All Things Wicked (5 page)

Fifty and some odd years of neglect had only aggravated what a world-changing earthquake and massive flooding had started.

To look at it now, it was hard to imagine the chaos, the sheer hell that had overwhelmed a once-thriving city. Five decades had worn the worst of the cavity to a dull edge, helped along by industrious rich people who had built a new city right on top of the half-eaten ruins of the old. They’d planted a few thousand columns, paved over the whole damned thing. It was a solution, of sorts.

A Band-Aid.

The lucky ones got to live within the walls of the new metropolis. Rumors and stories whispered of the unlucky ones, the people trapped outside the new city’s walls to be hunted down, torn apart by the things that existed between the remaining cities of the world.

She didn’t know what was true, she’d never been outside the guarded walls. She’d never met anyone who had. She knew there
were
other cities, and that heavy transports moved between them—how else could goods be imported in?—but that was all she knew.

As far as she could tell, it was all anyone down in the layered city was allowed to know.

Old Seattle existed somewhere in between the real world and the old. It was a cesspit of forgotten legacies, secure behind the city walls and all but alive with history and, she’d always felt, malicious hunger—dying to feed on the corpses of the unwary.

The coven lost witches every year to the ruins. Carelessness, sheer rotten luck; it didn’t take much.

Juliet looked back again, dragging her free hand through her sweat-damp hair and out of her face. The fire left untended behind them shone like a beacon, practically a comet in the vast emptiness. If they were true to old habits, the witches wouldn’t risk the light if they were anywhere even close to the roads that led up to the city proper.

They were deep, then. Deep enough that they could light fires and set up shop, sloppy though it was.

The light dogged their footsteps until Caleb jerked to a halt, seized her arm, and yanked her into a side alley. She stumbled over chunks of loose rubble and found her back pressed against cold cement, her palms splayed over hard, denim-clad muscle. It was a thin barrier. The heat of his body worked its way through his stolen jacket, and for a shuddering moment, she couldn’t think of anything but how cold her hands and feet were. How cold her extremities had been since she’d woken up in a grimy basement.

How cold all of her had been for too many long, empty months.

His body was warm and hard and strong against hers, and as she opened her mouth, he slid one hand over it, murmuring a wordless warning.

Her breath caught in her chest. She couldn’t see anything but the faintest impression of his silhouette, his angled jaw tilted to the side as he studied something, listened for something somewhere out in the black and barren ruin.

His elbows hemmed in her shoulders, caging her between them. His long legs braced hers, his chest rose and fell against her own in slow, rhythmic breaths that only pushed a slow, rhythmic—oh, God, an all too familiar burn to the juncture of her thighs.

She swallowed, opening her mouth again to complain. To protest. Her lips rasped against his callused palm and he froze.

She forgot how to breathe as Caleb turned his head. Forgot how to think as his breath warmed over her cheek. She didn’t have to hear it to know his breathing hitched; she felt it in the startled catch of his chest against hers. Felt it in the sudden slam of his heart.

Echoed in her own.

Her lips moved again. Shuddering, her lower lip brushed his palm on words she couldn’t form, and the hand splayed against the wall beside her head shifted. Slowly, so lightly that she wasn’t sure if she imagined it, the side of his fingers skimmed the curve of her cheek. Ghosted over her jaw.

His gaze gleamed in the faint light, chips of diamond. Unreachable. Unreadable.

Had she ever seen them warm?

Once
, breathed a traitorous sigh deep in her body. Once, they’d caught fire. Just for her.

She shoved at his chest with a low, raw sound. He let her go, released her as easily as if she hadn’t just shivered under his touch. His weight shifted, drew away even as he lowered his head to whisper, “The guard came back. Keep the flashlight close, but not on. Can you keep up?”

She’d die before she admitted to anything else. “You’re the handicap,” she muttered, struggling to sound as calm and unaffected as he was.

The bastard.

In the diminishing light, his teeth flashed. A smile? A scowl? She didn’t know. She gripped the flashlight in her fist as he turned and whispered, “Hold on to my coat. We’re moving fast.”

Juliet grabbed a handful of the jacket. “How will you see?”

“Better than average night vision,” he said matter-of-factly, and eased into a jog.

Before they’d taken twenty steps, she realized that concentrating on not tripping over rotting city would take more energy than she was sure she had. After only five minutes, Caleb was running in a smooth, easy cadence and she was struggling to breathe.

Within ten long, interminably slow minutes, she was ready to beg for mercy. She clenched her teeth and kept up.

She didn’t know how long they ran. At some point, Caleb slowed, asked her for the flashlight, and took off again, the thin light paving his way. Her breath rasped through her dry throat, rough as chalk, and her lungs seized as every breath tore through her right side. The cramp locked barbed hooks under her rib and made every step a newfound riot of torture.

She jumped, climbed, sidled, and jogged until she thought she was caught in a nightmare, an endless stream of rocky, slimy, treacherous, rubble-strewn road. It was all she could do to focus on putting one foot in front of the other until he finally stopped.

Her numbed fingers fell from his stolen jacket. Juliet sank to her knees and bent over nearly double, gasping for air. The ends of her damp hair clung to her lashes, her face, and she wheezed as she scraped it back with shaking, sweaty fingers.

“Never,” she panted, “again . . . Ever. Would rather . . . die.”

Caleb said nothing.

The light skated over piles of fallen, decomposing timber and jagged edges of rusted metal. A fetid smell punctuated the air, like things left too long in the rain and musty air. Flesh and bone; wood and decay.

Dragging the sleeve of her jacket over her forehead, she staggered to her feet as Caleb braced himself against a moldering wall. He was flushed, at least. Sweaty and as breathless as she was.

Small favors.

“Where are we?” she finally asked when she could manage it.

He hesitated, swinging the flashlight back the way they’d come. “Somewhere near the trench.”

“How can you tell?”

“Listen. You can just barely hear the water.”

Juliet stared at him. At his outline, just a glimmer behind the light. True to his word, the faintest whisper hovered just out of auditory reach; a trace of sound that felt like pressure. Like depth and motion and— “Oh. Oh,
Jesus.
That means we’re . . . We’re going to die.”

“Relax.”

“Don’t you tell me—!” Juliet caught herself, clipping off hysteria before the world around her got any more sharp and shiny at the edges. “Being lost this far into the ruins is as good as a death sentence,” she said tightly, fingers curling into aching fists. “You know this.”

After the fault had opened up under the city, the Old Sea-Trench had eaten away at the abandoned carcass long after the aftershocks stopped. The place was a death trap then. Fifty years later, it was suicide. Pitfalls, loose ledges, nature’s own booby traps had claimed more than one explorer over the years.

Every so often, the occasional tremor still rumbled through the fault. Sometimes, more shifted, fell over, or crumbled. The trench bottom was a rushing river of glacier-fed water, and she didn’t want to be just another body washed down the fault line.

“Relax,” he repeated. “We’re not dead yet.”

Exhaustion knocked on her skull. She dragged her hands through her hair. “Okay,” she said after a deep breath. Much, much calmer. She could do this. “How do we get back?”

“Not sure.”

“What can we do?”

“I’m working on it.” He straightened as she closed the distance, his expression shadowed and wary. Forcing her brain to override her feet, Juliet spun before she could do whatever it was her body had intended. Slap him. Push him.

Throw herself at him and beg to be comforted.

He didn’t touch her. God help him if he tried. Anger warred with fatigue and left her feeling that the dark glittered hungrily around her, like some kind of starving crevasse.

“Fine,” she managed. There. Civil.

He clicked off the light. “Sit. Rest. We’ll set off again soon.”

“I don’t want to rest,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut as the thick web of shadow threatened to smother her. Her voice tightened. “I want to get back to civilization.”

“Rest anyway. If you collapse—”

“If I collapse,” she cut in, aware that she was talking through her teeth, that she was being unreasonable and whiny and so beyond caring, “you’ll have one less worry, won’t you?”

Silence met her accusation, flung with wild, angry precision. She couldn’t see him. Couldn’t hear him,
damn it, she couldn’t see him.

And in the suffocating dark, Juliet felt abandoned. Isolated. Completely and terribly alone.

Fear.

“Look.” Caleb hesitated, barely a fraction of a second, then said crisply, “You’re going to have to get it together. If you panic, I’m going to leave you behind.”

“You wouldn’t.”

His voice thinned. “Wouldn’t I?”

It was as if he’d pushed her off some indefinable edge. Everything in Juliet’s body, her mind, spilled free. The fury—
terror!
—battering at her control cracked, and it seemed as if she watched someone else wearing her skin turn and launch herself in the direction of that so calm voice.

As if it wasn’t her body that collided with his, her voice that strangled on a sound shredded from a throat gone tight and raw.

Caleb caught her, but not easily. He deflected her, struggled to grab her shoulders, her arms, cursing in surprise and warning and staggering as she battered at him. As she twisted her fingers into claws and sobbed something that didn’t make it into real words, his back flattened against the wall. His boots scrabbled for purchase amid the rocks that crumbled at their feet.

Something cracked. Juliet hoped it was bone—she would have settled for his thick head. Then the world tilted on its axis. Vertigo slammed home as Caleb’s arms tightened around her, and the weak cement crumbled into nothing behind them.

They toppled as she screamed.

Chapter Four

A
ir rushed past her ears, air and darkness and screams that echoed from all sides. It seemed as if she hung forever, trapped and falling all at the same time, her fingers somehow twisted in his jacket.

Juliet didn’t have time to think. Didn’t have time to watch her life play through the projector of her mind. One wide hand wrapped around the back of her head and Caleb’s voice roared by her ear, “Inhale!”

She managed to open her mouth, to reverse the flow of air from an endless scream to a breath sucked into her burning lungs as the rushing sound grew louder and louder.

Between one second and the next, air turned to ice and she gasped as they plunged into the frozen river at the bottom of the trench. Caleb’s jacket wrenched out of her grip.

Bubbles streamed around her face, mind spinning wildly as the cold sucked every ounce of warmth from her body. It stole her breath, her thought, her ability to move. Her memory. The current wrapped liquid fingers around her limbs and dragged her tumbling downriver.

Was this how she’d die? Sucked into the icy currents and thrown against some desolate shore miles away?

Juliet flailed. She forced her eyes open as her lungs burned for air, thrashed and fought through water that seemed thick and viscous from cold. Water filled her ears, her mouth and nose, her skin, and she struggled to kick her booted feet. To climb through layers upon layers of freezing currents until finally, thank God, her head broke through the surface.

Lungs burning, she sucked in air, choked on a mouthful of water and thrashed as a cresting swell sloshed over her head. The flow moved too fast to see anything in the near dark, and she didn’t tread water so much as force herself to float on the top, to not fight as she relearned how to breathe.

“Caleb!” The white-capped rush of icy water swallowed the sound, threw it back at her in taunting, muffled echoes. She caught a mouthful of water, choked again, sobbing.

It was as if she floated in freezing, weightless nothing; a void of sensory deprivation so intense that it took her breath away. She fought the current—didn’t she? She could feel herself thinking about it, but she couldn’t shape the words in her head.

Swim. Stay afloat.

Rest.

Something closed around her ankle. She barely managed a breath before her head slid beneath the surface, hands grasping at nothing. The river pulled at her, fought to keep her, and the grip tightened to near pain.

Then another anchor, an iron band laced around her upper arm, and she gasped as it yanked her back to the surface. Panting, she couldn’t fight it as she was bodily hauled through the vigorous tide. She slammed against something hard, garbled a protest as jagged rock grated against her chest, her cheek. Maybe it hurt. How could she tell?

Sobbing with every breath, all she could do was cling to the cliff face, heaving up what bits of the river she managed to inhale.

“Don’t fight me, I’ve got you.”

Caleb’s voice, soothing at her ear. He curled one arm around her ribs, under her breasts, as secure a hold as she’d ever known in her life. It didn’t squeeze. He only held her, solid support against the current.

Juliet sobbed in relief. The river pulled at her, swirled around her waist, but he wedged her tightly between his braced legs and let her tremble. Let her cling to the cliff wall and pull herself together.

It was harder than it should have been.

When her panting sobs had eased to hiccups, and then to forced calm, she realized that his left hand hooked into a crevice, fingers twisted just so to provide an organic clasp. His arm extended, a mottled line in the dark and so taut that she knew it had to hurt. The other still splayed at her ribs, fingers tight. His hips braced hers against the wall, his chest warmed her back even in the cold water.

She couldn’t help herself. Adrenaline and fear drained out of her like a sigh, leaving her empty and exhausted and so cold that it hurt to think, much less move. She let her head fall back against his shoulder. Weary to the bone, her eyes drifted closed.

His heartbeat slammed near her ear. She timed her breathing to it. Four beats in. Four out.

Water slid down her face. Dripped from the end of her nose. Slowly, saying nothing, he settled his chin against her wet hair. The arm at her waist tightened, and she trembled.

They were trapped in the bottom of the Old Sea-Trench, barely hanging on to a cliff face with witches intent on killing them somewhere beyond. It was dark, freezing cold, and hopeless.

And yet. . .

Juliet had never felt so protected in her life.

And that was his strength, wasn’t it? Making people trust him. She clenched her teeth as a full-body shiver set them chattering.

The reassuring weight of his chin lifted. “Can you climb?” The question was even. Matter-of-fact.

Juliet almost laughed, but her heart wasn’t in it. It was only hysteria, anyway. She tightened her grip on the rock. “I don’t know.”

“We’re going to try. Give me your jacket.”

“Wh-what? Why?”

“I didn’t think to bring the rope you cut.” He pulled at her collar, and she sighed. It clattered with cold. With too much effort and his help, she somehow managed to wriggle out of the synth-leather jacket and let him take it.

He fumbled behind her, his muscles sliding against her back. Cold was rapidly replacing any sense of feeling she had left, not that the sodden coat had helped at all.

“We’re tied together,” he said, his voice strained. She could feel the shudders he desperately tried to suppress, a constant vibrating line down her back. “Just do as I say. Left hand first.”

Slowly, so slowly she was sure she’d die of hypothermia long before they got out, Juliet followed his directions. He lifted his left hand to search for a cranny to use, found one, and guided her hand to it. “Put your fingertips together, like you had a puppet. Good.”

She wedged her fingers inside, teeth clattering so badly that the sound peppered his every word.

Then he found his own niche. Followed it with his right hand. Left foot. Right toes. His body strained behind hers, and she realized how much of her weight he took as he pulled himself up behind her. Knew and couldn’t do anything about it as her numbed fingers slipped.

He caught her, the synthetic leather coat snapping taut between them. His breath wheezed out on a gasp that might have been a curse. For a moment, all she could do was catch her breath, muscles screaming.

“All right?” he asked.

“S-sorry,” she whispered.

“It’s okay,” he said, keeping his voice low and calm. “You’re doing fine. Let’s go.” Little by little. Aggravatingly, mind-bendingly slowly, the water eased from her waist to her knees. Another bout of directions. His voice became a steady rasp of sound, a constant stream of encouragement and direction that she couldn’t decipher as she struggled not to picture the yawning crevasse below them.

One misstep and they’d fall right back into the current. She knew she wouldn’t have the strength to fight it this time.

She must have made a sound because his arm curled around her ribs again, and his breath warmed her ear as he said, “Take a rest.”

She clung to the rock, shuddering. “Can’t,” she muttered thickly. “Won’t go again. K-keep going.”

He hesitated. Then, as if he understood her desperation, he let her go and instructed, “Right hand, reach up.”

She could barely feel the sharp rock anymore. She was only vaguely aware of his weight behind her; he supported her more than she was herself. Inch by inch, the icy currents below them dropped away. It was something she felt more than saw. Or did she imagine it?

Were they only a foot up? Only a few inches out of the water?

Juliet squeezed her eyes shut, moaning.

“Nearly there,” he said behind her, and she almost believed it. Almost.

“H-how do you st-st-stay so c-calm?” she managed, teeth chattering together. It felt as if her whole body vibrated, graceless as a puppet.

“The alternative sucks.”

She laughed. It shuddered. “C-can imagine. Aren’t y-you cold?”

“Freezing.”

“Can’t tell,” she said on a sigh that frosted the air in front of her.

“I just think about better times.” A smile touched his voice. Or did she imagine that, too?

“Like warm fires, r-right?”

His hips braced her weight, holding her for a moment as if he knew that her arms screamed in mutiny. “Like warm skin,” he said roughly, almost too low to hear. “Like sweat and spring green eyes and all that other crap I don’t need to be thinking about.”

Tears gathered behind her eyes. Exhaustion. That’s all. Her head ached incessantly; just another note in a symphony of misery.

“Left foot,” he added, and if there had been even a glimmer of lightness there, it was gone now.

“C-Caleb.”

“Now right hand, where mine is. Wedge your fingers in. What?”

Juliet jammed her twisted fingers into the crevice he guided her to and rested her forehead against the cliff face. “Did y-you know . . . this would happen?”

There was a pause as he found his own niche. A grunt as the muscles in his shoulders and chest contracted, supporting his weight and most of hers. The fluidity of motion behind her, the flex and tightening of his body, fascinated her.

She’d seen how badly scarred he was. He had to be in excruciating pain.

When they were tight against the wall again, he finally said, “I don’t see everything. I don’t even see things I think I should. It’s not a feed I can just dial into, it doesn’t work like that.”

“Why not?”

Another beat of silence, filled with the whispering current below them and the sound of her own hard breathing. Then, so quietly she almost missed it over the roar of the water, he replied, “I don’t know.”

“Are we g-going to die here?”

“Right hand,” he directed, and Juliet didn’t have the energy to do anything but obey. She let him dodge the question, let it hang beside them as they crawled up the cliff wall for what seemed like an eternity. They paused only long enough to shake out stinging fingers and talked only as much as directions required.

And every step of the vertical climb, he held her. Supported her weight, caught her as she fumbled and slid. Pain ratcheted through his voice as the climb wore on, and she struggled to maintain her own momentum. Carry more of her own weight so he wouldn’t have to.

When her fingers closed over nothing, her heart plunged into her stomach, then bounced up into her throat as Caleb gritted out, “We’re up. Wait.” The jacket pulled taut around her, then suddenly went slack.

Energy surged through her, strong enough to allow her fingers to get a grip as he helped her over the edge. She clambered over it, grabbing fistfuls of rock and dirt and God knew what else for leverage, until her feet cleared the shelf and Juliet sprawled, pressing her cheek to the ground in relief. “Oh, thank God,” she breathed. “Thank you, thank you.”

She heard him scrabbling behind her. Quickly, she turned and wrapped both hands around his wrist, dug her heels in and strained every muscle she had left. Fatigue welled through her aching limbs. She groaned.

Caleb’s muscles tightened, bunched suddenly in her hands and he surged over the lip, an explosion of raw strength and adrenaline. She bit off a surprised yell as he slammed into her, taking them both down in a tangle of exhaustion and fear and relief.

Panting, Juliet found her arms wrapped around his chest as he braced his elbows on the ground on either side of her shoulders. His chest heaved against hers; his breath just as harsh. Without warning, he muttered something hard and edged, and unerringly in the dark, his mouth closed over hers.

Shock warred with exultation; fear with anger. As his lips pushed hers apart, as he ignored her dazed stillness and slid his hot tongue into her mouth, something deep inside her stretched. Snapped.

Her fingers tightened over wet denim.

His tangled in her soaking hair, forced her head still between his clenched fists, his mouth hot and demanding as he thrust his tongue between her lips without any pretense of gentility. She fought it, fought him.

But not to escape.

Her tongue slid over his, tangled and pushed. He groaned incoherently, kissed her breathless.

Kissed her stupid.

She forgot the cold, the rocky ground; there was only the heat of his mouth, the hard, muscled weight of his body covering hers. She arched into him, gasping, and he swallowed the sound with another low, shuddering groan. Her pulse skyrocketed. Her temples throbbed where his fingers locked into her hair, and it slammed a bolt of heat to the suddenly too sensitive ache between her legs.

He had always been cold. Right up until he burned.

She wanted that heat now.

Her legs fell open, jeans rasping against the ground, and his hips settled more firmly into the cradle of her thighs. Lust slammed through her body, her head. Need.

She whimpered.

On a rough sound, he tore his lips away, leaving her gasping for breath. For sense. His forehead rested at the curve of her neck, his shoulders heaving with every breath.

Shocked into silence, mouth wet and tingling, Juliet let him.

For this single moment in the dark, as memory and need and regret tangled together low in her body, she struggled to find an even keel and said nothing. Did nothing.

Didn’t know what else to do.

She was alive. Desperate to be touched by a man she thought she hated and God only knew where they were now, but alive. The bulge settled into the vee of her shamelessly open legs wasn’t a product of her imagination.

It was, she admitted through the melting fragments of her own thoughts, much better than the alternative.

The tension at her scalp eased. Caleb forced himself upright, fumbling in the dark, and cool air slid into the vacuum left by his body heat. She shivered.

Something clicked, and a thin beam of light seared through her vision. She flinched, throwing up a hand.

“Jesus, Juliet.”

She thought he’d meant the kiss. She opened her mouth to protest hotly when he caught her wrist, and Juliet cracked open her eyes to find him peering at the abrasions decorating her knuckles. Ruined flaps of flesh puckered in a bloody mess, gleaming wetly in the light.