Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

“I’m scared.” Her words were muffled in the fabric of his shirt, and nearly drowned out by the sound of the subterranean river that was being diverted by ancient mechanisms and magic, to fulfill the need of the gods.

“So am I.” He wrapped his arms around her, cursing the gods for taking away their free will, forcing them into a union they’d tried once before and failed to make work. He and Alexis weren’t prepared for this, hadn’t ever thought it would be them going through the ritual. He could only assume the problems between Patience and Brandt went deeper than he’d thought, or else the gods wouldn’t have bypassed them. Hell, if he and Alexis were better candidates for the spell, then the White-Eagles’ marriage was in serious trouble.

The chamber finished its grating descent, coming to rest with a resonant thud and a shudder. Scant seconds later jets of water burst from the carved skulls at the perimeter of the room. The skeletal mouths screamed the water, dousing Alexis and Nate instantly with fire-hose pressure and cold. There was no preamble, no steady build like the one Leah had described. This was a mad rush to fill the chamber. Either the gods were impatient or something was very wrong, Nate thought.

As in the fucking chamber’s broken wrong.

It wasn’t entirely clear how much of the die-and-be-reborn trick of the sacred chamber was magic and how much was thousand-year-old engineering, and that was a seriously chilling thought, because if whatever was in charge of the water flow had been broken in the cave-ins the tunnels had suffered during the fall equinox, then the chamber might not drain the way it was supposed to when the transition spell was complete.

Game over, he thought as the water climbed past his knees.

“What if this whole place is broken?” he said softly. The water was to their upper thighs now and the pressurized jets continued screaming from the skulls high above.

“It isn’t,” she said without hesitation.

“You don’t know that.”

“I have faith.”

“You want to have faith,” he contradicted, feeling dread curl. “But it’s too simple to say that what has happened before will happen again, or that it’s not a sacrifice if it’s easy. What if all that’s bullshit, just like every other religion out there, just a construct used to frame some commonsense rules?”

She looked as though she pitied him. “It must suck to be stuck inside a belief system like yours.”

“At least I’ve got a system,” he snapped. “You just let your winikin tell you what to think.” Inside, though, something said, What are you doing? He was being a jerk; that was what. And he was doing it because he was scared. The water was cool, almost cold, reaching past his chest and threatening to buoy him off the floor. He let out a breath. “I’m sorry. I take it back. I’m being an ass because I’m not sure what else I can do.”

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do at this point.” Her words were matter-of-fact, but her eyes were wide and scared, and she was trembling. Then the water snuffed the torches, plunging them into darkness. She gave a short scream, then muffled it.

He caught her arm and drew her close, making sure they could find each other in the darkness. The water wasn’t glowing, and there wasn’t any noise or wind, which didn’t match up with how Strike and Leah had described their experience. Those details only added to his worry that the chamber mechanism wasn’t working right.

If this was the end for them, he didn’t want the last thing between them to be anger. Softening his voice and gathering her close, he whispered, “I’m sorry, Lexie.”

Her voice went hollow and very small. “Me too.”

Working by feel and instinct, he found her lips with his in a kiss that was part apology, part wish that things had, in the end, been different for them.

Then the water closed over both their heads. He couldn’t hear the incoming rush anymore, couldn’t hear beyond the pounding of his heartbeat, couldn’t feel much of anything in the cool numbness except her lips against his. She hung on to him, her fingers digging into him for a moment, then two . .

. then loosening and falling away.

Wishing he’d done it differently, that he’d been a better man all along, he held Alexis close and pictured the woman of his dreams. He whispered her name and let himself imagine the impossible as he kissed her and let out the last of his air, resigning himself to death.

White-gold light detonated in his skull. And then he was falling.

Alexis returned to herself slowly, as if awakening from a deep sleep, though her body didn’t feel like she’d been motionless for long. She was aware of being wet through, and a little cold, with a hard stone surface beneath her and a heavy weight pressing on her from above. Water dripped somewhere nearby.

She cracked her eyes to find amber torchlight reflecting off carved stone walls, and Nate sprawled across her, motionless. For a second she thought she was dreaming again. Then she saw that the chamber was curved rather than rectangular, and the dripping noise came from droplets of water trickling from one stone to the next, rather than from an underground pool. More important, she wasn’t alone in her skull. There was a tiny kernel at the back of her brain, warm and sparkling with colors. When she focused her attention on it, though, it dimmed and grew distant.

Come back! she thought, quick panic sparking her fully awake. But it hadn’t gone away, she realized after a moment; it’d moved lower, the warmth shifting and the sparkles dispersing until she thought she could feel each nerve ending as a separate entity, an individual thought. Even as she reveled in the sensation, another came to her, the feel of Nate shifting against and atop her. He was sprawled facedown with his cheek on her belly, his arms loosely encircling her hips, and his big body more or less centered between her legs. The realization of their intimate positioning sparked the warmth to a blaze, and when he turned to look up at her, dragging the faintly roughened skin of his jaw across the sensitive skin above her navel, she saw the same heat reflected in his eyes.

“It’s the magic,” she said, her voice cracking around the edges. “The god.”

But Nate shook his head. “If I’d seen you in Newport, I would’ve wanted you long before I’d ever heard the word Nightkeeper .”

She would’ve argued, would’ve demanded an explanation, but he surprised her by casting a mild shield spell, one that pressed against her, held her pinned. The magic caressed her skin, sending ripples of excitement and power rolling through her, the pleasure holding her captive as much as the spell itself. Then, before she knew what he’d intended, he moved down her body, somehow taking her combat pants to her knees as he put his lips to her, his clever tongue delving deep and slicking her sensitive folds, which were already swollen and ready for him.

Alexis cried out and arched against him, or would have, but the shield kept her flat, binding her to the stone floor of the sacred chamber hard enough to excite but not hurt her. They had played with restraints once or twice before, but not like this, not so she could feel his magic. The power was brutally erotic, as were the touch of his tongue and hands as he simultaneously drove her up and held her down.

The kernel of colored light within her expanded, reaching outward and straining toward a distant, unseen goal. She writhed as pleasure suffused her, sent her outside herself, hurtling through time and space to a world of hue. The spectrum surrounded her, light and color combining into tangible shapes and audible sounds. On one level she was aware of Nate’s mouth leaving her, and his big body moving up to cover hers. Another part of her, though, was caught, spinning out in a world of blue and gold, with ribbons of color twining around her, trailing from her in all directions.