Ill Wind (12 page)

“Like what?” He didn't look concerned. In fact, he didn't even look interested.

“Like who's doing this to me.”

“Well, I know it's not me. Does that help?” He gave up on the road and went back to the easy-chair comfort of his backpack. I gave him a glare and went back to checking hoses, but Delilah didn't give me any hints.

“Try it again,” David suggested. He was back
sitting down, reading. I checked the oil and ignored him. Nope, it was full and grime-free. Double dammit. I couldn't see anything blown, no telltale sprays of oil or fluid. The block looked good.

No sense in delaying the inevitable. I dropped to the gravel, rolled over, and squirmed under the car.

“Need any help?”

“No,” I yelled. “Go away!”

“Okay.” I heard David get up and walk over to the road as another car approached. It slowed down, then sped up a squeal of tires. “Jerk.”

“Not everybody's as nice as I am,” I agreed. “Shit. Shit shit shit.” The engine looked good from down here, too. I was getting oil-smeared and gravel-gouged for nothing. “This is just great. Come on, baby, give me a break here.”

I slid back out, cleaned gravel out of the palms of my hands and brushed off my blue jeans, shook dust out of my dark hair, and announced, “I'll try it again.” David remained unimpressed. He had taken his pack and moved about twenty feet farther down the road and was sitting with his back against the pole of the McDonald's billboard, reading.

I slid into the driver's seat and turned the key.

Delilah hummed to life, smooth and even as ever. I idled her for a while, gave her gas, revved her, closed my eyes, and listened for any hitches.

Nothing. I let it fall back to idle and felt the vibration in my skin.

David was reading
The Merchant of Venice
. He was kicked back, relaxed, feet up. His brown hair gleamed red highlights in the sun, and overhead the sky was blue, blue, merciless blue.

I popped the clutch and rolled past him, accelerating. He never looked up.

Ten feet past the billboard, I hit the brakes and skidded to a gravel-spewing stop. In the rearview mirror, I saw him turn down the page, put the book back in his backpack, and heft the thing like it weighed no more than my purse.

He stowed it in the backseat and got in without a word. As he got in, I grabbed his hand and held it palm up, then passed my hand over it and concentrated.

Nothing. If he was a Warden—Earth Warden, I suspected—he had no glyphs. Maybe a Wildling? They were few and far between, from what I'd ever heard, but it was possible he had some kind of talent. Maybe.

He took his hand back, frowning slightly. “And that was—?”

“Checking to see if you washed your hands.”

He looked doubtfully at me—oily, dusty, grimy. I accelerated out onto the open road.

“How'd you find me?” I asked.

“Luck,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed gloomily. “Luck. I'll bet.”

Five miles down the road, I spotted a cloud on the horizon ahead of us. Just a little cloud about the size of my hand. Hardly anything, really.

But I could feel the storm coming back.
Son of a bitch.

 

By the time the sun went down, I was exhausted. I planned to have David take the wheel, but there was a hitch in my brilliant plan.

David didn't drive.

“At all?” I asked. “I mean, you
can't?
”

“I'm from New York,” he explained. As if that explained it. To me, it was like meeting somebody with three heads from the planet Bozbarr. It also caused a big sucking hole in my plans—I hadn't wanted to pull over at all on the way to Oklahoma, beyond gas and bathroom stops. But the world looked sparkly and jagged, I was floating about an inch outside my body, and my muscles trembled like soggy rubber bands.

I'd kill us both if I tried to go on much longer.

“We're stopping for the night,” I announced. “I need some rest.”

David nodded. He had a little clip-on light on his book, and he was deep in the perils of one of John Grisham's lawyers. I wished he would get a little more interested in the prospect of spending the night in a hotel with a hot babe who owned a purple velvet suit, but apparently not happening.

I tried a hint. “Any preference? Trashy decor? Adult channels?”

He turned a page. “Indoor plumbing's a plus.”

Bigger hint. “Two rooms or one?” I kept looking at the road and the sunset. In my peripheral vision, he still looked relaxed and unfazed, but he marked his place in his book and turned the light off.

“Kind of takes the mystery out of it if you ask,” he said.

“Just thinking out loud.”

“One's fine.”

Well, that was an answer, but I wasn't getting the come-hither vibe. David was just about impossible to
read, which was funny, considering how much time he spent with the printed page. Ah, well. Truthfully, I was too wasted to be seductive anyway.

Up ahead, the cool blue glow of a motel sign floated like a UFO above the road. Clean sheets, fluffy pillows, little complimentary soaps. It sounded like heaven. Up close, it looked a lot more like purgatory, but any afterlife in a storm.

I checked us in, getting absolutely no reaction from the walleyed clerk to any of my quips, and paid with my fast-dwindling supply of cash. I signed the slip and got the room key and went back out to the car. The chunky orange tag attached to the key said we were in room 128. It was, naturally, on the other side of the building, the dark side, where half the parking lot lights were dead and the other half terminally ill. I pulled Delilah up in a parking space directly in front of the door.

Well, one benefit to the place: it was quiet. Awesomely quiet. Nothing but the wind whispering through trees and rattling a stray plastic bag across the parking lot.

“Shall we?” I asked, and reached down to grab my duffel. David took out his heavy backpack and camping kit. I doubted he would need all of it, but I supposed living on the road makes you less than trusting about that kind of thing.

Once we were inside, my visions of gleaming chrome bathroom fixtures and deep-pile carpeting were crushed. The carpet was indoor-outdoor, the bathroom had last been upgraded in the 1950s, and the sad-clown prints on the walls could never have been remotely fashionable. But it had clean sheets,
reasonably fluffy pillows, and (I saw during a fast reconnaissance) complimentary little soaps. So okay. Next door to heaven.

David leaned his backpack against the wall. “One bed,” he said.

“Lucky for you, you brought camping gear.” I flopped down on the bed and immediately felt gravity increase by a factor of ten. The mattress was old and sagged, but it still felt like a cloud under my aching back. “God, I could sleep for days.”

The bed creaked. I hoisted one eyelid and saw that David had perched on the edge, looking down at me. In a perfect world, he would have been all choked up with romantic desire. In my all-too-real reality, he said, “You look terrible.”

“Thanks,” I murmured, and let my eye drift shut. “You charmer. Sheesh.”

The bed creaked again, and I heard him rummaging in his backpack. Footsteps on the carpet. The bathroom door closed, and the shower started up with a stuttering hiss.

Sometime a few minutes later, the sound of running water melted into the steady, stealthy sound of rain. It was raining. That was bad, I could feel it, but I couldn't think why. Rain tapping the windows, polite at first, then beating harder, impatient to be inside. Wind whispered and rose to a roar, and I heard a rumble of thunder and felt the cold hair-raising frisson of electrons aligning.

A flash of lightning, blue-white, outside the window.

It was coming for me—

I pulled awake with a gasp and found David tucking a scratchy blanket around me. I flailed my way
out of it and stumbled to the window, ripped aside the curtains, and stared out at the dark.

Quiet. Quiet as the grave. No rain. No thunder. No lightning stabbing at me from above.

“What?” he asked.

It's looking for me,
I wanted to say, but there was no way I could explain that sort of thing. I was so tired, I was incoherent, shaking, almost crying.
It's out there.

“Did it rain?” I managed to ask.

“Don't think so. Maybe you heard the shower. You haven't been asleep long.”

Oh. I remembered now. The shower. He'd been taking a shower.

When I turned around, I realized he was wearing nothing but a towel and some well-placed water drops, and it hit me with a cattle-prod jolt that he was absolutely, unquestionably
gorgeous
. Skin like burnished gold, and under it the best kind of muscles on a man—long, lean, defined without bulging. A gilded thatch of hair on his chest that narrowed to a line down his stomach, pointing the way under the towel.

“Oh,” I blurted. “Wow. You—don't have much on.”

“No,” he agreed gravely. “I don't usually sleep in footie pajamas.”

“Would it be too personal to ask what you do sleep in?”

“Pajama bottoms. Unless that bothers you.”

Bothered me? Hell, yes. But in that nice, liquefying, warm-silk way of being bothered, as in “hot and.”
“No,” I said weakly. A drop of water glided down over his shoulder and melted into his chest hair. I had a fantasy so vivid, it raised my skin into goose bumps.

“Okay. You planning to sleep in that?” he asked me. I was still wearing the gritty, oil-stained denim from my try at fixing Delilah, and looking at him in all his glory, I felt grubby and short and smelly.

“Um, no,” I said, grabbed my duffel, and escaped to the bathroom.

Funny how a nice flare of lust can burn off the fog of exhaustion; I stripped off my clothes and kicked them under the sink, stepped into a shower he'd left warm for me. Shampoo and conditioner clustered considerately on the floor near my feet, open bar of soap in the tray . . . all the comforts of somebody else's home.

I scrubbed myself pink, washed and strangled the water out of my hair, and wrapped myself in one of the motel's thin, stiff towels. Record time. I considered shaving my legs, decided no, reconsidered, and then managed to get depilated in under four minutes, with only one tiny little cut near my left ankle.

When I came out into the bedroom, the bed was empty. No David.

He was zipped into a sleeping bag on the floor.

I stood there, dripping and steaming, and said, “You're kidding.”

He didn't open his eyes. “You've said that to me before. Do I really look that funny?”

“Bastard.” I flopped down on the bed again, squirmed under the covers, and stripped off the towel beneath. “You made me get up for nothing.”

“No,” he corrected. “Now you're clean and you'll sleep better.”

He turned over on his side, away from me. I wondered if he was naked inside the sleeping bag, growled in frustration, and put a pillow over my face. Suffocation had no appeal. I took it off and said, “You can bring your sleeping bag up here, you know. Beats sleeping on the floor.”

He didn't answer for a few seconds, long enough for me to experience total rejection, and then he turned over and raised himself up on one elbow to look at me.

I expected some quip or some question, but he just looked. And then he flipped open the sleeping bag, slid out, and walked over to the bed.

He hadn't lied. Pajama bottoms. They rode low on his hips.

I folded back the covers. He got in. I lowered my head to rest on the pillow, still watching him, and he rolled up on his left side to face me.

Some sane part of my mind was telling me that this was just some guy I'd picked up on the road, for God's sake, some guy who could be a rapist or a killer, and that part of my mind was completely right and completely wrong. I knew him in places that had nothing to do with my mind.

“Turn on your side,” he said. I did, feeling like I was already dreaming. The slide of sheets felt cool and soothing on my overheated body.

I could feel him warm at my back, not quite touching. He put a hand on my hip, slid it gently up.

I couldn't breathe.

He put his fingers at the base of my neck and drew them lightly down the curve of my spine, all the way down. I felt my muscles contract and shiver, and I wanted to stretch like a cat against him; it took all my control not to do it.

If I'd been melting inside before, I was boiling now.

“I'll have to call a penalty,” he said. His voice sounded far away. “You're not even wearing a T-shirt. Definitely a violation of the rules.”

His fingertips followed the curve of my hip again.

The tacky room had dropped away, and it was just the two of us, suspended in time and silence. There were no rules for this, none that I'd ever known. Just instinct. I started to turn toward him, and his hand spread out, holding me in place. His breath was warm on the back of my neck, his lips barely touching skin.

“You're afraid of me,” he whispered. His hand moved into the demilitarized zone of my stomach. “Don't be afraid.”

It wasn't him—I was scared of myself. I was tired, vulnerable, frightened, lonely, desperate. I couldn't trust my own senses, much less . . . whatever this was. Whoever he was.

I hadn't thought about the Mark for hours, but now I could feel it moving inside me, turning restlessly as if it hungered as much as I did. Oh, God, I couldn't concentrate enough to hold it back, not with him so close, so warm.

“Shhh,” he whispered, even though I hadn't made a sound out loud. His hand moved again, gently, tracing a line of fire from my stomach up between my breasts. Flattened out over my heart. “Be still.”

I felt a lurch inside, a chill, a burst of heat.

The Demon Mark stopped moving.

“How—?” I blurted, and instantly stopped myself from asking. I didn't want to know. There was so much here I didn't want to know, because if I knew, then I would have to move away from him, give up this warmth, this beautiful peace.