chapter Six
How did she find out? How the hell did she find out that Mother was here?” I spun around and glared at the cat, who perched regally on the tall four-poster bed. “You told her, didn’t you?”
Johannes cocked an eyebrow at me.
“Oh, don’t give me that look. I know full well that if you put your mind to it, you could speak. You damned…” Words failed me. I swore under my breath and stomped over to the window, jerking back the curtain to stare furiously down to the veranda. “If it wasn’t you, it had to be that bastard Nostredame. I’ll murder the bloody fool. Dammit, he’s already dead. I’ll… I’ll… I’ll call in a Summoner and have him removed.”
Johannes got to his feet, stretched, then jumped off the bed and strolled to the door, giving me an imperious look over his shoulder.
“What, now I’m your personal servant?”
He just looked at me with half-closed wicked green eyes.
“One of these days, Johannes…” I flung open the door, yelling after him, “So help me God, if you say one more word to Noelle—don’t give me that look, you could talk if you weren’t so damned lazy. I swear to you by all that you hold dear, I’ll send you back to Amaymon if you even think of meddling with my Beloved!”
The cat disappeared into the darkness of the hallway, leaving me alone with the horrible knowledge that I’d lost even the brief glimpse of paradise that had descended so unexpectedly upon me.
I returned to the window, leaning my forehead against the chill of the glass, seriously considering drowning myself in the pond before I remembered that it had grown over decades ago. “You’ve made a bloody mess of everything,” I told my reflection in the window. “Not content to screw up your own life, you ruined your mother’s, destroyed any hope of a happy future, and now you’re tainting the best thing that ever happened to you. You make me sick.”
The face in the window stared back at me. I sighed at it. “Christ, I can’t even be pathetically maudlin without sounding ridiculous.”
A flicker from the veranda had me growling out oaths I hadn’t used in a very long time, and without further thought about the reason I wanted to pummel Nosty to a ghostly pulp when Noelle and I had no future, I found myself chasing after the blasted ghost. He didn’t stay on the veranda long, leaving it before I found him. It took another twenty minutes before I finally pinned him down in the housekeeper’s room in the basement of the east wing.
“There you are, you traitorous bastard!”
Nosty spun around at the sound of my voice, his gaze immediately flitting around the room, obviously in search of escape. “Er… Gray. Hello again. Long time no chitchat. I was just… uh… talking to Miles, here. Wasn’t I, Miles?”
The mortal was sitting on a worn wooden chair in the middle of the room, lit only by a single candle that listed to one side, stuck into a broken saucer. “Who the devil are you?” He squinted at me for a moment. “Oh, you’re that horrible actress’s boyfriend. Well, you can leave, along with this chatterbox.”
I ignored the ill-mannered man. Mortals, on the whole, were interesting. This one, however, I could quite happily never set eyes on again. I honed my glare on Nosty. “Don’t try to weasel your way out of this. You know full well that I’m here because you’ve been telling tales.”
“Hello! Am I suddenly mute? I just told you two to leave!” Miles sputtered.
Nosty edged away from me. “Tales? Me? I’d never do that, Gray, you know that. Especially not tales about you.”
Miles breathed heavily through his nose. “The spirits sent me to this room so that I might commune with the deceased housekeeper. I feel that she has things she wishes to tell me, and she can’t bloody well do that with you two standing there bollixing away.”
“You told Noelle about my mother.” I growled, stalking slowly toward the ghost.
Nosty gulped and backed up, his hands out in a placating gesture. “I didn’t tell her anything about Lady Joan. Other than where she lived. But nothing else, Gray, I swear.”
“I think I am being possessed.” Miles, now swaying in his chair, his eyes closed, started humming to himself. “Yes, I believe the spirit of the housekeeper is merging with my consciousness. What is it you want, dear lady? You want these people out of your room? Yes, yes, I completely understand. You wish for your privacy to be honored.”
“That was enough to send her running over to the cottage to speak with my mother, whose very presence you neglected to bother mentioning to me. Shall I tell you what I do to those who annoy me, Nosty?”
“You were never here!” the ghost shrieked, now backed up against the wall. He looked as if he was trying very hard to disappear into nothing, but I hadn’t spent my entire existence coping with ghosts without learning a trick or two. I made sure he was grounded and couldn’t dissipate his being. “How could I tell you if you never showed up at the Abbey?”
“You’re bloody ’ere now, both of you, and you can just leave so I can get on with me ’ousework,” Miles said in a strong Cockney accent as he glared at us. “I’ve got an entire ’ouse what to clean and feed.”
I shot him a look. “The only housekeeper who ever used this room was Czech, not British, and she spoke no English.”
Miles blinked for a second, then collapsed back onto the chair, slumped down, moaning. “The spirits, so many spirits here, they are fighting to speak through me…”
“If you so much as open your mouth to Noelle again—” I grabbed the ghost by the front of his robe and lifted him off the ground, shaking him as I did so.
“I won’t!” Nosty babbled, his expression suitably frightened by my unspoken threat. “I swear by the saints, I won’t say another thing to her! I won’t tell her about Johannes, or Amaymon, or that night when your mother died… I won’t tell her about any of that.”
“See that you don’t.” I slammed him against the wall before I released my grip on his robe. He slid down the wall to the floor, where he crumpled into a ball before disappearing into nothing.
Behind me, Miles was humming softly to himself, occasionally tossing out a word of what was obviously tourist Czech. I turned to tell him he’d have to do better than that if he wanted to convince anyone that he was possessed, but the sight of the woman standing in the doorway, her arms crossed and one lovely sable eyebrow cocked in question, drove all lesser concerns from my mind.
“Johannes?” Noelle said, watching me avidly. Amaymon? Is that the demon lord who vitiated you? Why did your father kill your mother, and more important, why do you feel so guilty about it?
For a moment, for the time it takes for one synapse to fire at another, I thought of running. I’d run my entire life—why not now? But even as I stood tense and poised to escape, the warm lilac scent that seemed to be permanently imbued in her skin wrapped me in silken tendrils, pulling me toward her.
“I am now possessed,” Miles announced loudly in a quasi-Czech accent as I walked past him to the door.
“Bully for you.” I stopped in front of Noelle and looked down at her, trying to read in her eyes that which I so desperately wanted to see.
Her expression was inscrutable, although as I watched, the corners of her mouth began to curl up. I was distracted by the sight of her mouth, and the hunger within me came to life, swamping me with the pounding, insistent need to claim her in all the ways known to man and woman.
Instantly, I was ravenous with hunger and rock hard with baser needs.
“Oooh,” she said as I scooped her up and lurched painfully down the narrow hall toward the back stairs. “I like what you’re thinking. Feathers have been underused in sexual play, I’ve always felt.”
I slid a glance down at her as I started up a flight of stairs toward my bedroom. “Just how much sexual play have you indulged in that you would feel so strongly about the subject?”
“Are you by any chance asking me how many men I’ve slept with?”
“Yes.”
“I really don’t think that’s any of your business. I’m certainly not going to ask you how many women you’ve been with, so I don’t think it’s at all fair or even politically correct to inquire as to the number of my previous lovers. You do see, don’t you, that it’s what happens from here on out that’s important, not what happened in our past?”
“Yes, I understand that.”
She looked at me as I kicked open the door to the room that had been mine whenever I was at the Abbey, a little smile flirting with her lips. My erection went from rock hard to damn near impervious to a point-blank atomic blast.
“How many?” I asked, setting her on her feet and immediately stripping her of her clothing.
She giggled, damn her delicious hide. I had no resistance to such a feminine sound and only just managed to keep from pouncing on her. “Three. You?”
“Does that matter?”
“Oh, yes.” She leaned forward to nip my bottom lip. “What’s good for the goose and all that. How many, Gray?”
I sighed, checked the bathroom to make sure Johannes wasn’t lurking about, then returned to find Noelle lying seductively on the bed. “Twenty-two, if you insist on knowing.”
“Twenty-two… goodness!” She sat up, her breasts bobbing enticingly in front of me as I struggled to remove my trousers without simply shredding them off my body. “That’s a lot of women, Gray. I don’t think I like that number. When you compare three with twenty-two, well… that’s quite a difference.”
“I was born in 1664,” I pointed out, finally wrestling my trousers off, eyeing her with indecision. Should I start with those delectable breasts and work my way down or begin at the shy, pink-tipped little toes and work upward?
“Were you? That’s really neither here nor there, is it?” She did a little mental arithmetic. “Oh, I see what you mean. You’ve had relationships with an average of seven women every century.”
“Whereas you’ve had three in less than approximately fifteen years,” I said, crawling onto the bottom of the bed, taking one ankle in hand, the sensation of her smooth, warm flesh driving the hunger and passion inside me even higher, until I thought I might fall into the deep, red well of need.
“Twelve, actually. I’m thirty-one. Three makes me sound so very promiscuous,” she said thoughtfully, watching with interest as I struggled with the hunger, keeping my bites to gentle little nips as I kissed my way up first one calf, then the other. “Wanton, almost. Are we going to have oral sex?”
I stopped licking behind her knee to look up as she lolled back on the pillows, her dark red curls tangled on the bed linens, desire mingling with expectation in her beautiful eyes. “We’re going to do whatever you like. You may command me.”
“Really?” She smiled. “Then you’ll answer my questions about Amaymon and your parents and those other things that Nosty mentioned that had you looking like you wanted to kill him on the spot but knew you couldn’t because, well, he’s already dead, for one.”
“You may command me in sexual acts,” I said, biting a little harder on her thigh.
She moaned. “Oral sex, then.”
“As you wish.” I leaned forward to kiss a path down toward where shorter, darker curls shielded her intimate secrets, but she sat up, pushing me onto my back.
“You’re going to be the recipient, though.”
I thought, at least for an infinitesimal fraction of a second, of protesting that I wanted to be the one to give her pleasure, but there was no way on this good earth I was going to stop Noelle from doing what she so obviously wanted to do.
She laughed in my mind. I don’t think there’s a man alive who would say no.
I frowned as she moved my legs aside and sat on her heels between my calves. It’s not that. I simply do not wish to deprive you of the pleasure that you are so obviously anticipating.
She looked pointedly at my erection, which, at that moment, had properties in tensile strength that were similar to titanium.
“All right. Perhaps I am anticipating them as well,” I admitted.
“Tensile strength?” She giggled and stroked her hands up my legs, her touch like molten fire going straight to my blood and driving the hunger into a fevered pitch. “I like the way your mind works, Gray. Most men, most normal men, couldn’t come up with phrases like ‘tensile strength’ at a time like this. Most men would be lying back, moaning, clutching the sheets with both hands, begging me to explore your titanium-like penis with my tongue and mouth and perhaps, if I’m very, very gentle, even a little scrape of teeth.”
“I am not most—”
She bent over me, taking the very tip of me into her mouth.
The sensation of her tongue swirling against flesh that was suddenly sensitized beyond human bearing left me moaning, clutching the sheets with both hands, and begging her to never stop doing what she was doing.
I never thought I’d like this, she told me as she continued to torment me with her mouth, almost making me come off the bed when her hands joined in. But with you, it’s different. I think it’s because I can feel what every little touch is doing to you. Now, how do you feel about this?
It’s too much. My back arched off the bed as my hips thrust upward into the sweet torment of her mouth. You’re going to kill me.
You’re immortal, my darling.
If it’s possible to die of pleasure, I’ll do it, I managed to get out before the hunger slipped control, and I was pulling her over me, thrusting up into her, capturing her cry of ecstasy in my mouth. Her fingers dug hard into my shoulders, her breasts, those delightful little strumpets bent on my utter captivation, tempting me with their silken warmth as she moved to a rhythm that was shared between us, her pleasure feeding mine, which in turn drove hers even higher. It was as if we were in a perpetual cycle of rapture, and it was only when her release claimed her that I let myself drink deeply, the skin of her shoulder a silken haven that I couldn’t resist any longer. She was mine, and I knew at that moment that I would move the moon and the stars to make sure she remained that way.
It took a long time to recover, both physically and emotionally. I knew what committing myself to Noelle would mean, knew that it would require sacrifices from both of us, and was attempting to organize a number of arguments in favor of my point of view when she lifted her head and frowned at me. She was lying on top of me, our legs and arms tangled in a boneless, utterly sated manner. The fact that she had the strength not only to raise her head but also actually to frown annoyed me.
“You do not get to be annoyed,” she told me, her frown deepening. “You have been sexed to your very limits, and if you don’t like the fact that I, as a woman, can recover from such lovemaking faster than you, a mere man, then you can just pretend to be grateful that you have a Beloved as thoughtful and aerobically fit as to be able to withstand this sort of activity without actually dropping dead of pleasure.”
“I am the one who told you that you were going to kill me with your mouth,” I told her sternly. “I said it first, so you can’t now claim that it was so good that it almost did you in, too.”
She bit the end of my nose. “You were so good you almost did me in, Gray. You were like a titanium machine, a fabulously sexy, bitey, really, really talented machine whose touch makes me burn like a Roman candle.”
I allowed her words to placate me, closing my eyes as I drew little contented patterns on her delicious ass. “You helped a little. You may take a tiny portion of the credit.”
She pinched my nipple, giggling when I opened my eyes and yelped in indignation. “Now,” she said, stacking her hands and resting her chin on them, staring into my eyes. “We talk.”
I closed my eyes and snored. “I’m sleeping. Good night.”
“Oh, no, you’re not that tired. You can talk to me for a little bit.”
“Women talk after sex. Men recover.”
You’re immortal. You have nothing from which you need to recover.
I snored into her mind, but she was having none of it. “This is important, Gray. You know we’re going to have to talk about it.”
“Beloveds,” I said, sighing and capturing her legs between mine. “My father always told me to stay away from them.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “Would this be the same father who killed your mother?”
I frowned. “She told you that?”
“Yes. Look, I can feel that you’re not happy about having to talk about this, but as I’ve said several times now, I’m a Guardian. I can help you with your problem, but I really do need to have all the facts before I decide what steps to take. Let’s start with why you feel you were responsible for your mother’s death. She says you weren’t.”
Pain clawed at my guts, a familiar pain that I was used to ignoring. “She’s wrong.”
“You killed her?” Noelle looked at me with a gaze that stripped away all of the protective layers I’d built up over the years.
“Not physically, but if I hadn’t left the Abbey, she wouldn’t have died.”
“Start at the beginning,” she demanded, pulling the blankets over us and shifting until she was comfortable atop me, her gaze steady on mine as her fingers gently stroked my collarbone.
I didn’t want to but knew that sooner or later, she’d breach the part of my mind where my secrets were hidden.
“The beginning goes back to before I was born. My father was the child of a Dark One and a mage. Such pairings are not common, but he was born with not only the nature of a Dark One but the drives of a mage. The Magisters’ Guild wanted nothing to do with him, however, because of his dark origins, so he turned to a more sinister source of power.”
“A demon lord,” Noelle said, her eyes bright with interest.
“Not just one but two, actually. Amaymon and Ariton were thick as thieves, and when my father contacted them, they found in him a kindred spirit, albeit one who resided in the mortal world. They were inseparable for a time, according to all accounts, raping and pillaging and murdering at will. In addition, my father developed a taste for turning mortals, something the Moravian Council was and is quite against, except in extreme circumstances.” It hurt to admit the truth, but I knew that she was correct about one thing: if we were to have a future together, she would have to know the worst.
“I’m sorry.” Her kisses along my jaw were as soft as feathers, as gentle as the warmth she wrapped around my aching heart. You’re not responsible for your father’s actions, though. Surely you must realize that.
It’s not quite that simple… A tapping noise had been slowly growing while I spoke, until it sounded right outside the door of my room. I cocked my head, listening for a moment. The tapping stopped, and the door opened, the thin, weak light from a pencil flashlight flickering around for a few seconds before Miles appeared in the doorway.
“Ah. Just so. Er… I appear to have been in a trance and lost my way. I’ll return to my bed now.”
The door closed softly behind him, and after a few seconds of silence, the tapping again sounded softly along the hallway.
“What on earth is he doing?” Noelle asked with a frown of puzzlement.
“Trying to locate the treasure.”
“There’s a treasure here?” she asked, curiosity gripping her.
“No, but he thinks there is. Nosty filled him full of some story he tells the tourists. Sooner or later, the mortal will find the hidden chamber behind the fireplace in the great hall and will realize that Nosty is unreliable as a source of historical information.”
“Secret room, hmm? Sounds fascinating.”
I smiled to myself as she began to plot a way to get me to tell her how to access the room.
“So your father was buddies with Amaymon and Ariton and raising hell, and you feel guilty about that for some reason. How does your mother’s death fit into this?”
The pain that always accompanied that thought was just as sharp now as it had ever been. I wondered if it would ever dull. “I was powerless to stop my father’s path of destruction. I tried repeatedly, we both did—my mother and I—but I think now that he must have been a little mad. He was certainly heartless. The last time I tried to stop him, he had Amaymon vitiate me.”
She stared at me, clearly aghast, her jaw slack in surprise. “Your dad did this to you?”
“Yes. So I left the area, went to France first, later Italy, always hiding from the demons Amaymon sent after me. It wasn’t until a year had passed that the truth reached me. The night I left, the night I was damned for all time…” I stopped, the memories choking me.
Noelle kissed me, her arms tight around me as she filled me with all her light and warmth and love, using it to battle the pain that was bound so tightly around me. My darling, you’re not alone anymore. Let me help you. Let me free you from the vitiation, at least.
I held her, wanting to drink in her essence, wanting her goodness to erase all the stains on my life, but knowing I could taint her with my darkness. “The night I left, my mother died. By her own hand.”
Noelle gasped and pulled back, her eyes filled with tears. “But… she said your father killed her.”
“He did, in a way. He had a falling out with Amaymon—their relationship had begun to deteriorate for some unknown reason—and he went on a rampage of destruction. He blamed me for all the trouble that he himself had brought upon his head. Since my presence seemed to make things worse, I left, running from my responsibilities rather than facing them as I should. I told myself that things would improve if I were not around to remind him of his failures, and caught up as I was in my own fight for survival, I left the region. My mother saw what I did not: the only way to end my father’s reign of terror was to kill him. I was gone, so there was no one left to do the job but her. He was taken by surprise. I’d tried to kill him twice before, so he knew to expect an attack from me, but she… she loved him, loved him with every morsel of her being. And she used that love to give her strength to stop him when I couldn’t, taking her own life as penance for such a mortal sin.”
Noelle clutched me again, her fury at my father surprising me, almost as much as the love she felt for me. It sank into my pores like water on parched earth, easing much of the pain that had for so long been a part of my life. She loved me! She loved me, and I would do whatever it took to keep her safe.
“None of that, now,” she said, pinching my shoulder. “Perhaps I love you. I’m not entirely sure. It could be just indigestion. But even if I do, it doesn’t mean that I’m suddenly fragile, or vulnerable, or anything different from what I was before. In fact, it’s just the opposite. As a Beloved, I won’t age and die. So you can just stop thinking those protect-me-at-all-costs sorts of thoughts and go back to being parched earth, because I’m not going to let you run away any longer.”
I sighed and shifted her off me, getting out of the bed to open the door. Johannes sat outside it, giving me a smug look.
I stared at him, the taste of Noelle’s sweet lips still on my tongue. “You have the worst timing.”
Johannes strolled past me, tail held high, observing Noelle with interest as she clutched the blankets to her chest. He started for her, but I swore and picked him up, marching him over to the bathroom despite his yowls of protest.
“Go ahead.” I snarled at him as I flung open the bathroom door. “You dig your claws into me, and you can spend the next few days locked in there.”
“Gray!” Noelle gasped, sliding out of bed, winding a blanket around herself as she ran over to where the cat was spitting and hissing, trying to bite and claw me. “I know your emotions are running high right now, but you shouldn’t take them out on an innocent cat.”
“Innocent cat?” I spun around, holding Johannes at arm’s length, ignoring the pain when his back claws found my arm. “You didn’t let me finish my story, Beloved. You didn’t let me tell you what happened to my father after my mother killed him.”
Her eyes were confused as she looked from the spitting, snarling ball of fur to me. “What… I assume he died.”
“No. My mother killed him. Mostly. Amaymon may have washed his hands of Johannes, but his good friend Ariton was there as well, and he swore to my mother that he would not rest until my father was returned in one form or other.”
Noelle’s mouth formed an O of surprise as she looked at the cat, now making a low, ugly growl, his teeth bared at her. “He’s… you mean the cat…”
“I have neglected to make the proper introductions, haven’t I? Beloved, meet Johannes Horal, my father.”