Page 34 of Reaper’s Curse

Her eyes cracked open a smidgen, taking him in.

“I think I may have figured out how to help you. Will you let me try?”

Aside from the shudders and shakes, she didn’t move. But she blinked her eyes once, slowly, which Winter accepted as permission granted.

“Okay,” he murmured. “I make no promises, but we’ll give it a try.”

She stared up at him from beneath ice-crusted lashes, and he desperately wanted to lick the frost away. Warm her skin in more ways than he had planned.

I can wait, he told himself.

They had time. And he would never take advantage of her in her current state. He would be a better male than that.

“Do you remember earlier,” he continued, “when I managed to warm the side of your face, pull the frosty magic from your skin?”

A strangled noise escaped her lips, and she shivered violently. He laid his hand on top of hers. Gods, she was ice made flesh. Surely, she couldn’t take much more of his magic at this level.

“We’re going to attempt that same method again, and I won’t stop, won’t leave you, until your body temperature rises.”

He leaned forward and brushed his lips against the thin layer of sleet coating her skin. The magic’s reaction to his breath was immediate. The ice retreated, and her cheek warmed. Her cheek only. Not her nose or forehead. Nowhere beyond the placement of his mouth.

He moved an inch toward her temple, took another breath. More frosty magic retreated.

Well. This could get interesting.

He dragged his teeth over his lower lip.

“Do you want me to keep going, even if…” It requires my lips close to your skin in so many places?

A muffled murmur rose in her throat, and Winter dragged his fingers down the length of her neck. Could her vocal cords be near freezing? He shifted and glided his breath, his lips across her skin, from her chin to her collar. Bluing skin blushed with healthy color.

“P-P-Please,” she stuttered. “Doo. Don’t. Stop.” She shuddered. “Soosoosoo cooold.”

Under different circumstances, Raven’s request would have brought a grin to his lips. But she was freezing on a dangerous level. His magic was taking command of her body, and he couldn’t be certain it wouldn’t kill her.

And damn be the gods, but he cared. About Raven and her fate.

He swept his lips across her jawbone, tracing a line from ear to ear. He brushed his mouth in an arc across her forehead then softly coasted the line of her nose. He breathed a kiss upon each eye, and with each touch, each exhale and inhale, magic rose off her skin in misty swirls and surged into his core. Each intake was a keen mix of fire and ice dancing in his central being.

Beneath Winter’s touch, Raven’s body warmed, and her shivers abated. She groaned, and his body responded…a tad too enthusiastically. Her keening could be a reaction to her release from the freezing state, or possibly the methods he used to elicit the temperature change, but either way, when she released a second, softer moan, he captured it with his mouth.

And discovered a new method by which to extract the frozen magic from her system.

11

Fever, relentless and sweltering, devoured every piece of my body and soul. I lost time to the burning, found myself divided into two parts of myself: one young and scared, another ancient and irritated.

No. Irritated didn’t sum up my whirlwind of emotions. Angry. An explosion of fury. Fury so intense it would burn another on contact.

And despair deep enough to suck me under and drown me.

The internal tempest consumed me, and time blinked in and out of existence. On occasion, the freezing dark trapped me. Other moments, hours, or days, the light blazed blindingly bright, cracked fissures through my skull, and set my skin to boil.

Someone slapped my cheek. I cracked my eyes open and peered up at Aoes’s fuzzy image.

“Hey, man. Why did you lock yourself in the drunk cage?”

I hadn’t, wanted to say as much, but I couldn’t make my vocal cords respond. I was losing my body weight in sweat, and my mouth felt drier than the desert wastelands of Helvíti.