Silken Rapture (Princes of the Underground 2)

“I have…I have used my ascendancy to make her forget. I have never done it before to someone for nights…weeks. It must be having a negative effect on her. I didn’t mean to hurt her.” This time, Isabel clearly heard the anxiety in his voice and longed to comfort him. “I will leave for Delraven,” he said after a pause, his voice as barren and bleak as a desert at midnight.

“You must,” Margaret said. “This cannot go on.”

Don’t go. Don’t go. She was too weak to shape the words with her mouth. The plea reverberated around her skull, the message trapped.

It was she who was helpless, she who was trapped. She pried her eyes open, the effort costing her more energy than she ever recalled expending.

He glanced up and met her stare, his eyes wells of pain. He had heard her silent, desperate pleas.

“I’m harming you, lovely. I’m killing you. My need is too great. I must leave Sanctuary.”

“No!”

She screamed it through a rising sea of hurt and confusion. Everything swirled and struck, her desires and fears and fragments of memories pummeling her spirit like hurled projectiles. She couldn’t grasp what was happening to her. She was so alone. Only one thought possessed her, the sole plea that she clung onto like a raft tossed in a stormy ocean.

“Don’t go. Don’t go, Blaise. You are my other half now.”

“No, lovely. You will die if I stay with you.”

“I will die without you.”

“No. Never. You must sleep now. You have to rest.”

She fell into unconsciousness with his hand on her cheek and her heart clenching in pain.

Blaise glanced around quickly at the sound of Margaret Turrow gasping in shock.

“My word…how in the world did you get there?” she asked the man who stood next to Isabel’s bed.

Blaise dropped his hand from Isabel’s cheek and stood, his shock at seeing Usan for the first time in fifteen years nearly as great as Margaret’s. He watched, stunned, as the formidable Magian stepped forward and touched Isabel’s neck with long fingers.

“She is a strong one,” he told Blaise before he withdrew his hand. As always, the Magian’s sunny smile struck Blaise as bizarre, contrasting as it did with a handsome, austere face. Two lethal-looking incisors extending longer than the rest of his straight, white teeth. Other than the fangs, Usan possessed human-like features, but his crystalline blue eyes conveyed an intelligence that immediately struck even Blaise as otherworldly.

“She is resting easy,” Usan said, seeming satisfied.

“What are you doing here?” Blaise asked, still numb from the realization he’d just made about Isabel. He’d been harming her by forcing her to forget their moments together—first their matings, and recently, their rapturous lovemaking. Now he must leave her—

“I thought it was time,” Usan said simply as he gestured toward Isabel. His hand lingered over her belly. He touched her.

Blaise reached with lightning speed, grabbing Usan’s hand.

“What does that mean?” he asked roughly, his incisors now extended in anger. “Do you know something about Isabel that I don’t? Do you sense an illness in her? Is she going to be all right?”

“She’s going to be fine,” Usan assured. Blaise released him when he jerked on his hand. Usan glanced over at Margaret, who was still staring at him in open-mouthed amazement, and gave a small bow, his unusual burnt orange robes billowing around his legs.

“Greetings. I’m Usan, and you must be Margaret Turrow. Blaise values your loyal service, honesty and even your occasional insubordination.”

Margaret’s gaze flickered over to Blaise, her eyes even wider with wonder. “Lord Delraven told you that?”

“No, but his mind is an open book to me,” Usan said, smiling.

“Then you’re singular in all existence. He’s a puzzle in the dark to most of us,” Margaret muttered. Usan chuckled.

“What do you want?” Blaise growled, Usan’s demonstration of omniscience in front of Margaret scraping his already raw nerves.

He could not say that he loved Usan, for the soulless did not love, but he’d grown accustomed to the Magian’s enigmatic character. Usan regularly withheld information from him, and then inexplicably spilled a precious kernel of knowledge out of nowhere. He might want to throttle Usan at times, but he also valued him as a link to his origins and his past. Usan was the closest thing Blaise had to an ancestor.

“I came to speak with you about Isabel,” Usan said mildly.