by Berinn Rae
At that moment, Daniel glanced down and saw her.
“Hey, Lil, you’re home.” He grinned around the mouthful of screws and hefted the fixture higher above his head. His T-shirt hiked up, exposing more naked skin, and suddenly Lily wanted her mouth on him, there, just below his belly button where a fading tan ended and tender, pale skin began.
Her knees buckled and she caught herself against the rail. Sketchbooks fell at her feet. Unable to look away, her gaze slid up over the arc of his ribs and across his chest following the perfect curve of pectoral muscle into bicep. The man on the ladder had ceased being Daniel and became instead a throbbing pulse in her throat and a hot ache between her legs.
“Lily?”
She blinked stupidly at him.
“You okay? Electricity’s out in your kitchen, but I’m almost done.” He eyed her uneasily and moved to climb down the ladder.
She jerked out of her trance. “Okay, yeah, electricity, right.” Somehow she gathered up her things, found her key and stumbled up the remaining stairs. When the door to her apartment opened, she fell headlong inside.
Daniel leaned out from the ladder. “Are you all right?”
Her head peeped out her door, eyes wide, pupils dilated. “I’m fine, really.”
A taut line appeared at the corner of Daniel’s mouth. “Then I take it you saw him?”
“What? Who?”
“That asshole Rodney.”
With a dizzying rush, the blood drained from her face. “So you saw him, too.”
“How could I not? Did he touch you, Lily? Because I swear, if — ”
“No, he just stared at me.”
Struggling to cool his temper, Daniel climbed a step higher and resumed working. “The jerk’s been lurking around all day. You told me he was gone.”
“I thought he was. Gone forever, in fact,” she shivered. “I’ll get rid of him somehow, I promise.”
“Try a restraining order,” Daniel said caustically.
Lily glanced up, wishing she could pour out the entire story to him. Instead, she ducked back inside the apartment and closed the door.
• • •
Daniel willed himself still, but the anger wouldn’t leave his body. Damn, but she tied him in knots! And he was bloody tired of it. This weird restraint between them lately seemed as unnatural as … as wool on a bluebird! He lived his days no longer content and easy but consumed by thoughts of her. And Christ’s army, the very idea of her with that pig Rodney … he’d never felt such a violent jealousy in his life. Or such savage joy at the feel of her pinned under him against the wall the other night. And Lily, she’d raged at him, feared and fought him … and loved him all at the same time.
The door to her apartment jerked open. “I was wondering … ” She leaned out, tried to meet his eyes and couldn’t. “You know how I hate art openings. The one at Gradyn’s new gallery is next Tuesday. Is there a possibility you might not mind awfully going with me?”
“No.”
“Oh, okay then. Well, no problem.” She started to close the door.
“I mean, I don’t mind going with you.”
“Oh, good.” Her large, unsettled gaze flitted to his face and away. “That’s good. Thank you.”
Daniel plucked the screws from his mouth. “What’s going on with you, Lily? You’re all fluttery. No, don’t duck back inside.” He stepped down the ladder and approached where she cowered behind her half closed door. His frown turned to astonishment. “Are you afraid of me?” Dragging off his baseball cap, Daniel ran a hand through his hair. “I behaved like an ass the other night, and I’m sorry but — ”
“Of course I’m not afraid of you, Daniel,” she scoffed.
“Then what’s going on? I’ll take care of Rodney if he’s frightening you.” Face grim, he stepped closer.
“No. Yeah, he scares me, but it’s complicated. I have to handle him myself, and that’s the long and short of it. Otherwise, I’m fine, really. I’m just … nervous.”
“Nervous? Of me? You’ve asked me to openings before, what’s the big deal — ” His eyes widened. “Are you asking me out, Lily?”
He jumped back as she slammed the door in his face. “Yes!” he exulted under his breath and grinning like a wolf, bounded back up the ladder.
Lily’s door burst open again. “Don’t you already have a date with Megan on Tuesday?”
Daniel’s face went blank. “Megan who?”
“The Megan you were with last week. She said she’d see you Tuesday.”
“You mean the Megan who works at Spencer Gallery? I wasn’t not going to the opening, Lily. It’s your big night, and Gradyn’s. And I kind of assumed you and I would go together. We usually do.”
“We do.” Lily nodded and disappeared inside. This time she left her door open and Daniel heard her shoes hit the wall as she kicked them off. “Do I have electricity yet?”
“Give me two minutes.” Daniel gave the wire connectors a final twist, fit the fixture tight inside its housing and placed the screws before stepping down the ladder to the breaker panel and flipping the switch. Light beamed clean and sparkling from the chandelier and in Lily’s kitchen, he heard the faucet filling a hollow tea kettle.
“Ruth says I’m to make you tea,” she called.
“Then I’ll be sure to thank her.” He gave Lily’s open door a bemused look as he folded the ladder. Gods and favors, but the girl was a mind-tweak. He never knew what to expect from her … even with his almighty psychic powers! Then Daniel heard the techo-punk band Tired Treads singing from her comp-deck about how there’s “no new thing under the sun.” His heart tumbled in his chest, and he wished she’d offer him more than tea.
Daniel came in moments later, minus the tool belt. He cast a quick glance at Lily’s face and caught a delicate flush there, so slipped into his best friend role. Soon he had her relaxed and laughing. Right where he wanted her, for the time being. She looked exhausted and Daniel, unwilling to overstay his welcome, left after one cup.
“Thank you, Daniel,” she stood when he did, “for not going off about Rodney again. I’m sorry if … well, he’ll be gone as soon as I can arrange it. For good.”
“I can arrange some very imaginative ways for him to disappear.” He flashed a malicious grin.
She looked up at him with her laughing eyes a radiant blue and he wanted her in his arms and kissing him more than …
Daniel made a quick exit and spent the evening working off his sexual frustration by repairing a broken dryer in the basement.
• • •
So exhausted half an hour earlier she could hardly climb the stairs, Lily now felt her blood zinging with a serotonin high one only got from love, sex, and rock ’n roll. Not that she’d had the sex yet. But if merely being in Daniel’s company had her skin humming harmonics and her nerves sizzling, what other inconceivable delights awaited her? Her body loosened as she put on sultry jazz and danced around the apartment, wolfing down celery sticks dipped in peanut butter.
Imagination firing on all cylinders, faith and love leaking from every pore in her body, Lily started the final painting for Gradyn Spencer’s opening. Not a portrait … well, perhaps a kind of a self portrait but only obliquely so. She began slapping paint on the canvas without a preliminary sketch and with an uninhibited pleasure she’d never experienced before.
Colors blazed to life, hot yellows and fierce reds that intensified the soft, moody blues of a shadowy form almost supernaturally taking shape on the canvas. Fueled by passion, Lily worked into the wee hours. When at last she called Gradyn, she caught him groggy on the phone and only then realized it was five o’clock in the morning.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered, “I just realized how early it is … it’s just I haven’t returned your calls and — ”
“Lily, it’s okay. I had to get up in another half hour anyway. Let me flip on my coffee.” She heard him moving about, and then his voice was back in her ear. “So, I’m guessing you stayed up all n
ight painting.”
“Yes. I hope you like the pieces I’ve done and feel they’re good enough. You’re giving me such a break,” she gushed, “and I’m sorry I didn’t call you sooner.”
“Stop apologizing, Lil.” He yawned. “Artists are notorious procrastinators. The downside of genius, I imagine. You’re more than forgiven. I assume you used fast drying oils?”
“I did, but the final varnish — ”
“It can wait. Are they standard sized canvases? I can get them framed if you bring them in today.”
“Thank you,” Lily breathed. “Two of them are already framed. The one at Faces in Time isn’t, but I’ll bring it by this morning. The rest are here. I’ll box them up. Should I get Daniel to drop them off at the gallery?”
“Are you two speaking to each other?”
“I … he … ” Lily could heard Grady laughing.
“I’ll call him, Lil, ask if he’ll bring them down for you. I hear you’re doing a kickass portrait of two girls. I should talk to Ellen Reid about doing a show of her portrait artists. Do you think she’d be interested?”
“I think she’d be interested. But Daniel says I’m all fluttery and not myself these days. So you should ask her.”
Gradyn laughed.
“Oh, one last thing.” Lily hesitated. “One of the paintings, it’s called Paradigm, can you not sell it? You’ll know why when you see it. Is that a problem?”
“Not really. I’ll just slap an outrageous price on it and a tag that says Sold. That’ll give buyers something to think about. And Lily, don’t stop painting. I want Spencer’s to carry your work exclusively. This is just the beginning. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I’m beginning to,” she said, hanging up with a shiver of excitement tangled around more than a little fear.
Chapter Fourteen
Daniel had new pages from Graffic Blues to colorize and worked all morning in his office. He hadn’t slept much, tossing and turning over dreams of Lily being pursued by shadowy figures, Lily lost in a labyrinth, Lily lonely and afraid. Getting up for a snack around two A.M., he heard her singing faint, broken snatches of song and knew she was painting.
The walls between apartments in the Lennox were more soundproof than most new buildings but once upon a time Daniel and Lily’s apartment had been one big suite. Remodeling in the late twentieth century had divided it into two apartments with only a thin wall between. When she’d first moved in, he’d felt uncomfortably voyeuristic. The wall of his office and her bedroom wall were the same.
Working late at night he could sometimes hear her singing in the bath, dashing about dressing, or the tired squeal of springs when she fell into bed. He found himself working more at night because she slept only a few feet from where he sat at his drawing table. As he grew to know her and discovered she was a peculiar cross between the proverbial ship lost at sea and the bull in a china shop, he felt more protective and less like a peeper.
He heard no sound from her apartment all morning, then just after noon sounds of abrupt bustling came vaguely through the wall, followed by the slam of her door and footsteps skipping down the stairs. Daniel had finished his pages by late afternoon and was ready for a break when he received the call from Gradyn Spencer and agreed to play delivery man.
Lily had left her apartment unlocked for him. The moment his hand touched the doorknob he felt the emotional maelstrom whipping like a tornado inside the room. Her magic. Christ, conjuring up this much supernatural power went far beyond the skills of simple alchemy! All his psychic barricades trembled. He knew if he entered her apartment with the air charged by this much expressively worked magic, the synapses in his brain would surely fry.
He’d heard of instances where extra-sensory overload permanently damaged a Reader’s telepathic powers. The whirlwind behind Lily’s door could irreparably damage him. It had happened before. But sweet Gods, he wanted her! With all her quixotic moods, her joyous pleasure in simple beauties, her expressive, yearning pain … and from beyond the door he could feel her need for him fill his heart and blood with an answering excitement.
Daniel closed his eyes, mentally spiraled down into the well of his own magic where he began constructing a shield he hoped would be strong enough to block so much unbridled, magical energy. Murmuring a protective spell, he drew a deep breath, turned the doorknob and stepped into Lily’s apartment.
An aurora borealis shimmered in curtains of vivid color, dancing in the air as if alive inside the room. It painted the furniture, walls, lush plants, even the fishbowl all the shades of Lily’s complex personality: vibrant purples, lush greens, brilliant blues … and refracted, amplified a hundred times, through the crystals pulsing like a beating heart inside the geode on her coffee table. Daniel stumbled against the psychic blast. A lifetime of defensive constructs crumbled into ruin. Holy Gods and Saints! She’d told him she wanted in … he could no more block her out now than he could stop breathing.
With elated surrender, he let down his barriers and opened himself fully to Lily’s magnificent power. For a moment all he felt was her joy zinging along his nerves. Then his sensory awareness deepened and the full impact of her jubilant passion exploded into him like a shredding grenade. Pain, fierce as blinding light, seared the pathways to his brain.
He fell to his knees clutching his head, panting against a scream rising in his throat. The air filled with the scent of her hair, the taste of her skin. His synapses flash-burned to colorless ash and still her emotional storm pounded him, demanding, racing through every nerve. He fought to stay alert long enough to magically bind his shattering abilities to her fledgling magic, praying the innocence of her power would be enough to save him.
Time stood still. Shivering and barely conscious, Daniel lay curled on Lily’s floor and heard deep inside his scoured mind his grandmother’s words from long ago. “Empathic magic is the most unforgiving of powers. You will know boundless ecstasy, suffer unholy pain, and discover more than you want to know about the human heart. Such is a Reader’s merciless gift.”
Gran had offered him the protection of her own magic twice. Shortly after his seventh birthday he began sensing other people’s emotions while tackling them in play or brushing against them at school. It terrified him, feeling sentiments as real as his own but not of his making. So he ran, began skipping school, avoiding friends.
His mother came from a family of witches, her magic was culinary. His father despised magic and refused to acknowledge it in any way. All his life Daniel had suffered his father’s impatient anger; now he learned the man thought him a freakish, unnatural thing. Life grew unbearable, his home a waking nightmare of atmospheric sensation he could not understand or avoid. He started sleepwalking, and when his mother found him half dead in the backyard one frigid winter night, she called on her aunts, healers all, and her maternal grandmother.
Daniel moved in with Gran while he recovered from a pneumonia that almost killed him. Her house was soothing, a quiet place of airy light scented with herbs. She kept her own emotions shielded, something she would eventually teach him to do and he knew a child’s peace once more, anxiety free and healthy. Birds of all species flew loose and free inside Gran’s house. They had their perches, favorite haunts.
Daniel learned, like his Gran, to carry a rag everywhere for wiping up bird droppings. It was part of life with her, a matter of course, and well worth the little effort to feel a handful of contented sparrows nestling in his hair while he studied or a finch affectionately tweak his ear as it sat his shoulder while he bathed or brushed his teeth.
Daniel spent two months recovering. During that time Gran began his training. He learned spells of focus that enabled him to build the all important “constructs,” those mental barriers that protect a Reader from seeing too deeply and feeling too much. He worked daily on the mundane disciplines of magic, calling fire, conjuring, scrying, as well as learning the basic elements of clairvoyance before he began studying magic more specific to his own
case, spells of defense and protection that provided shielding and internal shelters. He even learned charms of self-healing. And all the while he wore a fluorite crystal talisman Gran made to protect him from emotional overload.
By the time he moved home again, he’d learned to survive in public. He went back to school and developed thicker skin after scuffles over the fact that he wore a necklace like a girl. By the time he was ten, he no longer needed the crystal charm.
Then puberty struck and Gran saved his life a second time. Full power came to him suddenly at thirteen, bringing with it hypersensitivities that lit his body like a torch. Not only was his body in hormonal upheaval, but every day he felt the onslaught of everyone else’s confusion and pubescent turmoil. And he no longer needed to touch someone to Read them.
Girls … Glorious Gods! Their scent and their awakening female energy permeated every classroom in the middle school. They were everywhere, the sudden center of the universe with their alluring shapes and flitting, shadowed eyes. They frightened the wits out of him and every other male in seventh grade. But Daniel felt more than their interest. He was at the mercy of every hormonal nuance the girls projected and suffered irritating, frightening arousals over their budding and often aggressive sexuality. He began skipping classes again, dropped out of football and basketball, which pissed off his dad. He brought home a report card full of Fs, which just about killed his mother until she realized his every waking moment was spent scrambling together emotional barriers no longer powerful enough to protect a boy now becoming a man.
Once again, Gran came to his rescue, first with a new, more powerful charm to wear, and then the study of new spells, these more potent, more specific, and taught to him by witch women of his own blood. By the time his boyish face thinned to heartbreaking good looks and the girls began competing for attention from his beautiful, thick lashed eyes, he no longer had to retreat unprepared.
