The smile blooming on his lips stretched them wide. “A male has no power that way. Though, when the attraction goes both ways, the male can mark her in return, as I did to you.”
Brows pinched together, I tried to process all he’d said. “Hold on just a minute. What are you saying? That by some jinn custom, we’re now married?”
“No, not married. We’re more like engaged. There’s another custom we have to observe before pledging ourselves to each other fully.”
“What sort of custom? Another ceremony of sorts? Was I about to find out back there when we almost…” No words came to mind to finish the sentence that wouldn’t have embarrassed and shamed me further. Perhaps Mum had been right about my loose morals. I’d almost had sex with Amun in the middle of someone’s office in a public aquarium. Good lord, what was wrong with me?
A flash of something dark swam across his eyes before he averted them. “We would have, if Harper hadn’t interrupted. It’s complicated. I wouldn’t know how to explain it, but I know from stories it’s intense, the most significant moment in most jinns’ lives.”
Always vague.
Shivers preceded a full body shudder as I considered that. With so many questions piling up, I went on to the next one. “But what does the mark mean? Are you saying you belong to me and you can’t, you know, with anyone else?”
“Once we consummate our union, yes, that’s what it means. For now, it means we’ve made promises to one another, that you’ll make me your Taru, your lifelong lover, for lack of a closer term.”
“And Celeste, does my mark prevent her from trying to claim you again?”
Smiling, he nodded.
My relief found an exit upon a rapid exhalation. “And me? What does this mark on my side mean for me?”
“It means I return your affection, that I enjoy your company, and our union is mutual, stronger than a one-sided bond. Jinn women can choose and mark as many lovers as they like.”
Really? The men were limited to one, and the women had harems? Now I’d heard everything. No bloody way. I was a one man woman, and there would be no compromise on that no matter what jinn customs dictated.
With my curiosity sated, the full realization of what we’d done slammed into me. “Why did you let me do that to you when I didn’t know what it meant?”
Palm thrust up, he took a step one way, and then came back. “I didn’t want to tell you because I was afraid that when the time came, if you knew what it meant, you’d let your modern upbringing overrule your jinn instincts. I thought you wouldn’t mark me.”
Breath heaving, he leaned toward me, his temple resting against mine. “I want to be yours, Baylou. Since the moment I met you, I’ve wanted to wear your mark with pride. Doesn’t it please you to see how happy it makes me? To know I care as much for you as you do for me, even if you won’t yet admit it? I know you don’t fully understand, but don’t make it into something wrong.”
An intense twinge of something announced itself inside me when I saw where I’d bitten him, when he touched it with reverence. “Even if I do, I don’t want to own you, Amun.” Despite my words, my hands explored the planes of his stomach, climbing higher across the swell of his firm chest while Mum’s voice shouted insults at me.
“Let’s finish our union.” He left a trail of burning kisses over my ear, across my cheek. “Even if we lose this fight, I want to know what it is to be Taru to Baylou Hudson, the most powerful earth caller I’ve ever known.” His lips feathered across mine. Fifty thousand volts zapped through my center, turning me to molten stone.
Need thrummed in my soul, to touch him, to keep him, to strip him bare again and stare at him forever. To taste his lips and feel his weight upon me, to explore the far reaches of his tight body with my mouth and fingertips. The instinct engulfed me, burned away conscious thought, and left me with an endless hunger for him.
I knew, then, he could be my beginning and ending, my life and death, my sun and moon. If I allowed him to be. It wasn’t love, not yet, but the potential was there. It was fire as Mum had said. It would burn through and leave me ash, and I’d crawl out, wishing for one more second of that exquisite pleasure, even if it meant he’d raze me to the ground again.
His chest rumbled with primal, non-human sounds. “Let us revel in power, and blood, and flesh, and announce to the world that we are one.”
As the flesh and blood part pierced my haze, I shoved him away, panting. “I don’t even know what that means, yet I want it more than air.” A shake of my head sent hair fanning across my tired eyes. “You want to know why I’ve avoided you all this time? I’m scared of how I feel around you, and the more time I spend with you, the worse it gets. Back at the aquarium, I lost my mind. Something took over me, and I wanted it to. It was beautiful and terrifying. Flame and forbidden promises. I was more animal than woman, something primal and untamed, a beast I had little or no control over. I feel like I’m going to forget who I am altogether and get lost in you, as you were lost in Celeste.”
I backed away with effort, my hands patting the wall in search of a door to put between me and him. “I need time to think about this, and I need to sleep so I can figure out what to do about Celeste.”
His eyes shimmered with sadness and self-doubt, but he didn’t pursue me as I darted into the spare bedroom and slammed the door closed.
Too exhausted to do much else, I turned off the light, collapsed on the bed, and curled around the pillow, trying to forget the unspoken words that had gripped him. How many times had he been rejected? Why did that thought trickle into my consciousness and burn me with guilt? I would not jump into bed with a man I barely knew, no matter what he wanted. Even if I did, I’d never set myself free to enjoy it lest my emotions get the better of me and cause mayhem that would hurt and condemn us all.
How had my simple life turned into a train wreck? I tried to be a good person. What had I done to bring the sword of fate down on my head? Perhaps being born jinn had been enough, and that’s what Mum meant when she said my father had gotten what he deserved. Perhaps I deserved my fate, like my father before me, without ever having done anything extraordinarily wrong.
I didn’t know what the rest of the ritual to claim Amun’s life as my own included, but I wouldn’t do it. Not and remain who I was, who I wanted to be. Part of me wanted it, the jinn part, I had to believe, whether or not it was true. I wanted him to want me and no one else. I wanted every other woman to look at him and know he was mine. Even if I knew him better, trusted him and loved him with every part of myself, I still wouldn’t take away his free will. It went against everything I stood for.
* * *
Screeching broke me out of a deep slumber. Darkness dominated the landscape beyond the window. Another squeal from the glass made my teeth ache, and another sound, like wood shifting against wood, came after.
I climbed off a strange bed, taking a moment to orient myself in Amun’s spare room. The clock on the night stand read 1:15 am. Was it the water jinn trying to get in? I edged closer to the half-open window, squinting at whatever waited beyond the glass, but found only trees aglow with filtered moonlight. The sheer curtains billowed inward with the breeze, ghostly apparitions that reached out to touch me. My heart knocked a troubled tune against my ribs.
“Is someone there?” I whispered so as not to rouse Amun. After the way I’d left him, I wasn’t eager to face him again until I had to.
“It’s about time.” Isaac stepped into view on the outside of the window and slid his claws along the glass.
My hand deadened most of my yelp.
I hadn’t found a good night’s sleep in days, it had taken me hours to drift off, and the blasted vampire lord wakes me up? I wondered if he could invade my head undetected with whatever he’d done to me, but that theory seemed unlikely, or he’d have knocked on the inside of my skull instead of the window.
“I might have thought you were dead if not for the snoring.” He grinned at me as if we were great friends,
and I wasn’t fighting for my life.
“What do you want?” My tone left no question as to how annoyed I was.
His smile deflated. “You’ve found her, then?”
I nodded, wondering how he knew, but I had no strength to decipher his cryptic musings at the moment. “Her name is Celeste. We found and confronted her at the aquarium, where she killed one of her own and left another for dead. That one’s unconscious at the reservation, and I plan to question her tomorrow.”
“This Celeste…” Isaac tilted his head as he always did when scrutinizing me. “What is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“Lies.”
“I don’t have the energy to argue with you right now.” I shivered in the damp air filtering in through the window, cursing my pulse for giving me away.
Something glinted in his palm. He spun the object in his fingers, intent on it. My thinking rock, the black ebony I always kept in my pocket. He must have found it at the pool after my fight with Celeste. “Tell me why you cherish this.”
We were going to indulge in small talk, apparently. “I collect rocks. It’s smooth and pretty. Why do you care?”
His golden spark eyes rolled up to gaze at me. “You’re a terrible liar, lass.”
I shrugged, hugging myself tighter. Denying it would only add a third deception onto my pile. “Then you should have known right from the start I wasn’t murdering your people.”
“Who says I didn’t?” That infernal smile again.
I wanted to smack it off him. “Give it back.” I held out my hand for the stone, moving as close as I dared to the window.
“Lou is an unusual name for a woman. What is it short for? Marylou? Luanne? Lucinda? Louise?” Fingers curled over the sill, he leaned closer. I hadn’t seen him put away my rock, but he no longer held it in his hands.
Marvelous, he intended to ignore me. Two could play at that game.
“In case you’ve forgotten, it’s the middle of the night for most of us breathers. Is there something you wanted other than to ask me pointless questions?”
For a long while he went still. Had he felt my slip of power at the hive? Did he suspect what I was? No, he’d have taken my mind by force if he did, and I’d have been taken before the council.
I squirmed under his continued scrutiny. “I’d like to go back to bed, so if you have something to say, now would be a good time.”
He pulled my cell phone from his sporran, all traces of amusement gone. “Detective Peterson tried to reach you and got me.”
Mercy. If he’d called in the middle of the night, given everything that had being going on with me, chaos had broken out in Ironhill. “How does he know you let me go? And why did you keep my phone?”
I reached through the window for it, but Isaac stepped out of my range. “I grew tired of him cursing at me, so I told him I released you. He was rather upset you didn’t call and tell him yourself.”
I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that Gerry had worried about me, but it did. “When did he call? Have you approved the autopsy?”
“No.” It was more the growl of a beast than a human word.
“And you call me stubborn. Why ever not? Are you trying to make this harder for me?”
“Doona be absurd.”
“Arg, you are infuriating. What’s happened, then? What did Gerry want?”
The low light didn’t obscure the tips of Isaac’s fangs from showing below his upper lip. “Tell me, can you think of a reason why every ground-dwelling creature within the city limits would have stampeded into my district and begun to wreak havoc there?”
Bloody hell. “It would seem Celeste is having a temper tantrum.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
I stood in the middle of Rouge Avenue, just over the border into what most of Ironhill’s citizens referred to as Fangtown. Although most preternatural species who didn’t have their own realm did their best to spread out amongst the humans population, the vampires clustered together. The hive lord would buy property in one area where they lived and set up businesses that served only those of the undead persuasion. It bothered me to no end. They called for more acceptance than they gave in return.
A ten-foot-wide plated scorpion—a known pet of the haven—spun in circles farther down the street, its spiked tail smashing against store windows in confusion. Glass tinkled against the pavement, glinting with reflections from the overhead lamps like a grand mosaic.
Beyond it, a blind rat hound bayed at a banshee curled around a lamp post like a tattered flag. Fire sprayed up from something on the east side of the district, likely from one of the dragon bats that nested in the subway tunnels that were mostly unused on this side of the city.
Just what I needed to be doing in the middle of my hunt for Celeste. That was her point, I supposed. How had she done it? Flooded the subway system? Yes, that would have worked. Most of the creatures within my visual reference didn’t care for water.
“Never seen anythin’ like this,” Blake said, gripping a rifle with both hands. His light hair stood every which way, as if he’d gone straight from bed into the car. The lipstick smeared across his cheek suggested he hadn’t been alone. “And I’m some kinda glad you’re here, Lou, or we’d have been screwed eight ways from Sunday.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that if Isaac had killed me like he was supposed to, we wouldn’t have been neck deep in a deadly round-up.
“This speaks of frenzy.” Rudy tapped his gnarled wooden staff against the street in a nervous gesture. “Like fish rising to the surface to evade a predator.”
Unlike Blake, he had no hair to mess up and appeared as sleek and polished as he always did. The four-foot-nothing male wore his usual black robe. Before Rudy, I’d never met an umikan. Typically forest dwellers, they were a timid race, rich with animal magic, though it only worked on the non-preternatural sort.
He was the real-life version of the pied piper, a wonderful skill for ridding buildings of lice or cockroaches. Both of which frightened him down to the bone.
His large yellow eyes blinked up at me. If insects scared him, I couldn’t imagine what havoc the sight before us caused him. “What is it you said did this?”
Not who, but what. For the first time, that distinction stung me. By that same thinking I was also a “what”, not a “who”.
“I haven’t said, but since you asked, I don’t know yet. She can control and become water, and she’s not very happy with me right now.” I feigned interest in the chaos down the street to hide the lie on my face.
Amun grunted behind me. “We don’t have time for this. You know this is a distraction, and this is Isaac’s territory. Let him clean up the mess.”
“You know I can’t do that. Nobody else has my knowledge of these creatures, and regular police aren’t even allowed here. These beings are just scared.” And it was my fault they’d been displaced, but I left that unsaid. “If I can stop them from hurting the vampires and being destroyed themselves, I will, no matter the risk to life and limb.”
“And Celeste knows it. You’re giving her what she wants.”
I glared at him over my shoulder, annoyed he appeared as polished as always when I felt disheveled. “I won’t stop being who I am because it’s inconvenient. I’ll clean up her mess and then deal with her, now stop pouting and help me, or go back home.”
How much of his angst had to do with my refusal to finish my claim on him, and how much had to do with whatever he and Isaac had fought about outside before we left? The two of them had locked themselves in my car until they were done. A mighty dent in my dash told of an unpleasant conversation.
Isaac’s admission that he’d known of my innocence from the start still burned me. As did his refusal to help us now. The grouch made himself scarce after returning my throwing knives and my other elven dagger. I’d strapped those, along with the katana and my other dagger, onto my body. Harper, as I suspected would be the case when I tried calling, still didn’t pi
ck up her phone.
“So what’s the plan, boys?” I asked. “We’ve got no comms, only us and the retrieval trucks, and by the looks of what I can see, we’ve got at least a dozen creatures to wrangle, maybe more.” With so many with me, and every vampire in the district crawling along rooftops to evade the onslaught, I couldn’t use my power. Clearly, Isaac had forbade them to help me, too. Splendid.
I received nothing but shrugs from my company. Sighing, I headed toward the scorpion, katana in hand. “Amun, bring the truck close to it. Rudy, keep it from venturing any farther down Rouge with whatever tricks you can perform from a distance. Blake and I will distract it long enough for Amun to send out the tone.” If it would even work.
We’d developed a sonic pulse that incapacitated many of the larger insect-type creatures, but it wasn’t flawless. If that didn’t work on the car-sized scorpion, we wouldn’t have much choice but to destroy it. It wasn’t like it would follow me out of Fangtown if I left a trail of bread crumbs.
Blake gave a nervous laugh. “And how do you s’pose we’re gonna distract something that big without it spearin’ us with that javelin-sized stinger on its ass?”
I tugged him along with me. “Very carefully, Blake. Very carefully.”
He gripped my shoulder with his sweaty hand, squeezing hard. “I sure am glad you’re all right, Lou. Really don’t know where we’d be without ya.”
It seemed he meant it, so I nodded. Sentimental musings from my usually crass boss could take up mental space later. We had a tank of a scorpion to snag first, thanks to that hag. When I found Celeste again—provided I managed it in the next two days—I needed to prevent her from going liquid on me before I could wring her scrawny neck.
* * *
A flare shot over the rooftops to our left. I dove at Blake and slammed him to the pavement as another column of fire streaked toward us. Flames seared my back. The dragon bat was not a happy camper.
Stone Chameleon (Ironhill Jinn #1) Page 24
