by Skyler Andra
When the third voice called me, I smiled, happy that Mads joined us, his eyes a mischievous brilliant green, carrying only my reflection.
In another life, I wouldn’t ever have thought about being in bed with three gorgeous men at all. I might have imagined it in my deepest fantasies, but those would be gone in the morning, leaving me with a desire that was somewhat sharpened with embarrassment and the question of who did I think I was?
Here, there was nothing but pleasure, and I took my time with it, kissing first one and then the others. There was something delicious in how we mingled, how I could smell Byron’s scent on Rane and Mads and vice versa. In very short order, I couldn’t tell one touch from another, one man’s mouth or hands from the other. It was perfect. It felt like something I had always wanted, something I had always needed.
I woke up from the dream with a jump. When my eyes snapped into focus, I was confronted with the reality Byron crouched beside the bed.
“Hi.” I smiled to see him, and I reached for him, kissing him fully on the mouth.
The pleasure I carried from the dream rose up between us, and I could tell that he felt it too. He needed this just as much as I did, and along with the pleasure, there was a profound relief in it as well. In some ways, it felt as if this were something that had been hanging over us, possibly from the first moment we’d met. Finally kissing him like this was something we were always meant to have been doing but never had.
“Locke,” he said breathlessly, pushing my hand aside.
“It’s okay,” I said, slipping my hands behind his neck, not wanting him to leave me again like he had last night.
For a moment where he surrendered to the kiss and returned it. The taste of him and the feel of him was at once familiar and foreign, breathtaking and like coming home. He kissed as if he wanted to give me something, and it was a present I was eager to unwrap.
“This was hardly what we sent you in for.” The cold voice cut through the tension of the moment like a blade, and I jerked up, looking around.
A man in a cold gray suit stood at the foot of Byron’s bed, and another two in the doorway, clasping guns.
“Byron, what the hell?” I asked. “Are you into orgies nowadays?”
“I’m so sorry, Locke,” he whispered, his eyes dark with fear.
I sat up, glaring at the men. My whole body stiffened. I didn’t need to ask the question. I already knew the answer. The prick had sold me out. Contacted the police or whatever authority, and they’d come to collect me.
Regardless, I asked it anyway. “Who the hell are you?”
The man did not reply. My only word for him was smooth. His white hair was practically laminated into place, and his clothes looked as if dirt and lint would be too afraid to cling to it. He was an older white guy of the kind you see on British programming, probably saying something distasteful about empire and power.
“Miss Casey, I presume.” He made my name sound like a slur.
Definitely sounded like one of the mysterious evacuation group men.
Immediately I shook my head. “Sorry, you have the wrong person. I’m…” I had to bite back any of the ridiculous pseudonyms I used for my job, but the man was already shaking his head.
“Do not insult us with attempts at trickery, Miss Casey,” he warned. “Not after we have spent so much time tracking you. You may be too important for us to damage, but Mr. Sevarin has no such value.”
His words turned my blood to ice in my veins.
I glanced at Byron. He stared at the floor. By the look of the guns and the way the white haired creep eyed me off as if I were his prize, Byron hadn’t sold me out. But how did the men find me? Had they traced my email to him?
Dammit. I was such a fool for dragging trouble to his doorstep.
“Except as a hostage?” I snarled, and for some twisted reason, that made the smooth creep smile. Some people looked friendlier when they smiled. He absolutely did not.
“So good to work with a woman who sees things as they are,” he said, giving me the cheetah about to catch a gazelle smile. “Very well. I will not feed you any pabulum about this being all for your own good. Instead, I will simply say that if you do not come with us, I and the men with me will make Mr. Sevarin very, very sorry.”
I squeeze my clammy hands into fists.
“And if I come with you, you’ll let him go?” I asked, ignoring Byron’s dark look. I didn’t need any heroes or any martyrs.
“No, not at all,” the man advised. “But he will remain unharmed as long as you are cooperative. It really is all in your hands.”
“Save it,” I snapped. “I will not hold myself responsible for the crap you do.”
“As you like. Come with us.”
Chapter 19
When a man who looks like a movie villain appears and threatens one of your best friends, you assume that he’ll whisk you away in a helicopter to some dark mountain lair. Instead, he herded Byron and me to a minivan that was waiting outside the house, guarded by serious looking men in dark suits. Each step had the knot in my stomach yanking tighter. So tight I could hardly move or breathe without pain.
“It’s a bit of a drive, so make yourselves comfortable,” said the white-haired man.
Why did he pretend to care for our comfort or wellbeing when he effectively kidnapped us?
Thankfully, he got into a dark car that followed along behind us, and I slumped into the seat at the far rear of the minivan, Byron beside me.
While the armed men had put away their weapons to escort us to the waiting vehicles, they sure as heck pulled them out again for the drive, warning us not to do anything funny. The mere sight of them had me gripping Byron’s hand tight.
“I can’t believe this,” I seethed, trying to make light of the situation, because that’s what I did when things turned to shit. “A minivan. We’re being kidnapped by the evil association of soccer dads.”
“My dad used to coach peewee sports; don’t underestimate the rage of a soccer dad,” Byron said with a slight smile.
Despite the whole threat looming over his head, I was glad he was here with me. At least that way I knew where he was. Not shot in the heart and left in his house for dead. Maybe, if I could figure out my powers, I could do something about getting us out of this mess.
Byron leaned in to whisper. “Are you really worried about how cool our kidnapping looks?”
“No, but it beats being worried about the rest of it,” I retorted.
“Well, stop worrying about it.”
“Because it’s going to be okay?”
“Oh no, I have no clue whether it’s going to be okay or not.” Byron put his arm around my shoulder to cradle me to his side. In that instant nothing else mattered. Except when the harsh reality smacked into me a moment later. “Stop worrying because it’s a waste of energy, and it’s not like we can do anything anyway.”
I leaned my head on his shoulder. “That’s kind of a weird way of making me feel better.”
He squeezed me tighter and smiled at me crookedly. “I do my best.”
“How’d they get to you anyway?” I asked him.
He glanced out the window. “Tracked your email, I guess. They were waiting for me in my office after a lecture. You can’t say no to guns.”
No shit.
Light streaming through the van’s darkened windows highlighted the bruise high on his cheek. I hadn’t noticed it earlier as he was on the opposite side to me, but once I did, I knew exactly where it had come from. Fire stormed through me. I was going to make those pricks pay for hitting Byron.
“Those sons of bitches!” I shouted, and one of the men in the front seat glanced over his shoulder.
I bit back my shock when Byron covered my mouth with his hand. He shook his head, and I gave him one of those let me at them looks.
When he spoke, his voice was so soft that someone sitting next to us couldn’t hear it.
“No, Locke. Don’t do anything. I can deal with a little b
ruise, especially if the payoff is us learning a little more about what’s going on with you.”
“You can’t be serious,” I hissed when he took his hand away. “They hurt you.”
Byron shrugged impatiently.
“Touch him again, and I’ll kill you,” I warned the two men up front.
One turned to me, aiming his gun at me, refusing to turn back to the front.
“Oh, I get it,” I said, unleashing my acid tongue. “Bully stuff, chest-thumping machismo, compare how big our dicks are. I had worse in eighth grade.”
I memorized this guy’s face, the bumpy, ugly quality to it. Like he’d been in one too many fights, and fists had rearranged his face, giving him a crooked nose, and battered quality to his cheeks. After the white haired creep, I reserved my vengeance for this guy, and whatever that might be, it wouldn’t be pretty.
“This will keep her quiet.” The driver turned on the radio and turned it up loud.
It also gave me a headache and my set my nerves on fire.
Byron squeezed my hand as if to interrupt me, distract me, and ease my temper by talking into my ear.
Damn him. He knew me too well. His calming influence was already working. When all I wanted to do was make squashed crab face feel pain like no other for threatening Byron and I.
“Keep your trump cards, if you’ve got any, close to your chest,” Byron said, and I stared into his haunted dark eyes. “We can learn more from them than they can learn from you if you don’t try anything right now. Right now, the real problem is that you don’t know what’s going on, right? This might be where we fix that.”
Squashed crab face squinted as if straining to hear what we were saying over the blaring speakers.
I kept my gaze glued to him as I replied to Byron. “We can’t just bargain away our safety to an organization that kidnaps people just because we want information!”
Byron’s fingers hooked on my chin, drawing me to face him. “Right now, I’m not seeing us as having a choice. With a plan like this, at least we can learn more about what’s happening, all right?”
For a moment, I wondered if Byron was just trying to keep me calm, but then I realized it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to do anything that might risk Byron until I knew what I was doing. I needed information. That hadn’t changed.
“All right,” I said with a sigh, and I leaned against him.
Apparently getting kidnapped took it out of you, because I found myself mentally and physically drained. I leaned harder into Byron, hatching out ways to get out of this mess. The rocking of the van made me feel sicker, knowing each mile took us closer to our death.
Cars, trees, houses and miles of road zoomed past, all of the scenery sending me into a daze.
An idea surfaced to try and call Mads again. See if I could reach out my mind to him instead of needing a phone. I sent out the call to him. Immediately my vision blanked out and I heard a voice calling out to me. Was it Mads? Groping in the darkness, I searched for him, finding a rocky surface in some dark place full of twists and turns. Instead of Mads, however, I found Rane, and he smiled at me.
“Where have you been?” he said, his face covered in shadow.
“Hiding,” I replied.
Why was he here? Where was Mads? Wasn’t he the one who tracked me down initially?
“Where’s Mads?” I asked. “Isn’t he the bloodhound?”
Rane didn’t answer, instead scolding me. “You shouldn’t have left.”
“No shit. They’ve got me.”
A snap of energy rippled across his face. Flames exploded in his palms. The darkness began to consume him, tearing him away from me.
“Where are you?” he asked, his voice hollow and distant.
“I don’t know.” My voice came out frightened and panicked. Not just because I was losing my connection to him, but because I didn’t know what the future held for Byron and I, and if Rane was going to be able to find me.
The last thing I heard before he vanished was, “I’ll burn every city to find you.”
***
Six hours later, we hit the Utah border, right as the sunset. We continued for another few hours, a desert landscape rising around us.
The supervillain who had captured us, whose name turned out to be Dartmoor, was as much a disappointment in the evil lair department as he was everywhere else. He took us to a compound that looked like a country club in the middle of the desert.
When he opened the van door, he told me, “There are rooms set aside for our purposes. Miss Casey, you and Mr. Sevarin are free to roam as you please, as long as you make it to my appointments.”
They was he said appointments made think I was trapped at rehab or something.
I stared at him the whole time he gave us the camp counselor spiel.
“So you’re just assuming we can’t leave whenever we like?” I asked.
He smiled at me with a paternalistic indulgence that made me grit my teeth.
“You are welcome to try, Miss Casey.” His voice held an edge of finality. “Right beyond the perimeter of this place is about a hundred miles of desert on all sides. During the day it gets to over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and at night, it drops down to twelve or so. With no access to food or water and no ability to shelter yourself, you will be dead in two days, long before you can make it to civilization.” He paused, his eyes going frigid.
Well, when he put it that way, it sounded dandy.
“Not that we would let you die,” he added. “No. We have mechanisms in place to track you down and pick you up, though perhaps we would let you burn yourself to a crisp first. Then we’ll see if Mr. Sevarin here will relish a walk back to the compound while we drag you home.”
Rage burned hot in my chest, as if I were becoming the god of war as well, and I wrestled with my temper for several moments. I had no doubt in my mind that Dartmoor would do it. He was just that kind of bastard, and even if Byron was weirdly laidback about any damage he might take, I certainly wasn’t.
Instead, I did as Byron suggested, trying to learn about the people who held me captive just as they learned about me. In general, they didn’t ask much of me. Most of the first day involved hanging out in our new quarters. The space they had given us was a small apartment that looked a lot like a fancy hotel room reminiscent of somewhere Mads might take me if we were still together. The place they were holding us had more than once felt like a resort of some kind, and at least that meant that the fridge was stocked with oddly high-end food.
After lunch, a woman, Dr. Victors, nice-looking woman who really didn’t look as if she worked for an evil agency, wearing a fresh white coat, took me to conduct a thorough physical. Some part of me was darkly amused that it was the most thorough health and wellness attention I had gotten since I’d left university and lost my insurance. Turns out I had a clean bill of health, and there was nothing to be found that marked me as very different from any other twenty-something woman. I did have to work on my blood pressure a bit, but given the fact that I had actually been kidnapped by some kind of evil agency, I was going to assume this was the cause of the spike, not my diet or lack of physical activity.
The second day, they stood me up in front of a panel of men who all more or less looked and dressed like Dartmoor in fine clothed suits and ties. They sat at a long, low table while I stood in front of them, feeling like a piece of meat on display.
Byron was back in the room that we both shared, and as much as I would have liked some company when facing the panel of evil, I was relieved to have him away from the pit of collateral damage that I was beginning to feel like.
“Feeling like a show pony up here,” I said to the panel, and Dartmoor pressed his fingertips together and splayed them.
“How you feel or do not feel is entirely immaterial at this point, Miss Casey,” he said. “What we are here to do today is to determine your abilities.”
“That’s easy,” I responded. “I don’t have any.”
“Yo
u do,” he said calmly. “You were gifted with the powers of the god Eros, white-winged and feared among the pantheon. You will tell us what you are capable of or your lover will suffer for it.”
My first thought, oddly enough, was that they could never hurt Rane, not even if they tried. Then I realized that they meant Byron, and I tensed up again.
“Look, I have exactly one skill, and that’s it,” I said. “It’s nothing that will help you take over the world or whatever the hell it is that you want to do.”
“Perhaps it is taking some time for Miss Casey to come into her powers,” one bird-nosed man muttered.
“Trauma might help her powers awaken,” another commented.
My heart launched into a rapid beat. I wanted to tell him to stuff it, because being kidnapped was traumatic enough to trigger a full-on poltergeist episode, let alone some kind of weird Cupid powers. But my tongue swelled making it difficult to reply.
Dartmoor looked unimpressed. “Then demonstrate what you have learned.”
My stomach turned to mush. Well, this wasn’t going to be awkward at all. They’d throw me into the desert for the vultures to peck at once they found out my neat party trick.
“Fine,” I said. “Have you got a condom?”
For the first time, Dartmoor’s expression turned from indifferent to confused and disgusted. It made him look more than a little ridiculous, and I was willing to take my victories where I found them these days.
“I…I do not,” he said, clearing his throat. “Do you need one for whatever thing you are going to do next?”
For what it was worth, I got a bit of kick out of seeing him disturbed. “Are you sure?”
“Quite.” Dartmoor pressed his hands against the desk so hard his knuckles whitened.
“I bet you do,” I pushed him. “Check your pocket.”