Page 113

NINETEEN

Ruse

As he hefted his motorcycle—or as he liked to call it, “Charlotte”—off the back of the RV, Omen couldn’t quite restrain a frown. He set it on the darkened road where we’d parked on the outskirts of Athens and gave me an evaluating look, as if he thought I might break his treasured vehicle just by standing next to it.

“Don’t spend too long on this side trip,” he said in a terse but even tone.

I offered him a jaunty tip of the cap that hid my horns. “By the time you’ve found yourself a ship, I’ll be right there to talk us onto it.”

“I’m going to hold you to that.”

He got back into the RV, but Sorsha wasn’t in quite so much of a hurry to see me off. My mortal love trailed her fingers over one of the motorcycle’s handlebars and then turned her unusually pensive gaze on me. “Are you sure you need to do this? Are you sure you want to?”

She’d so generously given me her blessing to fulfill my appetites freely, but I thought I caught a whiff of possessiveness or perhaps a more general uneasiness in her demeanor, potent enough that I didn’t need to extend my supernatural abilities to pick up on it. But then, we couldn’t help our emotions, could we?

I touched her cheek, reveling for perhaps the hundredth time as I hoped to hundreds more in the way her bright copper eyes lit up at that simple caress. “There’s nothing this woman could stir in me that you don’t a thousandfold more.”

“You don’t know that yet. You haven’t really had the chance to compare before.” Sorsha let out a rush of breath. “It’s not really that anyway. I just— I know how much she hurt you. Well, the woman this woman will remind you of. No matter what happens, no matter what you see or what she says if you talk to her, it doesn’t change anything about who you are.”

“Maybe it does,” I said.

The gleam in her eyes flared, and I felt a waft of heat she must have suppressed before her anger condensed all the way into flames. “She barely knew you. She didn’t bother to. And her granddaughter has no idea at all what?—”

“I know. That’s not what I meant.” I teased my thumb over Sorsha’s chin just below those tempting lips. “What happened back then has stuck with me, though. You’ve seen that, or you wouldn’t be rising to my defense—very admirable of you, of course. That fragment of my history has held like a splinter under the skin of my soul, as much as I have a soul, and I think confronting it might be necessary to finally pulling it out. I’d like to be who I am without it.”

Sorsha made a face at me, but her tone was light. “Well, fine, give a perfectly understandable reason so I can’t grumble about it anymore.” She leaned in to steal a kiss as deftly as she’d stolen so many other things in her career, not least of all my heart. I let my mouth linger against hers, absorbing one last bit of love and courage to carry with me.

As she left me, I swung my leg over the bike. It wasn’t the first time I’d borrowed Omen’s ride, and my body settled into place on the seat easily enough. But despite my reassurances to Sorsha, my spirit was not at all settled as I revved the engine and took off through the crisply warm Mediterranean dusk.

Sorsha’s emotions weren’t the only impressions that had snagged on my incubus senses. From all around, more and more with each passing day, faint ripples of anticipation skipped across my skin from indistinct directions. Ripples with a vicious edge.

I couldn’t say for sure what they were. Possibly it was merely a global epidemic of emotional indigestion. I suspected, though, that I was picking up the violent hopes of those who knew about the Company’s goals and weren’t currently shuttered behind steel and silver. Those who knew that Tempest was only days from reaching that goal.

It wasn’t just Sorsha who needed me. It was the companions I’d promised to help in this mission and all the shadowkind who’d wither away if the sphinx got what she wanted. Maybe I wasn’t all that fond of every one of those shadowkind, but I wasn’t the type to wish them dead either. I vastly preferred it if they stayed alive and at a distance where they wouldn’t weigh on my limited conscience.

And if I was going to make sure of that, I’d damn well better be at my best. No niggling splinters of shame and doubt, no nagging memories I should have put to rest before Sorsha had ever come into my life.

Danae had lived in a hilltop villa with a view of the distant sea—the sort of home I’d now have said looked more believable as a movie set than in reality. But it was still here, the pale stucco walls of the house rising amid the bushes no longer in bloom. A few cracks and patches of repaired plaster showed here and there that hadn’t existed before, but the place was in much better condition than Danae herself would be these days, wherever they’d laid her old bones to rest.

I left Charlotte at a safe distance and traveled around the matching garden walls through the darkness. The gnarled old olive tree I’d once playfully called to my one-time lover from had gone as kaput as she had, but I found a rocky protrusion a few feet from the wall that allowed me nearly as good a glimpse into the yard. As I clambered onto it, my chest tightened.

If my memories of Danae were a splinter, then that shard of noxious wood was digging into my gut right now, prodding out trickles of embarrassment and shame. The way she’d looked at me when I’d made the proposition that we take our relationship beyond mere physical pleasures—the way she’d laughed …

What should it matter now? I was here, and she wasn’t. My capacity for love had endured after all, despite my nature, despite her dismissal of it. Still, I braced myself as I peered into the garden, preparing for a more wrenching wave of pain.

The current owners had changed the landscaping quite a bit. The only feature I recognized was the marble fountain dribbling water in the center of the space. The poor cupid poised over the pool had lost his head, which gave the whole piece a much more macabre look.

A newer wrought-iron bench stood nearby beneath the shade of a lemon tree, and the bushes stood scattered across the terrain in abandon rather than their former neat order. The varying shades of green in their leaves made for a delight of color even without their flowers. An herbal scent carried on the breeze thickly enough that I could taste it even from the shadows.

The sky had deepened into the indigo of night, but a few windows on the villa still gleamed with light. I was about to slip over the wall to spy through the glass when the woman I’d come to see saved me the trouble by strolling out.

It had to be the granddaughter—Demi, the miraculous internet had informed me. She was a tad taller and a shade slimmer than her grandmother had been, but her hair shone the same honey-brown, loose across her shoulders. Here and there the light caught a strand of gray—she was a decade or so older than Danae had been during our… acquaintance. But that only meant there were a few more lines around her graceful features, which held an echo of the woman who’d come before her. I could have believed I was seeing Danae herself in her middle age.

I took all that in—and my pulse beat evenly onward. The shame had faded away into the tranquility of the night. No jab of loss or regret ran through me. I couldn’t even say I felt a twinge of anger at the reminder of the woman who’d seen me as little more than a very animated, multi-featured dildo.

No, mostly what I felt was a mild curiosity. How far had the apple fallen from the tree?

Not all that far in some respects, if the book she held was anything to go by. She lifted the canvas-covered volume, the frayed ribbon placeholder dangling, and spoke in a low, sweet voice. Reciting the lines to a play—one of Aristophanes’, if my sketchy recollection served.

She must have picked up that hobby from her grandmother. That was how I’d fallen for Danae—watching her stride around her garden, making impassioned speeches and cracking the best of ancient Grecian jokes. She hadn’t wanted to act professionally, just to live out those scenes at her leisure, enjoying the poetry and the drama. Finding more depth in them than she’d ever been willing to see in me.

Should watching a woman so like her go through the same motions have rankled me? It didn’t. Instead, a strange, serene certainty washed over me.

Demi was merely going through the motions, just as her grandmother had been. Neither of them had ever really passionately declared a challenge to combat or plotted the demise of unspeakable enemies or bantered with scurrilous rogues. I’d fallen for the roles Danae had admired, but she’d only been playing at them.

Sorsha was every bit the fierce and unshakeable woman contained in those roles—and more. The love that had grown in me in her presence ran right down to my core, as true as anything. She was as tangled in my being now as the roots of that lemon tree were with the earth.

And I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Whatever splinter had remained from the follies of times past, it crumbled away with that understanding. I drew back from the wall without a moment’s hesitation and returned to the motorcycle.

It wasn’t hard to find my companions, even though they’d driven right through Athens down to the harbor. When I reached that area, I opened my supernatural senses to the energy I’d recognize as Sorsha’s—not pushing hard enough to get more than a taste, just enough to direct me.

Long ago, I’d let the scraps of desire I’d read in one woman’s mind convince me that if I only told her how much more I’d wanted, she’d find the same longing in herself. Now I didn’t need to scour my love’s soul for an answering emotion. I had a woman who offered up her affection with every word and gesture she directed my way.

The Everymobile was parked outside a closed fish shop. Its tour bus guise was thrown off a little by the tinsel it’d decided to sprout along the edges of the roof, which wavered up and down even without a breeze to carry it. It was definitely for the best that we hadn’t braved another trip to the rifts. It might have come out decked with a full set of holiday lights.

I left the motorcycle around back and traveled in through the shadows, only stepping out by Sorsha’s door. I could tell she was inside the bedroom, but it gave me an inexplicable pleasure to honor her privacy with the small gesture of knocking. “I’ve returned with all my parts intact, Miss Blaze.”

“I should hope so,” she said dryly, but when I slipped inside, I found her smiling. She looked me up and down as if confirming that claim for herself and gave my hair a fond ruffle. Her hand lingered over one of my horns in a way that never failed to send a thrill through me before it dropped to her side. “You look happy. Was she everything you expected?”

“She was exactly what she should have been, which was nothing I have any interest in anymore. I’d have had an awfully dull time of it if she’d been open to my full range of charms after all.”

I winked at Sorsha, and she laughed, but maybe the remark rubbed up against that thread of jealousy a little too closely. Just for an instant, flames coursed up over her hands, nearly translucent but hazy with heat. They vanished so quickly, with no change in her expression, that I wasn’t sure she’d even noticed her power had snuck out.

I took hold of the hem of her shirt and tugged her to me, tilting my face so my forehead rested against hers. Our mortal exuded so much strength and fire it was easy to forget she had her own vulnerabilities. She hadn’t asked me this, and she shouldn’t need to. It was a pleasure and an honor to say it for its own sake.

“In case I wasn’t clear enough earlier, there’s no one I need or want other than you.”

The corners of her lips curled upward again, and she met my kiss with that smile. But I knew even as I enjoyed the moment that it wasn’t enough. She had worries far beyond my part in her life.

She needed more than me … Maybe more than all four of us, despite all we could offer. She was a being of two worlds and uncertain abilities with possible apocalyptic potential.

All we could speak from was the shadowkind side. I could see that she got whatever other perspective she might need too, couldn’t I? The sort of help she never would have allowed herself to ask for.

Whatever Tempest was going to throw at us in the next few days, Sorsha had to be at her best to meet it too.

When I left her, I stepped outside and pulled out my phone, but it wasn’t to do any more digging into my own past. It was to bring up the number of the most vital presence from Sorsha’s.

“Hello?” said the voice that answered, energetic and cautious at the same time.

I leaned against the RV’s side, tipping back my head to watch the tinsel waving in its manufactured breeze. “Hello, Vivi. It’s your best friend’s favorite incubus. How would you feel about embarking on a little trip?”