The Fallen 03 - Warrior (24 page)

Don’t be kind,
I thought miserably.
Don’t be nice to me. Don’t make me fall in love with you.

But this time he didn’t read my mind. Instead he looked at me, his dark, dark eyes so deep I felt myself begin to drift, lost in his gaze. Mesmerized. And then he dipped his head toward mine.

H
E KISSED ME.
I
TRIED TO PULL
back, but the grip on my wrists was relentless, and even though I jerked my head away he held me tightly.

“Why are you kissing me?” I said in a deliberately cranky voice, hoping that would mask the pain. “You don’t even like me.”

For a moment his blinding smile lit his face, and just that quickly all my resistance vanished. He shifted his grip so that he held me captive with one strong hand, while the other reached up to cup my face, so that I had no choice but to look into his eyes again. Fall into them.

“Such a foolish little goddess,” he whispered. Before his mouth caught mine once more.

It wasn’t a mercy kiss. It was hard and wet and full of carnal demand. His long fingers pulled my
mouth open, and he pushed his tongue into me, demanding a response that I was helpless to refuse. I fell back into that dangerous world, throwing pride and caution to the winds, kissing him, lost in the sensual delight he wove around me with merely a look. I started to move closer, press up against him, but our hands were in the way.

And then he wrenched himself away, and we stared at each other, breathing heavily. “Did you ever stop to consider there might be a reason I keep myself as far from you as I can?” he said in a soft undertone. “I want you. I want everything about you, including your blood.”

“But you don’t care about . . . blood.” I hated even to say the word. It confused me, frightened me, horrified me. The thought of someone drinking my blood, swallowing it, was disturbing. And yet, beneath my horror and aversion ran a thread of arousal that made no sense.

He brushed his mouth across my lips, my cheeks, my eyelids. “I want yours,” he said, moving his mouth to the side of my neck, just beneath my jaw. I felt him inhale deeply, and his tongue danced across my veins. And then he pulled away, still holding my hands. “We have to go.”

I stared at him, bemused, once more lost in his darkened gaze. “Go where?”

He jerked his head over his shoulder, and for the first time I looked around me.

The river rushed beside us, though we were now
on the opposite bank. Such as it was—the brown-toned landscape looked odd, unfinished, and then my eyes focused behind his head, and I froze.

It was as if someone had painted a watercolor of browns and grays and then left it out in the rain. Walls of viscous light pulsed and throbbed like living things, and I skittered away in fear. “What the hell is that?” I demanded in horror. But I already knew the answer.

“The Darkness.” His voice was flat, implacable.

Panic sliced through me, and I tried to yank my wrists free. “I don’t—”

He held me, refusing to let me go. “We don’t have a choice.”

Man up, Tory,
I told myself. I wasn’t used to being afraid. Then again, all the real danger I’d faced had been human, normal. I’d never faced anything with the malevolent force of this liquid wall of power, and it shook me to the bone.

But I had never been a coward and I wasn’t about to start now. “Are we going to make it through?”

I was hoping for reassurance, but His Saintliness wasn’t one for meaningless lies. “Maybe,” he said. “I can help.”

“How?”

“Trust me.”

Those were notoriously dangerous words. I said nothing. The dismal truth was that I did trust him, and the last thing I wanted to do was tell him so. He already held too much power over me.

“Good,” he said, and I wanted to snarl.

“Don’t make assumptions!”

His smile was faint, devastating. “I told you, everything you think shows on your face. You’d be a terrible poker player.”

“I don’t believe it’s that simple.” He saw things too clearly for it all to be a matter of an educated guess.

“We can argue about it when we get back,” he said. “In the meantime, we have to deal with the Portal and then the Darkness. Time passes differently in this world than it does in Sheol, and we have to get back before it’s too late. We need to concentrate on that.” He separated my wrists, holding each hand out from my body. “Don’t fight this,” he said.

“Fight what?”

I had deliberately kept my eyes averted from his beautiful chest, but something drew my gaze. The tattoos were shifting, sliding across his golden skin slowly, sinuously. I wanted to touch them with my mouth, lick the slowly moving marks, but he held himself too far away.

“Hold still.”

As if he were giving me any choice. His grip was merciless, and I watched as the line of tattoos twined across his chest, coming down the middle and swirling upward again in mirrored lines, up to his strong shoulders. They curled around his biceps, gliding down to circle his forearms, his
wrists, and then across the hands and fingers that held me.

I felt the first touch of them as a faint caress, almost a tickle, and I gasped, looking down as the marks slid up my own arms.

It felt like a hundred butterflies dancing in my veins. They ran upward, disappearing beneath the short sleeves of the ruby dress, and then began to swirl across my neck and shoulders, dipping down beneath the gown to caress my breasts, and I let out an involuntary moan of pleasure.

“There,” he said in a muffled voice, and released me.

I fell back, but he caught me, easing me down. I lay in the grass, staring up at the colorless sky, and felt the strength fill my body. After a moment I managed to sit up.

“That was amazing,” I breathed. “Better than sex.”

There was no missing his wry smile. “It’s less work.”

“Fuck you,” I said genially, twisting my arms to admire the sinuous tattoos. They moved on my skin as well, and the sensation was delicious. Empowering.

“We’ve put this off too long,” he said abruptly, rising to his feet and reaching for his discarded shirt. My own dress had dried with surprising quickness, and wet denim no longer cupped his butt.

I scrambled to my feet too. “What will these do?”
I lifted my skirt halfway up my legs and saw them move across my thighs as well, a soft caress.

“They’ll make you infinitely stronger,” he said, turning his back on me as he fastened his shirt. “They’ll make the pain more bearable, give you a fighting chance.” He turned back, taking my hand in his. “Come.”

Something felt wrong. I had no idea what it was, but something had shifted, and despite my new strength I felt frightened as he drew me forward toward that malevolent, shimmering cloud.

“What if we don’t make it?”

He looked down. “You will,” he said, and pulled me into the cloud.

I’d been expecting a veil, a thin wall that would hurt like hell and then be over, but it was thick, impenetrable, like Jell-O.

And then the pain hit, like a thousand shards of glass slicing deep into my skin, and I cried out, shocked at the harshness of it, gripping Michael’s hand so tightly that if it had been anyone else I would have broken his bones. I tried to breathe my way through the shattering pain, remembering the movie scenes of childbirth, and I clung to Michael even more tightly, not sure if I could stand it.

And then his words came back to me. “You will,” he’d said. Not “We will.”
I
would survive.

But what about the archangel? He was stronger, he was immortal, nothing could touch him. But he’d said, “
You
will.”

The pain grew, a living thing, the knives of glass digging deep inside, into my organs, my stomach, my heart, my womb, and I began to sink, losing this epic battle, and he was wrong, I wouldn’t—

I was pulled up against a hard, strong body, but it was trembling, shaking, as he vibrated with pain.

“Michael!” I screamed in sudden terror, and I felt something wrap around me like a blanket of feathers, shielding me, protecting me, and I stopped fighting, sinking against him, letting go.

And then it was over. Silence, thick and deep, flooded my brain, filling it with marshmallow fluff. I didn’t move, feeling those magic butterflies dance through my body, healing, soothing, and I drifted, absurdly happy, wrapped in Michael’s strong arms.

It took me a long time to realize that something was wrong. The skin beneath my head was cold, almost clammy. My head was against his chest, and his heartbeat, usually so strong, was faint, thready.

Light blinded me as the protective blanket withdrew. He released me, and I realized his wings had been around me, protecting me, cradling me. That same feathery softness had covered us when we’d made love in his room. Blessing, protection. Love.

But his arms had fallen away, his wings had vanished, and he lay still on the ground.

A faint glow emanated from Michael’s body, a much stronger one than mine. I looked down at Michael, and I knew he was dying.

His eyes were closed, his color pale beneath the
cuts and bruises that hadn’t been there before. His shirt was shredded, and I gazed at him in horror.

The tattoos were gone from his body—all the marks that had danced across his golden skin. The wards and protections had vanished, and I knew that the Portal hadn’t taken them. They still danced across my arms. He had given them all to me, and had gone into the Portal with no protection at all.

“You idiot!” I screamed at him. “Take them back.”

His dark eyes fluttered open, but they were dull, fading. “Can’t,” he said, his voice barely audible. “Takes . . . too . . . much.”

“Don’t you dare die on me, you asshole!” I said. “You can’t live for millennia and then die because of my stupidity.”

“Not . . . stupid, Victoria Bellona.” It was just the trace of a smile on his battered face and I knew he was doing it simply to annoy me. Even as he was dying, he was still trying to irritate me.

“I’m not letting you die,” I cried, my hands gripping his strong shoulders. They were cold to the touch—his life force was slipping away.

“Nothing you can do.”

I wanted to howl, to scream, to cry. He couldn’t do this. Not just to me, but to the Fallen. To the world.

I tried to shake him, but he was too heavy. “Don’t leave me.” I don’t know where those words came from, and I didn’t care. “I lo—” Before I could finish
the damning sentence, he reached out and caught my hand with the last ounce of his strength, pulling me down to kiss me.

Then his mouth went slack beneath mine as he let go of life, abandoning me in the malevolent world of the Darkness.

I
KNELT IN THE GRASS BESIDE HIS LIFE
-less body, and for the briefest of moments I wanted to scream and cry and rail at whatever God he supposedly served. But only for a moment.

“No,” I said flatly, calmly. I had no idea what to do, and I could act only on instinct. Do what my heart told me. What my blood told me.

I had nothing with which to rip my flesh, but if it came to it I would tear the skin on my wrist open with my teeth. And then I remembered the thin piece of metal I had hidden in the folds of my dress.

It took precious moments to shove my hands through the cloth to find it, praying as I did that I hadn’t lost it in the car, the barn, the river. I slashed it across my wrist, and blood welled up. Ignoring my queasiness, I put my wrist against his lips, forcing my blood there.

He didn’t move. I pulled him partway into my lap, cradling him against my breast as I smeared his beautiful mouth with my bright red blood.

His eyes were closed. All life seemed to have left him, yet I felt a faint stirring in the body I held so tightly, a quickening.

I caught my wrist in my other hand and tried to squeeze it, like wringing juice from an orange, but the steady drips weren’t enough.

I reached up to my neck, feeling for my artery. Could I cut into that and still survive? I’d heard that if you nicked an artery, you automatically bled out and died. Of course, that was in a world without vampires or angels who drank blood.

Last resort, I decided. I was willing to die to save him, simply because I couldn’t stand the thought of living without him. I refused to consider why; I only knew that the world would be unbearable without his rare, blinding smile. I wouldn’t let him die.

I looked down at my body. I wasn’t endowed with much extra flesh, but the pale swell above my breast was reachable. I allowed myself a faint whimper of anticipation and then drew the metal across my skin.

The reward was so much blood my hands were sticky with it. Using all my strength, I pulled his comatose body up against me, pressing his mouth against my torn skin, willing him to live.