The Shadows and Sorcery Collection Read online

  Warren shrugged. “I don’t keep track.”

  “Has it affected your aging?” I eyeballed him—for thirty, he looked pretty youthful and vibrant. Not that thirty was old by any means, but living past the end of the world ages a body.

  “The opposite, in fact. Time travel rejuvenates me.”

  “Huh,” I said, because no other words seemed to encompass the depth of his story.

  He grinned and nudged my knee with his. “Have I made the badass SEB agent speechless?”

  “Maybe. I didn’t realize bringing you home would send me down a rabbit hole deeper than Senka's grave.”

  Warren laughed.

  “Let’s get this bullet out, then we’ll talk some more.” I knew at some point I would have to take him to Lila. But for now, I wanted to keep him to myself and wring all his secrets dry. Every detail he shared made him that much more intriguing.

  Warren took a deep breath and sat up straighter, physically bracing himself. “I’m ready.”

  I shook my head and gently shoved him against the back of the chair. “You need to relax, or it'll hurt worse.”

  “You’re about to cut open my leg with a box cutter. Relaxing is the furthest thought from my mind.”

  I moved my chair as close as I could, which cradled his knee firmly against the most intimate part of my body. I pretended I didn’t notice. “Think about kittens. And clove cigarettes.”

  “Kittens smoking?”

  I laughed. “You’re an interesting dude.”

  “Not the worst thing a girl has ever told me.” He shot back the rest of the whiskey and then said, “Let's do this.”

  “Deep breath. Then breathe normally, okay?”

  Warren nodded. He pulled in a deep breath and closed his eyes.

  Fresh blood flowed from his leg as I opened him up. He hissed and the muscles in his thigh tensed.

  “Breathe, Warren,” I said, keeping my eyes on his bullet wound.

  He chuckled, albeit painfully, and took a shaky breath. “That’s the first I’ve heard you use my name. I like it. Sexy.”

  My neck flushed, and I blamed the heat coming from his body. “I’m going in. Squeeze the table if you need to.”

  I’d sewn up my own leg before, but I hadn’t actually put my appendages inside another person’s limbs. His skin and muscles and blood closed over my two fingers in a grossly intimate embrace that exhilarated me and made the bile rise in my throat simultaneously.

  Then the bullet was out.

  “Fuck. Me.” Warren gasped the words, sinking against the back of his chair.

  His choice of terms didn’t help the flush still warming my skin. I dropped the bullet on the table and reached for the rubbing alcohol. If I focused on the minutia of my movements, I could pretend his scent wasn’t overwhelming me.

  “It isn’t over yet.” I uncapped the bottle.

  He eyed me warily. “That’s to sanitize the needle. Right?”

  “Right,” I agreed and tipped it over his thigh.

  He groaned through clenched teeth. I gave him credit for not screaming like a little girl.

  I made quick work of sewing him shut. The bleeding had already ceased before the final stitches were placed. Considering I’d managed the bullet extraction without prior practice, and I had put in stitches for the first time in six years, I thought I’d done pretty well.

  “All set,” I told him, patting his good leg. I gathered my supplies and took everything to the sink to wash my hands.

  Warren whistled as he regarded the bullet. “Such a small thing to cause so much pain. Though I’m unsure how much pain came from the bullet and how much came from your bedside manner.”

  I laughed as the last of his blood washed away from the creases in my knuckles. “Glad you’re getting your sense of humor back.”

  “That was probably the second most exciting experience of my life.”

  “Only the second? What was the first?” I asked, drying my hands as I turned to face him.

  He stood behind me. I hadn’t even heard him approach.

  “Meeting you.” He winked. He reached past me for the paper towels, his body so close I could feel the power that emanated from him. I knew why he didn’t feel fae now, considering he was only half-fae. But I could also tell it was there: a barely contained wildness, a magick that sang to my own.

  My heart pounded in my chest. I wanted to touch him. I wanted to feel the muscles beneath his t-shirt, to press my hips against his, to taste him. What was wrong with me?

  Warren stepped away and used the towels to clean up his leg. “Thanks for doing this. Hurts like fuck right now, but I’m sure I’ll feel better later.”

  I tossed the dish towel I’d been using into the sink and leaned a hip on the counter. “I don’t have any antibiotics, but we can get some at HQ. You’ll need to take some stat, before any infection has a chance to set in.”

  Warren moved forward to deposit his used towels on the counter. At the same time, I pushed away from the counter to go clean the table. We ran into each other, my leg unfortunately bumping his stitches.

  He grunted and wavered on his feet, falling into me. I reacted quickly, encircling his torso with both arms. “You need to sit. You shouldn’t even have stood yet, you idiot.”

  “Oh, thanks,” he said sarcastically. “That makes me feel so much better now that you’ve maimed me.”

  “Don’t be such a baby. It's just a flesh wound,” I reminded him, throwing his flippant words back at him.

  I helped him into the chair, both of us nearly tumbling to the floor with his backward momentum. I ended up in the chair across from him, straddling his good knee, my arms still tangled behind him, and our faces inches apart.

  I tried to right myself, getting my hands between us to push off his chest.

  Warren’s hands cradled my waist. His gaze moved south to where my breasts threatened to escape my tank top from the awkward angle of my body. The pain drained from his expression, replaced immediately by an almost feral desire that took my breath away.

  I watched the metamorphosis, shocked to see it happen so quickly. To see so clearly what would happen next.

  He kissed me. A hesitant touch of the lips, a question that stole any sense I had left.

  Desire exploded within me. I fell into him, mindful of his wounded leg. I deepened the kiss, a small moan escaping as his tongue touched mine. His hands moved to cup my ass and draw me closer, until I was on his lap, his leg between mine, and my hip pressed into a very impressive surprise beneath his thin boxers.

  His mouth left me breathless. His hand beneath my shirt, cupping my breast, made my skin run hot until I felt like if I didn’t shed everything I wore, I’d incinerate on the spot.

  “Relle, tell me to stop,” Warren murmured against my lips. He drifted lower, his tongue touching the sensitive skin near my collarbone. He jerked my top out of his way and closed his lips over the dark bud of my nipple.

  I gasped and rocked against him. “You’re not doing a great job convincing me to make you stop.”

  He grinned against my skin, and fuck the movement was as sexy as his hands on my body.

  We locked lips again. Warren reached for the button on my jeans.

  It took me a moment to realize the rocking beneath us wasn’t Warren, or the chair, or me. Everything was rocking, and an accompanying rumble grew in intensity.

  Earthquake.

  I tugged Warren beneath the kitchen table, all worry for his injury ignored. I braced myself against the base of the table, Warren's arms wrapped around me from behind.

  The entire world quaked around us in a disorienting blur. Plaster fell from the ceiling, and appliances danced off my kitchen counter. This was more vicious than the quake during Georgie's takedown. That one had been the opening act; this was the main event.

  Above the growing rumble, another sound met my ears. Something breaking apart. A vicious series of whines and cracks followed by the sound of debris raining down from above.
<
br />   The skyscraper.

  I lunged out from beneath the table to grab the messenger bag with Rice’s Com in it. My fingers had barely wrapped around the strap, when Warren yanked me against him.

  The ceiling collapsed onto us, rebar and chunks of construction material piling onto my kitchen floor. Then the world dipped and changed, and I fell for the second time in Warren’s arms. Nothing remained but his scent and touch and the lingering taste of his lips as we traveled through time.

  15

  After the crazily tilting world came to a halt, my senses took a few seconds to catch up to my body and realize the ground no longer moved beneath my ass.

  When I finally shook away the cobwebs, I heard: “You live here?”

  We sat in the same position we’d taken beneath the table, my back pressed against Warren’s chest and his hand resting possessively on my stomach. We were between the skyscraper and the apartment building, hidden from sight.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks on the outside,” I heard my own voice answer. Had I always sounded so low and gruff?

  “I guess I expected the Reina’s hound to live in luxury.”

  A pause. “Don’t call me that. I don’t need luxury.”

  “I see that.”

  I glared at Warren in a mimic of the same look I’d given him earlier. “I’m not the Reina’s hound.”

  “Oh, sorry. I meant her ‘BFF.’” He squeezed me playfully.

  The heavy metal door slammed behind “past” Relle and Warren. Strange to think not much time had passed since we walked through that door. Even so, that girl was the past. That girl hadn’t yet leapt on her strange, hybrid-shadow touched patient like a cat in heat.

  “We should move,” I told him, leaving the ridiculously comforting warmth of his arms to stand. “This building is gonna collapse right on top of us.”

  “We can’t go yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “There are rules with time travel,” he said patiently as he used the rough red bricks of the building to stand. “We can’t be seen, and we can’t move on until the timelines sync.”

  I motioned to the skyscraper looming precariously above us. “If we wait for the timelines to sync, we’ll be dead anyway and your little time stunt did no good.”

  He leaned against the apartment building. His lips curled into a grin, but the tightness around his eyes gave away how bad he hurt. “Trust me, Relle. I know that’s hard for you, but just trust me.”

  “What do you mean it’s hard for me? I trust plenty of people. Forgive me if I’m still leery on a guy I just met two days ago!”

  He reached out and gently gripped my biceps to pull me into him. I was no slouch in the height department, and he still loomed over me by several inches. His lips grazed mine.

  “You didn’t seem very leery a few minutes ago,” he said, voice husky.

  That smooth molasses rasp made my knees turn to jelly. I locked them fuckers in place and took a step back. “You have no pants.”

  Warren looked down at his bare legs. His wound looked raw and red, the stitches stark against his skin. At least the excitement—pre-Earthquake and during—hadn't busted his wound wide open. “Ah, yes. They’re on your kitchen floor.”

  “You wanna go back in for them?” I grinned saucily.

  “She makes jokes! Who is this person?” he asked the empty alley.

  “We’ll get you some new pants at HQ. You know, whenever you let us leave. If you let us leave before the earthquake kills us.”

  “Anybody ever tell you you’re an impatient one?”

  “My mother. My brother. My boss.”

  “I am validated.”

  The banter felt so fucking normal. Bantering with Warren came easy, like it had with Rice. Except with Warren, there was a new undercurrent of desire that made my insides burst into frenzied recon.

  Warren held my gaze a beat longer than socially acceptable, then said, “Your home is about to implode. You’re about to lose everything.”

  I shrugged. “No. I lost everything when my brother died.” I gazed up at the quiet building, thinking of my neighbors—all the men and women I’d shared my life with for years. “Everybody is sleeping.”

  Warren followed my gaze, his eyes sparkling in the ambient light from the stars.

  “Does that make it hard?” I asked him. “You have the power to save yourself from catastrophes, but not a building full of people.”

  “It is hard.” His voice was low. Intimate. As if he shared secrets no one else could be privy to. “I can’t think about it too much, or I blame myself for their deaths.”

  “Was anybody hurt during the earthquake in the pueblos?”

  “Yes. Several.” He lowered his eyes and made a show of studying his stitches. “Only a couple deaths.”

  What did it say about the state of the Hollow that ‘a couple deaths' in the encampment didn’t warrant a second thought? Sometimes, death felt like a jealous lover who ruled my every move. Sometimes, I even liked it.

  Other times, I vaguely recalled a little girl with hair like a spun web of night sky who had vowed to always be just and good.

  We didn’t find the unraveled threads of conversation again. I had a feeling Warren was lost in his own guilt right alongside me.

  Consciences were messy. They fucked with the reality of right and wrong until you couldn’t remember which was the correct course of action.

  Maybe I was just the Reaper—a murdering hound of the Reina, robotically doing her duty regardless of conscience.

  I thought of sweet, blind Mr. Popovich asleep in the bed he had shared with his wife of thirty years. He had no one to save him. He would feel the ground shake and die in the chaos of darkness.

  I was thankful, at least, that Elroy would be safely at work, toiling away in the warehouse. One of my few friends in the building who would survive.

  The rumbling started beneath my boots. Warren wordlessly threw an arm over my shoulder for support, and we ran.

  I’d never driven my bike during a quake before because, hello, dangerous. But if we wanted to get far enough from the skyscraper to keep from being flattened like tiny people-pancakes, the bike was the only option. We had mere seconds to get to it, start the engine, and get away.

  Warren stumbled as he mounted behind me, nearly falling off. I whipped an arm out to steady him and then gunned the engine.

  Surprisingly, I managed to keep the Ducati upright. We rode the waves like surfboarders, dodging debris as it rained from the buildings around us. The noise was incredible, as if the earth had opened its maw and begun to roar. I couldn’t hear my engine; I could only feel its comforting purr between my legs. I’d never been so thankful to be so in tune with my bike.

  I whipped right onto Main, the bike drifting precariously sideways for a breathless minute before we righted. People had begun to appear, racing from apartment buildings as if being in the street made them any safer. Made us any safer. I dodged them as if I were playing one of my brother's car chase games.

  As I turned left onto the road that would take us to Headquarters, a woman clutching a small boy by the hand darted into the street in front of us. I jerked around her, missing the kid by an uncomfortably small margin, and lost control.

  The Ducati fell. We slid. Asphalt tore through my jeans and pain ripped through the fleshy skin of my thigh. I reached frantically for my magick, Warren’s bare legs my only concern as I manipulated the street to ice on a flash of fae power. The burn of ice was infinitely less painful than road rash.

  I dug my boots into the ice and came to an abrupt stop on my back. Warren crashed into me, sending us sprawling another two feet. The Ducati slammed into a streetlight, tires first.

  I lay there, ice melting into my tank top, and stared up into the stars as the rumbling slowly ceased. I could still hear the roar; it nearly drowned out the cries around us, burned into my ears. But the ground had stilled. For now.

  “You—” I coughed, looking for my voice. “You
okay?”

  Warren laughed, but I could hear the sting of pain in the sound. “I’m alive. ‘Okay’ is up for debate. I think there’s still some skin left on my good leg.”

  “I admire your willingness to find humor in any situation.”

  Warm fingers closed over mine, and Warren’s face hovered into view. “Are you okay?”

  “Just winded. Give me a minute.”

  He touched my face. “That was some good work there. Even if my balls are cold.”

  I laughed.

  Before I had the chance to sit up, my Com beeped. I lifted my wrist to look at the screen. It wasn’t dispatch. It wasn’t even work.

  It was Lila. GET HERE NOW.

  16

  I barely recognized Headquarters.

  I slowed as I passed the front door. Warren and I gaped at the crowd of people outside. They surged en masse against the glass front of the building, banging fists on the windows. Half the SEA stood on the other side of the glass in their distinctively human uniforms, guns drawn and poker faces on. I didn’t see any familiar Bureau faces. The realization pinged my radar. Coupled with Lila's cryptic demand, I felt like the apocalypse had come to call.

  I sped up before we gained any notice and turned onto the side street. I set my Com against the scanner on the employee garage and eyed the road behind us as the door slid open. We got inside unmolested, and the guard secured the door quickly once we passed through.

  I pulled the bike up on the sidewalk in front of the staircase, because if there was ever a time to ignore parking laws, it was now. The Ducati had been functional enough to get us there, though I’d have to look at the insides before its next ride if I didn’t want to destroy it completely. Even a machine of its fortitude couldn’t walk away from a collision unscathed.

  Warren groaned as I helped him off the bike. I wedged my body under him and supported his weight while he breathed through the pain.

  “At least it’s not bleeding anymore,” I remarked, studying the vicious red wound. The thick black stitches buckled his skin together, fascinatingly Frankenstein-esque. I flashed him a grin. “Sorry I’m not a plastic surgeon.”