“What if this whole place is broken?” he said softly. The water was to their upper thighs now and the pressurized jets continued screaming from the skulls high above.
“It isn’t,” she said without hesitation.
“You don’t know that.”
“I have faith.”
“You want to have faith,” he contradicted, feeling dread curl. “But it’s too simple to say that what has happened before will happen again, or that it’s not a sacrifice if it’s easy. What if all that’s bullshit, just like every other religion out there, just a construct used to frame some commonsense rules?”
She looked as though she pitied him. “It must suck to be stuck inside a belief system like yours.”
“At least I’ve got a system,” he snapped. “You just let your winikin tell you what to think.” Inside, though, something said, What are you doing? He was being a jerk; that was what. And he was doing it because he was scared. The water was cool, almost cold, reaching past his chest and threatening to buoy him off the floor. He let out a breath. “I’m sorry. I take it back. I’m being an ass because I’m not sure what else I can do.”
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do at this point.” Her words were matter-of-fact, but her eyes were wide and scared, and she was trembling. Then the water snuffed the torches, plunging them into darkness. She gave a short scream, then muffled it.
He caught her arm and drew her close, making sure they could find each other in the darkness. The water wasn’t glowing, and there wasn’t any noise or wind, which didn’t match up with how Strike and Leah had described their experience. Those details only added to his worry that the chamber mechanism wasn’t working right.
If this was the end for them, he didn’t want the last thing between them to be anger. Softening his voice and gathering her close, he whispered, “I’m sorry, Lexie.”
Her voice went hollow and very small. “Me too.”
Working by feel and instinct, he found her lips with his in a kiss that was part apology, part wish that things had, in the end, been different for them.
Then the water closed over both their heads. He couldn’t hear the incoming rush anymore, couldn’t hear beyond the pounding of his heartbeat, couldn’t feel much of anything in the cool numbness except her lips against his. She hung on to him, her fingers digging into him for a moment, then two . .
. then loosening and falling away.
Wishing he’d done it differently, that he’d been a better man all along, he held Alexis close and pictured the woman of his dreams. He whispered her name and let himself imagine the impossible as he kissed her and let out the last of his air, resigning himself to death.
White-gold light detonated in his skull. And then he was falling.
Alexis returned to herself slowly, as if awakening from a deep sleep, though her body didn’t feel like she’d been motionless for long. She was aware of being wet through, and a little cold, with a hard stone surface beneath her and a heavy weight pressing on her from above. Water dripped somewhere nearby.
She cracked her eyes to find amber torchlight reflecting off carved stone walls, and Nate sprawled across her, motionless. For a second she thought she was dreaming again. Then she saw that the chamber was curved rather than rectangular, and the dripping noise came from droplets of water trickling from one stone to the next, rather than from an underground pool. More important, she wasn’t alone in her skull. There was a tiny kernel at the back of her brain, warm and sparkling with colors. When she focused her attention on it, though, it dimmed and grew distant.
Come back! she thought, quick panic sparking her fully awake. But it hadn’t gone away, she realized after a moment; it’d moved lower, the warmth shifting and the sparkles dispersing until she thought she could feel each nerve ending as a separate entity, an individual thought. Even as she reveled in the sensation, another came to her, the feel of Nate shifting against and atop her. He was sprawled facedown with his cheek on her belly, his arms loosely encircling her hips, and his big body more or less centered between her legs. The realization of their intimate positioning sparked the warmth to a blaze, and when he turned to look up at her, dragging the faintly roughened skin of his jaw across the sensitive skin above her navel, she saw the same heat reflected in his eyes.
“It’s the magic,” she said, her voice cracking around the edges. “The god.”
But Nate shook his head. “If I’d seen you in Newport, I would’ve wanted you long before I’d ever heard the word Nightkeeper.”
She would’ve argued, would’ve demanded an explanation, but he surprised her by casting a mild shield spell, one that pressed against her, held her pinned. The magic caressed her skin, sending ripples of excitement and power rolling through her, the pleasure holding her captive as much as the spell itself. Then, before she knew what he’d intended, he moved down her body, somehow taking her combat pants to her knees as he put his lips to her, his clever tongue delving deep and slicking her sensitive folds, which were already swollen and ready for him.
Alexis cried out and arched against him, or would have, but the shield kept her flat, binding her to the stone floor of the sacred chamber hard enough to excite but not hurt her. They had played with restraints once or twice before, but not like this, not so she could feel his magic. The power was brutally erotic, as were the touch of his tongue and hands as he simultaneously drove her up and held her down.
The kernel of colored light within her expanded, reaching outward and straining toward a distant, unseen goal. She writhed as pleasure suffused her, sent her outside herself, hurtling through time and space to a world of hue. The spectrum surrounded her, light and color combining into tangible shapes and audible sounds. On one level she was aware of Nate’s mouth leaving her, and his big body moving up to cover hers. Another part of her, though, was caught, spinning out in a world of blue and gold, with ribbons of color twining around her, trailing from her in all directions.
She was in the sacred chamber with Nate; but she was in the sky too, in the realm of the gods. She saw them, impossibly beautiful, impossibly colorful. She was one of them, yet not, just as she was herself, yet not.
Then the shield spell was gone and she was free to move. She didn’t go far, though, only enough to roll with Nate and rise above him. He was naked now, and so was she, their sodden clothing piled off to the side. The earth and sky combined within her for a second, letting her see his face, letting her see his reservations and his needs. Her heart cracked and bled at the knowledge that he didn’t want this, that he was sacrificing himself for a cause he didn’t fully embrace, compelled by the magic rather than choice.
Perhaps he saw her sadness, maybe just saw her hesitate; either way, he reached up, rising up to meet her, to cup her face in his hands and look into her eyes. “It’s okay, princess,” he said, and for the first time in many months, maybe ever, the term didn’t sound like an insult coming from him. It sounded like an endearment. Like a love word. “We’ll make it work.”
“Yes.” Somehow they would, she knew. There was no other option.
Letting herself sink into that promise, she touched her lips to his and let him guide her down, let his hard length fill her, stretch her until he was seated to the hilt. The feel of him inside set off a chain reaction of pleasure, each pulse showing a different color behind her eyelids as she let them drift shut.
“Lexie,” he said, his voice ragged on the syllables, his palms bracketing her hips, his fingertips digging into her skin.