Naughty Karma

He gave a low, dark laugh and took a long drink. “I eat. I drink. I even sleep on occasion. My hair grows and when I try to grow a beard, it itches like a bitch, same as any other guy. The difference is the more magic I use, the more it sort of speeds up my body. I need to eat more often, shave two or three times a day, and I might as well be narcoleptic if I’m really burning hot, cuz I’ll pass out and wake up fifteen minutes later ready to do it all over again. So while I get drunk fast—one more of these and I’m gonna be singing show tunes—I also sober up fast.”

“What happens when you don’t use magic?”

He smiled. “I always use magic.” Their glasses refilled with a wave of his hand, the level in the bottle dropping in concert.

“I bet you couldn’t go one day without casting a spell.”

“And you would win that bet.” He shrugged, unapologetic.

She’d expected him to puff up at the challenge, but he tipped back in his chair, rocking it onto the hind legs as he swirled the vodka in his glass, calm and utterly unoffended. She really didn’t know this man. He’d been her greatest frustration for months, but what did she really know about him?

“What kind of name is Prometheus?” The vodka made her tongue feel loose and easy, words spilling right off it.

“Titanic.”

“But why call yourself that?”

“The man who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the masses, then was doomed to lose internal organs as a punishment? Somehow it seemed fitting.”

“But Prometheus. Don’t you ever wish your name was Steve or something?”

“You probably fantasize about being called Beth, don’t you?”

“Katharine, actually.” She blinked and frowned at her glass—she’d never told anyone that.

He laughed. “Sweetheart, you’re no Kate. People like us need names that could never belong to anyone else.”

“People like us. What does that even mean?”

“Demigods.”

“You’re saying one of your parents was a god?”

“Fine, I’m not a demigod by the strictest definition. Maybe just a minor deity. But demigod has such a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

“You aren’t a god, Prometheus,” she said dryly. “Demi or otherwise.”

“I guess that depends on your definition. What is a god anyway? I have the power to bend the world to my whim. Isn’t that godlike?”

She ignored the question, realizing he was trying to pivot the conversation away from his past. There was so much more she wanted to know. “You changed your name after you traded your heart?”

“About that time, yeah.”

“What was your name before that?”

“That’s a useless question.”

“Why?” She noticed she was holding the charm he’d made for her and dropped it over her neck. It settled against her breastbone, warm and right, expanding her sense of calm.

“I’ve been Prometheus for longer now than I was ever known as anything else, and it’s more who I am than any other identity ever was. You won’t know me by looking back there. In all ways that matter, I was born a little over nineteen years ago.”

He rocked his chair and drained his glass. Karma sipped her drink. The vodka wasn’t kicking anymore. It slid down smooth and easy, warm and welcome. The glasses kept refilling on their own and now that she thought about it, the glass felt different in her hand, bigger. Or maybe it was her hand that felt different. Tingly and sort of swollen—like there was a delay between her skin and the nerves, a padding that filtered everything she touched.

And her lips, they tingled too. She ran her tongue over them, fascinated by the feel. She might be drunk. Was Prometheus drunk too? She looked at him, wondering if his lips felt tingly and flushed like hers. He looked relaxed, tipped back in his chair, his lead lolling back loosely as he rested his drink against his stomach. He nagged at her about relaxing, but he didn’t let his guard down around anyone else either. It was ingrained, that distance he kept between himself and the rest of the world.

“Did you like growing up in foster care?”

The chair legs thumped as they slammed back to the floor. Prometheus wasn’t relaxed anymore. His black eyes bored into her. She hadn’t meant to say it. Her filters were down and that knowledge that sometimes hit her had popped out of her mouth before it had even really had a chance to register on her brain.

“No one likes growing up in foster care.” He reached for the bottle, refilling their glasses by hand.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“You pulled that out of thin air, didn’t you? Post-cognition too, huh? Some fucking gift you’ve got there.” His face was tight. She’d never seen him angry before. She’d been furious in his presence, but he’d never gone past I-don’t-give-a-damn on the emotional spectrum. It was a little scary, seeing him like this. She felt the most animalistic part of her brain screaming at her to run like hell, there was a pissed off predator a few feet away from her, but she stayed perfectly still, watching him.

“Does it all make sense now?” he snapped. “Why I don’t give a shit about my birth name? Why I can’t understand why you wouldn’t have any curiosity about your birth father? What is with that? I’ll never know who my biological parents were and that shit makes me nuts. How does it not make you crazy?” He lurched up out of the chair, his long legs covering the ground to the couch in three strides.

Karma rose, the room swooping dizzily for a moment, and followed, drawn toward him like a tether connected them. She knew the answer to his question, but she didn’t say it. She had a family. Her parents. Jake. Sure, she’d been different. The ocean of power inside her had set her apart from them, made it so they could never wholly understand her, but they had always loved her. That’s why she didn’t need to know who had supplied the sperm to create her. Prometheus hadn’t had that. He’d been alone, trying to figure out who he was in a vacuum.

It was easy to picture him—she wasn’t sure whether it was imagination or some facet of her abilities supplying the images, but she saw them all the same. Smart, independent, resourceful, often in trouble. The system would not have rewarded his defiant brand of ingenuity.

She toed off her heels and sank onto the soft, ivory leather of the couch beside him, careful to keep all traces of sympathy from her expression. He wouldn’t want it. The topic was a minefield and she was too fuzzy to navigate it well, so she hid the way the thought of him as a kid made her ache, letting him see only the respect she had for what he’d become.

She raised her glass to him. “To hacking out a place for yourself in the world.”

That obsidian gaze landed hard on her. He went preternaturally still and for a moment, she saw the predator, pure and unvarnished, looking back at her. Her stomach clenched. Then he blinked, something unlocked and suddenly his mouth was twisted in a wry smile, his glass clinking against hers. “To hacking it out.”

Karma took a breath, belatedly realizing she’d been holding it, and they both drank. After the tension of the moment, relief made her head spin. Or maybe that was the alcohol. The vodka slid over her tongue like silk now and pooled pleasantly with the warmth in her stomach. She could focus on him, but the rest of the room had taken on a distant, fuzzy quality. Houston, we’ve achieved orbit. She frowned, squinting blurrily at the ice clinking merrily in her glass. “Why isn’t the ice melting?”

“Magic,” he rumbled. And just like that, he was relaxed again. How did he do that? He stretched an arm along the back of the sofa, his fingertips grazing the back of her neck as he lazed there, like a lion sunning in the afternoon. Even when he relaxed, he brought to mind predators. There was probably something seriously wrong with her psyche that she got a charge out of the little shivers when he made her feel like prey. It certainly said something about her defective survival instincts, but everything was loose and liquid right now, her entire body warm and mushy, and she couldn’t make herself care. Or move. Especially as his finger began to repeat a slow, deliberate stroke down the nape of her neck.

She’d always been sensitive there, but it had never felt quite like this, like every single individual cell was