Chapter Twenty-one
What have I done to you? he thought with mystified incredulity. Not a goddamned thing. Which is a hell of a lot less than I want to do to you.
His body ached with need. Pain was literally moving through his bloodstream, incinerating everything along its path. There was a wicked magic inside him absolutely begging to be let out so it could do its job. He would have her swooning, naked, kneeling before him. He could have her on her back on his bed, legs spread, wanting and waiting.
Liar, he told himself. It was all darkly wishful thinking, because she would put up a fight the likes of which no one in the realms had ever seen. He would win eventually, if by sheer need alone, but the entire world would come down around them in the process. She was strong. Beautifully, wonderfully strong.
He knew who her parents were.
Calidum gritted his teeth together and felt the prick of fangs. They’d come out as he was holding her, and when he saw how she reacted to his touch on the wounds Arach had left, he was filled with an intense mixture of his own anticipation and outright jealousy. He wanted to sink his own teeth into them, reclaim them as his own. The way a dragon was meant to do when he took his mate.
At least it wasn’t her throat, he thought. That, Calidum wouldn’t have been able to stay away from for long.
He gazed steadily at her, unable to look away, unwilling to look away. She was agonizing, stunning, standing there in complete surrender to her own natural beauty. Her snow white hair had been disheveled in their power play, and it flowed around her like a shimmering, frozen water fall. Her lips and cheeks were flushed with anger, her large eyes shining like the clearest, deepest purple amethysts. He’d had an effect on her, so strong she couldn’t deny it. She thought he’d cast a spell? Did she not know? Could she not see that it was so much more basic than that? How could she deny this?
He wanted to wrap his hands around her throat, gently tilt her back, rip the clothes from her body, and….
May the gods help him.
The gums around his fangs pricked and ached along with the rest of him. He touched the teeth with his tongue and willed himself to keep his mouth shut. He couldn’t bear to make Eva any more afraid of him than she already was. He knew he must have appeared frightening.
He felt like fucking and then killing.
He ran a stiff hand through his pitch black hair and tried to ignore the way she was shaking. She wanted to be so very strong, but her world was being turned upside down.
“Tell me!” she demanded, using her words to mask her weakness. “Tell me what you’ve done to me, you son of a bitch.”
“Absolutely nothing,” the Dragon King said, his eyes still very much on fire. He could feel them in his head, burning from the inside out. Fury was joining the need in his veins, quickly matching it in measure, and the latter was just as difficult to bear as the former. “But your mind is clearly made up, Eva. And at the moment I’ve no further desire to argue with you.”
Screw your brains out, yes. Argue, no.
He turned away from her and strode to the kitchen again. Once there, he opened the refrigerator door, pulled out a bottle of beer, and twisted the non-twist cap off with his bare hand. Then he proceeded to down the entire thing, willing the liquid inside to numb the worst of his pain, the worst of the burning that was destroying his will and resolve.
He slammed the empty bottle down on the marble counter top just hard enough that it didn’t break, then pulled out a second one. He was half way through this second beer when he heard her speak up again behind him.
“I’m sorry.”
He stopped mid-gulp and his eyes flew open. Slowly he lowered the beer, swallowed what remained in his mouth, and turned to face her.
She was as tiny as ever, wrapped in her own arms, her brow furrowed, her lips trembling. She nervously looked down, a muscle in her face twitched, and she looked back up again. “I’m… I’m sorry that Arach is after me. And I’m sorry for accusing you,” she told him. Her voice shook with so much awkward emotion, it was adorable.
He was stunned. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been stunned before. This was new to him, and Calidum found it caught him way off guard.
“I just don’t know what to think,” she said helplessly, softly, and with a voice on the verge of a breakdown. It ripped at him as sure as claws would have, far more powerful than a bellow, more disabling than a physical attack.
Then and there, quite unexpectedly and in the face of this new power, all Calidum wanted to do was hold her. He wanted to lay her head gently on his chest, feel her silken strands of hair through his fingers as he caressed her to comfort, and whisper to her that it was going to be okay.
Everything is going to be okay.
But he wasn’t sure it was going to be okay. And she would have pulled away from him anyway. There were too many walls between them, built brick by brick by the passage of years and on a foundation of inescapable trauma.
So he swallowed with difficulty past the massive lump that had formed in his throat and thought very hard, very fast. He said, “I need to speak with Roman D’Angelo. He needs to know about Arach and Amunet.” His voice was tight, strained. His body still ached. “I was going to suggest that you stay here….”
It was the safest place for her, perhaps the one location Arach couldn’t breach. “But I think it might be better if you accompany me.” He put down the half-empty second beer and swallowed again. “We’ll talk to him together.”
You’re insane, you daft bastard, his mind reprimanded. He’ll come for her for sure. What man wouldn’t? But he couldn’t keep her a prisoner in his home in his absence. And she shouldn’t be alone, not now. But more importantly, and decidedly, he needed to be near her. Leaving her alone just then was literally the very last thing in the world that Calidum wanted to do.
“But…” she hesitated, and he could read her thoughts. They were one word: Arach.
His right fist clenched. He was going to rip that fucker’s lungs out and use them as balloons at his next birthday party. But she was right.
He thought some more, and with the same speed. Finally he realized what he had to do. He needed to bring one or all of the other twelve kings here.
Impossible, his mind scoffed. It drained you enough just getting the two of you here. It takes the strength of a Legendary to breach these barriers. Or something even stronger.
He studied Eva carefully, thoroughly, noting the way her eyelashes made shadows on her cheeks they were so long. The way her pelvic bone could be seen peeking just above the waistband of her jeans, beyond tempting. The way her ash-white hair was so long it brushed her waist, even touching that exposed bit of flesh –
Shit, he suddenly thought. Her hair.
He realized he’d forgotten something very important, and it was her white hair that reminded him. Because what Eva didn’t know was that her hair wasn’t supposed to be white. Her mother had changed it before she was born. She’d had her reasons. Her mother was powerful enough to do it. Her mother was powerful enough, even, to perhaps help him get twelve monumentous kings across several dimensional barriers.
Once safe from the trio of bad guys they were facing, they could plan, practice, and prepare to end the hell they’d unleashed before it destroyed the planet altogether. It would buy them time. And time was what they very much needed right now.
“I don’t want to leave you alone,” he told Eva. You have no idea, he thought. “But you’re right. You can’t afford to abandon the safety of this dimension.” He strode toward her, but stopped a good two feet away, giving her space. He was still uncertain. Not so much of her reaction – but of his will.
She looked up at him with luminous lavender eyes, and his chest literally ached. He wondered which heart it was that was breaking just then. “I’m going to head back for a very short while,” he told her, “to find someone.”
He started to turn away when her voice stopped him cold. “Calidum,” she said, using the name he had grown accustomed to. He met her gaze. Unintentionally, he read her thoughts.
Don’t let him leave, she told herself. Not yet. She still needed to know – about her father. For Eva, nothing had changed. The drop of confusing information he’d given her had only served to further muddy the waters of her past, and he knew it.
At the moment they were safe from Arach – or so Calidum hoped. There might not be another time; she may not have another chance, and this particular nightmare had haunted her for the entirety of her life. In truth, he could have easily read these thoughts across her face. There was no need to enter her mind.
So he waited for her to ask him the question he’d known was coming since he’d seen her in the mall in San Francisco, and he willed himself the strength to answer it.
“If you didn’t kill my father,” she said quietly, “then who did?”
Calidum closed his eyes and licked his lips. The information fought with him, wanted to stay buried. This was going to be harder than he’d thought.
“Please,” she continued. “For the love of the gods,” she added, her words speeding up, her tone becoming anxious. “After all this time, you must have some idea of how badly I need to know.” She obviously tried to steady herself, but urgency still pushed each word past her teeth. He could hear them chattering. “So just tell me. If you have nothing to hide, then… why can’t you just tell me?”
Cal opened his eyes. When he did, he felt the red in them. Their fire had gone from grayscale to the hue of blood, like the fire of a failing star, filled with radiant emotion. If his chest had ached before, it was positively mutilating itself now. The air around them was once more charged, but this time not with danger. It was simply emotion. Hard and strong. And he couldn’t tell which of them was doing it more.
Across the room, he saw her throat work. She swallowed, no doubt wondering if she was prepared for what she must know was coming.
“I didn’t kill your father, Eva,” he said slowly, softly, and with solemn gravity. “Because your father is still alive.”
A beat of space, of pure emptiness that nature meant to cushion a traumatic blow, passed between them all too quickly. And then Calidum’s words slammed into her like a Mac Truck; she literally took a stumbling step backward.
But her breathtaking eyes remained locked on the Dragon King.
“What did you say?” she whispered.
Calidum again steeled himself. Then he repeated, “I said your father is still alive, Eva.”
She slowly shook her head. He could tell she was going numb. “I… saw him die.”
“No you didn’t. You saw the Great White die,” he told her. “And I didn’t kill him either.”