by Ann Macela
How could he be when he couldn’t send her energy? He didn’t know how, or if it was even possible, no matter what anybody said. He was one big failure.
Where did his failure leave them? Especially her? Yeah, he knew more now about the awesome power of a Sword, and everything he’d heard about the fight with Finster’s Stone meant the one with Ubell’s would be worse. Worst of all, the damn item would target her, and he wouldn’t be able to help.
“Jim?” Irenee said as she came up behind him and put a hand on his back. “What’s going on in your head? Your aura’s blue, like it is when you’re having a hunch.”
He turned, took her in his arms, and held her close, rubbing his cheek on her hair. When her unique scent wound around and into him, he almost grew dizzy with desire. His center practically fainted with happiness. After a minute of wallowing in sheer pleasure, he separated enough to see her face. “I guess I just can’t hide a thing from you, can I?”
She grinned. “I turn red, and you turn blue. What a colorful pair we are.” She gave him a little shake. “So, tell me.”
He let go of her and stepped back to regain his control. “One hunch is telling me Whipple is right. We need to mate. I guess I’m scared. Not so much about the commitment we’ll be making, because I certainly want you forever, but ...”
“You do?”
She had a confused look on her face. Hadn’t he told her? He mentally winced. No, there hadn’t been time after lunch. When had they had the chance for privacy?
Before he could elaborate on his declaration, she nodded, her expression changed to delight, and she said, “I came to the same conclusion.”
Confusion returned when she said, “Well... what’s the matter, then?”
She came to the same conclusion? She was his? The thoughts hit him like a tidal wave of happiness.
Followed by a hurricane of doubt.
Would she still want him after he told her what he was really thinking? After he told her he couldn’t help her? He stiffened his backbone. Neither hunch helped here. He had to find out. It was time to tell the truth flat-out, whatever the consequences.
He took another step back and a deep breath and began, “Until the little demo you and the Defenders put on, I didn’t fully realize what you go through as a Sword—the power you have, the dangers you face. When Baldwin threw that mega-bolt in a cheap shot, I came unglued. If I’d been on the arena floor, I’d have blasted him, or at least decked the guy. I felt so damned helpless up there in the balcony. Whipple’s demands and the reasons behind them and his plans for killing the damned Stone underscored another, even bigger problem.”
She stepped forward, but he held up his hands. “Let me explain. It’ll be easier if we don’t touch. I have a hell of a time concentrating when we do.”
“I have the same problem.” Smiling faintly, Irenee walked over to the couch and, sitting down, looked expectantly at him.
“I’ve always been about protecting people.” Too restless to stand still, too nervous about how she’d accept what he was about to tell her, Jim paced by the windows. “When I was young, I watched out for littler kids. I beat the crap out of a bully who was terrorizing some guys in the seventh grade. I later had the satisfaction of arresting the bastard for abusing his wife.”
God, the memory of that was still sweet. He couldn’t, however, dwell on the past.
“I’m still all about protection.” He ran his fingers through his hair and turned to face her. “But, Irenee, it sure doesn’t look like I can help you at all in the fight against Ubell and his damned Stone. Certainly I won’t be able to protect you like I want to.”
“You can help,” she said. “You heard Fergus. I need your energy support, not your protection here. I don’t expect you to stand in front of me or wield my sword. I need you behind me, holding me up. Together, we’ll do the job.”
“How? Ihaven’t felt any transference between us—or anything even remotely like what people have described. In your test I watched the team of Defenders share energy. I could see the power pouring off the golden ring in their pentagon right into the Swords. Johanna and I tried the exchange bit, and nothing happened with either of us. My energy only sat there in my bucket and didn’t move. I can’t do what everybody says I have to do.”
He held up a hand to stop her from interrupting. He was on a roll and absolutely had to get the rest of this out. “Wait, there’s more. I have another hunch. It says I’m absolutely crucial to your survival in this mess. How on earth can I be if I can’t share power?”
He shook his head when she opened her mouth, and he spoke before she could. “Yeah, I know, you felt something when my magic center woke up, and you stopped the pain from the imperative when we were on the floor right here. I felt nothing, so the energy had to be coming from you, not me.”
She was clearly worried by his words, but his last statement surprisingly brought a smile. “In that specific instance, I personally did nothing,” she said. “The imperative took away the pain when I, your soul mate, touched you, and you accepted it and me. The imperative wants us together. We were. We are. Has it bugged you since then?”
“Only little twitches in my center when I see you again after we’ve been apart—like when we were training.”
“Is it very painful?”
“No,” he said and sighed wearily when his center wiggled like it was laughing. “It’s more ... smug. Like it’s got me exactly where it wants me.”
“Mine’s happy, too.” She gave him a warm smile, and his center grew even more self-satisfied.
“That’s all well and good—and useless to me. I want to, I need to, help. Actively. I couldn’t live with myself if this damn evil Stone destroyed you and”—he took a deep breath as her eyebrows rose, and he blurted it out—“and all I could do is stand there like a frigging idiot. I honest-to-God don’t know what I’d do if I lost you. What good will going to bed do, outside of making me extremely happy for a while, when afterwards, we’re right back where we started? At my total inability to carry my weight here?”
Her brown eyes shining, she stared at him for a long moment. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you, either,” she finally said softly.
Clearing her throat, she sat up straight. “Let’s back up a little. I’m the one with the experience here. First, I don’t agree you can’t help. I do know we transferred energy when your magic center woke up. I felt it. We simply have to figure out how to activate the conscious ability in you—like we had to wake up your center in the first place.”
He put his hands on his hips to stop from punching the wall in frustration. He wasn’t getting through to her about the seriousness of what they faced. She thought she knew it all again. Thought it would be simplistic and easy. A typical rookie mistake.
She kept talking. “Second. Are you getting a single, even a tiny hunch about the Stone? Its or our destruction ? Or another bad outcome?”
“No. My only active hunches say we should mate and I’m critical,” he admitted after concentrating on his mechanism—for all the help it gave him. He jumped when a jab hit him in the stomach. “The damned imperative just took a bite.”
“Probably telling you to get on with it. Okay.” She made a shooing motion as if to wave the problem away. “Third. You agree, we’re soul mates?”
“Yeah.” He had to smile. That was the only thing he was sure of. “Commitment and all.”
“So do I. Let me think for a minute. How do I share energy?” She grimaced, little stress lines appearing around her mouth, like she was being rushed. He knew how she felt. Frowning, she sat back on the couch and crossed her arms. Stared at the coffee table. Frowned some more.
He was about to interrupt her concentration when a crafty expression crossed her face, and she stood up. Positioning herself in the middle of the room, she pointed to a spot on the rug about three feet from her. “Stand there.”
He moved to the spot and faced her. “What now?”
“Fourth. Ther
e’s something we haven’t investigated, and it might bring us closer to sharing. Create a lightball about the size of a baseball, and push all the power you can into it.”
“You mean to see if they merge like when I learned to cast lux? They coalesced independent of direction from us. What’s that got to do with our transfer?”
She put her hands on her hips and gave her one of those shut-up-and-do-it looks his bosses so often used. “If our energies can blend passively, and they melt together like Defenders’ power does in the ring, then we ought to be able to move the stuff between us actively. Come on, what do we have to lose by trying?”
“You have a point.” In fact, he’d forgotten all about their merged lightball. He revised his estimate of her know-it-all tendencies—rookies often came up with new approaches. Thank God, he had a smart soul mate. If her idea had a remote chance to work, or at least to get them closer to the goal, he’d try it.
“Lux!” His bright blue ball popped into existence, and he grinned at it. “I have to admit, some of this magic stuff is plain old fun.”
“And it just gets better all the time,” she said with a wink. “Lux!”
Her indigo-violet ball floated next to his.
Slowly, they began to merge and grow.
When the combined sphere reached basketball size and the colors were stirring around, forming miniature whirlpools, it looked like a blue version of Jupiter—with a big indigo spot. He and Irenee lifted their hands and cupped them in a cage around the glowing ball.
“Ouch!” Jim jerked, but managed to stay in contact with the surface. “Did you feel the shock?”
“When my fingers touched yours, I got a little jolt.”
“Little? My hair stood on end. It didn’t do that before.”
“We hadn’t acknowledged the soul-mate situation at that time, either,” she said. “The jolt must be connected to our connection now. This reminds me of holding my sword—like live energy between my hands.”
He didn’t want to think about how dangerous that must be, so he asked, “What do we do now? Make the cage smaller like before?”
“Let’s take it slow. What are you feeling? My hands are tingling, and I can feel a pulse, a throb, in time with my heartbeat.”
Gripping the ball a little tighter, he concentrated on the sensations for a few seconds. “Yeah, me, too. I don’t think the pulse is coming from the ball alone, even though the colors are moving faster. It’s beating with my heart, too. All three of us must be in sync.”
“Or the two of us are, and the ball’s a conduit. Okay, let’s do what we did last time.”
He pushed as he had before, to compress the ball and intertwine his fingers with hers. This time, however, the light did not dim. Instead, it grew brighter. The tingling began to run up his arms. “Irenee? I can feel prickles up to my shoulders. Is that normal?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea,” she replied. “I’ve never done anything like this before, never touched another’s lightball, never even heard of two melting together. The way the balls merge looks so much like the energy ring forming in a pentagon, it’s got to be related to energy transfer. Isn’t it exciting? Keep going.”
What? Never done it before? Some expert. Here they went again, operating on the spur of the moment and without thinking it through. However, the process was certainly causing a different result from the last time. She was right: they couldn’t stop now.
The blue-indigo-violet light streamed out of the openings in their cage. When their fingers were laced together and the ball, about the size of a softball, was between their palms, the luminescence suddenly folded back upon itself and surrounded their hands in a shimmering blanket.
“Holy shit! It feels like an electric current all through my body”
“Me, too,” Irenee said. “Can you feel the flow, like something’s running along your nerves?”
“Yeah. It’s beginning to settle, right in my center.”
“Hot damn! That’s magic energy for sure! Keep pushing.”
When their fingers were totally entwined and overlapped the backs of the other’s hands, they moved their wrists so his right palm met her left and vice versa with no space between them and with their thumbs touching. The ball vanished, but the glow remained.
“Oh, wow,” she whispered. “Okay, don’t let go, whatever you do.”
“Not a chance,” he replied—not with every cell in his body crying out for some of the power flowing around his hands.
“I’m going to send you some of my energy, like we do among Defenders when we share by touch. It’s going to come from my center, out my arms, to your hands, exactly like you were my sword. See if you can pull the power into your center. Ready? One, two, three.”
The prickles in his hands increased in tempo, like a thousand pins were dancing on his palms, and he felt a force pushing through her palms into his. “Something’s coming, the pulse picked up, and I can feel ... it’s like holding a hot cup and feeling the heat warm your hand.”
“Imagine pulling the warmth into your center. The energy has to be in your well before you can use it.”
“Okay.” He felt sweat break out on his forehead as he coaxed, pulled, and tugged at the stuff. He succeeded in moving it only about an inch to his wrist.
“Don’t work so hard,” Irenee murmured. “Open yourself and let it flow.”
Without letting go of her, Jim rolled his shoulders and forced himself to relax. Flow, she said.
He closed his eyes and thought of his bucket. How would he get energy from her to it? If her hand was a faucet, he could open it with a twist. He rubbed his palms back and forth across hers, aligned them carefully, and with his fingers on the back of her hands, pushed her palms into his.
Visualizing the waiting energy as water, he twisted their hands ever so slightly. The pressure against his palm, then his wrist, increased. Another little turn, and the warmth moved along his arm to his elbow. One more ...
Yeeeessssss. Energy poured through his arms, into his chest, and into his bucket until it would hold no more.
“Oh, wow,” Irenee whispered. “The dam burst.”
“What a rush!” Jim opened his eyes. Though their hands had ceased to glow, they were still warm. He took a second to savor the triumph, before he sobered up. “But how do I send it back to you? That’s the key, isn’t it?”
She shrugged. “To get energy to my sword when I first started, I’d visualize a line, or a stream, or a pipe coming from my well, up my nerves to my arms and out my hands. I’d concentrate on my supply and pull the power up.”
“Okay, here goes.” He didn’t close his eyes or move his hands. Instead, he imagined “pushing” the energy from his bucket up the path it had created coming down. It worked, but sluggishly and more like a trickle than a good flow. He pushed harder, felt the energy coalesce into a stream and begin to climb his nerves. Come on, get up there ...
Pressure built, first in his bucket, then his chest, when the energy moved. It grew and grew until ... heat rushed up his chest and down his arms. When it reached his hands, warm magical power gushed directly into hers.
“Yeah!” he shouted. The power poured from him. The feeling—and relief—was almost as good as sex.
“Oh, wow! It’s like a flood! Wooo hooo!” she cried. “Man, are you strong! Back it off if you can. I can only take so much.”
He felt her closing the energy stream from her side, and he managed to get better control and turn off his faucet before his bucket emptied.
“Let’s try it again, this time slower,” she suggested, and they traded a couple of turns of sending, receiving, and moderating the flow.
Once they had established equilibrium, but were still clasping hands, he did what he’d been afraid to do up to now. The last thing he wanted to see on her face was knowledge of his failure. Having succeeded, he could look directly into her eyes. Shining back at him were triumph and satisfaction and ...
Like a thunderclap, desire shook h
im from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. He stretched their still-clasped hands out to the sides, and the movement pulled her flush against him. She came up on her toes and lifted her chin, and he kissed her. As their lips met, their centers aligned, and the energy within them hummed. His entire body hardened.
He let go of her hands to wrap his arms around her and hold on tight. He was hers, and she was his, and he wasn’t going to let her go. Oh, God, she felt so good, she smelled like heaven, and she tasted like chocolate-covered strawberries. He let himself indulge.
Eventually, he raised his head and gazed into her eyes again. They grinned breathlessly at each other like two giddy idiots who’d just won the lottery. He leaned his forehead against hers. He wasn’t sure what he referred to—the magic transfer or the kiss—when he managed to gasp, “Oh, honey, that was incredible.”
“Yes,” she panted. “I’ve never ... never experienced ... anything like this before.”
Although he wasn’t sure of her reference either, he didn’t care. Not with his arms holding her, his center humming, and his body aching.
Still breathing hard, she gave him a victorious smile. “Now do you believe we can exchange power? You can truly help me? We can fight the Stone together?”
Where did she get the lung power to talk? Besides, who gave a crap about power exchange when all he wanted to do was ... what he was supposed to do. Their energy exchange and that kiss had blown away all his doubts. He took a deep breath and forced the words out, “Yes. I believe. Before we do anything else, though, we follow the rest of Whipple’s orders.”
She blinked at him. “What orders?”
He swung her up into his arms. “What our leader commanded. We mate.”
Laughing, he carried her into the bedroom feeling like he’d won an enormous battle, and he was about to get his reward.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
At Jim’s words and especially his actions, Irenee’s heart began to race again—not that it had truly returned to normal after his kiss. He was right. She had his declaration they were mates, and he had hers. While neither had been the most romantic thing in the world, both had been sufficient. She had no more doubts. The time for talk and waiting was past.
