Opal recoiled, gaping at her friend. “Christ, what did you see?”
“I can’t tell you that, because I don’t want it to come true. What I can tell you is what you already know. You are not responsible for Joaquin dying.”
Opal forced herself to reply evenly, though she wanted to rage. “I was his partner. It was my job to guard his back. I should be with him.”
“Well, you’re not. You’re with us. And you still have a duty to do the damn job. I’ll tell you one thing, if you fail Ulf’s son, you’re going to have an even bigger set of regrets than Joaquin. So pull out of this death spiral before you drag us all down with you.”
It was like having a bucket of ice water dumped over her head, shocking Opal out of her preoccupation with her own grief. Alys was right. She might have been nursing a death wish for herself, but she had no intention of taking the Magekind down with her. She stared at her friend, her mouth going dry. “What do I need to do?”
Alys sighed and leaned forward, bracing her elbows on her knees. “I can’t tell you in any detail. I’ve spent hours today scrying all the futures I could. There’s a lot I can’t see because something’s blocking me. It’s like… a black hole that just sucks in all the futures at a certain point. I can’t see the key moment at all. I do know our collective survival depends on giving Adam the Gift. And I mean right fucking now. Go home, talk to the man, and be honest with him and yourself. Then Gift him.”
“I’ve slept with Adam once already. Should I do the next two times one right after the other?”
“Yes. Don’t stop until the Gift triggers. He’s going to take some convincing. I’d try to help, but when I looked at that future, it didn’t end well.” She leaned back in the chair again and studied Opal, her gaze serious. “This is up to you. You’re going to have to confront your shit and Gift the guy. Then you’re going to have to take him with you when the time comes.”
Opal stared, appalled. “You want me to take a freshly Gifted vampire on a mission? They can’t control their strength at that stage. It takes months of training before a rookie can handle himself on the job without getting killed. And they know nothing about sword work.”
“He’ll have to manage. As for the sword work, Ulf started teaching him how to use a blade when he was three. His mother insisted he keep up the training after his father left. If this comes out the way it’s supposed to, she’s the one we need to thank.” There was an odd look in Alys’ eyes as she dropped her voice. “Or apologize to.”
A thought hit Opal, and she froze, trying to think through the implications.
“I know that look,” Alys said. “What?”
“What if I Truebonded with him? A psychic bond that deep would let me share my combat experience with him. It could keep him alive.”
Alys’s dark brows rose. “Opal, you just met the man. You can’t break a Truebond. Ever. You’d be joined at the hip for the rest of your very long lives.”
“At least he’d be alive.”
“Assuming he didn’t get you killed. You can’t undo your failure to Truebond with Joaquin by jumping into one with Adam.”
“Are you telling me not to do it? Did you see…”
“I didn’t say that. I’m just saying that before you take a step that drastic, you’d better be damn sure it’s what you want to do. Because you can’t reverse it. And a Truebond can be fatal.”
“So can not Truebonding. It could help me keep him alive.”
“Opal, Joaquin would be just as dead now if you’d done it. The only difference is, you would be too.”
“I didn’t say I was going to do it. I just wondered if it would work. You’re right, it was a crazy thought.” Opal rose to her feet and squared her shoulders. “Look, I’m going to go get this done.”
Alys stood too. “Tell him what happened with Joaquin. All of it.”
Opal looked down at her boots. She usually tried very hard not to think of that day -- she saw it in her dreams too often as it was. But there was no option. “All right.”
To her surprise, Alys wrapped both arms around her in a hard hug. For a moment she froze -- her friend wasn’t the huggy sort.
In her ear, Alys said, “You’re a good woman and a hell of an agent, Opal Cassidy. You can do this. And Joaquin would be the first to tell you it’s past time you forgive yourself for what happened to him.” Then she stepped away and walked back into the house.
Rubbing her aching forehead, Opal turned to head back to the hacienda.
How was she going to get Adam into bed? With any other man, it would be easy -- show up naked with beer. Add the offer of immortality on top of that, and the guy would be on his back with his dick in the air two minutes later. But nothing was ever that easy with Sir Baldulf’s son.
* * *
Adam lay staring moodily at the stained-glass window beside the bed. The cowboy it depicted stood silhouetted against a sunset that glowed in a hundred shades of orange and red, shading into violet. Something about the angle of his head reminded Adam of Joaquin’s portrait.
Joaquin, who, dead or not, still had Opal’s heart.
You will fucking never learn. Open yourself up, get kicked in the teeth. Dad. Branwyn. Opal. After his Come to Jesus meeting with Dad, he was no longer quite so pissed at his father. Still, his heart didn’t have a great track record.
Joaquin might be dead, but he’d been a lucky bastard. He’d had Opal for… must have been decades. She’d loved him so much, she still grieved for him more than a decade later.
Adam had never had anything like that. Yeah, he and Branwyn had been closer than a lot of married couples, bound by shared work and shared danger.
Yet there had always been a certain distance. Maybe he’d known all along that Branwyn had been keeping secrets. Hell, for all he knew, he’d found out about her, and her scaly pal had waved his magic shillelagh. Poof! No more memory. It was how these bastards rolled.
Branwyn’s right. I don’t trust anyone. Adam had to admit, he maintained a certain emotional distance from the women he slept with. Going to war was notoriously hard on relationships, even when you weren’t doing the fighting. Besides, most of those women hadn’t been interested in much more than a one-night stand anyway. Probably because of too many ISIS journo-beheading YouTube videos.
Still, when Adam had wanted company, he’d never had any trouble finding it. Opal was just one more one-night stand. His ego was wounded, that was all. What else would it be? He’d never believed in love at first sight. That was nothing more than a biochemical illusion, and he was way too old for that shit.
The soft rap of knuckles on his door made him jolt.
“Adam?” He hadn’t even heard Opal climb the stairs. “Adam, are you awake?”
“Yeah, I’m awake. Give me a minute, unless you want to conjure pants.” He rolled out of bed and reached for the pajama bottoms he’d taken off. He slept nude.
The door opened before he could do more than pick them up. “Don’t bother.” The words might have come off as flirtatious if it hadn’t been for the grim look on Opal’s face.
Automatically, he held the bottoms in front of him. “Do you mind?”
“Sorry,” she said, not looking sorry in the least.
His eyebrows lifted as he got a good look at what Opal was wearing. No wonder he hadn’t heard her footsteps on the stairs. She was barefoot, dressed in an ice blue silk nightgown as thin as a whisper. Its plunging décolletage revealed a great deal of creamy, tempting cleavage. The material wasn’t quite transparent, but it was so thin it revealed her nipples, furled tight, pink as candy.
And Adam knew they tasted every bit as good as they looked.
The gown’s color made her eyes look more blue than gray, the shade seeming to pop against the vivid copper curls tumbling around her lean shoulders. “I talked to Alys,” Opal said. “We’re going to have to finish this now.” Despite the sensual picture she made, there was nothing seductive in the set of her mouth.
“You mean
the Gift?” To hell with it. Adam threw the pajamas on the bed and watched her gaze slide away from his groin. “Because which of us ran out of here in tears?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. But…”
“I’m really not in the mood,” Adam interrupted coolly. “And from the looks of it, neither are you.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I’m in the mood or not. Alys ambushed me on my walk. We’ve got to do this now. Back to back, until you change. We don’t have the luxury of taking it slow or we’re going to regret it.”
“You said it was my choice.”
“Yeah, if you don’t mind people dying.”
“Do the words ‘emotional blackmail’ mean anything to you?”
“Look, I don’t like this any better than you do.”
“Judging from the tears, you liked it a great deal less.” Damn it, he hadn’t meant to say that. To make matters more humiliating, it had come out sounding wounded. So he curled his lip. “What would Joaquin think?” The minute Adam said it, he felt like a bastard. He threw up a hand. “That was out of line. It’s just… That was why you ran out.”
The anger that had been growing in Opal’s eyes collapsed into quiet grief. “Yes. We were together one hundred and twenty-four years. He’s the one who Gifted me to begin with. And he died because of me.”
Adam stared at her, his heart sinking. I don’t have a prayer.
Chapter Five
Adam frowned at the intensity of his disappointment. Wait, why do I even care? She’s high-handed and arrogant and she turned me into a puppet. The last thing I need is a relationship with her. And yet the grief on Opal’s face wrung his heart anyway. “I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” She squared her shoulders. “Alys said I should tell you about it.”
He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it, but evidently that wasn’t one of the options. Adam blew out a breath and sat on the edge of the bed. “So he… Gifted you? Was he one of those court seducers?”
She shook her head and moved to sink down beside him. “No, it was actually more like your situation. Somebody had a vision I was needed. It was 1884, and I was hiding out in this little town, dressed as a boy, hungry as hell, and hoping not to get killed by the same bastards who’d murdered my family.”
“What the fuck happened?”
Opal sighed. “Range war. There was this lake on my family’s land a neighboring cattle baron had his eye on. It was more of a pond, but the summer had been dry, and he wanted the water. Hell of a thing to kill ten people over.”
“They wiped out everybody?”
She nodded. “They hit us late one night. My dad and his ranch hands held them off while I tried to get my little brother to safety. He was riding behind me holding on, and when one of the killers fired at us as we rode away, he took a bullet in the arm. It wasn’t even that bad. We escaped up into the hills and lost them. Unfortunately, Billy’s wound got infected and he died a week later. I buried him and sneaked back home. The bastards had burned the house down. Everyone was dead.” Opal’s mouth took on a bitter cast. “I kept riding until I reached a town I thought was so far away, I’d be safe. I tried to get the sheriff to do something about the massacre, but he either didn’t believe me or pretended not to.”
Adam felt sick. “How old were you?”
“Nineteen. I’d run out of bullets and I was hungry, but I didn’t have any money.” A slow smile replaced the darkness in her eyes. “Then this good-looking stranger named Joaquin offered to buy me lunch. Seems he had a sudden need to buy my horse. Paid me a hell of a lot more than that crow bait was worth, too. It took me maybe two days to fall in love with him while he pretended to believe I was a boy.”
“And you became Magekind.” And why the hell am I jealous of a dead man over a woman I just met?
“Yeah. We were together for the next one hundred and twenty-four years. But then…” Her mouth took on a bitter twist. “What do you know about the werewolves?”
Adam blinked as his brain disgorged a chunk of information. “Merlin created them to keep an eye on the Magekind in case we tried to enslave humanity. Unlike us, they can make any mortal into Direkind just by biting them. In Magekind, the bite causes some kind of…” He frowned. “Allergic reaction?”
Opal nodded. “Exactly. Your throat swells up and your organs shut down. Anyway, eleven years ago, the werewolves wanted to execute Davon Fredericks for killing a seventeen-year-old boy.”
“Davon?”
“Alys’s lover.”
He blinked at that. “He killed a kid?”
“Not voluntarily. The leader of the werewolves was trying to trigger a war with the Magekind, and he cast a spell on Davon to make him murder the boy. The werewolves demanded the Magekind turn Davon over for ‘justice.’” Her long fingers sketched air quotes. “Arthur told them to pound sand. Davon promptly surrendered himself, hoping to prevent the war. They were all set to execute him when we staged a rescue.”
“Sounds nasty.”
“Oh, it was.” Opal stared sightlessly at the stained-glass window. “You should’ve seen this crowd. It looked like they were having a picnic. They brought their kids, Adam. They were going to execute a man, and they brought their kids.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope. When we gated in, Arthur ordered the evacuation of anyone who didn’t want to fight. We started guiding the noncombatants to safety, but one of the women pretended to trip.” She rubbed her forehead as if nursing a headache. “When Joaquin bent to help her up, the bitch transformed, snatched his helmet off, and bit him in the face. I ran her through as all hell broke loose.”
“And he started having that reaction.” Adam rested one hand on her back and began to rub small, soothing circles with his thumb.
“Yeah.” She leaned into his touch. “Went down with his face swelling, struggling to breathe. Christ, it was fast. I conjured a claw-proof non-magical dome the wolves couldn’t get through -- they’d have punched through a magical one -- and went to work trying to heal him. Meanwhile, the werewolves are pounding on the dome, trying to shatter it. I couldn’t figure out what was killing him, because at the time we didn’t know how it worked. I poured my magic into him, fighting to keep him alive, screaming for a healer. But all the healers were busy with other people.”
He stared at her profile, feeling sick.
A muscle flexed in her jaw. “When I realized there was no hope, I decided to Truebond with him.”
Adam blinked as his brain coughed up more information. A Truebond was a psychic link so deep, a Magekind couple could share their consciousness at all times. The link allowed them to amplify one another’s magic and share their skills. It was the most profound kind of marriage imaginable, and it had one hell of a catch. If one member of the bond died, the shock would kill the other. “But he was dying. You’d have gone with him.”
Opal nodded. “That was why I never Truebonded with him to begin with. Yeah, in a Truebond psychic link, you share your magic, which makes you both stronger than you would’ve been separately. But if your bonded partner dies, the shock kills you. I always figured I’d be the first to go, and I didn’t want to take him with me.”
“But once he was bitten, he wouldn’t let you Truebond,” Adam said, knowing it was true.
“And it’s not possible to form a link that deep without the cooperation of the person you’re bonding with. Joaquin said he loved me and he wanted me to live. So…” A tear tracked down her cheek. “… So I held him in my arms while he died.” Her voice cracked. “Then I killed every motherfucking werewolf in range of my sword.”
Adam drew her closer against him, his chest aching. “You’re not to blame, Opal. You know that, right?”
“Joaquin was my partner. Keeping him alive was my job.”
“But it took werewolf magic to create that cure. A Maja’s wouldn’t work anyway. You couldn’t have saved him.”
“Warlock’s daughter was working on the cure,
trying to save Guinevere and Arthur.” Opal’s eyes flashed up at him. “If I’d been able to keep him alive just twenty minutes longer, she might have been able to save him. But I failed.”
“Look, it’s apparent even to me that Joaquin loved you. Do you really think he’d want you tormenting yourself about this eleven years later?”
“Like Ulf said, some things you don’t get over.” Opal gave him a smile so ripe with grief, he wished she’d stop.
Adam took her hands. In the end, it didn’t matter that Joaquin stood between them, and probably always would. “All right. But you can forget the pain for a little while.” Adam leaned in and tilted up her chin, then gently took her mouth.
* * *
Adam kissed her with such exquisite tenderness, even her battered heart began to yearn. Opal had come in determined to simply fuck Adam like a dildo until she triggered his Gift. Then she’d get the hell away from him and sink back into the numb calm of her days.
Adam just as obviously had other ideas. The slow stroke and slide of his tongue said he had no intention of rushing this.
Suddenly Opal found she didn’t want to rush it either. Not with Adam’s mouth moving so gently over hers, his big hand cupping her jaw. His thumb ran back and forth over her skin, leaving a tender little trail of compassion and need.
Opal slid a hand over the warm, hard muscle of his chest, felt his heart beating in long thumps beneath it. Adam kissed along the line of her jaw until his tongue traced the shell of her ear, the sensation cool and tickling. Opal found herself huffing a laugh and squirming.
His hand came to rest on her shoulder, cupping it as Adam pressed into her, urging her back onto the tangled sheets of his bed. He looked down at her, his vivid eyes absorbed.
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