Dead Drop (12 page)

Until the end, he’d only needed to deal with magehelds until they were severed and free. Easy enough. None of them outranked him. He kept them busy or incapacitated until they could be severed. Then the mage tried to kill both the witches on the team. They could take care of themselves and did. No worries there. But after that, the fool had attempted to murder one of his remaining magehelds in an effort to juice his power. By then, though, putting a stop to that was easy. Boom. Dead mage.

All done, and now he was home.

Once he was in sight of his building, the effect of his bond with the human woman eased up. Inside his apartment, the rest of his tension melted away. He threw his keys on the table in the entryway and stripped off his jacket. She was asleep face down on his couch, one leg and one arm dangling to the floor. He left her there while he took a quick shower, his oath pulling at him the whole time.

Back in the living room afterward, he found her still deep, deep asleep. Dreaming. Unshielded. The oath he’d made meant an inevitable and incidental degree of access to her mental state. More than usual with a witch because she didn’t have any magic in place to keep her safe. They’d have to work on that.

Four and a half hours of sleep wasn’t enough, and if he woke her up, that interrupted sleep wasn’t going to be as restful as she needed. He stayed on the couch because the thought of leaving her here, even if he was just dicking around in his room, made him tense. Something could happen, and he wouldn’t be close enough. He’d be damn glad when things settled down between them.

Her dreams were anxious ones, and that transferred to him. He didn’t like the way her anxiety triggered him. Like he could protect her from a REM cycle. Every few minutes some dream-event spiked hard, and he got more than a little of the backlash. There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, either.

If Tau were here he’d be in his element. That guy had freaky abilities when it came to humans and their dream states. The rumor, which Tau never denied, was that he could move from human-to-human-to-human through their semi-conscious states. Even better, where he came from, there weren’t any rules about being nice. That was the rumor.

She slipped out of her dream cycle and into a state that was more relaxing for him. Thank you. He went to the kitchen for a beer. Back in the living room he sat on the very end of the couch. She slept on while darkness faded to dawn over the bay. Felt good, watching over her. He’d been antsy as hell while he was out, worrying whether she was safe.

When he was done with the beer he set down the empty. Calmness was her thing. Peace and serenity. The exact opposite of him. He thought about retrieving his tablet and finding something to play while he waited. Maybe Iskander or Kynan were on line. Her cheek was stuck to the screen of his tablet, but she stayed asleep even after he got it free. He touched the screen and brought it to life. She’d been reading Marcus Aurelius. The assholiest of all the asshole Romans. No wonder she’d fallen asleep.

Games without the sound on weren’t any fun, and nobody he wanted to talk to was online. He tipped his head back so he could stare at the ceiling and reposition the stars without moving. He’d had an arc of them for months now. He was due for a change in scenery. Maybe more like the Milky Way. With some interstellar dust thrown in for effect.

Awake.

“That you, Palla?” She mumbled, but he understood her just fine.

He looked at her, but she hadn’t moved from her face-down sprawl. He could see the outline of her bra strap through the back of her shirt. “No. It’s some other fucking asshole.”

“Go away.” She moved her head so she wouldn’t be looking at the back of the couch. His connection to her flared up then settled to where it might not pound like a nail through his head. His blood-oath had hooked in but good. If anything happened to her, he’d be caught in some seriously painful blowback. “Palla finds you here, he’s going to be pissed.”

“I can handle him.”

“You can’t.” Her voice stayed muffled because she was mostly taking to the cushion. “He’s a mad killer, and you look like a total wuss. No offense.”

He smiled but only because he knew she couldn’t see him. “Wake up. We have work to do.”

“Say something sweet, and I will.”

“Get the fuck up.”

She groaned and turned over, eyes closed, an arm across her eyes. “I love it when you’re all warm and fuzzy like that. It’s so hot I can’t stand it.”

He got off the couch and crouched by her head. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” he said all soft and tender. And then not. “Wake the fuck up.”

She lifted her arm and opened her eyes, and it hit him that she was exhausted. Not because he figured it out from looking at her, but because the minute they made eye contact she was wide open to him. Kin sworn to Nikodemus weren’t supposed to make links without permission, but in the case of blood-oaths, the rule had an exception. Just like you couldn’t expect a literate person not to read words put in front of her, there were times when the connection was just there.

Like now. With Wallace.

“Ten more minutes. That’s all I ask.” Her eyes drifted closed, but they stayed connected.

He set a fingertip to her forehead. Smooth, silky skin. Warm. So calm. She was so calm inside. Slowly, she lifted her near arm and touched his upper cheek close to his eye. “That was easy. Why isn’t it always that easy?”

“Life’s a bitch.”

She laughed and hauled herself upright. They stayed linked. “Good practice I guess.”

“Yeah.” He sat next to her. She was still fuzzy. Still tired. Maybe he ought to send her back to bed.

“Now what?” She stretched and ran fingers over her hair. More awake now. Not a morning person. Some humans had to ease into their day.

“Stay open. See if you can follow what I do.” He looked at the ceiling and concentrated on one of the bronze stars there. They looked like paint but they weren’t. Some of them were smaller now since he’d been going for the starlit look. He sent his magic toward one of the remaining larger stars and gave it a psychic nudge. It shifted a few inches to their left. “Yeah?”

“Do it again.”

He did.

“It’s so pretty.”

“Fuck pretty. Focus.” Maddy never stopped harping on focus for her street witches and mages. He hadn’t paid much attention because he didn’t care if they learned to do anything with their magic or not. Now, Wallace’s ability to focus mattered, and he was wishing he’d paid more attention to Maddy’s tips. He moved the star again. “You try.”

Their link was still going so he felt it when her magic flexed, and that was when he realized he’d failed to take into account what happened to the kin at times like this. Nothing he couldn’t control, but with them linked like this, and her magic winding through him, he was getting worked up. Totally in control, but he’d forgotten the edge and how good that could feel. This reaction was the reason the kin had ended up in trouble after humans learned to fight back.

Her power continued its ramp up in that
opposite
way, and he let it take him along. The way her magic fit with his was a distraction, sure, but also exactly what he needed to rescue Avitas, and he was grateful for that. Truly grateful. Something clicked in him. Not another bond, nothing like that, just a deep sense that here was something good. Something that mattered. Maybe Maddy had a point about the benefits of working more with the magekind. What Wallace was doing for him mattered a lot.

He left her long enough to retrieve his stash of copa, a relaxant to the kin and a magic-booster for humans. The downside for humans was the addictive effect of having your magic ramped up. Magekind had to use copa with caution, and most did. But there were always some who couldn’t give up the additional power. They craved what they could do with their magic while under the influence. Some had trouble giving it up. And some couldn’t at all. They used until the copa burned out their magic or killed them.

He came back and sat on the floor at her feet. Her bright socks made him think about bikinis and he needed not to be remembering all that gorgeous dark skin or the curves he hadn’t been expecting. He took a bolus of the golden-yellow substance and let it dissolve in his mouth. “Have you had copa before?”

“No.” She let up trying to do anything to his ceiling in order to answer him. He wouldn’t have expected her to know about it. She’d never been enough of an insider to know.

“Maddy told you about it, right?”

She nodded. “She said for us not to.”

“You’re a big girl now. Playing with the big boys.” He handed her a smaller bolus. “Maybe you’re a hybrid like Harsh.” Harsh Marit being one of the kin who, so he’d heard, turned out to be a genetic hybrid. He wondered if she could be. “Magekind and demonkind at the same time.”

“Is it going to turn me into a raging addict?” She examined the copa. Some of it crumbled onto her palm.

“No.”

“You going to tell on me?”

Look at that. He got that she was joking. “Like I’d tell Maddy I took you out behind the shed to play.”

“Gross.”

He leaned closer. “Just like you aren’t going to tell her you were playing with me, right?”

“God, no.” She laughed. “What’s it taste like?”

“Copa. All at once is best.”

Wallace shrugged, put the copa in her mouth, and immediately made a face. In a thick voice, she said, “It’s not very good.”

“It’s delicious. You know it is.”

She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth.

He went up on his knees, still linked with her, her still linked with him, and it was making him hot, no question, which she knew. “This is normal,” he told her. He put his hands on the edge of the couch, and that was her leg right there. The kin were a tactile species. When they were together, touch didn’t have all the messed up meanings it did with humans. His kind touched, caressed, stayed close to others.

She touched his cheek, and he surrendered to the contact. Losing Avitas had fucked him up but good, and his years as a mageheld hadn’t helped his stability any. No mistake, better free than enslaved, but freedom didn’t make his life a piece of cake. He still didn’t know how to cope without Avitas. He tended to keep to himself too much, and he had trouble getting along. He knew that. “Hey,” she said. “It’s okay.”

When he looked at her again, her eyes had gone from brown to copper. One of the telltale effects of copa on humans was that temporary change in eye color. When the copa worked its way through her system, her eyes would go back to normal.

“Try now,” he said. No touching humans when they hadn’t consented. She wasn’t kin. She wouldn’t react to casual contact the way one of the kin would; as something necessary, usual, and welcome. He knew from their link that she had access to her magic now. On the ceiling, one of the stars jittered at the same time that weird sideways effect of her magic rippled through him.

“Yeah, like that,” he said. Not sideways magic. Not really. He’d just never encountered anyone like her before. That didn’t mean she was a freak. Chances were there were others like her. Just like it had turned out there were other street witches.

She gave him a huge, satisfied grin. “It worked.”

“Make it like the others.”

“How?”

“Let me show you again.” He faced her but stopped right before he was about to touch her and get her focused on their link. Without Maddy to supervise and make sure nobody fucked up, he needed to be careful. “Okay? The contact?”

“I need to learn this, so yes.”

He pressed three fingers to her forehead. Her gaze flicked to him, and their link flashed hot. She was something, no question about it. When he was sure they were sufficiently hooked in, he looked at the ceiling and scattered the star the way he had the others. Without her dry-heaving reaction to a psychic link with one of the kin, they had all the time in the world for him to show her what he did.

Their magic worked in concert, sliding, flowing, at times briefly merging, and that was a hell of a high. This was the closest he’d felt to whole since Avitas was murdered. The connection wasn’t typical of the kind the kin made with the magekind. Whatever the deal was with her magic, whether she was rare or something common the kin and magekind hadn’t known how to see, he needed to learn this, too.

The star oscillated, condensed, and spread out in a spray of smaller particles that took their place in the arrangement he’d started. Above them, another of the stars came loose and spiraled down, feather light. He reached up and let the bronze shape hover above his palm. He gave her a look. “Want a tat?”

“What?” The word was skeptical and inviting at the same time.

“A little magic, living on your skin.” He caught the star and rolled it between his fingers and drew a line along the inside of his forearm. The material shimmered, then sank into his skin. Once there, it moved. Shifted. Swirled. “Let’s see how you react.”

“What if I don’t want it?”

“No big deal. You can get rid of it if you don’t like it.” He called on his magic, making sure she had access to what he’d done. What had once been a star on his ceiling and then a bronze line on his skin, again floated above his palm. “Yeah?”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

“Where?”

“What are you, twelve? Where I can get to it if I don’t like it.”

“Leg or arm?”

She held out her arm. She was wearing short sleeves so it was easy to touch his finger to her right biceps. Color spread along her skin, and while it was still settling in, he slid his fingertip around her arm until the two ends of color met and a narrow armband glowed bright against her skin. For several long moments she watched the color moving. “I like it.” She held up her arm and moved so the light and angle of her view changed. “It’s hot, don’t you think?”

“Sure.”

Which, it turned out, was either the worst possible thing he could have said. Or the best.