Forged: The World of Nightwalkers (19 page)

“She doesn’t know she’s dead or something,” Kat said, nibbling one of her chapped lips.

“Kat. ’Tis cold and time is wearing on,” he said gently.

“I know. I’m sorry. I just want to try one more thing. Where are we going?”

“For now? Walmart,” he said dryly.

“Right. Okay. That’s too long. It’s going to take us forever. I was thinking if the plows come through by the time we get to town then we could get a car somehow and drive the rest of the way there. The main roads might be better than the side roads … plowed sooner anyway. So let’s see if she can make it off the property.”

She looked around. “Aha!” Then she wrote, “Meet me at the willow tree.”

The willow was about fifty yards away on the other side of the road. Then she immediately began to hurry away, her companion tagging along behind her. As she ran she could see a second set of footprints running along beside her, though at a careful distance. After all, they didn’t want to run into each other again. The first time had hurt bad enough.

Sure enough the ghost made it off the property just fine. They began to write back and forth again furiously.

“Are you a ghost?”

“Are
you
a ghost?” she responded in reply.

“Hmm. Odd.”

“Kat, I’m freezing my bollocks off.”

“Right! Sorry. Let’s have them meet us at Walmart. It’ll take us another couple of hours to get into town and if the roads are better … I’d say tomorrow night? Maybe around nine p.m.?”

“Yes, but where? And what if we’re late?”

“Do you have any paper? Let’s see if she can read from a note.”

He looked at himself and his nearly nude state and then back at her as if she’d lost her ever-lovin’ mind.

“Oh! Right. Okay, so no paper. But they’ll have paper there if we can get there.”

Will leave a note at River Ridge Walmart entrance. Right-hand side
.

“Those entrances are huge. Inside or outside?” Ahnvil asked.

“Oh right!”

All the way inside immediate right. 9 p.m. tomorrow night
.

Okay!
The ghost replied.

“Wow! Let’s go! I want to see if she can make it and if she can find the note. This is so cool!”

Suddenly the woman who had been dragging her feet the whole way was delighted and eager to be going. She whooped out, the sound echoing in the night, as she hurried her way down the mountain. Good thing, too, because Ahnvil couldn’t feel a damn thing from the waist down.

It was nearly dawn by the time they got into town. There wasn’t a plow in sight. Her disappointment was legendary.

“Doona worry, Kat. We’ll make it there come time for her to get the note. Let’s find a place to warm up.”

“There’s a motel.” She eyed him up and down. “I’ll get the key. You can wait and I’ll let you in the room.”

By the time he got into the room with her he thought he’d rather be dead. He was so cold he could hardly move and his feet were torn up and bloody, a fact he was going to have a hard time hiding from her once they were in close quarters again. He could only hope that lack of electricity would work in his favor.

“Jesus Christ,” he said under his breath once he had excused himself to go into the bathroom. He was hunched over into himself, leaning back against the door. There was nothing for it. There was only one way he could think of to get warm the way he needed to get warm fast. And since sex wasn’t likely to be the best idea in her opinion, he would have to settle for less. He took the time to wash his feet in cold water—cold water, which felt a damn sight warmer than his feet right then. He changed
his flimsy towel for a clean, dry one then hurried out of the restroom.

“Oh good!” She went to hurry past him. “I snuck Karma in. Took me a few minutes to pull the hunks of snow out of her fur, but she’s good now. I’m going to use some towels to dry her. And I have to pee fiercely bad. Needed to for hours but, you know, baring my ass in the cold was so not in the cards. I was—Hey! What is this?”

She came out of the bathroom holding up the bloody towel he’d used for his feet. “Is your wound bleeding again?” she demanded, running over to him, but he grabbed her hands and kept her from raising it.

“ ’Tis nothing. Now hurry up and get into bed wi’ me. We need tae conserve what li’le warmth we have left.”

“In bed with … oh.” Clearly she hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Maybe we should get separate—”

“No,” he said, hard and short. “ ’Tis no time for you to be quailing about. You’ll sleep wi’ me.”

And that apparently was the end to it. And, gratefully enough, worrying about getting into bed with him was enough to keep her from remembering the blood on the towels. Not willing to press his luck he made sure all the drapes were as tightly closed as possible and then shivered his way into the cold bed. When she was done drying the dog off as best she could she shucked off her snow pants, and climbed gingerly beneath the covers as well. Then before he could reach for her and drag her up against him she whistled for Karma and the big dog lumbered up into the bed and, bless her heart, crawled right up between them.

“Och, lass, a Newfoundland chaperone?”

“Yup,” she said grinning at him through the dark. “Plus, she’ll keep us warm.”

He couldn’t argue with that.
It was probably for the best
, he thought. He really needed to keep his distance from her. He was no good for her. Despite his cravings
otherwise, she would be better off the sooner she got him out of her life.

But hours later as he lay there in excruciating pain listening to her snore, he couldn’t keep track of that fact.

He whistled and snapped his fingers beside the bed. Karma obediently perked up and after a minute lumbered down off the bed. Clearly she was used to the big animal moving in and out of the bed because Kat didn’t so much as flicker an eyelash at the departure. Once he had gathered her up against himself, rolling her to the center of the bed, he patted the bed on the other side of her and called up Karma. Karma came back eagerly. Now she would be swaddled in warmth from back to front and he would have the feel of her to add even more pain to his already agonizing existence. Despite having warmed up a modicum, he was still feeling cold and his side and feet were on fire. The idea of putting on those snowshoes again was unbearable. As it was he would need to get boots when they finally made it to Walmart and he had no idea just how swollen he was going to end up being by then. It didn’t matter. As long as he got through to the next leg of their trip.

Soon after his exhaustion caught up with him and he fell asleep.

He wasn’t aware of when his stone skin began to ripple along his body in alternating waves.

When Kat awoke it was to the feel of something hot and rough surrounding her. She started and the roughness immediately dissipated and melted into heated male sinew in an arm locked around her. As her movements stirred him, she twisted around to face him.

“Were you just stone?” she asked.

“Hmm? No, I …” Then he went very still, seeming to think about it and doing an internal check of some sort. Then his expression grew shuttered and shadowed. He pushed away from her, backing out of the bed until he hit the nearby wall on that side. “We better get going,” he said after a moment.

“Wait a minute,” she said, scrambling after him. “You did! You did turn to stone. And you were lying to me weren’t you? You don’t have as much time as you led me to believe you did, do you?”

“Leave me be,” he said darkly, moving to push past her.

“That’s it!” she cried. “I’m right! You
lied
to me!”

“Doona fash yourself, lass. Now let me by … unless, of course, you’d rather help me with the raging cockstand sleeping again’ you has given me. Maybe that’s the stone you were feeling?”

“Oh!” She hauled off and smacked him on the shoulder
 … and she didn’t pull the punch. Not that it hurt him. And that was the problem. Nothing hurt him. Not his side, not his feet. Nothing. And that could only mean one thing. He’d turned to stone while he slept. Turning completely to stone state increased his healing time exponentially. “You are not going to try and use sex to scare me off. That’s what you’ve been doing, isn’t it? With the towels and now with this. Where was that blood from anyway, if not your side?”

“My feet. They were cut up something fierce.”

“Were?”
She immediately knelt down at his feet and began to inspect them. This time the groan he bit back proved he hadn’t just been using sex as a device to keep her at bay. Kat down on her knees before him while he was hard as nails erect sent desire clawing through him. He shook his head and tried to stay focused.

She’s mad. Remember she’s mad
, he thought to himself.

“There’s nothing wrong wi—”

She chose that moment to look up and with a gasp she realized his loosened towel was doing very little to hide the state of his body. In fact, she was so close to his erection that all she would have to do was rise up a little more on her knees and she’d be able to kiss him on it.

No! No kissing! No thinking about kissing a large, hot, incredibly hard penis
, she reminded herself fiercely.

Nope. Not her. No, sir.

“I warned you, lass,” he said, one of those shit-eating grins spreading wide across his face. “You doona wish for me to lie tae you? Well, I want your mouth on me fiercely bad an’ there’s no lie abou’ it.”

Just speaking the words made his cock ache twice as hard with need. He would never have allowed it of course because she would deserve a lot of attention long before he could even think about her gracing him in such a way, but there was no curbing the hot flash of fantasy seeing her on
her knees in front of him was riding hard on him. He could just imagine what the warmth of her wet mouth would feel like. The stroke of her tongue. The touch of her hand.

“Jesus woman, stand up. You’re killing me.”

Kat hastened to her feet and backed up a careful step.

“Your feet are healed,” she said. She swallowed, clearly trying to pretend he wasn’t sporting the most stellar erection of his long long life.

“When I turn stone it hastens healing,” he told her. The reminder that he’d lost control over himself did wonders for cooling his ardor. Still, ardor was becoming a constant state around her. “My side is near healed as well.”

She stepped forward at that, forgetting to be cautious as she lifted his shirt and pulled back the bandage. It had blood on it from the rigors of yesterday’s travels, but beneath the bandage his wound was knitted and well on the way to forming a fresh scar.

“Will you scar permanently or will that change as well?”

“It will most likely scar. We carry the mark of severe wounds. But only the most severe. Everything else we heal completely from.” He didn’t realize it, but when he spoke of severe wounds his hand automatically rubbed at the brand on his chest.

“What’s that called?” she asked, drawing his attention to it.

“An ouroboros. When a Bodywalker is made a tattoo of an ouroboros appears somewhere on their body. My master chose it as his brand to identify me as belonging to him so no one would question me or give me a hard time if I made demands of them. You see, no one likes a lowly Gargoyle to give them commands.”

There was anger in his eyes as he said that, but there was also a determined sort of pride as well. He would not allow his past to drag him down. That was what the
lift to his chin meant. Nor would he accept any pity she might be feeling for the life he’d been forced to live. It had been what it had been. Nothing they did, nothing they
felt
, would change that.

She moved away from him, moving to the tightly drawn drapes. She gingerly peeked around one to look at the sky. It was nearing dusk. She stepped back.

“We have a little time. I’m going to see about getting us some food and—”

“No! You canna go out in the light!”

“I can bundle back up, use my scarf to cover my face. There’d be no—”

“I said no!” he said, his tone final and fearsome. “You’ll no’ risk yourself on account of me. Any one of a thousand things could happen and you’d get hurt. You’ve no sunglasses tae shade your eyes. ’Twould be madness and I’ll hear no more of it. We wait.”

The truth was she didn’t want to go out in the light. But she did need to check the roads and maybe see about renting a car, if it were at all possible. But she nodded to him and figured another hour wouldn’t make too much of a difference. The car rental place would not be likely to be open in any event. She looked at her watch. She was anxious to get to Walmart. She wanted to see if her ghostly friend would be able to find her note. In order for that to happen they needed to get there before nine.

“All right, we’ll wait,” she said.

She stood there for a moment longer, long enough to shiver in the stark cold of the room. It was so cold she could see her breath on the air. Clearly the electricity was still out and for some reason Clemmons, the motel owner, did not have a generator. She hoped he was just as cold as they were. It was very thoughtless of him, especially knowing what the weather could be like and
the fact that this was ski season and he was more likely to be full than not this time of year.