She said, “I’m scared to look at it too closely.”
“Do not be frightened,” Khalil said quietly. “You and the children will be safe. I have said so.”
At that, she turned to face him and met his crystalline gaze.
Those ageless, inhuman eyes held such piercing clarity, when she looked into them she felt as if she fell into forever. She couldn’t look away, and he didn’t. With the whole of her attention on him, she felt her own energy settle into alignment with his, and it was an entirely new experience that felt right somehow, comforting and good. It held a completeness she had never known before, his maleness to her femaleness, his Power touching the Oracle’s Power that resided inside her, along with her own, unique Power of the spirit. She felt enfolded, warmed, almost as if he had physically reached out to put his arms around her. A strange expression flickered across his face. He frowned slightly, tilting his head as he stared at her.
Up this close, the shining flame of his own Power was fierce and inexhaustible, a pure, unceasing roar that was…
It was sexy. Not just a little sexy. Awesome, kick-in-the-head sexy.
For the first time in months, she felt a pulse of arousal.
What?
Shocked and disconcerted, she pulled away. His hand fell from her arm. Breathing unevenly, she sat in a rigid, upright position and stared straight ahead. She could feel the blood rush to her cheeks.
His fiercely male presence filled the house, just as it had last night.
And he was no longer entirely indifferent to her.
“Now you have interested me,” murmured Khalil.
“I have no idea what you are talking”—she could barely squeeze enough air out of her lungs to get the words out—“about.”
He chuckled, and the husky sound was even more dangerous than that from the night before. It shivered along her exposed nerve endings with as much sensuality as if he had trailed his fingers along her bare skin. “I think I might like it when you lie,” he said. “It makes my truthsense feel so superior.”
She tried to glare at him but was afraid she might have just ended up looking panicked and confused. Outrage, where was her outrage when she needed it? “Of course superiority would matter to you.” Her attempt at scoffing came out more like a squeak, and she had a sudden impulse to get her sheet from the futon and pull it over her head.
She never saw him move. Suddenly he was bending over her from behind. He whispered in her ear, “You know, our truth game is still open, and it’s my turn to ask a question.”
She started shaking her head then her whole body decided to join in, as she shivered. They were supposed to be talking about something scary, but there were so many scary things in her life right now, she had lost track. What were they supposed to be talking about again?
“We’re on a new round of questions,” she whispered back, unsteadily. “So it’s only your turn if I don’t end the game.”
“Are you going to end it?” Tiny puffs of air from his words tickled her ear.
She shivered harder. Smart. Dumb. Oh, Damascus. “I–I don’t know.”
He cupped her shoulders. “Are you cold?”
She looked over her shoulder at him, wide-eyed. His eyes shone, and his expression was heavy lidded, languorous and wickedly knowledgeable. This time she didn’t even try to verbalize, but instead shook her head again. She felt as if she had lost contact with gravity and was floating in midair.
Khalil gave her a slow, keen smile. “What are you, then? You’re shivering.”
She fought to get some grounding, to push back. “You’ve just asked three questions, and I’ve answered two of them. No matter how you look at it, it’s my turn now.”
His smile widened into a grin. The look was stunning with his elegant features. He was not just prince of his House. He was also prince of mischief. “I concede,” he said. “It is indeed your turn.”
“I won’t be rushed,” she warned. This time she would be sure to make her question count, if she had to sit down at the computer and write drafts until she got it right.
“Take your time,” he purred. The pure sound licked over her skin. “I am in no hurry.”
Where had the irascible, antagonistic Djinn gone? He had been replaced by one who oozed sensuality and sin. She heard herself blurt out, “Do Djinn even like sex?”
Oh, God, she didn’t just ask him that. Why did she always have to take the dumb route? She squirmed and felt herself flush, not just on her face but all over, so that she could actually feel heat pulsing off her body. She would give anything to hide under her sheet.
If he was stunning before, the expression on his face now turned downright electrifying. “With the right person, we enjoy sex very much,” he said in a gentle, unhurried reply. “We enjoy it in a leisurely fashion, and we devote all of our attention to it. And our lovers crave it.”
Grace felt like she was about to leap out of her skin. He still bent over her as she sat in her chair, and he had braced one hand on the edge of the table. The memory of every boy she had kissed in high school, along with the lovers she had taken in college, burned away under Khalil’s intense, incendiary attention, and all he had done was flirt with her.
What would kissing him be like? Her mind whited out, and she coughed. It sounded suspiciously like a whimper. “Well, okay. I guess I blew that round again, didn’t I?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “Did you? I found your choice of topic extremely interesting.”
She shook her head. “I just blurted it out.” Her voice sounded jerky, the words disjointed. “I was going to ask you something really clever and useful.”
He laughed. The deep sound of his mirth filled the room. “We have both been caught using our questions poorly. I have not been so foolish in a long while.”
If she were to choose how she viewed what just happened, she decided she would feel a small, sneaky sense of triumph for goading (coaxing? flirting?) him into the foolishness, because excuse me, at his age, he really should know better. She wasn’t sure that it made up for her own foolishness, and she suspected she had been quite a bit more foolish than he, but she wasn’t too proud to take any victory where she could find one.
And their whole exchange had been too strange, too intense. A strategic escape might be in order. She swiveled around in her chair to face the table again, grabbed her iced coffee and buried her nose in the glass.
Still chuckling, Khalil moved back to the table to take his seat. With her head bent, she took small sips, watching him out of the corner of her eye. He sobered and grew thoughtful. After a bit, she thought it might be safe to put down her drink, but she didn’t let go of it. Talk about foolishness. As if holding a glass of anything would ward off a Djinn who was determined to do something.
Khalil’s gaze darkened. “As much as I have enjoyed teasing you, we still must talk about this morning.”
All thoughts of flirting blew away. Her shoulders sagged even as she nodded. “Yes, of course.”
She put her elbows on the table, her forehead in her hands, and turned her attention to what she had been circling around since it happened, the memory of the voice that tore down the stars.
While she appreciated that Khalil had been trying to reassure her in his own way when he told her not to be frightened, she didn’t think he understood that the vision itself had been terrifying, and she was reluctant to open herself up to the possibility of having another one.
Her hands clenched into fists as she poked at the memory. To her immense relief, it remained distant, disconnected from her.
She hadn’t realized how much she had tensed until Khalil put a flattened hand to her back. He said, “Talk.”
“I’m not getting anything else,” she said. “It’s gone now. The vision definitely came for Cuelebre.”
Khalil said, “The voice mentioned the Great Beast.”
“Whether he wants it or not, it’s his prophecy.” Her forehead crinkled. “Although I think whatever
the vision is about, it might be bigger than just Cuelebre. It felt global or elemental in some way. I had a vision of stars being blacked out in the night sky.” The sight was so unnatural, she couldn’t stop another shudder.
His gaze sharpened. “I did not see anything. I only heard the voice. Did you recognize the landscape?”
She shook her head. “No. It might have been symbolic, but I’m not sure. Oracular visions can come in a variety of ways. They can be from the past or from possible futures, or they can be a dreamlike sequence of images that has particular significance to a petitioner. My grandmother and Petra could tell the difference, but I haven’t had enough experience yet. This was only the third time I’ve accessed the Oracle’s Power. My second time was with Carling and Rune.” She gave him a twisted smile. “Both my grandmother and my sister, Petra, said the same thing. The Oracle sees a lot of weird shit. They also said they—we have a kind of built-in defense mechanism that helps us gain distance from the visions after we have them. The visions we see come for other people. We’ve got to let go of them or go crazy. Petra thought that might also be why the Oracle sometimes blacks out. I think I’m starting to understand what she meant.”
“Is it normal that both Cuelebre and I heard it?”
“Yes and no.” She grimaced at him. “Sometimes the Oracle can channel someone who has died for those who are in mourning and who need to say good-bye, and when we prophesy, the Power has its own voice. Several people might hear it, but usually that’s when we’re all together. And usually the Oracle only prophesies from a place deep in the Earth.”
“Why is that?”
“I think part of it is tradition. That’s how things have always been done, so we continue to do it that way. Also, the Power that comes to each Oracle is inherited.” She frowned as she fumbled to explain something she knew so intimately. “Just like anybody else, we each have our own wellspring of Power, talents and affinity to things. My sister was really good at a kind of clairvoyance called farseeing, which is a kind of seeing at a distance but in real time. My talent is an affinity to spirit. I’ve always had it. I have a facility with ghosts and other spirits, and I know when you’re around even when you’re not visible or in physical form. I could also feel the connection you created.”
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “That is quite unusual. I have never heard of another human able to do so.”
“In our family, our talents make us potential Oracles, but the Power of the Oracle itself is an inherited Power.” She swallowed a sudden lump in her throat. “I knew my sister was dead when I woke up in the hospital, because the Power had come to me. I know this sounds strange, but we never know who will inherit it, except that it always moves from female to female. For example, theoretically it could have moved to Chloe when her mom died, although I’ve never heard of it going to someone so young. But it wouldn’t have gone to Max.”
His eyes narrowed. “So you didn’t have a choice about it coming to you.”
“No,” she said. She felt a sudden impatience and brushed that aside. “But that doesn’t matter. It’s mine now, and it’s up to me to see what I can make of it. Basically what I’m trying to say is most people have one source of Power. I have two sources, the one I was born with and the Oracle’s Power that I inherited earlier this year. That is a very old Power, and it runs deep.”
He watched her face closely. “What do you mean?”
“It’s always present. I can feel it, but it sits just on the edge of my consciousness.” She tried to sift through the lifetime of teachings in her head to distill things for him quickly and easily. “Did you know that human witches often take a patron god or goddess?”
He shook his head.
“Our goddess is Nadir, because she’s the goddess of the depths. There’s one family legend that says Nadir gave us the Power of the Oracle. There’s another that says it came from someone else, another god or Powerful creature. Whatever the truth of that is, the original temple at Delphi was in a cavern below ground, and we have a small cave system here on the land. When someone petitions to speak to the Oracle, that’s where we take them. Going there helps us to reach down into that deep part of us, so we can access the Power.” She thrust her fingers through her hair again. She muttered, “I’m giving you too much information.”
“Do not trouble yourself about that,” he said. He was still frowning. “So this Power might leap from you to Chloe.”
She shook her head grimly. “Not while I’m alive,” she said. “When I die, it will pass on to another female in the family. That may be Chloe. She’s the only other living female relative that I have right now. Or maybe by then we’ll have more family, if Chloe and Max grow up to have kids.”
“And what happened this morning was different from how the Power usually manifests?” he asked.
“Well, I’m no expert,” she said. “But yes, it was different from anything I’ve experienced or anything Petra or my grandmother talked about. What happened this morning came out in full daylight. I was taught that we have to reach for the Power, to call it up, but this morning it just spilled out. I don’t know if that was because Cuelebre’s presence triggered it, if the vision was urgent, or if it had something to do with me and how I connect to the Power. I’m just grateful Chloe and Max didn’t know what was happening.”
He pressed his palm against her back, almost as if he would press strength and calm into her body by willing it to happen. “Did the voice take you over?”
She lifted up her head to frown at him. He was watching her closely. She fumbled for words. “It was more like I tuned into a radio frequency, and the voice came through on that channel. I don’t know how else to explain it. It couldn’t have been physical, or the children would have heard it too. Right?”
He nodded, frowning as well. The brilliance of his gaze was muted into shadowed diamond sparkles. “Your radio frequency analogy is a good one. I heard it like telepathy, but it felt on a different level somehow than normal telepathy.”
“Chloe’s telepathic,” Grace told him, her throat constricting. “She isn’t very good at it yet. Most human children develop the ability after they develop physical speech patterns. Petra always used to say it was nature’s way of protecting young parents. Just think what it would be like to have a telepathic two-year-old having a screaming tantrum in your head.”
He gave her a small smile. It faded almost at once. “If you feel something like that vision coming again, you call me immediately. Pull hard at the connection, and I will know your need is urgent.”
She nodded. She didn’t see how she had any choice. As fast as the earlier vision had taken her over, he was the only entity she knew who could get here quickly enough to make some kind of difference. “I can’t lose control like that and leave the children unsupervised. You saw what happened with Chloe and the milk. If I pull really hard, when you come, look after the kids, do you hear? Make sure they’re safe.”
His expression turned fierce. “I have promised both you and the children protection, and you will all have it.”
Her eyes grew moist. She wouldn’t thank him again. She had thanked him enough, and anyway, he didn’t like it. Instead she leaned back against his hand.
He tilted his head as he studied her. “You are doing all this on your own, while looking after the children.”
She lifted one shoulder. “Not quite. Petra’s best friend, Katherine, kept the kids until I got out of the hospital and could bring them home. Remember Janice from yesterday morning, the one who babysat when I spoke with Carling and Rune? Janice belongs to a roster of witches who are on call to babysit whenever someone petitions to speak to the Oracle. They do it as part of their community tithe. More people are coming on Saturday to put in a quarterly work day. They’ll beat back the worst of the weeds and mow.”
She braced herself for another one of his contemptuous looks. That had stung when she didn’t even like him very much. Maybe she did like him after all, now that she had gotten to
know him better. Now his disdain would hurt worse than a sting.
But he didn’t look contemptuous. Instead, his face tightened. He said, “It is good that you have some help. And now both you and the little ones have me for protection. But you are still too much alone in all of this. You should be surrounded with a House filled with associations.”
She had to press her lips tightly together and look away before she could say, after a moment, “Well, nobody ex-pected things to turn out this way.”
The afternoon sunlight had deepened as they talked. From down the hall, Chloe started to chatter. She was talking to her toys, but Max burbled a wordless reply.
Grace turned back to Khalil. His hard face had eased into an indulgent smile again. “Thank you for the talk,” she said. As the words fell out, she clapped a hand over her mouth. “I swear, that one just came out. I’m sorry.”
Instead of looking angry or disgusted, this time he looked amused. He stood. “I will come back tomorrow to visit with the little ones.”
Grace stood too. “We’re going out. It’s story time at the library, and we have books to return, and…” He was listening to her with such close attention, she grew self-conscious. She ended, awkwardly, “Well, you don’t need to hear about all that.”
“What is their schedule in the evening?”
“Dinner at five, bed by eight.”
He raised his eyebrows. “May I come to visit with them before they go to bed?”
Grace was impressed. He actually asked; he didn’t dictate. She said, “Sure.”
He studied her for a moment, his gaze unreadable. Then she felt his presence slide along hers in a scorching, invisible caress. As she sucked in a breath, he inclined his head and disappeared.
She shut her mouth with a click. What was that—his version of a hug good-bye?
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