Demon Crossings (19 page)

She snaked her arms around his neck and pressed her open mouth to his shoulder, sucking at the water on his skin and taking her time, using her weightlessness to test every angle as she lowered herself, drawing out each movement until she thought she’d come if even a stir of water touched her clit.

She arched and Aiden splayed his hand low on her back to support her. His eyes locked on her floating breasts, the nipples peaked in the cool air and she liked that look on his face, raw, needy. The water caught her hair and weighed her head back. This was good. The soft caress of the water. Aiden’s heat. His hard cock inside her. Floating, letting the drift of the current bring them sweetly together then drag them apart.

His hand drifted across her belly, covered her breasts. His touch was so gentle it was nearly reverent. She thought that his restraint would snap and he’d take control but he didn’t, just kept himself planted deep, anchoring her, letting his hands wander over her body while she writhed on his cock. She was the one who clenched her thighs around his hips and dragged herself upright, grasping at his slick skin to pull herself higher and ride him harder.

She knew the moment he reached the end of his endurance. A growl rose in his throat and his fingers clenched on her hips.

“Hold on.”

She did. The muscles of his arms flexed under her fingertips as he started to move her body, sliding her down over his cock in a long, determined sweep then pulling her back up.

“Like this, Grace?”

“God, yes.”

“Not a god, remember?”

“Aiden,” she groaned, meaning it as a warning. Instead it came out plaintive and hungry.

“That’s right, sweetheart. Don’t forget it.”

How could she forget him? There was no chance of her ever wiping him from her mind. It scared the hell out of her. But she wouldn’t think about that now. Not when she couldn’t catch her breath and his cock was swelling inside her. When she came, it felt as if she was riding the lightning again but it was his heat seeping deep into her body.

His arms tightened around her, holding her up, and his head dropped to her shoulder. The roll of thunder was a distant growl. A bird sang in the dark and she shifted, letting her legs drift down to tangle with his.

Letting out a sigh, he cupped the back of her head and kissed her temple. “Time to go.”

Tonight was the night. New moon. The portal was unstable enough that the full hunt could push through. So they planned to ride, no test run this time, and Grace didn’t know if she could handle it. She sat on the porch swing while Aiden made the final arrangements with the others on the phone.

He was a good leader, taking his job seriously and always facing things dead on. She didn’t do that. She ignored the things that she didn’t want to deal with, holding them inside when they threatened to well up and packing them in deep. Hiding her gift, the memories of her family both good and bad, letting herself go numb from the routine of her lonely, monotonous life back in St. Louis. She didn’t want to go home. She knew she should call and check in again with Mike.

Instead she set her foot against the floorboard and kicked the swing into motion, waiting for it to slow nearly to a stop before doing it again. She could hear Aiden’s voice through the open window, low and commanding. She’d seen him only briefly that morning. He always woke up hours before she did. She’d felt his tension, so focused he’d barely remembered to say hi.

She was nervous too. Flashes of being caught by the fire demon had kept her up late into the night. That cold clawed hand around her arm, the disorienting drop between worlds and that place, Asgard—black, foul and icy as death. She didn’t want to go back but she’d never once considered the possibility of running away from Hallie. Not when the little girl was trapped over there. Grace turned her face into the breeze, letting it blow back the strands of hair that had come loose of her ponytail.

The screen door squeaked open and slammed shut. Aiden’s energy was fierce today, like bound lightning. It made the air around him tremble. Maybe it was him messing with her nerves.

“Everything ready?”

He nodded, standing in front of her and leaning against the railing, stretching those long, muscular legs out and crossing them at the ankle. “Are
you
ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” she said.

He glanced to his right at the fields stretching to the horizon, the blue sky with a scattering of feathery striated clouds. When he looked at her, his expression was serious. “I want to thank you again for doing this.”

She nodded an acceptance but didn’t bother to answer. They’d been over this. No matter how torn Aiden was over putting a civilian in danger, he would do it for Hallie’s sake. She cocked her head to one side and asked, “What would you have done if I hadn’t been willing?”

His fingers tightened on the rail but he answered the question. “I would have done whatever I had to do to get you to change your mind.”

She started the swing rocking again. Nerves twisted her stomach. She ignored it and summoned a smile. “Just as well it didn’t come to that.”

“If we make it back tonight…” He wasn’t looking at her. The first time he’d actively avoided meeting her gaze. An expression flashed over his features too quick for her to read and then he shook his head. His jaw set, he met her eyes and tried again. “If we make it back tonight, what are your plans after that?”

She didn’t want to go home. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll take that vacation after all.”

He didn’t look satisfied by that answer but she didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. He said, “You know all about us.”

Her eyebrows raised. “So now you have to kill me?”

“No,” he said harshly. “That’s not even funny.”

“It’s a little bit funny.”

He made a disgusted noise. “I mean—what then? You’ll just go back to your life in St. Louis, tracking missing kids and forget about us.”

“I’m not going to lie to you and say that I love my job. I hate it. I hate that there’s a need for someone to go looking for missing kids but there
is
a need and I’m damn good at it, Aiden.”

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. She wanted to scream at him—
tell me what you want
. She was miserable with hope and a deep aching sort of longing that made her want to go to him and wrap her arms around his waist. The comfort of his body wasn’t enough for her anymore. She wasn’t going to beg and Aiden was offering her…nothing.

She didn’t know if he wanted to know if she was leaving town because he wanted her to stay or because once Hallie was back, he needed to figure out a way to get the woman who’d brought her back out of his home and out of his life as gently as possible.

He would be gentle, Grace knew that. He would tear her heart out while making Grace agree that it was the best thing for everyone involved. She was being selfish. This was all about Hallie. It had to be. She stared down at her hands, not really seeing them. “Don’t worry, Aiden,” she forced past a burning throat. “Once Hallie is back, I’m gone. It’ll be like nothing ever happened.”

He stiffened. He didn’t answer right away and she couldn’t make herself look up to see how he took that.

“Grace,” he said but when she lifted her face, he seemed to be at a loss for words. There was that frown line between his eyebrows again, cut in deep, and his eyes were a mess of emotion she couldn’t hope to untangle. And she waited. And waited as the seconds ticked by until she couldn’t take it anymore.

“Well, I’m going to go take a shower.” She got up and went inside, the chains of the swing jangling behind her.

She thought she heard him curse but he didn’t call her back and he didn’t follow.

They waited until full dark. As anxious as Aiden was to find his daughter there were rules to the crossing that Grace didn’t understand. When she’d asked, he started talking about energy flares and fault lines and she decided to leave the magic to him and his people. This time she was riding with Christian so that Aiden could cleave through any demons that tried to stop them with his great sword. She could see him when she stretched to look over Christian’s shoulder, riding just ahead of them, the hilt of the sword poking up from its sheath.

“Easy, Grace,” Christian murmured. “It will be okay. We’re all here to keep you safe.”

Because they were descended from gods and could recover from almost any wound. Because she was human and they were not.

“You wanted to leave me behind,” she reminded him.

She could feel his chuckle from where she was pressed up against his back. “You made it back the first time. You’re tougher than you look.”

“That’s a compliment?”

“That’s a compliment,” he said. “When you get a fix on Hallie, all you need to do is point the way.”

“Like a retriever.” Which, essentially, was what she was. Her job in her own world and this one.

“I wish our own hounds were as talented,” Christian said loudly and was rewarded with a chorus of growls and snarls until Aiden looked over his shoulder and the noise cut off abruptly.

“This is not a game,” Aiden snapped.

Christian touched his head in mocking salute but went as silent as everyone else. He’d only been trying to help her relax and she squeezed his waist instead of saying thank you. She was as much under Aiden’s spell as the rest of them. Because he was a good leader who kept all of the various personalities under his command in line and focused on one purpose. Because he cared deeply about each and every one of them and they loved him back. And Aiden…he didn’t let down the people he loved.

They threaded through the woods on a narrow deer trail, different from the path they’d taken the first time. The gate had shifted again but she had no doubt that Aiden could find it.

There was no moon and they carried no torches. They were a shadowy ghost army moving through the night. Occasionally she caught the sound of a muffled voice, the clank of metal or a heavy foot crunching on loose stone. Aiden said this was part of their glamour. That a human might pass within a few feet of the hunt and not notice anything more than a light breeze against their skin, an uneasy feeling of being not quite alone in the woods. Even from the inside, it was as if she moved through a fog, seeing no more than the people immediately surrounding her.

She thought she’d met everyone at the bonfire but there seemed to be more tonight than she could account for. Of course, in the dark it was impossible to tell how many there were, some mounted, some shifted to animal form like the hounds that ran to either side of her, forming a moving guard.

As they came closer to the fault, the air cooled. The humid summer air thinned until it was winter cold and their breath frosted in the air. Aiden had said there would be a flare tonight but she hadn’t expected to be able to feel the difference. Last time, the air had been a little cooler than normal maybe. She remembered the growing pressure that made her ears pop. It was like that, she supposed, but magnified a hundredfold. She hunched behind Christian in the saddle, her breath coming harsh and shallow. He patted her leg and Aiden must have made some signal, because suddenly they turned off the path and picked up speed. Her hands tightened on the straps attached to the saddle.

Lightning split the clear sky and she heard an echo like the fading call of a horn. All at once the hunt rushed forward, hounds howling and Christian echoing Aiden’s shout. Damn him. He was excited by this, all of them were. She could hear it in their voices. Hound and human, rising in a battle cry that shook her to her soul. It was a reckless kind of glee she wasn’t feeling at all. That she’d never felt. She wanted to throw herself off the horse, tell them all she’d made a horrible mistake, curl up in ball under the nearest shrub and pray for dawn.

But they kept going, faster and faster, toward the source of that feeling of dread sitting like a rock in her stomach. She couldn’t get off. Even if there was any stopping the hunt from a full galloping charge across worlds, she couldn’t,
wouldn’t
back down now.

So she closed her eyes tight against the people she’d partied with the night before, their fierce fixed grins, their bright hungry eyes and the faces that no longer looked wholly human. The hounds and the horses were glowing now faintly even though the moon was dark and there wasn’t any other source of light. This time they headed straight for the lake. The horse’s hooves hammered at the packed earth trail, scattering dry leaves behind them as they passed. Water splashed against her calf, soaking through her jeans, all the while that strange pressure was building and building until her head screamed with it. She held on and when she opened her eyes again, they were in hell.

Dark. Cold. Smelling of stagnant water and rot. No wonder the demons had fire in their blood. The only way to survive in a place like this would be to carry your own heat and your own light with you. It was hard to believe that this world had once been alive. Aiden claimed that his people were refugees and that this…
this
had been their home. No wonder he’d looked at her as if she was crazy when she’d suggested they reclaim the place.

She caught the flash of Aiden’s sword out of the corner of her eye. A sickening, wet sucking sound, and then Christian trampled over a patch of uneven ground, or a body, impossible to tell which it was.

“Which way, Grace?” he demanded.

But with those creatures flying at them, the sharp scent of blood on the air and the terrifying sound of steel splitting flesh, she couldn’t focus. It hadn’t been like this last time. It was almost as if they’d been waiting for them tonight.

Aiden half turned his horse and shouted, “Grace. We need to know now.”

She couldn’t—
oh, God
—this was an awful mistake. She saw the same realization on Aiden’s face too. The understanding there broke her heart more than the disappointment. He opened his mouth, to call retreat she thought, when one of the demons managed to slip past the hounds and launch itself at his exposed flank. He twisted in the saddle bringing his sword up faster than she’d ever seen him move, faster than she’d ever seen anyone move, and caught the demon across the chest.

Gagging, she turned away but the vision that met her there was far more terrifying than the blood spurting over Aiden’s face. A man, standing above the fight, silent and absolutely still, dressed all in silver and black. His face was covered and although the figure was man-shaped, there was something slightly off in his build, his proportions wrong. And no one human could stand as still as that, as if he was the single fixed point in this crazy world.

He waited, sword in his hand, a shimmer of red chasing down the blade. He was watching the fight, watching her. She could feel his regard like a skeletal hand wrapped around her heart. Cold curiosity. Everything receded, the noise, the smell…until it was just him and her. And, she realized, he was like her. Another seer, who right now was trying to see inside her head.

“Grace,” Christian barked and wheeled his horse around. His sword swung down, slicing through the arm of a demon that had gotten close enough to reach for her. That snapped her out of it, at least temporarily. “Hallie. Where’s Hallie? We need a direction.”

Now or never. She dragged in a deep breath, closed her eyes and extended herself, careful to avoid that presence on the cliff. Hallie was there, just off to her right. Grace pointed toward her and opened her eyes to find Aiden staring, burning with intensity.

“You’re sure?” he shouted.

Grace nodded and then held on as they started in that direction, breaking free of the mass of remaining fire demons and outrunning them within seconds, racing down a culvert. There was movement above them, tracking along the embankment to either side. It occurred to her that this was a great place for a trap. Aiden, who’d been doing this his entire life, couldn’t have missed that fact either. He was running on hope and bringing his men along for the ride, trusting her. And they rode, hounds slipping between boulders, bounding over obstacles, and everything blended together, the heavy beat of the horse’s hoofs, the snapping snarling sounds the hounds used to communicate, Christian’s staccato breath and her own thundering heart. She couldn’t see much hiding behind him and what she did see made her wish she hadn’t risked a peek.

Everything was barren and alien. A thin trickle of black water below the shallow embankment. A few twisted trees with smooth gray trunks and sagging yellowed leaves. Patches of thorn and bramble. Every once in a while one of the demons would hurl itself down from the cliffs, one of the twins would crow out a warning and the hunt would adjust course. There wasn’t a lot of room to maneuver.