Annabella kicked with her foot when it was inches away, but the Shadow branched, one tendril twining coolly around her ankle. When it hit bare skin she started to shake uncontrollably.
Custo dropped to his knees, grasping the dark body, and ripped it off her. The Shadow evaporated like smoke in his hands, and he redoubled his efforts as the snake reformed before Annabella’s eyes.
A low moan, her own, reached her ears as rank terror gripped her. Custo couldn’t stop it. Why couldn’t Custo stop it?
The serpent insinuated itself beneath the hem of her pant leg in a sizzling caress, climbed her calf, and twisted around her thigh.
She screamed, near mindless, beating at her clothes in futility as the snake crossed her crotch, lined her like a fat G-string—oh, please, no—then tightened around her waist as he approached the cleft between her breasts. Her body quivered with its touch.
Custo was already at her pants, ripping the seams as he tore the thing off her. The wolf’s burn on her skin was hot, blistering, her body responding to his dark magic with a violent, unwilling orgasm. She throbbed with it, flesh, blood, bone. Her senses were subsumed with want and revulsion, Shadow and magic torturing and promising at once. Her scream gave way to choked weeping, and when Custo tore away the last of the wolf, she was certain her soul had been ripped away as well.
Her life, the world, was both wild and ravaged, reason and meaning torn ragged.
At last her legs gave, and Custo took her weight at his shoulder. Dimly she was aware of a subtle retraction of darkness, the retreat of the wolf. Part of her yearned to follow, to be satiated, obliterated by Shadow, even in an ecstasy of pain. But she was anchored in her body, too.
“Where is he?” Custo shouted. His chest felt solid, his arm around her secure. Which was good because she’d finally lost it. Custo would hold on to her. Custo wouldn’t let her go.
“I can’t see him!” Adam returned, but from a great distance.
Annabella’s body went slack against Custo’s, her head to the side on his shoulder, dumb to anything but the pump of his heart and the receding promise of magic. Her eyes burned and tears scorched her cheeks as they fell unchecked. The room grayed to static, the fuzz filling her ears.
Then nothingness swallowed her.
Chapter Fourteen
ANNABELLA was sleeping. Finally. She was tucked into bed, her shiny brown hair spilled across the crisp white pillow. Her breathing was deep and even, lips slightly parted.
Custo exhaled and scrubbed a hand through his hair. A shiver of fever racked him, though the wound in his gut was a hot throb. He was too angry to care. He wanted to hurt something, beat something, tear something apart with his hands…and make it stay dead. Was that too much to ask?
He stood up from the chair beside the bed, pain stabbing his belly, and paced the length of the mattress.
The fight at Abigail’s place was the second time in as many days that the wolf had evaporated in Custo’s grip, leaving him clutching at empty air. At least wraiths could be contained, but the wolf kept slipping away.
Why? Why attack and then retreat only to stalk and wait and watch? Why not attack and attack and attack, until all resistance was exhausted, all protectors dead?
Custo didn’t like his answer. He’d spent the three hours since the fight trying to come up with a different one, but with no success. The reason was crystal clear.
The wolf wanted Annabella willing.
The wolf had already tried to seduce Annabella through her beloved dance. Like Custo had expected, he’d simply changed his approach.
Abigail, already filled with Shadow and ailing, required little effort for the wolf to possess. He could sample the mortality that he so craved in Annabella. If Abigail had been a stronger vessel, the wolf might have been satisfied, his menace to the world exponentially compounded, and the immediate threat to Annabella ended.
Abigail, however, was weak. And how wily of the dog to leave the old woman alive. That way, he’d deliver to Annabella a threat and a promise with the same act: Come with me, and no one else need be harmed. Then he slithered all over her to demonstrate how their union was inevitable. That he could give her carnal pleasure, however forced. That not even her “angel” could stop him.
The thought made Custo sit down again, sweating, clenching his hands, remembering the empty fistfuls of darkness as he tried to wrench the wolf off Annabella.
Custo gazed across the bed at Annabella’s lovely profile. She’d awakened in the car, confused, blinking for memory. Then she’d sat up, spine stiff, yet shaking during the swift ride back to Segue. She wouldn’t let him hold her anymore, and a touch of her mind told him she meant it. And she wouldn’t eat, though he knew she’d been fantasizing earlier about food. Annabella had come to the same conclusions he had about the wolf’s attack.