“If you call her ‘fiery’ I’ll hang up on you.”
She laughed. He’d always liked her laugh—innocent but with an edge. The few times they’d fucked she’d laughed a lot. No seriousness or overblown emotion to the act, just lots and lots of hot fun. Even though Lea wasn’t the prettiest woman, she was definitely worthy, by his standards. So far, she’d lured, captured, and blackmailed into his service four humans with secret powers.
For many years Michael had thought that finding Sean would have been enough to show up Raymond. Then he’d met Lea, who’d revealed there was more magic out there that she could help him harness.
Which he’d realized he could then throw in Raymond’s face.
“The fire elemental’s the only one I couldn’t blackmail, Michael. I got the tip where she was, saw the opportunity, and took it.”
“How’d you get her? I can’t even get near the cage. Sean feeds her through the trap door on top, just drops food down. She pees in a bucket, but we can’t empty it because she won’t let us near.”
“What fights fire, Michael?” Lea asked dryly.
“Water.” Michael scratched his chin. “Ah, so that’s why you brought Robert. You’re so good to me, Lea, getting me a pair.”
“Who said they’re for you?”
“What?” He didn’t like that. This wasn’t Lea’s show. And yet, he absolutely depended on her uncanny ability to sniff out the magic. If she wasn’t kept happy, she’d leave, and he couldn’t afford that.
“Trust me. You’ll keep getting what you want. And now, so will I.”
“Which is?”
“Just trust me, baby. Have you informed good ol’ Daddy about your latest acquisition?”
“Not yet.” Timing hadn’t been right. Michael should have been filming the garage that first day he’d awakened his prize. Now he just needed to piss her off again, make her call fire. Get it recorded. “Hurry up and get here.” Suddenly he needed one of those fucks. He’d been fantasizing about Cat too much. And the fire woman.
“Just a few more days. Can’t rush these things or they’ll be on to me.”
“Tell me you’re not worried about the cops.”
She clucked her tongue. “Give me a little more credit, would you? The cops don’t know anything. This is our world. We don’t let in outsiders. Ever.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d said that.
“You’re welcome, by the way.”
That made Michael smile. “I tell you thank you all the time. Now get over here and let me show you.”
Deep down he knew Lea wasn’t doing any of this for him. She didn’t hunt down humans with weird powers for shits and giggles, or even to please him. She had her own agenda. He wasn’t stupid. As long as he kept her in his sights, he wasn’t worried.
But ever since a living match had been stuffed into his garage, he wondered if maybe he should be.
She showed up.
Nine o’clock in the morning, and there Cat stood, leaning against the wall just beyond the Gold Rush Theater marquee. Waiting for
him
.
Xavier didn’t know what surprised him more: that she’d willingly come after his disastrous exit from Fresh Powder, or that he had.
The action on Waterleaf reminded him of a turbulent ocean—bodies and motion everywhere, never-ending, making him a little queasy—and him clinging to a life raft as the waves pounded around him. But he was going to go through with this, however the hell it went. The Burned Man could scream in his ear for three hours and he’d see it through. At least he could say he tried.
He’d reached a pretty hefty decision around 3:00 a.m. After beating the boxing bag into submission and sprinting a few miles on the treadmill, and then slapping together three different kinds of herbed butter, he concluded that he would think of Cat as an experiment. Nothing more. He would meet her for the movie, think not one sexual thought about her, and learn how to
talk
. How to communicate.
Yeah, right
, chuckled the Burned Man at his side.
You’re weak. All your kind are.
Xavier stood there in the middle of the surging crowd, watching Cat without her seeing him. The red hat was back in place, long waves of her hair spilling out from underneath. She blew on her mittened hands. The urge to turn around, head back to his kitchen, and dice every vegetable in his refrigerator into atoms thrummed strong, but he held fast. Today he wouldn’t be weak.
He walked toward her, crossing the red carpet, now brown and squishy with slush, that had been spread under the marquee. She saw him and pushed away from the wall, surprise evident on her face.
“Hey.” He stopped a few feet from her, hands shoved into his pockets.
“Hi.” One corner of her mouth twitched and he had to focus on a neutral spot over her shoulder. Her mouth conjured too many ideas, made him think of too many weaknesses. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“I’m sorry.” The words just bubbled out. He didn’t know if he’d ever said them before. If he had, he didn’t remember.
She blinked. “For what?”
He tossed his head back, hair swinging away from his face. “Last night. Yesterday. My reactions…”
Then she did the strangest thing. She laughed. Not
at
him, not maliciously. But a low, soft chuckle that made his spine buckle. “No worries. I get it.”
His turn to blink. “Get what?”
In the cold her nose had reddened. In the daylight every single one of her fine-sprayed freckles stood out like stars. She held up a hand. “Let me guess. Some tourist chick made you fall hard, screwed you over, then took off with barely a glance behind her. Now you’re a little gun-shy.”
Not at all where he expected this conversation to go, but he let her hold on to her theory if it steered them away from the truth. “How’d you guess?”
This time when she laughed there was zero humor behind it. “Because I’m a townie, too. Just in a different town. It’s happened to me. I get it. Look, you don’t need to worry about any heavy stuff from me. I’m only here for two weeks. I have a few hours before my meetings. Let’s just see a movie and have some fun.”
A great weight suddenly—surprisingly—rolled off his chest. He even touched it, to make sure he was actually still there, standing on the freezing sidewalk in front of this woman who knocked him sideways with every word.
“You have a funny look on your face,” she said. “Could you not get tickets or something?”
He rummaged in his jeans pocket for the two slips of paper he’d begged Pam for an hour ago. She’d already been in Shed, taking deliveries. If you wanted to get into Shed during Turnkorner you had to have some kind of “in,” so she was able to make a call and scrounge up a pair on short notice. She’d raised an eyebrow at him, however, so there would definitely be an inquisition later.
“I’ve got them.” He looked at the title. “I don’t even know what it’s about.”
Cat smiled and he had to look away again for fear of being blinded. “No one does. Let’s get inside.”
If he’d thought the scene outside was chaos, the theater lobby was chaos in hell. Shoulder-to-shoulder people, camera flashes every few feet, heat and noise. He let Cat lead the way. This was her domain, this crowded world of Primaries. Halfway up a set of short steps climbing toward the double doors of the main theater, she said something to him over her shoulder.
“What?” He bent closer, and unwittingly inhaled her scent. Like a drug, it hit his bloodstream and sent his mind hurtling toward the hard, spiked wall of desire. He dug in his heels. Dug them in hard.
Ah, that’s more like it
.
The lobby couldn’t hold another body, yet there the Burned Man stood, leaning against the glass case with Skittles and
Junior Mints. He was smiling, but on the melted half of his face it just looked like twisted skin.
“I said that this must be old hat to you,” Cat repeated.
“No.” He jerked away, out of the sweet, simple cloud of her perfume or shampoo or whatever it was. “I’ve never been before.”
She reached the top of the steps and turned around. “To a festival film? And you live here? Really?”
He’d never been to any movie, actually, but even he knew that was weird to admit, so he just shook his head.
“You have really amazing eyes,” she said. “Who’d you get them from? Your mom or your dad?”
No Tedran born and raised in the Plant had any other color. It was the color of their magic.
The house lights dimmed and came back up. The crowd clenched around them, pushing in waves toward the double doors.
He didn’t answer. “Let’s get inside.”
She gave a stiff nod, and he knew he’d been gruff and awkward. In the silence, they found a row with two vacant seats and they nudged their way down, apologizing with every knee clip. They plopped into the seats, and Xavier realized much too late how tiny the old auditorium seats were. The iron arm rests dug into his elbows. The seat pads had lost their softness decades ago. His knees touched the seat back in front of him. Cat’s thigh rubbed against his. He pulled his away.
Three years of not touching a woman. Three years of not even touching himself.
His right hand pinched an invisible knife and started sawing through imaginary food. He ran through recipes in his mind—all the ones from Shed he knew by heart and ten more he made up on the spot.
Cat peeled off her coat and unwound her scarf. “Here. Can you hold this a sec?” Her hat dropped into his lap. He stared at the red pompom, knowing that he’d never be able to see that color for the rest of his life and not think of her. She pawed at her long, wild hair. “Now I need to ask what conditioner you use to get yours to stay down in this dry weather.”
He looked up from the hat and realized that the Burned Man hadn’t followed him in. He was still there on the fringes,
waiting, but this sort of casual conversation thing bored him. Kept him at bay.
He turned to her. “What the hell’s conditioner?”
Her face broke into a wide grin and it triggered something inside him. Something that had nothing to do with sex.
“Holy cow,” she said. “You can smile.”
So that’s what it felt like. His cheeks tingled, but it was the levity in his heart and the swoosh of warm adrenaline through his blood that he didn’t at all expect.
She threw up her hands. “Oh, whoops. Scared it off.”
Not at all. The thrill of it lingered.
As the theater went dark, he took off his coat and stuffed it behind his calves. A grainy film title flickered on the screen.
“I hope it’s a good movie,” he mumbled.
Cat guffawed then slapped a hand over her mouth. The people in front of them turned around to glare. She leaned closer to Xavier. The euphoria from his smile disappeared and he concentrated hard on not glancing down to where her thighs, in tight jeans, spread over her seat. Instead he stared up at the little balconies lining both sides of the auditorium.
“Now I know you weren’t kidding when you said you’ve never seen a festival film before,” she murmured.
The auditorium had gone deathly silent and he was forced to bend closer to her. “Why do you say that?”
Her cheek brushed his hair and he held his breath. Did she think his hair was too long? He’d never given it a second thought, cutting it only when it got past his shoulders. And even then all he did was hack at it with scissors.
She was smiling again; he could hear it in her voice. “Maybe three movies out of the whole festival will actually be ‘good.’ Half are awful. The rest are
god-
awful.” She rubbed her hands together. “Good is boring. I hope it’s the worst movie I’ve ever seen.”
It was the worst movie Cat had ever seen. A pretentious script,
melodramatic acting, and handheld camera work crashed together in a horrible accident she couldn’t look away from.
The house lights came up and polite applause filled the auditorium. Xavier said out of the corner of his mouth, “I don’t know about you, but I thought it was a masterpiece.”
When she looked up at him, he was watching the stage where the director and lead actors pulled up chairs and snapped on lavaliere microphones for the question-and-answer session.
“Don’t you dare,” she whispered. “Don’t you dare make me laugh now.” But as soon as she said it, the laughter came up. She choked on it, her eyes watering and her stomach muscles burning.
Xavier tapped his lips with a finger. She doubled over and bit her own knee to keep quiet. Her face was probably as red as the velvet seat cushion. When she finally composed herself, she sat up and put her elbow on the armrest, shielding her face with her hand.
She couldn’t see him, but it didn’t make her any less aware of his long, lean thigh just inches from hers.
All that talk out on the street about avoiding the heavy stuff and just wanting to have fun was BS. She was insanely attracted to him. No one had ever intrigued her more. At first it’d had something to do with that weird sense of familiarity that clung to him, but that had been pushed away the moment they’d spoken in the bar.
And the killer? His modesty, his shyness. His cluelessness that people on the street strained to watch him go by, trying to figure out in which movie or TV show they’d seen that beautiful, tall man.
The director-and-actor gabfest ended. Xavier cleared his throat and unfolded his body from the cramped seats. When she looked up at him, he was staring at her with an odd look. Like he was surprised to be having a good time.
Her phone buzzed and she pulled it out of her coat pocket. It had gone off several times during the screening. All texts from Michael, confirming their meeting time later that day, reminding her who they were having a late lunch with tomorrow, what to wear…it was like every time a thought popped into his head, no matter what time of day, he reached for his phone.
“Do you have to go?”
She couldn’t read the meaning behind Xavier’s question. Was he looking for an excuse to leave, or did he want to spend more time with her?
“Not yet. You?”
He checked his watch, a battered thing barely clinging to his wrist with strands of worn leather. “No.” He dragged a hand through the long, messy hair that she found surfer hot. He was like a granule of beach sand in this cold, waterless part of the world. “Shift starts soon, but there’s a private party tonight so I’ll be in the kitchen until after midnight.” He swung on his coat.