They went to bed. Nadia had fallen asleep by the time Riordan finished brushing his teeth. He gazed at her face. The hard edge had vanished from her features, and she looked relaxed. Perhaps she would have a solid night’s sleep.
Riordan kissed her forehead, lay down next to her, and was soon asleep himself.
He awoke at about two in the morning when Nadia’s fist slammed into his ribs.
Riordan sat up at once, years of experience and combat reflexes taking over. He called his magic, preparing to cast a spell, and his Shadowmorph seethed and stirred inside of him. His hand curled around the pistol he kept hidden between the nightstand and his side of the bed, and his eyes scanned the room. One of the gifts of the Shadowmorph was enhanced senses, and his eyes scanned the gloom. The bedroom door was still closed, and he didn’t hear the security alarm or anything moving in the condo…
Nadia moaned, and his gaze shifted to her.
Her hands were clenched into fists, and she was thrashing in her sleep, the cords on her neck standing out. Her eyes darted back and forth behind closed lids, and her teeth were bared in a snarl, her jaw clenched. The fight at Ricci’s warehouse had reminded her too much of the Eternity Crucible. She had spent a hundred and fifty-eight years getting killed every single day, and she was reliving one of those days inside her head.
“Nadia,” said Riordan. He grasped her arms and pulled her to a sitting position. It was harder than he thought. She was stronger than her size suggested, and her muscles were clenched in the struggle of the nightmare. “Nadia. Nadia!”
Her eyes popped open, wide and gray and crazed and terrified. She looked around, trying to find the anthrophages and other creatures that had haunted her dream, and she raised one hand in the beginning of a spell.
Riordan caught her wrist. “It’s just a dream. You’re not in the Eternity Crucible. You’re not in the Eternity Crucible.” He felt her pulse against his fingers, and his mind automatically counted it even through his fear for her. A hundred and seventy beats a minute, maybe a hundred and eighty. “You’re in the condo, with me. You’re not in the Eternity Crucible.”
She stared at him, quivering, and something like lucidity came into her eyes. “I…okay. The condo. Not the Eternity Crucible. There weren’t any condos in there. God. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“No,” said Riordan. Well, his side ached a little, but that was trivial. That was one of Nadia’s great fears, that she would wake up from one of her nightmares and hurt someone. She had almost killed her brother after a nightmare of the Crucible, and the experience had driven her to cutoff all contact with Russell and Riordan for a year for fear that she might hurt them.
“Oh, good,” said Nadia, her voice shaking. “Oh, good. Okay. I’m going to lie down.” She slumped against the bed, and Riordan pulled her into his arms. She was shaking as if she had just run ten miles. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“No,” murmured Riordan. “You didn’t do anything. It’s not your fault.”
Nadia said nothing but buried her face in his shoulder. They lay like that for a while, and her shaking subsided. She tended to react in one of three ways to these nightmares. Sometimes they exhausted her, and she fell asleep at once. Or she rose and exercised to tire herself out, but she had already done that.
Her hand slid across his stomach and slipped into the waistband of his shorts.
Or she wanted a different form of distraction.
The Shadowmorph shivered with sudden hunger inside his head, and for once Riordan and the symbiont were in complete agreement. He spent his life living within rigid self-control. The Shadowmorph gave him tremendous abilities, but it also inspired dark appetites that had to be kept under control. Younger Shadow Hunters like Alex indulged themselves more than Riordan thought proper, but they didn’t cross the line. If they did, they would be warped into monsters like Sasha and other Shadow Hunters who had given into their Shadowmorph’s impulses.
But here, with Nadia, Riordan could relax his self-control a little.
He kissed her hard, and she let out a little moan and kissed him back. Her hands kept moving over him, trying to tug away his T-shirt and shorts. Riordan paused long enough to help her, then grabbed her shirt and pulled it over her head.
As he had expected earlier, she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. His blood stirred at the sight. She wasn’t buxom by any stretch of the imagination, but she was lean, toned, and very well proportioned, and looking at her without any clothing turned the hunger in his blood into a fire.
She was staring at him, breathing hard, and the full intensity of her gray eyes focused on him like there was nothing else in the world. It was an intoxicating sensation, and then all rational thought washed away in a tide of physical need as Riordan pulled her against him.
Later, once they had finished, Riordan lay on his back, Nadia’s head on his shoulder, her arm flung across his chest.
“Okay,” said Nadia. She let out a shaky laugh. “Okay. You are…really rather exceptional at that, you know?”
Riordan grunted in answer.
“It’s not weird, is it?” said Nadia, her voice hesitant.
“A husband and wife making love at two in the morning?” Though it was actually past three now, come to think of it. “It’s normal. Even healthy.”
“I mean…that I jump you to come down when I have a bad dream,” said Nadia. “The Eternity Crucible ruined a lot of things for me, but not this. It…well, it calms me down. That doesn’t bother you? It’s not weird?”
“Why should it bother me?” said Riordan. “You were upset. I was glad I could help.”
She levered up on one elbow and grinned at him. “Admit it. You enjoyed that too.”
“Was there any doubt?” said Riordan.
“Not really,” said Nadia, and she lay back down. “You were very enthusiastic.” She hesitated. “I love you. You know that, right? Even when I’m…um, not entirely in my right mind.”
“I know,” said Riordan. “And I love you, too.”
He drifted back to sleep.
Riordan woke at about seven. He sat up and looked at Nadia. She was still naked and asleep on her stomach, her head turned to the side, a small puddle of drool soaking into the sheets near her open mouth. That was good. She had needed a deep sleep.
He gazed at her for a moment, admiring the way the dim gray light of morning touched the contours of her body and shaded her legs and back. She was a beautiful woman, but more than that, beneath her prickly manner she was as brave and as loyal as anyone he had ever met. A deep wave of affection rolled through Riordan, shocking in its strength. After his bitter experiences with Miranda and Sasha, Riordan hadn’t thought he could love a woman as much as he loved Nadia.
Well, Nadia was good at proving people wrong.
Riordan got to his feet in silence and pulled the blanket to Nadia’s neck so she wouldn’t be cold when she woke up. He dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, slipped out of the bedroom, and walked down the hall to his gym. Soon after he had bought the condo, he had converted one of the bedrooms to a gym, with a pair of treadmills and a variety of free weights. He had gotten two sets of everything since he had been with Sasha at the time and she liked to exercise in the morning. Sasha had almost always left the gym a mess when she had finished. Nadia had used the gym last night, but even in her black mood, she had still racked her weights and wiped down everything.
That wave of affection went through Riordan again. Love, he had come to realize, wasn’t built on grand gestures. Rather it came from a thousand little acts of kindness and respect repeated over time.
Then again, he had proposed to Nadia a few weeks after he had dragged her through a rift way about four seconds before a nuclear bomb exploded in her face, so maybe there was room for a grand gesture every now and then.
Though hopefully, he wouldn’t have to repeat that particular gesture anytime soon.
Riordan laughed at himself. Nadia’s somewhat cracked sense of humor was
wearing off on him.
He spent the next forty minutes lifting weights, relying on his own strength and not the augmentations the Shadowmorph could give him. In combat, Riordan had found, it was best never to rely too much on any one thing – whether his Shadowmorph, or his magic, or his equipment. Best always to be prepared for something to go wrong.
After Riordan finished, he went back to the bedroom. The bed was empty, and Riordan showered off in the bathroom. He dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a sweater, and went to the kitchen to find some food.
To his mild surprise, he found that Nadia was making breakfast.
The kitchen opened off the dining room, with counters wrapping around all three walls. Nadia was wearing his T-shirt again, her hair tied in a messy bun, and she was scrambling eggs on the stove. Another skillet held frying bacon, and the smell of it reminded Riordan that he was hungry. Riordan had a small TV set into the wall over the sink, and Nadia had turned it to the local news. The big story of the day was the murder of some art dealer or another. Riordan would have to check the news sites to see if any report of Ricci’s death had emerged, but with the writ of execution, Homeland Security would suppress any mention of it.
“Hey,” said Nadia, stirring the eggs. She seemed in good spirits. “We’ve been married two months, and I’m already barefoot and in the kitchen.”
Riordan laughed. “Thank you for making breakfast.”
“Mmm.” She stirred the eggs some more, the spoon scraping against the pan. “We both worked pretty hard last night. Got to keep our strength up, you know?”
In short order, she had the eggs and bacon on plates and cups of coffee poured. Riordan joined her at the dining room table, the windows around them overlooking Manhattan. He put some salt and pepper on his eggs. Nadia produced a bottle of hot sauce and put a liberal quantity on hers.
“Hot sauce?” he said. “On eggs?”
“Yeah,” she said, eating a big spoonful. “It’s the only way to have eggs. Clears out the sinuses, too.”
He knew the real reason why she put hot sauce on eggs, and most other foods. She had told him once that in the Eternity Crucible she had been torn apart so often that sometimes bits and pieces of her flesh landed in her mouth as she shrieked. Any food that reminded her of that taste and texture caused her to become violently sick.
Fortunately, nothing from the human body tasted like hot sauce.
“Does it?” said Riordan.
“Oh, yeah,” said Nadia. She swallowed another bite of eggs. “It works really well. It…”
She blinked several times, looked away, and sneezed quite forcefully.
“As I was saying,” said Nadia.
“You’ve convinced me,” said Riordan. “These are quite good.”
“Thanks. I learned how to do eggs really well when I was a short-order cook,” said Nadia.
Riordan blinked. “What?”
“Didn’t I tell you that?” said Nadia.
“You did not.”
“Oh. Well. It was the year before I met you,” said Nadia, gesturing with her fork for emphasis. “Morvilind wanted me to rob some safe-deposit boxes in this high-security bank in Cincinnati. I needed to make a copy of the vault database, and the bank’s overnight security director took the backup drives home with him in the morning.”
“Sloppy,” said Riordan.
“Yeah, that bank really overcharged,” said Nadia. “Anyway, he’d always stop for breakfast at this diner on the way home, order the same thing. I was seventeen at the time, so I lied about my age, said I was twenty-three, and got a job as a short-order cook.”
“Surprised they didn’t make you a waitress,” said Riordan.
“Manager said I didn’t have the personality for it,” said Nadia. He stifled a laugh, and she pointed her fork at his chest. “Don’t laugh. I watched that security director every morning for two weeks, and I bought some external hard drives identical to the ones in his bags. I swapped out the drives, robbed the deposit boxes, and got out of Cincinnati on the same day.” She took a big swallow of coffee and grinned. “See, and since we got that royal pardon for everything back in July, I can tell you all about it now.”
“Well,” said Riordan, “you make a fine plate of scrambled eggs. Even if you’re putting hot sauce on them.”
Deliberately she picked up the bottle of hot sauce and dumped some more on her eggs, and Riordan laughed.
“You’re going to the Sanctuary today?” said Nadia.
Riordan nodded. “I need to talk to the Firstborn about Ricci.”
“God knows Alex won’t shut up until he’s paid,” muttered Nadia.
“I’ve known him longer. Nothing ever shuts him up,” said Riordan, and Nadia laughed. “Then I think I’ll come back and write for the afternoon.”
Nadia nodded, took a bite of eggs, and hesitated, her expression thoughtful. Riordan thought she had put too much hot sauce on the eggs, but instead, she picked up the bottle and added more. She was definitely going to have clear sinuses after this. “I’m going to do some paperwork for Moran Imports. The first harvest of fruit from Kalvarion is supposed to come through the Great Gate in November, and Russell’s got contracts lined up with all the grocery chains in Milwaukee. If it goes well, we want to expand to some of the other urban areas in the Midwest.”
“I’m surprised Russell has time for all this,” said Riordan. Nadia’s brother had an astonishing amount of energy, especially after his frostfever had been cured.
“If he passes that proficiency test, he’ll be done with high school, and then all his time will go into the company,” said Nadia. She finished off her bacon. “I doubt he’ll miss it. Not that I would know since I never went to high school.”
“You didn’t miss much,” said Riordan. His own high school years hadn’t been enjoyable. The one bright spot had been meeting Miranda, and that had later turned sour.
“But after we get our work done for today,” said Nadia, “we should do…you know, a thing.”
Riordan blinked. “A thing?”
“Like a married couple thing.”
“We did that this morning.” Riordan felt himself smile. “But I’m sure I would be up for another round later.”
She smirked. “You usually don’t need much encouragement. But I haven’t had enough coffee to express myself coherently yet.” To solve that problem, she took another long drink. “I mean, we should go out and do something fun. You know, like a date, except we’re married now, so it’s not a date.”
“We could go to a museum,” said Riordan, half-seriously, but partly to see the flicker of alarm that went through Nadia’s eyes. She was very intelligent, but she had absolutely no use for anything abstract and a profound suspicion of anything intellectual, a dislike that had only hardened after her experiences with Nicholas Connor and his band of ideologically-driven Rebels. “Or we could go to a shooting range?”
The alarm turned to pleased surprise. She did like guns. “Really? God, I haven’t been to a shooting range in…in…well, longer than you’ve been alive.”
“We should rectify that,” said Riordan. “Dinner, and a trip to the shooting range. I know a veterans’ club in Queens that has a good range. It’s not too stuffy, and it’s not too expensive, either. Once we finish up for the day, we’ll head out there for a late supper and burn through a few hundred rounds of ammunition.”
“That sounds fun,” said Nadia. “It’ll be just like the old days.” She snorted. “Course, in the old days, I was scared to death of Morvilind and scared of Homeland Security or the Inquisition catching up to me. Hard to get nostalgic about those days. Except when I think about you.”
“And now you work for the High Queen,” said Riordan.
Nadia nodded. A distant look went over her face, and she rubbed the fingers of her right hand with her left, as she often did when the topic turned to the High Queen. “I’m scared to death of her, too. But she’s not like Morvilind. She’s…” Her voice trailed off.
&nbs
p; “She understands loyalty,” said Riordan. “In a way that someone like Morvilind never did. He used people up and threw them aside when he was done with them. Whatever else can be said about the High Queen, she doesn’t do that.” His thoughts turned to his brother Aidan. Like Nadia, he had been Morvilind’s shadow agent. Unlike Nadia, he hadn’t survived the experience. To find a way to save his brother, Riordan had joined the Wizard’s Legion and then the Shadow Hunters, trying to find a patron with enough power to force Morvilind to release Aidan.
It hadn’t worked. Aidan had been dead for decades, but Riordan was still a Shadow Hunter.
“Ah, shit,” said Nadia. She reached over the table and squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring that up. Here we’re having a nice breakfast, and I have to ruin it.”
“You didn’t ruin anything,” said Riordan. “It is possible to be both happy and sad at the same time, on occasion.”
“That’s true.” She squeezed his hand again. “You’re okay?”
“Yes.”
“Can I let go of your hand and finish my eggs? I’m really hungry.”
Riordan laughed. “By all means.”
They finished breakfast, and Riordan went to the bedroom and changed to a suit and a tie. Meeting with the Firstborn had certain proprieties. He returned to the dining room and saw that Nadia had already set up her laptop and the stacks of paperwork related to her brother’s new company, though she had carried the dishes to the kitchen and was washing up.
Nadia glanced up from the sink and smiled. “Well, don’t you clean up nicely.”
“Thanks,” said Riordan. “I suppose I could meet with the Firstborn wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, but probably best not to do that.”
Nadia laughed. “Tell the old spook hi from me.”
“I will,” said Riordan. The Firstborn and Nadia had charmed each other the few times they had met, which was something of a relief. “I’ll text if anything comes up, but I should be home by noon.”
“Okay. I’ll be right here glaring at paperwork.” Nadia dried off her hands, rose up on her tiptoes, and kissed him. “I love you.”
Cloak of Dragons Page 5