Oracle's Moon (43 page)

“All right…when do you want to leave?”

His satisfaction dissipated. Really, she did not look as excited as he had expected about the prospect of this date. “Whenever you like.”

She looked down at herself, then back up at him. “Maybe we should just go and get it over with.”

He scowled. “Fine.”

He stood and held his hand out to her. She stood as well, more slowly, and walked into his arms, and they blew away.

Away from Louisville. Away from Kentucky. Away from the Northern Hemisphere.

From Earth.

Khalil had studied Grace’s needs and practiced, until he was confident he could keep her wrapped protectively in the right pressurized temperature, provide her with the right UV filter, and the perfect air for her to breathe.

He brought her to the moon with a flourish. The near side facing the Earth, not the far side, since he thought they should take the trip in stages. She turned in his arms to look around at where he brought them.

“W-wha…”

“I told you it would be somewhere special,” he said, in the invisible bubble he had created for them.

She screamed.

He smiled smugly. Yes, this second date destination was worthy of a happy scream. Very few humans had walked on the moon. He knew how rare this opportunity was. Surely it should make up for what had happened on their first date.

Grace kept screaming. She turned and clawed at him.
“Oh, my God. Oh. My. God. OHMYGOD!”

His smile vanished. He tried to get hold of her in a gentle but tight grip. That was more difficult than he expected. She seemed to have acquired a half-dozen arms and legs. He informed her, “You may stop making noise any time now.”

Somehow she had climbed halfway up his body before he managed to grasp her waist. He plucked her off and set her on her feet. She started to climb up his body again.

“Are you having fun?” he asked suspiciously.

“We’re on the fucking moon!”
she shouted.
“There’s nothing here!”

He stared at her. “I don’t think you’re having fun.”

“No air!”

He shook his head. “Think about that logically. Could you have possibly said those words if there truly was no air? Of course there’s no air or atmosphere outside this bubble—”

“Ofcoursethere’snofuckingairhereorfuckingatmosphereonthefuckinggoddamnMOONyouGODDAMNFUCKINGCRAZYMORONICDJINN…”

“
Grace
,” he roared in her face.

He put so much Power into his shout, her screaming snapped into silence. Her breathing hitched as she stared at him. “Look at me,” he said. “Keep looking only at me. There is no danger. You’re perfectly safe. I’ve got you. I’ve always got you. You’re mine. I will never let go. I will always protect you. You are my life now. Do you understand anything I’m saying?”

Her breathing hitched again. “I’m breathing,” she whispered. “On the moon.”

“Don’t look away!” he ordered, as her eyes started to slide sideways. Her gaze snapped back to his. “I’m sorry I scared you. I wanted to show you somewhere special that I love to go. I thought you would love it here too. Do you need to leave?”

“I d-don’t know, give me minute,” she said faintly. “I’m having some serious instinct issues. You always make me feel like Darrin, and I’m
not
Darrin, dammit.”

“All right.” He rubbed her arms. “But I don’t know what any of that means.”

“Soon as you said ‘date,’ I knew something calamitous was going to happen. You are never, ever—
ever
—going to surprise me like this again, or I swear, I will throw my expulsion spell on your ass for a week.” Hitch. “And I mean hard, Khalil.”

“Never again. I promise you, I am never doing anything like this again. Just tell me if we should leave.”

“Hold on.”

He watched, bemused, as she took several deep breaths, as if she were about to dive under water. Then she slowly, slowly turned. He pulled her back against his chest, wrapping his arms tightly around her. Her whole body was shaking.

“Oh, my fucking God, I’m on the moon,” she said. After all of that, she sounded almost conversational. “No helmet. No spacesuit. No oxygen tank. Just you.”

Khalil had learned caution the bitter way. He asked carefully, “Is that a good thing?”

“It’s the most.” She shook her head and sucked in more air, gripping onto his forearms as they crossed her chest. Tilting her head, she looked up at the immense, graceful orb that was Earth. “It’s the most gloriously insane thing I’ve ever seen. You crazy Djinn.”

Well. That had to count for something, didn’t it?

He rested his chin on the top of her head with a deep sigh. This whole dating thing wore him to a frazzle.

G
race could only take a few more minutes on the moon. Then after such an extreme adrenaline rush, she felt as if someone smacked her on the back of the head with a two-by-four.

He was speaking, calmly, in that gorgeous pure voice of his, while he rubbed her arms with his hot, big hands. “The far side is pretty spectacular too.”

“I will go anywhere with you, anywhere at all,” she said. “With a little warning. And in increments. But right now we’ve got to leave.”

“As you wish.”

She turned in his arms, clutching his waist as the cyclone took her.

Khalil rematerialized them in the guest bedroom they were using at Isalynn’s house. As soon as the ground had firmed underneath her feet, Grace turned away, took three dizzy steps and collapsed on the bed.

“Kiiiick in the head,” she said into a pillow.

The bedsprings creaked as Khalil sat beside her. He rubbed one of her legs.

“I love you like crazy,” he whispered.

Her breath caught. Like crazy. Yes, that was how she felt too. Crazy outside of herself, like when they had made love and she literally left her body. She reached behind to grip his hand. His long fingers closed over hers, hard.

“What you did with my father—that was bloody magnificent, Grace. Few creatures have been able to face Soren down like that and win.”

“I did have something of an inside scoop,” she said. “And forty or fifty Djinn to back me up.”

For a while on Sunday, the visions of possible futures had never left her. Then they had passed as the Oracle’s moon had passed, leaving her anchored where she belonged, in the here and now. But she still remembered some of those possibilities, glittering strange horizons she hardly dared to contemplate.

She sensed him leaning over her, an impression of bulk and strength. Something happened, a tight compression of Power, like when he had pulled all of his rage into himself, only this compression was deeper and harder, a diamond being pressed out of thin air.

Frowning, she lifted herself up on her elbows and started to turn over. He pressed a kiss to her shoulder blade. The sensation lingered on her skin after he lifted his mouth away.

“Promise me something,” she said.

He traced the hairline at the nape of her neck lightly with the tip of one finger. “Anything you like.”

“Don’t change,” she said. “Not permanently, not without talking to me first.”

His finger stilled. He said nothing.

This time she did turn onto her back.

While he was still dressed in the same T-shirt and jeans from that morning, he wore his human skin again, those regal, elegant features with the touch of beard along his lean jaw, and the trace of laugh lines at the corners of his muted eyes and unsmiling mouth. His long hair was loose, still shining and black, but indefinably different. She put a hand to his chest, and there was the blaze of his Power, hidden deeply inside his body like a gleaming pearl.

She reached up to touch those amazing laugh lines. He shuddered and closed his eyes, turning his face into her palm.

“Promise,” she said. “Khalil, you have the ability to fall into flesh, but a goddess in a dream told me I can leave my body again if I want to badly enough.”

His eyes flared open. He stared at her, tension in every line of his massive body. He put his hand around her throat, his thumb caressing the line of her jaw. “‘What will a mortal do with an immortal Power?’” he breathed.

She lifted her shoulder and said awkwardly, “Well, it was just a dream. I don’t know if it could really happen. We need to take time to experiment with all of this. All I know is I don’t want to try to become something different from the kids while they’re growing up, because they’re never going to be able to change, and they deserve the best human life I can give them.”

“They deserve you alive,” Khalil said. “Gods—if you could change, you would be stronger, harder to kill.” He swallowed hard. “You’re all so fragile.”

“That’s part of what being human is,” she said. “We’re pretty damn tough, too. Besides…” She smiled. “I’m perfectly safe, remember? I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.”

“Please always stay mine,” he whispered.

“Always.”

She stroked her hand down his back, and he arched and shuddered. He reached behind him, bicep flexing, and grasped his T-shirt to pull it over his head.

Oh, my God, he had a sprinkle of dark hair on his chest. She ran her palm over it. It was as silken as it looked. He stared at her in naked surprise, and there was the hunger again, washing over her in a sheet of flame.

“Take everything off,” she hissed.

He arched away from her to tear off his jeans. She had meant to do the same; she really had. But the sight of Khalil’s nude body as he flexed free of his clothing tore almost every coherent thought out of her mind.

Except two. The same—different—the same—they were like two sides of a coin flipping in midair. She saw her lover in every line of Khalil’s body, but the newness of his more humanlike form made him almost a stranger. Silken black hair arrowed down his long stomach to his genitals and sprinkled long, muscle-corded thighs. His testicles had drawn up tight under a taut, large erection. She stared at the broad mushroom head and thick length of his beautiful penis.

He turned to her and growled in frustration. “You were supposed to take your clothes off too.”

She gave him a stricken look and whimpered, “I forgot.”

Laughter and affection creased his lean face before his expression turned sensual and wicked. “Do not trouble yourself in the slightest,” he murmured. “I will help you.”

He stretched his long body beside her and eased the buttons of her shirt open one by one. She could not stop staring at him everywhere. That cock. She took hold of the warm, hard length in both greedy hands.

A sound broke out of him, a short, sharp cry of shock, and he bowed over her hands almost as if she punched him. Worried, she started to draw back. He grabbed her wrists. “No!” he gritted. “That wasn’t bad. That was because
it’s so damned good.
”

She flexed her hands along the soft skin that covered his distended flesh. The pleasure of it shuddered through his entire body, and she wanted him so badly she could barely breathe.

Love you.

She gave into the feeling, gave into him. She arched her back and wiggled haphazardly down the bed, until she reached his waist. Then she rolled toward him and pulled the thick tip of his penis into her mouth. A groan wrenched out of him. Every line of his body, everything she could sense of his presence, roared astonishment. His erection jerked in her mouth. She closed her eyes and felt his hands fist in her hair as she sucked him in.

Love you like crazy.

He pushed his hips, growling as she worked him. She lost herself in his touch, in his taste and rhythm. The sheer physical pleasure of him was blinding.

When he jerked his cock out her mouth, she blinked up at him. His expression was a crisis of need. “Not that way,” he muttered. “Not this time.”

He hauled her up the bed, she lunged up to a sitting position and together they tore off her clothes until she was as naked as he was. He cupped a hand at the back of her neck, and as he eased her back down, he rose to cover her body.

She spread her legs, and he helped her, so careful with her knee despite how he shook, that she fell in love with him all over again. She was so drenched with desire, he barely had to stroke her before her moisture covered his fingers. He looked at her in mute question, and she nodded. “Get the hell in here,” she breathed.

He pushed at her entrance. As he stretched and filled her, his body trembled all over. She held him fiercely, protectively, because no matter how Powerful he might be and as strange as it was, this was his very first time.

Human skin to human skin.

Then he was in her, to the root, and their bodies were aligned. His eyes filled as he stared down at her. There could not be more wonder in his face.

“Grace,” he said, and he always said it that way, as if it was not just her name but the most tender and vibrant of stories. He held his big body frozen over her, as if he didn’t know what to do next.

“Now kiss me,” she whispered.

Leaning his weight on one elbow, he cupped her breast as he brought his face down to hers. His lips closed over hers, and he bowed his shoulders over her with as much reverence as if he knelt to pray in a cathedral, and she never felt more beautiful than she did in that moment as he lost control completely and climaxed into her.

She thought that was it, and it was more than enough, but he surprised her as he always did, for as he climaxed, he ground himself into her, hit her pleasure center just right, and that brought her over the edge with him.

Always loving, always falling.

Like crazy.

The full weight of his body slumped on her in the utter surrender of exhaustion. She spun away into a gentle darkness, for there was no urgency, nowhere she needed to be and nothing they needed to, and it was the most extravagant luxury imaginable.

At some point, he must have stirred and shifted his weight away, but she only woke up when he pulled her with him. She made a sleepy sound as he guided her head onto his shoulder and wrapped his arms tight around her, then she fell back into drifting.

A strange ringing filled the bedroom. Sleepy and confused, Grace rolled onto her back and lifted her head to look for the noise. Her new cell phone danced along the bedside table on Khalil’s side of the bed.