Shadowfae (9 page)

Nervousness tingled, and I pretended I didn’t know what he meant. “How about me what?”

“You know. Those.” He gestured to my bangles, careful not to touch me.

My cheeks burned as I reflected on the hellish convent where I’d grown up. The stink of piss-starched linen, shutters pulled forever over the windows. Days of prayers, lessons, more prayers, starvation rations, and a thrashing the penalty for a mistake. Biting my split lips when the bruises stung under the rough white cloth that hid my face. Sleepless nights waiting in terror for cold, grasping hands. The night I finally escaped, I was limping as I crawled out into the stinking dung heap, squinting through one eye at magnificent, sprawling, shit-streaked London, the other eye swollen like a pea stuffed in its pod.

Fifteen endless years old, with neither love nor pity in my heart. I sank into rebellious days of picking pockets and robbing graves, confidence tricks with my hair stuffed under a boy’s cap or curled in ringlets like a lady’s. Nights of mad absinthe-soaked reveling, ripped satin gowns dyed verdant with arsenic, paste diamonds in my ears, all the men I wanted and some I didn’t but took anyway because I could. I got diseases, and I sloughed them away with vinegar or whiskey or some other poison. I never got pregnant; the nuns and their gnarled beating stick had seen to that. I cursed the Church like it cursed me, and crawled laughing into the fringes of a shadow world, where the altars were dark, the crosses upside down, the rituals blended with blood and orgasm. The Continent, Paris, Amsterdam, Constantinople, wherever the black word spread me.

And then Vorenus Luna, the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. The face of an angel, the body of a god, and not the slender weeping god nailed to those crosses but a glorious, virile idol of the weird who fairly glowed with power.
Come with me, Jade, kiss me once more and I’ll show you real magic, not just fucking on an altar to spite some foolish absent lord. Take me the way I want it and I’ll make you immortal.

Now I had real diamonds, silk gowns embroidered with golden thread, a carriage with horses, and all the man I wanted, for I only wanted one. He trained me in his every pleasure, molding me in his sensual image, and I wallowed in it. We played every game, twisted every kink, left no vice untried. Our library was hidden in a locked room, ancient books with human skin for covering, grimoires, poison recipes, the devil’s handwriting in blood on singed black paper. Luna’s power proved elusive, difficult, always just beyond my reach.

And one day he tired of me and left me chained to a wall underground, visiting me every so often to make me eat and to humiliate me with things I no longer wanted to do, at least not with him. My silk gown wore thin and greased up with grime, the curls falling from my hair. I cursed Luna as I’d cursed god, but a liar doesn’t need belief to thrive, and I’d learned no power that could ever hurt him. He’d made sure of that.

Two months later he lost me to Kane in a faro game. End of story.

I hadn’t thought about Luna in a long time, and I didn’t like talking about it. I’d wanted immortality once, to spite that skinny god who insisted I must die as he had. I’ve changed since then.

Now I looked across at Rajah, this oddly animated, disturbingly attractive stranger who longed to escape Kane’s thrall so he could live, not so he could die, and an empty place deep in my heart yearned. I wanted him to understand me, and not just because an incubus was probably the only man who could, but because for some deluded reason I thought Rajah might actually care. I wanted him to care. I wanted him to know me for myself, not just as some desperate rapture-drenched screwup or a scared little princess who gets beaten up by her jealous vampire boyfriend.

I took a deep breath and told him the whole thing.

He walked in silence for a minute after I finished, his hands still stuffed into his pockets. “Our stories are similar,” he said at last, and looked up at me with a dark hint of smile. “We searched in the wrong places. There’s no shame in that.”

We turned the corner into my street, and I couldn’t help but smile back, his gaze steady and warm on mine, until after a while his candor made me uncomfortable and I looked away.

He surveyed my door, squashed in under the stairs like a rabbit hole, and laughed. “You’ll go a long way to make your point, I’ll give you that. You know Kane would put you in a South Yarra mansion if you asked him to.”

“I’ll never ask him to.” I shifted, awkward, and held out my hand. “Thanks.”

After a moment he took it. “No worries. If Ange bothers you, call me.”

I flushed to remember that he’d walked me home so Ange wouldn’t beat me up again. Not because he actually wanted to talk to me or anything. “I didn’t mean that. I meant thanks for dinner. And . . . and for wasting your night on me, I guess.”

“It wasn’t a waste. I . . . umm . . . had a good time.”

He didn’t drop my hand, and my skin burned even hotter. He was teasing my wrist with his fingertip, wearing a tragically innocent look on his face. A shiver whispered up my arm, delicate, genuine, not a contrived shimmer of rapture but honest desire. I thought of my flat, humid and dark, sour with that blue-drenched smell. I didn’t want it to smell of Nyx. I kept Nyx in my heart, where he belonged, not smeared on my floor like excrement. I wanted it to smell of rogan josh, the sweet smoothness of lassi and the dark, fresh aroma of Rajah’s sweat.

I swallowed. “Rajah?”

“Yeah.” He slid his fingers over mine, tracing them one by one, watching, transfixed.

I didn’t pull away. “You’re still here.”

“So I am.” He brought my hand to his beautiful lips, and his clever tongue flickered tingles over my fingertip.

I couldn’t help but gasp at the rush of desire that flooded me, burning, all the way to my hardening nipples, my trembling thighs, the desperate ache starting between my legs. I wanted to slip my finger into his hot mouth so he could suck it. “Didn’t you say something about disappearing?”

He gave a sultry half smile and nibbled my fingertip again, this time grazing it with his teeth. Damn, his wicked mouth turned me on. “Do you want me to disappear?”

God no. I wanted him to undress me, trail his mouth over me, worship me, plunge his tongue between my legs and drink me until I screamed. I shifted closer, and I could feel the beginning of slick wetness down there, where that ache was getting worse, my flesh swelling for him, blood pounding. “You mentioned kissing me good night, too.”

He guided my hand into his satiny black hair, gentle but insistent. “I think I mentioned not kissing you good night, actually.”

“So how’s that looking?” I grabbed a handful, dark locks caressing my wrist, my nails grazing his skin.

“Not good. Keep doing that and I’d say hopeless.” He tossed his head back, sighing in pleasure.

The action brought me even closer, and my tight nipples scraped his chest through my rough linen dress. Pleasure zinged straight to my sex, so immediate that I moaned. He must have felt it, too, because he crushed me against his hard body, his hand leaving mine to cup my waist, strong fingers holding me, supporting me.

I dragged his head down to mine, my fingers clenched in his hair, and his eyes gleamed with anticipation. I was mesmerized. I inhaled, my lips parting, tasting him in advance, that cardamom flavor doing wild things to my pulse. He groaned and bent his tempting lips to mine.

The kiss seared my lips, shocking. Blood throbbed in my clit, and I staggered, faint. Rajah pressed me close, keeping me upright, his lips caressing mine so beautifully, sliding hot over my mouth, taking me exactly where I yearned to go. My mouth sparkled, alive with his energy, not edible and nourishing like Kane’s but pure sex, spearing through me, filling my womb, making my flesh weep with longing.

He danced his tongue lightly over mine, playing, teasing me until I whimpered, begging for more of him. Then his tongue plunged into me, taking me like he might with his cock, long smooth strokes that had me gasping and locking my arms around his neck, pressing against him to feel his straining erection.

The taste of him made me drunk and reckless. God, I wanted him filling me. A man who cared what I thought, who actually gave a damn what I wanted. And it wasn’t like it could ruin our friendship. Nothing to ruin. Just because I told him my most humiliating secret, and he not only sympathized but actually understood, didn’t mean I cared, right? And it certainly didn’t mean he did.

But I knew from the way we kissed, the way his body responded, that he craved me, too, wanted to take me hard, with his cock, his tongue, his deft fingers, everything. My breasts ached against him, burning for him to suck them, and my swollen clit demanded the same. I hadn’t wanted like this in an age. My eyelids swelled, treacherous tears cool on my hot cheeks.

He gentled the kiss, his mouth leaving mine to brush the tears away, his lips tender and soft on my face. “Good night, Jade.”

Urgency speared through my veins. He probably didn’t like me, not really. Just liked turning me on, liked my body and the idea of fucking me, another way he could get one up on Kane. But I didn’t care. I twisted my fingers in his hair, yearning for him.

“Stay.” Hell, that sounded desperate. I was desperate. For him.

He caught his breath, closing his eyes for a moment. “Don’t. Please. You’re upset, you don’t really . . . I can’t.” He sighed, reluctant, and gently but firmly set me away from him.

“I’m okay. Really. I just . . .” But I couldn’t stop the tears falling. It was that easy for him to take it or leave it. He didn’t really care what I wanted. Just some mortal remnant of his conscience, stopping him from screwing a woman in tears.

He bit his lip and lifted his hand to my face, but checked it before he touched me. Instead he reached over to trace his fingertip in the dusty glass on my door. Digits. His phone number. “Just call me if you need anything, okay?”

And before I could say anything, he’d vanished, only his delicious scent lingering.

7

R
ajahni Seth stalks down the dark street, his shadow long and black like a hellish shade. He’s seething, his palms burning and lust trembling in his roaring blood. That Jade. Like her. Want her. Damn her.

So delicate, almost translucent in her beauty, yet wild and passionate, sighing into him like she meant it, the acid scent of her wet sex—wet for him—seeping over her to drown him. His cock aches to fill her, bring her off, make her scream. His mouth waters at the thought of tonguing her hard little nipples, her smooth flat belly, the fragrant creases at the tops of her thighs. Wrapping his lips around her secret flesh, feeling her blossom and come in his mouth, with no thought for soultrap or nourishment or thrall, only her pleasure and his, over and over . . .

He kicks at a pebble, sending it skipping into the gutter. He wants her, so hot and hard, his desire almost blots out the torrid shock of her words from a few minutes ago.

But not quite.

Vorenus Luna. Hearing the name on Jade’s lips nearly floored him. The face floats in his mind, the memory nearly four hundred years gone but still fresh, bleeding.

Rash hatred fills him, mixing seductively with his lust. Luna. Trickster, thief, confidence artist, oozing latent aptitude like he oozed sex appeal. A magnificent predator. They’d been enemies, fierce competitors, reluctant but compelled colleagues, attracted by some fell magnetism of mischief. They’d whispered in dark ocean grottoes with demons, made love to soul-stealing fae in candlelit stone halls, dragged ghosts screaming from their rest to demand the answers to death itself, just for the sheer hell of it all.

Until Luna decided he wanted the power more than he wanted the fun, and betrayed Rajah to Kane in return for immortality.

Luna is here. In Melbourne. The lost echoes of Rajah’s power call to him, in the whisper of the wind at midnight and the electric buzz of neon. But he can feel Luna in his blood, too, in the same cells that sparkle in delight at the sweet potential whetting this infant city’s pristine air. Luna will have sensed that also, with whisper-sharp perception both stolen and innate, and if there’s one thing our Luna will never miss, it’s a party.

Sweat curls around the rolled edges of Rajah’s bangles, running over the magic words inscribed there.
Odium
—hatred—he’s done with. Next comes
primordium
—the origin—and
primordium
has Vorenus Luna written all over it. The origin of his thrall. He just knows that when he finds Luna—which was what he intended to see Angelo Valenti about tonight, before he got distracted by a stunning handful of intoxicating, sexy woman—when he finds Luna, that aura will leap out like wicked sunshine.

He wonders how long before Jade realizes the same thing.

He doesn’t know what
odium
means to her. It could be anyone. But from the heart-wrenching story she told tonight, Luna and
primordium
are one and the same.

They can’t both drink Luna’s soul. And if they don’t drink Luna’s soul, they can’t be free. Frustration claws at his heart, and he almost wishes he’d left her bleeding on the footpath by Valentino’s. Why did it have to be her? Why now?