She drained him, left him weak legged and shuddering, wholly at her mercy. At some point they collapsed together on the bed with her astride him, driving him up again as he filled his hands, his mouth, with her breasts, her lips, her tongue. He talked to her, slipping from English to Yucatec and back, saying her name, lacing it with praise and pleas, urging her up and over, saying more perhaps than he’d said to anyone since he’d nearly lost the option to say anything ever again. She shuddered against him, small climaxes building to the whole, as she rode him, drove him onward, controlled him, until finally she clenched around him, shuddering, his name seeming ripped from her throat as she came.
He followed her over, kept her going, grinding against her, pulsing into her as she said his name again, this time on a moan. Then on a whisper. Until, finally, she sagged against him, pressed her cheek to his, and went still. In fact, he was pretty sure the whole world went still for a long, drawn-out moment that laid him bare, stripped him raw. And in that moment, he thought that he would do anything to keep her with him, anything for her.
He lay there drained, reveling in the languor of an orgasm that had devastated him, seeming akin to an apocalypse in its own right. Unable to move, he lay sprawled and satiated while his senses spun and a faint breeze seemed to come from nowhere to tug at him.
It took him a few precious heartbeats to recognize the sensation through the postcoital haze. Then exultation slammed through him. Magic! It was there; he was there. He reached for it, grabbed on to it, opened himself to it—
And the world hazed luminous green around him.
“No!” He lunged upright, pawing at the night. “Godsdamn it, no!”
He saw Jade’s face swim into his vision, saw her mouth moving but couldn’t hear the words; he couldn’t hear anything over the hammer of his heartbeat. His vision flickered back to normal and the world lurched, or maybe he was the one moving. Jade’s voice cut in, soothing: “It’s okay, it’s—”
“It is godsdamned well not okay,” he snarled, then froze when the words came out instead of being trapped inside his skull, and he snapped back to awareness of his own body. The world solidified around him. “Fuck. Oh, fuck.” He doubled over, leaning against her. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Up,” she ordered. “Into the shower.”
“Yeah.” His voice was thick; his mouth tasted like shit. He staggered to the bathroom, got the shower on, and stuck his head under the fiery spray. Nauseated and shaking, he stayed under the stream, heat on max, until his skin was red and he was back under control.
Then he stayed another couple of minutes as his brain came back online and things started making sense, and not in a good way. He toweled off, found clean jeans and a tee waiting for him, and dragged them on, his heart pinching at the expectation of things to come.
Jade had gotten dressed and was waiting for him in the main room. She’d shut off the TV and turned on a light. When he appeared in the doorway, she looked up at him, her eyes huge in her face. “Why did you fight the magic?”
“I wasn’t fighting the magic. I was fighting the makol.”
She paled. “You weren’t.”
“Trust me, I’d know that green eye slime anywhere, anytime. The bastard is still inside me. If I hadn’t yanked myself out of there, I might have—” He broke off, had to swallow hard so he wouldn’t gag on his own bile. It was like before, only worse, because this time he’d thought he was finished being a slave. “I can’t go back there. I fucking won’t.”
She stood to face him. “You’re not going anywhere, Lucius. The makol is dead; its soul was destroyed during the spell, just like my sister’s was. There’s no way it’s still connected to you. It doesn’t exist anymore. If it did, you wouldn’t have been able to access the library even the first time. Get it? The only place that demon still lives on is in your memories.”
He went very still. “You think I’m making this up?”
“I think . . .” She blew out a breath. “How about we sit down?”
Eyeing the sofa, he said softly, “Would you rather I lie down while you pull the chair around? I’ve told you I don’t want to be your patient, Jade. Don’t try to therapize me.”
“There’s no such word as ‘therapize.’ And another word for therapy is a two-way conversation, Lucius.” But the way she said his name, he knew she was thinking “asshole.”
Deciding she was probably right about that, he sat on the damn couch, and he didn’t move away when she sat beside him and took both of his hands in hers. In fact, he was tempted to lean into her, lean on her. He compromised by tipping his head to rest lightly atop hers. “The sex was fabulous. Sorry about the postcoital girlie screaming.”
Her fingers tightened fractionally on his. “That was more than sex. And there’s no makol. Whatever you felt just now was your psyche’s way of warning you away from the powerlessness and lack of control that comes from caring for another person. You’re not afraid of the makol. You’re afraid of what’s happening between the two of us.”
For a second he thought he’d misheard. When he went over the words and they didn’t change in his head, he bared his teeth. “In what way?”
She seemed to miss the danger signs, instead rolling on: “I accessed my magic by opening myself up to my feelings for you; I was hoping you’d eventually come around to the point of doing the same thing on your own. You finally did just now, and the Prophet’s magic started to come back online, but—and here I am therapizing a little, to use your word for it, but bear with me, because it plays—I think the magic triggered some of the fears you carry from your experiences with the makol, namely those of being trapped and out of your own control. Your psyche knee- jerked that into a signal it knew you’d react to, namely the green glow of makol possession.”
He ground out, “Back up to the part about hoping I’d come around, will you? Exactly how long have you been working on this theory?”
Her encouraging smile—her counselor’s smile—faltered. “Since I started being able to access the scribe’s talent by thinking about you.”
If he hadn’t been so shaken by the makol’s reappearance, the fear that it would block him from getting back to the library, and, yes, the intensity of the sex, he might have appreciated the irony. Here he was, facing down a lover who was looking up at him as if he were the answer to her freaking prayers, and all he could think about was escaping. From his own damn house.
Hello, shoe on the other foot.
He hadn’t gone into this looking for a relationship. He’d been looking to grow up and move on, and stop getting caught up in old patterns. He’d gotten caught, though, in reverse. And with a woman he cared about, one he hadn’t meant to hurt. Bullshit, a voice said inside him, sounding like Cizin all of a sudden. If you really didn’t want to hurt her, you would’ve cooled things off days ago. You knew she was falling, but you kept coming back. Hell, you carried her over the damn threshold. What the fuck was she supposed to think?
He was suddenly chilled, both by the familiar mental tone of a creature that logic said was dead, and by the realization that whatever the source, the inner bitch-slap had a point. He’d been telling himself one thing while doing what felt good. Those weren’t the actions of the nice guy she’d painted him as. It was the sort of thing makol bait would do.
There was a flicker of nerves in Jade’s eyes now, but she continued. “What just happened is good news, really, because it means that the next time, if you ignore the green and let the magic take over, you’ll wind up in the library.”
“Maybe,” he said coldly. “Or maybe you’ll wind up with another ajaw-makol loose inside Skywatch. And maybe this time I won’t be strong enough to stop it.”
She paled. “There’s no makol here right now. It’s your way of processing the fear of being vulnerable.”
His anger drained, leaving a hollow ache behind. “Damn it, Jade, they were your rules. Just friends, you said. I was the one who started off wanting more, back before, and you
let me down easy.” He shook his head. “Now I guess it’s my turn, for the first time ever, to try to do this right. So I’ll start off with the cliché: It’s not you; it’s me. If I’ve learned anything over the past nine days, it’s that love means putting the other person first, even over your own safety and life, and despite what the writs say about loyalty to the king and the war.” He paused, trying to get it right, and trying not to falter as her face fell. In the end, he said simply: “I can’t put you first.”
Her eyes flared for a second and she snapped, “That’s—” Then she clicked her teeth shut on whatever she was about to say, and shook her head. “Forget it. Just forget it. I guess I misread what I thought I was seeing. I thought we were on the same page.”
“So did I.” He was going to feel like unholy ravening shit in a few minutes, he thought. For the moment, he just felt numb and gray. Like all the color and life had leeched out of him. Was this what it felt like to break up with someone you liked but didn’t love? Gods. He’d thought it sucked to be on the other end. This was ten times worse. A hundred. He felt as if a piece of his world were suddenly out of joint.
“I . . . I guess I’ll go. It’ll be morning soon.”
Reminded that it was the cardinal day, Lucius fleetingly wondered whether he should have let the magic take him, on the chance that he’d been wrong somehow about the green. No, he knew that had been makol green. No question about it. He’d done the right thing, just as he was doing the right thing now. He didn’t know how to love as people like Shandi or Willow did. He had no basis for it, and didn’t want to learn. Jade had been right in the first place when she’d said that love destroyed lives. Love wasn’t the answer. Inner strength was.
He watched in silence as she crossed the TV room and turned back at the kitchen threshold he’d carried her across less than an hour before. Her face was calm, composed, but he could see the strain beneath. “I’m sorry things got messy. I’ll see you on the ball court in a few hours. We’ve got a game to play.”
She turned and left. He didn’t call her back.
When her family-only cell phone rang, Patience nearly dropped a plate of eggs in her husband’s lap.
Brandt’s head came up at the unfamiliar ringtone. “Who’s that?”
The accusatory edge to the question assuaged her guilt when she flipped open the phone and blithely lied, “Kristie, at the dojo. I know I’m not an official owner anymore, but I gave her my private number in case there were any questions we didn’t go over during the transfer.” Don’t overexplain. She placed the plate in front of him at the dining table they hardly used anymore. “Dig in. I’ll take this in the bedroom while I finish getting ready for today.”
Alone, she pressed the phone to her ear. “Ms. Montana?”
“Nope. Apparently today my name is Kristie and I own a dojo. I’m betting I dot the ‘i’ in my name with a little smiley face. Or am I a Kristy-with-a-‘y’?”
Having already discovered that the bounty hunter had a high retainer, a killer hourly rate for nonbounty work, a smart mouth, and little interest in making friends or even being polite, Patience didn’t bother responding to the dig. “Did you find something?”
“Not just something. I found your sons.”
“You—” Patience’s voice broke on a surge of emotion.
The other woman rattled off a quick summary about facial recognition and driver’s licenses, blah, blah, followed by an address.
“Wait! Let me write this down.”
“I’ll text it.”
“Thanks.” Her heart was going rapid- fire and her palms were damp; it’d been months since she’d last felt this good. A year. “Do that.”
The phone clicked. It took her a few seconds to realize the bounty hunter had hung up on her. Moments later, the text came through. She stared at the address, memorizing it. Then she pressed her lips together and made herself delete the info, just as she’d deleted all the other small nuggets of info as soon as she’d committed them to memory, just in case. All the while, her head spun with a litany of She found them! She found them! I can’t believe she found them!
Dropping the phone back into her pocket, she headed back out into the kitchen to scare up some cereal for herself while Brandt finished his cholesterol bomb. He gave her a fork wave as she passed. “Everything okay?”
She smiled. “Everything’s fine now. Just a few details we need to nail down.” And then, after that? Clear sailing.
Within the first hour of playing Kinich Ahau’s game, Lucius discovered that being a jock wasn’t nearly as cool as he’d imagined it would be. Or rather, it was fun being one of the cool kids, but it was also damned hard work. By the second hour, he’d come to understand the game on a cellular level; his body seemed to know where to put itself to return each serve with a forearm, shin, or hip. By the third hour, he’d become almost prescient within the confines of the ball court, always placing himself at the point of maximum impact, maximum play.
The heavy ball, made of natural rubber and infused with some sort of magic that had kept it resilient despite the years, was heavy and irregular, meaning that it bounced erratically, often confounding lifelong athletes Strike, Michael, and Alexis, as well as more analytical players like Nate, Brandt, and Leah. Sven flung himself through the game with wild abandon, usually winding up out-of-bounds, while Rabbit played with vicious glee and lots of knees and elbows. By that time, the others had rotated out and were watching from above.
The points stayed grimly even, rising and falling together, never hitting the magic thirteen. The hoop, eighteen feet in the air and mere inches larger than the ball of play, could’ve been an illusion; the ball passed by it, banged off it, arched over it, but never went through.
By hour four, when the strange orange sun hit the apex of the sky and began its descent toward dark and destiny, Lucius had entered a glazed, numb-feeling zone where he was down to physical action without internal reaction, sport without soul. He’d even ceased being aware of Jade sitting up above, carefully not watching him with cool, hurt eyes.
A finger tapped him on his unarmored shoulder and a voice said, “It’s over.”
Anger surged through him, hard and hot and searching for an outlet. Blood hitting fever pitch in an instant, he whirled on his enemy, lifting his stone-weighted hand. “Fuck you.”
Jox stood there in a referee’s robe, with the conch-shell pipe that acted as a time-out whistle, his eyes going wide and scared as the hand stone descended. Lucius’s vision flickered green, then normal; he didn’t pull the punch.
“Son of a bitch!” A heavy blow slammed into him from the side, sending him to his knees; he lost his grip on the hand stone and came up swinging with his fists, dully surprised that it was Rabbit who had knocked him aside, Rabbit who protected Jox with his body and shouted, “Leave him alone, asshole; he’s just doing his job!”
“He—” Lucius stopped dead, aware that the others had stopped playing, were ready to step in. “Shit. Fuck. Sorry, I—Sorry. I got caught up.” Was that all it had been? He hoped to hell so.
“Understood.” Jox nodded, accepting the apology, though he stayed behind Rabbit’s bigger bulk. “But like I said, play is over for right now. We’re breaking for an hour. You might want to take two.”
“I’ll take an hour,” Lucius grated. “I don’t have time to be tired today.”
He grabbed food at random from the overloaded picnic tables that had been moved to just outside the court, found a spot far away from all the others, and sat on the steps of the ball court alone. He ate mechanically but didn’t make any headway against the hollowness inside.
“I’m disappointed in you.” The censure came from slightly above him, in Jox’s voice.
He glanced back and saw the winikin set down his plate and take a seat one step up and a few feet over, out of his immediate reach. Lucius shook his head. “I don’t have anything against you personally. You just seem to be the guy in my way when I lose it.”
The w
inikin bit into a hot dog. “That wasn’t what I was talking about. You’re wimping out.”
“The old me was the wimp. Try again.”
“The old you might not have been able to bench-press a Hummer, but he wasn’t afraid to go after what he wanted.”
“You’re talking about Jade.” Appetite gone, Lucius shoved aside his plate. “You’re off on that one; she didn’t want the old guy. Besides, he was terrified of being alone, and spent most of his time wishing, not doing. He . . . Shit. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You don’t need to talk to me anyway. Talk to her.”
Lucius looked over to where Jade sat between Sasha and Patience, chatting. She was wearing a pale peach-colored shirt and had a matching scarf tied around her loose ponytail, its color nearly washed out in the funky sunlight. The others might think nothing had changed. Her face was smooth, her eyes clear, her tone light. Lucius, though, saw the hurt beneath the calm surface. “I can’t. I’m not ready to. She’s the one who says that people don’t change, not at their core, and I think that’s true to a point. I’m bigger and stronger now, better coordinated. I’ve made choices not to repeat old patterns. But deep inside, I’m still me.”
“You’re the one distinguishing between the old version of you and the new one,” the winikin observed mildly. “The rest of us aren’t.”
“She is. She gave the old me the ‘let’s just be fuck buddies’ speech. The new me got a watered-down version of the same speech at first. Then, the next thing I know, she changed the rules on me and tried to manipulate me into falling for her. How is a guy supposed to deal with that?”
“Let me see. . . .” The winikin paused, considering. “A beautiful, talented woman you’ve been panting after decides she wants to be more than bed partners. . . . How should you feel? I’m thinking flattered would be a good start. Maybe grateful. How about overjoyed?”
Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers Page 32
