She was okay. She’d done actual magic without drugging herself. She clutched the box so hard her fingers hurt. What if Xia needed her magic, and she was back to her usual pathetic might-as-well-be-vanilla self? She fumbled with the box, but it refused to open. “Shit.”
She turned her back on the living room and headed for the stairs, still working at the box. Hands shaking, heart pounding, jittery with the certainty that if she didn’t get back to Xia, she’d die or worse. Chik. The lip of the box lifted. Golden yellow flashed in her vision. Copa. She stopped and opened the box the rest of the way. The pills crumbled easily, she remembered. When Xia had taken some at her house, they were wrapped in paper. She headed back to the kitchen, fighting panic the entire way. In the garbage, she found an old receipt reasonably clean and big enough to serve her purpose. She opened the box again and took out two of the pills, and when it didn’t look like too many were missing, she took out three more. She folded the receipt around the pills and put them in her front pocket.
She felt like utter shit. She was a liar. A betrayer. A deceiver. How long had she lasted? Half an hour? Forty-five minutes? And here she was, in trouble already. She was better than this, wasn’t she? Alexandrine turned on the water in the sink and flipped the switch for the garbage disposal, then upended the box over the sink. The copa dissolved almost immediately. For good measure, she used the sprayer attachment until there weren’t even any crumbs left. She did the same with the pills she’d put in her pocket. Problem solved.
Alexandrine left the zebra box on the counter. Open and empty.
Her panic stayed with her.
She retrieved the cup and started up. Each step reeled in her panic. The higher she went, the closer she got to Xia, the less jittery she felt. By the time she reached the top, her panic vanished. She dimly remembered what she’d felt like downstairs. Xia was half sitting on the bed, struggling with the top button of his jeans, a testament to bad living and insane amounts of exercise. He looked up when she came in, and oddly, she had the impression he was relieved.
She gripped the plastic cup of stinking swill she’d brought upstairs with her. “Here, I brought that stuff from the fridge.”
“Thanks,” he said. Xia took the cup from her and stared at her long enough to make her feel a bit odd with the silence. What if he knew what she’d done downstairs? He closed his eyes and emptied the cup in one long swallow. When he was done, the cup slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. The fact that it didn’t break had to be a miracle.
“Help me,” he said. His breathing was shallow, like he was holding back some major hurt. “I need to get out of my clothes.”
She swatted his hand away from his fly. “Let me, okay?”
He leaned back on his elbows, and boy, oh boy, did that do something to his abs. She tugged on his zipper.
“Hurry up, would you?” he said.
“I’m hurrying. Quit moving around, and maybe I can get these off you.”
He stretched out a hand and touched her cheek. Heat zinged through her, and behind that was a bone-deep pain. They both winced. His pain flowed back into her. His fingers spread over her cheek. “It’s better when I touch you.”
“All right,” she said. She pressed his palm to her cheek and braced herself for the flash of pain. And, man, she did get pain. Fire burning right through her. The contact also brought her waning magic closer. Her head buzzed, colors flashed, and she felt Xia’s magic, her magic, and the talisman, too.
“Baby,” he said. “Don’t stop. Please.”
“I won’t.”
The tension went out of his face. He went back to working on his pants. Right. He needed to get undressed. She unzipped his jeans the rest of the way. His shivering increased. His skin was hot. Burning hot. She yanked down his jeans and took his socks off, too. When she straightened from that, he was flat on his back, wearing nothing but a pair of black boxers that he was pushing off. He shoved his thumbs in the waistband.
His eyelids vibrated. “I need to be naked, Alexandrine. Have to be.” His eyes flashed. In her head, his imperative echoed. Have to be.
Xia struggled to sit, and Alexandrine put an arm around him to help him take off the rest of his clothes. The internal chaos that was sending him off the deep end flowed into her with the contact. She felt him relax. Her magic mirrored the pandemonium going on in him. As naked as the day he was born, he passed out, and the chaos in her ramped down. Just like that.
“Xia?” She leaned over him, a hand to his forehead. She got a sense of deepness settling in on him. Whether that was good for him or not, she had no freaking idea. He was still warm to the touch, but not scorching hot like he had been earlier. With some degree of pushing and prodding and pulling that was by no means easy, she managed to get him under the covers. Afterward, she picked up his jeans and boxers with the intention of folding them. Ms. Domestic, she was. She set his knife and scabbard on the bedside table.
His magic was wide open to her. And she could still pull. More now than when she’d been downstairs trying to figure out a way to put out the brazier. Way more. Being around him cranked her magic. Which didn’t make any sense at all. She let his magic flow over her, through her, around her, in her.
There was a bathroom down the hall, and she went in to wash her face. Her body ached with a less acute version of the anxiety attack she’d had downstairs. Bizarre. Once again, the sensations put her in mind of how she’d felt about being separated from the talisman. She washed her face and scrubbed her fingers through her hair. There was a new toothbrush in the cabinet along with some Tom’s of Maine peppermint toothpaste, so she brushed her teeth. Much better. No expensive lotions in here. Thank goodness. Ms. High Maintenance hadn’t made it upstairs, then.
Back in the bedroom, she sat on the edge of the bed and stared at Xia. Pain etched his face, and his body moved restlessly. Once, he hissed, baring his teeth. But he maintained his human shape. Sleeping, if that’s what he was doing, didn’t look soothing. She remembered him saying he felt better when she touched him. Based on the way she’d kept transitioning into and out of Xia’s mental and physical experience, she guessed that when she touched him, some of his pain siphoned off into her, thus providing him some measure of relief.
She touched her fingertips to his cheek, and immediately an echo of pain washed over her. The longer she touched him, the more vivid his reactions felt. Swirling chaos from his magic, amidst which she could occasionally distinguish the talisman, seeped into her. Physically, his body was taut with pain that slammed into her like a rogue wave. With the contact, Xia’s expression eased, and his body relaxed.
Alexandrine, however, found herself floating in nightmarish pain.
Chapter 18
Kynan Aijan glared at the cell phone on the coffee table. The ringtone was “Linus and Lucy” from Peanuts. He wished he’d picked some other ringtone for these calls.
“Are you going to answer that?” Iskander asked. Considering their respective reputations, one crazed killer and one psycho, Kynan thought the query reasonably and politely put.
Iskander was a psycho, sure, but he was a psycho who knew how the hell to have a good time. Whatever the event, Iskander was always fully charged and intent on the experience. He didn’t reach out to his fellow kin often, but when he made the psychic link, he burned. Sometimes during an exchange, when the kin were connecting, casually or otherwise, Kynan felt Iskander’s sexual desires, his affinity for the male form. For example, he knew Iskander thought Nikodemus was hot, that he’d been with Nikodemus and Carson both, in a manner of speaking, and that he had erotic memories of Harsh. How the hell was Iskander, with his personal dose of craziness, keeping himself under control? It would be nice to know how he was doing it. Kynan wasn’t having as much success himself.
Right now, Iskander was gaming with a white-hot passion and didn’t bother to take his eyes off the wall-sized media screen in front of them. On-screen, he caught another animated fish. Lucky bastard. Without paus
ing, he said, “Your phone is ringing, Warlord.”
“I’m not answering it.” What Kynan needed was to get laid. Despite his current disinclination for the act, he sometimes thought if he didn’t get someone else to work him, he’d go as psycho as Iskander. He was having some serious fantasies about making it with a human, especially with Carson Philips. Too bad she was off limits. And these days, calling her human was stretching things a bit. There weren’t many women who’d be down with what was going through his head these days.
“My friend,” Iskander said, “your phone is very annoying.”
“That’s the ringtone for numbers I don’t recognize. Whoever it is will give up, and it’ll go to voice mail.” As if on cue, the phone stopped ringing. “See?”
Kynan was not in a good mood. Some would say he was in a permanent bad mood. Yes. He was. So what? Even this was better than the hell his life used to be. Fact was, he wasn’t getting past his need for Carson Philips. As ordered, he’d killed her parents when she was three and brought her to Magellan. He’d watched her grow up isolated and lied to and smarter than was safe for her. He’d watched Magellan poison her and had even dosed her himself. He’d watched her turn into a beautiful young woman and had constructed elaborate fantasies in which he worked out a way around Magellan’s strictures on him in order to get Carson into bed, where he’d either take hours to kill her or bind her to him permanently. He’d come closest to fulfilling the first. After everything he’d done to her, she’d severed him from Álvaro Magellan. Killing Magellan didn’t begin to repay his debt to her for setting him free. He’d sworn fealty to Nikodemus, but so what? He owed his debt to Carson Philips, and she wasn’t ever going to be his.
“Please, next time answer the phone,” Iskander said. The cobalt stripes down the left side of his face got brighter.
“You looking for a fight?” he snarled.
“Not with you, Warlord.” Iskander pulled, and that got Kynan cranked up. A little violence might just take his mind off his troubles. “What I want is for you to answer your phone when it rings.”
Kynan looked at his mobile, which was sitting there all innocent and quiet. He cocked his head like he was considering the request. “Nah.”
“What if that was Xia calling you on some other phone?”
A good point, but Kynan couldn’t bring himself to care. “If it rings again, you answer it.”
“With all due respect, Warlord, I don’t take orders from anyone but Nikodemus.” Iskander had the cojones to back up that kind of talk. Few of the kin cared to cross a warlord, which Kynan was, whether he’d sworn fealty to Nikodemus or not. For a psychotic, Iskander was even-tempered, slow to take offense. He lived in a world with different rules. And yet, Kynan had no doubt Iskander didn’t give a shit about making his displeasure over ringing phones known in a physical manner. A fight with Iskander would take off the edge that was killing him.
“Like you should talk.” One thing he liked about Iskander was the way he was nuts. His mental instability came out in all kinds of interesting ways without regard to time or place.
Iskander shrugged. You never could tell exactly where you stood with a blood-twin. Even a former blood-twin. Maybe the phone thing was going to push him over the edge.
Bring it on.
He and Iskander were supposed to be waiting for word of whatever the hell had happened to Xia. Not so privately, Kynan thought Xia had gotten into a fight with Harsh’s sister and then offed her. Considering Xia’s attitude about witches and the rumor, backed up by the evidence Kynan had seen at her place when he went looking for Xia the other day, he liked the odds of finding out Xia had killed Alexandrine Marit. It might be a while before Xia decided it was safe to show himself around here. Nikodemus wanted answers, though, and Harsh was ready to come home to kill Xia with his own two hands.
He clenched his Wiimote. Lucky bastard. If anybody got to kill a witch, it ought to be him. He needed it more than Xia.
Iskander slumped on the couch, working his Wiimote for Legend of Zelda, intent on fishing as only a psycho former blood-twin could be. Kynan’s cell went off again. Iskander stared at it for several seconds. Oddly enough, the phone did not explode or melt. The call went to voice mail, and they went back to fishing. Five minutes later, the phone rang again.
“My friend,” Iskander said in a low voice that didn’t sound friendly at all, “answer the phone.”
“No.” Whose idea had it been to play Legend of Zelda, anyway? He couldn’t catch enough fish, and besides, his shoulder was getting sore.
Iskander grabbed the phone and started squeezing. Kynan didn’t doubt he could crush the phone without pulling magic. The guy was seriously strong. They all were, compared to a human. “Say good night, Gracie,” Iskander said cheerfully.
Kynan held out a hand for the phone, and Iskander dropped it onto his open palm. He flipped it open at what had to have been the last second before the call would have been sent to voice mail for a third time. He held it to his ear and said, “What the hell do you want?”
Dead silence on the other end.
Kynan’s finger went to the disconnect button, but something stopped him. The silence gave him itchy skin. It wasn’t Nikodemus. Nikodemus would have taken his head off for answering the phone like that. Harsh would have found a way to freeze him over the airwaves, and Carson wasn’t ever going to call him. What woman wanted to call the freak who’d tried to rape her? “Who is this?” he asked.
Through the phone, someone cleared his throat. Her throat. Definitely a female. “I think I have the wrong number. I’m so sorry.”
Crap. He didn’t think this was a wrong number at all. “Who is this?”
“Um.” Another itchy silence followed. “Alexandrine Marit. Harsh’s sister?”
Okay, so Xia hadn’t killed her yet. Kynan sat up. He let Iskander feel the mental charge that zapped Kynan through and through. They got a connection going, and that was just what he needed, wasn’t it? A psycho’s thoughts leaking into his head. Like he wasn’t disturbed enough all on his own. “I know who you are,” he said into his mobile.
Iskander turned off the Wii and slipped the Wiimote strap off his wrist. The three blue stripes tattooed down the left side of his face started to glow. Yeah, that felt good and twisted. The burn of psycho magic. Kynan got the urge to go out and do some harm.
“Who am I speaking to?” Alexandrine Marit asked. She spoke as if she was afraid of being overheard. What the hell had Xia done now? Or maybe she thought he could reach through the phone and rip out her heart. He wouldn’t mind killing a witch about now. Might be a nice way to improve on his shitty day. “Is this Nikodemus?”
“Nikodemus is in Paris with your brother.” He wasn’t sure how much she knew about Nikodemus and Harsh, or the kin, for that matter. They were better off if he didn’t say more than what she seemed to know already.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “I know.” Another silence stretched out. So. She wasn’t a stupid woman.
“This is Kynan Aijan. Put Xia on the phone.”
“I can’t.” She hesitated, and this time Kynan waited out the silence. “Something’s wrong with him.” She was supposedly Harsh’s sister, but she didn’t sound anything like what he expected, which was overeducated and bossy as hell. Her voice was calm, but a quiver of anxiety underneath cracked at the end.
“What’s wrong?”
He could hear her swallow. “I can’t wake him up.”
Kynan’s body flashed hot. Seeing as how the kin didn’t sleep, at least not the way humans did, either she was lying to him or something had managed to take down the meanest bastard Kynan had ever met. Besides him. “Where are you?”
“North of San Francisco. I don’t know the exact address.”
More points for being smart under pressure. “Sausalito, right? Blue house? On the water?”
“You know it?” Relief filled her voice.
Kynan decided he wouldn’t mind the drive to Sausalito. He needed to get
away from Iskander and all his psycho energy, anyway, and besides, he wanted to know what the hell had happened to Xia. Maybe he could pretend Alexandrine Marit was Carson. On the other hand, he hadn’t promised to keep the little witch alive. Maybe he could do Xia a favor and off the witch to get him out of guard duty.
Now, wouldn’t that be a fun way to pass some time?
Chapter 19
Kynan snapped his phone closed and stood, smoothing wrinkles from his jeans as if he were wearing a five-thousand-dollar suit. At Magellan’s insistence, he’d lived in Italian suits for years. For him, custom Brioni. Now, whenever he was reminded he wasn’t wearing tailored wool, he got a jolt, especially now that he was back where Magellan had fucked him over every minute of every day. Denim instead of superfine wool under his fingers disoriented him. Sometimes he’d catch himself reaching to straighten a tie he wasn’t wearing.
He seriously wished he could kill Magellan again, only slower this time. Make it last. Make it painful.
Now that Magellan was dead, a suit meant one thing and one thing only: enslavement. Anything else, on the other hand, meant freedom. The day he stood in his old room, in possession of his own life at last, Kynan’s instinct had been to burn every goddamned suit Magellan had ever forced him to wear. So he did. He’d gotten a nice little fire going after a bit.
He incinerated fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Italy’s finest menswear, and then he went grunge. Totally outof-fashion grunge. Old jeans. Cargo pants. T-shirts and hoodies. And, naturally, he was growing his hair. He didn’t do anything to it. At all. After all those years with a shaved head, he’d forgotten what color his hair was and whether it was curly or straight or something in between. Thick. Straight. Golden brown. Hell if he wasn’t a pretty boy. Took vanillas by surprise when they found out he wasn’t as nice as he looked.
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