A heart of bones, p.19
A Heart of Bones, page 19
I nodded. I could probably guess the other reasons.
“What about your House?” he asked. “House Corvus?”
I tried to suppress the flinch that came almost automatically at hearing someone say that name out loud. My name. “I don’t really remember that much about them,” I lied. I remembered plenty. And none of it was particularly good.
Richard seemed to accept that he wasn’t going to get any more out of me on that subject. He gave me a sympathetic sort of nod, but I could read a subtle disappointment in his eyes.
Why was I continuing to lie to him? What was I afraid of exactly?
I sighed and took a too-big gulp of whiskey before I felt brave enough to speak again. “I do remember some things, I guess. It’s just… My childhood was kind of fucked up. Okay, it was very fucked up. I guess they weren’t good people. My family. The people from my House,” I said softly. “In fact… I think…they may have actually been evil.”
Damn, it hurt to admit that. I glared down at the alcohol in my cup. Goddamn truth serum.
But I couldn’t ignore the fact that the forest around our compound had always been sickly and diseased, empty of animals except for the swarms of mosquitoes and black flies, the lake devoid of fish. The trees were not our friends. They feared us. The ghosts our intricate wards kept at bay were not benign or content. They were fucking angry.
House Corvus hadn’t just taught me to change my shape, or set wards, or heal living flesh. No. That wasn’t all they’d taught me. It was the place where I’d first learned how fucking good it felt to drain the life force from a rabbit. That amazing rush as the animal’s cells gave up everything for me, as its heart stopped beating so I could have more power. As the rabbit’s life became my life.
It was the place where I’d learned how to kill.
I’d always hated those stereotypes about Black Mages, but the more I thought about House Corvus, the worse they seemed. The worse I seemed. I’d tried to live my life differently since I’d left them. But I’d still done those things. I’d still used my magic to kill someone. In desperation, maybe. But I’d enjoyed it. Could I even blame the Vis Magus for hunting the worst of us down? Maybe House Corvus deserved everything they got.
My throat felt tight. “What happened to my House?” I asked.
Richard stared at me for a long moment before shaking his head. “I don’t know. It wasn’t something sanctioned by the Inter-House Council, if that’s what you’re asking. I couldn’t find any records relating to an official action against them. I’m not sure if anyone knows what happened. The Vis Magus looked into it back then, of course, but they never came to any conclusions. The records are there, but there’s nothing of substance. No real investigation.”
I took a sip of my drink, my eyes stinging with it. We hadn’t been there. My parents. Zoe and me. When whatever had happened to House Corvus had happened, we weren’t there.
I remembered that night, though. Vividly. I remembered my mom, waking us up sometime before dawn, the way her hair had come loose from the braids she always kept so neat. The fear in her eyes as she said we had to hurry, to leave everything behind, that there wasn’t any time to pack. And then we’d run. And we’d kept running for four years. Until the day me and Zoe came home from school to our tiny apartment on 16th Street and found our parents dead on the living room floor. After that it was just the two of us running.
“They knew,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. It was only occurring to me now, because I don’t think about what happened before. Hardly ever. Maybe because so much other shit had happened since then. But now that I was looking back on that night with adult eyes and through the clarity of years, it was obvious my parents knew something bad was about to go down.
Richard was watching me.
“My parents knew,” I said. “That’s why we left. That’s why I’m still alive. They knew what was about to happen to my House. They knew someone was coming for them. And they ran. And then someone killed them too.”
Richard didn’t say anything. He just watched me with those soulful eyes.
“What about…” I swallowed, tried hard not to choke. “What about the man I killed?”
“You mean the incident the VM arrested you for when you were eighteen?” He said it as gently as possible.
“Yeah. That.”
I remembered so little from that night. My life had been a complete fucking mess, anyway, after my parents died. I’d gotten tangled up with the wrong crowd, gotten myself hooked on drugs. Gotten myself stuck in an abusive relationship. It was a wonder I remembered anything at all. And what I did remember was so painful that I’d fought to bury it every time it tried to rise from the grave again.
I closed my eyes and let it come back to me now.
I remembered the shape of a man—a man all in shadow, except for his glowing eyes—standing over Lyle’s twisted body. I remembered the binding spell Lyle had me under finally breaking with his death. And it was like waking up from a long, restless sleep only to find myself in a fresh nightmare. I remembered a sudden agony as my flesh started to shift. Not in transformation, but in decay. My cells dividing faster and faster, out of control, descending from order into chaos.
And in that desperate moment right before my own death, I’d felt the Shadow Man’s magic. Not exactly like mine, but so close I could touch it, taste it. In weaving the spell he was using to kill me, he’d left himself vulnerable. And I’d reached out, in one last, desperate bid for survival, and grabbed his life force. And then, well…
You can probably guess the rest.
I swallowed again, trying to push the nausea back down. “Who was he?” I whispered. “Why did he want me dead?”
Richard shook his head, and his voice was soft. “I took a look at your file. Before I came down to Keyes Point. But there’s not much there. I don’t know who the man was or why he attacked you. That part of the record is sealed. I can’t access it.”
That made no sense. “Why would they do that?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. It’s not standard procedure, and there aren’t any notes in the file explaining why the victim ID is missing. But, for some damn reason, the VM’s decided to keep his identity a secret.”
I’d never know. I’d only have what I remembered. For the rest of my life, I’d never know what happened to my parents. Or if the people who’d murdered them would come back for me again. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it was enough that I was still alive. “Okay,” I said. My voice trembled.
A heavy silence descended on the trailer. Even the trees had gone quiet.
Man, I’d gone and made things weird again by opening my big mouth. Maybe one day Richard and I could sit down for a drink and just talk about the weather or sports or other stuff that wasn’t such a major bummer. The way I could imagine normal people did.
I squeezed out of the bench and stood, my head spinning just a little from the whiskey. “I, uh… I’ll sleep on the floor tonight. You can take the bed.” It seemed only fair. I probably wouldn’t be sleeping much anyway.
Richard stood up too. He reached out and grabbed my arm before I could escape from the tension I’d created. “Jack…”
I turned back to him. “Yeah?”
“After all this is over. And we’ve dealt with these people… I can help you try to figure out what happened to you and your family. If that’s something you’re interested in pursuing. I have the resources to do it. And I owe you that much. All you have to do is say the word.”
I froze. What if I could know the identity of the people who’d destroyed my House? Who’d killed my parents? Would it be worth it to dig up the past if I could find out who was chasing me? I’d never really thought about it seriously before. But what if I could finally be free? What if I could live my life without fear?
“Uh, yeah.” My eyes stung again. Stupid whiskey. “Yeah. That’d be… Yeah,” was all I could say.
Richard nodded seriously once. He didn’t let go of my arm, though. Time seemed to stretch out again. The wind outside the trailer blew. I could hear the trees talking about the rain that was coming.
I swallowed past the sudden dryness in my throat. Hell.
Richard stared at me, those amazing fucking eyes boring into me. His grip on my arm tightened and he pulled me slowly closer.
I knew he was giving me a chance to say no, to tell him to fuck off again. But I didn’t. I don’t know exactly what had changed between last night and tonight, but I was suddenly doubting my earlier resolve. I still had no fucking idea what I wanted, I realized.
So I just stood there and let myself be reeled in, all of the very good reasons I’d come up with to justify remaining celibate seemed trivial now. Our magic met in the heady millisecond before our lips did, and I felt that strange new connection flare to life as energy jumped between us.
Richard either didn’t notice or, more likely, he didn’t care. He deepened the kiss into something serious. God, it was so good! My traitorous body certainly knew what I wanted. I wanted him to keep going, I wanted him to fuck me, even if the slightly more rational part of my brain was nagging at me to put a stop to this nonsense.
I jerked my face to the side, gasping, trying to catch my breath. “This is probably a…bad idea.” I mean, there were at least five hundred reasons why this was a really bad idea. I’d made a damn list, even.
Richard attacked my neck instead. “No, it’s not,” he said, between bites. “’S a great idea.”
“Shouldn’t we, like, talk about stuff? Before we… before…” It was really hard to think with him doing all the amazing things he was currently doing with his mouth.
I got a kind of muffled grunt in reply, which I interpreted as, we’ve talked enough.
I huffed out a half-desperate laugh. My body could certainly get behind that sentiment. My brain was still trying to figure out some kind of loophole. And those questions were still spinning around in there. Granted, they were becoming easier to ignore by the second. I grabbed at the question most relevant to current events before it could slip away completely. “What’s going on with our magic? How come I can see your magic? Why can you see mine?”
Richard reached for me, tried to pull me back in. “Later,” he murmured in that sexy, slow Texas accent.
I whacked his hand away. Sex was great and all, but this was important. “Lady Amanita knows what’s up. I think you do, too.”
That seemed to sober him up for a moment. He grimaced. “I do have an idea about what’s happening, but I’m not one-hundred percent sure.”
My pathetic self-control wavered. I wanted him. I was annoyed that he wouldn’t just answer the question, but I wanted him just the same. Maybe that was all that mattered right now. “Promise me we’ll talk about this tomorrow?” I said.
“Promise.” Those earnest blue eyes were working their special magic on me.
And, yeah, the last of my resistance crumbled away just like that. “Deal.” I kissed him hard and pulled him back against me, putting one leg down wrong. We stumbled and nearly fell. Damn whiskey.
“Come on.” He tried to manhandle me toward the bed, which, granted, was a pretty big target in our tiny trailer. And I had to admit it did look inviting. Dangerous, but inviting.
I wasn’t quite ready for that level of commitment, though. Not yet.
Richard may have had more muscles, but I was slippery as hell. After an awkward stumbling shuffle, we slammed into the wall between the built-in dinette and the kitchen in a very ungraceful and sharp-cornered way. The dishes rattled in the cupboard next to my head. Tamara would probably be pissed if we broke her shit. I had to admit that bed was looking better and better.
I also really wished we both had less clothes on, but I didn’t know of a spell that could solve that particular problem. Not offhand, anyway. The best I could do was to shove Richard’s shirt up and out of the way so I could paw at his belt buckle. There wasn’t a lot of space to work with and I ended up basically groping him through his jeans. He was hot and damp through the fabric. I wanted to drop to my knees right there and suck him off. But then I’d have to give up his mouth. Also, I was sort of wedged into the corner.
Didn’t matter anyway, because his belt buckle was proving impossible to deal with in my present desperate and slightly inebriated state. I made a frustrated sound and settled for running my hands up his chest. I had no idea when he found the time to shave—maybe he used magic to do it?—but I could definitely appreciate all the smooth skin I got to explore.
I could feel that same, strange vibration under my hands—the life energy thrumming through his body, but also the spells on his skin coming awake at my touch. They called out to me in a way that only my own magic had before. I could manipulate his tela artis, I realized, if I wanted to. They’d let me do it.
I touched the lines of one of his wards. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it, running like a conduit of power over his skin. A purposeful touch, my fingertip ready to draw a rune, the way I’d manipulate my own magic. This spell channeled the excess heat from his body into a reservoir of energy, stored it until he needed it. I had no idea how that worked. It wasn’t a spell I was capable of casting. I drew a tiny bit of that stored energy out—the ward let me do that, too—felt it flare red-hot and then fade into a cool blue.
Richard shuddered against me.
Fuck. I made an utterly embarrassing sound and pressed my cock harder against his thigh. Which was almost enough to get me off. Fucking hell. I was so touch-starved I was going to come in my pants like a teenager on prom night. I was going to come rubbing myself off against the man who’d wrecked my quiet, peaceful life. The man who’d saved my life. The man whose life I’d saved. The man who I was maybe falling for. Because I was a complete idiot like that.
And in that moment, I didn’t care.
Somehow, I’d been distracted enough with the spell that I hadn’t noticed he’d gotten his hand down between us and undone my fly. I did notice when his hand squeezed down into my pants and wrapped around my cock.
I jolted like I’d been shocked. The pleasure was intense, made more so by that weird tingling magic I could feel racing over my skin, like his touch had awakened my own power.
Zuraw was still pulling me against him, his hand moving on me relentlessly. He was murmuring nonsense in my ear. “C’mon. Feels so good. Yeah, keep going. Like that, just like that.”
“Shut up,” I hissed, because if he kept talking that way, this wasn’t going to last more than a few seconds. I was fucking whining against his shoulder. His shirt was damp from where I’d been mouthing at him. And it felt so good and it had been so damn long since I’d gotten off with anyone other than my own hand that I didn’t quite want it to end.
Richard’s other hand was digging into my bony ass, pulling my thigh between his. We were moving together in an odd, jerky, rhythm. It probably looked goddamn ridiculous, but it felt amazing.
“God, yeah,” he murmured. “Jack…”
I don’t know what did it. Maybe it was hearing him say my name like that—soft and low and desperate. Maybe it was the fact that I’d been living as a horny, sex-starved hermit for far too long. Maybe it was whatever weird thing that caused our magic to become entangled. Either way, that was the exact moment when I lost it.
I groaned, “Fuck,” and came all over his hand. And his pants. And probably my pants, too. And then I collapsed against him like my bones had just melted out of my body. “Fuck,” I whispered again, because, well, fuck.
I took a few moments to catch my breath, and then I reached for Richard’s belt once more, because at least one of us still needed some attention. But there was no way I could’ve been responsible for the entire mess I felt down there. “Did you…?”
He actually looked a little embarrassed. “Well, yeah. I just… You were so…” He shrugged. “That usually doesn’t happen. Sorry. Been a while.”
I gave him a sloppy grin. “Well, I am pretty damn awesome.” And just to prove the point, I lost my balance and almost knocked both of us sideways into the bench. I was totally spent.
Luckily, Richard was there to help me stumble over to the bed. I allowed it this time since the danger of passionate sex had now passed. I flopped down onto the mattress with a groan. The last few days of stress and no sleep and intense magical drain were catching up to me like a freight train at full speed.
I let Richard pull my pants off and clean me up with a damp towel. Which probably would’ve been pretty damn erotic if I wasn’t already half asleep. As it was, I could barely keep my eyes open.
Luna flew out from wherever she’d been hiding while we got it on and did an irritated zoom around the bed. Finally, she settled in the crook of my neck, still flashing cold. I huffed. She’d never approved of any of my hookups. Even as few and far between as they were.
The mattress dipped as Richard settled down next to me. He reached out and brushed the messy hair out of my eyes. “G’night.” I felt his lips touch my forehead for one brief second, so faint I could’ve imagined it.
“Night,” I managed. And then I passed out.
***
The rain Richard and the trees had predicted arrived right on time.
I couldn’t remember the exact details of the dream that had woken me up this time, but I couldn’t seem to get back to sleep, so I lay motionless in bed and listened to the rain drum against the metal sides of the trailer. I’d always liked the sound of rain, as long as I wasn’t caught out in it. Peaceful, steady, like the hum of life all around me. Richard was on his back, still wearing all of his clothes, one arm thrown across his face. The rain drowned out his snoring. Bonus.
