Chapter 15 #2
I increase the pace. Faster. Rougher. My fingers work her clit in tight circles in time with my thrusts, and her thighs are shaking, and her hand reaches back to grip my hip and pulls me into her on every stroke. Taking more than I’m already giving.
Her head drops forward. I press my mouth to the curve of her throat. The pulse there hammers under my lips. Our hearts pound in the same rhythm.
“Close,” she breathes. “I’m close.”
“What about your plan?”
“To hell with the plan,” she moans.
I shift the angle. Press in. My thumb works her clit beneath the water in tight circles while I move inside her, and the dual sensation tears through both of us at once. The wave builds in her body before it builds in mine. The crest approaching.
She comes apart.
Her body clenches around me, pulsing and rhythmic, and the orgasm rips between us and hits me from both sides and I follow her over.
I bury myself in her and the release is absolute, total, every wall I maintain, every century of control, stripped down to nothing but this.
Her body fluttering around me. My palm pressed flat over the crescent mark, the crimson blazing under my hand.
Her hand comes up to grip the back of my neck, dragging her wrist past my mouth.
My teeth find the pulse there. Instinct.
The bite is exact, and her blood is warm and rich and carries that depth I noticed before, that fullness I couldn’t name, and the taste of it floods my mouth as the last waves of climax pulse through us both.
She turns her head. My wrist is at her cheek, the arm wrapped across her chest. Her teeth break skin. My blood in her mouth. The circuit closes completely.
And the water responds.
A vibration in the pool, starting where our blood meets the spring water and pushing inward. Into us. The springs surge against the combined signature and flood into us with a pressure that feels ancient and nothing I have a name for.
Every nerve ending fires at once. The shadows in my blood surge and settle and surge again, recalibrating against what the springs are pushing into both of us. The gold in the chamber blazes. Every vein. The Lithenmere brighter than I’ve seen it.
Something inside me loosens. Beneath everything else. Gone before I can place it.
Celeste lifts her head from my wrist. She turns in my arms, water sliding off her shoulders, and looks at the pool. Looks at me.
“Did we do that?”
I look at the pool. The water is glowing from within, the deep magic visible now, luminous and alive.
“I think it did that to us.”
We stay in the water. Her head tilted back against my shoulder. My arms around her.
“We keep accidentally being miraculous,” she says.
I lower my head to her hair. “There is nothing accidental about you.”
She settles against my chest. The water is still luminous. Her fingers thread through mine under the surface.
Her thumb moves across my knuckles under the water.
I kiss her shoulder. She turns her head and kisses me, slow and unhurried, and the springs glow brighter.
Footsteps on stone. They stop at the threshold.
“I felt the activation from the upper corridor.” Seraphina’s voice, from beyond the entrance. Out of sight. “May I enter?”
“Give us a moment,” I call back.
“Of course.”
We climb out and the water sheets off us. We dress in silence. Her hair is damp against the collar of her shirt. The mark on her chest still glows faintly through the fabric.
“We’re ready,” she calls.
Seraphina steps into the chamber. Her silver eyes go to the gold in the walls, then down to the pool as she crosses to the edge. She kneels. Dips her fingers in. Goes very still.
For a long moment, she does not speak.
When her voice comes, it is quieter than before. Listening, not telling.
“The springs want you to know what you have done.”
Her hand stays in the water.
“They have been dormant for two hundred years. The deep magic in them stayed, but it would not answer. They have refused every scholar in Thessivane who has tried to wake them.”
She lifts her hand from the water. The deep magic glows between her fingers, luminous and alive.
“They woke for you. Not for vampire blood. Not for Fae blood. For the bond itself. The combined signature. They have been waiting for something they could recognize, and they found it in you.”
She turns her hand. The light clings to her fingers a moment longer before settling.
“They want me to tell you they have been waiting a long time.”
Seraphina stands.
“I need to study this,” she says. “Before we leave.”
She walks out.
The chamber goes quiet. The springs hum. The gold pulses steady in the walls.
Celeste’s hand finds mine. We don’t speak. We walk back together through the Lithenmere’s passages to our chamber, and the gold tracks us the entire way.
The Lithenmere brightens.
The walls bloom gold around us, dense and slow. The Lithenmere's version of morning.
Celeste stirs against my chest. Her thumb traces along my collarbone before her eyes open. Then she lifts her head and her gaze finds mine.
“Let's go home,” she says. “I want my own bed and I want to see whether Marcellus has murdered Julian yet.”
“Julian will outlast him out of sheer spite.”
“Probably.”
She pushes herself up. Stretches. Her hair is tangled, and the mark glows faintly through her shirt. I want her enough, that for a fraction of a second, I consider the cost of being late to the Veil crossing.
I set it aside.
We dress without talking. She watches me pull on my coat. I watch her braid her hair.
The memory stone waits on the table where I left it last night. I tuck it into the inside pocket of my coat. Celeste's eyes follow the movement.
"What's that?"
"Something Lanthar gave me before the springs. A memory stone. It carries the truth of why he left, and he's asked me to hold it until Mira's ready to see it."
She crosses to me and lays her palm over the place where it rests against my chest. The mark beats once beneath her hand.
“And you're going to be the one deciding when that is?”
"He didn't give me much choice in the matter."
"Are you going to tell her you have it?"
"Not yet. She has enough to carry on the way back."
Seraphina and Mira are in the corridor when we step out of the chamber.
Mira's mouth lifts at the corner when she sees me.
The stone is warm against my chest.
The four of us walk out together. The Lithenmere lets us go, the gold thinning behind us as we move through the palace and out into the realm, until we reach the field where we arrived.
"The Veil doesn't follow a ratio," Seraphina says. "Whatever time has passed on the other side will be what it is. Be ready for it."
"We will be," Celeste says.
"Ready," Mira says. The smile gone. The soldier back.
Celeste's hand finds mine. Her hand tightens.
Seraphina faces the trees at the field's edge. The air between the trunks is unchanged, but the shift in the soil is palpable. She raises one hand. The air shimmers, then parts, and a gap forms.
She doesn't gesture us forward. She waits.
Celeste lets go of my hand.
She steps through.