Night Forbidden

by Joss Ware

  That was a good sign.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked carefully, walking back to join her. She didn’t seem to be in pain. Or to have any residual injuries from his . . . enthusiasm.

  You’re a big guy, Bruno Paolo. You don’t know your own strength, his mama had warned. More than once.

  “Oddly enough,” Ana said, stretching lazily and, thank God, removing his mother from the room, “this was the first time I’ve ever done that in a bed.” She arched her back, twisting her torso like a sensual feline as she looked at him.

  Of course, he noticed the way her breasts shifted and slid, taunting him with jutting nipples that just begged to be kissed . . . and the smooth curve of her belly and hips . . . and the soft shine from each of her crystals. Holy motherfucker, they were mad sexy, set delicately into her skin the way they were. He noticed, too, though, that she only used one leg and set of toes to help shift her body. The other one didn’t move much at all, and when she finished her stretch, she ended up lying on her side with the injured leg on the bottom. Hidden.

  Fence settled next to her. With space between them, so he could keep his head instead of reaching for her and—

  Then her words sunk in, superseding his wayward thoughts.

  “Really?” he said, wondering suddenly where and with whom she actually had had sex. And never in a bed? She certainly didn’t seem inhibited, but until now he hadn’t given it much thought because—as he’d told more than one bed partner—the only thing that mattered was here and now.

  . . . Of course, that was usually when his partner wanted to know about his history. Which, he’d learned, wasn’t a good thing to get into.

  “Yeah,” she said. “And it was also my first time out of water.”

  “Are you shitting me?” Did that mean this was her first dry hump? Heh.

  “No,” she said. “It’s a lot warmer and drier outside the ocean.”

  Fence couldn’t help it. “I don’t know, sugar, it was pretty crazy wet where I was.” Then before he got too caught up in that image again, he sobered, restraining his wayward thoughts. “Did I hurt you?”

  To his unabashed delight, her attention drifted to his dick, which couldn’t help but begin to stir under her regard. “Um . . . no,” she said. “I could push a baby out there . . . I think I can handle that.”

  His cock twitched again, ready to take her up on it.

  “I meant . . . your leg,” he ventured. “I was a little rough, I think. I . . . uh . . . wasn’t really thinking about it.”

  “Really? You were thinking about other things?” she asked, her eyes all wide and innocent in that way he’d come to learn was dangerous. “Counting sheep perhaps? Or the stripes on the wallpaper?”

  He chuckled. “Well, I can’t deny that I haven’t done that in the past . . . sometimes a guy has to, uh, hold things back for the lady. But,” his voice dropped, “not in this case. Not with you. If I was countin’ anything, sugar, I was countin’ the number of times you groaned and moaned and cried out.”

  Even in the faulty light he could see a tinge of pink coloring her cheeks. “Was I loud? I didn’t know . . . we . . . uh, underwater, we can’t make much noise. We don’t really talk.”

  He was fascinated in spite of himself. “Don’t be embarrassed, sugar. It’s a compliment to hear you making noise. Then a guy knows he’s doing things your way.”

  She laid a hand over the center of his chest, right over the breastbone, and his heart begin to thunder. “I liked hearing you talk to me . . . saying those things,” she said, looking not at him, but at her fingers.

  “Is that so?” he asked, leaning into her hand, feeling the entire palm imprint itself on his skin. He ducked his head and found her lips, tasting them gently and slowly, savoring their fullness and warmth. “Well, I got lots more where that came from.”

  She smiled against his mouth. “I don’t find that the least bit surprising.”

  He eased back, aware that things had already begun to awaken down south, but needing to take care of other business first. “Ana, you have to tell me straight—did I hurt your leg?”

  “Not really,” she said, and hot shame rushed through him.

  Not really? Idiot, idiot, idiot.

  She must have noticed his stricken expression, for she explained. “I mean, not any more than any other bump or getting my hair caught, or skin pinched, or whatever. You know, the normal stuff that happens.” She smiled slyly. “Like when I bit you.”

  And the shame was gone. Just like that. “You bit me?” He swore his heart stopped beating, then began again with greater force. Definitely a live one.

  “You didn’t notice?” she said, still with that sly smile. Her eyes danced with delight. “Right here.” She traced his shoulder, swirling her finger around in a little circle over a place that might have been a bit more tender than any other part of his body. Except the wood suddenly raging between his legs.

  Down boy.

  First things first.

  “Okay,” he said, trying to keep focused. “So give me a little guidance here. I want to make sure I don’t hurt you, so I need to know what your limitations are. Okay, Ana?” He held his breath.

  The sexy smile eased and a shadow flickered in her eyes. “I know it’s frightening to look at—”

  “I don’t think that at—”

  “—but it really doesn’t hurt that much,” she finished. “Most of the time.”

  He shifted up on one elbow and wished her bad leg wasn’t hidden by the bunched-up blankets so he could show her he didn’t care what it looked like. “How did it happen?”

  His dick sagged in disappointment at the change of subject, and Ana’s expression turned just as unenthusiastic.

  “I’d rather—”

  “Tell me,” he pressed, to the dismay of his hormones. Chill, easy rider.

  “I’ll tell you if you tell me your secret,” she said at last.

  His body went cold. “I don’t have any secrets,” he said, wishing he’d have listened to his hormones instead. “What you see is what you get.” Even his signature seductive chuckle didn’t sound right to his ears. His shield was slipping.

  “You certainly do,” she replied. “I want to know how you came to be called Fence, and what your parents named you.”

  Relief poured through him, but he pretended to think on it. “Well, I suppose I could be convinced to give that up. As long as you make a lot of noise the next time.”

  “What makes you think there’s going to be a next time?” she retorted. But that coy smile was back and she’d shifted just enough so her left nipple was hardly a breath away from his bicep. Pretty, rosy, and begging to be kissed.

  He could have gone that route—she’d certainly opened the door, and he had this thing about opportunity—but something stopped him. He found he wanted to know more about her than just what made her cry out and groan and sigh.

  “Tell me what happened, Ana. I really want to know.”

  She shifted, and the next thing he knew she’d flipped the edge of the coverlet and blankets up to cover her bare hips. “My father and I were escaping from the upper city of Atlantis and my leg got caught in one of the gates as it came down.” She said it quickly and simply, as if explaining that the sky was blue.

  He couldn’t help a little laugh. “Well, now, sugar, that just creates a lot more questions than it answers. You know that, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “I suppose I should start at the beginning.”

  “That’s where my mama always started her stories.”

  “Your mama sounds like a smart woman.”

  His eyes stung suddenly and his throat felt raw. “She was.”

  Ana looked at him searchingly. “I loved my mother too. She was an Atlantean, as you know, and she married my father against the wishes of her parents and the Atlantean Guild.”

  “The Atlantean Guild is . . . ?”

  “The governing body of Atlantis and the Atlanteans. They didn’t want the
genetic pool or bloodline sullied by mere mortal blood. They feel they’re much superior in many ways to those who live on land. But Mamya and Dad met once when he was fishing—he loved the ocean too—and his boat capsized. She saved him, dragged him onshore, and . . . What?”

  “That sounds like a Disney movie. Did your mom have red hair and purple seashells over her—”

  Ana laughed, and he felt the whole damn world shift . . . or something. Her eyes lit up, her face beamed, her beautiful mouth curved with mirth, her head tipped back so her hair tumbled down in a tawny-colored fall. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

  “No, my mother wasn’t Ariel,” she said. “But I have to be honest, once Dad and I got away from Atlantis and settled on land, while I was recovering from my accident, I watched that DVD way too many times. It made me feel a little better, thinking of my parents loving each other enough to brave their respective worlds in order to be together.”

  “She got sick?”

  “Yes. We knew she wasn’t going to make it . . . her crystals were starting to flicker and fade. And when that happens . . .” Ana shrugged, but he could see the grief in her eyes. “Dad—he’s really an amazing scientist—tried to find a way to reanimate her crystals, to wake them up and get them working again.”

  “Yours don’t glow all the time,” Fence said suddenly. “Does that mean—” He stopped, aware that his whole body had just gone cold.

  But Ana shook her head. “Mine, you know, mine are different . . . so they don’t always glow like those of a pure Atlantean because of that. Anyway, my dad did a lot of experiments with other crystals, trying to figure out what the secret was to their energy . . . their life. But in the end he couldn’t save her. Mamya’s crystals died, and so did she.”

  “I’m sorry, sugar. I can’t imagine what it was like, losing your mama at that age. It’s terrible at any time, but at thirteen . . . just becoming a woman . . .” He felt grief swelling up inside him again. He’d been thirty when he lost his mother—and everyone else in his life. He loved his whole family, and Lenny too . . . but it was her loss that he felt the most.

  “I really miss her. We were very close. And . . . Mamya was different from the others. She didn’t really fit with them—maybe it was because she loved my dad, who wasn’t an Atlantean. She didn’t share the same prejudices that her people did, probably because she’d gotten to know a normal human. Or maybe that’s why she was able to love my dad—because she didn’t have the prejudice. Most Atlanteans have a sort of condescension toward land-livers—because they can’t exist in the water the way the Atlanteans can. But in reality, it’s the Atlanteans who are restricted, who are, in some ways, weaker than people like you. They’re tethered to their watery world and can’t leave the ocean for more than a few hours at a time. I think . . . I really think that the reason the Atlanteans hate land-livers is because they envy them their freedom. And I suspect there might even be a deep-rooted fear too. There aren’t that many Atlanteans either. Only a few thousand. And I think they’re afraid that if the humans find out about them, they’ll destroy them.”

  “Just like the Atlanteans did to the land-livers?” Fence said grimly.

  Ana’s expression tightened. “It was beyond reprehensible what they did to the world. I remember hearing the stories when I was younger . . . but they were told as if it were a heroic thing, raising the new city up from the ocean. They didn’t tell us about the mass destruction that happened here, or the hoards of people who were killed.”

  “Selective history,” Fence murmured, thinking of the way the colonization of North America had been taught in schools, often glossing over the resulting genocide of Native Americans. “Happens all the time.”

  Ana continued, “But Mamya knew . . . and she and Dad made sure I understood the truth. That’s why . . . that’s one of the reasons Dad and I didn’t want to stay after she died, and be a part of them. I’d like to forget that aspect of my history. But Mamya and Dad had to live in Atlantis because of her crystals and being tied to the water and its power—even though I think they would have rather not. Though she’d been raised to think and believe that land-livers were lesser beings, crude and simple compared to the Atlanteans, I know my mother realized otherwise.”

  “You said you had to escape. You had to break out of Atlantis?”

  “Yes. Rather convenient how they changed their mind about Mamya and Dad’s marriage once I came along. You see, I was the only living child of an Atlantean and a regular human—and possibly the only one ever . . . although I think there were two other biracial couples when I left. The Guild wanted to keep me there for obvious reasons—to keep their existence secret, but also to see how I grew up and lived. Dad implanted the crystals in me when I was just a baby.”

  “I couldn’t help but notice that your decorations are a lot less gaudy and overdone than your friend who washed up on the beach. He had enough crystals to rival Elvis Presley.” He wondered fleetingly if she even understood the reference.

  “I’m only half Atlantean, and, as such, I was an experiment of sorts,” she explained. “They implanted the oxygenating crystals in only one of my lungs, hoping that I could be fully functional on land in the mortal world as well as in the water. And . . . it worked.”

  “So . . . I don’t know much about the legend of Atlantis, but I was always under the impression that the Atlanteans were just normal humans who had advanced technology, and whose city sank beneath the sea. Is that right?”

  “Some of it. Their island city didn’t sink, but much of it was destroyed by a massive earthquake that made it seem as if it had sunk. From the stories I’ve heard, it seems as though one day it was there, the next everything went crazy and then it disappeared. But before that, they’d already begun to build a city at the bottom of the ocean, so the survivors ended up there.”

  “How the hell did they breathe down there?” Fence couldn’t quite control the dart of panic in his belly.

  “They found the Jarrid stone—one of the largest of the deep-sea crystals. They realized if they held part of the stone or its crystals in their mouth, it enabled them to breathe . . . like those things people used when they . . . scoobered? Scoobied?” She frowned.

  “Scuba diving,” Fence interjected. “So the crystal acted as a sort of regulator, allowing them to breathe. That’s amazing.”

  “The earliest Atlanteans were just as human as you are, but once they found those energizing crystals and began to utilize them—eventually experimenting with ways of attaching them to the body, piercing them, and, finally, implanting them—they began to change physically as well as mentally. But they realized too late that the stones, though powerful, also made its user dependent upon them. They gave strength, power, and youth, although not necessarily immortality—as well as the ability to breathe underwater—but they also become part of the body and weaken it when they try to remove them.”

  A rush of horror erased any lingering sexual thoughts he might have had. “Like an addiction? Do you mean that you . . . also . . . are weakened? That you have to stay near the water too?”

  Ana shook her head and gave a half shrug from her reclining position. “I’m perfectly able to live on land without feeling weak, despite my crystals. That’s why they find me so fascinating. I could possibly be the answer to the problem of the Atlanteans being tied to the sea.”

  Fence thought of Marley then too, who, although she wasn’t an Atlantean, had a crystal implanted in her body as well. It was true: when she was away from flowing water for a great length of time, she became ill and weak. But the crystal didn’t allow her to breathe underwater, and it gave her immortality. And Quent had the one used for communicating with them. How many freaking kinds of crystals were there?

  “And so you and your dad left Atlantis?” Fence asked, bringing the conversation back to Ana’s personal story.

  “Before she died, Mamya told Dad and me that we needed to leave. In fact, she tried to make us go before she passed on, but we sure as hell wer
en’t going to do that. Dad wanted to take her with us, to see if anyone on land could help her, but she was too weak.”

  “Why did she want you to go?”

  “She was afraid of what would happen to us once she was gone—what they’d do to me. Experimentation and who knows what else. And to Dad, because he’d been studying those crystals for years. She told us how to get out.”

  “There are gates?”

  “Walls and gates, and the old city is of course underwater—although the Raised City is a place where we’ve—they’ve—been trying to adapt to for the last fifty years. Since the Above was destroyed.”

  Fence had a million more questions, but this was enough for now. “So your mother told you how to find a way out. A secret way, I’m guessing. And that’s when you almost lost your leg?”

  Ana nodded. “I wasn’t quite fast enough—we only had a few seconds to get beneath the gate. Mamya told us how to time it, how to measure the beats of light in the crystal locks. Dad got smashed on the head as he was trying to help me when the iron bars came down. We were a bloody mess—it really is a miracle that we made it away safely. He did most of it, dragging me off, forcing me to swim, watching for sharks . . . and when we finally got somewhere safe, he conked out. And when he woke up . . . he wasn’t exactly the same. He’d lost some of his memory—mostly of our years in Atlantis. Although he’s never forgotten Mamya.”

  “How did he breathe underwater? He doesn’t have crystals, does he?”

  “No. He wore one around his neck on a chain, like the early Atlanteans did until they learned how to implant them permanently. It helped him to breathe, but it also sapped some of his brainpower and memory. I think that might be part of the reason he doesn’t remember much detail from Atlantis.”

  “Hell, the man seems pretty sharp to me,” Fence said with a little laugh. “Growing bacteria for drugs and studying up on them. He asked Elliott if he could look at the crystals from Kaddick and study them a bit.”

  She smiled with affection. “Dad’s brilliant in that way . . . but the rest of him has . . . shall we say gentled.” And then, with a sudden slap of her hand onto the bed, Ana said, “Well, now that you know my secret—probably more than you ever wanted to know—it’s time for you to pay up, big guy.”