Lightning Game (GhostWalkers 17)

“Thanks, Lightning Bug,” he replied gruffly. He thought it was a huge compliment and knew Jonquille didn’t give those out, not that there was anyone for her to give them out to.

They hurried back to the cabin. Twice in the distance, thunder rolled ominously, but the storm was clearly a good distance away. Rubin could visibly see the pull on Jonquille’s body and the way, even though the storm was so far away, the tension in her was so ingrained that she began to try to distance herself from him.

Rubin had a long reach, and he snagged her wrist easily and pulled her closer to him. “Sweetheart, the last thing you ever want to do when a storm comes is move away from me. You want to be close to me,” he said. “I know that’s a behavior that will have to be learned, but you should start now, when no one else is around.”

She sent him a look from under those silvery lashes that told him she wasn’t so certain. “Just because you think so doesn’t mean you’re right, Rubin. I’m not so willing to take chances with your life.”

“We kissed and you didn’t fry me.”

A faint smile curved her lips and she looked away, shaking her head. “I don’t know how you got so unlucky to have been paired with me, but that’s probably the only reason you didn’t get fried. That doesn’t mean if a lightning bolt suddenly comes out of the sky and strikes somewhere in our vicinity, you aren’t going to die.”

“We’re going to form a partnership, Jonquille.” He poured confidence into his voice. “I’ve been working on ideas for a long time. If you came to the conferences, you had to have heard some of them.”

“Theories aren’t the same as practical knowledge, Rubin, you know that. One mistake and you’re dead. Just one. Lightning kills. Electrical charges kill. The amount of volts is beyond anything anyone really imagines. You talk about directing lightning. Do you know how fast it is?”

“Why, yes, I do, Miss Jonquille, now that you ask,” Rubin said. “I happen to be well versed in my facts on lightning. Each bolt of lightning can contain as many as one billion volts of electricity.” He flashed her a boyish grin. “The lead stroke from air to ground is much slower and can come in steps, a microsecond at a time. It’s the return charge that’s fast, traveling at speeds of 320,000,000 feet per second. We also know how hot you can get.”

“Don’t be cute. This isn’t funny, Rubin. Were you really going to experiment?”

“That is exactly what I came up here to do, and I intend to do it. And it isn’t my first time. Now that you’re here with me, it will be fun. Don’t get all grim and foreboding on me like Diego. He’s all gloom and doom, sure we’re both going to go up in smoke.”

“You probably are.” This time when she said it, she sounded a little more amused.

He sent her another quick smile. “We know you’re hot as hell. How fast are you when you’re not cheating?”

One silvery eyebrow shot up. “I don’t cheat.”

“Drawing energy from others and using it against them isn’t cheating? If we’re racing, you can’t take my energy for yourself.”

“I think you do that,” she pointed out, giving him a little haughty chin lift.

He did do that, specifically with her. He could drain off quite a bit of that dazzling white-hot energy sizzling through her, but he wanted to see what she could do with it when she wasn’t using it to call to the clouds.

Deliberately, he set a faster pace, breaking into a sprint through the brush, leaping over the first of a series of low bushes and choosing the ground with the least amount of foliage to run through. He was a big man, tall, with long legs and a long stride. She was short and her legs couldn’t possibly cover the ground he could. He knew he was taking advantage, but she’d been so confident so many times and he wanted to see the skills she had.

A flash of light overhead distracted him for a moment and he nearly stumbled as he tilted his head to look up. She was so fast, gliding from tree branch to tree branch, her weight barely making the leaves shiver as she skillfully landed and took off for the next one. She outdistanced him fairly quickly, making her way to the cabin unerringly, as if she had been born in the mountains. Few others could have done that, found their way without a map or consulting a GPS, but she had some built-in chart in her head.

He arrived right behind her. She was waiting for him, standing right outside the mudroom, looking smug.

“If we were racing, I’d call that a win for the ladies,” she announced.