Eighty-six days left until the zero date
Coyote Cave
Despite her sunglasses, Cara had to use her hand to shade her eyes from the sun’s glare, trying to see across the rolling hills that surrounded the mouth of the empty cave. “He said for me to meet him out here.”
Out. Pearl’s tail whisked the hardpan, stirring little dust devils. Although she was adjusting to life inside the compound, she still preferred the wide-open spaces beyond the canyon. Risky or not, she liked being free.
“I don’t see another Jeep, though, and he’s not in the cave.” And the flat, barren expanses between the hills weren’t talking. “What gives?”
She was trying not to read too much into Sven’s message—gods knew textspeak sucked at nuances—but he’d been gone since early that morning and he’d been furtive on the way out. She hadn’t pressed, but she had definitely noticed. They were still feeling each other out in the relationship department, still figuring out how it was supposed to work. It wasn’t like either of them had any practice at it.
He was trying, though; they both were. And her warrior’s instincts—the gut feelings she had learned to trust even before she knew they were real—said they would get the balance right eventually. He would still need time alone and it would be a while before letting him in became second nature for her, but they would make it work.
There. Coming. Pearl rose to her feet with smooth, lethal grace and stood at alert, body quivering.
Cara didn’t quite quiver, but it wasn’t far off. Anticipation tightened her stomach as a big shadow came out from behind a nearby dune. “What the…?” Then she burst out laughing at the sight of a contraption straight out of Mad Max, driven by the man she loved.
Sven, wearing surf trunks, wind goggles, and a huge grin, wrestled with a big wind sail set off-center on a two-person surfboard that rode on big, wide wheels. As he came around the corner and headed for her with Mac barking his fool head off and nipping at the tires, a gust caught the sail and sent the vehicle heeling over onto one set of wheels.
“Whooo!” Sven counterbalanced and rode the breeze right to her, then made a wide, braking turn that he managed to make look ridiculously elegant. Then again, he was ridiculously elegant, completely at home in an element that had nothing to do with magic or the war, and everything to do with him. With them.
Fun! Pearl sent. Fun-fun-fun!
Yes, it is, Cara thought, and went to meet her mate.
Love shone from his eyes as he dropped down from the wind sail and collected her for a sweaty, satisfying kiss that had her blood humming and tugged at the connection between them. When they parted, his eyes were dark with promises, and fully focused on her, on the moment.
“I like your new toy, sailor.”
“Our new toy,” he corrected. “Skywatch needs to remember how to have a little fun. Besides, I want to take you sailing, and thought this would be a good compromise for now.” He was breathing lightly and grinning like a kid. “After the war we’ll get ourselves back out to sea.”
“It’s perfect. And so are you.”
“Can I quote you on that?”
“We’ll see.” Stepping away but linking their fingers to tug him along with her, in the easy contact that had become second nature, she went over to the contraption. “Take me with you?”
He moved past her to right the sail and turn the thing against the wind, but he looked back over his shoulder, met her eyes, and said quietly, “Always.”
That one simple word lit her heart with joy. Things weren’t perfect, but she wasn’t waiting anymore; she was living in the moment with the man she loved, the one who stood there now, bare chested, tan, and laughing as he held out a hand to her in invitation with a quirked brow that said, I dare you.
And she dared. Oh, she dared. And as they sent the wind sail screaming across the desert, pressed together, laughing, kissing, and just being, with their familiars galloping behind, she couldn’t imagine a more perfect moment, a more perfect man, a more perfect love. It was a world—and a life—worth saving.
Forever after.
Don’t miss Rabbit’s book,
Spellfire
Coming in November 2012 from Signet Eclipse!
Read on for a preview…
Rabbit’s father had always said that someday Rabbit would get what he deserved… and it turned out he’d been one hundred per-fricking-cent right. Shit, Rabbit could practically picture Red-Boar standing in the doorway, glaring at him from beyond the grave with a big-ass See? I told you so plastered on his mug, as leather whined through the air.
Then the brined lash cracked across Rabbit’s back, laying open another bloody ribbon, and the image exploded into white-hot pain. He twisted against his shackles as if it were the first time he’d been whipped rather than the thousandth, and he might even have screamed.
Maybe not, though. He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure of much these days; his world had condensed down to the stone-block cell that had become his prison, and the golden-haired bitch who tormented him, tortured him, trying to make him give up something he’d already lost.
“Turn him around.” At her order, talons scraped on stone and he was hit with a foul stench. Claws swung him on his chains, and he went from having his battered face pressed against the putrid wall to staring into the equally putrid visage of a camazotz.
Nearly eight feet tall, with the body of an overendowed man and a face cursed with ratlike red eyes, a smashed-in nose, and a triangular mouth that held way too many fangs, the bat demon was ugly from a distance, and really fucking gnarly up close. It kept its ragged wings and barbed tail curled near its body in the narrow confines of the cell, but the oily drool and the way its beady-ass eyes went over Rabbit’s body said it was thinking about taking what little was left of his skin for wing patches.
A month ago, Rabbit would’ve told it to go fuck itself, and maybe even described the process in graphic detail. Now all he could do was groan as his spine grated against the sandpapery stone.
“Back off,” his tormentor said from behind the creature, and the camazotz ducked its head and gave way, returning to its post beside the door with a hiss that was its version of Yes, mistress, anything you say, mistress. That left Rabbit with a view that—to him, at least—was worse than a chorus line of camazotz doing Pirates of Penzance.
He didn’t know what the demon’s natural form looked like—the Banol Kax could take on many shapes, from humans to three-story-tall winged monsters that breathed fire. This one appeared to be a woman in her twenties, with long, wavy hair, high cheekbones, and pale eyes that were unnervingly like his own. She wore a long red robe and had the trefoil mark on the inside of her right wrist, just as he did. All that was the same as it had been before, when he had known her in the world outside his cell. But where before she had come to him, slipping through the protective wards around Skywatch to speak to him in visions where she seemed ethereal and ghostly, now she was flesh and blood, or at least pretending to be.
It was all lies, after all.
As she approached, he forced a sardonic smile through split lips that hadn’t even bothered swelling, as if his body had given up on any hope of repair, and said, “Hello, Mother.”
She wasn’t his mother, of course. She had played the hell out of the role, though, getting inside his head and offering him what he’d most wanted: a mother who had loved him and a reason to think that his old man had given a shit. She had sold him on the fantasy of having a real name—Rabbie—and a real family. She had cooed over him, coddled him… and then she had turned him, gradually and irrevocably, until he believed with every fiber of his twisted being that she was his only ally and all the others were his enemies, even the one person who had loved him unconditionally no matter what.
Myrinne. The word was a whisper in his soul, a cry of agony coming from the raw wounds of knowing what
