by Helena Maeve
“That feels good,” Neil breathed as she nibbled along the inside of his thigh.
“Yeah? How about this…?” Eve let her tongue scrape over his scrotum in one long, wet lick. She felt his erection bob, nerve endings alight with interest.
Neil sucked in a breath. “That’s— That’s good, too,” he said, stubbornly holding fast to his composure. He was fisting the sheets—he’d never been one for pulling her hair, however much she’d asked—and his legs were taut with the effort to keep still.
Eve didn’t know why he bothered. They both knew where this was going.
She settled more comfortably between his thighs and dipped her head, sealing her lips just under the glans as she hollowed her cheeks. She was a little out of practice, not having gone down on a man for better than four years, but Neil didn’t seem to mind that she was feeling her way through the motions.
He took his time with touching her—maybe he didn’t want to pressure her, but all Eve could think of as she worked her mouth over his dick was how much easier it would be with Neil’s hands to guide her. She moaned when he finally wound fingers in her hair, a long note of relief that seemed to ricochet through Neil as he canted his hips back against the bed.
“Fuck, Eve—please,” he gasped, screwing his eyes tightly shut.
Please, what? she wanted to ask, but the tease tangled in her throat as Neil tugged on her curls. A zing of desire sparked in her veins and she followed the movement, let her throat relax as best she could. This was how she wanted it—with Neil in control, showing her how he needed to be touched. He’d never been shy about trying new things. Now wasn’t the time to start.
Eve pinned both hands to the mattress, forced herself to keep them there. She didn’t realize her eyes were watering until she felt Neil tug her off. “Am I hurting you?” For all that his cheeks were flushed with arousal, and his breaths were knifing in and out of his lungs, it was concern that twisted up his features.
She shook her head. This wasn’t pain. She knew pain and this was something else—a welcome ache growing in the pit of her stomach.
Eve didn’t trust her voice to speak. She crawled up his body with awkward, shaking limbs and took him inside her with a trembling hand.
It wasn’t easy. He slipped out the first time, his length slippery with spit and pre-cum and soon enough, with her arousal, but on the second time, he speared her deeply. Eve curled her toes into the sheets and sighed. This was what she wanted—perfection.
They rocked together slowly. There was little range of movement for either of them and neither seemed willing to adjust. So much for a good, hard fuck. Eve couldn’t bring herself to regret the easy pace.
Neil never rushed her. He ran his hands over her spine, down into the dip at the small of her back and up the wings of her shoulders all over again as if to reacquaint himself with how it felt to hold her. It was a nice thought—that maybe he wanted to remember this for another decade to come.
“I’ve missed you,” Eve whispered into the crook of his shoulder. “I’ve— Oh, God.” She recognized the overwhelming pull of need, her insides clenching as the heat building up in her belly spilled over. She came squeezing down around him, every tremor stolen, as if her own pleasure was meaningless if she didn’t devour Neil by the same token.
He didn’t seem to mind, if the tenor of his cries was any indication.
They lay in each other’s arms when it was over, the two of them equally spent and trembling. Eve followed the ascending path of a spider crawling stubbornly along the windowpane.
“Think you’ll be able to do it?”
“Hmm? Oh…” She could feel the rise and fall of Neil’s chest as he breathed, could hear the hammering of his heartbeat—slower now, decelerating like an overworked engine. “I don’t know. I hope so.”
He hadn’t been able to heal himself from a twisted ankle and that should have been child’s play for a warlock. Opening a rift was like asking a human to run through shifting sand without sinking. It could be done, but there was every reason to fear the reverse.
“If you don’t want to,” Eve started.
“Right now, I just want to lie here with you and not worry about casting us both into the underworld.”
He wasn’t asking for much, just a few moments of peace. Eve nodded. “Okay.” If she ignored the crooked Eiffel Tower and the tendrils of smoke rising from small fires all over the city, Eve could almost pretend they were just visiting Paris, like lovers had been wont to do for generations. It was a wonderful, harmless cliché. She could embrace it, for Neil’s sake.
She could pretend that the task before them wasn’t bordering on impossible. We need to go back, she told herself stubbornly. We can’t just run away.
It did not escape her that running away was precisely what she’d been planning to do when she’d withdrawn the full five grand out of her bank account. There was a world of difference between self-sabotage and self-awareness. The former had never given Eve any trouble. She was still working on getting the hang of the latter.
* * * *
“You know, if this works, I could just open a rift for you, send you where you need to be,” Neil said, tugging on his clothes. He seemed to be rallying—with some difficulty, true, but his infamous willpower was paying dividends as he gingerly rested his weight on his injured ankle. “You could save your money.”
They’d split a couple of chocolate bars for breakfast, chasing them with fizzy soda. It wasn’t so hard to make do in a city not beset by scavengers.
“I doubt I’ll need it,” Eve mused, zipping up her fly. “I appreciate the thought, though.” She more than appreciated it—she felt the tug of guilt for having to refuse, for knowing that she couldn’t afford to be any more indebted to him than she already was.
The oracle had said that Eve had trouble believing. That wasn’t true. What she had trouble with was the knowledge that there was a world out there she couldn’t change. The dice had been thrown. Now they were just coming to grips with the consequences.
She finished dressing and pulled her backpack over her shoulders, settling the straps so they wouldn’t chafe her bare arms.
“You’re still hanging onto that thing?” Neil asked, shaking his head. “You look like a tortoise.”
“And you have the face of a gnat,” Eve shot back. She stopped just short of poking her tongue out like a little kid. Mature insults had a way of rolling off her like silk on a windowpane, but childish taunts demanded equally childish retorts. She didn’t bother trying to make more sense of it than that.
Neil slid an arm around her waist before she could step one foot outside their room, his lips curling into a smile. “I’m glad I ran into you again.” It was the kind of thing someone might say as a goodbye, so naturally Eve had to gloss over it with a joke.
“Even if I keep landing us in hot water?”
“Even if,” Neil said and kissed her chastely on the lips.
She would’ve liked nothing better than to deepen the kiss, to take him again—because, really, what else was there at the end of the world if not free love without consequences?—but the soft thump of a foreign heartbeat made itself heard and Eve knew they had company. She disengaged with a sigh. “Don’t worry. We’re ready.”
“Good,” said the oracle. “We’ll need somewhere a little less cramped. Follow me.”
Somehow, she was able to negotiate the narrow steps without a single stumble. Eve hovered uselessly at her elbow, ready to catch her if she fell. There was no need. For a blind woman whose third eye was sharper than all her other senses, she had proved herself as autonomous as she was cagey.
They emerged into streets that were beginning to look familiar in their rampant desolation. Eve had heard a helicopter soar overhead last night, after she had switched from hawk to feline form, but it hadn’t dropped any soldiers on the ground. Eve had followed it northward. Presumably it was bound for the British Isles, whence people would sooner or later descend to claim new territory
, or analyze the rocks that had nearly exterminated all human life on the blue marble they called home.
She’d wondered if Neil’s kind would be first in line. Doubtful, they were a notoriously reclusive sort. It was mundanes who would probably make up most of the vanguard—who would act. It was too much to hope that packs and covens would come together to get involved in the reconstruction efforts when the voices with greatest authority were so allergic to change.
For good reason, Eve thought, the Briars never far from her mind.
“This will do,” said the oracle as she came to a stop in a deserted square, a public park on her right and shuttered shops on the left. Five streets accidentally marked the points of a more or less even pentagram, with the three of them at its center. Eve had no idea if that was enough of a symbol to rally one’s power, but her knowledge of Neil’s craft was purposefully modest.
She hefted her backpack nervously, determined not to give in to the prickle of fur and claw beneath her skin. Now wasn’t the time for cowardice.
“You will have to concentrate,” the oracle said.
“No, really? And here I thought I could do it with one hand tied behind my back…”
Eve elbowed Neil in the ribs. “Behave.” His roguish grin really shouldn’t have made her insides feel all warm and squirmy. This was serious. They couldn’t afford to make mistakes.
“I know how to make a void around me,” Neil said, rolling his eyes with false bravado. “I’ve invoked the dead before—”
“You’ve never stepped into their realm, though, have you?” The oracle was adamant—he had to concentrate not on himself but on the destination he was aiming to reach. “The meteors have created a breach in the thin mesh separating our world from all the others. The fabric of time and space is resealing itself, but you may yet be able to pass through the gaps if you hurry.”
It was Eve’s turn to scowl. “You couldn’t have said this was a time-sensitive operation before?”
“It slipped my mind.”
Bullshit, you’ve been playing us since the beginning. “You know, you still owe me an answer,” she pointed out, watching as the oracle stepped away in her faded nightdress. “You never said if—”
“He kills you?”
Eve glared, pretending that she couldn’t see the confusion writ clearly across Neil’s face. She hadn’t told him about what she’d glimpsed before they had passed through the rift. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him with the information, but that she was reluctant to add to his burden. “Yes,” she gritted out.
The oracle seemed to ponder the question. “To my knowledge… Yes.”
“Who kills you?” Neil asked, glancing between them.
“No one. Doesn’t matter.”
“Really? Because from the look on your face, I’d say—”
Eve stepped in close. “I’ll tell you when you get us home.” It wasn’t a lie, not yet. She just couldn’t fathom telling him that they were likely traveling to meet a future version of himself whose dubious intentions would wind up having vastly unpleasant consequences.
She folded her hands around his. “Scared?”
“Terrified.”
“Me too,” Eve confessed, but fear was no reason not to attempt to bend the laws of physics. Science had been attempting it for decades.
“Remember,” the oracle said, “think not of yourself but of the place you need to reach. That should do it.”
“Should?” Eve muttered. “One of these days, woman…”
Neil gave her hands a squeeze. At first she thought it might be a reprimand to keep her from lobbing threats left and right, or directing them at someone who was, however clumsily, attempting to help them. But then Eve saw his tightly shut eyes, the grimace twisting at his features.
He wasn’t floating in that semi-aware plane where warlocks and witches stored most of their awesome internal library. He wasn’t rifling through the pages of grimoires he could recall by heart when Eve herself could barely remember her PIN.
He has opened himself to you, the oracle said with lips unmoving. Help him. It is the only way.
Eve didn’t know how. She had spent years erecting tall, immovable walls to block out the past. She imagined herself taking a hammer to that make-believe mausoleum and striking into the brick. Each blow juddered through the link of their joined hands like a physical blow.
She wanted to ask if she was hurting him, to offer to stop, but no words came out. The derelict storefronts and the sallow creature watching them from the bench faded with the first blade of light spilling out from the felled wall. There was light within—and just like the blaze of the rift, it was blinding and painful to behold.
Chapter Eight
Colorado, fifteen hundred days before
Eve tightened her hold on Neil’s hands. He was slipping away, his palms moist and hot against hers, his skin burning her like a brand.
“Neil!” she shouted, but in the strobe-white of the space around them, there was no echo, no air to carry the sound. Eve began to choke, her lungs burning as she and Neil hurtled together through a vast and empty space. It was impossible to say if they were going up or down. The ground seemed firm beneath their feet yet equally present on either side of them, compressing like an ever-tightening cage molded unswervingly to the shape of their bodies.
She panted for breath, her lungs coming up empty, and felt rather than heard Neil say, Don’t let go.
There was no risk there. Eve couldn’t have moved her cramped digits if she’d wanted to. The forces pulling them this way and that were far beyond her control. Her inner beast clawed at her insides, increasingly frantic. She could feel the prick of fangs in her mouth just as sure as she sensed the ticklish, electric fluttering of phantom wings at her shoulders. Her body didn’t know what it wanted to become, which form would best save it. Her mind was similarly torn.
The first time they had gone through the rift, it had been quick. A single step and they were on the other side, dropping to their knees on dusty concrete thousands of miles from where they’d started.
Something must’ve gone wrong.
They weren’t supposed to be stuck in this halfway place. The blinding white lights were doing a number on Eve, who hissed as though burned and thought of cages, of rooms peopled by lab coat-wearing torturers who shined lights into her face and prodded her with needles.
“Neil!” This time the sound echoed loudly, a shrill note dispelling the milky-white mist.
His eyes snapped open, found hers, and in that moment Eve knew beyond a doubt that she hadn’t been mistaken. The blue-eyed creature was Neil and Neil was the one who was turning the knife in her back.
At least you know now, Eve told herself as her knees gave out.
She touched down in muddy grassland, felling a couple of timid dandelions in the process. “This isn’t St. Louis,” she croaked, surprised that her rough, husky voice was audible once again.
She blinked away the sunlight and turned her head. Neil was stretched out beside her in the dirt, his chest rising and falling rapidly with every shaky breath. “You okay?”
Neil shook his head.
He looked spooked more than exhausted and ran a shaking hand over his face.
“We’re okay,” Eve said, willing it to be the truth. “See? You’re— You brought us back to Earth, so that’s a victory right there.” She was by no means an expert, but she figured that the underworld would be a trifle less sunny.
It was a pretty spot of grassland they’d landed in. Were it not for the mud, it might have been worth lying there and catching their breaths. Eve thought better of it as she pushed herself up from the ground, hefting her backpack. Something about the perfume of pine needles and wet grass called to her memory.
“I know this place,” she breathed. “I’ve been here before.”
Not in human form and not recently. The oracle had told them to keep in mind their destination, to concentrate on returning to St. Louis the night of that heinous sto
rm. She had warned that Eve was to help Neil keep their rudder straight. And Eve had dropped the ball.
Neil held up a hand to block out the sunlight. “When?”
It was a good question and it gave Eve pause as she considered her answer. It came to her quickly, like a blow to the head. “Ten years ago… Give or take a few weeks.”
The more pertinent question was how far back in time they had gone. The Rockies offered no answers, their jagged, white-capped peaks mournfully silent. Not even the ancient firs stirred on the slopes. There was only one place to find answers in this no-man’s-land—and that was the gray-walled mausoleum below, its chain-link perimeter as off-putting as it was impenetrable.
* * * *
Eve soared over the facility twice before she was satisfied that it was abandoned. No soldiers were moving between the watchtowers, no one was herding test subjects out for their morning constitutional. She spied an open door leading down into the subterraneous bowels of the base, but she was reluctant to venture in alone, not out of fear—she knew what she’d find at the bottom of the long, winding staircase—but out of self-preservation.
“It doesn’t look like anyone’s home.”
Neil took up the backpack while she dressed. “Is it deserted?”
“Or they haven’t peopled it with staff yet,” Eve suggested dubiously. “Anything’s possible when you’re dealing with time travel. We still don’t know the date, do we?”
To her disappointment, Neil shook his head. “I checked my phone, but the battery’s dead.” It was useless to check if her own was working, but Eve did anyway. The rift had left them bruised and battered, their thoughts scrambled like egg yolks. Was it any wonder that human technology had followed a similar fate?
“We could go inside,” Neil said. Eve felt him watching her out of the corner of her eye. Was he worried she would freak out at the suggestion? It was the only sensible thing to do, bad memories aside.