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Ice shut his eyes tight, forced himself to find a place of focus from where he could operate. If he was right about what was happening, things were only just getting started. The next eight or ten hours were going to be a bumpy ride, with the insanity peaking at around the four-hour mark. He’d only had one experience with this, but it was burned into his brain, seared into his psyche, carved into his consciousness.
“It must have been an NOC operative,” Ice muttered, furiously rubbing his jaw as he replayed Benson’s warning at the end of the phone call which seemed as hallucinatory and fictional as everything else right now.
Indy’s saucer-wide eyes snapped into paranoia-fueled focus, like she’d suddenly remembered in a rush where they were and who they were and why this was serious as hell, dangerous as sin, deadly as death. “Somebody activated a Non-Official-Cover Operative to come after us?”
Ice shook his head wildly, his thoughts coming too fast to control, too hard to stop from gushing out as garbled words. “Not us.You. Benson said it might be Rhett’s next play, that the guy wouldn’t send in a clumsy subcontractor wet-team again, that he’d either just abandon the whole thing or else try to activate an NOC operative in Mumbai, take you out in a way that leaves the door open that . . . thatImight have done it, to make it look like Kaiser told Benson to order me to put you down quietly, cover this whole thing up so it doesn’t make Kaiser look bad in front of Robinson and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Do you follow? Because I can barely hear myself right now. Shit. Shit.Shit. This is bad. Really fucking bad.”
Indy’s eyes darted all over the place like twin pinballs, like she could literallyseethe words flying past Ice’s lips. He knew he’d been blabbering at the speed of light, but apparently her mind was amped up to where she could process it at light-speed too.
But although dark recognition flashed in her eyes, all she said was: “Dosed? On what, Ice? What . . . what’s happening?”
“LSD,” Ice said, nodding furiously to clear his head even though he knew it was useless, that LSD was a one-way ticket, that there was no getting off this train because there were no brakes and it was all downhill. “Colorless, tasteless, odorless, undetectable, unpredictable, unstoppable. Nothing to do but ride it through. Trust me, if there was an antidote, some home remedy to make it stop, I’d know it. Shit. Shit.Shit.”
“But . . . but how did . . . how did it get into us . . . I don’t . . .” Indy trailed off, her cheeks suddenly darkening with color like she’d suddenly understood.
Ice understood too—the first part of it, at least.
He knew howhe’dbeen dosed.
But why the hell wasshetripping like a flower-child from Frisco?
The answer came lickety-split, in a rush of hot recognition, an avalanche of overwhelming arousal that almost brought Ice down cold because the blood left his head so fast.
Somehow he stayed upright, fought his way through the stars spinning his vision into spacey sparklers, realized he was grinning like a moon-eyed wolf.
“You didn’t wash those panties out, did you?” he whispered as that arousal snaked up his throat and forced his thick tongue to slide out past his lips that were feeling real dry right now. “Oh, you filthy little spy. So I did read you right. I read you right all along.”
Ice took a step towards her even as the last vestiges of his sanity tried to pull him back, tried to remind him there was a CIA assassin somewhere in this building justwaitingfor him to let his guard down, that of all the dumb careless reckless decisions he’d made today this would be by far the worst, that if he didn’t stop himself now there was a very good chance Indy was a dead woman, that if he failed to hold himself back now he’d fail this mission, fail this woman, fail every damn thing he stood for as a man.
But he couldn’t stop the advance. And it was most certainly themanin him driving Ice onwards.
Not the beast, not the animal, not the demon.
Well, maybe alittleof them, Ice acknowledged with a dangerous shrug as he felt the beastly animalistic demonic wolf-grin break so wide his face hurt.
Indy’s face looked to be hurting too, but from mortified horror as she covered her mouth and backed her way wide-eyed into the bedroom.
“I . . . I . . . of course I washed them out,” she mumbled through her spread-out fingers even as her eyes screamed the truth. “Of course I washed out your grossness from my panties. I can’t believe you’re evensuggestingthat I in any way shape or form wouldeverdo something so filthy. You’re sick. Get away from me.”
But Ice stomped forward as Indy scuttled backward, both of them grinning like goons, snickering like schoolkids. She backed into the bedroom, then with a sly shrug and a wicked wink Indy slammed the door shut in his face as her lips mouthed something through the boiling air, words that took their time to make it through the blood-thunder in Ice’s eardrums, words that called out an invitation that Ice felt in every fiber, heard in every heartbeat.
You know where to find me, she’d whispered through that wicked wink, giggled through that gargantuan grin, cooed through that crack in the door, that splinter in space, that tear in time.
Ice’s consciousness was running away from him, skyrocketing to some place he didn’t want to accept was real but couldn’t deny existed. His vision was speckled with starlight but somehow clear and crisp like a sunny day in winter. That whimpering voice of sanity still echoed somewhere in his vibrating skull, but it was being drowned out by this new clarity, this perfect plan, this undeniable event that Ice somehow knewhad to happen now, had to happen before anything else could happen, had to happen because it was the only thing that ever fucking happened in the universe, from big bangs to black holes to supernova sunsets to red giants rising.
It was all the same energy, Ice suddenly understood as the chimes of comprehension rang in his ears, the bells of belief trilled in his brain, the sirens of second-sight shrieked in his soul. Shit, it was all the same damn energy, wasn’t it?
The energy of creation, the energy of destruction, the energy of sex, the energy of violence.
The energy of love.
Suddenly Ice was laughing, and he swore he could hear Mom and Dad laughing from somewhere behind that veil which was opening up like a stage-curtain to reveal that it was all a play, an act, a game of fate, a dance of destiny. And as Ice heard his own laughter peal through the turgid air along with those bells and chimes and sirens he knew this train had left the station, that he was on it, maybe even driving it, driving it like a mad clown because the train was out of control, couldn’t really be driven but only ridden.
Ice stumbled across the room, kicking his boots off, tearing his shirt off, that closed bedroom door glowing with the energy of her invitation. Somehow he had the presence of mind to make his way to the front door first, peer through the spyhole to make sure it was clear outside before cracking it open and sticking the DO NOT DISTURB sign on it even though the letters looked like hissing hieroglyphics one moment and singing seahorses the next and sounded like bells again, chimes again, sirens shrieking in his skull again, shrieking way too loud to be imagination.
And then Ice realized that maybe the bells and chimes and sirens weren’t just in his head.
They were coming from the couch.