"You shut up," she snarled. "Pain and humiliation, my ass. You keep talking like this and I'll clean your clock so hard you'll wish that you were back in the torture chamber."
"Nicola." Gabriel felt appalled by her threats.
"I mean it," she insisted. "I didn't save you to listen to your bitching and moaning and watch you kill yourself. I did it because… because if I can keep going, then so can you."
She did care for him. "Tell me how."
"Well, for one thing you can stop trying to be so goddamn noble about everything," she snapped. "The Renaissance days or whatever it was like when you were human? They're over. If you want to survive in this day and age, then you have to toughen up and be smart. You deal with the murderers, thieves, and liars. Yes, it's awful, but that's the way it is. The world's full of them. You have to think the way they do. For all you know, I could be one of them."
"I do not think I am strong enough." Gabriel could taste her tears, hear the swallowed sobs beneath her sharp words. That seemed far worse than the blow she had given him. "They didn't break my body, Nicola. They broke my heart."
"You're breaking mine now." Her voice trembled. "Don't you know that? I know you're blind, but can't you feel it, what's happening between us?"
Gabriel kept his hands at his sides. "What I feel is wrong."
"Giving up, that's wrong. I lost everything that mattered to me ten years ago, along with everyone I loved, and I haven't thrown in the towel yet. I've still got a heart, don't I? It works, most of the time. Jesus, I hit you. You're making me nuts. Come here." She put her arms around him and pulled him down so that their foreheads touched. "I'm not giving up on you. There's a reason we found each other. Let's find out what it is."
Hopelessness dragged at him. "I did not intend to make you angry."
"Guys never do." She slowly rolled her brow against his. "Look, we can be strong together, right? We're survivors, you and me."
"Survivors."
"Exactly. So the world fucked us over; who cares? It doesn't have to be all about that. We're free." She grabbed a handful of his shirt. "Once I find the Madonna and take care of that, we can go wherever we want. We can get away from the holy freaks and the Kyn. We can live. We're good together, aren't we?"
He was infecting her with his despair. She was healing him with her dignity. Which one of them would succeed?
"I think," he said, very slowly, "that of the two of us, you are the noble one."
"You're crazy." She brushed her mouth over his in one of her quick, startling kisses. "And you're shaking." She turned her head and drew his down to the wound in her neck. "Take it."
Her blood-wet his lips, sweeter than any honey, more tempting than any wine. "I fed on one of the shooters."
"So don't take much." She pressed her slim body against his. "I like it. It felt good when you do it in the forest. I want to feel that way again."
Her embrace and her softness proved stronger than his self-disgust. He drank from the bleeding wound, tasting her, savoring her as he felt the violent coldness inside him retreat. Madness and sorrow evaporated, replaced by a grinding, demanding need for more of her flesh. That hunger became so intense that his cock swelled between them and pressed into her flat belly.
He put her at arm's length. "If you despise me as much as I do myself, you should go now."
"Not going to happen. We need each other." Her hands slipped under the edge of his shirt, and she rubbed herself subtly against the ridge of his penis. "Every time I'm near you, I don't know whether I should kiss you or jump on you. I couldn't help myself in the shower. You feel it too, don't you?"
He gave his heart to her in that moment. Loved her, a human woman, as he would never love another. And as he stooped to pick her up in his arms, he found that he didn't care.
"Hello. Blind man." Her arms went around his neck. "You're going to walk into a tree."
"I know where I am going." He carried her back to the oak where he had found her, and lowered her onto the bed of moss there.
Gabriel wanted to rip her clothing apart and feast on her body, and feared he might do just that if he fell back into the darkness. He reached out with his talent, dismissing the moths and summoning the quietest creatures in the forest, the patient watchers who formed and wove their hungry threads into silken traps.
"Do spiders frighten you?" he asked as he stretched out beside her.
"No, I…" She went still. "Uh, Gabriel?"
He followed the bridge of her nose with his finger, gliding over the curves of her lips and chin and sliding down the slope of her throat.
"Did you ask me that because there are about two hundred spiders hanging over us?"
He nuzzled her hair. "I want to see you," he murmured against her ear. "Through their eyes, I can." He sent for a very specific forest dweller, calling them from their burrows in the ground and under the tree bark.
"Does this seeing-through-them thing involve their crawling on me?"
"No." He took her hands and stretched them out over her head as he rolled on top of her. "I'm going to do that."
The spiders showed him the long lines of beetles marching up the trunk of the oak tree, flashing green bio-luminescent light from their abdomens until there was enough to illuminate Nicola's face and body.
"Your eyes shoot laser beams, too?" she asked, looking up.
"Fireflies," he told her, fascinated to see that she had a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose. What other parts of her were dusted with these little gold specks? She shifted under him and tried to pull her hands free, but he held her tight. "Be still."
"I can't." She lifted her hips, driving them into his. "I've been wanting you all day. All my life. I don't want to wait another second. Hurry up."
"Shhhh." He put his mouth on hers, opening her lips with his tongue and tasting her with slow, deep strokes. He lifted his head and breathed in her gasp. "You will have me."
Gabriel stripped off her T-shirt, taking her bra with it, jerking open his own shirt so that he could feel her breasts against his skin. He peeled her jeans down and off her legs, inserting his hands between her knees to coax her thighs apart. The pants she had borrowed from Jean Laguerre were loose enough for him to shake off, but he couldn't wait now, not smelling the delicious dampness of her exposed sex. He reached down to push them out of the way, taking his cock and guiding it to her.
She felt plump and hot and meltingly sweet against the dry, tight bulb of his penis head, sending a surge of answering wetness through his shaft. It had been so long—too long—since he had put himself in a woman's body that Gabriel feared he would spill his seed before he fully penetrated her.
"Oh, my man."
Through the many he saw that she was looking down at their bodies, her eyes narrow and her bottom lip caught between her teeth. He watched her face as he worked in the head of his cock, finding the angle of her sheath and pushing in past muscles tight with nerves. Her arousal eased the way, but the rest of her body was as tightly wound as his.
"Take me as you did with your breasts, your mouth," he said, kissing her brow.
"No soap," she whispered. "No water."
He moved his hand to cup her sex. "Feel how wet you are?" His fingers made a vee around his cock, massaging her with her own moisture. "So soft and smooth."
Gabriel exposed her clit and tucked two fingers on either side of it, pressing and stroking the insides of her labia but not touching it. At the same time he sank deeper into her, making her take more of him, feeling her lower labia stretch around the thickest part of his shaft.
Nicola had caught her breath; now she seemed to forget how to release it. Her eyelids lowered and opened, and she stretched under him, arching and tightening until he impaled her fully, and then she uttered a moan that nearly sent him over the edge.
Not yet, not yet.
He recoiled, pulling out of her until only his head remained embedded in her, and then thrust back inside her with one long, smooth stroke, angling higher, catching the tiny bulge of her clit and dragging at it. Their body hair tangled and her hips rolled as she shuddered under him, not there yet but speeding toward it.
Gabriel wanted to tell her how lovely she was, how good she felt on him, but the words would not come. His balls had tightened as much as his throat. So he showed her with his fingers and mouth and penis, working her as sweetly and slowly as she clasped him, putting his mouth to her breasts and his teeth to her nipples, licking the drop of blood from her lip before giving her his tongue and kissing her as deeply as he was fucking her.
Nicola thrashed under him, trying to force him to thrust faster, but he held her down and buried himself inside, feeling the head of his cock nudging the mouth of her womb. It was agony not to move, but he brought his hand to her breast and cradled it, holding it up for his mouth. He held her like that until she trembled and whimpered, and then he put his dents acérées to her breast, grazing her skin with them before he sucked hard, and then drew back and drove his cock into her as deeply as he could, once, twice, three times.
Pleasure so sharp it might have been pain surged out of him and gushed inside her, mingling their fluids and wrenching cries from both of them. Then Gabriel pulled out and up, working the beating pulse of her clit against the base of his shaft until she came again, the contractions dragging his cock back inside her body and milking the last drops of semen from him.
Gabriel slipped from her and eased to her side, his hand still cradling her breast, his softening cock caught between her thighs.
An eternity later, Nicola's eyes slowly opened. "Damn. I could have had that."
He ran his hand through her curls. "You just did."