Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows) (41 page)

"You two are keeping interesting company these days," Eamon said. He didn't sound happy.

The stone cold terror abated enough for the group on the floor to drag in a chorus of ragged breaths. Avery joined in with little thought to the fact that the mild relief he was feeling made him look like a candy-ass. The only one unaffected was Royal and the demon obviously had his hands full with his reaction to Ceyla's linebacker routine. The guy had positioned himself as far away from her as he could get without moving from in-between Cey and the human. What a colossal cluster that was.

"Desperate times?" Avery choked, going for the joke and failing.

"Where is the other breed?" the Morrigan asked. The lilt of her brogue was so feminine and pleasant it almost made the question sound like the bitch hadn't insulted them. Almost. She cocked her head in an unsettlingly avian manor, black eyes boring into him, as she waited for an answer without blinking.

"She's referring to Tian," the assassin said, shooting the Morrigan a less than friendly glare. The fact that Daediem had stood up for any of them caught Avery off guard. If he hadn't know better, he would have sworn that there was a glimmer of respect in the male's tone. Had to be bullshit though, it had been said for centuries the assassin respected nothing. The Morrigan's slight flinch at the low level trickle of power Daediem had directed at her was proof enough that he didn't give a shit about protocol. He didn't care much for his vitals either because the look she returned said he was going to pay later.

"The truth Avery," Eamon said. He waited to continue until he had everyone's attention. "She is immortal, yes? Do not force violence. I guarantee that we are well equipped to deliver."

"Yeah, and what do we look like? Girl scouts?"

All the heads in the room swiveled toward the door, where Xavier sat propped up in the orchids with a giant ass burning broad sword leveled across his knees and a kamikaze expression plastered all over his puss.

Well, well, didn't that sum things up nicely?

****

The sublime violation of him lingered in unfathomable recesses. The things Sio was capable of doing with his body were inexplicable, so intense that if he hadn't imprinted himself into her bones she wouldn't have believed they were real. She was still having writhing aftershocks from them, muscles ridged and spasming as if she would die.

We are elemental
, the goddess whispered in a moment of peace.
Perfect.

For one brief and blessed moment in time it was impossible not to agree. And in that moment, Tian found her soul was quiet, not flat lined or screaming like usual, just quiet. Clean. Sio hadn't been gentle, but she'd been right, there was no malice to his passion. It was exactly what she'd needed. What she wanted. What they'd done had to be what a miracle felt like...or maybe a cataclysm.

What they'd done had broken Sio's binding. She'd been too far gone to worry about the consequences when the jagged molten bands had burst, detonating in the room like shrapnel. After, he'd pushed her off the precipice of another savage release and she'd lost track of the world.

"It's snowing," Sio said. His low satisfied rasp slid against her skin, causing her to shiver. She opened her eyes even though they felt weighted. He was glowing, still resting in the cradle of her hips, wide hands resting on either side of her head.

"The moon lives in the lining of your skin," she told him. Fuck, she felt intoxicated. Why else would she pop off all Pablo like that?

His lips curled up at the corners. "Yours?"

"Do I look like a poet?"

"Sometimes."

"It wasn't mine."

"And what am I?" Sio asked. His expression was neutral, as if he was terrified of her answer. Tian looked at him and felt his emotions mingling with her own, felt how much it had cost him to ask.

"You," she said, "are stuck with me."

The Goddess only knew how long she could keep that going. The smile he returned liquefied her internal organs. Hell, that smile gave her a sense of well-being the likes of which she hadn't known existed. The heat it inspired wasn't cooled by the soft pattering of the ice crystals she noticed against her skin. She glanced up half dazed and tried to wrap her head around the unexpected shift.

"It's snowing in my room."

"Are you cold?" Sio slid his mouth along the contour of her collarbone where he'd marked her. He bit down again and sent her libido into over drive. Tian jacked off the ground.

"Not cold," she answered.

Sio's lips grazed her own and a gut wrenching scream broke through the silence. It was a mournful, soul-crushing, puppy-slaughtering sound. And shit, nothing like the slaughter of innocents to kill the mood. She and Sio scrambled for weapons. They were only half assed prepared before sprinting out of the room barefoot and partially dressed. Tian was so focused on finding the source of the high-pitched keening that she was twenty feet down the hall before she processed the unfamiliarity of their surroundings.

This corridor was all ice and fog and intricately laid silver floors. It had walls that clouded and cleared as they ran past as if the space were sentient, breathing. She had no damn idea how to react to that, so she kept running.

"I can't say that I remember these hallways being quite so convoluted," Sio said as they rounded another corner. The dagger he held blade down glinted cruelly in the diffused light.

"They weren't." Tian stopped as the hysterical screaming branched in three different directions all of which dead ended into the walls. "Fuck," she spat, "What is that supposed to mean?"

The noise stopped, opening the way for a dead silence that made her blood run cold.

"It means we need to get to the front door," Sio said.

Tian turned to look at him. They were practically swimming in the amount of energy emanating from his body. It took her a minute to get her voice to work.

"Which way?"

He wrapped a paw around the back of her neck and pushed them both through the solid wall to their left. The thing fragmented like mist around them and they spilled out of the entryway mirror into a scene that was the picture of placid domesticity. The foyer was dark and only the porch light was switched on. Tian rubbed tiny circles into her trigger guard with the pad of her right index finger as Sio crossed to the door. The comfort of the nervous gesture was countered by the ominous ticking of the grandfather clock bearing up in the alcove across from the mirror. The soft sound in the silence was hollow, came off as slightly malicious. She sighted the 1911 as Sio opened the door, and she dropped the muzzle in the same breath. This was wrong on so many levels.

"Zulpey?"

The small female was draped through the battered metal bars of the security gate. Large angry welts and mottled patches of ruined skin were visible any place the fraying 49ers jersey didn't cover. Brass keys littered the sidewalk around tiny feet that were encrusted in old blood, dirt, and city debris.

"I can't do the doors," Zulpey said, clawing frantically at her skin. Her fire engine red eyes were wide with a heart wrenching mixture of agony and confusion.

"Jesus," Sio said.

Tian leveled her weapon as she made for the gate. The metal was slicked in fresh blood and she had trouble getting the thing open one-handed. She had to wipe the excess on her shirt twice before the shit was tacky enough to get a good grip. Tian shoved open the gate, trying not to knock the battered female backward into the street.

"There's something out there," Sio said.

He sounded dazed. Tian searched the darkness as he collected Zulpey's broken body and hauled ass up the steps to the front door. Six street lights were out on either side of the Victorian, smothering them in a black shroud.

"Do you know what it is?" Tian asked as she passed the threshold behind him.

He shook his head negative, kicking the front door closed. "I can't... Shit, other than there are more than two dozen of them. I don't know."

"It's better than we had before."

"Tian?" Zulpey's voice was soft, barely above a whisper. "It hurts."

Zulpey convulsed in Sio's grip. The spasm nearly took her down to the floor. Sio dropped to his knees to keep her from hurting herself. The female's skin was ashen, riddled with toxic bulging veins that expanded with every pained breath. Sio pushed the matted hair back from Zulpey's face in soothing strokes while she looked at him with shaking naked gratitude.

A fractured whimper preceded another chorus of tortured screams. Tears streamed down Zulpey's face, tangling in the dirty rat's nest of her once golden bob. She jerked like a fish out of water, coughing up and pissing blood all over the hardwood floor. The ground rumbled under them, a loud pounding like a stampede rattled the fixtures as Tian reached out and took the small female's mangled digits in her own blood-covered hand.

"I don't know how to make it better Z, but I can make it stop," she said.

Zulpey nodded, exhaling flecks of blood though both nostrils with the effort. Her eyes were wide and pleading. Brave little bastard.

"Sio, I need your dagger."

"We take care of our own, halfling. Move."

Tian hadn't realized anyone else was there, but it explained why the thundering had stopped. She looked up and forgot to breathe.

"Royal," Zulpey cooed. Her joy at his appearance was palpable, given without a trace of relief or thought to her own predicament.

"We missed you, little one," Xavier said, stepping around the dangerous assembly that had gathered.

Zulpey's joy at being reunited with the angel was no less tangible than it had been with the demon. She struggled to sit up and set off another string of gut wrenching bloody seizures during which she began to choke on pointed teeth where they broke in her gums.

"We're going to make the pain go away, love," Xavier said, taking Zulpey's childlike hand from Tian as he knelt next to her on the ground. Tian moved over toward the wall by the door, taking Sio with her. He didn't flinch and didn't comment at the bloody hand prints she left on his bare torso in the process of tugging him away. There were no words for something like this.

"Are they still out there?" she asked under her breath.

"They're waiting for something."

Eamon spared them a dark glance, as if he'd overheard the near sub vocal exchange, and Tian's skin went cold. The Unmoved opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by an unintelligible choked gurgle from the floor. Zulpey look up at Royal with wide frightened eyes as she stretched her free hand out to him. The demon's electric green gaze burned like a harbinger of death. His custom threads hung in bloody tatters off his lean frame, and the fact that he neither seemed to notice nor care spoke volumes to his state of mind. The lines of his face were so harsh from strain they could have been chiseled in stone. His expression was dangerously vacant. Royal stepped over the thrashing female, crouched down and took Zulpey's hand as if he were afraid his touch would cause her to break.

"You always were too good for this world, little sister," he said.

"Tian," Eamon said. "If this female, who is now under your protection, were to be dispatched on your threshold by those invited through, it would break your warding, would it not?"

Son of a bitch. It would and he knew it. Eamon hadn't become the queen's left hand just because he was pretty.

"She's suffered enough," Tian said. It sounded as if she were pleading. Hell, maybe she was.

"Perhaps we should take this party outside before the walls come down then, give these boys some privacy," Daediem responded. His tone was grim; but his voice sparked enough adrenaline for ten Beserkers. Tian had nearly forgotten what fight or flight felt like, but leave it to the assassin to slam the recollection home. The level of contemplation in his mismatched gaze made her wary. She became more so when she realized that he was fixated on the scant half inch of the Deity design visible at her collar. The Goddess rumbled with reciprocated interest deep in the back of Tian's soul.

"You were not brought here to become embroiled in a Breed feud, assassin," said the Morrigan. Her distaste was obvious and it was hard not to wonder what Daediem had done recently to piss her off.

"No, you're here for me," Sio said. The heat leached from the air on the heels of the static crackle of his voice. "You may as well join me outside."

He must have looked up because the Pureblood shock response to the appearance of his unshielded eyes was damn near comical.

"Sweet Mother." The Morrigan reached a hand out to steady herself against the wall.

Ceyla cleared her throat. She was watching Royal's bowed form. "Think you lot can manage while we go nick a few weapons?"

"Eamon?" Tian asked.

The General nodded. Eamon had paled, making the gray hue of his skin look almost natural. The tightness in his jaw was out of place, almost horrifying, in his elegant features. The Unmoved was visibly shaken for the first time in living memory. His sterling bright gaze was riveted to Sio's face. He had yet to blink or look away and it didn't appear likely to happen any time soon.

"Come on, Janey," Avery said, breaking the tense silence that followed. He grabbed Loren and propelled the battered human down the hallway after Ceyla. "Let's get you a gun."

Sio gritted his teeth, made with the figurative earmuffs, and tried to give the trio on the floor as much emotional privacy as possible. It shouldn't have been hard, given all of the shit floating around in his skull. He was catching a running ticker tape of all of those half formed thoughts no one with a shred of common sense would ever put voice to. It wasn't just from the group on the ground either. The jumbled mess was further complicated by bouts of random intuition involving everything with a pulse in a fifteen foot radius.

He didn't have the slightest clue how to even begin to process it all. He did know that if it weren't for the smooth continuity of Tian's presence he would have been screwed; adrift in the chaos with no anchor. She was his beacon where she stood with her back pressed up against his chest and she was terrified of the three aesthetic all-stars in front of them.