found the entrance to hers. “Holy Christ,” he hissed, and then he drove into her from behind.
Her lungs filled with a moan as he parted her, forged deep and deeper still. Her senses coalesced to the point of entry as her inner muscles clenched around him while he withdrew and surged into her again. His body was slick and strong as it arched over her. He surrounded her, filled her, kissed the back of her neck as he thrust into her again and again in a primal, atavistic rhythm that started fast and then went faster still.
The resting heat of the orgasm she’d just had snapped tight in an instant as her body said, Yes, this and more. She wanted to give more, take more, take all of him.
Widening her stance, so the outsides of her thighs slicked against the insides of his, she wrapped her arms around his braced forearms and arched her neck back to press her cheek to his jaw, feeling the heat of the two of them together.
“Cara,” he whispered, and it sounded like a prayer. Then he shifted his weight to one arm and freed the other to touch her breasts, her thighs, and the place where they were joined.
At the first brush of his fingers to her sensitized flesh she jumped against him. At the second, she leaned in and purred, arching up against him as he moved. Pleasure coiled anew, raw and unfettered, and she swayed and might have collapsed entirely had it not been for his strong arms holding her, caging her. She convulsed in the throes of a second orgasm, this one coming so much stronger than the first, overwhelming her.
“Ah, gods!” Sven gripped her and quickened his tempo, driving surer and deeper for three strokes, four, and then surging into her, and growling long and deep as he shuddered and cut loose.
He held himself rigid while a groan drained from him, ending in her name. They stayed like that for an endless-seeming moment. Then, breathing like he’d just run the entire proving grounds with a demon at his heels, he collapsed against her, bringing them both to the bed on their sides, still joined by the flesh that stayed hard within her, pulsing.
Wow, she thought. Oh, holy… wow. Or maybe she said it aloud; she wasn’t entirely sure, though he pressed his lips against the back of her neck as if in answer. But he too seemed to have lost the words.
They lay there, locked together and unspeaking, for a long time. Long enough for their breathing to level off and for them to separate. Long enough for the air to feel cold and him to tug up the comforter over them. And long enough for her to know, as she slipped into a light doze and then deeper, that things between them would never be the same.
Skywatch
Rabbit crouched over Myrinne’s body, holding a stained knife that dripped blood onto her lifeless face and open, staring eyes, knowing he was in a dream.
It wasn’t the same dream, though. It was day instead of night, and they were inside Sven’s coyote cave. But she was still dead; he was still standing over her, breathing heavily, his blood racing with a mix of grief and rage.
“How could you?” He heard the words echo like he was in someone else’s mind, only he wasn’t. He was himself, inside his own skull. “Why did you do it? For chrissake, why would you—”
He lurched awake with a strangled cry, slashing at the air with his empty knife hand, trying to ward off the images, the nightmares. Then the fog cleared and he found himself sitting up in bed, surrounded by the familiar walls of his old man’s cottage—his cottage—cast with the bloodred light that oozed from the scarlet-eyed skull night-light Myrinne had gotten him as a joke last year.
“Sorry,” he said blearily. “Didn’t mean to wake—” He broke off, because she wasn’t there. Her side of the bed was cool to the touch, and the cottage had that echoing feeling of emptiness, silent save for the hum of the fridge, that said he was alone.
“Myr?” he called anyway. “You there?”
He didn’t expect an answer, didn’t get one.
He sighed and scrubbed both hands over his face, trying to erase the dream, though he knew that was futile. Even if he managed not to think about it for a few hours or days, it would always come back. Him. The knife. Myrinne.
He couldn’t pretend it wasn’t prophetic anymore; if it had just been the same flash over and over again, maybe… but ever since his mother’s spirit had visited him that second time, the nightmare had been changing. First he’d dreamed the scene with Skywatch whole and untarnished in the background, not burning. Then the time had changed from night to day. And now the location had shifted.
The body and the knife were always the same, though.
One possible future, his mother had called the devastated landscape, which meant that unlike the itza’at seers, her spirit could see varying outcomes, not just a single incontrovertible one. So the changes in the dream had to mean that his actions were affecting the most likely outcome of that night, which was good. But so far, all he’d changed was the setting, not the act. “I don’t care where it happens,” he said. “I want it to not fucking happen.”
In the lonely stillness of the night, though, his words lacked any real punch. Because the hell of it was, he was having doubts.
Where did she go when she slipped out of bed at night? She left her wristband behind, which meant she didn’t want him to be able to track her down. Before, he had told himself there was no crime in her wanting to be alone sometimes. Now he couldn’t stop wondering what the hell she was doing.
He’d been watching her during the day, keeping tabs on where she was, who she was talking to, and he had noticed her getting chummy with some of the winikin. Was it true? Had she somehow orchestrated Zane’s breakdown, as his mother had said?
No, impossible, he’d told himself over and over again, trying not to read too much into each conversation, each witnessed head tilt and overheard laugh. And later, when they were together, the guilt would come crashing down and he would get stiff and awkward with her, or cling too hard and then, when she asked what was wrong, make up some shit about the screaming skull and the First Father.
She knew he was lying; he could see it in her eyes. But she didn’t call him on it. Instead, she would rub his back, make love to him, fall asleep next to him… and sneak out several hours later, headed gods only knew where, leaving him too much time to think. With Zane and Lora cleared of any involvement in the funeral attack, there was still the question of how the creatures had gotten through the ward. Which could—maybe, possibly—leave Myrinne as a suspect.
Gods, please, no, he thought, digging his fingertips into his eye sockets and trying to work away the pain that had become a constant companion over the past few days, along with blurry vision and a shitty appetite. It was depression, he knew, confusion. Giving it a name didn’t make it feel any better, though, so he reached for the Pepto he’d installed in his nightstand and knocked back a third of the bottle, using it to wash down a few Tylenols for good measure.
After all the times Myrinne had stood up for him, stood beside him, behind him, wherever she freaking could stand that would help him make the most of himself… after all that, he hated that he was having doubts. But even if his mother was wrong about some or all of it, that didn’t explain two years of nightmares.
As the Pepto smoothed the sandpaper in his gut and the Tylenol took the edge off the knives being driven into his brain, he dragged himself out of bed and into the second bedroom. Part “toss it in there and we’ll get to it later” and part workspace, the spare room mostly held Myrinne’s Wiccan woo-woo stuff and their school crap. A few months ago, he had cleared out a corner and set up a private altar.
Rather than the Nightkeepers’ standard chac-mool, he had filched a carved stone turtle from the library. Roughly two feet across and resembling an oval coffee table with a domed top and turtle head, it had the calendar glyphs carved around the rim of its shell and a circular depression in the center of the dome. Affiliated with neither light nor dark magic, the turtle symbolized the earth and its waters. Which he figured made it an okay choice, because he wasn’t breaking his “no dark magic” promise to Dez, but he wasn’t praying to the sky either. He was more opening himself up to the possibilities.
Now, though, as he pricked his finger with a stingray spine and smeared the blood onto a small piece of parchment, he was feeling more churned up than opened up. He wanted answers, not more questions; he needed to prove that his mother’s beliefs were flawed in some logically explained way and Myrinne wasn’t using him. He needed both of them to be right.
Then again, the universe hadn’t exactly given a shit about what he wanted in the past. What were the odds it was going to start now?
