Storm Kissed (16 page)

“Whoa. Potent stuff.” Weaving a little, she left her room and headed down the hall. She hesitated for a second at Dez’s door. Then she crossed her fingers, sent a small, wordless prayer to whatever higher power might be listening, and let herself into his room.

On one level, Dez knew he was dreaming, that his mind was rebooting as his body healed and his magic rebounded. On another level, though, he was twenty-one again, and more jittery than he’d expected to be as he pushed through the door to the pawnshop a couple of blocks down from his and Reese’s apartment.

 

He dipped into his pocket to touch the smooth, warm bit of carved stone he’d won from Keban, the one the
winikin
had said would help him reach his full magical potential. He hadn’t been able to work any of the spells yet, but he would do whatever it took to gain control of the lightning . . . and his first real taste of that power had come to him while he was kissing Reese.

 

The dream partway dissolved, leaving Dez swimming in the memory of the calculating bastard he had become under the star demon’s influence. He braced himself, knowing there was more—there always was when Anntah sent the dreams.

Sure enough, images started forming around him once more. Only this nightmare wasn’t anything like the others.

 

He was his present self, wearing army surplus and carrying an autopistol on one side, knife on the other, but as he stepped out onto the street, the neighborhood was the way it had been back then: grimy streets lined with jacked-up cars, dated stores, and minimal foot traffic, like now-Dez had been plugged into then-Dez’s world. He looked around, gut clenching.
What the hell am I supposed to do now?
he asked inwardly, but didn’t get jack from his spirit guide. So he started walking, heading toward the apartment he and Reese had shared, thinking that maybe he was supposed to find his younger self and kick some sense into—

Makol!

The
makol
fanned out and took cover, still shooting—four big guys with filed-sharp teeth, wearing street clothes and a gang swagger, their eyes glowing eerie green. Then four more of the bastards came out of a second alley behind Dez’s position, getting the damned drop on him.

He knocked down two of the green-eyed bastards, but didn’t dare break cover to finish them off. Bullets slammed into the car, bursting the windows and ricocheting. He nailed two more, but there were too damn many of them. Panic stirred at the realization that he wasn’t wearing an armband, couldn’t call for backup. Worse, the
makol
were spreading out, circling like nasty sharks.

She nudged his gun away. “Didn’t mean to startle you. What, did you forget the plan? Sorry I’m late. Those guys took longer than I expected.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder where dark, greasy ash piles marked where she had already reduced four
makol
to dust.

As the remaining
makol
opened with a renewed barrage, she dropped back down beside him, pressing close, so they were touching from shoulder to hip. She was wearing full combat gear and packing extra clips, two of which she tucked in his belt as naturally as breathing. Like him, she was now-Reese in then-Reese’s milieu—her face honed here, softened there, her hair copper-streaked and sassy. But there were no shadows of hidden hurt in her eyes, none of the wariness that said she was just waiting for him to revert. More, when she bumped up against him, his body recognized hers with a soul-deep sense of rightness, a shimmer of connection that made him feel for a split second like they were sharing head-space, that he could see through her eyes and she through his.

 

Reese hesitated at Dez’s bedside, feeling hotter than the heated air in the room. Her head might be fuzzy with the effects of having tasted the syrup, but she was with-it enough to know that she was going to have to excavate him from the mountain of bedclothes in order to get the medicine into him.

And, yes, that was his underwear over there on the floor.

“You can do this,” she told herself. “It’s no big deal.” But the heavy throb of her pulse said otherwise.

As she pulled off a couple of layers of bedclothes, she wasn’t sure how much of the burn that suddenly fired in her blood was her inner teenager looking for closure and how much was a flat-out hormonal reaction to the man he had become—sleek, predatory, and dangerous. Then there was the magic—she had told herself it wouldn’t be a big deal, but it was. Her skin still tingled from the shield spell he’d used to save her life the day before, warning her that she hadn’t outgrown her rescue fantasies, after all.

“You know you can’t trust him,” she reminded herself.

He was lying on his side facing the door, angled diagonally across the bed, and he didn’t even twitch when she pulled back the sheet, baring his upper body. She didn’t let herself gasp—at least she didn’t think she did. The only thing she knew for sure was that she was staring at an acre or two of smooth golden skin stretched over a relief map of muscle and bone.

He. Was. Magnificent.

His face was fierce even in sleep, lines drawn between his brows as though he glared through closed eyelids. His mouth was a flat line, his jaw an aggressive jut below the long, hooked nose, wide-set eyes, and high cheekbones. Before, his lashes had been thick and full; now his eyelids were bare, turning him into something strange and primal. Back in the day, she had assumed he had started shaving his head to look tougher, and it had worked. Now, she wondered whether it had been a sign of his magic waking up, an impulse he hadn’t fully understood at the time.

She touched his shoulder, intending to shake him, but then just let her fingers rest there. His skin was warm satin, his muscles living stone that poured across his wide shoulders and rippled down his abdomen to disappear beneath the sheet, temping her to picture the rest of him, muscle-etched, golden, and entirely smooth to the touch.

Reese, who waxed herself ruthlessly bare, felt a little envious . . . and a whole lot turned on, her insides gone molten, her skin dampening from more than the room’s near-tropical heat, and—
And you’re stoned
, she thought on a slow-moving churn of logic.
Or high, or something.
The antidote had put her in a major state. Her heart thudded and desire raced through her veins, making the past and future seem so much less important than that precise moment in time, and the way her skin looked against his as she touched him, stroking his shoulder, his arm, then trailing down to—

Bad idea.
She pulled back, inhaling a shuddering breath that did nothing to calm the churn of heat and nerves. She should leave the syrup and go, get out while she could, clear her head. He could drink the damn stuff when he finally woke up. Except that Lucius didn’t know how long that would take; Keban was out there on the loose; another village had disappeared; the meteor shower was two days away, the solstice ten . . . and the Nightkeepers needed her help to get their Triad mage back and make sure he didn’t have a hidden agenda.

The heat amped a notch at the realization that she might be in over her head, out of her league, but she was
doing
something, damn it. She wasn’t just making phone calls and tracking down last knowns. The realization, like the leather jacket back in her room, made her feel more alive than she had since she stopped nabbing bail jumpers. Back then, she had been saving her own piece of the world; now she had a chance to help save the whole damn thing. The blood beat beneath her skin with a mix of nerves and euphoria, a cocktail she had once needed like a drug.

Warning signals went off in her brain, but they were drowned out by the knowledge that she was doing the right thing here. And that for a change—maybe for the first time ever—she had the ability to fix what ailed big, badass Snake Mendez.

“Okay, slick.” She stopped stroking him, shook him instead. “Time to wake up.”

No response. He was out cold.

After a couple of more tries, she hitched a hip onto the bed. Ignoring the way the room spun around her just as much as she was ignoring the little voice inside her that said this was a really bad idea, she leaned over him, touched a fingertip to the thick syrup, and stroked it onto his tongue. Then she rubbed his throat, which rippled beneath her touch—smoothly, sinuously—as he licked his lips.

She stared at his mouth, transfixed. His heat surrounded her, making her skin prickle, and she suddenly felt like a voyeur in her own body, watching her hands and his mouth as she repeated the process a second time. And a third. The fourth time, he swallowed on his own, and she thought he might have been breathing a little faster than before. She definitely was. The room wasn’t spinning anymore; it was throbbing. And she was in serious trouble. In some corner of her mind, two words whispered:
sex magic
.

She had read up on it back at Skywatch, had felt the way the air shifted around the mated couples when they shared a look, a touch. And now she felt it in the way the air vibrated, the fine tingles that ran along her skin, and how suddenly nothing mattered more than touching him. She wanted to run her hands over him, wanted him inside her with a ferociousness that couldn’t be anything but a magic-driven compulsion.

She told herself to leave.

She leaned closer instead.

“Dez.” When her voice cracked, she swallowed and tried again. “Dez, can you hear me?”

He groaned and shifted, rolling partway onto his back, closer to the center of the wide mattress. His thick erection was the center pole of an impressive tent; it drew her eyes, made her want to touch, taste. There was no thought process anymore, no real logic, only the magnetism that drew her onward, made her keep going. She got onto the mattress and knelt beside him, dipped two fingers into the syrup, and touched his lips. When he opened for her, the breath went thin in her lungs, and when he suckled, a hot wash of pleasure suffused her, leaving her tingling and wanting more.