possible.
There were no cubicles—privacy was so damn girly—just an even dozen showerheads and a sloping floor with a drain in the middle. The tile was white and the fixtures were shiny, but only because they were new. I doubted that the shoe warehouse had come equipped with bathrooms this big, so they’d probably been a recent add-on. And yet, despite the newness, the place managed to be really ugly in the tradition of institutional spaces everywhere.
I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed some more, and since the soapy stuff seemed to double pretty well as shampoo, that included tackling my hair. And damned if I didn’t manage to finally soak the green out. Should have asked Pritkin for something before, I thought blearily, resting my head on the water-slick wall.
I felt exhausted, clammy and vaguely nauseous—the same as when I fed Billy a little too much. I wasn’t completely drained; Pritkin had stopped short of that. In fact, Billy had left me feeling worse than this a time or two—with one exception. Feeding Billy had never left me with a burning little knot of guilt under my sternum.
And that’s exactly what this was, too: guilt. Not overwhelming or paralyzing or crushing, but guilt all the same. I’d experienced enough of it in the past to have no trouble identifying it. I just didn’t know what it was doing there.
This wasn’t the first time Pritkin and I had gotten close; it was the second. The first had been about a month ago during the final battle with Apollo. Pritkin had been seriously injured and his incubus abilities had saved him, with a little help from me. Very little, compared with today, but the basic idea had been the same: I’d provided the energy, he’d done the healing, the end.
And it really had been the end. Our relationship had gone back to the usual and I hadn’t even thought that much about it afterward. There had been so much other stuff going on that it had seemed, well, just one of those crazy things. Like almost drowning myself in a bathtub or being chased by a dragon through an office building. Crazy shit like that happened all the time lately, and that’s the folder it had gone into in my brain. If anything, I’d just been grateful it had worked and that we’d both come out of the battle with a whole skin.
So what was different now?
Was it because I’d enjoyed it? Because I had; there was no point in denying it. Not the first few minutes— those had been pretty damned horrifying. But later . . . yeah. I’d enjoyed it. Kind of a lot. Okay, a hell of a lot. But then, I’d enjoyed it the last time, too. And, seriously, Pritkin was the son of the prince of the incubi. What the hell did my brain expect? That I’d hate it? I mean, what were the odds?
And the fact was, I’d have helped him whether I’d gotten any pleasure out of it or not. The guy was
Was it maybe because I was dating Mircea now, and I hadn’t been before? I mean, Mircea had claimed me a while ago, but master vamps had a habit of simply taking whatever they wanted, as I knew from long experience. It hadn’t surprised me, but I also hadn’t considered us married just because he said so. I hadn’t considered us as having any status romantically at all until we started dating, and that had been after the last little incident.
So was that it? Was I feeling like I’d cheated on him? I thought about it for a while, but that didn’t feel quite right, either. It wasn’t like this had had anything to do with romance. If Pritkin had been a vampire, I’d have given him blood; as it was, I’d given him what he needed to heal. And considering that he’d almost died in both instances because of me, I’d sort of owed him one.
And yet, for whatever reason, this one felt different. I hadn’t had any trouble meeting Mircea’s eyes after the last time. I didn’t know if that would be true now, and it pissed me off that I didn’t even know why.
However, I did know one thing. I wasn’t going to get any absolution—not that I needed any, damn it— because I couldn’t tell him. Not because I didn’t think he’d understand. Vampires tended to be a lot more pragmatic than humans, and if I could explain that it had been a life-ordeath situation . . . well, there was a chance Pritkin wouldn’t lose too many limbs. The problem, of course, was that I couldn’t.
I couldn’t tell Mircea anything, because if I told him why, I’d also have to tell him what—specifically what Pritkin was. And if I told him what he was, I might as well tell him who he was, since there’d only ever been one humanincubus hybrid in all history.
And I didn’t think the magical community was quite ready to hear that Merlin had returned.
Of course, I didn’t know that they would hear about it. I didn’t think Mircea would plaster it all over the front pages, for instance. But he’d do something with it. He wouldn’t be a vampire if he didn’t.
And I really didn’t want to find out what that something would be.
After a while, I sighed and gave up. I’d figure it out later when maybe I didn’t feel like I was about to fall over. The water had stayed hot, but my knees were starting to get wobbly, so I shut it off.
God, I was tired.
I dried off and pulled Caleb’s shirt and a half over my head. The “short” sleeves came down past my elbows, and the hem almost hit my knees. I decided it would do and padded back outside.
The jogger had gone off somewhere and no one had taken his place, so the cavernous space felt kind of creepy. I looked around for Pritkin, because it would be perfectly in character to find him pumping iron even after being almost dead half an hour ago. But I didn’t see him.
The gym was big but it was also pretty open, with no real obstacles in the exercise area and only industrial fluorescents overhead. So it wasn’t like I could have missed him. For one, brief, panic-filled moment—or it would have been panicked if I’d had any panic left—I thought he might have gone back to pick a fight with Caleb. But then I heard water running.
I debated it for a couple of seconds, in case it was the runner who had decided to have a sluice down. But I was really too tired to be embarrassed, and war mages tended to take things in stride. I decided to risk it.
The guys’ bathroom looked exactly like the women’s, other than being larger and having a line of urinals. I walked past the bathroom stalls and into the big shower room in back. There was no door—of course—so it didn’t take me long to find him.
It took me a little longer to figure out what to do.
For a guy who was as loud as Pritkin, he really didn’t lose it very often. Maybe all that yelling served as a release valve; I don’t know. But no matter how bad things got, he kept his shit together better than most people I knew, including me. Not that that was saying much. I was usually the run-screaming-at-the-first-sign-of-danger type, but Pritkin was Mr. Cool under Pressure.
Which was why it was a little strange to find him standing in the spray, staring at a bar of soap with the air of a man who has forgotten what he’s supposed to do with it.
It didn’t look like he’d used it. There were streaks of blood on the powerful legs, oil or something black on the broad back and livid bruises pretty much everywhere. The black stuff had run, dripping down the multicolored skin, making him look like some kind of avant-garde painting or vandalized sculpture.
The hair was wet and plastered to his skull. It made the bones of his face stand out more, and his nose look bigger as he turned his head to me. It wasn’t with his usual rapid reflexes, but in a bewildered kind of way that really worried me. Not that an assassin was likely to be sneaking up on him at war mage HQ, but still. I had the disturbing impression that, if I
Okay, then.
I walked over, despite not knowing what the hell I was supposed to do. Growing up at Murders ’R’ Us, I’d seen a lot of nasty stuff, and my visions had shown me a lot more. Pretty early on, I’d learned to distance myself from inconvenient feelings, from anything I couldn’t easily handle. And by now, I was tops at the Scarlett O’Hara school of emotional distancing. I always thought about the uncomfortable stuff tomorrow, and, as everyone knows, tomorrow never comes.
And despite what psychologists would have you believe, living in denial actually works pretty damn well. At least most of the time. It had worked for me, keeping me functional, keeping me sane—more or less—long after anyone could have reasonably expected.
It wasn’t working so well right now.
It meant that I didn’t know how to talk to Pritkin about his shit, whatever his shit was, because I rarely talked about mine. I didn’t know how to tell him it was going to be okay, because I wasn’t sure that it was. I didn’t have anything useful to say at all, so I didn’t try. I slid my arms around him from behind and held on.
