27. Walls Coming Down #2
Canyon came inside him in slow, powerful pulses that Jace felt not just physically but emotionally—each jet of warmth accompanied by a surge of Canyon's internal state transmitted through the lowered barriers: love, release, the peace of a body emptying itself into its chosen vessel, the predator and the man existing in the same breath for the first time in three centuries.
Jace's own orgasm was a mirror, his cum between their bodies, his pleasure echoing into Canyon through the bond, the circuit complete, the practice successful.
"That," Canyon said afterward, his voice rough with emotion and the exhaustion of a man who has just held his most dangerous impulse at bay for thirty minutes while simultaneously achieving orgasm, "is what the exchange will feel like. Multiplied by infinity."
Jace lay in the dark and tried to imagine infinity.
Failed. Decided that failing was acceptable, because the point of infinity was that it exceeded imagination, and the point of the exchange was that it exceeded the bond, and the point of all of it, the mountain, the vampire, the love, the terror, was that it exceeded the life he'd been living before, and he would rather face an infinity he couldn't imagine than return to a finitude he understood too well.
Tomorrow night: the blood exchange.
The sabotage threat materialized that afternoon, though Jace didn't recognize it as such until later.
Milo reported something unusual during his perimeter watch: a disturbance in the southeastern quadrant, where the territorial markers bordered the national forest land that Canyon's claim didn't cover.
Not a breach, more of a probe, a testing of the boundary's strength at points Milo had learned to monitor with the quiet competence that had become his defining characteristic since the revenant attack.
The probes were subtle: slight discolorations in the bark of marked trees, the faintest trace of a chemical signature that didn't belong to Canyon or the wolves or anything in Milo's growing catalogue of the mountain's native biochemistry.
Canyon investigated and found nothing conclusive.
The markers were intact. The perimeter held.
He attributed the probes to residual revenant activity, the Collector's automated intelligence-gathering, continuing on program even after the political pathway had closed, the way a satellite continues broadcasting after the station that launched it has been decommissioned.
But Jace noticed Lucien's expression when Canyon reported the findings.
The micro-pause. The infinitesimal tightening around the cognac eyes.
The readjustment, visible only to someone who had spent weeks learning to read the expressions beneath Lucien's masks, of a creature that recognized something it hadn't expected.
"You know something," Jace said, pulling Lucien aside while Canyon reinforced the southeastern markers with fresh blood seals.
"I know that the Collector doesn't accept closed pathways," Lucien said carefully.
"I know that the blood exchange creates a ten-minute window of vulnerability during which every marker on the mountain goes dark.
And I know that a creature who has survived for a millennium didn't get there by gracefully accepting defeat. "
"He's going to hit us during the exchange."
"If I were him, and I've spent enough decades in his orbit to model his behavior with reasonable accuracy—I would."
"And you're telling me this because—"
"Because I told you I'd decided which side I was playing for.
And the side I chose doesn't include watching the most extraordinary bonding event in recorded vampire history get interrupted by a collector with a thousand years of tricks and a personal grudge against the vampire who escaped his control.
" Lucien's expression shifted, the mask lowering, the actual face emerging, the five-hundred-year-old creature looking out through the performance with an honesty that still, after everything, surprised Jace.
"We need a countermeasure. Something the Collector can't anticipate because it doesn't exist in his strategic vocabulary. "
Lucien told him. The plan was elegant, audacious, and required something that Lucien had not yet demonstrated he possessed in sufficient quantity to serve as a foundation for life-or-death working trust:
Trustworthiness.
Jace looked at the golden-haired vampire who had spent two weeks trying to pull his life apart and was now offering to hold it together, and he made a judgment call that was not based on evidence or strategy or the careful cost-benefit analysis that Reed would have recommended.
It was based on something more fundamental: the look in Lucien's cognac eyes when he'd said the memory lives in the blood like a stone.
The look of a creature that knew loss. That had carried loss for four hundred years.
That recognized, in Canyon and Jace's bond, the thing it had failed to protect in its own past and was determined, this time, to get it right.
"I trust you," Jace said. And meant it.
Lucien blinked. The cognac eyes widened fractionally, the first uncontrolled reaction Jace had ever seen from him, the involuntary response of a creature that had not been trusted in so long it had forgotten what the word felt like aimed at itself.
"That is either very wise or very foolish," Lucien said quietly.
"I'm learning that the best decisions usually are."
The blood ritual was twelve hours away.
Jace spent the remaining hours with Canyon, not talking, not planning, not preparing.
Just existing in each other's presence with the lowered barriers open and the bond humming and the mountain's energy building beneath them like a tide approaching the shore, the geological force gathering for the moment when it would flow through them and change them and make what was two into something that was one.
Tomorrow, everything changed.
But tonight, they were still human and vampire, still mortal and ancient, still two separate beings occupying two separate bodies with two separate heartbeats that the bond made sound, in the shared space between them, like one.
One more night of two.
And then: one.