by Sierra Dean
“Bring me the boy. Don’t let anything happen to him.”
He didn’t add an or else, but I heard one all the same.
The rain had settled into a soft drizzle, enough to dampen my face and create a smoky effect around the light posts. Seth, who evidently thought our business was concluded, began to walk away, ready to fade back into the mist.
The sound of a door lock engaging behind me returned me to the here and now and reminded me why Cade and I had come here in the first place.
“Seth,” I shouted.
Cade stiffened. I hadn’t realized he’d relaxed until the calmness left him. He apparently thought our interaction with the storm god was over as well.
“Yes?”
“We came here tonight to do a task for Ardra. If you want Cade to help me find Leo, it would go a long way with Ardra if you helped with her task personally.”
This, admittedly, was a bit selfish of me. But if we were going to bring down the house, I’d much rather Seth be the one to throw the lightning instead of me. It didn’t drain his energy in the slightest.
“Tallulah…” Cade began, but didn’t get further than my name.
“You want me to dirty my hands with human concerns?”
“I want you to show Ardra that her goodwill in letting Cade accompany me won’t be unappreciated.”
This was dangerous territory. If he was still in an ill humor, he might think I was being insolent instead of helpful. The truth was, I was thinking on my toes, and insolence was sort of my default setting.
What can I say? I was born difficult.
He chewed on this thought for a moment, then walked back towards us, the thin sheets of rain parting around him as he moved so it appeared like he was approaching through a shimmering tunnel of mist.
The effect was impressive.
“Fetch the mortal.” He waved his hand dismissively at the door. “I’m not here to do Manea’s bidding.”
I swallowed hard, realizing the only reason he was giving the man inside a chance to escape was that killing him would benefit the death goddess. Any other time he probably would have leveled the resort without a second thought towards the life inside.
After dashing quickly to the front door, I hammered on the glass pane until a pale, round face appeared. The man was in his late sixties, with thinning brown hair going gray around the temples and small blue eyes currently full of fear.
“Unlock the door,” I demanded.
“No.” His voice was muffled, but I managed to hear the rude tone all the same.
Man, no one appreciated a good life-saving effort these days.
“This building is coming down whether or not you come out.” I gave him a serious look so he would understand I wasn’t bluffing. “Unlock the door and get out, or stay in there and hope you aren’t crushed under a beam. Do whatever you want, I’m not going to fight you.”
I stood back, crossing my arms. In a different scenario I might have shown more patience or tried harder to make him understand what was happening, but thanks to my nerves being run raw by the presence of Seth, I was in no mood for hand-holding. Someone here was going to feel the brunt of my annoyance, and the man inside the building was the most obvious target.
Overhead, the clouds had begun to churn again, and the rain was falling harder. Soon the raindrops took on a more menacing sound, and I looked down to see quarter-sized pellets of hail bouncing off the sidewalk by my feet.
“Last chance,” I warned. “Open the door and leave, or stay and die. I don’t care.”
“I’ll call the police!”
“Mortal law has no bearing here.” I almost laughed at the absurdity of his threat, but the situation was serious enough that I remained poker-faced. “The police can’t help you.”
“I won’t go.” Yet he didn’t move away from the door. For some reason this idiot thought I was bluffing.
“Show him,” Seth said.
Well, if the boss told me to, I guess I was going to put on a little display.
“Stand back,” I whispered to Cade. This might get messy, and the last thing I wanted was for him to get caught in the crossfire. He didn’t look thrilled about it but stepped away from me all the same.
My skin tingled. With Seth so close, I didn’t need to pull the power from the storm, I could take it straight from the source. It was like the difference between plugging a lamp into a portable charger or plugging it directly into a grid. If I wasn’t careful, it could actually overwhelm me, and that could have disastrous consequences.
Small hairs along my arms and the back of my neck stood up, and all the warmth I’d felt from my proximity to Cade was replaced with the cool, quicksilver feeling of Seth’s enormous power flowing into me and filling me up. I closed my eyes, letting the electricity flicker, touching every nerve and synapse in my body. I was a storm of lightning bugs. A meteor shower compressed into human form. I was too bright to be contained.
I screamed, the magnitude of the energy overpowering me. It was too much, too fast, and it needed an outlet now, or it would burn me up from the inside out.
I whipped my head around, and my attention fixed on the man’s car parked a few feet away. It was slicked wet with rain and glimmering faintly under the parking-lot lights. Electricity sparked on my skin, and I lifted my hands, which were glowing bright blue-white, and willed the energy out of me.
The lightning struck me then, a forked bolt straight from the sky that sliced through me easier than a hot knife in butter. The bolt followed the path of Seth’s energy and poured out through my hands, directly into the car.
Much like the sedans driven by Manea’s henchmen, the car in front of me exploded, sending a ball of flame and metal ten feet in the air before the shell of the former automobile fell back to earth halfway across the parking lot.
I turned back to the hotel, still radiating waves of pure, storm-borne power.
“Get out now,” I snarled.
This time the man didn’t argue. He opened the door and ran, never looking back. He passed the husk of his car and kept going until I could only see flashes of his white shirt in the night.
“Good. Now we finish.” Seth touched the mark at the back of my neck, and I felt as if I’d been punched by a fist made of thunder. My bones ground together, and I thought my brain might be exploding one particle at a time. He pushed his power through me, and though my mouth was open in a scream, I couldn’t hear any sound.
The sensation of it was somewhere between the worst pain I’d ever felt and what I imagined pure bliss to be. It confused my senses so thoroughly I didn’t know how to react. He’d never used me as a conduit before, not like this.
Lightning struck me a second time and poured out of my hands once more, flowing into the resort. A chorus of bolts followed suit from the sky, crashing into different parts of the hotel.
Glass shattered and wood groaned as it splintered. The whole building sounded like it was howling in pain.
Or maybe that was me.
Seth released me, and I staggered. The hotel was in ruins, a smoldering heap of wood and debris. I’d brought it down in a minute flat.
“We’re done here.”
I waited, rooted to the spot until he had disappeared into the rain.
Then I fell, and the world went black before I even hit the ground.
Chapter Eight
Someone was licking me.
I woke up slowly, my body protesting with each minor shift or adjustment, every part of me demanding I just lie still and everything would be okay.
But I was being licked, and that required further investigation.
Opening first one eye, then the other, I found a pair of wide brown orbs staring back at me, a fawn-colored snout and huge ears completing the face.
“Go away, Fen,” I grumbled.
The fennec gave a short, barking sound, then began to lick me again, until I lifted my arm to push him away. He nipped at my fingers, enjoying this new game. My joints and muscles,
on the other hand, hated me for every second of it.
At that point I paused, drinking the whole tableau in.
If Fenrir was here biting me, and I was lying down…
I sat bolt upright and looked at my surroundings. Back in the motel room, as I’d suspected. But how? The last thing I remembered was Seth using me as an amplifier for his power, and after that I was down for the count.
Cade stepped out of the bathroom, his jacket gone and his Henley sleeves pushed up to the elbows, giving me an uninterrupted view of his toned, tattooed forearms.
“You’re up.”
I ignored him, taking stock of the room and myself. My own jacket had been removed, as well as my boots and socks, but my pants and tank top were still in place. My hair was spilling down over my shoulders, so either I’d lost my ponytail holder in the events at the resort, or he’d taken it out for me.
The room itself was as disorderly as I’d left it, but I noticed Fen’s food dish had been refilled.
This might have been pure kindness, or it might have been to keep the fennec from annoying Cade to death by begging. Either way I was grateful to him for doing it. And for getting me here.
Cade was holding a washcloth, water dripping through his fingers onto the floor. He looked exhausted, and fine lines of worry had drawn his eyebrows into a deeper-than-usual scowl.
“What happened?” I tried to sit up, but my head screamed and my body felt as if it were being fueled by pure agony. Every gesture was torture, even speaking. My throat felt raw, each word like sandpaper scraping the inside of my lungs and throat. The best I could manage was to prop myself against the flat motel pillows, my head thumping lightly against the wooden headboard.
“How much do you remember?” he asked.
Without being invited, he approached the bed and sat next to me. The weight of his body made the mattress dip, and I leaned towards him as a result, my shoulder bumping his.
“I remember hitting the resort.”
A smirk toyed at the corner of his lips, then vanished. Only then did I spot the cuts on his cheek, throat, and over his eyebrow. They’d been cleaned and didn’t look too serious, but they were still fresh and raw.
Without stopping to think, I touched his face, my fingertips delicately grazing the red lines across his cheekbone. He flinched, and I froze in place, thinking he was about to pull away, but he merely sat there, his breath suddenly short, ragged. I traced the line of one cut, which was maybe two inches long and not too deep, and his eyes locked on mine, deep brown pools, the color of scotch on the rocks. Unlike with Seth, the intensity I saw in Cade’s expression didn’t frighten me.
Okay…maybe it did a little.
I continued to investigate the damage, gently inspecting a crimson nick on his temple. Then I spotted another wound, this one below his lip. He seemed to feel the weight of my gaze, because as I moved my hand once more, guided by something that defied logic or reasoning, he grabbed my wrist and eased it back down to the mattress. His grip was light but firm, telling me I was finished with my little exploration.
My cheeks warmed. What the hell had that been? One minute I was in agony, the next I was thinking of touching his mouth.
A mouth that was now turned downwards in its typical back off frown.
I must have taken a pretty serious knock to the head. That was the only way to explain it.
He inched closer, and my pulse sped up. I was almost never allowed the opportunity to be in such close proximity with a man. All attempts I’d made to date in my late teens and early twenties had been severely quashed by the higher-ups at the temple.
Clerics were meant to be virgins.
And failing that—which I had, spectacularly—we were to give the impression of a celibate life.
By the time I turned twenty-five I’d all but given up on finding someone, even a body to warm the space at my side for one night. It wasn’t worth the headache it caused back home. Inevitably there would be a BuzzFeed post or clickbait article about some guy’s evening with a Rain Chaser.
They never got tired of using jokes about “A spark between us.”
A night of barely decent sex didn’t balance out a five-hour lecture from Sido about the way my actions impacted Seth and his tithes.
So the celibate life it was.
Cade’s nearness and warmth and inescapable maleness were starting to make me dizzy. Did he have to be so big and have those tattoos and smell like leather and pine? Good gods, it wasn’t a fair thing to do to a lady with a concussion.
“Hold still.” Was it my imagination or did his voice sound a little tense?
His hand looped around the back of my neck, rough fingers tracing my birthmark. He tugged me towards him, and though he didn’t force the motion, the unspoken power of his arms made me go willingly. With his other hand he pushed my hair over my shoulder so it was all in front of me, leaving my neck and back exposed.
I concentrated on my breathing, focusing on his arms instead of his face, which I could not bring myself to look at, fearing the redness of my cheeks would give away all the dangerous paths my mind was wandering down.
I’d never seen his tattoos like this before, uncovered and there for the reading. There were so many they merged together into one colorful, beautiful piece, making it hard to pick apart the individual elements. The longer I stared, though, the more I was able to see. Here, a small black rose, there a bird with a wing covering its head. The pieces did not seem to have any connection to each other, yet side by side they made sense. A collection of short stories combined into one book. Independent of one another yet still comfortable in the same binding.
A green four-leaf clover caught my eye. One leaf was marked with a black skull.
I swallowed hard at this bitter reminder of who Cade was and what he did.
I touched the clover, and his jaw tensed, but he continued what he was doing. Once my hair was out of the way, he picked up the damp washcloth and pressed it to the back of my neck.
Sucking in a breath through my teeth, I gripped his wrist hard. Each forked line of the scars on my back sang out in a chorus of pain. I could feel them all individually, the heat from the damp cloth radiating down my spine. I shut my eyes and let out a growl.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “This was easier when you were out.”
“Yeah, I tend to complain less when I’m unconscious.”
He gave a rough chuckle and carried on dabbing at my back. When he pulled the cloth away, it was pink with blood.
“Wow.” I stared at the small square of fabric, then couldn’t resist the pull of my own curiosity. Ignoring my body’s protestations, I let go of Cade’s arm and squirmed away from him. I went into the bathroom, where the sink was splattered with more diluted blood. My jacket was draped across the toilet, and there were smears of blood across the floor. None of it was excessive, more like a kid getting overzealous with pink watercolors.
Cade walked in behind me just as I was lifting the hem of my tank top.
Part of me wanted to tell him to turn around and give me privacy, but considering the state of the room, I suspected he’d already seen what I was hiding under my shirt. I pulled up the tank, careful to expose only the back and part of my midriff, but keeping my chest covered. I was wearing a bra, but I still didn’t feel like flashing him the goods.
Once my top was up, he looked away but remained in the room, the washcloth balled in his hand. I twisted my neck to look over my shoulder, and what I saw made me gasp. The often-present Lichtenberg figures, which had merely been red earlier, appeared as if they had burst. They were deep vermillion, angry red forks of lightning spreading from both shoulders and down my spine. Fine lines traced my shoulders and upper arms, and one bold scar had come across the front to my collarbone. The lines disappeared down the waist of my jeans, and throbbing pain told me they extended down to my tailbone.
The worst of them were weeping diluted blood, which was what Cade had been tending to while I was passed out.
“I guess that’s never happened before?”
I hadn’t gotten around to answering his original question about how much I remembered. But I certainly had my full memories of Seth, and how he’d wielded me like a weapon. “Never.”
“I used a little peroxide on them, but they don’t look too deep. Some of the marks were old.”
I nodded, still staring at myself in the mirror. My back looked like a tapestry of broken glass. “I had some from earlier tonight. And a few from the week before.” Normally they faded out completely in two weeks’ time, but this time I’d pushed myself too far. I wasn’t sure if some of these were going to heal entirely.
“Tallulah…” I caught his reflection staring at me.
I lowered my shirt slowly, trying not to irritate the open wounds he’d spent so much time cleaning.
“Thank you.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear whatever it was he was building up to, because the look on his face was much more serious than I would have liked it to be.
“Come sit down.” He wasn’t asking. This was a command through and through, and I wanted to tell him where he could put his orders, but I was feeling lightheaded.
He remained in the doorway, meaning I had to brush against him as I passed. Cade closed his eyes and breathed in sharply through his nose, then followed me back to the bed where I sat down, trying to soothe my aching head.
I shut my eyes to keep the room from spinning. When I opened them again, Cade was crouched in front of me so we were eye to eye.
“Tallulah,” he said my name again, forcing me to keep my focus on him. “What happened back there?”
“Hey, I’m the one that blacked out.” I smiled, pretending I wasn’t freaking out. “I thought you were supposed to tell me what I missed.”
“You annihilated twenty-thousand square feet of real estate. In one shot.”
My attention returned to the cuts on his face. “I hurt you.”
Cade shook his head. “I’m not worried about me.”
He could say that all he wanted, but the truth was my power had done something to hurt him. That wasn’t okay. I was supposed to have enough control to do this sort of thing without any collateral damage.