Authors: Calista Fox
She smiled at him.
He pulled her into his arms and kissed her. A long, slow,
deep kiss. Her body melded to his and she wrapped her arms around his neck.
Darien let the kiss go on and on. His hands roamed her backside, along her
spine and down to her ass. He kneaded the soft flesh, while keeping her tight
against him. His erection pressed to her belly, but he was in no hurry. He
enjoyed the feel of her body against his and the taste of her kiss.
When she jerked in his arms, Darien knew the doctor had
started stitching her up. In his fantasy, he ended the kiss and floated on his
back to a smaller waterfall. Her arms were still around his neck and she
drifted with him. He sat on a flat, smooth rock with the water flowing behind
him, breaking over his shoulders. She straddled his lap, her palms splaying
over his pectoral muscles.
“You’re more beautiful than ever,” he said, willing her to
see herself healed. “I can’t take my eyes off you.”
She leaned forward and kissed him. His hands cupped her
breasts and he tenderly squeezed them before sweeping his thumbs over her
puckered nipples. She sighed lustily and sank onto his hard cock, taking him
deep inside her.
Darien groaned. “I love how you feel. So tight and wet. So
warm.”
Moving with him, her hips undulated and her head fell back.
He kissed her neck. Having her in his arms was pleasure enough, but with her
pussy contracting around him, his arousal soared. His lips skimmed over her
skin, just below her ear.
“I meant what I said at the church, Jade. I do love you.”
She ran her fingers through his hair and clutched his cock
tighter. He wasn’t experienced enough with using a fantasy to calm her mind to
fully understand the nuances, but he suspected that if she spoke, it would pull
her attention away from her other efforts, so he didn’t expect her to answer
him.
Though she was clearly capable of responding to him with her
body. She rode him slowly as the water cascaded over them, the gentle flow
creating a soothing sound. The sky above was cloudless and a vibrant blue. The
rustling of leaves from a summer breeze and the chirping of birds surrounded
them.
The environment was serene and sensuous and he would have
prolonged their time there as long as possible, but she gasped and his eyes
flew open.
“I’m finished,” Schaeffer said.
Darien glanced down at the stitches over Jade’s left breast.
The physician had apparently dabbed the wound with iodine, which was likely
what had caught her off guard.
Her eyes were closed and her breaths were still shallow. Schaeffer
checked her pulse and recorded it on a sheet of paper.
“A little better,” he said. “It should continue to get
stronger. Some of the cuts on her face have already healed.” He stared at her
in awe.
“Michael?” she whispered.
Darien’s jaw clenched at the other man’s name.
“He’ll be fine,” the doctor said. “He has a dislocated
shoulder, but I’ve already seen to it. Walker brought him to me earlier.”
Darien asked, “What happened to him?”
“Wraith’s horse,” Jade said, her voice weak.
He didn’t have to ask her why Michael had been at the
cottage earlier. It was Jade’s birthday, after all. And they were friends.
Darien himself had been on the way to the village to see her for the same
reason when he’d heard her screaming.
He told her, “Dr. Schaeffer says Michael is fine. Now you’ve
got to help yourself along.”
She swallowed hard. “I need to sleep.”
Not exactly what Darien wanted to hear, since it slowed the
healing process. But he could understand how exhausted she’d be.
The physician left a small bottle of morphine on the
nightstand and packed up. Then he said, “Check her pulse regularly. She’s
improving, but should be monitored closely for the next twenty-four hours.” He
studied her a moment longer before adding, “I don’t understand how the blood
soaks into her skin.”
“It’s a strange phenomenon for a human, obviously. But she
can repair herself if she has the energy—and needs the blood to do it.”
“This is…extraordinary.”
“Yes,
she
is.” Darien glanced down at her again. “She
just needs to believe it.”
“Well. There’s clearly nothing else I can do for her right
now. I’ll check by in the morning, but if anything happens this evening, send
for me.”
“Thank you. I’ll be sure to have my assistant pay your bill
immediately.”
The doctor spared one more look at Jade. “I’d like to
continue to follow her progress, if you wouldn’t mind, your Highness. And tend
to her back as soon as it’s safe to move her.”
“I’d prefer that, in fact. But she does seem to require
lengthy sleeping periods when she’s injured.”
“I’ll leave my visits to your discretion then.”
The doctor collected his bag. Darien experienced a moment of
hesitancy as his concern for Jade’s condition caused him to wonder whether he
and Sheena could help nurse her back to health this time. Her wounds were much
greater this evening than with the broken hand and wrist.
But as her breathing turned steady with sleep, and was not
as labored as it had been previously, he said, “Please come by late morning.
That should give her some time.”
“Very good.”
Darien saw Schaeffer out of the cottage and then noticed the
bottle of wine on the end table in the living room. He found a collection of
small juice glasses in her tiny kitchen and poured a healthy amount of the
merlot into one. He sat bedside, trying to gauge Jade’s progress.
The laceration on her chest still appeared angry and red,
despite the stitches. He couldn’t see if she’d made any headway with her back,
since she lay propped against the pillows. From the way she occasionally
squirmed on the bed, he deduced not.
He sipped his wine and tried to get his anxiety under
control. When he felt he could speak calmly and rationally—without his deepest
fears of whether she’d live or die lacing his tone—he leaned close to her and
spoke. It was a gamble when trying to help her recover, like every other chance
he’d taken along that vein. But perhaps his voice might keep her fighting…
“I told you I’ve regretted the result of the wars,” he said
in a low tone. “But I didn’t tell you why.”
He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “My grandfather
attempted to rally the first revolution against the humans in the late 1300s.
His reign, however, eventually passed without any success toward his mission.
Centuries later, my father felt he was in the position to take up the quest,
when settlers came to North America and the continent wasn’t so heavily
populated with humans.”
He sipped before continuing.
“Unfortunately, transporting demons from other continents to
this one in order to build an army proved challenging back then. The vampires
couldn’t resist the human blood on the ships that crossed the ocean. The
shifters couldn’t survive the captivity. And other demons had difficulty going
undetected. There were many demonic possessions during those times and most of
the passenger ships eventually carried priests on board to perform exorcisms.”
Coming across the Atlantic from Europe in the mid-1800s had
been difficult for him as well.
“The demon world hadn’t been able to form a war strategy
with all the disjointed factions and their idiosyncrasies. Not to mention their
various politics that couldn’t be reconciled or coalesced. Each group had their
own idea of the power they purportedly possessed and how significant they
thought their kind was. Unity had been impossible.”
With a low groan over the demon drama, he told her, “Then I
came of age, so to speak, around my two-hundredth birthday. I studied the
potential of the demon community for a long time and it suddenly clicked into
place for me. I realized that every type of demon also requires what humans
thrive upon—leadership. Whether the dominant political stance is fully agreed
upon or not, every species looks to a leader to guide them. I merely had to
find common ground to band them all together.”
Jade stirred and her head rolled toward him. She didn’t open
her eyes, but she said in a quiet voice, “You told me you didn’t agree with any
of this.”
He brushed his fingers over her cheek. “I didn’t. Yet it was
my destiny, according to my father, to discover the key to unleashing the
demons on the human world in order to conquer it.”
“What was the common ground?”
“You’ll cringe at the irony of this.”
She licked her dry lips, reminding him to dab balm on them,
which the doctor had also left. “Tell me.”
When he was done with the balm, he let out a hollow laugh
and said, “Freedom.”
That one word had innumerous connotations.
“For the demons,” he continued, “if we usurped human power,
the various species wouldn’t have to hide in the woods or attempt to conceal
their true identities to avoid being hunted by slayers. They could roam the
lands and take advantage of everyday life without always looking over their
shoulder. They only had to follow a few simple rules when the wars were over,
and I found a vast portion of them in agreement with my laws, because they no longer
felt threatened by the human populace.”
She was clearly groggy, but asked, “Why destroy all the
cities? Burn the buildings?”
With a sigh, Darien said, “I never advocated that sort of
mass destruction, but it went well beyond my control. Demons are simple
creatures. We don’t care for modern technology or advancements. Most of my kind
hoped to restore the continent to the way it had been even before Columbus
arrived. We like nature, not skyscrapers. Fresh air, not smog.”
“Pictures,” she said. “I’ve seen pictures of the brown layer
along the horizon. It’s kind of disgusting.”
“Doesn’t exist anymore. But then again,” he said,
reflective, “neither do a lot of the comforts your kind was used to.”
“Hard to miss what you never had.”
He tried to take solace in that statement, but it didn’t
fully register. What about the humans who
had
experienced those
comforts? What about medical equipment that would outfit a hospital capable of
taking care of someone like her at a time such as this?
Obviously, he could drive himself mad pondering these
things. Instead, he said, “Back to sleep.”
“Okay. But…keep talking. Please. Even if you’re just reading
to me. Your voice is soothing.”
After retrieving
Alice in Wonderland
from the living
room, he settled next to her again. She was soundly out, but he did as she
asked anyway.
Several days passed, with Sheena helping to serve Jade water
and broth when she was awake and him carrying her to a cool bath to help
relieve some of the sting of her burns, which she hadn’t yet been able to
heal—and they didn’t seem to be improving on their own.
The doctor advised him not to disturb the blisters or peel
the dead skin away, reiterating the layer beneath would still be too vulnerable
to infection. Unfortunately, it was difficult trying to keep her back cool and
the rest of her warm.
Darien was vigilant though. And Sheena was no less
supportive. Sometimes, she even sent him away when he was wound too tight with
emotion. He went, not because he’d ever taken orders from anyone other than his
father, but because he knew it was best for his own sanity. Sheena never
wavered in taking his place in the chair next to Jade’s bed, reading to her as
he’d done.
A week after the attack, Jade’s pulse was strong and steady,
satisfactory to Schaeffer. Her stitches had dissolved into her skin and there
wasn’t a trace of the scar. The cuts on her face and arms had also disappeared,
and her cracked rib seemed to be only mildly tender. Yet her back was still a
mess, because it didn’t heal at the accelerated rate.
In fact, both the physician and Darien noted the injury
seemed barely to heal at all. The doctor eventually cut away the skin from the
popped blisters, but the raw layer beneath continued to bleed. He gave Darien a
heavy antibiotic cream to slather on her skin, now that Jade was able to lie on
her stomach.
Another week went by. Darien stretched alongside her on the
bed one afternoon. Sheena always returned to the castle before dawn and then
came to the cottage after dusk, usually with a fresh set of sheets and another
clean comforter for Jade.
The house was quiet, save for Jade’s breathing and the snap
of the fire. He’d finished
Alice in Wonderland
and three other books
Lisette had sent over with one of the slayers, since they’d informed the
villagers Jade needed to recover without interruptions.
Darien could only imagine how agitated that made Michael.
Were he in the other man’s shoes, he’d be desperate to see her. He could
empathize with Jade’s friends, though he didn’t want anyone to become
suspicious of her healing powers.
“Your back is finally looking better.” He was able to put
aloe on it now, since the threat of infection had lessened.
“What a nightmare,” she said. “I could tell by everyone’s
face how horrible the wounds appeared.”
“We were more concerned about how painful they were for
you.”
She sighed. “Once I separated the burns from the cut on my
chest, I really didn’t want to deal with the scorched skin.”
“You tried to let it heal on its own.”
“Ordinary people survive burns.”
“Yes, well…” He brushed strands of hair from her face. She’d
folded her arms over a pillow and her cheek rested on her stacked hands as she
gazed at him. The doctor recommended that she stretch regularly to keep the new
layer of skin from healing too tight and this seemed to be a comfortable
position for her. “You’re not ordinary, so stop pretending to be.”
A sharp laugh fell from her lips. “I’m not complaining about
my ability to quickly heal. The agony level, however, could be reduced by
several notches and I’d be happier for it.”