American Goth (33 page)

I put down my book and swallowed. There was a very good reason we sat so far away from each other—we weren’t forbidden to touch, it was simply that once we did, there seemed to be almost no boundary, no marking point between loving touch and making love; the last few nights we’d held each other so tightly, bodies rigid with the effort to not cross that line, to relax, soften, entwine…

“What?” she asked again, and this time, she did smile.

“The moon,” I said finally when I found my voice and the subject I was supposed to be focused on. “How can an orbiting lump of rock be so important to anything?”

“Sam. It pulls the
oceans
from one side of the planet to the other. How can it not be important, not affect you?” She shook her head and returned her attention to the equations spread before her. “Two days,” she said softly.

“What?” I knew it was an echo of her earlier question, but Fran didn’t mind.

“Today, and tomorrow, and then…” She let that hang there as her glance told me everything she thought, she wanted. We wanted the same things.

“And then?”

“If you keep looking at me like that, we won’t find out.”

I was warm, I was restless; I couldn’t take it anymore. I closed the book, shoved away the charts, and got out of my chair. “Look like what?” I asked when I stood next to her. Even six inches away, it was almost too much to bear, the shimmer of energy that radiated from her that reached toward me, not in a hungry, seeking sense, but as part of its natural flow, part of our connection.

I rested my hand on the table next to her notes. “Look like what?” I repeated softly as I leaned over to catch the scent of her hair.

She placed her hand over mine. “Stop, please.” She looked up at me. “I can barely
breathe
, never mind read, with you this close. You know this is hard on me too.”

“Yeah?” I couldn’t help myself anymore; I so wanted to kiss her, a simple, little kiss on the cheek. “Is it very hard?” I hadn’t meant to speak in double entendres, but once it was said, it was the question she answered.

“Very,” she whispered across my lips. “It’s
very
, very hard.” And then her mouth was next to mine as I kneeled next to her chair, her hand held tight in mine and our fingers almost crushing as we told each other as directly as we could how we felt.

“Would the two of you prefer lunch here or in the dining room?” Elizabeth’s voice broke through to my consciousness and it was with great regret that I ended our kiss.

Fran’s nostrils flared, her hair was slightly mussed, and the glimpse of golden primal wild that flashed in her eyes as they held mine told me I probably looked no different. The sweet of her tongue lingered on my lower lip as I tasted it.

“Whatever’s easiest,” I answered, unable to tear my eyes away from Fran’s. I could barely hear myself through the rhythm that beat in my head, and completely lost whatever it was Fran said as I stood with her hand still in mine.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her and finally, to Elizabeth. “I wasn’t, I mean, we weren’t—”

“I know, I wasn’t worried about that,” she smiled and answered. “I’ve an idea, though. Lunch up here since you’re both studying, but Ann, would you mind spending a moment with me? I’d like for us to talk.”

“Sure,” I agreed and Fran gave my fingers a quick squeeze before she let me go. “I’ll go down with you, then.”

“Thank you.”

I bent to give Fran the original kiss I’d planned. “Hurry up,” she said and grinned. “It’s hard
and
I’m hungry.”

That made me laugh, and I kept the smile until I walked into the kitchen to help Elizabeth with the food and the trays. Everything was already laid out, soup, sandwich fillers, it merely had to be arranged and served.

I knew what she wanted to discuss and I preempted her as we worked together on the counter. “Elizabeth…Fran and I, it’s what we have to do. Surely you understand that.”

“I do,” she agreed. “I understand why you would think and feel that way, as well as why she does. But, Ann, she’s not weak, she’s not less than you. If anything, she’s your match in so many ways.”

“But the threats, and that hound, the one that almost—”

This time Elizabeth interrupted me. “It wasn’t because she was unable to defend herself. You, you’re under her barrier, all the time, within it, as much as she’s within yours. What that…” And her lips tightened even as I could feel the wave of anger and disgust that came from her. “What that
thing
attempted to do was to breach it, to force the rapport, mental rape, if that explains it for you, gives you a better idea, and that can happen to anyone, for any reason.” Her voice gentled as she continued. “It’s what happened to you, when you were so very small.”

I felt the blood drain out of my face as I tried not to spill tomato soup anywhere but into the bowls, and a flare of quickly muted fury that anyone would try to do such a thing, to anyone, and
especially
to Fran. “I didn’t know that.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Elizabeth agreed. She paused as she sliced perfect forty-five degree angles into the bread before her. “I’m afraid that…” She sighed, then began again. “You’re hurting yourself, hurting each other unnecessarily. I think you’re making a tremendous mistake based on gaps in your knowledge, and until they’re filled and corrected, you’ll make others.”

“I expect that I will make some mistakes,” I said, “as this is not something I was born knowing. But,” I added quietly, “Cort thinks I’m doing the right thing.”

For the first time since I’d known her, I felt as much as heard something as close to a snap as I’d ever seen from Elizabeth.

“Of
course
he does—he trains Wielders, the Light Bearers, and
nothing
comes before that.”

Wielders. Plural. My father counted as one and I as another. But the way she’d said it… Was there another he’d trained besides the ones I knew about? “Wielders…as in more than two?” I asked.

Elizabeth didn’t answer that as she took a tray and I another to follow her back out of the kitchen. “Just remember,” she said, stopping to face me as we stood before the landing. Her very being almost vibrated with her intent as she searched my face. “There is more to you than the sword and the Light. You…your very self, are a living soul, and you too are meant to find the happiness you can, as much as any other.”

*

It turned out that we were all encouraged to eat as much as we wanted since the next day would be a fast day until after the Rite.

“We have to do this starving on every level,” Fran joked and I agreed. But we were well behaved, as well behaved as we’d been for the prior six long nights even as we lay skin to skin in a careful embrace that satisfied only the most surface need to touch and nothing else.

“You don’t have to go through this with me, you know,” Fran had said one night when the connect and the skin and the kiss had left us both with a longing that was a physical ache.

“You could let me just…” And she skimmed her hand along my side, over my hip, and I caught it in mine.

“No,” I countered as I linked my fingers through hers, “if you have to, I have to.” That just didn’t seem fair, and besides, once she touched me, I had to touch her, not for any other reason than I needed to, I wanted to, I simply had to. The compulsion was as irresistible as it was undeniable.

“I love you,” she sighed as she kissed me and we pulled each other closer, let our legs tangle together.

“And I love you.” I kissed her nose and we lay together, simply staring into one another’s eyes, reading the world in them, the world that was us, letting the energy and intensity grow and build.

“Turn around, let me hold you,” she asked quietly. “We’re never going to sleep like this.”

“If I do that,” I whispered back, “you have roving hands and we still won’t sleep.”

“Guilty as charged,” she allowed with a tiny smirk, “but we’ll feel better.”

I smiled back at her. “Close your eyes. We’ll sleep fine, I think.” I did as I suggested.

“Are you asleep?” I asked less than a minute later.

I knew the answer, though, even before I opened my eyes to find hers still on me, and I chuckled.

“You giggle?” she teased. “Can you do that again?”

“Don’t tickle me,” I warned, “things might happen.” Her fingertips played up and down my arms anyway.

“Oh yeah? What sort of things?” God, the way she spoke was so sensual even as she teased me.

“This!” I surged against her, pressed her beneath me, and she welcomed my tongue between her lips.

“So…” I said almost breathlessly as I stared down at her. I held her hands over her head in mine. “No tickling.”

“You’re evil.”

I thought about that for a moment as I released one of her hands and her legs slid against mine. “I might be,” I agreed and circled her nipple with my thumb. It was so beautifully hard and Fran sighed under me.

“Okay, you’ve made your…point,” she said, glancing down at my hand and I stopped, only to kiss her again, but this really had to stop before we couldn’t, and we fit around each other, her back curved against my belly, my hand firmly on hers.

“You owe me,” she said into the almost-sleep silence.

“Hmm?”

“When all of this is done, I’m gonna tickle you.”

“Ha. I’ll remember that,” I promised as I tightened my arm around her waist and tucked my head behind hers.

“No, you won’t,” she teased, “and then? I’ll get you, you’ll see.”

“Uh-huh, sure, if
that’s
the first thing you want to do when you can,” I teased back.

She turned in my arms and I could see the slow, sexy smile she gave me in the near dark. “That’s not the only thing I want to do.”

“Really?” I asked, the words soft and muted as I spoke them so close to her lips. “What else do you have in mind?”

I kissed her and the ardent return of her lips gave me the answer even as she eased her leg between mine and she slipped a hand down to my hip to clutch me to her.

I knew what she wanted to do, and I wanted her to do it. The quiet, sensual little moan that escaped when I felt her breasts against mine—
wehavetostop, wehavetostop, wehavetostop
—“What makes you think,” I gasped out raggedly against the pounding in my head and chest, the feel of her heart wild against mine, the muscles of her back under my fingertips and the desperate way hers dug into my hip, “that I’m gonna let you?”

She gave a small chuckle, and I knew she recognized my tactic for the diversion it was. “Because,” she said and kissed the sensitive skin just under my ear, “you like the way I do it.”

Of course I did—and we both knew it. “I don’t,” I said anyway, just to play.

“Really? You don’t?” she drawled, knowing I was playing as I drew my fingers up her back, along her shoulders, then up her neck until I could catch her face in my hands.

“You know I don’t
like
it,” I said softly as I gazed into eyes that gleamed at me in the intermittent light from the window and drew my thumb against her cheek. “I love it,” I told her and kissed her gently, “I love you, love what you do.”

The urgent need hadn’t abated, but the frantic pull eased back to a manageable sensuality. “Love you too,” she murmured against my lips, “love what you do.”

Entwined as closely as if we’d just made love (and maybe we had in a way), we once more settled in. “Shh now. Sleep,” I whispered.

“You’re still gonna owe me,” she whispered back, then kissed my neck.

I did, and knew I always would. She gave me everything and I owed her everything—and the only way I had right now of paying her back was to do everything I could to keep her safe.

*

That rode through my mind as we separately took the long drive, me with Cort, Fran with Elizabeth, to wherever it was that this whole thing was supposed to take place. With almost every suburb ending in “ham” or “shire,” they tended to blur in my mind, in much the same way that the three different versions of Compton had when we first got to London, and I was not as surprised as I’d thought I’d be to discover that most of the ceremony would happen outdoors.

“Won’t everyone get cold?” I asked Cort.

He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Between the ritual, the fires, and the energy, no one will notice. You’ll see.”

As we walked along a side path that led to the yard, the carefully tended shrubs gave way to vines, all obviously painstakingly trained to grow along a canopy so that at the far end, a scene from ages past was set in a yard that seemed to roll on until it met yet another field bounded by a stonework fence, that yawed from there to a mountain.

I didn’t know what I’d expected, but this… People, perhaps sixty or more, some in regular dress while others were in robes, all rushed about in an organized chaos, moving tables, setting torches along a set path, groups clustered to light not one, not two, but four well-contained fires that were about six feet or so in diameter and were maintained to a height of about two feet.

“They’re getting ready to meet the first star of the evening,” Cort said into my ear as I gaped about.

Someone pressed a mug into my hand, glazed warm clay that was smooth under my fingers. “It’s okay, you know—it’s part of the whole Rite,” he told me after he sipped from his own mug.