Demon Marked (27 page)

“The cold
is
familiar. Not the kind of cold out there, but colder. It's enough to be familiar, though, and I don't like it.”

“Why?”

“Because it's different. Those other things that are familiar, when I feel them I want to chase them down. I want to find out where the familiarity came from. I want to know what memory I'm missing.” As if suddenly agitated, she rocked up out of the chair, stood looking out of the window before turning to face him again. “With the cold, I don't want to chase down what's at the root of it. And I have memories, real memories that frighten me, and that I don't want to revisit—a memory of Lucifer cutting these symbols into me. The memory of that Guardian looking at me. When I do think of them, I'll shake a little. But when I think about the cold . . . I feel like if I ever reach the end of that memory, if I ever remember why it's familiar, I'll start screaming and screaming and I'll never, never stop—”

Her voice cracked.
God.
He didn't know what to say. He wanted to go to her, hold her. He didn't trust himself to.

“Ash?”

Shaking her head, she pushed her hands into the pockets of her hoodie. Wearing it, even inside. She
always
wore it, he suddenly realized. Despite the T-shirt beneath, despite the heat of the room and her own body. She took off her jacket sometimes, and he would see it tossed over the back of a chair, but then it would disappear until the next time he saw her wearing it again.

Hell, she was always fully dressed. Except for the time she'd stripped off in front of him, he'd never seen her boots come off. Like her jeans, they seemed to change now and then, especially if she'd ripped them during their training or they'd been soaked in melted snow or mud. She didn't launder them; they simply became new.

Maybe because they were familiar, too. And comforting, unlike the cold.

“Anyway,” she said. “We train outside all day, and I make myself ignore that feeling as much as possible. But it's always there. So at night, I keep warm.”

He
could keep her warm. She didn't sleep, but she could read in the dark. The bed wasn't all that big. If she slid in right next to him, he'd keep her warm all night.

And she'd be hot. So fucking hot next to him. He could discover how hot she became, how wet, how loud when he buried himself inside all of that heat.

Or he could chop some damn wood, bring it in, and let it start drying out.

“Was she that bad?”

“Who?” Confused, Nicholas followed the direction of her gaze, realized she was finally seeing him naked. Or half-naked, at least.

And that he was just fine with that.

“Madelyn. Your wrists.”

Oh. He couldn't remember why it had seemed so important to hide those scars from her.

“Yes,” he said. “She was.”

Her gaze returned to his face. A fierce emotion lit her eyes. “I'd help you find her even without the bargain.”

She would help him find Madelyn just by being here, because Madelyn had some use for her. That was good enough. But he sure as hell wasn't going to release her, and risk having her leave or running straight into the Guardians again. Or maybe even chasing after Madelyn, if she discovered anything about Steve Johnson's ghost—which she
would
discover, as soon as she returned to make his life hell.

No. There wasn't a chance he was letting her go. “You're not getting away that easily, demon.”

She smiled, and he drank in the sight of it before realizing that he was about two seconds from asking her to return to the bed with him. Jesus, what was he thinking? He needed to sleep this off.

Her voice caught him as he turned away. “Nicholas?”

He stopped, waited.

“What I said before, about like and dislike—I didn't lie. It was true then, they didn't matter. But they do now.”

She'd also claimed that she liked him.
That
shouldn't matter to him. And so that's what he said.

“Whether you do or not doesn't make any difference to me.”

But goddammit, it did. Too much.

 

Had she always been this stupid? Ash couldn't remember.

The slender tree top swayed beneath her weight. Maybe she shouldn't have climbed so near the top, but she'd wanted to have the longest drop possible, the longest time for her reflexes to kick in. She'd learned to use her speed that way; she'd also learn to fly.

She gripped the trunk tighter when a breeze slid through the firs, bending the tree top toward the ground. If it broke, the end result wouldn't be any different than what she'd planned, but Ash preferred to control when she fell. It might be the only thing she controlled in this experiment.

As soon as she got up the courage. Until then, she could at least enjoy the view.

She'd chosen the tallest tree at the edge of the clearing that surrounded the cabin. In the distance, the mountains rose against a clear blue sky. Gorgeous. The sun shone from directly overhead. The cold never felt familiar with the heat of the sun against her skin, and she lifted her face to it, soaking in the warmth.

The birds must have been enjoying the sunshine, as well. Though usually quiet, today they were twittering away in the trees around her. Grizzly bears inhabited this area, but she hadn't seen one yet—she supposed they were all in hibernation at this time of year. Ash was almost sorry for that. She'd have liked to have heard one, as she often heard the wolves.

A continuous, almost rhythmic thud was coming from beside the shed—Nicholas, chopping wood. Ash had volunteered to do it instead. She didn't tire, and strong as she was, the effort would go more quickly, but he'd grunted something that apparently passed for words in man-chops-wood language, looking disgruntled and almost offended, and so Ash had left him to it. From her vantage point, she could only see his back. He hadn't turned around yet, hadn't seen her climb the tree. Probably a good thing.

Oh, and now she was just delaying. She glanced down at the clearing, trying to choose the best landing spot. Tracks crisscrossed the deep snow, mostly from their training sessions, and she tried to recall if any one area had seemed softer than the others. Even if it wasn't, maybe it didn't matter. The demon had dropped her from a similar height, and it hadn't hurt too much. Of course, he'd also broken her neck, so she hadn't felt anything at all.

And maybe that wasn't the best thing to think about right now.

Anyway, the point of this experiment was
not
crashing into the ground. Her instincts should kick in, her procedural memory should take over. All right. She filled her lungs with a deep breath, and gave a small prayer that it wouldn't be smashed out of her at the bottom.

Gathering her body, using the tree trunk as a spring, she leapt out over the clearing . . . and began to fall. Quickly.
Oh, shit.
Something needed to happen here, her wings needed to pop out and—

The muscles of her back suddenly locked. Ash cried out in surprise. Sensation exploded through her, strange and new, in places she'd never felt anything before. Places that hadn't
been
there before. Cold air rushed over wide expanses of skin. New muscles strained against the onslaught of the wind. From the corner of her eye, she saw one of her wings. Black and leathery, it stretched over a thin frame, like a bat's wing.

How did she move them? Why weren't they flapping? Ash rolled her shoulder, tried to flex the new muscles. Pain ripped along the frame. She'd pushed something the wrong way, and like a fragile kite folding beneath a strong wind, her wing seemed to collapse. Unbalanced, she flipped over, went into a flat spin.

Ash slammed into the snow. White erupted around her, a bit of a cushion but not enough. The impact smacked the breath from her lungs in a painful slap, a punch to the belly, and she didn't want to fly anymore but just curl up and not move again for a while, but she couldn't even manage that yet. Everything still spun and she couldn't quite focus.

Now the cold surrounded her. The pain wasn't the same but she could almost hear the screaming—

No. Not now.
She wasn't going there.

More rhythmic thuds. Nicholas? These were different, not the sound of an axe, but boots smashing through the snow toward her. Dizzy shock began to fade into awareness.

Strong hands gripped her shoulders. “Ash!”

Her wings had already vanished again. Moving still hurt too much. So did breathing. She groaned an answer instead, and Nicholas swore.

“I'm going to turn you over. Tell me if I hurt you.”

He didn't hurt her. Everything just hurt. He pulled her against him, half-propped up against his leg, and she opened her eyes. Tiny snow clumps clung to her lashes, framing her view with white flakes before they melted from the heat of her skin. His face taut, Nicholas brushed more snow from her hair, her jacket.

“What the hell were you doing? Trying to kill yourself?”

“No.” Her voice came out thin and hoarse, but her chest was working again. “Trying to fly. But I only managed the worst belly flop ever.”

He didn't laugh. His lips thinned, paled with anger. “Do you have any idea what it was like watching that? I can't even—God.”

His fingers tightened in her hair. He stared into her eyes, wild emotions chasing across his expression, each one too fleeting for Ash to catch.

Then he bent his head, and captured her mouth in a kiss.

Surprise held Ash motionless, then flooded away the pain in a sweet rush. Oh, she'd waited for this. Wanted this. His lips parted over hers, searching out her response. Shuddering, she opened for him.

He swept in, taking possession. Oh, God. This was nothing like his first kiss. That had been controlled, and this was all searing hunger unleashed with teeth and tongue. Ash's fingers curled into his sleeves, holding on as his need fed hers, until she was moaning low in her throat, desperate for more.

But he must have mistaken the sound for pain. He lifted his head—and no, she couldn't grab him, pull him back down. She couldn't follow him up and take what she needed. And now that she'd had it, now that she knew the feel of him, the sweetness, the heat, only the fear of death and breaking the damned Rules held her back. She'd have crawled across the frozen field for more of this.

She could only ask. “More.”

“No. I shouldn't have—” Nicholas broke off. Looking almost shaken, he drew back. “I'll help you inside. Are you still hurting?”

“Not really,” she said.

He pulled her up, so close, and when she looked up, the world stilled again. Would he kiss her? She watched the struggle play across his face, the war between what he wanted and what he believed.

Belief won. He didn't put distance between them this time, but he might as well have. His expression hardened—not cold now, but solid . . . and effective.

Now she was hurting again, pain centered near her heart. Throat aching, she started back to the cabin.

Nicholas trudged through the snow beside her. “So what the hell were you doing?”

“We're here to train. But if I'm going to do it right, I need to fly.”

“So you just decided to jump?”

“Yes. I needed to be fast, so we worked that out. Now I need to know how to make my wings appear, and if I can force them through some survival instinct, maybe eventually I'll just be able to control them—just like I can be fast whenever I like now.”

“So you'll keep jumping?”

“Yes.”

“God.” A heavy breath clouded the air. “Tell me next time, then. So I can be there.”

“I would have this time, but I thought you'd try to stop me.” His smile was grim. “I probably would have.”

They reached the porch. Nicholas paused to stomp the snow off his boots. Ash's were already clean and dry. She didn't know how they did that. Sometimes she thought about what she'd like them to be, then looked down, and they were.

“There's something else,” she said, and waiting for him to glance up. “They weren't familiar.”

“What weren't?”

“My wings. They're completely new to me.”

He frowned. “Do you mean you just don't remember—”

“No. There's familiar, and there's not. The wings were
not
familiar.” And not in the same way the Boyles' picture had been unfamiliar. There had been no surprise when she'd seen them, no sense of something new. “And I was falling, falling . . . but I didn't know how to fly. It's not in my procedural memory. Just as fighting isn't, even though I supposedly fought in a war in Heaven. You'd think
that
would leave a stamp on someone's memory, wouldn't it?”

Nicholas's brows drew together. “So you don't remember that. All right.”

“No. I'm saying that being a demon is
new
to me. How can I put in a security code or drive but not know how to fly? It doesn't make sense.”

“It doesn't,” he agreed, but she could see by the cold front coming in that the explanation that first occurred to him was: If it doesn't make sense, then maybe the demon is lying. Even if he did agree, even if he believed her, Nicholas was reminding himself that he
shouldn't
.

Disappointment weighed on her chest. God, she was an idiot. Disappointment meant expectations, and that meant she'd expected something different from him.

That had to be stupider than jumping from a tree.

With a sigh, she left him standing on the porch and pushed open the cabin door, but stopped halfway through. She faced him again.