49 #2
I swallow against my dry mouth, my fast-beating heart. Hells, being with him makes breathing hard. His eyes shimmer like fresh tar as he watches me from the side. He knows that I can’t aim. That I’m inevitably going to fail.
My eyes widen and my heart leaps as he takes a step toward me.
“I haven’t even touched you yet, and you’re already trembling,” he purrs. “Little lamb.”
I glower at him. “Funny statement for someone who can shatter bones with a thought, don’t you think?” I’m not sure, but for the briefest second, I think I see the corner of his mouth twitch up. What the hells? Did Caryan really just almost smile? Is such a thing even possible?
“Aim, or you know how this goes,” he says then, sharply, the hint of mirth disappearing as fast as it came.
Right. So much for humor.
I can’t. I know I can’t. Shit.
“You know you’d look nicer if you’d smile.”
“I am not nice,” he drawls, licking his fang—and damn me, I watch the movement of his tongue.
What the fuck is wrong with me? This man just openly told me he’d have let half the campus die if it wasn’t for me, and my blood is still burning with anger…yet it also burns for him.
“So you’d better impress me,” he says then, stepping dangerously close behind me.
I freeze as his breath makes the skin under my ear tingle. Gods, a part of me wants to fry him with a streak of lightning and the other—
I gasp as his pelvis presses against my back and I feel his hardness. Is he hard, for me?
“Trouble concentrating?” he purrs down my neck before he… licks it.
And I…
Hells. I let out a sigh, melting against him. My treacherous body just gives in. Caryan laughs darkly and my pulse jackhammers in my chest when his hand grazes my hipbone.
“Aim. Focus.” His voice is suddenly serene again and full of a dark promise about what’s going to happen if I fail. He’s still too close to my neck, but at least his body no longer touches mine, and it makes thinking easier.
I lift my hands, calling lightning into my fingers the way Riven showed me.
Gods, that mountain is way too high and way too far away.
I try anyway. I focus on the lightning—but it’s not the kind of maelstrom it was once under Connus’s dome.
Or when Caryan touched me, for that matter.
It doesn’t even reach halfway up the mountain, and it’s only a shy chain of lightning when I aim.
“Again,” he orders.
I clench my teeth, calling for more lightning—but it answers in nothing more than a shy, sluggish trickle.
I gasp as Caryan’s lips suddenly press against my neck, and the magic in my veins flares violently through his touch, like a thousand stars igniting at once.
My power is reckless and alive and bright, filling me up from head to toe.
It’s a damn heady feeling—ecstasy prickling along my spine that could be from my magic but also from his lips that still lick and suck my neck. Abyss.
I call to my magic again, and this time, the sky thunders as streaks and streaks hail down, scorching the ground in their wake, leaving only craters of charcoal where they hit.
Caryan sinks his teeth into me without warning.
His hands grab my ribcage, just shy of my breasts.
His cock pushes against me from behind, and I gasp as I feel the full size of him.
He locks me in place—drinking me with a growl that’s nothing short of pleasure and satisfaction.
And hells, it turns me on like nothing else.
For a moment, there’s just us in this strange, forgotten world. His hands on my ribs, his fingers sliding up so they graze my nipples just so.
He finally releases me but stays close, his body flush against mine.
“It’s been too long,” he murmurs against my hot skin, his words barely more than a whisper.
A secret. A confession. He missed me. Throughout the months I’ve been away from him, he missed me.
Longed for me in the same twisted, unreal way I long for him.
Something that binds us to each other, no matter whether we want it or not.
“Now aim again and hit that damn peak. I know you can,” he orders, his tongue sliding over the bite wound, and goosebumps cover my whole body. The feeling travels right between my legs.
“I know you’re capable of so much more,” he says quietly. “Impress me.”
I lift my hands again, pinch my brows in concentration as I focus on that peak. Impress me.
No. I won’t just impress him. I will surprise him.
I aim, calling on my magic, drawing deep while I focus on Caryan’s closeness.
The sky parts. And then a single, mighty, silver-streaked bolt of lightning hails down right on top of the peak. The world stops.
The peak explodes. Just explodes into dust. And then it’s gone. Where there had been a single, pointed outline on the horizon, there’s now a flat plateau.
I draw in a sharp breath, my eyes wide. Holy shit.
“If that had been a building—let’s say a certain fortress—it’d be half gone by now, turned to powder,” I tease, a little breathless.
“That’s why you need wards,” he answers, brushing off my attempt at a joke, as if I hadn’t just blasted away half a mountaintop—or casually threatened his castle.
I ask, “What happened to this world?”
This time, Caryan says nothing. And the sudden silence frightens me more than his threats ever could. I take a step away from him, trying to think more clearly, then look back at him.
“Caryan?” I push. He looks at me strangely for a long moment, and I realize it might be the first time I’ve ever used his name in a normal conversation.
His gaze flicks to the horizon. “It was destroyed.”
I try not to notice how glorious his wings look in the breeze.
Or the utterly stunning perfection of his face.
Tendrils of his magic curl around him in never-ending waves.
I shudder at the memory of exactly how soft they feel against my naked skin.
Like cold smoke. And dew. And clouds. Soft and enticing, and at the same time elusive as the sky itself.
I shiver as his wings stretch wide, shadows curling around me like smoke—as if he’s read my mind. Cool. Drawing. Seductive.
Traveling right between my legs again.
“By demons?” I prod, because everything I’ve ever heard of being destroyed was destroyed by demons. And because whatever his magic is doing makes thinking really hard.
Again, he frowns. “No.”
I look at him and another bolt of my lightning veers dangerously close to our feet. Abyss, I forgot all about the clouds I must have summoned, still looming overhead, my magic still running rampant.
Caryan’s magic wraps around it and kills it before it can fry us, extinguishing it effortlessly.
I grin coolly, pretending I didn’t almost lose control.
He sketches a brow at me. “Careful.”
“Who destroyed it?”
He breathes in deeply. When his eyes meet mine, the weight in them makes me shudder. “Do you trust me?”
Wow. That’s a sudden change. I hesitate. My first instinct is to say no. Of course not. Fuck no. But we once promised each other truth. Or at least he promised me truths once.
So I catch myself before I say carefully, “Maybe.”
He makes a sound that could be a snort.
“So—by whom?”
“By me,” he says finally.
I just stare at him. The words hollow me out. “What? Who lived here?” I’m not sure I really want to know. I might not be able to stomach the truth.
His eyes slide back to mine, glimmering dangerously in the twilight. “Interesting how you automatically assume that I killed people .”
“Excuse me, but isn’t that what you do?”
He snarls so viciously into my face, I stagger back and land on my damn ass. His eyes flare, his wings behind him like a black wall. And right now, he looks wilder and more otherworldly than ever. More like his dark twin. That terrifying creature that brought me to a place similar to this.
I think of the stone in my pocket—and as if on cue, it begins to hum, calling for him.
Why the hells is it in my pocket again ?
I’m absolutely sure I put it back in that drawer this time.
But the damn thing seems to have a mind of its own.
I swallow hard, wondering whether Caryan can feel it—and what he would do if he found out I’m keeping something this important from him.
My heart starts racing when, for a second, Caryan actually seems to listen.
I pray he can’t sense anything and blames my hammering heart on his terrifying reaction.
“Sorry,” I mumble quietly, not sure what else to do—but apologizing seems like a good idea. Did I hurt him? Him , of all people? Caryan?
He averts his gaze, but his fangs are still bared. “Sometimes you’re nothing but a silly little girl.”
“Yeah, well, I am a silly little girl compared to you, dinosaur,” I offer sarcastically. Then I get up and dust off my hands. They tore open on the stones when I fell, and blood is dripping over my palms.
Fury flushes through me when he says, nonchalantly, “I suppose you are.”
Screw him. Well, I guess I had that coming.
“So—is this fairy tale actually leading somewhere? Because I can sense a bad ending, and I love for everyone to have their happily ever after.”
“Can you for once not be sassy and impudent?” he growls.
I stagger back when he whips his head toward me so fast, his vicious teeth snap shut right into my face. My heartbeat stumbles and thunders in my chest. “You scare me. And I get sassy and sarcastic when I’m scared,” I tell him—without knowing why.
But the effect is instant. I might as well have poured a bucket of ice over his head, the way he looks at me. As if he just realized something about me he never had before.
He takes a step back, tucking his wings in tight, as if this somehow makes him a little less scary. “It is one of the hells. This place.”
“Of the nine hells?” I ask, my eyes instinctively searching the horizon for demons.
“There were many more, a long time ago.”
Caryan lifts his hand and I gasp as, on his silent command, sand starts to swirl and rise, giving way to ruins that have been buried beneath.