CHAPTER 24
My mouth hung open. Dust stuck to my lips, and I snapped them shut, then made spitting sounds, minus the spit, until the particles sailed away.
“Sawyer to the rescue,” I murmured.
“You live a very full fantasy life.”
“Considering my life, can you blame me?”
Sawyer sawed his way through a few dozen revenants. I’d never seen him so worked up. He appeared truly pissed.
“How did he know we were here?”
I no longer wore the turquoise, which, in light of recent events, was just plain stupid. Except . . . there he was.
Jimmy inched behind me. I glanced over my shoulder with a frown. That wasn’t like him. Usually we were shoving each other as the both of us tried to place ourselves in the path of every danger.
Jimmy pressed his crotch to my bound hands. “Take it off,” he murmured. “Quick. Before there’re more minions to ice than he can handle.”
I returned my gaze to Sawyer. His chest covered with dust, his bare feet made tracks in the mess on the floor as, face fierce, he just kept mowing them down.
More minions than he could handle? I didn’t think that was going to happen. However—
We did need to move along before the Phoenix showed up. Sawyer might be crazy powerful, but who knew what she could do? I’d forced Jimmy to bring back his vampire self; the least I could do was let him use it.
“You can’t kill Sawyer,” I cautioned, fingers fumbling with the button on Jimmy’s jeans, then the zipper.
“I’m sure I can.” His voice was low and a bit hoarse.
I paused, zipper halfway down. “I mean it, Jimmy.”
He cleared his throat. “I won’t be me when I’m like that. I’ll kill anything in my way, so keep him out of it.”
“Fine.” I yanked the zipper the rest of the way down, ignoring Jimmy’s sharply indrawn breath. Then I skimmed my fingertips across his belly; the muscles fluttered beneath his skin. His chest was hard and warm against my shoulders; his breath stirred my hair. Memories flickered.
Ruthie’s kitchen in the middle of the night. Jimmy comes up behind me in the dark. His arms go around me; he presses his lips to my neck, and my heart tumbles.
The image was so sweet and nostalgic, the feelings that went with it so raw, I couldn’t help it, I stroked his stomach, tracing the spike of his hipbone, the dip where it casted inward, the well of his navel and the happy trail that drew me ever lower. I remembered my quip about removing his collar with my teeth. Too bad I didn’t have the time.
The clink of my nails when they tapped the metal made me catch my breath. As I wrapped my fingers around it, around him, he leaped, then began to swell.
Too late I understood what a bad idea touching him had been, because when I tried to remove the cock ring, it was stuck.
“Sanducci,” I said in a low voice. “Get a grip.”
He leaned closer, and his lips brushed my ear, making me shiver. “I think the problem is that you’ve got one.”
I yanked my hand out of his pants. “Think of England or something. Paint chips. Wallpaper swatches.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Turn it off!” I swatted his swelling erection.
“It’s not that simple. This happens whenever you’re around.”
“I thought you hated me.”
“Hate. Love. Doesn’t matter to that part of me. You touch him and he’s lost.”
That we were talking about his dick with a pronoun was almost as weird as why we were talking about it at all.
“Listen, you have to—”
“Too late,” he murmured, and I glanced up.
Sawyer was right in front of me. I jumped so high I nearly knocked Jimmy’s teeth out when my head thumped his chin. Sawyer grabbed me by the arm and started to drag me toward the door.
“Wait.” I tried to dig in, but with revenant dust all over the floor, I only slid along like a water-skier being towed by a powerboat. “Sawyer. Sheesh. Stop.”
I couldn’t leave. I’d come here for the key, and I didn’t have it yet.
I looked back at Jimmy, whose pants were hanging open and his privates peeking out. He hurried after us, sliding along too in the dust strewn across the wooden floor.
Sawyer swung around, fist pulled back to punch Jimmy in the nose, then paused, gaze first lowering to Jimmy’s crotch, then lifting to my face. “What is wrong with you?” he asked.
“What’s wrong with you?”
He didn’t answer; I hadn’t expected him to.
There was something off about him. He was furious. Furious and Sawyer did not go together. Coldly homicidal maybe. Calmly murderous. Serenely dangerous.
Since he was still touching me, I closed my eyes and opened my mind. He shook me so hard my teeth snapped together, and said, “Stop that!”
“You’re a great black hole anyway,” I muttered.
His gaze narrowed; then he glanced at Jimmy. “Cover yourself, Sanducci.”
“I’d be happy to. If you’d just release me from these chains.”
With an impatient grunt, Sawyer strode forward. Keeping one hand around my biceps, he used the other to put Jimmy back in his pants. Or at least he tried.
Jimmy twisted, drawing his shoulder away, then slamming it forward, catching Sawyer in the chest and nearly knocking him down. If I hadn’t been attached, he would have. As it was, I had to take a couple of quick steps or be dragged along.
“Don’t touch me.” Jimmy’s voice was flat, deadly.
Outside the wind stirred, blowing in through the door, tracing patterns through the dust. I couldn’t tell if the distant rhythmic patter was incoming rain, the breeze through the trees or merely the cadence of my own heart.
Sawyer’s gray eyes darkened to smoke, and his nostrils flared as he fought to keep himself under control. The air seemed to crackle with fury and power. If they’d been dogs, their hair would have been standing on end. Mine was.
Then Sawyer’s gaze lowered, and his lips curved. “A cock ring? The Dagda is my kind of man.”
“Since he isn’t a man at all,” Jimmy snapped, “I can see the resemblance.”
“Glass houses,” Sawyer murmured.
“Listen,” I interrupted. “We don’t have time for you two to play ‘my dick’s bigger than your dick.’ ”
“It is.” Sawyer lifted an eyebrow in my direction. “Isn’t it?”
I was so not going there.
“We need—” I began, then paused as a singsongy voice from outside called, “Sawwwww-yerrrr!”
He dropped my arm, faced the door. I glanced at Jimmy with a frown, but he was staring at the door too. That distant patter had become a full-blown thud.
Revenants marched in. Brand-new ones from the looks of them. Tiny particles of dirt pinged lightly against the floor, mixing with the dust of their forebears.
“Guess we were right,” Jimmy murmured. “Mommy’s been raising the dead all over the place.”
My chest went tight; I couldn’t breathe. My gaze was glued to the doorway as I waited for my first true sight of my mother.
She flew in—not literally, though I guess she could have—shoving aside revenants like the nuisance they were. Every time she touched one they cringed, scrambling as far away as they could get, though stopping just short of the door.
The chandelier’s yellow light made her skin glow like gold. Her curly dark hair shone. She’d found better clothes—a bright red sheath, yellow sandals, with turquoise bobbles at her ears, wrists and throat.
I stared at her and felt nothing, remembered the same. How could that be? This woman—loose term, I know—had given birth to me. Shouldn’t there be some connection? But when I saw her I only experienced a sense of the bizarre. That someone could look so much like me yet not like me. That we could share the same blood, yet without the similarity in appearance she could be any other being on the planet.
“My love,” she purred, her voice lower than mine, with that thick accent that brought to mind sand dunes and the pyramids of Giza. “What did you do?”
I opened my mouth to answer—who else could be her love?—and Jimmy elbowed me in the ribs. She wasn’t looking at me, didn’t even appear to have noticed me in the room, which was downright disturbing.
Hey! Long-lost daughter here.
I remained silent as she laid her palm against Sawyer’s dust-strewn chest. When she lifted it, she left her handprint in the grit like a brand.
“They disobeyed,” he said simply.
“So you killed them all.” She licked her lips. “You’re so deliciously vicious.”
I blinked. I’d just been describing Sawyer with similar contradictory terms. Was that an inherited trait? Or could she read my mind without even touching me? If so, we were all dead.
She drew her fingernail—long, spiky, very Fu Manchu—beneath the mountain lion tattooed on his chest. Rubbing her hand in the blood that welled, she expressed the delight of a child who’d just discovered finger paint, before she pressed her palm to his stomach, leaving behind a more colorful, more gruesome brand.
“Mmm.” She tilted her head as if listening to someone, though the room was quiet as the eye of a storm. “More.”
She’d cut his neck before my eyes tracked the movement. Blood spurted, and she stuck both hands beneath the flow, then began to finger paint in earnest, all over Sawyer’s body.
Sawyer, who’d been standing still as a rabbit caught in the glare of headlights, grabbed the Phoenix. I figured he’d toss her through the window, smack her against the wall, throw her to the ground and do a rain dance on her head. And we needed her—at least until we had the key.
My mouth formed, No! But I never got the word out. It caught in my throat, choked me so badly I couldn’t quite breathe, as Sawyer put his hand at the back of her neck. One quick snap and—
Instead he lifted her onto her tiptoes and kissed her more passionately than he’d ever kissed me.
“You see now why I always think it’s Sawyer?” Jimmy murmured.