Ghostland (33 page)

Ryker faltered again. He turned toward her. His eyebrows drew together in puzzlement. The voices from the boat grew more demanding.

Aisling wished the fog of the ghostlands would block the sailboat and silence the voices—and as if hearing her call, the spirit winds came in a breeze that sent Ryker’s hair and her own dancing until a shroud of gray was wrapped around them.

The confusion slowly faded from Ryker’s eyes. As it did, Aisling said, “You wanted me to take you back to Draven.”

Ryker’s hand went to his chest, where the knife’s blade had left only a small deadly wound. He glanced down and took in his nakedness, then hers. The infectious smile returned. “Another first. Draven will be sorry he wasn’t included. He has a decided preference for blondes. Shall we return?”

“Yes,” Aisling said, and the ghostland cocoon expelled them.

Aisling scrambled from the bed and ran to the bedroom door. Behind her came the sound of thrashing, curses.

She opened the door and was immediately grabbed and pulled through it by one of the vampires stationed in the hallway. Even if she’d been tempted, there was no chance to look back.

The door shut. A second vampire moved to stand guard.

“This way,” the one who’d pulled her from the room said.

Aisling followed him to a suite like something out of a magazine depicting the lives of the rich. A large-screen television took up a great part of one wall, in an area with a couch and chairs. In the next room a huge canopied bed was placed in the center, amid plants and flowers of all descriptions.

Beyond the bedroom was a bathroom with a sunken tub. She touched the sparkling faucets and couldn’t resist the idea of submerging herself in heated, bubble bath-infused waters.

Aisling stripped as the tub filled. When her fingers brushed over the fetish pouch, her thoughts went to the woman who might have given birth to her before becoming a vampire. She opened the pouch and removed a single fetish—the one representing her most powerful protector, the being she was beginning to think was demon—her father.

Unlike the others, most of which were made of bone, the one she examined was clear crystal, with no shape other than the one she’d found it in on the day Aziel led her to it. The being it represented was the only entity she could call upon who wasn’t bound by the spiritlands—though Aziel had warned her more than once that the cost of saying the name and summoning her guardian was beyond any she could imagine paying.

Ice slid through Aisling’s veins. Was he so frightening? Was the place he called home so terrifying that becoming vampire was preferable? Or was the woman Draven and Ryker spoke of an unknown sister, a cousin or aunt?

Aisling returned the crystal to the pouch and got into the tub. She let the heated water and luxurious bubbles turn her mind away from answers she might never have, questions that might cost too much to ask.

Zurael’s image rose in her thoughts. With it came memories of what they’d done together when they shared a bath.

Aisling closed her eyes and glided bubble-slick hands over her breasts. Her nipples firmed as she imagined that her palms and fingers were Zurael’s, stroking, admiring, bringing pleasure.

Desire made her cunt clench in reaction. In her mind’s eye she saw the two of them standing in front of the bathroom mirror, saw his wings unfold behind them as he pierced her with his cock.

Demon. And she was helpless against the need he inspired in her.

She abandoned a breast, smoothed downward to swollen cunt lips and an erect clit. Hidden by bubbles, her toes curled as sweet sensation spiked through her when she rubbed the tiny bared head, slipped her fingers into her slit.

A moan escaped as she forged in and out of her channel, slowly at first, savoring the fantasy that it was Zurael’s tongue, Zurael’s penis. Then faster, even though she knew the ecstasy would never rival what his touch did to her.

 

 

IT was nearing dawn when Zurael finally tired of pacing the confines of Aisling’s house. Hours had passed since he got back from The Barrens. It felt like a lifetime.

He’d thought spending the darkness in the owl’s form, searching as he’d done before, would ease his worries for Aisling and make her absence more palatable. It did neither.

Once again he picked up the note she’d written, examined it for clues as to who’d come to claim the debt she owed. It didn’t escape him that only her physical safety was guaranteed.

A shudder passed through him when he considered what might happen to her in the spiritlands. When she got back—

His cock answered for him with a sharp pulse.

Zurael shed his clothing and escaped to the shower. He couldn’t afford to lose control when she returned.

Water cascaded over heated flesh. A moan escaped when he took himself in hand.

When he’d returned the first time to find the note, he’d known only misery waited for him between the sheets of Aisling’s bed without her there. And so he’d flown. He’d hunted through the night and tried desperately to avoid the truth of his misery.

Aisling
. Her name echoed each time his fisted hand moved up and down on his shaft. Images of her filtered through his mind as fire built in his testicles.

His thighs bunched. His buttocks flexed.

He fucked through the tight fist of his hand. Slowly at first, then faster. Until, with a shout of her name, release came in hot jets of semen—but brought only a moment of peace.

Zurael dressed. He rubbed his chest as he paced, felt the hollow place that widened each time he thought of the future.

The dawn came. Faded to morning.

A scratching at Aisling’s front door had him flinging it open. Dismay filled him when he saw Aziel, but it passed when the sound of a car drew Zurael’s attention away from the ferret.

The two of them remained motionless in the doorway. They watched as a black car rolled to a stop in front of the house.

Aisling emerged. She stopped to say something to the driver, then turned and hurried up the walkway.

Her smile pierced Zurael’s heart. The sight of her rushing toward him filled him with emotion he wasn’t brave enough to name.

He welcomed her into his arms, buried his face in the gold of her hair and held her to him until she laughed and pushed at his chest. “Aziel expects a greeting, too.”

Reluctantly Zurael released her. A spike of anger stabbed him when she cuddled the ferret in her arms, rained kisses on Aziel’s head.

“Why didn’t he accompany you?” Zurael’s voice held the bite of his anger.

Aisling stepped farther into the house. He followed, closing the doors behind him, then listening as she told him about the meeting with Javier.

It was as Malahel en Raum and Iyar en Batrael had thought it would be. The one behind the sacrifices, the one believed to possess the tablet, wanted Aisling.

“I will deal with him,” Zurael said, determined to protect her, even as the worry for him that he read on her face nearly undid him.

“I’ll help you. I’ll be your bait,” Aisling murmured against Zurael’s chest, but before he could reply, a knock sounded at the door.

He didn’t recognize the woman, though the likeness to the witch Tamara suggested it was her mother. Aisling greeted the woman by the name Annalise and invited her in.

“I only have a few minutes,” Annalise said, sparing him a glance before focusing on Aisling. “Levanna dreamed last night. In her dream you passed The Mission and followed the early Church’s symbol of a fish into The Barrens. It led you to the child. She’s beyond our reach, but not yours. Will you go for her?”

Aisling didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

Annalise pulled a braided band of leather from her pocket. Aisling tensed at the sight of the sun hanging from it. “Levanna sends this for protection. Do you accept it?”

This time there was a tiny hesitation before Aisling answered, “Yes.”

Instead of handing Aisling the charm, the witch tied the leather around her wrist. The sun amulet swung from a thinner strap connected to the larger one, so it lay against Aisling’s palm.

“You’ve got powerful, dangerous enemies who can travel between worlds freely,” Annalise said when she’d finished the task. “Touch this to their skin and will them away from you; it will force them from this world and back to their own.”

Zurael gripped Aisling’s wrist as soon as Annalise left. He studied the charm.

A memory stirred, an image from one of the books in the library of his father’s house, but it remained elusive. Finally he lifted his eyes and met Aisling’s. He saw her determination—not only to go for the child, but to find the Ghost source.

“Gather food and we’ll leave now,” he said, willing to put off his hunt for Javier in order to keep her safe.

Fourteen

ZURAEL worried it was a trap. Twice police cars had pulled alongside the bus. Once a guardsman’s jeep had slowed at an intersection and waved the bus onward when it would have yielded the right of way.

Aisling’s fear washed over him each time the authorities were present, fear so deeply ingrained in her she couldn’t prevent her rapid breathing or the tiny tremors that shook her. And yet she didn’t turn back from the task.

He took her hand as they walked, felt the tension in her slide away. Her courage amazed him. Her trust destroyed him. He couldn’t allow anything to happen to her.

They passed the houses huddled together in worn-down poverty and gritty survival, the vine-controlled wastelands, the burned out, rusted shells of other structures, until eventually they came to the place where ragged orphan children fished on the banks. The Mission followed—a last vestige of civilization before The Barrens.

Zurael thought he caught a glimpse of Davida in an upstairs window. His suspicion that it was a trap set for Aisling grew.

Hidden eyes followed them. He felt the gazes—curious, apathetic, hostile, suspicious. Predatory.

His hand fell away from Aisling’s. He studied their surroundings, looking for danger. Prepared to kill anyone or anything that dared attack.

Having explored The Barrens on wings, Zurael chafed at the pace they were forced into because of the necessity of having to look for the fish symbol. He hated that Aisling was so vulnerable, so very human in a place filled with danger.

She slowed at the first blackened shell beyond The Mission. It stood at an intersection, though nothing remained on three of the corners and the road had long ago cracked and become pocked with holes.

A school of crudely drawn fish was ankle-high on the strongest of the walls still standing. Each swam in the same direction, face pointing forward, through the intersection.

“We’re going to find them,” Aisling said, excitement and anticipation making the blue of her eyes rival the sky.

Without conscious thought, Zurael leaned forward. He was a short breath away before he realized the danger, how close he was to touching his lips to her.

He stood abruptly and turned away. But not before his heart wrenched at the sight of Aisling’s uncertainty.

They continued on in silence, their progress slow. The continued sensation of being watched, considered prey, kept him at her side instead of scouting ahead.

They stopped long enough to eat lunch. Then later, dinner.

The daylight grew into evening light, but neither suggested they turn back toward Oakland. It became harder to locate the symbols of early faith.

Several times they hid as jeeps driven by guardsmen patrolled. A helicopter in the distance, its arrival too sudden and unexpected, caught them out in the open, though it didn’t veer toward them.

Crickets and cicadas came to life. The rumble of car engines purred in the dusk all around them, alternating between growing louder and fading.

Zurael considered shifting to the demon’s form and flying with Aisling to safety but thought of the game he’d witnessed the guardsmen playing each time he’d been in The Barrens. The risk was too great. He couldn’t protect her from bullets, or a fatal fall, if he became formless.

“We need to find shelter,” he said, studying what remained from the time when one city merged into another and another until little was left besides concrete and steel and teeming masses of humans penned in a place that would ultimately make their slaughter easy.

Nature was in the process of reclaiming much of the area they were in. The vines once developed by scientists to leach industrial poison from the soil now covered the horror left by man’s temporary rule of Earth.

Aisling pointed at what might have once been a secure storage shed. “How about there?”

Zurael studied it for a moment. He compared it to the larger structures around them, most with gaping holes, to the cars buried beneath shrouds of thick stems and shiny leaves. He nodded. The walls of the storage building were concrete, the roof solid metal. They’d be trapped, but the narrow doorway allowed for a defensible space.

The wind brought the sound of hounds baying. Next to him Aisling shivered and rubbed her arms. He ushered her into the building and indicated a corner for her to settle into just as the sound of a helicopter reached him.

It was a risk, but this time he deemed it necessary. He crossed to her and knelt in front of her, noting how fragile she was, sitting on the floor with her knees to her chest and her arms wrapped around her legs. The desire to protect her filled him with the primitive, explosive heat of molten rock.

“I won’t be far,” he said, unable to stop himself from stroking her cheek, from brushing his thumb over her lips and losing himself in angelite eyes.

Pride spiked through him when she pulled a long kitchen knife from the burlap sack holding what remained of their food. She laid it on the ground next to her. “I’ll be okay.”

Zurael shed his physical form and moved away from her, motes of dust and dirt, lightly tossed leaves and insect carcasses the only things marking his exit.