He looked at her without a suggestion of amusement. “It can be anything we want to make it.”
Willow walked on, slowly.
“It’s on St. Peter Street,” Ben said. “Near Dauphine. Why don’t you know that?”
“Sykes never volunteered the information. Things were strained when he found the studio and started spending a lot of time there, so I never asked. We’re going the wrong way.” She swallowed.
“Yes,” Ben said, turning her around. “So we are.” He didn’t keep the pleasure out of his voice.
He wanted her to himself tonight—but then, he’d wanted that for a long time. What hadn’t changed was Willow’s own uncertainty about whether they could be happy together for very long.
“I’m going to call Nat first thing and find out if Blades came to any conclusions about Chloe Brandt’s wounds. And the cause of death.”
“Yes.” She wanted to know, but wished she didn’t have to think about it constantly.
Even passing drunks were subdued. A man sat on the curb with his feet in the gutter, a bottle hanging between his knees. Stillness blanketed the Quarter, still heat. A storm could be brewing.
“We’ve got the same issues between us, Ben,” Willow said.
“I wish you’d let me in on exactly what they are. It’s time we didn’t have any issues at all. I’m thinking of getting us both away from here. Start over somewhere. White picket fence, a couple of kids—”
“Don’t joke.”
“Who’s joking? I want to see if you like Kauai, too. My house is on the beach at the most secluded spot in an amazing bay. If I see someone nearby, it’s an event.”
He turned her left on Dauphine.
“How long would it take you to get bored?” Willow said.
“Go there with me and ask that.”
“Maybe I will one day.” She glanced up at the side of his face, all angles in the shadows, his hair shining black and tied at the nape. She couldn’t imagine a woman who would get bored being with him in a secluded Hawaiian cove.
Power moved with Benedict Fortune, and grace, but most of all, mysticism.
“You’re coming into your own fast,” he said as if he heard what she thought.
That wasn’t beyond possibility. Willow frowned.
Out of the stillness came a current of air. Strong, direct, aimed where it tossed Willow’s hair aside. She looked at Ben again, but he hadn’t noticed. She took a deep, calming breath and carried on walking without so much as a check in her pace.
This time the uninvited visitor slithered over her skin with a dozen soft caresses.
Willow jolted the length of her body, so hard she ached.
“What?” Ben swung her toward him. “What is it?”
She couldn’t speak, only point, at her cheek, her neck—and then low on her stomach.
Ben gathered his forces. Turning all of his energy into his core, he became rigid. A deeper glance around showed him there were fewer of the undead abroad at this time of night—they preferred the perceived challenge of moving among their counterparts in the daylight. Those he saw skimmed along, not quite touching the ground, their eyes fixed on nothing he could see.
There it was, and this time clearer. A winged creature, he thought, and playing some kind of game with him, popping out from behind Willow as if to peer at him, only to dart back.
“Nothing to worry about,” he told Willow. He couldn’t worry about whether his voice sounded even remotely normal. Keeping her distracted was the aim. Being her strength where she had little was his chosen responsibility.
Her eyes grew larger and she winced, rubbed the middle of her back. This creature wasn’t keeping its attention on her neck anymore.
Mario growled and squirmed in her arms. He wriggled until she set him down. Ben saw Willow’s dress shift over her thigh and rage twisted at him. She was helpless to stop this sly molestation.
Mario surprised him by closing his teeth on one of Ben’s pant legs. He pulled him away a few feet and closer to a boarded-up shop front with a sagging, padlocked gate across the doorway.
Ben walked back to Willow, but the shadowy creature soared straight up from behind her, then swooped. It’s absolute lack of sound unnerved Ben.
“You okay?” he asked Willow.
She said “no” so quietly he barely heard her.
“Be very still,” he told her. “You’re okay.”
The thing zipped toward the padlocked gate. It was fast, but not as fast as Ben. All of his vitality sheathed his center. He shifted, dived sideways and over the gates. He must not take a nanosecond too long.
The last thing he expected was to find himself inside an abandoned shop. The actual front doors were gone and wooden crates had been piled, waist-high, across the entrance. Already he had decided what he must do, and tonight. Going forward, he would have at least one advantage against this will-o’-the-wisp with tiny glittering fangs. It would carry his mark.
The opposition zipped over the crates and Ben followed.
The attack came without warning.
This time there was a noise, a high-pitched sound like a sonic dental drill. Ben threw his hands in front of his face and launched himself through the air, changing direction instant by instant. He focused, using the third eye he reserved for extreme danger. The effect mimicked military night goggles, and he saw a shape move, black with a green outline, diving at him. Only his speed could save him from the thing’s bite, and he didn’t doubt that with it, bite to kill was the order of the night.
With absolute clarity he understood how inconvenient he was, how important his removal must be to this creature and whoever was behind it. He was certain it didn’t act alone.
They wanted Willow.
Ben slammed into a wall covered with empty glass shelves and they shattered. His enhanced sight saw the shards explode, rise like a space shower against a darkened universe and scatter, in slow motion. He held a hand in front of his eyes. Pricks, like delving ice spicules, peppered the side of his face and one arm. He felt fine trickles of warm blood on his skin.
The high buzz screeched from behind him in the stuffy space. Ben whirled, both forearms crossed in front of his face. Eyes, all light but white, colorless, zeroed in on him and shot forward so fast Ben barely resisted blinking. He couldn’t afford to blink—any more than he could afford to die with Willow a few yards away and completely vulnerable without him.
As the creature would have collided with him, Ben pitched a scant few inches to the left, and it passed him by. The whining grew louder and now he recognized an angry note. Rage.
This was personal.
Without pause, the wings shot upward, rotated the small fleshy mass hanging below, and came at him again. Blood slid into the corner of his eye, but there was no time to wipe it away.
The whining drone became wild, disjointed, a scream. It came at him again—eyes blazing—and Ben held his position, his head almost touching the ceiling, his body folded and ready to spring.
Ben extended his right forefinger and concentrated on its tip. He saw the minutest pause in the thing’s flight, before the wail continued and it came for him again. It was less than an inch away when he feinted to the left and jammed that forefinger into tissue behind one wing. Sickeningly, it dented and fizzed.
He hadn’t expected the curdling scream that followed, or the flash of flame that flared, and just as quickly extinguished itself. With a zipping sound, the creature changed visibility. It could be seen with the human eye. Fluid squirted from between the wings, bathing all of it.
One side disappeared from human sight, the other remained visible to anyone. It was the fluid that rendered it impossible to see with normal eyes, and he had burned out part of whatever reservoir stored the stuff. He could hope the damage never healed.
Swooping, the creature repeatedly brought itself to a level trajectory, then fell away again. For one wild beat in time Ben wanted to make pursuit, to attempt to take the enemy down for good. But if
he failed and was left too wounded to act, Willow would suffer and he wouldn’t allow that.
He heard another sound, a whimpering like a wounded animal—and he smelled burning skin, or fur or flesh.
In one thrust, he returned to Willow.
She stared at him just as she had before he’d left. When he smiled, she smiled back. He waited, expecting her to say she knew he’d been gone. Instead, she reached out and touched his bleeding face, her expression turning to one of horror. “Ben. You’re bleeding.” She searched in every direction. “What hit you?” She grabbed his right arm and held it up where she could see the wounds there.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We’re not far from Sykes’s place.”
“Don’t you need to be seen by someone?”
“Sure, I need to be seen by you.” He felt less flip than he sounded. “A shower will take care of everything.”
“Ben. Something really bad just happened. We can’t walk away and pretend it didn’t. I know you were gone again.”
So much for being fast enough to fool her completely this time. “You’re too observant.” He touched her hair. “Too talented and getting more so by the hour.”
She ignored that. “Was it the same as the last time?”
“More or less,” he said.
She grabbed him convulsively. “Those wounds could kill you. They’ve killed before, haven’t they? They killed Chloe Brandt.”
“Not these. I slammed into some glass shelves. Our ugly buddy never touched me. It tried—but failed.”
“But it’s still here.” She turned in a circle until Ben stopped her.
“It’s got something else on its mind right now,” he told her. “Like pain. Let’s take advantage of that. We need to figure out what we know and what’s next—and get some sleep. And we’ve got to stay out of jail because bars may keep one of us in, but they won’t keep that little monster out.”
Chapter 21
Sykes’s hideaway, a blue-washed house set in a walled garden and hidden from surrounding buildings by palms and aged shrubs, had one entrance: from an alley beside a faded little hotel.
Willow stuck close to Ben’s side, but kept looking over her shoulder all the way to a gate in the wall all but hidden by swathes of red passion creepers. Mario remained draped over her shoulder and growling very faintly.
Neither Ben nor Willow spoke while they made their way through banks of billowing flowers, faintly luminous under the moon, to the gallery surrounding the house. They climbed steps to a front door where flowering vines looked heavy enough to bring down the overhang.
Ben took a key from his pocket and let them in, putting on a table lamp inside the door.
Minimalist. Sparse furnishings, but all beautiful original pieces, and she noticed most were eighteenth-century French.
Willow looked around, into a sitting room, up a flight of stairs to the left and back into gloom in the farther recesses. Panicky fluttering took over her stomach. “I don’t feel safe anywhere,” she said. “Sorry, Ben, that just said itself. I don’t think I’ll sleep again as long as I’m waiting for that thing to come after me. We don’t know when or where it’ll show up. It is me it wants, isn’t it? Everyone who has died is somehow connected to me. And Chris is missing because of me. I don’t know where to go from here.”
“Go where you’re already going,” he said. “Face it head-on. I think most of what you say is correct, but it’s also more complicated. It has to be.”
He took her by the hand and they held on tightly, their arms shaking with the power of it. “So I face it, but I can’t stop it?”
“I can,” Ben said. “I did tonight, and I will again if I have to. I won’t let anything hurt you. You aren’t alone, and you’re not going to be. Not at all until this is over. Right now Sykes and Gray are out there working. Pascal, too. Marley’s been doing whatever she does in that workroom of hers and she’s not talking, which Gray says is a good sign. He says it’s also a good sign that she’s eating chocolate with both hands because it means she’s really into the project.”
“I don’t want her traveling out of her body looking for dangerous creatures,” Willow said. “Not now.”
She felt Ben’s close attention and raised her brows at him. “What? Why shouldn’t Marley use her power when it’s needed?”
Willow frowned. “I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. Where’s Sykes’s studio?”
“On the other side of the house. I’ve never been invited to see it. It was added on. There are skylights but no windows—or so Sykes tells me.”
She shrugged. “Mr. Mystery never disappoints. I’m told his pieces are sold before they’re finished, but I don’t even know what he makes—I mean, I don’t know if he chops bowls of fruit out of wormy wood or chisels the gigantic stone stuff with titles like Doomed on them that they put outside buildings.”
“Neither do I,” Ben said.
Mario gave her a lick and wriggled. Willow recognized the signal that he wanted to explore on his own and set him down. He rushed up the stairs at once.
“I know more about you than you know about me,” Ben announced, looking over her head.
The sudden announcement surprised Willow, but she collected herself fast. “That’s true.” Why pass up a good opportunity? “I always thought you’d tell me what you want me to know if you were ever ready.”
He looked into the sitting room with her trailing behind him. “When you’ve got questions, ask. I’ll try to answer. I’m a pretty simple man.”
Willow laughed aloud but controlled herself when Ben gave her the evil eye.
“I don’t want to stay on the ground floor,” Willow said. “I feel safer higher up.”
Ben didn’t comment and she appreciated that. Rather he retraced his steps and climbed the stairs. “I haven’t been up here, but Sykes said to use whatever we wanted.”
She felt herself turn a bit pink. “Some protective brother he is. Tossing my virtue to the wind. Or he would have been…” She let the words trail off.
“Not to the wind, just to an old friend he trusts and knows you’re already Bonded with.”
The dread word, Bonded. How could she be certain Bonding really existed or that it was, as the family insisted, permanent?
“Because we were Bonded and nothing’s changed,” Ben said, undeterred by the slowing of her feet. “It’s a Millet thing, not a Fortune thing, but I’ve accepted it because I can feel it. And so can you.”
“Maybe we only imagine it.” She didn’t really care that he was letting himself read her mind. If she ever did care, she would tell him.
“You can say that after today?”
She really couldn’t and was glad.
“You’re not concentrating or you’d know you keep letting me into your mind.” He glanced back at her and reached the top of the stairs. “You’re asking me to come in. You’re communicating directly with me. I don’t imagine what I feel for you, Willow.”
The first room on the right, a bedroom with no frills, did have a red silk love seat at the bottom of a simple iron bed covered with a plain white spread.
“This could be Sykes’s room,” Willow said, knowing her brother’s simple taste, combined with his flair for the dramatic. “He would be the one to choose white everything for his bedroom—almost everything.”
“Must be his. He said there’s only one bed in the house.”
She looked dubiously at that bed. Did Ben expect her to sleep in it?
“I thought you would,” he said. “I’ll keep watch so you won’t have to worry.”
“I guess I really am an open book to you,” she said. And he was right, as long as he was with her, she felt safe. “Ben, you are human, y’know.”
He pulled his long-sleeved black T-shirt over his head and gave her a piercing look. “We both know that.”
“You aren’t like other men, but you can be hurt. If you couldn’t, you wouldn’t have blood on you now.”
“True.”<
br />
She was making a hash of this. “I couldn’t handle it if something happened to you.”
He paused, then tossed the shirt on the bottom of the bed. His torso and arms were long and lean, the muscle well developed. As he was right now, he seemed invincible.
“Why did you send me away?” he asked.
“I can’t talk about that.”
“I don’t want to think about living without you, Willow.” He undid his buckle and whipped the belt from his jeans. “Don’t duck this—give me an answer. I’ve earned it.”
“I don’t want to mistake a habit for something more,” she said. “You’ve always been around—all my life.”
“When you were a little kid I thought you were a nuisance,” he said with a grin. “That changed.”
She nodded and bit her lip.
“What happened today wouldn’t have happened out of habit, would it? It was all new—still is. I want you. I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you. Something like this doesn’t strike twice.”
He was offering himself on a platter. An amazing man who could have his choice of women, and he wanted her. That made them equal but for one thing: Willow’s questions were growing deeper.
“I can’t deny that I’ve got so-called powers anymore,” she said. “How do you feel about that?”
He grinned. “It’s the greatest.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re coming into your own, and you aren’t fighting it anymore. You’ve got a lot to add to the picture. You and I are going to make some team.”
“Go shower,” she told him. If she kept pushing in this direction, she would only manage to persuade herself that he wouldn’t want her if she was normal.
With a long look, he headed for the bathroom, but paused on the way. “Would you feel better if you came in with me?”
“Depends what you mean by ‘feel better.’ I think I’ll hover near the door.”
“I’ll leave it open.” Even with his back to her he radiated smugness.
Willow heard the shower go on and stood close to the door, where steam soon started to creep out.
For the first time in hours she thought about Mean ’n Green. She couldn’t abandon the people who depended on her—for services or for their livings.
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