Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (192 page)

W
inter
in the high desert usually didn’t really hit full force until after Halloween, but this year it seemed to be making an exception. It was barely the first week of October and the air was already filled with the harsh bite of ice. The sky was blanketed with low, snow-filled clouds, but everyone expected the storm to pass us by like it usually did.

Uriah’s clear voice called to me from across the school parking lot. “Claire! Wait up.” His long legs carried him to me in a few short seconds.

There was no need for him to ask me to wait. I had been watching for him, just as I did every day after school. We spent most afternoons at Uriah’s house, helping each other with our homework and watching television. Because Uriah’s parents only had one vehicle, and his pride refused to let me drive him around, I usually drove to his house every morning then handed over the keys. It was one of his few flaws, but I preferred to let him drive anyway, so I let it slide. Actually, I really would have preferred leaving my car at the school and walking the distance. The longer I could keep Uriah’s hands on me the better. Even if all I ever got from him was hugs and him holding my hand. The freezing winter temperatures today did make me happy to take my car instead.

“Ready to go?” I asked after accepting a warm hug, even though I was dying for something more. We had been together for five months and Uriah had yet to kiss me, except in my dreams, when they weren’t overtaken by someone else, which didn’t happen that often anymore. Dreaming of Uriah was slowly becoming the new norm, but if I spent too much time away from him, my blonde haired, blue eyed man pushed his way back into my thoughts. Every time he did, I woke feeling like I had betrayed them both. My dream guy because he was in my heart first and should have won my loyalty, and Uriah because I shouldn’t have been thinking of anyone but him anymore.

Shaking away anymore thoughts of dreams and guilt, I brought myself back to the problem of Uriah not kissing me. At first, I thought it was because of my dad making some kind of threat, but I was starting to think there was more to it than that.

“Let’s go,” Uriah said. He grabbed the keys I was offering him and hurried me into the car. Running over to the driver’s side, he slid in and shut the door quickly. “How’d your algebra test go today?”

Usually I did well in math, but my second year of algebra was proving a little more difficult for me than I had expected. It was hard to grasp the problems when everything was so abstract. Uriah’s tutoring was the only thing keeping me afloat.

“I think it went okay,” I said

“I’m glad.” Uriah took my hand and I leaned into his shoulder. “No more talk about school, though. I don’t want to even think about homework until Monday.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“What are we going to do for the next two days?” Uriah asked.

“I have a stack of movies ready, and if it ever warms up enough, Cole told me about a couple of really great riding trails we can check out. What else do you want to do?”

“My parents are planning to go down to Santa Fe on Sunday. There’s supposed to be some big play my mom really wants to see,” Uriah said. “Do you think your parents would let you come with us?”

My dad would most likely throw a fit, but I was sure my mom would allow me to go. And if they couldn’t agree, I’d just make sure Uriah was there to settle it. “Of course, that sounds like fun.”

“Good,” Uriah said with relief. He pulled into his driveway and came to a stop. “Come on. Let’s get out of the cold.”

Hand in hand, we walked quickly down the gravel driveway up to Uriah’s house. His parents had gone to Espanola for the day to meet with someone about a horse they wanted to buy. The frigid desert temperatures had meant very little privacy for us lately. I loved Uriah’s parents, but I was looking forward to nestling against him by the fire. Maybe even figuring out how to get him to kiss me.

Reaching the house just as I was starting to lose feeling in the tip of my nose, Uriah opened the front door and ushered me in. “I’ll be right back with some firewood,” he said before disappearing around the house. He was back within minutes, and I watched him build the welcomed fire. The couch I was sitting on was angled comfortably between the fireplace and the television. Thinking about my plan to get a kiss today, I dug the book I wanted to read out of my bag and propped myself against the arm of the couch as I thought.

“Are you hungry?” Uriah asked.

I shook my head. Uriah was always hungry. Sometimes I thought I could see him growing. In the past year and a half he had shot up nearly six inches, while I had added maybe an inch to my minimal height. Many of the boys we knew had grown a lot as well, but most were just plain lanky now. Uriah was not. Working with his father was building new muscle, making the girls I knew stare at him behind his back even more than they did before.

I loved that Uriah seemed to think of himself as an ordinary guy, someone nobody would ever really notice if it weren’t for him playing sports. For myself, I knew that wasn’t true, but none of the other girls thought him ordinary either. Everyone but Dana watched what they said around me now that they all knew Uriah and I were together, but before, I had heard all of the gossiping the other girls did about him.

Thinking of it flushed my face. I couldn’t help but be a little jealous of their interest in him. Dana still smiled and flirted with him every chance she got. Unfortunately, her being in the same grade as Uriah made sure she had plenty of chances from what Lana said. Uriah was completely oblivious to anyone but me.

Which was why him not kissing me every chance he got, like I wanted him to, made no sense. I think the idea that my dad might do something to separate us made Uriah nervous about doing anything to set him off, but I was the only one who would know if he kissed me today, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell my dad.

Plus, even though Uriah thought my theory about everyone doing what he said was pure imagination, he knew my dad always backed down when he confronted him. He had done it when he first found out about us, when Uriah asked me to go to homecoming with him, and even when I wanted to go with Uriah’s parents to watch him play football out of town. No, something else was making Uriah hold back.

Today, I was going to find out exactly what that was.

Interrupting my thoughts, Uriah plopped onto the couch next to me, a sandwich piled high with meat balanced in his hands. Flipping on the television, he settled in to eat. I turned my attention back to my book, though it was always hard to focus on anything with Uriah nearby. Tired from a long week of work and school, Uriah was breathing heavily in a deep sleep before I could think of any way to bring up the business of kissing. The slight smile on his lips as he slept was adorable. I smiled despite my disappointment and immersed myself in 18th century Europe until my own eyes started to droop.

H
e smiled
as soon as he saw me. I shouldn’t have, but I smiled back. In a few short steps, he was by my side. His arms wrapped around my body and held me like he had a thousand times before. There were no words between us. There never were. We didn’t need words. We were connected in a way that made speaking unnecessary.

His hands slipped down to mine and he began leading me out of the nothingness where we always met and into a garden so luscious and flower-filled that the air was thick with their syrupy scent. In the center of the plants there was a blanket lying on the velvet grass. We laid down and my head immediately fell to his chest. His heartbeat matched mine exactly, slow at first, then speeding up as he began trailing, first his fingers, then his lips down my neck.

“
H
ey
,” Uriah said, shaking my shoulder gently a few hours later, “it’s snowing.”

Blinking rapidly, I guiltily tried to clear thoughts of my dream guy from my mind. How did he even get in my head today? Usually being with Uriah kept him away. I tried very hard not to remember the way he had been stroking my skin. “It’s snowing?” I asked Uriah.

“Yeah, let’s go see it.” Handing me my jacket, Uriah was already pulling on his own wool lined coat with a smile. I loved his enthusiasm. It was infectious enough to make me push the dream out of my mind. Most likely, whatever snow did fall would be gone by morning, but I had to admit that the hope of seeing the tiny flakes so early in the year had me smiling, too.

“Come on,” Uriah said impatiently.

“I’m coming,” I laughed. We bounded out the door and were immediately swallowed up in the storm. It was really snowing. Not just the lazy flecks we usually saw in October, but real thick, wet snowflakes. I felt like a little ceramic figurine inside a snow globe. A girlish giggle escaped my lips and I blushed under Uriah’s gaze. His grin outmatched mine.

“I wonder if it will stick,” Uriah said, gazing at the darkening sky.

“Probably not,” I said, “but it sure is beautiful. I wish it would snow here more often.” Santa Fe was only forty minutes away, but it got a lot more snow than we did. It made me a little jealous sometimes.

“But that’s what makes it so special.” Uriah smiled. “I doubt people in Colorado get as excited about snow as we do here.”

“Probably not,” I said. I could hear the bleating of Uriah’s sheep and wondered if they were enjoying the scene as much as we were.

“Maybe we’ll go somewhere where it snows all the time someday. That would sure be a change from the desert, wouldn’t it?” Uriah mused.

I loved it when he talked about our future together. “We could live high up in the mountains of Colorado, or maybe all the way to Alaska,” I said.

“Alaska,” Uriah said, “I could do a lot of fishing in Alaska.”

“I wonder what that would be like, to be so far away from the pueblo.”

“I can’t really imagine it,” Uriah said.

“Do you think we’ll ever leave?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

I would love the chance to get away from my father, but leaving would mean leaving my mom and my brother, Cole, too. For Uriah, it was an even more difficult choice. Not only did his parents love him, they needed him. The ranch would be too much work for them alone. He felt guilty about wanting to leave, even for college. Uriah’s sense of responsibility and devotion to his family set him apart from so many of the other guys his age. I looked at him and wondered how he could ever think he was ordinary.

Uriah’s dark eyelashes and hair were dusted with snow, slowly melting as his body heat reached them. A snowflake fell on my cheek. Uriah brushed it away, but his fingers lingered. I felt my face grow hot at his touch. Stepping closer to him, I was unable to resist his warmth. Rising to my toes, I reached my hand behind his neck and started pulling his lips to mine. Uriah dodged me and pulled me into a hug instead.

Irritated, I pulled back. Forget having a plan, I needed to know. “Uriah, why won’t you kiss me?”

Surprised by my question, Uriah hesitated. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“We’ve been dating for months now, and you still haven’t even tried to kiss me, and every time I try to kiss you, you find a way to distract me. Don’t you want to kiss me?”

“Of course I do,” he said. “It’s just that…I…I don’t know if I can.”

I sometimes pretended that Uriah had never kissed anyone else, but I knew for a fact that he had. Twice. I don’t think either kiss was initiated by him, he only dated girls once before dating me, but knowing that, a couple of girls had tried to change his mind about that the first chance they got. Dana was one of the two. Another reason I couldn’t stand her anymore. A really strange girl named Leslie was the other one. She apparently did that to every guy brave enough to take her out. I had no idea what Uriah meant when he said he didn’t know if he could kiss me.

“I think you might need to explain that,” I said.

Frowning as he thought, Uriah looked away from me for a few painfully long moments before turning to face me again. “I don’t know how to explain this without sounding like a complete idiot,” he said.

“Try.”

“When I’m around you, Claire, I feel different, like something’s pushing me away from you. That sounds stupid enough, but when I touch you it gets worse. It honestly hurts. My strength disappears, and my body feels actual pain when I’m touching you. Most of the time, I don’t notice it anymore, but when I really want you, it’s almost too much to handle. I have never felt anything like this before.”

He looked at me with his soft, beautiful eyes, searching for some indication of what I was thinking. I was a lot better at hiding my emotions than he was, but he probably saw my confusion anyway.

“Look, I know this sounds really stupid, but I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know what will happen to me if I do kiss you,” he said.

Well, I was the one who wanted an answer. I wanted to tell him that it was just his imagination, or, hopefully, him falling in love with me, but I was also the one who had tried to tell him I thought he had some kind of power over people. Although, his weird control never seemed to work on me. I argued with him about all kind of things, sometimes just to make sure I still
could
argue with him. Why would I be the only one able to stand up to him, but the only one who hurt him just by being around him, too?

Did anything I was thinking even make the remotest bit of sense?

I had no idea how to respond to what he had just told me, but for some reason, I found myself believing him.

Hesitantly, Uriah brought his hand up to my cheek and held it there. I was instantly concerned about hurting him, and it must have showed on my face. A small shake of his head told me not to worry, but I did anyway. The space between us closed as Uriah pulled me nearer. Leaning down, he brought his lips closer to mine.

“Uriah, wait,” I said. It was a halfhearted protest, though. I would never want to hurt him, but I wasn’t totally sure what he said made sense. And I really did want him to kiss me.

Bringing his lips close enough that I could feel his warm breath pulsing against my skin, he paused. “I want to kiss you, Claire.”