Demon Bait: Children of the Undying, Book 1 (9 page)

Such a small thing, but it freed something inside her. “I know what I want.” She eased away from his touch and climbed over him, positioning her hips above his. “I want you, Gabe.”

“I’m yours.” Raw words, ground out from between his teeth as he urged her to sink onto him. “I’ll give you anything you want. I’ll bend the world in half for you.” All she needed was what she had. She had to go slow, easing down bit by bit, and the sheer intimacy of taking him inside her body brought tears to her eyes.

His grip tightened at once, soothing noises falling from his lips. “Take me slow, honey, so it doesn’t hurt.”

“That’s not—” Marci leaned close and kissed him. “It’s not that, I swear.”

“Slow,” he insisted again, proving himself more than capable of being commanding, even beneath her. His hips began an unhurried roll, working his cock deeper with every advance.

It was perfect. He knew exactly what to do, and when to start going a little faster. A little harder.

Marci braced her elbows on either side of his head and let him control their movements, but she couldn’t hold back a soft moan each time he thrust up against her.

He was groaning too, making low, hungry noises with every thrust, until his hands tightened on her back. “Tell me it’s okay to roll you under me and take you.”

The words washed over her like a caress, and a pulse of reaction made her clench around him. “
Yes.
” In the next moment, they rolled, tumbled. She ended up on her stomach again, on the bed this time, with Gabe’s chest pressing down on her back. One smooth stroke buried him deep again, maybe even deeper.

“Just like this,” he whispered against her cheek. One arm slid under her body, wrapped across her chest until his fingers curled around the opposite shoulder. It kept her still, utterly immobilized as he ground into her with another rumbling growl.

She couldn’t move. All she could do was give herself over to whatever he did, to the sensual tension twisting inside her. “I trust you,” she whispered. “I’m yours too.”

“I know.” He pulled back and bit the back of her shoulder. When he surged forward this time, the depth of his thrust stole her breath. Left her shaking.

Nothing could have prepared her for this—not sex in or out of the network, not even the mingling of magic when he’d marked her. This was beyond that, far past giving or receiving.

Possession.

The world exploded, hurtling in a million different directions, and Marci tumbled with it. As unbelievable as the pleasure was, it was the satisfaction that startled her, the sense of completion that suffused her when he snarled his release against her ear, his hips driving hers to the bed.

The building could have fallen around them, and Marci wasn’t sure she’d notice. She lay under Gabe, feeling his heart beat against her back, and she never wanted to move. Ever.

But they had to. At least to their sides, where he curled around her, his breath hot against the back of her neck. “I could do this all day.”

She relished the solid heat of his body at her back. “Just this?”

“This too.”

It made her laugh. “How long do we have to stay here before we can head to Rochester?”

“Until the demons get bored. A day, maybe two.”

“How will we know when they’re gone?”

His hand settled on her hip, and he stroked his thumb over her skin. “If I concentrate, I can feel them.” The travails of the day had taken their toll. Outside, the sun was probably breaking, but underground, in Gabe’s safe house, all Marci wanted to do was sleep. “Will you stay with me?”

“Of course, honey. As long as you want.”

“For now,” she mumbled. “Later will take care of itself.”

Maybe it was the bliss of good sex, or just the warmth of Marci’s body curled so trustingly against his, but Gabe slept past the assigned check-in time.

It didn’t stop Trip from dragging him into the network by the virtual scruff of his neck.

Demon Bait again, but this time there were no busty redheads. Instead, Lorenzo and Trip sat on either side of a hulking brute with dark hair and the generally surly expression of someone who was pissed off at the world pretty much all of the time.

Dominic Wetzel was not a man Gabe wanted to cross—not in any lifetime—and his presence signaled trouble. It also made Gabe straighten up and pull his shoulders back, some instinctive recognition of martial power and the danger inherent in crossing a warrior. “Zel. Lorenzo. Sorry I—” Zel cut him off with a sharp gesture. “You escaped?”

“Yes.” His rational brain reasserted itself over sleepy guilt. Keeping his answers short and to the point was the easiest way to avoid walking into trouble.

Lorenzo tapped the table. “And the summoner?”

Careful, Gabe.
“With me. Rattled, but in one piece.”

“We intercepted all the alerts bound for Nicollet,” Trip told them. “If Gabe has trouble now, it should be entirely demon-related.”

Zel’s flat gaze landed on him, one eyebrow rising in a silent, unmistakable command to issue his report. Gabe fought the suicidal urge to offer a jaunty, teasing salute. Death wasn’t permanent in the network but pain still hurt, and warriors had notoriously odd senses of humor. “One of the exterior alarms went off while we were escaping. An old-fashioned one. I had to take down one wing and two popped scouts, and I can feel a few demons still circling up there. Not close enough to get an exact count, but I’d rather not fight through them if I don’t have to.”

When Gabe glanced at Lorenzo, he found the halfblood watching him closely, but he only asked, “How are you and your guest fixed for supplies?”

“We’re set for a couple weeks, maybe a little less, if we don’t get enough sunlight to offset the power we’re using.”

Lorenzo shook his head. “We could mount a rescue if it looked like you weren’t going to make it out by then.”

“I doubt they’ll hang around that long.” Though he wouldn’t mind if they took a little bit of time. A few days, maybe a week. Enough to show Marci how very, very good life could be with him. “I can ping Trip before we leave, so you know to expect us.”

The tech nodded. “I’ll be waiting.”

Zel was still watching him, his eyes iced steel. “Daily check-ins with Trip. If you have your handheld now, you can ping him instead of uplinking. And Gabriel?” His full name. Never a good sign. “Yes?”

“Follow the fucking rules, or I’ll come out there and break a finger for every one you’ve disobeyed.” It wasn’t an idle threat, or even a particularly outrageous one. Dominic Wetzel was fully capable of protecting a summoner’s free will with brutal, immediate violence.

Gabe swallowed hard and marveled that he could
feel
the imaginary knot in his virtual throat. “Yes, sir.”

Lorenzo leaned back in his chair and traced idle patterns on the table’s surface. “She should have drawn demons for miles once you took her above ground. How did you encounter so little resistance on your way to the Weisman?”

The lie escaped before he realized he’d decided to tell it. “It wasn’t far, and we moved fast. But I’m pretty sure that’s why they’re not going away. I’m going to have to turn our ADS on for a few days, even if it stings like a bitch.”

Lorenzo inclined his head, pacified. “Do what you have to do.” If he’d had time to consider it, he wouldn’t have dared to lie. Not to Lorenzo, who could smell a lie even in the network, where avatars weren’t quite as responsive and everything was a little off. His desperation and single-minded determination must have made it work.

He’d lied to the two strongest halfbloods in Rochester. Now he had a week—two, tops—to figure out a way not to die for it.

Gabe woke in the bed, with Marci leaning over him, her breath coming in frightened pants. “Don’t
do
that, damn it!”

Shaking off the disorientation of a fast drop out of the network took a moment. He blinked and tried to focus on her face. “Do what?”

“Space out on me.” She sat up and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “I couldn’t tell if you were uplinked or if something was wrong.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled, propping himself up on his elbows. The room still seemed blurry, like an after-echo of Demon Bait lingered in overlapping inverse. “I got pulled in because I slept through the rendezvous.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Fine,” he said easily, and now he was lying to her too. Not forgetting to tell her something—flat out lying. “They’re giving us a few days to lie low, see if we can wait the demons out. If it doesn’t work, they’ll come get us.”

“Mmm.” Marci settled beside him and pulled the blankets up around them again. “More waiting. At least we won’t be bored…” Her fingertips traced through the hair on his chest.

That was all it took to stir his body, to make him so damn hard it was embarrassing. A brush of fingers on skin, and he was ready to roll her underneath him and spend hours cataloging all the noises she made when she came.

It wasn’t an itch, or even the mark. It was her, plain and simple, and a need so frighteningly deep that he’d lied to steal a little more time with her before it all came crashing down and Lorenzo and Zel arrived to pass judgment on the purity of his motives.

Nothing pure. Not with her magic singing inside him like the ocean and his body aching to claim.

“Not bored,” he managed, his voice hoarse. “But
you
might get bored of
me
.” She kept her mouth close to his shoulder as she laughed and then bit him. “I doubt it very much, Gabe.”

A trickle of power became a roar, and he did roll her, bringing her body under his with a helpless growl. “We can’t fuck all the time.”

Her smile faded, and she stared up at him. “We don’t have to. We could talk or—” Her mouth snapped shut.

Gabe closed his eyes and dropped his head to her shoulder. “We could talk.” With his body shaking with need, he should have been disappointed. Instead, he saw it as an opportunity, one he could snatch at with both hands. He was a halfblood, raised to trust his instincts, especially when they told him that the virtual stranger stretched out beneath him would make his life complete. She needed more.

She needed to know him.

He could give her that.

They were locked in an old bomb shelter, and it felt like heaven. The kitchen was tiny, and Marci bumped into Gabe for the third time as they tried to prepare a lunch that didn’t come out of a self-heating pouch. “So what happened to the chickens?”

“I told Jai he had to take them back, but he wasn’t having any of it. So I had to wait until he was at lessons and smuggle them back to their owner.” Gabe lifted the pot over her head and settled it on the tiny electric stove. “In the demon camp he’d grown up in, you got to keep everything you stole. He was twelve before he stopped picking people’s pockets.”

It would have been funny, if not for the heartbreaking reality of a child dropped into a strange society with no understanding of the way it worked, or of people’s expectations of him. It made her wonder if Gabe had particularly understood his friend’s plight.

So she asked. “What about you? You said you grew up out west, near the ocean, but you didn’t say where or how.”

With the pot safely set to boil, Gabe turned and leaned against the opposite counter. “My mother was a prisoner of war in Minneapolis. The demon holding her moved west with a small camp, but fighters rescued her and the other prisoners in what used to be California. So that’s where I was born.”

“Before or after she was rescued?”

“After.” He draped his arms over his chest, a movement that seemed like one of tense habit. “We lived in the enclave there. It wasn’t as nice as Rochester. They didn’t have the resources to be. But sometimes I got to see the ocean.”

She wasn’t tall enough to face him eye to eye, but she managed to rest her forehead against his jaw by stretching up on her tiptoes. “Did she make it out?”

His rigid posture eased as he looped one arm around her back. “Yeah. She’s back home, actually. When I was nine, she found out that her youngest sister had made it out of the fighting and was living with a summoner in Rochester. We moved to be with them.”

“Good.” She tilted her head back. “A happy ending.”

“It was,” he agreed with a tight smile. “My mother got to be with people who understood. The mediator halfbloods—the ones like me? We’re usually around because a demon seduced a human man or woman into giving in. Maybe only for a few hours, or a few minutes…but they gave in. I’m one of the lucky ones. My mother didn’t hate me for it.”

His pain was a tangible thing, driving into the space between them. “Gabe, talk to me.”

“Zel’s stepfather? Oliver Wetzel? He’s the one who founded the settlement. He used to put all us little halfbloods through counseling sessions.” His laugh was equal parts bitterness and amusement. “Talk about our feelings. About self-directed hate, and guilt. Because we’re all alive because one of our parents raped the other.”

There was nothing anyone could say to ameliorate the hard, basic truth of his words, of his
existence
, not then or now. “Okay, no talking. Tell me what you need.”

“No, that’s not what I meant.” His hands settled at her hips, holding her against him. “Talking isn’t bad. It just… It didn’t help then. They didn’t understand what we were, or what we’d become.” It hadn’t occurred to her that Gabe’s nature might have been just as foreign to the inhabitants of Rochester back then as it had been to her a few days ago. “What did you become? All of you?”

“Lovers and fighters.” His fingers tightened—not quite hard enough to bruise, but the grip bordered on desperate. “Warriors and mediators. Oliver made up the names when the oldest halfbloods hit the other side of puberty and he realized how very, very different the two could be. After that, we had different training. Different coping mechanisms.”

“Lovers and fighters.” Shivering, she recalled the short, brutal fights above ground. “I don’t think I’d want to meet one of the warriors in a dark corner.”

“They can be scary fuckers,” he agreed. “And loyal friends. When we get back to Rochester, you can meet Jai and Bran.”

“I’d like that.”