He had never bothered to count time before, but he started to now, and it began with counting each breath she took. He watched the gentle rise and fall of her chest in agonized amazement. She would take only a limited number of breaths in her lifetime, and then she would stop breathing forever. Max and Chloe, those bright-eyed baby birds, would live for such a short, short while.
Once he had thought they lived such small lives, outside of politics and world concerns and violent struggles for dominion and Power. Now he realized how big their lives really were, because their lives were everything that mattered. They were the only thing that mattered. The joyous surprise in each discovery they made together was more precious than the treasure of kings, more suspenseful than the most spectacular of car chases, more beautiful than the most exotic of landscapes.
He studied Grace with meticulous care. As uneasy as it made him, the patterning of her light, fiery energy entwined with the dark Power really was quite beautiful. The pattern flexed and breathed, a part of her living presence, flowing through her life. He had been worried that the darkness would taint the Power she had been born with, dull the bright strength that was so uniquely hers, but it didn’t appear to be doing that. In fact, it looked like the dark Power reinforced what had already been there.
How would it change her? Was he right? Was she actually becoming the Oracle in a way that none of the others that came before her had?
As he had told her, he was no healer, nor was he any expert on human physiology, but he still examined her body as carefully as he knew how, to see if the Power changes might be toxic to her in any way. She appeared perfectly healthy to him, her young body strong and filled with vitality.
Her cheeks were flushed with a soft rose. He noticed that her thick eyelashes were a rich, tawny mink, darker than her short, fine red-gold hair and eyebrows. Her hair would probably never lie down in a sleek cap, because she was always running her fingers through it. The rucked bedsheet was only partially tucked around her torso, exposing a generously rounded, pink-tipped breast.
He let his gaze trail along the graceful dip of her spine to where it disappeared under the cover, noting how the sheet followed the swell of her round, firm ass.
He remembered the taste of her desire, the feel of her delicate, stiff little clitoris against his tongue, the exquisitely curved petals of her labia, and how she sucked in those precious shocked breaths of hers as he ravished, sucked, licked her everywhere, everywhere, and the interplay of her physical pleasure with the vibrancy of pleasure in her spirit was so goddamn beautiful it was symphonic, ineffable. Then her remarkable spirit had opened wide as he had pushed into her welcoming body, and he had fallen into her so far he could not imagine how he would ever wish to come out again.
And he needed to know, needed to know, what it was like to take her, human skin to human skin, but he had squandered too much of his energy earlier on foolish, useless things, and he would not be able to fall deeper into flesh again until he had rested and fed.
He wanted to stroke her all over, but that would disturb her sleep, and she needed to rest. He held his hand a few inches over her head and imagined, remembered, what the silk of her hair felt like. Then he clenched his hand into a fist and struggled to tamp down the desire raging through him, because it was really quite extraordinary that she could sense that too, and if he didn’t control himself, he might wake her up that way as well. She was the most alive and sensitive creature he had ever met.
Even though he tried, she still sensed something. She stirred and murmured. Without fully waking up, she reached up to take his hand and pull his arm around her. He sank down, wrapping his body around her while surrounding her with his presence.
You destroyed me, she had said.
If that was true, she had destroyed him as well.
He was too old to have allowed just anybody to do so. He did not think he would have allowed her, except that those incredible, loving children had acted as a stealthy vanguard and stole their way into his heart. When he dropped his defenses and opened up to them, Grace somehow became the engine that drove his existence.
He buried his face in her flyaway cloud of hair.
I love you too.
Love.
Too.
He drifted, resting until the sun broke over the horizon. Then he began to absorb energy from it. He could get more nourishment faster if he shifted out into direct sunlight, but he felt too lazy and comfortable to move.
Grace shifted and sighed, and her presence came to alertness. At least somewhat. “I might have figured.”
Excellent. Now that she was awake, he let himself do what he had been wanting to do for hours and hours. He stroked down the curve of her back. “Might have figured what? I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“No,” she murmured. She rubbed her eyes. “With the kids gone, I thought I would be able to sleep past dawn for once, but I think they’ve got me trained too well.”
She felt so warm and soft. He pressed a kiss to the sleek curve of her shoulder blade. “Do you want to try to go back to sleep?”