swirled and struck, her desires and fears and fragments of memories pummeling her spirit like hurled projectiles. She couldn’t grasp what was happening to her. She was so alone. Only one thought possessed her, the sole plea that she clung onto like a raft tossed in a stormy ocean.

“Don’t go. Don’t go, Blaise. You are my other half now.”

“No, lovely. You will die if I stay with you.”

“I will die without you.”

“No. Never. You must sleep now. You have to rest.”

She fell into unconsciousness with his hand on her cheek and her heart clenching in pain.

Blaise glanced around quickly at the sound of Margaret Turrow gasping in shock.

“My word…how in the world did you get there?” she asked the man who stood next to Isabel’s bed.

Blaise dropped his hand from Isabel’s cheek and stood, his shock at seeing Usan for the first time in fifteen years nearly as great as Margaret’s. He watched, stunned, as the formidable Magian stepped forward and touched Isabel’s neck with long fingers.

“She is a strong one,” he told Blaise before he withdrew his hand. As always, the Magian’s sunny smile struck Blaise as bizarre, contrasting as it did with a handsome, austere face. Two lethal-looking incisors extending longer than the rest of his straight, white teeth. Other than the fangs, Usan possessed human-like features, but his crystalline blue eyes conveyed an intelligence that immediately struck even Blaise as otherworldly.

“She is resting easy,” Usan said, seeming satisfied.

“What are you doing here?” Blaise asked, still numb from the realization he’d just made about Isabel. He’d been harming her by forcing her to forget their moments together—first their matings, and recently, their rapturous lovemaking. Now he must leave her—

“I thought it was time,” Usan said simply as he gestured toward Isabel. His hand lingered over her belly. He touched her.

Blaise reached with lightning speed, grabbing Usan’s hand.

“What does that mean?” he asked roughly, his incisors now extended in anger. “Do you know something about Isabel that I don’t? Do you sense an illness in her? Is she going to be all right?”

“She’s going to be fine,” Usan assured. Blaise released him when he jerked on his hand. Usan glanced over at Margaret, who was still staring at him in open-mouthed amazement, and gave a small bow, his unusual burnt orange robes billowing around his legs.

“Greetings. I’m Usan, and you must be Margaret Turrow. Blaise values your loyal service, honesty and even your occasional insubordination.”

Margaret’s gaze flickered over to Blaise, her eyes even wider with wonder. “Lord Delraven told you that?”

“No, but his mind is an open book to me,” Usan said, smiling.

“Then you’re singular in all existence. He’s a puzzle in the dark to most of us,” Margaret muttered. Usan chuckled.

“What do you want?” Blaise growled, Usan’s demonstration of omniscience in front of Margaret scraping his already raw nerves.

He could not say that he loved Usan, for the soulless did not love, but he’d grown accustomed to the Magian’s enigmatic character. Usan regularly withheld information from him, and then inexplicably spilled a precious kernel of knowledge out of nowhere. He might want to throttle Usan at times, but he also valued him as a link to his origins and his past. Usan was the closest thing Blaise had to an ancestor.

“I came to speak with you about Isabel,” Usan said mildly.

“What do you know of her?” Blaise demanded, his tone so sharp that Margaret started.

“I know many things.” The Magian’s eyes sent a chill through him when he met his gaze. Usan stepped back and held out his hand toward the door. “Shall we adjourn to your quarters?”

Blaise swallowed and glanced back at Isabel sleeping on the bed.

“I have told you Isabel would be fine. Have I ever lied to you?” Usan asked quietly.

Blaise leveled a cold stare.

“Isn’t silence the biggest lie of all, Old Man?” he grated out bitterly, before he headed for the door.

“You cannot leave Sanctuary, Blaise,” Usan said a half an hour later.

Blaise paused in the process of wearing a hole in the carpet before the fireplace with his pacing feet. He felt as if an animal were in him, rearing and clawing, demanding release. He kept picturing Isabel’s malaise, her piercing hurt when her confused mind understood they were about to be separated. How could he have known he was harming her by making her forget their nights spent pressed together, skin to skin?

“Are you forbidding me?” he challenged Usan, his frothing anguish and bewilderment requiring a target for release.

“No. I have never forbidden you anything. You possess free will, Blaise. If you did not, my research would mean nothing.”

“Damn your bloody research,” he bellowed. “You say you don’t lie to me, but look what you do now? The mandate you have set in my blood to control Morshiel prevents me from any sort of free will, and you know it!”

Usan’s nonchalant shrug infuriated him farther.

“
Come on
,” Blaise said.

“What? Where are we going?” Usan asked.

“To fight,” Blaise bit out. “Right here. Right now. I don’t know why I haven’t ever wanted to knock your head straight to the earth’s soul before.”

“Oh, but you have,” Usan said, seeming unaffected by his surge of aggression. “After Elysse died you wanted to fight me, don’t you recall?” His tone gentled when Blaise continued to glare at him. “Besides, Isabel is not dead. She’s not Elysse, either, but something much more powerful, as we both know.”

He settled back on the couch and smoothed his robes contentedly, the fringe on his odd hat brushing his classically sculpted cheek. Blaise often referred to him as “Old Man” although Usan possessed no features of advanced age. His skin was vibrant and smooth, and not a single strand of gray ran through the jet black of his hair. A human might have guessed he and Usan were the same age, but Blaise instinctively understood the truth.

The male who sat before him was more ancient than he could fathom.

Blaise unclenched his fists and began to pace again. Pounding in Usan’s face would accomplish nothing, and it might even prevent him from attaining one of the meager little morsels of truth Usan occasionally tossed his way like a human threw scraps from the table at a dog. He hungered for facts—some guideposts in this new confusing territory he’d entered with Isabel. He wasn’t too proud to refuse Usan’s leavings.

“If you understand about Isabel, then you know why I must go,” Blaise said gruffly.

“Because you have mated with her, you must leave?” Usan asked, bewildered.

“The Sevliss aren’t meant to take mates. You have told me this yourself. We are sterile. We cannot…love.”

Usan gave a little apologetic smile. “I wasn’t lying. The truth changes over time, Blaise. Nature is not a fixed process. Thank the Empress for that.”

“I am harming her.”

Usan sighed. “The harm you cause her is from your habit of making her forget the moments of mating, not the mating itself. The body, spirit and mind suffer when they are forced not to recognize one another. You cut off a portion of her very soul by making her forget your mating, by forcing her to forget her intimate knowledge of you. It is depleting her vibrancy, but not to the point of harm. Not yet, anyway. But her soul longs to be with you so much, that she forces herself into unconsciousness, where she knows she will find both you and her buried memories of you.”

Blaise blanched at the news. How could he have known? He noticed Usan studying him and resisted another urge to lash out.

These
were not the particular truths he wanted to hear at the moment.

“I can’t seem to stay away from her, as much as I know I should,” he mumbled.

“She has a brilliant soul…breathtaking,” Usan said.

“If I can’t stay away from her, then I must leave Sanctuary, mustn’t I?”

“What if I told you that I will remove the wards of magic that protect Sanctuary if you go to Delraven? Isabel and the Literati will have no protection against Morshiel and the Scourge.”

Blaise froze, stunned. “You would do that, just to spite me?”

“I have no use or time for spite,” Usan said, his voice suddenly ringing with power, his countenance that of a different creature. “If it came to protection between you and Isabel, I might choose her. Do you mock me for that?”

“No,” Blaise replied quickly. He was still angry, but his curiosity was mounting. Usan was behaving strangely, even for him. “I would choose the same. But because I would have you protect her before me does not equate to you automatically agreeing. You have never granted my wishes in the past so readily. Why would you now? Why do
you
care what happens to Isabel?”