Shadowfever

My mouth is suddenly busy. By the time I get around to finishing my sentence, I have no idea what I was going to say.

We end up in the shower, an enormous affair of Italian marble and shower heads on all walls. A dozen feet long, six feet wide, it has a bench that’s just the right height. I think we stay in there for days. He brings in food and I eat in the shower. I wash him, slide my hands over his beautiful body.

“When you die, do your tattoos disappear?” Wet, his hair is darker, glossy, his skin a deep bronze. Water runs over muscle, sprays off his erection. He’s always hard.

“Yes.”

“That’s why they were different.” I frown. “Do you come back exactly how you were when you died the first time?”

“Were you Pri-ya the entire time?”

I gasp and try to duck my head so he can’t see my eyes. My eyes betray me sometimes, no matter how hard I try, especially when my feelings are intense.

He grabs my head and holds it with two fistfuls of my hair, forcing me to look at him.

“I knew it—you weren’t!” His mouth is on mine, he has me against the wall. I can’t breathe and I don’t care. He is exultant. “How long?” he demands.

“What happens when you die?” I counter.

“I come back.”

“Duh, obviously. How? Where? Do you eventually just stand up from your ashes again or something?”

I hear a rattle and suddenly he’s on the floor, head back, muscles rippling, fighting to remain a man. He’s losing the battle. He has talons. Black fangs slide from his mouth, gouging into his skin. I can tell he doesn’t want to turn, but something I asked him has made him frenzied.

I can’t stand watching him struggle. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to help Barrons. I answer, talk to him to keep him grounded in the here and now. “I knew what was happening from the moment you asked me what I wore to the prom.” I drop to my knees beside him, take his head in my arms and cradle him at my breast. His face is half beast, half man. “I began to surface. It was like I was there but trying not to be there. I’m here, Jericho. Stay with me.”

Later we sleep. Or I do. I don’t know what he does. I’m exhausted and warm and feel safe for the first time in a long time, drifting off in Barrons’ underground world, next to the king of beasts.

I wake to him pushing into me from behind. We’ve had sex so many times, so many ways, I can barely move. I’ve come so many times I think it’s impossible for me to even want to come again, but then he’s inside me and my body tells a different story. I need so badly I ache. I slip my hand down and, as soon as I touch myself, I come. He shoves into me deep, rocking into my climax. I’m on my side. He’s tucked me into his body, spooned close. His arms are around me, his lips on my neck. Teeth graze my skin. When I stop shuddering, he pulls out and immediately I want him again. I push back with my rump and he’s back. He goes slow, so slow it’s torture. He thrusts, I clench. He withdraws, I lay tense, waiting. Neither of us says a word. I barely breathe. He stops and stays perfectly still for a while but not to tease. He likes being hard inside me. Connected, we lie there in silence. I don’t want the moment to end.

But it does, and when we’re separate, we don’t speak for a long time. I watch the shadows flickering on a famous painting on the wall. He’s not asleep. I can feel him back there, aware.

“Do you ever sleep?”

“No.”

“That must be hell.” I love sleeping. Curling up, napping, dreaming. I need to dream.

“I dream,” he says coolly.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Never pity me, Ms. Lane. I like what I am.”

I roll over in his arms, touch his face. I let myself be tender. Trace his features, slide my fingers into his hair. He seems both put off and entranced by the way I’m touching him. I rearrange my head to accommodate the advantages of never sleeping. There are a lot. “How do you dream if you don’t sleep?”

“I drift. Humans need to shut down to let go. Meditation accomplishes the same thing, lets the subconscious play. That’s all you need.”

“What happened to your son?”

“Aren’t you question girl?” he mocks.

“He’s why you want the Sinsar Dubh.”

I feel the sudden violence in his body. It gusts like a sirocco, and just like that I’m inside his head and we’re in a desert and I wonder with a strange sense of duality in which I am him and I am me why it always seems to come back to this place for him. Then …