Chapter Thirteen
Shay dozed in the rental car at a rest stop just outside the city. With a shift, she tried unsuccessfully to alleviate the cramp in her upper back. This car hadn’t been designed for long-term sleep comfort.
Restless energy had pulsed through her all night. Still did. She wasn’t entirely certain what had happened with that disgustingly gorgeous guy, except that this time she hadn’t lost her mind completely.
What about that kiss, though
? It conveyed exactly what kind of lover he would be: dominant, powerful…and thorough. She could almost climax just thinking back on it. Last night she’d been close.
In her life, she had participated in her share of kisses. Certainly a few with some undeniably attractive guys who were decently versed in tongue dancing. But none were in the same league as the gladiator. He had all the right moves and not just with his mouth. Had the guy gotten her instruction manual and memorized it? The way he had touched in concert with the magic his mouth created had torpedoed her from slight interest into do-me-now in seconds. Honestly, it was a miracle she hadn’t lost her mind. And her clothes.
With that thought, she consciously dialed it down
. No more thinking about him.
She just spent over six hours conjuring every possible thing she wanted to do with that guy, who was likely the devil or…possibly a magus. He certainly seemed supernatural. Nobody oozed that much raw sexual potency and had the skills to back it up.
Bottom line: he was a dead end that she wasn’t pursuing further.
Her watch read seven a.m., indicating she had two hours before her designated meeting. She would make the meeting. Now more than ever, she needed answers.
****
A receptionist decked out in a swishy, colorful
hijab
escorted Shay through two security barriers into the heart of the Sanctum’s main office building. As she followed through long hallways and up several stairs she wondered how the woman managed to move in those five-inch spike heels. Their trek ended at a fluorescent-lit waiting area that smelled of a chemical cleanser. The generic furniture had about as much flair as a funeral home wake room.
With a plastic smile, the receptionist waved at one of the blue chairs. “Sit. They will be with you shortly.” She adjusted her head covering and left.
Shay parked it, but boredom took over within a minute. No magazines. No pictures. Not even a window. She shifted in the barely cushioned chair unable to find a position that didn’t strain her back.
A harried middle-aged woman, also robed in a vivid silk
hijab
,
hauled a boy by his elbow up the hall. She was strikingly beautiful with perfect makeup and the dark skin and eyes of a woman of Middle Eastern descent. She pushed her shiny black hair from her face, which unlike the receptionist’s was not covered. She stooped to the kid’s eye level and hissed, “Sit. Move an inch and I’ll tell Zimeri. Understand?”
The boy who couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen gave her an expressionless stare.
The woman shook him vigorously. “Speak, you little retard. You understand?”
He mutely nodded and fell into a seat directly across from Shay.
The woman’s flat cold gaze darted to Shay. With a superior once-over, she huffed an abrupt dismissal and stormed off down the hall, slamming through a door.
The hoop earring Shay had been fingering popped off and rolled into the middle of the floor between her and the kid. She leaned down to pick it up. When she came up, she caught the boy’s brief glance before his gaze shifted to her left. What a beautiful child with perfectly symmetrical facial features. If that woman was his mother, then he had obviously inherited his father’s pale skin littered with a few freckles across each cheek. Unkempt sandy blond hair fell across his forehead, almost obscuring his blue eyes. Their color reminded her of the Caribbean ocean on a clear day. Her heart went out to the child whose entire demeanor screamed defeat.
“Your mother seemed upset,” Shay commented, thinking the bitchy woman needed to learn a little compassion.
The boy’s eyes locked onto her. A flash of curiosity lit his face before it resumed its previous state of abject misery. He shrugged.
“I’m sorry. You’re probably not supposed to speak to strangers.”
He cocked his head and stared at her in an absorbed fashion for a few seconds. After what she gathered was a thorough assessment, he said in a tone thick with venom, “That woman isn’t my mother. She is Zimeri’s housekeeper and whore.” His speech pattern conveyed a vague British accent. His expression gentled and he said softly, “You’re in danger here. Please go before any of them return.”
Protective instinct flared within her. “Are they hurting you?”
“Best if you forget you ever met me. Go.”
“Do you need help?”
A pleading look filled with hope flashed on his face for but a second before he resumed his state of defeat. “There’s nothing you can do. They’ll hurt you here. Maybe even kill you, if he recognizes you.”
Who recognizes me?
“I can’t leave.” He lifted the hem of his pants showing an electronic band encircling his right ankle tightly. He was under house arrest? She’d only seen that type of monitor used in movies for that purpose.
After a furtive glance down the hallway, he whispered, “Mr. Kiersted is coming. You need to leave. He is very evil.” He resumed his stare over her shoulder.
“That’s not news to me about Brant. What can I do to help you?” Shay experienced a powerful urge to grab him and run, despite the ankle band.
“When you meet Dakar, tell him about me. It might be years, but remind him of Aileen’s prophecy. Tell him that I know how to end his curse. And if I don’t make it this time, then I’ll tell him next time around.” The boy held a pointer finger up to his lips and glanced down the hallway.
Dakar?
As in Dakarai of her fantasy? She wondered if the kid had a weird supernatural ability to pick through her memories. He looked benign enough, tortured actually.
Brant appeared. He sneered at the boy before ordering, “Follow me, Shay.”
Shay fleetingly glanced at the boy. The child’s eyes met hers, pleaded for an instant, and then glazed over into an unemotional blank. Her gut cramped as she followed Brant. This had
bad idea
written all over it.
Brant led her to a corner office decorated in ostentatious mahogany furnishings—modern, luxurious, and so outright boring that it gave her the willies. Where was the clutter? Her grad school desk was a certified disaster zone lost beneath papers, and dominated by her outdated blocky computer. Here, everything lay in pristine perfection. Even the solo fountain pen rested too casually near the phone. A cold sweat broke on her back.
She glanced at the two large windows. They were at least three or four floors up. Hard to tell since they took countless flights of stairs and no numbers marked the floors.
A middle-aged Arabic man unfolded his lithe frame from behind the massive desk. His salt-and-peppered dark hair streamed uncovered down his back. A keffiyeh head covering lay draped over the back of his chair. She wondered what caused the burn scar deforming his left cheek.
As he moved close, his looming height intimidated. And his eyes…their color was unnatural, almost…aqua, but didn’t look like he was using contacts to augment the hue. The malevolence within him oozed in his gaze like a cobra readying for the strike.
How could you be so reckless?
Stephen Levin’s voice rang in her head.
Stupid.
Going off half-cocked and getting into deep waters again. Every warning alarm in her body blared
exit
. Now.
In a low voice, raspy to a degree that suggested a life-long chain smoker, though she smelled no evidence of cigarette smoke, he said, “Miss McGinnis, it is good to meet you. I am Terek Nadir.” He extended his hand.
Shay returned the handshake. Chill waves traveled up her arm, leaving goose bumps in their wake. Now, she wanted the guy from last night to be close by. He might scare the hell out of her sexually, but he never once indicated he’d hurt her. Intuition suggested he would protect her from whatever Terek’s ugly smirk promised.
Idiotic move,
she thought, to trust anything that had to do with Brant. Escaping this room became her sole focus. A whispering caress along her skin signaled the tattoo that had been resting over her left arm now moved, likely in reaction to her apprehension.
Terek leaned against his desk with false nonchalance. He glanced at the bandage over the left side of her forehead. A crackle of light entered his cold eyes. “What can I help you with, Ms. McGinnis?”
Her heart thudded so hard her ears hurt. She elected to remain standing. “I found some answers last night to the things I’d been wondering about. No need to take up any more of your time. I’ll be going.” She turned to go.
He grabbed the bare skin of her wrist. “Why the rush? You’ve only just arrived. Let us speak about your experience with the daemon.”
She yanked against him.
He clamped down and stared into her eyes. He grabbed her chin to gaze into her eyes for a few long seconds, ending with a strangled whisper, “Shaiani?”
“It’s Shay.”
A cold blast to the point of pain tore up her arm. Terek mumbled unfamiliar words as his hand clamped down. Welts developed on her skin where he touched. Between the bumps, her skin began to crack and bleed. She ordered her body to struggle, to escape, but found herself frozen by an ill-defined power.
The tattoo shot from her sleeve to her wrist. It counteracted the coldness with a protective heat.
He yanked his hand from her. His eyes widened when the tattoo morphed into a dragon and bared its teeth. He rasped, “
Bochnori makhaut.
”
Shay’s mind translated: Clan of the moving mark.
But how did she do that translation?
That was not a language she recognized. Clarity hit. The tattoo translated.
The energy around her stirred, crackled. Terek was about to do something far worse than whatever freeze-voodoo he’d used moments ago. She turned toward the door, but Brant had moved in to block her exit.
Trapped. Panic welled within her. A domineering power spread from the moving tattoo. It also knew she must escape. As a control freak, her mind screamed denial. But her command over her body vanished. The tattoo owned her.
As if in a trance, Shay pivoted. She lifted an overstuffed chair effortlessly and hurled it through the glass window. With a leap, she launched herself through the broken window and went airborne. Although a place in her mind was horrified that she had just committed suicide, the forefront of her mind was controlled by the power of the tattoo. It conformed her body into a landing position. With the grace of a cat, she landed on her feet.
No pain
, said that appalled section of her mind. Just a firm landing.
She sprinted at a superhuman pace augmented by the power of the tattoo. With a bit of key fumbling, she cranked the rental car and sped through the security gate. Back toward Asheville.
In her rearview, she spied several cars on her tail. Great. She had skipped the course in school on evasive driving. And now that she was back in control of her body, she wasn’t about to relinquish control to that tattoo-thing again.
Once she hit Asheville’s streets, she wove the car haphazardly until she was fairly certain no one followed. After a poorly executed parallel, she ran up the street into a busy fast food restaurant, pushing her way through a line of waiting customers toward the bathroom. It was a two-stall deal. A woman primping in front of the mirror stared at her leg.
Shay glanced down and cringed. Blood soaked her pants. She must’ve gouged herself on glass in that insane jump. Now that she noticed the wound, she did register a vague pain in the area. Her eyes met that of the primping woman, silently challenging her to comment. The woman packed her stuff and rushed out of the room.
The bathroom door slammed open with a force that it bounced against the wall.
They had found her.
****
“How did she manage to jump and not die?” Kiersted asked while staring through the broken window.
“Your stepsister is fascinating.”
She’s back!
This time she would be his since Dakarai remained locked in the Middle Realm.
The green fire in her gaze when he inflicted the cold-burn up her arms…spectacular. Terek shifted in his office chair to accommodate his arousal. How unique—genuine sexual lust for a human. Certainly he could get it up, and even perform sex in this hijacked body, but he got nothing out of the encounter. Now, for the first time in thousands of years, his peripheral senses functioned. He touched his arousal, and nearly jumped when sensation rocketed through him, but covered his reaction from Kiersted by reaching for the teapot on the sideboard next to his desk. Usually his skin was a barren wasteland of dead nerves. The sensory part of his neurologic system simply didn’t function in this body.
How he reveled in the pain of his arousal in its confinement. Experiencing this again—well, any sensation—was the primary impetus to acquire the Trifecta. Certainly immortality and a free pass forever out of the Middle Realm remained crucial. But to feel…he’d forgotten the intensity of tactile sensation.
To make this permanent, he must unite the
wesekh
he had acquired a few months ago and the Anukrati amulet. If he could locate the third in the Trifecta of Eternity, then he could escape the daemon curse. He still searched for a clue to the location of the Sword of Neith. Unfortunately, he suspected the gods kept that one close, probably in Osiris’s
K
ingdom.
Would the actual act of sex itself be rewarding now? He trembled at the joy of the pain required to climax. Maybe he had just needed Shaiani to awaken his body. He planned to use her for the new needs she’d awakened. First, however, he would experiment with the harem he kept tucked away for his
Fedavis
’
use. Maybe for once it would be less about on-demand performance and actually about personal pleasure.
Terek asked, “Kiersted, did you know Shay has a
bochnori
?”