Incubus Moon (14 page)

CHAPTER 17

A chorus of nightingales determined to rival the loudest orchestra were singing in the trees beyond my open bedroom window. The room was dark, except for a thin shaft of moonlight pooling on the hardwood floor beneath that same window.

The singer had left some time ago, but the memory of our intimacy still hummed inside me, her perfume mingling with the culmination of our sexual frenzy that lingered in the sheets and pillow cases and covered every inch of my skin. If she were still here, I’d make love to her again. Only this time, I’d let a slow burn stoke our passions.

But she wasn’t here.

I rolled over to check the time. The digital clock on the nightstand displayed the hour in soft, fluorescent orange numbers. Three-twenty-eight. Between the birdsong, my horny on the rise once more, and Mark’s edict to pack up and get out, it seemed pointless to lie here in bed and prolong the inevitable. The monster that was coming for me wouldn’t care about such mundane matters. It just wanted me dead, or so I assumed.

I headed into the kitchen to retrieve a bottle of water from the fridge, and then padded out onto the veranda, where I flopped onto the Moroccan daybed I’d bought last week. In a few short hours, my world would change forever…
again
.

The material possessions I’d be leaving behind meant little to me. The realization that I’d be losing Christie and Mark was what left the deep hollow forming inside me. Stumbling headlong into an uncertain future was worth the price, though, if it meant keeping the two people I loved most safe. Dimitri Ravello was another matter.

Twice tonight incubus lust had risen in me, and to an astonishing new degree. Of greater significance, it had outed me as something other than human to him; a man who just so happened to possess uncanny strength, hypnotic green eyes, and a cool, electric touch. I’d sensed he wasn’t ordinary at our first encounter. So what was he, another incubus, like me?

With only the crickets and unseasonably warm night for company, I closed my eyes and inhaled the fragrant, wind-swept darkness. It felt better out here, the buffets of air caressing my nakedness and easing some of my restlessness.

“End your suffering and come away with me …”

My eyes flew open and I bolted upright. Lips might as well have brushed my ear for how closely those whispered words had been spoken.

I twisted on the daybed to search the deeper shadow of the living room, my heartbeat a stampede in my throat. Nothing stirred. Peering over the balcony to the garden below, I half-expected to find some late-night party stragglers, but this too was still and silent.

I was seemingly alone. Me and my galloping pulse.

The bizarre and dangerous had returned to my life with a vengeance. The real
Shadow Walker
was out there somewhere, getting closer. I could
feel
him even now.

Maybe I shouldn’t wait until daybreak. I could pack up a few things and be gone within the hour. It was gutless not to face Mark and Christie before I did. In the end, though, what would confessing the strange and terrible truth to them accomplish?

No, the sooner I took off the better for everyone.

“Leave behind a world you despise and embrace the new one I offer you…”

I half-jerked, half-kicked, experiencing the sensation of free-falling.

When I looked around again, I found myself in a strange room and bed that, nevertheless, felt as though I belonged in them. Gossamer, tent-drawn sheers surrounded me, behind which candlelight flickered in the gentle currents of air. A large armoire stood in the far corner, and a wooden chest sat at the foot of the canopy bed opposite an ornate escritoire.

I was not alone in this bed, either.

Reaching an arm over, I pulled the warm body lying next to me against my nakedness.

This was clearly a dream; a remnant in my subconscious from my encounter with the rock singer. Why not go with it?

So I let myself trace small, delicate circles with my fingers over the woman’s shoulder, before venturing lower, where I caressed and kneaded the creamy flesh of her smooth belly. My dream body was swarthy against her porcelain complexion, my arms and chest covered in a light dusting of dark hair. Pressed against her like this, my arousal intensified.

“You should not be here,” she said in a sleepy voice, the swell of my excitement pushing at the inviting cleft in her backside.

“Because your Queen forbids it?” I responded with a dismissive laugh and moved my hand lower on her body. “I do not fear Alyahs.”

She placed her own hand atop mine in a bid that I go no further. “You should.”

The woman turned in my embrace, her bed-tousled locks a sea of white-gold in the candlelight against the meandering vines and exotic
blooms of her corn-silk blue pillowcase. Her skin held the ethereal glow of women in Renaissance paintings.

Paintings
. This was the young woman from the portrait at Dimitri’s. The very same woman from my dreams! The moment she focused soft, sapphire-gray eyes on me, her whispered name fell from my lips. “Francesca.”

How amazing to be taken over by a fantasy this vivid, yet still be aware that I was dreaming on some conscious level.

Suddenly, I was no longer gazing down at Francesca, but found myself staring up at the man I had once been through her eyes. Staring up into the handsome face of Dimitri Ravello.

“The Queen forbids a union between us,” I warned him as the young woman now. “She and her army…they will move against your people.”

He caressed the side of my face, his hand unnaturally cool, electric. “They would not dare. Our retaliation would be swift. Merciless.” The force and conviction behind this last word, the brief angry fire animating his green eyes, awakened a delicious quiver between my legs. “Open to me, my love, and I shall forever liberate you from your queen’s tyranny.”

“You ask for what I cannot give.”

Dimitri fixed me lovingly, his lips curving into a seductive smile. “Your heart is not your own to give?”

His voice sent a wave of gooseflesh across my body, causing my nipples to harden, as he leaned forward to part my lips with his tongue. I loved the feel of him in my mouth, the weight of muscular body pressing me to the mattress. But when I broke from our kiss, a gust of wind swelled the bed sheers over us like a giant sail, only to recede again, leaving the candles to flicker dangerously on their stands.

A storm was coming.

Dimitri took no notice of it and stole a hand beneath the bedding to cup one of my breasts, the other he used to pull me closer against the cool, solid planes of his body. His touch thrilled the soft flesh there in a way that no other man could, his fingers deftly finding and igniting the stiff little protrusion at its center, which he rubbed between his thumb and forefinger.

He took my gasp as further encouragement to stoke and fan my rising heat for him.

His arousal twitched between us, and I found myself both excited and wary of what his passion was capable. “Yield to me, beloved, and be free.”

It was as if a warm line stretched from that swollen little mound between his fingertips to my brain, compelling me to abandon everything I held dear and give in to him. Part of me wanted to do just that, allow him to fill me, to take me over completely.

Dimitri pressed into me again, almost to the point of pain. “Yield to me, Francesca.”

“I…” I arched against him and almost said yes. “…cannot defy her wishes.”

“Your Queen is corrupt!” he all but growled. “Blinded by arrogance and misguided hatred. Even her own King spurns her sadistic lust for violence and war.”

He was right. He was also here with me, no matter the danger his presence brought to us both. I didn’t want to spoil the moment with talk of my mother and the fragile truce between our peoples. He should be kissing me, making love to me; for I did love this man with all my heart.

“Midnight magic and mischief,” I whispered, gazing up at the handsome man I’d first met under silver moonlight in the woods near our palace. “That is what you are to me.”

“Then say yes, Francesca, and spend an eternity of such enchantment with me.”

“Don’t you see?” I reached up to stroke the side of his face. “To be yours forever means to forsake everything else that I cherish; my people, my birthright.”

Dimitri’s eyes ignited with rage. “I offer you a new life to cherish, with me at your side.”

I withdrew my hand and turned into the pillow. “Alas, it is a gift I cannot accept.”

A roar like that of a wild beast erupted from him, his dark hair a trembling mane of tangles, his naked chest heaving. He lunged at me then, his mouth slamming against my throat and tearing a short-lived scream from me.

I could feel my windpipe collapsing beneath the force of his bite, the sting of sharp teeth and a sticky wetness flowing down the side of my neck and onto the sheets. Blackness threatened to consume me, my bedroom giving way to a nighttime wasteland with a gaping maw at its center. The scent of rotting citrus was everywhere, the stench undercut by something even more fetid. The stench of the grave. I would not go willingly into that void.

With all the strength I could muster, I clawed and shoved at Dimitri, his mouth tearing away from my throat with a sickening wet pop. It was dripping with my own blood.

I made one final attempt to strike out at him, but a volley of wind whipped one of the gossamer panels into the candelabrum next to my bed. The fabric exploded in a riot of flames. It jumped to the next panel, then the next, until an unstoppable heat licked at my naked flesh.

I screamed, but Dimitri clamped a bloodied wrist over my mouth and forced me to drink deep of it. I gagged on the coppery-sweet fluid flooding my mouth and throat, the intense heat pure agony now.

A tremendous explosion rocked the bedchamber, followed by the sound of shattering glass and splintering wood. It obliterated that other lurid image with a new one; my body being propelled away from Dimitri and out into the cold night air filled with shouting and screams coming from within the castle.

The roar of flames thundered in my ears. I was on all fours, the abrupt silence of early morning daylight signaling that the dream—no, the nightmare!—had finally ended.

I coughed several times, bringing a hand up to shield my eyes from the brightness. My throat ached from the heat and smoke that only ever existed in my subconscious, and I lunged for the half-consumed bottle of water at my feet, drinking it down in one gulp, a lifeline in an angry sea. The water stung the lining of my throat as if it had actually been singed.

When had my dreams started to come with physical side-effects?

A succession of poundings inside brought me to my feet. I trudged to the front door and opened it. Mark Gold was standing there holding up a Peet’s to-go cup and a brown paper bag.

His contrite smile instantly vanished. “Jesus!”

I followed his shocked expression as far down as my knees and blinked in disbelief. Bloodied and raw, the top layers of skin had been peeled away, which was about the same time every pain receptor in their general vicinity began to sting and throb like crazy.

Holding the coffee cup in one hand and the bag clenched between his teeth, Mark ushered me inside and tossed the food items on the kitchen countertop. “First aid kit?”

My voice came out a dry croak. “Bathroom.”

I winced lowering myself onto a barstool from the jolt of nerve-sparks shooting through the pulled skin of my kneecaps.

He returned with a red canvas pouch and bathrobe, which I draped over my lap. I’d forgotten that I was naked. He dabbed at the first knee with a hydrogen peroxide-soaked cotton pad. “And here I figured a cappuccino and pastry would make up for last night.”

I jerked from the cold sting of the bubbling liquid. “I’m not that easily bought.”

An inspection of the contents of the paper bag revealed two croissants staring up at me, their chocolate bits begging to be savored. Guess I was that easily bought.

“Wanna tell me what happened?”

Here it is
.
Your chance to come clean
. “Not particularly.”

Mark lowered his gaze and applied some Neosporin to the wound. “Look, Austin, I—”

“Moving in here was a mistake. You obviously have issues with me. Where I go, who I talk to, who I fuck.” Mark reacted as though I’d dumped ice water on him. “So I’m gonna make this easy for both of us and find somewhere else to live.”

He stood up and stared down at me in stunned disbelief. “I call you out on barging into my neighbor’s house uninvited and now you’re just gonna split?”

I stood up as well, albeit more slowly and painfully. “Your neighbor. Your property. Your life. You need to be in constant control of everything and everyone around you.” It was fucked up of me to end things like this, but better Mark hate me for something he could rationalize than the implausible, horrible truth. “Not being my landlord is a first step in the right direction for both of us.”

Incredulity and hurt darkened in his expression. “Where will you go?”

“I’ll figure something out.”