Black Magic Woman (23 page)

At least now she could feel him. The heat of his big body warmed her, and she could feel the proof of his need pressing against her belly. Now, she could tell exactly how much he wanted her, how difficult it must be for him to seduce her so slowly, and she appreciated the strength of his resolve.

She also determined to break it by any means necessary.

Daphanie stretched beneath him, slowly, sensually. She pressed her softness against him, reminding him of the plump pillows of her breasts, the warm welcome of her thighs. She felt the answering stutter of his breath, the increased heat of his kiss, and gloried in it.

His hands traced her curves, and she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. By mutual accord their lips parted, his to trace a lazy path down her throat and over her breastbone, hers to whisper his name in a sweet rush of need.

His mouth slid over the curve of her breast to close around the peak, and she moaned a shivering sound of thanks. She rubbed her hands over the taut muscles of his back and shoulder, drawing him closer.

Her legs parted to twine with his and she realized as he slipped naturally between them that the sense of competition had dissolved in the sweet haze of togetherness. They each worked toward the same goal, the same end. She wanted to feel him become part of her; he wanted to make her a part of him. No one needed to win tonight, because there was no way either of them could lose.

He drew at her breast with strong, rhythmic pulls, but the pleasure of it didn’t spur her to desperation; it settled over her in a glow of contentment. She tilted her hips, not to beg him to enter her, but to savor the knowledge that he would and to enjoy the feel of him, thick and heavy against her. She could love him this way all night. All day.

All her life.

Even as the thought slipped into her consciousness, he slipped into her body, as soft and easy as morning. He released her nipple and trailed his mouth across her chest to the other, curling his tongue around the neglected tip and drawing it inside. Daphanie crossed her ankles behind his back and drew him deeper.

They moved with a dreamy, thoughtful rhythm, not racing toward climax but gliding toward it, drifting like leaves on a current, content in the knowledge that pleasure waited for them, even as it encompassed them on the journey.

Daphanie shifted her hands and cupped his cheeks in her palms, drawing him away from her breast until she could press her lips once more to his.

The kiss tasted of communion, felt like a benediction. Asher tasted of tenderness and joy, affection and hunger. She poured the emotions back into him, even as her hips rose and fell to meet his easy rhythm.

The pleasure built not in waves or in increments, but as in the slow, steady trickle of water filling a vessel. Daphanie was the vessel, and in moments she felt the pleasure overflow into ecstasy.

She heard Asher groan, felt him go still above her, felt his muscles quiver and his heart stutter as he emptied himself inside her. A soft cry tore from her own lips, half sob, half clear, ringing note of joy.

Her last thought before she slipped into sleep was that if she really were going mad, she hoped that God would leave her this one memory to sustain her. She knew she could live on it for the rest of her life.

Fifteen

The number of professions occupied by Others in our society never ceases to amaze most humans, to wit … all of them. Name a human occupation and you will be guaranteed that an Other has performed it, and is likely performing it somewhere right this very minute. Others are and have been doctors, lawyers, teachers, and clergy; artists, artisans, laborers, and servants. They have built buildings and composed symphonies, shoed horses and written novels.

You see, the desire to have a profession, a purpose, is one of those basic instincts that drives all sentient creatures. Why should the Others be an exception?

—A Human Handbook to the Others,
Chapter Two

Daphanie woke feeling refreshed, even if she had the vague impression that the dream had visited her at least briefly during the night. She could discount that, because it had remained on the edges of her mind, kept at bay by the twin forces of exhaustion and Asher’s warm body beside hers.

By the time she’d had a shower—made doubly relaxing by the addition of playful, soapy sex—and wolfed down a surprisingly tasty omelet, she felt ready to take on the world. Or at least a few feet of iron pipe.

“If I don’t get into the studio, I’m going to wind up pitching myself out a window,” she warned Asher, conscious of the look of displeasure he’d donned when she’d brought up the idea. “I’m not the kind of person who can stand to sit around twiddling my thumbs and waiting for stuff to happen. I need to keep busy.”

He did not appear sufficiently moved, so she tried another tactic.

“Besides which, I have orders to fill,” she pressed. “I accounted for getting nothing done last week because of the wedding, but I was planning to be back at work yesterday. I can’t let myself fall behind. It’s not like I have a staff I can delegate to.”

Guilt, she had always found, was a great motivator.

Asher gave in with a sigh, but he didn’t bother to try looking happy about it. “Fine, but you’re not going to spend any time in that studio alone. I’m coming with you. I’ll give you four hours, but that’s all I can spare. I have things of my own to do today.”

What, did he have a Guardian clock he needed to punch?

“Eight,” she insisted. This was her job they were talking about.

“Five.”

“Seven,” she wheedled, throwing him a cheeky grin. “And I’ll throw in oral sex.”

She thought she saw his mouth twitch.

“Six. And that’s final.” He pushed away from the breakfast table and reached for her hand to accompany her to the door.

“Six,” she agreed as she led the way out of the apartment. “Plus the oral sex.”

“You drive a hard bargain.”

*   *   *

If he thought she drove a hard bargain, he hadn’t seen anything until he glimpsed her with a hammer.

When they got to the studio, she cleared off the one chair she kept for occasional exhausted collapses, pushed him into it and ordered him to stay there, out of her way. Then she fired up her furnace, stoked the forge, and set out to melt her troubles into malleable, white-hot iron.

Daphanie hadn’t worked much in front of observers since college, but she found Asher’s presence in her studio to be unobtrusive and surprisingly pleasant. He obeyed her by keeping out of the way, sticking to his chair and occasionally asking the kind of intelligent and concise questions she never minded answering. Otherwise, he occupied himself quietly with a book he pulled off her small shelf of reference materials. She found his choice interesting. Instead of paging though a technical manual on the workings of a forge or the fundamentals of a smith’s craft, he chose a study of the blacksmith artists of West Africa’s Mandé people. Like herself, he appeared less focused on
what
went into working metal and more concerned with the why.

It made her smile.

She smiled for a good two hours. It took nearly that long for the coke to heat to her satisfaction and for her to arrange the coal layers around it just the way she wanted them. The first fire in a new space was critical in her mind, and she wanted this one to be perfect.

When the coke glowed at just the right color and the heat blasting off the hearth made her think of the outer circles of hell, Daphanie reached for her tongs and thrust a short length of pipe into the forge.

God, she loved her work. She loved watching the cold, hard steel begin to stir like some magical creature previously frozen in place by an evil spell. She loved the way it began to color, like a blush creeping into its cheeks, the way it seemed to reach toward the hearth as heat stretched and expanded it. More than once she had ruined a piece and had had to start over because she got so caught up in the sight of the changing metal that she let it go past the workable state of orange-yellow and straight to nearly liquid white.

Today, she very consciously monitored herself along with the pipe, drawing it away from the forge and onto her anvil just as the edges of the glowing portion began to lighten from brilliant orange. She worked quickly to establish the basic shape for one of her organic candle holders. She used the hardy hole in the anvil to brace the hot end of the pipe and set her weight into the lever end, forcing the steel to bend in a short, fluid curve. As it cooled, she added a half twist, then deepened the curve before plunging the whole thing back into the forge to reheat.

She worked steadily for another hour, pausing occasionally to swipe her arm across her sweaty forehead or to chug from the bottle of water she kept ready on the worktable. The heat was ferocious, in spite of the high ceilings of the converted industrial space. Even with the industrial ventilation fans churning full blast, sucking hot air away from the forge as fast as they could manage, the heat was intimidating. The fans couldn’t hope to keep up with the output of the glowing coke; all they could do was keep the temperature down far enough that it didn’t threaten to scald the inside of her lungs when she stood waiting for the steel to heat and reheat.

The few friends who had ever asked to come and see Daphanie work had never asked more than once. Most people couldn’t take the sweaty, dirty atmosphere of a working smithy, but Daphanie gloried in it. In her uniform of tank top and loose-fitting, lightweight trousers, she was in her element, and her element was fire.

She felt the glow from the hearth heating her cheek as she gripped the wolf jaw in her gloved hands and watched the half-formed candlestick slowly begin to glow red again. She could feel the sweat beading on her brow, sheening her cheeks, trickling down her nape despite the ruthlessly high, tight ponytail she always wore while she worked. For an instant, she remembered the heat of another fire on her skin and she dropped her tongs on a strangled gasp.

Asher reached her before the sound of the metal tongs bouncing off the brick of the forge and the concrete of the floor even had time to echo in the large space.

“What?” he demanded, his eyes and hands running swiftly over her. “What happened? Are you hurt? Did you burn yourself?”

Daphanie shook her head frantically. She opened her mouth and tried to tell him, but no sound came out. Her muscles spasmed, jerking her in his grasp like a marionette, and she felt a surge of terror as a familiar, sickening haze began to blanket her mind.

No! she tried screaming, but the desperate cry remained trapped in her head. In the studio, the only sounds came from the forge and the fans and Asher urgently demanding to know what was wrong with her.

She didn’t
know
what was wrong. It felt like she was being dragged bodily back into one of her dreams, but that was impossible; she wasn’t sleeping. She was wide awake, perfectly alert and perfectly aware of her identity, her work, her lover watching over her in a vain attempt to keep her from harm. The dream wasn’t supposed to come to her like this, wasn’t supposed to
be able
to.

Daphanie’s mind screamed those very words even as the haze clenched around her mind like a malevolent fist and dragged her consciousness beneath a thick, oily pool of black oblivion.

*   *   *

“Daphanie!”

Asher had never known terror like the sight of this woman convulsing in his arms. He gripped her above the elbows, watching helplessly as she shuddered. Her eyes rolled back in her head, the warm brown disappearing and leaving behind only blank, eerie whiteness. Her head snapped back so hard he thought he heard a tendon ping like a rubber band, pulled and released too quickly.

“Daphanie, wake up! Do you hear me, Daph? Snap out of this!”

He shook her, too afraid to be gentle, but she took no notice anyway. She flopped in his arms like a rag doll, and he felt his heart squeeze in his chest until it had no more room to beat. What the hell was happening here?

He lifted her clear of the floor and began to carry her to the chair he’d just jumped out of. He’d left his jacket there with his cell phone in the pocket. All he could think to do now was set her down and call 911. That’s what you were supposed to do when a human had a seizure, right? Call emergency personnel, rush to the hospital, and wait while modern medicine and pharmacology made everything all right again.

That was the way this worked, wasn’t it?

He made it barely two paces back to the huge carpenter’s table when Daphanie’s eyes flew open and she stiffened in his arms to the rigidity of a wood plank. For a long, tense moment she stared at him, her almond-shaped eyes drawn unnaturally wide with absolutely no sign of Daphanie discernible in their velvet brown depths.

Asher swore, his breath catching in his throat. Instead of Daphanie—warm, funny, fierce Daphanie—something cold and brutal stared out at him. His heart sank.

“Fils de putain!”

With a feral snarl, the Thing that wasn’t Daphanie sprang at him, teeth snapping at his throat. The move took him by surprise, so much so that he almost didn’t pull away in time. He’d expected a struggle to get free, not an immediate and lethal attack. He grunted and shoved the Thing away from him with enough force to send it slamming back into the side of the worktable.