Hex Appeal (35 page)

Jimmy let his injured hand flop at his side as he stepped in close. “She sobs your name in her sleep, you son of a bitch. What did you do to her?”

“What didn’t I?” Sawyer whispered, then flicked one hand through the air as if batting a fly.

By the time Jimmy landed, and I’d run to him, Sawyer was gone. I don’t know if he shape-shifted, or ran off on his own bare feet. Maybe he just went
poof
—with him, anything was possible. In truth, I didn’t care how he’d gone, I was just glad
that
he’d gone.

“You okay?” I asked, but Jimmy was already getting up.

He stared at the place Sawyer had recently stood; the only indication that the man had been real and not a mirage was the imprints of his toes in the dust.

“I don’t care what he is.” Jimmy retrieved his knife. The wrist Sawyer had broken still hung limply at his side, but the fingers had begun to move, curling into a fist I wasn’t even sure he knew he’d made. “I’m gonna kill him someday.”

Only one thing could make men—even those who weren’t completely men—behave like this.

“Who is she?” I asked, proud when my voice didn’t break even though my heart was.

Stupid to feel betrayed. I might have known Jimmy Sanducci intimately for eons, but he’d only met me yesterday. And, from the way he’d said
she,
another had already captured his heart.

“No one,” he murmured in a voice that clearly said
the
one.

He walked to the car and got in without glancing my way at all.

*   *   *

I pulled into the first motel I saw, a small, single-wing, once-white place with a neon sign that announced
SLEEP EAP
. It wasn’t until I parked beneath it that I saw that the
C
and the
H
had burned out.

“Why are we stopping?”

Those were the first words Jimmy had said in the hour we’d been on the road.

“I’m tired.”

“I’ll drive.”

“If a cop sees you behind the wheel like that…” I waved at his torn and bloody shirt, his even bloodier chest.

“You’ll magic them, and we’ll keep right on going.”

“It’s easier to stop here, take a shower and a nap, start fresh in the morning.” Besides, I’d magicked so many people today, my hands hurt.

I figured he’d argue, so when he laid his head against the seat and closed his eyes, I palmed the keys and got us a room. There was no way I was letting Jimmy out of my sight until he was back under Ruthie’s thumb. I wouldn’t put it past him to sneak away in the middle of the night and try to kill Sawyer again.

Unfortunately, Jimmy didn’t wait for the middle of the night. By the time I got back to the car, he was gone.

“Fuck!” I kicked the tire. I should have put a leash on him.

I looked up and down the road, but in the middle of nowhere, even with fairy eyesight, the highway disappeared into a black maw of nothing after a few hundred feet.

I honestly had no idea which way to go, or even if I
should
go. Jimmy was a big boy. He wasn’t my responsibility.

No matter how much I might want him to be.

I turned toward the motel and got a shimmy of déjà vu so hard I staggered. I’d dreamed this.

The Impala right there, the hotel in front of me. Jimmy was gone. I was worried. Everything was the same, right down to the ache in my fingers, except …

The sign had been off—black and still—not flickering like it was now.

In the next instant, the neon died with a sizzling
phzaat.
Darkness settled over me like a cool spring mist. I held my breath and waited for reality to catch up with the dream.

The animal-like shriek rent the night, and I lifted into the air without benefit of wings.

I flew toward the scream, already knowing what I would find.

A cottage miles away from the nearest neighbor, at the end of what would have passed for a decent road in the year 2, the night so dark the figures that surrounded it were mere wisps darting in and out of the light that shone from the windows.

One man battled a multitude of hunched and decrepit crone-things, with tails like dinosaurs and bony, bald heads. Despite their ancient appearance, they moved fast, and they had very sharp teeth. It wasn’t until one of them bleated like a goat that I remembered what they were.

Chupacabras.

Mexican vampires. The stench of rancid garlic was so strong, my eyes watered. Jimmy had probably smelled them from the car.

He seemed to be doing just fine on his own. Ashes flitted through the dim light. He whirled and jabbed, plunging a wooden stake into chest after naked, scaly chest.

However, I’d been here before, and I knew what happened. The king chupacabra—a much bigger, badder vampire, with spikes down his spine and gigantic bat wings—would swoop from the sky and drive first his right talon, then his left, through Jimmy’s throat.

I snatched up a likely sliver of wood from the pile next to the cottage and began to watch the sky.

Something bleated, and I lashed out, my stake sinking into the chest of the creature that had rushed me. Instead of bursting into ashes, the thing bleated again, a long, hiccoughing expulsion that sounded like laughter, then sank its fangs into my wrist.

I cursed and cuffed the chupacabra upside its bony, bald head. Instead of releasing me, it began to suck.

And from the east, the slow
thunk
of wings.

Panic threatened. How would I kill the beast coming for Jimmy if I couldn’t even end one of its minions?

Think, Summer! What kills a goatsucker?

If Ruthie had sent me here, she’d have given me more info, or I’d have found some on the way. But Ruthie hadn’t sent me. My dream had.

So I tried to bring that dream to mind, but all I could see when I closed my eyes were the talons going through Jimmy’s throat.

“Cross!” Jimmy shouted.

I opened my eyes, just as the clouds parted enough to reveal a thin sickle of a moon, the light fluttering off and on as the wings of something large and deadly hovered.

Using my free hand, I yanked the stake from the chupacabra and plunged it across to the other side of his chest.

Nothing happened, except that he laughed again, this time the sound not much more than a gargle of my blood in his throat. I threw some dust in his face, and said, “Release me.”

When he did, I retrieved my stake and flew. I’d throw myself in front of Jimmy. Maybe during the time the king goatsucker was trying to kill me, Jimmy could kill him.

But as I flew, another idea of what
cross
might mean occurred to me. I used my thumbnail to carve one into the wood.

I reached Jimmy as the gargantuan chupacabra materialized from the night. His talons went through my chest as my stake went into his.

He burst into ashes.

I passed out.

*   *   *

I came to inside the cottage. I lay in a bed; a fire blazed in the fireplace. I could still smell the distant aroma of garlic. All I wore were bandages at the wrist and chest.

Somewhere, a shower ran. Even as I turned my head, the water went off, a curtain rattled. Steam and a sliver of light slithered through a crack in the door. A shadow moved beyond the light, beyond the door, then the door opened.

Naked to the waist, his hair slick and shiny, Jimmy wore only a towel that threatened to drop from his hips with every step. His eyes went to the bed, and when he saw I was awake, they widened.

“You okay?” He crossed the room and sat at my side. Reaching out, he brushed back my hair. The warmth of his fingers against my chilled skin made me want to curl into him like a cat.

I opened my mouth, but all I could do was nod and stare at the single drop of water sliding down his smooth, olive chest, glistening like oil. I wanted to touch it. I wanted to taste it. Now.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Summer?” His hand cupped my face; his thumb traced my cheek. “What can I do? How can I help?”

He shifted, and his thigh bumped my breasts. I moaned.

“Sorry.” He fell to his knees next to the bed. “Does it hurt?”

I gazed into his eyes and thought:
It’s never going to stop hurting. I’m going to love you forever, and you’ll never be able to love me back.

Because of her.

I didn’t know who she was, but already I hated her.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“You saved my life.”

“Right place, right time.”

He tilted his head and his hair, nearly dry already from the heat of the fire, tumbled across his brow. “You knew that thing was coming, didn’t you?”

No point in lying.

“Sometimes I do.” I shrugged, then winced when my still-healing chest protested.

He reached for the coverlet. “Let me see.”

The flames flickered in his eyes as he slowly drew the blanket away. A white rectangle covered a four-inch square above my left breast. He reached out, but instead of touching the bandage, he touched me.

Was it an accident? At the time, I thought so. The way he snatched his hand back, though not too far, and caught his breath, the way his startled, almost mortified gaze flicked to mine.

Later, of course, I knew better, but then, everything seemed so innocent, a product of the moment, of us. We’d almost died. It made perfect sense we should desperately want to prove that we lived.

The loss of his touch was more painful than a talon through the heart, and without thought, I arched, the movement causing hand and breast to collide again. Of its own accord, his wrist—now healed—turned, and my full weight glided into his palm. The next instant he was kissing me, or maybe I was kissing him.

He tasted like the night, cool and dark, even as his skin beneath my fingers seemed to burn. I’d touched him in my dreams a hundred—no, a thousand—times. Yet every stroke was a revelation. As if I were coming home to a house that still smelled new.

I tugged on his shoulders, and he dropped the towel, then slid onto the bed without ever lifting his lips from mine. His hands explored, learning the curves at my breast, hip, and thigh.

“Soft,” he murmured, then moved his mouth across my jaw to my neck, where he worried a fold of skin between his teeth. “Sweet.”

I laughed, and the sound was low, throaty, sexy, not at all like me. Then again, I practiced glamour.
Me
could be anything at all. Since Jimmy seemed to like this version, I let her stay.

He nuzzled my breasts, laved a nipple, and I caught my breath as the sensation shot through me. He lifted his head; his eyes glittered auburn in the firelight. “You like that?”

“Mmm,” I agreed, and he lowered his head to give me more.

“I’ve been wanting to do this since you opened the door in that robe.”

He drew me into his mouth, suckling hard, and I curled my fingers into his hair. He teased me with his teeth, then blew on the moist, taut peak.

“Did you know I could see the outline of these?” He lifted my breasts to his mouth, tonguing first one then the other. “They were so beautiful, I couldn’t think of anything but you all the way to Mount Taylor.”

“Good at hiding it,” I managed.

He rolled on top of me, pressing his erection right where I needed it the most. “Not anymore.”

I licked the trail of that droplet of water, across his chest to his nipple. Before I could close my lips around it, he plunged.

He was young—who wasn’t compared to me?—but he also wasn’t completely human. He lasted longer than I thought he would.

I set my hands on his hips, gave him the rhythm, lowered my palms a few inches, and showed him the depth. His tongue echoed our movements. My breasts skimmed his chest with each thrust. He stilled, shifted, and did something amazing that made lights go off in the sky, on the ceiling, all around, or maybe just in my head. By the time I remembered my name, he was raining kisses across my damp cheeks and moving within me once more.

He was so beautiful, he made me ache. I couldn’t help but reach up and touch him. When I did, he lowered his gaze, and what I saw there made my stomach jitter and dip. Was that expression merely a reflection? How could he love me so soon? Then again, I’d loved him before he’d even been born.

“Jimmy,” I began.

“Shh,” he murmured, and kissed me, making me forget whatever I’d been about to say. Right now, all that mattered was this. The two of us all tangled up in each other, warm and safe for the moment, a memory I already had come to life.

His movements became faster, harder, I didn’t mind. He couldn’t hurt me.

Or so I thought.

When he pulsed to the beat of my heart, the tandem of that pulse made another start in me. I caught my breath in shock and wonder, crying out as the world again fell away.

I clung. I couldn’t help it. We couldn’t be together every minute. I couldn’t be in the right place at the right time
every
time. Sure, I’d made a deal, but the one I’d made it with lived on lies and had reneged on bigger deals with better angels than I.

Jimmy lowered his forehead to mine, his hair brushed my cheek an instant before his lips touched my nose, then he rolled to the side, taking me with him, folding me into his arms and flicking the blanket over us both.

His breathing evened out; I thought he was asleep when I whispered, “I dreamed of you.”

As consciousness fell away I could have sworn he whispered, too.

I know.

*   *   *

I awoke alone, which at first didn’t bother me. I couldn’t remember the last time I hadn’t. But I stretched, and the bed was warm everywhere, as if someone other than I had warmed it.

Then I remembered. Jimmy. Me. Us.

I hugged myself and went over every minute we’d shared, beginning with the expression in his eyes that had looked like love.

Then I heard his voice, and I leaped from the cocoon we’d made. When you lived a life like ours, a conversation in the middle of the night was rarely a good thing.

I paused, listening. He wasn’t in the cottage, so I glanced out the window. Jimmy stood beneath the stars, having a talk with his cell phone.