Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows) (17 page)

Loren cringed away from the solar flare in time to catch a collective hiss from the peanut gallery that made his stomach crawl in a sickly bubble of panic through his esophagus. An ice cold breeze stirred itself from nothing, winding its way around the circle. It brought the electric tang of fall and the promise of a long inevitable winter in its wake.

The retina killing brightness dimmed, the vines phosphoresced, rising from the aftermath. It took time to readjust to the new lighting scheme, but when he did, what he saw made him wish he were blind. There was a reason dark things lurked in dark places.

A reason.

The sluggish churning in Loren's skull indicated that the mud was trying to make sense of things, to understand, to survive what he was looking at without a full on neurological breakdown. It didn't work. He'd scratched his record and his brain was repeating only one moment in time. Too bad it was the wrong one. For a second he wondered if he had ringside seats to the end of the world, or if this was what the beginning had looked like.

All he knew for certain was that he was drenched in a cold sweat he couldn't control, and that the gun in his hand was laughable in the face of all of the terrible beauty that would ruin him forever. He peeled his eyes from the vast crystal ocean above and realized with a desperate terror that the circle was no longer empty. The glass was more than half full and not in a good way.

A thousand jigsaw rugrat nightmares were packed in like sardines. Their wide obsidian sockets brimmed to overflowing with inky tears that streamed down each and every face. Several small heads tilted back as their mouths elongated in inhuman ways. Bronze clouds erupted from upturned faces expanding at a freakish rate until they hung massive, writhing, and weightless in the air. Bright flashes lit them up from the inside, revealing the brain bending horrors inside. Loren could feel himself hyperventilating. Telltale gray spots appeared in his field of vision, blessedly blocking out large sections of the clouds.

He barely felt the jolt of pain that licked up his thighs as his patellas made contact with the scattered femurs in the floor. He railed against the involuntary ascent of his eyes as they made their way toward the back of his skull. And like that, the whole dark fairyland winked out and he was down for the count.

****

Her hand should hurt. Tian focused on the thought despite the languid metallic haze of possession that had bloomed under her skin. Her damned hand should hurt. But it didn't. It wasn't that she couldn't feel it; wasn't as if she was numb, or in shock, or simply unaware of the amount of damage that occurred when a piece of metal went through a sensitive area. Except, even knowing that it didn't hurt.

Worse, what was happening with it felt too much like sex for comfort. Sio's blood fountained in hot jets from his body and into her own. She gritted her teeth against the searing sparks that thrust their way up her arm and into the overworked organ in her chest. She couldn't remember the last time anything had felt so good and didn't think it had. Ever.

She panted against the sensory overload. Dark forms reminded her of raven's wings as they fluttered inside the skin of her already super-heated torso, fanning the metallic bonfire of the goddess in her body. Sio put that velvet soft pout against her skin and dragged it in an electric caress up her neck. Her legs buckled and her vision fogged like glass. Tian's bloody hand spasmed in his own as she clutched at him hard enough to break bone.

She heard the sharp exhalation of his stifled groan as he slid his right hand around her torso, pulling her in tighter against him. An unmistakable hardness ground against her lower back. Sio's hand slid up her ribcage, coming to rest on the bare skin over her heart at the neck line of her shirt.

Her body shredded itself. The brightness that flowed in caused the whole world to go white as a snowstorm. She was blind to everything, but the furious glare spun with golden tracers. Tian opened her mouth to scream, but it wasn't her voice that expanded outward. The Goddess's divine response spilled from her throat, tearing the skin asunder and battering the fabric of Tir Na Nog. It swallowed the eternity, reverberating in haunting, ethereal, deafening, unrivaled, perfection. The magic swelled and burst like a surfacing bubble, pouring out in a rush of cold fire. The remains of the dead rumbled under foot, trembling, grinding together as her vision began to reassert itself. Tian saw and found no words.

She watched in silent awe as the goddess' presence blazed beneath her ribs. Molten incandescence devoured the vines, burning away the decay and the centuries of heartbreak. The divine spark extended upward and plunged, steaming, into a vast body of clear water. Light fractured in the dazzling prismatic array of a hundred vivid colors that showed in startling contrast to the rich velvet background. It was like standing at the center of a new born star. Shining fun house mirror droplets floated from the abyss below. They met the hovering body of water with the fat happy splashes of a long sought reunion and assimilated into the depths as giant twirling plumes of smoky quicksilver.

Fae creatures, long lost to the world of man, greeted the surface in the hovering ocean, magnified by the way the light reflected through the water. The liquid mass boiled with the commotion spilling from its hidden depths. Jarringly bright salt water colors presented themselves in a dazzling array and the rapturous expressions on so many inhuman faces beamed with triumph and hope.

A cold wind spun its way through the circle, tingling against her skin and raising the hair on her neck. Tian remembered the electric eager thrill of being a child and wanted to laugh or cry with manic excitement. She wasn't sure which, and at the moment the two didn't seem that different. She couldn't remember the last time Tir Na Nog had felt...magical.

She couldn't remember the last time she found even the best of Faerie beautiful either and truly, the dark horde was beautiful. Beautiful and terrible; filled with such a keen edged wild grace that it brought pain to look at them. Her skin was searing hot, too tight on her frame, and humming with the blood magic afterglow and latent desire radiating from the points where Sio's body still connected with her own.

Sio.

She tilted her head back, craning her neck so she could see his face without breaking contact. His unguarded expression was one of awe and tender amazement. A gift that bore witness to a thousand prayers answered. It was the diametric opposite of what she'd seen when she'd walked in on him in the bathroom. The marked change healed a stray piece in her soul. It healed something she hadn't known was broken or had existed at all.

The breeze of wild magic whipped around them, caressing overheated skin and manipulating the delicate tendrils of steam it had coaxed from their flesh. Tian realized with a start that there was moisture on her face that had nothing to do with condensation. She would have looked elsewhere, broken contact to wipe the tears away, but the goddess' soul was so effervescent she could do little else but accept the unexpected pleasure of release.

Her eyes drifted to the Slaugh Lord Augustine where he'd fallen to the ground. The tears slid steadily down his face as he focused on an object shrouded in black fire at the center of the circle. The thing pulsed with meaty rhythmic contractions that matched the call from her own organ. Tian clenched Sio's hand, sliding through the blood slick points of contact that saw his fingers laced through her own. He tore his gaze from the oceans above and made an attempt to return to her, getting caught halfway. Another jolt flowed through their physical connection.

The Slaugh that had once hovered at the periphery of the Nemed now swarmed it. Thousands of misshapen forms congregated in a space that shouldn't have been able to contain them. Yet it did, because they belonged to it. Not all of them stood, some had fallen to their knees, and others had abased themselves as close to the bones as they could get.

The red caps hovered several feet from the ground. Their disfigured mouths were thrown open with jaws unhinged to make room for the wild bronze clouds that billowed out. The clouds expanded to proportions that dwarfed the bodies they'd come from. A clap of thunder sounded from the building specters and Tian swallowed the litany of profanity that stacked against her teeth. The thunderheads lit up, spotlighting the bloody phantasm of nightmares within. A cold wave of dread pissed its way through her veins. Her hand began to bleed again, accompanied by all the pain she'd missed in the first go round.

There was downward movement in her periphery. Sio must have registered more of the fall than she had, because his hand left her breast bone and shot out, grabbing hold of Loren's bicep on the descent. Another clap of thunder hit. The healed scratches from the succubus burned as they unzipped themselves. Sio swore and disengaged, grabbing Loren with both hands and hoisting the unconscious man onto a wide shoulder. Tian dropped to her knees in front of Augustine and waved a hand in his face.

"Your Nemed is silent no longer, but they will die if we stay here. Do you understand?" she said.

"It would be a most unforgivable breech of hospitality to slaughter those responsible for the gifts that have been bestowed within our boundaries," Augustine said. He ogled the crackling bronze clouds rising into the atmosphere.

Another round of thunder and lightning battered them. The center of her chest screamed pain through all available receptors as the clouds opened up and poured blood from both sides.

"We need a safe place that is not here....now."

It was the Nemed that responded to her plea. Bones shifted and twisted, clacking against one another until Tian was left staring at a dark hole cut out of the ground. She could hardly see through the bloody downpour as she stumbled over to where Sio was kneeling with the human. She took shallow breaths, trying not to wretch or pass out from gamey death smell. Fucking red caps.

She reached out to help Sio up, but he jerked away from her.

"Do. Not. Touch me right now," he said. She recoiled.

"How's about you have your tantrum when death isn't a likelihood."

Her throat was starting to bleed. She grabbed the front of Sio's shirt, making damn sure their skin didn't come into contact, and dragged them all into the abyss.

If the aerial acrobatics of his internal organs were any sort of barometer, they'd been falling for a good clip. It was black as pitch, so it wasn't as if he had anything else to go by. Sio let out a breath and tried to rein back the dread spilling into his jaw. Too far. He'd gone way too goddamn far.

Think of something else, prick. Anything else.

Except the only thing that came to mind was how unbelievably good the metallic sparklers in his veins had felt when he touched her, how badly he wanted her to touch him, and how much he resented the near overpowering urges he felt whenever she was close.

Stop thinking about her.

Reprieve came by way of a dense layer of arctic cold. Sio made a sluggish grab for Loren to reassure himself that the guy hadn't been swallowed by the bad. He glanced at Tian who still had hold of his shirt. Shadows spun in lazy patterns across her skin with a sheen that mimicked the way light reflected off an oil slick. She wasn't looking at him, but the profile of her face under all of that otherworldly sent a disturbing ripple lurching through his chest.

What did you do to me?

He opened his mouth with the question poised, when they punched crash test dummy style into an impossibly black ocean of ice. The cold permeated everything. It crawled in through his pores, sapped the heat from his nerves, and settled in his bone marrow. Sio screamed, but no sound came out. With another agonizing sensory jolt, they broke through the liquid nitrogen terror and felt a half a second of free fall acceleration before landing hard on a surface with a surprising amount of give. It still hurt.

A loud metal clang was smothered by a sharp curse and then there was light. It was murky at best and his vision was obscured as if they were under water, but he could see. The space they'd landed in was the size of a mausoleum. He wasn't having any trouble breathing, though. He attributed that meager comfort to the pressure surrounding them which was dead set on forcing thick lungfuls of glacial cold hand over fist into his chest.

Through the buttery flashlight haze he watched Tian slide off the tilted surface of a rectangular interrogation table. Metal chairs protruded from the walls at odd angles. She moved slowly, working to lever herself up with one hand, fighting the cold or the random battery of muscle aches associated with taking a swan dive into a steel table.

He settled Loren on the ground, took two steps closer, and wrapped his hand around her jacket clad bicep, tugging her upward. There was a pregnant silence before she disengaged, sliding her arm out of his grip, and stepping out of reach.

"He's sinking," Tian said. She wouldn't meet his eyes.

Sio rubbed the center of his chest, which felt like the cold had congealed and exploded into shrapnel. The irritation came on the heels of the ache, it crawled along the skin of his back like an itch, a mangy angry creature that held on for dear life. He stared at her, telling himself that he wasn't searching her features for a telltale flicker of emotion.

He's sinking. Sinking?
What was wrong with him?
Aww, hell.

Sio lunged for Loren, who was being consumed by some unidentifiable goo underfoot. It had latched on in congealed blobs of gummy dark paste like oatmeal. The harder he pulled the less the unconscious body moved.

"You have to jiggle him."

"That's usually my line," he said as he shook the body.

Tian's low chuckle preceded a sickening pop as he loosed the guy from the clutching quicksand science project mush.

"Where would you suggest I put him, princess?"

"Try the table. The dead sea eats immobile organic matter."

"Why didn't you say something when I put him down?"