by Holley Trent
Lola bent into the canvas tent situated on the outskirts of Maria and quickly tied the flap closed behind her.
Tarik pushed himself onto his forearms with leisurely grace and slanted an eyebrow at her.
Assessing him, she cleared her throat and settled onto her shins in front of him.
He lay shirtless on his belly atop a thin pallet. A lantern flickered in the corner providing very little light, but evidently enough for an angel’s powerful vision. Lola could barely make out the tiny print in the book he was reading.
Pinching the pages to hold his place, she shut the cover and read the title on the spine. “Dickens?”
He grunted. “When I was waiting for her to pack up her trunks, Sophie emphatically suggested that I read this. She asked me if I had when we visited her on the boat. I told her I was working on it.”
“She enjoyed it?” Lola asked acidly. Obviously Sophie was a well-read woman and probably had an infinite number of topics she could engage Tarik on. Lola’s pedigree precluded such. She’d rarely had time for diversions as a very young woman and had only started taking up hobbies after planting herself in Maria.
“She hated it.” He snapped the book closed and pushed it toward his satchel. He needn’t have taken his rest there in the tent. Rachel had offered to bunk with Elizabeth, but he hadn’t wanted to put her out. He’d been out there for ten nights. “Keeping watch for strangers,” he’d said, but Lola suspected he’d simply wanted privacy. Perhaps he had other creatures to entertain, like that yellow-haired energy leech that had visited a fortnight since. Beings like him were almost never encountered in her old lands, but she could tell what he was the moment she’d opened the door and felt his energy. So much of what was his was stolen. Piecemeal. Hastily pressed together and undigestible. Corrupt because it wasn’t his, but it sustained him anyway.
He was exactly the sort of company she expected Tarik to keep, and yet there she was, kneeling in Tarik’s tent and marveling at how stunning his teeth looked in that bewitching grin.
“Apparently, she only wants to talk about the things she hates.” He shrugged. The act set his feathers to quivering.
Instinctively, she reached out to touch his wing, but he leaned away.
Ashamed, she pulled her hand back and twined her fingers together tightly on her lap.
“I don’t mean anything by it,” he said, pleadingly soft. “I would just prefer you to leave it be.”
“Why? You let Rachel touch your wings. And Elizabeth.”
And Sophie. She hadn’t even been able to see them, but she’d enjoyed groping and smoothing the velvety grain of them.
Lola scoffed at herself. Sophie wasn’t there. Sophie was probably in hot, humid Bermuda demanding that her maid fan her with more enthusiasm.
“Rachel and Elizabeth don’t have magic like yours,” he explained. “There’s no risk of…” He seemed to be chewing on the words, pondering how to order them.
She didn’t require or want the delicacy. “Tell me.”
He fidgeted with a low, round bulge beneath the pallet and shrugged his good shoulder. “I simply do not wish for you to muddle your magic with the corruption of my body thinking that you can fix me.”
“I believe I can.”
“No. The last person who tried died. The energy in me isn’t meant to be poked, prodded, and manipulated. I’m more energy and light than skin and bone. Those things aren’t meant to be played with.”
“And yet you are playing with me.”
His smile was crooked. “I never proclaimed myself to be the most logical creature on the planet.” He took her hands and shook out the tight clasp they had on each other. “I love your hands.” His voice was a quiet, marvelous rumble that warmed her from cheeks to belly.
“There is nothing special about them.” She tried to draw them back, knowing that if he started kissing them again, she’d demand more.
That was probably half the reason she’d walked into the desert. She could pretend she was simply being hospitable or that she was checking in to see what new information he’d learned about the sheriff’s scheme. They’d both know she was being disingenuous.
“Most people talk with their hands,” he said, rubbing her left palm and tracing his thumb along her long, curved lifeline. “But you don’t. Have you ever noticed that?”
She shook her head. “I suppose not. My brother—my twin—he tends to be more expressive. Or, at least he used to be. I do not know anymore. I have not seen him in hundreds of years, and we have no way of communicating across distances like you do with your fellows.”
“The skill is highly overrated, anyway.” He massaged her palm and triggered some kind of nervous reflex in her body. Each press made her toes curl under and breath catch. “I don’t always like being so accessible,” he murmured. “It’s like living in a room that has no lock on the door. People barge in whether you’re ready to see them or not.”
“You cannot hide, then?” She could. She’d been successfully avoiding significant interaction with the remnants of her overlapping Mesoamerican pantheons for over a thousand years. They never agreed on anything anymore, anyway. Their people were all scattered, and in some cases, integrated. Cultures had been absorbed by others. There was no need for them to work in harmony anymore. In fact, they were all safer when they avoided each other. Hot tempers created major disruptions when they flared.
Yaotl avoided their kind as well, and for good reason. He’d endured the trauma of having his own cousin slaughter his human family “for the good of them all.”
She thought he still blamed her for that—not that she’d caused the murders of his wife and son, but because she hadn’t been able to keep them alive. Not even Yaotl understood the limits of her power or agreed with the prohibitions she had on interfering.
“What is that?” she poked the hard thing beneath his blankets.
“Hilt of my sword. Would you like to take a closer look?”
Ever curious, she nodded and worked it out when he lifted his weight from the pallet.
She barely had enough room to draw it out. It was nearly as long as she was tall and too heavy for her to lift more than a couple of inches without exerting more energy than she wished to.
It was a beautiful piece of weaponry, though. The dark metal of the blade was honed with razor-sharp edges. Looking down the length of the sword, she noticed the blade wasn’t flat, but thicker in the middle and thinner at the edges like a diamond. Probably a feature devised to inflict maximum injury. The hilt was worthy of awe as well. It’d been smithed out of some kind of ore that was the exact same color a Tarik’s eyes. She knew that because she was staring into them then. Watching him watch her.
“How long have you possessed it?” she asked, looking down at the hilt again.
“For about as long as I’ve existed.” He smoothed his fingers along the rune shapes craved along the blade’s right edge. “If I cease to be, so will it. It is not only a weapon but a tool I can use to focus my power.”
“I see.” She set it down gently and watched him nudge the heavy thing toward the side of the small tent. “I have never carried weapons. I never saw the need, but perhaps that will change.” Not liking the chilly draft seeping into the tent flap, she crawled toward him and angled herself away from the breeze. There wasn’t much room, but that was fine. Being near him was why she was there, after all. “My power is not quite the same as it once was. I am certain it will wane in time as I am no longer needed.”
“What do you mean?” Carefully, he sat up, drew his wings in tight and eased to the very rear of the tent so he could stretch his long legs in front of him.
“A normal enough thing, I suppose, for creatures like me. We simply burn out. It is a gradual diminishing. Perhaps we don’t pay much attention while the fading happens, but it does happen. I worry now that when I use too much magic to move around in the ways humans cannot, that the magic will not return. It always does, but one day…” She shrugged.
&n
bsp; It was what it was. There were ways of replenishing what she’d lost, but she wasn’t interested in pursuing any of them. She’d grown out of those selfish ploys thousands of years ago.
“No wonder you are so cautious,” he said.
“I have many reasons to be cautious.”
“Yes, I imagine you do. Come here.”
“Where? How much closer could I possibly get in this minuscule space?”
His lips quirked at one corner. “You’re not thinking three-dimensionally, Butterfly.” He patted his lap.
For once in her long life, she moved without retort, without resistance. She pulled up her skirts and straddled his thighs. She draped her arms over his shoulders and immediately began to fondle the tight curls at his nape as he stared pointedly into her eyes.
“Did you have some news to deliver to me?” he asked in a whisper. “Or are you checking to see if I’m on my best behavior?”
She swallowed thickly and smoothed her palms down his chest. “Your behavior could benefit from some strict management.”
“Ah. I see. Perhaps Lady Sophie will have some suggestions for me. She knows all the rules of gentility.”
Lola ground her teeth and accidentally dug her nails into the skin at his ribs. She didn’t realize she’d injured him until he grabbed her wrists and chuckled.
“You have no reason to be jealous of her,” he said.
“I am not jealous.” She tried to scramble off her lap, a protest she suspected wouldn’t bolster her case any, but he gripped her hips and settled her back surely atop him.
She hated the conflict in her when he laughed like that, so sensual and teasing. Hated that he could so easily shatter her careful moods and make her revert to that savage, primal thing she once was—the creature who acted on instinct rather than intellect.
She hated how she always lost time when she was around him because she was in her head and not paying attention.
Somehow, he’d gotten into her bodice and his thumbs were working her nipples into stiff peaks. His mouth was gliding along her jaw and her head was tilted back to give him room to roam.
Her core was angling toward him, shifting in subtle movements to catch the edge of the hard ridge inside his trousers. She hadn’t gotten to see him the last time they’d been alone. There were always distractions. She was tired of distractions. She wished she could make time stand still just for a little while so that she could finally get the disrupter out of her system. So she could tell herself that her attraction to him was just a lapse on her part. Her body’s aching emptiness was a temporary physical disturbance. She’d be fine when he grew bored and moved on to do whatever it was that fallen ones did.
He kissed her again, like before, but she’d gotten better, she thought. She held his face and controlled the pace because she refused to always let him have his way, and she liked how it felt when his fingers kneaded so savagely into her rear end. And the way he groaned when she ground herself against him.
And the way he tugged her skirts up in the back and hissed when his palms found bare skin and not more fabric.
She was a creature of fecundity and creation. She’d wanted nothing in between them. No barriers. No time wasted. Just curiosity extinguished so she could get beyond him and so the obsession that should have never started could die, once and for all.
His hand moved between their legs and the hard, smooth end of him nudged at her entrance.
She clamped her teeth and stilled her tongue in her mouth, pondering the physics of this crude thing. She hadn’t been such an active participant the last time. In fact, she’d been counting down the seconds hoping the ordeal didn’t drag on and on.
“Relax your thighs,” he murmured into her hair, shifting his brutally rigid shaft side to side in her slit. “You’re wet for me, hmm? Open for me. Let me in.”
She hadn’t noticed that her thighs were trying to touch even as she’d been attempting to drape herself over his prick. Swallowing, she let her knees turn out. She let his fingers search her opening and trigger a bolt of nervous twitching through her body when his thumb encircled the tingling nub.
“Just like that,” he cooed as his fingers plumbed her deep and spread her wide.
She sank onto him as his fingers retreated, setting her teeth into her lip as her body dilated around him, as he intruded her so thoroughly that she wondered how long she could still hold her breath. Breathing hadn’t always been such a chore, but the older she got, the more human she seemed.
She needed to breathe but couldn’t. Her brain informed her that her body simply could not engage in so many functions at one time.
Tarik somehow overrode that dysfunction when he started to shift beneath her. Her gasp triggered another, and a startled exhalation between the two. She didn’t think she was built for what they were doing. Her body screamed with a unified sense of urgency that escalated as he managed to work more of himself into her and lengthen his strokes.
“You’re so warm,” he murmured with something that sounded like awe. “And the way you grip me…” The ragged growl he released on exhalation seemed almost like a compliment, though she couldn’t be certain. Still, it bolstered her and overrode her fear that her body would break apart if she dared move.
She did move. She dug her fingertips into his shoulders and set her knees into his thighs to find her balance. When she hugged him tight and he leaned back a few hairs, each thrust made stars dance behind her closed eyelids. Each deep, wet glide made her high-pitched whimpers disturb the night’s silence. Every shift of his hands beneath her, holding her open wide for his considerable endowment and idly fingering the soft nest of hair there, urged her lower. Harder and faster onto him.
She wanted him on his back so she could ride him with more grace and better rhythm, but she didn’t know if the wings would interfere.
Ask later.
There had to be a later. There were still so many things she wanted from him. She’d only gotten a taste. She realized that even before her lower belly began to burn low and her pace faltered.
He kept thrusting, though, whispering, “Take what you want, Butterfly. Take whatever you want.”
She didn’t know when he’d stopped moving—how long she’d been impaling herself on him without his cooperation—but the way he kept nipping at her jaw with his lips soothed whatever performance anxiety she might have had.
Her body was bound together in loose stitches that couldn’t hold the combustion building within her. Her lungs had given up again, skin had gone prickly and then insensate, fingers cramped from her determined grip, womb spasming, sex grasping.
As her body began to violently writhe and heat lashed from her core, Tarik’s grip moved back to her hips. A hellish growl that made every hair on her body stand on end came out of his throat.
The noise should have sent her running, yet she threw her head back and bathed in the triumph of bringing him to heel—of making him suffer before he could take his own pleasure.
She found his mouth, or he found hers. She didn’t know which. It didn’t matter. They kissed and tasted until the embers in both of her bodies had ceased their crackling and sputtering. Until breathing became easy again. Until the sound of heartbeats wasn’t as loud as hoofbeats and didn’t compete with the wind outside or the sound of nocturnal beasts rustling in the scrub.
He held her against his chest, rubbing her back. Quietly murmuring in a language she didn’t know. The words didn’t matter as much as the sentiment. Whatever it was must have been tender.
She hadn’t known she’d wanted tenderness, but now that she’d experienced it, she didn’t ever want to be offered the alternative again.
Everyone knew she wasn’t “easy” or fun or sociable. She hadn’t known how to be those things in ages, not since she’d been mature enough to take a long look at the devastation around her and realize that some of it was her doing.
She’d swung so hard away from chaos that she’d met a new extreme. She shouldn’t have l
iked that way, either. There had to be something in the middle. Some soft landing place where she could seek joy and order at the same time.
She leaned back to see Tarik’s face and found herself smiling at it. Smiling just seemed right even if the muscles of her face twitched at the contortion.
“Should I be afraid of that smile, Butterfly?” He kept smoothing his hand over the small of her back. Idle motions. Comforting ones.
“No,” she said, putting her forehead against his shoulder. “If fact, you shouldn’t be afraid of me at all.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
As much as Tarik wanted to cling to Lola’s shadow day and night, he recognized that he still had work to do. Very few of his enemies slept, so he occasionally had to patrol to ensure none could surprise him with some foolish attack. But that wasn’t all he did. He’d located Lola’s Yaotl again. Yaotl he was still on the move with his friends. He was a smiling, gregarious man, but there was a hauntedness about him that Tarik couldn’t quite peg.
He’d moved around from town to town near Maria, scouring newspapers for information about the gold thieves Lola had told him about and pondering if they might have anything to do with the sheriff’s takeover scheme. Solving the situation would have been infinitely easier if Lola had simply let him do away with the man, but she insisted that they wait for evidence of wrongdoing. He found it to be quite quaint that she had so studiously adopted the laws of mankind.
He was strolling through a dank alleyway in Trenton, New Jersey in search of quarry he’d left unleashed for too long when a familiar warmth creeped up his spine. He wasn’t alone.
“Hello, friend,” he murmured, locking his gaze on the stream of pedestrians across the way. He caught a glimpse of red hair and a tall, willowy form whose attire was probably thirty years out of date and mismatched in the telltale way of a person not native to the human realm.
Ah.
Tarik reached to his back for his sword hilt, holding steady, watching.
Tamatsu edged around him and joined him in his surveillance. He didn’t say anything. Even if he could, he didn’t need to. They simply understood each other.
