My Forbidden Desire (23 page)

He lifted a hand and circled his taloned fingers around her wrist. His magic flared hot again, chaotic and completely and utterly compelling. A rainbow of fire arced over the bed and vanished with a sizzle and pop that seared her ears. Xia changed back, and his eyes flickered open. Pure white irises streaked with ice blue. “It’ll be all right,” he said. He threw his arm over his face and shuddered. “I’m good now.”

She slid off the bed, sick to her bones. She didn’t want Xia to die. He couldn’t die. But a tiny voice in her head whispered that if he did, she wouldn’t betray him by turning herself into the kind of copa-addicted magekind he hated so passionately. Alexandrine had no doubt whatsoever that if she gave in to the compulsion to drug herself in order to have real magic, she and Xia would be done. “You sure about not seeing a doctor?”

“The only doctor I’d trust near me right now is your brother.” He lifted his arm off his eyes enough to glare at her. “And he’s in Paris with Nikodemus. Why are you crying?”

“I’m not.” She brushed at her cheeks. Crap. “Fine. Go ahead and die on me, then.” Her voice edged up the register. “See if I care.”

“Downstairs.” He shivered, and her skin goose-pimpled from head to toe. What on earth was the deal with that? “In the fridge. There should be a plastic jug. Get me a big glass of what’s in it.”

“Ja, mein commandante.”

“Just do it,” he whispered.

On the way out, she kept getting bizarre flashes of what he was feeling. No fun. At all. For either of them. A headache throbbed behind her eyes, and she didn’t know if it was a headache of her own pounding away at her cranium or if it was coming from Xia. A quarter of the way down the stairs, her heart sped up. At first, she thought the reaction was due to her being about thirty yards from a box full of copa. Because, yeah, she was completely aware of that. A full-body shiver of apprehension went through her. The problem with that theory was that the refrain stuck in her head wasn’t
More magic!
but more like
What if something happens to Xia while I’m downstairs
?
What if he goes away? What if somebody takes him away from me?

She slowed, a hand pressed to her upper chest, which vibrated with an achy hollowness. True, she didn’t know the house, and she figured some level of anxiety about the unknown was to be expected. And she sure as hell wasn’t forgetting about the copa and the way touching her magic was getting harder and harder. But the panic rising in her about Xia wasn’t normal. In fact, the feeling was reminiscent of how she felt when she tried to take off the amulet. Anxious. Resistant. Paranoid. Wigged out and Golemy.

She forced herself to continue down the stairs, and everything got worse. Her stomach hurt, and her pulse drummed in her ears. At least the pain distracted her from that zebra-striped box in the living room that held the best dream of her adult life to date. Inside that box was her ability to use real magic. By the time she found the kitchen, she was trembling, with sweat beading along her forehead. It couldn’t be withdrawal. From what Xia had said, a mage had to be using for a while before he was addicted. But geez, coming down from the magic was going to be a hard landing. Nothing to do about that but suck it up like a big girl.

In the kitchen, she rummaged around and found the plastic jug Xia had told her about and a selection of cups made of black glass. Her hands shook hard enough that she had to worry about spilling while she filled the glass with the contents of the jug. The stuff smelled like crap. There wasn’t much food in the house—now, wasn’t that ironic?—a six-pack of beer with a guillotine on the label and a half-empty bag of tortilla chips. Nothing here but stuff to get cranked on. Beer. Copa. Chips. And Xia. She looked around and didn’t see a phone anywhere. No land line. Just great. Her mobile was in her backpack. In San Francisco.

Unless Xia had his phone with him, there was no way she could call for help; by now, she was thinking one or both of them was in serious need of an intervention. She didn’t have anything against drinking; it was just she didn’t like not being in control. A beer would taste good about now. Maybe a beer would help her forget about copa and tiny little Xias running around at her feet. But what she needed more than anything was to be upstairs with Xia.

Cup in hand, she headed back to the stairs. At the bottom step, she stopped. The brazier was still burning in the living room, giving off a smoky scent. The oil was going to catch fire and burn the house down. With them in it. She put the cup on the bottom stairs and walked in, feeling the trembling start up worse than before.

The zebra-striped box was there. Filled with copa. She had the shakes, but she couldn’t help feeling they didn’t have anything to do with copa or her magic. The metal bowl holding the oil was scorching hot. She felt the heat even before she knelt to figure out how to douse the source. The problem was immediately apparent. She was going to need magic, and she was on magical low tide. “Great,” she muttered. “Just great.”

She pulled and got next to nothing. The zebra-striped box taunted her. A little more copa would take care of her problem. A quarter of a pill was all she needed. Maybe half of one. He’d never notice one missing pill even if he bothered to look. She picked up the box with trembling fingers. Panic bubbled up. She pulled again, and this time she caught the upswing of the ebb and flow of her magic. The oil stopped smoking.

She was okay. She’d done actual magic without drugging herself. She clutched the box so hard her fingers hurt. What if Xia needed her magic, and she was back to her usual pathetic might-as-well-be-vanilla self? She fumbled with the box, but it refused to open. “Shit.”

She turned her back on the living room and headed for the stairs, still working at the box. Hands shaking, heart pounding, jittery with the certainty that if she didn’t get back to Xia, she’d die or worse
. Chik.
The lip of the box lifted. Golden yellow flashed in her vision. Copa. She stopped and opened the box the rest of the way. The pills crumbled easily, she remembered. When Xia had taken some at her house, they were wrapped in paper. She headed back to the kitchen, fighting panic the entire way. In the garbage, she found an old receipt reasonably clean and big enough to serve her purpose. She opened the box again and took out two of the pills, and when it didn’t look like too many were missing, she took out three more. She folded the receipt around the pills and put them in her front pocket.

She felt like utter shit. She was a liar. A betrayer. A deceiver. How long had she lasted? Half an hour? Forty-five minutes? And here she was, in trouble already. She was better than this, wasn’t she? Alexandrine turned on the water in the sink and flipped the switch for the garbage disposal, then upended the box over the sink. The copa dissolved almost immediately. For good measure, she used the sprayer attachment until there weren’t even any crumbs left. She did the same with the pills she’d put in her pocket. Problem solved.

Alexandrine left the zebra box on the counter. Open and empty.

Her panic stayed with her.

She retrieved the cup and started up. Each step reeled in her panic. The higher she went, the closer she got to Xia, the less jittery she felt. By the time she reached the top, her panic vanished. She dimly remembered what she’d felt like downstairs. Xia was half sitting on the bed, struggling with the top button of his jeans, a testament to bad living and insane amounts of exercise. He looked up when she came in, and oddly, she had the impression he was relieved.

She gripped the plastic cup of stinking swill she’d brought upstairs with her. “Here, I brought that stuff from the fridge.”

“Thanks,” he said. Xia took the cup from her and stared at her long enough to make her feel a bit odd with the silence. What if he knew what she’d done downstairs? He closed his eyes and emptied the cup in one long swallow. When he was done, the cup slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. The fact that it didn’t break had to be a miracle.

“Help me,” he said. His breathing was shallow, like he was holding back some major hurt. “I need to get out of my clothes.”

She swatted his hand away from his fly. “Let me, okay?”

He leaned back on his elbows, and boy, oh boy, did that do something to his abs. She tugged on his zipper.

“Hurry up, would you?” he said.

“I’m hurrying. Quit moving around, and maybe I can get these off you.”

He stretched out a hand and touched her cheek. Heat zinged through her, and behind that was a bone-deep pain. They both winced. His pain flowed back into her. His fingers spread over her cheek. “It’s better when I touch you.”

“All right,” she said. She pressed his palm to her cheek and braced herself for the flash of pain. And, man, she did get pain. Fire burning right through her. The contact also brought her waning magic closer. Her head buzzed, colors flashed, and she felt Xia’s magic, her magic, and the talisman, too.

“Baby,” he said. “Don’t stop. Please.”

“I won’t.”

The tension went out of his face. He went back to working on his pants. Right. He needed to get undressed. She unzipped his jeans the rest of the way. His shivering increased. His skin was hot. Burning hot. She yanked down his jeans and took his socks off, too. When she straightened from that, he was flat on his back, wearing nothing but a pair of black boxers that he was pushing off. He shoved his thumbs in the waistband.

His eyelids vibrated. “I need to be naked, Alexandrine. Have to be.” His eyes flashed. In her head, his imperative echoed.
Have to be.

Xia struggled to sit, and Alexandrine put an arm around him to help him take off the rest of his clothes. The internal chaos that was sending him off the deep end flowed into her with the contact. She felt him relax. Her magic mirrored the pandemonium going on in him. As naked as the day he was born, he passed out, and the chaos in her ramped down. Just like that.

“Xia?” She leaned over him, a hand to his forehead. She got a sense of deepness settling in on him. Whether that was good for him or not, she had no freaking idea. He was still warm to the touch, but not scorching hot like he had been earlier. With some degree of pushing and prodding and pulling that was by no means easy, she managed to get him under the covers. Afterward, she picked up his jeans and boxers with the intention of folding them. Ms. Domestic, she was. She set his knife and scabbard on the bedside table.

His magic was wide open to her. And she could still pull. More now than when she’d been downstairs trying to figure out a way to put out the brazier. Way more. Being around him cranked her magic. Which didn’t make any sense at all. She let his magic flow over her, through her, around her, in her.

There was a bathroom down the hall, and she went in to wash her face. Her body ached with a less acute version of the anxiety attack she’d had downstairs. Bizarre. Once again, the sensations put her in mind of how she’d felt about being separated from the talisman. She washed her face and scrubbed her fingers through her hair. There was a new toothbrush in the cabinet along with some Tom’s of Maine peppermint toothpaste, so she brushed her teeth. Much better. No expensive lotions in here. Thank goodness. Ms. High Maintenance hadn’t made it upstairs, then.

Back in the bedroom, she sat on the edge of the bed and stared at Xia. Pain etched his face, and his body moved restlessly. Once, he hissed, baring his teeth. But he maintained his human shape. Sleeping, if that’s what he was doing, didn’t look soothing. She remembered him saying he felt better when she touched him. Based on the way she’d kept transitioning into and out of Xia’s mental and physical experience, she guessed that when she touched him, some of his pain siphoned off into her, thus providing him some measure of relief.

She touched her fingertips to his cheek, and immediately an echo of pain washed over her. The longer she touched him, the more vivid his reactions felt. Swirling chaos from his magic, amidst which she could occasionally distinguish the talisman, seeped into her. Physically, his body was taut with pain that slammed into her like a rogue wave. With the contact, Xia’s expression eased, and his body relaxed.

Alexandrine, however, found herself floating in nightmarish pain.

Chapter 18

K
ynan Aijan glared at the cell phone on the coffee table. The ringtone was “Linus and Lucy” from
Peanuts
. He wished he’d picked some other ringtone for these calls.

“Are you going to answer that?” Iskander asked. Considering their respective reputations, one crazed killer and one psycho, Kynan thought the query reasonably and politely put.

Iskander was a psycho, sure, but he was a psycho who knew how the hell to have a good time. Whatever the event, Iskander was always fully charged and intent on the experience. He didn’t reach out to his fellow kin often, but when he made the psychic link, he burned. Sometimes during an exchange, when the kin were connecting, casually or otherwise, Kynan felt Iskander’s sexual desires, his affinity for the male form. For example, he knew Iskander thought Nikodemus was hot, that he’d been with Nikodemus and Carson both, in a manner of speaking, and that he had erotic memories of Harsh. How the hell was Iskander, with his personal dose of craziness, keeping himself under control? It would be nice to know how he was doing it. Kynan wasn’t having as much success himself.

Right now, Iskander was gaming with a white-hot passion and didn’t bother to take his eyes off the wall-sized media screen in front of them. On-screen, he caught another animated fish. Lucky bastard. Without pausing, he said, “Your phone is ringing, Warlord.”