Oracle's Moon er-4

by Thea Harrison

  She dug her fingers into the raven hair at the back of his head and hung on, her mouth moving jerkily under his in a clumsy attempt to kiss him back. Fractured thoughts and impressions swirled in her head, blasted by a cyclone. His familiar energy, the exotic sensation of his mouth, the blast of pain, anger and sexuality that roared out of him. His hunger and his need.

  He cradled the back of her head in the palm of one hand. His other arm circled her low at the waist. His hold tightened on her until her feet left the ground.

  She felt weightless, as if she was floating in him. The fastening that kept his hair pulled back was a simple strip of leather, and it came undone underneath her fingers. The black, silken mass tumbled to his shoulders.

  He lifted his head and looked down at her. His expression was tight and remote. The crystalline radiance of his eyes blazed like lighthouse beacons in the darkness, warning of treacherous, storm swept seas. His lips glistened with the moisture he had taken from her mouth. All she could do was stare dumbly at him as she trembled all over, for he was so rampantly glorious, it had stolen her voice.

  He eased her down again until her feet touched the floor. She wasn’t sure she would be able to stand on her own.

  But then she had to, because he let go of her and vanished without a word.

  Khalil’s kiss burned in her memory that night and through Wednesday. She woke up at night, aroused, her skin damp with a light sheen of sweat, her sheet tangled around her legs. He had used his mouth with such experienced sensuality. Clearly he had taken human lovers before. Realizing that after the fact was devastating. It brought into the forefront of her imagination thoughts of what he might be like as a lover, something that once would have seemed barely conceivable but was now urgently compelling.

  Sensations and images flashed through her mind. The feel of his hard mouth taking hers, and the sense of limitless strength in his enormous body. The sheen of his raven hair as it broke loose and framed his ivory, inhuman face and incandescent eyes. The heat contained in his physical form and his scorching, true presence. His regal demeanor, his pain and his anger.

  Khalil’s pain and anger didn’t bother her especially. Grace understood pain and anger, rather more than was probably good for her. But what she did not understand was that he had seemed angry with her. What had she done, or not done, to make him angry? She brooded on that the next day.

  Her preoccupation made her stupid. She managed to put the salt and pepper shakers in the refrigerator, and when they were out running more errands and she stopped to get gas, she drove away from the pump without replacing her gas cap. Luckily when the cap fell off the hood of the car, it rolled to the edge of the gas station’s parking lot, and she was able to find it easily enough when she drove back to look for it.

  She also had a difficult time focusing on what had happened in the back meadow, but she forced herself to concentrate. Because of her own impetuousness, she had put herself in danger, and she couldn’t afford to do that again so cavalierly. While the children napped, she concentrated on running through the mental exercises her grandmother had taught her. She pulled up the Oracle’s Power carefully, and when she let it go again, she did so slowly in a controlled fashion.

  By the time she had finished practicing a few times, she was able to call the Power up at any time of the day or night, no matter where she was. While she would never forget how dangerous it could be, working with it had a different quality than it had that first wild, tempestuous time. It no longer strained to flow away from her or bucked to get away from her control.

  Early in the morning, she spent over an hour carefully looking for evidence that the strange ghost was still influencing it, but the serpent woman really had relinquished her hold and was nowhere to be found. The more Grace worked with the Power, the more readily it came to hand. Now if she could only figure out what all of it meant, but she thought that might take years or even decades. She made a silent promise to Chloe to work as hard as she could to make it hers irrevocably. Immortal Power or not, she planned to take it with her when she died. Then Chloe, along with any other female descendants Grace might have, would be truly free to explore destinies of their own choosing.

  That was Grace’s destiny. It was the first thing in her life, including college, that she embraced wholeheartedly.

  By the time Khalil showed up Wednesday evening to read Chloe the promised story, Grace thought she had the whole incident with him figured out.

  She thought it was possible to sometimes hurt too badly to accept comfort. Maybe by offering him the hug, she had touched something he couldn’t bear to have touched. If that was so, she wasn’t sure what to do next. It didn’t seem quite the thing to apologize or to bring it up so they could talk, but keeping silent felt strange too. She felt adrift at sea, unable to make a decision as to how to move forward.

  Khalil did not show up until after supper. By then she had tied herself up in knots. She and Chloe were picking the day’s toys up and stacking them in the living room toy box. Max stood at the coffee table, hanging onto the edge while he chewed on plastic toy keys. He was teething and had become obsessed with chewing on anything he could get his hands on.

  Khalil appeared in silence, but she could feel his arrival at her back. Her pulse leaped. She turned from the toy box, tangled up in pleasure, self-consciousness, discomfort and confusion.

  Whoa. He seemed bigger when she hadn’t seen him for a day.

  His arms were crossed. He wore plain black. Even though she had seen him assume other colors, black seemed to be his go-to color when in physical form. His hair was bound back again, and his pale, elegant face wore a closed expression. He held his energy tight with rigid restraint. Looking at him was like running full speed into a wall.

  Oblivious to the undercurrent of tension in the room, Chloe sang out a happy greeting, skipped up to him and flung out her arms. He gave the little girl a slight smile and picked her up. “What shall I assist you in reading today?”

  “The terrible, no good day!” she said.

  “That is an excellent choice,” he told her. “I would have picked it too.”

  He carried Chloe over to the bookcase where she leaned over to retrieve the book, then they settled in the armchair. Max let go of the coffee table, fell to his diaper-padded bottom and scuttled over to them eagerly. Khalil scooped the baby up too, and he began to read to them.

  Aside from a glance and a nod, Khalil didn’t speak to Grace. Her leaping pulse twisted into a heavy sludge, and her own energy clenched into a hurt knot. So that’s what it was going to be like, was it?

  Fine. Screw him.

  Their laundry pile had turned into a mountain. She was determined to catch up before people arrived on Saturday. She went into the kitchen to switch loads, fold clothes and diapers, and carry most of them to the children’s bedroom. After she had put their things away, she straightened and dusted, changed their sheets, and then she went into the half bath, which had somehow turned into a disaster area. She cleaned the mirror, scrubbed vigorously at the sink and toilet and mopped the floor. Then it was time to switch the laundry around again and fold more clothes.

  The house felt too close, and the fans did little more than push the humid air around. The ghosts sighed and murmured with vague restlessness. Outside, the crickets and cicadas began to saw their nightly symphony. Grace felt toxic with sweat and dust, bathroom cleaning chemicals and anger.

  She had been lonely, the kiss hadn’t meant anything, and he was clearly regretting it. How many mistakes did that sentence encapsulate in the history of relationships?

  She was standing at the kitchen table, slapping folded diapers into a growing pile, when Khalil spoke in that low voice of his that was much too pure to be human. The purity shivered over her skin and through her awareness. Her hands stilled, and she closed her eyes, aching as she listened to it. He spoke with a deep clarion power she imagined renegade angels might use, as they called one another to war with God.

  Then
she realized the depth of her own foolishness. How could someone that wild and regal, that immortal and pure, be interested in someone as flawed and uninteresting as her? He was a prince of his kind, while she didn’t even know what the term prince meant to them. She was the antithesis of her own name, graceless, churlish and rough. She fingered her chapped knuckles, and her throat ached when she tried to swallow.

  She hadn’t hurt him. She hadn’t been important enough to hurt him.

  Belatedly, she caught up with what he was saying. “…and I thought you would not mind if I put Chloe and Max to bed.”

  She looked over her shoulder. Khalil held the children in his arms. Max was sound asleep on one huge shoulder, and Chloe had her head down on the other shoulder. She was knuckling her eyes and yawning. Grace met Khalil’s gaze briefly to nod an assent before she turned back to the laundry.

  He clearly didn’t want to talk with her, and she didn’t expect him to come back into the kitchen. She finished folding the load of laundry, grabbed a washcloth and went over to the sink to wash her face and the back of her neck. Then she sponged off her bare arms. She was too tired again to climb the stairs for a bath. Tomorrow she wanted to go upstairs while the kids were down for their afternoon nap, and she would run a bubble bath that reached the top of the huge, claw-foot tub in the upstairs bathroom and soak until they woke up.

  For the first time, she had worn shorts in public that day and simply ignored the sidelong looks people gave her scarred legs. The cool, moist cloth felt good on her overheated skin. She couldn’t twist her bad leg and lift it in the air to wash, nor could she balance her whole weight on it to lift the other leg, so she had to sit at one of the kitchen chairs when she washed her legs and feet. She rinsed and remoistened the cloth, sat down and—

  Khalil’s tremendous hand came down gently over hers.

  She froze. She didn’t blink or breathe, and she didn’t look up. She just stared at his hand as he eased the cloth out of her unresisting hold.

  “You will allow me,” he said. Said, didn’t ask.

  She would?

  He knelt on one knee in front of her, an immaculate giant with his regal, severe expression still closed to scrutiny. She blinked as he took her bad leg and lifted it with care. He began passing the washcloth over her overheated skin, from midthigh, down very lightly over her knee to her calf.

  “I saw you limping earlier,” he said. “You should have put on the brace.”

  Lightning danced through her muscles. The washcloth felt cool and refreshing as he stroked it along the contours of her leg with a delicate sensitivity that surprised her. She could barely hold herself still. She managed to articulate, “I’m hot and cranky, and I didn’t want to wear it.”

  “That was foolish,” he said.

  “It was none of your business,” she said.

  “Have you begun checking the babysitting roster yet?”

  “I haven’t had time,” she said shortly. What did he think she was capable of, anyway? There were only so many hours in a day. Then she realized she had never told him what had happened in the back meadow. The realization felt odd, and it led her to another realization: just how very much she had begun to confide in him.

  He didn’t seem to take offense at her tone. He merely nodded as he curled the washcloth around her bare ankle. Then a prince of the Djinn washed her foot, set down her leg gently and reached for the other, and she couldn’t stand it. She grabbed him by the wrist and told him, “Stop it.” Her voice sounded as raw and as graceless as the rest of her.

  He stopped and looked at her. Kneeling as he was, their heads were at the same level. She fell into forever again as she looked in his diamond eyes. He looked stern, still rigidly contained and impossible to read. He said to her, his tone deliberately even, “We will play the truth game now, just one more time.”

  Would they? She was getting tired of being told what to do. She said between her teeth, “I don’t hear you asking me.”

  He leaned an elbow on his upraised knee, his crystalline gaze steady, ruthless. “I can always leave.”

  Her mouth threatened to wobble. “Why do you want to play?”

  “I would have this exchange balanced,” he said tersely.

  She was bewildered. She didn’t understand why the concept of a balanced exchange was so important to him. Maybe it had something to do with control? Then she remembered what he had said before, about wishing for information and not wanting to be beholden to her for it. Her expression tightened.

  Well, it wasn’t as if she had anything real to lose. She folded her arms and said, “No. We’re done with the truth game. Ask me what you want to ask me, and I’ll answer or not if I like. I’ll ask you anything I want, and you’ll answer or not if you like. No forfeit, no control, no balance. No more favors or deals or measuring shit. We’ll either have a real, messy conversation, or you can get the hell out.”

  He grew angry. She could feel it shifting through his energy, slow and sulfurous like slow-moving lava.

  She liked it. His anger felt satisfying. It meant he wasn’t indifferent to her. So she pushed him harder. “Go on, go.”

  Ever since he had kissed her, Khalil had felt wrapped in invisible chains.

  He had attended to his various duties with a surly attitude, snarling at anyone unfortunate enough to get in his way or to look at him strangely. He sat in on a Demonkind legislative committee hearing because it was his responsibility and he must, but he didn’t listen or participate. The committee chair put the subject to a vote, and Khalil looked around at the people with whom he most often shared a common point of view. He raised his hand when they did. Nobody remarked upon it, so he must not have voted for anything too out of character.

  He left the legislature and let go of his physical form as soon as he was able to. Then he took to the winds. Releasing his physical form wasn’t as satisfying as he had thought it would be. Nothing he did that day was.

  He could not seem to put enough distance between himself and thinking about Grace and the children. He wondered what they were doing that day. Finally, in exasperation, he chose to leave Earth altogether. He materialized into his physical form on the moon.

  There was no sound, because the moon had no atmosphere. There was no wind, no air. The sun was a piercing roar of flame. The sun’s reflected light off the moon’s surface was silver white; fragile, unshielded human eyes would have been blinded by the radiance. It did not discomfort Khalil in any way, because his form was a focus. He did not need to breathe. He crossed his arms, staring at the milky green, blue and white ball that was Earth, while he soaked up the blast of inexhaustible energy from the sun.

  The moon was as far as the Djinn could travel from Earth without traversing one of the many crossover passages that led to Other lands in other dimensions. Many theories had been put forth about the Other lands, but Khalil thought that the lands were, in the end, either shadows or mirrors, reflections or folds, of the Earth itself.

  Around noon, he wondered what Grace and the children were eating for lunch. It would be cheerful, simple and tasty enough to tempt a picky child’s appetite.

  Bah. He was back to thinking about them again. With a silent hiss he flicked his fingers angrily in the direction of the blue-white orb. Then he dematerialized and went to the far side of the moon. That side permanently faced away from Earth. It was much more suited to his brooding mood. The surface was battered and densely cratered. The moon was halfway through its lunar cycle, so part of the far side was in darkness.

  Here light and dark were knifelike. There were no soft, colorful shadows of dusk, as there had been at Grace’s house last evening. He chose the darkness and rematerialized to lean back against a boulder and stare at the sharp, bright stars. Away from the Earth’s atmosphere, they seemed closer, but they weren’t.

  He pushed away from the boulder and strode along the moon’s surface restlessly. The invisible chains were inside of him. It did not matter where he chose to go. His own thoughts
were his cage.

  Tasty.

  Last night, Grace’s mouth had been tasty, succulent with surprise and a kind of honeyed innocence that had nothing to do with virginity and everything to do with the breathless pleasure of new exploration. Her energy had bloomed with arousal.

  She was not all sweetness and light. She had thorns, prickly edges and that quick temper he loved to bait into flaring, but the thing that sent him spearing into the night after kissing her was how the darkness of her pain called to his.

  While he was not as bigoted as he had once pretended to be with Grace, he had not known many humans very well. He had met those who were just as he had said, conniving and too interested in the search for Power. He had also met some that he enjoyed, and he had taken humans as lovers before.

  As lovers they had been toys, a game he had played at, meaningless diversions when he had been bored and looking for a change. He had taken on his physical form for them, because the human lovers Khalil had known couldn’t sense his full, invisible aspect. They didn’t have the presence or the Power to align with his. They couldn’t know what brought him the deepest, truest pleasure, and he always quickly lost interest in them.

  Grace had the ability. She was like no other human he had met before. Her Power was, quite literally, unique. She could match him, fit to his presence in the way that Djinn made love to Djinn, share in formless pleasure and arousal. It was bizarre.

  It was perfect.

  For the first time he seriously wondered what pleasures the actual human senses might have to offer.

  His physical form gave him a limited imitation of what humans experienced with all their senses, bound in flesh as they were. But he never really felt the depth of real physical hunger or pain. He never fully tasted, as humans did, the delicacy or nuances of flavor in food, nor did he know to its fullest extent the intensity of physical sexual pleasure. He only played at those appetites, as did most Djinn, sooner or later.