Ride the Storm (Cassandra Palmer 8)

I just sat there for a second, unmoving. And then I did turn, having to fight his hold. And when I did—

His eyes were emerald. Not green, not jade, but pure emerald, shining in the darkness like a light was behind them. Because one was.

Soul light.

I felt like crying and laughing all at once. He was finally here, the person I’d chased through centuries of time. Only to arrive too late.

“Tell me! That is your name?”

Pritkin looked like my answer was important. Like it was the most important thing in the world. Like it was something he’d clung to, through whatever personal storm he’d been living all this time.

I got up on my knees and took his head between my hands. “My name is Cassie Palmer,” I told him steadily. “And I love you.”

Chapter Sixty

I kissed him, and he tasted the same as before: like ash and smoke and spent magic. Like I probably did, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything but the warmth of his mouth and the strength of his arms, and having someone with me at the end. And not just someone. The person I wanted more than anyone else, that I’d searched for, loved for, God, so long.

As I’d have admitted a long time ago, only I was really good at ignoring the impossible.

But it wasn’t impossible now. Nothing was. And I guessed he thought so, too, because the next moment he was pushing me back into the mountain of clean laundry and pulling my dress over my head.

Outside, things were deteriorating rapidly. The sounds of battle came in gusts, blown on an increasingly violent wind. Burning sparks cascaded past the tent, adding the scent of fire to the smell of linen and mud and ozone. The sky was burning, with boiling mountains of clouds streaked with the light of that terrible wound.

I barely noticed.

The unnatural light haloed Pritkin’s head as he finished stripping off his tunic, reflected in his eyes, made him look more like his father’s side for a second. And then more like his mother’s, when sparks like fireflies danced in his hair. But when he bent over me, he was once again the man I knew, finding my lips, pulling me into an embrace that blocked out everything else.

And then fire took us.

But not with devastation and fury, as I’d half expected. Not with the wrath of an angry god. But with something else, something that had been waiting a very long time. Something that was rushing at us like a massive wave toward a beach. And this time, there was no one to stop it.

It broke over us a moment later, in a storm of mouths and hands and hearts beating together. It swept away clothes, quieted inhibitions, masked pain. Pritkin’s hand s

moothed carefully over my side, because a ragged bandage hid an injury that was nowhere near healed, but I didn’t feel it.

I didn’t feel anything but hunger.

And power. I could sense it puddling on my skin wherever his hands rested. Could track the prints of fingers and lips as they explored me. Could feel it scintillating off that terrible hair as it swept across my body, brushing breasts and stomach and thighs as he kissed his way down. Could feel it flood inside me when he found my center, when his lips closed over me, when he—

God!

I arched up, and it felt like time slowed. The floating embers in the air became a stream of rubies. The drag of Pritkin’s stubble over my thighs was like the scrape of velvet. The sheen of water on his bare skin a shining coat, like the armor I’d seen on the fey, like the cascade of watery diamonds tumbling in through the tent flap as the wind shifted.

I felt every one. I felt everything, arching under the heavy droplets hitting my breasts, and then under Pritkin’s lips as he chased them down, as his fingers replaced his tongue elsewhere, as I felt the tent rock, like from another earthquake, except nothing was moving but me. I tried to stay grounded, to think, before sensation tore me off this earth and sent me spinning into madness. But it was impossible. The tide had me now, and I was helpless to do anything except squirm and shudder and make soft little sounds at the back of my throat that I couldn’t seem to stop or control.

Pritkin groaned, and that sound in that voice had my back arching until I thought it would break, my fingers tightening into fists in his hair, needing something, anything to ground me. But nothing helped. It was too much sensation, far too much, and I couldn’t even think clearly enough to ask what was happening.

And then I didn’t need to. Because something looked up at me, but it wasn’t Pritkin. At least, not in the form I knew. An incubus stared at me out of his eyes, thin and starved and desperate. He didn’t say anything, but I could feel his emotions battering me. He hungered, he hurt, but if he fed, he hurt others. So he had starved, for so long, so long . . .

“It’s all right,” I said unevenly. “You . . . won’t hurt me.”

But he didn’t believe it, was already backing down, was sinking away from me. And I realized why as Pritkin’s head dipped again, his lips drawing runes whose meanings I’d never known on my skin. I’d always thought those symbols were to enhance sensation, but I’d been wrong. Goose pimples retreated as he painted my skin in magic, heat cooled, the light bled back to simply light. And I cried out at the loss.

“No! I don’t want you to—”

But he wasn’t listening. He’d become afraid to feed, to take what he needed so badly. Afraid to be who and what he was. Rosier might have been wrong about some things, but he’d been right about at least one. Pritkin wasn’t human. And trying to be so was killing him.

“You can’t hurt me,” I said, my hand in his hair. And there was enough of that other still there that he rubbed up against the touch, like a cat. Thoughtlessly sensual in a way that Pritkin never was.