Cold Moon Rising (24 page)

“Yes,” I replied, my voice once again dripped with disdain for the man and his ideals. “It is. It was intended to be. I didn’t just disappear, Tuli. I was forced out, stripped of my title, of my name—banished forever for bringing shame to his throne.”

Now she looked truly confused and reared back in her seat. I’d forgotten how her emotions showed on her face so easily, while I’d schooled myself for centuries to show nothing at all. “Shame? But you were an icon of the people. The hero of the northern war who turned back the invaders and brought us new lands. You were the emissary to the great meeting of shifters . . . even learning the languages so you could speak on behalf of the snakes. You brought glory to all Akede by securing your father a seat on the first council of leaders.”

All true, which is why it had been such a shock to me. “My shame had little to do with my own actions, I’m afraid. No. It was a small bobcat that was my undoing. We were to be a marriage between two great houses—the snakes and the lions. The girl was a half-breed, but a powerful seer and Father wanted her talents for his great mission. But she refused the offer, slaughtered the escort I provided for her, shunned the gifts of gold and slaves, and fled. I was forced to return home a failure. He cast me out quietly, in the dark of night, with a price on my head if I returned.”

Tuli was open-mouthed, which was almost charming. The shock in her scent told me this truly was news to her. I should be surprised that Father had never told anyone. But I wasn’t. Just like I wasn’t surprised .

. . now that Josette Monier, the cat in question, had refused me. She’d seen Father’s goals and treachery even back then. I knew that now. But I couldn’t imagine her abilities back then. I still hate her, will always hate her for the life she stole from me. But I couldn’t blame her. Not really.

Tuli’s voice made my muscles twitch and I felt a swelling of something like pride inside at the intensity of her outrage. “She refused you? A prince who might someday rule an empire that stretched across most of Europe? You should have killed her for that insult!”

My own chuckle caught us both by surprise. “Oh, I’ve tried. Trust me. She’s not so easily killed. As I say, she’s a seer with powerful foresight. It’s difficult to sneak up on her, and there’s no defeating her in a fair fight. The lion in her is strong.”

She was silent for a moment and then asked quietly, “So Narmer took you in? Is that why you chose his name as your own?”

I felt my head nodding and realized my hand had crept over to where it was covering hers. The olive skin was so very soft and I couldn’t help but trace my thumb over the pulse point of her wrist the tattoo of the order feeling slightly cooler than her skin. There was a frantic flutter as I did. And those blue eyes . . . they’d haunted me for so many years after I fled. “Rather than be publicly whipped and chased through the streets of cities and villages, I left Akede as Father demanded. He had that power back then, if you remember, with Nasil at his side to support his edicts among the populace. I wandered for a long time in the desert, a nomad filled with self-loathing and shame. But Narmer took me in when I finally asked to be allowed to settle—offered me a post as an adviser even though I was a man without a country, without a name. Frankly, I’d fully expected Father to send runners ahead of me to announce my banishment to the neighboring empires so I’d be forced to wander forever. But I wasn’t even worth that much time and trouble. I was simply forgotten, left to fend on my own. We didn’t see or speak for close to a thousand years, while I lived and served in the house of another. Narmer and his brethren taught me things that Father had no concept of—tolerance, patience, and leadership without the fear of the people. The man I became was because of him, not Sargon. I couldn’t hold my seat on the council now without the skills I learned from a foreign king. While some of the deceit and violence that were my father’s legacy have also served me, I honor Narmer instead. So in a way, you weren’t lied to. Rimush is dead. He has been for a very long time.” It was strange how little the recitation bothered me. I’d fully expected to feel anger and shame roil up again, even after this long. But it didn’t. Maybe it was the satisfaction of knowing I’d had a hand in his death that had also exorcized the demons that had chased me.

I stared out the window of the high-tech jet, watching the blinking lights far below fade back to the blackness that had existed since the dawn of time.

We were quiet for a moment, each thinking our own thoughts, so it surprised me when Tuli lifted my hand and pressed it to her lips. There were tears falling from her face to land on my skin and I suddenly couldn’t think what to say. All I could do was turn my hand in her grip to raise her chin and look into her eyes with a smile that said she didn’t need to pity or feel sorrow for me. She reached up with her other hand to stroke the side of my face, and when she pulled me forward into another kiss, I let her.

With age has come experience, so each careful touch was meant to bring intense sensation. My magic could be feather or whip, and I really didn’t care whether Nasil heard Tuli’s moans as I refamiliarized myself with the taste of her skin, the curves of her body, and the delight of her cries. I wasn’t quite willing to go so far as to remove my clothes and bed her right here, but a great many pleasures can be had without revealing skin.

I could tell she was fighting her desire. She also hadn’t planned on going this far, but something about letting me proceed was both terrifying and deeply arousing to her. When I unbuckled her seat belt, the muscles in her stomach twitched under the camouflage trousers and her fingers convulsed in my hair. Pushing her backward into the soft leather cushions and tracing my hand heavily along her muscled thigh caused a whimper and made her come up for air from the kiss.

“Ahmad, I can’t.”

That widened my eyes and forced me to ask, “Why? Are you married? Betrothed to someone?”

She shook her head and bit at her bottom lip while staring carefully at my neck. But her protests weren’t quite enough to keep her from sliding her hand across my chest under the shirt and flicking my nipple with her fingernail. I responded in kind and felt her shudder.

I dipped my mouth to her ear and let out a slow, rolling hiss that brought a new tightness to her nipple, slowly being tormented between my thumb and forefinger. “Tell me, Tuli. What would happen if I took you again after all these years?”

“It’s . . . it’s not something I can talk about right now. I just can’t.”

I waited for a long moment, but there was no elaboration, so apparently that was all the answer I was going to get. She fought through her attraction until all that was left was confusion and embarrassment. I rose up off her, reluctantly letting my hand move away from her silken skin. “Very well. I’ve no need to force myself on a woman. If the feelings we once shared are gone, there’s nothing more to say.”

She opened her mouth to reply, a startled look on her face. But then she closed her mouth again, tightlipped to avoid speaking whatever had tried to rise to the surface.

I moved away from her, buttoning my shirt as I did. “Perhaps it’s time I checked on Nasil. He’ll probably want a break from flying soon. I’ll leave . . .”

. . . leave, Tony? I shook my head, pulling myself away from what Ahmad had been doing to the woman in the plane. Can you hear me? Don’t we have to leave?

I pressed fists to my eyes, trying to scrub away the image of the plane floating in front of me. It had at least frozen in place, so I wasn’t hearing and seeing them.

When I could finally open my eyes back to my own reality, Sue was lying under me on the bed, looking rather disheveled and hazy. The digital clock on the nightstand said another half hour had flown by. I had a raging hard-on, and she looked like I’d been doing to her what Ahmad had been doing to Tuli. Just great. “Goddamn it,” I muttered. “I’m getting sick and fucking tired of being trapped in someone else’s wet dreams.”

I rolled off her and raised a finger and then made shooing motions to make her leave while I tried to think of things that would get rid of this erection without having another round of sex. Not that I minded the thought of sex again, but I had to beat this without giving in to it every time. My only consolation was knowing that Ahmad was probably going through the same thing at thirty thousand feet.

Fortunately, the usual things worked to bring my libido to a standstill: mental images of my high school gym teacher, a creepy old guy who spent way too much time in the locker room showers watching us. And then there was the horse-faced nun who’d slapped my wrist with a ruler every time I asked a question in Sunday School. Finally was Carmine, slashed and bleeding on the floor of a condo.

Okay, that did it.

Sue had done as I asked. She stayed quiet and left the bed to go comb the tangles out of her hair and touch up her makeup. Once I’d thrown down the rest of the lukewarm coffee from the four-cup maker on the table, I was just about back to normal.

We didn’t really talk until we were almost out the door. Then she made a comment, real casual-like, that made me want to pound my head on the wall. “For what it’s worth, you’re a really good kisser when you’re Ahmad.”

But a second later, I stopped cold, right in the hallway, and pointed the car key at her chest. I hadn’t said his name when I shooed her away. “Why did you say ‘Ahmad’? What was I doing while I was kissing you?

Was I talking?” That would be something entirely new, as would Sue being along for the ride into his head. Would that mean she could also see hindsights now when I was doing them?

The question made her freeze, brows raised and mouth open in a small ‘O’. She stared at me, and then the floor, and she finally wound up tapping her foot on the carpet, hands on hips. “I don’t really know. Let me think about it for a minute.”

Fair enough. I turned to walk and she did too. We got in the car, breakfast forgotten, and drove silently until we were nearly at the clinic. Time was ticking by way too fast and I knew Charles wanted me to drive the kid to the airport. I didn’t know how many flights there were per day to New Jersey from Denver, but I was betting it wasn’t many.

There were a ton of things rolling around in my head, but seeing a narrow cutoff at the edge of the Sazi land made me remember our earlier conversation—before the whole Ahmad-nearly-getting-laid episode. I turned down the road and had to slam on the brakes to avoid a big pothole.

“Where are we going? This isn’t the way to the clinic.”

I nodded once. “You’re right. We have something to do real quick.” She stopped talking and grabbed the strap next to the visor when I made an abrupt left to go around a rock big enough to take out the oil pan. The Lexus really wasn’t the car for this terrain. Raven had taken me up here in a Jeep. But I needed to see something for myself before I had any talks with Lucas that involved Sue.

Fortunately, it was only another few hundred yards and then we came down a slight hill into a basin where a row of wooden stands faced a hillside. The Wolven agents had to train somewhere, and having a private gun range on the land was a pretty good solution. While I wasn’t outfitted as well as I’d like, I did have the Taurus and the Ruger, both of which I had an extra box of ammo for in the trunk. And according to Lucas, there was plenty more at the clinic.

“Ah, gotcha. No problem.”

I flicked my gaze toward her as I shut off the engine. “You just intuitive today, or reading my thoughts?”

She shrugged and her scent was pretty much normal. No particular emotion. “Intuitive, I guess. It’s a shooting range. We were talking about me becoming an agent. You’re an I’ll believe it when I see it sort of guy, so I presume you want to see it. And hey, I’ve been practicing really hard, so I’d sort of like to show off a little.”

She would, huh? “Okay, let’s see what you’ve got.” I walked her toward the first table in front of the bar and pulled both guns from their holsters . . . one at the small of my back and the other at my ankle. “I’d love to give you earplugs, but you won’t get any out in the field in a crisis. Better to know now if you’re not going to be able to hear afterward.”

I stepped back and waved a hand toward them in invitation. I wanted to see how she’d approach them. Had she been taught proper handling, and by who? Shooting’s not about just picking up a gun and pulling the trigger. It’s a process. Was she looking down-range to check her target? Did she open the cylinder to check the ammo? Etc., etc. But I didn’t want to coach or reprimand. I’d heal if she shot me, and we were next to the clinic if she shot herself. So I leaned back against the nearest pole support and decided to just zip my lip, lock my head to our mental link, and observe.

She took a deep breath and let it out slow, knowing my eyes were watching her every move. Her scent was a blend of fear, determination, and worry, which is a really weird combination—sort of like soggy stir-fry left in the fridge too long. It doesn’t smell bad, per se. But it’s odd.

It didn’t take long to tell me what I needed to know. She picked the guns up with a level of comfort that said she hadn’t been bullshitting about practicing. She checked the gun and the ammo, and found an unmarked portion of an old paper target at the fifty-foot line to fire at. The caustic, familiar scent of burned smokeless powder filled the air as she squeezed the trigger. God, I love that smell. I’d like to say that the noise didn’t bother me, but it did. Guns are hideously loud near the full moon. But I managed not to wince.

Her stance as she shot told me she’d been using target loads in her practice sessions. She made a little stutter backward in her steps and stared at the gun like it had bit her. I load my shells pretty hot, even for hunting rounds. She glanced at me as a question, but I didn’t so much as blink. Not accusatory, nor comforting. But when she looked away, I noticed that she’d hit about an inch below the black dot on the target. It wasn’t a bad shot, but since I know it’s not the gun, it wasn’t that great either. Still, it would put down a deer, or a charging wolf at that distance, so I couldn’t bitch much. Perfection takes practice .