Demonkeepers

She paled. “You weren’t.”

“Trust me, I’d know that green eye slime anywhere, anytime. The bastard is still inside me. If I hadn’t yanked myself out of there, I might have—” He broke off, had to swallow hard so he wouldn’t gag on his own bile. It was like before, only worse, because this time he’d thought he was finished being a slave. “I can’t go back there. I fucking won’t.”

She stood to face him. “You’re not going anywhere, Lucius. The makol is dead; its soul was destroyed during the spell, just like my sister’s was. There’s no way it’s still connected to you. It doesn’t exist anymore . If it did, you wouldn’t have been able to access the library even the first time.

Get it? The only place that demon still lives on is in your memories.”

He went very still. “You think I’m making this up?”

“I think . . .” She blew out a breath. “How about we sit down?”

Eyeing the sofa, he said softly, “Would you rather I lie down while you pull the chair around? I’ve told you I don’t want to be your patient, Jade. Don’t try to therapize me.”

“There’s no such word as ‘therapize.’ And another word for therapy is a two-way conversation, Lucius.” But the way she said his name, he knew she was thinking “asshole.”

Deciding she was probably right about that, he sat on the damn couch, and he didn’t move away when she sat beside him and took both of his hands in hers. In fact, he was tempted to lean into her, lean on her. He compromised by tipping his head to rest lightly atop hers. “The sex was fabulous.

Sorry about the postcoital girlie screaming.”

Her fingers tightened fractionally on his. “That was more than sex. And there’s no makol. Whatever you felt just now was your psyche’s way of warning you away from the powerlessness and lack of control that comes from caring for another person. You’re not afraid of the makol. You’re afraid of what’s happening between the two of us.”

For a second he thought he’d misheard. When he went over the words and they didn’t change in his head, he bared his teeth. “In what way?”

She seemed to miss the danger signs, instead rolling on: “I accessed my magic by opening myself up to my feelings for you; I was hoping you’d eventually come around to the point of doing the same thing on your own. You finally did just now, and the Prophet’s magic started to come back online, but —and here I am therapizing a little, to use your word for it, but bear with me, because it plays—I think the magic triggered some of the fears you carry from your experiences with the makol, namely those of being trapped and out of your own control. Your psyche knee- jerked that into a signal it knew you’d react to, namely the green glow of makol possession.”

He ground out, “Back up to the part about hoping I’d come around, will you? Exactly how long have you been working on this theory?”

Her encouraging smile—her counselor’s smile—faltered. “Since I started being able to access the scribe’s talent by thinking about you.”

If he hadn’t been so shaken by the makol’s reappearance, the fear that it would block him from getting back to the library, and, yes, the intensity of the sex, he might have appreciated the irony. Here he was, facing down a lover who was looking up at him as if he were the answer to her freaking prayers, and all he could think about was escaping. From his own damn house.

Hello, shoe on the other foot.

He hadn’t gone into this looking for a relationship. He’d been looking to grow up and move on, and stop getting caught up in old patterns. He’d gotten caught, though, in reverse. And with a woman he cared about, one he hadn’t meant to hurt. Bullshit, a voice said inside him, sounding like Cizin all of a sudden. If you really didn’t want to hurt her, you would’ve cooled things off days ago. You knew she was falling, but you kept coming back. Hell, you carried her over the damn threshold. What the fuck was she supposed to think?

He was suddenly chilled, both by the familiar mental tone of a creature that logic said was dead, and by the realization that whatever the source, the inner bitch-slap had a point. He’d been telling himself one thing while doing what felt good. Those weren’t the actions of the nice guy she’d painted him as.

It was the sort of thing makol bait would do.

There was a flicker of nerves in Jade’s eyes now, but she continued. “What just happened is good news, really, because it means that the next time, if you ignore the green and let the magic take over, you’ll wind up in the library.”

“Maybe,” he said coldly. “Or maybe you’ll wind up with another ajaw-makol loose inside Skywatch. And maybe this time I won’t be strong enough to stop it.”

She paled. “There’s no makol here right now. It’s your way of processing the fear of being vulnerable.”

His anger drained, leaving a hollow ache behind. “Damn it, Jade, they were your rules. Just friends, you said. I was the one who started off wanting more, back before, and you let me down easy.” He shook his head. “Now I guess it’s my turn, for the first time ever, to try to do this right. So I’ll start off with the cliche: It’s not you; it’s me. If I’ve learned anything over the past nine days, it’s that love means putting the other person first, even over your own safety and life, and despite what the writs say about loyalty to the king and the war.” He paused, trying to get it right, and trying not to falter as her face fell. In the end, he said simply: “I can’t put you first.”

Her eyes flared for a second and she snapped, “That’s—” Then she clicked her teeth shut on whatever she was about to say, and shook her head. “Forget it. Just forget it. I guess I misread what I thought I was seeing. I thought we were on the same page.”

“So did I.” He was going to feel like unholy ravening shit in a few minutes, he thought. For the moment, he just felt numb and gray. Like all the color and life had leeched out of him. Was this what it felt like to break up with someone you liked but didn’t love? Gods. He’d thought it sucked to be on the other end. This was ten times worse. A hundred. He felt as if a piece of his world were suddenly out of joint.

“I . . . I guess I’ll go. It’ll be morning soon.”

Reminded that it was the cardinal day, Lucius fleetingly wondered whether he should have let the magic take him, on the chance that he’d been wrong somehow about the green. No, he knew that had been makol green. No question about it. He’d done the right thing, just as he was doing the right thing now. He didn’t know how to love as people like Shandi or Willow did. He had no basis for it, and didn’t want to learn. Jade had been right in the first place when she’d said that love destroyed lives.

Love wasn’t the answer. Inner strength was.

He watched in silence as she crossed the TV room and turned back at the kitchen threshold he’d carried her across less than an hour before. Her face was calm, composed, but he could see the strain beneath. “I’m sorry things got messy. I’ll see you on the ball court in a few hours. We’ve got a game to play.”

She turned and left. He didn’t call her back.

When her family-only cell phone rang, Patience nearly dropped a plate of eggs in her husband’s lap.

Brandt’s head came up at the unfamiliar ringtone. “Who’s that?”

The accusatory edge to the question assuaged her guilt when she flipped open the phone and blithely lied, “Kristie, at the dojo. I know I’m not an official owner anymore, but I gave her my private number in case there were any questions we didn’t go over during the transfer.” Don’t overexplain. She placed the plate in front of him at the dining table they hardly used anymore. “Dig in. I’ll take this in the bedroom while I finish getting ready for today.”

Alone, she pressed the phone to her ear. “Ms. Montana?”

“Nope. Apparently today my name is Kristie and I own a dojo. I’m betting I dot the ‘i’ in my name with a little smiley face. Or am I a Kristy-with-a-‘y’?”

Having already discovered that the bounty hunter had a high retainer, a killer hourly rate for nonbounty work, a smart mouth, and little interest in making friends or even being polite, Patience didn’t bother responding to the dig. “Did you find something?”

“Not just somethin g. I found your sons.”