She reached out her hand to physically touch the flame color of her own strand. The demon said, “With that choice you will return to your flesh prison without knowing what changes you wrought.”
“Will I encounter Levi at this place in the future?”
“Yes.”
“Then that’ll be enough,” Araña said, trusting in the outcome she’d accomplish with her knives far more than in the demon standing next to her or the gift that had always been a curse.
She altered the future by touching her life to Levi’s. There was only the briefest impression. Early dusk. Levi opening the brothel door into the alleyway. A soiled newspaper tumbling over her foot. And then she felt a shock of joy as name and spirit and body fused together, rousing her as the five candles on the floor around her guttered and went out.
SHE was back. Tir felt the turmoil of Araña’s emotions as soon as he reached the rubble-free ground marking the beginnings of the healer’s yard.
Relief swept into him that she’d returned safely, followed by heat, lust, a tide of feelings that began and ended with her, and had since the moment she first breached his mental shields to invade his dreams.
The promise of freedom made every sensation all the headier. His cock throbbed, thick and full from the knowledge he was only steps away from her.
He’d take her as soon as he got inside. Then take her again before they left for the bookseller’s shop.
It was a few hours less than a day since he’d been with her last, but it was too long. He was anxious to be inside her, to have her beneath him, thighs splayed, midnight black eyes heated in sensuous welcome.
He jogged the last few feet and took the stairs in a leap, only to halt at the front door and remember how he’d prowled the house earlier when he found her missing. How her absence had given birth to something dark and primitive, something that demanded she be punished for defying him when he’d ordered her to remain in the house until he returned.
She was mortal. Human. Vulnerable.
A blink and she could be gone from his life forever. With his blood and his vigilance, she could remain by his side for eternity.
Possessiveness and desire were a liquid-fire heat pouring into his bloodstream and pooling in his testicles, making his penis pulse so violently a drop of arousal escaped its tip.
His mind flashed back to the child and the pregnant woman at L’Antiquaire, only it was Araña’s face overlaid onto the stranger’s and onto the little girl’s. He wanted a child with her in the future. When he was free, his need for vengeance satisfied.
Tir unlocked the door and entered the house. She’d cleaned since returning. The scent of wood soap and fresh air made him think of the Constellation.
She’d showered. Moments earlier. He smelled shampoo and felt the fine hint of mist against his skin.
He didn’t call out. She knew he was back. He sensed it in her, but instead of challenge or sexual invitation, it was confusion, distress, the longing for comfort that assailed him.
Tir stripped the shirt off as he crossed the tiny living room and went into the bedroom. He nearly doubled over at the sight of her standing naked in front of a mirror secured to the wall.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, meeting her gaze, no longer able to bear the confinement of trousers when his cock ached unmercifully.
He kicked off his shoes. The machete fell to the floor as he crossed to her. As did his pants. “I went to the witch’s house,” she said, their eyes locking in the mirror. The desire to punish her for worrying him returned. But the need to touch her, to hold her in his arms and feel the press of her skin to his, overrode it.
Tir’s hands went to her waist, then up, to cover her breasts. The hitch of her breath inflamed him further. The way she melted into him very nearly had him burying his face against her neck and finding her opening with his cock.
“You should have waited for me to accompany you.”
“I couldn’t.”
His fingers tightened on her nipples in rebuttal. She argued with the press and rub of her buttocks against his hardened shaft, by covering his hands with hers. “What happened?” he asked, no longer able to resist kissing her neck, her shoulder, brushing his lips over the spider that appeared like a deadly pet, also seeking his attention.
She shuddered. Her distress spiked. Her eyes became haunted.
“Tell me,” he said, letting her feel the hint of teeth, a silent promise he wouldn’t let her evade his question as he had the last time they were together.
“Do you think it’s possible I’m a demon?”
Surprise allowed the laugh to escape. That was his only excuse.
She stiffened in his arms, but her hope wiped away any affront his reaction might have warranted. In the mirror her gaze flicked to the hated collar around his neck then met his again. “You knew Levi was Were and Rebekka one of the human gifted after encountering them at the ambush site,” she said.
His lips went to her ear. He traced the delicate outline of it before sliding his tongue in and out of the sensitive canal.
She arched, pushing hardened nipples against his palms and smooth buttocks against his groin. The longing for comfort he’d felt in her earlier melted into the need to feel him inside her, the desire to be so closely entwined it would be difficult to tell where one of them ended and the other began.
Tir moaned, wanting the same thing, nearly yielding to the demands of his body and hers. “You’re human. Fully human.”
He had never thought the words would give him such satisfaction. But at the moment he found her mortality arousing, her fragile, feminine form unbearably pleasing.
“Then how do you explain the mark?”
He shrugged. “A geis perhaps. Or a curse. Now tell me why you think you’re a demon.”
Araña shivered; her cunt clenched and nipples ached. The birth dream seemed just that—a dream, an illusion so far removed from reality it no longer mattered.
Lies built on truths, especially hidden ones, were more powerful than those formed without basis. Looking back on it, she wondered if perhaps a part of her had always known the man and woman raising her weren’t truly her parents, despite what she called them.
No matter what she did and how hard she tried to be what they wanted, there’d been underlying coldness and suspicion, a reserving of love. It had been easy to attribute it to the demon mark, but now…
If it lives, I won’t claim or raise it.
If it lives, I’ll see that it’s raised by those who won’t spoil it by sparing the rod, as happened with the mother.
That much of what she’d seen in the vision place she believed. Her back bore the evidence of it. And Tir’s suggestion of a geis made her think of her birth father’s curse. Let Satan take the child the same as he claimed the mother giving birth to it.
How could this not be her body? She knew every inch of it, its strengths and weaknesses, what it was capable of doing, of enduring, its craving for touch—for Tir— hercraving.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. She’d accomplished what she set out to do when she went to the witch’s house.
Tir’s fingers claimed her nipples again in a punishing grip. Her cunt wept from it, wept with the need to have him inside her, and had since the moment he stepped through the front door.
“I already intend to punish you for leaving when I told you to remain here until I returned,” he said, sending erotic fear whipping through her. “Do you want to make it worse?”
Lust coiled in her belly, a dark need she wouldn’t have thought possible, given the scars marking her back. “The witch opened a gateway to the place the visions take me. When I entered it I saw… my own birth. I was the spider, a demon taking possession of a human body, a newborn child’s body. I felt her die as soon as I touched her. I—”