J.R. Ward the Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8 - J. R. Ward [318]
As he took another drag, he tried to tell himself that she wasn’t Cormia.
No, this wasn’t Cormia . . . this was no one female, just a composite of sexual attributes he’d forgone with all his celibacy. This was the feminine ideal he wished he had been with for his first time. This was the female he would have loved to have been drinking from all these years. This was his fantasy lover, giving and demanding by turns, soft and yielding sometimes, greedy and naughty at others.
She was not real.
And she was not Cormia.
He exhaled a curse, rearranged the hard cock in his pajama bottoms, and stabbed out the blunt.
He was so full of shit. Full. Of. Shit. This absolutely was Cormia.
He glanced at the Primale medallion over on the bureau, thought of his talk with the Directrix, and cursed again. Great. Now that Cormia wasn’t his First Mate, he’d decided that he wanted her. Just his luck.
“Christ.”
He leaned over to the bedside table, twisted up another fattie, and lit the fucker. With the hand-rolled between his lips, he started to draw the ivy, beginning at her lovely, curled toes. As he added leaf after leaf and obscured the drawing, he felt as if it were his hands going up her smooth legs and over her stomach and up to her tight, high breasts.
He was so distracted by caressing her in his mind that the choking sensation that usually came when he covered a drawing with the ivy didn’t flare up until he got to her face.
He paused. This truly was Cormia and not a half-her, as his drawing of Bella had been the other night. Cormia’s features were all there, out in plain view, from the tilt of her eyes to the plump of her lower lip to the lushness of her hair.
And she was looking at him. Wanting him.
Oh, God . . .
He quickly drew the ivy up around her face and then stared at the way he’d ruined her. The shit covered her completely even overflowing the bounds of her body, burying her without putting her under the ground.
In a flash, he recalled the garden at his parents’ house as he had seen it that last time, when he’d gone back to bury them.
God, he could still remember that night with perfect clarity. Especially how the remnants of the fire had smelled.
The grave he had dug was off to the side, the hole in the earth a raw wound in the thick ivy of the garden. He’d put both his parents in it, but there had been only one body to bury. He’d had to burn his mother’s remains. When he’d found her, she had decomposed in her bed to such an extent that he wasn’t able to carry her out of the basement. He’d set what was left of her on fire down where she’d lain, and had spoken sacred words until the smoke had choked him so badly he’d had to get out.
While the fire raged within her stone room, he had picked up his father and taken the male out to the grave. After the blaze had devoured what it could reach in the basement, Phury had swept up the ashes that were left and placed them in a large bronze urn. There had been a lot of them, because he’d burned the mattress and bedding along with her.
The urn went next to his father’s head, and then he had shoveled loose dirt on the top of them.
He’d burned the whole house down after that. Burned it flat to the ground. It was cursed, the whole place, and he was sure that even the fierce temperature of the flames hadn’t been enough to cleanse the infection of bad luck.
As he’d left, his last thought had been that it wouldn’t be long before the ivy covered up the foundation.
Sure you burned it all, the wizard said in his head. But you were right, you didn’t make the curse go away. All those flames didn’t cleanse them or you, did they, mate. Just made you an arsonist as well as a failed savior.
Putting out the blunt, he wadded up the drawing, attached his prosthesis, and went to his door.
You can’t run from me or the past, the wizard murmured. We’re like the