A Siren's Song (Ride of the Darkyrie 2) (10 page)

             
Jason lifted my arm and drew the sponge down my skin to my hand, where he made sure to scrub gently at the blood there—his tender ministrations surprisingly effective.

             
“You trusted me. I should have been here. I was too pissed you left with Sickert.”

             
His words warmed me further. “It’s okay, Jason. We all made our choices. I don’t blame you.”

             
“
I
blame me. You trusted me to come with you, to protect you until you could protect yourself. I’ve been too caught up in what that meant for me. In being angry that you asked me to do this and give up the Helreggin you were for all those centuries. I pushed. I wanted. I took. When I should have served as I promised you I would.”

             
His words were sharp daggers that shredded the mantle of goodness I’d laid over his shoulders. The Cross was right. I’d broken this god. I’d twisted him into something he was never meant to be. What kind of being would sacrifice so much of himself for another? Not just someone else, but for a monster? For me, who couldn’t love, didn’t want to feel… who couldn’t give back any of the things he’d give to me.

             
“How did I ask?”

             
He moved to wash my other hand. His mouth curved into that sexy smirk. “You didn’t. You told me what we were doing. Then you fucked me until I’d have promised you anything if only you let me come.”

             
His words shocked me. I don’t know why, I suppose because I have never been overtly sexual. They aroused me too. I’ve never thought about what it would take to give another person pleasure. I was never concerned with it. The only pleasure that made sense to me was killing.

             
Yet with the heat of his presence at my back, I was starting to learn about another kind of pleasure. The pleasure of his weight pushing me down, his body inside mine, his hands on my skin. I would like that. Not as much as dealing death with her toothsome smile, but enough.

             
It seemed like it would be a good weapon to have. It didn’t matter if I understood it, or liked it. Although, I was sure with Grimes, I would like it very much.

             
I propped my leg up on the corner of the tub, offering it for him to wash as well. Now he used my margarita scented Philosophy body wash, no cloth or sponge. Only his warm hands and the satiny soap sliding up and down the length of my leg. I found the higher he moved up my thigh, the higher I wanted him to go. I was hit with a keen disappointment every time he moved his hands lower.

             
I presented my other leg for the same treatment and he indulged me. We were both aware that the energy in the room had changed. It had gone from comforting and consoling, protecting and soothing to something hot and dark.

             
But still neither of us spoke of it. He continued to wash me as if this was something he’d always done for me, not as Helreggin, but Brynn. In this world, this life. It felt right to have his hands on me.

             
He moved around the side of the tub and carefully began washing my shoulders. I tilted my face so I could look at him. His eyes had changed again, still infinite and ancient, but rather than the blue of the sky as the sun set, they were the bright fire of the aurora borealis.

             
I imagined the tension between us to be like a single cell organism. It began as this moment, a single thing. But it divided itself again and again, consuming oxygen and space, filling up with itself, expanding until there was nothing left but the weight suffocating us both.

             
His hands had stopped their delicious torture and for a moment, we were frozen just like the winter nights of our homeland. There was no breath, no thought, only electricity.

             
I moved my hand to where his palm rested on my shoulder and drew his hand down to my breast. I’d already asked him not to leave me, I couldn’t ask for anything else. But this move, it was a demand, not a request.

             
It shattered the concrete tension in the room like it was nothing more than glass. He dove for me like I was an oasis in a desert and his lips crashed into mine.

             
He tasted sweet, like red table grapes and the end of summer. I wrapped my arms around his neck, pulled him down hard to me. Jason was unmindful of the water, of anything but me. He came down to me willingly.

             
The Cross’s words exploded in my head like land mines.
“Your lover. Baldur. He should hate you for what you did to him, but instead, he worships at your feet like a dog. That’s what you get off on. Walking the edge with someone who wants you dead. Turning them, destroying everything they stand for, their honor.”

             
I was the one who failed and now it was Jason who took the blame, apologized. Took away my culpability as my protector.

             
And I was going to let him because this felt so good.

             
He lifted me out of the tub easily and I wondered again how I ever thought I was stronger than he was. Or why he even let me. He could have shattered that illusion a million times over.

             
“Jason?” Breathless again, like some innocent who hadn’t had blood on her hands. I looked up at him searching his face for some clue as to how I should proceed. I didn’t want to admit any more vulnerability, and yet, whether I admitted it or not, I was vulnerable. I’d only done this once before and it had hurt.

             
“I promised I’d take care of you and I will,” he whispered raggedly against my ear, somehow knowing what I needed from him. He always knew. 

             
I surrendered to Jason Grimes then, to Baldur, to everything he was and I trusted him again. I swore I wouldn’t, but I couldn’t help myself.

             
He carried me to the bed, like in the books Jenna was always lending me, and he spread my legs apart gently, bending to kiss me there. Thora’s father had never done that.

             
Jason dragged his tongue along my seam, delving and licking, focusing on the spot he somehow knew I’d like best. I understood then why other women loved that smirk, there was the promise of this in that expression—a supreme confidence in his own gifts.

             
“You taste like honey.”

             
Strange, I’d never imagined those parts of a person could taste sweet. Salty, musky, but never sweet. I dragged him up to me to kiss me again so I could test the truth of his words. All I could taste on his lips was fire. Everywhere he touched me was a burn.

             
He dipped his head again, his lips and tongue a waterfall of flame as he moved down my body. Something inside me tightened, like a bowstring, taut and ready to snap. I found I liked the sight of his golden head bent between my thighs, it tingled deep in my gut.

             
My hands balled into fists around my hotel style sheets as that tight feeling inside me became frenetic.

             
This was what it was to be in the tail of a comet—I didn’t know I was burning until Jason’s gravity pulled me down into this death spiral.

             
Suddenly, I crashed, but instead of the snap of a bowstring, it was a supernova. An explosion behind my eyes, inside me that sent all that stardust careening through my blood into my brain. My body arched up, spasmed under his lips and fingers and all I could do was let the waves take me.

             
It was poison and bliss.

             
I hated how out of control I was, Jason had a power over my flesh that was unacceptable. I thought again how perhaps this was another power I needed to add to my arsenal. I could learn to wield my body as a weapon, not just as a killer, but as a woman.

             
“That was beautiful, Brynn,” he murmured.

             
Beautiful? What did he get out of it? His body wasn’t stimulated, mine was. Perhaps it was because he liked watching the evidence of his power over my flesh? That I could understand. It made sense.

             
He pulled back from me and I watched him as he methodically stripped out of his clothes. I licked my lips and found myself eager to see more of his golden skin.

             
Jason’s body was beautifully sculpted, as if it belonged in a museum cut from stone rather than warm tissue. The movement of his muscles was like a dance, so perfectly in sync, fluid.

             
The aftershocks of what he’d done to me ricocheted all the way to my feet, a pulsing in my heels. A strange sensation. The pulse became a throb again when his fingers made quick work of his slacks and he freed his cock.

             
That part of him would be inside me. I wanted it.

             
He crawled up my body on the bed, that beast of a weapon was warm on my leg and promised only bliss, not the ripping pain I’d had the first time. Jason searched my eyes, and I knew in that moment, if he’s spoken to ask me some trite line about if I was sure, I would have said no and been done with it.

             
But he didn’t.

             
Instead, he kissed me again and I bucked my hips up to him, inviting him to take everything he wanted from me for now, in this moment.

             
He pushed into me with no preamble, but there was no pain. Only this sense of fullness that was so right. The only ever time I’d felt this way was that first time I’d killed. There was a wholeness to me, like I’d been missing this part of my life.

             
No, no. This was only because my soul knew his.

             
Jason met my gaze and we fell into each other. He cupped my face with his strong fingers, almost as if he were afraid if he didn’t hold me there, I’d disappear.

             
And I did.

             
A tidal wave of Helreggin’s memories dragged me out in an undertow only to launch me back up onto the shore of my current incarnation again. The image of Jason’s god self was superimposed on this reality and he whispered in my ear even though his lips didn’t move.

             
He spoke of love, of long nights under Yggdrasill, the Tree of Life. Of twining ourselves together with the leaves glistening like diamonds above our heads.

             
I knew then that Helreggin loved him, as much as any creature such as she could be capable of loving.

             
But those feelings were not mine and I didn’t want them to be.

             
That knowing exploded through me with more force than the physical release. It was brighter, hotter, and more wonderful. A sense of self, of who I was in this world,
this
life. I understood my place in it again.

             
His essence spilled into me as he climaxed.

             
It occurred to me that this was the most vulnerable he’d ever be—lost in the sensation of my body milking his, spasming around him and pulling his seed deep into my womb. His throat was literally bared to the beast, the predator in me.

             
As Jason’s body stilled, he brushed another kiss across my lips and lay down beside me. A strange spell had been cast over us for those moments and now that the madness had passed, it was simply over.

             
It made me think of the Voodoo women who invited their gods to possess them…to “ride” them. That’s what this had been. My limbs, my breath, my lips—none of those things had were my own.

             
Jason must have felt it too because he didn’t try to hold me or even wait for me to speak before he sat up and started pulling on his clothes.

             
I followed his example, not having much experience in these things. “So is the victim still at the scene?” The best thing here was to talk about work. Neutral territory.

             
“No. She’d dead.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

             
“That’s why I came to find you. Whatever she had to say doesn’t matter anymore.”

             
“It doesn’t matter? How can you say that? The killer must have told her to ask for me. Do you know what that means?”

             
“It didn’t matter enough for you to show up. So no, it doesn’t matter.” The gentleness of his tone belied the hard punch of his words. I couldn’t argue with him either. In that moment when the Cross had burned my letter, I’d chosen myself over catching the killer.

             
And I’d do it again with no regrets.

             
“Sometimes that’s just the way it goes, Grimes.”