The Touch of Twilight

26

The voice that had begun screaming inside me the instant I’d seen Ben pinioned beneath Regan fell silent as we sped away from the chapel. I was suddenly icy with calm, but the accompanying silence was that of a hurricane’s vortex. It must have frightened Hunter, because he kept one hand on the steering wheel as he drove, the other poised on the console between our seats, tensed. His eyes were on me more than they were on the road, but I didn’t care. I was playing and replaying everything I’d said and done and missed, piecing together the puzzle of how Regan, once again, had gotten to Ben. Gotten, this time, inside him.

Closing my eyes, I leaned back against the leather headrest. I’d told Regan that Ben would never be with her as long as I was alive. So instead of wasting time or risking rejection, Regan had chosen a more effective tactic in making him her own. She’d become me. And that was my fault too. Hadn’t I taunted her less than twelve hours ago? Hadn’t I told her straight out that Ben knew who I was, and we were going to be together tonight, and every night hereafter?

I’d handed him to her on a silver platter, I thought numbly, opening my eyes to watch the zigzag of streetlights flaring before us, disappearing behind. By confirming to Ben the truth of my dual existence, or at least part of it, I’d given her leave to fill in the blanks. And she had. She’d pretended to use a changeling to turn herself into the old me-as Ben knew I’d done before-and with the mask on and the mannerisms she’d studied so closely, and a scent she’d manufactured and bottled after scrutinizing my own, she’d recreated the woman who spoke to Ben’s soul. And he was expecting me, after all. He wanted me. He thought he was making love to me.

None of that lessened my desire to throw myself from the speeding car.

The bay door to Hunter’s warehouse was lifting even as we rounded the final corner, and he pulled in smoothly, then waited for it to close again. He unlocked the car doors and got out. I remained seated, the cabin’s silence a cushion against my senses, only vaguely aware when Hunter lifted me from my seat and carried me through a narrow passageway I’d never even noted. We continued up a flight of stairs that ended in the crow’s nest where I’d sat with Warren a week before. Hunter deposited me on the corner of the desk, studied my gaze as it lingered on the black depths of the workspace below, then lifted me like I was a rag doll, and dropped me to the chair, away from the railing.

“Don’t try to escape the warehouse,” he said, closing the door to the hidden passageway so it melded back into a rickety wooden wall. It was almost pitch-black up here, and I looked around for the utility lights that were casting his outline in relief, finally glancing up to find a low-slung ceiling angling over the bed’s raised platform. It glowed with an elaborate universe of stars. I’d have thought it was some cheesy attempt at turning the crow’s nest into a love nest, but all the Zodiac members had a weird obsession with the solar system and the stars freckling its face. Raised outside the troop and inside a city whose skyline obliterated the night sky, I harbored no such affection. I’d have asked him to turn on the lights, except I preferred not to be seen right now. “It’s rigged, alarmed with trips and snares. You won’t even make it onto that concrete floor.”

“You can’t trap me here.” My voice was scratchy with the screams that’d escaped me, and thick with those still caught there.

He folded his arms and leaned against the wall, putting himself between me and what looked to be my only escape. “I just did.”

And he probably thought it was for my own good. He always thought he knew better than I did; that he was right just because he was stronger, had more knowledge and experience in death dealing and demon fucking, and creatures who used sex as nothing more than a sport or a job or another weapon in a superhero’s arsenal. Just like him. Just like her.

I narrowed my eyes, feeling anger heating again like the core of a nuclear reactor, though this time I had a new target. Hunter felt it too, but he couldn’t back away…the arrogant, sanctimonious, merciless…

“Why are you pissed at me?”

“Because you’re always there!” I screamed, twisting the last word into an ugly growl, throwing my arms wide to send a stack of books skittering across the ground. I stood, squaring on him. “Always watching me, stalking me! Just like them!”

That wasn’t fair; he had saved my life more than once, but none of that mattered now. My lover was with Satan’s spawn, and instead of helping me-rushing the room, securing Regan, saving Ben-Hunter had dragged me to a location where only he knew the hidden passageways and alarm trips.

Worse, he wasn’t even defending himself. He shifted so his legs were spread apart, defiant as his regarded me from that not-wall, absorbing shock after shock of my anger like he was an emotional sponge. I rose with the need to claw at someone, rip at them with my teeth until blood filled my eyes and I no longer saw that damned image of Ben pumping and pumping, ecstasy etched on his face. But Hunter was the only one in front of me, and he was as calm as I was frenzied. Which pissed me off even more.

And then he opened his fucking mouth.

“Should I put on a mask? Because the death breath is getting a little thick.”

My vision had gone red, and the sheen reflected back in the corrugated roof slats, smoke pumping through my pores without me willing or controlling it. My father’s temper was getting the best of me…and I didn’t care. I cursed Hunter so loudly the furniture shook on its legs, and an alarm sounded from somewhere below. Still calm, he leaned over in the billowing smoke and pushed a button on the outside of his squat headboard to silence it, his other hand covering his mouth. But he still watched me with that patient darkness.

“Fuck you!” I repeated, over and over again, the inflection altering in my throat, scratching it raw as it grew deeper and more fibrous, and feeling good. The part of me that always had a sarcastic comeback told me I was having a major paranormal shit fit, but I just screamed louder. A desk lamp went over the railing, triggering another alarm, and I heard the whizzing of deadly darts cutting air, fired pellets that joined my voice in the ringing chaos. I screamed some more.

I don’t know how much time passed before the breath simply wouldn’t come. One minute I was standing in the center of the crow’s nest, wolf-mad with howls, the next I was mewling on the bed, slumped up in the corner like a patient in a nuthouse. Finally deeming it safe, my sarcastic bent popped up its head again. At least I wasn’t drooling.

“I hate you,” I told Hunter, as he stepped through the thinning smoke, his indistinct form solidifying again. It felt like the only solid thing around me.

“I know.” His voice was gentle, still absorbing the aftershocks of my tantrum as he lowered himself to a crouch in front of me.

“You should’ve let me kill her.”

He put his hand over mine. “You would’ve hated yourself later. It would’ve fed into his destruction. Just like Regan is doing.”

“Stop that!” I jerked away, sick of people bringing up my Shadow side, as if I was any more treacherous than anyone else. Like Hunter wouldn’t have felt or thought the same things if it was his lover being fucked by a rotting corpse! “Stop using me against myself!”

“I’m not.” He laid his hand on my arm again, but this time its solidity balanced me in a world gone formless and faint. “I’m pointing out a strength that makes you better than them, or any of us who make flawed decisions even without a lineage that puts us in opposition with ourselves. Regan mistakes your Light for weakness. But it’s a greater strength than I’ve ever witnessed in any person…and any man, at any time, should be able to recognize it.”

A tremor shot up my spine, like the carnival game where the smash of a mallet sends a bell ringing above. I suddenly realized the silent knot coiled inside me was really a choked-off thought, one I’d strong-armed into silence so I didn’t have to admit the selfsame thing. Leave it to Hunter to come along and clobber that bell square. I wiped at my eyes with the backs of my hands.

“She looked like me,” I said weakly.

Silence reigned. I dropped my legs to the floor, shifting uncomfortably, and I found myself unable to meet his eye in the wake of that feeble excuse.

“I’d be able to tell it wasn’t you.”

I looked up into Hunter’s face to find his steady, assured patience coupled with a fierce tenderness. And the knot that’d already been dissolving in steamy corkscrews gave way to scalding tears. My shoulders shook.

How? I wondered. I wasn’t male and couldn’t know if one woman’s flesh beneath a callused hand felt much the same as another. Could a man distinguish between two women-by the way their hands moved over his body, how their tongue tasted in his mouth, how their thighs warmed his as he pressed them apart? I’d have gone on wondering, and weeping, if I hadn’t accidentally spoken the word aloud.

Hunter’s palms stilled my knees, his smooth fingertips pressing lightly. He leaned forward slowly, until his breath was in my ear, shifting the hair at my neck in the slow, calming beat of his pulse. I turned to him, our faces inches apart as I studied him studying me, and breathed in deeply. A gentle fizzing on the air, the Light in him straining to comfort me, an enveloping warmth like a hot spring in a hidden cave, something wanting to warm and secure me all at once. Overlaying it was the sharp, depthless need I always tried to ignore, and the poised flint of his banked gaze, ready to spark to life. Oh, I thought breathlessly as we locked eyes. I’d forgotten. Hunter felt like lava-licked sea water and smelled like ozone, and yes, it was totally different from any man I’d ever known.

“Because once he’s been inside you,” he whispered in the breath of a scalding ocean, “how could any man mistake you for another?”

A final sigh stuttered out of me, my defenses unraveling, and I lowered my gaze to his sea-swept mouth.

Ah, I remembered now. He tasted different too.

His strong, solid face blurred as I leaned closer, then reappeared touching mine, lips soft and warm and waiting. The kiss started out uncertainly, a meeting and parting, desire squared and split in two. Then, the smoothest flick of his tongue and heat shot through me, a slide that numbed, like bubbling champagne hitting the tongue.

With the gentlest press of printless fingertips, he lowered me to the bed, and this time-as never before-I let him, watching the faux stars spread out overhead as he loomed above me, the glow of distant planets and forgotten origins the only witnesses to my acquiescence. They grazed my irises before I closed my eyes, winking their approval.

Five minutes later he rose to his knees, stripped off his shirt, and unbuttoned his jeans. Tenting his body over mine, he held his weight on his arms and I ran my hands along his tight biceps, over the dense rounding of the shoulders I’d been wanting to caress since seeing him shirtless, and traced where I knew that enigmatic tattoo lay, marking his back. Meanwhile I branded him with my tongue, wet warmth sliding over his chest, crisscrossing the peaks of his nipples as I pushed his jeans down using my instep. We kicked them away together, a little more rushed, slightly frantic now, and I gazed up at him, down at him…and wished for more light.

The removal of my clothing went a little more slowly, more considered as his hands worked over and down, between and in, his warrior’s artistry turned soft, but still relentless as he shaped and pressed and molded me as he pleased. My focus faded and sharpened in turn, as did my breath as he licked me into place, pressing kisses just so to ensure I stayed there.

By the time I lay naked beneath him, my body was dewy from openmouthed kisses, mind numb from those electric fingers, and my legs curled lightly around the backs of his thighs. He bent, found a breast, performed the lazy crisscross I’d fired across his nipples, and I arched back, hooked my ankles in on a moan, and rose to him.

He slid inside me like he’d been there before, like I’d drawn him a map he’d committed to memory, tracing memorized pathways on my bridging body so he could find his way there in the dark. Though coming to it late, I began to study him too.

But Hunter saw me looking, and offered a swollen smile before slipping his thumbs over my eyes, sliding his tongue between my lips, rocking forward to rest solidly at my core. All my senses shorted out as I curled around him, tightening inside. My hearing dimmed, sight snuffed, taste melting on a moan. My fingertips curled like talons on his naked back, and the safety he offered, that steady peace, the barrier between me and the rest of this heartbreaking world swept over me like a gauzy net.

And that was when his need reached in to kindle the remnants of our once-shared aureole. I hadn’t known it was possible, but there it was still living between us, sparking to life. What I thought was dead had only been banked, and I saw the same surprised realization flash across Hunter’s face before he plunged into me again, mouth and middle, separating those soft places while I simultaneously opened for more.

The connection was like electricity surging across naked distance to collide with a bolt of lightning; one force instantly recognizing the other. Seconds earlier I was wishing he could go deeper, and now he did…into my thoughts and knowledge, my experiences and past, the flash of a hard memory causing a tear to fall over his cheek. This both was and wasn’t the aureole we’d shared eight months earlier, more of an apparition born of our need, stark black and white line drawings blurring as one rushed into the next.

Our individual memories of the last few months fused to make a new story. My knowledge of how he felt about Marlo’s death was no longer empathetic. I owned it now, and gave him my recollection in return, our shared guilt shorting out as the memories repelled one another. There was a flashback from the last time we’d kissed, tucked in the shadows of a boneyard maze, and the power we’d denied then flamed to life now, redoubling itself so we both stiffened in the wake of its current. My memories differed from his only in that they appeared in boldface, but otherwise we shared them, like we were both scales, and the aureole the beam balancing out the raw power streaming through our split pulse.

But it wasn’t a bridled thing. The power turned on us suddenly, pulsing and alive, and we groaned together, bartering for breath as those shared memories fragmented into incomplete and current thoughts.

More…love this…can’t stop…thank you…

And, finally, Fuck. Now.

His orgasm drenched me in his aura, I could see it in our joining, and the syllables of my name arched gold across his tongue, into my mouth and down to warm where my bruised heart slammed mercilessly in my chest. When I cried out, sending my red aura channeling across to saturate his soul, it was in the tongue of the same ancient power that caused stars to shatter in the sky, elemental chaos reigning, the rich twining of color trailing behind like the tail of a shooting star.

I opened my eyes in the last moment, Hunter clasped close, and stared at the stars above. Each one looked cocked and ready to shoot. Yet as I gloried in the rightness and oneness and random perfection of an observable universe, I knew even celestial bodies were subject to certain laws. Strongly opposing elements only came together, brightly, because of so many other far-off deaths.

“Your map is fucked up.” My voice was disembodied as we lay in the near darkness on that narrow bed, and raw from the yelling I’d done before we made love. Hunter had gone downstairs to retrieve some bottled water-hadn’t even gotten shot in the ass by fatal arrows while doing it-but I didn’t attempt to escape or follow. I was boneless and numb, parched from my loss of breath and dizzy from the gift of his.

“No,” he said, reclining beside me as he took a long swig from his bottle, one strong thigh bent and resting against mine, the other hanging off the bed. “The constellations are correct. The rest are frozen stars.”

I glanced back at the sky and only then noted the stars I’d thought were positioned incorrectly were all blazing more brightly than the others. I should have known I’d never catch Hunter making an astronomical mistake. He took the reading of the sky far too seriously. I was a novice, and that was being generous. “Frozen?”

“Black holes. All that’s left of giant stars that have evolved, contracted, and died.”

I shifted, trying to make out his features, but I was prone, and much of his face was hidden by my pillow. But his silhouette showed he was gazing up at his treasured recreation. “You track the death of stars?”

“Only the large ones.” He paused uncertainly before continuing. His voice rumbled deeply; I could feel it vibrating through the pillow beneath my head. “They have the shortest lives.”

I had enough trouble remembering the days of the week on the Western calendar, so while I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about, I did detect the sad undercurrent to his whisper. “Why?”

“Why do I track them?” I felt him shift, and nodded. He returned his attention to the heavens with a sigh, but not before I smelled myself on his breath. I warmed again like he was still in me. “The irony, I suppose. The idea that something so enormous, that once gave off such heat and light, can collapse in an instant, with such force and density even light can’t escape…”

I sat up on my elbow, and did study him now.

His eyes flicked to me, then away again, and he brought his bottled water up to his lips self-consciously. “It fascinates me.”

“It should frighten you,” I said sharply, because we obviously weren’t speaking of frozen stars anymore. Hunter, sensing my mood shift as clearly as if it was his own-and, who knew, it probably was-inched away and didn’t answer.

“I don’t understand,” I finally said, shaking my head as I sank back down, resting as my eye traced the pattern of the black holes. I didn’t explain what I meant, but I didn’t need to. He’d been so deep inside me he could probably explain me to myself.

“It’s simple,” he said after a time. “The Light in you is magnified because of your darkness. I’m like a child pressing my nose against a windowpane, seeing the source of the light and wanting to warm myself with it.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Because for you it’s like the sun. You’re blinded when looking directly at it.”

“But for you?”

Warm breath passed again over my skin, then the cool slide of one fingertip tracing my hips. Bumps shot along my thigh, tightened my nipples, raised hairs on my arms. Hunter’s whisper was steady as always. “It’s like the touch of twilight, a fleeting and beautiful thing. Even now, in the dark, it feels like waves rolling over my ankles. It makes me think a peaceful balance between the two really can exist.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t feel beautiful or rare. But I couldn’t deny the peace slipping over me, coaxing me to release my questions and sorrows for now, and steal this sliver of time while I could. If I let my vision blur, it even felt like I was floating in that wrongly marked sky, weightless and buoyant amid the remains of dead stars. The power I’d felt before, the aureole obliterating the skin that separated us, was fading. And now, I thought dizzily, I was just tired. So I curled up and finally closed my eyes, drifting off at some point before sunrise, still blind to whatever it was Hunter saw as he continued to stare down at me.

Chandra had been the one to tell Hunter where I was. She’d awoken in the cave at Cathedral Canyon, untied herself in short order-as I knew she would-then hiked back to town, which wasn’t as bad as it sounds. She wasn’t a star sign, but she could still move four times as fast as any mortal on foot. Once there she’d contacted the one person she knew could save me from myself. I suppose I should’ve been grateful. If she’d contacted Warren instead of Hunter, I’d be in a secret hospital, unconscious, and wearing someone else’s skin by now.

However, I doubt Chandra had predicted this turn of events, I thought, rising to dress at some point the next afternoon. It was Sunday-the day of Kimber’s metamorphosis and the doppelgänger’s deadline-and I knew I wasn’t the only one in Vegas waking with the distressed realization of what they’d done the night before. Despite the aureole we’d shared, and the solace I’d taken in Hunter’s bed and body, the morning after any ill-considered knee-jerk response was bound to appear sordid in the light of day. It seemed sadly appropriate that Hunter’s makeshift sky had been whitewashed into oblivion in the day’s light.

Hunter wasn’t stupid; he had to suspect I wasn’t making love to him as much as I’d been escaping the haunting image of Ben and Regan together. At least, not at first. Worse, he’d been willing to settle for it, which meant it was less a matter of him taking advantage of me than my exploitation of the perpetual state of hope I knew he lived in. I had exposed that hope. He had let me.

Of course, he also knew the moment I rose from his bed. He didn’t try to stop me, though I felt his gaze on my back and heard the bedcovers rustling as he shifted. I didn’t want to turn around and risk seeing anger-or worse, foolishness-stamped across those stoic features, but I owed him enough to at least look at him. So steeling myself to the expected hostility, I masked my own features and whirled.

He was sitting up, propped where the two walls met, the white sheet draped over him from navel down, though one leg was bent, exposed from thigh to ankle, his foot disappearing again under the covers. He watched me without blinking, everything he’d done and said the night before naked in those dark eyes. He didn’t look ashamed or foolish or apologetic, or anything you’d expect of a man who’d caught a woman sneaking from his bed. And with one short word, he opened to me again.

“Stay.”

My knees almost buckled.

“No,” I said quietly. I laced up the boots to my ridiculous costume, fingers trembling slightly. “I have to make sure he’s okay.”

But we both knew I was lying. If there’d even been a chance of Ben being killed or mortally wounded the night before, we would have both worked to save him then. But Regan hadn’t been killing him. That wasn’t what she’d wanted me to see.

“Why?”

I skipped past the stock replies and straightened to give him the real answer. “He makes me feel soft.”

The dark eyes narrowed. “I thought you didn’t like that.”

But I wanted it all the same, I thought, wincing. How fucked up was that? “There’s a strength in being vulnerable.”

“I know,” he said sharply.

I swallowed hard. He did. He was doing just that by showing me into his workshop via his secret passageway. By lying naked-literally and figuratively-in a bed he’d allowed me to share. By opening his body and mind to me so completely I’d momentarily forgotten myself. But…I sighed.

But Ben.

“I know what you’re thinking, Jo,” Hunter said, his voice so reasonable I was sure he’d rehearsed this during the night. “Peace and quiet sounds good. Some harmless little mortal sounds safe. But it won’t satisfy you for long.”

I wanted to tell him he didn’t know what would satisfy me, but after last night I couldn’t even think it. “Don’t push me, Hunter. I’m being pushed from too many sides right now, and I don’t need it from you.”

“No,” he said evenly. “It’s exactly what you need.”

I covered my face with my hands, slumping slightly, just for a moment. “Please. Just stop.”

He paused…but he didn’t stop. “So what do I make you feel, then? Because it’s something.”

Guilt. Chaos. Divided.

I looked him in the eye, needing to prove I too could be strong and vulnerable at the same time, and thinking the truth would settle things between us once and for all. “Whenever I look at you I feel at war with myself. You make me think of need, like there’s something lacking in myself. That, and violence.”

He winced before he could help himself, looking sad, like he’d trusted me with something fragile and I’d responded by smashing it at his feet.

“Look, Hunter-” I was reaching toward him, but he squeezed his eyes shut and jerked his head.

“You’ll make it worse.”

My frozen silence was making it worse anyway. I glanced down at the workshop floor, the organized clutter of tools and chests and tablets and books. Foam templates spilled from his waste bin, crumpled papers drooping over the drawing table and onto the floor. Chandra’s arrival had obviously interrupted his work. And he’d dropped everything to come to me.

“You know it’s not out there, right?” He huffed humorlessly at my returned look of incomprehension. “The lack you’re talking about. It just goes on and on. And one day you’ll be cruising along, doing the work you’ve championed for years, and suddenly it’ll rear its head, and your conviction fails. All this time, you’ll find yourself thinking, I’ve been a fool.” I swallowed hard as his gaze skittered past me, unseeing before he blinked. “But when it happens? It’s actually a relief. You’ll recognize yourself in the mirror again. It’s the epiphany you’ve been seeking laid out right under your nose.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I murmured.

“I’m saying you don’t have to do what you’ve always done,” he said, voice snapping sharp. I swallowed hard, and stepped back. “You can just forget, drop off all the memories that make you you, and give yourself leave to feel more.”

“I don’t want to forget him.”

“You don’t want him to forget you.” He shook his head in disagreement. “You’re holding on to a Ben that doesn’t exist because you’re holding on to a Joanna that no longer exists. You don’t exist.”

I straightened on the spot. “I’m right here!”

“But you’re not present! If you were, you’d stay with me!” And he pounded his bare chest so hard the echo thudded through me. He ran a hand over his hair, pulling at it in frustration. “You want everything to be like it used to, but it’s okay to change, Jo. Growth doesn’t have to be painful. It’s natural for a person to change their mind. Even to admit they were wrong.” A humorless snort escaped him, but I only stared, and he fell back against the wall again, deflated. When he next spoke, his voice was again soft. “You can even change your heart. You can do it in an instant.”

I didn’t believe him. Certainly not in this instant. Because You don’t exist still hung on the air. “Maybe you can. I can’t.”

“Won’t.”

“Semantics.”

“Truth.”

“Hurts!” I countered, yelling suddenly. He should stop. Now.

“Maybe,” I said, after a hard swallow, “I just prefer him.”

He scoffed, expression shuttering again. “You prefer the idea of him…but the white-picket fantasy will never be yours, Archer. Your fence will always be coated in blood. Don’t drag him into it.”

I smirked. “Your concern for him is touching.”

“I’m concerned for you.”

No. Like everyone else, he was concerned for himself. “I love him.”

The words didn’t even faze him. “If you did you’d never have let her near him.”

That mobilized me. I clamored down the rickety staircase in haste lest I really think about what he was saying. “I just hope you find someone who feels this strongly about you someday. Then you’ll understand.”

Let him sulk and scheme alone, I thought, kicking a foam template out of my path as I headed across the vast open space of the warehouse. Because that person couldn’t be me. My mind had been made up long ago. It wasn’t a matter of just doing something new or dropping treasured memories like they were refuse. It was a matter of following through and sticking it out and making the life you wanted-and needed-for yourself. My life. With Ben. Period.

Hunter was at the railing now. I could tell because his voice shot over the empty warehouse like it was fired from his body. “I doubt it. Your violent need,” he said, throwing my words back at me, “has completely fucked me.”

I stopped in my tracks, the warehouse too silent after the sure-footedness of my heeled boots. I wanted to keep walking but I couldn’t leave him like that, not after what we’d done and shared and knew.

“Don’t,” he called from over the balcony, a warning and a command. “Don’t you look back now.”

“But-” I was already half turned and could see his strong naked silhouette from the corner of my eye.

“You’ve made a commitment with your head and your heart. A backward glance is an apology. And an insult. Better to stick with your bad decisions.”

And I had made my decision, long before he’d ever come into the picture. So despite the waves of pungent bitterness assailing me from behind, I began walking again. I needed to compartmentalize if I was going to effectively go after Regan…and Ben. I’d bottle this night up and let time wash it away, because there was only one way to fill the lack creating that hole inside me, and it couldn’t be accomplished with another man’s body.

So I strode out into the crisp autumn day, turning into the chaotic center of my hometown, the sharp scent of Hunter’s hostility lessening the farther I walked.

I didn’t look back.