Darkness Unbound (20 page)

“As if I raised my hand and yelled
pick me
,” she mumbled. She stared at the broad, strong hand gripping the longneck. And imagined his fingers on her skin. With a convulsive swallow she road-blocked that fantasy. She tried to redirect her mind, but failed. She desperately wanted to straddle Kane’s lap and attack those sexy lips.
Stop it!
she screamed at herself.

She longed for the warmth of his body near hers. To bury her face in his neck and lose herself in his scent. But the barriers she’d erected between them, her ingrained need for his respect, and her terror of the emotions roiling through her held her motionless.

Think business
, she told herself. “What are you doing in here?”

He shrugged, blue eyes revealing nothing.

Yeah, stupid question. He was always nearby every single time when she woke up in shitty shape. In the hospital, in the field, and that time homeward bound from Sumatra a few years ago.

She spotted the cloth-wrapped Sword of Neith propped against the bathroom doorframe. She lunged at the sword and unwrapped the gilded sheathed blade. She held it out to him. “I’m pretty sure they want you to have this.”

“Which
they
?” He glared at the weapon as if it was a coiled venomous snake.

“Every
they.
Magi. Gods. The blade shouldn’t hurt you. But it will seriously damage anyone else that touches it.”

“Then, why not you?” He didn’t accept the sword. Instead, he took a sip of beer.

She dropped it near Kane’s boot-clad foot, its bulk too heavy to remain in offering position. “I’m only its babysitter. It tolerates me.”

“It’s your sword, then,” he said, still eyeing the weapon.

Astrid shook her head. She backed up to the bed, and perched on its edge. Waiting. Would the sword accept him?

Kane stared at the blade. His gaze widened. He reached for it as if the weapon lured him. He pulled it onto his lap and traced the designs on the sheath. “She’s talking to me,” he said, his voice filled with wonder.

Oh God,
Astrid thought. Maybe Kane was linked to Zannis? Maybe that was what Amun-Ra had meant about waiting for Zannis’s soul to return. Could Kane now be Zannis?
NO!
This was Kane. This wasn’t the man who tried to murder her hours after she’d fallen in love with him. Her heart kicked in her chest, pounding so hard it hurt.

Her gaze snapped to Kane when she heard the familiar chant of reverence. Chills bathed her spine. He unsheathed the blade. Its patterns swirled in blue along the length of the hilt.

She asked, “Did it tell you to say that?”

He nodded. And stroked a finger down the long blade.

God, to have him touch her body with such intensity. She swallowed hard. “That thing doesn’t like just anybody. Only you can command her.”

Kane asked, “How would you know?” His eyes lifted to hers.

“Her previous owner told me.”

“
Him
? The magus that pushed a sword through you?” He ghosted white and dropped the sword on the floor. “Was this the blade?”

Astrid shook her head. “It wasn’t this sword. It was a look-alike. Take the sword. It is truly yours. I’m going to take a shower.” When she returned minutes later, damp and her head wrapped in a towel, Kane and the sword were gone. Her stomach plummeted. With a disappointed sigh, she returned to the bathroom to brush her hair.

As she brushed, she realized she needed proof. A pregnancy test. Now. She wasn’t about to take the word of a guy with glowing blue hair. She jogged to find the doctor.

****

Kane jolted awake. He squinted into his dark bedroom to make sense of the noise at the window. He must’ve finally conked out after hours of staring at the shadowed ceiling while his brain seesawed between the need to confirm Astrid slept peacefully in the room across the hall and the impulse to bang his head against a concrete block until he cleared the thought of her with that now-dead magus.

The window slid open. With his field knife gripped tight in his right fist, Kane waited.

A hand appeared on the windowsill followed by a foot. Instinct demanded he strike first. The moment before he released his knife on his intruder the dragons gripped his arm in a Rottweiler-stinging chomp. The knife spun out of control and missed.

“Shit,” Kane cursed.

“That sounded more like a
shit I missed
rather than a
shit I almost killed my brother
.” Markus plucked the knife out of the windowsill and tossed it on the floor. With a grunt, he managed to fall over the sill and into the room. He scrambled upright.

Kane cursed and retrieved his blade. “You’re lucky I missed.” He flipped on a lamp and wondered if he’d missed because the dragons threw off his usually perfect aim or because Markus’s remarkable luck had kicked in, as usual. He’d seen Markus prevail in more gone-to-shit disasters than he could count on both hands. Every single time they faced a guaranteed-fatality situation his brother strolled away from the incident as if all had proceeded according to his plan. If a nuclear bomb landed next to Markus, Kane expected his brother would stumble into the only radiation and bomb-proofed facility within a thousand mile radius seconds before detonation. “What are you doing crawling into my window in the middle of the night? On the second floor. Why not use the front door?”

Markus dropped a frayed backpack at his feet. “I didn’t want to deal with the bulldogs at the gate. Didn’t want to wake anyone. I figured the front door was probably alarmed, but the second story was most likely not. It was damned hard to scale that drainpipe and get up here.”

“How’d you know this was my room?”

“Dunno. Just knew.” Markus unwrapped a stick of gum and settled into a comfortable chew. “Where’s my
how’re you doing
? Or at least a
good to see you
?”

Kane barely heard him as he massaged his arm where the dragons moved. Based on their nonstop gnawing, his arm should be a pulpy mess of muscle and bone. But he’d confirmed the area on which they rested to be wound-free about a hundred times in the past few hours. His massaging hand shook. He fisted it and cursed.

“What’s wrong with you? First you miss and now your hand is shaking? I mean, thank God, your aim is off tonight, but that’s just…not you. What’s going on?”

Kane’s gaze popped to Markus. “What?”

Markus leaned against the wall and crossed his arms over a wrinkled white T-shirt with a cherry red stain down his left side that was probably the remnants of an exploded slushy, given his addiction to the synthetic crap.

Markus asked, “You get your head whacked or something? Do I need to speak slo-ow-ly?”

“Leave me alone.” Kane marched into the adjoining bathroom. He brushed his teeth and splashed his face, not feeling any more refreshed. And still just as jacked up. He stared at his reflection, unable to accept that he was now one of those cursed immortals expected to fight inhuman freaks. For eternity.

Aside from the dragons chewing his arm and new mid-chest triangular tattoo, he didn’t look or feel any different.

And then there was Astrid. Even after five years, one glance from her deep blues was all it took to tie his gut in knots. He’d tried to deny and then bury his distracting desire for the woman. She shut him down every time he got within a mile of the subject. He’d even filled out a transfer request four times this year—after each time she almost died—but chickened out on the actual submitting part. He needed to be there and do his damnedest to keep her on this side of the afterlife. Now he’d been commissioned to the task by a god.

He rubbed his forehead and ran a hand along his chin. She’d say he needed a shave.

The bitter truth hit him square in the chest with the force of a semi-truck. He might be head over heels for the woman, but she didn’t reciprocate. Maybe she never could. He couldn’t survive being near her and not touching for the rest of his life, which now promised to be a very long time, unless some daemon killed him. That blue-haired guy had implied they might be able to be together, but it didn’t matter. Where his mind was right now should she strip naked and grant his every fantasy, he couldn’t move beyond the image of her with another man. A guy who hurt her, and not just a little bit. And then left her pregnant. Every instinct in his body screamed
she’s mine.
Betrayal pierced through his brain, adding to its throb. That she could even consider another man cut deep.

Kane planted his butt on the closed toilet and pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets, desperate to halt the hum in his brain.

“You’re freaking me out, Kane.”

Kane blinked at Markus in the doorway. “Yeah. I know.”

“What’s up?”

“I’ve just been strapped into a rollercoaster from hell with no brakes.”

“I thought that shit you did in Sumatra going in with Astrid to free twenty kidnap victims was insane. After that stunt everything else is a downhill slide. What could be worse than that?”

“They made me one of them.”

“Who made you one of what?” Markus blew a green bubble whose small pop echoed in the bathroom.

“A magus. They made me a magus. Like Astrid.” Kane pressed his thumb into the side of his forehead. The easy way out of this migraine was to see Kira, but he wouldn’t.

Markus blew another bubble. It popped. He smacked a few loud chews. “Oh.”

Kane grinned. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got for me? And here I thought you might pull some piece of earth-shattering philosophy out of your ass to clear my mind fuck.” He shook his head and chuckled.

Markus lifted his shoulders and dropped them. He chewed his gum open-mouthed in a grin. “Could be worse.”

“How?”

“You could’ve
borrowed
a Persian sandstone icon from a sheik who got pissed and took out an international contract on your life.”

“I got you out of that one,” Kane said. “Not easily. It cost me a lot, but I got you free.”

“Yeah, but you hitched me a ride out of Turkey in a chicken truck. There were like a thousand of those scrawny turds in there with me. They’re mean little bastards when they’re hungry. One tried to eat my thumb. I still have nightmares that half my thumb’s gone, and I wake up with the smell of chicken shit in my nostrils.”

A snort laugh erupted from Kane. “You win.”

“I’m going to check out the refrigerator. Want a beer or something?”

“Nah. Why are you here, Markus? Really.”

Markus popped a bubble. “Felt like the right place to be.”

“The FBI is after you, aren’t they?”

“Damned Feds. I was on the up and up on this deal. This Columbian statue shouldn’t have been on their radar. It’s been underground for about four decades. But they showed. Everything went to hell with a lot of bullets. I think I saw your old boss there.”

“Colonel Greene?”

Markus nodded.

“If she was there, then they didn’t care about whatever you were peddling. They wanted to capture you to get to me.”

Markus nodded. “I thought so. That’s why I figured here was better. At least I hope the food is better. The only thing in the fridge at home are a few of your yogurts and ketchup. You know I hate yogurt. And ketchup’s only good if you have the fries to go with it.”

“That yogurt expired at least three months ago. I just never got around to throwing it out. The kitchen is downstairs. Back of the house.”

Markus saluted good-bye.

Kane pushed off the toilet and slipped back into Astrid’s dark bedroom. Hell, he didn’t even know why he was in here again, but he needed a visual.

A bit of light escaped under the bathroom door. She always left a light on. Long ago she explained it helped her locate intruders faster, but he suspected it reflected a deep need to stay out of the dark. He understood that.

She slept on her stomach, one hand near her head close enough to get the knife under her pillow, if needed. She’d pushed off the covers and her PJ bottoms had ridden up to her knees. Her pale hair glowed in the low light, invitingly soft. God, there were so many ways he wanted to touch her. So many things he could do to her body that would leave her gasping and immersed pleasure. This woman was trouble for him, and had been since the moment he met her.

He didn’t want her to fight against daemons with him, and definitely not without him. When she was on an op with him, he remained more intent on protecting her than on whatever danger threatened them. She was a distraction. It was why he should’ve followed through on that transfer. His distraction put both of them and their team at risk. Sure, he could pretend to have his head in the game when on an op. He was a pro at maintaining the appearance of having his shit together. But usually he was totally and completely focused on her. At first he thought his preoccupation was normal since any time a woman was in the vicinity on a mission, a part of him looked out for her. Women were strong, especially Astrid. Resourceful and clever. But the primal male in him insisted they were to be protected. When it came to Astrid, though, this went way beyond protection and well into obsession.

His gaze swept over her perfect toned ass. He needed this woman in ways he didn’t understand. Ways that extended far beyond sexual and scared the hell out of him. He wanted to stretch out beside her on the bed and pull her into his arms. To hold her tight against his chest.

You’re an idiot
, he told himself. She’d reject him. Again. He swiftly pivoted and vacated before he did something stupid that might shatter his soul.

Chapter Fourteen

Kane peered into the dark Arkansas megachurch from the upper level of stadium-style seating. “You’re telling me I’m supposed to fight some sort of inhuman otherworld beast in the dark? I can’t even see my shoes in this coliseum.”

“This is where
seichim
becomes important,” Dakar advised. “We shall follow the wall down.”

“Based on what Nate says he still doesn’t get that
seichim
crap. I’ve been at this five days. I definitely don’t get it.”

Dakar led downward. “Nate has not trained enough. The boy remains challenged by his abilities.”