Chains of Frost: The Bellum Sisters 1 (22 page)

She felt the change in him, like
a switch being thrown. His mouth firmly latched onto her neck with a growl and
he sucked hard as he started pumping faster. Her tissues tingled, his cock
landed against that spot so deep inside her. He let out a half-shout against
her neck.

Hearing him lost sent her body
shooting apart like a supernova. Her arms came around his shoulders to hold onto
something from this Earth as she screamed with the force of her release. He
didn’t stop growling. She felt him shooting inside her even as he continued to
thrust over and again.

She heard something and realized
she was chanting his name. He slowed his thrusts to a lazy rock then pulled
away from her neck. Chloe followed his head down to the pillow, kissing his wet
lips. His hands came up to her face, cradling her as he kissed her back. A
warm, satisfied feeling settled in her heart, made it feel bigger, happier than
usual. Even as it terrified her, she reveled in it.

He pulled back and looked at her,
his eyes tracing over her features then down to her neck. His eyes pulled tight
and then he was pushing her aside and heading for the bathroom.

“What’s wrong now?” He didn’t
answer but he did close the bathroom door. Sighing, she tamped down the anger,
not wanting to ruin the incredible, floating feeling inside her. As she closed
her eyes, she could smell his clean scent against the pillow, and quickly fell
asleep.

Chapter Eighteen

“Get up!”

Chloe jerked awake at Tyrian’s
yell. She had only a moment to blink before he was yanking her out of bed and
shoving her behind him.

She blinked again as she saw the
giant double-bladed axe he wielded one-handed. Was this a dream? Where the hell
did he get that thing? It’s not like she wouldn’t have noticed it.

A terrible shriek boomed through
the air. Whatever made the sound had to be massive. Not even a second later,
something crashed into the window, sending sharp shards of glass exploding into
the room.

Holy shit. The demons had found
her. “They can fly?” she said, stunned at the demon lumbering to its bony green
feet.

“Some can. Looks like your demon
has gained some extra followers.” The demon locked eyes on them, screeched, and
launched at Tyrian.

Tyrian swung his axe in a wide,
arching sweep just as the demon moved, clipping a wing off with a meaty sound.
The demon screeched and rounded on Tyrian as something hard started banging on
the front door. The keychain rattled violently against the door, the frame
splintered and shook. Chloe frantically looked around for a weapon,
anything,
but saw nothing she could actually use. She didn’t have some magical axe to
fight with.

Tyrian went after the demon with
a series of swings that sent it tumbling back into the wall. With one final
swing, its head was severed from its twitching body. The demon fell limply to
the floor like a doll.

The front door cracked, then
splintered open in an explosion of wood. Demons poured in, too many for Chloe
to count. They screeched ear-piercing sounds that had her huddling away,
covering her ears to block it out. Something heavy and hard slammed onto her
back. She never saw it coming.

It wrapped its limbs tightly
around her, nearly squeezing the air from her. She ran backward, rammed her
back into the corner of the wall and the arms around her opened as the demon
squealed in pain. Spinning around, she was ready to fight for the right to
live.

The demon didn’t fight her
though, but grabbed onto her arms and pulled her toward the broken window.
Chloe screamed in the demon’s face and wrenched her arm away. She let her fist
fly and hit him in the face with everything she had. The demon let go of her as
it yowled in pain.

Chloe turned and found Tyrian
making his way toward her, lopping heads, arms, and legs off as he came. The
room was filling fast with more
idummi.
The look on his face was one
she’d never seen before.

Two demons broke past him, each
latching onto her arms with clawed fingers. Screeches, roars, and cries of pain
echoed in the room sounding like some epic-scale battle from a movie. Chloe
kicked at the demon pulling her as she struggled fiercely to get her arms back.

Hot burning pain shot up her arms
with the exertion. Nothing she did worked. They continued to drag her closer
and closer to that window, their bony, fleshy wings flapping and slapping
against their backs anxiously. Suddenly, another demon came up and snatched one
of them off her, tossing the demon into the wall where they began to snap at
each other. Chloe had no chance to be relieved, because the action set the
other demon’s claws deep into her stomach.

Chloe stopped breathing as she
stared down at the four bleeding lines appearing on her naked stomach. Searing
hot pain blasted across her stomach like four hot pokers were pressed up
against her. She screamed, flailed, and finally managed to dislodge the other
demon from her. Agony rippled through her stomach and went deeper and deeper.

Before panic could set in, Tyrian
was there and so was Rayn. She didn’t stop to think how the warrior got there; she
was just relieved when her body began to tingle all over in that increasingly
familiar way. Then everything faded around them as the room transitioned to
some room she didn’t recognize. But she recognized the stone gray walls. Castle
Death.

Rayn was speaking quickly. “I’ll
get Nanu.”

“Hurry,” Tyrian said. He urged
her onto a white hospital bed and made her lay down. She did because the
retching pain in her stomach had tears streaming down her eyes. Intense pain
seared into her organs like hot knives covered in boiling acid.

“What’s happening to me?” she
croaked.

Tyrian’s face was paler than
usual, his eyes shielded with impassable ice.

“Nanu!” he roared.

“Please tell me.”

He grabbed her hand and pushed
the hair back from her face. The pain was spreading like lava in her body,
pressing up to her chest and down to her hips and thighs. “It hurts,” she said
and couldn’t stop the sob that came out. “Stop it, please.”

“I know, sweetheart. Just hold onto
my hand.” Chloe squeezed tight to his hand. His hand felt freezing in hers,
like he’d been holding it in a bucket of ice water. What was wrong with him?
Did something happen to him, too? Chloe slammed her eyes shut as piercing pain
punctured through her legs, down to her feet, then up into her arms and hands.

“It’s taking me. Don’t let it
take me, Tyrian.” Everything around her was turning fuzzy. The bright,
fluorescent lights on the ceiling were fading, dimming out. Tyrian’s face
wobbled before hers. Was it from her tears, or was she dying? “I don’t want to
die.”
Will I see Papa if I die?

“I would never let anything
happen to you, Chloe. Look at me.” Her eyes fluttered, scrambled wildly around
the room searching for him. Then he was right there. If she focused hard enough,
she could feel his breath against her face, cooling her hot tears. “You know
that I do not lie. I would never lie to you. I will not let you die.” Tyrian
squeezed her hand as if to prove his point. Then he threw back his head again
and roared, “Nanu!”

Chloe might have winced if she
wasn’t dying, because she was. She’d never know where Lily and Willow were.
She’d never discover all of Tyrian’s secrets. She’d never have babies and know
what it felt like to have a baby suckle her breast.

The pain inside her morphed,
twisted into something worse. She screamed, her body shaking violently on the
table, her teeth chattering hard. She knew Tyrian was speaking, but she
couldn’t hear the words. The room spun and shook around her, growing fuzzier,
blacker. In one last searing wash of pain, she sucked in a breath of air and
everything faded to black.

Chapter Nineteen

Nanu came sprinting into the
room.

“Where the fuck have you been?”
Tyrian growled. Nanu came to a hard stop at the sound of his voice. He’d never
yelled at her before.

“I’m sorry, I was in bed.”
Quickly, she pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves and grabbed the stethoscope
off her desk. “Tell me what happened.” She listened to Chloe’s heart as he
answered.

“Demon attack at the hotel. It
clawed her straight across the midriff.” Nanu pulled back the scope and barked
orders.

“Go to the med cabinet and grab
the two clear bottles that say diazapram and sodium pentobarbital. Now!”

As Tyrian rushed the cabinet,
Nanu swabbed Chloe’s arm with alcohol. Tyrian handed her the bottles and she
quickly filled a cocktail in a thin needle. As she did, she said in clear,
modulated tones, “Listen to me; I need you to go to into the next room to the
bathroom. There’s an ice machine behind me. Fill the tub with ice and cold
water. We need to lower her body temperature now.”

Tyrian paused and leveled a hard
look on her. “If you let her die…”

“I know. You’ll kill me. Hurry up
and get her in there. I’ll be right behind you.”

Tyrian filled the bath with cold
water and ice and had Chloe floating in it in less than thirty seconds. “What’s
wrong with her?”

God, he felt wired, strung out,
and terrified. And why did he even ask what was wrong? He knew what was wrong.
He’d been fighting demons for most of his life. Now he was just losing his
mind.

“She’s poisoned. Relax, Commander
Tyrian. I should be able to drain it from her system before it reaches her
brain.”

Her brain,
he thought and froze. “Hurry,”
he said gruffly. How much time had already passed since she was poisoned? He
tried to think fast, to count the minutes and seconds, but he couldn’t be sure.
He’d been fighting a wave of demons, hadn’t even known she was being dragged
back. He ran a hard hand over his face. He fucked up and it was his fault.

Tyrian could only stand back and
watch everything happen. Could only watch as his most skilled healer slit open
Chloe’s wrists, a vein under her knees, and one in the center of her chest. The
wounds weren’t terribly deep but they weren’t paper cuts either.

Fuck. He paced back and forth.
The sight of her blood turning the icy water around her red had his heart
pounding in his chest, hands pulling at his hair.

“You must care for her a great
deal.” Nanu’s words took a moment to sink in.

“No. I am her Protector. She is
my responsibility.” He couldn’t hold it back anymore. The anger and fear inside
him finally spilled out and he bit his lip until he tasted blood and drove his
fist into the wall. The brief flare of pain didn’t help, but it helped to bring
him back down to Earth. The stone crumbled around his fist.

Tyrian turned back to watch Nanu
work. How she managed to keep her hands from shaking was a pure miracle. Though
that was a big part of why she worked for him. He had only the best. Nanu
wasted no time after the cuts were made. She sprinted into the lab and came
back with a green flask he was familiar with.

During The Great War when the
Atal Warriors were created to battle the demons, many men and women died
because of the
idummi
’
s
poisonous claws. Nothing any of the
healers did could cure the vicious fluid or stop its destructive path to the
brain where it quickly feasted upon the matter and killed the being; no matter
if he or she was vampire, shapeshifter, or even succubus.

There was no surviving once it
reached there. That is, until hundreds of years after The Great War, when the
battles had settled to mere pockets of excursions, and healers worked together
to develop an anecdote. They did it, too.

At first, the concoction didn’t
work. They injected it into the blood and still the poison ate its way to the
brain and destroyed the unlucky being. It was only after countless more deaths
and experimentation that the healers developed a method to cure the
idummi
poison.

First, there was the time factor.
They had to act quickly because it didn’t take long for the poison to make its
way through the body. Second, blood had to be let. The healers referred to the
process as ‘leaching’ though they didn’t use leaches anymore. Tyrian didn’t
know what the purpose of it was, but knew that it was necessary for the injection
that came.

Nanu stuck a large needle into
the green flask and pulled back until fluid nearly filled the entire syringe. She
lifted Chloe’s closed eyelids and said, “Shit.” Then she plunged the big needle
straight into Chloe’s heart. “Grab me the bucket from the corner over there.”

Tyrian grabbed it and held it
next to the tub, his stomach tightening at what was to come. If it hadn’t
already killed her, then this was going to be the messy process, the third step
in the cure.

For long, breathless moments,
nothing happened. Not a flicker of movement, not even a blink. Seeing the full
of life succubus so…dead, twisted his heart like a coiling snake. He didn’t
have time to breathe as he normally would have done, or to take a moment to
block himself off from feeling. Chloe always seemed to find a way to make him
feel no matter how hard he fought it. Was this why Francis sent her to him?