The Neon Graveyard (31 page)

Hunter and I were aware of none of this. We made love in the pure silence of an elevated cocoon. What had once felt like my prison while my stepfather was alive was now the site of my greatest pleasure. Because even more satisfying than Hunter’s raw physicality was the way his gaze confirmed what I already knew—that he was seeing, wanting, only me, that I was exactly where I belonged, with whom I belonged.

That I’d finally caught the tail of my destiny, I thought, inhaling deeply, if only for these scant fleeting moments.

And because we both knew them for fleeting, we gave in utterly to our need. I wasn’t merely oblivious to the world outside, I was blind to everything in the room, including myself. All I saw was Hunter—his mouth, his tongue and hands, his body ever bowed toward mine, his cock both the softest and hardest thing I’d ever felt. His desire consumed me, like I was a phoenix begging to be burned to ash. I could die in such a way, I thought, as he pinned me beneath him, one hand above on my wrists, the other below, taking wetness for his own.

Yet I didn’t feel like I was dying. Living for sure, I thought, as his desire thrilled through me. The proprietary way he touched me didn’t make me feel weak; on the contrary, the way his thighs spread my own made me feel a rush of primal feminine power that had me opening further. I loved that I could take the full of his thrust, the same force he’d use in battle or attack, and absorb it within me. I felt strong taking it, inverting it, spindling it together into something so powerful it even banished, momentarily, the memory that we’d ever been apart. Had it all been a dream? I found myself thinking at one point. Or some reality show Hunter had turned off with the touch of his skin to mine.

And now we rolled, and he turned into me. The idea of something so simple—a retreat where Hunter and I could turn to the other any time we wanted—was what finally made me cry out. The simplicity of such a thing, unavailable to me, was agonizing. Outside of my grief for Vanessa, it was the first real ache I’d felt since leaving Midheaven.

God, I wanted this man. All of him, all the time. Even in the stronghold of my greatest enemy, with only a doorway to keep death away, I still wanted him. Alone, him always, mine forever—everyone else’s will be damned.

At some point, somehow—probably while flipping him, and taking my place on top—I must have uttered as much.
Mine, mine, mine . . .
was what was going through my head, when suddenly he cupped my face in those large, warm hands, stilling me, and raised his knees so that his thighs became barriers.

“I never gave myself to her,” he rasped, the wild need I felt alive in his own gaze. His need to take and reassure me at the same time undid me again, and tears welled. “I never gave her anything at all.”

No, but she’d taken things from him. I saw the knowledge, dark, behind his eyes. He wouldn’t say it, but he’d experienced things at Solange’s hands that made him a different man than the one who’d entered that world. I swallowed hard. “She knocked you around because of it.”

“She knocked everyone around.” And lifting his hand, he ran it along my jaw where Solange had struck me. The tightness around his eyes told me he was recalling the moment, the scent of her snarling, animallike fury and all the ways the day could have turned out differently.

I placed my hand over his, my turn to still him. “Not anymore.”

Then I slid both my hands up his arms, over his chest, bracing them against his shoulders, settling him back again. He could throw me with his hips, of course, but as I started a slow wave, my body undulating over his, I wouldn’t bet on it. I pressed my knees outward, pushing to the base, earning a groan before his hips rose.

“You belong with me,” I said, keeping my motion slow, pressing his shoulders firmer like I was preventing his ever leaving me again. “Wherever you go and whatever you do, from now on you do it only with me.”

His responding moan was answer enough . . . that and the way he flipped me, both throwing me down and cushioning my fall, but never leaving my body. I struggled for position, but he pressed into me, now placing me where he wanted. Then he pulled away, almost free, and hammered back with one solid pound. I simultaneously arched and shuddered, and wound my legs around his waist.

Using each other’s hips and bodies as leverage, we found a rhythm that was both sweet and brutal, a beat that demanded my full attention and breath, barely allowing me to recover from one stroke before the onslaught of the next. I clutched him, my body responding to his, urging him to bear down even more, marking time in breaths, measuring the depth of it in gasps.

“Not yet,” he muttered, breaking the rhythm, pulling away and rolling me at the same time. I was on my stomach before my head stopped spinning, the pillow half in my mouth, my own scent strong in my nose. “Only and always means you’ll give in to me too.”

Game until then, I turned, affronted. Pressing me back down, he leaned close. “You’ll have yours, of course. But not now.”

And he buried himself so fast and deep the slap of flesh was like a killing blow. Unaware that pride was at stake here, my traitorous body responded like hull to waves, crafted and made to endure storms. I moaned and lifted for him, pushing back even as he hammered into me again. As he braced a forearm across my shoulders, his breath was hot and hard in my ear. “I’m going to brand you on the inside. So that from now on wherever
you
go, and whatever you do, everyone will know you’re mine.”

He pushed my legs flat, and buried my answer into the pillow, though he wasn’t exactly waiting for my surrender. He took it, though. I reared back as he barreled forward and he felt, and claimed, it. Forcing his body into mine, he kept forcing until it
was
mine. And I did the same, his way. For now.
For always.

I didn’t feel his weight or limbs atop me after that. I lost any sense of the pillow or bed beneath me. I felt instead that I was suspended, that there was only my molten core, two people inhabiting the same spot, existing in a singular moment, exactly where we both belonged.

Then I saw stars. And we went supernova. Together.

24

“H
ow do you feel?”

Like you care?
I thought, cracking an eyelid, and lifting a lazy brow. It was either thirty seconds or thirty minutes after we’d finished, hard to tell when I existed only as liquid, but I was leaning toward the latter if only because I felt marginally refreshed. Talk about a catnap.

“Well,” I said, my voice raspier than normal, “my left leg is a little numb from that thing we did with the pillow and your belt. I’m not sure the headboard’s ever going to be the same either.”

Hunter gazed at me dryly. “I meant how do you feel after facing down Midheaven’s queen bee?”

Brushing the hair from my face, I looked at him for a long moment. What was the deal with the sudden shoptalk? Solange was no longer an issue, pressing or otherwise, and we were momentarily removed from the war going on in the valley below us. So why the sudden swerve into seriousness? Was he trying to put some emotional distance between us already? Because our physical nakedness was a nonissue; warriors had a natural comfort with the body, so that wasn’t it. Even now, though Hunter’s voice had grown distant, our limbs had somehow meshed into a pile a master weaver would be hard pressed to untangle.

But the words we’d said and the emotions we’d shared while putting those warrior bodies to task? Those were the things that had really laid us bare.

“Oh, the
easy
feat,” I finally said with an exaggerated eye roll, lightening up since it seemed that was what he wanted. He responded still with a serious nod, so I shrugged and propped myself up on one elbow. “Not as bad as I thought. Thank goodness Vanessa prevented the full force of her punch.”

Though it hadn’t felt like it at the time. When Solange landed atop me I thought for sure my breaths were numbered. Hunter echoed the thought with a disbelieving sound in the back of his throat. He shook his head. “I saw that blow land.”

I shifted, pushing my hip against his. The intimate move was meant to test him, and when he shifted back, I smiled. “Well, maybe you need to get your oh-so-perfect eyesight checked.”

His gaze sharpened at my lifted brows, before the birth of a smile played at the side of his mouth. It was small, but real, so to me it was as wide and glorious as the Grand Canyon. I tried to swallow down the accompanying thrill as my belly flip-flopped, but that majestic smile spread, and so did mine.

Yet he still didn’t change the subject. “So other than your usual biting sarcasm, you’re feeling okay?”

“A little tired,” I admitted, though that could be due to our lovemaking as much as our escape from Midheaven, or midterm pregnancy. Yet I nixed the thought as his hand began a light play over my belly. The rub of his thumb traveling lower definitely had my fatigue lessening.

“Well, that’s to be expected. Normal, even,” he said with a scoff.

I tilted my head at the sound, wondering if that was his way of saying he already knew about the baby I carried inside me. Maybe his strong sense of smell was already ferreting out the changes in my body. Or maybe by joining our bodies again he was able to tell there was life between us?

Possible . . . but I didn’t think so. The child was a part of him. Thus harder for him to scent. Plus, his expression was open, even a bit anticipatory. Like he was waiting for an answer to a question I hadn’t even thought of yet.

“My ‘normal’ is a bit different than it was when we last saw each other, Hunter,” I reminded him, almost apologetically. “So . . . just be gentle with me.”

And I wasn’t speaking solely of my humanity. The echo of his cry in my ear as he climaxed still curled along my gray matter, and if he took that from me now—if he left or changed his mind or had some sort of regret at being yoked with a mortal—I didn’t know what I’d do. Screw mortality . . .
this
was vulnerability.

Hunter drew back, concern darkening his eyes, telling me he scented my panic. “But I thought you said you felt normal?”

He didn’t see it, I thought, breathing deep to calm myself. That I was his alone. That I was in love with him. That without him, I’d belong to no one. Not even, at least for a time, myself.

So I played it off, pretending that I was speaking only of my body. “You just have to be mindful of my mortality. The last time we played this hard I had bruises for weeks.”

He looked momentarily sorry for that, before rising to his elbows and bringing his hands from beneath the pillow to cup my palms. He wrapped his fingers around my free hand, then brought it to his lips. The extreme gentleness of the kiss made me blink in surprise. I tilted my head.

Maybe he did see. Maybe, I thought, tilting my head, he felt the same.

“You’re not listening to me. Or at least not hearing me correctly.” And despite his words, his voice was as tender as his touch. “What I’m saying, my dearest Joanna, is that
mortality
is not your normal state. And, as you’ve already said, you feel relatively normal.”

And he flipped our joined hands over, palms up, still linked, to reveal a cluster of playing chips. Poker chips.
Soul
poker.

I sat up so fast my head spun.

“It seems,” he continued, as I fought to draw air in my chest, “that power is very much like health. Something we only take note of when it’s gone.”

But his voice had turned into a buzz in my ear, hollow and suddenly distant. And my limbs were my own, my palms still cupped, but I stared down at my hands in wonder.

“Hunter—?” I said, though what I was really asking was,
What does this mean? Are these really my powers? How did you get them? Oh my God, am I super?

He answered every unvoiced question succinctly by wrapping both of our fists around the recovered chips. “Tekla saw it. You
are
the Archer. The Kairos. The woman, it seems, with nine lives.”

“These . . . this is everything I lost in Midheaven.” I gazed at the chips while mentally cataloging the lost powers. A plain upward-facing triangle, representing my elemental sign, fire. A chip containing what looked like a tree holding aloft three moons. And an open-based infinity sign, one Shen had taken from me out of spite. One, I thought, tearing up, that represented my supernatural ability to regenerate, to heal, from all mortal wounds.

“You told me before I left for Midheaven that you played soul poker. You told me you lost.”

But I’d also won. I looked at Hunter. “I won one man’s sense of smell. Another’s ether . . . whatever his is. I have their chips too.”

I’d carried them back in a bag months earlier.

But Hunter shook his head. “I’m sorry. They’re useless unless those men physically return to this world.” And we both knew that wasn’t going to happen.

Still, it was hard to feel disappointed. I had a total of four powers back. Four, in a world where moments earlier I thought I’d had one.

“What do they do?” I asked, because Hunter would know better.

He leaned close, smiling at my excitement, happy to play teacher. “The triangle is the symbol for fire. It represents activity and transformation. Basically, it’s physical strength, darling. Try not to give it away again.

“This one,” he said, pointing to the slanted infinity sign, “is actually the sign for sublimation. In science it’s when something turns from a solid into gas. In astrology it can resolidify, while adhering to its vessel . . . that’s you.”

“Healing,” I said, simplifying things.

“Yes. You can heal again.” And he touched my chin where Solange had planted her fist. Squarely, I now knew.

“This is your ability to build walls around you. It might seem redundant since your ether is the power of creation, but that’s an offensive weapon. This allows you to play a mean defense.”

And I sorely needed both.

But what about the rush that accompanied the return of power? The way my ether’s return had forced me to my knees in Io’s lab? That power had rolled through me like head-to-toe thunder, but I’d felt nothing like that this time. Still, what I was sensing, scenting, finally made sense. No wonder I’d swayed upon reentering the underground stupa. Everything else had been drowned out as those three additional powers rushed back into me.

I gazed back up at Hunter, knowing I was gaping and wide-eyed, but unable to stop it. “So does this mean I can kill people with the flick of my wrist again?”

“There’s my girl.” Hunter’s voice was teasing again, but his eyes were still soft, and reflecting my own amazement, also brimming with tears. He’d brought me back my powers. He’d brought back myself. I shook my head, gazing down at the chips again in disbelief.

After a moment, he took a deep breath and slid to his back, and tucked his arms behind his head again. “So, uh . . . still think true escape is beyond you? I mean I’d be willing to give you a head start.”

My normal retort—quick and biting and playfully combative—didn’t come. I’d needed a good head start for so long now. Besides, what Hunter was really asking was if I still wanted to be here now that I had the freedom that came with my returned supernatural power. Did I still think he belonged with me, and I with him alone?

Oh my God. I’m
me
again.

I stared at the man whom I’d saved and who’d saved me in return. Whom I’d sided with at a time when he looked guilty of betrayal, recalling that he’d once done the same with me. I looked at this man whose touch I could recall in my sleep, whose mind I could rap against, yet still relish and respect. Who thought of me when I didn’t have the time, inclination, or ability to think of myself.

And I began to shake. Once I started I found I couldn’t stop and the chips slipped from my hands, falling silently on the bedcovers, to disappear into the rumpled sheets. Even my chin was shaking, a girlish and vulnerable reaction I’d always hated, and seeing it, Hunter’s half-teasing smile fell away. Despite daring me to escape, he reached forward, but that was as far as he got. I met him halfway, flinging myself at him so hard he flew back again, air whooshing from his lungs, his embrace of me also a defense.

My powers were one thing, I thought, hands flying over his frame, my mouth dropping kisses over his entire face. My life, normalized, was another. But this man and these powers together meant I could seek a new life altogether—
we
could—and that wasn’t something I’d ever take for granted.

He did belong with me. And I belonged to him also.

“Mine. Hunter,” I whispered into his chest, and his grip tightened around me, too. “Thank you. Thank God.”

“For?”

“All of it.”

I
’d heard some people say that bad sex was better than no sex at all, and while what we did next couldn’t be called bad, it was certainly fumbling, desperate, and raw. We didn’t make love so much as throw ourselves at each other, and afterward—sweaty and each staring wide-eyed at the ceiling—we remained silent for a long time. Probably shell-shocked.

“I think I’m embarrassed,” I finally said.

Hunter snorted. “Don’t be. You’re not rusty at all.”

I slapped at him feebly, a blow he didn’t bother to dodge while he rolled from his back to his stomach, revealing scratch marks along his biceps and shoulders. Oops.

After I’d stopped blubbering like a Twi-Hard, I’d let loose of my death grip on Hunter’s neck, but I hadn’t let go. There was a time for explanation and words, and a time to just hold on tight and let your body speak up. Mine, apparently, was screaming in tongues, an overwrought babble of grateful relief, disbelief, and pregnancy hormones. Still, we made it through the wild lovemaking and collapsed into each other, our bodies loose with dissipating sexual energy and much needed respite.

But the glittering gem I’d returned to him, one he’d carelessly dropped bedside, caught my attention. I reached across him to pick it up and rolled it between my fingertips.

“Seems hard to believe that this is how Solange controlled everyone in that world. I mean, it’s so small. So pretty.”

Hunter only cracked one eyelid before letting it drop shut again. “Plenty of people fight for control of small, pretty things.”

I nodded, unable to argue that. “Well, all’s well that ends well,” I said, though I could afford to be nonchalant now that Solange was dead, Hunter was reclined in naked superhero glory next to me, and I had enough returned power to put mortality behind me. “Though good ending or not, one thing’s for sure . . . I’m never entering that twisted underworld again.”

Hunter made a growling noise in the back of his throat. It would have been intimidating if he’d bothered to open his eyes. “You should have listened when I told you never to go back the first three times.”

Using his arm as a pillow, I dropped my head down so that we were face-to-face. “Would you have listened to me if our positions were reversed?”

“Yes.”

Liar
. I scoffed. “And then done what you wanted to anyway.”

“God, Jo.” He pushed to his elbows, dumping my head to the bed as he loomed over me. “What do you think I felt when I saw you appear in that web? Knowing she was lying in wait?”