“Do you remember before? When I was telling you about my templates and the way I fashion the conduits for individual agents?”
I’d have thought he was trying to redirect the sudden intensity, except he hadn’t moved; he was still too close and warm and overly physical, but I let him talk, mostly because I was afraid to move more than I had to. If I did anything more than nod I might just loosen my limbs, throw my legs around his waist, and rock.
“Well, there’s another reason some conduits feel like they’re made for your hand and others don’t.” And his left palm was suddenly warming my side, gliding, smooth-tipped. “See, your crossbow has a catch mechanism and lock, so when you’re controlling the conduit you can feel all manners of ripples and bouncing waves and vibrations.”
“And if there aren’t any catch mechanisms?” Like on your whip, I wanted to say, but even the thought of that slim piece of leather sent heat through me.
“Then you feel the lack of them, and for some, that’s the right fit. Either way, when the right tool meets with the right person, there’s a natural harmony of body and spirit. It’s so simple. And complex. It’s chemistry.”
“Hunter-”
He spoke over me. “It’s the same with people. Two people meant to be together will be drawn together again and again like they’re caught in a magnetic field. And every time they interact, the energy changes between them. They change each other. So while the elemental forces that initially drew them together are reinforced, others are deconstructed to alter into something new.”
I swallowed hard. I couldn’t argue because our chemistry had had physical consequences. We’d once fired the night with a single torrid kiss and created thunder between us.
“And when the two join, like conduit and controller…well, it’s not just the way they move together, the friction or the taste on the tongue or the sigh meant only for the other to hear…it’s how one single body affects the other. It’s elemental and-”
I knocked his hand aside, and tipped the stool to get away. I was breathing hard, the drawing table between us now, arms propped on it for support, head lowered as I kept my wary gaze on his.
Hunter righted the stool, straightened slowly, and after a moment, shook his head. “What are you so afraid of?”
I thought of the tattoo on his shoulder, the one stating fear was the opposite of desire. If I said I was afraid of him, he’d know I wanted him as well. And I did. My mouth watered with it.
“I fear myself,” I finally whispered. “You should too.”
“Yes.” His eyes did a slow crawl down my body, pausing in all the right places. Heat rushed through me. “Very scary.”
The taunt had me pushing away from the table, and I found that the momentum I carried inside me, that constant blind run away from him, still had some steam. “Are we done?”
“The compound is gone, if that’s what you mean.”
I began to pull my slacks back on. The turtleneck was ruined, but maybe I could temporarily knot the pieces together. I turned away from Hunter, hands shaking.
“I wouldn’t hurt you, you know.” His voice was a whisper, one I could’ve chosen to ignore, but doing so might make him think he had a right to say it, and he didn’t. Not with Ben and my long-standing no and little more than silk standing between us. It was an opportunity he should have let be.
“No,” I replied, gathering my shirt in front of me, “but you might charge me by the hour, and we have a long night ahead of us.”
“Ah, the bitch is back,” he said wryly, but didn’t defend himself as he cleaned up, lifting the wires from the bowl with metal tongs, depositing them in the toolbox as promised.
“I’d like to look through the panic room,” I said, ignoring the fat spears of guilt stabbing at my chest, and the spicy evidence of our lust hanging heavily in the air, threatening to choke me if I took too deep a breath. I took one anyway, looking right at him so he knew my mind was in control here, not my hormones, and told him how I wanted to study the map of breaches the doppelgänger had made in to our world so far.
The change in topic worked, or so I thought. He dumped the toxic solution into the floor drain, sprayed and wiped it clean with a red shop rag, and nodded slowly to himself. I didn’t expect anything more, so I turned toward the panic room…and was ambushed by his next words.
“You should let Micah erase his memory,” he said, and I froze in my tracks. The statement was bolder than his flirtations, and blunter than I’d have expected.
“I don’t want him to forget,” I said just as bluntly, without turning.
Because Ben would have to forget it all-me, our past, our potential future. All memories would stop the night I was attacked a decade ago, and Micah would rebuild a history for Ben that had me languishing in a forgotten childhood…and one that didn’t include me in his adult world at all. I would cease to exist for the last person on earth who’d truly known me as me. “We have a child together.”
“And you think that’s reason enough to hang on?”
I still didn’t turn around. “I do.”
“You sound obsessed.”
“I don’t expect you to understand,” I said, and though I did turn my head and meet his eyes, it was a dismissive gesture, my mind made up. “Why should I have to lose him just because I’ve found my true self?”
Laughter barked out of him, his bluntness turning cruel. “Because that’s what we do. We live for them, Jo, not with them…and not for ourselves.” He wiped his hands on another rag before tossing it on the floor. “You ceased doing that the day you metamorphosed, and the sooner you accept it, the easier it will be. For everyone.”
Like Hunter gave a shit if life leaned a little easier on Ben. Superhero, I well knew, didn’t mean saint. “I won’t ever accept it.”
I turned away before he could respond-because what I was saying was I won’t ever accept you-but not before I saw an emotion abandon his face, one that apparently had been holding it up. I hesitated in the wake of that broken emotion, feeling victory and loss at the same time, before walking away. There was no call from behind me asking me to return, no apologies or explanations or footsteps across the floor to stop or help or seize me. I reached the panic room and flipped on the light, but all it did was illuminate the silence. I hesitated a second more, then closed the door firmly behind me.
18
I remained locked in the panic room for most of the night, knowing-sensing-Hunter on the other side of the door, my mind flitting unbidden to the warmth that’d seeped from his body into mine before I’d pushed away. Again. After refocusing on the reams of maps for what must’ve been the hundredth time, I finally recognized that Warren’s tight handwriting wasn’t going to reveal any additional secrets to me just because I was the targeted double.
Yet there was an additional key located to the left of the map, where yellow, red, and green dots spelled out suspected activity, but this was in Hunter’s slanted script, probably marking for Warren his suspicions about how and where the doppelgänger would cross into our terrestrial plane next. The known entrances were yellow, and seemed to be mapped down to the square foot. The red dots represented places Hunter believed were most susceptible to the doppelgänger’s future breaches, and the fewest dots, represented by green, were a mystery entirely. No matter how long I stared at them I couldn’t decipher their meaning, and after the way we’d parted, I couldn’t exactly go out and ask Hunter.
I followed the green dots once more with my finger, tracing them in what appeared to be a written chronological order, then gave up and left the room long enough to brew a pot of coffee, to make a call to the hospital to check on the mortal woman, and take another from Warren-whom Hunter had phoned after our nonargument-before returning with a high stool to sit while I tried to predict where the doppelgänger might pop up next. The red dots ran right through the center of town, one right in the middle of Valhalla itself, which I thought was poetically ironic.