Page 22

CHAPTER 22

Dante was right. The one had been created for the other, out of the bones of the earth, stone and sand, heat and fire, the artistry of God and man, working together.

Dramatic. Absurd. And true.

Maarja opened her chain, slid the stone free, slipped a finger through the hole, and considered the bottle.

“The wax,” she said. She meant the wax that sealed the bottle, the temporary replacement for the stone that had lasted for generations.

Using a magician’s trick, a bone handle appeared in his right hand, and with a flick and a click, a sharp thin steel blade appeared.

She flinched.

Stiletto. She guessed it had come out of his sleeve or his belt or… She didn’t know. Didn’t want to know.

With a frightening efficiency, he slipped the point under the wax and popped it out.

They both waited, wondering what kind of odor would come from the long-unopened bottle reputed to hold the blood of a martyr.

Dante took a long inhale. “Cedar. Lavender. Thyme. He’s not in here.” He sounded almost disappointed.

“Blood of my blood,” she reminded him. “The other scent is honey. Whatever they preserved of J?nos is mixed with scents that would pleasure him in the afterlife, and the honey preserves him and the plant material.”

“How do you know that?” Dante wasn’t doubtful, just curious.

“The Egyptians used honey to preserve small bodies, because honey is antimicrobial and antibacterial. It doesn’t spoil.”

He flicked the wax from the tip of the blade, and the stiletto vanished with a sleight of hand as efficient as its appearance. “You know the oddest facts.”

“I could say the same about you.”

He observed too much of her reluctance to mate the stopper to the bottle, yet he waited on her without reproach.

The scents rose in her brain, blurring the edges of reality. “I don’t know how to make the stone fit.”

“You don’t have to make it. With a little care, when you maneuver it, the stopper will slip into place.” Once again, he cupped the bottle in both his palms. “I know this. Don’t you?”

“Yes… The stone feels warm in my hand, as if it understands the momentousness of this event.”

He used that deep, gentle, soothing tone he’d used during her seduction. “Do it. It’s time. Past time.”

“Yes.” Her fingers shook a little as she fitted the stone into the bottle’s collar. It was like a jigsaw puzzle; it had to fit exactly right, but he was right. She maneuvered it, and with a small clink it was seated as if the stone and the glass had never parted.

Dante smiled with so much satisfaction he might have been created for this moment. “Take it.”

When she reached with one hand, he pressed it into her palm, then took her other hand and wrapped it around the bottle, too, so she cupped it in both her palms as he had before. He enclosed her hands in his, so a layer of him supported her, and a layer of her supported the now joined bottle and stopper, and inside the bottle the blood of J?nos rejoiced. Even more than the sex between her and Dante, even more than the click that signified the bottle and stopper had mated, the mere act of holding while so entwined seemed like it meant…something…

Dante leaned toward her, his breath softly caressing her skin. “After so many years, they are one. Maarja, can you feel their celebration?”

Mesmerized by him, by the sense that together, they’d created something greater than themselves, she nodded.

“Maarja, shall we celebrate, too?”

She thought he would close in on her, kiss her, be that kind of masterful upper-hand I-took-your-virginity guy that he actually was.

He waited. He wanted her to lean into him.

In a distant corner of her mind, she was aware this was probably not wise.

He was the enemy.

He handled a knife like a professional executor.

Yet nothing about this, from the moment the explosion blasted her to the moment she gave herself to this dangerous stranger to the moment she’d reunited the bottle and stopper, had been wise. She gave herself over to the dizziness of knowing that together they had made history, and stood on tiptoe to lightly touch his lips with hers.

His fingers clenched around hers, holding her holding the bottle. The glass ignited with such heat she felt as if the whorls on her skin had been dissolved and rearranged. His mouth applied a firm pressure, his lips opened, and what she had thought would be a soft accord sizzled with lightning so bright it blinded and thunder so loud it deafened…yet her mind unwillingly comprehended the brand that burned them. Without words, an ancient wrong had been righted, a new vow had been made.