Come to Me (10 page)

The idea should have bothered him far more than it did.

And why did he keep picturing her clothed as a young noblewoman, walking in the forest with a basket on her arm?

"There is but one thing I want of you," he said, and against his will all the lustful imaginings of the day sprung fully back into his mind.
He wanted her to come to his bed in the night and mount him, to ride him until dawn; he wanted to grab those full breasts and squeeze them as she arched her back above him, her hips rocking, her hand reaching behind her to lightly grasp his balls. He wanted her to bring him to release again and again and
… "Just one thing," he said again, his mouth dry.

Damn her to the hell from which she'd come: At this moment, he'd be as happy to spend himself within her as to use her for his revenge.

"If I can do it, I will," she said.

He closed his eyes briefly and tried to regain control of his thoughts. He would
not
be seduced away from his plans, and certainly not by a demoness.

He would not.

God help him, he would not. He was a man with a purpose, and he would not be distracted. He hoped.

Samira watched the fleeting expressions on Nicolae's face, trying and failing to read what he was thinking. She had thought she was good at such deciphering, but she was learning quickly how much she had relied on her ability to enter into a man's mind. Without that mind-penetrating advantage, she was nearly blind to his emotions. All she could see for certain on Nicolae's face was a hard lack of compassion for her and her ilk.

"In exchange for your freedom, I want you to make nightly visits to one man," he said to her. "You can do that, can't you?"

She licked her lips, afraid to say no. Afraid to say yes, too. "I can, although it is dangerous."

He lifted a brow. "Dangerous? Why? I thought that the succubi loved to do such things."

She shook her head, hair rippling, catching gemlike refractions of firelight that were wasted on his cold eyes. "It's not what we're meant to do."

He frowned. "Isn't it? Don't you live off the energies of men?"

She fluttered her wings in a shrug, eyes shifting to the side, intimidated by his hard glare. "Many men, never just one." She chanced a glance at him. "And we give such a wonderful gift in exchange."

He snorted. "And what is that?"

She blinked in surprise. "Do you not know?"

"Unless you mean stealing the seed of men to impregnate women not their wives, no, I do not know."

"That's very rare," Samira said, appalled. Was that really what he thought she did? "And only done when the husband's seed is dead and the couple are desperate for a child."

He laughed, hard and mocking. "Tainted children are born more often than that."

"Well, do not blame the succubi and incubi."

"Then what is this great gift you give, if not bastard, hell-bound children?" he asked.

How blind was he to the obvious? She raised her chin and trailed her fingertips lightly down her belly to the soft bed of crimson curls at her naked loins. His eyes followed involuntarily, and she saw a shift in his body as he reacted to the invitation of her self-touch.

She twisted a lock of her nether hair around her finger, tugging gently, then let it slide loose while her fingertips drifted lower still.

Nicolae tore his gaze away and, with obvious effort, forced himself to look again at her face.

So then, he was
not
utterly immune to her presence, however much he tried to pretend otherwise. Samira shifted a glance downward. His body was not lying about how he felt: he wanted her.

"Tell me what this gift is," he said, his voice holding a rough edge.

"It is every dream you have ever had in the night where you were touched and delighted in that touch, where you reached your satisfaction," she purred softly, meeting his gaze once again and half lowering her eyelids. "It is every midnight pleasure—every secret, dreamed delight of your body that brought you to your male release. Those are dreams that were given to you by a succubus."

He shook his head slowly in denial, his face going even more pale than it already was. "No. No, you are the first I have ever seen."

"But not the first to have visited you, of that I am certain."

He still shook his head, rejecting the idea. "I could not have lain with a demoness," he said, sounding desperate to believe his own words. "I could not have enjoyed it, if I had. I would have known. You lie."

So she did, perhaps. He certainly hadn't wanted
her
last night. But she laughed as if she found him amusing. "You know what I say to be true. All powerful dreams are delivered by the beings of the Night World. Your human dreams are paltry things in comparison, made up of details of your mundane days and your petty concerns. It takes a dream demon to give you something with fire and imagination—something you'll feel, and remember, and that might change the course of your life."

He made a disparaging noise. "You think too little of humans."

"You know too little of the world as it truly is," she countered. Ignorant human boy!

"And you know more? You, a soulless succubus?"

She put her hand on her hip in a gesture she had learned from watching humans. "I have lived fifty mortal lifetimes, and more. I have seen more than you will ever hope to learn in your paltry span of days."

"There is a difference between knowledge and wisdom," he said. His air of superiority challenged her own.

"A difference you do not know," she hissed, "if you were so unwise as to capture me." She smiled, just enough to show her white teeth. "I have no soul, as you pointed out. Aren't you afraid of what I might do?"

A small frown of concern appeared and then vanished between his brows, and she hoped he might be thinking she was less helpless than she presently appeared. Than she presently
was
. Holy stars of the night, did he have any idea of just how much power he held over her fate at this moment?

Apparently not. He'd given away his ignorance when he'd agreed that she could not be held past morning. What he didn't seem to know was that if he held her until the sun rose, she would be destroyed.

A denizen of the Night World could not exist in the Waking World. She would disintegrate; she would shatter into a billion bits of energy and exist no more, with no hope of resurrection. She did not, as he had said, have a soul, and so had no promise of eternal life.

"Aren't you afraid of what
I
might do?" he asked back, his dark eyes taking on a calculating look, devoid of either sympathy or fear. He might as well be examining a sheep and considering the best way in which to slaughter it. "There is more in this text than spells to capture succubi," he said, gesturing to the open tome. "You would do well to mind your tongue with me, and do as I say. I have shown restraint so far, but by no means do I feel the need to continue such kindness. A flea is more a creature of God's creation than are you, and deserving of more consideration."

Samira felt the threat cut through her, the coldness of his tone sharper and more wounding than the words themselves. She searched his gaze for some trace of compassion or of yielding, some hint of kindness, and found none. He looked less human in this moment than any creature of the Night World. The aching loneliness and soul-deep suffering that she had felt in him during their brief contact was nowhere to be seen now. Where was his tender vulnerability, the yearning, the need for something to fill his darkened heart? She might almost believe that the other had not been Nicolae.

"What dreams do you want me to give to this man?" Samira asked, backing down from her bluff. Stars forbid he should discover how great his power over her was at this moment, and decide to destroy her for the mere pleasure of pinching a flea.

His coldness faded slightly as a flicker of embarrassment showed itself on his face, hinting at his humanity once again. "What dreams? The usual sort." He waved his hand through the air, as if shaping some imaginary form, some imaginary action. "I'll leave the details up to you."

"This man must be a good friend."

Nicolae laughed, harshly. "Hardly."

Samira frowned and shook her head. "I don't understand. Why should you wish to give him pleasure, then, if he is not a friend? Do you owe him a debt?"

Nicolae's jaw tightened. "In a manner of speaking. No, it's not the pleasure you give him that I care about. It's the effect. I want you to drain him; to enfeeble his mind and destroy his strength. I want him to lose his will to live in the world outside his dreams."

Comprehension slowly dawned, and Samira drew back, horror making her go cold inside. "You want me to kill him."

"Don't try to look as if the idea is so abhorrent to you. You succubi make a habit of such. He's just another meal to you."

She shook her head, mute. "You cannot ask me to do this." She might as well die with the dawn, rather than promise to murder a human. Her life would be worth nothing, the punishment meted out by Nyx or Theron sure to be a thousand times more horrible than a brief death in the daylight. Or, moonlight forbid, they would hand her over to the Day World gods to be destroyed.

"I can't very well kill him myself, now, can I?" Nicolae said bitterly, misunderstanding her. He gestured toward his damaged arm and leg. "I would not fare well in a fight, and I would make an even poorer assassin, trying to slip into his home."

"But why?" she asked. "What has he done to deserve your hatred?"

"That's not something you need to know."

"I would understand why I am being used as a weapon of destruction," she pleaded, feeling herself on the verge of repeating her own history. She had asked too few questions of Theron before giving the dream to Dragosh.

"So you agree to the task?" he said.

"Tell me why," she asked again. "Give me that, at least. Don't make me wonder at the evil that I do."

"You wonder at the evil you do." He laughed. "An odd statement, from one such as you."

"We have our sense of right and wrong, however different it may be from your own," she reproached him. "Whatever your book may have told you, we succubi
are not murderers, any more than you humans may be."

"I am not reassured," he said, with a touch of humor.

"Please tell me," she said again, begging this time. "Please."

"You swear to do as I bid, if I tell you?"

"I swear to help you," Samira said, careful in her choice of words.

He stared at her, suspicion in his eyes.

"I will help you to right whatever wrong has been done," she said. "I swear it."

"There is no
righting
possible. What is done is done. It is vengeance I seek."

"Then I will help you to that, if you have truly been wronged."

"I will let you judge that for yourself," he said bitterly, and pulled his tunic off over his head.

"
Goddess of the Night
," Samira swore under her breath. The pink webbed scar that started on his cheek and poured down his neck widened farther still over the left half of his body. His arm was encased in the webbing down to his wrist, although his hand was mercifully unblemished. The scars went down his side, disappearing beneath his hose.