he forced himself to end the kiss. He couldn’t make himself pull away, though. Instead, he pressed his forehead to hers so they were leaning into each other, holding each other up. ‘‘It’s not that I don’t want you enough to risk the prophecy,’’ he said, his voice rasping. ‘‘It’s that I want you so much, when I’m with you the other stuff fades. You could become so much more important to me than the others.’’ He paused as a tremor within warned that maybe she already had, that their relationship was already clouding his judgment the way his father’s love for his family had altered the decisions he’d made as king. ‘‘I can’t let that happen,’’ he said. ‘‘Not if we’re going to win this war.’’
He expected her to argue, almost hoped she would. Instead, she said softly, ‘‘Then let me go. I can protect myself now . . . and you’d be a teleport away if I got in trouble. I think it’d be better, easier for both of us.’’
She wasn’t asking for permission, he knew. She was asking him to end it, to release her from their nonrelationship, or at least give her the distance to regain her footing in the rational world.
But he couldn’t. ‘‘Stay,’’ he said, a single word that held both command and longing, even to his own ears.
She drew away so they were no longer supporting each other. ‘‘You don’t need me here, and the others don’t want me here. Why should I stay?’’
Her eyes went dark. ‘‘And then?’’
‘‘And then we’ll see.’’
He expected her to press. Instead she nodded. ‘‘Until the conjunction, then.’’ She touched his arm, tracing each of his marks with a fingertip in a light caress that let him think about nothing but the softness of her skin and the taste of her breath on his lips. ‘‘Where did you go?’’ she asked, tapping the last mark, the one he’d gotten the night before.
It took him a second to refocus, another to answer. ‘‘I zapped myself into the barrier.’’ He didn’t mention that he’d jumped blind, and that he might’ve ended up totally in limbo if the
‘‘Are you ready to be king?’’ she asked, still touching his arm, her fingers resting above the serpent’s wings.
‘‘No,’’ he said, shaking his head. Not with what felt an awful lot like a demon rocketing around in his skull. Not until he figured out how she fit into everything that was going on around him, inside him, and whether the thirteenth prophecy would require her death if he took up the Manikin scepter, which was the symbol of the Nightkeepers’ king. ‘‘But I’m ready to be their leader. I’m ready to find out what the flying serpent mark means, and I’m ready for the others to get their talents so we can start functioning as a team. In fact . . .’’ He glanced at the bedside clock radio and winced when he saw it was past ten a.m. already. ‘‘Can you ask Jox to get everyone together for a meeting? You were right last night. It’s time for me to get off my ass and do my damn job.’’
‘‘Not exactly what I said, but close enough for government work.’’ She rose, her expression guarded, as though she’d taken everything that’d just happened, everything they’d just said to each other, and shoved it deep down inside for later consideration. ‘‘I’ll tell them to meet you in the main room for an organizational sit-down, so you can come up with a plan for the days we’ve got left before the conjunction. I’ll give you fifteen minutes to grab a shower and mainline some coffee.’’
‘‘Thanks. And, Leah?’’
She turned back near the door. ‘‘Yeah?’’
‘‘I’m glad you’re staying. And I’m sorry. For all of it.’’ He was sorry for disappearing on her the night before and leaving her to look foolish in front of the others. More, he was sorry for not being the man who could give her the stars and the moon, and all the love she deserved. And he was sorry that, even knowing he wasn’t that man, he couldn’t let her go.
‘‘Apology accepted,’’ she said, though he wasn’t sure which part she’d agreed to. Sending him a small finger wave and a sad smile, she slipped through the door, out into the sun-bright day.
When she was gone he sat there for a moment, staring after her, feeling shaken and stirred up and far more like a man in the grips of obsession than the levelheaded leader he was supposed to become, or the king his people needed him to be. He wished he knew how to balance the two, how to be a better man. But at the same time, he was realizing that something had changed. He didn’t know whether it was because of Leah’s lecture the night before, the motto she’d given to Skywatch, or his trip into the barrier, but for the first time he wasn’t wishing for an escape or an out.
He was trying to figure out how the hell to get it all done without losing himself in the process.
Leah was feeling shaky and achy as she crossed the pool deck to the mansion, squinting in the too-bright sun.
A few of the twinges were from doing the sleeping-sitting -up thing while waiting for Strike to come around, but the vast majority were from that hell-and-gone kiss he’d laid on her, the one that proved she’d been lying to herself when she’d tried to say that being with him hadn’t been as good as she remembered, that she’d fantasized it into something it wasn’t.
Nope. It was all that, and then some.
Which was a problem, not only because he was determined not to let it happen again, but also because she couldn’t be sure how much of the connection was real and how much was a product of the circumstances.
It was a given that what’d happened in the sacred chamber during the solstice had been courtesy of a god, probably Kulkulkan, trying to gain a foothold on earth by going co-op with her gray matter. And perhaps the sizzle the day after the aphelion had been part magic, too. But since then she hadn’t shown a lick of magical talent, and the sizzle was still alive and kicking harder by the day.
Okay, so she was hot for the guy, magic or no magic. But what about him? There was no way she could
