Come to Me (16 page)

"How… do I wash?"

"
What
?" He half turned, to stare at her. "What do you mean, how do you wash?"

She held the bar of soap out in front of her. There were smears of white all over her fingers, and the bar itself was indented from her hand. She must have been clenching it as if she was trying to strangle a chicken. "I don't know what to do."

He looked at her face. Her lower lip was beginning to tremble.

"It won't come off!" she said, and demonstrated by rubbing the melting bar against her stomach, making a mess of soap and mud.

"Oh, for God's…" He took a deep breath and blew it out, summoning patience. "Rinse yourself with the water first, then lather up with the soap—your hair, too—and then rinse again with water. That's it."

She set the bar of soap down, struggled to lift the bucket, and before he could warn her otherwise, dumped it down her front. The shriek that followed reverberated off the stones of the monastery, the sound piercing enough to wake the spirits of dead monks and Turks alike. The ghosts were probably huddling in each other's arms, past sins forgiven, seeking refuge from Samira's cry.

The succubus cast him an accusing glare, as if to say he had deliberately planned that shock of cold water for her.

He set his jaw, lowered the bucket back down the well, and cranked up another load of water. Let her think what she would.

"Stand still," he ordered.

Her blue eyes were cold and fierce, glaring at him, but she obeyed.

He'd be out here all night if he let her do this herself. He upended the bucket over her head.

The sounds she made had his ears ringing. Her arms flailed, and he stepped back out of the way until she'd worked off the shock. "You want your hair clean, don't you?" he asked.

"You're being deliberately cruel." Her eyes accused him of being a beast, an offended hurt mingling with the anger.

"This is being human. It's rarely comfortable. Get used to it. Now take the soap and lather up."

She turned around to pick up the bar, bending down and giving him a full view of her buttocks and sex. "Where did it go?" she mumbled, feeling around on the ground, butt bouncing, the dark folds of her sex winking at him. "I can't see a thing… It was right here…"

There was a stirring in his hose. His gaze followed her every movement, helpless to look away. He'd never seen such a display, and it captured him, seeming almost to pull him toward her. His hands went to one of the ties at the top of his hose, as if to undo them, grab her by the hips, and plunge himself straight into the heart of that soft pink target.

"Found it!" she cried, standing up.

He dropped his hands down to his sides and scowled.

"What's the matter?" she asked, turning around and seeing his expression. "Did I do something wrong?"

"You're taking too long."

Her lips tightened, but she didn't say anything. Instead, she rubbed the soap over her belly and then slid her hands up over her breasts, creating a soapy trail. "Is this the right way to do it?" Her nipple peeped between two fingers as she rubbed the soap over her skin. She moved her hands in slow circles, her flesh moving in slow undulations. "It feels nice," she said, and smiled in quiet surprise.

He moaned softly and turned his back again. "Tell me when you're ready to rinse. And don't forget your hair."

"
All
my hair? Everywhere?"

He gurgled.

"Like this? Oh! That feels strange."

He hummed, trying to shut out the sound. He would not look, he would
not
look, he would not think about her soapy hands running over her breasts, between her plump thighs, delving into her… His erection pressed against the confines of his hose and he shifted, trying surreptitiously to rearrange himself and relieve some of the pressure.

"Oops!" she cried.

Without thinking, he turned around to see what had happened. Her buttocks were in the air again, sex flashing at him as she groped around for the bar of soap.

He muttered dark curses and forced his gaze to the ground. His jaw clenched, he went to the well and drew up yet another bucket of water.

"Am I washing my hair right? The hair on my head, I mean."

Nicolae graced her with a bucket full of cold water poured over her head in answer. "You're done."

Petru appeared just then, with a sheet of semi-clean toweling and a long, dull green caftan-style shirt that crossed over in front and tied at the left shoulder. Nicolae thanked and dismissed him, then threw the toweling at Samira, who caught it by letting it land on her head. He put the caftan on the edge of the well and told her, "When you're dry and dressed, come up to the tower."

He turned on his heel and stomped off toward the burned-out church in the center of the courtyard.

Inside, he passed Grigore and Stephen making up Samira's bed in a corner, underneath a faded fresco of saints meeting their varied deaths. A beheading here, a flaying there, one being burned alive—it seemed a fitting place to put a demon.

He nodded to the men and went on, to the small arched stone doorway leading to the stairs, with their many landings and turns. They were made of wood, built by his men as the previous stairs had long since burnt. The climb upward distracted him, the ache in his leg as he reached the top managing to kill off some of the arousal pulsing in his blood.

He ignored the book on his worktable and walked straight across the room to one of the windows, looking out at the lightening sky and seeking clarity of thought. It wouldn't be easy to question her if all he could think about was bending her over the table and sheathing himself within her.

But why shouldn't he do just that? a small devil within him asked. She wouldn't care. She had no virtue to protect, no innocence to be shocked. It would probably ease his distraction if he just let himself have at her whenever the urge hit. It would save him from obsessing about it, which was proving to be a real danger.

He glanced back at the table, and the book on demons. Wouldn't sleeping with her in human form be just as dangerous as being visited nightly by a succubus? She could just as well drain his vitality from him. What if he couldn't stop? What if every hour of his day and night were taken up with thrusting himself within her, fondling her breasts, parting her soft lips and devouring her like a honey almond cake? He'd waste away to nothing, accomplish nothing, his soul would be damned forever for sleeping with a demon—no matter her human form—and then his men would be left to dump his drained body into the lake, to rot in the mud and be eaten by fish.

It was almost as if God had sent Samira to him as a test of his will. Was he serious about his plans to regain his position and defeat Dragosh, or was he going to let the same failings that had destroyed him before destroy him again?

Maybe he should have let Samira try to carry out her threat of finding Dragosh and offering her help to him. Then Dragosh could have been the one distracted and drained.

He went to the table and flipped open the book, to the page with the drawing of the succubus. He turned more pages, to the sections he had not understood: the words had been decipherable, but their meaning had eluded him. Maybe Samira could be of some help with that, if what she had said was true, and she was here to be of aid to him.

Although why that should be, he did not know. It was one of the things he meant to find out.

He heard light footsteps on the stairs, and labored breathing. Samira emerged from the hatchway, and as the handrail ran out, she crawled her way up the last few steps and onto the floor, and once safely away from the hatch she collapsed onto her back on the floor.

"How do you do it? I can hardly breathe. My legs hurt. My chest hurts. I stepped on something and my foot hurts. And I'm bleeding to death from a cut on my leg—you remember that, don't you?"

"You have a lot of energy for complaints, for one so close to death."

"These clothes are uncomfortable. Haven't you anything softer? I can hardly move." She plucked at the fabric over her chest.

"That might be because you have the shirt on backwards. And the toweling was not meant to be wrapped around your legs." She looked more like a pile of laundry than a sex demon, and his spirits lifted. He could deal with her, after all. Her hair was a knotted mess of red dampness, her figure well concealed. If she kept up such a litany of complaints, he'd have no desire to touch her at all.

The thought made him almost jolly.

He came over and nudged her hip with his toe. "Get up. Go sit at the table."

She narrowed her eyes at him but got up, unwrapping her improvised skirt as she did so.

"What are you doing?" he asked in alarm.

"Getting dressed properly."

"You can wait to do that."

"No, I want to do it right." She dropped the toweling, then shook herself free of the caftan. She sighed in relief. "Ohh, that feels much better! Colder, though." He saw her gaze go to his bed.

"Oh, no, you don't," he warned. "You put that shirt back on and come sit down."

She ignored him and started toward the bed. "Do you know, I've never slept before?"

He grabbed her by the arm, jerking on her harder than he intended in his sudden panic to keep her from crawling into his bed.

She yelped and bumped up against him, her body soft and solid and both warm and chilled all at once. He shoved her away from him just as quickly, and let her go. "Put your clothes back on."

Confusion and resentment struggled on her features, but she clumsily put her arms back into the caftan and pulled it closed in front of her. He reached out to tie it for her, but her gaze was caught by something out the window.

She gasped. "Holy mother of the night!"

He turned, alarmed, but saw nothing. Samira ran past him to the window, her hands clenching the edge of the embrasure as she leaned forward.

"What is it?" he asked, getting nervous.

"I didn't feel it coming!"

"What?"

"I've never—You don't think it will hurt me, do you?" she asked anxiously, looking to him for reassurance. "Like last time?"

"I…" He was about to say he didn't understand, but then he saw the faint pink touch of light on her cheek. It was the dawn—the dawn that had nearly pulled her apart before his eyes. "I think you'll survive."

She looked back out the window, and he watched as her face took on a look of wonder. Her whole body, her whole being was focused on the rising sun with an intensity that made her rumpled state meaningless. For a moment she was not a confused demon. She was not a woman. For a moment, she was an expression of pure awe.

As the light bathed her in tones of pink and gold, her face fixed in the wonderment of a child, Nicolae felt a twinge of something deep inside him. Envy, perhaps. Sadness, at something lost to him long ago. This dawn was her first, as if she had just been born into this world.

How different, the way she gazed upon it, compared to his own darkened view.

"Careful," he said softly. "Don't look into the sun. It's brightness will hurt your eyes."

As her sudden brightness was hurting his.

Samira watched the sun rise over the distant horizon with a sense of awe. Fear and wonder mingled within her, but as the light touched her and no pain occurred, she abandoned herself to the feeling of something incredible befalling her.