by Anna Windsor
John thought about this, and offered what observation he could make. “You’re all getting better at that different sort of stuff you do. The dinar, the charms—you’re working it out.”
“That’s just it.” She put the napkin down and raised her eyes to his, and he figured they were getting to it now. “I’ve been thinking of the charms like plastics or dynamite. Things I do that normal fire Sibyls don’t. Things to make me stronger. Explosive, yeah, but pretty stable and safe if you know what you’re doing. But John, those charms I made for Bela and Dio and Andy, what if they’re not stable, even with careful use? What if they’re lead azide—or worse?”
The food came, and the waiter placed it in front of them with a broad smile, waiting until John nodded for him to leave. He wanted to shove the guy away, but he could tell from the look on Camille’s face that it was too late. The thread had been broken, at least for the moment, and her attention was captured completely by her food. She looked like a little kid sitting down to a Christmas feast, and he thought that was pretty cute.
John had gone for the Beijing duck, which was strong in a just-right way, even if it bugged him a little that the duck’s head came cooked along with everything else, bill and all. He’d gotten used to stuff like that overseas. Camille had steered Cantonese and ordered the Grand Marnier prawns with honey walnuts—which, thank God, didn’t get served with the little bobbling eye stalks or anything. Even John had his limits.
For a few minutes they chowed, and then she started picking at her broccoli and the rich, dark nuts, the rose on her plate brushing the light, soft skin of her hand. Whatever it was she was trying to say involving the atypical abilities and the lead azide metaphor, it was pretty important to her, he could tell.
“Imagine if you had some guys who were great soldiers,” she said, “maybe the strongest soldiers in the unit, except they couldn’t shoot as well as everybody else.”
John scooted his duck head out of his direct line of sight. “Okay, yeah, I’m following you.”
“You make them special guns that do the targeting for them, and the guns work. They really work.” She looked up at him and smiled, and he thought this part of the story was real, maybe exactly what had happened, only with energy charms instead of other hardware. “All of a sudden they’re not only just as good as everybody else, they’re better. They even get to try the guns out in a few battles, and they kick ass and take names and make a gigantic difference.”
She stopped. Waited. He didn’t look at the duck head, and he added up her meaning, summarizing an old commander’s words. “By giving them the special guns, you made them relevant.”
Her expression brightened. “Relevant. Yes. Good word. Great word.” She put down her fork. “Then in a practice session, one of the guns malfunctions, and you realize those weapons could go bad in a firefight and shoot everyone in a ten-mile radius, friend or foe. What do you do next?”
John felt the weight of the scenario, and he could imagine it in so many different ways: as a soldier himself, and as a commander, and as a man who had struggled for many years to find his own relevance. “It sucks, but you don’t have a lot of choices. You have to retire the guns and go back to the drawing board on the design.”
She winced, and her frown made his chest hurt. “What if the technology’s faulty at base? What if it’s lead azide and can’t be stabilized no matter what you do?”
John’s heart sank for Camille. “Then you have to take the guns away forever.”
“And make the men, make my quad, who they used to be. Who we all used to be. The less-thans. The ones who struggle, who can’t be as good as everybody else.” She hesitated, spreading her fingers out on either side of her plate. “When I do that, I make us irrelevant again.”
John’s training and experience kicked in, and he spoke to her like an officer. “That’s up to the squad. To its leader, its cohesion, and its initiative and ideas. Lack of skill in one area doesn’t make any group a failure—hell, look at how strong your group was even before you made those charms.”
Camille gazed at him for a few seconds, then nodded. “I hear that, and I’m sure you’re right. Maybe the truth of this is, I feel like a bitch because I opened a door and now I might have to slam it closed. Even though I know it’s the right thing, the safest thing, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to go back to being … broken.”
John couldn’t quite believe he’d heard that. “There’s nothing about you that’s broken. Not a thing.”
She closed her eyes. “Please don’t tell me how everybody has different strengths and weaknesses. That’s just bullshit.”
“It’s not, but I won’t.” He waited for her to look at him again, and he made sure to think through the next words pretty carefully. “That thing you do with the fire—how you explore objects and track things with your energy, and how you can pull fire through you to do stuff like you did when you gave me this body—don’t you think that’s important? There’s got to be a reason you have that skill, and there’s got to be a way to use it safely.”
Camille finally went back to eating, a few little bites, and then she came up with, “If pyrosentience was so important, the fire Sibyl Mothers wouldn’t have bred for stronger pyrogenesis instead. They think it’s pretty useless and as unstable as any primary explosive.”
“Maybe they don’t think it’s useless.” John finally surrendered and put his napkin over the duck head. “Maybe it scares the hell out of them.”
“You’re an optimist.”
“Never thought anybody would say that to me.” He knew he was grinning now, and he was starting not to worry about it. “You have a strange effect on me, beautiful.”
“Yeah, well, that’s mutual.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
God, he loved her straightforward answers. If she’d been the kind of woman to play coy, he’d have worked through it, but he was glad he didn’t have to.
He lowered his voice just enough to be sure nobody else could hear them. “When I make love to you, will you light me on fire?”
“I’m not that kind of girl.”
Why did she sound sad when she said that? So much about her he needed to learn. He hoped she gave him time to figure everything out. For now, he settled for something simple and relatively safe. “You want dessert?”
“Yes.” She put down her fork again, and this time she put her napkin on her plate. “But not here.”
John stood up so fast his chair went flying. It took him a second to realize he probably looked like an idiot for that and for waving for the waiter—and really, he didn’t even care.
( 20 )
She liked walking with him. She liked talking with him. A cab would have been faster, but this light, slow stroll—it was its own kind of foreplay.
Camille had never felt so alive and powerful, hand in hand with John, buildings towering all around them, the city moving, moving, and them drifting through the nighttime lights and whirlwind chaos like they were the only people on the planet. He looked only at her, smiled just to her, talked to nobody but her, and she felt like everything to him. To this man who had been in her life for such a short time. This man with a wild, raging demon in his mind.
John was a risk. The perfect risk.
Camille really, really, really liked kissing him, even on the sidewalk with cars and buses and cabs whizzing by so fast the cold drafts made her hair blow. “You taste like duck and green tea with a hint of wonton,” she told him after the third time he pulled her to him and pressed his lips against hers. “I could eat you up.”
The next kiss came naturally, and the one after that, and the one after that, and all the while they were making progress toward the brownstone, not too fast, not too slow—just right. Camille thought she might be able to kiss this man forever, nipping his lips, brushing his tongue with hers, loving the way he moved his mouth, then found the line of her jaw, her ear. Not insistent. Not overbearing or way out of line. Just … teas
ing. Letting her know what she could have, whenever she wanted it.
They needed to get home soon. Still five or six blocks away, though. Maybe the cab wouldn’t have been such a bad idea.
When she put some space between them, he let her, though he kept stroking her arm as they walked. The contact kept her relaxed in some ways and increasingly tense in others. It was getting hard to think about words and walking and not running into lampposts.
Another kiss. Just one more. It wasn’t enough anymore, but Camille found herself pulling back yet again after just a taste, staring at him and letting him stare at her.
Was it possible that they were running out of words?
Lots of ways to communicate …
The heat between them felt like the flames in her heart, the fire she could never quite make, and she wanted to touch it, hold it, let it wrap her in a never-ending inferno.
“Home now?” he asked, his voice husky. “As fast as we can get there?”
“Yes.”
They made it about half a block farther before the mark on Camille’s forearm heated up at the same time the dinar she had tucked in her underwear went off like some kind of ancient, perverted vibrator.
She startled, slapping her free hand against her hip, feeling the message hurtle through both sources, except it wasn’t a targeted communication. No. Her tattoo’s elemental paints and the dinar’s projective metal were reacting to elemental energy, and very powerful stuff. It had struck Camille like a targeted bolt, like a shot across the bow.
Like a warning.
John let go of her hand and looked around. His nostrils flared like he was catching a strange scent. “Something’s off. Wrong. Do you—”
He broke off when he saw her reaching under her dress and fishing out the dinar. She slipped the chain over her head and let the coin fall against her cleavage, then rammed her hand in her bra to get hold of her small dagger and one of the throwing knives Dio had loaned her. People moved past them on the sidewalk, so she kept the blades palmed and out of sight as best she could.
“Are you armed?” she asked John, heart racing, looking left, then right, homing in on the direction they needed to go to follow the energy trace.
“Always.” He tipped his hand toward his left leg, where she saw the bulge of a holster under his slacks.
She gestured toward a side street. “This way. Go beside me. With just two of us, that’s the best way to approach an elemental threat. I’ll use my energy to shield you from an energy attack.”
John didn’t make a single macho bullshit argument against that, and she added up points in his favor for it. He fell in beside her as she used her tattoo to send a quick message home along with one to OCU headquarters asking for Sibyl and officer support. Then she led John in the direction of the disturbance—though she had a sense he’d be able to find it himself if she gave him a little time to search. He was still sniffing the air, using some of Strada’s leftover superior senses.
Camille couldn’t see the trace from that energy pulse, but she could feel it prickling across her skin like a thousand straight pins. Her pyrosentient talent, unenhanced, crackled at full mast. Her instincts and the ambient fire in the air led them to a brownstone, not as fancy as the one where they lived, but nice, with ten steps up, long narrow windows, and, weirdly, black curtains.
She reached out with her senses and searched the space in front of and immediately surrounding the brownstone. Nothing. All clean, so this was isolated to the building in front of them.
“You picking up any of those elemental locks?” John asked. “I don’t want to get cold-cocked when I step on the stairs.”
“No barriers that I can sense, but there should be.” Camille checked one more time, but she still didn’t pick up any protections. “What hit us, that was a lot of energy, well managed—and I think it got thrown at us on purpose. I’m sure whoever did it has the capacity to make elemental barriers.”
“So … maybe they want us to come in?”
As Camille stared at the brownstone, one of the black curtains slid slowly to the side. The movement brought her pulse pounding into her ears. “John?”
He got closer. “I see her.”
Female. Early twenties. Slight features, almost, like an Irish fae, one of the Seelie court. Blond hair, blue eyes. The girl was so pale Camille wondered if she had seen the sun in the last ten years.
“Hostage?” he asked, bending slowly toward his holster.
“No assumptions. She could grow wings and fangs and knock down half the building—and I’m thinking she might, because I don’t sense … anything. Not even any life energy. You? What do those cat senses tell you?”
John made a face without taking his eyes off the building or the girl in the window. “The place smells like a gas leak. Like rotten eggs.”
A shadow passed behind the girl.
She mouthed, “Help me—”
And she disappeared so fast Camille thought she might have been yanked out of the window.
John drew his Glock.
Camille palmed her dagger.
John nodded, and the two of them ran up the stairs.
John knocked and told a great big lie. “NYPD. Open the door.”
Nothing.
He grimaced at Camille. “Backup?”
Her heartbeat and breathing had gone steady, and her thoughts felt clear and focused, like the tip of a knife. “Ten minutes, give or take.”
Somebody inside the brownstone screamed. The sound gripped Camille’s insides, making her breath come sharp and fast.
John reared back to give the door a kick, but Camille shook her head. “Move. Get out of my way.”
He immediately stepped to the side as she put one hand on the dinar and the other on the door. Second nature now, after all her practice. She pulled at the fire energy around her, brought it into herself, then blasted it back out with all the force of her fear and worry for the girl inside the house.
A huge fist of fire energy bashed against the door and blew it off its hinges. The wood cracked as it smashed against the stairs to the right of the foyer, and the boards smoked and smoldered.
Didn’t even make my knees wobble. I’m getting better at this.
“Better than plastics,” John told her as he went in, weapon ready. “Gotta love a woman who makes shit explode.”
“Yeah, yeah. Just shoot the bad guys.” She was right behind him, dagger raised.
From the foyer, he said, “Nothing.”
Camille followed him, then split left where he went right. She opened doors, or knocked them down. Main room empty. “Clear,” she said. Her heart was thumping against her ribs.
Where was the girl?
John, from what looked like the formal dining room, echoed with a quick “Clear.”
He eased down the hall, weapon ready to fire. Camille pitched streamlined fire energy north, south, east, and west, searching for life or abnormal signatures.
Nothing. That made no sense at all.
They hit the stairs next, with John leading. She kept second position, because that’s where she worked best when she only had little blades.
When they reached the landing, a weak life sign caught Camille’s attention. “Left. Second door.”
They took positions on either side of the door, and this time Camille let John kick it in. They spilled inside what looked like a bedroom with twin beds and a small two-seater couch.
Camille heard herself breathing hard. She was pumped for anything.
The girl was sitting on the couch, just staring at them. She didn’t seem injured or distressed. She seemed to be waiting for them, and something in her bright blue eyes, in the way her mouth was set as she stared at the two of them, made Camille feel like the girl really was waiting for them specifically.
But why didn’t the girl feel more alive? The signal Camille was sensing—the girl might as well have been a housecat or a parakeet.
“You’re not worth much as warriors,” the girl sai
d, and her voice was flat and quiet but creepily eager. “I would have been dead if somebody wanted to hurt me.”
“Who are you?” Camille asked.
The girl kept studying her like she was a lab specimen. “Why can’t you make fire like the others? And where are your leathers? Oh, wait. I get it. A date? How … sweet.”
To John, the girl said, “I told them you were back, but nobody believed me.”
Footsteps clattered in the downstairs hallway. Camille reached toward the sound with her energy. No life signature. Nothing at all.
“Not one of ours, John.”
The footsteps ran back to the stairs and started up.
John leveled his weapon at the bedroom door just as a blond man topped the stairs and hurled himself into the room.
The girl waved her hand and Camille’s dagger tore out of her fingers and buried itself in a wall across the room. John’s Glock flew out of his hands and smashed against the same wall, firing wild and taking a chunk out of the door next to the man’s head.
“What the hell?” John tried to go for his gun, but the girl kept her hand up. Camille felt a dense crawl of power, mingled elements, indistinct but enough to hold a human. Enough to hold a lot of humans.
What is that? What is she?
Camille could move enough to get a good fix on the guy. He had on jeans and a black sweatshirt, and he was wearing a necklace that looked like a long, hooked tooth.
The energy from that necklace was wrong.
“What the hell are you doing, Becca?” The man’s voice sounded gruff. Angry, but not panicked.
“Showing you.” The girl pointed to John. “What do you say now?”
The blond whirled to look at John and stepped back. His jaw seemed to loosen. “You—how—”
“I’m not who you think I am,” John started to say, but the girl raised her other hand and he stopped making coherent sounds. Then John’s eyes bulged. He grabbed the sides of his head, his mouth came open, and he let out a long, guttural yell of pain.
