Embrace of the Damned (20 page)

Broder pushed the shaman away violently and turned from him, taking a moment to rein in his rage before he did something that would prevent him from getting the answers he needed. A second later he turned back.

The man was gone.

“Shaman!” he bellowed in the direction of the wrecked vehicle.

No answer. No sign of him. He’d vanished.

Jessa was curled up on the couch near the fire with her legs tucked under her when Broder returned later. He tossed the keys to the motorcycle onto the coffee table with a ringing clatter.

She looked from the keys to his face. “You didn’t catch him, right?”

“I caught him, at least for a little while. He used magick to escape.”

“Did you find out anything useful?” She sat up a little straighter.

His gaze caught hers and she had a moment to see bare torment in them before he looked away. “Nothing much that pertains to you.” His voice sounded hard and cold. “He got away before I could get anything useful out of him.”

She took a moment to answer. “Okay.”

“I did find out the order came from the highest person in the seidhr power structure. That’s definitely pertinent information.”

Something in her stomach twisted. She paused, twisting the edge of the blanket over her lap in her hands. “In the excitement over everything else, I totally forgot about this until this afternoon, but right before the demon attacked me in the parking garage I had a strange encounter with a man near the elevators. He told me to be careful—that ‘they’ knew who I was and that I was being watched.”

She had Broder’s complete attention now. The raw flash she’d seen in his eyes a moment before was now replaced with the more protective look she’d grown accustomed to seeing when he looked at her.

“He wasn’t human, I don’t think,” she added.

“Was he a shaman?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Is it possible he could have been … Blight?”

“What would make you think that?”

“He scared me and I got angry. When I showed my temper, his eyes went black … totally black, just like the demon who attacked me. But this demon seemed to be warning me, protecting me. Are there good ones? I didn’t see any fangs, but the eyes … He said his name was Dmitri.”

Broder went very still and his eyes narrowed. “Dmitri. I haven’t heard that name in a very long time.”

“So you know him?”

“Yes.”

She waited. And waited. Finally she sighed. “Do you think you could enlighten me a little?”

“Not until I know for sure it was him.”

She stood and faced off with him. “I’m sick of being treated like a child.
Tell me
what you know, Broder. Haven’t I proven I can handle it?”

He stared down at her with that forbidding, don’t-fuck-with-me-or-I-
will
-fuck-with-you way he had. It didn’t make her flinch and it didn’t scare her. She had him wrapped around her finger and she was just starting to realize that.

She
had
him
wrapped around her little finger. Big, strong, immortal warrior. She owned his ass … and a fine ass it was, too.

Feeling pretty damn self-satisfied and confident, Jessa raised an eyebrow. “Well?”

“Many years ago”—he paused and thought about it—“
centuries
ago, there was a high-level demon who went rogue. His name was Dmitri.”

“Went rogue?”

“He decided he didn’t want to play his role in bringing about Ragnarök.”

“Oh. I didn’t know they had free will.”

“The agents in the upper levels of the Blight hierarchy have great intelligence and free will. Dmitri was one such agent.” He rubbed a hand over his mouth. “He disappeared. We all thought the Blight had killed him.”

“So he’s a good guy?”

“No agent of the Blight is a good guy.” He paused. “But he could be considered an ally. One we can’t really trust.”

She gave him a look of indignant ire, although why she felt the need to defend a demon was beyond her. “He warned me I was in danger.”

“Then did nothing as you walked right into it.”

Her thoughts strayed to the underhanded shaman. “Guess I can’t trust anyone these days.”

“Wrong. You can trust me.”

She relaxed her stance and looked up into his face. He was studying her with that characteristic intensity. “Can I? You want to fuck me.”

“I do want to fuck you,
skatten min
. I want your bare skin moving against mine. I want to smell the trace of perfume at the nape of your neck. I want my hands on you, making you moan.” He paused, his gaze never leaving hers. “I want to be inside you.”

Whoa.

A tremble went through her body as she reacted to his words and the intention in his eyes. She took a step back from him and he caught her, dragging her up against his chest. “Tell me you don’t want those things, too, Jessa.”

She opened her mouth to say she didn’t and her lower lip quivered. It wasn’t because she was about to cry—it was because she was having trouble saying no.

He slid his hand around to cup the nape of her neck and dropped his mouth to hers. Right before his lips touched hers, she thought she heard him whisper, “I don’t deserve you,” but then his mouth touched her and she dissolved into lust and she forgot all about it.

For a man who hadn’t been with a woman for a thousand years, Broder had some moves. His kisses made her body ignite and her brain lose at least half its capacity for rational thought. His mouth slid slowly over hers, as though savoring the flavor of her.

She wanted his tongue to penetrate her lips and stroke up against her tongue, but he denied her, teasing her instead. He nipped at her lower lip, dragging it through his teeth slowly until she feared spontaneous combustion.

If she didn’t get away from him now, she’d end up on the
couch and the promise she’d made to herself would be broken.

Making a sound of torture, she broke the kiss, though she couldn’t quite pull away from his embrace. “Don’t you understand? I can’t do this, Broder. I’m not this way. I don’t have sex with men that I don’t have emotional ties with.”

Pain clouded his eyes, chasing away the lust. “You think I have no emotion for you?”

“I think you want to fuck me.”

He stared down at her for a long moment. “I want more than that. I want you in every way. When I look at you, I see—” He broke off, swearing in some foreign language under his breath.

“What do you see?” she pressed.

“When I call you
skatten min
, it is not just an endearment. You are a treasure, beautiful and precious. If I could lock you away in this keep forever to protect you and keep you close, I would do it.” He looked as if he were about to say something else, but instead he released her, turned away, and stalked from the room.

Jessa stood motionless for a moment, her body still singing from the memory of his touch and his nearness, then she rushed after him. She skidded into the foyer to see him disappearing upstairs and took the steps two at a time to get to the top. The corridor was empty when she reached it and his bedroom door was closed.

Standing in front of it, she wilted. Damn it, what had he been about to say?

Broder stood on the other side of his bedroom door, knowing that Jessa was in the corridor. He could feel her presence through to the center of his bones.

When he saw her, he saw his future. That was what he’d wanted to say to her, but he hadn’t been able to form the words. It was the truth, but it was an impossible one.

He had forever to live, yet he had no future.

Correction. He had a long future filled with killing, with
death, with punishment. He had a future in which he would go on wishing for his own death, wishing that someone would kill him.

Loki had said Jessa was his reward, but really she was just more punishment. By showing Broder what he couldn’t have, Loki had only twisted the knife. Loki had known Broder would fall in love with her and Loki would experience deep pleasure when he took her away.

With every breath Jessa took, she reminded him of everything he wanted, but could never have. With every move she made he regretted his past and longed to be free to share a future filled with life and love with her.

“What’s it like, being a Valkyrie?”

Jessa and Halla had taken blankets up onto one of the battlements and were lying in an afternoon of rare sunshine. It was warm, but just barely. Jessa was pretending she was on a beach somewhere.

They’d spent a grueling morning at training and it had left Jessa wondering about what Halla’s life must be like. They really never talked about anything personal, just the business at hand and that was usually training.

Halla shrugged and played with the straw stuck into her glass of soda. “The life of a Valkyrie is not much different from that of a witch, except our power lies in physical strength instead of magick. Like the seidhr, we live communally, study together, train together. In our case it’s a little like an … what is it called … an all-female boarding school.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“It can be, but it’s also very hard work. We train hard since we’re mortal, unlike the Brotherhood. We can be killed if we’re injured badly enough.”

“So you battle the Blight like the Brotherhood does, but have a higher casualty rate. Seems unfair.”

Halla looked into her drink and poked a melting ice cube. “I’d rather have the risk of death than to be living in eternal
torment like the Brotherhood. We have free will; we have our own lives. We love as we will, take vacations, go to the movies if we so choose. The Brotherhood can do none of this. They truly are the damned.”

“Broder and Erik sure don’t have a sense of humor, that’s for certain.”

“You wouldn’t, either, in their situation. To live at the whim of a god like Loki is not an easy thing.”

“Have you met Loki?”

Halla rolled onto her back and sighed. “No, and I’m glad. He’s a self-centered bastard. You see him sometimes, in magazines and in the background of celebrity TV shows.”

Jessa rose up on her elbows. “Really? Is he an actor or something?”

“No, but he runs in those circles. He’s very wealthy and handsome, and he has a certain charm. What is the word … charisma? I guess Hollywood is the closest he can get to Asgard. He was banished from that place, you know, and he loved it there.”

Jessa nodded. She’d been reading up on her Nordic myth. “Yes, for killing Baldur, the god of truth and light. Loki sounds like a real douche bag.”

“Baldur died because Loki wanted to show off his cleverness. Loki is all ego and immaturity. Thor loved Baldur, as did all the gods, so he banished Loki to Earth and set upon him the task of the Brotherhood.”

“Which Loki thinks is beneath him.”

“A god demoted to that of jail keeper. Yes, he believes it below him.”

“So he punishes the inmates.”

Halla nodded. “Every opportunity he has.”

Jessa was silent for a while, thinking of Loki and the Brotherhood. She turned over onto her stomach and adjusted her sunglasses. Halla had closed her eyes. “Do you know what Broder did to deserve a punishment like the Brotherhood?”

Halla rolled to her stomach, too, and took off her sunglasses. “The original crimes of each of the brothers are
well-guarded secrets. I don’t know what Broder did, but it involved blood, death. All of the original crimes are heinous things. These men may have found … what’s the word … relegation?”

“I think you might mean redemption.”

“Ah, yes,
redemption
sometime throughout the years, but none of them were good men back then. They were all murderers.”

Jessa tried to imagine Broder as a man like the ones Halla was describing and shivered. He was protective and caring now, but it wasn’t such a big leap to make.

Jessa stepped out into the morning air and inhaled the fresh scent, closing her eyes as it cleansed her lungs. It was a nicer-than-average morning, a bit warmer and clearer of mist. The view, even from where she stood near the front door of the tower, as she’d taken to calling it, was spectacular.

Even better, that morning she’d woken to a box of Jujyfruits on her bedside table. Smiling, she sipped her coffee. Broder might be as tough as steel on the outside, but the man possessed a compassionate heart.

She hadn’t slept well the night before—no big surprise with everything that was going on in her life at the moment. When she’d wondered where Broder had gone, Halla had grunted at her over her coffee and told her to check outside.

The sound of a tool on metal drew her attention to the front gates.
Ah.
There he was. The view had just improved tenfold. Broder was fixing the gate the shaman had busted through. He wore only jeans and a pair of black work boots. Her gaze skated appreciatively over the bunch and flex of the muscles in his arms, back, and chest as he moved.