Your Magic or Mine? (47 page)

Her voice trailed off as she looked at him and her mind took off on a different tangent entirely. It was still hard to believe that he was hers. She had no problem being absolutely certain she was his, but the reverse continued to surprise her. When he returned her gaze, she could feel the pull between them. The last thing she wanted to talk about at the moment was plants. They were alone here. Why not take advantage of it?

Swinging her hips more than usual, she sauntered over to him and ran her hands up his chest and around his neck. He immediately put his arms around her and pulled her close.

Pitching her tone low and sultry, she asked, “Ever made love in a jungle?”

“Not till now.” His blue eyes twinkled, and he bent to scoop her up.

“Uh-uh.” She took a step backward and gave him a mock frown. “My jungle, my rules.”

“Glori, Queen of the Jungle, huh? Okay, command me, my queen.”

His grin melted her insides, and she hid her reaction and looked him up and down. “You have too many clothes on for a jungle. Take them off.”

“Down to what? My underwear?”

“Down to the skin.” While he followed her commands and she stripped off her own clothes, she walked around in back of him and watched the interplay of his muscles and bones. Damn, he was so perfect. She sent a little thanks to the soul-mate phenomenon for its gift.

When he was down to nothing, he moved to face her. She stopped him with her hands on his shoulders. “Just stand there.”

She ran her hands down his back and squeezed his butt. He stiffened, and she noticed his hands clenching. She slid her hands around his waist to his front and up his chest. Under her touch, his muscles hardened even more. Her movement brought her breasts into contact with his back. He must not have realized she, too, was naked, because he inhaled sharply. She kissed his back between his shoulder blades, once, twice, three times, and rubbed her front over his back.

He raised his hands, probably to capture hers, until she tapped his chest and said, “Not yet.”

When she dropped her hands to his waist and lower still to run fingers through his springy curls, finally to hold his erection, he hissed and threw his head back. Through her cheek pressed against his back, she could feel his heartbeat increase.

The hum started, pulsating in her eardrums, and her blood heated as her heart speeded up to match his.

It wasn’t enough. She had to be closer.

She moved her hands to his hips and turned him to face her. His gaze was intense, and every muscle in his body was steel hard under her fingers. Happily, he was still playing by her rules.

“Lie down,” she ordered, and he lay on the chaise. She followed and straddled him, bracing herself on her hands and knees to lean down and kiss him. His hands came up to cup her breasts, and the familiar zings flashed from her nipples to her womb when he fondled them. The hum increased in tempo and intensity as she lowered herself until he was inside her all the way.

As she looked into his eyes, the playful ideas she’d had when she began this game evaporated like water in the Sahara before the heat in his gaze.

He pulled her down into a kiss that transformed in the time of two heartbeats from warm to hot to blazing to incandescent.

Her control slipped, then fell away altogether, when his touch grew more urgent and she began to move up and down on him. He changed his grip from her breasts to her hips and thrust in counterpoint. Their magic centers aligned and met with each thrust. Within seconds, they were pounding together. He added a twist of his hips that increased her frenzy until her world consisted of him and her and the deep, sonorous hum and swirling magical energy. They strained together toward … toward … an explosive, prolonged merging … until finally, nirvana.

Sometime later he stirred first, and she raised up on her arms again. He smiled and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Glori, you simply blow me away.”

“The feeling is mutual, or couldn’t you tell? To be absolutely clear, I love you very much.”

“I love you, too, Glori.” He said the words very seriously as if to be sure she understood. He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “To think, I wanted to reject it all. God, what an idiot I was.”

“Nah, in the end I wouldn’t have let you. I don’t know what I’d have done, but it would have been something.” She gave him her evil little-sister smile.

“Oh, I’m sure of that.” He laughed and gave her a hug. “Listen, I could stay right here forever, but if we don’t get up soon, we never will.”

She groaned and looked at her watch. “It’s going on midnight. Let’s get moving.”

They rose and started dressing.

“Now, that’s peculiar,” he said a minute later.

“What?”

“The African violet. It wasn’t that big or had that many flowers when I first noticed it.”

She came over to take a better look. “You’re right. How on earth …” She felt the leaves and the soil and counted the flowers. It had almost doubled in size. She measured the distance from the chaise to the table with her eyes. The answer she arrived at caused her to gasp. “Oh, my God, Marcus. We did that. We must have. It’s our combined spell aura. The magical energy, the hum—the plant must have been inside our spell-aura diameter, and that caused it to grow.”

He stared at her. “Antonia said our aura only extended a few inches.”

“We were certainly merging our bodies, and energy was flowing through both of us. The combined aura must be growing in the process like the bigger lightball.”

“Okay, if you’re correct, we’ve yet to see what else the soul-mate phenomenon has done to us.” He waved at the chaise. “What we went through here was almost as powerful to me as the bonding experience.”

She nodded. “For me, too.”

“We were expending a great amount of energy, much more than previously, so it stands to reason our aura could have expanded. But how did the plant grow without a specific spell to guide it or push it or whatever?”

“I don’t know.” She spread her hands in helplessness and shook her head. “Oh, man, we have to get to some teaching masters or somebody who can help us find out what’s going on. First the merged lightballs, next the ability to learn spells previously outside of our usual talents, after that to merge energy, and now an output of energy that causes results without our intervention.”

“Or maybe it’s your subconscious casting spells you’ve already learned, like the plant growth one,” he offered. “I agree, we need to get to the bottom of it, no matter what. Not right now, though. It’s too late to do that tonight.”

“Then let’s go home.” She switched off the cabana lights. Hand in hand, they walked the dimly lit, winding path to the entry.

“Someone’s coming,” Marcus said, looking out through the glass of the inner and outer doors.

“Who?” She did likewise. A car was coming down the road.

A big white Cadillac pulled up next to Marcus’s car. Under the light above the outer door, Gordon Walcott got out.

“What’s he doing here?” Marcus whispered as he watched Walcott reach back into the car and come out with an object—a gun, a semiautomatic, from the looks of it. “Oh, shit. John was wrong about him. Come on, we need to get out of here.”

“There’s no back door. When we bring in a tree, we have to remove sections of the wall. That is the only way out, and the glass in the walls is too thick to break easily. The front door is locked, and”—she manipulated the lever on the inner door—”so is this one.”

“That won’t hold him long,” Marcus said, pulling her back into the jungle.

“Wait. Let me turn off the path lights.” She flipped the switch. “Take my hand.”

“What about a phone? Can we call our parents?” he asked as she led him quickly through the darkness.

Walcott began to beat on the outer door and shout, “Forscher! Morgan, you witch! I saw the lights. I know you’re in there. The time for retribution has arrived, traitors.”

“There’s no phone out here,” Gloriana said. “Mine’s in my purse in your car.”

“Great, and mine’s at your house because I didn’t think I’d need it.”

Walcott started banging on the door with something metal, and a crash of breaking glass told them he’d made it through the first door.

“Damn,” Gloriana said. “I hoped the wire reinforcement in the glass would hold longer than that.”

“If we can sneak past him, we can make a run for it, but he’ll probably follow us. I don’t want to lead him to our parents.”

“Me, neither.”

Walcott started beating on the inner door.

“We’ve got to get the drop on him somehow,” Marcus said when they stopped in front of the control room. “Start the rain. That’ll slow him down.”

“Here’s something to use as a weapon,” she said, stepping around the corner and opening a door in the outer side of the room. She pulled out a machete and a crowbar.

He hefted the machete. “Good.”

She went into the control room and started manipulating the pump mechanisms by the glow of the LED displays. “It will take a few minutes to fully charge the system.”

“Get it started. I’ll create a diversion to slow him down. Give me the remote, too.”

She handed it to him. “Be careful, Marcus. I love you.”

“I will, and I love you, too.” Funny, the words got easier to say, and hearing them became more pleasurable every time. He couldn’t stop to think about that at the moment. He had to do something to protect Gloriana. The glass broke on the inner door with another crash. He felt his way into the thick bushes close to Sassy’s lair.

“Where are you, you bastards?” Walcott yelled. “You’re destroying magic and I’m going to stop you if it’s the last thing I do.”

Marcus heard Walcott cursing, but he didn’t seem to be moving. A little blip of green light glowed through the leaves from a location by the door, and the path lights came on.

“Aha, got you now,” Walcott called. He appeared at the opening from the path into Sassy’s clearing. A green lightball bobbed in the air beside his head.

The color of the ball didn’t help to penetrate all the green around it, however, and Marcus sneered silently at the seventh-to-eighth-level son of a bitch. Walcott didn’t even realize what a perfect target the globe made.

If the man would come a little closer … Marcus hit Sassy’s power button. A flash of red light from the python’s eyes showed the snake was working.

Holding the gun out with two hands like they did in cop shows, Walcott advanced slowly into the clearing. “You must come out and face the consequences of your lies,” he said in that calm conversational tone he’d used back at the debate. “You’ll never get away from me.”

Marcus gauged his distances carefully. When Walcott reached the point directly under the python, Marcus started the toy moving. Sassy dropped right on the thin man’s head.

“Yaaaagh!” Flailing his arms and almost hitting himself in the head with the gun, Walcott knocked the snake off his shoulder. When it lay on the ground wiggling, he shot it two times, then once more. His ball of light had disappeared in the excitement, and he recast it after he stared at the toy’s remains for a few seconds.

A loud “CLICK” in the ceiling above the clearing brought his eyes up.

And the rain came down in a deluge like Gloriana had upended a huge bucket.

The woman herself appeared at Marcus’s side and tugged him down to say in his ear over the thunder of the rain, “Are you all right? I heard shots.”

“Yeah. He shot poor Sassy, though. He’s so agitated, he can’t seem to hold his lightball together. If it weren’t for the gun, we could take him down easily.”

“The flood will only last a few minutes. I’ve got an idea. Let’s lure him into the next narrow portion of the path. If we can get him close to the vines there, we might be able to use our combined power to ensnare him.”

Marcus thought about that for all of a second. It was likely the only chance they had. Walcott might decide to start shooting, and who knew what might happen when bullets started flying. At the moment, the man was revolving in a circle in the clearing, holding his free hand like a visor over his eyes to try to see through the rain. The other held the gun in a ready position. The lightball had disappeared again, probably washed away.

What about a frontal attack? No. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to get through the undergrowth quickly enough to tackle him before he could shoot, and throwing the machete wasn’t a sure way to disarm him. Using one of them as a decoy wasn’t acceptable; no way would he expose Gloriana to a madman. Furthermore, sneaking past him to run would only lead him to their parents. It was either her idea or an unacceptable alternative. “Okay, let’s go for it.”

She pulled him out of the bushes, across the path leading from the clearing to the cabana, and into the thickly growing plants on its other side. The path narrowed to less than three feet, but the planted area between its loops was broad and supplied plenty of cover. They squeezed in between a good-sized tree and a big-leaved bush. The tree offered some protection if Walcott tried to shoot, and, while they were effectively hidden, they had a clear view of anyone on the path itself.

Pointing to the overhanging limbs and the vines climbing a tree trunk barely visible across the way, she said, “Those right there.”

He put his arm around her and pulled her close. “Start casting. I’ll try to get him coming in our direction.” He felt the hum begin when their centers aligned.

“Hey, Walcott!” Marcus yelled as loud as he could. “Go to hell!”

The fanatic shouted something back, although Marcus couldn’t make out the words through the rain. Marcus bellowed epithets once more, calling the asshole every name he could think of.

He shut up when Walcott stuck his head around the corner of the path next to a big elephant-ear leaf. The idiot had
lux
going again at a yellow fifth level, and its puny light was swallowed up by the dark and the downpour.

As suddenly as it had started, the rain stopped.

Only dripping water, Walcott’s heavy breathing, and the spell hum broke the silence. If he would only come forward a few more feet …