Changespell 01 Dunn Lady's Jess (19 page)

"Too warm for soccer, Jess," Mark yawned from the back doorway. "Geeze, last night's shift was a killer. Had all the guests for a wedding, must've been some kind of biker thing. They really know how to party."

Jess, typically straightforward, asked, "What is kissing for, Mark?"

Mark blinked, did a deliberate double take. "Whoa, Jess—you hit me broadside with that one. You sure you don't want to ask Jaime about this?"

"Jaime is busy," Jess said, pushing blithely onward. "Every time we look at the TV, there are people kissing. Why?"

"Um, because it feels good," Mark said, stumbling only a little.

"Show me."

He put both hands over his face and drew them down slowly, so that his eyes peeked over his fingers, full of misgivings. "Well, Jess, that's usually something two people do when they like each other."

Jess frowned. "I do like you."

"In a special way. You know, love, getting married, having a family—two kids and a dog, the whole works."

She did, then, understand a little of what he was driving at. Special, in a way that she'd almost deliberately avoided dealing with, because it was simply too much when added to the other things she'd had to assimilate. "I have to understand," she said slowly. "If Carey takes me home, there will be no more chance to learn. If I have to decide, stay or go, I want to know all the things I'm deciding about."

Mark bit his lip, staring at her, hesitating. "All right, but . . . Jess, people kiss for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes just because it does feel good, but usually because they love one another. I can show you how it's done, but . . . it won't be the same."

Jess nodded, and waited, and he closed the short distance between them, gently touched two fingers to the side of her chin, and gave her a soft but definite kiss. He drew back to look at her, and this time it was she who blinked, considering. Warm. Nice. But nothing wonderful. She drew her teeth over her bottom lip where she could still feel the contact, and gave him a quizzical look.

"Didn't make your hair stand on end, huh," he said. "I'm not surprised. It's different when—"

"Do it again," she said abruptly and, at his raised eyebrows, added a contrite, "Please."

"Again," he repeated, and sighed, but didn't offer any argument. Instead he simply kissed her, tasting slightly of bacon and coffee, lingering, giving her the chance to respond. And she found that she did, that there was some small stirring deep within her, and that there was more pleasure when she kissed him back. She began to understand the point to it, and when Mark stepped back to look at her, she just stared at him, touching her mouth, and thinking that a horse's mouth wouldn't do that.

He grinned and opened his mouth to say something, but snapped it closed along with his eyes as the grin turned into a grimace. Jess only then heard the footsteps she should have noticed long ago, should have swiveled her ears to catch, and to know it was Carey. She suddenly felt as discomfited as Mark looked, although she wasn't sure why, and she turned to face Carey as he stopped by the lawn chairs, his hazel eyes dark with anger.

"What in nine hells do you think you're doing?" he snapped, the anger in those eyes turned on Mark, a few unconscious steps taking him all the way up to Jess in a protective posture. "You might as well take advantage of a
child
—"

"I asked him," Jess interrupted, and had to repeat herself to be sure he'd heard, and taken it in. "
I asked him
. I wanted to know."

He stared dumbfounded. Stumbling over the words as though she'd somehow lost her tenuous knack of shaping them, she said, "I see people kiss in the TV stories. I saw
you
kiss women, in the empty stall next to mine. I wanted to
know
, Carey—why does that make you mad?"

Mark cleared his throat, filling in the gap of Carey's flabbergasted silence. "I told her," he explained quietly, "that it was something for people who had special feelings for each other. But there's nothing wrong with getting her first kiss from a friend, Carey. Lighten up. Better that she asks and knows about it before someone
does
try to take advantage of her."

"You could have asked
me
," Carey told her, the storm of anger fading to puzzled hurt.

"I—" she started, stopped short by the utter inability to voice that she
couldn't
have asked him, because that would make it matter too much. And then he had her by both arms, a possessive grip that drew them close, and when he kissed her there was no time for analyzing the feel of having him close—she simply
was
, centered on the pressure of his lips and the fire that made her heart thud almost painfully in her chest. He released her mouth, gave her lips one last gentle nibble nothing like the ardent touch he'd just relinquished, and stared directly into her dark, widened eyes.

"Is that what you wanted to know?" he asked, a rough, low question.

"Yes," she whispered. And he stepped back, deliberately released her arms, gave Mark a hard stare, and left them there.

She watched him go, barely feeling the pat Mark gave her arm. Through the haze of her emotions, she heard him say, "It's all right, Jess," but it
wasn't
—for she suddenly knew that if she followed her newly discovered, very human heart, it would take her to Camolen with Carey—where she would lose it to an equine form.

"My, you certainly do devour these books," the young librarian said, smiling at Jess. "You haven't been reading very long, if I remember right."

"Not long," Jess agreed, fingering the spine of
The Magician's Nephew
. She could still feel Carey's embrace; it was so real to her that she had to remind herself—often—that there was no outward sign broadcasting the encounter to others. It was that encounter that had driven her to ride into town with Mark, where he dropped her off at the library. Jess knew she could lose herself—and the emotional anguish that plagued her—in the next installment of the Narnia series, for there were so many things in the tales that she could utterly believe in—even though the books were called fantasy. She saw nothing strange with traveling between worlds and talking to animals.

She retrieved her library card from the woman and smiled her thanks, then took her treasure to the comfortable stuffed chairs in the reading section, where she would linger as long as she could, wrapped up in the adventures of Digory and Polly.

At nine o'clock, one of the librarians apologetically ushered her to the door and locked it behind her. Jaime wouldn't be here until after her last lesson, another 45 minutes. Jess stood in the slight chill of the night air, a warm day gone drizzly, and heaved a sigh for the loss of her refuge. There was nothing to keep her mind away from the new strength in her need to be with Carey, an odd sweet twist she had never felt before. Perhaps because it was nothing a horse
could
feel. What was the point, then, in returning with him, if she would only lose that feeling which had driven her to be with him? Except—if she didn't, she would be stuck with it, without him, and she had a hunch it would be a hundred times worse than the pain she'd felt when she'd been first separated from him on this world.

There was only a scuff of warning, enough time for her to straighten in alarm, raising her head to cast futilely for scent in the slight breeze—and then he was behind her, grabbing her arm in a tight grip that did less to stop her reaction than the cold, hard feel of metal at her neck—because where instinct screamed for her to duck her head and throw this attacker off, the biting, newly familiar scent of gunpowder made her freeze instead.

"It's been a long wait," Derrick said in her ear, "but I think my luck has changed."

"You leave Carey alone!" Jess demanded, sitting on a torn, dusty couch in an old house behind something Derrick had called the whyemceeay.

Derrick exchanged an amused glance with Ernie. "It's
you
that we've got," he said.

"To try to get
him
," she insisted. She was angry and hard put to sit still, but she was very aware of the gun Derrick now held casually in his lap. At the same time, she had the strangest feeling that although Derrick was not one who could be trusted, she was, in some strange way, safe here—as long as she followed their rules. They'd made it plain enough that the current rule was
sit still
.

"No," Derrick corrected. "To get the
spell
."

She frowned at him, trying to figure out this bizarre human game, finally shaking her head in exasperation.

"You really
were
his horse, weren't you," Derrick mused, another turn of mood Jess couldn't quite follow. He left the gun on the seat of his shabby chair and approached her, leaning over her, one hand reaching out to control the tilt of her head—though he hesitated at the warning that flashed in her dark eyes.

"Be professional, Derrick," Ernie said, bored amusement in his voice. "This is business, not playtime."

Derrick shot him a dark look. "I'm not paying you for preaching. If you believed what I've told you, you'd be a lot more interested in this woman."

"I'm interested in the money you've promised me," Ernie said, bitingly candid. "Although I admit you've provided a little amusement as well. And here I thought my forced little interlude away from Columbus heat was going to be boring."

Derrick didn't bother to answer; he might not even have been listening as he stared thoughtfully at Jess. Then, watching for her reaction, he said, "I'll call your master in a few minutes. I think he'll trade the spell for you, don't you?"

Would he? For a woman he considered to still be a horse?
Jess shook her head, feeling stubborn and glad that the true answer was one that could confound him—which it did.

"No?" Derrick said in surprise. "I saw the way he looked at you at the park. Very protective, he is. It's going to occur to him that there's no point in holding on to the spell when he can't get it back to Camolen, anyway."

"Neither can you," Jess pointed out, perplexed and a little suspicious that that obvious fact had escaped him.

"Can't I?" Derrick asked, his expression turning truly smug, and making what should have been an attractive face detestable. "Just because I'm adept with the physical aspects of my role, little mare, doesn't mean I don't have other skills. It's true I could never come up with this spell everyone wants, but I think I can eventually use it to return home—although, as I told Carey, by that time, Calandre will have accomplished her goals through other means."

"If you can not make the spell yourself, you will never get home," Jess said, willing to do almost anything to wipe that look off his face. She well remembered it, through different eyes, from the moment when Derrick had stood in his stirrups and released an arrow at Carey. "The spell is gone."

He laughed. "You
have
learned a lot from your time here. Nice try, but I don't believe you."

She wanted to kick him. "I tell the truth! Carey tried to use it and it blew up!"

His amusement died away, his eyes narrowed. "What do you mean, 'it blew up'?" Then, as the greater significance hit him, he grabbed her shoulders and asked, "You mean he accessed
magic
from this world?"

She was too startled, too angry, to do anything but fight his touch. She instantly kicked out at him, and would have squirmed from his grasp if he hadn't snatched the hair at the back of her head with an iron grip, forcing her head back, forcing her to stare at him.

"None of that," he hissed. "I can handle a woman as well as a horse, missy—and it can hurt a whole lot more than this."

She stared back through the involuntary tears that smeared her vision and allowed herself to be a horse again. For that one moment, she let herself feel the acquiescence to rules, to the hold on her head that wasn't so different from her training halter, albeit a more painful one.

Slowly, he released her, never removing his gaze from hers. When she did nothing but sit, not even so much as a toss of the head, he relaxed. Let him take it as submissiveness, instead of the subterfuge she was practicing for the first time. Let him think of her as too much the horse—just as Carey did—while she waited for the right moment to act. With effort, she kept her eyes from shifting to the gun on the chair behind him. Let him forget he had Jess instead of Lady, while he carried a gun that she, too, knew how to use.

And
would
use, with the fierce protectiveness of a mare guarding her own, unhindered by any veneer of civilization she'd acquired in her short time here.

Jaime followed the movement of horse and rider around the ring, nodding in approval, a slight smile on her face. "Good job, Kate! You feel the difference in him when you
push
him up into the bridle?"

"It's hard work!" her student replied, but there was no complaint in her voice as she rode by the gate to the aisle.

Jaime's smile abruptly faded. When Kate and her mount cleared the gate, Carey was on the other side, unhooking it and slipping through. Jaime felt a growl of annoyance fighting to come out; he knew the rules about interrupting lessons.

But the growl, too, faded, as he walked through the soft footing with long, hurried strides, and stopped before her, his face broadcasting a message of trouble while his mouth seemed unable to manage it.

"What on earth has happened?" Jaime asked, trying to keep an eye on Kate, whose light lovely trot was disintegrating into a rein-tugging match between horse and rider.

"Lady," Carey said.

"She's at the library," Jaime said, annoyance creeping up again. "I want you to do some walk-trot transitions, Kate. Twenty strides each." Then, to Carey, "She wouldn't tell me what upset her today, but I know you were part of it—she only gets that look on her face when it has to do with you. She's run away from it—and you—and I'll be leaving to get her in fifteen minutes, when this lesson is over." She pointedly turned back to her student, but Carey didn't take the hint.

"Derrick has her," he said.