Page 79

FIFTEEN

Sorsha

All the questions still hanging over me cast an unsettling gloom. Still, I put on my best upbeat front when Omen demanded a report of the meeting and through the other conversations that followed, both with my shadowkind companions and the various mortals I encountered as I made what I could of Klaus’s information.

Unfortunately, none of that talk got me anywhere. Klaus sent me snapshots of a couple of old photos he’d found that included a skinny guy around the age I was now with shaggy blond hair and copious freckles, but seeing my dad didn’t tell me all that much about him, let alone myself. My Saint Nick couldn’t even recall Philip’s last name.

I checked the public records I could find through the city’s administration, but there’d been no Sorsha born or any kid at all born to a Philip on or around the day I’d always believed was my birthday. Was that a lie, or had my parents simply refused to document my birth?

Given what I was, the latter didn’t seem totally unbelievable. But it did mean I had nowhere to go from here—no way of tracking down other relatives or even having good questions to ask.

By the time we’d had dinner, the weight of the uncertainty was wearing on me. I retreated to my bedroom to gather myself.

Pickle might have forgiven me a little since I’d accidentally toasted his scales, but we weren’t back to best buds just yet. When I scooped him up for a cuddle, he squirmed out of my arms, scampered across the bed and around the room a few times, and finally darted under the bed where he’d been building a nest out of a heap of gauzy curtain fabric the equines had left stashed down there.

I lay back and tried to clear my head, but the dragon’s restlessness had infected me. After several minutes of shifting around and not finding any position that felt relaxing, I got up and went back out into the RV’s common area.

Ruse and Snap were sitting at the table, both with a handful of playing cards. The incubus had decided that since his attempts at unearthing Snap’s memories hadn’t panned out, his next project should be teaching the devourer poker. They were placing their bets with blueberries from little bowls by their elbow. Snap probably preferred winning those over money anyway.

“I see your three and raise you five,” Ruse said, waggling his cards, and glanced up at me.

“Where’d everyone go?” I asked. “Or are they just lurking?” Even after all the time I’d spent in shadowkind company, knowing they could be around and watching without my having any way of telling was a bit unnerving.

The incubus shook his head. “Thorn went to conduct a wide patrol, because of course he would. The imp set off to search for shadowkind in the suburb we passed on the way out here, and Omen got it into his head that he needed to make some kind of inquiries of his own. I’m not sure where he headed—he wasn’t very loquacious about the decision.”

“That is generally his style.”

“Indeed.” Ruse motioned to the table. “Want to join a friendly game?”

I wavered, but I wasn’t sure I was in the mood to exchange banter right now. “I think I’ll just take a walk. I won’t go far.”

“Don’t be gone too long, or Thorn’ll have a conniption.”

The corner of my lips quirked up. “I’ll do my best to avoid that.”

We’d parked on the outskirts of the city in a secluded treed area not far from the river. I ambled past a picnic bench, which from its splintering edges and dirt-crusted boards hadn’t been used in years, and followed an overgrown trail down to the water’s edge.

The breeze murmured through the leafy branches and licked cool air across my face. The crisp, earthy scent of autumn was starting to emerge through the last whiffs of summer. It was all very peaceful until a chorus of frogs that somehow sounded both wheezy and hoarse started up. Excellent mood music.

The sun had nearly descended behind the distant buildings to the west. I walked in the other direction, dodging fallen branches and clumps of bushes, which gave me plenty to focus on other than how exactly I’d come to be the impossible being I was. When the breeze turned chilly enough that I wished I’d worn a jacket over my thin tee, I turned and headed back the way I’d come.

I’d nearly made it to the path when the last rays of sunlight caught on a head of golden curls moving toward me. Snap’s face brightened when he saw me, but there was something tentative in his expression too. Not a typical look on the being who liked to throw himself headlong into anything that caught his interest.

Keeping up the breezy, nonchalant front was harder with him than with the others. Every time I pretended we were just casual associates, my stomach knotted all over again. But that wasn’t his fault.

“Felt like stretching your legs?” I said with my best offhandedly friendly smile.

The devourer smiled back, but the tentativeness lingered. He came to a stop just a few feet away from me. “I wanted to see how you’re doing. You’d been gone for some time.”

“Oh.” I wouldn’t have thought this Snap paid enough attention to me to be concerned, but maybe I’d been unfair. I held out my arms in demonstration. “I’m fine. Just needed some air.”

“Are you going back to the Everymobile, then?”

I’d thought I was, but my legs balked. The gloom didn’t weigh as heavy out here. I wasn’t in a hurry to return to it. “I might just sit by the river for a little while longer.”

Snap paused. “I could sit with you if you’d like company.”

His presence brought a different sort of weight, but I found I couldn’t send him off when he’d offered so sweetly. “All right. Thank you.”

We settled in on a grassy patch by the remains of a concrete wall, just a few saplings between us and the rippling water. I leaned against the crumbling surface. Snap fingered a spiky flower that had sprouted nearby, careful not to detach it from its stem.

“I guess you must need a break from the rest of us sometimes, huh?” I said when the silence started to itch at me. “Always badgering you about things you can’t remember.”

“I would like to remember,” Snap said. “I don’t resent you for trying to help me. It bothers all of you too.” He glanced up at me. “Especially you, I think.”

It wasn’t a question, but I felt the need to address it anyway. “We’d… gotten to know each other pretty well before all this. You’re still you , but the way it happened—I don’t know if that can be replicated. Maybe we’ll never end up in the same place. But that’s okay. It isn’t your fault. If anything, it’s mine.”

He blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I…” I drew my gaze away and tugged at a few tufts of grass near my knee. “The worst part we can obviously blame on the Company assholes. I know that. But they only captured you because you’d gone off on your own, and I think if I’d handled certain things better, you might not have.”

“I’m sure if I left it was for reasons completely my own. You couldn’t have forced me.”

“Of course not, but— It’s hard to explain.” How could he understand how emotionally entangled we’d gotten when the being he was now had reverted back to having no concept of intimate relations? “But, you know, we’ve got bigger problems to worry about. It’ll be however it’ll be.”

Snap considered me for a long moment. “I don’t know what I would have done or said before, but I do know that I don’t like seeing you upset.” He scooted a little nearer to me. With a deliberateness that made me suspect he was bringing to mind a memory of seeing Ruse or Thorn taking the same action and was afraid of getting it wrong, he took my hand in his.

The simple gesture that would have meant so much more a week ago brought a lump into my throat. I swallowed thickly. Maybe it was okay if I just tipped my head slightly to the side so it could rest against his shoulder.

Snap didn’t pull away, but he didn’t tug me closer the way he would have done before. I closed my eyes, breathing in the smell of him, clover sweet with its mossy dark undertone. An ache filled my chest. Was this making things better or worse?

“I miss you,” I couldn’t help saying. The words were too true to hold down.

I supposed Snap with his literal mind couldn’t help his answer either. “I’m here.”

Yes, the most essential parts of him were here: the gentleness, the wonder, and the compassion. Just not the man who’d wanted to claim me as his own, who’d seen me as a shining hero, who’d been both so fierce and so tender in his devotion. The man I’d started to imagine building some kind of life with when all this was over, regardless of what realm he came from.

I’d woken up lust and passion in him, sure, but hadn’t he woken up plenty in me at the same time? I’d started seeing things, enjoying things, wanting things I’d never have thought of before… or maybe that I just wouldn’t have let myself think of.

The ache expanded down to my gut and up to the base of my throat with a more wrenching truth that could have followed my first admission. But what was the point in saying that? This was my chance, from here onward, to pretend it wasn’t true. To step back from the path I’d been hurtling down where my life would have been entwined with my shadowkind lovers far beyond the mission we were on.

Wouldn’t it be better to sever that connection here and go back to some kind of normal human existence as soon as I could?

The question passed through my head, and all of me tensed in rejection of it. I wasn’t a normal human—and whatever I was, it was okay. I’d rather be that than one of the people so afraid of risks and consequences.

I could admit this much: Even if I couldn’t have Snap the way we’d once been together, I wished I could.

I opened my mouth, but the words stuck in my throat. I hadn’t said them to anyone since Malachi, years ago—since the man who’d decided I wasn’t even worthy of a conversation had erased himself from our shared life. A sliver of a lyric came easier, twisted to almost the thing I meant to say.

“Somehow I’ve stayed like glue-ue-ue,” I sang softly, gazing through the trees toward the river. “Full of snow and frost I was until I found you.”

“Sorsha?” Snap said without moving to dislodge me. Moonlight glimmered across the ripples in the water, and my chest constricted.

Mangled lyrics didn’t cut it. Just say it. Once, out loud. He deserved to know, even if he couldn’t really understand it.

My fingers tightened around his. My lips parted, and the words fell out. “I love you. Just as you are, with everything that makes you a devourer too. I should have told you back then, when it mattered a whole lot more, but—this is the best I can do. I love you.”

Snap had gone rigidly still beside me. Shit, I’d probably terrified him with the seemingly random declaration. His hand released mine, and I lifted my head to give him space—should I apologize? How did I apologize for that ?—but before I’d had a chance to say anything, his arms were wrapping right around me, tugging me into a full embrace.

My heart skipped a beat. I wanted to look up at him and take in his expression, but I was afraid of shifting in his hold and breaking the moment.

His chin had settled in a familiar position on the top of my head. A faint shudder ran through his body, and his arms squeezed tighter. His next breath came with a hitch. Then he spoke, his bright voice so faint it sounded as if it were coming from a deep, dark hollow inside him.

“My peach?”

My pulse hiccupped. Had I heard that right? He couldn’t have—unless someone had told him about the nickname he’d given me?

There was only one possible answer. “My devourer?”

Another shudder passed through him, and then all at once he was pulling me right onto his lap, turning me at the same time to face him. “Sorsha,” he said, still strained but with a ferocity of emotion I hadn’t heard from him since we’d rescued him. Like a demand. Like a claim.

A burn crept into my eyes. “Snap? Do you?—?”

I forced myself to raise my head despite my fears of shattering the moment. Snap stared back at me with a look so fraught yet full of longing that the hope I hadn’t quite dared to let loose before flooded me.

I touched his cheek, and he leaned into my caress, the edge of his jaw coming to rest against my temple. His breath stuttered in a warm wash down the side of my face. His embrace tightened.

“The look on your face,” he murmured. “I—” He jerked back with a flinch. His arms fell to his sides, his expression tensing with a neon glow flaring in his moss-green eyes. “I’m a monster.”

The admission cut through me. I swiveled around in his lap, gripping his face when he made to move even farther away. That was why, after all—not the Company’s torments, although no doubt they’d contributed.

He hadn’t devoured himself just to escape their experiments. He’d devoured the moment he’d become the thing he’d hated about himself and accidentally taken everything else about the last few months with it.

“Yes,” I said, looking straight into his eyes. “You’re a monster. So are Ruse and Thorn and Omen. Some days, so am I. I love you with all the monstrousness included. I didn’t—I was just startled. I hadn’t known what to expect. It didn’t change how much you matter to me, not one bit.”

“I didn’t just kill that man,” Snap said. “I shredded apart his soul bit by bit, and every moment of it was agony for him.”

I gave him a grim smile. “And I’ve burned alive more people than I can currently count. I don’t imagine they enjoyed that experience very much before it killed them.”

“I liked doing it. I reveled in it, in all the pieces of his life I got to consume. I—” His voice dropped. “For a moment, I wanted to devour you .”

That would be the ultimate act of making me his, wouldn’t it? I wasn’t going to volunteer, but the admission didn’t stir any of the horror he’d obviously expected it to.

I stroked my fingertips over his cheek again and into his golden hair. “But you didn’t. Do you have any idea how many awful things I’ve wanted to do in my entire lifetime? No one has control over what ideas or feelings pop into their head. We are the things we say and do, not the things we don’t. The fact that you wanted to and didn’t shows what really matters to you, more than if you’d never wanted to in the first place.”

“It could happen again. I thought I could make sure I never gave in to that hunger again, but I was wrong. That’s why… The things I gleaned from that man’s memories—I thought maybe the Company knew how to destroy the dangerous parts of me. I went to ask them, to show— But they didn’t give me a chance to say anything.”

I bristled on his behalf even as my heart wrenched for him. “Of course they wouldn’t. They don’t want to believe any of you could be anything other than a total beast.”

“I know that now. They wrapped me in one of those jabbing nets and shut me in that glaring box, and when they took me out there was only more pain, and more, and…” He flinched just at the memory. “I wanted so much to get away from that, from what I’d done before, all of it. I didn’t mean to forget that completely. I’m not sure what I even did. It just… happened.”

“I don’t blame you for doing whatever you could to get through their torture. And I don’t blame you for what you did to that asshole either. If some prick is on the verge of gutting me again, I hope you do shred his fucking soul into as many little bits as you can manage.”

The neon flare returned to Snap’s eyes. His forked tongue flicked between his lips. He still didn’t look completely convinced, though.

I pushed myself off his lap and tugged him with me. With his slender frame and heavenly beauty, it was easy to forget just how impressively tall he was until he was standing right over me, his chin hovering above my forehead. But he was here. My devourer. He was with me completely like I’d started to believe I’d never have him again, and that felt like nothing short of a miracle.

I took a step back so I could catch his gaze again. “You saw how I looked at you when the change surprised me. Why don’t you see how I’ll react to you now? Bring out your devourer form. I know you won’t hurt me.”

“Sorsha…”

I walked my fingers up his lean chest. “Please, my devourer?”

I didn’t know whether it was the plea or the claiming that decided him, but he inhaled sharply and eased backward to give himself room. His shoulders stiffened. For a second, he looked so uneasy that I almost took back the request. Then the eerie green light that had glinted in his eyes shimmered over the rest of him.

His body stretched upward the way I remembered until he towered a good two feet over me. His face lengthened to accommodate that monstrous jaw that could unhinge to encompass an entire human head. His pupils had narrowed into slits around the neon glow in his eyes, and his fingers stirred restlessly at his sides, long and spidery.

Maybe I should have been horrified. But he hadn’t lost his golden curls, and the planes of his face still reminded me of a stunning sun god, if a more vicious version. I could see Snap all through the form that was his more natural state, even though he’d rather have shunned this side of himself. He looked brutal and unsettling and unnervingly but undeniably gorgeous.

Not your type? Not a problem. He was all mine. Just let anyone try to take this monster away from me.

Reaching up, I could just trace my fingers along his treacherous jaw. “ My devourer,” I said again. And then, softer, because somehow it was still hard to say it, “My love.”

The light in Snap’s eyes blazed. He contracted in on himself with a rush of air, his body barely returned to its more human-like state before he’d caught me up in his lithe arms.

He kissed me like he’d been suffocating and I was his only air. In all the passion he’d shown me before, he’d never been quite this intense. As I kissed him back, I tangled my fingers in his soft hair and held on for the ride.

“My peach,” he said against my lips. “My Sorsha.” Then he dove back in to capture my mouth just as utterly a second time.

I let one of my hands trail down his chest, and a savage sound reverberated up his throat. Still kissing me, he swept me around. I found myself pressed up against a tree trunk, the bark rough through my shirt and my legs splayed around the devourer’s waist.

Snap adjusted me against him, his hands on my thighs, as he dropped his mouth to the side of my neck. The flick of his forked tongue seared across my sensitive skin. His groin pressed against my sex with an unmistakable bulge that sent a wave of heat tingling up from my core.

“Too long,” he muttered. “Too many days I lost with you in that awful prison and then forgetting. I want to taste you everywhere again and make you gasp in so many ways, but for now I simply need to be inside you.”

“Please,” I said, with a perfectly good gasp just from the friction of his erection pressing between my legs through the layers of fabric.

His nimble hands made short work of my pants. He had to ease away to let me kick off those and my panties, but the second the clothes dropped to the ground, he hefted me up against the tree again. As he gripped my ass on one side, he delved the slender fingers of his other hand inside my slit. They curved into my slick channel to find the point of deepest pleasure within. When they stroked against that spot, I moaned at the flood of bliss.

Snap rocked his hand inside me and swallowed whatever other sounds I’d have made with another scorching kiss. It felt so fucking good, but it wasn’t what he’d promised me.

“Snap,” I said when he released my lips, a whine of need creeping into my voice.

He understood. With a blink, his clothes vanished—he formed them with his shadowkind magic and could dismiss them just as easily. He grasped my hips and plowed his rigid cock into me, not slow and lingering like the first time we’d fucked but all the way to the hilt in one go, thank all that was firm and fanged. The thrust set off a fresh surge of pleasure that knocked my head back against the tree trunk.

Once we were joined, though, the devourer’s urgency seemed momentarily quelled. He hummed happily, the sound carrying from his chest into mine, and traced a giddy path along my jaw with his tongue.

“My Sorsha. I love you too. More than any peach.”

A laugh tumbled out of me, even though my body was aching for him to ravage me to my release. “That’s pretty impressive, but only peaches? What about bananas? Strawberries? Mang?—”

He let out a rough noise that was almost a growl and plunged deeper into me, exactly the way I’d wanted. “More than any fruit. More than anything. You are mine, and I am yours.”

“Mmm.” As he thrust again, more pleasure seared through me, and I couldn’t find the concentration to tease him any more. But one other point that I needed to make swam up through the ecstatic haze clouding my mind. “You don’t leave again. No matter how worried you are. You’ll stay and talk. Promise me.”

“I won’t leave,” he agreed. “I swear it.” Then his mouth descended on mine, our breaths and tongues mingling, and we were both completely done with conversation.

My hips bucked to match Snap’s thrusts, and if my backside was getting rubbed raw by the tree bark, I didn’t give a damn. I couldn’t feel anything but the bliss spiraling through my body with each pulse of his cock inside me. As I clutched his shoulders, I sped toward my peak faster than a hurricane.

My whole body quivered as I came, an electric shock of the most exhilarating kind jolting through me. The cry that broke from my throat probably carried all the way back to the RV. What the hell. Let them know our devourer was himself again.

Himself and mine.

Snap followed me over the edge to release with a groan of satisfaction. His fingers clenched around my thighs as he poured himself into me. He held me there against the tree for a minute longer, nuzzling the side of my face, as gentle now as he’d been ravenous moments ago.

“I suppose we should return,” he said regretfully as he lowered me so my feet could touch the ground. “The others will worry.”

“About you as much as me.” I bobbed up to give him one last quick kiss and groped for my pants. “We wouldn’t want to cause them any panic attacks. Anyway, I do have a room in the RV, and we haven’t got any plans for the rest of the night, so…”

Snap beamed at me with a slyer slant to his mouth than usual. “We have a lot of time to make up for.”

“We do.” Struck by a wave of gratitude and affection too powerful to ignore, I wrapped my arms around him in another embrace. Tears that were mostly joyful this time formed behind my eyes. “In case I haven’t made it clear enough, I’m so glad to have you back.”

And who knew how much time we’d get to make up what we’d lost before the Company or some new catastrophe came hailing down on us.

* * *

Would you like to see Sorsha and Snap’s steamy reunion by the river brought to life in full color? You can find a fantastic NSFW illustration of that sweet and spicy moment on Eva’s Patreon! Check out all the benefits of becoming a patron here.