by Rachel Caine
He stowed it in the backseat and got in without a word. As he got in, I grabbed his hand and held it palm up, then passed my hand over it and concentrated.
Nothing. If he was a Warden—Earth Warden, I suspected—he had no glyphs. Maybe a Wildling? They were few and far between, from what I'd ever heard, but it was possible he had some kind of talent. Maybe.
He took his hand back, frowning slightly. "And that was—?"
"Checking to see if you washed your hands."
He looked doubtfully at me—oily, dusty, grimy. I accelerated out onto the open road.
"How'd you find me?" I asked.
"Luck," he said.
"Yeah," I agreed gloomily. "Luck. I'll bet."
Five miles down the road, I spotted a cloud on the horizon ahead of us. Just a little cloud about the size of my hand. Hardly anything, really.
But I could feel the storm coming back. Son of a bitch.
By the time the sun went down, I was exhausted. I planned to have David take the wheel, but there was a hitch in my brilliant plan.
David didn't drive.
"At all?" I asked. "I mean, you can't?"
"I'm from New York," he explained. As if that explained it. To me, it was like meeting somebody with three heads from the planet Bozbarr. It also caused a big sucking hole in my plans—I hadn't wanted to pull over at all on the way to Oklahoma, beyond gas and bathroom stops. But the world looked sparkly and jagged, I was floating about an inch outside my body, and my muscles trembled like soggy rubber bands.
I'd kill us both if I tried to go on much longer.
"We're stopping for the night," I announced. "I need some rest."
David nodded. He had a little clip-on light on his book, and he was deep in the perils of one of John Grisham's lawyers. I wished he would get a little more interested in the prospect of spending the night in a hotel with a hot babe who owned a purple velvet suit, but apparently not happening.
I tried a hint. "Any preference? Trashy decor? Adult channels?"
He turned a page. "Indoor plumbing's a plus."
Bigger hint. "Two rooms or one?" I kept looking at the road and the sunset. In my peripheral vision, he still looked relaxed and unfazed, but he marked his place in his book and turned the light off.
"Kind of takes the mystery out of it if you ask," he said.
"Just thinking out loud."
"One's fine."
Well, that was an answer, but I wasn't getting the come-hither vibe. David was just about impossible to read, which was funny, considering how much time he spent with the printed page. Ah, well. Truthfully, I was too wasted to be seductive anyway.
Up ahead, the cool blue glow of a motel sign floated like a UFO above the road. Clean sheets, fluffy pillows, little complimentary soaps. It sounded like heaven. Up close, it looked a lot more like purgatory, but any afterlife in a storm.
I checked us in, getting absolutely no reaction from the walleyed clerk to any of my quips, and paid with my fast-dwindling supply of cash. I signed the slip and got the room key and went back out to the car. The chunky orange tag attached to the key said we were in room 128. It was, naturally, on the other side of the building, the dark side, where half the parking lot lights were dead and the other half terminally ill. I pulled Delilah up in a parking space directly in front of the door.
Well, one benefit to the place: it was quiet. Awesomely quiet. Nothing but the wind whispering through trees and rattling a stray plastic bag across the parking lot.
"Shall we?" I asked, and reached down to grab my duffel. David took out his heavy backpack and camping kit. I doubted he would need all of it, but I supposed living on the road makes you less than trusting about that kind of thing.
Once we were inside, my visions of gleaming chrome bathroom fixtures and deep-pile carpeting were crushed. The carpet was indoor-outdoor, the bathroom had last been upgraded in the 1950s, and the sad-clown prints on the walls could never have been remotely fashionable. But it had clean sheets, reasonably fluffy pillows, and (I saw during a fast reconnaissance) complimentary little soaps. So okay. Next door to heaven.
David leaned his backpack against the wall. "One bed," he said.
"Lucky for you, you brought camping gear." I flopped down on the bed and immediately felt gravity increase by a factor of ten. The mattress was old and sagged, but it still felt like a cloud under my aching back. "God, I could sleep for days."
The bed creaked. I hoisted one eyelid and saw that David had perched on the edge, looking down at me. In a perfect world, he would have been all choked up with romantic desire. In my all-too-real reality, he said, "You look terrible."
"Thanks," I murmured, and let my eye drift shut. "You charmer. Sheesh."
The bed creaked again, and I heard him rummaging in his backpack. Footsteps on the carpet. The bathroom door closed, and the shower started up with a stuttering hiss.
Sometime a few minutes later, the sound of running water melted into the steady, stealthy sound of rain. It was raining. That was bad, I could feel it, but I couldn't think why. Rain tapping the windows, polite at first, then beating harder, impatient to be inside. Wind whispered and rose to a roar, and I heard a rumble of thunder and felt the cold hair-raising frisson of electrons aligning.
A flash of lightning, blue-white, outside the window.
It was coming for me—
I pulled awake with a gasp and found David tucking a scratchy blanket around me. I flailed my way out of it and stumbled to the window, ripped aside the curtains, and stared out at the dark.
Quiet. Quiet as the grave. No rain. No thunder. No lightning stabbing at me from above.
"What?" he asked.
It's looking for me, I wanted to say, but there was no way I could explain that sort of thing. I was so tired, I was incoherent, shaking, almost crying. It's out there.
"Did it rain?" I managed to ask.
"Don't think so. Maybe you heard the shower. You haven't been asleep long."
Oh. I remembered now. The shower. He'd been taking a shower.
When I turned around, I realized he was wearing nothing but a towel and some well-placed water drops, and it hit me with a cattle-prod jolt that he was absolutely, unquestionably gorgeous. Skin like burnished gold, and under it the best kind of muscles on a man—long, lean, defined without bulging. A gilded thatch of hair on his chest that narrowed to a line down his stomach, pointing the way under the towel.
"Oh," I blurted. "Wow. You—don't have much on."
"No," he agreed gravely. "I don't usually sleep in footie pajamas."
"Would it be too personal to ask what you do sleep in?"
"Pajama bottoms. Unless that bothers you."
Bothered me? Hell, yes. But in that nice, liquefying, warm-silk way of being bothered, as in "hot and."
"No," I said weakly. A drop of water glided down over his shoulder and melted into his chest hair. I had a fantasy so vivid, it raised my skin into goose bumps.
"Okay. You planning to sleep in that?" he asked me. I was still wearing the gritty, oil-stained denim from my try at fixing Delilah, and looking at him in all his glory, I felt grubby and short and smelly.
"Um, no," I said, grabbed my duffel, and escaped to the bathroom.
Funny how a nice flare of lust can burn off the fog of exhaustion; I stripped off my clothes and kicked them under the sink, stepped into a shower he'd left warm for me. Shampoo and conditioner clustered considerately on the floor near my feet, open bar of soap in the tray… all the comforts of somebody else's home.
I scrubbed myself pink, washed and strangled the water out of my hair, and wrapped myself in one of the motel's thin, stiff towels. Record time. I considered shaving my legs, decided no, reconsidered, and then managed to get depilated in under four minutes, with only one tiny little cut near my left ankle.
When I came out into the bedroom, the bed was empty. No David.
He was zipped into a sleeping bag on the floor.
I stood there, dripping and s
teaming, and said, "You're kidding."
He didn't open his eyes. "You've said that to me before. Do I really look that funny?"
"Bastard." I flopped down on the bed again, squirmed under the covers, and stripped off the towel beneath. "You made me get up for nothing."
"No," he corrected. "Now you're clean and you'll sleep better."
He turned over on his side, away from me. I wondered if he was naked inside the sleeping bag, growled in frustration, and put a pillow over my face. Suffocation had no appeal. I took it off and said, "You can bring your sleeping bag up here, you know. Beats sleeping on the floor."
He didn't answer for a few seconds, long enough for me to experience total rejection, and then he turned over and raised himself up on one elbow to look at me.
I expected some quip or some question, but he just looked. And then he flipped open the sleeping bag, slid out, and walked over to the bed.
He hadn't lied. Pajama bottoms. They rode low on his hips.
I folded back the covers. He got in. I lowered my head to rest on the pillow, still watching him, and he rolled up on his left side to face me.
Some sane part of my mind was telling me that this was just some guy I'd picked up on the road, for God's sake, some guy who could be a rapist or a killer, and that part of my mind was completely right and completely wrong. I knew him in places that had nothing to do with my mind.
"Turn on your side," he said. I did, feeling like I was already dreaming. The slide of sheets felt cool and soothing on my overheated body.
I could feel him warm at my back, not quite touching. He put a hand on my hip, slid it gently up.
I couldn't breathe.
He put his fingers at the base of my neck and drew them lightly down the curve of my spine, all the way down. I felt my muscles contract and shiver, and I wanted to stretch like a cat against him; it took all my control not to do it.
If I'd been melting inside before, I was boiling now.
"I'll have to call a penalty," he said. His voice sounded far away. "You're not even wearing a T-shirt. Definitely a violation of the rules."
His fingertips followed the curve of my hip again.
The tacky room had dropped away, and it was just the two of us, suspended in time and silence. There were no rules for this, none that I'd ever known. Just instinct. I started to turn toward him, and his hand spread out, holding me in place. His breath was warm on the back of my neck, his lips barely touching skin.
"You're afraid of me," he whispered. His hand moved into the demilitarized zone of my stomach. "Don't be afraid."
It wasn't him—I was scared of myself. I was tired, vulnerable, frightened, lonely, desperate. I couldn't trust my own senses, much less… whatever this was. Whoever he was.
I hadn't thought about the Mark for hours, but now I could feel it moving inside me, turning restlessly as if it hungered as much as I did. Oh, God, I couldn't concentrate enough to hold it back, not with him so close, so warm.
"Shhh," he whispered, even though I hadn't made a sound out loud. His hand moved again, gently, tracing a line of fire from my stomach up between my breasts. Flattened out over my heart. "Be still."
I felt a lurch inside, a chill, a burst of heat.
The Demon Mark stopped moving.
"How—?" I blurted, and instantly stopped myself from asking. I didn't want to know. There was so much here I didn't want to know, because if I knew, then I would have to move away from him, give up this warmth, this beautiful peace.
"Shhh," he said, and his lips touched the back of my neck. "No questions, no pain, no fear."
I glimpsed something then, just the edges of something vast and powerful, and I almost knew—
His hand moved again, gliding down, drawing my mind away from what it chased in the dark. His fingers brushed gently over my aching nipples, settled back on my stomach.
"You should sleep," he whispered. As if I could. As if I could ever sleep again, after feeling this, knowing this…
But it was all slipping away, water through my fingers, air flowing free through the sky. I was falling, and falling, and falling.
His hand moved slowly down and came to rest over the aching emptiness of my womb. It pressed flat and burned his warmth into my deepest places.
"Dream well," he whispered.
Pleasure came in a wave, drenching me from head to toe, and it went on and on and on. It was the last I knew, except for the dreams.
I dreamed of rain.
* * *
It was raining the night Lewis showed up at my door… the slow, steady, nuturing rain people believe is their birthright on this planet, the kind that had to be squeezed out of Mother Nature with a fist of power. I'd been working at it all damn day, and by the time I got home and sank into a hot bath, I was worn out.
I'd been soaking for about ten minutes when I heard the doorbell ring. Let it ring, part of me sighed. The other part reminded me that I was a responsible adult, a Warden, and besides, the visitor might be either Ed McMahon with a Publishers Clearing House check or—even more unlikely—a gorgeous hunk.
It was the gorgeous hunk possibility that lured me out of the bath. I wrapped a thick ratty blue robe around myself and made wet footprints to the door.
I swung it open to find… nobody there. And then I looked down.
There was a guy huddled in a sitting position against the wall, soaking wet, his brown hair sticking up like porcupine quills. He was shaking, hugging himself for warmth. It took me a full ten seconds to recognize his face and feel the shock.
"Lewis!" I blurted, and before I could think what I was doing, I got my hands under his arms and tugged. No way I could have lifted him myself, but he cooperated and stumbled over the threshold and into my living room, where he proceeded to drip and shiver uncontrollably. I slammed and locked the door, ran to the hall closet, and came back with the warmest blanket I had—considering it was Florida, not so very warm. When I came back, he was sitting down again, this time on the tile floor of the entryway.
I used a tiny jet of power to suck all the water off him and out of his clothes and directed it down the kitchen sink, where it gurgled and drained away. I warmed the blanket at the same time and threw it around his shoulders.
"Hey," I said, and crouched down. "Not that the floor's not comfy, but I do have a couch."
He opened his eyes, and I was surprised by the fear in them. Lewis, afraid. What could scare the most powerful Warden in the world?
"Can't make it," he admitted. He did look bad— skinny, almost skeletal, with dirty-pale skin as if he'd been someplace dark for a long time. "Thanks."
"I vacuumed you off and gave you a blanket," I said. "Don't thank me yet. Come on, up."
We repeated the grabbing-and-hauling and got him to the couch, where he sprawled and proved that a normal-size couch wasn't designed to accommodate a six-foot-plus guy at full length. I spread the blanket over him. "When's the last time you ate?"
"Don't remember," he murmured. I started to go into the kitchen, but he caught my wrist. "Jo."
The touch, skin-to-skin, started a burn between us. He let go the second he felt it.
"You're in trouble," I said. It wasn't exactly a stretch. "I get it. And no, I won't call anybody."
It was what he wanted. He nodded and closed those warm brown eyes.
When I came back with a microwaved cup of soup, he managed to squirm to a sitting position and sipped it faster than good sense allowed. I pulled up a pale plaid hassock, sat down, and watched him. When he'd sucked the last noodle out of the cup, I took it and laid it aside on the coffee table.
"Good," he murmured. I put a hand on his forehead. He was burning up with fever. "I'm all right."
"Yeah, like hell." I fetched cold medicine from the bathroom and made him swallow two gel capsules with another cup of soup. All nice and domestic. No sound in the apartment except for the steady tick of rain on the roof and windows.
He didn't say anything until the second cup
of soup was finished. He rolled the empty ceramic in his hands, watching me with fever-bright eyes, and finally said, "You're not going to ask?"
"Do I have any right?" I took the cup and set it back down. "You're the big boss, Lewis, I'm just a Staffer. You say frog, I jump. You say nurse you back to health—"
He made a rude noise. "Yeah. You're the mothering type, Jo. And the no-questions-asked type."
He had a point. "Okay. What the hell are you doing here, showing up starved and sick on my doorstep? It isn't like we know each other, Lewis. At least, not in any way that matters."
Cruel but true. Lewis's eyes widened, and he looked down. "I know you," he said. "And I trust you."
"Why?" He gave me an off-kilter smile for answer. I felt myself blush hot up around the cheekbones. "Okay, rephrasing the question. What kind of trouble are you in?"
The smile disappeared, and he looked ill and tired. "The worst kind," he said. "Council trouble. I broke out."
I froze, my own mug of soup halfway to my lips. Steam tickled my nose with ghosts of spices. "Broke out?"
"They were keeping me in a hospital, the one where…" He had an inward look, and what flashed across his face didn't look like a pleasant memory. "They were keeping me at the Pound."
The Pound was a nickname among the junior Wardens for the hospital Marion Bearheart oversaw, where Wardens checked in and walked out—or were carried out—as regular human beings. The place where we got neutered, or in my case, spayed.
The place where our powers could be ripped away at the roots.
"No," I whispered, and put the soup down to take his hands. His felt cold, still. "God, Lewis, they couldn't. Not you."
"They hadn't decided, but I knew which way it was going to go. Martin didn't want it, but the others—" He shrugged. "I don't fit, Jo, I have too much power, and they can't control it. They don't like that."
No wonder he'd run. He had so much to lose, so much… I couldn't imagine Marion agreeing to it, but she was sworn to obey, like all of us. Lewis was right not to take the chance.
