The Sweetest Burn Read online

  He kissed me deeper, each stroke of his tongue igniting my senses, until my whole body felt like it vibrated from desire. I was lightheaded, as if everything around me was still spinning, but the car had come to a complete stop. His hands moved down my back with sensual possessiveness before sliding over my hips and staying there. I wasn’t aware that I’d been gripping his shirt until it ripped open at the collar. The sound he made as his kiss became bruising caused things low in me to tighten so suddenly, I cried out.

  That rush of passion did more than cause me to writhe with need in his arms. With an internal flash that was as intense as a solar flare, my abilities activated and I felt that the staff wasn’t anywhere nearby. Oh, a few hallowed things were, but nothing as significant as an object that had channeled enough power from on high to control nature. That wouldn’t register as a faint “blip” on my radar. It would blast it, just like David’s ancient slingshot had when I found it months ago.

  Adrian pulled away, his hands now framing my face instead of gripping my hips. “I felt that. What is it?”

  “You can feel that?” I asked with a gasp.

  He brushed my hair away while his gaze raked over me. “You’d be amazed by some of my abilities, Ivy.”

  The raw sensuality in his voice promised pleasure and threatened obsession. At the same time, there was something distinctly not sexy about my abilities rearing their head right now. To say that I hadn’t been focusing on anything hallowed for the past several minutes was putting it mildly.

  Yet my abilities had had their priorities in order, even if I hadn’t. I uncurled myself from Adrian’s embrace and began to scoot back into my seat. His eyes stayed locked onto mine, but he didn’t stop me.

  “You were right, adrenaline did the trick, but the staff isn’t here,” I said, voice raspy as I tried to regain control.

  “Ah.” The word did nothing to tell me what he was thinking about my putting the brakes on—or starting things to begin with. Was he frustrated? Upset? I couldn’t stand not knowing.

  “You—you could say something else about what just happened,” I stammered.

  The faintest smile tugged his lips, which were fuller from how hard he’d kissed me. “So could you, but if you want me to go first, fine. I love how you taste, how you feel, the little noises you make when you’re turned on, and when you ripped my shirt open, I wanted to throw you in the back and fuck you so hard, all the windows would shatter.”

  Adrian’s tone was light and he never lost that half smile, but his stare said that he meant every word.

  “You promised.” My response was 90 percent a reminder of his vow, and 10 percent a plea for him to forget it.

  He reached out, catching my hand in his. Then he brought it to his lips, kissing my knuckles while never breaking his stare.

  “That’s why we’re still in the front seat, but you wanted to know what I was thinking, so I told you.”

  Then he let go of my hand and moved his seat forward. I looked away, flushing. I hadn’t even noticed him moving it back, but I wouldn’t have fit on his lap otherwise. Despite my tinge of embarrassment, I also felt a sense of relief. By repositioning his seat, Adrian was further confirming that nothing else was going to happen. I’m the one who’d started this, but I’d only meant it to be a kiss. Not for it to end with sex.

  Then again, if my hallowed radar hadn’t acted up, who knows how this would have ended? With lots of broken windows?

  “Your turn,” he said, interrupting that dangerous line of thought. “You’re the one who kissed me. Why?”

  I squirmed at his bluntness. “Isn’t it kinda obvious?”

  Another ghost of a smile. “I didn’t make you guess what I was thinking when I answered you.”

  No, he sure hadn’t. I looked away, unable to reply while on the receiving end of that deep blue stare. His gaze was too probing, too knowing, and yes, still too enticing.

  “I shouldn’t have,” I said at last. “That makes me a tease, I suppose, but I felt so...free, right before I kissed you.” I let out a choppy laugh. “Guess it made me forget all the reasons why I’m not.”

  “Ivy.” The way he said my name forced me to look at him. When I did, he pulled me into his arms before I even realized that he’d moved.

  “Adrian—”

  “Shh,” he murmured. “I don’t think I’ve ever just held you before. I was always pushing you away, and the one time I didn’t, we were also in this car.” His lips brushed my hair. “Did you know that old Challengers were your aphrodisiac?”

  I laughed, relaxing at his loose embrace and his light, bantering tone. “What can I say? I’m into vintage things.”

  His chuckle rumbled against my back. “I’ve missed you, Ivy. All of you, so don’t think you’re not free around me because you are. That means kissing me isn’t teasing. I want to do truly filthy things to you, but I can wait. If Zach hurries his Archon ass up, I won’t even have to wait long.”

  I had to say it. “You do know it’s extremely twisted that you need an angel’s help to hook up, right?”

  This time, his laughter had an edge. “I never have before, but with Zach, I can give you the guarantee that you demanded.”

  I didn’t remind him that I’d only promised him a chance, not a sure thing. “How does Zach factor into you proving that you can beat your fate?” I asked instead.

  He tensed, but then relaxed almost as fast. “It’s complicated, so I’d rather show you than tell you.”

  “That’s what my prom date said right before I cracked a beer bottle over his head,” I replied, my tone dry. “You told me no more secrets, remember?”

  He angled his head so he could look at me, and his expression was serious. “I don’t want to tell you right now. That’s a choice, not a secret, and yes, there’s a difference.”

  Not in my mind, but I’d given him an ultimatum—a huge one—and he’d sworn to meet it. I still didn’t think that it was possible, but I had to admit—the idea was starting to appeal. And if it was possible for Adrian to prove that he could beat his fate without having to wait until the end of this war, how could I refuse to honor the only stipulation he’d given me?

  “Fine,” I said. “You’ll tell me, or show me, when Zach does what you want him to.” If he does, I silently added. Then I changed the subject. “So, the staff’s not here. What’s next on our list of places filled with unexplainable natural weirdness?”

  “It’s...” His voice trailed off, then he almost shoved me away. He was out of the car before I could ask what was wrong, but one look around answered that.

  When I’d glanced out the window moments ago, the sky had been bright blue. Now, it was deepest indigo that was fast turning to black. With all the crazy lightning, I would’ve thought a storm was rolling in, except there were no clouds.

  Adrian jumped back into the car, slamming it into gear and hitting the gas. The instant velocity knocked me against the seats hard enough to risk whiplash.

  “Call Costa.” His tone was urgent. “Tell him to aim for the lightning and get out of here, now.”

  I began to tear through my purse looking for my cell phone. “What’s going on?”

  Lightning continued to flash on every horizon, until the perimeter of the landscape was bathed in strobes of dazzling white. At the same time, the sky turned pitch black, and more terrifying, somehow looked like it was starting to fall.

  Adrian floored the gas. “This area is being swallowed by a demon realm.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  I’M THE FIRST to criticize when people ask dumb questions during a crisis. Seriously, I can’t count the times I’ve thought, Just shut up and run! while watching a horror movie. In reality, stupid-babble was a side effect of shock, and despite all that I’d been through, I still wasn’t immune to it.

  Take me sayi
ng, “What? How?” while dialing Costa’s cell phone with shaking fingers.

  Adrian didn’t take his eyes off the nearest lightning storm, which he was driving us straight toward.

  “Told you, demon realms are created when they cause parts of their world to slam into ours. I’ve seen it done before, and this is what it looked like.”

  Yes, he’d explained realm creation to me months ago. Not that understanding it helped when a nightmare-black sky was bearing down on us like a giant foot about to squash an ant. Costa answered on the second ring, and I didn’t wait for him to say hello before blurting out Adrian’s instructions.

  “Drive for the lightning. A realm’s coming down on us!”

  “What?” Costa demanded. See? Stupid-babble.

  “A realm is about to swallow us,” I yelled. “The only way out is through the lightning, so drive, drive, drive!”

  I heard Costa shout something to Jasmine, then the line went dead. I checked the phone. No bars. With two worlds about to collide in the same space, that wasn’t a surprise. Darkness had now completely enveloped the area around us, making it difficult to see the bands of lightning we were headed toward. Without our headlights, we’d be driving blind, and we needed to see or we’d crash into one of the area’s many boulders. When we’d gone on our joy ride, we’d driven well away from the bus, not knowing that there would be any consequences. Now, I only hoped that Costa and Jasmine were closer to the lightning belts than we were, because despite Adrian pushing the muscle car to its limit, the horizon around us was turning completely black.

  Then several loud booms shook us. Adrian skidded to a stop, narrowly avoiding a large fissure that opened up in the ground in front of us. The air became heavy, compressing us as if each square inch had been filled with invisible weight. Something far louder than thunder echoed across the sky, making me clutch my ears in a futile attempt to lessen the painful noise.

  Adrian put the car in Park and shut off the engine. When his gaze met mine, the grim expectancy in those sapphire depths made what he said almost redundant.

  “We can’t outrun it. It’s here.”

  I looked out the window—and a scream trembled in my throat. I barely noticed Adrian unclipping his seat belt and pulling me into his arms. With those awful compressing sensations growing worse, only his grip kept me from running out of the car in an instinctive, useless attempt to get away.

  “Brace yourself!” he shouted above the deafening noise.

  I did, unable to stop staring out the window. The wall of black rushing down upon us lost its impenetrable, inky darkness. Instead, for a few terrifying seconds, it looked like a smoky mirror. I could see the top of our car amid the rock-littered landscape, see the cracked ground shuddering and fissuring as if caught in the grip of an earthquake, and then I saw my own pale, stricken face staring up from the windshield when that mirrored reflection crashed down on top of us.

  Glass pelted my face before Adrian shoved my head into his chest. I tried to concentrate on how tightly he held me, not on the sudden heaviness in my gut that made me feel like I was being eviscerated in my seat. The noise was the worst; a roaring, blasting sound that seemed to reverberate through my entire body. The urge to run was overwhelming, but at the same time, fear kept me frozen in place.

  After what might have been minutes, but felt like hours, Adrian pulled away. He lifted my head, and the faint light from the electronics on the dashboard showed blood running from his ears and from the countless tiny cuts on his face. He leaned over and took some napkins out of his glove box, wiping at my face instead of his. I only realized I was bleeding, too, when I saw that they were stained red after he drew them away.

  “Is—is it over?” I asked, surprised that I was barely able to hear my own voice.

  He nodded, and I lip-read more than heard him say, “Yes.”

  I drew a shaking hand through my hair, feeling the bite of countless shards that were stuck inside the brown mass. A glance down revealed that Adrian and I were covered with glass. All of the windows and most of the windshield were gone, and my mind flashed to his prior erotic statement. How I wished these had broken from uncontrollable passion instead of a realm slamming into this section of desert.

  Even if Adrian hadn’t told me what was happening, I’d have figured it out from the new frigid temperatures and the utter darkness. No moonlight interrupted the unbreakable blackness, either. If the moon existed in demon realms, it was never seen because not even the sun’s reflection made it into these frozen facsimiles of hell.

  I shivered, shock wearing off enough to remind me that I was dressed in shorts and a tank top. Perfect for an afternoon in Death Valley; highly dangerous for our new surroundings. Adrian caught the shiver and drew his shirt off, causing a small shower of glass to hit the seats. Then he balled it up and began using it to brush the glass off me. He said something, but I only caught a word or two. Then he shouted, which made my ears hurt even more, but at least I understood him.

  “Get up slowly, there’s glass everywhere.”

  No shit. I managed to get to the door, wincing at all the new cuts that caused despite my being careful. When I was finally outside, I began brushing the shards off me while my shivers turned into shudders. Where had that wind come from? It felt like it skipped my skin and went straight into my bones.

  Adrian got out and walked over to the trunk. When he returned, I was relieved at the thermal pants, boots and ski jacket that he held out to me. Thank God his car was stocked for emergencies, and a demon realm landing on us definitely qualified as an emergency.

  I stripped off my torn, bloody shirt and shorts without hesitation. Clad only in a bra and panties, I started to pull on the new clothes when Adrian stopped me.

  “Wait,” he said, holding up a plastic bag. His headlights, which miraculously hadn’t shattered, showed a cake-like substance in the bag that I recognized as manna. Right, better heal my injuries before bleeding all over my new clothes.

  I scooped out a handful, wincing as I spread it over the parts of me that were the most red-splattered. You’d think that I could feel where the cuts were, but with being nearly naked in the cold, everything hurt. I sure felt it when the manna began to heal my cuts, though. They stung like I’d jabbed myself with a fork before the pain faded into a slight itchiness. The fabled bread of heaven that had fed the Israelites while they wandered in the desert had more than one use. Manna’s healing properties were amazing, but it also had its limits, such as how it couldn’t heal a mortal wound. Thankfully, I didn’t have one.

  Adrian positioned himself behind me and lifted my hair. His hands were gentle as they moved over me, but any enjoyment I would have normally felt faded at the numerous stabs of pain as he spread manna over the cuts on my back. Once he was finished, I hurriedly put on my new clothes and boots, then grabbed a handful of manna and gestured to him.

  “Your turn.”

  Either his ears weren’t as damaged as mine or he could lip-read, because he understood although I’d forgotten to shout. He turned around, moving until he was directly in front of the headlights. When I saw his back, I sucked in an appalled breath.

  Long, deep gashes rent his skin. Glass was still embedded in multiple slashes, reflecting the light through sheens of red. I couldn’t believe he’d treated my insignificant wounds first. He looked like he could bleed to death from some of these!

  And he’d gotten them while shielding me from the worst of the fallout when the windows exploded. I blinked back my tears. These wounds should have been mine, but he’d taken them for me. How did I begin to say thank you for that?

  First things first, by healing him. I started to lay my manna-smeared hand on his back, but he stopped me.

  “You need to get the glass out first, or it’ll be stuck beneath the newly healed skin.”

  I used my other hand to start picking out
the glass, wincing at each inadvertent flinch he made. When I had the largest slash cleared, I laid my manna-coated hand on top of it. His muscles bunched and he clenched his fists, but he didn’t make a sound as the wound began to close as if pulled by invisible strings. The rivulets of blood slowed and tan skin replaced the red, puckered line. Then even the new scar vanished. I took in a deep breath. One down, dozens to go.

  It took over twenty minutes to clear his back of all the serious wounds. He worked on his front at the same time, so when I was done and he turned around, nothing but smooth, red-stained skin met my gaze. I let out a relieved noise and impulsively hugged him, running my hands over his back as if to reassure myself that all those awful gashes were truly gone.

  “Don’t do that ever again!” My words were muffled against his chest, which then shook with suppressed laughter.

  “Sure, Ivy. The next demon realm that crashes onto us, I’ll let you take the brunt of.”

  Liar. I pulled away, my heart fluttering at the total blackness beyond our headlights. Now that we’d survived the immediate danger, we still had to get out of here. But first, we needed to find out if Costa, Jasmine and Brutus had made it through the lightning in time, or if they’d been swallowed by the new realm. If they were here, we couldn’t leave without them.

  “Do you have warm clothes, too?” I asked, a practical sort of mentality kicking in. “If you run around in shorts and sandals, the demons will know it’s you, Archon disguise or no Archon disguise.”

  “Zach didn’t glamour me, so I’m not in disguise,” Adrian said, stunning me. I always saw through Archon glamour as if it wasn’t there, so I’d had no idea that everyone else could see the real Adrian now, too.

  “Why not? Is Zach trying to get you caught by demons?”

  He shrugged, but hardness filled his gaze, making me think I wasn’t the only one who’d wondered that. “Zach said it wouldn’t matter this time, so he refused to do it.”

  My jaw clenched. Wait until I saw Zach again. I’d shake the truth of his motivations out of him, because it was well past time that the Archon revealed whether he was trying to help Adrian overcome his fate, or trying to doom him to fulfill it.