Once she started talking, she didn’t stop. She started with the dream and worked her way backward, and she told it all wrong, because everything came out in a tangle.
The dream. The goddess. Hitting Phaedra with an expulsion spell that knocked her across the cavern. How everyone acted earlier that day, everyone except Olivia. Either Brandon or Jaydon or somebody had lied, or she simply didn’t understand, or maybe she had misheard, but it was strange how the story had shifted from eighteen people who had planned to come to work that day to twelve. The talk she’d had with Isalynn, postponing her duties as the Oracle, practicing with the Power until she could call it up at any time, whether it was daylight or not, no matter where she was.
Talking to him was as beyond perfect as his lovemaking had been. It was such a relief to unburden herself. Although he occasionally asked her for clarification, he didn’t rush her or appear impatient in any way, and he didn’t try to stop her.
At least not until she told him about the ghost of the serpent woman.
His physical form dissolved, and caught by surprise, she fell forward. Her nose squashed in the pillow he had been leaning against, and the hair at the back of her head whipped around as a cyclone rampaged her room. Cautiously she braced herself on one elbow and lifted her head to look around.
She had never been very interested in knickknacks, and earlier her small jewelry box had traveled downstairs along with her dresser. That was probably a good thing, since her bedside clock, along with three somewhat dusty paperbacks and the lamp, crashed to the floor. The window curtains blew into knots, all the upstairs doors banged shut then blew open again, and the windows rattled.
Somehow the lightbulb in the lamp hadn’t broken. The light shining from the floor threw elongated shadows over everything. The familiar surroundings looked ominous and strange.
And he felt absolutely furious.
Was he having his version of a shit fit?
She sank back down on the pillows and put an arm over her head. She said to the cyclone, “I hope you know you’re picking everything up again and replacing anything you break.”
He cursed, and the light flickered wildly as the lamp jerked off the floor and landed back on the bedside table. “You tell me that your sanity and your life might have been in danger, and I find this out days later?”
Yep. Shit fit. She told him, “Stop yelling.”
Still disembodied, he plummeted down on her. The entire cyclone seethed with rage on the space of her double bed. The air felt heavy, far too dense, and the change in pressure made her ears pop. Was this her problem? Yeah, she thought this one probably was. She pulled the covers over her head.
He yanked them down again. “Gods dammit, Grace, how could you do something so dangerous? Why didn’t you call me? You’re supposed to call me!”
Her nose prickled, and a tear leaked out. She swiped at it with the back of her hand. She said, “You’re making some pretty big assumptions.”
He snapped, “Like what!”
“I didn’t know it would be dangerous,” she said softly. “The petitioners were having a problem with going into the cavern, and I just thought if the Power came out once in the daylight, I could make it come out again. I had no idea the ghost existed until she showed up. By then it was too late to do anything but deal with the situation. I certainly didn’t have time to think about calling you or anyone else, and even if I had…”
“And if you had?” he prompted when her voice trailed away.
“Even if I had thought of calling you, it wouldn’t have done any good,” she said. “Because you wouldn’t have been able to do anything. Nobody would have. Everything that happened, the conversation with the ghost and the whole struggle was internal. By the time I had anything to say to anybody, it was all over.”
He took form behind her on the bed and turned her so that she lay on her back. His hands were so gentle that when she opened her eyes, she was completely unprepared for the severity of emotion that transformed his face. He said coldly, “I’m calling in the favor you owe me.”
Jolted, she said, “What, right now?”
He interrupted her. “Are you able to pay your debt?”
“Of course,” she told him. “As long as it doesn’t affect the kids—”
He cut off her words by simply putting a hand over her mouth. Eyes blazing, he leaned closer until the only thing she could see was him, and the only thing she could feel, all around her, was him.
“You will call me,” he said. “For the rest of your life, you will call me. I don’t give a shit whether or not you’re in the mood. I don’t care if your cause is useless or if I am too late or if you can fix the whole damn problem by yourself or if you just get scared. You will call me, Grace. You will call me.”
Her eyes widened. He was not quite in control of his physical form. It rippled, or his hand simply shook with the same emotion that shook through his voice. His eyes weren’t just blazing. They were too bright, even for him. She listened to not only what he had said, but to what he had not said. Underneath his anger was another emotion.
You scared me, he had said earlier, and he wasn’t used to experiencing fear. He was too arrogant and Powerful, too accustomed to the complacency of living a very long life.
She curled her fingers around his wrist and urged his hand away from her mouth. His jaw worked, but he allowed her to shift his hold. The tips of his fingers stroked across her lips.
“I love you too,” she said, because her sense of direction for picking out all the dumb routes in her life was pretty much infallible. She watched as the impact of her words changed his expression drastically, and she started to babble. “I know it’s stupid. I thought the age difference between Hugh Hefner and his girlfriends was bad. And who has time for this sort of thing, right? I think it happened when you put Max on your lap for the first time.…”
She never finished the sentence. Khalil slid his hand to the back of her neck. He lifted up her head as he lowered his face, and she got caught in the middle, as his mouth settled over hers, and it didn’t matter if the Oracle wasn’t supposed to be able to prophesy for herself, because in that moment Grace knew she would love him unconditionally for the rest of her life.
He kissed and kissed her, like he had before, gently, hungrily, spearing into her with his hot tongue, and she burned everywhere he touched her, all over her body and deep in her soul. “You will call me,” he said against her lips. “Swear, Gracie. I cannot stand it if you do not call me.”
“I swear it,” she murmured. She felt desire take fire in him again. He had cracked her wide open before, and it was too soon, too much for her to reach that insane, intense outpouring of passion again. She wasn’t ready for it, but at the same time she needed it and him. She dug her fingers into his hair and started to shake.
“Shh, be easy,” he said. He gripped her by the hip, gently, as he rested his forehead against her collarbone. His desire remained steady, banked. “Your Power is still roused. I do not like how it has been dangerous for you.”
His own stern control helped her to find hers. She rubbed her face as she checked the strange landscape she had become. “It doesn’t feel roused,” she said. “Maybe it feels stronger to you because today is the Oracle’s moon. The Power flexes with the lunar cycle.”
He lifted his head, frowning down at her. She could feel him scanning her carefully. It felt delicious, like he was physically running his hands gently down her limbs. Underneath the weight of his body, she stretched and sighed. “You’re right,” he said. “It is stronger than it was last night. But it’s more than that. It’s different. I don’t think that difference is because of the lunar cycle.”
She confessed, “I’m starting to lose the sense that it’s something separate from me. It feels like we’re knitting together.”
His mouth tightened as he shifted to her side. He settled his body alongside hers and propped his head in one hand. “You are.”
She watched his face curi
ously. “How does it look—or feel?”
“It’s beautiful,” he said with obvious reluctance. “But then you were beautiful before. It’s a dark vein marbling your energy. If this continues, I don’t see how it will pass on to Chloe or to anybody else.” He met her eyes. “That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
She smiled. “Yes. That’s exactly what I wanted.”
“It’s changing you,” he said. His own gaze was shadowed with worry. “Are you sure that you’re all right with that?”
“It changed me the moment it left my sister and came to me,” she told him. “I’ve kicked against it, cursed and yelled at it, then finally accepted it. Now I’ve claimed it, and I want to know what I can make of it. And what it’s making of me.” She bit at a fingernail. “That means I need to keep experimenting. That expulsion spell I threw at Phaedra was meant to get rid of dark spirits. I only threw it at her because I lost my temper and got desperate. That spell never would have had the strength to physically throw anybody before. She bled a light-colored liquid that soaked back into her. I didn’t know you could bleed.”
“We don’t, at least not in the way humans bleed. When the bodies we create sustain damage, the part of our Power that has become physical leaks until we fix it.” His hand resting on her hip tightened. He growled, “You don’t experiment alone anymore, do you hear me? Forget that, you don’t experiment without me. In your dream your grandmother and sister said you were going the wrong way. You need someone else present to help you in case things get out of control again.”
She nodded as she curled against his side. Her eyes felt dry and gritty. She closed them and turned her face into his chest. He cupped her head, holding her gently against him. “That might have been what they meant. I’ve certainly been doing things differently from how I’d been taught.”
“I see another truth,” said Khalil quietly. “You’re discarding the rituals your family has used for generations. You exorcised the ghost, or at least you persuaded the ghost to leave you, and you claimed the Power. It is as though the Oracles that came before you needed all the rituals and the steps in order to access the Power, because they were substitutes, while you are actually becoming the Oracle.”
She held her breath as she considered his words. Was he right? She couldn’t tell. Exhaustion weighed her down again. She muttered, “I’m tired of thinking about all of this right now. Khalil, I had a long day, and I need to get some more rest. I have to pick the kids up in the morning.”
“Then stop thinking.” He kissed her forehead. “While you pick up the children, tomorrow morning I am going to do what I should have done before this.”
She pressed her lips against the smooth skin of his chest. “What’s that?”
“I am going to find out where Therese lives,” he said. A stiletto of malice crept into his voice. “I would like to know how she enjoys it when someone looks through her things. I’m also interested in what I will find when I do so. And after that, I think I will find this witch Brandon. I might even introduce myself to Jaydon Guthrie. Then we will see what tale this Oracle’s moon tells.”
She snorted, a small exhalation of air. “I have another human saying for you,” she said drowsily.
“What is that?” he asked.
She smiled and told him, “Just let me know if I ever piss you off, so I can have a chance to apologize.”
Amusement danced through his energy. “Sometimes you have made me very angry,” he said. “And I have not noticed that you are overly eager to apologize for that.”
“Mmm.” It might be time for a strategic distraction. She stroked his presence with hers in a lavish, languid caress.
He caught his breath then whispered, “Go to sleep, dearest.”
Her heart kicked and pleasure rippled through her at the oddly archaic, beautiful endearment. Then she sighed and did just that.
17
I love you too, Grace had said, and that was a far more radical thing than simply calling him friend.
Too.
As if she had already known something he hadn’t.
Khalil held himself tensely while he watched Grace sleep. How had this young human woman become so precious to him so quickly? It had happened in less than two weeks. A mere handful of days.
He had been at war with Lethe for longer than some civilizations had existed. Often he had taken years to decide where he might go on vacation. When he had met Leo Tolstoy in 1906, the Russian novelist had intrigued him so much, Khalil decided he would consider reading War and Peace, and he had still not yet made up his mind. It wasn’t that he was indecisive; he simply had no reason to rush anything.
He had never bothered to count time before, but he started to now, and it began with counting each breath she took. He watched the gentle rise and fall of her chest in agonized amazement. She would take only a limited number of breaths in her lifetime, and then she would stop breathing forever. Max and Chloe, those bright-eyed baby birds, would live for such a short, short while.
Once he had thought they lived such small lives, outside of politics and world concerns and violent struggles for dominion and Power. Now he realized how big their lives really were, because their lives were everything that mattered. They were the only thing that mattered. The joyous surprise in each discovery they made together was more precious than the treasure of kings, more suspenseful than the most spectacular of car chases, more beautiful than the most exotic of landscapes.
He studied Grace with meticulous care. As uneasy as it made him, the patterning of her light, fiery energy entwined with the dark Power really was quite beautiful. The pattern flexed and breathed, a part of her living presence, flowing through her life. He had been worried that the darkness would taint the Power she had been born with, dull the bright strength that was so uniquely hers, but it didn’t appear to be doing that. In fact, it looked like the dark Power reinforced what had already been there.
How would it change her? Was he right? Was she actually becoming the Oracle in a way that none of the others that came before her had?
As he had told her, he was no healer, nor was he any expert on human physiology, but he still examined her body as carefully as he knew how, to see if the Power changes might be toxic to her in any way. She appeared perfectly healthy to him, her young body strong and filled with vitality.
Her cheeks were flushed with a soft rose. He noticed that her thick eyelashes were a rich, tawny mink, darker than her short, fine red-gold hair and eyebrows. Her hair would probably never lie down in a sleek cap, because she was always running her fingers through it. The rucked bedsheet was only partially tucked around her torso, exposing a generously rounded, pink-tipped breast.
He let his gaze trail along the graceful dip of her spine to where it disappeared under the cover, noting how the sheet followed the swell of her round, firm ass.
He remembered the taste of her desire, the feel of her delicate, stiff little clitoris against his tongue, the exquisitely curved petals of her labia, and how she sucked in those precious shocked breaths of hers as he ravished, sucked, licked her everywhere, everywhere, and the interplay of her physical pleasure with the vibrancy of pleasure in her spirit was so goddamn beautiful it was symphonic, ineffable. Then her remarkable spirit had opened wide as he had pushed into her welcoming body, and he had fallen into her so far he could not imagine how he would ever wish to come out again.
And he needed to know, needed to know, what it was like to take her, human skin to human skin, but he had squandered too much of his energy earlier on foolish, useless things, and he would not be able to fall deeper into flesh again until he had rested and fed.
He wanted to stroke her all over, but that would disturb her sleep, and she needed to rest. He held his hand a few inches over her head and imagined, remembered, what the silk of her hair felt like. Then he clenched his hand into a fist and struggled to tamp down the desire raging through him, because it was really quite extraordinary that she could sense that too, and i
f he didn’t control himself, he might wake her up that way as well. She was the most alive and sensitive creature he had ever met.
Even though he tried, she still sensed something. She stirred and murmured. Without fully waking up, she reached up to take his hand and pull his arm around her. He sank down, wrapping his body around her while surrounding her with his presence.
You destroyed me, she had said.
If that was true, she had destroyed him as well.
He was too old to have allowed just anybody to do so. He did not think he would have allowed her, except that those incredible, loving children had acted as a stealthy vanguard and stole their way into his heart. When he dropped his defenses and opened up to them, Grace somehow became the engine that drove his existence.
He buried his face in her flyaway cloud of hair.
I love you too.
Love.
Too.
He drifted, resting until the sun broke over the horizon. Then he began to absorb energy from it. He could get more nourishment faster if he shifted out into direct sunlight, but he felt too lazy and comfortable to move.
Grace shifted and sighed, and her presence came to alertness. At least somewhat. “I might have figured.”
Excellent. Now that she was awake, he let himself do what he had been wanting to do for hours and hours. He stroked down the curve of her back. “Might have figured what? I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“No,” she murmured. She rubbed her eyes. “With the kids gone, I thought I would be able to sleep past dawn for once, but I think they’ve got me trained too well.”
She felt so warm and soft. He pressed a kiss to the sleek curve of her shoulder blade. “Do you want to try to go back to sleep?”
She shook her head and reached behind to stroke his hair.
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