The Touch Of Twilight (40 page)

He didn’t answer, just disappeared around the back door, which led into the outdoor gazebo, moving so fast I caught only a glimpse of his black shroud as he slipped back over to the themed rooms. I tried not to look rushed as I followed, smiling at stragglers in the outdoor tents, and discreetly rushing past a couple making out in the pulsing light of the Disco Suite. More mirrors, please, I thought sarcastically, as I averted my eyes again…and again.

I finally caught sight of his tattered hem disappearing around the corner, and called out for him to slow down, but my voice was drowned out by the organ music straining from the Gothic Suite. A fog machine had mist snaking from beneath the closed door, and when I tried the handle I found it locked tight. No telling what Our Gang was doing in there now. I moved to the window to peer into a replica of Dracula’s castle, replete with leering gargoyles and the flicker of medieval sconces, but my gaze was immediately drawn to the coffin-shaped bed centered beneath a werewolf’s moon.

And to Ben on that bed, satin red sheets pooling around him like blood.

I was there too. My old bob swinging down around my cheeks as I rose and fell above him. The muscles in my arms flexed as I rode him. My small breasts strained through the soft chemise Ben had neglected to remove as he gripped my hips, both of us moaning. A mask like the one Hunter had designed for me lay snug against my cheeks.

Her
cheeks. Regan’s.

A keening wail spiraled out of me and I rushed the door, only to be yanked backward. The arm wrapping around me was as unyielding as concrete.

“No,” Hunter said, repeating it when I jerked against him. “It’s what she wants!”

“Oh, it’s what I want too.” I slammed my heel into his foot, and his grip loosened momentarily, but he pulled me back to his body before I’d taken three steps.

“You have no weapon. Breach that door, and Ben will be dead before you touch her.”

The truth in those words had me sagging. Hunter’s grip relaxed, released, and I lunged for the whip at his side, and raised it to the level I’d seen Regan’s head through the window, but he wrapped his hand around the steel-tipped length so that I’d have to cleave through his flesh in order to wield it. “Think, Joanna. Think what it’d do to him to see ‘you’ slaughtered on top of him. It’s what she wants. She’ll break him through his mind rather than his body, and in doing so she’ll still get to you.”

Because mortals were so easy to break, especially when you didn’t give a shit about any of them.

It was masochistic, but I leaned forward, looked through those cobweb curtains again, hoping against hope I hadn’t seen what I knew I had. That maybe Ben would open his eyes at any moment and throw Regan from his waist, realizing his mistake. But he was too far gone, lost in an ecstasy that was supposed to be mine, spending himself inside her even as I blinked, and causing another blade-sharp wail to rise from my throat.

Hunter wrapped his arm around me again. Regan threw back her head. And I swore she looked right at me as she climaxed.

The voice that had begun screaming inside me the instant I’d seen Ben pinioned beneath Regan fell silent as we sped away from the chapel. I was suddenly icy with calm, but the accompanying silence was that of a hurricane’s vortex. It must have frightened Hunter, because he kept one hand on the steering wheel as he drove, the other poised on the console between our seats, tensed. His eyes were on me more than they were on the road, but I didn’t care. I was playing and replaying everything I’d said and done and missed, piecing together the puzzle of how Regan, once again, had gotten to Ben. Gotten, this time, inside him.

Closing my eyes, I leaned back against the leather headrest. I’d told Regan that Ben would never be with her as long as I was alive. So instead of wasting time or risking rejection, Regan had chosen a more effective tactic in making him her own. She’d become me. And that was my fault too. Hadn’t I taunted her less than twelve hours ago? Hadn’t I told her straight out that Ben knew who I was, and we were going to be together tonight, and every night hereafter?

I’d handed him to her on a silver platter, I thought numbly, opening my eyes to watch the zigzag of streetlights flaring before us, disappearing behind. By confirming to Ben the truth of my dual existence, or at least part of it, I’d given her leave to fill in the blanks. And she had. She’d pretended to use a changeling to turn herself into the old me—as Ben knew I’d done before—and with the mask on and the mannerisms she’d studied so closely, and a scent she’d manufactured and bottled after scrutinizing my own, she’d recreated the woman who spoke to Ben’s soul. And he was expecting me, after all. He wanted me. He thought he was making love to me.

None of that lessened my desire to throw myself from the speeding car.

The bay door to Hunter’s warehouse was lifting even as we rounded the final corner, and he pulled in smoothly, then waited for it to close again. He unlocked the car doors and got out. I remained seated, the cabin’s silence a cushion against my senses, only vaguely aware when Hunter lifted me from my seat and carried me through a narrow passageway I’d never even noted. We continued up a flight of stairs that ended in the crow’s nest where I’d sat with Warren a week before. Hunter deposited me on the corner of the desk, studied my gaze as it lingered on the black depths of the workspace below, then lifted me like I was a rag doll, and dropped me to the chair, away from the railing.

“Don’t try to escape the warehouse,” he said, closing the door to the hidden passageway so it melded back into a rickety wooden wall. It was almost pitch-black up here, and I looked around for the utility lights that were casting his outline in relief, finally glancing up to find a low-slung ceiling angling over the bed’s raised platform. It glowed with an elaborate universe of stars. I’d have thought it was some cheesy attempt at turning the crow’s nest into a love nest, but all the Zodiac members had a weird obsession with the solar system and the stars freckling its face. Raised outside the troop and inside a city whose skyline obliterated the night sky, I harbored no such affection. I’d have asked him to turn on the lights, except I preferred not to be seen right now. “It’s rigged, alarmed with trips and snares. You won’t even make it onto that concrete floor.”

“You can’t trap me here.” My voice was scratchy with the screams that’d escaped me, and thick with those still caught there.

He folded his arms and leaned against the wall, putting himself between me and what looked to be my only escape. “I just did.”

And he probably thought it was for my own good. He always thought he knew better than I did; that he was right just because he was stronger, had more knowledge and experience in death dealing and demon fucking, and creatures who used sex as nothing more than a sport or a job or another weapon in a superhero’s arsenal. Just like him. Just like her.

I narrowed my eyes, feeling anger heating again like the core of a nuclear reactor, though this time I had a new target. Hunter felt it too, but he couldn’t back away…the arrogant, sanctimonious, merciless…

“Why are you pissed at me?”

“Because you’re always there!” I screamed, twisting the last word into an ugly growl, throwing my arms wide to send a stack of books skittering across the ground. I stood, squaring on him. “Always watching me, stalking me! Just like
them
!”

That wasn’t fair; he had saved my life more than once, but none of that mattered now. My lover was with Satan’s spawn, and instead of helping me—rushing the room, securing Regan, saving Ben—Hunter had dragged me to a location where only he knew the hidden passageways and alarm trips.

Worse, he wasn’t even defending himself. He shifted so his legs were spread apart, defiant as his regarded me from that not-wall, absorbing shock after shock of my anger like he was an emotional sponge. I rose with the need to claw at someone, rip at them with my teeth until blood filled my eyes and I no longer saw that damned image of Ben pumping and pumping, ecstasy etched on his face. But Hunter was the only one in front of me, and he was as calm as I was frenzied. Which pissed me off even more.

And then he opened his fucking mouth.

“Should I put on a mask? Because the death breath is getting a little thick.”

My vision had gone red, and the sheen reflected back in the corrugated roof slats, smoke pumping through my pores without me willing or controlling it. My father’s temper was getting the best of me…and I didn’t care. I cursed Hunter so loudly the furniture shook on its legs, and an alarm sounded from somewhere below. Still calm, he leaned over in the billowing smoke and pushed a button on the outside of his squat headboard to silence it, his other hand covering his mouth. But he still watched me with that patient darkness.

“Fuck you!” I repeated, over and over again, the inflection altering in my throat, scratching it raw as it grew deeper and more fibrous, and feeling good. The part of me that always had a sarcastic comeback told me I was having a major paranormal shit fit, but I just screamed louder. A desk lamp went over the railing, triggering another alarm, and I heard the whizzing of deadly darts cutting air, fired pellets that joined my voice in the ringing chaos. I screamed some more.

I don’t know how much time passed before the breath simply wouldn’t come. One minute I was standing in the center of the crow’s nest, wolf-mad with howls, the next I was mewling on the bed, slumped up in the corner like a patient in a nuthouse. Finally deeming it safe, my sarcastic bent popped up its head again. At least I wasn’t drooling.

“I hate you,” I told Hunter, as he stepped through the thinning smoke, his indistinct form solidifying again. It felt like the only solid thing around me.

“I know.” His voice was gentle, still absorbing the aftershocks of my tantrum as he lowered himself to a crouch in front of me.

“You should’ve let me kill her.”

He put his hand over mine. “You would’ve hated yourself later. It would’ve fed into his destruction. Just like Regan is doing.”

“Stop that!” I jerked away, sick of people bringing up my Shadow side, as if I was any more treacherous than anyone else. Like Hunter wouldn’t have felt or thought the same things if it was his lover being fucked by a rotting corpse! “Stop using me against myself!”

“I’m not.” He laid his hand on my arm again, but this time its solidity balanced me in a world gone formless and faint. “I’m pointing out a strength that makes you better than them, or any of us who make flawed decisions even without a lineage that puts us in opposition with ourselves. Regan mistakes your Light for weakness. But it’s a greater strength than I’ve ever witnessed in any person…and any man, at any time, should be able to recognize it.”

A tremor shot up my spine, like the carnival game where the smash of a mallet sends a bell ringing above. I suddenly realized the silent knot coiled inside me was really a choked-off thought, one I’d strong-armed into silence so I didn’t have to admit the selfsame thing. Leave it to Hunter to come along and clobber that bell square. I wiped at my eyes with the backs of my hands.

“She looked like me,” I said weakly.

Silence reigned. I dropped my legs to the floor, shifting uncomfortably, and I found myself unable to meet his eye in the wake of that feeble excuse.

“I’d be able to tell it wasn’t you.”

I looked up into Hunter’s face to find his steady, assured patience coupled with a fierce tenderness. And the knot that’d already been dissolving in steamy corkscrews gave way to scalding tears. My shoulders shook.

How? I wondered. I wasn’t male and couldn’t know if one woman’s flesh beneath a callused hand felt much the same as another. Could a man distinguish between two women—by the way their hands moved over his body, how their tongue tasted in his mouth, how their thighs warmed his as he pressed them apart? I’d have gone on wondering, and weeping, if I hadn’t accidentally spoken the word aloud.

Hunter’s palms stilled my knees, his smooth fingertips pressing lightly. He leaned forward slowly, until his breath was in my ear, shifting the hair at my neck in the slow, calming beat of his pulse. I turned to him, our faces inches apart as I studied him studying me, and breathed in deeply. A gentle fizzing on the air, the Light in him straining to comfort me, an enveloping warmth like a hot spring in a hidden cave, something wanting to warm and secure me all at once. Overlaying it was the sharp, depthless need I always tried to ignore, and the poised flint of his banked gaze, ready to spark to life. Oh, I thought breathlessly as we locked eyes. I’d forgotten. Hunter felt like lava-licked sea water and smelled like ozone, and yes, it was totally different from any man I’d ever known.

“Because once he’s been inside you,” he whispered in the breath of a scalding ocean, “how could any man mistake you for another?”

A final sigh stuttered out of me, my defenses unraveling, and I lowered my gaze to his sea-swept mouth.

Ah, I remembered now. He tasted different too.

His strong, solid face blurred as I leaned closer, then reappeared touching mine, lips soft and warm and waiting. The kiss started out uncertainly, a meeting and parting, desire squared and split in two. Then, the smoothest flick of his tongue and heat shot through me, a slide that numbed, like bubbling champagne hitting the tongue.

With the gentlest press of printless fingertips, he lowered me to the bed, and this time—as never before—I let him, watching the faux stars spread out overhead as he loomed above me, the glow of distant planets and forgotten origins the only witnesses to my acquiescence. They grazed my irises before I closed my eyes, winking their approval.

Five minutes later he rose to his knees, stripped off his shirt, and unbuttoned his jeans. Tenting his body over mine, he held his weight on his arms and I ran my hands along his tight biceps, over the dense rounding of the shoulders I’d been wanting to caress since seeing him shirtless, and traced where I knew that enigmatic tattoo lay, marking his back. Meanwhile I branded him with my tongue, wet warmth sliding over his chest, crisscrossing the peaks of his nipples as I pushed his jeans down using my instep. We kicked them away together, a little more rushed, slightly frantic now, and I gazed up at him, down at him…and wished for more light.