War for the Oaks (39 page)

The phouka stood up stiffly. His face was bleak. "I'm sorry. If it's any consolation . . . no, of course it's not. But I would do anything now to undo what I've done to you."

His words were a distraction, and she shook her head to clear them away. "Was he recruited the way I was?"

"Essentially. The binding itself was not the same."

"And did he try to get away from them?"

The phouka looked confused. "I don't know."

"I bet he didn't." She shook her head again. "I bet he thought it was a great way to get back at me. It was a lost cause before you even showed up, and I never knew it."

He knelt again before her. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying I never knew, all the time I was with him, what a mess he must really be. Poor screwed-up Stuart."

The phouka looked genuinely rattled. "He may not be doing his part wholeheartedly. You weren't, at first."

"Do you think I'd stand by, even
stand by
, and watch you ambush an unarmed man?" Eddi snapped.

Round-eyed, he shook his head.

"Have they hypnotized Stuart? Turned him into a zombie? No? Then don't offer any goddamn excuses for him." And she turned her face away.

"We cannot know what they've done to him."

"I know. I hope to God there
are
excuses for him. But Stuart has always wanted to be bigger than he is. If somebody offered him what you offered me . . ." Her throat felt hard and hot, and she had to stop talking.

"Do you forgive me?" the phouka asked after a moment, with caution.

"Nothing to forgive."

He sighed, closed his eyes, and let his head fall back. She took his face in her hands and pulled it down again, and his eyes flew open when she shook him a little. "But in the future, would you please, please,
please
tell me these things?"

"Yes. I shall."

"Is there anything else I should know?"

The phouka shook his head.

Eddi stood up and looked around the room. There was nothing more to see, no new clues. She wasn't sure what more she wanted—a
map to the bad guys' hideout, maybe. "We have to do something," Eddi said, hearing echoes of Carla's words in her own.

The phouka set his hands on her shoulders. "We can do nothing more now. Wait until tomorrow. The Lady will choose her course then, and it may affect ours. And if she chooses to give up the park, then we need do nothing at all."

"Is she likely to do that?"

After a pause, he replied, "I cannot say."

"But she will do
something?"
Eddi turned under his hands. She needed to see his face, even though she knew he wouldn't lie.

"She will. All of the Dark Lady's arguments are sound. Willy is the queen's kin, and it must prey upon her to think of him in the hands of her enemy."

Rain spattered on the windows; Eddi went to the nearest and looked out. The street was already shining wet. "What will they do to him?" she asked.

"I don't know."

She leaned her head against the glass, and the coolness of it was a comfort.

"Do you find you still care for him?" the phouka said softly from across the room.

She turned around to look at the band's equipment, at Willy's guitar with its string hanging broken. "He's my lead guitarist," she said finally, with a flimsy smile. "And given a little time, he might be my friend. I don't think he understands friendship yet, but he's making progress. Yeah, I care for him." Then she shifted her gaze to the phouka's wary face, and her voice hardened. "If she'd kidnapped Carla, I'd have dangled her out of one of her goddamn windows until she gave her back."

"I see. What would you have done, had it been me?"

"Same thing. Only I'd have held her by one ankle."

His lips twitched. "I'm impressed by the strength of your regard."

"Oh, Phouka," she said, not quite steadily. She met him in the middle of the floor and put her arms around him, pressed her face into his ruffles.

"If you get tearstains on my shirt, my valet will never forgive you." He held her tightly against him.

"Fire the bastard," she said, and sniffed. "Let's go home."

They stopped by a phone booth on the way, and Eddi called Carla.

"They've got him, all right," Eddi said. "Looks like they grabbed him from the rehearsal space."

There was a long pause. "Shit," Carla said.

"Stay put tonight," Eddi told her. "Meet at the practice room at three tomorrow. Either we'll know something then, or we won't be able to stand it anymore."

"Jesus. Isn't there
anything
we can do in the meantime?"

"Is Dan there?"

"Yeah."

"Then what are you asking me for?"

Carla laughed, if reluctantly. "I'll tell him you said so."

When she'd hung up, she stood for a minute looking out through the wet glass of the booth. She'd found a spot under an awning to park the motorcycle, and the phouka sat on it, his arms crossed over his chest, his head down. In the window beside him a neon beer sign flashed on and off. It lit the rain in his hair with red reflections and tinted his profile. She wondered if it was the light that made him look sad and tired.

She ran across the street through the drizzle. When he looked up, she kissed him.

"I love you," she said.

"Whatever gave you the idea that I needed to hear that now?"

"I don't know."

"Well, whatever it was, I'd like to thank it." The bleak look was gone from his face.

They rode home through the gathering storm, as the thunder caught up with the lightning. When they pulled up behind the apartment building, the weather struck in earnest. The rain pounded them, and they ran for the back door and left puddles on the stair landings. Once inside the apartment, neither of them moved to turn on a light. Rain slapped the windows like hail; the lightning strobed through the room.

Eddi went to the windows. "Have you ever noticed how lightning takes the color out of things?" she said. "Every time there's a flash, it looks like a bad print of a movie."

"Eddi . . ." The phouka clutched the back of the armchair looking down. "Nothing is as I would have wanted it, but I . . ." He flung his head back, shaking water out of his hair. Between one roll of thunder and the next, she heard a frustrated sigh.

She knew suddenly how it would feel to touch him: sliding her
hands across the wet, chilly fabric of his shirt and finding his skin warm underneath. She shivered.

He stepped forward and laid his hand on her upper arm. "You're cold."

She put her fingers over his, to keep him from pulling them away. They stood like that for a moment before Eddi lifted his hand. She touched it to her lips, one fingertip at a time. His other hand curled around the back of her neck and drew her to him. She relinquished his fingers and kissed his mouth.

"Come with me," she said at last, when her head felt light and her heartbeat rattled her like the thunder did the windowpanes. She led him through the lightning into the bedroom.

He stood very still beside the bed. He might have been reluctant—but she heard him breathe, saw his face and his closed eyes in the intermittent light. She slid the damp brocade coat off his shoulders and let it drop to the floor, then unbuttoned the waistcoat beneath. That followed the coat, and she began to work on the tiny pearl buttons buried in the ruffles of his shirt. She heard him laugh breathlessly.

"I could make it all vanish if you prefer."

"Don't you dare. I enjoy this."

"I can tell." He drew her damp hair back from her face and kissed her temples. "So do I. You'll forgive me, won't you, if my knees become too weak to hold me up?"

"I think so." She finished with the buttons, and began to slip the shirt off his shoulders.

"Cuffs," he murmured, and attended to them himself. Eddi watched, fascinated with him. There was a remarkable, pleasurable tension in it—she knew he was conscious of her gaze on him, and yet he didn't raise his eyes until he'd dropped the shirt on the floor. Then he shook his hair back and faced her, unsmiling, his chin up in the haughty pose that meant he was scared. The streetlight in the alley filtered through the blinds, painted highlights on the muscles of his chest and abdomen and shone on the tight-curled hair growing there.

He took her chin in his hand and kissed her. "I haven't the faintest idea how to get you out of this, you know," he said, tapping the velvet on her shoulder.

Eddi realized why he'd seemed so absorbed in his cuffs—she was seized with shyness as she undid the zipper under her arm and pulled the blouse over her head.

"Ah," he said softly. "That's where it is. I can manage the rest, I think." He did, his hands careful at her waist. Hers shook over the buttons of his pants. The most vulnerable moments in lovemaking were in undressing, Eddi decided. She would have examined the notion, but her thoughts wouldn't settle down long enough for study.

She was half-afraid to hold him naked against her, but only half. He was all smooth, soft skin over hard muscle, all hungry mouth and inquiring hands. She turned away long enough to pull the bedcovers back. He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her to him, but she kissed him swiftly and shook her head. "Lie down on your stomach," she said.

He raised his eyebrows, but obeyed.

She wanted to make it last. She would only have one chance to make love to him for the first time; though arousal was itself a powerful glamour and clouded the mind, she chose to linger over his body. She kissed his neck, beneath the crisp black hair. She stroked his shoulders with her lips, and sketched his spine with kisses. His fingers stretched out tense and then curled, like a stroked cat's paws. She heard a hiss of indrawn breath when she reached the small of his back, and again at the insides of his thighs. She nudged lightly at his waist with one hand, and he rolled over.

She knelt over him, and kissed his mouth and eyelids, his ears, down his throat. He fastened both hands on her hips, then let his palms slide upward, over her stomach and ribs and breasts, across her shoulders to her arms. Then he pulled her down against him. His excitement fueled hers—his breathing fast and harsh, his heart pounding under her spread fingers.

The world shrank slowly, steadily, until it was a tight-fitting envelope that barely held the two of them, the continuous two-colored surface of their skin and all the sensations that coursed along it. Her thoughts were blurred and broken; she moved by instinct, through pleasure like a brewing storm. Then he cried out beneath her, and all her senses failed in light and darkness. When she had skin again, and a body, she found that he did, too, and they were sweat-damp and drained, twined around each other. They dozed like that, and the warm, grassy smell of his hair invaded her dreams and made them sweet.

The first time she woke, the sky was lighter outside the bedroom blinds. The phouka lay on his side next to her, asleep. With his restless
energy set aside, his eyes closed, and the lines of his mouth softened in sleep, he looked about seventeen. She drew the sheet up over his shoulder and shut her eyes again.

When she woke again the sun was up, and he was awake, propped on one elbow and watching her.

"Mm." She smiled at him. "What're you doing up?"

"I need very little rest. Do you know that when I tickle your nose, you frown at me in your sleep just as you do when you're awake?"

"When were you tickling my nose?"

"Just now, to make you wake up. You see? I told you that you frown."

She tried to throw her pillow at him. That led them, through devious routes, to another kiss, which in its turn led them to lovemaking.

Afterward, she said sleepily, "What time is it?"

"A little before noon, I think," the phouka replied, playing with her hair.

"D'you figure Her Ladyship has made up her mind yet?"

"We can hope. Would you like me to find out?" He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. She watched him go out into the living room, brown and graceful. For a moment she felt a wordless, longing ache, as if he were a line of music she couldn't reproduce.

He stood at the kitchen table, doing something to a piece of paper from the telephone notepad. She slid out from under the sheet and went to lean in the bedroom door.

"What's that?"

"You'll see." He was folding the paper, his fingers quick and certain. Just as she recognized it, he held up the finished paper airplane. He went to the living room window, blew softly on the plane, and launched it out over the alley. "You thought I was joking, didn't you?" he grinned.

"When you said you got messages by paper airplane? Of course I did." The plane was a scrap of white, spiraling over the next roof in the updraft—and then it was gone. Not carried out of sight, but vanished between one moment and the next.

The phouka came and leaned on the other post of the doorframe, so that their hips barely brushed. "Of course, the very idea is a joke of sorts. We're fond of children's toys and games. The best of them have the power of symbol and ritual, polished and perfected through years of repetition."

Eddi smiled. "I think it's just your essential juvenile nature coming out." She went into the bathroom to start the shower.

"Oh, a good bit of that, too," the phouka said over the sound of the water. "But you'd be amazed. Centuries of mortals seeking to master magic, pursuing blood sacrifice and self-denial and all manner of unpleasant studies. And if only they'd known the trick of it, they could have slain their enemies with a game of jackstraws."

Eddi stepped under the flow of water and looked out at him. "Can I slay
my
enemies that way?"

His mouth took a sudden wry twist. "Unfortunately, no. You have the wrong sort of enemies."

"Good."

"Good?"

"If it was that easy, I'd feel sort of obliged to do it. And I'm not hot to start killing people."

He stepped into the tub and pulled the shower curtain closed behind him before he answered. "It may come to that, you know," he said quietly.

"But it might not. Pass the shampoo?"

They took pleasure that was only slightly erotic in scrubbing each other's back, and they stood embracing under the shower head, so that the water would rinse them both at once.