“I do have an idea. I’ve finally made a breakthrough.” He took a thick book off a top shelf and splayed it open on his desk. As he flipped pages, she realized it was a scrapbook, filled with notes, pictures, clippings from newspapers, even, and from what she could tell, most of it had to do with Pestilence. “I believe this is a clue.” He drew out the parchment he’d had her inspect the other day. “I’ve translated the text, and it basically says that disease is cured by death.”
“Well… yeah. Death sort of cures everything.”
He shook his head. “A few days ago, I found this in a demon temple dedicated to Pestilence’s worship. It was on an altar that wasn’t there the last time I checked, and it was wrapped around exact metal and wooden replicas of Deliverance and a scythe… my symbol.”
“Pestilence has a temple dedicated to him?”
“We all do.” He said it like a normal person would confirm that of course they had milk in the fridge. Like, who didn’t? He traced his finger over a photo taped to the next page. “Beneath the replicas was this writing carved into the stone altar. It’s a warning that Deliverance, if wielded by me at a precise moment, will restore Pestilence to his weakness, which, in evil demon terms, means he’ll become Reseph again.”
“So that’s it? You stab him and he’s better?”
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He paused, his gaze focused on the parchment. “We forged Deliverance so that stabbing him in the heart will kill him. Or any of us. But if this new information is to be believed, a perfectly timed jab of the blade will return him to Reseph. We just need to find out what that ‘precise moment’ is.” He tapped the writing with his forefinger. “At least the first part of the mystery is solved.” On his arm, the horse tattoo kicked. He looked down and ran his finger over the shoulder, and the lines seemed to settle down. So weird.
But he’d just given her the opening she needed to get her hands on him. “Can I touch it?”
His head snapped back. “What?”
“The horse. Can I touch it?”
“Why?”
Because in the Horsemen erotica it says you feel everything the horse feels in corresponding parts of your body. Oh, yes, she could use this to arouse him, to make him crave more of her touch.
“It’s fascinating,” she said truthfully. She might have ulterior motives, but she was also curious as hell. “Your other tattoos are multicolored and metallic. This one… it’s like a henna tattoo. Just lines, but it moves.”
“Because it’s alive,” he said. “Surely you’re aware that our horses are part of us.”
“Yes, and that’s what’s so interesting.” She stepped closer. “May I?”
He looked at her like she’d asked if she could chop his head off, but finally, he gave a curt, sharp nod and held out his arm. It was odd how the other tattoos were layered on top of each other, which should have caused a jumbled mess, but somehow they were distinct, multi-dimensional. But the horse lay flat on his skin with no other tattoos beneath or on top.
She took Thanatos’s hand, palm up, in hers, and his entire body tensed. Hers did too, as the inked bones on his wrist took on lives of their own, and in her head, she got their story—how they’d gotten there, and oh, wow… this Horseman was holding on to some serious pain.
She saw the female demon who was responsible for putting the tats on his skin. Regan wasn’t sure how it worked, but this demon took memories and feelings out of her customers’ heads and put them on their bodies. But why? These tattooed bones told her so much… the death he’d caused in one day. Demons… a demon war. He’d fought on the side of humans, had taken dead demons to a pit to be rendered down to their bones.
Her stomach rolled, and quickly, she shut off her unwelcome gift.
“You okay, Aegi? You’re turning green.”
“Yeah.” She cleared her throat of the raspiness. “Just overwhelmed. You know, being here with a legend.” Oh, gag, she sounded like a teeny-bopper mooning over Justin Bieber. But hey, flattery got you everywhere, right?
He made an indecipherable grunting noise, and she went back to what she was doing, which was trying to seduce the guy. Or, at least, le, aflattery garn the key to seducing him.
Tentatively, she touched the tip of her finger to the horse’s long neck. Even though she’d shut off her gift, faint stirrings of confusion, annoyance, and anger filtered in, but she couldn’t tell if it was coming from the horse or from Thanatos.
She traced the lines, working her way over the animal’s ears, jaw, nose, then down the front of his throat. When she slowly drew her finger along its chest, Thanatos inhaled harshly, and his pulse picked up, hammering into her thumb. He liked this, so she lingered, stroked. In the silence marked only by the crackle of the fire, she eased her fingertip along the beast’s belly and then up, over its back and down around the curve of its rump.
Again, she stroked, feeling the textures in Thanatos’s skin, the hard, pulsing veins that shot through the stallion’s lines. And under her thumb, his pulse quickened more.
“What are you doing?”
She blinked up at him innocently. “Tracing the lines. It’s exquisite. Can the horse feel it?”
A muscle in his jaw leaped. “Yes.”
“So he’s aware that I’m touching him?”
Another leap of muscle. “Yes.”
“Does he like it?”
“Yes.”
Hiding a smile, she ran her thumb over its belly again, and Thanatos hissed softly. “If your horse—Styx, right? If he was standing here, would he let me pet him?”
“He’s ill-tempered.”
“Like his master?”
“You’re funny.” He watched her fingers play, his throat flexing with his frequent swallows. “He seems to like… this. So he will probably allow your touch in person.”
What about his master? She didn’t say anything, but she did decide to forge a new path and see how far he’d let her walk down it. Pretending to be in awe of his other markings—which wasn’t hard, since she kind of was—she slid her hand up to the image of a bow and arrow that was half-hidden under his sleeve.
“And what’s this?”
“It’s the weapon I used to kill the man who raised me,” he said, his voice flat, toneless, and it turned the warm room cold. He pulled his arm out of her grip. “Enough. It’s late.”
She glanced at her watch, and sure enough, it was two in the morning. “Do you mind if I take one of these books to read in bed?”
“Can I make a suggestion?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Sure.”
A wicked, crooked smile lifted his lips as he reached for the Horsemen erotica. “This. In case you need to stay warm.”
In case you need to stay warm? What kind of crap was that? Than was an idiot. He didn’t need to be playing with fire, and Regan was a damned inferno.
What he needed was to get the hell away from her. He spun around, but she stopped him with no more than a word.
“Wait.”
He stared at the doorway, because hell if he was turning back to look at her. “What?”
“How does it end?” Her voice was soft as a whisper, just like her touch. “The story, I mean.”
“I told you. She has a bunch of kids, and—”
“No. Your part of it. After you were done with her. When you came back out into the tavern, and Reseph was with all those females. Did you share stories?”
“You mean, do I kiss and tell? Is that what you want to know?”
“Sort of.”
He had no idea what got into him, but in an instant, he was in front of her, one hand gripping the back of her head, the other at her waist as he tugged her to him. Then his lips were on hers, and his head was spinning, his blood was thundering through his ears, and her eager mouth was open to him. Their tongues met in a hot, wet tangle, and his erection was a throbbing rod of need against her soft belly.
He pulled away, enjoying the way her eyes had glazed over. “Do I kiss and tell? Guess you’ll have to find out for yourself.”
This time he stalked out of there, and this time, he intended to stay away. If five thousand years had taught him anything, it was that he could tease himself to the point of insanity and still come away without getting his dick wet.
There’d been a time when he’d taken himself to the edge, had drowned himself in females just to see how far he could go without plunging deep inside them. But he’d been young and dumb then. He’d enjoyed kissing, working females up, and for the first hundred years, he’d played games that had been… cruel. He’d used his status as a Horseman to bring a female home, and then he’d kiss and tease, and never once allow them the ultimate pleasure. It had been a way to torture them both. The females were always demons, and in a way, he figured he was torturing them for their part in his curse.
The males he just killed outright.
He stalked to his room, which he kept cold as the air outside. He stripped, relishing the blast of freezing temperatures. His skin shrank, but naturally, his c**k wouldn’t care if he dipped it in liquid nitrogen. It wanted relief.
It wanted Regan.
Stupid bastard.
He fell onto his bed, hissing at the icy covers against his fevered skin. He sprawled out, staring at the rafters high above.
Even Limos was coming unraveled. The human male had thrown her off balance. That had to be the reason she was suddenly a bundle of nerves. She could be impulsive and flighty, yes, but raw panic and fear? Never. But she’d been terrified during the confrontation with Lucifer, and he’d seen the same terror in her eyes after she’d destroyed Sartael. Was her fear for Arik? Had she fallen for him? God, he hoped not. That would be a doomed relationship, for sure. The human wanted her—Thanatos could see it in his eyes, and a male like that wasn’t going to settle for heavy-petting.
Then again, that was what Than had to settle for. His lips tingled in remembrance of Regan’s kiss, and he palmed his cock, so worked up that his h*ps bucked at the touch, punching up into the ring of his fist. He wasn’t going to last long at all.
He didn’t want to imagine himself with Regan, but she was there in his mind anyway, na**d, on her hands and knees as he pumped into her from behind. Her tight, wet heat gripped him, and he groaned. He squeezed his shaft, building sensation, and then he dropped his palm to his sac, wondering what it would feel like to slap against her swollen flesh.
Slowly, he slid his hand back up, now imagining that he’d flipped her and was driving into her in the way a male made a female his—face to face, mouths fused, hands clasped. He knew he shouldn’t think that way, because there were some fantasies that were too hazardous to even consider. When he dreamed of having his own female, depression darkened his mood and dangerous ideas popped into his head.
Sometimes, at his lowest points, he thought he should just f**k a woman and get it over with. His Seal was going to break eventually, so why put off the inevitable? He wanted sex, dammit. But there was the problem; if he was going to break his Seal and bring down all of mankind, he wasn’t going to screw some random female. He wanted one to love. Which created the next problem: how could he possibly make love to a woman he cared about, knowing that as soon as it was over, he’d turn evil and she would probably be the first to die by his hand?
Yep, it was a nasty circle, a catch-22 he’d never get out of.
Viciously, he jerked his thoughts in another direction, flipped the imaginary Regan over again, and plowed into her as he pinned her against a wall. She was whimpering in pleasure as he hammered into her, and yeah, that was better. Keep it impersonal.
His c**k kicked in his palm, reminding him that this was as impersonal as it got. Him, alone in bed, with only his hand as his date. Awesome.
Fuck.
He snarled, pumped his fist from root to tip, pausing to smooth the drop of p**cum around the smooth head. The sensitivity multiplied, and he pretended his thumb was Regan’s tongue.
That did it. His cl**ax brought his h*ps off the bed and made a strangled groan rip from his throat. Hot jets of liquid shot onto his stomach and chest as his balls clenched.
The difference was that the empty bed thing was, for her, only temporary. Eventually, she’d go back to her human life, to her human job, her human house. And if she wanted, she’d find a human male to fill her bed.
And fill her.
Thanatos snarled, spun, and put his fist through the wall.
Nineteen
You will forever be a liability to your own race. You belong with us now.
Arik hadn’t bothered to argue with Limos or Ares. She’d gated him back to her house, left him to shower, and he’d numbed out under the hot spray, his mind drawing a blank on all the reasons they were wrong.
All he’d wanted for his entire life was to fight for what was right. He’d started by defending his sister and mother. He’d moved on to join the military to fight for his country. Eventually, when the R-XR had tapped him, he fought for the entire human race. The idea that he was now a liability, a threat, even, left him dazed. The situation wasn’t acceptable, and somehow, he had to fix it.
He threw on the jeans and a white T-shirt that were in the duffle that was still in Limos’s bedroom, and then in a bizarre move, Hekili had called him to the kitchen, thrust a beer and a towel into Arik’s hands and motioned toward the water. As Arik started down the steps to the beach, Hekili stopped him.
“She is in one of her… moods. Help her before she hurts herself.”
Arik had no idea what the warg was talking about, and he didn’t have a chance to ask because Hekili took off like his kitchen was on fire.