A Taste of Ice (The Elementals)

by Hanna Martine

  “Hey, I keep the meter running.”

  “Hey, I don’t care.”

  Michael approached the house, trying to keep his steps light and unhurried. People running in and out of houses tended to leave an impression on those who watched, and the cabbie was definitely watching.

  The front door opened. Sean had one hand braced on the doorjamb and a ghostly expression on his barely adult face.

  Michael waved Sean back inside and glanced over his shoulder to see if the cabbie was eyeing them, but the cabbie had turned his gape-mouthed attention to the east wing of the house. The fewer people who saw Sean the better. He was still technically “missing.”

  Sean backed into the foyer and Michael shut the door behind himself. The faint, stale smell of smoke lingered; Sean must have burned toast again.

  “Talk,” Michael said. “I had to split to get up here.”

  He didn’t have to explain the time limits to Sean. Sean knew. He knew very well.

  Sean ran a hand through his sandy hair and kept it there, clenching the straight stuff at the back of his skull. “Lea got you a new one.”

  Michael slid his hands to hips, parting the cashmere coat. “Yeah, that’s what you said. Weren’t we expecting another? She had her heart set on one in particular.”

  Sean was shaking his head before Michael had even finished. “No. A new one. Like, one that neither of us knew was coming. And it was delivered here.”

  Michael’s arms dropped. So did his voice. “Why here? The L.A. house is all set up for collection.”

  Sean shrugged. “Said you’d want to see it right away.”

  The high that came with another addition to his collection, another new discovery…there was nothing like it. “Where is it?”

  Sean paled even more. “In the garage.”

  “The…Jesus. Okay.” Mentally he paged through his commitments that week, trying to recall if he was supposed to entertain anyone here at the house. Grant would know; that was his sole purpose. But Michael couldn’t exactly text him right now, considering his other half was likely sitting next to his assistant in a darkened movie theater.

  Michael tugged off his gloves and stalked through the echoing marble foyer, passing the curving staircase on his left. In the great room at the back of the house, just off the kitchen, was access to the garage through a door next to the two-story fireplace.

  Two of Cat’s huge canvases, protectively wrapped, sat propped side by side against the anemically filled bookshelves. These paintings were in his private collection, and ones he’d insisted Helen put in her show. Nothing like a placard saying “Property of Michael Ebrecht” to spark buying interest.

  A third canvas—the smallest she’d ever painted, one of her first—rested on the fireplace mantel. That painting was how he’d first met her, walking past her flapping tent in the Key West art fair. He’d bought it within fifteen minutes, after talking her down twenty-five bucks and imagining her naked in twenty-five ways. Imagining her elevated to his level. Two years later, Ocean #2 came with him wherever he went.

  A low rumble detonated behind the garage door. Beside him, Sean froze.

  Michael swiveled to the kid. “What the fuck was that?”

  Sean swallowed, backed up a step. “The new one. When it started doing that, I called you.”

  Michael bolted for the door, threw it open.

  A giant box consumed one half of the two-car garage. It was made of a thick translucent material, but for some reason he couldn’t fully see inside. Like the inner walls had been painted with a substance that constantly shifted between shades of sick, menacing dark gray. The garage door had been opened a few inches on the bottom and a big fan ran on high in the corner. The smoke smell burned strong.

  “It’s caged?” Michael buzzed with frantic excitement. He jumped down the two steps into the garage. “How the hell did she get it in here?”

  “Big truck.”

  “Yeah, but how’d she get it in here?” He stabbed a finger at the garage floor.

  Sean shrugged. “She’s got Jase with her. He moved it.”

  Yeah, Jase could move just about anything. What a find, that guy. And apparently Lea had been planning for this capture without telling Michael, given that she’d already had the cage and truck and all.

  Another rumble exploded inside. The box rocked, one corner lifting a few inches off the concrete. The box was fucking huge. The power it must have taken just to nudge a thing like that…

  Michael couldn’t breathe for the anticipation. “What is it?”

  “Lea said it was a surprise. Said you’d love it.” Sean hovered in the doorway to the house, refusing to step into the garage.

  Love didn’t even begin to describe what Michael was feeling. He was already imagining how he’d throw this one in Raymond’s face. How the old man would react. Michael inched closer. Something thump thump thumped inside the blackened box. Like a toddler first facing flame, he stretched out a hand. And, like a parent, Sean said, “Don’t touch it. It’s hot.”

  Michael scoffed.

  “No, really. It is.”

  Michael raised one hand, touching his index finger to the corner of the cage. He jumped back, hissing at the searing pain.

  “Told you,” Sean muttered.

  Michael just stood there, staring. Holy shit, that was smoke inside that box. Thick, black, kill-you-with-a-single-inhale smoke. Goddamn it. What the hell was in there?

  “Where’s Lea now?” he barked.

  “She and Jase and Robert dropped this off and then took off again. Said she’d caught the trail of a water she wanted.”

  Michael absently waved a hand. “That can’t be right. We already have a water. We have Robert.”

  “It’s what she said.”

  Well, hell. Two were always better than one. His Lea, a fountain of twisted information. The best magic bloodhound in existence.

  Michael stared into the box, shifting his position every few seconds, trying to see through the thick murk.

  “Lea said she probably wouldn’t be back until the day of the opening at Drift,” Sean said. “Maybe later.”

  Shit. “She didn’t say anything else about what’s inside? Anything at all?”

  “No.”

  There was no seeing inside. He was this close to grabbing the ladder hanging from the garage wall, climbing up to the box top, and unlocking the latch, when Sean said, “I saw it, you know. Before it did…that.”

  Michael held his breath. “Did what?”

  “Made it go all black and smoky inside. It did that when it woke up. Got pissed off.” Sean slowly backed farther inside.

  “What is it?”

  Sean said nothing. Just pointed.

  Michael followed the line of Sean’s finger.

  The black smoke swirled in a slow, deliberate circle. Thin streams leaked out from the box’s tight seams. The fan picked up the wispy tendrils and sent them flying under the garage door.

  Something moved inside the box. No, against the box. An arm, rubbing away the char. He crept forward, nothing making a sound in the whole garage. In the whole world.

  A face peered out of the small, smudged hole. A woman’s face. A face as beautiful as heaven and twisted as all hell.

  The smoke cloaked her, twined around her like it was a sentient being. He didn’t know where the smoke ended and the black of her hair began. She didn’t cough, didn’t wipe at her dark, slanted eyes that eerily didn’t water.

  He bent closer to the box, the tip of his nose feeling the heat blazing from inside.

  She came closer, too. Absolutely no fear on her face. She opened her mouth to speak, and though he couldn’t hear her, he knew exactly what she said by the shape of her mouth.

  “Fuck. You.”

  And he smiled.

  Her eyes had burned dark before, but now they plunged into full black. Black and hard as coal.

  The woman slammed her hands against the box wall, her palms making pale prints in the coat of ash. T
he box jerked from the incredible force. She opened her mouth and screamed, the tendons in her throat jutting out.

  Michael just stood there. Staring. Lea had been right. He’d never seen anything like this woman…and he loved it.

  She stopped screaming. She stepped back, one side of her mouth twisting up, like she was queen of the world and knew all. Her clothes draped in burnt tatters across the muscular lines of her strong, firm body. She was beyond exotic, her skin deeply colored and smooth, her features a hodgepodge of Asian and Pacific Islander and European.

  “Guess what,” Michael whispered, “you’re mine now.”

  She drew a deep breath—so deep it seemed unnatural—her spectacular chest expanding up and out like her ribs were rubber. Her red lips parted and her mouth opened wide. There, in the back of her throat, sparked a flame. No more than a match strike, tiny and yellow. Her lips narrowed, the flame rolling in the depths of her mouth, her cheeks glowing from the interior heat and light. She lifted a hand and blew the flame onto a finger where it danced without being snuffed out. She rubbed her fingertips together and the flame grew into the size of a golf ball. Bringing her other hand into it, she rolled the fireball between her palms in slow, sensuous movements. The longer she worked it, the bigger it got.

  Jesus, he was getting hard watching this.

  She dropped one arm, cradling a fiery mass larger than her head in her palm. That same arm fell back then launched forward. The fireball smashed against the inside of the box, leaving a new layer of char. Blocking his view.

  He couldn’t wait until Raymond saw this.

  As Michael turned back to the house, he was aware of Sean’s look of horror, of perpetual worry. But Michael was smiling. Exhilarated.

  Fucking jacked.

  FOUR

  She walked into Shed at 8:03 p.m. Not that Xavier was watching. Or waiting. He saw everything from behind the wide pane of kitchen glass. It perfectly framed the way Cat wove sinuously between the black tables draped in white cloth, the way the low light seemed to catch and hold on to her. The hostess seated Cat and her companion—an older woman he swore he’d seen before—in the center of the dining room. No table near the busboy station for this last-minute reservation during high season. Thanks, Pam.

  The three seconds over, he returned his eyes to his station and tuned his ears to the beloved clatter and hiss of the kitchen at his back. Pam was making her station rounds. At the burners next to Xavier, she was talking to Jose about the sear on his chicken. With an encouraging clap on Jose’s shoulder, she came over to Xavier.

  “Did you do something to my Cabernet sauce, X?”

  The nickname made him shiver. In the Plant he’d only been known as 267X, but he couldn’t tell Pam that.

  His hand went instinctively—protectively?—to the wooden spoon in the pot holding the lovely crimson-colored, peppery sauce for the filet special. “Maybe. Why?”

  “Tastes different.”

  “What’s it taste like?” He cracked an egg for the béarnaise, passing the insides between shell halves to separate out the yolk.

  She drummed her short nails on the cutting board. “Like I want to roll around naked in it.”

  He hid his smile.

  She sighed. “I should fire you, you know.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at her pursed lips and raised eyebrows. “So fire me.”

  “Ah, fuck. You know I won’t.”

  “Good. ’Cause I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  “Double good. I’ll just keep taking advantage of you.”

  “As long as we understand each other.”

  She let out a short laugh as he continued to crack and separate eggs. As he reached for the whisk, she asked, all falsely casual, “So who were you looking at out there?”

  Here it came. “No one.”

  Pam made a show of standing on her toes and craning her neck to peer through the glass. “Angelina Jolie? Kate Winslet?”

  Who? With a testing spoon, he checked the seasoning in the sesame sauce that got drizzled over the salmon.

  “Ah, I see her.” Pam whistled. “She’s really pretty. Those tall boots with that skirt. Damn.”

  Pam turned toward the pastry station before he could tell her to leave.

  Boots and a skirt. He ordered himself not to look. Béarnaise was tricky and if you didn’t keep whisking it over the heat it would break…

  Cat didn’t wear her red pompom hat to dinner. In fact, she didn’t wear much of anything. She’d pushed her chair out a bit, her legs crossed diagonally toward the table. Her black skirt was short and tight, her boots high. The line of her thigh muscle made his skin as hot as the burners to his right, but he couldn’t look away. A fuzzy sweater exposed her shoulders, drawing a delicious, horizontal line of skin. Could women wear bras under sweaters like that?

  While Cat’s companion examined a bottle of wine, the sommelier standing at her elbow, Cat turned her face toward the kitchen. She found him immediately, as if she knew exactly where he’d been all along. Their gazes slammed together. She tilted her head.

  The little balloons of dining room conversations popped. The clanking sounds of the kitchen fell away. The desire tackled him and he went down without defense. His blood began to pound, racing toward the throbbing part of him that would give everything away.

  The kitchen glass fogged over, the swirls of hallucinatory white forming the ugly, mocking face of the Burned Man.

  How perfect, he said. You’re used to an audience.

  Fuck no. This was not happening again. Not twice in one day. Not here, where he was supposed to be safe.

  Xavier stretched over to Jose’s station, snatched a red onion from his pile. Choking up on his chef’s knife, Xavier bent far over the onion and made precise, quick strokes into the pliant pink flesh. Opening his eyes wide, letting the fumes rise up and curl around his face, he inhaled. The sting stabbed at his eyes and sawed at his throat. He did it again. And again.

  When he lifted his head the Burned Man no longer haunted the glass. And Cat no longer looked at him.

  “You never answered my question back at the gallery.” Helen leaned heavily on the table, elbows pulling at the white cloth. They’d nearly finished the best bottle of wine Cat had ever had. Although that wasn’t saying much, considering ten dollars for a bottle at home was a splurge. This one had cost two hundred; Cat had snuck a look at the leather-bound wine list.

  “Which question was that?”

  Helen flicked her wrist in a grand gesture, a massive diamond ring twinkling on her finger. “Why do you paint water? What draws you to it?”

  Cat frowned and twirled her wineglass, leaving fingerprints on the bowl. “If I could put it into words, I’d be a writer, not a painter.”

  Helen had gotten it right, though, in what she’d observed that morning: Cat both loved and hated the source of her inspiration. Most days she really did wish she could put it into words. Might have made her life a heck of a lot easier.

  Helen made an “ah” sound and nodded, like Cat had just imparted to her the secrets of the universe. It was impossible not to like this woman. Cat was close to so few people. Her job—the real one, the one that actually brought in money—made her skeptical of most human beings. Not many women chatted her up while sitting at her bar, and the men who did didn’t seem to realize that small talk and false enthusiasm were written in to her job description. There were co-workers who were friends, sure, but when her shift ended, she was in front of her canvases, trying to figure out her life.

  Cat threw back the last of her wine. The music filling Shed carried a steady, sexy, electronic beat, and the sounds of boisterous, wine-soaked conversations made Cat raise her voice. “What do you know of inspiration?”

  Helen had started to peruse the dessert menu and now looked at Cat over her bifocals. Her eyes were done only in champagne eye shadow and black eyeliner. Age had only slightly overshadowed the beauty of her youth. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,
is inspiration something artists talk about a lot?”

  Helen smiled and folded the little dessert menu. It likely wasn’t on purpose, but that smile made Cat feel about six years old. “They get asked about inspiration a lot. Where it comes from.”

  Cat inched forward on her chair. This was what she wanted to hear. “And what do they say?”

  Helen shrugged. “That it just comes to them. That it’s indefinable.”

  Cat looked at the table, trying not to let the defeat show on her face.

  “That upsets you?” The bifocals came off again.

  “‘Upsets’? Not exactly. Disappoints, maybe. It’s…never mind.”

  “No, go on.”

  Cat uncrossed then crossed her legs, and a warm trickle of awareness skated over her, moving slowly from hip to ankle. It tingled stronger than the wine in her blood. She didn’t have to glance at the kitchen to know Xavier was watching. Just the thought of it exhilarated her, but she wouldn’t look over there, not with Helen’s eyes on her, too.

  She tapped the table. “I don’t understand why I love water so much. Only that I’m drawn to it, that it’s part of me, and the only way to express how large a portion of me it is, is to paint.”

  Helen pursed her lips and bobbed her head side to side. “Makes sense. That comes through in your work. There’s mystery to it. Agitation. A sense of the unknown.”

  “Yes! I’m so glad you see that.” The wine made her all loose and comfortable, so she kept going. “I guess I’m partly here to learn what that’s all about. Maybe, if I put myself out there, I’ll find something that might be able to explain why my inspiration is so strong. Maybe, if I get to be around other artistic types, I could see how they work. Get a clue about myself.”

  “And sell some paintings.” Helen smiled beneath a raised eyebrow.

  “Oh. Yes. Of course.”

  Helen sat back, considering. “Are you prepared for criticism?”

  “As prepared as I’ll ever be, I suppose.” Which wasn’t at all, but she wouldn’t tell Helen that.

  “Are you ready for the spotlight? Because anyone standing next to Michael gets it.”

  Cat tried not to wince. “I had no idea who he was when I met him. I mean about the films and such. I didn’t know until the third or fourth time he came to my bar.”