But this wasn’t womblike and warm. This assaulted the senses, an angry attack from the heavens that ripped through the bruised sky to punish the pane.
“God, no wonder you needed to get out of here. This is…”
“Atmospheric,” he finished, opening his arms wide to throw himself off balance again. I let him stumble since he was headed toward the bed, but he righted himself again in an exaggerated sway and offered me an equally overstated grin. I smiled back weakly. Seeing a heroic man this drunk was like seeing a rhino tottering about after receiving a tranquilizer dart. You really didn’t want to be near it when it fell.
“I was going to say depressing.”
“What? You don’t like rain?” He maneuvered over to the wall, touched the faux window, and came away with wet fingers. A water wall too, I realized, as he rubbed his smooth fingertips together. “I love rain,” he whispered. “It makes me feel small. It feels like baptism.”
The note of loss in his voice bored a hole straight through my chest, and another sharp bolt of light cracked through the room, lighting the hollows under his eyes. I felt the air escape me as his shoulders slumped, and crossed the room quickly, putting my arm around him again, this time in comfort rather than support. He turned into me, and heat leached from my body into his and back again. I imagined it driving the cold spots from the crevices of his heart, held him for a long minute, then squeezed him hard before pulling away.
He pulled me close again.
“Hunter,” I said, my voice muffled against his chest. God, but his skin smelled good, even with the alcohol and sorrow permeating his pores. Still. “Let go of me.”
He released me enough to stare down at me, eyes so dark his golden skin appeared whitewashed in contrast. “I’m sorry, Olivia, but you’re being a tightass, and this is for your own good.”
And he kissed me. And that’s when I realized that whenever he did so, I thought of violence. Sure, it was tempered with warmth and the softness of his full lips, but there was a firmness in his embrace, a determination to infiltrate, overpower, and conquer that made some primal need in me rear up to do the same.
My hands were on him before I could stop them. We over-balanced-he was drunk and had an excuse; I simply had a sudden and blinding need to taste and feel more-and we crashed against that wall of water, the pane shaking beneath our combined body weight. He could match my strength, so I wasn’t gentle, concentrating solely on my hunger as lightning scorched the sky behind him. In the brief illumination I saw water sluicing over the sides of his silhouette, plastering his hair to his skull, his T-shirt to his back, molding his jeans to his ass. I lowered my hands, pulled in close, and he dropped his head back on a rich, musical moan. A single trail of water coursed over his left cheek, and I caught it at his neckline, stroked upward with my tongue, found his ear, pressed closer.
His hands were on my waist then, beneath my shirt, printless fingertips gliding along my sides. They dipped to the small of my back, met there, and I quivered as they lowered, cupping me from behind. He was towering over me now, head bent, his lips so close to mine, I scented his breath on mine.
“Joanna…”
My name, whispered, brought me to my senses. It wasn’t supposed to be paired with his. Not in my dreams, or in my life, not even surrounded by a punishing rainstorm bested only by his heart against my own. It was supposed to be Joanna and Ben. The way it’d always been. The way it always would be.
So what the hell was I doing? This wasn’t a flirtation, or a game, or fun. This was a wild bid to escape whatever had buried itself in his mind. I pulled away despite a desire to curl up into his core, knowing there was no epiphany to be found in his arms. Or mine.
“How altruistic of you,” I managed, when I got my breath back. I licked the taste of him from my lips and met his gaze. “Now let me go.”
His mouth quirked, like I’d told a joke, but he let his arms drop. I felt unbalanced; free, but fettered at the same time. Hunter seemed to know it. Letting out a deep sigh, I shook my head and headed to the door. His voice stopped me halfway across the room.
“Jo.”
I turned back warily. As the only member of the troop outside of Warren and Micah who knew my true name, he also knew not to use it. But he used it again now that we were alone, tongue silky over the single word. “Jo. You think I don’t know how you want me? That I can’t see what’s going on inside you? Or feel it?”
I gave my head a short jerk. “I know you know.”
“Because you know me too. Because when you gave me the aureole we became joined.” He took a step forward, steadier now. “You’ve already let me inside of you.”
I swallowed hard. “Not on purpose.”
Another step. “You don’t have to be alone.”
I looked over his shoulder to the wall of glass and falling rain. What he meant was we didn’t have to be alone. Me, him, and the emotions that’d lain him flat tonight. If I stuck around I’d learn about them all, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I had my own failures to be haunted by, my own epiphanies to seek.
“Hunter, I-”
“Need an ally,” he interrupted, as sober as he could manage. “Someone who knows your secrets and has seen into your Shadow side…and still stands by you. Warren won’t, you know. You don’t want him to know about your daughter-”
“Not my daughter.” I was getting tired of having to remind people of that.
“The child who carries your lineage in her blood, then,” he said sharply, and that somehow sounded worse. Maybe because it was the truth, and someday soon I was going to have to face it…and do something about it. I dropped my head, saying nothing, and a moment later the warmth of his palm glided up my arm, sending chill bumps along my side, while he rested his hand on my shoulder. His weight against me was solid and reassuring. “Warren can sense you’re not telling him everything. He’s waiting for you to make even one false step. If anything reminds him remotely of the Shadows he’ll name you a rogue, just like his father.”
I jerked away, my hands automatically clenching into fists. “Thanks for lumping me in with a murderer.”
“I didn’t. I lumped you in with the other person Warren loved and still killed out of duty.” His eyes were half shut with fatigue and drink, but what I saw of them was calculating and too knowing for my liking.
I looked away, staring at the storm flailing at his false window. It suddenly felt like I was out in it. Warren wasn’t doing that. Was he? Look for faults, waiting for me to screw up?
“Look.” Hunter sighed. “I want to help you. I’ll keep your identity, your daughter, and your moves against Joaquin hidden. I can do that, you know. I can be your secret keeper.”
He said it like he meant love slave. Damn those lips, that voice…
“In exchange for what?” I managed, falling back on my trusty sword of sarcasm. “My bed?”
Because the mention of Warren’s rogue father had been a veiled threat. So had the reference to Ashlyn, whom Hunter knew about because of the aureole, but Warren did not. Venom coated my words, anger boiling in my core. I thought my Shadow side must be peeking through; there was just a hint of smoke rising in the thundering air, possibly a deepening of my eyes, though I’d have to look in a mirror to know for sure. I didn’t want to do that.
And I didn’t want to admit Hunter would be a great ally. He had more patience with me than Warren, and seemed able to face those black holes in me that even I could not. Like now, I thought wryly, watching him stare at me. Even at a time when I was afraid to face a mirror.
“I didn’t say you should barter your body,” he said carefully, reading my mood. Then he licked his lips. “Just…share it with me.”
Don’t you just love semantics?
I studiously kept my eyes off his lips…and his hands, and his eyes. And the rest of him too. Because even though I could use an ally, what I didn’t need right now was a lover. Unfortunately they were being offered as a package deal. I lifted my chin and steeled myself against the offer, the need. The understanding.
“I still love him,” I said flatly, and had to watch Hunter wince. He didn’t recover as quickly as he would’ve were he sober-a stab of pain, then disappointment blazing in his eyes as the next arrow of lightning flashed through the room-but eventually his expression closed.
“Which is why you should let him go.”
He knew all about Ben, of course, had learned about him and more when we’d swapped memories and emotions through the magic of the aureole. And I could see why he wanted to feel it again. I’d never felt more understood than in those brief moments. I’d never been less alone than when Hunter had seen the Shadow in me and hadn’t shied away, but accepted it and my thoughts as his own. I knew, in exchange for helping shoulder his own mental burdens, he was offering to do the same now.
But he was in a self-destructive mood.
“And letting you into my body as well as my mind is going to help with that?” I said, forcing a note of detachment into my voice that I didn’t really feel.
He shrugged, offered me a rare if lopsided grin. “Can’t hurt.”
“You know that’s not true.”
But I swallowed hard. I’d enjoy having him inside me, that much was true. You didn’t have to know Hunter when he was sober, and in save-the-world superhero mode, to know there was a world of possibilities waiting in those arms. Even now, with him smelling of booze and staggering slightly, his focus was like the sun through a magnifying glass.
And me, I thought, shifting my feet, just a little ol’ bug.
“Sleep it off, Hunter,” I said, my voice more callous than I intended as I turned from him and opened the door. I escaped into the light and sterility of the hallway, blinking hard, because this was what felt unreal. It was a too-abrupt end to the violent music of the thunderstorm, and the heated tension between Hunter and me as we faced off in the near dark. I turned back a second too late. He had followed me to the door, and when I looked up the lust in his gaze had been shuttered, and all that remained was the cold depths of the emotions he was trying to escape.
“Look, I’m sorr-” I started, but the door clicked firmly shut in my face, and the silence of the hallway rose to a buzz in my ears. I finally got my feet moving, my footsteps filling the silence. By the time I reached my room, I was breathing in time to them, a steady beat despite my own erratic heart, as the possibilities Hunter had spoken of died around me.
I made my move on Joaquin the following night. I’d have gone the previous dawn, but I slept badly after fending off Hunter’s advances, dreaming of making love with Ben while another man watched through a rain-streaked window. I dreamed I was back in my old body, which would’ve made me happy if I hadn’t realized someone else was inside my dreaming flesh as well, curled around Ben, sharing it-and him-with me.
It also seemed poetic to attack Joaquin in the hours he’d first attacked me. It was the same time of year, and the same desert sage rose to perfume the air in the predawn hours, when decent people were still sleeping off the hangovers of the night before.
So I used my daylight hours to rest, and to plan. There were detailed maps of the city archived in the record room adjacent to Tekla’s astrolab, and I spent half the day there, poring over photos of street maps, imagining and reimagining scenarios of approach, infiltration, and escape, and staring at the home of the man who’d affected my life more than any other since the one who spawned me.
I used the photocopier to make duplicates of the residential streets and his home, and sat down to study them, thinking I really should make more use of this room. I knew the arteries and thoroughfares of Vegas as intimately as I knew the veins webbing my wrists, but there were other Vegases in the journals and books and registers here-line-drawn depictions of the original settlements-Indian, Spanish, Mormon-and those primitive roads lay like ghosts beneath the alternately beautiful and stark streets I knew. Someday I’d like to know them all.
“Later,” I said aloud, and shut off the lights as I exited the room. First I had another man to make into a ghost.