Anne was reading one of her books on mathematics when she heard a creak somewhere in the house below. She leapt out of bed and ran to the head of the stairs.
Gabriel leaned against the wall, halfway up. She could see a trail of bloody handprints behind him.
Anne rushed down the stairs and threw an arm around his waist. He sagged against her but didn’t seem to see her. He looked ghastly, his eyes wild. She hauled him up to the second floor, step by painstaking step, as he ranted incoherently in French. Anne eased him into his bed, panting from the effort of nearly carrying him the last twenty paces.
Gabriel looked at up at her, his pupils tiny pinpricks. Anne had seen it before in the rougher parts of London. Opium.
“You’re knackered,” she muttered.
Then she unbuttoned his coat and her heart turned to ice.
Gabriel smiled through red teeth as she fetched wet cloths and cleaned the gore away, tried to bandage the terrible wounds with strips of cloth she ripped from the shirt hanging over the chair. They kept bleeding through so she wound them tight as tourniquets. At least he seemed beyond pain.
“God sent me an angel,” he whispered, so low it was almost inaudible.
The sight of him was more than she could bear.
Why wasn’t he healing? What had been done to him? And who had done it? She felt a cold rage far worse than any he’d ever driven her to.
Anne stayed up all night watching him, cooling his forehead as he muttered deliriously in his sleep, raising water to his lips and making him drink. The next morning, when the sun rose, he looked a little better, but she was shocked to see a streak of white in his hair.
Gabriel’s eyes opened. They had a mad light. Then he saw her and his gaze softened.
“Anne….”
“You’re home now,” she said soothingly. “Drink some water.”
She held the cup to his dry lips. He winced as he swallowed.
“Tell me what happened.”
Gabriel face grew hard. “I was betrayed. Constantin sold me out. It was … a mess.”
“Is he the one who drugged you?”
Gabriel looked away. “It doesn’t matter. Bekker is gone. It could take years to find him again.” His jaw tensed. “But I’ll hunt them down, every one of them.” He struggled to sit but she gently pushed him back down again.
Anne touched the white in his hair. “You’re aging, Gabriel.”
“The fight at Picatrix drained me,” he admitted. “And the price of healing.”
“What do you … need?” Anne swallowed. “I have years to spare—”
Gabriel gave her appalled look. “You? No! Never.” He gazed at her, his eyes narrow. “You say it’s wrong for me for prey on mortals, to steal their lives. So I won’t. But if you don’t bond me, soon I will die, just like the poor, tragic Beast.”
His words triggered that instinctive fear. Could Anne truly trust him with everything that she was?
“I thought you were supposed to be Beauty,” she snapped irritably.
“Yes, but now I’m losing my good looks,” he joked with a weak smile. “It will be Old and Ugly and the Beast.”
Anne didn’t find this amusing in the least.
Gabriel slept again. He slept all day, a sleep as deep and still as the enchantment of her rose cameo. In the evening, Anne came back and sat on the bed. Seeing him at the very edge of death made her realize how terrified she was of losing him.
She kissed his forehead and curled up next to him, listening to his soft breathing.
And she dreamt she was running next to a huge, dark shadow, running through the trees as a stag leapt into the underbrush ahead. It veered away and she let it escape, only running, running through the endless forests of the night.
The moon was high and full when she woke, flushed with strange, feverish longing, and reached for Gabriel.
The bed was empty.
Anne went down to the entrance hall and sat on the stairs, waiting for him to return.
Just before dawn, the door eased open. Gabriel strode into the house wearing only his skin. He had a smudge of dirt on his face and leaves caught in his hair.
He halted when he saw her. He looked full of life again. Unmarked and strong. A man of no more than thirty-five, although she could see the faint streak of white in the moonlight.
“Tell me what it’s like,” she said in a low voice.
He drew a deep breath. Exhaled. “It takes me out of my head. There is no thought. Nothing but…. My beating heart, the sounds, the smells. The earth beneath my feet, the stars above. My body.”
She moved to him and ran a hand down his lean flank. The muscles twitched beneath her palm.
Gabriel pulled back, his face cold. “Don’t,” he said roughly. “I swore to myself I wouldn’t touch you.” His gaze flicked to the rose cameo. “Not like this.”
“Then you have no choice.” She stared at him defiantly, tugging at the ribbon on her cotton shift and letting it fall to the floor. A chill from the open door swept across her skin. “Release me, Gabriel.”
His eyes lingered on her small, high breasts, her softly rounded belly, then lifted to her face. Without a word, he pulled her to him, one arm around her waist, the other fumbling at the cameo around her neck and then…. Anne shivered as strength and power rushed into her body. She slid into the Nexus, her senses sharpened to a fine point.
She heard the blood pumping through his veins — and could have reversed its flow with a thought, freezing the powerful muscle of his heart.
She felt earth resonating in his bones — and could have snapped them all, one by one.
The only thing on this earth stronger than a necromancer was a daēva.
Gabriel stepped back, watching her with wary eyes. She knew he’d just been betrayed by the one man he trusted above all others.
Anne didn’t hesitate. She stepped forward and pulled his mouth down to hers. It was a soft, tentative kiss at first. He cradled her head with one hand, pulling her deeper into his mouth, the other exploring the line of her hip. Gabriel lifted her in his arms, his breath ragged, and took a step for the stairs.
“No,” she whispered, aflame with desire for him like no other man she’d ever known. “Right here. Now.”
Gabriel looked down at her, as hungry as she was. Hungrier.
He backed her against a tapestry, the rough weave pressing into her shoulders. Gabriel lowered his head, nuzzling her neck. “Wrap your legs around me, Anne,” he murmured in her ear. “Hold me tight.”
She threw her arms around his shoulders and Gabriel lifted her up to straddle his hips, his hands cupping her buttocks, his thumb brushing her swollen sex.
“Mmmm, like this, Anne?”
“Yes,” she hissed. “Yes....”
His teeth grazed her neck as she arched into him. A finger teased her open, slid inside.
Anne’s breath hitched, a sharp, convulsive gasp. She reached between them and circled his velvet flesh with her hand, eliciting a growl of pleasure. Anne tried to guide him inside her but he slapped her hand away.
“No, no…. Not so fast, little beast.”
Gabriel lowered her down, but only the tiniest bit.
“I’ve wanted you for so long,” he murmured. “Dreaming of you. Your smile, your ears….” He took a lobe between his teeth.
He suspended her above him, giving her himself a fraction at a time as he always had, ignoring her pleas with an iron discipline that she wanted to shatter into a thousand pieces.
And then, after long minutes of this outrageous teasing….
“I’ve taken all I can hold of you,” she gasped.
Gabriel stopped. She pressed her face to his damp neck, half-wild from the deep, aching throb of him between her legs. He lowered his head and kissed her, a lazy, eternal kiss. Then his hands remorselessly guided her down again, his voice coaxing and thick with need.
“Just a little more, Anne…. Only a little….”
Gabriel exhaled a shuddering breath as he thrust home.
His head fell back, exposing a column of pale throat, and Anne kissed the place where the Beast had nearly torn him open, felt the hot vein pulsing just beneath the skin, tasted the salt of his sweat.
Only to stay like this forever….
Small tremors ran through him, every muscle ratcheted tight, palms rough against her bottom as his hips moved in a slow grind.
“All of me,” Gabriel whispered, his voice uneven. “Will you take it all, Anne?”
He meant not the part of him that pressed her to the wall but his madness and passion and his bloody, bloody hands.
Yes. Yes. Yes, she whispered back. I will.
The chill air raised her breasts to hard peaks and they brushed his chest, only the slightest touch, but it broke her. Waves of pleasure so sharp they might have been pain wracked her body, cresting and building again. She clamped down on him and he cried her name, howled it through the empty halls of Chateau de Saint-Évreux.
Gabriel’s legs were shaking like autumn leaves as he eased her down and buried his face in her hair. He braced one arm against the wall, the other pulling her close. He smelled like the forest, like pine and moss and cool streams.
And sex.
He gave a hoarse laugh. “Okay, I could wait another three hundred years for that.”
She took Gabriel by the hand and he allowed her to lead him up the stairs, docile as a child. When they reached her bedroom and crawled beneath the blankets, she thought he would collapse into slumber. But he started kissing her again, cupping the curls between her legs, stroking her with a practiced hand.
Anne gave a low laugh. “I’m sore, Gabriel. It’s been … a long time.”
“My poor darling.” He didn’t sound very sorry. “For me as well. I’ll have to make it better then.” Gabriel took the rosy bud of a breast in his mouth, his weight pressing her into the goosedown mattress. Anne ran her hands down the taut lines of his back, the hard curve of his buttocks.
“Nom de dieu, Gabriel,” she whispered in his ear. “You were nearly dead last night. Haven’t you had enough?”
His brown eyes lifted to hers, gentle and warm. The Father Gavra eyes, Anne thought — though there was nothing saintly in the look he gave her.
“I’ll never have enough of you, Anne. Never enough….”
His tongue returned to her breast, then moved down with excruciating slowness, finally parting the tender flesh between her legs. She slid her fingers into his hair and gripped it as she felt herself nearing the precipice again.
And will he take all of me?
Anne sat up, her cheeks flushed, pulling away from his mouth. “Not so fast, ma Belle.”
This time, she made him lie on his back and she had her way with him exactly as she pleased, sometimes sweet and slow, other times hard and brutal, toying with him as mercilessly as he had done with her, until they both lay in a spent tangle, the blankets hurled to the floor and the bed having moved a good four paces from where it started.
“Tell me about The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz,” she said, tracing his full lower lip. Gabriel employed that lip to great effect when he sulked, or curled it in scorn, but now it was soft and pliant beneath her fingertip.
He glanced at her. “You found it?” He gave a purring sigh. “It came to me in a vision. A beautiful dream of a better world.” He was quiet for a moment. “I don’t remember much about my early childhood. It was so long ago. But I have a single memory of standing on the shore of the Bay of Biscay, the water lapping at my feet. I must have been very young. It’s one of the things I liked about this place when I bought it. The view of the water.”
Gabriel’s voice grew drowsy. “After I deserted from Neblis’s army, I came home to Gaul. My family was all long dead but I had nowhere else to go, so I stayed, watching the Roman Empire fall and Christendom rise under the Emperor Constantine. For a long time, I lived aimlessly, day to day.”
Anne laid her cheek against his chest, listening to the soft beat of his heart as he idly stroked her hair.
“I tried to hunt only evil men, rapists, murderers and the like. I haunted the lowest wine sinks where such creatures were most often found. I grew soulless, Anne. Despairing. Empty. Was I truly any better than my victims? And then one day, I was in Rouen and I passed the great cathedral there. Something made me go inside.”
“I’ve seen it,” she said softly. “It’s beautiful.”
“Yes. In truth, I was trying to find the courage to end my life. Seeking some final forgiveness for my sins before I did the deed. I knelt down in the pews and prayed.” He laughed. “I wasn’t even sure who it was I prayed to, but in the hush of that great building I sensed a … presence. A presence of grace. Of unconditional love. My burdens lifted. I felt reborn, a child of God again, and resolved to follow a new path. So I joined the Knights Templar. You know the rest.” He paused. “And you, Anne? What did you do after you were freed?”
And she told him of the years she spent traveling among the ancient cities of the world with Alec and Vivienne, sealing and closing the twelve Greater Gates to the Dominion, until she grew restless and started to go her own way.
“Gabriel?”
“Oui?”
His voice was very heavy now.
“I want to bond you.”
The hand stroking her hair tensed. She felt his heartbeat speed up.
He rolled to his side and looked her in the eyes. To Anne’s surprise, he seemed hesitant.
“Are you sure it’s what you want? It can’t be broken, Anne. Only by death.”
“Or transference to another,” she pointed out, though that would be … unimaginable.
He looked away. “Or that.”
She touched his cheek and turned him back to face her. “I am, Gabriel.”
He nodded, his voice ragged at the edges. “If that’s what you want, Anne, I’ll give it to you.”