The recovery was faster that time. I didn’t have to beg or plead with Kathan for my third look into his pieces. He knew I wouldn’t stop until he agreed, so he just kissed me and swept me into the storm of separation.
Whenever I spend enough time around someone, I start to pick up traits from them. I’d always been that way, even when I was little. It was almost like I was just a reaction to my environment, like I wouldn’t exist if no one else did, but I tried not to think about it like that. Instead I thought about it like I learned what I needed from everybody I met. In the time I’d been with Kathan—weeks? months?—I’d gotten pretty good at that separation trick myself.
In one part of my mind, I drowned myself in his desire.
I’m yours, I told him. Love me, Kathan. Hold me. Make it better. Make everything better, just like you always do. Make everything go away.
And in that part of me, he did.
With another part of my mind, I shadowed one of the separate pieces of my lover. Perfectly silent. Perfectly still. Some part of him knew I was there, but he didn’t call me out for spying.
Kathan was in the hall outside of our suite. Rian stood in front of him, wearing that ridiculous Halo Police Department uniform, and giving a report.
“—with the vampire who ran the bakery. They’ve been knocking boots for a good long while now, according to that psycho chick who called in the tip.”
“Mitzi Gudehaus?” Kathan asked.
“That’s the one.”
“What did she ask for in return?”
“She wants a pass to carve up whatever groupies she picks up whenever she’s in town. I figured what’s the harm.”
Kathan nodded. He was thinking that soon he would be running the show on Earth and it wouldn’t matter if NPs around the globe decided to extinguish humanity once and for all. Assuming there was any humanity left after the Destroyer was unleashed, of course.
Rian hitched his thumbs into his thick cop utility-belt. “And since I killed him and got you the sword back, I figured—”
“You have the sword with you?” Kathan said.
Rian smiled. As he reached for the gun on his hip, the part of Kathan’s mind that I was shadowing switched from the human visual spectrum to a world of glowing black halos and laser pointers and ball lightning.
Greenish black strings reached out from Rian in every direction. According to Kathan’s memories, those belonged there. But there was also a bloody ball of thick-looking red light near his hip. That didn’t belong. It was uglier and more out of place there than I would’ve been in a church choir. Rian’s hand disappeared into the bloody ball and he winced. When he pulled his hand back out, he was holding Mikal’s flaming sword.
“You bet your ass I got it with me.” He held it out, offering it to Kathan.
Kathan backed up a step and shook his head. “You took it. You wield it.”
Rian’s smug grin twisted into something Desty probably would’ve called a leer. “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”
At first, Kathan wasn’t going to give a subordinate the satisfaction of responding to something so idiotic, but then he decided that to ignore the comment would give the appearance of weakness.
“Weapons belong in the hands of pawns,” he said. “In any case, I’ll be damned if I’m going to bring a flashy knife to a full-scale atomic war. I prefer to have my finger on the big red button.” He thought of Modesty in the hands of his foot soldiers, the few he commanded, the first of what would soon be an army of legions, and he smiled.
Furious passion overwhelmed the first piece of my mind. Back there, I was ripping his clothes off while he pressed me to the wall. His lips burned against mine.
Now, I begged him. Let me see what it’s like inside you while you make love to me.
He laughed, his breath hot against my cheek. You couldn’t handle it.
Please, Kathan. I arched my back and rubbed against him, trying to satisfy the ache for contact.
In the disconnected, all-business piece of him listening to Rian, Kathan was still thinking about Modesty, about what it would take to forge her into the other half of his Destroyer.
Not the Destroyer. His Destroyer.
All right, I’ll show you, he agreed in the first piece, then he pulled me into a third.
Sensation flooded my world. Sights, sounds, pleasure and anger so intense that some parts of me screamed and cringed away. It was too much. But the rush of sensations drowned out the thing I hated most in the world, made everything but Kathan so small and so distant. Parts of me died in him, reduced to cinders in his heat.
But one part of me stayed with Kathan in the sitting room of our suite and thought about all the things he would order his foot soldiers to do to my sister to make her the other half of his Destroyer.
I might not have been the smart twin, but I wasn’t brain dead, either. Not yet. I knew what it meant that Kathan wasn’t stopping me from shadowing his separate parts. He knew I was there, but he wasn’t trying to hide anything. He knew he didn’t need to. I was already his. I was already lost.
Tough
I paced the attic of Lonely’s Tattoo Parlor for the hundredth time, tossing a frag grenade back and forth between my hands, and avoiding the tiny slices of light that shined in through the window.
When I agreed to this, I thought I was agreeing to laying an ass-whupping of epic proportions on Kathan, and at some point,
