Demon Marked

her body. She gripped the forward projecting edge of the roof with a taloned claw.
    Her eyes began to glow. “Hello, Nicholas. You look well.”
    He hadn’t been well. Not until this moment. “You look beautiful.”
    Fangs glinted in her smile, and his heart tightened, a painfully sweet ache. God, how he’d missed her.
    “I thought I’d try to scare you,” she said. “The birds gave me away. It makes me wish that I liked to eat chicken.”
    “You probably scared them .”
    “But not you.” She rose and stepped off the roof. Her wings caught the air, and she glided to Nicholas, landing easily just in front of him. The glowing crimson faded to human blue. Scales slid back into tattoos and a tan; her horns vanished. Jeans and her hoodie formed over naked skin. “I’ve missed you. But is it too early yet?”
    He knew exactly what she meant, but still didn’t know how to answer it. So he gave her what he had to give. “I missed you, too. So damn much.”
    The joy in her smile slipped into him, through him. “It took me two years just to remember part of my name, Nicholas. If you need me to go, I can—”
    “No.” He’d missed her, he’d wanted her in his arms and to see her smile, but he hadn’t known how much he needed to see her. And now that she was here—“I need you to stay.”
    Holding his gaze, she lifted her hands to cup his face, to slide her fingers through his hair. “You feel the same. And so familiar. I’ve touched you more in my imaginings than I ever have for real. I’d begun to fear that I’d forgotten, or that I remembered wrong.”
    “And you are just as . . . just as . . . everything .” It hit him like a punch to the chest. “Everything.”
    “So.” She grinned. “Even you can’t manage eloquence when you’ve just spent six weeks living like a hermit.”
    “No.” He shook his head, and her smile faded. “Don’t you see? It’s—”
    Too much to say. Too big.
    So he kissed her.
     
    This wasn’t familiar. The urge to cry and to laugh, and the painful effort to hold it in, to keep her emotions from overwhelming him. She rarely took such care. Only once had she fought so hard to contain them, but that was when she’d been full of desperation and fear, but trying to prevent Madelyn from using those emotions in any way, trying to keep from giving herself away with every lie, every evasion.
    And now, his mouth on hers, she felt the same thing from Nicholas—an explosion of emotion, somehow contained, but that couldn’t be any longer. Oh, God. She lifted to him, welcomed the possessive surge of his tongue, touching his shoulders, his arms, the broad sweep of his back and the delicious tautness of his ass, claiming all of him for her own.
    He lifted his head, breathing raggedly. “Everything, Ash. This is what I want to be. I thought you needed to be separate from what mattered, but it’s not. You’re the reason for it all. You’re the reason I can feel that anything else matters at all.”
    “Nicholas.” Smiling, she trailed her fingers from his temple to his jaw. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I feel the same way. How is that, do you think?”
    He grinned. “I have no idea. Hold on. And vanish your wings.”
    She did, then laughed aloud as he bent and swept her up against his chest. Her arms circled his neck. “They are a pain in the ass through doorways. Are you taking me to have sex? Because if your answer is no, I want you to put me down—so that I can pick you up, and take you to have sex.”
    “You’ll have to come up with a better plot than that.”
    She could, easily. “Oh, Nicholas! My clothes just fell off.”
    The fabric between them vanished. With a single glance, his eyes flared with pale blue light. Ash caught her breath.
    “Oh,” she whispered. “Oh. You are . . .”
    His arms tensed. “Different?”
    “Beautiful, I think.” Her chest filled with it. “It is sometimes hard to decide whether something is known or felt. I have always known how handsome you are. But you have never been so beautiful to me as you are now, naked like this.”
    “I’m not naked yet.”
    “You wear clothes, Nicholas. But I see you. Better than I have ever seen you before, with some of you that is new to see. Not just the glowing eyes; it was not just a transformation. You are a Guardian now.”
    His throat worked, and his answer was rough. “Yes.”
    “Just as I’m a demon—though I am, of course, the best kind. The only kind of