All Things Wicked

by Karina Cooper

  His heartbeat slammed near her ear. She timed her breathing to it. Four beats in. Four out.

  Water slid down her face. Dripped from the end of her nose. Slowly, saying nothing, he settled his chin against her wet hair. The arm at her waist tightened, and she trembled.

  They were trapped in the bottom of the Old Sea-Trench, barely hanging on to a cliff face with witches intent on killing them somewhere beyond. It was dark, freezing cold, and hopeless.

  And yet. . .

  Juliet had never felt so protected in her life.

  And that was his strength, wasn’t it? Making people trust him. She clenched her teeth as a full-body shiver set them chattering.

  The reassuring weight of his chin lifted. “Can you climb?” The question was even. Matter-of-fact.

  Juliet almost laughed, but her heart wasn’t in it. It was only hysteria, anyway. She tightened her grip on the rock. “I don’t know.”

  “We’re going to try. Give me your jacket.”

  “Wh-what? Why?”

  “I didn’t think to bring the rope you cut.” He pulled at her collar, and she sighed. It clattered with cold. With too much effort and his help, she somehow managed to wriggle out of the synth-leather jacket and let him take it.

  He fumbled behind her, his muscles sliding against her back. Cold was rapidly replacing any sense of feeling she had left, not that the sodden coat had helped at all.

  “We’re tied together,” he said, his voice strained. She could feel the shudders he desperately tried to suppress, a constant vibrating line down her back. “Just do as I say. Left hand first.”

  Slowly, so slowly she was sure she’d die of hypothermia long before they got out, Juliet followed his directions. He lifted his left hand to search for a cranny to use, found one, and guided her hand to it. “Put your fingertips together, like you had a puppet. Good.”

  She wedged her fingers inside, teeth clattering so badly that the sound peppered his every word.

  Then he found his own niche. Followed it with his right hand. Left foot. Right toes. His body strained behind hers, and she realized how much of her weight he took as he pulled himself up behind her. Knew and couldn’t do anything about it as her numbed fingers slipped.

  He caught her, the synthetic leather coat snapping taut between them. His breath wheezed out on a gasp that might have been a curse. For a moment, all she could do was catch her breath, muscles screaming.

  “All right?” he asked.

  “S-sorry,” she whispered.

  “It’s okay,” he said, keeping his voice low and calm. “You’re doing fine. Let’s go.” Little by little. Aggravatingly, mind-bendingly slowly, the water eased from her waist to her knees. Another bout of directions. His voice became a steady rasp of sound, a constant stream of encouragement and direction that she couldn’t decipher as she struggled not to picture the yawning crevasse below them.

  One misstep and they’d fall right back into the current. She knew she wouldn’t have the strength to fight it this time.

  She must have made a sound because his arm curled around her ribs again, and his breath warmed her ear as he said, “Take a rest.”

  She clung to the rock, shuddering. “Can’t,” she muttered thickly. “Won’t go again. K-keep going.”

  He hesitated. Then, as if he understood her desperation, he let her go and instructed, “Right hand, reach up.”

  She could barely feel the sharp rock anymore. She was only vaguely aware of his weight behind her; he supported her more than she was herself. Inch by inch, the icy currents below them dropped away. It was something she felt more than saw. Or did she imagine it?

  Were they only a foot up? Only a few inches out of the water?

  Juliet squeezed her eyes shut, moaning.

  “Nearly there,” he said behind her, and she almost believed it. Almost.

  “H-how do you st-st-stay so c-calm?” she managed, teeth chattering together. It felt as if her whole body vibrated, graceless as a puppet.

  “The alternative sucks.”

  She laughed. It shuddered. “C-can imagine. Aren’t y-you cold?”

  “Freezing.”

  “Can’t tell,” she said on a sigh that frosted the air in front of her.

  “I just think about better times.” A smile touched his voice. Or did she imagine that, too?

  “Like warm fires, r-right?”

  His hips braced her weight, holding her for a moment as if he knew that her arms screamed in mutiny. “Like warm skin,” he said roughly, almost too low to hear. “Like sweat and spring green eyes and all that other crap I don’t need to be thinking about.”

  Tears gathered behind her eyes. Exhaustion. That’s all. Her head ached incessantly; just another note in a symphony of misery.

  “Left foot,” he added, and if there had been even a glimmer of lightness there, it was gone now.

  “C-Caleb.”

  “Now right hand, where mine is. Wedge your fingers in. What?”

  Juliet jammed her twisted fingers into the crevice he guided her to and rested her forehead against the cliff face. “Did y-you know . . . this would happen?”

  There was a pause as he found his own niche. A grunt as the muscles in his shoulders and chest contracted, supporting his weight and most of hers. The fluidity of motion behind her, the flex and tightening of his body, fascinated her.

  She’d seen how badly scarred he was. He had to be in excruciating pain.

  When they were tight against the wall again, he finally said, “I don’t see everything. I don’t even see things I think I should. It’s not a feed I can just dial into, it doesn’t work like that.”

  “Why not?”

  Another beat of silence, filled with the whispering current below them and the sound of her own hard breathing. Then, so quietly she almost missed it over the roar of the water, he replied, “I don’t know.”

  “Are we g-going to die here?”

  “Right hand,” he directed, and Juliet didn’t have the energy to do anything but obey. She let him dodge the question, let it hang beside them as they crawled up the cliff wall for what seemed like an eternity. They paused only long enough to shake out stinging fingers and talked only as much as directions required.

  And every step of the vertical climb, he held her. Supported her weight, caught her as she fumbled and slid. Pain ratcheted through his voice as the climb wore on, and she struggled to maintain her own momentum. Carry more of her own weight so he wouldn’t have to.

  When her fingers closed over nothing, her heart plunged into her stomach, then bounced up into her throat as Caleb gritted out, “We’re up. Wait.” The jacket pulled taut around her, then suddenly went slack.

  Energy surged through her, strong enough to allow her fingers to get a grip as he helped her over the edge. She clambered over it, grabbing fistfuls of rock and dirt and God knew what else for leverage, until her feet cleared the shelf and Juliet sprawled, pressing her cheek to the ground in relief. “Oh, thank God,” she breathed. “Thank you, thank you.”

  She heard him scrabbling behind her. Quickly, she turned and wrapped both hands around his wrist, dug her heels in and strained every muscle she had left. Fatigue welled through her aching limbs. She groaned.

  Caleb’s muscles tightened, bunched suddenly in her hands and he surged over the lip, an explosion of raw strength and adrenaline. She bit off a surprised yell as he slammed into her, taking them both down in a tangle of exhaustion and fear and relief.

  Panting, Juliet found her arms wrapped around his chest as he braced his elbows on the ground on either side of her shoulders. His chest heaved against hers; his breath just as harsh. Without warning, he muttered something hard and edged, and unerringly in the dark, his mouth closed over hers.

  Shock warred with exultation; fear with anger. As his lips pushed hers apart, as he ignored her dazed stillness and slid his hot tongue into her mouth, something deep inside her stretched. Snapped.

  Her fingers tightened over wet deni
m.

  His tangled in her soaking hair, forced her head still between his clenched fists, his mouth hot and demanding as he thrust his tongue between her lips without any pretense of gentility. She fought it, fought him.

  But not to escape.

  Her tongue slid over his, tangled and pushed. He groaned incoherently, kissed her breathless.

  Kissed her stupid.

  She forgot the cold, the rocky ground; there was only the heat of his mouth, the hard, muscled weight of his body covering hers. She arched into him, gasping, and he swallowed the sound with another low, shuddering groan. Her pulse skyrocketed. Her temples throbbed where his fingers locked into her hair, and it slammed a bolt of heat to the suddenly too sensitive ache between her legs.

  He had always been cold. Right up until he burned.

  She wanted that heat now.

  Her legs fell open, jeans rasping against the ground, and his hips settled more firmly into the cradle of her thighs. Lust slammed through her body, her head. Need.

  She whimpered.

  On a rough sound, he tore his lips away, leaving her gasping for breath. For sense. His forehead rested at the curve of her neck, his shoulders heaving with every breath.

  Shocked into silence, mouth wet and tingling, Juliet let him.

  For this single moment in the dark, as memory and need and regret tangled together low in her body, she struggled to find an even keel and said nothing. Did nothing.

  Didn’t know what else to do.

  She was alive. Desperate to be touched by a man she thought she hated and God only knew where they were now, but alive. The bulge settled into the vee of her shamelessly open legs wasn’t a product of her imagination.

  It was, she admitted through the melting fragments of her own thoughts, much better than the alternative.

  The tension at her scalp eased. Caleb forced himself upright, fumbling in the dark, and cool air slid into the vacuum left by his body heat. She shivered.

  Something clicked, and a thin beam of light seared through her vision. She flinched, throwing up a hand.

  “Jesus, Juliet.”

  She thought he’d meant the kiss. She opened her mouth to protest hotly when he caught her wrist, and Juliet cracked open her eyes to find him peering at the abrasions decorating her knuckles. Ruined flaps of flesh puckered in a bloody mess, gleaming wetly in the light.

  His own weren’t any prettier.

  She didn’t fight as he tugged her upright, forcing her to sit up, but she couldn’t summon the energy to pull her hands away. “They don’t hurt,” she said wearily. “Not more than yours do, I bet.”

  “They hurt like hell,” Caleb replied evenly, and she couldn’t help her crooked smile. Even her humor was tired. “Are you hurt anywhere else? Is anything broken?”

  “I don’t know. It’s all numb.”

  The light slid up her legs, picked out her soaked jeans and glossed over her arms.

  Juliet tipped her head back, closing her eyes again. “Well? Am I alive?”

  Could she be any less alive? Her body all but hummed under his perusal, and she clenched her knees tightly together.

  Get. A. Grip.

  This was memory talking, that was all. She’d already screwed up by sleeping with him once; she just needed to break that habit of easy freaking arousal.

  No problem.

  He said nothing. Some sense, an inner warning caused her to raise her eyelids. She practically had to peel them apart. God, she was tired.

  He stared at her, his gaze glittering in the faint light afforded by the thin beam centered squarely on her chest. Her breath caught in her throat. Slowly, dreading what she knew she’d find, she looked down.

  A flap from her black tank top hung over her chest, its ragged edges clearly visible against the pale, dirt-speckled curve of one breast. In some calm, objective part of her frozen mind, she realized that the rock wall must have torn it free when she’d wriggled against it. Her simple black shelf bra was askew, and the edge of one dark nipple was clearly visible.

  Calm slammed into mortification. Heat seared her cheeks as she made a grab for the torn material, but Caleb caught her wrist, his grip rigid.

  She pulled at it. “Let me—”

  “What is this?” His voice bit, sharp as a whip crack and colder than the water below.

  Her laugh cracked. “I’m pretty sure you’ve seen boobs before.” He knocked her other hand away and hooked a finger in the edge of the gaping fabric, peeling it away from her ribs. It revealed more of her bra. More of her flesh, half freed from the constraining band.

  She jerked.

  Caleb splayed his hand against her chest to keep her from twisting away, his mouth a thin line. The warmth of his palm drilled into her skin, swelled to a burning ache, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  She did. Damn him.

  He let go of her wrist and instead stroked a finger over the three-inch-long bar code stamped just under the heavy swell of her left breast. Her skin prickled under his touch. Her stomach clenched.

  Confusion sizzled to stunned disbelief. “What, my tattoo?”

  “Where did you get it?”

  This time, he let her push him away, and she scrambled backward as he stood. “I can’t believe—You act like you’ve never seen it before,” she said with a scornful laugh.

  His jaw hardened. “We didn’t exactly get naked, Jules.”

  Heat climbed her cheeks. Blazed away the cold under a fierce pulse of humiliation.

  The memory hit her all at once, of her discarded jeans cast in shadow. Of her bare legs wrapped tightly around his waist as he braced her against the wall, muscles rigid as he thrust himself so deep inside her that he’d been forced to muffle her shameless cries with one hand. And then his own mouth. Her shirt had never made it off. Neither had his.

  She jerked the fabric back up to cover herself. “It’s always been there,” she snapped, mortified that he had to remind her. The memories of that night, of the raw, fervent sex that had left parts of her psyche permanently embedded into that wall were too much to handle now.

  Maybe ever.

  “What do you mean, always been there?” he demanded, and her shoulders rounded.

  “I mean,” she threw back, “Delia said I was already branded when she found me.”

  His eyebrows winged upward.

  Juliet sliced a dirty hand through the air. “Save your pity.” Her voice cracked. “Delia found me when I was a baby, okay? She took me home, God knows why, but there you are.”

  The rectangle of black ink had never meant anything to her. Why should it? All her life, Juliet had never seen anything else like it. Speculation was all well and good, but it didn’t pay for food.

  Now she studied Caleb’s taut expression, tying the ends of the torn fabric together, and remembered why she never spoke of it.

  Pity. It always came on the heels of her parentless confession. Well, screw that for a laugh. She didn’t need his pity. “Fine, now you know, can we move on?

  His shoulders moved, twisted faintly. “You’re an orphan?”

  “Like I’m the only witch who is,” she scoffed. Grief knotted her throat; she fought it back even as fatigue beat at the edges of her thoughts. She slumped. “Look,” she said wearily, “Delia found me when she was six years old. She lived with a couple of strippers, okay? So I did, too.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Don’t know.” Juliet plucked at the knot holding her tank top together. “Young enough to still need milk.”

  “Jesus—”

  She cut him off with a sudden, sharp shake of her head. Droplets of water scattered across the pitted ground. “Don’t even. So we were raised by prostitutes and strippers, so what? It wasn’t the worst life ever.”

  “And the tattoo?”

  “Will you listen to me?” she said sharply. “I already had it when Delia found me.”

  “She never said—”

  “No,” Juliet cut in, and she pressed two fingers into
one throbbing temple. “She didn’t know what it meant, and neither did anyone else. What’s the big deal?”

  Caleb centered the beam on her chest again, and Juliet resisted the urge to check the knot. “What did Cordelia—”

  “God damn it, Caleb!”

  The words exploded from her lips, bitter. Sharper than she meant, more ragged. So much more emotional than she ever wanted to reveal, especially to him.

  Juliet surged to her feet with renewed vigor, adrenaline slamming through her body. Her head. The ache between her ears intensified.

  The light in Caleb’s hands jerked.

  “Stop it,” Juliet pleaded, almost a sob. She dragged her forearm across her lips, as if it would wipe away the grief. The regret; the not knowing. “Just stop it. My sister—fuck you,” she cut in brokenly as he opened his mouth. “My sister is missing, okay? She’s been missing since that day you killed everyone else I knew, Caleb. What do you want from me?”

  His eyes narrowed. The light shifted, pointed down to the ground at her feet.

  “I looked everywhere,” she continued, leashing it down to a low, tense pitch. It hurt. It slammed through her chest like a howl demanding to get out, but she forced herself to be quiet. Contained. Like him. “I asked everyone I could find, everyone left. She knew about the coven, so I even went back to the park. I thought maybe she’d gone looking for me that day. I sifted— Jesus.” She dragged her forearm over her eyes. “I even sifted through the rubble once the missionaries were gone, but they took all the bodies.”

  Caleb didn’t blink. Didn’t look away. “Are you blaming me for your sister?”

  Juliet opened her mouth to say yes, to skewer him with all the rage and hatred and . . . and loneliness that she’d drowned in for the past year, but her breath snagged. Twisted. Something in her chest popped, pressurized, and Caleb flinched.

  Features tightening, he splayed out a hand as if it could ward off a blow. “Jules. Stop it.”

  She seized her head between her palms. As if untwisting, uncoiling like a spring, the power rushed through her veins, thicker than blood and more intoxicating than any gin. It hammered at her temples, beat against the fragile cage of her ribs, and Juliet groaned from behind her clenched teeth.