“Too much to explain. But there’s a chance. We have a chance. Please say yes.”
Another moment of staring at me, and I was afraid he was going to make me explain, or he was going to say he didn’t want a baby after all, or it was all too much and he didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. But what he did, finally, was grab my shirt and pull it over my head, and hitch my legs over his hips so he could carry me to the nearest clear spot of ground.
Between nuzzling my ear and massaging my breast, he found the stone wolf around my neck. “This,” he said, his voice husky, “has something to do with it?”
“More magic,” I murmured back.
“Figured,” he said, and moved on to yanking off my jeans.
My head tilted back, my eyes closed. “Don’t you want to know what it does?”
“Not interested in anything but you right now, hon.”
And those right there were the real magic words.
Chapter 21
OUR SEX was fast and fueled by adrenaline. It was also filled with love and need and relief. Resting after, the cool air against our skin and the bright sun made this feel like the morning after a full moon. I started giggling out of sheer joy at being alive, and Ben joined in. We’d saved the world. We could do anything.
Over the next rise, the geysers of West Thumb had started bubbling again, a pleasant, distant froth and hissing that reminded me of boiling pasta or a mad scientist’s lab. The caldera had settled. Nothing was going to be blowing up today.
Far too quickly, we heard voices and caught the scent of familiar people walking upwind.
“Shit,” Ben muttered against my naked shoulder.
I grinned. “They’re alive.”
We scrambled for our clothes and managed to make ourselves presentable by the time Cormac came over the rise, looking for us. Well, actually, Ben was picking pine needles out of my hair when Cormac, Tina, and Sun came over the rise. Ben might actually have blushed when Cormac stopped, smirked, looking around at the treetops as if examining the foliage.
I took another breath, scanned the group—Grant and Hardin were missing, and my gut twisted.
“Where…” I said, stepping forward. “What … Grant, Jessi—”
“Hospital,” Cormac said. My knees went so weak I almost sat down.
“They’re fine,” Tina added quickly. “They’ll be fine, they just got banged up.”
“Oh my God,” I muttered, hand on my head. Ben put his hand on my back to steady me.
Sun Wukong laughed. “That’s funny,” he said. “I mean, considering.”
They all looked banged up, to tell the truth. Cormac had a bandage wrapped around his arm. Tina, still recovering from her previous injuries, had new bruises on her chin, her arms. Except Sun—he looked completely unharmed, as usual. I didn’t know if anything could hurt him. Rather, I never wanted to face down the thing that could hurt him.
“And you two—you’re fine, I take it?” Cormac said, politely not mentioning that we looked like a couple of teenagers caught in the backseat of a car.
“Yeah. Just fine,” Ben said, smirking back.
Sun strolled along the shore. “Well, something blew up here.”
In the daylight, the place looked even worse, very much like a bomb had gone off, right where Roman had been standing. All the markings he’d drawn in the soil, all the evidence of his ritual had been swept away. The nearest trees were broken, the air still smelled of soot. But the water looked calm.
“The amulet worked,” I said.
Cormac went to the smear of ashes that used to be Roman. He recognized a destroyed vampire when he saw one. He kicked at it and turned away. “Good.”
* * *
CORMAC EXPLAINED that Ashtoreth left the geyser basin right after we did. Her job wasn’t to kill everyone—it was to stop me, keep us away from Roman, prevent us from interfering. She hadn’t let anything distract her.