Dead Drop (6 page)

“Angel, it’s not personal. I hate all humans.”

“Same difference.” She eyed the beer, but he kept it because he knew it would bother her. “Maddy feels bad for me every time I fail. To be honest, it’s a little wearying. You’re not just going through the motions, but you also don’t feel bad for me when nothing happens.”

“I don’t feel a thing about you.” He took a pull on his beer. “Except for not liking humans. Or witches.”

“Sure.” She met his gaze. She was brave to be looking at him like that. “But you still want me to get better.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. I swore an oath. That’s all it is.” It wasn’t, but she didn’t need to know that.

She studied him for a while, and then took the beer. Because he let her. He watched her drink and thought about yellow bikinis and then about the lack of them. They switched off with the beer again. “The reason doesn’t matter, does it?”

“So?”

“So. What if it’s not because I can’t? What if it’s because I keep trying the way everyone says to, but it doesn’t work because that’s not how I am?”

He leaned an elbow against the counter behind him. Well, shit. “Okay.”

“Most of the street witches, when their magic comes on, if it does, they either cope, go insane, or die, right?”

“That’s what I hear.”

“I didn’t go insane or die.”

He toasted her with his beer. “You’re a survivor.”

“That’s right. I coped.”

He stared at her. Really stared. Round face, but with cheekbones that made her interesting to look at. Big, dark eyes. Pretty eyes. Brown skin that looked smooth as silk. He’d do her in a minute, he really would, and since he was being replaced with Telos, he didn’t have to worry that dirty sex with her would fuck up everything else.

In a low voice, she said, “I am not like other witches.”

“No.” He blinked a couple of times, and everything shifted. All the
off
about her magic fell into a different place. “You’re not.”

“I think” –She licked her lips– “I think maybe I’m like one of those optical illusions where you have to make yourself see the other image. Which way is the lady spinning? Is it two vases or one face? Some people look their whole lives and never see the other way.”

“Show me.” He put down the beer. “Show me what you mean.”

She’d have moved away except Palla was so vivid right now she couldn’t think straight. Palla, she knew, was formidable when he decided to pay attention to you. The way he’d decided to pay attention to her now.

“Show me.” Flecks of color swirled across his eyes. She’d seen that effect dozen of times now, but it still took her aback. When his eyes were like that, he was holding power. Ready to use it, and like always, she could not feel it when any other witch would have. “Not like you’ve been doing. Do it the other way. Maddy’s not here, so you better give permission first. I don’t want questions I can’t answer later.”

She knew that. The rules were that a demon needed permission to make a psychic link with a human. Maddy had made a big deal out of all the witches understanding what was allowed and not allowed and what it meant to consent to certain acts with a demon. Like Palla.

“I need the word.”

He was right about getting her permission again. Maddy was a stickler for reconfirming consent after a break from practice. “Yes.”

Palla nodded.

“Okay, what do I do now?”

“Nothing you normally do.”

“Big help.”

He shrugged.

She abandoned the visualizations Maddy had them run through, and there was that space in her that was shaped, not formed. The emptiness that was there all the time. A void she could shape, not one that took shape. She concentrated on the container of the void in her middle, the hollowness in her middle that she’d always thought ought to hold her magic and did not. She stopped trying to find anything there and instead concentrated on where the void was not.

Awareness of Palla blossomed in the center of her chest. A supernova. Just as fast as she connected with him, she lost contact.

He sucked in breath. “What the hell did you just do?”

She trembled because she hadn’t thought it would work, that it could be so easy. She tried again and he was there, overwhelming her again.

Palla steadied her but she gripped his arm because she was shaking. Couldn’t stop shaking. Dizzy. She held on as long as she could, trying to memorize what she’d done to get here, but the steps weren’t a list you followed, there was no incantation, no rules. She didn’t trust this, why should she after all these weeks of failure, and her control slipped out of reach. Palla went from a flare of energy to the usual blank.

“Let me in.” He touched a finger to her forehead. “Let me in so I can see what you’re doing.” A lock of his black hair fell across his forehead the way hers never would unless she used chemical straighteners. It was a look she couldn’t afford on her salary.

“I don’t know how.”

He extended a hand palm up and sliced the side of his nail across the tip of his index finger. The motion was sharp and fast, but because she was watching she saw the transformation of fingernail to talon and back. Red welled from the slice he’d made. He held his hand between them.

“Blood makes a link easier and more intense, so we don’t do it with the street witches. Not at the start.” He offered his hand again. “I’m not talking about an oath. This isn’t permanent, and it’s not an indwell either. This’ll juice it a little, that’s all.”

“I’ll tell you what happens,” she said. He was pushing at her, and her nausea was starting up again. “I get sick to my stomach.”

“Not this time,” he said. “That’s not going to happen this time.” He gave her a long, dirty look and they didn’t need to be sharing any mental space to know what he meant. “Angel, my blood is going to be the best thing that ever happened to you.”

She rolled her eyes. “How does any woman resist you?

“They don’t.” His voice was rich as melted chocolate.

Her stomach did a slow flip, and that did not make any sense, that she’d react like that. She put that out of her mind because she did not want him thinking she was hot for him. She wasn’t. You could appreciate the package a man came in without liking him.

The parts of his eyes that should have been different colors were variations of gold. Pupil, iris, sclera, and throughout were moving flecks of color; yellow and bronze, whirling, appearing, disappearing. Now and then one of the flecks glittered green or gold. He drew her close and held his blooded finger to her lips. “Make it happen, Wallace.”

She took his finger in her mouth, and his blood was warm. A sizzle spread through her, a thousand sparks.

“Go.”

She got her head around what she was doing again, the way she’d done it before, and Palla flashed alive. She recognized the sensation of him pushing in on her. She’d spent hours practicing with him, never connecting for longer than a few seconds. Those times hadn’t been like this. Nothing like this, and this time they stayed connected.

He was there in her mind, and she wasn’t sick to her stomach because he wasn’t reaching into her head the way demons did. Instead, she was letting him in through the edges of the void inward, and he followed that path instead of the one he was used to.

Wallace blinked hard, disoriented with having him alive like this. He slid an arm around her waist, steadying her. He was in her head, and Palla was not an ocean, he was that which contained an ocean. There was no hole where her power ought to be. There was the outside of the container.

“Fuck me, Wallace.” His whisper formed in her thoughts as an idea, not conversation. Not spoken words. This was effortless, having him there. Breathtaking. Heartrending. All this time. All this time. Her power had been there all this time, and she had been looking with the wrong eyes.

“Now that I know it’s there,” he said, but not
said
. There was just the blossoming of his thoughts in her head. “I see the shape of your magic.”

Palla was a demon. Not human. That came home to her with a crash.

“Yeah.” He laughed. “And you are a witch.”

The sensation wasn’t unpleasant, not the way it had been all those other times when they’d all been forcing the wrong process on her. But it wasn’t comfortable, either. Every so often she lost her way, and Palla ramped down, became less vivid.

“You could make a link with me. Two way. Me in your head like we are now. You in mine.” It was strange, not being sure whether he’d spoken out loud to her. He arched an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“How?”

“Most witches, I tell them their magic is like a pool, and they can draw from it.” His arm stared around her waist. “It’s like you said, that’s not how it is for you. I don’t have the right words. Not a reflection.” His fingers stayed wrapped around her upper arm, his other arm still looped around her waist. “Let’s say that’s how you’re seeing it. When you try the way we’ve been teaching you, it’s like there’s nothing there. But there is.”

She leaned into him, and tried and got...nothing.

“It’s fucking insane how strong you are. No wonder you dead dropped me. That’s how strong you are, that you could be like this and stay sane.” He scowled, but not at her. “I don’t get how you didn’t pass their test.” He meant the magekind. They tested all their children at three. The children who passed were trained. The ones who failed were usually adopted out to families without magical ability. A lot of those kids, though, they ended up on the street. Like her.

He put his mouth by her ear, but he was talking directly into her brain, his thoughts forming there. “You make the others look like dabblers.”

She laughed because didn’t he know how to motivate her?

“You’ve been handling yourself for years. You don’t freeze up over things you don’t understand. You’ll be fine.”

“How do you know?”

He released her arm to cup the side of her face. He smiled at her, smirked really. “Because I’ve got your back.”

“You are such an asshole.” Maddy had warned her about him. That he was unstable and unfriendly and Entelechy. But right now he didn’t seem so bad, and that scared her.

“Don’t you forget it.”

Her torso was snug up against his, and she closed her eyes to block out everything but that place inside her that she used to think wasn’t there.

“Come inside,” he said in a voice that sounded like sex. “Come inside where you belong.”

Around the corner. Into the reflection. Ignore the way she’d been told it worked. There was magic, and she didn’t have to reach out and touch it, all she had to do was shape the container. She did and reached for him in this new way. Her way. What worked for her. Power shivered through her, and there she was. In his head. Linked with him.

“Oh hell yes,” he whispered.

She blinked a few times to orient herself amid the shifting awareness of herself and of Palla. Of them. She experienced his thoughts, his physical reactions, saw what he saw as if she were in his body instead of her own.

“Let it settle.”

“Don’t let go of me, I’ll fall.”

He brought her closer. Until they were in an embrace. How had that happened?

She touched his cheek, and his gaze stayed steady on hers until she blinked again, and she saw herself. She was looking down at herself, her arms around her waist–not her arms, Palla’s arms. She flicked in and out of the state of dual awareness. Palla’s sensations, the lure of her magic, the danger Maddy had warned them all about, that sizzle that drew the magekind to a demon and a demon to a witch, that volatile combination of sex and magic. She traced a finger along the line of his cheek and felt both his skin under hers and his reaction to her touch.

Through him, she felt the vibration that was his awareness of Maddy and Telos. The two of them were still here. To Palla, Telos was kin. Both bound by an oath to the same warlord. Maddy was
other
. Magekind. Human. Safe only because she was sworn to Nikodemus.

“We could be in different rooms,” she said, “and we’d know what was going on.”

He set her back, and, for a few seconds, her head swam. Her surroundings stabilized, and she was almost back to normal. Except not normal at all. Palla was still there, and there was still this two-way connection between them, and she had always been afraid of him on some level. Now she knew why. She saw and felt why.

Entelechy. A demon not born to humans. Because that was how the demonkind reproduced now. With humans. Everyone who knew about demons understood that. From the few, many, by pairing with humans.

“We used to do this all the time.” He touched his forehead and then hers, but she already knew what he meant. “With the magekind. Centuries ago. Before everything went to hell, and it was nothing but us trying to kill or enslave each other.”

Images flashed through her head, emotions and memories that came with glimpses of people and places she’d never seen, and a sense of a Palla who didn’t have the bitter desolation of the creature before her now. A different Palla.
Avitas
.

Their link had settled, less intense, not as overwhelming. Probably a good thing. It was disorienting to feel his psychic reaction in the split second before he moved or spoke. He shifted effortlessly between the levels of information exchanged between them; the psychic and the verbalized, while she needed–insisted on?– separating the two things and connecting them to the correct bits of information.