Shady Lady (Corine Solomon 3)

“Stay here. Don’t move.”

Well, where would I go? Disjointed noise spun all around me, and I tried to track his movement, but he slipped and slid in a dazzling display of pyrotechnics. I blinked, trying to force the colors to die down, but no matter how I looked at him, I saw his body edged in silver and gold, crowned in a white light. But he hid darkness in his core, a tiny little knot of sorrow.

Wait—is he fighting? It was an animal, but so smeared in red I couldn’t see. Images overlaid my vision, transparent and only half realized. More light. More shadow. Every tree and rock gained new dimension, as if I could see in a spectrum of color to which I’d been blind before. My eyes hurt with it, so I closed them and dropped my head on my knees. The world needed to stop now.

I felt his hands on my shoulders and I jerked. Not in pain, but because the power of him swam inside me. Before, I had no idea how strange he was—how alien—and now he felt too big to be crouched beside me, a force of nature rather than a person. He glowed like a sun.

“It will wear off soon.”

Blindly I reached out and fisted my hands in his shirt. There was no spark, reinforcing the fact that he wasn’t just a gifted human. “What did you do to me?”

“Just breathe.”

“You had wings,” I whispered. “Two of those scars on your back—you had wings once, raven dark, inky blue. When you flew, people crossed themselves and hid in their homes.”

Because I had hold of him, I felt the shudder that ran through him. “Now there is proof you are born of ancient kings. You saw too much. Such a small amount of my blood should not affect you so.”

“There’s no taking back what you’ve given me, Kelethiel.”

A low growl slid from him. “That name must not be spoken.”

“Keleth—”

He sealed his hand over my mouth, silencing me. “Name me not, unless you mean to bind or banish me.”

Some devil prompted me. I did the one thing I was sure would make him recoil: I moved my mouth in the faintest whisper of a kiss. He tasted of salt and copper, the hint of the blood he’d sacrificed for me lingering on his skin. My lips burned, his power seeping in through the dry cracks.

He did not withdraw, merely stared at me through narrowed eyes, as if I had transformed into a dangerous creature. His shoulders tensed, but he appeared to be appraising me in a way I could not measure. And then he moved his hand in increments of millimeters. Maybe it wasn’t his intention, but his withdrawal became a sweet torment of fingertips dragging over sensitive skin. I had never received a kiss that stirred me more than that furtive, forbidden caress.

It’s the blood, I told myself. Not him. He’s like a powerful mushroom or an exotic toad. He can’t help the effect.

His mien grew stern. “Are you yourself again?”

Ah. So that was how we were going to play it. My mind must’ve been addled for me to take such liberties with God’s Hand. More fool me, because my heart thumped at his proximity, kindled by the traces of fierce magick in the air. He crackled like a fire, all leashed power and restraint.

“I am. Your secret is safe with me,” I assured him quietly.

He lowered himself to the ground beside me, beside the clay statue, and his head went down, hunched shoulders indicating weight I could not see. For those terrible moments where I’d glimpsed him from the inside out, I had seen countless wars. Never-ending wars. Wars on earth, in hell, and in heaven. He had seen far too much for me to comprehend all of it, and yet—

I cut the thought mercilessly. That tree could bear no fruit. Ah, Corine. Always the emotionally unavailable men, but this one makes Chance seem like an open book.

What are you, Kelethiel, whose name I must not speak? All the lore I had read made me think he was an angel, but surely not. Not squatting in the mud with me.

“No wonder Nalleli wanted your blood,” I murmured. My mind was clearing, so maybe I had been addled when I kissed his palm. In the silence I wondered how it would be to have him focused on me with the intensity he devoted to divine orders. “For spells . . . and probably chemical diversion as well.”

Christ, a trace of his blood got me high as a kite and made me see things I wished I hadn’t. Infinity hid behind his eyes, like precious gems beneath a layer of ice. For a whisper of a moment I’d seen him as he was—and as he saw himself. I didn’t know if I’d ever recover.

He merely nodded. “I’ve driven away the cat. A jaguar.”

“You didn’t kill it?” Interesting.

“It was roused by our intrusion into its territory. We’ll be on our way shortly.”

I nodded. “As soon as we figure out the meaning of those markings. And I think I know what I need to do.”

“And that is?”

“Sleep.”

Booke would have answers. After all, we’d solved a number of problems via dream consultation. If anyone could help me, the hermetic scholar in the U.K. could. I liked to picture him in an enormous library, surrounded by arcane tomes. But before I could tap that knowledge, I had to prepare. I got a piece of paper and went to work. By the time I copied the glyphs, the sun hung low in the sky, though I could see only glimpses of it through the canopy. I could tell it was sunset by the lengthening shadows.

I had no idea whether this would work, but I had to try. On those other occasions, Booke had found me in my natural sleep; this would be my first crack at tracking him down. Before my power shifted—expanded—I doubt I would’ve attempted it. I was too accustomed to seeing myself as crippled in this world. I didn’t feel that way anymore.

“I’ll keep you from harm,” he said.

And I trusted him to do so.

Dreamwalker

Acknowledging Kel’s promise with a nod, I lay down on top of my bedroll. Sleep scooped me up fast and carried me away. First, I dreamt of angels with fiery swords and nightdark wings, but I couldn’t stay to watch the titanic clash. From there I wandered into a world of shades that whispered of death and tried to touch me with smoky fingers. It was cold in comparison to other worlds, so I shifted again.

This time, I found myself in my old apartment, watching Chance. As always, he was lean and gorgeous. His hair had gone wild in shaggy layers, falling into his tiger eyes. By the angle of the sunlight, it was early afternoon, and he held his cell phone, arguing with someone over a repayment schedule.

“No,” he bit out. “You’re two weeks overdue. I’ll start doubling the daily vig if you don’t get me my money tonight.”

I couldn’t hear the other half of the conversation, so I watched as he listened. A cruel smile curved his mouth. “You think so? Listen, asshole, you do not want that. If I become your new best friend, it’ll be worse than if I had your legs broken.”

Another pause.

He laughed softly. “Well, you’re welcome to test it, but you’ll be sorry.”

That, I knew, was true. When we were together, he’d enforced his loans like that. Instead of inflicting injury on his delinquent debtors, he offered friendship—and that was about the worst thing he could do, particularly since the bad luck clung like barnacles, and without fail, it would crush the person closest to him.

This reminded me of when I’d dreamt of Jesse, another instance when I played the invisible ghost, watching what they did without me. But entertaining as my subconscious proved to be, I shouldn’t linger here, yet I couldn’t make the shift. Something locked me in place, despite my struggles to move on. I scanned for Booke, seeking his familiar air. His personal tell felt to me like a lonely, pebble-strewn beach, and so I cast for it, eyes closed, denying what I saw, denying Chance.

But he didn’t go away.

Once he cut the call, he ran a hand through already disheveled hair in a gesture so familiar it tugged at my heartstrings. It gave him no pleasure to use his gift this way. I knew that, but he had been obsessed with making money as long as I’d known him, as if nothing could ever be enough. I didn’t quite understand why.

After a moment, he rose and strode over to the bureau, where we’d once kept our keys and miscellaneous objects. I assumed he still did. Most people had one junk drawer—because of my pack-rat ways, we’d needed five. He pulled out a photo album, the red one I made our first year together.

He opened it and I followed to see what he was looking at: a picture of him and me, taken by his mother. We stood by the ocean, the sun setting behind us, and I looked so happy it hurt. I had been blond then, and relatively tan. I almost looked like a different person.

“Soon,” he said softly.

I forgot I wasn’t there—that it wasn’t real. “Chance . . .”

He spun, his hands white-knuckled on the book. Did he hear me? Clearly he couldn’t see me. I wondered whether I actually went somewhere when I dreamt, but before I could speak again, test my curiosity, the tug came; I recognized Booke latching onto me as the lonely beach of his soul abutted mine. Not now. Not yet. I slid away, speeding toward a new dreamscape.

Booke waited for me, as always, in a library that existed only in my imagination. It looked like an old-school gentleman’s study, with burgundy carpet and matching leather chairs, all mahogany and tasteful draperies. My mental image of Booke summoned a man in his late thirties or early forties, with a sharp, clever face, nut brown hair, and eyes like slate. Where he lived—and what he really looked like—well, I didn’t know, because I’d never met him. He existed only as a voice, but he was more real to me than that.

“Could you feel me?” I asked, as the world went three-dimensional.

He nodded, wearing an expression of abject intellectual intrigue. “It was rather like a knock. I wasn’t asleep, but I felt you buzzing in the back of my head, like a fly.”

“Don’t you have trouble sleeping? How did you—”

“Took something,” he said. “I do resort to the chemical solution now and then. I collect you have need of me?”

“Things have been . . . eventful since we last spoke.” I sat down in the leather chair across from him, crossing long legs that existed only in this dream space. “My shop is gone, and Montoya’s hunting me.”

“Oh, Corine.” He leaned forward as if he wanted to comfort me, but he caught himself at the last moment. If we touched, it would jolt us both awake. Lucid dreaming had few rules, but that one was ironclad. Since we weren’t physically together, contact broke the shared illusion. “Were there any casualties?”

I nodded. It was tougher to say aloud than I’d expected. “Señor Alvarez. He worked for me, mostly in a contract capacity, but he ran the store when I had to travel. He was . . . a fine man. I believe he had family in Monterrey.”

When this was all done, I would find out who they were and provide for them. Kel had said, long ago, I do not understand why a good man like Alvarez chooses to work for you, as if he saw integrity in him that I lacked. Now he was dead, and I’d made a deal with the devil to save my own skin. Guilt gnawed me from the inside out, but maybe, just maybe I wasn’t wholly damned if Kel would choose to aid me of his own volition—and he’d said so, hadn’t he? Perhaps my soul wasn’t as black as it felt.