Текст книги "Shadowfever"

Автор книги: Karen Marie Moning

Соавторы: Karen Marie Moning,Karen Marie Moning
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 30 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

43

If I’d never eaten Unseelie, healing miraculously would have messed with my head.

As it was, I pretended I had eaten Unseelie. I couldn’t deal with the whole elixir-that-prolongs-life scenario. It made me want to kill Darroc all over again. Violently. Sadistically. With lots of torture.

He’d not only turned me Pri-ya, he’d planned for me to live that way eternally. I’d softened when I saw those pictures of him with Alina, imagining a different outcome for them, but now all softness vanished. If Barrons hadn’t saved me—I couldn’t even begin to imagine the horrors. I didn’t want to. I would have been pathologically insane in a very short time. What if he’d locked me away, refused to give me what I needed? Kept me somewhere small and dark and—

I shuddered.

“Stop thinking about it,” Barrons said.

I shivered. I couldn’t help it. There really were worse things than dying.

“It didn’t happen. I got you out and brought you back. It all worked out in the end. You’re tough to kill. I’m glad.”

I’d bled out, according to Barrons, several times. Too much of my throat had been torn away for my body to repair me quickly enough. While I’d been dead—or at least no longer breathing—my body had continued repairing itself. I’d regain consciousness, only to bleed out again. Eventually enough of me had been restored that I’d remained conscious for the rest of the process. I was covered with blood, crusted with it.

Barrons picks me up and is carrying me again. We pass through luxurious rooms, down stairs and more stairs, and I realize there are more than three levels beneath his garage. He has a whole world down here. I usually hate being underground. But this is different. There’s a sensation of expansiveness, of space not being quite what it seems. I suspect he has more Silvers in here, many ways in and out. It’s the ultimate survivalist fantasy. The world could be nuked, and life would go on down here, or we could pass through to some other world. With Barrons, I suspect, no catastrophe is ever final. He always goes on.

Now, so will I.

I don’t like that. I’ve been reprogrammed, changed in so many ways. This one is going to be the hardest to deal with. It makes me feel less human, and I was already feeling detached. Am I part of the Unseelie King, now nearly immortal? I wonder if this is a loop. Are we reborn over and over again, to repeat the same cycles?

“Would it be so bad?”

“Are you reading my mind?”

“You’re thinking with your eyes.” He smiles.

I touch his face, and the smile vanishes. “Do it again.”

“Don’t be a jackass.”

I laugh. But there’s no amusement left in his face. It was swiftly erased.

He looks at me with cold, hard eyes. I see what’s in them now. To the rest of the world, they might seem empty. I remember thinking a few times myself that they were void of all humanity, but that’s simply not true.

He feels. Rage. Pain. Lust. So much emotion, electric beneath his skin. So much volatility. Man and beast, always at war. I know now it’s never easy for him. The battle he fights is nonstop. How does this man go on every day?

He stops and lowers me to my feet. He moves through the shadows, turns on a gas fire, and begins to light candles.

We are in his bedroom. It’s like the Unseelie King’s lair: opulent, luxurious, with an enormous bed, draped in black silk, black furs. I can’t see past it. All I can see is myself there, naked with him.

I’m trembling.

I’m awed that I’m here. That he wants me.

He lights more candles near the bed. He picks up pillows and pushes them into a pile I remember from being Pri-ya.

In that long-ago basement, he mounded them beneath my hips. I sprawled over them with my head on the bed and my ass in the air. He would rub himself back and forth between my legs until I was begging, then push slowly into me from behind.

He places the last pillow on the pile, and looks at me. He jerks his head toward the pile of pillows.

“I watched you die. I need to fuck you, Mac.”

The words slam into me like bullets, taking my knees out. I lean back against a piece of furniture—an armoire, I think. I really don’t care. It holds me up. It wasn’t a request. It was acknowledgment of a requirement to make it from this moment to the next, like I need a transfusion, my blood has been poisoned.

“Do you want me to?” There is no purr, or coyness, or seduction in his voice. There is a question that needs an answer. Bare bones. That’s what he’s after. That’s what he offers.

“Yes.”

He strips his shirt over his head and I catch my breath, watching those long, hard muscles ripple. I know how his shoulders look, bunched, when he’s on top of me, how his face gets tight with lust, as he eases inside me. “Who am I?”

“Jericho.”

“Who are you?” He kicks off his boots, steps out of his pants. He’s commando tonight.

My breath whooshes out of me in a run-on word: “Whogivesafuck?”

“Finally.” The word is soft. The man is not.

“I need a shower.”

His eyes glitter, his teeth flash in the darkness. “A little blood never bothers me.” He glides toward me, in that way that barely displaces air. A velvet shadow in the darkness. He is the night. He always has been. I used to be a sunshine girl.

He circles me, looking me up and down.

I watch him, holding my breath. Jericho Barrons is walking naked circles around me, looking at me like he’s going to eat me alive—in a good way, not like his son. As I watch him, emotion staggers me and I realize that I never completely thawed from what I’d done to myself back there on the cliff, when I’d believed he was dead. I’d stripped away so much of me in order to survive. When I’d realized he was alive, there were so many other things going on and I was angry because he hadn’t told me, and I’d shoved the messy tangle away, refused to look at it. I’d walked through the past few months refusing to let any of what was happening really touch me. Refusing to accept the woman I’d become, denying that I’d even become it.

Now I thaw. Now I stand and look at him and realize why I never turned it all back on.

I would have destroyed the world for him.

And I couldn’t face that. Couldn’t stand what it said about me.

I want to slow this moment down. Once before, I ended up in bed with him inside me, but I was Pri-ya—it happened so quickly and without conscious choice that it was over before it began. I want this to happen in slow motion. I want to live every second like it’s my last. I’ve chosen this. It feels incredible. “Wait.”

His demeanor changes instantly, his eyes haze with crimson. “I haven’t waited long enough?” His chest rattles. His hands are at his sides, curling, flexing. He breathes hard and fast.

In the flickering light, his skin begins to darken.

I stare at him. Just like that, lust to fury. I think he might launch himself on me, take me down, shredding my clothes as we go, and shove inside me before we even hit the floor.

“I’d never take it.” His eyes narrow. Crimson stains the white, bleeds into them with tiny rivers. Suddenly his eyes are black on red, no whites at all. “But I won’t tell you I haven’t thought about it.”

I inhale deeply.

“You’re here. In my bedroom. You have no fucking idea what that does to me. If a woman comes to this place, she dies. If I don’t kill her, my men do.”

“Has a woman ever come to this place?”

“Once.”

“Did she find her own way in? Or did you bring her?”

“I brought her.”

“And?”

“I made love to her.”

I jerk, turning with him, staring into his eyes. That he says those words about another woman makes me feel like launching myself at him, tearing off my clothes, and slamming him home inside me before we reach the floor. Erasing her. He wants to fuck me. He made love to her.

He’s watching me closely. He seems to like what he sees.

“And?”

“When I was done I killed her.”

He says it without emotion, but I see more in his eyes. He hated himself for killing her. He believed he had no choice. He succumbed to a moment of wanting someone in his bed, in his home, in his world. He wanted to feel … normal for a night. And she paid for it with her life.

“I’m not the hero, Mac. Never have been. Never will be. Let us be perfectly clear: I’m not the antihero, either, so quit waiting to discover my hidden potential. There’s nothing to redeem me.”

I want him anyway.

It’s what he wanted to know.

I exhale impatiently and shove hair from my face. “Are you going to talk me to death or fuck me, Jericho Barrons?”

“Say it again. The last part.”

I do.

“They’ll try to kill you.”

“Good thing I’m hard to kill.” Only one thing concerned me. “Will you?”

“Never. I’m the one who will always watch over you. Always be there to fuck you back to your senses when you need it, the one who will never let you die.”

I pull my shirt over my head and kick off my shoes. “What more could a woman ask?” I skinny out of my jeans but get a foot tangled up trying to get out of my underwear. I stumble.

He’s on me before I hit the floor.

Since the moment I laid eyes on Jericho Barrons, I wanted him. I wanted him to do things to me that pink and clueless MacKayla Lane was shocked and appalled and … okay, yeah, well, utterly fascinated to find herself thinking about.

I admitted none of it to myself. How could a peacock lust for a lion?

I’d been as fancy as one of the proud males, in my useless plumage. I’d strutted around, stealing glances at the king of the jungle, denying what I felt. I’d assessed my tail and his killing claws and understood that if the lion were ever to lay down with the peacock—it would only be on a nest of bloody feathers.

It hadn’t stopped me from wanting him.

It made me grow claws.

As I fall to the floor beneath him, I think, here I am now: a featherless peacock with claws. My lovely tail lost, in one ordeal or the other. I look in the mirror and have no idea what I am. Don’t care. Perhaps I’ll grow a mane.

Relief floods me when his body slams into mine. Barrons moves like a sudden dark wind. He’s not only on me but pushing in me before we hit the floor.

Oh, God, yes, finally! My head slams back into wood but I barely feel it. My neck and back arch, my legs spread. My ankles are on his shoulders and I suffer no conflicts. There is only need and the answer to it all shoving inside me—sleek, hard, animal dressed up in the skin of a man.

I look up at him and he’s part beast. His face is mahogany, his fangs are out. His eyes are Barrons. The look in them isn’t. It makes me wild. I can be whatever I want to be with him. No inhibitions. I feel him growing harder, longer inside me.

“You can do that?” I gasp. The beast was bigger than the man.

He laughs, and it is definitely not a human sound.

I moan, I whimper, I writhe. It’s incredible. He’s filling me up, gliding deep and deliciously inside me where I’ve never felt a man before. Oh, God! I come. I explode. I hear someone roaring.

It’s me. I laugh and keep coming. I think I scream. I use my claws and he bucks in me, sudden and rapid. He makes that sound in the back of his throat I’m so crazy about. I love that sound.

I’d walk through hell and back, smiling, as long as he was beside me. As long as I could glance over at him and our eyes would meet and we’d share one of those wordless looks.

“You haven’t lost your feathers.” His words are strange, guttural, forced out around fangs.

I’d snort, but then his tongue is in my mouth, my jaws are wide, and I can’t breathe, and he’s right. One day you do meet a man who kisses you and you can’t breathe around it and you realize you don’t need air. Oxygen is trivial. Desire makes life happen. Makes it matter. Makes everything worth it. Desire is life. Hunger to see the next sunrise or sunset, to touch the one you love, to try again.

“Hell would be waking up and wanting nothing,” he agrees. He knows what I’m thinking. Always. We’re connected. The atoms between us ferry messages back and forth.

“Harder. Deeper. Come on, Barrons. More.” I feel violent. I am unbreakable. I am elastic around him. Insatiable. His hand is on the side of my neck, around my throat, half cupping my face. His eyes bore into mine. He watches every nuance, every detail of every expression, as if his existence depends on it. He fucks with the single-minded devotion of a dying man hunting God.

As he fills me, I wonder if—in the same way that sex makes its own unique perfume—we don’t really “make” love. As in create, manufacture, evoke an independent element in the air around us, and if enough of us did it really well, for real, not just for the hell of it, we could change the world. Because when he’s in me, I feel the space around us changing, charging, and it seems to set off some kind of feedback loop, where the more he touches me, the more I need him to. Having sex with Barrons sates my need. Then feeds it. Sates, then feeds. It’s a never-ending cycle. I get out of bed with him, frantic to be back in it again. And I—

“—hated you for it,” he says gently.

That was my line.

“I never get enough, Mac. Drives me bug-fuck. I should kill you for what you make me feel.”

I understand perfectly. He is my vulnerability. I would become Shiva, the world-eater, for him.

He withdraws and I nearly scream from the emptiness.

Then he’s lifting me into his arms and I’m on the bed, and he’s spreading me over the mound of pillows, nudging my legs wide, and when he pushes into me from behind, I sob with relief. I’m whole, I’m alive, I’m—

I close my eyes and ride the mindless bliss. It’s all I can do. Be. Feel. Live.

I’m Pri-ya again.

I always will be with this man.

Much later, I look up at him. He’s on top of me, barely inside me. I’m swollen, hot, and fiercely alive. My hands are over my head. He likes to tease, an inch, maybe two, until I’m crazy with need, then drive it home hard. It undoes me every time.

I know part of what turns me on so hard, makes me so violent with lust, is that he’s dangerous. I fell for the bad guy. I’m crazy about the one who’s trouble. The alpha that doesn’t play well with others and doesn’t take orders from anyone.

What else would I expect? It’s possible I’m part of the ancient creator of the Unseelie race.

He’s kissing me. V’lane’s name is long gone from my tongue. There’s only him, and he’s right: No other man would fit.

“Maybe there’s nothing wrong with you at all, Mac,” he says. “Maybe you’re exactly what you’re supposed to be, and the only reason you feel so conflicted about it is that you keep trying to bat for the wrong team.” He thrusts deep, rocks his hips forward with a muscle I’d be willing to bet no human man had.

I arch my back. “Are you saying you think I’m evil?”

“Evil isn’t a state of being. It’s a choice.”

“I don’t think—”

My mouth is suddenly busy. By the time I get around to finishing my sentence, I have no idea what I was going to say.

We end up in the shower, an enormous affair of Italian marble and shower heads on all walls. A dozen feet long, six feet wide, it has a bench that’s just the right height. I think we stay in there for days. He brings in food and I eat in the shower. I wash him, slide my hands over his beautiful body.

“When you die, do your tattoos disappear?” Wet, his hair is darker, glossy, his skin a deep bronze. Water runs over muscle, sprays off his erection. He’s always hard.

“Yes.”

“That’s why they were different.” I frown. “Do you come back exactly how you were when you died the first time?”

“Were you Pri-ya the entire time?”

I gasp and try to duck my head so he can’t see my eyes. My eyes betray me sometimes, no matter how hard I try, especially when my feelings are intense.

He grabs my head and holds it with two fistfuls of my hair, forcing me to look at him.

“I knew it—you weren’t!” His mouth is on mine, he has me against the wall. I can’t breathe and I don’t care. He is exultant. “How long?” he demands.

“What happens when you die?” I counter.

“I come back.”

“Duh, obviously. How? Where? Do you eventually just stand up from your ashes again or something?”

I hear a rattle and suddenly he’s on the floor, head back, muscles rippling, fighting to remain a man. He’s losing the battle. He has talons. Black fangs slide from his mouth, gouging into his skin. I can tell he doesn’t want to turn, but something I asked him has made him frenzied.

I can’t stand watching him struggle. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to help Barrons. I answer, talk to him to keep him grounded in the here and now. “I knew what was happening from the moment you asked me what I wore to the prom.” I drop to my knees beside him, take his head in my arms and cradle him at my breast. His face is half beast, half man. “I began to surface. It was like I was there but trying not to be there. I’m here, Jericho. Stay with me.”

Later we sleep. Or I do. I don’t know what he does. I’m exhausted and warm and feel safe for the first time in a long time, drifting off in Barrons’ underground world, next to the king of beasts.

I wake to him pushing into me from behind. We’ve had sex so many times, so many ways, I can barely move. I’ve come so many times I think it’s impossible for me to even want to come again, but then he’s inside me and my body tells a different story. I need so badly I ache. I slip my hand down and, as soon as I touch myself, I come. He shoves into me deep, rocking into my climax. I’m on my side. He’s tucked me into his body, spooned close. His arms are around me, his lips on my neck. Teeth graze my skin. When I stop shuddering, he pulls out and immediately I want him again. I push back with my rump and he’s back. He goes slow, so slow it’s torture. He thrusts, I clench. He withdraws, I lay tense, waiting. Neither of us says a word. I barely breathe. He stops and stays perfectly still for a while but not to tease. He likes being hard inside me. Connected, we lie there in silence. I don’t want the moment to end.

But it does, and when we’re separate, we don’t speak for a long time. I watch the shadows flickering on a famous painting on the wall. He’s not asleep. I can feel him back there, aware.

“Do you ever sleep?”

“No.”

“That must be hell.” I love sleeping. Curling up, napping, dreaming. I need to dream.

“I dream,” he says coolly.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Never pity me, Ms. Lane. I like what I am.”

I roll over in his arms, touch his face. I let myself be tender. Trace his features, slide my fingers into his hair. He seems both put off and entranced by the way I’m touching him. I rearrange my head to accommodate the advantages of never sleeping. There are a lot. “How do you dream if you don’t sleep?”

“I drift. Humans need to shut down to let go. Meditation accomplishes the same thing, lets the subconscious play. That’s all you need.”

“What happened to your son?”

“Aren’t you question girl?” he mocks.

“He’s why you want the Sinsar Dubh.”

I feel the sudden violence in his body. It gusts like a sirocco, and just like that I’m inside his head and we’re in a desert and I wonder with a strange sense of duality in which I am him and I am me why it always seems to come back to this place for him. Then …

I’m Barrons, and I’m on my knees in the sand.

The wind is kicking up; the storm comes.

I was stupid, so stupid.

Death for hire. I laughed. I drank. I fucked. Nothing mattered. I swaggered through life, a god. Grown men screamed when they saw me coming.

I was born today. I opened my eyes for the first time.

It all looks so different now that it’s too late. What a grand fucking joke on me. I should never have come here. This is one battle-for-hire I should never have taken.

I hold my son and I weep.

The sky opens, letting the storm free. Sand comes, so thick it turns day into night.

One by one, my men fall around me.

I curse the heavens as I die. They curse me back.

There is black. Only black. I wait for the light. The Old Ones say there is light when you die. They say to run for it. If it goes away, you drift the earth forever.

No light comes to me.

I wait all night in the dark.

I’m dead yet I can feel the desert beneath my corpse, the abrasion of sand on my skin, up my nostrils. Scorpions sting my hands, my feet. Open, dead eyes crusted with sand watch the night sky as the stars pop and vanish, one by one. The darkness is absolute. I wait and wonder. The light will come. I wait, I wait.

The only light that comes for me is dawn.

I stand up, and my men stand up and we stare uneasily at one another.

Then my son stands up and I don’t care. I spare no thought for the strange night that shouldn’t have been. The universe is a mystery. The gods are fickle. I am and he is and that is enough. I toss him on my horse and leave my men behind.

“My son was killed two days later.”

I open my eyes, blinking. I can still taste sand, feel the grit in my eyes. Scorpions crawl at my feet.

“It was an accident. His body disappeared before we could bury it.”

“I don’t understand. Did you die in the desert or not? Did he?”

“We died. It was only later that I pieced it together. Things rarely make sense while they’re unfolding. After my son died the second time, he died many more times, simply trying to get back to me and come home. He was deep in the desert without conveyance or water.”

I stare. “What are you saying? That every time he died, he came back in the same place he’d died that first time with you?”

“At dawn the next day.”

“Over and over? He would try to make it out, die of heatstroke or something, then have to start all over again?”

“Far from home. We didn’t know. None of us died for a long time. We knew we were different, but we didn’t know about the dying. That came later.”

I watch him and wait for him to speak again. This is the crux of Barrons. I want to know. I won’t push.

“That wasn’t the end of his hell. I had rivals who rode the desert, too. Death for hire. Many were the times we’d thinned each other’s pack. One day, they found him walking the sands. They played with him.” He looks away. “They tortured and killed him.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because when I finally put things together, I tortured and killed a few of them and they talked while they died.” His lips smile; his eyes are cold, merciless. “They set up camp not too far from where he was reborn every dawn and found him the next day. Once they realized what was happening, they believed he was demon spawn. They tortured and killed him over and over. The more he came back, the more determined they were to destroy him. I don’t know how many times they killed him. Too many. They never let him live long enough to change. They didn’t know what he was, nor did he. Just that he kept coming back. One day another band attacked, and they didn’t have time to kill him. He was left alone, tied up in a tent for days. He got hungry enough that he turned. He never turned back. It was a year before we were hired to hunt the beast that was scouring the country, ripping out the throats and hearts of men.”

I was horrified. “They killed him every day for a year? And you were hired to kill him?”

“We knew it was one of us. We’d all changed. We knew what we’d become. It had to be him. I hoped.” His mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “I actually hoped it was my son.” There was naked hunger in his eyes. “How long was he a child tonight? How long did you see him before he attacked you?”

“A few minutes.”

“I haven’t seen him like that in centuries.” I could see him remembering the last time. “They broke him. He can’t control his change. I’ve seen him as my son only five times, as if for a few moments he knew peace.”

“You can’t reach him? Teach him?” Barrons could teach anyone.

“Part of his mind is gone. He was too young. Too frightened. They destroyed him. A man might have withstood it. A child had no chance. I used to sit by his cage and talk to him. When technology afforded, I recorded every moment, to catch a glimpse of him as my son. The cameras are off now. I couldn’t watch the recordings, looking for him. I have to keep him caged. If the world ever found him, they would kill him, too. Over and over. He’s feral. He kills. That’s all he does.”

“You feed him.”

“He suffers if I don’t. Fed, sometimes he rests. I’ve killed him. I’ve tried drugs. I learned sorcery. Druidry. I thought Voice might make him sleep, even die. It seemed to hypnotize him for a time. He’s highly adaptable. The ultimate killing machine. I studied. I collected relics of power. I drove your spear through his heart two thousand years ago, when I first heard of it. I forced a Fae princess to do her best. Nothing works. He’s not in there. Or if he is somewhere, he is in constant, eternal agony. It never ends for him. His faith in me was misplaced. I can never—”

Save him, he doesn’t say, and I don’t, either, because if I’m not careful I’m going to start crying, and I know it would only make things worse for him. He’s thousands of years past tears. He just wants release. Wants to lay his son to rest. Tuck him in and say good night forever, one last time.

“You want to unmake him.”

“Yes.”

“How long has this been going on?”

He says nothing.

He will never tell me. And I realize a number doesn’t really matter. The grief he felt in the desert has never abated. I understand now why they would kill me. It’s not just his secret. It’s theirs, too. “All of you return to the place you first died every time you die.”

He is instantly violent. I understand.

They kill to keep anyone from doing to them what was done to his son. It is their only vulnerability: wherever they come back at dawn the next day. An enemy could sit there, waiting for them, and kill them over and over again.

“I don’t want to know where that is. Ever,” I assure him, and mean it. “Jericho, we’ll get the Book. We’ll find a spell of unmaking. I promise. We’ll put your son to rest.” I feel suddenly vicious. Who had done this to them? Why? “I swear it,” I vow. “One way or another, we’ll make it happen.”

He nods, folds his arms behind his head, stretches back on a pillow, and closes his eyes.

As the moments pass, I watch the tension leave his face. I know he’s in that place where he meditates, where he controls things. What extraordinary discipline.

How many thousands of years has he been taking care of his son, feeding him, trying to kill him and ease his agony, if only for a few moments?

I’m back in the desert again, not because he takes me there but because I can’t get the look on his son’s face out of my head.

His eyes say, I know you will make the pain stop.

Barrons has never been able to. It never ended. For either of them.

The child, whose death destroyed him, has destroyed him every single day since. By living.

Dying, Barrons said, is easy. The man who dies escapes, plain and simple.

I’m suddenly glad Alina is dead. If the light comes for anyone, it came for her. She rests somewhere.

But not his son. And not this man.

I press my cheek to his chest, to listen to his heart beating.

And for the first time since I met him, I realize it isn’t. Have I never heard his blood rush before? His heart pound? How could I not have noticed?

I look up at him to find him staring down his chest at me, an unfathomable expression in his eyes. “I haven’t eaten lately.”

“And your heart stops beating?”

“It becomes painful. Eventually I would change.”

“What do you eat?” I say carefully.

“None of your fucking business,” he says gently.

I nod. I can live with that.

* * *

He moves differently down here. He doesn’t try to conceal anything. Here, he is himself and moves in that way that seems one with the universe, smooth as silk, flowing noiselessly from room to room. If I forget to pay attention to where he is, I misplace him. I discover he’s leaning against a column—when I’d thought he was the column—arms folded, watching me.

I explore his underground lair. I don’t how long he’s lived, but it’s clear he has always lived well. He was a mercenary once, in another time, another place, who knows how long ago. He liked fine things then, and his taste hasn’t changed.

I find his kitchen. It’s a gourmet chef’s dream—stainless-steel top-of-the-line everything. Lots of marble and beautiful cabinets. Sub-Zero fridge and freezer well stocked. Wine cellar to die for. As I devour a plate of bread and cheese, I imagine him here all those nights when I trudged up to my fourth– or fifth-floor bedroom and slept alone. Did he pace these floors, cook himself dinner, or maybe eat it raw, practice dark arts, tattoo himself, go for a drive in one of his many cars? He was so close all that time. Down here, naked on silk sheets. It would have driven me crazy if I’d known then what I know now.

He peels a mango while I wonder how he managed to get his hands on fruit in post-wall Dublin. It’s so ripe it drips down his fingers, his arms. I lick the juice from his hands. I push him back and eat the pulp off his stomach, lower, then end up with my bare ass on the cool marble of the island and him inside me again, my legs locked around his hips. He stares down at me, as if he’s memorizing my face, watches me like he can’t quite believe I’m here.

I sit on the island while he makes me an omelet. I’m ravenous, body and soul. Burning off more calories than I can eat.

He cooks naked. I admire his back and shoulders, his legs. “I found the second prophecy,” I tell him.

He laughs. “Why does it always take you so long to tell me the important things?”

“You should talk,” I say drily.

He slides the plate in front of me and hands me a fork. “Eat.”

When I finish, I say, “You have the amulet, don’t you?”

He catches his tongue in his teeth briefly and gives me a full-on smile. It says: I’m the biggest baddest fuck and I have all the toys.

We go back to his bedroom and I get the page from Mad Morry’s notebook and the tarot card from my pocket.

He looks at the card. “Where did you say you got this?”

“Chester’s. The dreamy-eyed guy gave it to me.”

“Who?”

“The good-looking college-age guy that bartends.”

His head moves funny, like a snake drawing back to strike. “How good-looking?”

I look at him. His gaze is cool. If you want that kind of life, get the fuck out of my house now, his eyes say.

“Nothing like you, Barrons.”

He relaxes. “So, who is he? Have I ever seen him?”

I tell him when and where and describe him, and he looks puzzled. “I’ve never seen the kid. I saw an elderly man with a heavy Irish accent pouring drinks a few times when I came to get you, but no one like you’re describing.”