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  He lifted his mouth from the ecstasy of her wet heat and stared up at her, his fingers stilling inside her where her tight sheath clenched around them, clutching at them as she would soon clench around his cock. “Yes, you can. You will. I am going to make you come so hard and so often this night that you will never get the taste and feel and scent of me out of your mind or body. Just as I will never have the taste of your passion out of mine.”

  He bent his head to her again, licked around her swollen clit, then fastened on to it with his lips and sucked, hard, as he renewed stroking inside of her with his fingers. Erin’s entire body went stiff under him for an instant, and then she screamed his name, shaking and shuddering out her release into his mouth, her creamy wetness dripping down his fingers.

  His own body screamed at him for his release, and he stood on shaky knees and lifted her into his arms. He strode over to the pallet and lay her down, then yanked her thighs apart and stared down at her. “Tell me what you want, Erin,” he rasped out.

  “I want you,” she whispered. “I need you, always you, only you, Ven. I need you inside me.”

  The words broke the final thread of his control, and he centered his cock over her slick, wet opening and plunged in so far his sac slammed against her as he thrust in to the hilt. He stood, holding entirely still for a long moment as his body quivered with the furious pressure for him to take and take and fuck her harder and faster and then harder still.

  She quivered underneath him and lifted her arms to him. “Now, Ven. Come for me, this time.”

  “Mine,” he growled, pulling back to plunge back into her, harder and faster and deeper. “Say my name again. Tell me that you know it’s me who is fucking you, claiming you, taking you for my own.”

  “Yes,” she said, arching her hips up to meet his furious thrusting. “Ven. Yes.”

  Her beautiful blue eyes, blue of the sky, of innocence, of the magic she’d wrapped around his heart and soul, stared up at him, and he felt a tingle of her magic wash over him. Then the song of her gems burst forth from the control she must have been keeping them under and swept him away, swept her away, in a fierce tsunami of passion, of heat, of powerful hunger and need.

  He came harder than he ever had, so hard he thought something in his balls must be rending, pumping his seed into her for what seemed like forever, and she came with him, clenching and spasming under him and around him, milking his cock with her feminine muscles, until finally, finally, he collapsed onto her and the world faded as her music sang exultation around them.

  “If that’s the soul-meld, how can we ever survive it?” she whispered, her voice trembling.

  He smiled at her, reveling in the feel of her, in her music, in the light and color that was her soul. “Now that we have found it, mi amara, how could we survive without it?”

  Chapter 21

  Erin woke suddenly, a warm and unfamiliar heaviness across her stomach, and stared into a pair of very amused black eyes.

  “You snore,” he said, laughter lacing the words.

  “I do not!” Indignation warred with embarrassment. She lay there nude, zipped into the sleeping bag with him, the warmth of his arm and one leg casually thrown across her body.

  She had an instant to realize that she would be happy to wake like this every morning, and then the memories of the previous day crashed through her sleep-filled mind. “Oh, Goddess, Ven.” She pushed at his arm and struggled to sit up. “How could we…when so many others—”

  “No, Erin. Don’t diminish what we shared with regrets. We needed to rest and regroup, and our bodies needed the reassurance of each other. Our souls—”

  “No. Please. I can’t talk about that right now. We may not survive this fight with Caligula, and I can’t go into it if…just not now.”

  He pulled her into his arms and held her for a long moment, saying nothing. Then he spoke against her hair, his chest rumbling beneath hers. “As you wish, mi amara. But there is one thing I need to tell you, as much as I may not want to do so. The soul-meld does not negate free will. You are not bound to me, if you should choose—” His voice cut off, and he stilled before inhaling a huge breath. “If you should choose another path than mine.”

  She pulled away from him, and this time he let her go. “The soul-meld, that’s what allowed me to see inside you? What allows you to hear my music?”

  “Yes. It is a pathway between the souls of two who have the ability to find love on a much higher scale of intimacy than merely physical or emotional.”

  She laughed a little, shaken. “So, does using formal speak help you negate the fact that you’re centuries old and I only have a human life span? Or that we might both die in the next day or so? How does that play into everything?”

  A muscle in his jaw clenched at her words, but he answered her calmly. “If you were to die, I would end my existence as well. So it would be a good idea for us to get up and make that coffee and get to work practicing for what we plan to do, wouldn’t it?”

  She blinked, not even sure where to start in asking about the “end my existence” part of that statement. Not sure she wanted to know the answer.

  After they drank coffee and ate some of the food provisions they’d brought, Ven stood before the fire, staring into the flames. The wood he’d added crackled merrily, since he’d done some Atlantean thing to sweep it clear of every drop of water and snow that had clung to it. She glanced at her watch. “We slept most of the day away, but we still have about four hours of daylight. Dark comes early in Washington in the winter. And I may need the sunlight to try some of the spells in the scroll Marie gave me.”

  He turned to her, face impassive. “We have part of the day tomorrow, as well, to plan and prepare, if we need it. You also have the book from Gennae? The one from the Fae?”

  “Yes, although it really ticks me off that she took so long to give it to me. She’s had it since I turned twenty-one—five long years—but Berenice convinced her not to give it to me. Said I wasn’t ready,” she said bitterly.

  “No use crying over plucked peacock feathers,” he said, shrugging.

  “Spilled milk.”

  “What?”

  “We say ‘no use crying over spilled milk,’” she explained, smiling a little.

  “Why would you cry over spilled milk? Does that injure the cow in some way?” His brow furrowed with confusion.

  “Never mind. If we survive this, we’ll have a crash course on stupid human sayings.”

  “When we survive this, mi amara,” he said, voice coated with shards of ice that she knew weren’t meant for her.

  “That’s another thing. What does mi amara mean?”

  His expression softened for a moment. “That’s another thing we’ll talk about when we survive this.”

  “How much time do we have, Ven? Marie and Conlan told that messenger that they could only hold Riley in stasis for forty-eight hours without risk of harm to the baby. And that she was fading, fast.”

  “We must locate the Nereid’s Heart within the next seventy-two hours if we’re going to make a difference,” he said. “There is something you must know, Erin. Her system is apparently rejecting the baby as a foreign body, which puts the future of any Atlantean-human mating at risk.”

  The room swirled around her as the implications of that crashed into her. “Mating? You mean…not that we know each other well enough to even…but we could never…I mean—”

  He crossed the room in two strides, knelt in front of her, and took her icy hands in his own warmer ones. “Not now, Erin. Not now. Let us add this to the list of ‘things to worry about later,’ okay?”

  She looked around the cabin, with its bare wooden floor and walls, the pile of Ven’s weapons centered on the table, the scroll and book that might teach her some way to harness her gem singer Gift in front of her, and blew out a breath. “Sure. Why not? It’s an awfully long list. That’s going to be one humdinger of a conversation.”

  “Humdinger. Humdinger.” He rolle
d the word around in his mouth, clearly enjoying the sound of it, then the amusement faded from his face in slow degrees, leaving the icy promise of death in its wake. “Yes, we’ll have a humdinger when we have destroyed the monsters. For now, we train.”

  10,000 feet beneath the cabin on Mount Rainier

  Caligula watched as the cringing, cowering fools from his blood pride shuffled into the main floor of the cavern, shivering as they assembled before him. The smell of dried blood covered them all, so some success must have been achieved, but there were far fewer than the nearly two hundred he’d sent out into the night to sow fear and dread into the humans.

  Far more important than the missing vampires, however, was the other who was missing. He snarled at the leaders, who he’d turned many years earlier than these newest idiots. “Where is she? How is it possible that one weak human female managed to escape all of my best and brightest—all of my most powerful?”

  They bowed until their foreheads touched the damp and icy dirt of the cavern floor. “She was protected, my lord. The Atlanteans and many shape-shifters were there in the building that you sent us to. And the witches had warded their home so strongly; there was no way for us to breach it.”

  He bared his fangs and hissed at them, too furious to form words. The leaders began to moan, knowing that he enjoyed nothing more than killing the bearer of bad news.

  Well. Perhaps not nothing more. He glanced at the alcove where Deirdre was imprisoned and licked his lips. Then he turned his attention back to the fools, suddenly realizing yet another who was missing. “Where is my general? Did Drakos not lead you to them?”

  “He did, my Lord, but he was injured badly by the Atlantean prince. He shot Drakos in the belly. We might have retrieved him, but even as we tried to break through the witch’s shield, the Atlantean priest called power beyond anything we’d ever seen. He blasted some kind of lightning strike through the building and destroyed every one of us within a mile.”

  The rage built inside Caligula’s skull like a vat of boiling oil, until he was certain his very brains must be seared and bubbling from the intensity. “And yet you managed to escape this catastrophe?” He roared so loudly that sheets of ice and dirt and stone crashed down from the walls.

  “I, uh, I retreated when the electricity began to build, my lord. I saw a vampire get electrocuted in a lightning storm once, and I was—”

  “You were afraid,” Caligula sneered. “You were more afraid of an Atlantean lightning strike than you are of me?” He dove down at the cowering vampire. “Truly you are a fool.” With one slash of his extended claws, he ripped the man’s head from his shoulders and then jumped up and down on the skull, shrieking, until nothing but a featureless lump of smoking slime hissed underneath his boots.

  After a few minutes more, he leashed his rage and carefully wiped first one, then the other of his boots on the bent back of one of his blood pride who still cowered on the ground. Then he sought to center himself and find calm within. If he had lost Drakos, and all he had remaining to him were imbeciles the caliber of these, then he would need to retreat and regroup before he could press further. If he lost Erin Connors because of it, her sister would pay for it in agony beyond any he’d visited upon her thus far. He wanted them both—it had gone beyond obsession to him some time ago—and he would not be denied.

  But at least he had begun the work of smashing the so-called civilizing advances the humans were forcing on the undead. He and his kind were born to rule the night, not to obey puny laws made by the sheep. His gaze raked over the worthless members of his blood pride.

  Well, he amended, some of his kind were born to rule the night. Some were simply cannon fodder. But the most powerful generals and emperors learned to tell the difference early on, or they were assassinated by those they’d once trusted.

  A slight disturbance in the air interrupted his bitter memories and heralded the approach of another vampire, one with a familiar cast to his thought patterns, although they were nearly unrecognizable under the throb of agony slicing through them. A black form plummeted to the ground before him and struck the ground hard, bouncing once and then lying still. The stench of blood and pierced intestines rose rankly through the air.

  Caligula cautiously rolled the bundle of bloody clothing over with one foot and stared down into the burned and battered face of his only general.

  Drakos slowly opened his eyes, his entire body wincing with the effort it must have cost him. “I am here, my lord, to report. And I know how we can capture the witch. She’s on her way here to us, now.” He broke off, coughing and groaning, very near to permanent death.

  Caligula smiled and raised one wrist to his mouth, then tore it open with his fangs. As he bent to his general and held his wrist to Drakos’s mouth, he smiled the smile that had once held all of the Roman Empire in terrified thrall. “Drink, Drakos. Drink and tell me everything.”

  As Drakos clamped on to his wrist and began to drink, the hideous tolling noise began to pound through the cavern again, and his blood pride squawked and scrambled away, covering their ears. Caligula bared his teeth and snarled out a challenge to the earth itself. “I recognize your noise as the herald of my own dominion, whatever you are!” he shouted into the darkness. “I am Caligula, and I will rule the world!”

  The noise grew even louder, until he was forced to pull his wrist away from Drakos and cover his ears against it. Somehow, however, even over the horrible noise of the unknown bell, and though his hands covered his ears, high above him he heard Deirdre begin to laugh.

  Chapter 22

  The Temple of the Nereids, Atlantis

  Conlan looked down at Riley’s pale, sleeping form and forced himself to believe in miracles. The flickering light of the candles reflected prisms of color from the jewels surrounding the low bed in one of the Temple’s many healing rooms.

  He forced the words out past a throat frozen with pain. “The stasis holds?”

  “Yes, I can easily hold it for the full forty-eight hours,” Marie said.

  He shot a hard, measuring stare at the First Maiden, noting the gray pallor and the lines of strain in her face. “Are you sure? Marie, I know I have no right to ask you to risk your own life or health—”

  She shook her head. “Do not finish that thought, Your Highness. As First Maiden, it is my right and my privilege to offer aid to the women and unborn babes of our realm. Can I do less for the future heir than I do for the least of us?”

  “Why? Why is this happening?” His voice was a howl of anguish, more wounded animal than man. “Why does her body reject the child?”

  “The energy of her pregnancy is…wrong. I’ve never felt anything like it before. It’s not a simple miscarriage, but something fundamentally off—discordant—in the energies between mother and baby.”

  He stared down at Riley, who had become more important to him than his own life. His beloved, his soul, his future queen. He finally asked the question that she had forbidden him to speak, or even to think, although it gouged bloody holes in his heart to form the words. “If you took the babe?”

  Marie’s face paled even further, and she swayed on her feet. “I cannot, Conlan. Riley spoke to me before she agreed to the stasis, and she made me swear on my oath as First Maiden that I would do nothing that would harm her child, if there were the slightest hope that the baby might survive. No matter who might ask.”

  He made himself ask. “Is there that hope?”

  She touched Riley’s forehead with one slender hand, then looked up at him, a quiet strength in her eyes in which he desperately wanted to believe. “As long as there is life, there is hope, my prince. Now we must pray to the Goddess and to Poseidon that your brother and the gem singer are successful.”

  The cabin

  Ven finished reinforcing the magical warding that Alaric had taught him, then settled back to watch Erin. She’d spread the gemstones from the velvet bag Marie had given her across the table more than two hours before, and then spent the
time since staring at them. She had not moved except to lift first one, then another, stare intently at them, then place them carefully back down on the wooden surface. He’d reined in his questions and his curiosity, but when she put her head down on her arms, the muffled sound of despair sliced through him like the sharpest dagger.

  He pulled her up off the bench and into his arms. “Tell me,” he murmured against her hair.

  “I can’t do this. I don’t know enough. Marie expected me to somehow instinctively know how to use these gems; how to channel their power. I’m the gem singer, woo hoo,” she said bitterly. “But even though I hear their song, I don’t know how to use it. I don’t know how to sing their songs.” Her voice caught on a sob against his chest.

  “I can hear the power of the stone in the mountain calling to me, Ven. It’s so loud it’s like thunder in my chest and bones. Every hour, on the hour, it rings and calls me.”

  “If you hear it, then we can find it, Erin. It’s calling out to you to find it and we will.”

  “But will it matter? If I can’t figure out how to sing these small healing gems, how will I be able to sing the healing of a jewel so powerful that it calls me through thousands of pounds of dirt and rock? I’m not enough, Ven. What if I try and fail and Riley’s baby dies?”

  His heart clenched in his chest, both at the thought and at the resonance of the pain in her voice. “We won’t fail. I’ll be there, and I’ll be your strength.”

  He remembered her word. “Together, we’ll be a humdinger.”

  A tiny laugh escaped from her lips, and she looked up at him and touched his face, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “Thank you. I needed to jump off the self-pity train and get back to work.”