Witches' Waves (23 page)

Deck wasn't an otter and he spat out a curse as the cold water struck his sensitized cock. But the magic heated him, in several senses of the word. The cold water, after the initial shock, was energizing rather than painful, and his arousal didn't falter.

He took Kyle into his mouth. Kyle tasted rich, like musk and salt and light. Like Kyle, when all was said and done, and his uncut cock was so beautiful, felt so perfect in his mouth that Deck wondered why he wasn't doing this all the time. When Deck began to suck him, Kyle went very still, almost as if he were afraid to breathe, let alone move, except for clasping his hands into fists at his side. Deck sensed, through their link, how good it felt, how right and natural it felt, and at the same time how Kyle itched to grab Deck's long hair, to take control of this moment, if only so Deck could steal control back later.

It's all right, it's all right, love,
Deck thought as hard as he could.
I won't break and neither will the magic.
Kyle's hands relaxed, which was something, but he still didn't reach for Deck. Finally Deck stopped what he was doing long enough to say, “Touch me, Kyle. Touch me however it feels right. It'll be what the magic wants.” He trusted that, although he didn't know if Kyle was as sensitive to the flow of magic as another witch would be.

In response, Kyle moaned as he put one hand on Deck's shoulder, the other behind Deck's head, fingers weaving into his long, blond hair. Not taking charge, just taking part, letting Deck know how good it felt and how eager he was for more.

Red magic whirled around them, adding its own faint whirring to surf, rain and thunder. Deck couldn't use his normal sight anymore. Everything was witch-sight, auras and faint shapes and pulsing, vibrating energy. Not that he cared, because he felt more with his eyes closed: Kyle's life force and the whirls and spirals of magic, and the energy of ocean and earth and storm gathering around him.

Kyle's cock was sweet and thick and heavy in his mouth. Salty hints of precome tantalized him, urged him to keep going, taste his lover's come this way.

But the magic demanded something else and, right now, the magic was in charge. He let Kyle's cock go with a pop. “Next time,” he said, “you'll give me your come.”

It came off as a demand, a threat, and Kyle drew in his breath harshly, then gasped out, “Yes…of course…yes,” in a voice so hoarse and urgent that only magic's needs—and more to the point, Meaghan's danger—held Deck back from finishing Kyle with his mouth on the spot.

Instead, Deck pulled Kyle's legs out from under him, though Kyle seemed to expect it and was already getting ready to fall. They tumbled together into frigid water, sputtering when a wave broke over them.

When power broke over them. Each wave pumped Deck's magic, and with it, his arousal. But he needed the grounding fire of red magic to control the power he was building and store it for later. Needed to contain the power, contain himself.

And what better way to contain himself than to bury himself deep in Kyle's body?

“Need you.” He wrestled Kyle into position, on hands and knees, knelt down behind him so surf caught them both. “Need you to open for me, Kyle. Need to fuck you. And need us both to remember that there are two of us together now, but we're three. Three.”

As he spoke, he opened up Kyle's ass with his fingers. No resistance, even without lube and with the chill salt water, no resistance at all, as if the magic acted as lubricant. For all he knew, it did, because for all his sexual and magical experience—and he had plenty of both—Deck had never been this deep in the red magic before, never this lost to himself and open to the power. As open as Kyle was to him, Deck was to the magic, and if submitting to a lover felt anywhere near as good as it felt to be magic's bitch, he understood Kyle better now.

“So hot and tight,” he said, and the words sounded more like a spell than like standard dirty talk, “but you're ready for me, aren't you?”

Kyle didn't speak, maybe couldn't speak, but he nodded and Deck felt assent pass through the smaller man's entire body.

“I'm taking you, love, and the magic's taking me, and together we'll bring our Meaghan home. We will, Kyle.” Deck's dick pressed against Kyle's ass, which fluttered and opened. “Because we are three and we're going to stay that way. Three.”

And on the second
three
, he thrust and Kyle pushed back to meet him. Nothing subtle, nothing careful, just two bodies crashing together. As they did, lightning crackled and thunder exploded, too close even for Deck's comfort.

Except that right now, his dick buried in Kyle's hot body and waves breaking over them both, Deck didn't fear the lightning, as a man or as a witch. He seized it, drew it into himself.

Saved for later, when he and Kyle and Meaghan might need it.

Drew in the cold fierceness of the water and the solemn, ponderous power of the earth.

Drew in Kyle's love and desire, and in return sent his into Kyle and out into the world in search of Meaghan.

Pulled in magic and love and touch, and the elements and the power of the storm and Kyle's power too, the power that he willingly gave over to Deck when they had this kind of fierce, claiming, kinky sex and that Deck returned to him with loving, erotic interest.

Focused on the power. Focused on the waves, getting fiercer all the time, pushed by the storm and the incoming tide and at the same time focused on Kyle, Kyle's body under his and tight around him, Kyle's heart and mind and spirit that he'd entrusted to Deck. He fucked fiercely, fucked hard, hit places in Kyle he was pretty sure he'd never hit before, and at the same time found that with each stroke, the gripping pleasure as Kyle tightened around him reached previously untouched places inside him.

He was coming undone, so full of magic and love that he was going to fly apart, and it didn't matter to him, not really, except that it would be a waste when he needed all this energy for Meaghan.

Kyle hissed, “Control.” At the same time, he clamped down with his inner muscles as he came himself and control became impossible.

Impossible and at the same time, possible again. Deck wasn't coming undone anymore. He was just coming, coming deep inside Kyle, and with that explosion he grounded, pulling all the energy he'd collected into himself and integrating it so he could store it for later.

He collapsed on his lover, pulling them both down into the water. His shoulder twinged, still tender despite magical healing. Probably more than twinged, but he was too high to tell, riding the lust and the magic like the best waves ever.

“Okay to move?” Kyle's voice drifted in over the surf from a million miles away, but it made its point.

He nodded, unable to find words just yet over the roaring in his blood.

Just as silently, Kyle stood, then helped him up.

He still couldn't see, not in the normal sense, and he couldn't find the words to explain it, but Kyle seemed to know anyway.

Chapter Twenty-Three

After a tense flight made worse by having two nervous duals on board, and a long drive in the dark, they rumbled into the ruins of the logging camp—or maybe it was a mining camp, no one seemed sure—in rented SUVs arranged by Akane's friend. In semidarkness, it didn't look like much: a few ramshackle wooden buildings, one with a tree growing through where the roof used to be, a few vegetation-covered mounds with random boards or pieces of metal sticking out where other shacks had lost their battle with the elements.

But Paul's dreams had led them here, and Paul's dreams were never wrong.

Hard to interpret sometimes, but never wrong.

Deck's skin prickled as he stepped onto the earth, but it wasn't because he sensed the Agency or felt Meaghan almost close enough to touch but trapped in some ghastly lab.

It was because he felt nothing, even with all the power he'd banked. No magic. No natural energy. No
life
, although birds chirped and twittered and flitted among the trees and insects buzzed around them. The whole place was invisible to his witch-sight. Even his companions were dim outlines, except for Akane, and even her colors were muted. Freaky-ass shit.

He should at least pick up subtle vibrations of earth energy through his hiking boots, know where the nearest spring or mountain stream was. Demons and devas, they'd crossed a stream not a quarter of a mile from the site and even on his worst days, the stream would resonate in his blood. Not now though.

“Are you sure this is the spot?” Kyle was right in Paul's face, tense with fury.

Akane stepped between them, or maybe she just materialized there because Deck didn't see her move with his normal sight, but his still hyperaware witch-sight caught a blur of russet. “Calm down, otter. Of course Paul's sure.” She placed one hand on Kyle's arm. Her aura flared.

Kyle shouldn't have been able to see it, but maybe his keen dual senses picked something up. He took a step back and his voice sounded much less fierce when he said, “Sorry to doubt you, but I expected to see something. This is deserted.”

Paul and Akane said some variation of “no, it's not” more or less simultaneously.

Kyle gestured around him at the few tumbling-down buildings and empty cellar holes.

“Too empty,” Deck said. “If this were just an abandoned settlement going back to the forest, Paul and I would pick up all kinds of life energy from plants and animals. Instead there's nothing.” He crouched down and put his palm flat on the ground to test, then shook his head. “Not even earth energy.”

“Whatever is here is so strongly shielded it seems magically null,” Paul confirmed. “And nothing is magically null, except objects mass produced without love. I know we're in the right place because it's like being in Walmart without any of the workers there. But if I kind of look at it sideways, I can make out really bizarre magic, not exactly witch magic, not exactly sorcery, but with elements of both, and some high-tech cloaking mixed in.”

A weight lifted from Deck. He wasn't alone in feeling the freaky blankness, and Paul, bless his theory-geek heart, had figured out what was causing it.

“Now that we all know the emptiness is an illusion, maybe I can fix it,” Paul added. “I'm pretty good with illusion magic. But this goes beyond anything I've ever seen.”

Deck jumped at the sound of a chuffing fox, which turned out to be Akane laughing, a full-bodied, outrageous laugh, not the polite titter behind her hand that she'd cultivated to help pass as a human woman in Old Japan. All three of her tails were twitching. “Sorry,” she choked out. “You'd think after all these years I'd remember mortals have to do everything the hard way. Let me fix this.” She gestured with one graceful hand like she was wiping fog from a mirror. The hand morphed into a white paw as she brushed the air.

Light flashed in the rough-grown clearing and searing pain stabbed into Deck's eyes. He grabbed Kyle's hand and screwed his eyes shut, but in the time it took him to do that, the pain vanished as if it had never existed, replaced by a euphoric adrenaline rush like surfing a sweet wave that was almost too big to manage.

He opened his eyes, blinking against moonlight filtered through evergreen trees.

They still huddled in the middle of a ramshackle ghost town, but a narrow, paved road led through the overgrown ruins of collapsed shacks. It led to a cluster of well-maintained, modern Quonset-hut-type buildings surrounding a small entranceway that appeared to go directly into the hillside. Black SUVs, that cliché of government agencies, along with a few older trucks filled a parking lot they would have tripped over if they'd walked a hundred yards farther.

And everyone's auras were back to normal, though Akane's was still dim.

“Okay,” Kyle conceded. “We're in the right place.”

“Akane, any ideas about how we actually get inside?” Tag asked.

The kitsune shook her head. Deck thought she looked pale, but then realized she was actually translucent. “It was
hard
breaking that illusion. I made light of it because that's a kitsune's way, but it hurt me. My original thought was I could trick us all inside, but the longer I'm here, the more it hurts. Something in the warding actually suppresses magic that doesn't belong here. And I…”

“You're magic and you don't belong here.” Paul's voice was gentle. “You got us here. You broke the illusion. Now get somewhere safe.”

“I'll kick some butt for you, babe,” Tag drawled, his whisky eyes concerned as he looked at the fading kitsune. “And then I'll come home safe to you.”

“You better. Remember my katanas—sometimes it's better to look tough than to be tough. And if you die, I'll go to the Otherside and tease you unmercifully.”

With that, she winked out of the clearing. Akane's sad smile and the tips of her furry ears remained visible for a few seconds after the rest of her vanished.

“Anyone have a plan B? Or Q, or whatever we're up to?” Kyle couldn't manage to quip convincingly, which said something about how desperate they all were.

“I'll try shooting the lock.” Tag patted the pistol at his hip. “Doors stand still, so it's got to be easier than deer huntin'.”

“When I was an EMT, I sometimes ended up hanging out with cops after an incident,” Kyle said. “Shooting a lock off a door is harder than it looks on TV.”

Deck squinted at the door with his witch-sight. His witch-sight wasn't working right, any more than anything else was, but the damn door was glowing. “And they didn't buy that door and lock at Home Depot. The door might just shoot back.”

Then Kyle blinked and turned to Deck. “A stream runs underground here. Off that hill, I think. Can you feel it now?”

Deck probed, found the cool gray-blue vein and followed it. “To an underground lake! I may be able to work with that.” He explored farther, letting his senses expand. “No, to a cistern within the facility. And there are pipes, but they're wide ones. Old school, like the Agency built on top of something from the old mine.” He smiled for the first time in what felt like years. “I can definitely work with that.”

“No,” Kyle said. “We can.”

“We'll get an invisibility spell on you, one that will last even when you change forms,” Deck assured him, looking at Paul for confirmation, since illusion magic wasn't one of Deck's strengths. Paul nodded. “And I know you can hold your breath a ridiculously long time in otter form, but I can extend that. One of the water magics that always works for me, even inland.” Granted, he knew that because he'd dated a girl who liked underwater sex and went to school in Eugene, but experience was experience.

“I only wish I were a river otter. Those guys can squeeze in places where I can't.”

“Think skinny, Kyle, and wiggle that fine butt of yours like your life depends on it.”

Kyle corrected Tag. “Like Meaghan's life depends on it.”

Think skinny
had sounded funny when Kyle was in wordside form on dry land—okay, mildly amusing, but all the tension had magnified it to hilarious.

He could even smile to himself about it while swimming in the chilly stream. He wasn't as buoyant in the fresh water as he was used to, and ripples and rapids were no match for waves, but he was an otter in the water. He turned off his wordside, with all its worries, and let the otter take charge. The otter was frantic too, knowing part of his raft was missing, but his animalside could embrace the now. Slipping and sliding downhill in the stream touched pure joy even under the circumstances.

It worked until the stream diverted underground.

He could even tolerate the natural underground stream, though he hated knowing all the rock was above him instead of friendly salt water.

The pipe leading into the facility was another story. He liked risky surfing and risky sex, but those were dangers he could calculate. This situation was unknown, which made it exciting in a bad way. More like those moments when you wiped out and a wave held you under and it was all you could do not to gasp for breath and suck in a lungful of water. A great story once you reached the surface safely, awful while it was going on.

And despite the otterside's best efforts, his imaginative wordside started screaming inside him, panicked at a space it couldn't possibly fit, and imagining all the ways this could go badly wrong.

Steady on.
Right now the pipe wasn't dangerous. Right now nothing was blocking passage. And while the otterside didn't always understand how humans thought, he couldn't imagine there wouldn't be access to and from the cistern for maintenance. He'd get in and find his way to open the door for the others.

Lord, Lady and Trickster help him. He'd do this. For Meaghan. For Deck. For his raft of three and all their kin.

He pictured Meaghan as he swam, hoping that the water would help her pick up his silentspeech message:
We're coming to rescue you. We love you.

Thinking that over and over took the edge off the wordside's panic, kept the otter focused on what needed to be done.

And then he hit the metal grating blocking what could only be the entrance to the cistern. Old, rusty, probably predating the Agency, it was still sturdy enough it didn't budge when he flung himself against it.

Panic washed over him. Trappedtrappedtrappedtrapped. Couldn't go forward, couldn't go back…

Mental image of smashing an abalone with a rock.

Right. The grating attached to the pipe with clamps that looked like they might break with enough force.

Finding a stone at the bottom of the pipe was the easy part; the creek must carry all kinds of debris in here. But the clamps, rusty though they were, weren't abalone shells, and he couldn't get enough force with his short otter legs at this angle. His otter body smashed down to crack things, not up and out.

He needed his wordside hands and arms.

He hated being partly shifted. His two bodies were too disparate in size and shape for it to work well at the best of times, and his broad human shoulders wouldn't fit well in this space. This called for a petite female Cirque du Soleil acrobat, not a fairly big guy.

Meaghan, soft and strong and smelling of amber and ocean, her pussy gripping his cock, her love holding him, her eyes focused on him even though she couldn't see. Meaghan, so fragile and yet so brave. Meaghan, who would die without help from Deck's healer relatives.

This was going to hurt…a lot. But not as much as losing Meaghan would, or letting the Agency hurt more people, including Elissa's baby. And the bastards had killed Deck's
grandmother
,
one of the sweetest old ladies he'd ever met. Terrifying, but still sweet.

Both otterside and wordside steeled themselves and started the shift.

His wordside shoulders wouldn't fit in the pipe in their natural position, but he managed to wiggle and scrunch, an effort made easier because the rest of him was otter and thus flexible. He'd have no fur left on his arms and shoulders by the time he was done with this. Not that he had fur on his wordside arms and shoulders, but he was going to lose so much skin in this narrow space that he'd sport bald patches in his otter form until the wordside healed.

Worth it.

A few good whacks with the stronger wordside arms and the rusty clamps bent. Something wrenched in his left shoulder but he ignored that hot pain and the constant discomfort of scraping and hit the fasteners a few more times. One gave. Now to get one of the others loose, push the grate in, shift back to full otter form and get through.

And fast. He needed air badly. He could hold his breath for three minutes in this form, maybe a little more, and Deck's spell had extended that considerably. But his lungs ached and strained.

Another smack with the rock. Two. Three. Four.

Nothing.

Deck's spell would keep him alive. It had to.

He picked a different angle, hit again. Muscle tore in his left shoulder, skin ripped on his right.

The hinge gave.

Using what strength remained in his damaged human arms and the force of his long otter body, he pushed on the grate. It moved.

Not all the way out of the opening, but enough that once his arms and shoulders shrank—painfully and more slowly than usual—to their proper otter shape, he could squeeze through. His shoulders still throbbed in otter form, but the ominous pain in his left shoulder shrank to the tolerable soreness of a bad bruise.

Water expanded around him, still enclosed, but with space to spare. Overhead, it was still dark, but his instincts screamed that up meant air. He shot upward. Within seconds he broke the water's surface and filled his lungs with blessed oxygen.

Holding himself straight in the water, Kyle looked around the dimly lit space. Thank the Powers. Even this feeble emergency lighting indicated that people came and went down here. The cistern had started out as a small natural cavern, but it had been modified, expanded. A narrow catwalk with a single narrow rail ran around the inside of the chamber, above the water level.