Page 23 of Monsters in the Museum (Defenders of the Light #1)

Chapter twenty-three

N ora woke with a stifled gasp, drenched in cold sweat. She shoved down the panic from the acute sensation of being suffocated, discovering that it had been caused by her lying face down on an overly soft pillow. Still, she shuddered in the chill air of her apartment as her dream faded. The images of perfect skin peeling back to reveal the blackness beneath melted into the familiar sight of her cramped bedroom.

At her stirring, Drew sprang up from the window seat where he had been dozing. Nora had offered to let him sleep in the bed, considering that they had shared this bed nightly less than a year ago, but Drew had insisted he would sit up for a while to make sure she was all right. Although she was loath to admit it, she was glad to have somebody watching over her as she slept.

“Does anything hurt?” Drew asked as he perched himself on the bedside next to her, obviously inspecting her with the keen eye of a physician looking at a patient with a head injury. She could just make out his narrowed eyes as he scrutinized her in the dim light coming through her window, signaling that sunrise was not far off.

Nora shook her head, and Drew moved to her hand. He picked it up gingerly to check the bandage he had placed on the burn encircling her wrist.

He had tended to her wounds the night before after practically carrying her, numb and incoherent, up the stairs to her apartment on the third floor of a brownstone. She was endlessly grateful that he didn’t ask her what had happened and simply let her indicate where her injuries were. Drew’s presence was solid and familiar enough to be reassuring, even if she wasn’t sure she wanted to be around people right now.

Now Drew moved to the bandage around her scorched foot to check on it as well, saying, “I’m glad your head feels okay. If you take one more blow to the head, I may have to force you to go everywhere wearing a football helmet.”

Nora smiled at him weakly, somewhat revived after a few hours of sleep but still not up to full-on laughter.

“What woke you up? Was I snoring?” Drew asked.

Nora finally spoke, her voice a croak from the combination of sleep and the fact that she had barely spoken a word since getting in the cab with Drew last night.

“You know you don’t snore. I’m just used to waking up before sunrise, so I can get to work early.”

Drew now swung his legs onto the bed and folded them so he could sit cross-legged, facing her. “You sure that’s the only thing that woke you?”

Nora only paused a moment before shaking her head, knowing it was no good to try and lie to Drew.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not particularly,” Nora answered, toying with a loose thread in the sleeve of her pajamas. “But I suppose you think I should.”

“I think I’m a friend who’s here to listen if you decide you want somebody to listen to you.” Drew gave her shin a soothing rub. “I also happen to be a doctor who has seen enough patients come in after horribly traumatic experiences to know that it’s perfectly valid to not want to talk about it right away.”

Nora heaved a sigh, running her hands through her hair, which had become hopelessly tangled from her tossing and turning during the night.

“I do actually think it might be… cathartic to talk about it. I just don’t know how to explain how unbalanced the whole thing made me. You’re going to think I’m crazy for how I reacted when you found me.”

“I already know you’re slightly crazy, and I like you anyway, so I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Besides, you talking about this is for your benefit more than mine. And I’m not one to question your methods for staying sane immediately after going through something harrowing.”

Nora grabbed the pillow from the spot next to her and hugged it to her chest. She looked at her own twisted thoughts and decided it might not be the worst idea to pick them apart out loud, so she dove in. Once she began to talk, it was as if a faucet had been turned on, and the story poured out of her, from the moment she walked into the museum until the moment they found her on Michigan Avenue. Drew didn’t interrupt her once, letting her follow her own streams of consciousness, never asking for an explanation.

When she finally fell silent, Nora felt both deflated and light, as if the weight that she had released by sharing what had happened had also been what was propping her up. She also realized that most of the blinding rage from the night before had drained away, only to be replaced by an aching deep in her chest.

Drew’s only comment was, “I want you to know that you are incredibly strong for being where you are right now and making it through what you did.”

Nora snorted. “I don’t feel strong. I feel like a used Kleenex.”

“You know what I mean,” Drew said with a roll of his eyes. “Even heroes have to go home and feel like a used Kleenex sometimes.”

Nora offered him a rude hand gesture in response, and the pair enjoyed a few moments of levity before growing serious again.

“So what do I do now? What do I do about everybody at the Sanctuary?” After a slight hesitation, Nora added, “About Adam?”

Drew gave her a knowing look. “Well, I think you have to decide how you feel about him first.”

Nora looked down at the pillow she was still hugging to her chest.

“I think you know how I feel about him. But how can I, in good conscience, feel that way about him if he’s been lying to me this whole time?”

“I’m going to tell you a few facts that I think you should consider, but at the end of the day, only you can decide what you are going to do.”

He didn’t continue until Nora looked up and met his eyes.

“First, last night was the second time I’ve seen Adam react to your life being in danger, and let me tell you, this was even scarier than when he charged into my ER covered in your blood. For somebody you would think has a lot of experience being cool under pressure, he was dangerously close to a blind panic. That wasn’t the type of act he would put on for my benefit.

“Second, when you asked him if he had been lying to you, Adam admitted to it immediately. Not the move you would expect from a shameless manipulator. And you didn’t get any clarification from him on what he was lying about. This could all be one big misunderstanding, like the ones you always make fun of in romantic comedies.

“And last, something Thad said the other day really stuck with me. I was at the Sanctuary when Adam was getting ready to go to your gala, and he stopped by Thad’s room to borrow some cuff links. He was practically bouncing out of his skin he was so excited. When he left, Thad said, ‘I haven’t seen him this happy in over six hundred years.’ If you are making him that happy and he still lied to you, he must have had a damn good reason.”

Nora had decided what she was going to do before Drew got to his last point, but by the time he’d finished, her heart leaped up into her throat. She wasn’t surprised that her rage from the night before had faded. Nora was always quick to anger, but equally quick to calm down and resort to rationality.

What surprised her was how much Adam’s feelings affected her. She knew she liked him, but she hadn’t realized the extent of her own feelings until the hurt of his betrayal ripped her to shreds.

“Would you think I’m crazy if I said I want to go to the Sanctuary and talk to him now?” asked Nora.

Drew smiled. “I think you would be crazy not to.”

It was almost noon by the time Nora stepped through the electric silk of the portal and onto the Sanctuary lawn. She had been anxious to head out right away after making up her mind, but Drew had insisted she take care of herself first. She was glad for his insistence now that her belly was full of greasy diner food and copious amounts of coffee.

Nora limped through the Sanctuary, avoiding putting too much pressure on her singed foot, and hoped that she would find Adam in his room. When Nora poked her head around the door into Adam’s room, she found that he was there, but he looked as if he’d had an even worse night than she had. He wore the same clothes from the night before, but they didn’t have the distinct rumpled look of somebody who had slept in them. He was slumped in the chair in front of the fireplace, examining a small object in his hands. There was a full cup of tea sitting forgotten on the table next to him, no longer steaming.

Adam jumped to his feet as if he had been shocked when Nora cleared her throat. Seeing her, he crossed the room toward her in a few long strides before pulling up abruptly a few feet from her. His body was almost vibrating with tension; his eyes were rimmed with red.

“How are you feeling?” Adam asked, his calm voice a sharp juxtaposition to his frantic appearance.

“Tell me everything,” Nora demanded. “Now.”

“Okay.” Adam gave a jerky nod, somehow managing to look even more tense. He gestured toward the chairs by the hearth. “You better sit down.”

Nora made her way over and took a seat, but Adam remained standing. He paced in front of the fireplace, beginning to fidget with the object in his hands again. It appeared to be a small piece of jewelry, like a locket.

“I need to tell you about how my wife died,” Adam blurted out.

Nora was taken aback. This was not how she had expected this story to start, but she nodded for him to continue.

He took a shaky breath before beginning. “She was an incredibly brave Warrior. We were fighting side-by-side at the Defeat, and things were not looking good for the Eteria. We were making our last stand when the two of us were separated. It looked like she was about to be overwhelmed when, all of a sudden, she used the Light in a way nobody had ever seen before. It was as if she were simply a vessel for it, and she used it to burn away every last Shadow on the battlefield.

It was incredible, but the act was too much for her body, leaving it completely broken. It wasn’t until later that we found out that her destruction of the Shadow had also hindered our ability to use the Light.”

Nora felt a pang of admiration for the woman who had given her life to protect what she loved, but she tilted her head in confusion. She couldn’t follow how this was going to come back around to her.

Adam continued pacing while he talked, twisting the object in his hands unconsciously.

“When she collapsed on the battlefield, I ran to her. Seeing her dead… it left me broken. So, out of my mind with grief, I tried to use my power to do the unthinkable. I tried to bring her back.”

Nora gawked. She had read enough novels to know that was not a good idea.

“To everybody’s surprise,” Adam soldiered on. “I managed to grab onto her spirit as it was slipping away. When I tried to put it back in her body, though, it was too broken to hold it. The best I managed to do was give her a tether to this earth in my own soul, and she began to slip away to find another source of life. Before her spirit slipped out of my grasp, my wife’s voice whispered in my head. ‘Come find me.’”

Nora furrowed her brow at Adam, who had now stopped his pacing and was looking at her intently.

“So… she was reincarnated?” puzzled Nora.

Adam nodded slowly. “And she has continued to be reincarnated, again and again to this very day.”

Adam stared at her as if he were waiting for her to combust on the spot. There was something about his story she was missing. The link that would explain why he was telling her this.

When it hit her, it was as if Zeus himself had struck her with one of his thunderbolts. She was glad that Adam had suggested she be seated for this conversation as she opened and shut her mouth several times like an oversized goldfish before stammering, “You can’t mean me ?”

Adam nodded again, his eyes over bright.

“But how…? Why do you think it’s me?”

At this Adam crossed the rug and sunk to his knees in front of her. “You look the same in every life, but that wouldn’t even matter. I would know your spirit even with my eyes closed. As soon as you chased after me and yelled at me to stop in that alley, I knew it was you.”

Nora would have told him he was insane, but her spirit seemed to have opinions of its own and was whispering to her that he might be right. It was like when she had found it surprisingly easy to believe in the existence of a race of immortal sorcerer warriors, only magnified.

“So, we’ve been doing this repeatedly for thousands of years?” Nora asked.

Adam flinched, still on his knees in front of her. “Not exactly. I haven’t done a stellar job of finding you. The world is a very big place.”

“How many times?”

“Three.”

The single syllable hit Nora like a physical blow. Two thousand years of walking the earth, and he had only managed to run into her three times.

“We’ve only spent three lives together in all that time?” Her voice shook as she said it.

Adam shook his head. “Even when I find you, it’s not always simple. My feelings for you may be eternal, but being together is not guaranteed. We have a choice.”

“Tell me,” Nora urged, needing to know.

Adam sat back on his heels but didn’t move to get up from his seat in front of her.

“The first time I found you, was a few hundred years after your death, in Egypt. I had begun to think I had imagined the voice telling me to find you altogether, when suddenly there you were. You weren’t as you were when I lost you, though, but frail and failing with all your hair turned gray. I stayed near you for the short few years until the end of that life, trying to help you in whatever ways I could.”

Nora gripped the arms of the seat so hard her knuckles cracked, but she did not interrupt.

“The next time I found you was almost five hundred years later. You were young, and just as I always pictured you in my dreams, but when I followed you, trying to come up with an excuse to run into you organically, I saw it. You were married, and you already had three beautiful children, all with your eyes and your dazzling smile.

It was in that life that I was forced to come to terms with the fact that just because I had married you in one life, it did not mean I had the right to derail every other life you had. If we were going to be together, you would have to choose me all over again. It was one of the hardest realizations of my life, but you and your husband ended up being some of the best friends I ever had.”

Nora was barely breathing now, but she held on.

“The last time I found you was seven hundred years ago, in France. You were in the prime of your life, a young widow. We met and had a whirlwind romance that was everything I had dreamed of. When I suggested marriage, though, you turned me down. You were managing your late husband’s estate, and you knew you would lose legal ownership of the property if you were ever to marry again. Devastated by your refusal, I took a trip to the country to clear my head. I had only just left when I heard the news that the black death was spreading. I rushed back to you, but I was too late. I ended up holding you in my arms, and I vowed that I would never assume anything about our relationship again.”

Adam reached down and plucked the piece of gold jewelry off the ground where it had fallen on the rug when he kneeled in front of her. He ran his thumb over the face of the round locket she had spied on his shelf weeks before.

“This is from that last life,” Adam explained. “I keep it with me so I never forget, well, any of it.”

He popped the locket open to reveal the picture inside, and if Nora had any doubts about Adam’s honesty, it was instantly banished as a minuscule painting of her own face smiled back at her.

Tears filled her eyes as she asked, “And now?”

“And now… now you’re here in front of me again. I saw the life you had built for yourself, and it made me admire you even more. I never wanted to take that life away from you. I wanted to give you the type of love you deserve in the life you chose, but then you got dragged into everything here at the Eteria, and I knew I could not keep this from you forever.” A tear leaked from the corner of Adam’s eye, but he didn’t move to wipe it away. “I had hoped we might fall in love first, so I could tell you this without forcing you into anything. I wanted to give you the space to make your own decisions and destiny, and not feel like you owed me anything because we had once been married.”

Adam scooted forward until he kneeled directly in front of Nora and put his hands on her knees. “And now I—I have spent thousands of years learning every language there is to know and reading the best work by the greatest writers of every age. Still, I have never found the proper words to express how I feel about you. Yet I can tell you this: I have seen your face every time I have closed my eyes for the past seven hundred years, and still, I never could have imagined the joy I would feel when I finally saw you again.”

Nora stared into Adam’s dark eyes, tears now freely streaming down his face in a mirror of her own. She knew she had a choice. She knew she could get up and walk out forever, and Adam would let her do it.

Instead, she threw her arms around his neck and crushed her lips to his.

This kiss was nothing like their first. If their first kiss had been a mild summer’s day, then this one was a hurricane. She poured everything his words had made her feel into the kiss, hoping he would understand what she was trying to convey. He only froze in surprise for a moment before responding in kind. He pulled her closer to him, letting the locket fall from his hands to the carpet with a dull thud. She knelt on the carpet with him as his hands wandered all over her. They trailed through her tousled hair before coming to cup her face briefly, then wandered down her back, as if they had to touch every part of her to make sure she was really there.

Nora’s hands began to wander just as much as she tilted her head to kiss him more deeply, the kiss morphing into exploring tongues and nipping teeth. He tasted like the spiciness of the chai tea he preferred, mixed with the saltiness of their combined tears. Her hands began tugging at the buttons of his shirt, but he stilled them.

“I’ve thought about this reunion for the last seven hundred years,” Adam said as he looked through his lashes at her. “I won’t let this be some frantic romp on the floor. I’m going to savor every moment of this. Take my time to relearn every inch of you.”

Nora swallowed and couldn’t repress the shiver Adam’s words sent up her spine. Instead, she looked down at the white fur beneath her knees and joked, “Yeah, I don’t think a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace is quite your style.”

“I refuse to be that cliché.” Adam’s eyes glittered with dark promise, and he stood before scooping her up off the carpet and depositing her on the enormous bed. He crawled on top of her and kept to his promise, their next kiss slower and more intentional. Nora parted her legs so he could lie between them, and the press of his pelvis against hers threatened to undo her completely. Still, his lips didn’t leave hers until she was shaking like a leaf in the stiff Chicago winds.

When he finally pulled away, Nora was sure she looked a mess, panting and glassy-eyed, but Adam’s gaze as he stared down at her only burned brighter. She tried to catch her breath, but Adam was having none of it, stealing the air from her lungs by bending down again to press his lips to her neck, alternating teeth and tongue as his hands trailed down her body at a torturous pace.

His lips mapped behind her ear and the hollow of her throat, painting her skin with the affection he had carried for so long. Nora let out a hiccupping sigh of desperation as she bucked her hips up, but one hand came to her waist, pinning her down. He pulled back, and Nora was of a mind to protest the loss of his heat until he moved to pull her shirt off over her head.

She found herself bare from the waist up beneath him. His lips were wet and swollen from their kissing and his eyes sparkled as bright as the stars embroidered in the bed hangings above him. Nora’s nipples tightened under his scrutiny, and as desperate as she was, she found herself smiling up at him—this man who had seen all the world had to offer, yet still looked at her like she was brand new.

He smiled back for just a moment before diving back down to resume his torturous attention. His breath ghosted over her breasts before teasing them with the flat of his tongue. If Adam noticed Nora’s fingernails digging into his shoulders, he gave no indication but to lavish even more attention on every inch of her. She wanted to urge him on faster, but she bit her lip to control herself, wanting this moment to be everything he had promised. But she could not control the shivering that grew to full-on trembling as he kissed down her belly, working her leggings down her hips before tossing them carelessly over his shoulder.

Then his mouth came to land between her legs, and she lost all ability for coherent thought. If Adam had seemed intent on his task before, it was nothing compared to how he took her apart now. He covered her sex with his mouth while his tongue parted her in one long stroke. Nora hadn’t had a chance to recover from the lightning his touch sent through her body before he used the tip of his tongue to trace tight, inexorable circles around her most sensitive point.

Nora could only rock up into him, one hand coming to cover her mouth and contain the sounds now forcing their way past her lips. Adam reached up and pulled her hand away from her face. When she glanced down, his eyes were desperate, as if being deprived of the noises coming from her physically hurt him. So, instead, Nora dug her fingers into his curls and let him have every groan and whimper she had to offer.

Her desperate noises seemed to only spur him on further, and he used his thumbs to hold her open as he devoured her. Even as her moans increased in pitch, they weren’t enough to drown out Adam’s own groans of pleasure, as if Nora were a delicious meal and he was a man starved.

The stars on the fabric above her began to dance as her vision swam.

“Adam,” she breathed, a warning and a prayer and a plea all mixed into one.

His response was to slide a single digit into her tight channel, and that was all it took to turn the stars to supernovas as she shattered, crying out and pulsing around his finger.

Her limbs still shook, and sparks still danced over her skin when Nora pushed Adam back and flipped them over so he lay on his back, and she was able to hover over him. She already felt like she might shatter again at any moment, barely recovered from the attentions of his mouth, but she was determined to hold out until she could be joined with Adam fully. He made a slight noise of protest at the sudden change in position, but a small smirk and a glint in his eye told her that he was far from unhappy with her enthusiasm. His lips glistened from her, and Nora ran her thumb over them, only for Adam to dart his tongue out and make sure he had licked her there, too.

She removed his clothing with much more haste than he had, knocking his glasses off as she ripped his sweater over his head. Once he was bare, though, she did pause to take him in, wanting to seal the way he looked in her mind, from the length emerging from the curls between his legs to the ruined look in his eyes.

She straddled his thighs as she looked her fill, tracing fingers over the divot between his pectorals, across his abs, before taking his cock in her hand. She reveled in the way he tensed beneath her thighs as she ran her thumb through the slick droplet at his head. She wanted to taste it, but it seemed that would have to wait, as even Adam had reached the end of his patience after millennia of waiting. He pulled her down to kiss him again, his lips still coated in her musky taste.

Now she didn’t make him wait, shifting her hips until his cock caught at her entrance, already slippery and desperate. When he slid inside her, Nora nearly cried with the satisfaction of it. She was reduced to a bundle of sensations: Adam’s hands on her hips, his breath on her neck, the slight scratch of his stubble against her cheek. Their bodies fit together like they had been made to do so, which didn’t seem so far-fetched anymore. Nora shuddered as her muscles were overcome with the pleasure of it all, her hips losing their rhythm as she tried to grind down onto him, but Adam took matters into his own hands. He flipped them over and drove into her, chasing after what they both needed.

She wrapped her legs around his hips, heels digging into his lower back as she urged him on. A dark curl fell into his face as he stared down at her, his golden skin glowing with the sweat of his exertion. He was beautiful, and otherworldly, and most remarkably, hers .

Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes again as she tried to withstand the onslaught of feelings. One of Adam’s hands reached up to cup her face, holding her cheek gently, at odds with the way the fingers of his other hand dug into the flesh of her hip, holding her against him as he drove into her relentlessly.

She covered his hand with her own, the beginnings of her release cresting over her, but there was something else: something buried in her chest clawing to burst forth.

As Nora’s back arched and she fell apart in Adam’s arms, she found the words to say what she had been trying to this whole time.

“I love you.”

It hadn’t taken her long to realize that Dr. Adam Scott was the type of man she could love. When she learned the truth about the Eteria, she had convinced herself that he would never be able to feel that way about her, but every new facet of him she uncovered still drew her in further. Now, knowing all he had been through for her—how he had waited and suffered and respected her wishes even when it hurt him to his core—she was sure that her soul belonged to him, in this life and all others.

“I love you too,” Adam said, breathless but without hesitation, as if it were as necessary for him to tell her this as it was to breathe. As if he burned with it.

As he spent inside her, Nora knew she burned with it too. After long moments of trembling, Adam rolled sideways and pulled Nora into his chest. While the fire inside her banked, it remained warm and insistent, and she knew it would not be extinguished.

Later, when they were content and breathless in each other’s arms for the second time that night, Nora had the fleeting thought before she was claimed by sleep that this was worth waiting seven hundred years for.