Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) (6 page)

“We’re strangers. We can’t have sex to warm you up,” she said.

“I know. I’ll leave.” He turned clumsily for the door. He had his own sexual ethics. It was about self-respect as much as respecting his partner.

“But I want to taste the hunger in you,” she finished.

He rocked to a halt, his hand on the door. He bowed his head, resting it against the cool wood.

“A kiss.” Her voice was husky. “I want to know what clarity of sight feels like.”

“Kissing me won’t show you.” Being truthful hurt. He ached to touch her.

She walked up behind him and placed a hand on his back.

He flattened himself against the door, leaning away from her, fighting for control, unable to leave. Utterly unable to resist.

Both her hands on his back, up to his shoulders, and down, tracing his muscles, down to his butt. His hips jerked.

She pressed into him, stretching up. “One kiss.”

He turned so fast that she stumbled and he caught her. Her body scalded him. He leaned his back into the door. If he stayed there, shoulders touching it, he couldn’t do anything she didn’t want. He slid down the door just enough to bring their mouths level. She could choose if their hips aligned. He waited.

Gina burned. Lewis had attracted her at first sight. She knew he wasn’t really interested in her. This was some weird consequence of attaining clarity of sight. Perhaps any woman would have triggered his arousal. But with him watching her as if she was a sex goddess and talking about tasting her, promising to have her melt over him like warm honey. She was wet.

A kiss. They could both handle one kiss.

She wanted to know, to share, the experience of clarity of sight. In Morag’s home, Lewis had appeared tortured. His scream had been agonizing. Even now he seemed different. He was a voyager back from an unknown dimension, part of him still lost. But his eyes…wherever he’d been, whatever he’d seen, he was now utterly focused on her. And that was seductive.

He’d caught her when she stumbled and his hands remained at her waist, large and gentle. He waited. For all that he’d been staring at her breasts as if they starred in his erotic fantasies, he made no move to caress them.

He stared at her mouth. She’d specified one kiss, and he waited for it.

She looked into his eyes. “Kiss me.”

His mouth swallowed the “me”. He kissed her hard, nothing tentative, no suggestion of learning one another’s kissing quirks. He kissed her as a lover would, a lover coming home. He claimed, he took, and he gave…bliss.

“Don’t stop.” She panicked when he broke the kiss. Her lips were swollen, kiss-bruised. The flavor of him intoxicated her.

He tipped his head back against the door, his throat exposed, and she kissed it, maybe sucked on it a little. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. His fingers dug into her hips.

She realized she was rubbing up against him, with his fingers squeezing her hips in rhythm to her thrusts. She froze. That was well beyond a kiss. Well beyond safe boundaries for however long they’d have to associate till Morag had taught him the Deeper Path.

Gina struggled to surface. The cover story for the Collegium was that she was his girlfriend, but that wasn’t the truth. It would be too complicated to be the truth. She knew that. Maybe he could claim that he was out of his mind at the moment, influenced by attaining clarity of sight, but she didn’t have that excuse. What would he think of her once this whatever it was wore off?

What would she think of herself?

Commonsense demanded that she save herself. There’d only be heartache in getting involved with Lewis.

Her heart pounded. His chest heaved against hers with rough, aroused breathing. She pushed away, retreated several steps and leaned against the kitchen table. They stared at one another.

His breathing evened out. He managed a slight, wry smile. “I’m not cold anymore.”

She half-laughed. “No, you’re not cold.”

He raked a hand through his short blond hair. “I haven’t been that out of control in years.”

“You weren’t out of control. You didn’t even move your hands from my hips.”

“You think that means I was in control?” He shook his head, finally straightening from the door. “Gina, I was hanging by a thread. If you’d invited, I’d have taken.”

Their gazes locked.

“Pie.” She cleared her throat. “Morag said you should eat. There’s pie on the table.” He could still leave, insist on taking the portal back to New York immediately. But she needed him to stay. Rational or not, she couldn’t handle him walking away.

He pulled out his chair and sat at the table.

“I’ll make tea.” She hid her relieved sigh. “Herbal okay with you?”

“That’s fine.”

She made the tea and sat kitty-corner to him at the table, trying not to imagine what else they could have done with the cream on the pie.

“Will what we did cause problems?” he asked. “Are you still willing to provide the cover story of being my girlfriend?”

“Oh. Those kind of problems.” Not the kind where she thought about cold showers or simply running into the ocean so it steamed instead of her. “Morag still has to teach you the Deeper Path. You’ll need a reason to be away from the Collegium.”

His fork scraped the plate, a tiny grating sound as he chased a final bite of pie. He seemed utterly intent on it. “We also had a deal that I’d have the same number of cover visits for my personal use.”

Understanding washed over her. “That’s the real reason you agreed to meet Morag. You don’t care about the Deeper Path.”

He looked up. “I’m interested. The silver light is unusual.”

“But your personal quest is more important to you. What on Earth is it?”

Lewis considered Gina’s impulsive question.

She wanted to know what was more important to him than the different magic Morag offered to teach him. To Gina, clarity of sight and the Deeper Path were a holy grail. She wanted them desperately, envied him greatly.

But Gina wasn’t a guardian. She didn’t bear the weight of lives lost because of her stupidity.

He did.

Other magic users remembered the two hundred and sixteen people saved when he held back the ice storm in the North West Passage. He remembered the five men who died when their helicopter crashed. The storm had come out of nowhere, summoned by a weather mage, and the weather mage had been hired by the Group of 5 to distract and destroy Lewis.

And I fell for it.

Silver light flickered, spinning out and across Gina’s kitchen, lighting patterns and objects, curling around the herbs on the windowsill and frilling like silver lace against the darkness outside. He blinked and the silver light vanished. Apparently, emotions could erratically enable it, which told him he would need Morag’s help to learn how he controlled it.

“It’s none of my business,” Gina said. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’ll honor our deal. As many times as you visit Morag, you are free to claim to be visiting me, your fake girlfriend. Where you go from here…I won’t question.”

“If I used the portal, would Emmaline keep the secret of my travels?”

“Yes. She’s strongly against surveillance.” Gina replaced her mug on the table and laughed. “It’s ironic. Emmaline generally identifies the Collegium as snoopers, and now she’ll be helping its president to move around secretly.”

“Her portal isn’t registered with the Collegium?”

“It is, but she doesn’t like oversight, whether Collegium, government or even concerned family. She is frail, though, so we watch her anyway.”

“I won’t bring trouble to her door.” He swallowed some herb tea. It tasted of straw and medicine to him. He wasn’t a fan. “Would it be possible to use a burn phone while I’m here? Would your privacy wards prevent it being tracked?”

She stared at him for a long moment, then faintly shook her head. “Do you remember what I do?”

“You’re a dragon knight.”

“That doesn’t actually occupy a lot of my time.”

He resisted asking what the role did involve. If he wasn’t answering questions, he couldn’t ask them. He recalled their meeting. “You said you’re a software consultant.”

“Ye-es.” She drew it out as if waiting for him to understand some obvious point.

“Is that a euphemism for hacker?” he asked.

“It’s a hint that I have the skills to hack. A lot of my work is searching out vulnerabilities in new software.”

“Hacking.” He finally understood. “So you’ve taken precautions to ensure people can’t track your online activities back to your home.”

“I have a room filled with tech equipment and a garden filled with wards. Whatever you’re doing, it won’t be traced.” She watched him over her mug of tea.

She didn’t offer. He’d have to ask. But she’d put it out there: she had the skills to help him with his quest.

She could be an ally.

“How well do you know the Collegium?” he asked.

“I know it was created after the First World War to protect mundanes from the horrors of war amplified by magic. The decision was that we, magic users, would police our own.”

“And protect our own. People forget that bit. Individual magic users are vulnerable. The Collegium reassures them that they’re not alone. If they encounter trouble, or simply observe something suspicious, they report it to us. We recruit widely and we strive to reflect the broad range of magical capabilities out there. We need to understand the issues people are experiencing.”

“Did the previous president feel that way?”

“You know the story?”

“Your predecessor fell under a demon’s influence and—”

“No,” he interrupted. “No. When a story is told and retold, people blur or forget important distinctions. It was Richard’s personal assistant, Nancy Yu, who summoned a demon and fell under its control. The demon used Richard’s obsession with power to isolate him from the senior Collegium mages. Something that Nancy facilitated. Richard’s daughter, Fay, banished the demon a month ago, and I’m—we’re—still discovering the damage it did as it burrowed into the heart of the Collegium. It tainted how some people thought, twisting their actions.”

“You don’t know who to trust,” she said slowly.

“Ninety eight percent of our members are well-intentioned, but their decision-making might be scarred from the demon’s time. Even those not tainted…knowing the demon infiltrated has unnerved some people.” For instance, his own replacement as commander of the guardians. Kora wanted to protect him in his new role by surrounding him with guardians. He wanted to work alone. Was he wrong? Richard—with Nancy Yu and the demon’s assistance—had isolated himself as president, and that had brought the Collegium to the brink of disaster. People hadn’t been close enough to Richard to detect the demon’s presence.

He understood that Kora feared that situation repeating, but allowing the guardians to surround him as president strained the relationships he had to build with all of the Collegium’s departments and senior mages. If they thought him captured by guardian interests, that would stress the Collegium’s operations in new ways. The institution could implode from infighting, and from information and support withheld.

Kora thought he was being obstructive as a result of his sensitivity to his loss of magic. She refused to heed the political reality he saw so starkly.

“I have to tread carefully,” he said to Gina. “Even as we clean out the stench of the demon’s presence, we have to rebuild. We have to restructure to prevent a repeat of the demon’s sly attack, and we have to restore our members’, and the wider magical community’s, trust in us. It is the core of our identity. About ninety percent of the work we do is in response to reports by magic users of suspicious happenings. We investigate and take appropriate action.”

“Ninety percent is a high number.”

“It sounds as if we’re reactive, doesn’t it? That’s a debate in the Collegium right now. However, research falls under that responsive percentage, and we have a significant number of mages involved in research and development. The remaining ten percent of our activity is us anticipating trouble. We look for patterns that indicate undetected rogue mages, demons, and so forth. Magical hazards.”

She frowned intently, analyzing his explanation and making her own deductions. “You saw something in the investigated reports. They’d need sign off from the president. The information crossed your desk and now you want to check something out quietly. The Collegium is unsettled and you can’t risk destabilizing it further.”

Computer hacker, house witch, dragon knight. Gina sat relaxed yet alert in her kitchen, in the house that her magic hid from the world. The electric lighting turned her red hair to fire and showed her clear green eyes, bright despite a long day.

The day had been hard on her. She’d had to watch him achieve her dream. Yet, she’d kissed him with an honest passion that fed his own hunger. Visiting the dragon had left him cold, so cold. The world had seemed distant. And Gina had brought him back, in more ways than one. She was as sexy as hell and just as smart.

“You’re almost right.” He could have let her misunderstanding remain. It was near enough to the truth for her to search the dark web efficiently on his behalf. Instead, he looked at his half-full mug of herb tea. Discussions like these needed more than grass-flavored water. “Do you think I could have coffee, instead?”

“You won’t sleep.” But she stood and made the coffee. Two cups.

He swallowed some of the smooth, caffeinated elixir, and gave her the truth. “My quest started before I became president and before I burned out my magic. It is why I burned out my magic. And I didn’t hear the rumors from a Collegium source.”

She added another slice of pie to his plate.

It distracted him. “Do you feed everyone who enters your house?”

A touch of color flushed her cheeks. “I want another slice to go with my coffee.” Slightly cross. “Do you want cream with yours?”

“No, thanks.”

She dolloped two scoops of cream onto her pie.

Rather than watch her eat, her lips parting and rounding and savoring the cream and pie, he stared at the window, but with night outside, that only gave him the reflection of the two of them. Man and woman alone, even in the ordinariness of a kitchen, had an unsettling intimacy. Perhaps it was the ordinariness of the setting that disconcerted him. He looked back at his slice of pie. The blueberries were plump and oozing indigo sweetness.

He picked up his fork. “In the dragon’s den I told you my parents are stage magicians. They have a touch of real magic, but it’s barely present. They rely on sleight of hand and misdirection for their act. A lot of the people they socialize with are the same. With the way magic talent rises and falls through the generations, those in a magical family have to find careers outside magic, but often they can’t leave it all together.”

She nodded. “It’s the same in my family. On both Mom and Dad’s side we’re mostly house witches. Fortunately, working in hospitality, mundane skills are as important as magic. Those with less magic are never made—never are—lesser.”

“That’s something I remind trainee guardians. Power can blind you. Sometimes stronger magic users forget the skills, intelligence and other talents mundanes possess. My parents spent years travelling around America, performing in all sorts of places and building a network of friendship and favors. Now, they’re mostly based in Las Vegas, but they hear things.”

He ate some pie. He never discussed his parents within the Collegium, so people assumed he wasn’t close to them. He was about to expose that illusion to Gina. “Mom and Dad are my link to those who exist on the fringe of magic. Sometimes rumors are clearest on the periphery, perhaps because it’s where people listen hardest.”

It had been his Dad’s idea. Selwyn Bennett had almost no magic, but he was brilliant at reading people and predicting what they’d do. When Lewis graduated from guardian training, Selwyn had suggested an illusion. If Lewis and his parents cultivated an impression of distance, people would ignore their relationship. People on the fringes would tell his parents things they’d hide from the Collegium, and those Lewis dealt with would forget that he had connections to another life, one outside of true magic.

It had worked. Lewis heard rumors that others within the Collegium missed. But the price was the growing truth of his isolation. When he’d burned out his magic, he’d chosen not to go home to be fussed over by his mom. A grown man didn’t need fuss—but perhaps everyone needed reminders they were loved?

“Dad heard the rumor from a travelling conjuror. Valenty Smith came from a family that possesses thieves’ magic. In him it was so diluted that his magic was barely a breath. But he still specialized in escapology, unlocking padlocks, unknotting ropes, all those
open-sesame
tricks. He wasn’t very good and that got worse as he started drinking.”

“You’re using the past tense,” Gina observed when he paused to swallow some coffee.

“Valenty was a conspiracy theorist as well as a failing conjuror. Most people ignored the various illogical tales he believed in so fervently, and given his alcoholism, no one was particularly surprised when one of his tricks went wrong and he drowned.”

“Ugh.” She shuddered. Her head turned so she faced the ocean, unseen and unheard, but ever-present to Cape Codders. “A horrible death. You don’t believe it was an accident.”

“No. A week before he died, Valenty sent Dad a letter. If the postal service was more efficient, maybe Dad would have thrown it out, but the letter arrived the day after Valenty’s death. Dad read the letter, he inquired quietly among his friends if anyone else had received communications from Valenty—three had—and then, he contacted me.”

Gina put her elbows on the table, leaning forward with her coffee mug cradled between her hands. “What did it say?”

“Valenty rambled. His hand writing was atrocious and deteriorated as the letter continued, probably because he was drinking as he wrote. He warned Dad of a Group of 5 who knew enough to be dangerous. Outcasts like us, he said. People who knew of magic, but whose families’ power had faded. Resentment, greed and fury. They’ll use us, he told Dad. And they’ll destroy everyone. He wrote on paper, he said, because they could trace anything he sent online.”

“Paranoia or truth?” Gina queried softly.

“What if it were the truth? Some people think the internet is magic. What if people who know of real magic but lack it substituted computer skills? They’d be nearly undetectable and they could organize in secret.” He drew a breath. “I believe they hire rogue mages for specific jobs. But the initiating events are so minor, they don’t show up in the Collegium’s reports. I’ve found them by tracking backwards, which isn’t particularly helpful, to find what triggered a major change. Magic and mundane sabotage are changing the world. It’s like chaos theory. One flap of a butterfly’s wings in the right place at the right time and a hurricane can flatten a city. This group knows where to flap its wings.”