All the houses I passed were silent, empty. I hoped that meant my tribe had evacuated. How could they not with Acura's darkness made visible?
But when I got to my mother's, I realized not everyone had evacuated. Mama and Mai set on the front step, old fingers and young fingers knitting stars into an indigo tapestry. And before them, Daddy built a brick wall.
“Daddy, what are you doing here?”
He dug a spade into a bucket of mortar, and spread the mixture on the top of the wall before he carefully placed another res brick. “What does it look like I’m doing, buttercup?”
“But you’re dead.”
He turned his handsome, weathered face toward me, squinting into the sunlight. “Death is relative.”
He turned his concentration back to the wall, so I joined Mama on the porch.
The yellow stars decorating their blanket had doubled while I talked to Daddy. They twinkled like little diamonds on a background of deep, endless blue.
Neither my mother nor my sister acknowledged my presence.
“Mai shouldn’t be here, it isn’t safe,” I chastised my mother. “She can’t protect against Acura like we can.”
Mama didn’t bother lifting her eyes from her work. “That’s why your father is building the wall, Maurelle,” she replied, her tone indicating I was an idiot.
I glanced at Daddy. The wall barely reached his navel, and the bricks were dwindling too fast. Acura's seething mass had drawn closer.
“Mama, you know that dinky wall won’t hold back the darkness.”
She didn’t reply.
I turned to my sister. “Mai, do you want to come into the city with me? Rice will play video games with you.”
Wait… That wasn’t right. Rice was dead. So was my father.
I looked over my shoulder where he'd been working on the wall. But he was gone. Acura's evil seeped around the edges of his unfinished wall.
I ripped the blanket away from Mama and Mai. I threw it away, irritated they had continued working on it, ignoring my warnings as the darkness came closer.
The blanket sailed toward the darkness. As it fluttered through the air, it grew. Yellow stars and indigo sky grew larger and larger until I could no longer see the darkness.
Strong fingers clasped my wrist. I whipped around to find both my mother and my sister staring at me.
Their eyes were completely black.
19
Sunlight filled the room when I emerged from dreams.
I still lay in the warm circle of Warren’s arms. My chest ached, as if my dreams had reached inside me and ripped out my heart. I massaged away the feeling with two fingers and focused on breathing.
“You okay?”
I startled at the soft murmur of his voice against my hair. I hadn't even realized he was awake. I shifted so I could see his face.
Warren gazed at me sleepily through hooded eyes. For the very first time, I could see the beauty in his odd, darkened eyes. The nearly all-encompassing black of a shadow touched’s eyes had always seemed ugly. Unnatural.
But… I knew Warren. He wasn’t cursed, or evil, or deadly. He was just different.
Beautiful.
“I’m okay,” I answered. He didn’t need a rundown on my weird ass dreams. “How are you feeling?”
I rolled over so I could see him fully. Our bare legs slid together, and my robe - already loosened from sleep – gaped open.
His gaze drifted to the line of exposed skin between my breasts “Good. Dr. Webster knows his medications.”
I froze beneath his regard, feeling suddenly exposed. He licked his lips, and heat flooded me from top to toe.
“Are you wearing anything beneath that robe?” he asked in a husky voice. He splayed a hand over my hip, his fingers digging into me possessively.
My heart thudded between us. “Do you want me to be?”
He met my gaze. His hand slid from my hip to the collar of the robe. He kept his eyes on mine as he slowly pushed the robe aside, exposing my breast to the sunlight. He trailed the very tips of his fingers over my skin, cresting carefully over the peak of my breast. My nipple tightened beneath his touch, echoed by an ache between my legs.
I moved my hands over his hard, bare chest, breathless. “I have to get up.”
“I’m up enough for the both of us,” Warren said.
I groaned at his bad joke. “Don’t ever say that again.”
He caught my eye. “You don’t have to get up yet.”
Before I could respond, his hand moved down beneath the barely-tied robe sash. My breath hitched as his fingers scaled the sensitive skin of my abdomen and dipped into the hot, aching core of my body.
I gasped and arched into his touch. My body was such a livewire of unfulfilled needs and nervous energy, I’d needed nothing more than his eyes hungry on my bare skin for my body to betray me. A single finger dipped into me, so slow I wanted to scream.
“Clearly, you don’t want to get up,” Warren added, and then his mouth closed over mine.
Kissing him sent a rush of dizziness through me, as if all the oxygen had been taken from me. He yanked me against him, and I angled my leg over his. His tongue slid against mine, and he squeezed my ass with bruising force, hips rocking into mine. I felt him, hard and thick beneath his thin shorts. That heavy feeling of him, so close but so far, made me mindless with need.
I realized then that I didn’t have time for niceties. I had a shadow touched princess to guard and a Hollow to save from her darkness, so who the fuck knew when I would have this chance again? I wanted this man. I didn't give a fuck about anything else but this insane, desperate need to feel Warren inside me and forget about the rest.
I broke the kiss and pushed him onto his back. I straddled him and let the robe fall, then reveled in the way his expression morphed as his gaze roamed my naked body. I shoved his boxers down and met his gaze as I maneuvered him into me.
I sank down the length of him slowly, my body rushing hot with the heavy weight of him inside me, with the feeling of being in absolute control.
Then he proved me wrong. He sat up, an arm snaking around my back and his lips crashed into mine, suddenly I was beneath him, as if I’d weighed nothing at all.
He pulled out, a smile on his face as I wiggled beneath him, one part dying for him to fuck me and the other fighting my prone, submissive position.
“Impatient faery.” He chuckled.
“We’re not a race known for our ability to wait. Instant gratification is a trait of ours.”
Warren dipped to kiss me, his hips settling between my legs. “Press pause for me. If I die tomorrow, I want to go remembering this.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Is imminent death an possibility?”
“Not right this moment.” He grinned and sank into me.
He moved so torturously slow, I thought my body would revolt. But the heavy weight and warmth of his body on mine, in mine, chased everything away. We were hands and lips and limbs.
I wrapped my legs around him and enjoyed the ride. If I died tomorrow, I wanted to remember this, too.
When I left the suite an hour later, Warren had already passed out again, one long leg flung across the spot where I had slept beside him. His mahogany hair glittered in the sunlight streaming through the curtains. He looked beautiful. Innocent, even.
Coffee in hand, I headed for the elevator, peeved to realize my knees were still weak.
I found the lobby slightly less full of mayhem than it had been the night before. The crowd of people outside had dispersed, though a select few remained, camping out on the sidewalk. Since Lila and Everett had released a statement regarding Senka and the earthquake, I didn’t fully understand what they hoped to accomplish sleeping on the sidewalk outside Headquarters.
The guard at the lobby elevator greeted me with a pleasant morning grunt. He swiped his Com and gestured me into the elevator.
“Security’s been overridden,” he said in a raspy wheeze. “Just push the button.�
�
I thanked him, then rode the elevator in silence. I’d never lived in a world where I could enter Senka's tomb without Lila or Everett. You’d think this wouldn’t shake me so much, considering the princess had physically touched me last night. But it did.
Everything had changed.
I left the elevator for the eerie hush of the underground. The doors rattled closed behind me as I made a beeline for the guards’ box.
Senka sat where I had left her six hours before, her hands folded primly in her lap. She reacted immediately to my presence, her lips twisting into a grimace slightly closer to a smile than her previous attempts. She reached for me happily, and I accepted her cool hands.
She looked different. Warmer, skin darker, cheeks flushed. Her vacant stare had focused more, until it seemed she really was meeting my gaze.
Then I realized why the princess looked so healthy. Her nighttime guard, pestered into sitting with her so I could sleep, sat in the corner.
Mummified.
20
From apples to people. Lovely.
I pulled up the screen on my Com, eyeing Senka warily as I radioed for backup. Her smile widened and settled more comfortably on her face, more like it belonged there.
Despite the way her pretty face brightened, a chill set in my bones. I had to focus on keeping the unease out of my tone as I requested aid from dispatch.
Then, the super fun part, I texted Lila: Wake up, Queen Bee. We have a problem.
Her response came almost immediately: Shit.
I assumed that meant she was on her way and under the impression our “problem” was more of a “catastrophe.” I definitely didn’t need to disabuse her of that notion.
I sank into a free chair—one of those uncomfortable folding metal monstrosities that were only good for ass-bone torture. “Did you touch your guard, Princess?”
Senka’s glittering eyes shifted to my face. Her gaze moved slowly, as if she could see the story of my life upon my brown skin. Finally, she met my questioning gaze.
And smiled.
Lovely. I didn’t know if she was a damned sociopath or just incapable of understanding exactly what she’d done.
I stood up, too creeped to stay close to her. I wandered to the dead guard, briefly noting the irony in my preference to hover over Night of the Living Mummy instead of Senka.
The guard sat comfortably in her chair, one hand resting on her lap and the other wrapped around a coffee mug half full of dark brown liquid. She looked out over the tomb, a magazine open in front of her. Her blonde ponytail looked as silly and shiny as it had when she relieved me. If it weren’t for the rough, puckered leather of her skin, dried prunes for eyes, she might have looked normal.
Nothing indicated she’d been paying any attention to Senka. If Senka had snuck up on her, she would have reacted. A hand thrown out, chair pushed back, something.
But it looked like she withered away by proximity.
Back-up arrived in the beefy form of John Nesbitt.
“We have got to stop meeting like this,” he joked, offering me a high five.
I slapped his palm, cheered by his jovial attitude. “I’m gonna start thinking you like me.”
“Not a secret, Nez. We go too far back.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and whistled at the withered husk that had once been the night guard. “Fuck. Senka do that?”
“Don’t touch it,” I said before he got too close to the body. “I don’t know if it’s residual.”
Nesbitt jerked his hands up in an I-surrender stance. “Okay. That’s terrifying.”
“Tell me about it. I’m not one-hundred percent certain being in the same room with her won’t suck us dry.”
Nes and I both glanced at Senka, who was calmly running her fingers over the computer's keyboard as if we didn’t exist.
“Other than call in our illustrious crime scene team, I don’t really know what to do.” He rubbed a hand vigorously over his shaved blond head – chopped sometime between the councilman's murder and this.
Little details like that always reminded me there really was life outside the job. I wasn’t great at remembering that for myself.
“It's not like we can try her for murder,” Nes continued. “She’s Senka.”
“Not to mention she doesn’t seem to have any control over it,” I said, a note of warning in my tone. “She’s not a villain.”
John’s gaze gentled. “You don’t have to tell me that. We owe her our lives.”
Suddenly, Senka’s gaze left my face and traveled to Nesbitt. She shook her head, as if frustrated she couldn’t speak, and extended a hand to him.
As John stepped forward to take her offered fingers, I firmly shoved her hand back to her lap.
“No, princess. You might hurt him,” I told her.
Something like understanding flickered in her black eyes. She clenched her fist and bowed her head.
John looked distraught that I had kept him from touching Senka. I could have launched into the samba with the dead guard's withered body, and I had a feeling he would have still wanted to touch her.
I understood that loyalty.
“Have you alerted the Reins?” he asked.
“Yeah. Lila is on her way.”
“Lila is here,” our reina interrupted. She swept through the door in a long white dress that looked oddly angelic next to Senka’s dark purple. Her messy blonde hair was pulled into a ponytail, and dark rings encircled her sapphire eyes. When her gaze landed on the guard, she sighed.
“It appears her touch can be deadly for people, too,” I offered helpfully.
“I gathered,” Lila said wryly. “This poses a problem.”
“I’m not sure this is the biggest problem we have.”
Lila ignored me. “You have to get her away from here. Take her to the tenth encampment. Somewhere where she can’t hurt anyone else.”
“There are plenty of people to hurt at the encampment,” I pointed out.
“Where she can’t hurt anyone who matters.”
Her flippant dismissal sent irritation crashing through me. “If they’re alive and not causing us any issues, then they don’t deserve to die.”
She looked at me scant-eyed. “Since when do you champion the shadow touched?”
Since I slept with one. Not that I'd go anywhere near that subject with Lila. I didn’t want to catch her in one of her moods and end up a puddle on the floor. Shit, I hadn’t totally come to terms with just how well I'd come to know a shadow touched.
“Taking Senka away from the core isn’t any safer,” I went on. “What about the darkness? As far as I can tell, considering people aren’t dropping dead from shadows all around us, she’s still protecting the Hollow. If I take her away, we lose that. The core will no longer be safe.”
Nesbitt, who had remained respectfully silent through the exchange, spoke up. “Are you telling me she’s protecting us from the darkness at the same time she’s killing us?” He pointed at the dead guard.
“Not on purpose, I think.” I remembered the flush to her cheeks as she drew energy from the apple. And now, how much more normal she looked after draining the guard. “I think her magick is trying to heal her body. Pull life force from around her to balance the weight of the darkness.”
Lila remained silent for a moment, tapping a finger to her lip. “Well then, we have to put her back below where she can’t hurt anyone.”
I opened my mouth to argue – we couldn’t just bury a fully conscious Senka, after all. But I didn’t get a chance to speak.
Senka stood so swiftly I barely followed the movement. With an elegant swing of her hand, she sent her chair flying across the room. Metal hit drywall with preternatural strength, and plaster crumbled to the ground.
Nesbitt, who had been silent during our exchange, unholstered his weapon and aimed it at Senka.
“Stop. Idiot.” I put a hand to the barrel of his Luger and shoved it down.
Senka towered over Lila, though she didn�
��t seem to be looking at her. The princess's small hands clenched into fists at her sides – the only indication of her residual anger.
I retrieved Senka's chair and placed it behind her, then gently guided her back into it. “Obviously, she doesn’t want to go back.”
Senka finally looked up, acknowledging my presence. She threw her arms around my neck and whimpered like a scared puppy.
The angle was awkward, but I couldn't bring myself to untangle from Senka's frightened, groping arms. I patted her back and squeezed her tightly. “I won’t let them take you,” I whispered in her ear.
Senka relaxed, her face pressed into my neck. Her steady breaths brushed over my skin. Still, she held on to me.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Lila gestured to the two of us and our tentacle embrace. “She could hurt you. Suck you dry.”
I extracted myself from Senka's arms. “She didn’t hurt me last night.”
Lila glanced at the dead guard. Our crime scene techs had yet to arrive. When the crime occurred in your own building, and the guard was so dead you could start a fire with her withered corpse, I guess you placed the scene low on the priority list.
“Why do you think she hasn’t hurt you?” Lila mused. “She's touched you more than anybody.”
“I don’t know.”
Senka touched my forehead. She opened her mouth, her jaw twisting as if it had forgotten how to function. She gaped once, then twice. A single, rasping word escaped her lips. “Bricks.”
I froze, stunned. Senka had spoken.
Senka touched my bare chest right above my tank top. Her cool finger traced a square on my skin. “Bricks,” she said again. Her cool fingertip repeated the square right next to the first.
As if she were building a wall.
Brick by brick.
“My walls.” My voice was breathless with the realization. I glanced at Lila. “She can’t get through my walls.”
Lila wrinkled her nose. “Your walls?”
Relics and Runes Anthology Page 12