After placing their clothes near the fireplace so they'd dry, she sat and turned the spit as needed. "You were really quick."
"I didn't have to go far." He'd scented the existence of prey on his first sortie. "I took the old one in the group, the one whose time had come." Never did he take the young ones, for that would destroy the ecosystem of which he was a part.
"My thanks to the hunter, and my thanks to the creature that gave up its life so we can live."
Naasir looked at her profile. "You are a scholar."
Somehow, she understood what he was asking. "I didn't grow up a scholar. My parents are based in an untamed part of Charisemnon's territory." When Naasir bared his teeth at the sound of her grandfather's name, she nodded, her next words blunt. "Yes, he is a disgusting excuse for an archangel."
The ugly emotion in Andromeda's tone had him growling. "Did he touch you when you were a cub?" Naasir knew of Charisemnon's appetites, that he took those not yet full-grown to his bed.
Andromeda shuddered. "No . . . but he looked at me in a way that made it feel as if I had spiders crawling over my skin." She shook herself, clearly throwing off the memory of the sensation. "My parents control a remote sector for him and it's a sprawling place full of creatures wild and free."
Her tone changed, her love for her distant homeland a second heartbeat. "I saw nature at its fiercest and most ruthless growing up. There are predators and there are prey. The lion runs the antelope to ground, and the cheetah hunts the gazelle. It is the natural order of things. It's only those who hunt without need of food that upset that order."
Feeling more comfortable as his pants started to steam from the heat, drying out fully at last, and his bare chest heated from the fire, Naasir stretched out his legs. "I'm glad you're not a vegetarian." He knew scholars who only ate leafy things, found them to be fascinating creatures. Who could live on only leafy things?
A soft laugh from the woman beside him, the one who smelled more delicious than the meat and who had beautifully uncontrollable hair he wanted to rub his face against. "Do you need blood?"
He thought about it. He'd eat some of the meat even if it was cooked, and he'd fed well during the journey to Lijuan's stronghold. "No. Not yet." Looking at her, he allowed himself to turn his eyes to her pulse.
It jumped.
Forcing himself to look away when his cock started to swell and harden, he stared into the flames. "Not from you," he said, the words coming out rough; he wanted to pin her down and sink his fangs into her at the same time as his cock. "You need your strength. I'll find someone else."
She didn't say anything, but there was a new stiffness to her as they finished watching the meat cook. When it was done, they ate in silence. He gave her the best pieces but she still didn't talk to him as she had before. Unable to figure out what he'd done wrong, he decided to talk about something else.
"Did you take your vow because your parents can't control their need to rut?"
Her head jerked up. Going so pale that her freckles stood out stark against her skin, she finished the food on her plate and got up to wash it clean. Then she went to the bed she'd made up using sheets from the cupboard, and lay down.
Not wanting to hurt her by asking more questions, he finished his own food in silence before going to stand watch at the window so she could sleep in safety.
"It's part of it." A soft confession from the bed almost ten minutes later. "But it's not all of it."
He waited; he could be patient when it was needed. Sometimes, he didn't move for hours when hunting cunning prey.
Sitting up with her arms wrapped around raised knees, Andromeda met his eyes. "It's me," she said, her tone husky and one hand tight around the wrist of the other. "I have the same carnal drives as my mother."
"You want to rut with many people?" He tried not to growl those words, though they made him want to growl--he was going to keep his mate for himself. He'd satisfy her as many times as she wanted, but no one else would be touching her.
Andromeda swallowed. "I'm afraid that's exactly what I'll become if I give in to the need inside me."
Naasir struggled to understand. "Have you never lain with anyone?"
"No," Andromeda admitted, conscious he wouldn't understand her choice. He was a vibrant, rawly sexual creature. Being with him had made her own consciously dormant sexual instincts fight to awaken; she wanted to rub up against him, wanted to taste him and be tasted by him.
Frown turning into a scowl, Naasir came over to crouch down in front of her. She'd shifted position to sit with her legs over the edge of the bed, suddenly realized he'd be able to see straight between her thighs if she wasn't careful. Her panties were still near the fireplace, the thin fabric probably dry by now.
"Does it not hurt to be alone?" he asked her, his hair sliding to the side as he cocked his head in that way he had of doing. "I like being petted. Don't you need petting?"
His honesty demanded her own. "I've made myself not need it." It had been brutal when her natural inclination was to wallow in sensation. "It's why I first picked up the sword. To put my sexual energy into controlled violence." Rather than the sadistic kind practiced by her parents.
"Fighting is like rutting." Naasir's eyes gleamed. "Not the same, but it gets the blood pumping and it makes me ready."
When her eyes dropped instinctively, she had to force them back up. She had no business checking whether or not he was aroused. "Sexual pleasure is like a drug," she said to Naasir. "You become addicted to it until it takes over your life, until pleasure alone isn't enough and the search for novelty turns brutal. At least that's how it is with my family."
"Your parents rule a sector," Naasir pointed out. "They do other things."
"It's a far-off and not very important sector." Charisemnon might have deviant appetites, but he was still an archangel and no fool. He knew his daughter and her husband weren't capable of running a large sector, so had stuck them in a small, unimportant corner politically speaking.
"They also have two stewards who can run the territory without instruction, they've been doing it for so long." The twins had been there since long before either Andromeda's mother or father had even been born. "My parents are powerful enough to be dangerous when called upon to defend the territory, but otherwise . . ."
She gripped one of her hands with the other, squeezing tight to restrain the urge to reach out and play with the silken temptation of Naasir's hair. "They've been dissolute and jaded and sexually violent since they were young." She'd read stories of her parents' debauchery, their every move chronicled because of her mother's bloodline.
"The fact they can't control their urges makes them weak." Naasir's gaze was a lightning strike, as if he'd shatter light right through her, exposing all her secrets. "A woman who has fought her natural sensual instincts for hundreds of years is not weak."
Andromeda sucked in a breath, wanting to grab at his words and hoard them close. "It requires constant control."
A shrug. "I have to exercise the same not to act too inhuman."
"Don't," she found herself saying. "Don't act with me."
Snapping his teeth at her, he grinned at her little jump. "I thought you wanted me to act civilized."
"Argh! I said that once while I was mad." She pushed at the warm, bare skin of his shoulders when he laughed, wicked amusement in his eyes. "You make me want to act totally uncivilized."
His eyes lit up. "Good." Rising to his feet, he said, "I must keep watch. Rest and think about choices."
She scowled at his back as he retook his position by the window. "Don't try to give me orders when we're not creeping about."
Glancing over his shoulder, he raised an eyebrow. "Sleep or you'll fall down when you lumber about. You haven't mastered creeping yet."
She threw a pillow at him.
Catching it, he laughed in unhidden delight, his claws apparent on the softness of the pillow. His unrepentant badness made her lips twitch as she fell back onto the bed and pull
ed up the sheet, programming her mind to wake in a few hours so Naasir, too, could rest. He was older and stronger than her, but he still needed rest. As he needed blood.
Her mood sank again as she thought of him feeding from another woman.
But that, too, was the natural order of things. Naasir was a sexual creature and women were drawn to him. There was no room in his life for a scholar who'd taken a vow of celibacy before she'd ever understood what it was to need, to so desperately want . . . to look into eyes of molten silver and see a future far more extraordinary than the one written in her blood.
*
Andromeda and Naasir left the cottage after nightfall, fully dressed in their dry clothes. Naasir had ordered her to cut up a sheet and use the strips to wrap up her feet, since her slippers had fallen apart during the final hours before dawn. She'd used the oldest sheet she could find, the one that looked as if it had been forgotten in the cupboard.
Rejuvenated by sleep and food, with her feet protected enough that stones didn't cut into her soles, she was able to trek for hours without flagging.
"Why did you rescue me?" she asked Naasir partway. "I gave Jessamy a copy of the details of my research for safekeeping."
Silver eyes glinted at her. "Stop insulting me."
Scowling when he turned back around and kept on walking, she poked at his shoulder with the tip of her sword, being very careful not to break his gorgeous, strokable . . . pettable skin. "It was a perfectly reasonable question. I'm an apprentice, and I'm not part of any court." A lie, but it was a lie she'd chosen to live . . . would live for the days of freedom that remained.
"Jessamy belongs to no court and to every court and so do all who work for her." He snarled when she went to poke him again. "I'll bite you if you're not careful."
Thighs clenching, she tried to think cold, nonsensual thoughts. Except her discipline seemed to have deserted her. When she strode past him in an effort to outrun the desire crawling over her skin, he came up next to her, drew in a long, deep breath and smirked. She held up the sword before he could open his mouth. "Say a single word and I'll put this right through you."
"You'd hurt me?"
"You're a six-hundred-year-old vampire. You'd recover."
He flashed his fangs at her and they carried on walking. It took her what felt like an eon to get her body back under control, and even then, it was a shaky control at best. Every time she saw him move, every time his scent came to her nose, every time he said something in that low, growly voice that felt like a rough caress, the sensual part of her nature sat up in quivering attention.
She stepped up the pace, pushing herself to the edge.
Naasir spotted a vehicle three hours later, but there was no way her wings would fit in it, so they continued walking till dawn began to shimmer through the sky again. Hunkering down in the shadow of a mountain, they rested in turns while the sun burned overhead.
The search squadrons appeared to have turned back, but she and Naasir couldn't afford to lower their guard. Should they be spotted by villagers who reported it to their goddess, a citadel squadron would come at them from one side, while border squadrons would angle in from the other. They'd be caught in between with no way out.
Watching Naasir sleep while she sat guard, on watch for any other signs of life, Andromeda couldn't help herself. She bit her lower lip and reached out very, very, very carefully to touch his hair. It was cool silk and far softer than she'd imagined it might be. She wanted to--
He snapped up a hand to capture her wrist, his eyes still closed. "Andi, what are you doing?"
19
Andi?
It wasn't an angelic name, not at all . . . but she liked it. "Touching your hair," she admitted, since she'd been caught red-handed.
Yawning, he released her hand. "You can." Then he seemed to fall right back to sleep.
Not quite believing it, she reached out and wove her fingers through the lusciously soft strands. He didn't wake, didn't even stir, though she had the awareness that he was like a great big cat who slept with one eye figuratively open. He was even striped like a tiger.
What?
Blinking, she looked again at his arms and face. The illusion held. She glanced up, wondering if it was a particular combination of tree branches that was causing it, but saw nothing that could explain the shadowy pattern beneath the gold-stroked deep brown of his skin. "What are you?" she whispered, but he didn't wake this time--or if he heard her, he chose to keep his secrets.
She stroked his hair for a long time, her pleasure in the act bone-deep. It felt exactly like petting a wild animal who had decided to permit her close. He wasn't tame and anyone who made that mistake would regret it, but for now, he'd decided he liked her. She knew that would change the second she took up her enforced position in an enemy court, and that, too, was inevitable.
Her heart felt as if it was being crushed in a giant metal fist.
*
Naasir had to feed that night. Leaving Andromeda to wait in the thick stand of trees next to a small village, he walked in, found his prey, fed, and walked back out. The entire exercise took him six minutes at most, but even that felt too long. He knew Andromeda could defend herself, also knew that if he didn't feed, he'd no longer be able to protect her, but it still felt wrong to feed from another when she was in his life.
Andromeda wasn't where he'd left her when he returned. Not that it took him long to track her to a small stream nearby. Her body was stiff, pretty wings patterned like a bird's held off the ground. "Done?" she asked without turning around.
"Yes."
She fell in beside him to continue their journey, but he could feel the wrongness in the air. As he'd demonstrated to her, he could put on a civilized skin when necessary. Most of the women he'd taken to his bed had never once seen him in anything close to his real skin. They had seen only the cool, cultured avatar who made them shiver with a primal fear that heightened their sexual pleasure.
It was a game that wasn't a game but a kind of a lie, and it didn't come instinctively to him. He'd learned how to pull it off only after realizing women wouldn't otherwise allow him near their soft bodies and delicate skin.
Don't act with me.
Andromeda might jump when he playfully scared her, but she hadn't flinched once when it counted. She'd been happy he'd brought her meat, had let him touch her with his claws, hadn't looked at him with terrified abhorrence just because he wasn't like other men. No, she looked at him as if she wanted to pet him and bite him and play with him.
Except tonight. Tonight, she wouldn't look at him at all.
"I chose a man."
She stumbled over something in her path, righted herself. "Oh." A long pause before she said, "I didn't think you liked men that way." Her voice was tight, as if she wasn't breathing properly.
"Food is food." As long as it wasn't diseased like the blood that ran in the veins of Lijuan's reborn, it would keep him alive.
Andromeda shot him a knife-edged glance that made him happy his mate had claws--and angry she was using them on him when he hadn't done anything wrong. "I've heard the women in the Refuge talk about how sensual it is when you feed from them."
Naasir shrugged. "Cooperative food is better than noncooperative food." When he needed to hunt, he went after meat prey. For blood, he took no one who wasn't consenting. "But the Refuge food is too cooperative," he grumbled. "How much blood do they think I can drink?"
Mouth falling open, Andromeda shook her head. She'd braided her hair again so it was as restrained as possible, but her eyes sparkled with wildness. Then she began to laugh, clapping her hand over her mouth to stifle the sound. Fascinated, he just watched those bright, sparkling eyes. Every time she tried to speak, she started to laugh again, so he just let her until she'd tired herself out. And he enjoyed her pleasure.
"What's so funny?" he asked when she finally spluttered into giggles.
"All those women," she whispered, eyes crinkling up again. "They boast about how
you feed from them, the implication being that you find each one deeply attractive--and you think of them as food!" She doubled over again, shoulders shaking as she tried futilely to stifle the sounds.
Not that it mattered; there was no one to hear but him.
Grinning at the wicked glee he'd glimpsed in her, he stroked his hand down the center of her wings in a petting gesture. "They have different-tasting blood," he told her. "I think it has to do with their diet. I like the variety. Like going to different restaurants."
She fell to the ground, she was laughing so hard by now. Tears leaked out of her eyes. "Stop it," she managed to say between her giggles before setting her sword on the grassy earth and clamping both hands over her mouth as she lay on her back.
Straddling his fierce, sparkling, delicious-smelling mate with his knees on either side of her thighs, he braced his body on his palms above her. "Shall I tell you a secret?"
Laughter still holding her captive, she shook her head, but he could tell she wanted to know.
He levered himself down until he was bare inches from the lush-lipped mouth over which she still had her hands. "If Dmitri hadn't taught me to be civilized," he whispered, "I'd probably have eaten some of the women by now."
When Andromeda's eyes went huge, he realized he'd made a mistake, shown her too much of his nature. About to push off her before she screamed or acted terrified because he wasn't sure he could handle the hurt, he was held in place by her grip on his T-shirt.
Hauling him down, she whispered, "Are you making fun?"
He knew he should lie, but he didn't want to be with anyone who expected him to hide himself. Janvier and Ashwini didn't hide themselves from each other. Honor knew all of Dmitri's secrets. "No," he said. "I'm fully capable of eating a person, but I'd have to hate them and be really hungry." He thought about telling her what he'd done to the angel who'd created him, decided to see how she took this first truth.
Tiny lines formed between her eyebrows. "Do you think of me as food?" It was a snarl.