Magic, New Mexico: In Graves Below (Kindle Worlds)

by Carol Van Natta

  Idrián turned out to have decent carpentry skills, which meant he could help assemble the standing set pieces, and she put his artistic talent to good use in fixing a backdrop so the large, rearing stallion painted on it had the usual four legs instead of three. She didn’t try to hide her attraction to him or their nascent relationship, knowing her friends would figure it out anyway. The only fibs she told were pretending they met on the internet instead of a magical plane between worlds, and that he’d come to Denver to see her dance, not because of a prophecy by a five-hundred-year-old ghost.

  “I’m going up front to check that the box office is locked,” she told him, putting her hand on his arm because she wanted to feel the connection. She thought she was starting to be able to tell where he was even when she couldn’t see him, but she sternly warned herself that might be wishful thinking.

  “Okay.” He leaned closer and whispered conspiratorially. “Does it have any spots for making out?”

  She laughed. “Let’s go see.”

  The lobby was deserted and dark, but streetlights shone through the wide bank of front windows, making it feel like a fishbowl. After confirming the box office door was locked, she checked the lobby doors, too, then crossed to Idrián to stand just a few inches in front of him. “Hi there, handsome.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder. “Whatever they’re paying you, you deserve double.”

  She smiled. “Thank you. You’re seeing us at our worst because we’re having to cram two nights’ work into one. Tomorrow will be better.” She dropped her forehead to his shoulder. His presence played merry hell with her concentration, but she wouldn’t trade it for anything.

  “Thank you for not treating me like an invalid.”

  She looked up at him, surprised. “It never even occurred to me.”

  “I know.” He smiled and kissed her lightly.

  She slid her hands onto his hips and hooked her thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans. She wanted him with an intensity that made her heart race and her belly tighten. “After we’re done here tonight—”

  A loud knocking on the glass interrupted them. A man and a woman in suit coats stood at the door, staring at them.

  Riya moved closer to the door. “Sorry,” she yelled so they’d hear her through the glass, “the theater is closed.”

  One of the men lifted a lanyard and pressed the identification and a badge to the glass. It said he was Detective Wayne from the Denver Police Department.

  “Riya Sanobal?” he shouted. “Denise Moreland said to ask for you.”

  Riya turned her head toward Idrián. “What do the factory worker ghosts think?” she asked quietly. She knew he’d asked them to be sentinels, since he couldn’t set wards on a large public building.

  “They’re human. No magic,” he murmured.

  Riya turned the knob to unlock the door and pulled it open to admit the two detectives.

  “Are you Riya Sanobal?” asked Wayne. He was tall, balding, and wore round-frame glasses. His companion was younger, dark blond, and considerably leaner than the pot-bellied Wayne.

  “Yes. How can I help you?”

  “I’m Detective Wayne, and this is Detective Sundstrom. We’d like to talk to everyone who was here last light. Ms. Moreland said you’d all be here.”

  “We are… well, except for Jonathan St. Peters.”

  Wayne exchanged a meaningful look with Sundstrom. “We know.”

  Riya didn’t need her grandmother’s prognostication talent to know it was bad news.

  According to the police, Jonathan St. Peters had been found murdered in an abandoned warehouse in an older industrial district near the railroad tracks. From what the police weren’t saying, she gathered the death had been unpleasant. Riya had never known anyone who’d been murdered, and even though she heartily disliked St. Peters, he didn’t deserve that.

  Wayne asked her about the fight she’d had with St. Peters the day before, and what she’d done the rest of the evening. She told them frankly that St. Peters had tried to take credit for her work, and she’d told him to come clean or else, then spent the rest of the evening with her friend and houseguest, Idrián. They took a photo of his identification, but didn’t seem interested in him, perhaps because he was just visiting and perhaps because all they saw were his injuries.

  According to the dancers, St. Peters had announced his new position and said Riya had taken the news badly and stormed out. He’d received a text message around six-thirty and told them he was running an errand and to start the tech rehearsal without him. He hadn’t come back by nine-thirty, so they’d locked up and left. Riya was sorry the man was dead, but he was still an asshole.

  Sundstrom showed everyone selected digital photos of the warehouse where St. Peters’ body had been found, and asked if they recognized the symbols painted on the floor. The police apparently thought they were made up, but Riya recognized them at once as magical in nature, and she knew from a quick glance at Idrián that he did, too.

  Under pretense of needing better light to see the photos, she took Sundstrom’s tablet to the stage manager’s station, where she used a small spell to send all the tablet’s photos to an encrypted shared storage location that her family used for private affairs. Her father’s cloud-spirit family had invented cloud storage long before humans got around to it. She wanted her very magical parents to look at the symbols, but first, she needed to warn them that some of the photos might not be for the weak of stomach.

  By the time the police left with complete contact information for everyone, it was almost nine o’clock.

  “We have three choices,” she told the group. “Do the full run-through like we planned, do an entrances-and-exits run-through, or give up tonight as a lost cause and make do with the full dress-and-makeup rehearsal tomorrow.”

  Whitney raised her hand. “I vote we do a full run-through tonight, but marking where we can.” The other dancers quickly agreed, and the crew said they’d stay, mostly because she promised overtime pay. With a new, fat check in her bank account from Denise, she could afford to pay them herself if she had to.

  “Okay, five minutes to places. Warm up when you can. Write down problems on the stage manager’s clipboard.”

  Fortunately, she had time to take Idrián to one of the dark corners she’d promised him. In between a few hot kisses, because she couldn’t resist, she told him about the photos she’d copied.

  “Could you email them to my cousin Roman?” he asked. “He’s a genius with languages.”

  “Sure, text me his address.”

  “What’s ‘marking’?” His warm, capable hands caressed her back and gently kneaded the knots he found there.

  “I’ll give you an hour to stop that.” She leaned into him gratefully and let his fingers work their mundane magic. “Marking is doing the movements, but not with full energy or intensity. It’s safer when dancers are tired or distracted. We all have regular jobs so we can pay the rent, so it’s been a long day for us.” She moaned softly while he worked the sore muscles below her shoulder blades, where she often carried tension.

  She kissed along the left side of his jaw and came to his deformed ear. Carefully, in case the area was painful, she touched it lightly with her tongue. He shivered and tightened his grip on her.

  “Okay?” she asked.

  “Better than okay,” he breathed, his voice deep and rumbling.

  “We’ll save it for later,” she promised. He’d already found a couple of sensitive spots on her, so she was glad to have sensual ammunition of her own.

  She reluctantly sent him out into the audience to watch so she could focus on her work.

  Riya waited until she saw Whitney and Mack, the last to leave, get in their separate cars, then locked the front lobby door and went back into the theater to meet Idrián at the backstage doors. She found him muttering, and assumed he was talking to the factory’s ghosts. She was hungry and tired.

  He touched fingers to the side of her face. “Let’s g
et food that’s bad for us and go home, oh highly underpaid woman.”

  She chuckled. “Can’t argue with that.” She opened the door and gestured for him to go first. She closed the door firmly shut after them, checked it to be sure, then used her magic to make doubly sure that all doors were locked, especially the alley door the dancers sometimes used to step outside for a moment and forgot to close.

  By the time they got to her place and parked their vehicles, she’d already wolfed down all of her ultra-sized order of fries and half her burger. She laughed when she saw Idrián had done almost the same.

  She pointed to the several dabs of paint on his forearm. “Do you want a bath tonight?” Heat rushed to her face when she imagined him gloriously naked, and helping him wash every part of him. “I, uh, my shower isn’t big enough for a chair.”

  “Yes, a bath would be good.” He tilted his head toward her loft apartment. “The circular stairs will be a challenge for my legs. Could you carry my bag up?”

  She blushed again. “Sorry, yes, of course. I didn’t even think.” She was a babbling idiot.

  “Just this once,” he responded with a twinkle in his eye, “I’ll forgive you for not anticipating the need for accessible stair design for a total stranger who dropped in on you out of the blue.”

  “You’re too kind,” she laughed. “Go on up. Light switches are on your left, and the bathroom is the first door on the right after the kitchen. Ignore any clothes you see on the floor. They have parties when I’m not home.”

  As she collected his bag and hers, she deliberately didn’t watch him navigate the staircase because she didn’t want him thinking she thought he was incompetent. When she’d remodeled the warehouse to suit her, designing for the disabled hadn’t even crossed her mind. She needed to remedy that, and soon.

  Assuming, of course, that Idrián would ever be back again. They’d only just met, not counting dreamwalk time, and lots of things could go wrong. The sizzling desire that had kept her engines revved for the last twenty-four hours was a shaky foundation for a relationship. He lived five hundred miles away. She had to get through all the performances and look for a new place to dance. He had ranch responsibilities that she, a city girl, couldn’t even imagine. Her parents would want to meet him, and that was the tip of the iceberg as far as dealing with her challenging family. The spirits of his ancestors might reject her for her non-human heritage, despite her dreamwalk abilities, and she knew their approval was important to him. And despite her alibi, she might be a person of interest in a murder case.

  The sound of running water drew her out of her spiral of doubts, and she knew where she wanted to be right then—upstairs, where the man she’d been dreaming about was getting naked.

  She knocked on the closed bathroom door. “I’ll leave your bag outside the door.”

  “Could you bring it in?”

  She left her bag in the hall, then opened the door to find him seated on the edge of her large, antique claw-footed bathtub, wearing only boxer shorts. His brace was leaning up against the rim. The extent of the burn scars didn’t surprise her, because she’d seen them as the living tattoo in dreamwalk, but seeing his legs did. She blushed when he caught her staring. “Sorry, I guess I was expecting feathers and talons.”

  He snorted. “Is that how you see my legs in dreamwalk?”

  She blinked. “Don’t you?”

  “No, they’re just my legs. My prosthesis translates to a sort of realistic mannequin’s leg with a hinged ankle.” He splashed his hand in the bath water, then adjusted the hot-water faucet. The play of his lean abdominal muscles made her breath catch.

  “What about your burn scars? I see them as tattoos that are constantly moving, like they’re telling a story.” She blushed again. “They lit up where I touched you, like one of those old mood rings.”

  “I see them as they are. Could I have the metal stand out of my bag?” He nodded toward the bag she was clutching to her chest.

  “Sorry.” She put the bag at his feet, then found the stand and handed it to him. It put her close enough to catch his scent, and despite her exhaustion, her hormones woke up. She stepped back quickly, before she did something stupid. A flash of hurt crossed his face before he smoothed it away. Did he think she was repulsed by him?

  “Idrián, I love it when we touch.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, deciding to take a chance on honesty. It was easier to say what was on her mind in the ephemeral world that was dreamwalk, but it felt important to say it in the physical world. “You’re sexier here than in dreamwalk, and that’s saying something.” She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. “It scares me, wanting you this much, because I want more than wicked-hot sex with you. I want to build a relationship that lasts, and I don’t know if that’s what you want. So when I back off, it’s not because I don’t want you, it’s to stop from throwing myself at you and going up in flames.”

  Wordlessly, he set the stand on the floor, then stood and held his hand out to her. She took it and let him reel her in as he stood and wrapped his arms around her. Two thin layers of cloth did nothing to hide his body’s reaction to her, or hers to him. She pressed her cheek to his shoulder and enjoyed the sensations.

  “I want all that.” He rubbed a gentle circle on her back. He probably meant it to be soothing, but her hormones begged to differ.

  She gathered her courage and looked up at him. “Will you share my bed?”

  His eyes widened. Then he kissed her, hard, and she met him with neediness of her own. He tasted of heady desire. Her breasts felt swollen, aching for his touch, his lips, his tongue. She grabbed the hand that was caressing her ass and put it on her breast to give him the idea. A distant clatter reminded her where they were. With as much willpower as she could muster, she pulled her mouth away from his. “Bathtub. Water.”

  The dazed look faded from his eyes as he processed her words. “Right.”

  He started to twist around, but she beat him to the faucets to shut off the flow. His chest was heaving for air as much as hers was. “As much as I’d like to continue this,” she said, putting a palm on the pectoral muscle of his chest, “we shouldn’t waste the hot water. My water heater is old and slow.”

  He slid his hand under hers to capture her fingers, and a corner of his mouth twitched. “Is this a subtle way of telling me I stink?”

  She laughed. “I slept through subtlety class.” She took a step and picked his leg brace off the floor from where it had fallen, and leaned it against the rim of the tub again. Reluctant to lose the last bit of contact with him, she stretched out her leg to hook her foot in his open bag and drag it close to the tub. “The sooner you’re done in here, the sooner we can pick up where we left off.”

  She backed up a step and released his hand. Their connection energy dropped but didn’t fade to nothing as it had before. Or maybe she hadn’t been paying attention.

  “Out,” he mock growled, then gave her an evil grin. “Unless you’d like to watch?” He slowly slid his thumbs under the waistband of his boxers and started to tug them downward.

  “More than anything,” she told him frankly. “I love burlesque. But hot water waits for no man.” She turned to exit, then turned back. “The bedroom is at the end of the hall.”

  She scooped up her bag and marched to the bedroom. If she’d stayed a moment longer, she’d have been helping him out of his boxer shorts with her teeth, and she didn’t want their first time to be on the hard, icy-cold bathroom tile.

  She switched on the light and was relieved to discover she hadn’t left a horrendous mess. She dropped her bag to the floor inside her walk-in closet, then pulled off her clothes and dropped them into her hamper. Growing up around shifters, she was comfortable with nudity, but he might not be, so she put on a nightshirt. She wanted to seduce him, not shock him.

  As she turned back the covers, she remembered she hadn’t told her parents about the police photos. She pulled her notebook computer out of her bag and sat with it on the e
dge of her bed. She composed the message to her mother asking for translation and information on the magical symbols, with a warning the some of the photos might be grisly, then used her magic to send the message to their family cloud net. She got Idrián’s cousin’s email address from her phone and sent same message and the photos to him. She plugged both devices into their chargers and put them on her tall, narrow dresser.

  She sat on the edge of the bed to wait. A wave of exhaustion ran through her, making her realize she was nearly at the end of her reserves. She closed her eyes. Four more days, and the concert’s run would be over, and she could think about what to do next. Whatever it was, she wanted it to involve the clever and sexy man in her bathtub…

  The next thing she knew, Idrián was gently shaking her shoulder. “Riya, lift your legs.”

  She realized he was trying to get the blankets out from under her. She rolled over onto her back and looked up at him blearily. The only light was coming from her bedside table. “Sorry, I must have fallen asleep.”

  “Shhh,” he said softly. He was half-kneeling beside her, wearing nothing but thin cotton shorts. His damp hair was slicked back into a ponytail. He slid the covers down, then guided her feet under the sheet.

  “Please stay?” she asked hopefully.

  “All right.” His voice soothed her.

  She dozed until he slid his hips down and lay flat on his back, his arms up behind his head. She rolled on her side, then oozed herself into the solid warmth of his body, twined her leg with his, and rested her head on his chest. Nothing had ever felt as perfect as that moment. She tried to hang onto the bliss even as she sank into oblivion.

  Chapter 10

  For the second day in a row, Idrián had slept the whole night through without once being awakened by phantom pain in his nonexistent foot, or bad dreams, or even an unfamiliar bed. It had taken him a moment to realize he was alone in that unfamiliar bed, and that it was close to nine o’clock in the morning.