Feverborn (Fever #8) - Karen Marie Moning Page 0,21
switchblade in one hand, alcohol which I hadn’t had time to use in another, a feral look of triumph on my face. I might have even been laughing a little.
Butt-ass naked.
6
“Remember when I moved in you and the holy dove was moving, too…”
I felt drugged. I was drugged, high on my victory over the bullets, blood pounding with immortal strength, stamina, and lust.
My mind registered Barrons, my body said: Let’s get down and dirty. I’m in the perfect condition for it. Last time I’d eaten Unseelie flesh, he’d been killed a few minutes later. I’d suffered both the high and withdrawal alone. Had endured most of the high getting home from Germany, trying not to think or feel too much.
How long had it been since we’d devolved into an animalistic, no holds barred fuck-fest? What in the world had been wrong with me?
I knew the answer to that question. It was the thing I was keeping to myself, cocooned inside, a voracious worm in the rotten apple that was MacKayla Lane O’Connor.
Now, with the impunity and belligerence of an Unseelie-flesh high riding me, Barrons standing there looking half savage, half man, and no immediate threats to my existence, I had a single imperative. I was clarified—the Mac I used to be, back in more ways than one. Maybe this was what I needed to do to get through the days until I’d sorted out my many messes. Become an addict.
I’d never had sex with Barrons while I was amped up on Unseelie but I’d enormously wanted to. The small taste I’d gotten in Mallucé’s grotto had infiltrated my dreams, tantalized me, goaded me to indulge again. Pri-ya was horrific. It made you mindlessly insatiable, little better than a puppet.
But an Unseelie-flesh high was fully aware unquenchable lust—with an unbreakable body. If we fucked too hard, so what? My skin would heal even as we were doing it, letting me have more and more. We could do that thing I loved to do so much, that drove Barrons absolutely bugfuck crazy, with no repercussions.
I shivered with lust, suddenly understanding the See-you-in-Faery girls more than I wanted to.
Our eyes locked and I jerked.
Fucking river of blood in my House.
I actually saw the capital H in his eyes and knew Barrons’s House was whatever he’d claimed as his own, and nobody, but nobody, shit in it. There would be hell to pay, and I wasn’t certain I wouldn’t steer him in Brody’s direction before the night was through. I’ve learned a thing or two during my time in Dublin: when you let the bad guy walk, he comes back. Until you don’t let him walk.
Paint, I corrected. But his primal senses had told him that before he’d even walked in the front door. The man could smell if I was having my period. Or even just close to starting it.
Barrons snarled, black fangs flashing, and I realized walking through the bookstore in its current condition must have awakened a memory from another time when he’d stalked a battlefield of blood, wondering what he would find. Most likely discovering everyone he knew—with the exception of his immortal companions—dead. I wondered how long he’d had to live before he quit letting himself have one ounce of interest in a human. How it must have felt to lose everyone around him like I’d lost Alina. Oh, yes, easier not to care. To ultimately let oneself revile.
Barrons’s beast is always close to the surface. I sometimes wonder if one day he won’t simply change, lope away, and never walk as a man again. Go be pure in the form that makes the most sense to him, on some other world, in a skin that’s much harder to kill and, for him, much easier to live in.
His dark eyes flashed. Fuck. Didn’t know what I’d find. There are still some things that can kill you. Hate that.
Ah, so he’d considered the possibility Dani had come after me with my own spear. Fuck. Didn’t know if you’d come back. To me, I was quick to chew off. Hate that.
He smiled but it vanished quickly. His lips tightened, his mouth reshaped in a way I knew well. He was thinking about what he’d like to be doing to me with it. And it wasn’t talking. Barrons doesn’t waste time on the mundane. Another man might have said, “Gee, how are you visible again?” Or, “What the hell happened to my bookstore?” Or, “Who did this and are you okay?”