(22)
The townhouse basement felt cool and comfortable to Duncan as he stretched out the kinks on his mat. He felt like himself again. Well, mostly, if he didn’t focus on the really old fire Sibyl trying to talk to him, the coin around his neck, or the ghost of his best friend, still lurking around in his brain.
John Cole had clamped down tight on the issue of the will, insisting that he’d just done what he had to do to keep Katrina happy, and he wasn’t going to discuss it any further. So Duncan was letting it be for now. He’d been asleep for a day, had a good meal, had a good shower, and won a good fight with Blackjack, who had a busted knee and black eye he refused to explain when Duncan asked. The bastard finally agreed that Duncan was still a cop, definitely assigned to the OCU, but classified “on special assignment.” No attending shift report, no official duties other than sticking with Bela’s quad until the Sibyls said he could work alone. Duncan could live with that. For now.
He was having more trouble living with Mother Keara standing next to him nonstop, stinging him with sparks even when he was trying to do his stretches and relax.
“A few weeks, a month, maybe two—it’s hard to say, cop.” The one Mother still playing fire-breathing babysitter actually looked sad as she explained what the Sibyls thought after the last round of blood drawing and analyzing skin scrapings. “You’ll keep yer health until then, so long as John Cole’s spirit keeps helping you out. And when death comes, you won’t suffer. The demon-change’ll happen fast, and we’ll take care of … putting you down.”
Duncan figured he didn’t want to ask how.
“Thank you,” he said to Mother Keara.
She pointed to the coin around his neck. “The dinar’s key to keeping John Cole close to you, and holding our blood and tissue wards in place. Don’t take it off, or you’ll hasten the process.”
“I won’t.” Duncan didn’t want to hear any more negatives right now. He had other things on his mind. “And I’m feeling fine for now. I want to see Bela.”
Mother Keara’s braids smoked. “She’s busy. Not hurt at all, don’t go worryin’. The Rakshasa pulled an attack on the townhouse while we were workin’, and she and Dio and Camille drove them off. They saved yer life.”
Duncan’s jaw tightened.
While he’d been thrashing around on a basement mat getting his insides burned up and smashed by elemental energy, his angel had been upstairs fighting demons?
Not okay.
He stood and faced Mother Keara more directly. “I want to see Bela now, please.”
She gave him a blow-off frown and shook a knotty finger at his hip—because she didn’t reach any higher. “We’ve been keeping her away, because you’ll be needin’ another day or two to be solid on yer feet.”
“I try to respect my elders, ma’am, and I’m more grateful to you and the other Mothers than I can say for the extra time you’ve given me. But I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.” Duncan put his hand over the dinar to keep it from swinging down when he leaned toward Mother Keara to be sure she heard him. “I don’t have a lot of time left to me, and I want to see Bela. Now. I want to be with Bela as much as I can. Either you send her to me, or I’m going up to find her.”
All that came out loud.
And powerful.
It had kind of an echo to it.
The coin tingled beneath Duncan’s fingertips, and he let go of it to stare at his skin.
From the center of his brain, John said,
Interesting
, then faded from Duncan’s awareness.
From somewhere around Duncan’s right elbow, Mother Keara said, “Did yer mother ever make things catch on fire, by any chance?”
Duncan glanced down at the Mother, wondering if she’d gotten overheated during his healing. “Ah, no. Not unless she used matches.”
“Hmm.” Mother Keara sounded like she didn’t believe him, but she accepted his word nonetheless. “All right, then. You wait right here, and I’ll let her know you’re awake and asking for her.”
Duncan watched the Mother totter over to the basement door, tempted to follow her just to be sure she didn’t jack around with him. He didn’t think she would, though. If she hadn’t wanted to go get Bela, she would have just set him on fire for being pushy.
That’s what he was liking most about Sibyls so far. What you saw was what you got—only better. And he never had to worry about where he stood, because they’d damned sure tell him.
Duncan touched the dinar around his neck again, and he sensed her.
Bela.
She felt like a cool island oasis in a sea full of sharks.
“Come here, Angel,” he murmured, even though he knew she couldn’t hear him. “We need to talk about no and not yet—and saying yes.”
According to Riana’s triad, the search for the Rakshasa had turned up nothing. Again. The Sibyls on patrol had tried tracking the demons and the humans who helped them invade the townhouse’s elemental protections, but once more, it was like they vanished from the city’s borders as soon as they ran away. They had to have one hell of an elemental shield in place somewhere—something strong, yet subtle enough that the patrols were missing it completely.
Bela sat at the townhouse’s kitchen table in her street clothes, because Mother Keara and Jack frigging Blackmore, with his purple eye and sprained knee from falling out of the damned wall on the crest of Andy’s wave, had refused to let her and her quad go on the hunt. They didn’t think it was safe, not until the Mothers had the opportunity to study what Bela, Camille, and Dio had done to stop the Rakshasa’s energy attack during the healing.
Stupid.
But not worth the fight.
If truth be told, Bela didn’t want to get that far away from Duncan anyway.
“You know we’re not tryin’ to shame you or punish you.” Mother Keara’s crackly voice caught Bela off guard. She hadn’t heard the Mother enter the kitchen or come to stand behind her. Mothers could be like that, damned silent and sneaky. “We’re only holdin’ you back until we know more.”
Bela kept her hands on the table in front of her and didn’t turn around. “You’re holding us back, period. My quad might have been able to track those monsters while the trail was fresh. We touched their energy shield. I think we could recognize it again. I know we could do it, if we work together.”
“You don’t know any such thing. No one, not one person—are you hearin’ me?” Mother Keara stomped around the table where Bela would have to look at her, bringing her fire as she came. Bits of flame danced across Bela’s wrists and fingers. “Not a livin’ soul on this earth knows what might happen, usin’ elemental power like the three of you did. The air Sibyls are crawlin’ Motherhouse Greece’s archives to find what they can to explain it, to help us understand it.”
Bela got to her feet and gazed down at Mother Keara. “
We
understand it.”
“Do you now?” Shadows and flames played across Mother Keara’s wrinkled cheeks as she spoke, and Bela was reminded fiercely of pictures of Rumpelstiltskin and goblins and other tiny, terrible things. “How long can you use it before it drains you down to nothing—or kills you?”
She’d never come out on top in this argument, but stubbornness and irritation drove Bela to keep going anyway. “It’s an exchange. We have to keep the output less than the input, that’s all.”
“And what damage might that output do if it got away from you? What if the next time it takes yer life—or Dio’s, or Camille’s?”
“Don’t you dare use my caring for my quad against me!” Heat poured into Bela’s face. She wanted to say a lot more, but she rubbed her temples instead, pushing back a big headache. “Leave off, old woman. I can’t talk to you anymore until I get to go on patrol and burn some energy.”
Fire burned a streak across the table separating them, and Mother Keara laughed at her. “You should have been a fire Sibyl.”
“And you should have been a sneaky-ass leprechaun, so we’re even.” Bela let go of her head and steadied herself with the table again. She was relatively certain her temper wouldn’t drive her to accidentally open a projective hole in the floor and let Mother Keara fall all the way back to Ireland.
Mother Keara’s paper-thin hand rested over Bela’s on the table, without burning her at all. “Yer detective’s awake,” she said, no doubt feeling the upsurge in Bela’s earth power as she spoke. “I’m thinkin’ he’d like to see you now.”
Bela’s worries and frustrations fractured and dispersed. She blinked once at Mother Keara and started for the kitchen door, but the irritating little leprechaun snatched hold of the waistband of her slacks. “He looks good now, but don’t be fooled, child. He’s got weeks at best—a month or two, no more, before we’ll have to kill him in demon form, and he knows that.”
Bela tried to pull herself free, but Mother Keara held tight to her pants. “You’ve got yer issues with being told what to do—but I’m tellin’ you this. Watch yer heart. Duncan Sharp’s damned good at stealing those.”
When Bela turned to extract Mother Keara’s fingers from her clothing before she burned holes in the fabric, she saw tears in the old woman’s eyes. That nearly made her sob. It was all she could do to get herself loose and keep herself together.
Weeks
.
Damnit, I don’t accept that
.
But weeks …
The next few seconds blurred as Bela’s thoughts spun down, down toward Duncan, and what time they could have together, and what they’d never have. She couldn’t really do this, could she? Go down those basement steps and touch a man she knew she was going to lose. The pain of trying to measure minutes and hours before another soul-killing loss would crush her sanity.
Bela’s body moved without conscious drive. She felt the kitchen door with her fingertips, then the basement door. Her elemental focus propelled her forward, and her awareness dwindled to the single point of bright heat that was Duncan, his life energy pulsing into the earth below her. It drummed a rhythm like a heartbeat, and she knew that sound like she knew the shape of dirt and the taste of rock, the scent of sand, the bone-deep rattle of the world in its turning.
Pound, pound, pound
.
Death didn’t seem real or even possible, with life speaking so loudly.
She moved down the townhouse stairs, her feet, her breathing, and her own heart keeping that cadence. Tiny shocks of pain still echoed through her body, remnants of what Duncan had endured, but he
had
endured. And so had she.
Mother Keara was wrong, at least about some things. Bela understood that now, because she knew she wasn’t a misguided fire Sibyl after all. She was of the earth and for the earth, born to its service and living by its grace. She didn’t need to move the soil and bend it to her will, because it moved
her
. It powered her, lifted her, drove her. She spoke to it, and it spoke to her, and she knew it like a twin, from its molten core to its shifting dust that touched every living thing that walked its surface. From now on, instead of finding channels in its depths or trying to force them into existence, she would be the channel, and let the earth rise through her.
Duncan’s essence was one with the stone beneath his feet, and with the ground beneath the stone. He had been bathed by elemental energy, and he was as purely connected to the earth as anything Bela’s mind had ever touched. His presence pulled her like a primal force, away from her friends, her quad, the Mothers, and everything she knew for certain. By going to him now, she was walking away from her past and committing to an uncertain future.
Riding the tide of her deepened terrasentience and the direct rush of earth power it gave her, Bela pushed the gym door open, and heavy boards smashed against the stone wall behind it. Bela stared at the splintered wood. With the right focus and concentration, she could have shoved it straight through the rock, all the way to the next block—though she suspected the energy exchange definitely would have laid her out, or even killed her.
So much to learn now. So much new
.
The basement stretched before her, as quiet as a temple chamber. The elemental healing had left the room smelling like fire and wind and rain, like a mountain forest after a hard, thundering storm. The stone walls and floor gave off a cool, earthy energy, but that did nothing to chill the heat rising through Bela’s body.
All the exercise equipment was shoved to the walls, leaving the cavernous space empty except for a single blue mat in the center of the floor. Duncan was standing beside the mat in his jeans, bare-chested except for the glittering gold dinar, and he was staring straight at her. Both of his arms looked healed and strong, like the rest of him. No cast. No bandages anywhere. He had the glow and vigor of the recently healed, and she knew he’d still be bursting with the elemental energy he’d received. His slash wounds were closed. The scars curled away from his neck and crossed his shoulder, then swept down to cover the left side of the skin over his heart. Some were pale, some raised, some furrowed. They marked him like the shrapnel from his first war.
As a warrior.
As a survivor.
Bela lost another piece of her heart to him. If she could have bargained with the Goddess to trade some of her own days, months, and years to keep him breathing, she would have done it.
Duncan studied her, not smiling, not frowning. When he spoke, his voice was low, and close to teasing. “I know what you did to help save me, and I’m grateful—but I told you not to stay here, Angel.”
Bela almost laughed at that. “You should have realized something by now, Duncan Sharp. I never do what I’m told.”
Duncan folded his arms across his scarred, muscular chest. His unbelievable eyes sparked, then burned with a warm gray light. “All right. If that’s true, then I’m telling you, don’t come over here.”
Bela slammed what was left of the basement door behind her, surprised when it thumped into place and didn’t snap off its hinges. She walked toward Duncan, taking her time, wanting to mark each detail about him and appreciate every nuance.
Her slacks felt like damp weights on her legs, and her blouse clung to her arms and waist like white cotton binding. They were in her way, holding her back, so she took them off. A few buttons, and a toss. A snap and zipper, and a kick.