The two women were staring at him. The blonde smiled, slow and obvious. “Hey,” she said.
Three seconds. That’s all the time he allowed himself to look. That’s all that was safe. Three seconds to look at a woman. To note the shape of her mouth or the intelligence in her eyes. To make assumptions about her character. You could learn a lot about a woman in three seconds, not the least of which was whether or not she wanted to sleep with him.
The blonde did.
“Do you live here?” she asked as her friend laughed low.
He’d never get used to this, to the bold women of the outside world who lusted on their own terms and displayed that lust for all to see. Before,
inside
, he’d been the one with the desires. His captors, the water elementals called the Ofarians, had done a damn fine job of creating that monster, and he was still trying to exorcise it.
Xavier swiveled away, the three seconds over, his body aflame with need. He was so well trained, such a good pet, and it would take a hell of a lot more than the passage of years to break his conditioning. Five silly words from a girl and every muscle in his body, no matter how small, had tightened with expectation. Every blood cell raced faster. He
wanted
. He needed sex.
And yet he ran.
Man, he was messed up. He was still learning about the world outside the Plant, but that much was pretty clear. Normal Primary guys didn’t sprint the opposite way when a hot woman showed interest. Normal Primary guys didn’t spend more than half their days either cooking or thinking about cooking, and the remaining hours pounding the ever-loving shit out of a boxing bag, just to avoid getting naked with someone.
But then, he wasn’t Primary. He wasn’t entirely human.
And even though he wanted nothing more than to be “normal,” he certainly wasn’t that either.
He slipped back into the slow-moving crowd. Away from the women, who’d probably already sidled up to another guy, his body cooled.
Shed’s entrance was tucked into the back of a cobblestone alley that ran alongside the nineteenth-century Gold Rush Theater, now used as the festival’s main venue. The alley was barely forty yards away, but the crowd had completely stopped and Xavier was going nowhere. He bounced on the balls of his feet, willing himself not to duck his shoulder and barrel through the tourists. Willing himself not to have a panic attack in the close quarters. What was the holdup anyway?
Craning his neck above the sea of bobbing heads, made taller by colorful hats, he saw that two massive pockets of people—gaping at two different things—had converged, and no one could get through.
Some young, grizzled guy stood under the triangular theater marquee, a half-moon of five camera teams surrounding him and angling for a shot. A gaggle of fans shouting his name—a name Xavier didn’t recognize—fought with the laughter and cheers coming from the crowd closest to Xavier. A giant circle had formed around a street performer.
A middle-aged man wearing a beige North Face jacket and a cheap, felt jester’s hat danced along Waterleaf’s yellow divider. Xavier’s first instinct was to just lower his eyes and try to press on, but what Jester was doing froze Xavier in place.
Jester juggled a mass of colored balls, his hands blurring, a rainbow in the air. Some seemed to disappear then reappear. The audience gasped. Xavier did, too.
Was this guy like him—a Tedran, a Secondary human—capable of true magic, true illusion?
No. That would be impossible. Xavier was the last.
He peered closer, intently following the intricacies of Jester’s hands. When Xavier caught the deft slip of Jester’s fingers into the folds of his coat, he exhaled. He watched a charlatan, nothing more. He started to turn away, to head back into the thick of the crowd, then stopped. He wanted to be normal, right? If this was the sort of thing Primaries did, then maybe he should suck it up and try it, too.
He planted his feet. Closed his eyes. Shoved away the feel of strangers around him and pretended he was weightless and invisible. He drew in a deep breath through his nose and pushed it out. Opened his eyes.
Jester was storing the balls in a suitcase to the sound of applause. He pulled out a deck of cards from his coat pocket and shuffled them in an impressively high arc. He started to go around the circle, asking random people to pick a card, look at it, then put it back in the deck. His marks all happened to be women.
With a hand flourish, eyes deliberately averted, Jester offered the deck to Xavier, then finally looked up at him. “Whoa, sorry. Not you, big guy.” Jester tried to play it off for laughs, but the nervous shock on his face was nothing Xavier hadn’t seen before.
Since escaping the Plant, he’d put on a good thirty pounds of muscle on his already six-foot-five body. No one knew how horrible it was to be the person who stood out more than the person who actually stood out. But that’s not usually what made people react when they saw him.
Pam, his boss at Shed, said it was because his eyes were the color of guns—shiny, silver, and full of
don’t fuck with me
.
Xavier thought they were the color of death. And they were.
Jester offered the card deck to the person standing to Xavier’s immediate left. “Well, hello, beautiful. Care to pick a card?”
Three seconds. Ready…go.
The woman watched Jester with genuine excitement. Laughter cast her in a spotlight. She clapped her mittened hands like a kid about to get a cookie. Her deep brown hair, streaked with gold and wavy like the ocean, streamed out from beneath a knitted red hat topped with a pompom. She was tanned, like so many Hollywood people traipsing around White Clover
Creek right now. A fine layer of freckles covered her whole face and neck. A price tag stuck to the sleeve of her green, fur-trimmed coat.
She radiated joy, so unlike those women on the Tea Shoppe steps who were clearly here to see and be seen. This one was…so unlike any woman he’d stood this close to before.
He forgot how long a second lasted.
Vaguely he sensed his skin start to tighten. Just barely did he notice a heat rising from deep inside. Then a hard, throbbing pulse kicked up that had nothing to do with his heart. It felt goddamn amazing. Like someone had chained him to a rock for centuries, and now he’d been given the go-ahead to jump from an airplane. Too fucking long to deny himself this rush—this want and need—day after day. What had he been thinking, going all these years without?
She must have felt the weight of his stare because a funny look passed across her face. She glanced over her shoulder at him. Did a double take. Their eyes met and hers widened. They were the color of the caramel he’d made at two in the morning last Tuesday.
She didn’t look at him with apprehension, like Jester had, but with surprise. Like she’d been expecting to see him and, suddenly, there he was.
When she turned toward him, his body went haywire. That beating pulse took a dive for his dick and his mouth dried up.
“Hi,” she said.
Nothing came from his lips, but inside he screamed. Told himself to walk away. To get away from her
now
.
Too late.
Here it came. That low, ragged voice breaking free from the dark place where Xavier had stashed it the day he’d arrived in Colorado. The gravelly, taunting voice of the Burned Man spiraled up from the past, and it hadn’t lost any of its punch.
Stay here
, ordered the Burned Man.
You’re already hard for her. I brought her for you. Take her. She’s yours
.
Three seconds. It had taken just three seconds to destroy three years free from the hallucinations.
They came back in a horrible rush, filling Xavier with terror and shame. One moment he was on the crowded festival street of White Clover Creek, the next he was back in the Plant’s
breeding block, known as the Circle. White walls, a well-used mattress. Him, naked and anticipating the Burned Man—the Ofarian guard who’d tormented Xavier most of his life—bringing him a woman he was supposed to impregnate.
Today it was the smiling freckled woman whose joy Xavier would quickly erase.
In his waking nightmare, she crossed the Breeding Circle’s white floor without enthusiasm or emotion, like all the others had. In his mind, Xavier plucked the red hat from her head and tossed it to the floor, then he went for the zipper of her coat. Pulled it down, peeled the thick garment from her body. She was naked underneath, and the rest of her was as tan and freckled as her face, but he’d been trained to care only about the heaven between her legs.
He pulled her to the mattress, and even though he hadn’t been made to lie on it in almost seven years, his nightmares recalled the stiffness of it, the bleachy smell of the sterile sheets changed before every breeding session. The freckled woman lay back, turned her face away, and he pushed himself inside her. He shouted at the feel of her—it had been so long—and took what he’d been made for. Years without release built and built and built inside him, propelling his thrusts.
Xavier—the man he had become since escaping this torture, the man who knew this was wrong—grabbed desperately for reality. It slipped out of his reach. In the hideous world of his past, his body still worked inside hers. Long-denied fulfillment—because it could never, ever be called pleasure—and self-loathing collided together at a violent crossroads.
He threw his head back, pleading for mercy.
She doesn’t want this. And I don’t want to want this
.
The square window he knew should belong to the Tea Shoppe morphed into the wire-crossed observation holes in the Circle. The Burned Man appeared on the other side of the glass, terrifying as ever. Unchanged over the last three years. The scarred cheek and chin, the missing hair, the melted ear, the webbed hand…
Don’t stop
, he growled in his fire-damaged voice, the puckered skin on his neck stretching.
If you stop, I’ll just bring another
.
In the waking nightmares, as in life, Xavier always came.
It was what he’d been bred for: to create new generations of Tedrans. New slaves for the water-worshipping Ofarians.
It’s okay, what you’re doing
. The Burned Man’s tone rang syrupy false. Xavier had always suspected he’d enjoyed watching, and it had turned his stomach.
Her life will be better if she gets pregnant anyway.
A red-mittened hand touched Xavier’s arm, snapping him back to Colorado.
He gasped as though he’d been held under water—a paralyzing sensation he knew intimately—and gulped down the sweet, cold air. The loud drone of the festival slammed back into his ears. Sunlight bounced off the snow piled around the square, blinding him. He knuckled his eyes, hard enough to hurt. When he opened them, she was still there right in front of him, gorgeously and hideously innocent.
“Are you okay?”
Her voice was smoky, sexy, and it tugged him between reality and the evil place in his head. She wasn’t naked beneath him, taking it because she had to. But the possibility of it terrified him.
“Fine.” He ripped away from her touch. “I’m fine.”
Right about then would have been the perfect time for the old asshole Xavier to return, to shove his way through the ever-increasing crowd and not care if he hurt anyone, like the guy who’d knocked down Mr. Traeger.
“I’m sorry, but”—her freckled nose crinkled and a curious smile lit her candy-colored eyes—“I know this’ll sound weird, but do I know you? You seem…familiar.”
He pictured a pristine cutting board, felt the phantom weight of a scary-sharp chef’s knife in his palm, and imagined rows and rows of vegetables laid out before him, waiting. The vision brought him instant calm.
“No, you don’t.” He turned away, found the tiniest crack between bodies, and shoved himself into it.
Get away, get away
. He angled for freedom, pushing and mumbling apologies to strangers.
“Are you sure?” she called at his back.
The alley mouth leading to Shed was forty yards and forty thousand miles away. The crowd eased some, but the constant
touch of unfamiliar bodies gave rise to panic. An elbow here, a hip there. The next one might be the one that made him crack. He had to get into the kitchen.
At last he broke the edge of the crowd and veered into the alley. At the far end flapped the yellow-and-white-striped awning over Shed’s entrance. His long legs strode for it.
“Hey, wait.” That smoky voice. Following him. “Can you hold up a sec?”
Didn’t she realize that if she didn’t leave him alone, the Burned Man would come for her again?
Giant pots holding yews decorated with bows in Shed’s signature yellow and white dotted the wide alley, and Xavier wove among them. Stupid to think he could actually lose her, given that the alley came to a dead end, but he was grasping for any way out. When he ducked under the awning and still heard her footsteps crossing the cobblestones, he knew there was only one option left.
Xavier hadn’t just given up sex the day he’d arrived in White Clover Creek. He’d abandoned magic, too. But standing there, in the cold shadow under Shed’s awning, he reached deep inside himself and pulled out the rusty words of the Tedran language.
No reason to speak it anymore, since there were only two people on Earth who could understand him. Adine Jones, the half Tedran born without magic, had guided him through the basics of the Primary world and then disappeared. Gwen Carroway, the Ofarian Translator who had freed Xavier’s people and stopped the slavery, had started a new life with her Primary lover in Chicago.
It had been ages since he’d spoken his native tongue, but with the first hesitant word, the rest sprang up like the quick gush of blood after a pinprick.
He chose his illusion, imagining the face and body he wanted, and whispered the Tedran words to bring it about. Glamour enveloped him in a light, airy caress. Head to foot, the new image fell around him in a shimmering cloak made of the thinnest material. Touch it and it would dissolve.
He couldn’t deny that for some part of him, using his birthright after all this time was a well-deserved comfort.
He grabbed hold of the thick iron bar on the original granary shed wood door, and slid it wide on oiled rails. Rushing through the little foyer that blocked the winter wind, he pushed open the restaurant’s main door and waddled inside, shouldering a huge purse that wasn’t really there.