Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows) (26 page)

"I'm good, Acho." Virgil turned to Tian. "I'm following you."

She took him at his word, leading him down a Victorian corridor while Avery tagged along. It had been ages since Virgil had been inside a hollow that straddled both the fae and human planes so effortlessly. Another surprise. He was beginning to feel sheltered, the only home school kid left to fend for himself at an inner city high school. It had been a long time since his life had walked that razor edge between survival and brutality. Too long probably.

The Morrigan, his own patron, had left him to his own devices for over a century, only dropping by every now and again so he could mend one of her crows. The rest of the time, he dealt with basic faerie ailments and a few injuries resulting from the random magical mishap and lived in whatever manor suited him.

They rounded a hidden corner and Tian stopped so abruptly he almost ran into her.

"Sio."

Virgil noticed a curious hitch in her voice, but his train of thought derailed as he saw the brick shit-house in front of them. The guy radiated in a way that ate up every millimeter of space in the hall. Once again Virgil found himself at a loss. No way this colossal bastard was the one with the bindings. There was no way anything Sidhe wrought could be that ineffectual. Power on that scale was inconceivable.

"Don't worry," Avery said. "We all kinda had that reaction to him. Too much sex appeal shorts out the hardware. You'll get over it."

"Have you?"

"I'm working my way out in stages, but in case you hadn't noticed that male's only got eyes for my girl."

Indeed. Neither Tian nor Sio were paying them the slightest bit of attention. Virgil couldn't see her face, but he could see Sio's and the male was staring at the killers' killer, The Little Death, as if she were his own personal version of heaven. A hard lump caught in Virgil's chest as he wondered if he'd ever look at another female that way again. The idea was devastating and unwelcome.

Sio braced an arm on the wall in front of Tian and leaned down until his mouth was level with her right ear. "Thank you," he said. The gentle current generated by his breath feathered against an errant strand of hair in its way.

She turned her head into him and Virgil could practically see the connection sparking. He cleared his throat, not sure how much more he could bear witness to. Sio's hardened gaze pinned him against the wall. Virgil opened his mouth once and closed it when he realized nothing had come out. Those mesmerizing and terrible eyes were the color of bleached winter grass surrounded by a delicate layer of pitch so black that the devouring darkness stirred hungrily in the depths of that fine line. Virgil had seen those eyes before in a painting so long ago it was if he'd dreamt them. Now he stood bared before them as they peered out from the living flesh of another face.

"Virgil." Avery was shaking his shoulder hard enough to leave a mark.
Tian was less tactful as she positioned her body in front of him with her gun drawn and pointed at his face. It was probably only fair...

"What's your damage?" she asked.

Virgil took a deep breath, shaking Avery's hand off his shoulder and raising his own palms to face outward, a placating gesture in a pathetic attempt to show that he wasn't about to do anything stupid.

"Estas corriendo en la chingada! I'm fine. Goddess turned. I'll fix your human, Tian. I'll fix your human, but you need to find out how extensive those bindings are and where they came from or
that male
is dead and so are we."

Tian paled, but the expression on her face was the one he'd been expecting when he'd greeted her with the sawed-off in his waiting room. He hadn't been wrong about her. The Little Death kept her nickname because she was a killer.

Her eyes flicked back to Avery and without a word between them the shifter gripped Virgil's bicep and tugged him down the hall.

"We'll find you a room, dude, cause I guarantee you're not going anywhere until you explain what just happened." Avery's tone was eerily friendly.

"Are you always this goddamned pleasant to everyone?"

"Right up until I break them apart and suck the marrow from their bones," Avery answered, flashing a surprisingly cruel smile.

Virgil felt his stomach clench as the testosterone roared through his system. "Don't threaten me motherfucker. I'm a healer, not a pacifist."

Avery stopped and let go of his arm as they turned to face one another. "That's a good thing," he said. "Pacifist half-breeds don't have much of a shelf life."

There was a heartbeat of silence before Avery disengaged, tossing out another easy going grin and turning away. "Come on, Sleeping Beauty's down the hall."

"I need you to strip."

Tian was on emotional lockdown again; perfectly climate controlled. She was using the same inflection Sio used to order lunch. It was irritating. He didn't say so, just like he'd kept his mouth shut in the hallway when that guy had looked at him like he was a goddamned ghost and leveled the big time doom and gloom prophecy. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and dropped it on the floor, turning the movement into a strung out confrontation. The tension in the room was palpable. What he really felt, and was trying to avoid examining too closely, was the core of peace he didn't remember having. This new found warm fuzzy was surrounded by an unfamiliar layer.

"Pants too."

Hope. It had to be. Jesus, that was terrifying.

Tian leaned back against an already overburdened work table and folded her arms in front of her. The jumbled outlines of designs that interlocked like hands started at the inside of her clavicle and trailed around and down her right shoulder. They became a sleeve that gleamed silver and white in the light and ended mid forearm. They were new. So were the black and gold tattoos in her wrists. None of it had been there when he'd seen her at The Gates. He would have remembered. He remembered everything about her.

Sio gripped the chair at his back and cleared his throat. The last thing he needed was another erection he couldn't subdue while she was trying to find out what was wrong with him. He wondered how much of how badly he wanted her had to do with biology. He was still there. He still had that brain-burning urge to strip her down and get inside her any way he could, only now it wasn't just a cruel trick from the pheromone gods. It was personal.

Tian had seen him. She'd looked at the hell in his life and done the one thing he wouldn't have expected from anyone. That she had chosen to take his place in the Between considering what she'd been through was beyond words. It was monumental, scary beautiful, heroic, heartbreaking, and amazing. He was still trying to wrap his head around it.

He gestured to the marks on her arm. "What do they mean?"

Tian smiled. It was a beautiful private expression that made his skin tight. The hard edges were there, but they didn't come off as razor sharp anymore either. She was quiet for a long time.

"They were a gift. A revelation of the good I've done in the world. For a long time I hadn't really thought there was any."

"Am I in there?"

"I don't know." She trailed off, eyes following, his hands as they slid to his waist band.

"I should be."

He meant it too. Almost as much as he meant the three words he'd been choking on. His hands hovered around the button at the top of his jeans, plagued by either shyness or indecision. Neither were feelings he was used to.

"Sio, we don't have to do this tonight."

"I want to. I just have to warn you..." He wasn't sure how to finish the sentence.

"About what, your inordinately large ego?" She raised an eyebrow and shot him a dry look that made his cock twitch.

"Yeah," he said, reaching down to liberate the rabid bastard straining against his fly. Tian blinked. He imagined he could see the pulse hammering in her throat. Sio peeled the jeans down his thighs, kicking them off as casually as he could manage. When he looked up again the stare she hit him with was so blatant and intense she could have burnt paint off the side of a building. He clutched the chair back as if it were a lifeline.

"What now?"

Tian shook her head as if she was trying to clear it and squeezed her eyes shut.

"I don't know. All I can think about is how much I want you inside me." She unfolded her arms as if she were going to touch him, but held back, dragging her hands through her hair, pushing it away from her face in an unconscious gesture.

The statement registered and Sio bridged the gap while her hands were still behind her head. He caught the front of her jeans with his index finger, sliding it under the waistband. Her skin was burning hot where it came in contact with his own. Sparks shot down his arm. Tian moved toward him, offering no resistance as he tugged. When she was pressed into the line of his body, he leaned in.

"I need you to touch me," he said. He reluctantly let go of her and went back to white knuckling the chair behind him. Tian made a soft choked sound in the back of her throat and something delicate under all of the chair's leather padding cracked.

"Please." He was whispering because he couldn't breathe right. Sio was acutely aware that the phrase had never passed his lips in any meaningful way and never in reference to sex.

Tian's callused finger tips feathered over his lips. They trailed down the front of his chest, sending tremors in their wake. His heart was a jackhammer. She pressed her flattened palm into him with increasing pressure until all thoughts he may have had about self-control got good and ghost.

Sio trapped that elegant, strangely contradictory hand against the flat planes of his pecs as his other hand burrowed into her hair, balling into a fist and dragging her head forward against his mouth. Tian's sharp inhalation did nothing to help his deteriorating composure. Goddamn, what was he fifteen? He could do better than this. He licked the inside seam of her upper lip and caught her bottom lip between his teeth. He sucked her mouth even as it scalded him and the sensation was exactly what he wanted, pleasure so intense he would happily waste away under its onslaught.

Tian pressed against his lips, pressed against his body; wrapped her arms around his neck. Her tongue thrust into his mouth, licking a straight line up his own and sending another shot of electric current jolting through his nervous system. They were spilling steam again, the way it had been in the car.

Sio dropped his hands to the hem of her shirt and came up for air long enough to drag it over her head and pitch it across the room. He slid a thigh between her legs and was struck dumb by the amount of heat she was generating. He grabbed the front of her jeans. There was a loud tearing sound as he jerked her hips closer, ripping the tough material apart. The sound wrenched him back to reality. He was dangerously close to that rough edge where what he wanted met what he could live with.

Sio railed against the demand burning in his veins. He buried his head on the inside of her neck and was flooded with the desert rain ozone tang of her. Raging fingers were forcibly uncurled from her brutalized jeans. He coerced them away from her clothing by wrapping them around her rib cage. His muscles screamed under the strain of control.

Tian tangled one hand in his hair while the other cupped his jaw, raising his face to meet her eyes. He waited for her to ask him what was wrong. Dreaded it.

"Quit being so fucking careful."

Sio made a noise deep in the back of his throat and bared his teeth. He turned and shoved them both into the bookshelf covered wall. He trapped her lower body between the mass of his raging hard-on and the hundreds of multi-hued bindings behind her. Her eyes glowed like embers.

Love you, love you, love you, love you.

"Tian." His voice sounded hoarse. "I need to stop or I'll hurt you."

"It's fine."

She was really jacked up, writhing against him. He almost came.

"You don't understand. I'm having trouble keeping myself in check."

"Then don't."

No. He leaned in closer so that his lips grazed her ear. The steam of his breath rolled against her skin. Sio pulled back and ground himself into her lower body. He rotated his thumbs and brushed them over the lace of her bra. Tian's eyes went wide. Her mouth broke open so she could take in more air. Her desperate rib cage expanded and contracted in a frantic flutter. He ran his tongue up the slender column of her throat, breathing her, on the verge of passing out; fighting the crushing desire to grip her tighter, sink teeth into her flesh. Sio closed his eyes and stared hard at the insides of his lids.

"Balls deep until we're both raw from screaming, Tian. I don't have enough control to do this gentle, right now... I'd leave marks. I'd miss them when they healed." He opened his eyes and stared at her knowing they were wild. "I want to bury my teeth in your shoulder until I taste blood and spend myself into you until I'm fucking blind."

He took another ragged breath that did nothing to calm the burning in his bloodstream and managed a self-deprecating smile. "If I started I wouldn't be able to stop."

"Good."

"It's not good, Tian. I lose control with you. I need this to be gentle." The lust was beginning to toe the line of frustration.

She went still and tossed him a dark stare. "What if I'm not gentle?"

It would have been a good mask if he hadn't used it so often himself.

"What are you so afraid of?" He pressed her harder against the bookshelf. "Is it that I need to be more than a hard fuck to you? 'Cause I've just happened inside a lot of people and you're never going to be one of them."

"Then maybe we shouldn't do this," she said. "I don't want to be with someone who can't accept what he wants. Don't go all Waltons for my benefit."

He recoiled as if she'd slapped him and his already frayed tether snapped.

"I'm in love with you. How's that for acceptance? I have been since the second you shoved me through that god forsaken bathroom stall. I'll put it down six ways from Sunday, but the first time with you is going to be gentle. Goddamn personal. That is what I need. And you're going to admit that it means something or I'm not touching you again."