When I came out, Levi’s face was pinched, his shoulders rounded forward. His eyes were still closed.
“When is this going to wear off?”
At the sound of my voice, he jerked up, affecting a “relaxed” position as if nothing was wrong. Other than him looking past my ear instead of into my eyes.
“I’m fine,” he said tersely. “I need rest and food and there’s both at the cabin.”
He didn’t want me to see him weakened? Well, I didn’t want to feel like his condition was my fault and that I should have seen past his insistence he could hang on a bit longer and got him out of there.
I sat down, stretching out my fingers and toes. My muscles had unwound from burning and seized up to a full-body twisty throb, kind of like an everywhere stomachache. You wouldn’t be so miserable if you’d taken the magic like you were meant to.
Sure, evil voice. Welcome to the party. Slowly, I fought my way out of this unquenchable need. The cravings and cramps subsided, but no matter how hard I tried to stuff my lingering horror over what I could do into a padlocked box, it squished out in a toxic darkness, its form eerily reminiscent of a smudge.
Levi still wasn’t looking so hot.
“Why did you let me search the place?” I said. “If we’d gotten out of there sooner–”
“Had we left, we wouldn’t now have the briefcase and one more smudge to destroy.”
We wouldn’t have found out what I could do.
The taxi pulled in. Levi raised his head in its general direction, but didn’t move.
“Come on, babe.” I wrapped my arms around him like the clingiest of girlfriends, and bundled him into the back seat.
His body was rigid beneath my hold, but his eyes remained scarily dead, so he allowed himself to be guided.
The cab driver put our luggage in the trunk. Levi gave him the name of the place and we were off. It really was one property over. The entire ride lasted about two minutes.
Even now, in the middle of the night, the sky was varying shades of gray rubbed down to a black horizon. A thin frothing line of white danced along the shore, the ever-present roar of the Pacific mirroring the scream stuck in my throat. The landscape was wild and raw and beautifully savage, every pristine lungful of air crisp with underlying notes of cedar and pine, but it was marred by shadows.
Once the cab was gone, Levi directed me to a small row of cabins in front of a larger condo building. Each cabin was isolated from its neighbors by a thick row of trees. His instructions were so precise that even blind, I’d bet he could describe them down to the last detail from memory.
I saved the luggage for the second trip, taking Levi and the briefcase to our corner cabin first. Between his tentative stride and my post-craving exhaustion, every step was a fight to hang on to him.
“I’ve got you,” I said.
“Why don’t you worry a bit more about yourself?” he snapped.
His anger and resentment flailed my raw nerves. I dropped my hold and walked back to the luggage, leaving him there. By the time I’d returned, he’d barely made any progress, his arms outstretched before him.
“Your current trajectory should land you in the ocean and out of my hair soon enough.”
He dropped his arms. “Can you help me inside?”
My hands were full of bags, so I had him hang on to the back of my jacket and we lurched our way to the cabin.
The inside was small and cozy with red cedar window frames and ceiling beams. A dining table was all that separated the kitchen with its white appliances and butcherblock countertops from the living room, with a sofa and two chairs grouped around a fireplace with a flat screen TV mounted above it. There were two bedrooms with a bathroom in between.
I dropped the bags and led Levi to the sofa.
He collapsed onto it, slumped miserably in one corner.
“Can I get you something to eat?”
He shook his head, so I flicked on the switch for the fireplace, desperate for its warmth to unthaw me. My skin was dotted in goosebumps and an all-around malaise was soaked deep into my bones.
Levi sat on one side, I stood on the other defrosting, and between us was this giant white elephant of what he’d seen me do. Part of me selfishly hoped his blindness would last until we parted ways so I wouldn’t see his disgust again.
The feeling finally returned to my extremities, and since it was better to be useful than sit here brooding, I picked the briefcase lock.
“The only things inside are the vial with the smudge and a thumb drive.” I gently tapped the vial, and the smudge burbled and flowed like a tiny lava lamp. “It’s really a third-party smudge if we’re going to be technical. You know, already torn away and out there floating free, versus magic that’s inherently part of a person but has not yet been torn out, like what happened with Birthmark…” My voice was getting high and pitchy. “Fuck.” I shoved the vial back into the padded foam encasing it in the briefcase.
Stay professional. I steadied myself and examined the thumb drive but there weren’t any markings.
“Ash?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.” Levi looked at me with a clear gaze.
“You’re welcome. All better?”
“Yes.” He paused. “Your bedside manner is shit.”
“You suck as a patient.” Our dynamic returned to its regularly scheduled programming.
He stood up to rummage around in the kitchen but his movements were clumsy. “Are you hungry?”
I shook my head. “I might take a…” I squinted out through the balcony sliding doors facing the beach. “Is that a hot tub?”
“Yeah.” He removed a loaf of bread and some peanut butter from the fridge.
“Is it on?” I crossed my fingers.
“Should be.”
I shucked off my boots and jeans and stripped off my sweater, leaving me in my sweaty T-shirt, bra, and boy shorts, then I shuffled outside, hopping from one foot to the other with a little yelp at the cold. I pulled off the cover and the hot tub hummed to life, bubbles floating to the surface.
Inching my way into the water, I rested my feet on the molded plastic seat next to mine and tucked my knees in to my chest. Hot tubs were the one luxury I’d kill to have on a regular basis. Baths weren’t hot enough or deep enough to let me soak the way I wanted.
Nefesh had been stripped of their magic for this bullshit cash grab by persons unknown and they’d used individuals with powers like mine to further their aims. I sent up silent thanks that I hadn’t completed the process with Birthmark Man and he still had his magic.
I turned my newfound understanding of smudges and my abilities around and around in my brain until the knowledge was, if not comfortable, then processed. If all my powers were unlocked and accessible now, who was driving this train? Was it some predator/hunter instinct of mine or was it me? Ultimately, how much control did I have over it?
Priya had been kidding about me being an A.I., but I didn’t want to be a vessel, a machine, or a predatory virus. Or, worst of all, some magic-addled junkie ripping away people’s powers for some reason hard-wired into me. I wanted to be Ashira Cohen with free will.
There was a gentle splash and Levi settled himself in the seat across from me. My first glance was to assure myself that though he looked tired, his color had returned and his movements were no longer lethargic. My second took in his soccer player’s build: leanly muscled, with beautiful broad shoulders, and a light dusting of hair on his bare olive skin.
Were his legs–? Nope. Not looking.
Okay, maybe looking, but I couldn’t see anything under the water. I sighed and stretched out. This exquisite heat was soothing me body and soul. Body, anyway.
“Make yourself at home,” he said wryly.
“Too late. I’m never leaving. Expense it to the House.” I pushed away the floating chlorine dispenser.
The weight of all the things no one wanted to discuss pressed down on us.
“How did you fin
d this place?” I said.
“We’re investing in some environmental tech with a company based in Tofino. Seemed prudent to have a place here.”
“Oh.”
We listened to the lapping waves, breathing in the faint tangs of chlorine and salt spray and my muscles unlocked.
“You dropped your glamour,” I said, trying for a safe entry point into a debrief and realizing that after that shitshow there wasn’t one. “When you saw me… when you saw.”
“I know. Not yours though. And I don’t think that guy noticed.”
“No, he was a bit preoccupied,” I said.
“If he did?” Levi shrugged. “We’ll deal with it should the time come.”
I pulled my eyes away from his chest to stare up at the stars that never shone this brightly in Vancouver. “For the record, I don’t think you’re a monster.” I paused. “That’s where you say, ‘I don’t think you’re a monster either, Ash.’”
Please say it.
“I think the two of us are more alike than I even imagined,” he said.
I shifted on to one of the raised seats, the breeze rapidly cooling my heated skin. Not that Levi’s opinion mattered, but this person who thought so little of me could at least draw the line somewhere, because saying I was a monster like him was awful.
Birthmark Man had looked shattered from that ant illusion. I hadn’t known I could create smudges, but Levi had honed his monster self into a mighty weapon.
Or perhaps I wanted someone to say I was okay. That having this particular ability didn’t automatically make me a horrible person and that there had to be some good reason for it.
I massaged my foot. “Jeez, Levi, that’s depressing.”
“Isn’t it just?”
Well, fuck you too.
“For better or worse, we have to work together until these third-party smudges are destroyed,” I said. “So we better find a way to peacefully co-exist, even though we’re nothing alike. We’re oil and water.”
His gaze was too penetrating. “No, we’re not. We’ve reminded each other of ourselves from the first day we met, and the reflection is a little too close for comfort.”
We could argue this all night, he wouldn’t see the truth.
“There are more out there like me.” I shifted sideways, resting a hip against one of the massage jets.
“I figured. Did you know you could do that?”
“That I could create smudges? You got me,” I said frostily. “I’m the one running around town doing this. I’m also working with Mr. Sharp and his people.”
“Here’s a wild idea. Try and see this from my perspective. Nothing about your magic fits the rules. I don’t subscribe to this hairbrained theory about recessive genes turning on.”
“It’s a perfectly good theory, but how did you hear about it?” I jammed my thumb into the arch of my foot to get at an achy spot.
“Assume I know everything that goes on in my House. Obviously, you didn’t create the smudges that are out there, but I’m still waiting for a plausible explanation about when your magic first showed up.”
“Me too, but right now that gene theory is the only thing I’ve got, so stop making me feel like a criminal. You’re having trouble with all this? Try living it. Fuck.” I’d taken my anger out on my poor foot and squeezed my little toe too hard.
“Apology massage?” Levi said after a couple of moments.
I held out my foot. “Tickle me and I’ll puke on you.”
“Noted.” He massaged my arch with strong fingers and the charged air de-escalated into a wary truce.
How much truth did I owe him about my magic? It was so much easier to see things clearly when it wasn’t my truth at stake.
“I swear I didn’t know about the smudges. But being able to take magic?” I exhaled. “Sharing. Not a thing I do much of.”
“Another thing we have in common,” he said.
I swear if he said that one more time I was gonna kick him in the nads.
“I suspected I could do it the night we trained,” I said.
“Hence the freak out.”
Not the only freak out anymore or even the worst one, but I wasn’t ready to tell Levi how good taking Birthmark Man’s magic had felt. Now that the cramps and distress had faded, I was kind of hoping that I’d overblown the entire thing.
He pressed some magic spot on my foot and I moaned.
“Foot massages. You’ve finally revealed your weak spot.” He mimed twirling a mustache. “I’ve waited years for this.”
I snorted. “You’d have to catch me to use it against me.”
“I could catch you.” His voice was low and his stroking fingers sent delicious shivers inside me.
I made a dismissive noise. And pressed my thighs together. “That’s a terrible line. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
He raised a brow imperiously. “I am Levi Montefiore. I do not require lines. Women fall at my feet.”
“More like your ego sucks up so much oxygen that they pass out.”
“Can’t let me have one win, can you?”
“We have a working pattern. Why break it?” I gnawed on my bottom lip. “I can’t stop thinking about Meryem. What they might be doing to her. Hopefully that thumb drive will have answers.”
“We’ll see, but in the meantime, there are more of those vials out there and they can’t be allowed to exist. Multiple smudges wreaking havoc? It’ll be catastrophic.” He released my foot.
“That drive is our only lead right now to finding the kids, the vials, and whoever is behind this. You have any other ideas?”
“No.” He sank under the water for long enough that I kicked him to resurface. He slid up, water streaming over his pecs, and flicked his hair out of his eyes with a surety of movement, the moonlight catching on the tiny silver scar where I’d stabbed him with the fork over the doughnut. The one chink in his projection of strength.
I swallowed, oddly mesmerized by those elegant fingers and the play of muscle against the one long vein on his tanned forearm when he dropped his hand.
“Do you get manicures?” I blurted out.
His WTF look was answer enough.
“Why illusion magic?” I said, grasping at a change of topic. “I always thought it was because you’re such a control freak that you had to bend the world to your will, but it doesn’t fit my idea of you that you’d think it’s monstrous.”
“I’m not your puzzle to solve.”
“Sweet summer child, everyone is my puzzle to solve. Besides you’re the one who raised the whole onster-may thing.”
Levi caught hold of my other foot. The one on my injured leg. I tensed for a second before sitting back and motioning for him to continue. Foot massages in hot tubs were the life goal I didn’t know I’d been missing. “Drop it, Ash.”
“Come on. You know all about my fucked-up life.”
He massaged my toes and I tried not to squirm.
Levi regarded me steadily. “Actually, I don’t. Your dad took off. Sucks but you kind of went over the top with the whole car thing, don’t you think?”
I winced. “You don’t pull punches, do you?”
Gawd, he really was Watson.
“Not with you. So?”
Pulling my foot away, I closed my eyes and sank up to my chin. I wasn’t handing Levi my issues on a silver platter.
“Your dad was a Charmer. Did he have you charmed or something and that’s why you went apeshit when he left?”
My eyes snapped open. “No. God. You knew about my dad’s magic? How big is that file on me?”
“My father has no magic and it eats him up.” Levi sounded downright smug about that fact. “He’s also shady as shit, and had to subcontract certain jobs over his illustrious career in data security to people with the innate ability to charm others into business deals that benefited my father.” He smiled tightly at me.
I sat up straight. “You’re kidding.”
“Would that I were.”
“
My dad worked for yours? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Adam was gone by the time we met and I didn’t even know until several years ago. What was the point?”
“The...?” I stood up. “Fuck.”
“Sit down.”
I stared stubbornly out to sea.
“Ashira.”
“Dad taught me there were two kinds of people in this world, cons and marks. And marks were the worst thing you could possibly be. I had that pounded into my head. But when he left us without a word, that’s what I was. A stupid mark, because I’d believed him when he…” My voice cracked. “When he called me his little jewel and said how much he loved me. So sue me, I went a little apeshit.” I did the quotes. “I swore that no one was ever going to play me again. Except then I found out that someone had tattooed a ward on my head and suppressed magic that hey, happens to be monstrous, and I’m realizing I’ve been played so many ways that I don’t even know what the game is. Or if you’re part of it.” I stared at him dead-on.
“I’m not.” His expression iced over, his lips flattened in a severe line and his eyes deepened to the flinty blue of the coldest winter’s night.
“Whatever. Now you know. Mazel tov. All your worst opinions of me are confirmed.”
I tried to climb out of the hot tub but Levi grabbed my arm. “What the hell are you talking about? I don’t think badly of you.”
I jerked away. “You think I’m lying about my magic.”
“No, I don’t understand why your magic wasn’t present at birth, but I don’t think you’re lying. Anymore,” he amended.
“And that I go around doing whatever I want.”
“You do.” At my snort, he held up a hand. “If I’m being honest, I admire that about you. Hell, I wish I could live that way. You’re doing exactly what you want to, despite all the obstacles you had to overcome: being female, being Mundane. You’re smart, you’re tough, and you have no hesitation dishing shit out to me constantly. You know how rare that is? With very few exceptions, everyone either wants to kiss my ass or knock it down a peg.”
Gaping, I sat down so hard in the seat beside him that I slipped sideways, splashing water into Levi’s face. I grabbed his shoulders for balance, then frowned.
Blood & Ash: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Detective Series (The Jezebel Files Book 1) Page 16