CHAPTER SIXTEEN

When Marcella stepped out of the bathroom, dragging her feet with what looked like bone-weariness, Soren was seated on the edge of her bed. He passed his phone from one hand to the other.

She stopped near the dresser, clutching the towel’s knot at her clavicle, her throat convulsing with a swallow.

He tucked the phone into his pocket and stood. “Two hours.”

She closed her eyes. “That long?”

“Longer, actually. I didn’t start keeping track until an entire episode of Seinfeld came and went, and you didn’t make a sound. Do you feel better?”

“As good as could be expected.”

“Do you want to talk?”

“I…” The line between her brows deepened. For several seconds, she did nothing but breathe. Bracing inhalations and long, shuddering exhalations. When she opened her eyes, they were watery, and not from allergies or emotion or injury. They were watery like before in the tub, but briefly. The white of the organs reappeared as did the dark irises presided in them. “No, I don’t want to talk about it, but who’s to say this won’t happen again? I’m a bit out of my element here.”

He pressed his lips tightly together, holding back the quip that might silence her. Getting her to speak was already so difficult, and he didn’t want to do anything to staunch her willingness to speak.

She perched on the arm of the chair near the dresser, her knuckles going white at her grip on the towel. “As far as I know, there are only a few people like me.”

He had no idea what she was referencing but nodded for her to go on, hoping she’d provide context.

“Me, my mother, my grandmother. If there are others, they’ve been as discreet as I have been. I wouldn’t blame them for not making their abilities known. Who knows what evil people would do if they were able to contain me?”

She rubbed her free hand up her arm, chasing a shiver that seemed to be increasing in intensity rather than settling.

“Too close to the air,” he whispered.

“Hmm?”

He crooked his thumb toward the air vent mounted over the dresser. “Vents are pointed toward you.”

She moved to the chair by the window. “Normally, I would have noticed such a thing. I’m really out of it.” She bent, reaching for the corner of her bag, her long, heavy hair spilling over her shoulders as she rooted.

Her hair looked dry.

“You made a big splash. I heard the water, so how is your hair dry?” Soren asked, moving closer to the corner of the bed. His fingers tingled to touch Marcella, to feel her. To make sense of her.

“It’s not completely dry. It’s a bit wet at the ends, but that’s…hard to explain. You’re right that it should be wet.” She pulled an oversized T-shirt over her head.

He moved the rest of the way around the side of the bed and leaned in, tugging one of her locs from root to end, testing for moisture and feeling very little.

“I don’t completely understand the ins and outs myself,” she said, her gaze tracking his fingers as he worked them down another densely matted coil. “All I know is that when I…come back to myself, sometimes it’s dry, and sometimes it’s wet. I don’t know how to control that.”

“Control what?”

“I…” Grimacing, she nudged his hand away from her face but, unexpectedly, she held it on her lap. Her brow creased again as she looked down, not studying his hand so much as looking in the general direction of it. He was glad for that. There was nothing pretty about his hands. They were work-roughened and calloused. Square-tipped fingers and blunt nails so short that he could barely lift the tab of a beer can with them.

Her hands were lovely, just like the rest of her. Long, elegant digits, nails shaped into perfect ovals, and not a mark to be found anywhere in the brown.

“The fact that I’m able to touch you like this,” she said, “is unusual.”

“How so?”

“I believe that’s the case with many people with psychic gifts. Touch either distracts them or arrests them in peculiar ways. They try to avoid physical contact so that they can operate at their baseline.”

He danced his thumb over the bumps of her knuckles and then back, watching her face as he did. Watching her gaze focus on her hand and his. Watching her understand that they were touching and nothing bad had happened.

“Normally when people touch me, especially men, certain abilities of mine intensify. I have an unusual gift of persuasion. In certain situations, I can compel people to behave in a certain way or get them to act faster with regards to the things they were already going to do. I don’t have to be touching people to use my magic, but the ability is certainly stronger when I do. I try to be extremely cognizant of how I converse with people so that I don’t inadvertently mold their actions.”

“And the Shrews don’t know?”

She shook her head. “They only know that I have certain ways about me. Nothing specific. I assumed that they wouldn’t probe further until I was officially hired. Fortunately, the ladies seem unaffected by me. A few of their associates are not immune. I noticed last week that Dustin has no resistance to me. Doc doesn’t either. She’d been trying to wheedle me into an exam for weeks.”

“Doc’s normal.” Soren grunted. “Or as normal as anyone who makes herself an accomplice to a band of mutants can be.”

“Yes, well, I have to take special care around her. I don’t want to harm her. I would like to consider her a friend. She…asked to examine me so she could start a file, but I begged off. I sent her away without meaning to.”

“So that’s why you’re good at interrogation.”

She shrugged. “I wouldn’t say I’m good at it. I have certain instincts, perhaps, but I think I’ll become more efficient in time. I won’t have to use so much energy to get the same information. Today, I made an error. I was trying to be gentle, but I ended up using up too much of my energy because the subject was so…empty. Running roughshod over people is so much easier. It’s easier when I can’t bring myself to care about them.”

“I agree. Fighting is easier when I don’t have to worry about how much damage I’m doing.”

“So, you worry about that, too.”

“Of course I do. I’m not a psychopath.”

Her lips quirked up at one corner.

He sighed.

“It’d be one thing if I were only wiped out after needing to engage with someone—”

“Judging from what I’ve learned about witches and psychics, that’s typical.”

“Yes, well, I’m not just that. The…other thing I am makes composure more difficult. When one type of my magic gets messy, so does the other. They’re like conjoined twins.”

“What’s the other type?”

“I…” She wrung her hands and ground her back teeth. “Well, there’s no name for people like me, at least not one I’ve heard. We don’t even have a name within my family. We don’t talk about what we are. In fact, I didn’t know what I could do until one day when I was eleven or twelve. I sneaked out to the beach with some friends. They’d been coaching me to go for weeks. A new resort had recently opened, and the owners hadn’t yet locked down the access to the private beach. The sand was so pristine and clean, and they had all these lovely loungers and cabanas set up.”

“I would have been convinced to go, too, if that was how my friends had described the place.”

She scoffed. “Yes, well, they did a superb job. I hadn’t spent much time at the beach, or even at the pool during summers. I once asked my father for money so I could take swimming lessons with my friends. He managed to scrape up the funds, but when I went to Granny to ask her to fill out the forms, she patently refused. She said the water wasn’t for me.”

“Why?” He furrowed his brow. “Everyone should learn to swim. That’s as important as learning basic CPR.”

“Well, she said that we couldn’t swim. I didn’t understand what that meant. I didn’t understand her emphasis on the word, but she was unyielding no matter what arguments I put forward. So when I went to the beach that day, I suppose what my grandmother had been trying to hide from me happened. Perhaps there was something about the salt water that triggered the change in me that first time. I’d stepped in, to ankles, to knees, to thighs, and all was fine. Then there came a big wave.” She made a wave motion with her arms and let out a breath. “Knocked me over, and then no one could find me.”

“What do you mean? You mean you—”

“No, no.” She shook her head vigorously. “I didn’t drown. But everyone thought I had because I didn’t stand back up. And then I didn’t crawl out, and they couldn’t find me when they and the resort’s lifeguards swum in a grid looking for my body. The next day, I washed ashore far down the beach, naked and confused as to where I’d been and how I’d gotten there.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Imagine how I felt, then.” She extracted her hand from his and rubbed her palms against the scratchy material of the towel. Her gaze locked onto something on the ceiling—the overhead light, perhaps, or maybe even the brown water stain in the corner. “All I could remember was that I was drifting, and so aimless. I couldn’t direct myself. I couldn’t think. Everything seemed so pointless and yet so peaceful. I walked home. After my grandmother and mother both had a good scream at me, they had to tell me.”

As hypnotized as he was by the lull of her voice and her knack for storytelling, he needed her to skip to the end. He needed the “a-ha”—the resolution. He grabbed her cheeks and tilted her face down toward his. “What the hell did they tell you? You’re killing me with suspense.”

Her forehead creased yet again, and her lips parted wordlessly. “I…”

“Marcella, please.”

“I haven’t told anyone. I… This is…”

“It doesn’t matter what words you use or how cogent they are. Give me something, and we’ll piece the facts together later.”

She grimaced. “When I’m in water, I sometimes…become water. I disappear in it, and sometimes I start to fall apart when I’m land, too. If I’m touched too much or if I’ve let myself grow too tired from using magic.”

I sometimes become water, she’d said.

He sat back, pressing his elbows to the bed, staring at her.

She wrung her hands and then stood. “You don’t believe me.”

She started to move away, but he grabbed her by the hips and pulled her back to him. He turned her, tugged her onto his lap, and hooked his chin over her shaking shoulder.

“I believe you, Marcella.”

“But you can’t possibly—”

“I believe you,” he said, squeezing his arms around her waist. “You may think you’re very rare, and you are, but there have always been whispers of people who become the old elements. Air. Water. Earth. Fire. The record-keepers—people like my father—have always assumed that we’d never see any. We believed they would never show what they are, but now, I’ve met two kinds of the four. So don’t tell me I don’t believe you.”

“Two? But, who?”

“Have you ever worked with any of the Castillo men or learned much about them at all?”

She gave a slow shake of her head. “No. None of them. Why?”

He slid his fingertips down from her shoulder to her arm, pausing at the bend of her elbow to make a swirling pattern. The touch must have tickled because she squirmed, though not so much to get away. A subtle movement of revulsion to make him stop, or to simply…move on to some other place.

And he did. He continued tracing, pulling his fingertip down the back of Marcella’s forearm, and stopping again at her wrist. He encircled it with his thumb and middle finger. She was slight but strong.

“Tell me about the Castillos,” she said, drawing a pattern on him, too. She glided her finger around the tattoo of Ursa Major on the back of his hand. Her touch was delicate, almost shy.

She didn’t have to be shy with him. He wasn’t anything special. In fact, she’d be hard-pressed to find a more predictable character than him. Everything he was, he’d already shown her, and probably twice.

“You would have learned the truth in time,” he said, turning his hand over so she could fiddle the sleeping bear tattoo on the underside of his wrist. “So I don’t believe they would mind me telling you. The Castillos are what they call wind-walkers. They become air. They disappear into the wind in the same way you become water.”

She craned her neck around and ogled him. “You don’t mean that.”

“Truly. Ask Tamara if you don’t believe me, or even Dana. The Castillos don’t make a habit of using the ability quite often—especially not the twins. They’ve seen the effects in their father from him shifting too often. They choose not to repeat his mistakes. They’re very good at what they do because they’ve always had each other’s support. Their practice didn’t happen in isolation. They were circus freaks for most of their lives, pulling off illusions that weren’t tricks at all, but paranormal biology.”

“They don’t do it anymore?” He’d never heard her speak with such animation before—with such curiosity. She’d truly thought he’d never be able to understand her, and that made him sad. “Become air, I mean.”

“Only occasionally when they’re working, and a job requires a higher level of discretion.”

“Oh.” She wrung her hands some more.

She seemed to need some time to process the new information, and he could certainly understand why she’d be shaken. She’d assumed that she was aberrant and so much an outsider that she couldn’t even begin to explain what kind of freak she was. But there were people who, while not exactly like her, were similar enough in talents who could certainly empathize.

Holding a hand in front of her face, she flexed her fingers and stared. The skin on the back of her palm rippled and smoothed like waves that didn’t have enough heart to move so much as a grain of sand. “Not even Maria knows. I was afraid to tell her. Afraid she’d find me too odd.”

“Maria?” He laughed. “No way. You should tell her. Of anyone, she’d understand. She’s the biggest advocate for the underdog I know, so you don’t have to pretend to be Superwoman around her.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she whispered.

“I know I am. You need to start telling some people. No one in the company wants to see you fail. They need to know who and what you are so they know who best you’ll work with. Who best will watch your back, and who can scrape you up if the shit hits the fan.”

“I try to avoid letting shit hit the fan.”

“Yes, we all do, but this is an unpredictable business. You never know when some small gig will go sideways and you end up having to pull yourself out of a scrape, and there’s no one there to help you.”

“Like me at the office building. That should have been an easy job. If you hadn’t been there…” She peered at him over her shoulder, dark eyes round with apparent realization, cheeks blazing burgundy with shame, and lips parted to speak.

He put his finger to her lips and shook his head. “We’ll not worry about what-ifs. That information is of no use to us. We can only think about the future and make plans of how you’ll handle the next situation.”

“We?”

He shrugged and dropped his finger from her lips. A pity, because they were tantalizingly soft, but perhaps that was also for the best. He was having a hard enough time seizing control of the situation with her sitting so rigidly atop his lap. One small move backward and he’d have to start worrying about contraceptive options.

“You should know by now that I’m not so easy to get rid of,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. It’s unreasonable for you to expect that I should.”

“But—”

“And, no, I will not stay out of your way. I don’t care how the other Shrews have handled their business in the past in circumstances where they were working with their lovers.”

“I’m not your lover.”

“I intend to rectify that.”

“I’m working.”

“So am I.”

“This is my gig. You’re not on the clock.”

“Keeping Dana happy is in everyone’s best interest.” He scooted back on the bed, pulling her along with him until their feet no longer touched the floor and she had no choice but to lie back on his chest.

Staring at the ceiling, she sighed.

“No more protesting,” he said. “It’s tedious, and you know I’m good for you.”

“No, you claim that you are. You saying so doesn’t automatically make a claim true. Leave me alone. I need to send Dana an email.”

“Go ahead, then.” He skimmed the backs of his fingers up Marcella’s bare arms. She was warming up, thank the goddess.

She let her head fall to one side and watched his hand glide up and down. “I am.”

“Okay. I think your computer is in the car.”

“I’ll go get it.”

“You’ll need to put pants on.”

“I will.”

He trailed his left fingers up the side of her neck and let the swirl beneath her chin. Her skin was like satin, smooth and supple. She would glide over his body as if she’d been polished, and he wouldn’t want to let go, because when were Bears ever afforded such luxury?

He’d waited so long for a woman like her, and he was going to lord his good luck over everyone who’d listen, uncaring if he were petty or boorish or crass. A man didn’t get a woman like Marcella only to speak about her in whispered tones. No, he’d roar his satisfaction to anyone who’d listen with his voice booming and an indecent smile on his lips.

“Roll over so I can kiss you properly, woman.”

She snorted.

“You think I tease.”

“I’m amused that you think I’m so compliant.”

“Fine. Don’t comply.” He rolled him and Marcella over and straddled her legs. He pressed a hand to either side of her face and leaned down, dragging his lips along the shell of her ear.

Her breath hitched and skin seared, and he whispered, “I want you on your back. It’s not your cheek I want. I want your mouth. Give it to me.”

She swallowed. “I don’t give things away.”

“I see.” He rolled her. Granted, she allowed him to, as sweetly as she pleased. There was a smirk on her lips when he shifted her onto her back, and that twist of her mouth made the beast in him bellow.

How dare she tease him knowing what a state he was in?

His lips peeled back as a growl vibrated in his chest. He put his lips against Marcella’s, nudging away the smirk, shaping her mouth to make it open for his, and then he took it. She tasted like sweet fresh things he couldn’t name. Maybe honeysuckle or clean mountain water or some other poetic shit like that. She had a drugging effect, and that wasn’t magic, but desire, and he needed her to push back. After so long craving her, he wouldn’t be able to temper his lust for her. He was a beast with wild passions, and he finally had his mate beneath him. Nature compelled him to do one thing, but she needed more than rough sex and sweaty sheets. He needed to make her understand what he did—that they were inevitable, and that they were so much better together than they were as individuals.

He paused his tongue’s tangling with hers to ask, “Do you have something you want to say to me?”

She slid her hands into the back of his jeans and dug her nails into the meat of his backside. The sting excited him—made him go from hard to aching—but then escalated the torture. She wrapped her legs around his thighs and ground against his crotch.

“Yes.” She licked across the seam of his lips and dug her nails in even deeper. “Shut up.”

“Good luck making me.”