Silken Rapture: Princes of the Underground, Book 2 (28 page)

She’d been to the apex room once before, with Margaret. She’d been overly wary of the giant crystal. Not only did she sense its immense power—like a mainline for the earth’s energy—she had vague, frightening memories of being forced to touch it by Morshiel’s followers.

Wary or no, she would go there tonight.

She stepped off the elevator into a carpeted hallway. The silence seemed to have weight, it was so thick. She heard a noise, like the soft growl of an animal, and spun to her left.

For several seconds, she just stared, sure she was hallucinating. She was playing the role of Cleopatra. Had she somehow managed to conjure the ancient queen’s spirit? Was this more of Sanctuary’s magic?

The black-haired woman who stood before her wore a simple sheath dress, her gleaming, golden-brown skin making the color of it look starkly white by contrast. The only other adornment she wore was a half-dollar-sized crystal that lay flush next to the skin on her chest.

Her eyes were like two knives carved from ebony.

“He said I was to remain invisible, but I will eviscerate you, in Hathor’s name, for daring to carry the sistrum,” the woman hissed.

Isabel blinked in shock. She glanced down to where she clutched the prop in her hand—a small percussion instrument. She knew the sistrum played a part in ancient Egyptian religious ceremonies, and that only priestesses were allowed to carry it.

“What are you talking about? Who
are
you?” Isabel demanded.

The women sneered. Her downward glance was like splashed vitriol. “You call that the dress of an Egyptian queen? I wore robes spun from pure gold. I wore rubies and emeralds, and it was said the most precious gems in the entire world were invisible next to my beauty. You…
you
look like a harlot dressing up for a man with a costume kink.”

Isabel straightened in rising indignation when the woman began to laugh, as if she thought her joke was the best she’d ever heard.

“I don’t have time for you,” Isabel muttered under her breath before she started down the hallway in the direction of the apex room.

Apparently, this was not the thing to say to the woman. Isabel turned around at the sound of pure fury behind her. She barely had time to put up her forearms in front of her face, blocking the woman’s oncoming, clawed hands. Isabel grabbed her wrists, halting her in mid-air, but the woman struggled like a wild cat. Isabel’s fear that she would lose her eyes to the woman’s sharp fingernails made her fight back with equal fervor.

“You dare to speak to me that way? I am Shirian the Magnificent! You are nothing!
Nothing
,” she shrieked, shooting spittle into Isabel’s face. She flung her body forward, causing Isabel to stagger before she regained her balance. Isabel struggled to defend herself, shocked to the core by the intensity of a stranger’s hatred. Without pausing to consider her actions, she jabbed her knee upward between the woman’s thighs.

Air whooshed out of her attacker’s lungs. Her black eyes went wide and she broke free of Isabel’s hold, staggering backward. Isabel read the moment in the woman’s eyes when her shock morphed to unmitigated fury. She flew at Isabel again, howling as she did so, her beautiful face twisted in malice. Isabel did the first thing that popped into her mind. She hauled back with her fist and clocked the woman in the jaw. Her assailant wailed in pain, but kept coming, clawing her fingernails through Isabel’s wig, and finding her real hair coiled beneath it. She scraped skin and yanked brutally. Tears swelled in Isabel’s eyes at the sharp pain.

“I don’t care what that fool Morshiel thinks, you’re nothing but a worthless whore,” Shirian grated out between clenched white teeth.

Pain made it difficult for her to think, so she automatically mimicked what Shirian was doing. She grabbed at a hank of thick, smooth hair and yanked for all she was worth.

“I don’t care what
anyone
says, you’ve got to be the biggest bitch on the face of the earth,” Isabel replied with difficulty from her stretched throat before she placed one hand on Shirian’s face and pushed back at the same time she jerked at the hair at her nape with all of her might. She landed a kick on the woman’s knee. She barely had time to process Shirian’s cry of outrage when her fingers caught at the leather string around her neck. Isabel felt something give.

Suddenly she was stumbling around off balance.

“Isabel?” Blaise called to her sharply.

She made a sound of dismay when she saw the woman was gone. Had it all been a bizarre waking-dream?

She lifted her fist and saw the crystal pendant swinging from the brown leather string. It had really happened. She’d ripped the necklace off the woman’s throat, and then she’d vanished.

“Isabel? What is it?”

She glanced around, disoriented, meeting Blaise’s bewildered stare. He looked up and down the corridor, his stance wary.

“We heard a scream. Are you all right?” Blaise prompted.

“Blaise?” she asked breathlessly. “Who was that wom—”

She stopped abruptly, her mouth hanging open in shock. Another man had just appeared to the right of Blaise’s shoulder, his height and breadth the exact match of her lover’s. Blaise saw where she stared and looked back at the man calmly.

“Oh my God. What’s
he
doing here?” she asked, pointing at a smiling Morshiel.

“I can explain, Isabel.” She blinked disbelievingly at Blaise’s even tone. He put out his hand. “Come with me. I’ll tell you about it in the apex room.”

She hesitated, confused by everything that had happened since she’d stepped off the elevator.

“Come with me, Isabel. Morshiel can’t hurt you. Not as long as I’m here. Trust me. I will always protect you. Always,” he finished quietly.

She went toward him, her hand outstretched.

The resonance of the crystal flooded Blaise’s awareness when he opened the door. He entered, Isabel at his side and Morshiel behind him. Morshiel closed the door and locked it.

The crystal’s energy pulsed into him. It vibrated the air, creating a subtle song. It seemed to hum at a higher frequency than it had in the past. There was definitely magic in the air tonight.

“Blaise, what’s happening?” Isabel asked when he turned toward her.

She looked beautiful to him in that moment, still wearing her costume and Egyptian-styled gold jewelry. Her gold-streaked chestnut hair had been pulled back close to her head in order to make room for her elaborate headdress, but for some reason, the sleek knot had been torn loose. Long tendrils parenthesized her exquisite face.

When Isabel held out her hand to him a moment ago in the hallway, and she’d come to him, so much trust in her dark eyes, Blaise had recalled his dream. The truth had hit him full blast. He recalled Elysse’s mausoleum and Isabel reaching out to him and Morshiel—
no, it is not death, but life,
she’d said.

He’d understood then, better than ever before.
That
puzzle had been the true part of his dream. Not the dream of a dead woman’s taunts, not the horror of his decaying body. Death was a part of life, after all.

It was folly not to embrace it.

Sometimes, the thing you fought against most in life was the key to your liberation. He had started to understand the truth last night, when he heard Isi’s story. Understanding had coalesced as he spent the night in Isabel’s arms.

He hoped desperately that he was right in what he was about to do. Part of him knew in the deepest sense of the word that he
was
. Still, fear curled at the edges of his consciousness. He pushed it aside resolutely.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Isabel murmured as she came into the circle of his arms.

He pulled her against his body. Her dress was relatively thin. He felt her heat seep into him. He spread a hand on her hip and rubbed the taut curve.

“I thought Morshiel couldn’t come within the bounds of Sanctuary,” she continued, casting a wary look over her shoulder at his clone. “I thought it was protected by Usan’s magic.”

“I can enter if the master of Sanctuary invites me inside.”

Isabel whipped around. Morshiel had spoken telepathically. Blaise had heard him, but apparently so had Isabel. Morshiel watched her with a hot, covetous stare. Isabel stirred in his arms uneasily.

Blaise had never seen Morshiel appear so scruffy before. Whiskers shadowed his upper lip and jaw, and the hair on his head had grown enough to look like a short buzz cut. It was strange for Blaise to see him thus—like something familiar, and yet utterly new at once. It was like seeing a new facet in the face that stared back from the mirror.

Isabel met his stare again. He did his best to appear calm, even though his heart was throbbing next to his breastbone.

“
You
are the master of Sanctuary,”
she said in his mind.
“Why would you ask a man who wants to murder you to come within your protected territory?”

He couldn’t seem to find the words. There was so much he wanted to tell her about what he’d come to understand last night after speaking with Isi, after making love to her.

“What is it?” she whispered. “What’s wrong? What’s happening, Blaise?”

He glanced uneasily at Morshiel and back to Isabel’s upturned face.

“I must again ask too much of you, I know this.
I’m sorry, Isabel. I didn’t fully understand until recently.”

He saw her bewilderment slowly morph into disbelief. She went pale and glanced back at Morshiel. Morshiel smiled…a sly smile, the smile of a falling angel. He understood how horrified Isabel was upon seeing him. Morshiel was soulless defined. Evil defined. And yet Isabel was drawn to him against logic, against her very will, like a living, vibrant planet drawn to a massive black hole.

He understood this about her, because he now accepted it in himself.

Blaise was shocked to see that his clone had retracted his incisors. He’d never seen him do that before.

“I would do anything to touch you, Isabel. Anything. Even this,”
Morshiel said.

“Even what?”
Isabel asked shakily.

“Even submit to my clone, if it is necessary. It is my destiny. Blaise realized this. Now I do as well,” Morshiel said out loud. “It will be a small price to pay for the ecstasy of touching you, of burning in your fires.”

She made a sound of fear.

“Isabel, listen to me,” Blaise said, turning her in his arms. She had begun to tremble. He placed both of his hands on her delicate jaw. Her wide-eyed, trusting stare cut at him. “Morshiel and I are one. People have always thought I said this symbolically, but I mean it literally. We are separate in the physical world, but we are two sides of the same coin in the spiritual sense. He is my dark half. Usan knew this. He made us separate in order to cause a certain friction within me.”

“I know,” she said quietly.

“
How
do you know?”

“Usan told me. I know many things, Blaise.”

He went very still when she placed her palm on his chest just above his heart.

“Do you understand what’s happening here, Isabel?”

She inhaled sharply, and Blaise realized it was because Morshiel and he had asked her the question in tandem in her mind. He glanced at his clone quickly. He still hated Morshiel with all of his being, but since last night, something had changed. Part of him pitied Morshiel. He would always feel the need to control what Morshiel represented, but he no longer would fight it from without. He would do so within.

And he would win.

“I cannot kill Morshiel. I can only try to control him. This was the magical mandate Usan set in my blood years ago,” Blaise explained softly, his mouth just inches from Isabel’s lush, trembling lips. “The only way I control him is by accepting fully what he is. I could never do that before, because I could not fully control my own aggressiveness, my animal instincts. Now I can, Isabel.”

“But…why now?”

“Because you taught me that I can,” he said, tenderly wiping a single tear from her cheek with his thumb, sensing her uniqueness and beauty at that moment in every cell of his being. “It’s like I told you last night. I could never hurt you. Never—because I love you. That is what you taught me. A great lesson, greater than I can ever put into words. Indescribable, really. If I can love, I know I can control the beast within me. It may be hard for you to understand what I’m saying…but I did…not…
know
this until last night,” he grated out.

“I understand,” she whispered. Another tear splashed on his fingers.

He tried to smile. “You understand because you’re so special. You gave me a gift unlike any other. Until you, I doubted I could control Morshiel, control myself. Do you see? Only knowing love made it a possibility.”

She appeared to be choked with emotion. She nodded.

“And now…” He glanced back at Morshiel who stood and watched them, seemingly transfixed. “We must finish this. It is a ritual. A very crucial one.”

“Let me touch you, Isabel,” Morshiel said, longing thick in his voice. Isabel turned. Blaise pressed her back against his chest and wrapped her in his arms. His body responded to her closeness, to the full, taut friction inherent to the magical moment. His cock lengthened as he pressed his face against her fragrant hair.

“I’m sorry to have to put you through this. You can refuse in a second. All I can say to comfort you is that Morshiel is me—all that is evil and vile and empty in me, yes. But me, nonetheless. I will think no less of you if you cannot accept him. But you are my soul, Isabel. If you cannot accept Morshiel this one time then I can never truly accept him…never truly control him from within, as opposed to without,” Blaise told her.

He saw that Morshiel stared into her face and sensed their gazes were locked. “I can control him,” he whispered the secret near her ear. He felt her shiver in his arms. “You must trust that I can.”

“I do trust you,” he heard her whisper. “I will do it.”

Morshiel staggered forward almost clumsily, as if her consent had magically released him from immobility. Perhaps it had. Blaise’s arms tightened around Isabel possessively as Morshiel came toward her, hands outstretched and shaking. He touched Isabel’s bare arms.