Summoner of Storms (6 page)

Pleasant as it is to be admired, Gray wants
more contact. He falls forward, hands planted to either side of
John’s shoulders, and kisses him hard and deep. John moans, sucking
on his tongue, body writhing and thrusting from beneath.

Gray pulls back a bit, to kiss his throat.
“Look at me,” John whispers urgently. “I want to see your
face.”

He lifts himself up, just far enough to do as
John has asked. The blue of John’s eyes was the first color he ever
beheld, shockingly bright and seemingly pure. But up close, the
irises are threaded with a thousand different shades, neon to
sapphire and everything in between.

“Gray,” John pants, seeing
him,
wanting
him
. Then John cries out, face twisted in ecstasy
and heat flooding between them. His breath comes in short gasps,
but he grasps Gray’s hips, even as his body shivers in orgasm.

Gray allows himself to be tugged forward,
until John’s lips wrap around him. Urgent and hard and wanting, so
Gray decides not to hold back, to let it all wash over him. Ecstasy
gathers like a breaking storm, drawing up tight before exploding
outwards, semen from Caleb and energy from him, messy and tangled
like everything else about their shared existence.

As John’s breath and heartbeat fade slowly
back to their ordinary level, Gray stretches out beside him. John
turns his head for a kiss. His mouth tastes like them now, their
flavor not quite the same as Caleb alone.

“I can feel you,” John whispers. “Your
energy. I always have, a little bit, but when you’re manifested
like this...wow.”

“You are happy with this arrangement?” Gray
hopes so. He does not wish to go back to hiding.

“
I wouldn’t let you. We’re in this
together.”

John smiles and brushes their hair to the
side. “Well, I’d prefer not to be on the run for our lives, but I
can’t complain about the company.” He presses a soft kiss to Gray’s
forehead. “I’m not afraid of you, no matter what anyone else says.
Whatever you are, whatever shape you and Caleb make together, I
know you’ll do the right thing.”

“I do not always know what the right thing
is,” Gray confesses.

John’s smile turns wistful. “Yeah. Welcome to
the club.”

Breakfast consisted of drive-through sandwich
biscuits and coffee just after dawn. Knuckling the sleep out of his
eyes, John said, “What’s the plan?”

Tiffany drove one-handed, a sausage, egg, and
cheese biscuit clutched in the other. The morning commute had
already jammed traffic up on the interstate, and she scowled at the
driver next to them who was using his rear-view mirror to shave.
The flesh around her eyes was puffy, and he wondered how much sleep
she’d gotten, if any.

“I made some phone calls last night,” she
said as traffic crept forward by a few inches. “Mom tried to warn
me about something, just before she d-died.”

John winced. None of this was easy on any of
them, but Tiffany had to go through it on top of mourning her
mother. But he knew any attempt at condolence would just be
rebuffed again. “When you told her about Forsyth’s demon army,
something seemed to click for her.” Too bad they’d been distracted
arguing about Gray. “And there at the end, she said you need to
find out where.”

“Yeah, but where what?” Caleb asked from the
back seat.

“If we knew, things would be a hell of a lot
easier.” Tiffany edged the car a lane over to escape some of the
congestion caused by the on and off ramps. “As it is, we have to
figure out the
what
to figure out the where, and no one I
talked to last night had the first fucking clue. Thanks for being
so damned tight-lipped, Mom.”

“What about your father?” John asked. He
vaguely recalled the man from some function or other—their
graduation from the Academy, probably.

Tiffany’s mouth pressed into a line. “I
couldn’t reach him.”

Not good. “I’m sure he’s okay,” Caleb offered
from the back seat.

“Cut the crap, Jansen.” Tiffany glared at him
via the rear-view mirror. “I don’t need any platitudes from
you.”

“Where are we going?” John asked, hoping to
head off an argument.

Tiffany didn’t reply for a long moment,
instead taking a bite from her biscuit. “My cousin’s house,” she
said at last. “It’s a few hours down the road.”

John suspected she hadn’t told them
everything. “You think this cousin knows what Renée meant?”

“No.” Tiffany sighed. “The family—my
family—has a
lwa ghede
.”

John shifted in his seat, angling toward her.
“An NHE?” What the hell?

“Don’t get all high and mighty with me,”
Tiffany snapped. “Yes, an NHE. They retain the memories of their
hosts.”

“Like Gray,” Caleb said.

“Right. Except in this case, it’s like
passing on ancestral wisdom. Say I’ve got a problem, need some
advice. We hold a ceremony, summon it into one of the people there.
It’s like a family dinner, except I might get some advice from my
great-grandmother who’s been dead for fifty years.”

John sank back in his seat, not sure what to
think. It sounded benign, but so did every summoning that ended in
horror and death. “And how will this help us find out what your
mother knew?”

“If she horsed the
lwa ghede
recently
enough, it will have her memories.” Tiffany glanced in her
side-view mirror. “It’s a long shot, but it’s all we’ve got right
now.”

“Wait a minute. If she ‘horsed’ it? Do you
mean was possessed by it?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were Catholic.”

Tiffany honked the horn at a truck, which cut
in front of her. “You don’t know a damn thing about voodoo besides
racist Hollywood bullshit, do you?”

John stared at her. What else had Tiffany
hidden all these years? “Have you ever been possessed?”

“Yes. So?”

“So it’s a federal crime.” If they’d been
caught, the whole family would have been looking at serious jail
time. “You swore to uphold the law when you joined SPECTR.”

“As did you.” She cut a sharp glance at him,
before returning her attention to the highway. “Going to turn in
your boyfriend?”

“No, but...”

“But exceptions are just for you?”

She had him there.

“Wait a minute,” Caleb said, “why do we have
to go to your cousin for this? Couldn’t we just summon it anywhere?
You can, um, horse it and we’ll find out if it knows what your
mother knew.”

Her hands tightened on the steering wheel,
and John caught a whiff of warm plastic. At least she didn’t set
the car on fire. “Because I’m too pissed off right now.”

John frowned. “What does that have to do with
anything?”

“Don’t you get it yet, Starkweather?” Disgust
laced her voice, though at him or the world in general, he didn’t
know. “NHEs don’t corrupt us. We corrupt them.”

He exchanged a look with Caleb, who seemed
just as bewildered. “What do you mean?”

Tiffany sighed impatiently. “They aren’t
human. Whatever their natural state is, they don’t experience the
world the way we do.”

“It’s true,” Caleb piped up from the back
seat. “Even with the memories of a few thousand corpses, Gray still
doesn’t always understand things. Love and hate and pain were just
concepts, before me.”

“There’s a reason a lot of ritual surrounds
any sort of summoning, no matter the culture,” Tiffany said.
“People, especially the one being possessed, have to be in the
right headspace. Ceremonies, trances, rituals, all are a way of
making sure the person is calm. On an even keel. Now imagine you’re
an NHE. Maybe humans have summoned you before, for a few minutes or
even a few hours at a time. You got to experience emotion and
sensation, but only under very controlled circumstances.”

She put on the blinker, then swore when
someone else merged into the opening instead. “Use your fucking
turn signal, asshole! Where was I? Right, so one day someone from
the family or tribe calls on you for help, because they’re out of
options. You come into their body and find yourself in the middle
of the wilderness, in the freezing cold, starving to death. Extreme
fear, hunger, terror, things you have no natural means of coping
with. The confusion, the panic, you’d feel. The inability to deal
with it. You’d go mad.”

John swallowed against a throat gone suddenly
dry. “You’re describing a wendigo.”

Tiffany nodded. “Yeah. Werewolves are driven
insane by a host’s need to destroy. Incubi are imprinted with the
desire to control. And once an NHE is broken, it’s done. Even if
it’s exorcised, the next time someone tries calling it up, they
just end up with a monster in their face. So right now, I can’t
take the risk.”

“Is that what happened to the other drakul?”
Caleb asked. “If they possessed warriors, or at least people who
really, really wanted to kill demons...”

“The lust for blood overrides everything
else.” Tiffany glanced at him the rearview mirror. “But the dead
don’t have passions. Just memories.”

“Huh.” Caleb fell silent, and it was Gray who
said, “She was pure.”

Tiffany started at the sudden change. John
twisted around to look in the back seat. Gray watched them through
lightning-laced eyes. “Gray?”

“I believe the mortal—” He stopped and cocked
his head, as if listening. “I believe Tiffany,” he corrected, “is
right. The memories are not entirely clear, but when I was summoned
into this world, the woman they chose to be my first body was
pure.”

“She?” John asked, then immediately felt like
an idiot. “Sorry, you just seem so...masculine,” he finished
awkwardly.

“I have no inherent gender.” Gray got a
listening expression on his face again. “Also, Caleb wishes me to
thank you for reinforcing outdated binary notions. I do not believe
he is sincere in his thanks, however.”

“I bet,” John muttered. “She was a
virgin?”

“Why should such a thing matter?” Gray paused
once more. “Ah. Mortal nonsense. She was pure of purpose. She
wished only to protect her people from the demons. Nothing meant
more to her—not her lover, nor gold, nor power. She felt no fear
when she mounted the temple steps to be strangled.”

“Fucking hell,” Tiffany said. “Horrible.”

“Why? It was her wish.”

“They didn’t have any extra bodies lying
around?”

“But he’s making your point,” John said. A
picture had started to form in his mind. “Maybe they didn’t want to
take the risk. Obviously they knew what happened when drakul came
into a living body and became overwhelmed by the sensations. If
they’d stuffed Gray into the body of an executed murderer and he’d
gone crazy from the memories...”

“Huh. Okay, point taken.”

“And when Gray finally did end up in a living
body,” John went on, his heart beating more rapidly, “he didn’t
lose it because he already had the cushion of memories in place
from the dead he’d taken over. He might not have experienced
emotions and sensations first hand, but at least none of them were
incomprehensible to him.”

He cast a triumphant grin at the back seat.
Gray had retreated; Caleb frowned thoughtfully. “You might be onto
something there.”

Some of the strain eased from Tiffany’s face.
“So taking a gamble on you wasn’t as crazy as everyone else thinks.
Good to know.”

* * *

Caleb’s butt had gone numb by the time they
pulled off the paved road and began bumping along a rutted dirt
track. Apparently these cousins came from the side of the family
who didn’t have multi-million dollar houses on Isle of Palms.

Gray stirred, like a tiger waking up from a
nap.
“You are worried.”

Caleb wanted to deny it, but lying to someone
who shared your brain wasn’t an option.
Yeah. I mean...what if
it’s true? About my emotions and stuff. What if I’ve corrupted you
somehow? Or do it later on?

“
You have changed me. And I have changed
you. Is this corruption?”

Not if it’s for the better.

“
Then you have no need for
concern.”

Caleb wiped his palms on his jeans, glad no
one paid much attention to him at the moment. John, for sure, would
have picked up on his concern.
How can I know? You’ve always
wanted to feed, I get it, but it’s different now, right? And you
want sex, and—

“
Is wanting things inherently
bad?”

I guess not.

Tiffany snapped her fingers in the air.
“Caleb! Stop zoning out back there and pay attention!”

He cursed silently. “Um, yeah. Sorry. What
did you say?”

“I said we’re almost there. I want you to
stay in the car, got it?”

They passed a battered mailbox pocked from
birdshot. “Why?”

“Are you kidding me?” She rolled her eyes.
“Haven’t you noticed how other NHEs react to you? Those soldiers
running for their lives yesterday?”

“Yeah, but those were demons.”
This NHE
Tiffany is talking about summoning...you wouldn’t want to eat it,
would you?

“
Perhaps.”
Gray’s interest perked.
“Do you think John would let us?”

“Fuck,” Caleb said aloud. “Yeah, okay. Don’t
bring the lion into a clearing where you’re trying to lure a
deer.”

John turned around in his seat to look at
Caleb. “Gray sees any NHE as prey?”

“I’m not sure about all of them, but
probably. Any he thinks he can eat.” Caleb sighed. “I haven’t
noticed any memories of him snacking on the sort of temporary
possession we’re talking about here, probably because he wouldn’t
have time to track it down before it returned to the etheric plane.
Which is good, I guess. At least he’s only eaten the dangerous
ones.”

John didn’t seem entirely convinced, but
Caleb thought the dangerous descriptor bothered him more than
anything else. John didn’t seem on board with the Vigilant when it
came to the safety of summoning any NHEs.