Embers (31 page)

“Why not?” Her brows drew together.

His gaze on her was heavy. “I want to help you. I do. But that demon you’ve got inside you is older than most diamonds. I’ve got to conserve my power for Sirrush.”

Anya turned her face away, cheeks burning. She didn’t know why she’d come, why she thought he’d help her. He was a stranger, a liar, and a monster. What could he possibly do to help her? And why would he want to?

She jerked away from his grasp and started toward the door.

He reached out and caught her wrist. “Wait.”

She looked back at him, feeling Mimi surge like bile in her throat.

“I will take the demon from you, but after. After I’ve summoned Sirrush. Please understand that. . . no matter what I feel, that must come first.” The look on his face was resigned, lonely. She understood that look, that feeling of apartness.

And she was tired of it, tired of always being on the outside looking in. Tired of being different, tired of feeling used, tired of no one understanding what she felt or why she just couldn’t allow anyone to be close to her. She was tired of everything she cared for breaking, and having it be her fault.

Drake was the only unbreakable person she’d ever met, the only other Lantern. He didn’t want anything from her, but her. And she didn’t want to let go of him. She would hold fast to this one thing.

His fingers laced in hers, and she heard Mimi laughing in the back of her head.

She tipped her face up to his. His fingers wound in her hair as he kissed her, scalding her mouth with his. His fingers scraped up through her hair, sending a shiver from her scalp to the base of her spine. She splayed her fingers on his chest, feeling the heart that beat so quickly there, and the void beyond it. His lips slid from the corner of her mouth down to her neck, leaving a molten trail of heat from her jaw to her collar. She pressed her body to his, feeling the tense warmth beneath his clothes.

Anya felt Sparky tugging at her skirt, heard his warning growl. For an instant, her breath and her hands faltered. She felt Sparky pulling her in one direction, Mimi in the other. The demon roiled underneath her skin, eager to vicariously feel the pleasures of Drake’s touch.

Drake snatched her hands, stared at her full in the face. His expression was guarded. “Is this you or is this the demon? What do
you
want?”

“I. . .” She swallowed. She wanted him to fill this dark void in her chest, wanted to feel something other than this damnable standing at a distance from the world.

“I want you,” she answered. “Maybe not for the right reasons, but I do want you.”

The tension in his face fractured into a dark smile. He laid his fingers on her lips. “Stay right there.”

He backed two steps away from her, reached for a can of spray paint on the table, and shook it. He sprayed a circle on the floor, nine feet in diameter, surrounding her, Sparky, and the table. He left a three-foot break in the circle open beside Anya. He threw a handful of salt that scattered across the floor like insects.

Drake picked up one of the dogs’ tennis balls. “Sparky.” He bounced the ball through the circle and to the opposite side of the studio.

Instinct got the better of Sparky. He lunged through the break after the ball, with the two dogs. After he realized he couldn’t grasp it with his elemental jaws, he turned back to Anya and Drake—only to find that he couldn’t cross the circle Drake had finished painting on the floor. The salamander paced at the perimeter, whining.

Drake advanced on Anya, backed her into the edge of the table, and laced his fingers in hers. His thumbs rubbed circles against the backs of her hands. His paint-stained hands left smears of gold on her skin.

“How did you do that?” she breathed.

“It won’t hurt him. Just a plain old magic circle that will hold just about any magickal creature—symbol and intent.” He nibbled at her earlobe. “And very delicious intent, it is. Is that mint?”

“Mmm.” She felt the muscles of his chest moving and slid her fingers under the collar of his shirt. She reached up on her tiptoes to kiss the scar above his blind eye, the bridge of his nose. He sighed and grasped her tighter, circling her ribs with his hands.

She flinched. He softened his grip immediately.

She cast her eyes down, dropping her hands. “The demon, ah. . . left me with some grill marks.” She couldn’t imagine how his artist’s eye would be revulsed by seeing the ugly burn on her chest. The overhead light suddenly seemed very bright.

Drake unbuttoned his shirt. “I’ve got a few scars of my own.”

His chest was crisscrossed with a spiderweb of raised white scars running across his ribs and curling around his back. Anya tentatively brushed them with her fingers, how they bumped over his ribcage and crossed over his spine in jagged tracks. It reminded her of the frost patterns made by the salt on his watercolors, strangely beautiful in their asymmetry, speaking of untold reactions beneath the surface, beyond what the eye could see. Her hands slid up to the cauterized, angry burn on his shoulder, where she’d shot him.

She lowered her mouth to a scar scraping just below his nipple, heard the hiss of his indrawn breath.

He picked her up, setting her on the edge of the table. She wrapped her legs around his waist, feeling his tongue thrusting in her mouth and his desire pressing against her belly.

His hands moved up from her hips to her breasts, teasing her nipples through the fabric. Plucking open her buttons, he pushed the blouse from her shoulders and kissed the first Hebrew character in blue permanent marker he found there.

“Your exorcist can’t spell,” he murmured against her skin.

“I thought intention was all that counted.”

“Not always.” He peeled the shirt from her chest, to her waist, stroked the burn crossing her chest with the back of his hand. He leaned forward to whisper in her ear: “Now, that’s the effect I’ve been looking for with carbon in my painting.”

He smiled against her hair, kissed her from her jaw to the hip bone jutting out over the waist of her skirt. His hand slid up under her skirt, stroking the inside of her thigh before sliding between her legs. She moaned and arched her back, pressing her breasts against his bare chest. She reached for his belt buckle, drawing it out of the belt loops and casting it aside on the floor. When she reached for him, he moaned, thrusting against her hand.

Drake pushed her back on the table. Bottles of paint and ink rolled away, clattering on the floor. Something shattered, but Drake ignored it as he drew open the drawstring of her skirt and slid it over her hips. He shucked his jeans on the floor and climbed up on the table.

She ached for him, craved the sizzle of his hot skin on hers. Taking his weight on his elbows, he pressed his body to hers. She moaned as he thrust inside her, wrapped her legs around him as he drove them both to an oblivion that rattled the last of his drawing pencils to the floor.

Somewhere in that sweetness of not being alone, something in her broke. It wasn’t the demon. It was something deep within her heart, behind the black void of the Lantern. It cracked and welled up, leaking from the corner of her eye in the form of a tear that she brushed away before Drake noticed.

It was a crack in the façade of fear.

Afterward, she lay drowsing on the floor in the enemy’s arms, wrapped in a clean muslin drop cloth. She lay with her head on Drake’s chest, watching the sky lighten to the east. Sparky lay piled with the dogs in the corner, his head tightly tucked under his tail. After this, she figured that the tail-sucking would be the least of her worries.

She rose and dressed in the thin gray light of morning. As soon as she stepped out of the circle, Sparky attached himself to her knee. She turned back and looked at Drake, stretched in the makeshift circle on the floor and the glitter of salt.

“Stay,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“Why fight what you are?” There was no accusation or anger in his voice, only a genuine wanting to know.

“Because I am what I am.” She bent down to kiss the scar on his eyebrow. “And I am not what you are.”

“I think,” he said, smiling sadly, “that you are not quite certain of that yet. But you will be.”

She left the studio when pink dawn began to stain the sky, his words ringing in her ears.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“LOOK, I TOLD YOU I couldn’t sleep with Ciro snoring like a chainsaw, so I left.”

Anya gripped the steering wheel and stared at the road ahead, not meeting Katie’s eyes. She still felt the witch’s disapproval heavy upon her. Between them, Sparky lay on the bench seat of the Dart. He was making a show of ignoring Anya by sitting this close to her with his back turned, thumping his tail on the seat.

“Yeah, well, it’s where you were afterward that bothers me.” Katie frowned. “You smell like enough fire magick to cook a steak.”

Anya rolled her eyes. “You’re not my mom, Katie.”

“Actually, since we got those forms notarized this morning, I
am
your mom. If you become mentally incapacitated, I get to decide which nursing home to stick you in.”

Katie crossed her arms.

“I am not mentally incapacitated. Not yet, anyway,” Anya grumbled. “Are you navigating, or are you here solely to bust my ass?”

Katie smoothed the map over her knees. “The next turn is just ahead. Left. And I will bust your ass whenever you’re deserving of it.”

Anya made a face and switched on the turn signal. She’d been stuck in the car with Katie for the last five hours, including two bathroom runs at gas stations with very interesting assortments of entertainment available from the machines on the wall. Katie had bought her a fistful of glow-in-the-dark French ticklers, and stuffed them in the Dart’s glove box.

This far south in Ohio, the flat glacial plane had given way to rolling hills and woods. Autumn’s breath was more evident here than in the cities, the brilliant fiery foliage speckling the landscape in a riot of reds and gold. The straight, wide freeways of the north yielded to winding two-lane roads bent back with blind hairpin turns. The gray sky overhead spat occasional raindrops on the windshield. The Dart growled up the hills and valleys in third gear, making progress irritatingly slow. Or perhaps it was just the company.

“Remind me what we’re doing here again?” Katie grumbled, looking greener than the Wicked Witch of the West. She popped another peppermint into her mouth. Anya hoped that if Katie barfed, she would give enough warning for Anya to pull over. The smell of vomit would be nearly impossible to clean from the Dart’s interior. Anya had been under the impression that getting back to nature was supposed to be good for witches. Apparently, the ride there wasn’t so agreeable.

“I’m not really sure,” she admitted. “My mother brought me to Serpent Mound when I was a kid. The shape of it reminds me of the Horned Viper symbol. The research that Felicity did for me indicates that there are some abnormalities in the bedrock here, melt marks consistent with the marks left around the arson scenes. . . it’s just a hunch, really.”

“At least it’ll keep you out of Drake Ferrer’s backyard.”

Anya gave her a dirty look as she pulled into the parking lot of the Serpent Mound Museum. The park perched on a plateau overlooking two branches of creek and surrounding forest. This far south, the grass was still green as summertime, curving around the small blacktop parking lot.

Katie had wrenched the door open before Anya had even shut off the ignition. She took two mincing steps to the grass at the edge of the parking lot and heaved out the remains of a gas station hot dog. Sparky looked balefully up at Anya, the first time he’d looked her full in the face all day.

Sighing, Anya crossed to the front of the car to rub Katie’s shoulders and hold her hair back. She hit the dry heaves pretty quickly, then sat down hard on the curb.

“I’m driving on the way back,” she announced.

“Okay,” Anya agreed, stroking the top of her head.

When Katie wobbled to her feet, the women made their way to the Serpent Mound Museum, a log cabin flanked by two pop machines. They were in luck—the Ohio Historical Society was promoting Ohio’s Haunted Places for October, and the museum was open. Anya bought Katie a bottled water, which she sipped at gingerly. Now that her feet were on solid ground, color had begun to return to her face.

The modest museum exhibited maps of the mound and aerial photos. From the sky, the mound looked like a squiggle of a horned snake opening its jaws around an egg, its spiraling tail curving away. The exhibit information described how, in the late 1880s, a Harvard University researcher had excavated the mound and attributed its construction to the Adena Indians as early as 800 years BC. Later researchers attributed the formation to the Fort Ancient Indians, who built it between 900 and 1550 AD. The exact reason for its construction and its meaning was lost in history, though some speculated that the effigy mirrored the constellation Draco, the dragon.

“Like the old magickal rule goes: ‘As above, so below,’ ” Katie murmured.

The head was measured to be aligned with the summer solstice sunset, but no concrete purpose beyond that could be found. Some historians speculated that the snake symbolized the creature known as the Uktena by the Cherokee people, a horned snake who was charged with the mission to destroy the sun.