Chapter 15
ERYX
I didn’t know how we got back to the cottage, only that she was in my arms, kissing me, saying the filthiest things imaginable, making me so hard again that I could hardly think straight.
I got her up the stairs without really processing anything, until she lifted her dress above her head and the moonlight hit her skin.
“You are so beautiful,” I breathed, kneeling before her. “The way you feel. I can never get enough of you.”
“Take off your shirt,” she said, running her hands through my hair. I did as she asked, practically purring under her touch.
But when she pulled me closer, I knew we had to stop.
We hadn’t had even the most basic of conversations about sex, limits, boundaries or anything of the sort, and we’d fucked in front of a restaurant of spirits—so hard we broke the table.
Besides that, I knew she had to be sore, or she would be later, from how roughly I’d fucked her in the restaurant.
I took a deep breath and hugged her. “We have to slow down, love.”
Her breath caught, and then she laughed. “That’s probably a good idea. We never did get to eat.”
I chuckled and stood up. “Why don’t you draw yourself a bath, and I’ll go scrounge something up?”
Rhiannon nodded. “That sounds good. Something light, I think.”
“We have some strawberries, and there’s a nice butterk?se, I think.”
“Perfect,” she replied, raising on her tiptoes. “Will you bring it to me in the bath?”
I kissed her again, just because I could, and was pleased when she melted into me. Before the kiss deepened, or rather, before I was tempted to deepen it, I trailed kisses along her cheekbones, her eyes, her forehead. “You were amazing tonight.”
A flicker of something odd passed over her face. “You’re not leaving, are you?”
It felt as though I’d been stabbed. How could she think that? “Of course not.”
She nodded once, but didn’t quite meet my eyes. “Just checking.”
“I’ll be right back,” I assured her. “Unless you’re not that hungry, and then I could stay.”
“I’ll be all right,” she answered, but I didn’t like the way she was retreating into herself. Had we done something at the restaurant she didn’t like? Things had gone a bit farther than I’d have liked without a clear discussion of what her limits were.
“Why don’t I run the bath and we can get in together?” I asked, winding a strand of her hair around my fingers. “And then when we’re done, you can come to the kitchen with me, and you can watch while I make you whatever you please.”
She nodded, her face solemn. I pushed my pants off so I was naked too, with a bit of flourish. It had the intended effect. She laughed a real laugh, though it was a little softer than usual, her hand slipping into mine.
As my fingers closed around hers, and we walked to the bathroom together, she spoke so quietly I could hardly hear her. “When I was in Aradios, I was with a man who would disappear in the middle of the night. He’d say he had to go to the bathroom, and then just disappear.”
I turned, whipping around in shock. “Why would he do something like that?”
She shrugged. “He was a human. One of those ones who called himself an ally to parapsychs. Wouldn’t go to dinner with me either, or be seen in public.”
My lip curled in disgust. “Someone should beat the living shit out of him.”
She shrugged, smiling sadly. “Maybe someone will someday.”
I walked ahead of her into the bathroom and turned on the light. Her breath drew in sharply. When I turned, her expression had shifted out of that wan sadness into what I could only describe as incandescent fury. “Who did that to your back? I will kill them.”
I’d forgotten. I glanced back over my shoulder at her. “Magnus. After Frannie.”
“Eryx,” she breathed as I turned the knobs on the tub. “I am so sorry for asking.”
I shook my head, then sat on the thick edge of the clawfoot tub, pulling her onto my lap. She curled into me so naturally, her head resting in the crook of my neck, her breath soft on my skin. I had to close my eyes to be sure she was real.
“It’s fine to ask.” I laughed a little, which was a surprise, but felt so good. “It is actually nice that you got so angry.”
“Why did he do it?” she asked. “Did he care about Francesca?”
“No,” I answered. “He cared that I fucked up. That I killed Hoight.”
Her body tensed in my arms, her fingers closing into those precious little fists again. No one knew how adorable Orphium’s assassin was. It was the most perfect secret I’d ever known. The City of the Dead’s most lethal woman was actually a squish-ball of sweet fury.
She was waiting, I realized, for me to keep talking.
Giving me space to speak, to tell her how I felt.
A lump formed in my throat. Immediately, I understood why everyone in her life sought her out so frequently.
It wasn’t that she was a people pleaser, or that the Maere were assholes taking advantage of her. It was this.
I didn’t actually know a secret about Rhiannon.
They knew it too, knew just exactly how special she was.
How intoxicating this mix of fierce and soft could be.
And like me, they couldn’t get enough of it.
She was a person so unique that she made people see that they too were imperfectly perfect.
However sharp her edges were, there was a depth of care to her that was addictive.
I held her a little tighter. “Magnus never let a mistake slide. Not when Roman was alive, and certainly not after he killed him. I was supposed to get the location of the girl’s body, then Eli was supposed to perform some healing miracle and we were going to send him back to O-Tex raving.”
“Eli Cabot?” she asked. When I nodded, she shook her head. “Is there anything that guy can’t do?”
I didn’t miss a beat. “Crack a fucking smile.”
She snickered. The miracle worker was notoriously grumpy. Feeling her laugh against my naked body was the kind of familiar sweetness that threatened to get me hard again.
I brushed a kiss against her temple. “Tub’s full. Do you want to get in first while I light the candles?”
She let me help her into the tub, and then I did as I promised, climbing in behind her.
When she leaned back against my chest, it felt as though the world might collapse into a single point, a part of me existing in all times.
In a past where I didn’t know her—but I missed her, missed this.
In a future where I loved her, and she loved me.
In this moment, when the sum parts of our past and future moved between us, shifting to create some new reality.
Candlelight flickered over the surface of the water.
Her head fell back against my shoulder and she let out a long, heavy breath, raising her face to mine to be kissed.
The movement was so surreal, so familiar.
As my lips met hers, the house itself went quiet, the whispers of the dead gone completely silent for the first time since we’d been here.
Her body slid against mine, her eyes falling shut as she curled against me. There in my arms, in a bathtub, inside the most haunted house in Orphium, I fell irrevocably in love with Rhiannon Bronte.
I let her sleep when the music started from behind the locked door of Magnus’ office, a haunting melody creeping out into the hallway. My arms tightened around Rhiannon, but I had nothing to fear from the dead while she slept.
So I waited, watching, listening, as the water slowly chilled.
When I feared she might be cold, I lifted Rhiannon out of the tub, and though she woke as I wrapped her in a towel, she fell asleep again as soon as I had her back in my arms. It was like the first nights in the cottage.
Some uncanny force kept her asleep, while I remained awake.
It was possible that her deep sleep was triggered by release and just enough comfort and relaxation that she could finally let go. I wanted to believe that, but I knew better. I knew spirits. The house was doing this to her somehow.
I helped her into bed, then sat back in the chair I’d kept vigil in those first few days. “Quiet,” I whispered in the vox spiritus.
The music stopped immediately. Too immediately. It typically took a moment for the vox spiritus to set in and work. I rose out of my chair, moving to the bed by instinct. Some energy built behind the door of Magnus’ office, but it was nothing like any of the malefics I’d ever encountered.
There was anger in it, rage, vengeful fury.
But none of it was directed at me, nor at Rhiannon.
It threatened to swallow us whole, all the same.
I tried to focus my energy around it, to help bring it forward, to allow it to speak.
When others watched me communicate with spirits, it appeared that they spoke through me, but my own perception of it was that of the vox spiritus being used in reverse.
To me, it was always a conversation, not the delivery of a monologue. I felt the spirit acquiesce to my request, a kind of relief in its energy that had not been there before. But something went wrong.
Rhiannon sat up in bed, her eyes open, but heavy. “Take me back to the gods of destruction. Tell them all I did in their endless names.”
I shook her shoulders, begging her to wake, but she just repeated herself in that same hollow voice. She was possessed.
Panic nearly pushed me to a place where I couldn’t think, but I forced myself to, for her.
It was a grave sin to turn the vox spiritus onto the living.
If she had been a necromancer, I would not have hesitated—necromancers can’t be hurt by the vox—but the rest of the living might be.
We could never direct it at them without unpredictable things happening.
But she was a true immortal, and as far as I knew no one had ever tried to use the vox on one of the Maere.
Her volume had increased, and she began to convulse.
I brushed her hair away from her face, pleading as I shook her. “Please Rhiannon, please wake up.”
But she didn’t wake. She just stared at me wide-eyed, repeating “Tell them all I did,” in a hoarse, vacant whisper.
Her voice was already weakened, which meant the spirit would take over soon, adding its vocal intonations onto her vocal cords, as a final act of domination.
I couldn’t let this go on, a powerful spirit inhabiting one of the Maere was the kind of nightmare that Ares and I had discussed after midnight for years.
For one to take over Rhiannon Bronte was the worst thing I could think of, on too many levels to count.
I had to take the risk of using the voice on her.
My heart raced, but I knew that she, herself, would insist on it. That’s who Rhiannon was. So I steeled myself against the fear inside me, drawing the vox out of my soul, holding gently to her shoulders as I spoke. “Let her go.”
Her eyes rolled back into her head and she went limp in my arms for a moment. Then her eyelashes fluttered and she shook her head. Her legs stretched out in the bed, almost languorously. My heart, which had galloped ahead of me a moment ago, slowed a bit now.
She yawned, then opened her eyes, smiling at me. “I fell asleep.”
“You did,” I agreed, my heart resuming its usual pace.
She was all right. I lay her back down on the pillows.
“We were happy tonight,” she said as she snuggled back into the bed.
I climbed in bed next to her and shut off the lamp next to my side of the bed. “We were,” I said as my eyes adjusted to the dark.
She yawned again, stretching like a cat in the dark. When her body relaxed, her eyes snapped open. My heart stopped as her arm raised, moving with none of her usual grace. She smiled as she stroked my cheek and said, “Remember her this way.”
What had I done wrong?
If the vox had worked, the spirit would be gone.
Rhiannon blinked and smiled more naturally. “I’m sleepy. Will you hold me?”
Possessed or not, there was nothing that would keep me from fulfilling that request. As my heart rate returned to a gallop, I pushed her hair back from her face. Somewhere along the way, we’d lost her sparkling combs. They were probably amongst the rubble at the Paradiso.
Rhiannon curled into my chest, kissing me one last time before turning over and tucking herself under my chin. She fit perfectly, and my heart sank. Had I made a terrible mistake using the vox on her?
“Please be all right,” I whispered to the dark. Rhiannon’s breath was steady and even. She was deep in sleep. “I can’t lose you, Rhi. I love you.”
In the hallway, the door to Magnus’ office opened, a soft glow of lamplight falling onto the wood floor in the hallway.
The house fell blessedly quiet. I listened to Rhiannon breathe, examining every bit of her aura that I could access.
She was, as far as I could tell, intact.
Herself. Unpolluted by any energy that was not her own. But I could not relax, nor retreat.
An instinct rose up in me. A simple observation of pattern, really.
Spirits were just people, after all. Dead people, but at their core, they behaved the way they had when they were alive.
And if I was right about this… well, it would open up a whole host of issues, but we would deal with that later.
And if I was right, we would have another clue about who controlled this place.
So, I declared myself. “I would die to protect her,” I said in a soft, clear voice, not wanting to wake Rhiannon. “I would never willingly hurt her, and as long as she wants me, I’ll never leave her.”
The light in the office shut off, and a deep peace fell over the house. Even I, who had been painfully awake a moment ago, was sleepy. Sleepy, but pleased.
As I sank deeper into bed I knew the answer to one piece of our puzzle: whoever was responsible for the complexity of the trap here in Oleander House loved Rhiannon.