started gaining the bulk of a Nightkeeper male, along with a warrior’s confidence and ambition. It was all part of the maturation process, he knew . . . but Reese didn’t want to believe it. She kept trying to reel him in and make him back into the guy he’d been before. Which so wasn’t happening.
He dipped into his pocket to touch the smooth, warm bit of carved stone he’d won from Keban, the one the winikin had said would help him reach his full magical potential. He hadn’t been able to work any of the spells yet, but he would do whatever it took to gain control of the lightning . . . and his first real taste of that power had come to him while he was kissing Reese.
Thus, the ring.
Zeke modeled it on his spindly index finger. “This is the one, right?”
“Yeah,” Dez said. “That’s the one.” He pulled out a fat wad of cash and handed it over. “This do it?” It wasn’t that far short of the ask. No point in negotiating when Zeke had seen the way she looked at it.
The pawnbroker boxed the ring up nice and handed it over, and Dez slipped it into his pocket, where it banged up against the statuette. “Keep your lips zipped on this one, okay?” He wasn’t sure how he was going to give it to her, or when. Or even what he really wanted it to mean, besides “I want to get laid.”
Zeke pantomimed a zipping motion, somehow managing to make it obscene. Dez just rolled his eyes and headed for the street.
The dream partway dissolved, leaving Dez swimming in the memory of the calculating bastard he had become under the star demon’s influence. He braced himself, knowing there was more—there always was when Anntah sent the dreams.
Sure enough, images started forming around him once more. Only this nightmare wasn’t anything like the others.
He was his present self, wearing army surplus and carrying an autopistol on one side, knife on the other, but as he stepped out onto the street, the neighborhood was the way it had been back then: grimy streets lined with jacked-up cars, dated stores, and minimal foot traffic, like now-Dez had been plugged into then-Dez’s world. He looked around, gut clenching. What the hell am I supposed to do now? he asked inwardly, but didn’t get jack from his spirit guide. So he started walking, heading toward the apartment he and Reese had shared, thinking that maybe he was supposed to find his younger self and kick some sense into—
He was caught flat-footed when luminous green flashed from the shadows of a nearby alley, and gunfire erupted.
Makol!
There were screams and scurries as the other street rats made themselves scarce. Dez, though, bared his teeth, pivoted and dove, putting himself behind a parked car as he pulled his pistol and snapped off a burst of return fire. Adrenaline surged through him; his warrior’s talent came on line, sharpening his focus and blunting everything but the fight.
The makol fanned out and took cover, still shooting—four big guys with filed-sharp teeth, wearing street clothes and a gang swagger, their eyes glowing eerie green. Then four more of the bastards came out of a second alley behind Dez’s position, getting the damned drop on him.
“Shit!” Throwing himself flat as they opened fire, he rolled, got to the back of the car and came up blasting.
He knocked down two of the green-eyed bastards, but didn’t dare break cover to finish them off. Bullets slammed into the car, bursting the windows and ricocheting. He nailed two more, but there were too damn many of them. Panic stirred at the realization that he wasn’t wearing an armband, couldn’t call for backup. Worse, the makol were spreading out, circling like nasty sharks.
When the air changed behind him, he spun, leading with his pistol. And froze, his heart thudding at the sight of amber-whiskey eyes and sleek, dark hair. “Reese.”
She nudged his gun away. “Didn’t mean to startle you. What, did you forget the plan? Sorry I’m late. Those guys took longer than I expected.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder where dark, greasy ash piles marked where she had already reduced four makol to dust.
As the remaining makol opened with a renewed barrage, she dropped back down beside him, pressing close, so they were touching from shoulder to hip. She was wearing full combat gear and packing extra clips, two of which she tucked in his belt as naturally as breathing. Like him, she was now-Reese in then-Reese’s milieu—her face honed here, softened there, her hair copper-streaked and sassy. But there were no shadows of hidden hurt in her eyes, none of the wariness that said she was just waiting for him to revert. More, when she bumped up against him, his body recognized hers with a soul-deep sense of rightness, a shimmer of connection that made him feel for a split second like they were sharing head-space, that he could see through her eyes and she through his.
Then she shifted away from him, lips thinning as she scanned the situation. “You ready to finish this?”
For a second he just stared as the realization hammered home: In the dream, they were the couple they could have been. He could dimly sense their history—how they had worked their way up and out, she as a cop, he as a real estate rainmaker. And how, when the call had come to reunite at Skywatch, there hadn’t been a question of her staying behind. She was his mate, and they were a team. He hadn’t spent a decade lost and alone, spiraling down into a black hell of his own creation. And he was free to love her, be with her, fight alongside her. Which was how he knew it was a dream.
The image wavered, but he reached for it, clung to it as his dream-self said, “Hell, yeah. Let’s do this,” and they came up firing as one.
Reese hesitated at Dez’s bedside, feeling hotter than the heated air in the room. Her head might be fuzzy with the effects of having tasted the syrup, but she was with-it enough to know that she was going to have to excavate him from the mountain of bedclothes in order to get the medicine into him.
And, yes, that was his underwear over there on the floor.
“You can do this,” she told herself. “It’s no big deal.” But the heavy throb of her pulse said otherwise.
As she pulled off a couple of layers of bedclothes, she wasn’t sure how much of the burn that suddenly fired in her blood was her inner teenager looking for closure and how much was a flat-out hormonal reaction to the man he had become—sleek, predatory, and dangerous. Then there was the magic—she had told herself it wouldn’t be a big deal, but it was. Her skin still tingled from the shield spell he’d used to save her life the day before, warning her that she hadn’t outgrown her rescue fantasies, after all.
“You know you can’t trust him,” she reminded herself.
He was lying on his side facing the door, angled diagonally across the bed, and he didn’t even twitch when she pulled back the sheet, baring his upper body. She didn’t let herself gasp—at least she didn’t think she did. The only thing she knew for sure was that she was staring at an acre or two of smooth golden skin stretched over a relief map of muscle and bone.
He. Was. Magnificent.
His face was fierce even in sleep, lines drawn between his brows as though he glared through closed eyelids. His mouth was a flat line, his jaw an aggressive jut below the long, hooked nose, wide-set eyes, and high cheekbones. Before, his lashes had been thick and full; now his eyelids were bare, turning him into something strange and primal. Back in the day, she had assumed he had started shaving his head to look tougher, and it had worked. Now, she wondered whether it had been a sign of his magic waking up, an impulse he hadn’t fully understood at the time.
She touched his shoulder, intending to shake him, but then just let her fingers rest there. His skin was warm satin, his muscles living stone that poured across his wide shoulders and rippled down his abdomen to disappear beneath the sheet, temping her to picture the rest of him, muscle-etched, golden, and entirely smooth to the touch.
Reese, who waxed herself ruthlessly bare, felt a little envious . . . and a whole lot turned on, her insides gone molten, her skin dampening from more than the room’s near-tropical heat, and—And you’re stoned, she thought on a slow-moving churn of logic. Or high, or something. The antidote had put her in a major state. Her heart thudded and desire raced through her veins, making the past and future seem so much less important than that precise moment in time, and the way her skin looked against his as she touched him, stroking his shoulder,
