Thanatos let out a growl that should have terrified her, but the reaction that came with it made her want to do it again. His urgent thrusts crashed into her harder, faster, and his grip on her grew tighter, more possessive. And when she took the fang between her finger and thumb and caressed the smooth surface, he roared in ecstasy.
Bucking beneath her, he came in a hot, wet flow, triggering her orgasm. The pleasure crested twice, massive surges that left her gasping for breath and collapsing bonelessly next to him when it was over.
“Damn,” he breathed. “Holy … damn, that was good.” He shifted so he was facing her and tenderly brushed her hair away from her face. “The fang thing? We’ll have to remember that.”
For next time. The unspoken words were there, hanging awkwardly between them. Well, maybe it was only awkward for her, because she had no idea where this thing between them was going. He’d taken the months-of-pleasure thing back, but what if she still felt like giving it to him? She owed him so much, but the reason she owed him had grown to include the fact that no one had ever made her feel so valued.
Not even The Aegis.
His hand and gaze roamed her body, light, soothing sweeps that seemed oddly like petting, as if he were showing Styx affection. The only place he wasn’t touching, though, was her belly. Smiling, she took his hand and put it just above her navel. It was funny—endearing, really—the way he was so tentative and unsure about handling a pregnant woman.
But then, she supposed that when you mainly dealt with violence and death, new life must be bewildering.
And talk about bewildering … she was still overcome by everything that had happened tonight. He’d come in from out of nowhere, his eyes full of murder, and then his energy had morphed into something else. The lethal, electric rage had still been there, but somehow, it shifted focus from violence to sex.
“Thanatos?” She idly played with one of his nipple rings. “Why did you say that when you were gone, all you could think about was me?”
On her belly, his hand stilled. Just as she thought he wasn’t going to answer, he grumbled, “I said it because sex makes a male stupid.” He took her hand in his and brought it to his lips. She liked it when he did that, which was good, because he did it a lot. “And because it’s true. Usually when I’m trapped in a mire of hate and the need to kill, no other thoughts break through. But since you’ve been here, there’s been a sexual fever rushing through me that gets worse when I’m angry, or like today, when I’m forced to a scene of death. It felt like I could burn off the violent energy with sex instead of blood. That’s never happened before, and I could only think of you.”
“Do you think it’s because we’d had sex and it woke up that sex demon side of you?”
“Yeah. Ares and Reseph always found that to some degree, sex could use up energy that would otherwise cause them to kill.”
“It’s weird,” she said, “that for you guys, sex can stop bad things from happening, but it’s the opposite for me.” She bit down on her lower lip. “Well, until now.”
“Why don’t you want The Aegis to know you’ve lost your ability?”
She shrugged, not fully understanding it herself. The Aegis had condemned the ability as a curse, but at the same time, it had made her the only Guardian who could handle certain assignments. With that gone, all she had left was her psychometric gift, which was handy, but so limited by the fact that it only worked on skin and ink.
What if she lost that, too? She was a good fighter, but so was pretty much everyone in The Aegis. She probably knew more than anyone about vampires, but it wouldn’t take another Guardian long to catch up to speed, and if she couldn’t share what she knew about the day-walkers, she didn’t have much of an advantage over anyone else.
“I guess I worry about what they’ll do.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know… demote me back to a regular Guardian.”
“They’re a**holes,” he muttered. “I don’t trust them.”
Which meant he didn’t trust her, either, but she couldn’t blame him. “I do. They took me in when they should have killed me, and they taught me to have control over my abilities.”
“On Ares’s beach, you said your father was put down. What about your mother?”
“My mom gave birth to me and left me on the doorstep at Aegis Headquarters before doing a death-by-demon.”
“She found a demon to kill her?”
“Basically. The Aegis had been taking casualties from a nest of demons hanging out in some electrical tunnels nearby. She armed herself, went in, and took out as many demons as she could before one killed her. It was a suicide mission, and she knew it, but she saved a lot of lives.” Val had found her body and the voice recorder she used to chronicle her kills. “So anyway, instead of killing me, like protocol demands, they put me with foster parents … other Aegis couples.”
“Couples? Plural? Not one set?”
She nodded. “The first couple divorced when I was four, and neither of them wanted the responsibility of raising a kid like me alone.”
Thanatos cursed. “Are they dead?”
“No.”
“Do you want them to be?”
She laughed. Thanatos definitely took his Horseman name to heart. “It’s okay. I barely remember them. The next couple kept me until I was nine, when my foster mother, Jean, was killed in a car crash. My foster father was so distraught that he left The Aegis, so everyone thought it was best to put me with another Aegis family since my psychometric abilities had fully developed.”
The move to the new family had sent Regan into a tail-spin of depression and emotional outbursts. She’d lost the only home she’d ever really known, from her foster parents, to her house, to their black lab puppy named Buster. Even though Kevin, her foster father, had been strict about Regan’s Aegis training and remote with his own feelings, Jean had been warmer, and Regan had loved them both.
“How long were you with the new family?”
“Until I turned thirteen.” Her stomach churned a little, because she really hated revisiting this part of her past. Tabitha and Shawn had been stationed in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and they’d been kind… at least, on the surface. After the trauma of losing Jean and Kevin had faded, Regan had come to accept Tabitha and Shawn, thinking she’d found a family in them. “Then my foster mom got pregnant, and they didn’t want me around their kid.”
“Are they dead?” he growled.
She smiled thinly. “No, and I don’t want them to be.” She ignored the slight twinge of pain that always occurred when one opened an old wound. “I get why they got rid of me. By then, I was starting to exhibit signs of the power the Aegis feared. I could have been a danger to their kid.”
“Bullfuckingshit.”
She trailed her fingers over the tiny foot pressing against her navel. “I can’t blame them. I’d do anything to protect the little pony.” But that didn’t mean their rejection hadn’t hurt. After being dumped by three families, and going through puberty with abilities she didn’t understand, she had needed someone to care about her. To tell her it was all right and that she was wanted. “So I went to the next family, a nice couple who ran one of the London cells, but things were bad from day one.” She chewed her lower lip, buying herself time. “You might have noticed my tendency to be a little … obsessive-compulsive.”
His brows raised. “A little? You leveled all the paintings in my keep.”
“How do you know?”
He gave her a cocky grin. “Because you straighten everything you touch, so I tilted all the paintings to see how long it would take you to put them right again.”
The man had the strangest sense of humor, so quirky, playful, and quiet, but she liked it. Especially because she had a feeling he reserved his playfulness for those inside his small inner circle. “Yes, well, wait until you look in your cupboards.”
Still smiling, he leaned forward and kissed the tip of her nose. Like his sense of humor, his gestures of affection were understated and surprising. “I can’t wait to see what you do with my sex toy drawer.”
Her cheeks grew hot. “You have a sex toy drawer?”
“No, but I think I’ll put one together just to see you twitch when I mess everything up.” He sobered, tracing a finger along the angle of her jaw. “So did the OCD start with this new family in London?”
She nodded. “No gradual buildup… just, all of a sudden I became a clean freak. Everything had to be organized, in order, and perfectly spaced. I couldn’t start anything or go anywhere if my watch’s minute hand wasn’t on a five-minute increment mark. Weird stuff like that. It was frustrating for all of us. And then, only a year into living with them, my soul-sucking ability got a man killed.”
“What happened?”
“I was on a demon hunt with a couple of other Guardians. We’d trapped a Soulshredder in an alley, and it raked me across the ribs with its claws.” The pain had been blinding, enough to launch her into a killing fury. “The next thing I knew, a light shot out of my body and attacked the demon. It ripped his soul from him, and the soul needed a body. It found some man on the street and took him.” She shuddered at the horror that had only gotten worse when they were forced to kill the poor guy.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Than said softly. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I did know. The Aegis had identified my ability when I was eleven years old, and I’d been going through training to manage it. I thought I had it under control, but I was wrong.”
“The Aegis was wrong. Not you. You were only fourteen. You couldn’t have known any better.”
“That’s what my foster parents said. And they might have even believed it. But they started fighting a lot after that.” The baby kicked, and she shifted to give the little guy more room. “I’d hear them in their bedroom arguing about me. They got divorced just before my sixteenth birthday.”