by A. J. Menden
“I’m not . . .”
“Yes, you are,” I snapped. And this was why I didn’t like to let anyone close. They would inevitably hurt me. The one guy that I’d let myself like—I wasn’t getting anywhere close to the other L word—in a really long time wasn’t into me. It was painfully obvious, and I didn’t need to be hit over the head with the fact. Not anymore.
“At least I’m not getting dumped for a vestal virgin this time,” I muttered, picking my dress up off the floor.
He yanked it out of my hands and tossed it off to the side in a movement so quick it barely registered. I stared at my now-empty hands and then at him. He was stripping off his shirt.
“Does it look like I’m rejecting you?” he asked.
“No,” I said, enunciating the word carefully. But I wasn’t entirely sure I wasn’t hallucinating. I reached out a hand to touch his chest, to make sure all of this was real.
“Damn straight.” He grabbed me, gathering me up in his arms while at the same time his mouth bruised mine, giving me a bone-searing kiss that set every nerve in my body tingling. He dropped onto my bed with me under him. Our tongues tangled. I clung to him, wrapping my legs around his hips, forcing him closer. I rocked my hips encouragingly against his, wanting more, needing more. I hadn’t needed anything this badly in eons.
His mouth tore from mine and he moved out of my embrace, catching my wrists and pinning me to the plush bed. Every patch of bare skin on my body immediately seemed hyperaware. “Hold still,” he growled with a half smile, and then he kissed me again, a deep and hungry kiss that I returned just as eagerly, saying somehow what neither of us was able to vocalize.
His mouth left mine to visit my neck, kissing along my jaw to my earlobe and down to the hollow in my throat, pausing to lick there. I shuddered in delight and tried to pull my wrists out of his grasp, wanting to get out of the way all of the remaining uncomfortable clothes between us, but he held me firm. He trailed kisses down my body, mouth hot through the thin fabric of my negligee, causing me to release a soft moan of frustration.
“Please, Cyrus.”
That spurred him on. He let go of my wrists. But I immediately missed the contact and reached up and pulled him to me, kissing him hard, plunging my tongue into his mouth. He reached between our bodies to shuck his pants. I started to slide out of the thin garment I still wore, but he knocked my hand away and got rid of my negligee just as easily as he had his own clothes. He froze then, just staring at me lying naked beneath him. I smiled at the appreciation I saw in his eyes and did some checking out of my own. How had I misjudged how attractive this man was for all these years?
He brushed aside a strand of hair across my cheek. “Goddamn, you’re gorgeous,” he said, his voice a reverent whisper.
The look of pure devotion and warmth in his eyes promised an emotion I wasn’t quite ready to face. It did strange things to me: I felt a tear start to burn in my eye. So he wouldn’t see, I sat up quickly and recaptured his mouth. His bare skin met mine and we both became too distracted by need to think of anything else.
I brought one of my legs up to unzip my boot, but he reached out and stopped me. Our eyes met. “No,” he said, his voice thick with desire. “Leave them on.”
I grinned wickedly. “Whatever you want, Cyrus. Whatever you want.”
“Want? I want to fulfill your agenda, sweetheart,” he said, kissing me again. “And we have a lot of time to do so.”
Some time and several fulfilled agendas later, I was lying blissfully on my back on an extremely rumpled bed. In a near comatose state, I was having a new ward painted on me in henna.
“You’re moving.”
“It’s tickling!”
“Do you complain like this to your djinn?” Cyrus asked, dipping the brush into the henna again before going back to work on my lower abdomen.
“They paint on my arms, not anywhere I’m ticklish.”
“There.” Cyrus sat back and admired his painting. “Now, don’t move until it dries.”
I tried to lean upward and read it but couldn’t and quickly gave up. From what I could see there were just numbers, much like the numbers on his arms.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“I’m not telling you. Not right now.”
“But you’ll tell me someday?” I teased as he lay down next to me.
“Maybe. If you’re good.” He kissed me.
“If it’s not actually a ward and is just something dirty, tell me.” I laughed. “I’m not going to get mad. It washes off.”
“Maybe I should convince you to get it tattooed for real, then tell you what it means,” he suggested.
“You can’t tattoo wards, remember? They lose effectiveness eventually.”
“This one won’t.”
“Besides,” I continued. “I’m fairly sure tattoos won’t work on me because of the invulnerability thing. Another mystery of being Fantazia,” I joked.
“Speaking of mysteries . . .” He twirled a strand of my hair around his finger. “Were you doing magic at some point during all that?”
I felt a wave of embarrassment flood me. “N-no. That wasn’t magic talk.”
He smiled. “I had a feeling it wasn’t. I’m just going to have to learn Italian then, to know what you’re saying when you’re talking dirty.” He dropped a kiss on my throat.
I relaxed a bit. “That was a very old dialect of Italian.”
“Ancient dirty talk. I love it.” He kissed my neck again. “I’ll have to ask the Old One what it means.”
“I wouldn’t recommend doing that,” I said, brushing a finger over his lips. “He’ll figure out where you heard it.”
“So?”
“Well, I kind of doubt it’ll get him pissed off, since we’re not that close anymore, but it’s bound to weird him out. I certainly wouldn’t want to hear any details about him and Lainey doing it. Emily’s enough evidence of that.” I shivered. It’s a definite mood-killer, thinking of your father’s sex life. Especially when you’re kind of angry at your father anyway.
Cyrus was looking at me strangely. “Not that close anymore?”
“Well, it’s not like he’s been much of a father for years. Still, I doubt he wants details of you sleeping with his daughter. That’s all I’m saying. It’s bound to be a bit strange.”
Cyrus stared. “W-what?”
I eyed him blankly. “What do you mean, what?”
He sat up. “You’re his daughter?”
I’d forgotten he didn’t know. Then again, to be fair, my mind was elsewhere—on agendas and things like that.
“I thought for sure you knew,” I muttered. “All of the rest of the EHJ know.” I processed the surprise on his face. “Wow. You really didn’t know. Yes, I’m his daughter. From an extremely long time ago, obviously. Possibly from his first life, though no one is certain just when that was. Didn’t you ever wonder about the shared Italian, about the shared magic?”
“I just thought you two were together at some point.”
“Ew!” I squealed. “Why does everyone’s minds always go there? Why didn’t you process the not-aging thing? Why didn’t you think, ‘Oh, the Reincarnist lives forever, and so does Fantazia. She must be his daughter’?”
“Toby’s related to him and no one in his family does that.”
I shrugged. “I’m different.”
Cyrus lay back on the bed. “Holy shit. I’m in bed with the Reincarnist’s daughter.”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“He’s going to kill me!”
I gave him an annoyed look. “I doubt it. Even if I wasn’t thousands of years past having a curfew, he doesn’t care that much.” At Cyrus’s incredulity, I shrugged. “We haven’t been close in a very long time.”
Cyrus shook his head. “That doesn’t matter. You’re still his daughter. He’s going to be weirded out.”
“No, he won’t,” I repeated. “He forgot me. The moment his life as my birth father ended, he came back as a
new person who thought I was just some servant girl. I let him think that. We moved so he could get a fresh start, and this was right around when my powers started kicking in. He became my magical teacher, but I couldn’t handle that was all he thought I was to him, a servant and a pupil. When I left home, he didn’t try to stop me.” I bit my lip because I was not going to cry about this. Not now.
Damn it! Stupid life-altering sex. It was making me soft.
“Sweetheart.” Cyrus brushed a tear from the corner of my eye but wisely said nothing about it. “This explains so much.”
I shrugged. “What? Why I’m such a mess? Sure, why not. It’s the oldest story in the book: I have Daddy issues.”
Cyrus looked concerned. “Whatever he believed in that first reincarnation, he knows now. He knows now that you’re his child. You said yourself that he wouldn’t want confirmation about me sleeping with his daughter.”
I laughed bitterly. “Yeah. That was my doing. I got depressed one day when another bit of history came back to bite me in the ass. I went to see him. Maybe I was wanting a daddy, or maybe I just wanted to hurt him because he was off having another new and perfect life, like always. So I told him who I am . . . He got all upset and was wanting to make amends. I just bolted. I figured I’d hide until he died and forgot me again.”
“Jesus.” Cyrus shook his head.
“Unfortunately, that was around the time he got the bright idea to start writing things down so he wouldn’t forget them. That included me. So, there’s no escaping him and all the centuries of awkwardness between us. Not unless I come here.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“ ‘That sucks.’ That’s about all you can say.”
“That sucks,” he said seriously.
I laughed. “I’ve gotten used to it. It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
Cyrus shook his head again. “Why is it I don’t buy that?”
I took a look at him, glanced down at him lying naked and glorious in my bed and decided the time for chitchat was over. “You know what? I’m not talking about my depressing life anymore. In fact, I’m going for a nice distraction.”
“You’ll smear the paint!” he said as I kissed him, pulling him toward me.
“You can redo it,” I said against his mouth. “We still have plenty of time.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
About twenty-four hours later the walls of the bar shuddered, and with them the walls of this reality. It could only mean one thing.
I sat up in bed with a start. “The spell’s down. The tracing spell must have worn off.”
“Just ten more minutes,” Cyrus mumbled sleepily beside me. “Hit the snooze alarm.”
“There’s no snooze alarm on spells,” I snapped. Standing, I whispered some Italian to get myself dressed, producing clothes out of my transdimensional closet, in this case a pair of tight jeans hanging low enough to perfectly display the top of the new ward Cyrus had painted, and a tank top with a slightly Grecian look. And I wasn’t going anywhere without some killer stilettos.
I glanced down at the painted tattoo again. “So, are you going to tell me what this means now?”
He studied me. “Are you going to tell me what you said in Italian last night?”
I shook my head. “No.”
He shrugged. “Me neither. Not yet.”
We seemed to be at an impasse. I glared down at the tattoo again, absently running a finger over the tops of the numbers, and wondered why I had said what I had last night in the first place.
“We can get out of here now,” I announced, changing the subject. “Mindy’s got to be wondering what happened to us, since her transmitter probably stopped working the moment we came through to this reality.”
“Thank God for that.” Cyrus laughed. “Otherwise she’ll be scarred for life. Or getting ready to leak a sex tape onto the Internet.”
“The transmitter also blew up,” I said. “Right after I cast that spell to take us away.”
“Good to know.”
He got up and threw on his clothes. I watched. He liked to be self-deprecating about his appearance, but there was nothing wrong with the show. Not from my perspective. He was all man.
He noticed me watching. “What?”
“Nothing.”
He shook his head at my obvious interest. “You’re a strange sort of woman, Fantazia.”
“You should be glad of that,” I replied.
“Believe me, I am. So . . .”
“So,” I repeated warily.
There was tension in the air, something I’d known was going to happen eventually. Everything was different now between us, and there would be no going back to simple friendship, at least, not without wading through a bunch of awkwardness first. Now was going to come a feeling-it-out phase, where we both tried to discern what the other truly wanted. There would be hints dropped, veiled discussions and strange looks until one of us finally got up the courage to ask the questions neither of us wanted to face.
Cyrus eyed me directly, his blue eyes boring into mine. “So, when we get back to the Elite Hands of Justice headquarters, is this staying behind us and becoming The Incident of Which We Do Not Speak, or are we going to play it by ear and just see what happens?”
Leave it to him to just power through to the difficult stuff.
“What do you think?” I asked, throwing the ball back in his court.
“I think I don’t know what goes on in your mind, Fantazia,” he said, sliding a hand out around my waist to rest on my hip. “But I also think I want to stick around to find out.”
I’ve never been the lovey-dovey type. I don’t go around holding hands or cuddling up or anything, but I smiled and relaxed, taking a moment to rest my head against his chest. I briefly realized I could possibly get used to it. “That’s a good answer.”
“I rehearsed all night,” he joked. “I also have a backup, in case that one didn’t work.”
“Which is?”
“ ‘No man, especially one who looks like me, is ever going to kick you out of bed before he has to,’ ” he replied.
I crossed my arms in mock seriousness. “Not bad, but it lacks a certain something. And I don’t know, for someone who was so resistant of my charms to begin with . . .”
“I’m beginning to see them in a different light,” he said.
He ran his hand down along my butt, and I resisted the urge to throw him on the bed and have my way with him. Barely. “We should probably go check in.”
“The EHJ can wait,” Cyrus replied, his hands now drifting under my shirt.
“They’ve waited twenty-four hours!”
“Then another won’t kill them. It’s not like we’re part of the team, anyway. Not officially. They don’t need us to fight Hacker and the Dragon cult; they just use us when it’s convenient. Did you notice how they never bring me along, even though I’m always trying to be useful? Now, please let me get my groping you out of the way so I don’t mess up and do it in front of your father and get myself killed.”
He continued to touch me in ways that would indeed get a man murdered by a parent. At least, by a parent who cared. “D-don’t mention him right now,” I gasped.
“If you want me to shut up, you’re going to have to make me,” Cyrus teased.
I did. I kissed him hard, stopping his mouth, and I realized all of our getting dressed had been in vain. But he was right: the EHJ could wait just a bit longer, and neither he nor I was a hero. We had slightly more realistic priorities.
“Nice of you to join us again,” Paul growled as we popped into the EHJ headquarters.
“I kept trying to call you on the transmitter,” Mindy said. “You just dropped out of existence!”
“Got waylaid by cultists,” I explained.
“I saved her.” Cyrus spoke in a deadpan. “There was an epic battle. You should have been there.”
“I heard that part,” Mindy retorted. “Then there was nothing.”
“We went back to my
place,” I said, wincing at the truth implied by that statement. “The cultists tried to follow us, and I had to make us untraceable for a while.”
“You could have gotten word to us somehow,” Paul said.
“If we could have, we would have,” Cyrus interjected. “The only way we could get away from the cultists was to just get away from everyone.”
“Look, in case you’ve forgotten, I don’t work for you,” I snapped at Paul. I didn’t need Cyrus trying to smooth things over. “I don’t owe you anything. I don’t have to call in and tell you where I’m at. I’m not your teenage daughter breaking curfew, for God’s sake!”
“No. You’re not my daughter.” Paul shook his head. “Thank God. We’ve got way too much other pressing business to deal with your lack of empathy.” He turned on his heel and walked away.
I stared after him, not sure what to say.
Mindy cleared her throat. “All I could tell him was that someone named London set a trap for you with the Dragon’s people because some other mysterious power wants you. Oh, and that some kid named Dylan who you never saw as a threat before is working with the Dragon. He got that girl London pretty quick and she’s been cooling her heels in high-security jail ever since. He’s been trying to track down Dylan ever since.”
“Why would Paul care so much?”
Mindy gave me a look like I was a dunce. After a moment she said, “I was talking about Wesley.”
The reaction hit me strangely. Was Mindy saying that the Reincarnist was upset, thinking I’d been horribly killed, and that he was trying to track down the perpetrators? Was that why Paul was giving me a hard time for not checking in, saying I lacked empathy? Because I had unduly upset my father?
Mindy continued: “Thank God we called Luke and Kate back, because it seems like all hell’s broken loose since—or, just continued to break loose, actually. The government’s about to cave in to Hacker’s demands.”