Cain lowered his shoulders and glanced at the demon-skull hand protector of his sword. "She knows." He sighed heavily. "That is re�grettable. I imagine she did not take my decision well." He looked at Damali and slowly smiled.
"Youimagine she didn't take it well?" Incredulous, Damali leveled her blade. "The mother of mothers is prostrate on the floorof Coun�cil," she shouted. "Her firstborn son is killing her slowly. The woman can barely draw her next breath! Her heart went into that throne with you, Cain. What about this don't you get?"
"Her condition is regrettable," he said calmly, beginning to circle her again. He tilted his head as he stared at her when they took war�rior stances and squared off again.
"Regrettable? Regrettable! She is my queen!" Damali took a run�ning swing and scored his chest armor, but he deflected the blow with a defensive move.
"I love you," he breathed out, raw desire in his voice as his eyes went crimson. "You would battle me because of my mother's honor. Do you know what that means to me?"
"You're crazy!" Damali shouted, lobbing three steel-to-steel clashes, but he caught her blade with his and drove it down to the rocky floor and stepped on it, holding it down with his boot.
"Totally insane over you. Devastation, come let me heal your arm. The combination of your fury and blood in here is-"
She pivoted, using the blade as anchor and caught him dead center in the chest with a hard, flat-footed blow. But she backed up quickly when he didn't move and just looked at her with a handsome smile. He removed his foot slowly from her blade and allowed her to pull it away. She backed up farther, putting ten feet between them and glanced around. Okay, she was on Level One, not in too deep.
"You shouldn't have taken that throne," she said, fury still roiling but now mixed with deep concern. This bastard waswaaay stronger than she remembered. Dante wasn't even that solid, and definitely didn't have the Neteru moves to go with it.
"Are you telling me that your rage was born from your concern for me... and for my mother?" he whispered, advancing toward her slowly. He licked his lips and then glanced at her arm, sealing the wound. Inhaling deeply, he kept walking forward. "Damali, you sim�ply render me-"
"Hey, motherfucker-back up!" Damali said, judging the edge of the precipice behind her that yawned into an abyss, and whether or not she could get up onto a boulder fast enough to avoid him.
Cain's gaze narrowed as he stared at Damali's throat. "While I was away, he abducted you with a battle bite?" Cain's thundering voice bounced off the crevices and cavern walls. "Infidel! He forced you to marry through such brutality? I knew you would never forsake me! The union is void! Come to me, my angel, and stop this foolishness. We will vanquish his armies together!"
She was motion. Five boulders up there was a ledge and a wide enough space to battle before making it to an exit tunnel. A shape-shift would be her friend. Then she was out. Only problem was, when she got to the top, he was standing there, and had the gall to reach down and offer her a hand. The bird thing wasn't working, in fact, nothing was. The queens needed to stop tripping and come together, like now!
"Come to me," Cain said in a quiet voice, pulling her up with one strong yank and stopping her wrist in midswing. "You do not want to take off my head."
"Like hell," she said, reinforcing her grip on the blade, refusing to let him see how panic-stricken she was. Then it slowly dawned upon her... in her outrage she'd told him that her Neteru Council of Queens had been weakened by Eve's devastation.He knew what that meant. She'd been played!
Her wrist felt like it was made of papier-mache in his hold, and he wasn't really applying pressure. This wasnot how this was sup�posed to go.
Cain chuckled low in his throat. "You have a wonderful dexterity with words. I love anything that rolls off your tongue. Let me taste it."
She yanked her head back when he tried to kiss her, and he quickly put both of her hands behind her, the Isis scraping the ground. When she tried to lift her knee to go for a groin kick, or alternatively stomp his instep, his tail whipped between her thighs, anchoring them open. Fifteen different shape-shifts raced through her head, every power that she had hummed inside her, but it was like turning the key in a car engine and just getting a click-dead battery. A weak energy pulse
arced from her palms, but the Isis caught the charge between them, sending a medium current into the cavern floor. Now she was scared, something she'd rarely been. It was time to bargain.
"Why would you make a deal with the Unnamed One?" she said in Dananu, breathing hard. "He'll rob you, take everything, every beautiful gift you once owned, once it's all said and done."
"Probably," Cain murmured, inhaling her scent in a hard nuzzle against her hair. "But that will be a very long time from now." He closed his eyes and sent craven images into her skull by force. "There is so much that I want to do with you," he whispered into her ear. "Choose one and I will make it so, lover."
She thought about using her teeth as a weapon, but then thought better of it. What was the point? She had to say something, do some�thing, to get him up off her to buy distance. Seconds felt like minutes as he pressed against her befouling her mind.
"Speak to me again in Dananu," he said with a shudder, sliding against her. "I did notknow you could speak it thus."
"Brother, why you got me all up against a cavern wall like this, huh? Tacky. When I first met you, you behaved like a royal-had wet my drawers, could sing, made me scream 'cause it was so good, and I hadn't even gotten any, for real. But see how one tumble into that throne has jacked you up?"
Cain pulled back to look at her and smiled. "I missed you. Perhaps that is what has made me too eager."
"Well, some homecoming."
They stared at each other.
"Damali, let me say this to you once. I am not the same man you met before. If this is a ruse..."
"There's no fraud. I'm scared of your ass now. I wasn't that be�fore," she said in a sexy whisper in Dananu. "What happened to the lair in Nod? It was beautiful. This frightens me. Can't we go there?"
"I have something better downstairs," he said, nipping her jugular. "All black marble. Would you like to see it?"