“Yes, I’m becoming pretty familiar with the term.” But she wouldn’t mind if she never heard it again. “So how do we break the tracking spell? Either that, or we need your wings back in the game.”
Gavin frowned and flexed his shoulders. “Let me try again.”
The concentration on his face would have been cute if they weren’t being chased by a crazed group of witches practicing really ugly spells. “Anything?”
“Let’s sit for a moment.” He walked to a fallen log and plopped down. He hadn’t been wearing a shirt when she’d discovered him pacing by the door, and watching the goose bumps flare across his arms, she realized she wasn’t the only one who was freezing.
“You know, now they have
your
blood on the broken glass at the hotel, and you left your bag behind. It’s not just me they can track.”
He smiled wryly. “Yes, I thought of that.”
“Well…crap. That’s okay. Try your wings one more time. Let me see what’s going on.”
When she laid her hands against his shoulder blades, he sucked in a breath. “Your fingers are like ice cubes.”
“So is the rest of me. Sorry.” She pressed her fingertips against his back and felt around. “Okay, get ready. One, two, three… Push.”
But the only thing that burst from Gavin was laughter. “I’m trying to extend my wings, princess, not give birth.”
She snorted. “How can you be making light of this? We’re talking about death magic—
next venom-ickiness
…or something like that. It’s not funny, Gavin.”
His lips twitched. “No, it’s not funny. I’m sorry. Come, sit down next to me. Let me warm you.”
Even covered in bumps, Gavin looked like he could offer a substantial amount of heat on a cold night. Kara’s mouth drew into a tight line. She wasn’t going to forgive him. There was no way. But the word
fool
came to mind again, and she had no intention of proving him right by being too stubborn to take the help he offered.
She sat, and he placed an arm around her shoulders. At first, his skin seemed frigid, but within moments, his body heat warmed her where they touched. Her fingers were so numb, she could hardly feel the tips. But her feet…fortunately, they’d lost sensation a while back.
When her hands crept along his sides and slipped between his other arm and his ribs, Gavin’s jaw clenched. The poor man was already an icicle, and her touch actually looked as if it was hurting him. She bit her lip and began to pull away.
“Don’t you dare,” he growled.
“Suit yourself.”
She sighed when the feeling came back to her fingers, then she pressed closer to him, not able to resist laying her cheek against his bare shoulder.
He squeezed her tighter, his massive arm heavy across her back. “Julian’s cabin isn’t too far, but unless we can break the tracking spell, we can’t go there. They would simply follow.”
“Julian has a cabin here?”
His breath on her temple billowed like fog around her head when he spoke. “We have homes around the globe, some old, some new, but Julian has been tied to this land for a thousand years—long before Columbus discovered it. Sometimes I would come with him to visit, but if we visited too much, it was always the same. Someone needed to have their memories sorted, others needed to be persuaded they never saw us at all. It was an adequate system, but those days are coming to an end.”
She shifted to look up at him. “What do you mean?”
“Facial recognition software. Needing fingerprints for the most mundane things. Mark my words, the age of technology will be our undoing. We won’t be able to hide our existence from the general population much longer.”
“General population? Who knows about us besides the witches? ’Cause I know for a fact that most witches want to keep their business on the down-low as much as we do.” It was still strange sometimes thinking of the witches as “them” and the Demiáre as “us”. The witches had been her people, at least in her own skewed version of reality.
“There are certain classified government groups that know of us and help maintain our way of life. We cooperate when need be, and they stay out of Demiáre affairs. They don’t want to cause panic among the masses any more than we want every cable channel ghost hunter investigating the Shadowland.”
“How do I not know these things?” Kara almost pinched him, but she held back and let her loud voice do the dirty work instead. “Nine weeks! Aiden had nine weeks to share this stuff with me, and I got nothin’ from him. And Jaxon! I flat-out asked him how you guys got away with not aging, and he said it’d never been a problem for him. He never once talked about secret government conspiracies.”
She returned to her warm spot on his shoulder and thought she felt his cheek bunch in a smile against her hair. “Calm down, princess. And don’t blame Jaxon. Lace is a cruel and jealous mistress who keeps her men isolated. He wouldn’t know much beyond serving her. I don’t allow government agents access to the island, and our men aren’t intimately involved in clan business.”
“That doesn’t sound very fair, keeping them in the dark and making decisions without them.”
“It’s not a democracy, Kara. Thus the name
lords
.”
She snorted and rubbed her hands against his side to make friction. “I’m too cold to talk about your political beliefs and your philosophies on running a clan. And unless you have your cell phone and those government agencies on speed dial, all we should be talking about right now is how we can break the tracking spell so we can make it to Julian’s cabin.”
“Breaking the tracking spell… Hmm… I have a couple of ideas, but I’m not sure you’ll like either of them.”
“Try me.”
“Well, the first one would be tantamount to swatting a fly with a twelve-gauge shotgun.”
“Ooh, gun talk. Sounds interesting. Keep talking.”
Gavin shifted, taking Kara’s hands between his to warm them. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that his icy fingers were only making hers colder. “The most surefire way to trick a tracking spell would be to cause a fundamental shift in your energy.”
“Okay…”
“You see—” he took her hand and ran a finger down the light blue veins showing through her skin, “—this represents your energy. And this, mine.” He held his hand side by side with Kara’s. “But if we were to merge them—” he wound his fingers through hers, “—you and I would become something new.”
“Wow. It sounds like the whole two-becoming-one-flesh idea I heard in the last wedding service I went to. You’re right. That may be a little over the top.”
He frowned but continued to hold her hand. “I warned you that it was. And I’m not suggesting it. In fact, I think it would be a terrible idea for so many reasons.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Thanks.”
“That’s not what I meant, princess. I’m only talking about keeping you safe. And while merging energy might sound like a good idea to avoid tracking, even if it worked, it probably wouldn’t be positive in the long run.”
“That’s fine.”
“It’s not you. You understand that, don’t you? It’s not that I would mind—”
She yanked her hand back and stood, but then pivoted to face him. “Yeah. I get it. I wouldn’t expect a man who walked out on me to merge his energy with mine. Why are you stressing about it? I know how you feel about—”
Before she could finish her sentence, Gavin rose and snatched her back to his side, bringing his mouth down hard on hers. He tasted so sweet, her belly clenched and her body ignited for him. How had she survived these months without him? His lips on hers was the most bittersweet agony she’d ever experienced, right up there with getting Julian back only to discover he had no memory of their time together.
Julian.
The man who’d given everything for her. The man who would never have walked out of her life of his own free will—who came back to her even after death.
She slid her tongue from Gavin’s mouth, raking her fingers over his upper arms. “Stop.”
“If you want me to stop, then
you
need to stop, Kara. I swear to the Maker I can’t take it anymore. I would never do anything to hurt you if I had another choice. Do you really not see that? Do you really have so little faith in me?”
“What are you talking about? If you left for a reason, you should have told me. You broke my heart, Gavin. But at least you made my decision easy. What do you expect to prove by kissing me now?”
“That I’m sorry for the way things turned out.”
“Sorry?” Kara laughed. “I’m not sure that cuts it. You want to get on my good side—help the man I love. Get him to safety. Make sure he’s all right. You do that, and I’ll be your biggest fan.”
He slowly rubbed the back of his hand over his lips. “I swear to you, I will do everything in my power to help your black-wing find his way to the Shadowland.”
Kara ran her fingers through her hair and tugged her scalp, almost crying in frustration. “Why? Because you think it really could be Julian? Or are you doing it for me? How hard is it to just open your mouth and tell me what you’re thinking?”
“Your friendship is dear to me. I don’t want to lose it.”
Her
friendship
? Really? Was that how he kissed his friends? “I don’t understand you, Gavin. This push and pull you do just leaves me feeling like I’m going to fall on my ass. It was never that way with Julian. It was never so complicated.”
He laughed. “Not complicated? I think your brain may have frozen, princess. You’re telling me you’re in love with a black-winged amnesiac who’s been attacking my warriors and who will likely be consumed by the Abyss if I can’t convince him to yield control to me so that I can guide him to the Shadowland—a place you can’t travel to until you reach maturity—and that’s all assuming he is my risen brother and not some flaming sadistic Aniliáre like my father, who simply wants to torment you.”
Kara paused a beat. “You forgot the fact that I need his blood for Abbey.”
“Oh, yes. The blood. Brilliant.”
“You know what’s funny, Gavin? Even that big, messy picture you just painted is easier for me to figure out than what’s going on inside your head.”
“I’ve said all I can say.”
When he simply stared back at her with his stubborn hazel eyes, she knew their conversation was finished. “Okay…so where do we go from here?”
“Energy flares,” he ground out.
Oh, sweet smelling salts. “What?”
“Since we can’t conceivably bind our energy together, we’ll have to settle for flares.”
She let out a big breath through pursed lips. “I’m listening.”
“They may not last until sundown, but it should be possible to send up enough energy flares in this area to keep them from pinpointing our location.”
“How does it work?”
“It was traditionally used as a warning to mark territory, but it fell out of favor in the last couple of hundred years. Now land is held with papers, signatures and treaties. It could also draw unwanted attention to us from the smaller Demiáre clusters on the East Coast, but I doubt anyone would trespass on Julian’s land when they realized it was me.”
“Let’s do it. We’ve already wasted too much time.” She honestly didn’t mean to infuse the words with bitterness, but Gavin was a frickin’ enigma.
“Watch me.” He raised his arms and extended his hands to the sky. Kara felt power building in him, twining over his skin until his fingers stiffened, and a shockwave shook loose from his core.
Boom!
Air whooshed from his lungs, and he bent double to catch his breath. “You see. Not too bad.”
The atmosphere around them was thick with his mark, as if he’d branded the hills and valleys with his essence. It was so ridiculously sexy, as if she were breathing in a piece of Gavin’s soul with every compression of her diaphragm.
“Your turn,” he said.
Kara’s cheeks burned. She lifted her goose-bumpy arms and extended her fingers toward the gray dawn. Closing her eyes, she focused on summoning her will, her power, until it wreathed around her like snakes dancing over her skin. Then with a grunt, she thrust it toward the heavens.
Blip.
Gavin wrestled his smile down, but his eyes shimmered. “Very good. You may need more practice, but that was a very nice first try.”
Oh, hell. How humiliating. But practice she did. Every mile or so, they paused to send up another flare until the entire countryside was one big, stinky Gavin-and-Kara eau de toilette.
By the time they arrived at Julian’s cabin, the sun was peeking up over the horizon, and Kara was so tired, she could have curled up on a patch of snow to sleep.
Even the sound of Gavin’s fist breaking the glass of Julian’s front door wasn’t enough to keep Kara’s head from lolling to the side. Just when she thought her knees might buckle, Gavin opened the front door and lifted her in his arms.
“You did well, princess,” he murmured into her ear as they crossed the threshold. “You’re safe now.”
Chapter Sixteen
Gavin carried Kara into Julian’s room and yanked the dust cover off the bed with one hand, then he placed her in the center of the mattress. Her head was limp against the pillow when he returned with a pile of soft blankets. Julian had never brought females here that Gavin was aware of, and the reminders of his dearest friend were present everywhere.