Dire Blood (#5) (The Descent Series) (35 page)

Had Ariane managed to escape? The Union? The surviving touchstones?

Did Elise care?

She sank to a crouch, gripping her head in both hands as she stared at the place where her feet dug into the soil. The Treaty was shattered. Everything that protected her from His wandering eye and looming grasp was gone. Hell, Heaven, Earth—it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t be safe anywhere. She might as well fight for survival in Hell as on Earth.

“We should find shelter,” she said, standing up as a cloud of dust rose from the collapsed tower over the Palace on the horizon. “We can figure this out later.”

James’s hand took her elbow as she stood. “You just have to want it badly enough,” he echoed.

“You think I
want
to be out here? It’s not like I can click my heels and take us back to Earth. I don’t think Yatam could even jump a dimensional gap that wide.”

His brow creased. “Maybe.” His eyes scanned her face, and she could pick up glimpses of what he saw, despite the warding rings: the hair that had escaped her scarf; the inky, endless depths of her eyes; the strange contrast of her lips against her skin. The days in Hell hadn’t made nearly the same imprint on her that they had on him.

“Forgive me,” he said.

James bent and kissed Elise again. His skin was hot, his lips were dry, and there was hesitancy in his hands on her shoulders.

The sound of blood rushed through her head—hers or his, she wasn’t certain. The barrage of sensation from him was cacophonous. His hypothalamus all but buzzed. And what were those hormones? Vasopressin? Cortisol? Oxytocin? She could see the shapes, taste them on her tongue as it tangled with James’s, but it was so hard to interpret without Yatam’s centuries of knowledge.

It was a dizzying, confusing mix of unfamiliar emotions. James felt a thousand things that Elise didn’t know how to name. Her own mind reacted by flushing her with the same hormones he produced, and the same feelings of need, desperation—desire.

He became bolder, more confident. His hands traced from her shoulders to her hips, and she clung to his shirt, unable to tell if her feet were even touching the dirt.

Elise knew that the other towers must have been falling. She heard the soft thunder cracks of stone and glass collapsing on itself, and the wind stung with dust and debris. But she didn’t care. Not when she finally, finally had James to herself, in the endless desolation of Hell. She couldn’t have cared if the ground yawned open beneath their feet and dropped them into the fires of the pit itself.

Let the Council die, the Palace fall, and the Treaty shatter in its belly, taking her mother and father and every fucking touchstone with it. She just wanted to be with James. She wanted to be
home
.

And suddenly, they were.

XVII

JANUARY 2010

E
lise was only
peripherally aware that they had returned to Earth and that the mirrored walls, dusty parquet, and weirdly moist air meant that her longing had dragged them across dimensions to Motion and Dance. She felt weak, disconnected, misplaced. She also felt herself stumbling back without releasing her grip on James, and knew that when her hip bumped painfully against a hard corner, that it was the barre at her back.

But James hadn’t released her, either. His hand slid into her hair, cupping the back of her head so that she couldn’t draw away.

Those hands—those familiar hands. They had held her when she had been wounded a thousand times, and had healed her a thousand more. She had fought with him, danced with him, and even cast spells with those hands on her body. But he had never touched her like this. Not in the entire decade that they had been together.

Elise didn’t want to protest when she finally had what she wanted after so long. But it was wrong—the Treaty was gone, they were still in danger, and Hannah and Nathaniel were waiting for them somewhere in the wide world.

She pulled herself against him, leveraging herself against the barre to kiss him harder for an instant, and then pushed back.

“Wait,” Elise said, even though her eyes couldn’t quite seem to focus.

James’s hair was rumpled, the top button of his shirt had gone missing at some point, and she could hear blood swelling his lips. His gaze burned her as he stroked the hair off of her forehead, pushing it behind her ear, baring her neck.

He lowered his lips to her shoulder as if she hadn’t spoken, and Elise tilted her head to rub her cheek against the softness of his hair.

God, he felt good. Better than Anthony. Better even than Yatam.

She tried to speak again. “James.”

“Later,” he said, breathing warmth down her chest.

“But we should find Nathaniel and—”

He silenced her with a finger on her lips, and he shook his head, almost imperceptibly. “Later, Elise.” Hearing her name spoken like that made her skin prickle.

It was hard to question the sudden absence of his reluctance when he was pushing her against the corner made by the piano and the mirror, forcing her off-balance so that she had to lean on the wall to remain upright. His fingers traced a line from the hollow of her collarbone to the top buckle on her corset. The sight of the dance hall, the baby grand, and the snow-fogged windows blurred and swam and seemed all too distant.

But wasn’t that wrong? Hadn’t he pushed her away every time she’d tried to kiss him? How could he want her so badly, but deny her for years?

There was a soft
clink
, and the first buckle was undone.

Something was wrong.

Another buckle, and then another.

The pressure of the boning against her abdomen relaxed. James’s hand slipped under the material and his fingers spanned over her ribs, stroking over her skin to the hollow of her spine.

He brushed over the line of tattoos. Elise hissed softly.

“Does it hurt?” he asked. She nodded wordlessly. “Is it bad?” And she shook her head.

James responded by pressing his fingertips into them a little harder. Pleasure rippled through her, like blood dripping from fresh wounds, and she burrowed her face into his neck with a sigh. The sound dragged a groan from his chest.

His hand slid lower and pressed harder against the base of her spine. Elise’s head smacked backward against the mirrors. She barely even felt it.

When she looked up, he was staring hard at her, as though trying to see through her skin. “What must that feel like?” James asked in a low voice, walking his fingers down the line of tattoos to her backside. “That pain.” His hand cupped her thigh, pulled her knee under his arm, and pressed his body flush against hers.

She thought that she should stop him, maybe, and make him see sense. But her hands had taken on minds of their own. They slid down the buttons on his shirt, opening them one by one, pulling the hem free of his slacks, and pushing the cloth off of his shoulders. It puddled on the floor. He threw her bustier on top of it.

He drew back to take in the sight of her naked body. “My God,” James said, tracing the curves of her breasts with the backs of his knuckles.

Maybe we should stop.

The thought flitted across Elise’s mind, and was gone just as fast.

She counted his scars with lips and tongue—the white starburst on the left side of his chest, the slender line of a knife wound over his heart, the elaborate sigil permanently carved into his solar plexus. And then she slid lower, dropped to her knees, and opened his belt buckle.

James took her hand before she could proceed, tugging her to her feet.

For an instant, she thought that he was going to stop her—that sanity had struck, and he was suddenly going to tell her they could never be
like that,
like he had before. But he didn’t release her hand. Instead, he rolled the warding ring between his fingers, as if contemplating it.

Elise realized what he had decided to do too late to stop him.

James tugged it the ring free and threw it across the room. Metal bounced against wood. It vanished into darkness, and a moment later, his ring was gone, too.

She tried to protest. “But—”

James kissed her again, forcing her hips on top of the piano’s lid. “I want to feel you,” he whispered against her lips. “Just this once.”

Just this once?
The words were meaningless when her sense of body had just completely unraveled.

Elise felt duplicitous, like she stood between her own legs, and she was the one gazing down at the most perfect pair of breasts she had ever seen, with a painful erection in her slacks. Adrenaline raced through her veins and closed her throat.

The shared desire was suffocating, but it was somewhat dampened by embarrassment when she realized that James was feeling everything she did, too. He felt her trepidation mingling with the desperate need to believe that he hadn’t really gone crazy. He felt the repressed longing warring with excitement and hunger. And when she sensed his sympathy, that just made the embarrassment worse.

Trying to swim to the surface of their cascading minds was like fighting against the undertow. She couldn’t escape. Couldn’t do anything but
feel
.

James did want her. He wanted her badly. And he felt guilty about it.

It was almost enough to kill the mood. He drew back, bracing his hands against the edge of the piano and letting his head hang between his shoulders.

“Are you okay?” Elise asked, and then she realized how stupidly unnecessary that question was.

He didn’t bother trying to speak.

The last walls between them had vanished. She picked up glimpses of his thoughts—more images than words. He was thinking about frozen beaches and helicopters. Graves and swords and cold things. Elise was in the middle of all of it, like she had taken up permanent residence in his skull long before they had ever bound to each other as kopis and aspis. It was a warm feeling, something more solid than lust, and completely foreign to her. She didn’t know how to put a label to that emotion.

“What does it mean?” she asked, brushing the sweep of bangs off of his forehead and drawing a line down to his jaw. “That thing you feel when you look at me?”

He turned his head and kissed the sigil on her palm. It was a strangely intimate gesture—somehow, much more intimate than kissing him or wrapping her legs around his waist. “It means that you’re oblivious,” James said.

His mouth trailed up the scar on her arm, over her collarbone, and found her lips again.

When he released her, Elise glimpsed their reflection in the mirror across the room. It was strange to see that they were still two distinct entities, even when she could feel the air brushing over the lean, muscular expanse of his back and the glossy piano wood braced beneath his hands.

She looked so soft against him, so strange, so unlike herself. She should have been the one made of hard lines. But time and blood and fate had changed her—had changed both of them. Their bodies were linked in a way that was more than flesh.

He saw what she saw through her eyes, and there was a thrum of satisfaction between them.

James unraveled the lacing at the hips of her leggings and then stripped them off. It was too chilly on Earth without the protection of leather, but she was only cold for an instant. He returned to occupy the space between her legs, and his hands braced her thighs. His fingertips bit into the still-fresh tattoos that he had branded on her skin.

Elise felt it through more than just her skin—she felt it as James did, too.

His eyes shut. His brow furrowed.

An electric shock of thought and memory pulsed from him. The idea that he had never liked pain, not like that, even when Stephanie had asked him to try it, and the fact that it aroused him now almost bothered him. But it was gone quickly. He was having as much trouble thinking as Elise was.

She opened the button on his slacks, slid her hand inside the waistband, and curved her hand around him.

James sucked in a hard breath. His fingers tightened on her hips, drawing more jolts of pain through her nerves—and through him.

“Elise,” he said, and then, “now.”

She pushed his clothing aside. They fitted their bodies together, and everything fell into place.

It was strange, filling and being filled; she was lost in the places they connected, hips and mouths and hands. Elise felt fingers stroking breasts, and she wasn’t sure who owned those fingers, or those breasts. Two hearts pounded. Four lungs labored to breathe. It was delirium, the haze of a dream, where she was blind and deaf and mute and nothing more than a sum of their combined parts.

One of them was moving—maybe both. It was a new kind of dance with a silent rhythm.

Too many hands, too much skin, too much feeling.

She was going to break.

“James,” she gasped, digging fingernails into her shoulders—no, those were his shoulders, even if she felt the bite of it. The sting was good. It made goosebumps ripple down to her nipples and blood swell in her vulva.

He responded with a low groan, wordless and incoherent. Lips and tongues tangled. Saliva mingled.

There were sparks inside his brain. James was close, and so was she.

“Elise,” someone said, and it was pointless trying to delineate between whose vocal cords were vibrating, because everything was one. United. And the climax hit them simultaneously.

Time shattered.

E
lise didn’t sleep,
but James did. They curled up in a pile of their own clothing on top of mats dragged out of the storage closet that she used to use when she was working out, practicing her flips and kicks and throws. The mats worked as a bed about as well as they worked as a landing pad for her falls.

For hours, she watched James’s chest rise and fall with the deep, even breaths of sleep. Dreams danced through his mind, and though she couldn’t pick up any of the specifics, she knew it wasn’t pleasant. But the sleep was restful, and he desperately needed it. She didn’t want to disturb him.

She rested her cheek on his chest, and his heart thumped underneath the bone, steady and reassuring.