It was as if I was being scourged. I flinched every time his back muscles quivered and I keened along with his moans, feeling a dark, deep Irish grief I’d never known in myself.

This was the downside of love, such total involvement in another’s pain that you are helpless to ease. I was kneeling over his brutally bared back, surprised when raindrops started dotting the rutted skin. Oh. My tears. I, who’d never cried, not even as an orphaned, unwanted child. Especially not as an orphaned, unwanted child.

Tears were storming down my cheeks. The thought of my own salt water striking even scars was so abhorrent I slapped the wetness off my face, hard to the side, so they wouldn’t sting wounds I couldn’t believe had ever truly sealed. I felt I was pouring fresh acid on them.

I bent to kiss away my tears, to consume my own corrosive saltwater sorrow.

Ric moaned deeply.

I reared away, horrified, rasping frantic whispers. “Ric, I’m sorry. Sorry! I never cry. I didn’t mean to hurt you again.”

My tears glowed on his back like drops of radioactive dew in the lamplight, in my mind. Were my tears cursed now, as well as my lips?

“I’ll fix it! Somehow. Fast!”

I kissed along one raised furrow, tasting my salt and trying to retract it back into my body and being, suck it away. I felt like a fucking vampire. God, no. No more pain!

Ric moaned again. Oh, my God, I was right! Ric could feel every touch as it was happening twenty years ago. I sat back up on my heels, debating whether to call the nurses or call Quicksilver and use his healing saliva and tongue again, since mine were so useless and even harmful…

The lamplight still revealed every ugly knuckle-thick welt knotting his flesh.

Except… one welt had shrunken, withered flat into a thin scar line, the one my lips had traced in anguished remorse. My forefinger lightly followed the silver line. Ric moaned softly again. I blinked, feeling the alien wetness still on my eyelashes, seeing more clearly.

Had I… kissed away… a whip welt?

Only one way to know. I bent and kissed along another eight-inch soul-scar of Hell. I jerked back.

Ric’s moan was more guttural as his torso writhed deeper into the mattress. I made tight fists in shared anguish as another welt shrank to a faint scar line as smooth as the untouched flesh on either side.

I held my breath, clapped my hand to my mouth to hold it in, realizing what had happened. If I was willing to inflict fresh pain on Ric I would be able to… to reduce his scars to ghosts of themselves, make them faint reminders only.

Trembling, I bent and deliberately traced an ugly welt with my lips and tongue, evoking another cry of pain.

Or…

Oh. Ric’s moans weren’t from pain. They were from pleasure.

I couldn’t believe it. I bent to his nearer shoulder and ran my lips lightly over the first hardened ridge of flesh they felt. The thick scar melted into another faint gleam as flat as the finest silver wire.

I began teasing him. A healing kiss high along his left hip. Again below the waist. His pelvis was grinding against the sheets, his moans soft and sensuous. Back to a shoulder, the middle of his back.

The growing tracery of healed welts was like a reverse tattoo, pale on his desert dusky skin, making a pinwheel of strokes that almost resembled some primitive artwork found painted on an ancient tribal rock.

I felt a triumphant joy in my work. Somehow, I was replacing old pain with new pleasure, erasing the past and even its evidence, undoing El Demonio’s deviltry. Even Ric’s brutal brush with the Karnak vampires couldn’t entirely undo this night’s work. The only visible scars of his indentured childhood were fading to shiny healed flesh. He’d be truly whole again.

My body was shaking slightly with the wonder of it. I was still feeling tearful but stemming that tide, half wanting to cry while I laughed, excited by my lover’s having the world’s most insanely literal wet dream because of me…

The double doors to the bedroom burst open as if a SWAT team were attacking. The bridal suite had turned from a night sanctuary of sexual healing into a predawn death trap.

I REARED UP on my knees as Quicksilver backed in, growling aggressively, forelegs down, teeth bared. I’d kneecap anyone busting in on our reverse S &M moment too.

I frowned at the single large shadow that swallowed the threshold before the one who cast it had even entered.

And then I saw who it was. Grizelle!

“What are you doing?” she demanded, her green eyes looking black in the meager lamplight. “What. Are. You. Doing?” she repeated, stalking toward the bed on its raised step.

Quicksilver danced in front of her, poised to leap for her long black throat five feet off the floor.

“I’ll eviscerate your dog if you don’t call him off,” she threatened, lifting a formidably nailed hand.

“Quick! Back.” I eyed Grizelle again. “And you get out of here. This is a private sickroom. What. Are. You. Doing. Here?” I parroted her with matching fury and venom.

She took a long stride forward to brace one leg on the riser and peer at Ric in the bed. I leaned over him to block her view but she was tall enough to see what she wanted to.

“So,” she said. “It is you! You must stop your bizarre healing ritual.”

“No. Why would I?”

“For every scar you diminish on your lover my master lies flayed below, his back laced with bloody stripes that keep appearing out of nowhere. I knew you must have something to do with it.”

Stunned, I tried to piece the two bizarre scenes together. For every whip scar I kissed away, Snow received a fresh slash in the same position on his own albino back?

Truly creepy. Impossible notions ran through my mind involving Quicksilver’s healing tongue and my accepting Snow’s Brimstone Kiss and converting it into a Resurrection Kiss. Now maybe a Retribution Kiss had boomeranged on its dispenser?

“You must stop now!” Grizelle shouted.

For a moment, memories of my humiliating moments standing half-naked and defenseless in front of Snow burned hot in my chest and throat, an attack of emotional heartburn.

Yes! My anger against Snow almost choked me. The bastard deserved to writhe under the lash. Better him than Ric. I’d make that choice forever and ever, amen!

Then the horror of what was happening on some floor above us hit me. No creature deserved to feel all at once what El Demonio had meted out to Ric over years of abuse. I pictured Snow’s skin as white and firm as Michelangelo’s David, reproduced at Caesars Palace. I shuddered to imagine the violation, pain, and wounds it had absorbed already.

Grizelle had backed off the riser toward the door.

“The damage is mostly done,” she said bitterly. “You have caused my master trouble since you came to this city and now you have made him suffer beyond belief.”

I stood statue-still on the riser, glancing back at Ric. Only a few of the horrible scar ridges remained. Could I stop just short of completion without undoing all I’d accomplished?

Wasn’t there a fairy tale? A girl’s seven brothers had been bespelled into swans, so she spent years weaving shirts from punishing nettles to reclaim their proper form.

Her fingers bled from the task but she didn’t quite make the deadline. As she threw the nettle garments on her swan-brothers’ backs, one shirt was missing an arm. One brother would wear a swan wing for an arm for all his life.

The moral? Leaving any small part of a magical task undone could have irreversible consequences. I couldn’t leave Ric half-healed, still unconscious. He might never wake up but remain suspended between the pain of the past and the pleasure of the present.