Crimson Wind (9 page)

“A girl can change her mind. Besides, who else is there?”

“You like your secrets. Why talk to anyone at all?”

She growled low in her throat, a sound of aggravation. “Whatever blows your dress up, Slick. You asked, I said yes. No one’s twisting your arm.” She reached out and turned on the radio.

He flicked it off. “Tell me.”

Irritation scraped at her. She yawned exaggeratedly. “Maybe I should sleep like you said.”

He reached over and grabbed her hand, squeezing gently. “Tell me.”

She looked at his hand on hers. His touch sent a jolt through every one of her nerves. She ought to pull away, but she didn’t want to.
Stupid
.

She remembered his threat—or had it been a promise? If she didn’t choose him, he’d leave. She didn’t want him to go. Neither could she imagine starting up a relationship with him or anyone else. A shiver pimpled her skin with goose bumps as her body clenched at the thought.
Never
. She didn’t want to care that much for anyone. It was too ….. dangerous.

But Alexander would leave.

Her mouth dropped open in a silent gasp as hurt drove through her like a spear. The wound felt gaping and raw. She closed her lips and stared blindly out the window. Was it too late? No. Even if she had developed real feelings for him, they hadn’t had time to take root. She could dig them out. With a chain saw, if she had to. So that if he did leave, she wouldn’t care.

But she did. Her Prime rose, borne on the raw emotions of her dread for her family’s fate and the thought of losing Alexander.

His hand tightened. “Max?”

His voice was almost guttural. It sent a tremor through her. His Prime had risen with hers, wild and primitive. She looked at him. He bent toward her. His expression was taut and his eyes were molten. Her eyes widened. He wasn’t afraid. But then, why would he be? He was as scary as she was. Instead, he was turned on. So was she. She dug her fingers hard into her thigh, touching the tip of her tongue to her lips. His gaze jerked and narrowed on the movement.

Then abruptly he pulled his hand away and drew a sharp breath. He clamped his hands on the steering wheel. “Not that way,” he rasped.

“Sure, Slick,” Max said, hiding her disappointment. She felt like he’d tossed a bucket of ice water on her head. The predator inside her snarled in frustrated fury, but it was no longer in danger of overwhelming her human reason. “I can always find a bed buddy for a night.”

He jerked the wheel, skidding to a halt on the side of the road. His hand whipped out. He snatched her arm and yanked her halfway over the console, his face twisting. “Do not dare,” he said between gritted teeth. “When you decide to come to me, you will do it because you want me as much as I want you, not because your Blade took possession of you.”

He thrust her back as suddenly as he’d grabbed her.

Max grinned. “Wow, you can’t make up your mind, can you? Must take you hours to pick out something to wear every night.”

He goggled at her and then gave a short laugh as he once again grasped the steering wheel, like he didn’t quite trust what he might do with his hands if they didn’t have something else to do. “You are a …..” He searched for words. “Remarkable woman.”

“I’m pretty sure you mean raging bitch.”

“That too.”

“Not to mention pain in the ass.”

“Of course. That goes without saying.”

“At least I’m not boring.”

“Oh, no. Never that,” he agreed, rubbing a tense hand over his mouth.

She couldn’t resist poking at him. It was fun seeing him off-balance for once. “I’m beginning to wonder about you, Slick. You ever think about seeing a shrink?”

He slanted a look at her. “Maybe I know something special when I find it.”

Max snorted. “Special? Like the bearded lady at the freak show?”

“I was thinking something more along the lines of a pirate treasure. Of course, it is buried under a mound of fire ants at the bottom of an active volcano and guarded by dragons, but a treasure nonetheless.”

“Tell the truth—you’re on drugs.” But despite herself, Max was hanging on every word like a pimple-faced fifteen-year-old girl drooling over the captain of the football team.

“I would like to know something, if you will tell me,” he said, turning to face her, his mood shifting suddenly.

“What’s that?” she said cautiously. He wasn’t off-balance anymore.

“You are attracted to me. You do not deny that.” He waited.

She nodded reluctantly. It was pretty pointless to lie.

He made a frustrated gesture. “Then why?”

Max went still. Why not tell him? There wasn’t much point in secrecy. Maybe he would back off if he knew. “Giselle.”

His brow furrowed. “Giselle? She does not want us to be together?”

Be together.
What exactly did he think could happen? Marriage and a baby carriage? “No. She couldn’t care less. Right up until the point where she decided that she could use you to force me to do something I don’t want to. You’d be a hostage.”

“I thought the two of you came to terms. You are working together.”

“For now. Until we butt heads, and then we’ll be back at it. If she didn’t think she’d need to push me around now and again, she’d have freed me.”

“So instead of living your life, you live like a militant nun.”

“Something like that,” she said, resenting the accusation in his voice. “Except I do find some time to have a romp in the hay.”

He gave a silent snarl, but didn’t respond to that, staying focused on the subject at hand. “And if she chooses Niko? Or Tyler? She has plenty of hostages against your good behavior. She has for years. What makes me different?”

He was too smart for her own good. She knew it wasn’t logical. But she was terrified of what would happen if she let Giselle get ahold of someone she really cared about. And she could care about Alexander. She already did.

“What about your family?” he pressed when she remained silent. “You are bringing them here. Will she not use them?”

“I’d kill her,” Max said. “No matter what it took.” Pain flared around her in a spinning tornado of razor wire as her compulsion spells reacted to her threat. She thrashed and clenched herself, letting the pain take her. She would never give in on this one.

Alexander grabbed her shoulders and shook her hard. Her head snapped back. “Max! Giselle is not here; she is not threatening your family. Let it go before you kill yourself.”

His words permeated the haze of pain slowly. She forced herself to relax. He was right. More importantly, she still had to rescue her family, and killing herself wasn’t going to help a whole lot.

The magic receded, feeling like it was peeling away her flesh as it went. She sucked in a breath and let it out slowly, feeling her heart slowing back to normal. Alexander’s hands fell away.

“The truth is, she has plenty of hostages to hold against you already, and you are about to give her more,” he said. “You cannot hide behind that excuse.”

Max stared out the bug-speckled windshield. He was right. She had no good excuses. “The last time I dated anyone was in 1980.”

When she didn’t say anything more, he prodded, “And?”

She lifted a shoulder. “He was cheating on me. Right after we broke up, my best friend in the world turned me into a Shadowblade. I may have some trust issues.”

He was silent for a long minute. “I can work with that,” he said finally, putting the truck in drive and pulling back out onto the road.

She looked at Alexander. “You’re awfully sure of yourself.”

“I am. You admit you want me and that you do not have any good reasons not to be with me. It is only a matter of time.” His eyes laughed at her, daring her to deny him.

Max’s stomach curled in anticipation. She ruthlessly crushed it. “You forgot something.”

“Oh? What is that?”

“I am already spoken for. Giselle gave me to Scooter.”

He was silent a long moment, negotiating the sinuous mountain curves, the truck’s wheels squealing as he swerved around them.

“Tell me about Scooter,” he said finally, the words pushed through gritted teeth. “What did you mean when you said he tried to drag you off while you were sleeping?”

Max eyed him sideways, feeling reluctant to begin again. Instead, she changed the subject.

“So you know you don’t use contractions, right? Like
isn’t
or wasn’t or
can’t
. You know it makes you sound pretentious and arrogant, like you’ve got a stick stuck up your ass?”

He stared, then shook his head. “I was not aware that my speech was so ….. stiff.”

“There you go again. ‘Was not aware.’ Couldn’t you say, ‘I wasn’t aware’? ‘I didn’t know’?”

“I expect I could.”

“Then why don’t you, already? Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

“In my younger years, my mother impressed upon me the need for proper speech.”

“And that’s proper?”

“According to my mother.”

Max’s lips pinched together. Saying any more would be an insult to his mother, and she had a feeling that would be crossing a line. Not that she minded crossing lines, but families were off-limits.

“So are you going to tell me about Scooter? What did he do to your arm?” he asked, not letting her off the hook.

She tightened her hand into a fist, feeling the cool heaviness of the spell along her arm. “How did you know?”

“I am not blind. You have been favoring it since you came out of the vault. What happened?”

She considered putting him off again, but he was likely to drive off a cliff. Or try to throttle her. Besides, he needed to know. Then he would give up on her. Why did that make her want to vomit?

She swallowed. “Scooter’s been a little irritated with me. I kept putting off going to see him, so he started coming to me while I was sleeping. At first, he just kept me from resting. I kept waking up. After a while, when I still didn’t go down to see him, he decided he wasn’t going to wait anymore.” She rubbed her forehead between her eyes, remembering the first of his visits. “He’d come into my dreams and push at me to go somewhere with him—on an astral level, not physical. It wasn’t so bad at the beginning. He was gentle, if demanding. But when I still didn’t come to him, he started attacking—trying to drag me off. It got to be that I would put off sleeping as long as I could, but it didn’t matter. He was always waiting. Fighting him got harder and harder.”

“That is—” Alexander caught himself. “That’s why you started looking like death warmed over.”

“Did I? I thought I was fashionably corpselike. I could have been on the cover of
Vogue
.”

He didn’t laugh. His face had gone cold, and the air in the truck thickened with the weight of his mounting fury. “So then what?”

“It’s been getting harder to wake up. He’s been—”
How to explain?
“He takes me to this place.” She closed her eyes, seeing the gray world again, with the spinning shards of cutting magic, the billows of silk that burned like acid, the clouds of flittering beauty that cut through her like flying razor blades. “It’s like a minefield, and if I don’t follow the path he’s laid out or if I try to escape, I get hurt.”

That was an understatement.

“My healing spells have had a hard time keeping up, especially with the lack of sleep.” She paused. “This last time ….. I almost didn’t get away.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” he said, enunciating each word through clenched teeth. “Ask for help?”

“What could anybody do? It’s his right. I told you, Giselle sold me to him. He just wants to collect on their bargain.”

“Fuck that,” he said with a snarl.

“Oddly, when I told them the same thing, neither Giselle nor Scooter found it to be a very compelling argument,” she said. “They seem to think that they can do whatever they want with me.”

Bitterness filled her mouth and made her want to spit. Old hate for Giselle welled up inside her, and she swallowed it down, forcing herself to remember that things had changed, and she wasn’t fighting the witch-bitch anymore. But she hadn’t forgiven, and she sure as hell hadn’t forgotten.

“So what happened when you went to see him?” Alexander’s fingers had tightened on the steering wheel, and she wondered if he was going to snap it into pieces. He’d sped up, and she felt the left wheels of the truck leave the ground and then settle back down. They skidded on the loose dirt and gravel that lined every Montana road, fishtailing across the rumble strip before he straightened it out.

“If you don’t want to flip the truck, then you might want to ease up, Slick.”

He growled but slowed down. She said nothing for a while, watching the steep sides of the wooded ridge beside them.

“I knew I was going to have to confront him,” she began again. “I’d been trying to wait until Giselle was stronger and Horngate had recovered some so I could go get my family, but I couldn’t put it off any longer, or my healing spells were going to eat me alive. So I went to see him. I made a deal. He’s going to leave off the dream attacks until I can go help my family.”

“A deal?”

“I told him if he lets me go get my family, I’ll go to him as soon as I get back, and he can have his wicked way with me. Otherwise, he was going to have to kill me to get me to cooperate. Apparently, he wants me breathing.”

“And your arm?”

“Says it’s a gift. If my life is seriously in danger, it will help me jump through the abyss or the web between worlds or whatever, and I’ll land a few feet away. But really, it’s a leash, to keep me from wandering off or taking too long. If I’m not careful, he’ll drag me back, and that will be that.”

Alexander sat silently for a long moment. He was seething. She could feel his body shaking, and his face was pulled into a harsh mask of fury. What exactly had crawled up his ass and died, she didn’t know.

“So you will go to him when this is done,” he said.

“That’s the deal.”

“Forever?”

There was a wealth of bullheaded tenacity in that word. Like he meant to fight the sentence with all his might. Scooter would wad him up like toilet paper and flush him, but Max appreciated the sentiment. Giselle hadn’t offered even that much.