by Anna Leonard
Stop, she said again, this time more softly. This place is not for you.
The blue light met the red-black, and a darker green appeared, pulsing like a heart, in and out, fast at first then slowing until it stilled. The nearest figure tried to fight her off, grabbing at her arm as though to tear it off, but the green barred it from her.
Close, she told the Gate. Seal. Her voice came through firm and in command, the wind blowing from a faraway land. The Lady of Flame commands it.
“No!” A hand grabbed at her, pulling her backward, knocking her off her feet. The green light pulsed once again, spreading to cover the entire surface of the archway, sealing it once again.
“No!”
If she had thought the Night Serpent insane before, he was maddened now, his jaw hanging open, bubbles of froth flowing over the corner of his narrow lips. His eyes had gone shallow, flicking back and forth like the movement of the creature whose name he had claimed, quicksilver and dangerous. He hissed, his jaw dropping even wider, and lunged as though to sink his fangs into her flesh.
She reacted to him not as woman to man, but cat to snake, hissing and lashing out with teeth and claws, slashing at his face and forearms, looking to drop him into the dust and rend his poisonous flesh. She struck hard, but her claws were not enough to finish the job, and he knocked her aside once again, looming over her.
The blue glow around her seemed to hesitate, then condensed into a darker glow, closer to her skin. Lily closed her eyes, then, despite the blood still seeping from the gaping wound in her back, somehow found the strength to spring at him again, her teeth trying to find his jugular and rip it out.
He fought her off, a heavy backhand landing across her face. “Bitch. Traitorous bitch! I would have—”
“Killed me. Again.” She spat blood, struggling as he tried to wrap his hands around her own neck. A squirm, her spine twisting until she landed on all fours, inches away. But the wall was to her back, and he was between her and the only door.
She was going to die. Again.
“You wanted power, but always someone else’s, taken from them. Fool!” She laughed, bitterly amused despite the blood dripping from her mouth and the feel of teeth loosened in her mouth. “You always…were…a fool. And me, for trusting you. But not this time. Not this time…I stopped you. I. Stopped. You.”
She might die. She probably would die. It was all right: she had done what she came back to do. Finally.
Distantly, she heard a commotion outside, far away, but getting closer, coming toward them. The Serpent reared back, readying for a final blow.
Lily should have ducked, should have tried to run. All she could do was stare up into his eyes: dark burning pits of desert fire, wrapped around with the sound of sand blowing and the low muttering growl of a crocodile on the sun-warmed mud of the Nile. She felt herself start to sway in rhythm to his own lithe movements, even as she told herself to blink, to look away.
A hissing cough broke into the sounds in her head, and vision flashed away from her. When it returned, her line of sight was lower to the ground, moving rapidly as things came into focus and then faded again. The look of things was wrong: too flat, too gray and blue. The sun was not bright or warm enough for comfort, and the air tasted of harsh metal, not the warm comfort of blood and flesh.
Cat, she thought, barely holding on to any sense of herself under the onslaught, and felt its agreement. Beautiful one. Run. Agreement again, but not the way she intended. It wasn’t running away. It was coming toward her. And it wasn’t, it proudly informed her, coming alone.
Her mate was with him.
Lily barely had time to process that before the door from the hallway crashed open. The Serpent went down to one knee, turning and with one arm crushing Lily to him, the other hand grabbing his knife off the floor. Her vision returned to her with a snap, hard enough to make her dizzy—or was that the blood loss? She wasn’t sure anymore. Everything was becoming fuzzy, grayed out around the edges.
Then the shining tip of the Serpent’s knife nicked the delicate skin under her chin, sliding to rest directly over her pulse, and her concentration returned with a hard crunch.
Suddenly, she wasn’t ready to die.
“Stop!”
The voice was painfully, wonderfully familiar. Lily didn’t have to look up to know who it was; she did it merely to satisfy the desire to see him again. Jon: his gun held in both hands, his body turned sideways like some hero on a television show. Beautiful man. He was dressed in black and gray, a windbreaker over a bulletproof vest like the one they had given her, and the cheetah was a molten golden and black statue at his side.
Her gaze flicked from the green-eyed stare of the cat up to the stark cold lines of the gun, and stayed there. Her bloody claws flexed, and she knew that Jon saw them. She meant for him to see them. But the gun never wavered.
He saw me. He saw me, and understood, and came, the cat told her. Good mate.
Very, she told it back.
“I’ll kill her,” the Serpent said, his voice cold and cool, as though he had never lost his temper in his entire life. In all his lives. “I will kill her and you will have lost.”
“You think that you can beat a bullet, be my guest,” Jon said in a voice just as cold and cool. Lily felt the knife dig in a little more, and raised her eyes from the gun to look into her mate’s face.
He wasn’t bluffing.
She had been right about Jon T. Patrick, and she had been completely wrong. Agent Patrick was dedicated to his job, and the demanding mistress named Justice. She respected that about him. She might even love that about him. He was also a man who had been able to take a leap of faith, no matter how improbable: to see the glimmer of a cheetah’s body in the grass, and know what it meant. To follow it. To trust it.
But her body hurt too much to follow that thought any further. Held upright only by the Serpent’s grip on her throat, every cell of her body was screamingly aware of what it had been through. If he let go, even for an instant, she would collapse in on herself, and possibly never come back. Her fingers itched horribly, and she risked a look down to see the claws slowly retract back into her fingertips, leaving behind blood-smeared tips over unbroken skin. Whatever gifts she had been given, they were leaving her.
It was all right. She had done what she needed to do. The Gate was closed. Jon could shoot this bastard and it would all be over. Nine lives, game over. No replay this time, not for either of them.
She wasn’t ready to die, but who ever was? She only hoped that Anubis’ judgment would be gentle this time.
Lily’s gaze dropped again, resting on the blunt lines of the cheetah’s muzzle. Green eyes stared into hers, the lids closing once, slowly. A sleepy wink, the sort one cat gave another to indicate that all was well, he wasn’t a threat, there was peace between them.
“Thank you,” she said to the cat. For coming back. For not killing her in that storeroom, despite what must have been overwhelming instinct. For being a reminder of the beauty she had once known.
Sister-two-foot. This is not over yet.
Mrrraaai she told it, and felt the cat’s amusement at her kitten-acceptance.
The Serpent jabbed her with the knife, stopping the conversation and drawing blood from her throat to match the red clotting in the rims of her nostrils and down the line of her back.
There was blood inside her throat, too, and her ribs made breathing difficult. She was aware of all this now, merely mortal again. She was dying. But that was all right. The Gate waited, and there would be peace on the other side. She hoped.
She braced herself for one last lunge, willing her fingers to work, even without the gift of claws. If she could distract him, Jon could finish the job. The Serpent must not escape. His punishment must be final this time.
Before she could do anything, a noise vibrated up through the soles of her feet, up into her bones, a strange guttural humming. She felt it, and saw the great cat’s long tail twitch once, a hard thwack ag
ainst the air. Those were the only warnings, and they happened so quickly the Serpent didn’t have a chance to react before that long line of lean muscle was airborne.
But the cat wasn’t aiming for the Serpent. A jaw that might have clamped down on him and done damage, claws that might have shredded skin from bones, none of those made contact. Instead, that jaw closed firmly but gently on Lily’s shoulder, while the cat’s own shoulder knocked into her with a solid thunk.
All three went sprawling to the floor. The cheetah twisted in midair, a seemingly impossible move, to land under Lily rather than on top of her, forcing her to land on her side rather than her injured back.
It still hurt like hell, but she managed not to pass out. The Serpent was down on his knees in front of her, and she wanted oh so badly to kick him between the legs, hard. If she could just move her leg. Or even her arm. She’d be willing to hit him, too. All of her rage came back and spilled over, fueled by the rumbling breath of the cat beneath her. Selfish, stupid…he had opened the Gate, all for his own selfish desires and wants, like a spoiled five-year-old. Did he not understand that the dead needed to stay dead? That allowing the Gate to open…
Disease. At the very least. Imbalance.
The Serpent looked across at her, and she shivered. His eyes were no longer blue and kind, or even black and intense; now they were flat and inhuman looking. Not even a serpent’s eyes, but dull as a river stone. A trickle of blood came from his left nostril, matching the one at the corner of his mouth. She tasted her own blood pooling in her mouth, and felt no sympathy.
“I…I would have…” he rasped, staring at her as if she still held some kind of answer. She had no answers to give him, and he seemed to realize that, because he started to get to his feet, the knife still clutched in his hand.
“Stay down!” Jon commanded. Who was he talking to? Lily could hear more noises from the hallway—someone else was coming? Help, or did the Serpent have allies? She struggled to back away, get to her own feet and out of his reach, only to have the heavy, meat-sweet breath of the cheetah hit her cheek. He had stretched just enough so that the heavy triangular head rested against her cheek, as though it were trying to scent-mark her, and the weight pressed her down to the ground.
Down. Stay down. Do as the mate says.
Not words now, but a sense of insistence, of concern, of worry that the small one would not be wise, would get hurt.
All right, she thought. All right. She didn’t have the strength to do anything else anyway.
“Down, I said!” Jon sounded pissed off. “Robert Bergman, you are under arrest for the kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment of Lily Malkin, among other bad moves. Lie on the floor with your hands over your head. Now!”
Instead, the Serpent closed his fist tighter around his knife and swung at Lily, aiming directly for her heart. A name from this time, this place, had no power over him. Whatever Jon had discovered could not be used to stop him.
The cat screamed, a sound that should not come from a cheetah’s throat, and Lily felt it as though it came from her own mouth, even as there was a harsh heavy noise, the sound of gunfire and an acrid smell like blood-warmed dust in her nose.
The Night Serpent hovered over her; a boogeyman slithered out from under the bed in the dark of night, the knife no longer glinting but covered in gore and blood. A matching blossom of red bloomed on the front of his shirt, and his throat was torn away, making his head loll to the side. The entire room crashed into silence that hung for one, two, three breaths….
Then he fell, the cheetah’s bloody muzzle shoving Lily out of the way just before he would have landed on top of her. The room exploded into noise and action, men in dark blue and gray everywhere, filling every available space.
The Serpent lay on the floor next to her, his face slack, his pale blue eyes open and sightless. A lock of pale blond hair fell over his forehead, making him look absurdly young.
Is done, the cat said in satisfaction. Judgment.
Lily turned away, rested her face on the dense plush fur of the cat, and felt one hard, bitter tear fall from her eye.
She had no idea whom she was crying for.
“Ma’am? Ma’am? Ms. Malkin?” Abraham, the guy who had come up from D.C. to oversee the operation. He was in her face, and she batted at him, trying to make him go away.
“Don’ like you.”
He looked taken aback, then grinned. The grin looked strange on him, like he didn’t do it very often. “Very few people do, Ms. Malkin.”
They had given her something for the pain. It didn’t make the pain go away, but she didn’t give a damn about it anymore.
“You got him.” She would not give him the benefit of a name. Not the one he’d worn here, not the one he’d had in their days together, not even the one that the media had given him. He would be nameless to her, forevermore. It was right. It was just.
“More like to say the cat did,” Abraham said. “Damn cat—we can’t figure what killed the guy, the bullet or the bite. That guy won’t be hurting anyone again, though, not anymore.”
“No. Not anymore,” she agreed peaceably. Abraham had no idea. No idea at all.
Then the EMTs returned and bundled her into an ambulance, securing her in her stretcher so that she wouldn’t bump or slide on the way to the hospital. It was a little like beings trapped on a roller coaster, she thought. There was a burst of conversation, someone arguing, and then they closed the doors and the ambulance pulled away, hands and voices still fussing around her. Even through the fussing, with her eyes closed, Lily knew that Jon was there, beside her in the narrow, crowded space.
“That was,” he said, his voice still cool, “possibly the stupidest thing anyone has ever done. Ever.”
Lily opened her eyes and looked at him, then raised one hand—a human hand, with human nails, not claws and pads—and touched the side of his face. It took too much effort, and exhausted her, just that one movement. The skin of his cheek was dry, prickly with beard growth. It was the most wonderful thing she had ever felt.
“Which part?” she asked.
He caught her hand with his own, holding her touch against his face. “Yes,” he said, and his voice was warm all of a sudden. “Yes.”
She smiled, feeling the texture of his skin and the weight of his gaze on her. Unblinking. Unflinching. He had seen. He might not know what he had seen, but he had seen. And he was here. He was still here. He hadn’t thrown her away, hadn’t walked away.
She had broken the cycle.
“I’m a heroine,” she said to him, drowsy from the painkillers. “You gotta tell me. What does the T stand for?”
This time, he laughed. “Tiberius,” he admitted. “My mom was a Star Trek fan, but my dad wouldn’t let her name me James because he had an Uncle James he didn’t like. I hate it.”
“Jon Tiberius. Goddess, that’s awful,” she said dreamily. Then an EMT shoved Jon aside and leaned over her to adjust the flow of liquids into her veins. She closed her eyes and let the darkness take her.
It was all right. Jon T. would be there when she woke up.
Chapter 19
The air was cold, an arctic front swooping down and reclaiming the season. Lily stood on the tiny balcony of her condo and looked up at the sky. There were no clouds, and the stars were still and clear.
For the first time ever, the stars looked right.
The sliding door opened and closed behind her, and Jon came up behind her. He paused just before actually making contact, waiting for her to lean into him. When she did, he wrapped his arms around her, careful to avoid the bandages under her sweater, covering the cuts and scratches on her shoulders and arms. They were all from the Serpent’s knife; the cat’s claws never touched her, even as he was knocking her to the ground.
The cheetah had taken the brunt of the Serpent’s knife in its side, even as it knocked her clear, allowing Jon an open shot at the man. One of the agents, risking his own life, had bundled the injured cat into the back of h
is car and driven it to the hospital himself, yelling at the emergency-room staff until someone got on the phone with the zoo, getting instructions over the line on how to sedate the cat and sew it up.
Lily had heard the story after, when it was funny, not terrifying. She suspected that the agent and the E.R. crew would all dine out on that story for months to come.
As though he knew what she was thinking, Jon told her, “The cat’s gotten a clean bill of health, and will be picked up by his facility tomorrow morning.”
She nodded. She knew that already, from the cat’s humming contentment she could feel even now in her bones, even across town. She knew that connection would fade the way the rest of it, the memories and the scars, were already fading. But that awareness wouldn’t go away, not unless she wanted it to.
She very much didn’t want it to. Not now. Not that she knew what it was. What she was.
“I still can’t believe he found you,” she said. Cheetahs had been used as hunting animals back then, and even now, but they were sight hunters, not smell. The ability to find Jon, and bring him back, across an unfamiliar, probably terrifying city…
“It was a miracle,” she said finally, not willing to push it further. Not willing to say the word the cat had bandied about so carelessly. Not yet.
“It was something,” Jon agreed. He still wasn’t sure what, hadn’t been able to say the words, but his training was to follow the evidence, and build theories on what he knew for a fact. And he knew for a fact that a cat had helped him save his lover.
And she knew that he knew for a fact that his lover had eyes that reflected light like that cat’s. That cats adored her, spoke to her. That when they made love, sometimes he felt the prick of claws, gentle, on his skin.