Dead Drop (17 page)

He moved just his head. Wallace was coming this way. She emerged from the hallway in the same clothes as before. She had all her things. Her purse, her jacket, shoes, coat. The battered suitcase she’d brought with her.

Her eyes got big, but not much rattled her. She’d seen demons in their true forms. Maddy didn’t let the witches go long without that experience, and besides, she’d fought magehelds, and Jeanne, and handled herself brilliantly. With her ability, she didn’t have much to worry about.

She put down her things. “Are you all right?”

Palla lifted the box that contained the talisman. He focused on her, on Wallace, and not the energy rocketing through him. “This is an abomination.”

“It is.”

Avitas was whispering to him, calling for him, but he looked at Wallace. “Will you bear witness to me, too?”

“I promised you I would.”

“What I’m doing, it is an honor,” he said. “Sacred.”

She lifted one shoulder. “I know.”

He stared at her with eyes that saw colors she could not. If he did not survive, there would be one person left to honor the memory of Avitas and him. With his vision beyond human acuteness, he could see the glow of the band of color around her arm. In a future that did not include him, would she look at it and think of him?

“In a couple hours, I’m going to call that number you gave me and have someone check on you. See if you need any help.” She headed for the door.

“Better if you call now. Before. Someone will come and get you so I know you’re all right.”

She turned around. “Because of your oath, you mean?”

“Otherwise, I would eventually be compelled to follow you. To be sure you are safe.”

She stood for several minutes, chewing on her bottom lip. “What happens if I wait here? Until this is over?”

The whisper of insanity from the talisman was working its way through him, slower than at Jeanne’s, but inexorable. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he went under the way he had before. “You cannot stop me.”

Her face softened, and he understood even before she spoke that she would never interfere that way. She replied in a low voice. “You deserve better, and so does she.”

Words would not leave his tongue, but she was used to silence from him.

“Once, at Maddy’s, one of the other witches told an awful story about an assimilation that didn’t go well. She was there. She saw it happen. You can’t pretend it isn’t dangerous, what you’re about to do.”

He laughed.

“I won’t let you die alone. You don’t do that to anybody. Especially not to people you love. So, you do what you have to.” She sat beside the pile of her belongings. “I’ll be right here.”

He nodded, because he trusted her. A witch. He trusted a witch more than he trusted some of the kin. He turned his attention to the box. Jeanne had sealed it with a nasty trap, but he unwound it without much trouble. Inside lay a marble cylinder that, to his enhanced vision, glowed with the life entombed in it. Unmarked, unpolished, level at both ends. He brushed the marble with the back of his finger. Cool stone, yet there was an electric buzz at the contact.

He opened himself to Avitas. A dry moan rustled through his mind; a death rattle that had lasted half a millennium. She was closer, so close, this echo of the missing part of him. The inseparable separated.

He wanted to touch her again. Hear her laughter, be complete again, but all that was left of her was inside the cylinder balanced on his palm. His shattered blood-bond with Avitas surged through him, insisting they could be whole again. The quiver that had begun in his fingers reached his shoulder, and the howl in his head was louder. So loud he could hardly hear.

His palm burned where the talisman touched his skin. At every point of contact there was a spark, a pinprick transfer of heat, and a tiny world in which he and Avitas were one and the same being. When he cracked the talisman, there would be nothing left of her. If all went well, and he survived, he would never have even this echo of what they had been.

He ignored the increasing pain of contact with the cylinder and closed his fingers around it. The energy from the material had nowhere to go but into his skin. He reached out, tapped with his mind and was engulfed.

In his true form, Palla was a sleek, virescent black that scattered cat’s-eye gold in the light. From her cross-legged position on the floor, Wallace watched, memorizing everything. The center of her chest vibrated with her reaction to him in this form, and to the undercurrent of the talisman. She, too, heard the screams of his still-dying blood-twin. She would not forget this. Whatever happened, she would have the memories she’d promised to him. Honor demanded it. Even if it meant watching him die.

Of all the demons who’d worked with her, he was the only one to see something in her besides the mundane. Because of him, she’d found the talent that lived in her. He’d trusted her with not only his life, but his blood-twin’s, too. He’d endured centuries without Avitas, knowing she’d been condemned to suffer without cease, and he’d been powerless to help her. Today, this moment, the wrong done to him and Avitas ended.

He wasn’t suppressing his power. Even without a connection between them, he bowled her over. She absorbed her terror of him so she would have this moment to bring to mind. He stood at least ten inches taller than in his human form, broader across the shoulders and chest. His eyes were gold, flecked with green, a thing of nightmare. Her heart gave a thud. This otherworldly Palla was monstrous, and beautiful, and beyond understanding. What had she been thinking, dealing with him as if he were, at heart, just like her? He wasn’t. He’d never been safe just because he looked human. He wasn’t. He wasn’t human at all.

He opened his clenched hand, palm up. The cylinder he’d taken from the box was gone. That faint call of madness remained, though, the unsettling wrongness. He folded his taloned fingers, a languorous motion of fluid joints. He turned his hand sideways. Translucent sand streamed toward the floor and pattered onto the hardwood. When the last of it was gone, he spread his arms wide, muscles tense, head back. Grains of the substance clung to his hand and glittered in the light. The stars on the ceiling glowed.

Now that his palms were turned toward her, she saw a dot of lava-red on the center of his palm. The dot shimmered and formed a tail that writhed and snaked toward his wrist. She focused on that. Avitas.

He straightened, turned his head to her with those fully gold eyes that were not human. His mouth curved, slowly, and a moment later she felt his psychic push at her. Not because he was trying to connect, but because that was his nature as demonkind.

“So,” he said. “Now we wait.”

Wallace went to him and studied his palm. The tail that had emerged from that livid red dot extended past his wrist. The color wasn’t a stain, it was under his skin, part of his hide, moving, swirling like a living thing, stretching along his arm, and her heart folded over with the conviction that no demon could survive prolonged contact with the power now concentrated there.

“Does it hurt?”

“Like fucking hell.” The voice that came from the changed planes of his face and mouth rumbled from deep in his chest. He curled his other hand around the back of her neck. She ought to be afraid of him, but she wasn’t.

She set a hand on his torso, smoothing his skin, gliding along that amazing black-green iridescence. She leaned in and pressed her lips to the center of his chest. His fingers tightened on her, slid up and covered the back of her skull. For two beings with so many differences, the thought of losing him after everything they’d been through panicked her.

He kept her near–she stayed close–and they remained like that for a long time. Forever. She floated along his vast, internal quiet until he swayed against her. She jammed her shoulder under his armpit. If he collapsed, he’d crush her in their fall.

Together, they stumbled to the couch, and he sprawled full length. His body changed several times in succession. He faded in and out of consciousness, sometimes alert; the Palla she knew so well. Other times, he was a blank to her. Different forms; beast, devil, animal. His human form. Once, only once, a human woman with blonde curls and icy blue eyes. Wallace took the woman’s hand and kissed her palm. She was Palla, and they had loved each other.

“I love you,” she whispered. “Forever. Both of you.”

The woman’s shape was subsumed by the creature she’d first seen. His eyes opened, he shuddered. The red streak on his arm was halfway to his elbow now. She moved away, but he caught her hand and brought her back. “Wallace.”

She put her hands on his chest and concentrated on him, on the pain that wracked him. She drew that pain into her, and after a few minutes, it seemed to her that he was better.

He was mostly himself now, his thoughts clear, and that had to be a good thing, right? She rested her head on his chest, relieved and terrified both. Let it be this easy, please. He slid both hands down her back, bringing her forward while he whispered her name. She gripped his other hand, ignoring the prick of a talon on the back of her hand. He flared in her head, raw, searing, and their connection was immediately two-way. She wasn’t new to this anymore. She could take care of herself.

“No shit, angel.”

She laughed, despite feeling like she’d rather cry, and then, without warning, the tears that had been threatening spilled from her.

One of his arms tightened around her, and he stood and brought her with him. She set her hands on his chest while his fingers followed her arms downward to bracelet her wrists. He walked her backward, an arm around her waist so she wouldn’t fall.

That red line undulated beneath his skin. He stumbled once on his way to his room. Just one of those things, right? They made it to his bed, and while he worked at her clothes, she was thinking,
like this
. With him like this because they might never get the chance again.

The streak moving up his arm was to his elbow now. His skin was hot, his hands warm when he touched her. Tension sizzled between them, familiar and at the same time utterly different this time because he was in his true form.

She put a hand on his belly, above his cock and then down, and she bent and took him in her mouth, and there he was in her thoughts, feeding her his response, and she managed to think
you don’t hate witches as much as you say.

He touched her shoulders, glided fingers over her skin, and he did come in her mouth, and she went along with him, feeling the moment when he was vulnerable to her because he’d let his climax take him away, and the entire time, she drew away the pain that was wracking him.

He touched her everywhere, after that, everywhere, and he savored the difference–the fact that she was human, and that he could touch her magic, and that was something, the way her heart raced.

The moment came when he pulled himself over her, she knew he was supposed to get her consent to this. He stilled, his cock hard, his alien, otherworldly features aligning in angles that weren’t human. “I need yes.”

That red streak was past his elbow now. He slid a thigh between her legs, and she could not imagine living another five seconds without him inside her. She put a hand on the arm he propped on the mattress above her shoulders and touched that red line. There was an image in her head now, of that line snaking around his throat, curling around to the back of his neck and upward.

“What happens then?”

“I’m either dead or not.” He lowered his mouth to hers and kissed the side of her throat. “Yes?” he asked in a voice and with a mind that was demon. Not human. “Yes, like this? Yes, I can taste your blood. Yes, I get to make love to you so you won’t forget even a second of this. I’ll change back in time, I swear it.”

She might never hold him again. Never again. “Yes, yes, please.”

Green and yellow flecks flashed through his eyes, and then he was pushing into her. She arched to meet him, to make it happen, and she hollowed out again at the sensations, the impossibility of the creature inside her, the way their minds slid alongside each other, intermingled even.

There was a desperation to their lovemaking. She couldn’t erase the possibility that he might not survive, or that he was thinking that if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be sorry to have this experience be one of his last.

He slid a talon along her arm, over the band of color around her biceps, and they both felt the surge of electricity, the sizzle of contact. With his mouth, he touched the side of her throat, warm tongue. Soft lips. The pressure of sharp teeth. Tension built in her. He closed his teeth but not enough to hurt or break her skin. Harder now. A sting, and while he drew out that sensation, he also pushed deeper into her.

One of his hands pinned her wrists to the mattress. With the other, he turned her chin away, exposing more of her throat. The sting blossomed. A nick. Enough to draw blood, and when he tasted, her mind whirled with colors she could not name. His hips pressed into her, and he let her see and feel what it was like for him to have a human woman’s body in his arms, to have the taste of her blood in his mouth, singing through him. He released her hand and drew a talon down her side and there was a surge of power in the wake of that contact.