Page 48

FIFTEEN

Sorsha

Red and purple lights flashed in the old fortune teller booth. The mechanical figure with her cracked plastic cheeks and glittering turban jerked a little to the left, still running on some reserve power source in the fairgrounds.

I popped in a quarter. “Who’ll they cast in my role when they make a movie out of this craziness?”

The crone’s creaky voice was starting to outright sputter as she ran out of juice. “The answer lies in your hea-a-art.”

I nodded sagely. “Okay, so an Eastwick-era Michelle Pfeiffer then.” Dye her hair red—it could work. We’d just need to invent time travel first.

I readied another quarter. “Am I even going to survive to see that movie?”

“All things are possible if you find the w-w-will inside yourself-f-f.”

The fortune-teller was basically a Magic 8-ball with a face. Since my restless wandering had led me through the night to this part of the fairgrounds, she’d answered my previous questions with cryptic remarks like, “Your chances will rise with your spirits,” and “Sadly, my ancient eyes cannot see that far.” It was a good thing she only cost a quarter. And also that her owner had left the money collection panel open so I could retrieve my few quarters for repeated rounds.

But maybe I didn’t want real answers. Maybe that was why I was interrogating her rather than getting some much-needed sleep. If I lay down with nothing to occupy myself, it’d give my worries a chance to really dig into my brain.

Not that they weren’t jabbing plenty of spades into me as it was. As I pushed in one more quarter, my throat tightened just a bit. My next question came out in a rough murmur. “What am I?”

“Seek with an op-p-pen mind, and the truth will become c-c-clear,” the fortune teller informed me.

Another voice followed on the tail end of her response, low and sly. “But clearly you’re a tall drink of water up way past her bedtime.”

My pulse skittered, but only for a second. I knew that voice. I folded my arms over my chest. “Very funny, Ruse.”

The incubus sauntered from behind the booth wearing his typical smirk. “I didn’t mean to startle you. You’ve seemed disconcerted ever since we left the grocery store. I figured I’d make sure you hadn’t wandered off too far.” He cocked his head, taking me in, and of course at that exact moment a yawn I couldn’t hold back stretched my jaw. “And you should be in bed, shouldn’t you?”

“With you there too, you’re suggesting?” I said, not totally against the idea.

The brief tensing of Ruse’s features tied a knot in my stomach. He was against it, apparently. “I suspect you do need some actual rest at this point,” he said.

“ I suspect I’m not going to be able to get to sleep until I’m at least twice as exhausted as I currently am.”

“Let’s see if we can’t tire you out some more then.” He eyed the crone in her plastic box. “This old gal doesn’t seem to be doing the trick. Come on.”

I was already tired enough that I couldn’t be bothered to protest. We wandered across the vacant lots where various carnival rides had once stood until we reached a sort of plaster hill about ten feet high that must have supported some part of a track.

“Mountain-climbing is good, solid work,” Ruse said, clambering halfway up the lumpy side and then offering his hand to me to help me. I waved it away and scrambled up to the top on my own.

The peak had enough room for at least three people to sit side-by-side. One of the ride operators must have used it as a lounging spot before we’d discovered it—an open beer can was wedged into a notch at one side. I drew my knees up to my chest and peered out over the desolate fairgrounds in the thin glow of the moonlight.

Ruse settled in next to me, leaving what felt like a careful space between us. Was he shunning all physical contact now? What was up with him these days?

Or maybe the problem was me thinking the incubus had to still be into me after our intense but admittedly short entanglement.

I resisted the urge to scoot closer to him, as good as it might have felt to have one of those well-toned arms around me. Which was the right choice, because a moment later, he said, “It has something to do with the man you saw in the store, doesn’t it? You knew him, and it wasn’t with happy memories.”

Since he wasn’t touching me, he couldn’t feel how much my body tensed up at the question. I gazed determinedly at the city lights in the distance. “There were some happy ones,” I said finally. “A lot of them. At least, I thought they were happy at the time.”

“Do you want to talk some more about that? Get it off your chest?”

I didn’t really want to talk about Malachi any more than I’d wanted to see him, but it could be I didn’t have any more choice about the former than I’d had about the latter. As long as I held the thoughts in, they’d keep gnawing at me. It wasn’t as if Ruse was going to judge me for my failures in committed relationshipping.

I shrugged, picking at the tab on the beer can. The sour smell of the stale alcohol fit my mood perfectly. “He’s the only serious boyfriend I’ve had. We were together for two and a half years, lived together for almost a year of that… Everything seemed to be going great. I was in love with him, thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with him. I hadn’t told him about the Fund stuff or Luna yet, but I figured we’d get there.”

Ruse sprawled back on his elbows, watching me with a mild expression. “I sense a rather large ‘but’ coming this way, and not the sort I enjoy checking out.”

I rolled my eyes at him, but my lips twitched at the joke. “Yeah. But.” The memory came back to me, so sharply it stole my voice and my breath. I braced myself, summoning all the detachment the years afterward had allowed me to cultivate.

“One day I got home from the job I had back then, manning the cash register in an ice cream shop, and it was like… like he’d erased every trace of his presence from the apartment. All his clothes and books, his shower stuff, the armchair his dad gave us—gone. Oh, except that he’d bought all the dishes and silverware, but he was kind enough to leave me one plate with a knife and fork.” I grimaced.

Ruse blinked, looking genuinely taken aback. “Totally out of the blue—no arguments beforehand? Not that up and leaving that way would be normal even under those circumstances, as far as I understand it.”

“Nope. As far as I knew, nothing had changed. He left a note…” I swallowed hard. “He said he felt like he was lying when he told me he loved me, that he couldn’t seem to fall in love with me because I wasn’t quite what he needed. That’s the last I ever heard from him. He ghosted me completely. I hadn’t even seen him again until tonight.”

“This may not be much comfort, but if that’s how he deals with his problems, I’d say you’re better off without him, Miss Blaze.”

“Obviously. I just…” I just had never quite been able to shake the question of what I’d been lacking that had made me unlovable. But maybe I knew now. Maybe there was something not quite right about me that he’d been able to sense even if he couldn’t have put it into words.

I didn’t want to linger in the chill of that possibility.

“It would have been hard to take when you were so fond of him,” Ruse filled in for me.

“Well, yeah.” I gave myself a little shake and forced my tone to turn wry. “It doesn’t matter. What’s so great about a normal life anyway? I’m having way more fun fleeing murderous psychos on a daily basis.”

Ruse chuckled. “Your involvement with the shadowkind has brought a certain sort of excitement into your life, hasn’t it?”

That was one way of putting it. But I did want him to know— “I don’t regret breaking you three out of those cages one bit. I let some of the things that should have mattered slide while I was with Malachi, not wanting to risk him getting caught up in any trouble I got into. It was only after he left that I really started going after the collectors, emancipating their zoos and all that. So I suppose you could say I’ve decided to be married to my work.”

“We’d certainly be in a much worse position if it wasn’t for that,” Ruse said with amusement, but the intentness of his gaze suggested he hadn’t totally bought my nonchalance about the break-up.

For a minute or two, we sat in silence. A plane flew by far overhead, its tiny light flashing. Then the incubus said, “It might make you feel better to know that from what I’ve seen, love doesn’t come all that easily to anyone.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “You haven’t exactly been pursuing that kind of relationship to speak from experience.”

He smiled crookedly. “Not generally, no. But—and I’ll thank you not to mention this to any of our companions—there was one woman, a little more than a century ago. She enjoyed our initial interlude so much that I found myself returning to her, and now and then we would talk before or after… or during… and I found I enjoyed much more about her than the physical satisfaction.”

It was my turn to blink at him. An incubus falling in love? I wouldn’t have thought the cubi kind were even capable of that—but maybe that was my own prejudice, as enlightened about the shadowkind as I liked to believe I was.

Ruse didn’t meet my gaze, still staring up at the sky. “It was ridiculous, of course. When I attempted to spark something beyond our encounters of the carnal kind, she made it very clear she only wanted me around for getting her off. Put me right in my place. An embarrassing blip in an otherwise illustrious career, but I guess we all have our lessons to learn.”

I studied his roguishly handsome face, trying to picture what kind of woman would turn any of Ruse’s attentions away. He’d gotten me off impressively well between the sheets, sure—I had no complaints there—but my fondest associations with him had nothing to do with the bedroom. There’d been the night he’d gotten us all dancing to one of Luna’s old CDs to lift my spirits. All the ways he goofed around to counter Thorn’s sternness. The delight he seemed to take in filling Snap in on all the weird and wonderful parts of the mortal realm.

The fact that he’d come after me tonight and made sure I was all right—and that he’d done it without turning it into a big to-do.

“She didn’t know what she was missing,” I said in all seriousness.

Ruse flashed another smile at me. “How kind of you to say.”

“I mean it.” And driven by an instinct I couldn’t deny, I leaned in to kiss him.

I half expected him to pull back from the kiss, to confirm the disinterest I thought I’d picked up on earlier. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The second my lips brushed his, Ruse pushed himself up to better meet me. His mouth seared hot against mine, and his fingers teased into my hair to urge me closer. I found myself gripping his shirt, lost in the wave of sensation he could provoke so easily.

“You’re perfect,” he muttered against my lips. “Don’t let any mortal prick convince you otherwise.”

There were other pricks I was much more interested in paying attention to right now—one in particular, behind those fitted slacks. As he claimed my mouth even more scorchingly than before, I let my hand trail down his chest to his fly, just to be completely clear that I was up for more than a quick make-out.

My fingers grazed the erection already hardening behind the smooth fabric, and Ruse groaned low in his throat. The sound of his desire—his desire for me —sent a tingling rush through my chest. His grip on my hair tightened, the pressure drawing sparks through my scalp.

He rolled us so he was nearly on top of me, and right then I’d have happily welcomed him on top of that plaster mountain or up against it, or any other way he wanted this to go down. My worries about him using his abilities on me, messing with my mind, seemed absurd now.

No wonder he’d been nervous enough to break his promise and take that one peek inside my head that he had, if the only other time he’d believed a woman might want more than his sexual talents, he’d had his heart broken.

Ruse delved his tongue between my lips and eased his thigh between my legs to pay back some of the friction I’d offered him. I gasped, arching into him automatically.

My hand came up to find one of the curved points of his horns where it protruded from his hair just above his ears. He’d seemed to enjoy it when I touched those. I curled my fingers around it, his tongue twined with mine, and for a few seconds, nothing else in the world existed.

Only a few seconds, though. Without warning, Ruse’s shoulders tensed. He drew back, his breath momentarily ragged while he gathered himself.

“Not the best place for this,” he said, a twinkle dancing in his eyes. “And I really shouldn’t be keeping you from your sleep anymore. Darkness knows Omen will be whipping us off on some new quest first thing in the morning.”

I sat up, my giddiness fading. As we climbed down from the fake mountain and headed back toward the camper van, I couldn’t shake the impression that those excuses hadn’t been the whole truth, or maybe even most of it.

Ruse had told me more than he’d admitted to any of the shadowkind tonight, but there was something else going on with our incubus—something he didn’t want to say to anyone at all.