His chest tightened at the sight, and at the realization that for all the times he had wished she could be more like an eagle and focus on her duties, the change saddened him, and made him very aware of the souvenirs he was carrying.
But she’d had a point—they had a job to do. So he played along.
He flicked one of the brochures. “The economy’s in the crapper. If the shtick works, more power to them.” Still, it was disconcerting that their hotel had gone from three-star anonymity to a chapel-slash-reception-hall that offered four different themes that he read off the brochure. “Sexy Spanish, Enduring Elvis, Beach Bash, and Mayan Adventure. Guess they couldn’t come up with anything alliterative to go with ‘Mayan.’”
“Mayhem?”
“Works for me. Not sure if that was quite what they were going for, though.”
Her relieved grin not only thanked him for following her lead; it quashed his fleeting urge to bag it and head for more romantically neutral territory. So when the couple in front of them moved aside, he exchanged plastic for a couple of key cards.
In the elevator, the Muzak was mariachi, the posters pimped the cantina, and the wall-to-wall was a muted tan with a pair of red footprints smack in the center in a faux-Mayan pattern. Brandt avoided standing on the prints, as did Patience. To the Maya, those woven footprints had symbolized leadership. When the king had stood on the footprints, it meant “Listen up. I’m about to say something important.” That the symbol had been transferred to an elevator seemed—
“Tacky,” commented Patience, finishing his thought as the doors opened on their floor and they headed for the end of the hall.
“No kidding. I’m almost afraid to see what the room looks like.” He stuck one of the key cards into its slot, and pushed open the door. “What do you think? Are we going to get a heart-shaped bed, a full champagne-and-strawberries spread, or maybe—?”
He flipped on the lights and broke off when their reflections blazed back at him. Swallowing hard at the noncoincidence of it all, he finished, “Or maybe mirrors.”
There were mirrors on three walls, windows on the fourth. The dressers were glossy black with mirrored edging, glass tops, and reflective knobs. Even the headboard was mirrored, though with beveling—to make a stab, he supposed, at taste. Neutral-colored drapes hung at the corners of the room, looped back with tasseled gold braid.
From the looks of the curtain rods, the drapes could be pulled across the walls, dampening the effect of the mirrors, which was pretty damned startling when his and Patience’s images were reflected back at them from what seemed like a hundred different surfaces.
As Brandt stared into his own eyes, the faint background hum of magic—the one that sounded different to him there than anywhere else in the Mayan territories—quivered slightly and increased in volume.
“Let me guess—they got the ceiling too,” she said from half a step behind him, her voice betraying a faint tremor, though he wasn’t sure if that came from nerves or half-hysterical laughter. Or both.
Overhead, mirrored ceiling tiles gave way to a huge mirror hung over the king-sized bed. Swallowing at the thought of what the mirrors were meant to show, he nodded. “You know, we should probably be laughing about this. It is way tacky.”
But it wasn’t laughter that heated his blood as he turned to face Patience, and it wasn’t amusement that lit her eyes.
It was heat. Desire. Magic. And a certain sense of inevitability.
There was power in the air, in their reflections. And when she lifted her hands to frame his face, there was magic in her touch, and in the brush of her breasts against his chest when he gripped the curves of her hips to draw her closer still. Their bodies fit together perfectly, bringing an ache of memory. Yes, said something deep inside him as his blood fired and his body hardened. Oh, hell, yes.
Their images were reflected at dozens of different sizes and angles. She was light to his dark, lean to his bulk, but as he angled down and she rose up to meet him, their reflections merged and blended, becoming one intertwined blur of light and dark as they kissed.
The first touch of their lips drew him tight and sent flames rocketing through his body. The second kiss, coming with a gentle slide of tongue, eased some of the hollowness within him even as a new, far more demanding urge built. His fingers dug into her hips, latching her body to his as he went in for kiss number three, taking it blatantly carnal with a thrust of tongue and a slow grind that said: Here. Now. Mine.
After that, he couldn’t count, couldn’t think. He could only feel and react, and take what she offered him, then demand more. He kissed her throat as she caught his earlobe in her teeth and sent heat hammering through him. His hands raced over her clothing, then under to find soft skin.
She hissed and tugged at his shirt, and then they were wrestling out of their clothes on their way to the bed, while his head spun with lust and the relief of finally being where he was supposed to be, there and then, with her.
Naked, he pressed her up against the bedpost, which ran all the way to the ceiling and was bolted firmly in place. Not letting himself think too hard about what acrobatics might have prompted that engineering decision, he cupped her breasts up against his face as he pressed butterfly kisses between them.
The past and present collided and then meshed, becoming a singular “now” composed of sensations and moves that were familiar yet not.
He knew the taste of her skin and the way she arched against him as he spiraled soft, licking kisses inward along one breast, knew the fascinating transition of textures where velvet skin went exquisitely smooth at the edge of her areola, then became crinkled as he worked ever inward. He knew her gasps of pleasure, the rhythm of her hands as they slid to his shoulders and trailed across the ticklish spots along his rib cage. And he knew the aching pleasure-pain of being hard and full to the point of bursting, throbbing and dying to pound himself into her, yet holding back, knowing it would please them both more to wait and take it slow. Even if it killed him.
But then she fisted her hands in his hair and tugged, raising his head from her breast, and he didn’t recognize the gleam in her eyes. It called to the hard, hot thud of “want to hit that now” resonating through his system, tempting him to put her up against the nearest wall, mirrors be damned.
He didn’t, though. She deserved better than the hard, fast rut his body demanded, and he knew she liked it slow and easy.
“Too fast?” he asked, voice grating from deep in his chest.
She shook her head. But the ripple of surprise brought by that negative was nothing compared to the hot, greedy shock that pounded through him when she turned around, bent slightly at the waist, and braced herself against the bedpost. The mirrored headboard gave him a delicious view of her round breasts, her taut belly, her parted thighs, with a neat triangle of darker blond between—and his own expression going from a dropped jaw to fierce heat when she looked back over her shoulder, eyes smoldering, and said, “Let’s take one for ourselves before we try the magic.”
His body tightened on a howl of yes, yes, yes, hard and fast, yes! But he held himself in check as he moved up behind her, curled his body around hers, and went still for a second, absorbing the sensation of her skin against his. He knew he should stroke her, knew he should take care of her before himself, but he was already on a knife-edge of control.
Gritting his teeth at the effort it took to move slowly, he reached down to rub the head of his hard, aching cock against her moist opening, hissing at the spear of sensation that pierced him, making his stomach muscles tighten against the press of her round, firm buttocks. He’d meant to move up and forward to tease the soft flesh at her front, but she shifted as he did, rolling her hips to accept the blunt tip of him.
Wet warmth slid around him, surrounded him with a sledgehammer of pleasure that had him surging forward with a harsh, primal growl. He thrust once, hard and deep, seating himself fully with zero thought for her, only for himself.
Slow d
own, damn it, said the gentleman within him, the one who knew how she liked it. Realizing he had one arm banded across her stomach, the other pressed flat against that enticing blond triangle, in a hold that pinned her back against the pressure of his hips, he eased up. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. And don’t hold back.”
The husky, unfamiliar timbre of her voice had his eyes opening. It took him a moment to focus, surrounded as they were by reflections of themselves from all different angles, the blend of his skin against hers, and the shadows they made together. Her face was flushed, her eyes gleaming. Belatedly, he noticed that her arms mirrored his, snugged tight atop his grip, holding him tight against her.
Their eyes met in the reflection, and hers blazed. “Take what you want. It’s what I want too.”
Lust roared through him like fury, but he managed to rasp, “Tell me you mean that.”
In answer, she fisted her inner muscles around him, so hard that the pleasure edged toward pain when she shifted back against him, inviting him to do more, to do everything. A whole-body shudder rose up from the soles of his feet as he locked his arms around her, his body into her. And he began to move.
The first stroke wrung a groan from his chest and battered his defenses with lightning-bolt lust; the second blitzed through the tattered remainder of his analytic self and left him in the throes of instinct, and the blind quest to possess the woman in his arms, and the power that sang in the air around them.
He held her, surged against her, pounded into her in a frenzy that went beyond emotion to pure action and reaction. He wasn’t fucking her, wasn’t making love to her; this was mating, pure and simple, the primal drive to lose himself in her, fill her with his seed. Even the distant knowledge that all the magi had undergone fertility-blocking spells to avoid complications in the final years before the end time didn’t diminish the imperative to plant part of himself inside her and mark her as his own in a place beyond marriage and the jun tan mark.
On some level, he was aware of her escalating cries, the graceful curve of her neck as she pressed her face to her arms and gave herself up to his hold and thrust. Her hand atop his urged him inward, until his fingers were tight against the hard bud of her clit as he rode her from behind.
Her pleasure, though, was far secondary to the need that consumed him, the pressure that built within him, tightening the muscles of his abdomen and ass. One second he was breathing hard and deep; then in the next he stopped breathing entirely, as oxygen became so much less important than the rushing tingle that started at the bottoms of his feet and the tips of his fingers and raced upward and inward, warming and tensing each individual muscle until his whole body felt the pleasure that had previously belonged solely to his cock.
A groan reverberated in his chest as he bowed his body to match hers, thrusting again and again in search of the pinnacle, helpless to do otherwise in the face of a gathering orgasm of unparalleled intensity.
Patience shuddered against him, said his name in a passion-strangled voice, and went over the top of her own climax.
He felt the hot, moist pulse on every inch of his skin, felt her pleasure as his own. Sinking himself deep within her, beyond all thought of control or finesse, he stroked again and again, then roared as his vision went white and he locked himself against her and came.
He flashed outside himself with a lurch of magic, and suddenly he was above, looking down on the two of them, suspended in a vision, yet not.
He saw them surrounded by a pearlescent gray dome, a shield unlike any other he’d ever sensed before. Within it, their images were strangely distorted, refracted, as though together they formed the pieces of an incomplete whole. Somehow he was certain—gut-deep certain—that the pieces they were missing could be found just beyond the dome, that he and Patience could be whole again if he could only breach that gleaming shell.
Then the vision shattered and he was back inside himself, losing himself to the rush of pressure and pleasure, the pulsing throb of ejaculation as he emptied himself into her. He held her tightly, binding them together as his vision grayed and time seemed to slow, measured only in the pulse of their joined flesh.
Even after the intense wave passed, he stayed still, absorbing the moment, the sensations.
Then, inhaling a huge draft of air, he pressed a kiss to her nape, where damp tendrils had escaped her beleaguered ponytail. As he eased out of her, he was all too aware that he’d taken her standing up. And he’d do it again in a heartbeat.
Feeling that he needed to say something profound, he started with, “That was . . . wow.” Okay, not so profound after all. Magic danced invisibly across his skin, making him conscious of the warmth of his jun tan mark, the faint sense of connection where they had been apart for so long. Trying again, he said, “I think—”
Dropping her braced-arm stance, she turned and silenced him with a soft brush of her fingertips across his lips. “Don’t think. For right now, let’s just leave it at ‘wow.’”
Instead of arguing, he kissed her.
He set a soft, slow rhythm that was the diametric opposite of the hard and fast, borderline-rough sex they had just shared. He’d meant the gesture to soothe, to wordlessly apologize if that had been too much for her, to thank her for the gift. To his surprise, she met him more than halfway with an inciting nip of teeth and tongue, and a shudder-inducing drag of her fingernails down his ribs.
Heat flared as he took the kiss deeper. Magic hummed anew, wrapping around them both and making him think of the shell that had surrounded them in his vision-flash, and the sense that good things were waiting outside that shell, that things would get better, not worse, if he could manage to break through the barrier blocking him from the Triad magic.
Or was that just wishful thinking?
It doesn’t matter, his conscience warned. You don’t have a choice. And it’s time.
So he ended the kiss, stepped back, and held out a scarred palm. “Lie down with me?”
Her eyes held a shadow of resignation as she took his hand, but she smiled. “With a brothel bed like this, how can I say no?”
“At least it’s not heart-shaped. And I’m pretty sure it doesn’t vibrate.”
“Color me disappointed.”
It was a ridiculous bed, all mirrors and black lacquered wood, topped with a scarlet brocade bedspread edged with gold braid, and a huge pile of gold-edged red pillows.
Somehow, though, it didn’t seem ridiculous. Instead, the red-gold of the bedding blended with the hum of magic that touched the air, intensifying as she stretched out on her side near the center of the plush mattress with one hand behind her head, one leg slightly bent, goddesslike in her nudity.
He stretched out opposite her for a kiss, then rolled onto his back and drew her with him, so she was cuddled up against his side with her hand over his heart, the two of them fitting together, puzzlelike. Their legs twined and he brushed his scarred calf along the softness of her skin.
Then, in unspoken agreement, they looked up into the big mirror that hung suspended over the bed. As their eyes met in the reflection, they touched the magic that hung thick around them, and together invoked the etznab spell.
The mirror wavered; the world around them went thin. And they slipped into memory together.
CHAPTER NINE
El Rey
Six years ago
Holy hookup, Batman. That was about all Brandt’s brain was capable of managing as he lay beside the underground lagoon, intertwined with Patience while their bodies cooled in the aftermath of some seriously hot sex.
How much of that had been about the two of them, and how much of it had been about his bloodline connection to whatever the hell was going on beneath El Rey? He didn’t know, couldn’t even begin to guess.
According to Wood, sex had been part of the magic on almost every level. In another lifetime, he might have thought the gods had meant for him and Patience to pair up like this. But he was out of that loop now, which meant . . . hell,
he didn’t know what it meant, except that something had drawn him to her, and it was no coincidence that they had found the underground cave together, or that they had gotten down and dirty beside the sacred lagoon.
But what did it all mean?
When she stirred and let out a small, satisfied sigh, he tightened his arm around her and cracked his eyelids, trying to come up with an awkward-moment-after line that didn’t sound totally cheesy.
Then he got a good look around them, and all he could come up with was, “Holy crap.”
The fireworks were long gone, but the air still sparkled red-gold.
Magic.
Patience’s body tightened. “Oh. My. God.” Her voice was tinged with the wonder he saw in her face when their eyes met. Then her expression clouded. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I can’t let you see this.”
Reaching out, she cupped his cheek and whispered three words in a language that should have been unfamiliar.
Except it wasn’t unfamiliar at all. It was a fucking sleep spell.
Shock hammered through him. Her expression fell when he didn’t go narcoleptic, and he could almost hear her thinking, Why didn’t it work?
If he could’ve formed a coherent sentence, he would have told her it was because lower-level stuff like the sleep spell didn’t work on magi. But his thoughts were racing too fast for that. The questions bombarded him: Where the hell had she learned the spell? How had she known what the glitter-dust effect meant? She obviously wasn’t Maya, but—
Whoa. He stared at her as the litany ran through his mind: The Nightkeepers had been big, fast, smart, and charismatic. And they were extinct. He was the last of them.
Unless they weren’t extinct.
And he wasn’t the last.
Excitement knotted low in his gut. What if that explained everything? What if he’d been meant to see her, meant to follow her and bring her to El Rey just in time for them to discover the doorway?
Granted, the chances of that were pretty fucking slim given his history. But the gods were low on options. And if the magic was coming back online now, with eight years to go before the zero date . . .
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