by Rachel Caine
Then, with nothing between us, and before I could allow any sensible objections to overcome me, I stepped forward, pressed my body against his, and kissed him.
Power flowed out in a torrent from him at that first touch of our lips, thick as melted amber, drenched with the essence of all living things, the slow pulse beat of Mother Earth herself. I felt my skin scrubbed clean, and my hair blew back in an invisible wind. I felt ... reborn. New. Perfect.
His lips warmed to fever heat against mine, damp and urgent and sweet to taste, and I shuddered against him as his hands traveled down my spine to the small of my back, then caressed the swell of my hips. His lips parted, and I felt the soft stroke of his tongue against mine. My blood felt on fire now, and my heart pounded hard. I didn’t know how much of what I felt came from his use of Earth power, and I didn’t care. It was intense and beautiful and utterly involving.
I couldn’t believe I had avoided it for so long, being daily in his company. I’d yearned for it, and yet I hadn’t even known why.
An odd sensation—the areas of the flame tattoos on his arms felt different. The flame tattoos seemed warmer, as if the dark borders banked in actual fire instead of only ink.
Luis broke off the kiss and buried his face in the hollow of my neck, breathing hard. His breath pistoned hot against my skin and fluttered my pale hair. “Slow down,” he finally said. “You’re going to get me off too soon. Relax. I told you, it’s not a race.”
“Then what is it?” I asked. “Because my body seems to want to rush to the finish.”
He laughed. “Stop feeding back my energy and I’ll show you. Shower first, though.”
“We’re clean.” Thanks to that initial burst of power from him, which had scrubbed our skin and hair and left us deliciously fresh.
“That’s not why we take the shower,” he said. “You trust me?”
“Yes.” I always had, at a very deep level. This was not different ... and yet, it was. This was a physical kind of trust that I found hard to imagine outside of this moment, and yet here and now it seemed perfectly inevitable, and perfectly right. “Of course I do.”
He slipped his hand down to grip mine. “Then come on. Get wet with me, girl.”
Somehow, that phrase had connotations I had never really considered ... ones shadowy and exciting, a sudden burst of spice on the tongue. It made my breath quicken, and my pulse beat faster.
I allowed Luis to pull me along to the bathroom. That door, too, he shut behind us, and locked with a quick snap of his wrist. He sensed me watching him, and raised his brows. “Only so Ibby—look, I don’t want you to think I’m trying to push you into anything. Is that what you think? Because you can stop this anytime you want.”
I smiled. “Do you believe you could force me to do this if I didn’t want it?”
“Ah, good point. You’d hurt me so bad.”
“At the very least,” I said, and put my pale hands on his darker shoulders. “And I hope I am not driving you to do anything beyond what you wish.”
He laughed. “Chica, you don’t know guys very well.” He took a second to sweep his gaze down my body, and then let out a slow breath. “Their loss, too. You are so beautiful.” He moved his focus back to my focus. “You don’t believe that, though, do you?”
I didn’t, in truth; to me human beauty was a very different thing—a thing of weakness, of vanity, of misdirected goals. I was strong, tall, perfectly serviceable in form, but I had never felt any need to be beautiful.
Now, suddenly, I did. For him, I did.
“I believe you believe it,” I said in a very low voice, and kissed him again. This time, I kept myself from reaching out to the core of his power, and this was merely flesh, warming and responding, perfect and natural. He backed me against the wall, and I gasped at the cold lick of tile on my skin, but the mild sting was quickly forgotten in the blur of the moment. Luis broke away to lean into the shower and turn on the controls, and as the water began to spray he pulled out towels from a cabinet and put them at the ready. In a moment steam was billowing inside the shower’s glass cubicle, and I saw moisture beading on my skin.
We stepped under the hot spray together, sealed so close together the water had a difficult time finding entrance between our bodies. The sensations overlapped, melted, blurred into a blood-warm, pulsing tide. I couldn’t distinguish between the heat of his hands, and the spray of the equally hot water. It was like being caressed everywhere, all at once, and as Luis’s fingers slipped again between my legs I put my arms around his neck for support.
What he was doing to me sparked miniature explosions inside of me, tremors that signaled something much, much greater on the approach. I found myself arching against his body, head back, lip caught between my teeth. That seemed to please him as much as it did me, a mysterious alchemy of feelings that I had never truly imagined was possible among humans. He didn’t speak. The water pounded down on us, hot as blood, and at last, at last, he lifted me by the waist, strong arms flexing and shedding water in bright silver streams, and braced my back against the warm, damp tile wall.
“Ready?” he asked me. I didn’t know what he was asking, but I nodded. I knew in principle, of course, but knowing and feeling were proving to be completely different things. “I’ll go slow.”
I had expected pleasure, not a searing, startling flash of razor-edged pain, and cried out more in panic than delight, putting my hands flat against his chest in protest. Luis froze, shocked, and held himself very still as I regulated my breathing again. In the next instant the pain wasn’t as great, but the surprise remained. I felt betrayed by my body, which had led me to suppose this would be nothing but sweet sensation.
Luis seemed just as astonished. After a few long seconds, he said, “Jesus, Cass, you didn’t tell me you were a virgin. I didn’t think ...” He pulled in a deep breath, and I saw he was angry at himself. “Stupid. Of course you’re a virgin. You came straight into human flesh—you haven’t been with anybody—”
He was right. I hadn’t been in this compromising, exceptionally intimate and vulnerable position with anyone else since my rebirth in human skin. I was, in many ways, more virginal than any human woman or girl, and yet I felt—not at all ignorant or unready.
Just betrayed by my own biology.
“It’s all right,” I said, and kept my voice low and steady, staring into Luis’s warm, cinnamon-colored eyes. “I’m all right.”
“No, I hurt you. I didn’t mean—”
I wrapped my legs around his waist and slowly, inexorably pulled him closer. Farther into my body, until we were completely joined. Then I fitted my hands around his face and smiled. “Since taking human form, I’ve had a great deal of pain,” I said. “That was a ... momentary discomfort. It’s done. Now help me forget it.”
He made a groaning sound low in his throat and dropped his head forward, into the warm space between my shoulder and neck. I felt his legs trembling, and then, by slow, gentle increments, he began to move.
“Tell me if I—” He was, even now, struggling to be gentle with me. With me, a being so old and powerful that even fellow Djinn had always treated me with caution. It made me laugh, and it made me warm with sweetness toward him. I solved his hesitancy by showing him my own urgent need, a furious bonfire of lust and heat, passion and delight.
No one had ever described what it felt like, to be consumed in that fire together, in an all-consuming, mind-destroying blur of hands and mouths, thrusts and silky caresses.
There were no words, and no real equivalent in the Djinn world. It was a humbling realization, one that made me understand, finally, why so many of my kind found solace in human form.
The world broke apart into sounds, and lights, and colors, frantic racing hearts and sweating skin, and then a slow, featherlight spiraling descent from an aetheric height I hadn’t known humans could scale. When Luis finally let me slip away, we stayed in the sheltering heat of the pounding water until it turned cool on our skin.
He shut it off
, and we looked at each through the fog of steam still in the air.
Luis smiled. It was a beautiful, unguarded expression, and I saw in that moment that he truly had loved me for some time now—months, perhaps. I felt the same tide of emotion inside my own body, and felt a similar wild, uncontrolled smile bend my lips. I ached in odd places, felt strangely warm in others, and a lassitude had settled in that made me want to curl up on the damp tile floor and sleep. All that stopped me was the knowledge that there was a warm, waiting bed just a few steps away.
Luis dried us both with a burst of power, and I followed him to the wide, clean bed, draped in dark red silk, that was his place of rest. I’d never touched it before, but now I sank without hesitation onto the soft mattress, beneath the weight of the covers, and then burrowed through the cool sheets to meet him in the middle. We were both still warm, and a little damp, and our lips met in slow, dreamlike kisses as we twined together, again.
Luis eventually chuckled, a rumble deep in his chest, and I pulled back to regard him questioningly.
“I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he said. “You know?”
“I’m fairly certain our shoes—”
“No, I mean we get interrupted a lot by people trying to kill the hell out of us. Seems like every time we get anywhere near doing this, someone comes along and tries to ruin our good time.” He looked around. “Nothing yet. I think that might be a good sign.”
I kissed him again, savoring the sweet spice of his mouth. “Yes,” I agreed. “I think it’s a very good sign.”
Nothing disturbed us for hours, and hours, except when we fell asleep at last curled together in delicious, delirious exhaustion.
Chapter 2
BEFORE DAWN, there was a knock at the front door.
Luis woke up fast, sliding out of my arms and out of the bed before I’d finished opening my eyes. He had a pair of blue jeans draped at the end of the bed, and pulled them on with hardly a pause, still zipping and buttoning as he moved to unlock the bedroom door and go down the hall.
I found a thick black robe hanging on the back of the closet door, and belted it as I followed him. He’d already reached the door and was reaching for the knob as the knock came again—an official kind of summons, fast and confident.
“Yeah?” he yelled through the wood, and motioned me off to the side. “Who is it?”
“Police, Mr. Rocha,” said a male voice from the other side. “Open up, please.”
“Let’s see a badge first,” Luis said, and cracked the door just enough. I glimpsed something that glittered brass in the porch light, and Luis nodded and stepped back. A uniformed officer came inside, noticed me in the next instant, and I found myself being summed up in a quick, head-to-toe glance that held no trace of emotion—just analysis.
There was a strong tingle of power from him, and a quick look on the aetheric assured me that he was, in fact, a Warden. One of the few who had assumed a mainstream occupation ... but I supposed that there were considerable advantages to having Earth powers, as a police officer. Strength, and speed, and the ability to bring down a fleeing suspect with knots of grass and the flailing limbs of trees, to begin with—and I hadn’t considered how useful Earth powers might be for tracing a suspect, or evaluating clues left behind. Theoretically, an Earth Warden could be a walking laboratory, much like a Djinn, within those close confines of the limitations of his power.
If he was at all pleased to meet us, I couldn’t see any trace of it in his manner, which was cool and businesslike. “Warden Rocha,” he said, and held out his hand, palm out. The Warden’s stylized sun symbol glittered there briefly, fired by a tiny burst of power—another form of a badge of authority, and one I didn’t have, though I could have easily enough. He transferred his cold, guarded gaze to me. “Cassiel. I’m Lieutenant Cardenas.”
I supposed that I didn’t merit the title of Warden, even though I certainly did the work. Interesting. That offended me a little. “And which organization are you representing at the moment? The Albuquerque Police Department or the Wardens?”
“Warden Bearheart sent me,” he said, which was answer enough. “She wants you two to bring the girl with you and come to meet her people for handover.”
“Handover,” Luis repeated, in a voice that wasn’t anything like friendly. “What the hell do you mean, handover?”
Cardenas shrugged. “As in, you bring her, you hand her over, you drive away. That kind of handover. Didn’t think there was anything unclear about that.”
Luis made a move, and I grabbed his arm in a tight, sanity-inducing grip, hauling him to a stop. “No,” I said. “We’ve had enough trouble with the police.” I meant that he had, and he knew that; I saw the fury slowly bank itself down in him, and he took a deep breath and nodded to me to let go. I did, but I didn’t back off far.
“Maybe you don’t know,” Luis said, his tone gone carefully flat, “that my niece is only five years old.”
“Almost six,” Cardenas said. “And I understand how you feel, but this ain’t optional. She needs to go to Warden Bearheart. Nothing bad’s going to happen to her.”
“No.”
“You know what you’re saying?”
“No way is Ibby being handed off.”
“I ain’t arguing about it,” Cardenas said. “Just delivering the message, that’s all. You can do whatever you want about it. I’ve got plenty to do without being your own personal message service, so if you want to tell Bearheart no, you call her up yourself.”
Luis’s jaw was stubbornly set, but he wasn’t being reasonable; his reaction was emotional, and I intervened on his behalf. “And where would Warden Bearheart like us to go?” I asked. When Luis shot me a furious look, I said, “It doesn’t obligate us to anything to know the intended destination.”
He had to nod, unwillingly, at that. “All right,” he said. “And why do this now? Ibby’s under control. She’s doing just fine.”
She was not, in fact, fine, and he knew that, but I understood his intense desire to protect the child from more trauma and harm. The Wardens didn’t have a spotless reputation for caring for their own, and I knew that made him wary, and very reluctant. Still, I had heard no ill of Marion Bearheart, and nothing but good about her healing craft. If anyone could heal Ibby’s wounds, it would be someone like her.
“There’s a rendezvous point in Nevada,” said the police officer. “I was told to give you the map.” He reached into a breast pocket and took out a compactly folded piece of paper. It was simply a computer printout of a state map, with no directions or locations highlighted. He held it out to Luis, who didn’t make a move to take it. I passed my hand over the map, using a small amount of power even as Cardenas said, “That won’t work; I already tried it. It’s—” His voice died, because under my touch, an invisible route sparked to life in glowing blue. I quickly killed the glow before it could reveal much. The Wardens were being secretive with the purpose of all this, and highly security-conscious. This map had been keyed specifically to Luis and me. I folded the paper.
“Thank you,” I said very firmly. “Was there anything else?”
“Guess not,” Cardenas said, and turned to go. Luis stopped him at the door.
“Wait. Did she say anything about why she wanted Ibby? Does she think we’re not safe here?”
“No clue. Like I said, I’m just the messenger. You want answers, get Bearheart on the phone. If she’ll take your call, you’re higher up than me.”
Luis weighed the risks, and finally nodded. “Fine,” he said. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” Cardenas the Warden disappeared, and Cardenas the policeman reasserted himself. “Sorry about your loss, by the way. I worked that drive-by of your brother and sister-in-law. Bad stuff. I heard the gang’s almost out of business these days. Local jefe had himself some kind of meltdown, decided to go straight and start doing charity work.” There was knowledge in that stare, and it worried me; Luis had taken steps on his own, and I’d seen him
do it. In altering the gang leader’s mind, he had violated one of the principal ethical codes of Earth Wardens. Of course, luckily for him, the Wardens were pressed on all sides now with emerging threats, so disciplining their own probably didn’t rank highly at the moment.
“Sounds like a good outcome for a scumbag like that,” Luis said. “Better if he’d had his change of heart before he pulled a gun on my family.”
“Yeah.” Cardenas nodded. “Better if that had been the timing, for sure. How’s the little girl doing?”
“Nightmares,” I said. “But she seems to be adapting.”
“Kids do that. Got two myself.” He touched the shiny brim of his uniform cap. “If something like that happened to my family, I might want the same kind of change of heart for that guy, too. If I couldn’t put a bullet in him, I mean.”
He was, I realized, obliquely telling Luis that although he knew—or at least suspected—the illegal alterations Luis had performed on the gang leader, he wasn’t going to report it. I hadn’t realized how much of a danger that might have been until I felt the cold, close passage of it.
Luis had gone just a fraction of a shade more tense, and now he nodded and opened the door. Cardenas gave us both good-byes and walked down the path to the police cruiser waiting at the curb. We watched it drive away. I still had the piece of paper clutched in my hand.
“Let’s see it,” Luis said. I unfolded the map out on the nearest flat surface, and moved my palm over it to wake the glowing symbols again. Blue flowed down roads, over what appeared to be open spaces, ending in a deserted area marked by a simple sun symbol. On the map, there were borders, but no reference marks.
Luis whistled. “What do you think about that?”
I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t think anything.” Because I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Area 51?” When I didn’t react, his eyes widened. “Come on, seriously? You never heard of Area 51? Dreamland?” When I shook my head, he sighed. “Got to get you a pop culture makeover one of these days. Boiling it down, this means the spooks all of a sudden like us enough to throw open the borders to one of their most secure facilities. Wardens have never been welcomed there before; maybe they’re letting us in because they don’t like all this weird Church business a whole lot more. They’ve had some bad experiences dealing with those kinds of cults.”
