He cut her off with a kiss that quickly became a clash of lips, tongue, and teeth, held more passion than finesse, and brought the salty tang of blood.
Without warning, he jolted against her and gave a strange, strangled cry that was more surprise than passion. Then a slash of electric awareness raced through her, sweeping her up and carrying her with a crazy-hot wave of passion and connectivity. For a second, she felt like she was
inside
him, feeling his heartbeat, his arousal, his confusion as the air around them took on a hint of red-gold sparks. She heard a strange buzzing noise and felt a hot, rushing sensation that was partly sexual, partly something else. Then the connection snapped as he tore himself away from her.
She blinked up at him in shock as the lights flickered and the power came back on, turning the darkness back into the reality of the two of them together in his normally off-limits bedroom. He was kneeling on the mattress beside her—shirtless and buff as hell, with his jeans unsnapped to show the sharply defined interplay of muscle and bone at his hips. If she had taken a picture just then, it would’ve read as sex personified. But this wasn’t a picture, and the look in his eyes didn’t read as passion. It was more along the lines of “oh, shit,” and the sight turned the heat of moments before into a sharp stab of pain.
Heart thudding, she started to reach for him, then pulled back and curled her fingers into a fist. “Dez,” she began, but then stalled on a slashing wave of disappointment, because what was left for her to say? She had made her play, and it hadn’t been enough. He was already pulling away.
“I’m going out,” he grated, avoiding her eyes.
“What?”
He stood, grabbed a shirt from the lopsided bookcase that served as his dresser, and pulled on the tee with jerky motions. He stalled at the bedroom door, though, made like he was going to put his fist through the wall, but slapped it flat-handed instead. Pressing his forehead to his knuckles, he grated, “This isn’t about you. I’m . . . Hell, I don’t know what I am these days, but it’s not good. And I can’t put that on you.”
She glared at him, letting him see the hurt and the gathering tears. “Yes, you can, damn it. We’re a team.”
But he shook his head as he pushed away from the doorframe. “Not this time.” Moments later, the door banged shut, and he was gone.
The weather was even shittier than it had looked from inside the apartment, but Dez stalked out into the teeth of the storm, hoping it would kick the crap out of him like he deserved. Damn it, he’d let things get way out of hand. And he’d made Reese cry.
Shit.
He rubbed his chest, where throbbing pain had replaced his heartbeat. But as the cold rain killed the last of the electric sizzle that had come from lightning hitting right outside the window, he was damned grateful for the searing jolt, because it had slammed him back to a reality that said he couldn’t take what he wanted.
She had been dead-on in everything she’d said: The apartment was just a place, safety a state of mind, and they were damn good together. And, hell, yeah, he loved her. He had for far longer than she probably guessed, but had sworn he would wait until she was old enough to make a real choice. By then, though, he’d had another problem, one that might’ve lost traction when she started kissing him, but was bigger than all the others put together: He was losing his fucking mind.
It had started with a deep, searching restlessness that had driven him out onto the streets after something he couldn’t name, couldn’t find. Then had come the dreams—sometimes dark, bloody scenes of wars past and present; other times native-dressed men and women bowing to him before slitting their own throats and bleeding out. The nightmares had gotten worse over time, as had his usual drive to do the most, be the best, get the hell ahead, until those urges had eclipsed everything else. He was pushing too hard and knew it, but he couldn’t make himself slow down, couldn’t bring himself to talk to Reese about it. Instead, he stalked along the parallel rows of warehouses late at night, looking for something that wasn’t there and unraveling more each day.
He headed there now, past the pitch-black tenements to the empty warehouse husks, which echoed hollowly in the rain.
He had tried to tell himself that the restlessness and nightmares came from subconscious fears about the idea of him and Reese taking the next step. It wasn’t like he’d grown up with a good role model when it came to relationships, and while she might be a street kid now, she had come from wealth and comfort. She should be Ivy League–ing it right now, with a varsity boyfriend, a blinged-out cell phone, and a sports car out in the lot. He couldn’t give her any of that.
And like that wasn’t enough to give a guy mental heartburn, there was Hood, the
cobra de rey
, king of the Cobras. The sick bastard was coming up for parole soon, and rumor had it that he was even more fixated on Reese than before. Dez figured he was due a few nightmares on that one . . . but that didn’t explain why, three times over the past month, he had awakened kneeling on the floor beside his bed holding a knife—twice a kitchen knife and once a switchblade he’d snagged from a street punk who’d been hassling the old guy who ran the convenience store on the corner. That third time, he had been bleeding from his palms: two shallow slices right along the old scar lines. Then last week he had woken up halfway to Reese’s room, carrying a six-inch blade he didn’t recognize. That had scared the shit out of him, point blank.
After that, he had added a second lock on the inside of his bedroom door, hidden the key, and booby-trapped the hiding spot to make hell and all of a racket if he went for it. He hadn’t yet, but that didn’t make him feel any better, especially as the restlessness had gotten even worse over the past few days. He could feel it now as he stalked past Warehouse Thirteen, his eyes slitted against the shit that was pelting out of the sky and cutting straight through his clothes, chilling him to the bone.
I’m here.
He stopped dead at the whisper, which hadn’t carried over the sound of the storm. It was inside his godsdamned skull.
“What the fuck?” He could barely hear himself over the pounding rain. His head was spinning, his body numb, but his shock was blunted by a second surprise as he realized loud and clear that something inside him recognized the whisper. Or maybe he really
was
crazy. Gods knew he had been raised by a madman. Maybe it had been only a matter of time.
Come and get me.
Holy shit. What was going on here? His feet started moving before his brain could catch up, and he stumbled and nearly went down. Cursing, he forced himself upright and stood braced on locked legs, caught between wanting to prove he could walk away and needing to know what the hell was going on. And—just maybe—what he could do to make the craziness go away so he and Reese could have a chance.
I’m here.
“I heard you,” he growled. “Keep your damn panties on.” Because the whisper—the insanity—was feminine. And it was pulling him toward Warehouse Seventeen.
That was where he’d first seen Reese, where he’d broken his own “don’t fuck with the Cobras and they won’t fuck with you” rule by grabbing her before Hood could make her one of his “girlfriends.” At the time, he’d told himself it had been a spur of the moment thing, a decision he’d made because something in her eyes had reminded him of his sister, Joy. Later, he’d admitted that an outside force had pulled him to Seventeen that day, and he’d toyed with the idea of destiny. Now, he didn’t know what the fuck to think. Hell, he barely
could
think, though he held it together enough to pull out his .44.
It was the only weapon he was packing. He didn’t trust himself with a knife anymore.
The warehouse was a black box of a building fronted with broken windows, dangling fire escapes, and a big “17” painted over the seized-up garage doors that hadn’t worked in years. Like most of the others, Seventeen had been abandoned by its owners, condemned by the city, and then ignored because nobody really gave a damn about what went on in the shit zone as long as it didn’t amoeba its way toward more important real estate. Over the years Seventeen had gone back and forth between being a central Cobra hangout and being abandoned to the street rats, who tunneled from one warehouse to the next, always making sure they had a way out. Lately, even the street kids had left it alone, though nobody knew quite why.
Come.
Dez followed the whisper into the dark shadows near where a couple of steel panels had been turned into a hidden entrance. He ducked through, leading with his gun but not seeing anything worth shooting. The few emergency lights that still worked inside Seventeen illuminated a jumble of racks, catwalks, and other random discards . . . including a small bundle that lay in a patch of scuffed-up dust beneath one of the working emergency lights. The wadded-up cloth didn’t look much different from the other garbage lying around, but he knew it was more. He
knew
.
His head pounded and spun; his senses fogged. A warning buzzer went off deep inside him, but he ignored it because this was what he’d been searching for. He was sure of it. Letting his gun hand sag, he crouched down and reached for the bundle.
A slight, wiry body slammed into him from behind, driving him to his knees.
Shit. Ambush!
Adrenaline blasted through him, clearing his head in an instant. Reacting even as he cursed himself for walking dumb-assed into the trap, he jammed his shoulder into his attacker′s gut and heaved. The move should’ve sent the guy flying into next week, but the runt countered, got an arm across his throat, and cranked down with a ferocity that grayed his vision and brought a stab near his collarbone. Tingling pain lashed down Dez’s arm and the .44 skidded away.
Pissed at himself as much as at the other man, he lunged to his feet with a roar and then went over backward, using the little shit to break his fall. Something snapped—maybe bone—and the choke hold slackened.
He rolled away from his assailant and surged to his feet. “How’d that feel, mother . . .
fucker
.
”
In an instant, the world telescoped down to the sight of familiar pale eyes in a sharp, tautly drawn face slashed through with six gnarled scar lines that ran across the other man’s cheek and throat.
“Keban.”
Dez hadn’t seen his godfather in almost five years. And the last time, he’d nearly killed the bastard.
“Hid yourself well, didn’t you, boy?” Louis Keban pulled himself to his feet, his sneer showing the jagged edge of a broken tooth. “But I found you. Always will.” His mad, bright eyes went to the cloth-wrapped bundle. “You felt her, didn’t you? That’s because it’s time—the war’s coming, boy. The end of the world’s coming. It’s time for you to step up and do what you were born to do.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind,” Dez grated, but suddenly he wasn’t so sure about that. He had felt the pull, heard the voice in his head. And the air had sparked red-gold when he kissed Reese.
They were just stories
, he’d been telling himself for years.
There’s no magic, no doomsday countdown.
It had all been part of Keban’s elaborate insanity.
Unless it hadn’t been, he thought as the world started to swim around him. What if . . .
“Fuck,”
he spat when his vision fuzzed and he realized it wasn’t just shock; the little bitch had drugged him. Swaying on his feet, he pawed his collarbone and cursed when his fingers hit the end of a snapped-off needle.
“Just a little something to help you get your magic.” Keban turned, scooped up the bundle, and unrolled it to reveal a small carving. “This should take care of the rest. Courtesy of Montezuma.” Made of shiny black stone and approximately the length of Dez’s thumb, it was a woman with wide hips and a big head, more grotesque than pretty.
Dez hissed out a breath as a hard, hot force suddenly surged up inside him.
Mine
, it said.
That’s mine.
He wanted to snatch the carved fragment away from Keban, wanted to hide it, to protect it, to have it as his own. He would kill to possess it, kill to protect it.
Kill.
He was moving before he was aware of having made a decision, surging forward and reaching for the statuette.
Mine.
But when he was halfway there his knees folded and the world went gray, fog closing in on him until the only thing he could see was the flare of triumph in the other man’s eyes. Then he was down and vulnerable, cursing in dread silence as Keban handcuffed his wrists in front of his body, positioning him so he was kneeling like a damned penitent. Then the bastard pulled a knife and cut Dez’s palms along the old scar lines.
They had played this game before.
The pain sparked a searing rage that burned through the drugs. As his vision cleared, he saw that the other man was using the same stone blade he had used throughout the years—black obsidian with etched serpent glyphs that matched the one on the bastard’s forearm: The mark of the serpent bloodline.
Son of a bitch
, Dez thought, reeling from both shock and drugs.
What if—
Then Keban pressed the black statuette into his hand, and the world went haywire.
The stone flashed from cool to hot in an instant, searing his palms, and a strange, crackling buzz sizzled through him, reaching deep and sparking anger and greed, the lust for power, approval, recognition, respect. He bared his teeth and strained against his bonds as energy stabbed through his chest and behind his eyeballs
. The head and heart are the sources of a mage’s power
, came Keban’s voice in his mind, drilling the lessons into him along with the strategies of a thousand battles, the workings of a hundred political systems . . . and the future as it existed inside the older man’s warped brain.
Your sister died so you could live. You owe me, owe her, owe the gods. Try harder. Be better, be more, or it was all a waste.