Chapter 14

Damien reached to pull her close, grasping her beneath her knees to slide her toward him. She slid easily over the sheets until her hips touched the insides of both his thighs and he was leading her legs around his back. They sat facing one another, so close now that her thighs rested atop his and they each had their ankles linked behind the other’s back. Damien’s hands slid up her beautifully shaped legs until they rested lightly on her waist. Their foreheads touched, their noses rubbing gently together as he reached to kiss her several times. The tips of her naked breasts brushed lightly against his equally bare chest, and he liked the reaction that immediately followed.

“I love the way you feel,” he said softly against her swelling lips.

Syreena smiled briefly before he kissed it away, exchanging that pleasure with another and then another as he slowly searched the taste and moisture of her mouth, feeding her the same from his own. Her hands slid around his rib cage to his back, the warmth and smoothness of his taut skin such a sensual delight that she spread her fingers far apart to cover even more of it. She liked how his muscles contracted in little twitches every time she moved her palms and fingertips to new places. If nothing else did, this would tell her how much pleasure he took in the exploration of her hands.

Damien’s hands moved into her hair, making the living strands curl happily around them, trapping them to the warmth of her head so it could constrict his fingers and wrists like a hungry nest of boas. Within moments, he was wrapped up to his elbows in it, his forearms snugly held in its pulsing shafts.

She kissed him as her hands continued to move over his skin. She forgot about the dust and barrenness of the enormous household around the master suite he had taken them to, even though every breath she drew seemed to echo into every near corridor. The must and cobwebs around them seemed to disappear, replaced solely by his masculine scent in combination with hers as they wafted together around the small world they had created between their close bodies.

They were both completely nude, save for the bandage and hard splint still dressing her right arm. But even that small restriction could not interfere with the total access they desired for this moment. Syreena felt as though it had been ages since they had touched one another, in spite of the fact that she knew she had never been touched by another being in her lifetime as much as Damien touched her. It seemed as though he could even caress her from a distance, with only his eyes and the very obvious desires within them that always took away any and all space between them.

“Let go of my hands,” he said with humor as he gave a curl of her hair a tug.

“Why should I?” she asked, her thoughtfulness and mischief coming through loud and clear.

“Because I know you want me to touch you,” he said with the assuredness of a telepath.

She could not argue with him, so she relaxed, releasing the stranglehold her hair had on him. Once he had slipped free of the loving snarl, he stroked his fingers over her face, down her throat and shoulders and arms. He started over the pulses in her neck, working his way down the path of the pounding arteries all the way to her fingertips.

Damien laced his fingers with hers, giving them a momentary squeeze. He released her almost as quickly, so he could stroke the backs of his knuckles down her chest, starting at the hollow in her throat. He followed a straight path over her collarbone and breasts. After briefly slipping his caressing fingers past her erect nipples, he turned his hands so he could cup the full weight of her within his palms.

For Syreena, every moment of the searching caresses was a slow beat that thrummed like a bass drum through her body. She closed her eyes, drawing in a deep breath as his hands flexed around her, their heat somehow more than the steady temperature that was normal for him. Perhaps it was her own hot skin that made it so, the eddy of it warming him incredibly, but if that were the case, how would she note the difference?

“Damien, I love the way you touch me,” she murmured against the rub of his lips.

“I know,” he told her before catching up her mouth with a depth that transcended the physical capabilities of their meshing lips and tongues.

His right hand released its loving hold on her breast so it could skim over her side and hip. He grasped her firmly and drew her completely up his thighs and into his lap, seating her with incredible intimacy against him. It was contradictory for him to be so blunt and bold when he had been so patient and tender until then. She made a gasping sound of surprise as iron hardness and heat swam through the exterior dampness of her body, but surprise immediately gave way to pleasure, and the gasp turned to a long, sweetly pained moan.

“I have missed you,” he said suddenly, pulling her ear to his lips so she could hear and feel the heat of his whispered words. “It cannot be more than a day since I was last here, close to your body, wrapped in your heat, but still I missed you.”

“You are not yet wrapped in my heat,” she argued, her entire being squirming against him in clear frustration over that fact.

She felt him smile against her ear.

“You seem impatient, sweetness,” he teased her, his teeth scraping over her earlobe and then releasing the sensitive flesh so he could blow a gentle breath over the dampness his mouth had left behind. She shivered as goose bumps raced along her spine and a fresh wash of liquid invitation flowed from her body and onto his.

“Tell me you are not,” she demanded, punctuating the request with an artful tilt of her hips, teasing him right back with a perfect seat that was the prelude to an even better one.

Damien made a rough, masculine sound as he felt the welcoming pulse of her inner body beckoning him from that intimate perch on the edge of the haven she was for him.

“I am,” he agreed hotly, finding her mouth again as his hands fell to her hips and held her with tight possessiveness.

He drew her forward onto himself even as she arched her hips and body to take him inside herself. There was always something so breathtaking about the initial joining of their bodies. It was a moment that could last forever in a heartbeat, their focus nowhere but on the blending fit of their heated sexes. He inhaled the shuddering groan of pleasure that she exhaled. Then her kiss seemed to come alive in tempo and intensity, twisting over and inside his mouth as if she intended to devour him.

She was steadily becoming bolder and more aggressive during their lovemaking, but she also was learning how to give herself over to him, allowing him to lead her to pleasurable places. It was all an issue of trust. In these moments, he knew she trusted him implicitly. She had to. It was an act of pure exposure and vulnerability.

It made him feel a power that went beyond his gifts of Vampirism.

Syreena put a hand against him, firmly pushing him several inches away from her chest and mouth. He pulled back, blinking his deep blue eyes at her.

Then, as her other hand slid away over the bedsheets, he remembered why they had come there.

Syreena picked up the steel poniard, the metal glinting fiercely in the candlelight, the emerald embedded in its hilt winking its fire-green facets at them. She held it between their breastbones for a moment, looking down at the haft of the razor-sharp blade. There was an inscription in Vampyr on the hilt, wending in a spiral around the decorative swirl of crafted metal.

“I will break thee in any heart counter to my own,” she said softy, impressing him with her ability to read his native tongue.

“Family motto,” he explained with half a smile.

“Very emotionally passionate for a Vampiric saying,” she mused in a whisper.

Syreena touched the cold blade to his chest, lengthwise, scraping it with delicate concentration over his skin. Considering the hone of it, he was amazed it did not cut him. It was her skill alone that made it so, he realized.

“Tell me where,” she asked, her breath catching nervously in spite of how excited she was on other levels.

“Anywhere. It is your choice, Syreena.”

Her choice.

The basis of their entire relationship, in two syllables.

But she would not vacillate this time. She had already been through her debates and her decisions. Now, with their bodies conjoined so perfectly and his trust as naked between them as the blade, there was no need for choice.

She moved so quickly, it was more like a twitch. Damien did not even feel the bite of the blade as it nicked his throat. Her aim was remarkable for the speed she had used, the breach of his skin under an inch wide in the lower left space just off center of his Adam’s apple. Instantly, a scarlet bead of blood welled out of the wound, quickly filling and breaking, running down his chest, over his pectoral muscle and onto the ridges of his abdomen. The thin stream of his life’s essence continued on until it disappeared where their bodies connected.

Syreena flicked up her bicolored gaze to his as she dropped the poniard over the edge of the mattress and onto the floor. She did not even notice the clatter of the metal against the stone as she leaned toward his neck.

The minute her lips sealed over his skin, Damien felt the balance of the world spin away from them. He groaned savagely as she swept her tongue over him slowly, her deft little mouth burning him like a brand, and then began to suck softly against him. He gripped her tightly as she did this, his head falling back to increase her access. His fangs made a violent appearance as the groan turned to a rolling growl of pleasure.

Syreena felt the effect she was having on him from the center of her body outward. He swelled within her, heated intensely, the increasing hardness of him pulsing with wicked life inside her. His taste was not what she had expected. It was somehow different from the rust and salt tang that she had anticipated. His flavor was bold and nearly sweet. As the warm fluid slid over her palate and down her throat, she began to get a hint of what it had been like for him the very first time he had tasted of her.

There was power in his blood. All Nightwalker blood held the power of its owner, but this was like nothing she could have ever expected. There was so much of herself within him, and so much of a combination of Nightwalker power from within herself. The addition of his essence was numbing and erotic and pleasurable beyond words. She was not prepared for the fire that flowed from her belly and into all of her limbs. If it could, it would have exploded out of her fingertips, toes, and the ends of her hair, that was how violently it burst through her.

She pulled back from the place where she fed as her entire body locked in a delicious spasm of delight. Damien felt the convulsion as it passed through her, constricting her around him so tightly he thought he might lose his mind with the intensity of the recoil of pleasure that followed. He knew what she was experiencing, if it was anything like the experiences he had had. The very idea of it was as thrilling as the feel of it.

Damien slipped his hands down over her bottom, fitting her to his palms so he could lift her against himself, drawing himself slowly out of the incredible clutch she had on him. Syreena’s hands reached out to grab his shoulders suddenly, her strength remarkable as she did so. She cried out roughly as he relaxed his hands and allowed her to slide back down over him, fitting him like a spandex glove made solely to his dimensions. Her arms slid over his shoulders, wrapping around his neck and head as he repeated the motion again and again.

Syreena closed her eyes because she could not have focused on anything, and it was making her dizzy to watch the room spin and move. She was so lost to the tearing eroticism flowing through herself that she could do little more than let him manipulate her as he wished. Without the intercourse of their bodies, she would still have felt that way. With it, she was beyond feeling anyone coherent emotion or sensation.

Her shoulder nudged up against Damien’s lips, exposing it to the scrape of his teeth.

He could smell her.

Lavender, sex, sweetness, all blended into the pulse that flowed over her collarbone. He closed his eyes, rubbing his lips and his face over her skin, trying to remember that he had hunted that night already, only a short while ago, in fact.

Until she lowered her head back to the cut she had made on him and put her lips to him again.

He swore in Vampyr, a vicious growl of impatience and lustful intensity. He timed the thrust of his teeth into her shoulder with the thrust of his body. Her warmth flowed over his lips and tongue and the ever-hardening shaft surrounded so tightly by her all at once. Damien understood in that moment why this thing between them was meant to be the way that it was. This was the spice of true life. It flowed over him in liquid and emotional form and he knew that he could live twenty millennia and never grow tired of the sensation. It could have been the newfound acuteness to his feelings that made him wax so poetic in his thoughts, but he did not think that was so. This went beyond all of that. This was the blending of souls, the joining of spirits and blood and body.

It was everything.

She was everything.

“I love you,” she gasped beneath his ear, gripping him frantically as she spoke the words brewing behind his own lips. He sealed the punctures he had made in her body and pulled back to look into her eyes.

“I love you,” she repeated for him once she could see the blue of his eyes. She sobbed sharply, tears welling in her eyes as she cried with both emotion and pleasure. Her sobs and gasps mingled with one another as their movements together grew rapid and frantic.

Damien had never known the sting of tears, the rending of emotion that spiked and sparkled within the entire body right before they made an appearance. He turned his face into the blessed curve of her neck, dampness clinging to his lashes in answer to her honesty of feeling.

When she climaxed, it was as if she were thrown into a seizure. Her entire body seemed to jerk and spasm in time with the sobbing she could control no more than she could the orgasm itself.

Damien felt as if she were tearing him out of the sane world. He could barely hold her as her body writhed in his hands, wrenching at him in demand that he follow her into her bliss. For all his strength and power, he could never have denied her or himself the inevitable release she stole from him. No force on the planet could ever be that strong.

The Vampire Prince fell back onto the pillows and Syreena fell with him, sprawling weakly over his chest. She could not breathe, yet was breathing too hard. She could not silence herself as she continued to weep against the column of his neck. She felt his hands weave into her lax hair, holding her against him with that masculine gentleness of touch only his hands could ever convey. Damien did not try to console her in any way other than that fitting of his hands against her hot scalp. He was busy enough trying to settle back into his own body, trying to figure out how so much fullness of feeling could ever fit back within the limited confines of his skin.

She had told him she loved him. He had known that, but hearing it in the traditional phrase had affected him in new and blinding ways.

Ways that made him believe he could do anything.

Anything she needed or wanted him to do.

Because her loving him meant so much more than him loving her.

Syreena felt as though she were completely paralyzed.

She could not move, even quite some time after she had calmed down from her emotional and sexual roller coaster of feelings.

So she simply lay still, sprawled over her lover as if she had been doing so for years, not days. She could feel his fingers drifting up and down the length of her spine, the sensation soothing and sweet in the aftermath of such tumultuous feedback.

She thought she wanted to sleep, everything she had been through recently both mentally and physically exhausting. At the same time she was far too wired to ever succeed at rest, even though it was certainly past sunrise.

Syreena sighed, feeling safe as well as content. Sunlight had always been such a fearful thing for her people, the sun poisoning they could suffer a terrible thing to experience. Now, however, the sun meant such different things to her. It meant the likelihood of enemies disturbing them was reduced to nearly nothing. It meant that neither ofthem would go beyond the walls of their living space again until dusk. There was something about being locked in with Damien that made it seem like they were cocooned together. He could not leave her, and she could not leave him. Of course, they did not need such things to keep them together, but still it provided an added sense of togetherness and security.

“I can hear those abstract thoughts of yours even without trying,” he murmured close to her ear.

She smiled.

Syreena realized she had never smiled much in her lifetime. She had always been such a seriously centered person. She’d really only first discovered the ability to be lighthearted when she had become a part of Siena’s household fifteen years earlier. Her sister was known for her mischief and humor and had a way of getting to everyone’s funny bone. She had taught Syreena the pleasure to be found in joking and teasing.

But it was Damien who had sparked one irresistible grin after another this past week in a way that she had always thought to be beyond her, just out of reach of her understanding. She knew now it was because she was becoming comfortable with herself for truly the first time in her life. One needed self-comfort in order to find ease in humor and happiness.

“Are you always going to be this philosophical after we make love?”

Syreena giggled, raising her head to look at him and finding she was glad to actually be able to do so. She looked down into those eyes that seemed as deep as the deepest ocean.

“I hope it’s telepathy, this part of you I am supposedly getting. I would very much enjoy snooping around in your head in return.”

“Sweetling, I would love it if you did. It would save me a lot of foreplay.”

“Mmm, sure it would,” she said, her disbelief all too apparent. “I think you’d be very upset if we subtracted the neck nibbling from this whole affair.”

“Too true,” he agreed with a laugh. His grin lingered as he reached to rub a thumb over his latest brand on her. “I am sorry if I get carried away. I cannot seem to help myself.”

“Do not apologize, Damien. It always seems natural when it happens. It is an enhancement, not an intrusion.”

“I can believe that,” he said, reaching to touch the wound on his throat that was already beginning to heal. “I have never felt anything like this before. You make a very good Vampire.”

“Thank you.”

Syreena found she had regained strength in her arms, and using her healthy arm, she levered herself up into a sitting position over him. She paused midway, making a sound of discomfort as parts of her body protested fiercely at the movement.

“Hurting?” he asked.

“A little. I feel … I feel like …”

“You have been turned inside out?” he supplied.

“Yes. Of course, you would know that.”

“Yes, though I believe it was a bit more violent for me.”

“I beg to differ. I would definitely claim violence on this end.” Syreena groaned as she moved a little too far in a sore direction.

She felt his hands reach up to help support her efforts, but then he went distinctly still. She watched as his chin tilted down and he acted as though he were listening to something. Her heartbeat picked up momentarily, her sensation of security bleeding away suddenly as she tried to sense what had caught his attention.

“What is it?”

He looked at her as if surprised by the question. “Nothing. No, that is not true. It is nothing bad. Relax, sweetheart, we are safe here.”

“How do you know that?”

“Trust me. We are surrounded by Vampires, Syreena. They know I have returned. They would never let anything make it this far inside our county.”

“I thought Vampires did not congregate in the same areas.”

“Romania is the homeland. It is different here. The Vampires of this county have been affiliated with my bloodlines for generations. You may not think so, but even we honor certain loyalties. This is why Jasmine wanted me to come here. She knew it would protect us from all threats to surround myself with known allies.”

“So then, what were you listening for?”

“To. I was listening to a telepathic message. Forgive me, I did not mean to get distracted.”

“Never mind that.” She waved him off. “What kind of message? Must I ask you for everything? You are so stingy with information sometimes.”

“I suppose I am. I am not used to … well, never mind. It was just a greeting of sorts. A very old-fashioned one. It actually has no linguistic equivalent.” He paused to think about how to best explain it. “It is our version of a call-out. An ‘all’s well,’ so to speak. I have not heard it in so long, I almost forgot it existed. It heralds the dawn, marks the time when all should be accounted for and safe. If anyone answers, it means something is wrong. Out of habit and respect, you listen in case there is an answer.”

“That is very … well, it’s like a pack cry. It’s very Lycanthropic.”

“We are not so different as we sometimes think, our two peoples.”

“I am learning that. I—”

She broke off as the room spun out from under her suddenly. She made a sickly noise and instantly lay back down over him. His hand went into her hair, the other against her cheek with concern.

“What is it?”

“Just a little dizzy,” she said as lightly as she could, considering the turning of her stomach. “There you go, this is the part of you I am doomed to get. The off-balance part.”

“Do not joke when you are seriously not feeling well,” he scolded her gently. “I hope we have not been reckless, doing this Exchange with so little knowledge.”

“We have been,” she admitted, resting her cheek on his chest and trying to focus on the candle on the bedside table. Closing her eyes only seemed to make it worse. “But I knew that before we did it. I was prepared to accept the con—”

She broke off again, this time with a shudder that flowed over her entire body.

“Syreena?”

Damien sat up with her still clinging to him. There was a helplessness in her grasp that troubled him. He gingerly turned her in his hold so that he was cradling her in his lap. He braced her forehead to his chin, hoping it would help the dizziness that was clearly not getting any better.

“It will pass,” she murmured, though less with conviction so much as with hopefulness.

“You know, it occurs to me you have not eaten much since you have been dwelling with those of us who do not eat. That could be why.”

“Yes. You are right. Of course.”

She took a breath, and then passed out cold in his arms.

Damien was trapped.

The sun was up and he was in a barren household with no assistance, no supplies, and no way of obtaining any of the above. Syreena was still breathing, but in soft, shallow bursts that were more unnerving than they were reassuring. He had laid her out on the bed, succeeding in finding a reasonably clean sheet in a nearby cedar trunk in order to cover her. He could feel she was losing body heat, but could find no explanation for it other than the one he dreaded.

He had survived his part of the Exchange, but it had been a fairly close dance with the beyond, as he recalled. Though Jasmine had told him that there was proof of it being a regular success between breeds in the past, Syreena was nothing like an ordinary Nightwalker. What if her mutations had made this a deadly choice for her? Damien did not think he could bear to live if anything happened to her because of this.

“Okay, relax,” he said aloud to himself.

She was going through what could be termed a catastrophic change in her physical makeup, just as he had done. It would simply take a little time for her to recover. It had only taken him a day to overcome the same effect. Perhaps that was all he needed to do, remain patient for a gathering of hours.

The reassurance helped to keep him from panicking, but it did little to relax him.

Damien spent the remaining daylight hours keeping vigil over her, watching her very closely, to the point where he knew exactly how many breaths she would take in an hour. He recovered his pants from their discarded clothing and searched the household, but he had been right to assume nothing of any usefulness would be found there. Unsuccessful in that venture, he took to pacing the room.

About five hours into the ordeal, she began to breathe a little easier and seemed to slip more into a form of sleep than a state of unconsciousness.

This was what finally relaxed him a little, enough so that he could settle down beside her instead of circuiting the room helplessly. He gathered her up against him, cocooning her body with his in every way he could manage.

The Prince closed his eyes, but he did not sleep. He simply listened to the way she breathed.

About three hours before dusk, she began to get restless. It started with a few nervous twitches, but then her central nervous system seemed to take over. She twisted and turned as if she were having a brutal nightmare. She made low noises deep in her throat like a small wounded animal. He bore this torture for nearly an hour, cursing himself the entire time for putting her through such a terrible experience. It gave him no comfort when he recalled that she had made the choice willingly.

In the later part of that hour, he wished Jasmine had never told him about the Exchange. This was because the restlessness gave way to petite seizures, and then escalated to worse ones until he thought her delicate spine would snap in two from the arching of her body.

Nothing signifying love and bonding should be so painful , he thought with anger.

He forgot that he had not minded so much in the aftermath of his own painful process. All he could think about, all he could see, was the woman he loved suffering.

At last, an hour before dusk, she fell into a deep sleep. So deep that he could not even sense her dreaming. Her body temperature returned to normal; so did her breathing. The perspiration that had coated her and soaked the first sheet had evaporated by the time he tucked her beneath a second one.

He rested beside her again, and again he did not sleep.

Damien closed his eyes as he settled back against the headboard of the huge bed. He acted as Syreena’s pillow, her back in a reclining repose against his chest and her head nestled securely beneath his chin. He could feel the soft movements of her hair against his skin as the restless ends seemed to seek a comfortable position.

Damien did not notice that the gray stubble that fuzzed over her altered hairline was growing, at quite a rapid pace. The cool gray hair darkened as it lengthened, the living strands spilling over Syreena’s cheek. Then, with every delicate pulsation of blood that circuited through her hair, the brown side deepened in color as well. For the first time since recovering from her illness as a young girl, her hair came as close to having a uniform color as it had ever had. In the end, however, it was all a marvelous charcoal color, not quite the pitch black of Damien’s hair, but nearly so. The distinction that remained, however, was the clear streaks of dark gray, dark brown, and pure black, that plumed back from her hairline just above her forehead, then fountained in three separate directions down the full length of her hair.

When Syreena opened her eyes at last, it was with the overwhelming sense that it was past dusk. All Nightwalkers could sense that on one level or another, but it seemed somehow sharper to her than usual. She did not feel well rested, but neither did she feel the exhaustion she probably should have. She took a moment, resting contentedly against Damien, ridiculously happy to find herself waking with his arms around her.

All traces of the dizziness that had plagued her earlier were gone, and it was a relief. The soreness had faded with her healing time, though she suspected once she moved she would find a few tender spots that would still be under reconstruction.

She had no idea how accurate her metaphor would turn out to be.

Damien felt her busy thoughts bumping around his extrasensory awareness before she even moved, opening his eyes quickly to look down at her. The change and growth in her hair was dramatic, and it took him several beats to absorb the impact of it. He was barely recovered from it enough to tell her about it when she looked up at him, exposing her eyes.

Her eyes. Eyes which had become the uniform color of charcoal, peppered with gray, brown, and deeper blackness. It was like looking down into intricate Italian marble.

It was, for a moment, like looking into the eyes of a stranger.

But then she smiled up at him, and she was instantly all Syreena. Changes notwithstanding, she was the same sharp, beautiful, tenacious woman he had fallen in love with.

And she was smiling.

He did not realize what a relief it was until he actually exhaled in release.

“I think I might have an idea of what you are going to get from me,” he told her wryly.

“Oh? Care to share?”

“Well …”

He thought for a moment, and then lifted her with himself as he leaned to the side and looked over the edge of the bed. She snickered as he tilted her to reach for something. When he came back to an upright position, it was with the poniard in his hand. He held the knife up for her, turning the flat of the blade toward her face. She gave him a puzzled look.

“Look into the blade.”

She did, and saw her slightly distorted reflection.

Syreena gasped, grasping his wrist to better angle the makeshift mirror. She could see the darkness of her hair in patches and pieces, but her eyes were quite clear.

“I match!”

It was a very childlike exclamation of clear delight, and he was more than a little bemused by it. He had thought she might be disturbed to see herself further altered. It had not occurred to him that the new uniformity of color might be pleasing to her. As he thought about it, however, he realized why it would be. Though it was all still very unique in coloring, there was nothing about it that marked her as a standapart being, not like the harlequin looks she had sported most of her life had done.

She kept tilting and retilting the knife, thrusting the inadequate mirror into all sorts of positions so she could see various parts of her new look.

“I wonder what it means,” she said softly.

“What it means?”

“The black, Damien. Remember? Lycanthrope hair colors to signify the form they take.”

“A raven?”

“Unlikely. I gave that to you. Seems a hard chance that you could give it back.” She sat up away from him further, scrambling for the edge of the bed, her feet hitting the dusty floor for only a second before his hand closed around her upper arm and pulled her back into the bed with him.

“You have just gone through a radical physical transformation that kept me up all day terrified for your health and safety, and you think I am going to let you trot around like nothing happened?”

“Damien, I am not the type to lie in bed all weak and moaning. I feel fine, and Iwant to …”

She broke off, reaching for the splint and bandages on her arm. After an all too brief touch test for pain, she tore the restriction away, throwing the shreds down onto the floor. She flexed her fingers and her arm, turning a brilliant smile on him.

“I want to fly!”

“Syreena!”

But she had escaped his grasp and was rushing across the suite, entering their private sitting room and running to the window, which she immediately levered open. Damien flew off the bed after her.

“Syreena! What if you have lost the falcon for some reason?”

“I haven’t. Iwould know.”

For a terrifying, breathless second, she ran at the window and dove out of it in human form. They were many stories up, so Damien’s heart seemed to leap out of his chest after her. He ran to the window, gripping the frame, almost afraid to look. But he had not gotten where he was in life by being cowed by new and dangerous things, so he looked after her immediately.

Her streamlined body sprang outward in an arc, passing the top of it as she formed an arrow out of herself. She began to plummet toward the ground, diving toward it as if it were water and not mountainous rock, her long, marblized hair fluttered in sheeted snaps as she finally spread her arms wide.

It took only a blink oftime before she flashed into the form that resembled a harpy, although the way she caught wind in her dark wings and buoyant feathers made her swoop elegantly from her death dive in a graceful sweep that was reminiscent of an angel instead of that mythical creature of hostility. She reeled, climbing upward now, using the powerful draw of her wings to skim back up the stone of the wall she had leapt from. Damien had to jerk back sharply to avoid cracking heads with her as she speared past the window.

Moonlight glinted off sleek, gray-black feathers as she whipped past. He grinned widely as he leaned back into the window frame to watch her take to the night sky. Her fly-by not withstanding, she clearly took to the air as naturally as she breathed. He envied her that ease for a moment, then tossed aside the sense of limitation and snapped himself into the form of the raven so he could join her.

Just as the raven cleared the building, his partner changed form once again, into the falcon that was so familiar to her. Only instead of the multi feathered brown they were used to seeing, she was the colors of her new hair tinting. Her back was striped black, her underbelly a soft, dark gray, and all the rest of her that dusty charcoal color.

The raven and the falcon dipped and turned in that eerie way birds had of perfect synchronization. She led, he followed. It would take quite some time for him to match her skill, but he was learning quickly enough to keep up with her.

Syreena swooped back down toward the ground, catching an updraft off the mountainside Damien’s holdings were built into. She was heading for the lake just beyond a ledge of rough-grown stone. Damien anticipated her, catching wind in his wings to brake his speed as she dove recklessly for the water just as heedlessly as she had leapt out of the window.

Again, she transformed on the fly.

She had missed the ripple of rubbery skin that immediately coated her distorting body. Even more, she had missed the artwork of the streamlined form of the dolphin. She hit the water at top speed, but the cut of her body made not a single splash. The dolphin skimmed beneath the surface like a flashing light of dark gray, the speed of the movement so quick, it was impossible to track while on the fly.

Damien settled onto the edge of the lake, mutating back to his most natural form until he was crouched low with one hand bracing his balance upon the ground. He watched her with more ease then, until she disappeared into the depths of the water.

She returned shortly, surfacing as the woman he was used to seeing, her exultant laugh making him smile wide.

“It has been so long!” she declared. “Only a week, but still too long!”

“So is there anything different? Beside the coloring, obviously.”

“I am sure there is, but I am not aware of it yet.”

“Are you sure you do not know what I am thinking?” he asked in such a way that he got a smile out of her to match her jubilant laugh.

“Yes, I do, but it has nothing to do with telepathy.” Syreena raised a hand out of the water and beckoned to him flirtatiously.

“Mmm, same result either way, so I do not particularly care how it was managed,” he told her as he rose up briefly and pushed off from the edge of the water.

His dive was clean and well-practiced.

When he surfaced, it was with a sputtered gasp.

“That’s right,” she said with an obvious snap of her fingertips. “It is wintertime, isn’t it?”

Damien was not amused. He swam to her in earnest, snagging her by a slick arm easily when she spent more effort in giggling than she did in trying to escape him.

“Let me guess, you do not feel the temperature of the water.”

“Not much,” she agreed, letting him drag her warm body through the water until she was sealed close to his. “But I did owe you for the attack of cold hands.”

“How is it you can feel that, but not this glacial cold?” he demanded.

“Because I was prepared. A flip of a mental switch, so to speak, and the fact that I am not entirely in human form.”

He felt her slap her legs against his, only to realize it was a finned tail and not legs at all.

“Well, well, if it isn’t the little mermaid,” he mused, running a curious hand down her back and backside, noting the point where skin blended away and became the smooth coldness of her tail.

“Don’t expect me to sing for you. I cannot carry a tune.”

“Not even with a partial spirit of a Siren within you? I find that hard to believe.”

He kissed her before she could retort.

“I thought I heard complaints about the frigidness of the water,” she purred as she snuggled against his immersed body a moment later.

“Yes, but as the heat leaves my body, it is easier to take. You cannot claim the same, I imagine. I am wondering about the way you will react to my cold appendages this time.”

She laughed, pushing away from him, splashing water at him.

“The joke is on you, Prince Damien,” she taunted him. “You would have to catch me first.”

She dove under the water, leaving him with an impertinent flip of her tail that sent a wave of water over him.

“The joke is on you, Princess,” he muttered, “because I can hold my breath longer.”

He did not bother to chase her, waiting instead for the inevitable call of oxygen to strike her.

When she did come up, he was going to see to it she warmed him up for her penance.