Hers to Claim (28 page)

Adonia didn’t know how long her spirit wandered in the crypt below Torre Bianca when she fel
t a masculine presence join her—a presence lacking the welcoming warmth she had come to associate with Isolde DeCorvus.

Woman
, why do you disturb the slumber of kings and queens?

“I seek Isolde DeCorvus. I have a question I would ask of her.
” Adonia hesitated. “Is she known to you? Will you bring her to me? To whom do I speak?”

Again, Adonia felt the swirl of
an intense male essence surround her with a sense of increasing threat until she felt distinctly imperiled—as if the aetheric presence somehow held the potential to harm her.

Who are you
, woman, that you dare ask the name of

a
prince of royal blood, and presume to make him your errand boy?

Had her mission not been
vital, Adonia would have fled on the spot, such was the weight of threat that suffocated her. “I am Adonia DeCorvus, daughter in blood to Isolde DeCorvus. The Great Mother tasked me to summon ‘the mighty asleep from ages gone’ to meet the great evil consuming our planet. I believe I am the raven referred to in the inscription at the foot of Torre Bianca.” Tempest buffeted her spirit as if a great whirlwind whipped the aetheric plane.

You
are the raven?

Scornful, a
ngry laughter echoed through her mind.

We shall see.
The great deceiver makes lies seem like truth.

Adonia screamed with agony
, and her earthly body writhed in Hel’s arms as an enraged force shredded her aetherial self into a thousand wisps of scattered energy before withdrawing into a boiling cloud. Her essence gradually reformed, and she quaked with internal terror. If her task hadn’t been so urgent, Adonia would have surrendered to hysteria.

I am Federago DeHelios
, my lady raven. You taste of our blood and bear the touch of our Great Mother. You are of the true light. I will bring my queen and Agentio.

“My thanks
… Prince DeHelios … I am very grateful.” She received no reply. She didn’t wait long.

Daughter of our blood,
it is Isolde and Agentio. My beloved Federago says you’ve questions to put to me?

Adonia mentally exhaled
, glad beyond words she didn’t face the spirit of Federago DeHelios again. “My Queen, my Lord Agentio,” Adonia acknowledged respectfully. “Our Great Mother has told me I must summon Her sons and daughters of light from ages past to combat the great evil that consumes our planet. We think that means those illustrious dead from Nyth Uchel’s history—those who are buried in this crypt. But I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, and I don’t know what to tell them to do.”

Our Great Mother
faces grave peril. We cannot foresee the ending. By the blood of the raven, call us by name to the aetheric plane only when all your might is exhausted and defeat an imminent surety. The Great Deceiver is unaware of our strength and cannot be allowed time to marshal resources against us; then pray we will be enough to defeat this darkness. I think we’ll not meet again. Be vigilant. Have courage. Where the light of love burns, so does life.

Isolde
and her lovers departed, leaving Adonia overwhelmed with desolate bleakness. She awoke in Hel’s arms, convulsed with terrible quaking sobs.

“
Nia, ah, love, don’t.” He held her close to him and whispered, “Beauty, please, your tears cut me deeper than any blade.”

Adonia scrubbed her face with her hands
and tried to temper her shudders and slow her breathing. She couldn’t explain to Hel her sense of despair and loss and her foreboding about the future. She had nothing concrete upon which to base her feelings. They were just…feelings. “Don’t worry. It’s just exhaustion.” She forced a smile. “I’ll be all right.”

“Did you get any answers?” Hel helped her to stand and then gathered the blanket.

Her smile wavered. “Yes. I know what to do now—sort of. I just don’t know when. From what our Great Mother said, we must act soon.” Adonia turned worried eyes to Hel. “But what is soon? I cannot escape the feeling an imminent disaster looms. I’m consumed by a need for haste.”

Hel thought about her concern. He didn’t discount her feelings, but… “A’rken specifically said when Belarus mates with Cirrus in the northern sky. If he is to be believed, we still have months.”

She shook her head. “I cannot explain my unease. I just…”
She faltered to a stop. “I don’t think we have months.”

Hel wanted a reprieve
for Nia after their recent crisis. By the Goddess, he wanted a respite for all of them—but especially his ‘beauty’. “You have done so much these past few weeks. I want to see you rest and recover. I prescribe some relaxation and pampering for you and our child. I want the gray of exhaustion gone from your face. I want to lie next to you at night and know that your sleep is natural and not that of physical collapse. Come.” He enveloped her hand with his and led her out of the crypt into a soft spring-like night scented with green things bursting into life and velvet black lightened to dusk by the shimmering glow of Torre Bianca.

Adonia paused for a moment on the entryway steps and gazed about her. “I don’t think I’ll ever become used to this magickal place. I wish my father could have seen it.”

Adonia
described her experience in the crypt as they walked back to the castle, particularly her run-in with Federago DeHelios.

“
That was when your body writhed in my arms?” Those minutes were branded in his memory; he’d been helpless to aid her—not a feeling he relished.

“Yes. He was testing me, I think.
I don’t believe I’d have enjoyed meeting him in the flesh.”

“
Hmm. I understand that was the general consensus. History describes him as formidable.”

Adonia
’s eyes met his briefly. “Like you, then.”

He drew back. “
You still consider me formidable?”

She tossed him a sideways look of skepticism. “
Bás dtost
? And when was the last time anyone said no to you? Even Lord Ramsey does your bidding.”

He stopped and drew her to him
, first cupping her face in his great hand and then gently running his fingers through the hair at her temple and tilting her face up to his. “You said no to me.”

She cast her eyes down shyly. “And got a very sore ass for it.”

Hel dropped his hand and his head fell back as he laughed freely then resumed walking. “Which you rather enjoyed. Ah, Nia, how you lighten my heart.”

“
The accomplishment I take the most pride in during these difficult times,” she murmured with pleasure.

He
warmed at her gentle disclosure and, with an arm around her shoulder, he drew her closer to him. “Of all the miraculous things you have done, you count easing my heart as the one you take most pride in? Not banishing the wraiths and ghouls and saving Nyth Uchel? Not dispelling a lingering winter or saving Steffania from certain death?” Hel felt her shrug.

“Of course
I
should
count those as greater but you are a miracle more valuable than any of those other deeds. If I can lighten your heart?
That
is beyond price to me.”

He stopped and turned to her.
The extent of Nia’s loving, giving nature stole all thought from his head but one. Though they could ill afford the time—there was a battle looming—he wanted to steal some precious moments to love her, cosset her, show her how dear she was to him. Lurking in the back of his mind was the thought he might never have another chance. “My dearest Healer, I wish to cosset you and attend you for the next few days. We are going to put aside our cares and anxieties temporarily and enjoy a brief hiatus from worry.”

Her luminous brown eyes found his. A smile turned her
lips. “I’d like that very much.”

Hel raised her hand to his mouth and kissed the back of it. “Make sure you tell me when the symptoms from the
cinnagin
abate.”

~~~

Hel heard those words two days later. During those two days, Hel and Nia took comfort in each other as their friends were buried; he held her in his arms while they shared intimacies about their life before the Haarb changed things forever on Verdantia—and he fell deeper and deeper into love with his self-effacing, giving ‘beauty’. They spoke of children’s names, and Hel nuzzled the satin skin of her belly before bed each evening, kissing the nascent life within her and telling the tiny DeHelios how longed for and loved he or she was. It was two days where his world narrowed to include only Nia.

Soft half-light, what
now passed for night in Nyth Uchel post-Great Rite, surrounded them as Hel pulled her slender hind end into his groin and pulled the coverlet over the top of them.

“I feel normal
.”

Nia’s whisper
galvanized him and her squeak of surprise accompanied his surge over her, flattening her on her back. Hel’s hips and thighs demanded she spread her legs to cradle his quickly hardening cock, and his hands wrapped her wrists at arm’s length over her head. His face hovered inches over hers. It had been exquisite torture to sleep next to her these past two days, his cock stone hard and aching with the knowledge she burned for him, too—and do nothing but hold her. Nia had offered him relief with her mouth or hands, but he’d refused. If she suffered unappeased lust, then so would he.

“Say again, B
eauty. Did I mishear you?”

Her eyes gleamed with mischief as they held his gaze
. Her head shook ever so slowly.

“You did not mishear me.”
She pulled a wrist free and her finger traced his cheek. “Be careful of your poor face. The swelling there is just now starting to leave.”

“I’m sure you’ll make me forget.”
A broad grin crept across Hel’s face until his cheeks ached. “You have sealed your fate. I hope you’re prepared to reap a whirlwind.”

Her throaty
laugh answered him. He held her gaze until her features blurred as he lowered his mouth to hers and closed his eyes to savor her plush lips. She opened to him immediately, and her tongue danced with his as he quested inward and sought her taste. She intoxicated him like
Pottsdim Likor,
and his brain reeled as if he’d consumed a decanter of the potent beverage.

Hel lost himself in the
wonderland of Nia’s mouth for endless minutes with the thought he had not kissed her nearly enough. Finally, he pulled back, dragging in air, and released her other wrist. His fingers sifted her hair at her temples. He held her gaze as his hips flexed and the head of his cock sought the wet haven between her thighs. “Can you take me?”

A siren’s smile and half-lidded eyes accompanied her movement as Nia wrapped her long legs around his flanks
and set her heels into his buttocks. Her motion opened her fully and centered his shaft at her gateway where, with a mere push of his hips, he could penetrate her. The steady pressure of her heels pressing him downward made clear her desire. He sank inward carefully and groaned as the slick, warm moisture of her inner flesh teased his greedy cock in a mind-blowing slide of pure wonder. He submerged himself in her, cleaving and joining with her, so lost to sensation that he no longer knew where he began and Nia ended. Hilted within her depths, Hel opened his eyes to meet hers. “Our future is uncertain. I don’t know what fate holds in store. But this I know; until time ends, with my body and soul, I pledge myself to you, beloved.”

Tears appeared in the corners of her eyes and she blinked. “I am yours,
my prince—beyond death—even as Federago, Agentio and Isolde.”

There was no expressing the emotion filling him with
something as simple as words so he told her with his body, disciplining himself to hold back until he had brought her again and then again to climax—though he could have screamed at the agony of restraint as her hot flesh suckled his hyper-sensitive cock. When he finally slipped the leash of his self-control, his triumphant roar echoed against the walls of their chamber. Both of them lay shattered in the aftermath, their eyes locked, and the luminous joy he recognized in Nia’s expression forged a bond between them Hel knew not even death could extinguish. “For eternity,” he murmured.

“
Beyond time,” she whispered.

The warm bre
ath of her soft sighs gradually became the regular exhales of sleep as her slender form relaxed beneath him. Hel prayed to all the deities known to him for the ability to keep her and their babe safe from the threatening cataclysm. He knew with certainty should Nia perish, he would shortly follow her into death—for life would hold nothing that could make him stay in a world without her. He arranged himself protectively over her and their unborn child but sleep remained elusive. He lay awake, guarding his beloved’s rest, until daylight stole into their room. 

~~~

“Rise, Beauty. I’m afraid our idyll must end.”

Adonia opened her eyes to her
prince stroking her sleep-styled hair away from her face. In spite of all the recent tragedy and all that still threatened, an elated wonder suffused her that she had captured the heart of such a man. She clung to her joy even more, knowing how short-lived it might be.

“Your bath awaits you
, then we’ll join Ramsey and Steffania for breakfast.”

When Adonia entered the dining room at Hel’s side,
Steffania’s bright gold gaze found her. “So … you two have finally emerged from the bedchamber,” she teased.

W
hile Adonia wouldn’t have sacrificed the time she’d spent with Hel for any reason, nevertheless, her conscience gnawed at her for abandoning her responsibilities at such a critical moment.

“Are you well, Steffania? I’m afraid I’ve been a very poor healer
. I should not have disappeared for days when so many must need me.”

Ramsey grunted. “
We managed. We knew where you were, Lady DeCorvus. Had there been a crisis, we would have found you.”

Adonia turned to catch the exchange of
speaking glances and nods between Lord Ramsey and Hel before Hel pulled out a chair and seated her; some sort of unspoken communication between males of a similar ilk, she supposed. She was struck again by the similarities between the two men and thought back to that seemingly long ago day in Sylvan Mintoth when Lord Ramsey had refused to be parted from Steffania and Adonia had wondered what it must feel like to be loved to such a degree. Her gaze sought Hel’s and the message in his steady gaze confirmed her certainty that now she had that kind of love.

As they fe
ll to eating, the men began discussing the current state of the city and plans for an excursion to Nyth Uchel’s borders. With a casual glance at her husband, Steffania leaned across the table to Adonia and murmured, “You glow with an inner joy, Adonia. The change in you and Nyth Uchel is wonderful. It is like witnessing a rebirth.” Delight brightened Steffania’s expression until the woman beamed.

Adonia found
it impossible to contain a return smile. “I know it sounds bizarre, but I don’t think I remember being happier.”

Steffania sat back. “Good. I don’t know of anyone who deserves it more. Has Prince DeHelios asked you to
stay, to make it official?”

Emotion clogged her throat
, and Adonia could only nod with what she was certain was an idiotic grin. “And, I carry his babe.”

Steffania returned a similarly ridiculous smile. “We knew it.
Ram said the …”

Adonia never did find out what Lord Ramsey had said for just as Steffania would have completed her thought, a trumpet fanfare resounded
distantly through the open windows. Hel stood abruptly, his chair toppling to the carpet. Another horn from within the city answered, with an elaborate run of notes. The whole repeated three times while the other three diners listened, frozen in place. When the last answering note had died, Adonia turned to Hel in puzzlement. “Were you expecting visitors?”

Hel leaned down and
righted his chair. “Come, all of you—to the eastern courtyard.
That
was the royal fanfare. Unless the horns lie, Nyth Uchel is about to receive an historical first visit from a sitting Constante queen.”