City of Souls

15

While Hunter busied himself putting space between us, I again cursed the timing of our return to the warehouse. He’d opened up to me for a moment there, like the dappled edging of the sun through the trees, the first real opportunity at intimacy since I’d left his bed in this very warehouse more than a month earlier. I knew even before stepping from the car that the precious sliver of vulnerability, like the sun, would be clouded over again by the time I joined him inside. Again I wondered why it couldn’t be simple.

No, not simple, I silently clarified, but true. Undivided. Decisive. A woman wants to be chosen, after all, the one deemed precious above all others. The thought made me think of Hunter’s eyes fixed on the road as he asked about Ben. Could that be what he wanted as well?

“Wow. I’m always leaving, aren’t I?” I laughed, a small, unamused puff trapped in the cab of the car. How ironic that I could do so much leaving while trapped in Vegas, in this body, in this life. How ironic also that my return from another world was what emphasized all those little departures.

Before I could think, or back out of it, I went inside and said that same thing to Hunter.

“What are you talking about?” He was occupied at his drawing board, shuffling papers and tossing foam pieces into an open bin. He looked like he wanted to shrug off my words but couldn’t quite. He knew exactly what I was talking about.

I just smiled. “I mean, I left Ben…actually, I left him a note. In a mailbox.” I shook my head at the stupidity of thinking that was somehow acceptable. “Then I left you for him…then him again. But you helped me return from Midheaven, do you know that?”

He swallowed hard and shrugged. His actions were jerky, not at all his usual lithe, catlike movements.

I leaned against the table, toward him. He turned, disappearing behind the clouded plastic screen separating the workshop from the shooting range. I raised my voice. “You did. I was…trapped there. It would have been easy just to…” Give up. Die. The words slipped away. “Anyway, it would have been easy. But I remembered you once talking about my strength, how you thought it was beautiful, and that memory made me want to fight.”

It’d been in this very workshop, the sole time we’d made love. I’d left him then too. I edged around the hanging plastic sheet to find him standing before it, unseeing, motionless. He licked his lip, still not looking at me. “Not now,” he whispered. “Please.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that.

“You also said it was okay to change, to want something new. To admit you made a mistake and then make a new choice. For a new person. In a moment.”

I thought of what Solange had said as we were spinning in her planetarium, that I doubted my place in the world.

But I didn’t doubt this.

Sure, I wasn’t Solange, with her confidence and authenticity-her powers-but I was certainly the best me I’d ever been. I put my hand on his arm, hoping he’d choose this moment too. That he’d choose this new me. Hunter lowered his head for a moment.

Then he turned away.

It hurt. I closed my eyes. Yet I still wanted him. I opened them again.

And when he strode off to clear the target, I followed. A firing range, I thought. How appropriate.

“What are you doing?” he said, stopping in front of the first bull’s-eye, feeling me behind him.

Keeping my expression pleasant, I inched closer. “Sticking,” I said shortly, slipping my smile into the word.

“No, you’re being obnoxious.” He yanked on the old bull’s-eye, crumpling it in his hands. “Not to mention aggressive.”

“I know.” I rolled my eyes. “It’s so unattractive.”

He loved my strength. He loved my stubbornness. I stepped closer.

Hunter moved away, not looking at me. “We tried this before.”

His resolve was so firm it made me ache to shatter it. I smiled. “And we’re going to do it again.”

He whirled. “No.”

“Yes.” I snorted. He was right. It was obnoxious. “What, hero? Nobody and nothing touches you just because you’re bulletproof?”

He lifted his chin. “That’s right.”

I tilted my shoulder and batted my lashes. “C’mere, Bulletproof.”

His mouth actually twitched at that.

“See. You’re going to start liking this.” I let my glance fall to his mouth. “I promise.”

He swallowed hard, serious again. “Stop.”

Maybe I would have. If his gaze hadn’t slid over my halter top, lingered on the belly ring, caught on the zipper of my chaps. My smile widened, he took another step back…and I picked him up.

“What the-”

I threw him into the sidewall ten feet away, hard enough to knock some sense into him without causing injury. He was a big boy. He could tell the difference.

He was already on his feet as I advanced again, looking at me like my body had been taken over by aliens while I’d been visiting another world.

“You’re thinking too much,” I said, closing in. The thick silver encircling my wrists jingled. My leather pants rubbed when I walked. Hunter watched me warily. All combined? It was a huge turn-on. “It’s starting to annoy me.”

He swallowed when I stopped before him, body tensed, ready to deflect another shot if he had to. “One of us has to.”

I feigned turning away…and pitched him across the room extra hard for that.

“Joanna!” Now he was really pissed. I wanted to throw back my head and laugh.

I stalked him again, took the shooting stand he was keeping between us in an underhanded grip and flipped it across the room too. Steel clattered against concrete to send my blood soaring. I knew Hunter scented it. He inhaled deeply and his dark eyes dilated. I was hunting, I realized. Still hunting, still fighting, and-oh, look-damned feminine while doing it. God, this felt good. “Don’t say my name if you’re going to say it like that.”

I reached him, and he caught my wrists so I couldn’t pitch him again. I stepped closer. He angled his body, shielding choice body parts. Not a bit of trust in the boy. “How should I say it?” he asked.

“Like this.” And, gently, I lifted to my toes and breathed the syllables into his mouth.

It was a reluctant enfolding, his mouth closing so gently over mine that I might have missed it were it not for the accompanying warmth. I moved my lips, opening to him further, and his hands gentled on my skin, but he didn’t let go.

“I won’t leave again,” I murmured, leaning into him. The warmth spread to all the places my body met his-lips, arms, breasts. I pressed. “I won’t leave you again.”

He swallowed hard and I knew I’d hit on a fear too deeply felt to even voice. Even the next one, which he did murmur, had him averting his eyes. “Looking back is a form of leaving.”

“Hunter.” I took his face in my palms, so gently you would have never known I’d thrown down only minutes before. “My mother is MIA, my sister’s dead, my ex has no idea who I am, and I can’t even revisit the last week of my life because I never lived it. If any of that is an issue between you and me, then, Hunt? I’m not the one looking back.”

“That’s not fair.” He drew back from my touch, though he didn’t let go. “Look, you’ve had time to think this through-”

I moved in again, eyes on his lips. “Just thought of it, actually.”

“And right now you might be confusing what you think you want-”

“I want you.”

His jaw clenched. “You have to give me time.”

“You’ve got thirty seconds.”

His eyes went wide.

I shrugged. “Thirty seconds and either these chaps come off or I walk away forever. Twenty, now.”

“You can’t expect me to make that sort of-”

“Fifteen. C’mon, Hunter. I’m keeping it simple.”

“Jo!”

“I told you. Don’t say my name like that.” I slid my gaze down his body, lids going heavy with what I saw. Damn, this man spoke to me. “What do you want?”

“What exactly do you want?”

I smiled, my gaze flipping back up on his, warming once there. “I want to know what you crave and need and desire in the next…” I looked at my bangled wrist. “Five seconds.”

“I want you to stop throwing me around!”

And he also wanted to take the words back as soon as they were out of his mouth, because we both froze in their wake. He meant physically, but the accompanying scent said it was his emotions that were battered. As did the way his brows furrowed, as if pained.

“Oh.” I drew back and swallowed hard, my amusement fleeing. What was I doing to this poor guy? I thought, eyes wildly searching his face. He was right to want time and space. He had a right to his feelings, and to take as much time as he needed to come around to them. I could wait for him to come to me…if he chose.

“Phew.” I ran a hand over my head as I turned away. “Okay.”

Thank God for the wall, because my back was against it so fast it was like the earth came unhinged from its axis. Hunter’s mouth brought everything swimming into its proper place again, and I thought, Yes. This is right. This is fate. This is mine.

He pulled back long enough to catch his breath. “I still had two seconds left.”

“Three cheers for time management.” I flipped on him again, not throwing him around this time, but rolling with him. We pushed each other in tandem, working together now, mouths and hands frantic, until I halted it with a leg snaking up his side. I wrapped it around the back of his left thigh as he pressed, then shuddered. I smiled. “So you do like the chaps.”

“Not so much.” He hooked his thumbs into the waistband, I lowered my leg and braced. Diana’s chaps ripped free, attached silver studs tinkling as they hit the floor. Hunter quirked a brow.

I rolled my eyes. “I know, they’re like wind chimes. I have no idea…”

How I was going to finish that sentence, I thought as his mouth recaptured mine. I wrapped my legs around his waist, and he braced me with his core, hand fisted in my hair as he pushed me higher.

I winced as my lower back took most of the impact. “Ow.”

“What?” He pulled back, brows drawn.

I grabbed him again. “Nothing.”

A month ago we’d been tentative, uncertain, gentle and giving. This time we were ravenous in our demands, active and punishing. I didn’t feel bad about raking my fingers over his back as I stripped his shirt from him, because his knuckles dug into my hips as he tore off my briefs. So I bit his shoulder until he growled and redirected my mouth. He kissed me so long and hard my heartbeat actually slowed.

Flipping my hair to one side, he dove for my neck. I countered, angling for his, and we tussled until he created space enough to flip me, remaining behind this time. My protest stuttered off as he angled my palms on the wall, higher than I’d have chosen, exposing me more, before his hands pushed aside my leather halter, pinching as he again captured my neck with his mouth.

I arched back on a moan, arms spreading, and he wrapped one forearm around my chest, bracing me there. There was the slide of a zipper, and my breath quickened from expectation alone. Nothing happened. I held still. Still nothing. I bit my lip, whimpering some wordless plea, but there was only that one bracing arm around my core. Frustrated, I angled a look back. “Hunt-”

He plunged, a gorgeous, solid stroke that set off the first of my orgasms. I wasn’t even letting him take me, instead arching, reaching back with every sense to demand more, wanting friction and heat, his strength in return for mine. I wanted him to go on forever. I wanted…I wanted…I wanted…

He wanted too. Hands returning to my breasts, he hooked his thumbs beneath my arms, nipples captured beneath long, strong fingers. I continued to open to him, luxuriating in his demand, and when I thought I couldn’t open any further, I gave some more. I wanted to pull him into me. I wanted to disappear into him. I wanted the one person who knew me to find shelter inside of me so I could do the same.

And right when I felt I was giving and getting just that, the magic of the aureole whipped across us. It was like the cresting tide of a monsoon, and having experienced it twice before, we each braced for the flash of color and knowledge to soak our senses, we both cried out as our minds intertwined. The energy gathering like a cosmic disaster in the sky was nothing compared to what arrowed between us. Our individual minds and thoughts slipped past skin and bone so that Hunter’s memories took root in my head, he took ownership of mine, and the separately lived moments merged as one.

His worry as he’d realized I’d disappeared into the pipeline a week earlier was an ache in my chest, like a fist squeezing my heart. I felt it now just as he had then.

The pain that had assailed me in the crossing between worlds reached out like an ice cream scoop to hollow his middle, and I actually heard his breath stutter.

After that I had a vision of him hunched over papers in the map room attached to the warehouse, making connections, his determination fueling long hours. In return, the memory plucked from me was of staring down Harlan Tripp across a pile of poker chips, and of sweeping those chips into my bag. The bag, connecting memories, was next seen hanging around a pipe as I huddled, barely breathing, feet away from the Tulpa and Regan in the dark.

The linear connection broke then, and we were flung back in time where a slash of stark moonlight lit Hunter’s face as he spoke the words I’d last read in a Shadow manual.

Everyone should have their greatest desire.

I wanted to turn to him, to question that, but the pain of the rejection he’d just endured, because of me, ran through me like a guillotine. To escape it, I squeezed my eyes…

And recalled for us both Solange in silhouette, stars spinning around her.

Hunter and I gasped together as the power arching between us reached its apex then, a shuddering pause before the coaster of emotion thundered downhill, picking up speed as we found our bodies again, renewed our rhythm, regained the present, and came together as one. Hunter’s aura, a gold spinning behind my closed lids, burst through me like a rocket. My red aura was weak, but my emotion was concentrated, and it spun from my mouth on that final cry.

It took minutes for the world to right itself, our breaths interloping to tug us back, together, inhale by exhale. I pressed my cheek against the cool concrete wall, spotted a bull’s-eye across the distance of the shooting range, and still breathless, I smiled.

We dropped to the platform bed tucked in the crow’s nest after that…it was either that or fall over, but the rightness that had slid over me upon climax enveloped me again as I nestled in next to Hunter. I was sore from the give and take, the aggressiveness and the surprising desperation in our lovemaking. I was also feeling the effects of my fight in Midheaven, and the passage both there and back, but nestled into the crook of his left arm, staring up at a ceiling of faux stars, I sighed, and every muscle relaxed.

Unlike Solange’s planetarium, this ceiling offered up a faulty version of the night sky. Hunter didn’t only track constellations, but “frozen stars,” dead ones, black holes. I’d wondered at that once, thinking it strange, but right now I had no energy to even care. I fit so well at his side, and was so relieved to be safe and home-not to mention out of those chaps-that I immediately began to drift off.

“How do you feel?” Hunter’s voice reached out to me like a breeze, hesitant and shifting. It was a similar question to the one he’d asked the last time we’d been tented beneath this improbable sky.

What do I make you feel?

At war with myself, like there’s something lacking…and violence…

I knew my answer had been hurtful, but at the time it had also been my truest reaction to the shock and sadness of having witnessed Ben and Regan together. Though rephrased, by asking the question now, Hunter was again opening himself to that hard answer, obviously hoping it’d changed.

My hesitation spooked him. He edged away, turning his back to me, but I caught his hip with my palm and spooned his body with my own, feet and knees and hips and chest an echo of his male strength. So complimentary, I thought, drawing closer. It made me honestly wonder why we were so often at odds.

While he remained silent, waiting, I traced the tattoo on his back with my fingers, trailing the shadowed side of the yin/yang symbol before running my index finger along the dueling words on each side: fear and desire.

“You make me feel…”

You make me feel like touching myself in the dark. You make me feel like whispering your name for no reason. You make me wish to put need and lack and violence behind me.

He turned to me, determined to face whatever I was going to say.

I offered up a watery smile, my fingers going tentative on his arm. I whispered, “I feel like me.”

Like I could be me-the good and the bad, the fabled and fallible, the Light and the Shadow-and still look in the mirror without shame. The jerk of his head revealed his surprise, but his relieved sigh told me it was the answer he’d been seeking. I stroked his arms, feeling the fine hairs there, the soft skin, the hard muscle underneath. I’d go back to Midheaven, I thought, like he could still hear it, and risk soul and powers and life for you alone.

He shifted toward me again, taking me in his arms. “It hurt.” It wasn’t a question. He knew, through the aureole. Still, the words made me feel small. I recalled what memory the aureole had shared, and closed my eyes.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Was it…that woman? The one in the aureole memory?” He was going to say “the beautiful one.” The hesitation was in his voice. I suppose it was indiscreet to say something like that when another woman was in your arms. But it was my memory…and Solange was beautiful.

“It was all of them.” They’d all been working together there, I now realized, as much of a troop as we were over here.

“What did they take?”

Now I really wanted to hide. How was I supposed to know? I hadn’t even had time to catch a second breath upon extinguishing that candle, much less worry about the triangles I’d so freely gambled away, what they represented, what I’d lost. I remembered the personality traits, stubbornness and fear, things that made people irrational-freeze when they should act, act when they should be still-yet they were also tools that could save a person’s life. Each trait on the human spectrum overlapped to zigzag like the locked pieces of a unique puzzle.

Then again, what about Solange’s words? Who armored you? Who is protecting your soul? Was someone protecting me? Had I possessed some sort of armor while there? I honestly didn’t know-not that, or what my passage to Midheaven had cost me. I just hoped it wasn’t a corner piece.

“I don’t know,” I finally sighed, so softly it disappeared into the black space between the winking stars.

“I’m sorry.”

And somehow that made it better. Not okay, I thought, turning into him again. But better.

Sleep visited in a series of images, none of them as pleasant as the reality that fatigue had me leaving behind. The first time I’d endured scorching heat and twisted poker games it was because I’d been trapped in another world. This time they were only bearable because even in unconsciousness I was aware of Hunter’s solid form next to me, that I was safe in my world, that I was home. I tossed during the next few hours, murmuring the names of men so washed out they looked made of dust, until Mackie’s skeletal visage, stretched in a furious scream, had me startling into full awareness. Hunter’s lips at my temples slowed my breathing to a normal rate, but when I turned to him again, limbs and lips seeking, it sped up in short time.

He entered me slowly this time, a calmness that hadn’t been there before riding over the both of us like we were still dreaming. Buoyed by it, we rode the waves of sliding limbs and twining tongues, and our long, slow climaxes were like ripples from stones dropped deep inside of us. He fell asleep, still inside, muscle gone lax atop me, transferring his strength to my bone. I lay there for a quarter of an hour, enjoying the weight, then shifted so we fell apart, again two separate people.

Hunter didn’t stir. His attention to me throughout the previous hours, plus whatever he’d endured in the days before that, had exhausted him. I ran my hand along the length of his body as I watched him breathe, and swore to never return to those tunnels. Entering them was like inviting in oblivion. One step in and you were enfolded in darkness. Much safer to stay on the outside, I thought, even with faux neon lighting up beneath a bulging sky.

He slept on his side, facing me, head resting on one arm, the other flung out as if reaching for something. I trailed my fingertips along his jaw. I loved the ability men possessed to expend all their energy in sex, and drop off like the dead directly after. I envied it a bit, but it also made me smile. I smoothed the dark hair from his forehead, feeling the silkiness rub, ghostlike, against the marble smoothness of my fingertips, and let myself begin to drift again as well.

Pounding at the steel bay door brought us both lurching upright.

“It’s Warren,” Hunter muttered, climbing over me so he was momentarily tenting my body with his own. I had a flashback of him lingering there, but by the time the slick, white-hot thought took hold, he was already pulling on his jeans and running a hand through his tousled hair.

“How do you know?” My voice was scratchy and raw. I cleared it and reached for the bottled water on the floor.

“That’s his knock. Here.” He threw me a sweatshirt, rolling his eyes when I put it to my nose and sniffed. “It’s fine. Don’t turn on a light until you’re dressed. Unless you want to be showcased like a burlesque dancer.”

It was early, predawn, and I nodded groggily as he rejected the ladder in favor of leaping directly to the floor twenty feet below. I groaned, feeling stiff and achy as I swung my legs over the side of the bed. My briefs and chaps were still downstairs in the firing range, but no way was I putting those back on. I fumbled about until I found an extra pair of sweats in a basket under the bed, answering Warren with a grunt as he yelled for me to meet them in the panic room. There was a metal desk lamp across from the bed, and I flipped it on once dressed to begin the hopeless task of trying to untangle my hair as I stretched. Gawd, I was stiff.

I felt the belly ring pull as I lifted my arms, and lifted my shirt to make sure it was okay. It was…but bruises surrounded it.

Bruises. “Oh my God.”

Fingertips dotted my skin in angry red brands, the memory of rough embraces marking every rib. I shot a glance downstairs, but the light was on beneath the panic room door, the two men already engaged in conversation. I twisted around to find my lower back already deepening in color, more places littered with livid color than not.

And this had resulted from a little charged, consensual sex? Okay, a lot of charged, consensual sex. At least now I knew which power Shen had taken. I dropped back to the edge of the bed.

“Regeneration,” I whispered. My ability to heal. I lowered my head to my palms, my palms to my knees. And now, like any human, I could be injured if struck by a bullet, sliced by a knife, hit by a car. Forget conduits. A mere slap from a Shadow agent would be dangerous.

All of a sudden, in a world of near immortals, the tiniest thing could kill me.