Deadly Descendant (24 page)

The air in my condo felt stale when I let myself in, but I was pretty sure that was just my imagination. I walked from room to room, reacquainting myself with my things, waiting for the tightness in my shoulders to ease, waiting for my body to acknowledge that I was home.

Maybe I was just too tired and stressed to relax, but being surrounded by my own things in my own home didn’t have the soothing effect I’d hoped for. The apartment felt cold and empty, oppressively quiet, and although it wasn’t unwelcoming, it didn’t feel like
mine
anymore. It reminded me of spending the night in my old bedroom at my adoptive parents’ house: I still felt emotional ties to the place, the bond formed from years of memories, but that was all in the past. I was just a visitor now.

More disturbed than I’d have liked to admit by the direction of my thoughts, I slipped between the sheets of my no-longer-familiar bed and tried to sleep. It took me far longer than it should have.

I hadn’t kept the kitchen stocked, so when I woke up in
the morning, I had to go out for breakfast if I wanted anything to eat. I wanted to stay longer, to give myself
an extended time-out, but staying in my apartment wasn’t giving me the kind of boost I’d been hoping for. Just the opposite, in fact. There was a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I feared the life I was trying to cling to had passed me by forever.

I left the apartment as soon as I was showered and dressed. I drove through McDonald’s for an elegant breakfast, then headed back to the mansion. I parked in the garage and walked to the front porch, where I found Jamaal lighting one cigarette from the butt of another.

It was none of my business if Jamaal was chain-smoking, but I found my footsteps slowing as I climbed the front steps and ventured onto the porch. He stared at me with neutral eyes while he took a deep drag on the fresh cigarette, holding the smoke in his lungs before letting it slowly out. It was then that I realized he wasn’t smoking one of his usual clove cigarettes.

“You’re smoking pot?” I asked, surprised. It was something I’d never seen him do before.

He shrugged and took another drag, then held the joint out to me.

For all my rebellious ways, I’d never been into drugs. Of course, if the Glasses hadn’t taken me in when they had, I’m sure I’d have headed down that road as a teenager. Luckily for me, the Glasses had cured me of the need to act out in self-destructive ways.

“Um, no, thanks.” I boosted myself up onto the rail that surrounded the porch, trying to read Jamaal’s face without being too obvious about it. “Everything okay?”

He laughed a cloud of smoke. “You’re kidding, right?”

“You know what I mean. You seem to be getting edgy again.” And there was a reason he’d graduated from cigarettes to joints.

He took another drag, then stubbed out the joint, putting the remains in a little tin, which he then slipped into his jeans pocket.

“This is normal for me,” he said, but he didn’t look happy about it. “Releasing the death magic made it better for a little while, but I can feel it building up again. Just like always.”

“But it wasn’t like this when Emmitt was around,” I said tentatively, always afraid to bring up his friend’s death. The death
I’d
caused. Emmitt had possessed some death magic of his own, and he’d been teaching Jamaal how to control it, apparently with some success.

Jamaal moved over to the porch swing, dropping into it like he was bone-tired. Maybe he was.

“It was better then,” Jamaal admitted. “We’d kind of … vent the death magic together. Send it at each other to ease the pressure inside.”

I shivered. “You sent death magic at each other? Wasn’t that kind of dangerous?”

He shrugged. “It wasn’t like we could do each other any permanent harm. And our magics tended to cancel each other out.” His eyes had a faraway look to them, and there was a faint smile on his lips.

Guilt niggled at me for the umpteenth time. If only I’d listened to my common sense that night, or if only
I hadn’t gone so fast on that icy road, Emmitt would still be alive today. I’d still be mortal, with no idea that the
Liberi
even existed.

“Why can’t you just do the same thing with someone else?” I asked. “It’s not like you can kill another
Liberi
.”

“Yes, I can. Emmitt’s magic canceled mine out, but it would kill any other
Liberi
. They wouldn’t stay dead for long, but people seem strangely reluctant to try it. Would you like to volunteer?”

“You know, that sounded almost like a joke. If you’re not careful, I may start suspecting you have a sense of humor buried somewhere deep down inside.”

“Who says I was joking?”

His voice was completely deadpan, and his face revealed nothing, so I don’t know what it was about him that told me he was kidding. It was something, though, because no shiver of fear passed through me, despite the very real reasons I had to be afraid of Jamaal.

I didn’t respond, instead thinking about the mysteries of death magic. Was it something specific to being a descendant of Anubis that allowed Kerner to channel his death magic into phantom jackals the way he did? Obviously, the
jackals
were specific to Anubis, but …

“Isn’t there any other way you can vent the death magic? Kerner thinks creating the jackals is helping him keep in control. At least, as in control as a psycho can be.”

“I can’t make it manifest itself physically, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Have you ever tried?”

He blinked at me like the thought had never occurred to him. “No, but—”

“Then how do you know you can’t? My powers didn’t come with an instruction manual, so I see no reason to assume yours did.”

He dismissed my question with a shake of his head. “If we believe anything Phoebe told us, Kerner hasn’t been
Liberi
a tenth as long as I have. If I had a power like that, I would have figured it out by now.”

I swung my feet between the balusters like a little girl, hoping the small movement would both help me stay warm and help me follow my own train of thought.

“But you haven’t
needed
to figure it out. Kerner had been buried alive. He had a desperate need to do something to get him out. You know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention.”

Jamaal arched an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting you’d like to bury me somewhere and see if I can make my magic dig me out?”

“Why are you being willfully obtuse about this? If you’re so unhappy about the effects of your magic, maybe you should try
doing
something about it instead of just whining.”

Jamaal rose slowly to his feet, eyes locked on me with simmering fury. I’d been treating him like a regular guy, allowing myself to forget just how terrifying he could be when he was angry. And how easy it was to set him off.

I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to be so abrasive. I’m just trying to help.”

The apology did nothing to appease him. “I don’t need your help. I don’t
want
your help.”

So much for any sense of calm the joint might have given him. A smart woman would have retreated in the face of Jamaal’s Mr. Hyde, but no one’s ever accused me of being smart where men are concerned.

“You need to smoke like five packs a day to keep from completely wigging out, and you gave in to the death magic last week at the cemetery. I’d say that means you need help.”

I slid off the railing and straightened to my full, but decidedly inadequate, height as Jamaal stalked closer. There was too much white showing around his eyes, and his pupils were little black pinpricks in a sea of chocolate brown. His nostrils flared like those of a predator who’d scented his prey. All very bad signs. Signs I chose to ignore as I held my ground.

“Are you really going to give in to it this easily?” I asked as my heart drummed frantically and my sense of self-preservation begged me to shut the hell up. “You’ve fought it for so long. And you’ve gone through so much to keep from being turned out of the house. Don’t fuck it all up just because someone tries to help you.”

Jamaal blinked in surprise, and I almost smiled. Amazing how much more effect an F-bomb has if you don’t make a habit of using them. He stared at me a little more, and I watched the anger fade from his eyes until he took a deep breath and lowered his head.

“Why would you want to help me?” he asked so softly I could barely hear him. “You have every reason in the world to hate me.”

There was a wealth of pain and loneliness in his words. He was not someone who was used to forgiveness. I’d explained to him numerous times by now that I’d forgiven him for his actions when I’d first become
Liberi,
but there was no sign he’d believed me.

I stepped a little closer to him. My feminine instinct was to reach out and touch him, give him a little human contact to anchor him in the now. But I knew he didn’t like to be touched, especially by me, so I resisted the urge.

“You know I don’t hate you,” I said, picking my words carefully. “You and I are too much alike.”

Amusement lit his eyes, and his lips twitched with a smile. “Yeah, we have a lot in common.”

He meant that sarcastically, but he was right.

“You saw my file, saw how many foster families I went through. I didn’t get bounced around like that because I was Miss Sweetness and Light. I spent years lashing out at people. I remember what that need felt like, remember what it was like to try to keep it buried and have it explode out of me at the least provocation. If the Glasses hadn’t seen past all that crap and adopted me, I don’t know where I’d be today. In jail is as good a guess as any.

“I got lucky, Jamaal. That’s the only reason I don’t have serious anger-management issues anymore. Maybe it’s my turn to see past someone else’s crap now.”

Chocolate-brown eyes met mine, warmer than I’d ever seen them, and I thought maybe I was getting through to him. Then, before I had a chance to get my hopes up, his expression clouded.

“You were just a kid when that shit happened,” he said. “And you didn’t have death magic beating down your barriers. I’m glad you were able to get help, but it’s too late for me.”

He started to turn from me, and I knew he was planning to retreat to the house without another word. I couldn’t let him do that, couldn’t let our conversation end on such a hopeless note. So I reached out and grabbed his arm.

He whirled on me, braids lashing through the air like whips. I stood my ground, refusing to let go as he glared down at me for daring to touch him. His biceps were as hard as marble, well defined, and almost completely devoid of fat. He could have broken my grip easily, and the fact that he didn’t gave me the courage to hold on.

“It’s not too late unless you want it to be,” I said.

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, so shut the fuck up.”

F-bombs from Jamaal were a dime a dozen, so I wasn’t particularly surprised by his response. I also couldn’t help noticing he still hadn’t tried to pull his arm from my grip. There was a battle going on inside him, a battle between the part of him that wanted to avoid all human contact to prevent being hurt and the part that was desperate not to be alone anymore. It was a battle with which I was intimately familiar.

“I know exactly what I’m talking about, and you know it,” I countered. “I know exactly what it’s like to be abandoned by someone I love, and I know exactly what it’s like to build up that suit of emotional armor so—”

Jamaal jerked his arm, the motion making me stumble forward, right into his chest. I expected him to shove me away, so what he did next shocked me.

His free hand plunged into my hair, grabbing a handful and pulling my head back. I started to gasp out a protest, but before a sound escaped me, his mouth crashed down on mine.

He smelled of cloves and smoke, with a sweet overtone of pot. His braids tickled my face and throat, and his lips …

This was not a soft kiss, not a kiss inspired by tender emotions and affection. This was rage and pain, loneliness and frustration, and, most of all, fear. His lips pressed against mine so hard I half expected them to fuse. My mouth was open from my interrupted protest, and he thrust his tongue inside.

I won’t lie and claim I wasn’t a bit turned on. There was no question I was attracted to Jamaal, had been even when he’d hated me and wanted to kill me. He was beautiful and exotic and dangerous, all of which made him sexy as sin. Desire stirred in my belly as his tongue brushed against mine. I wanted to shut off my brain and return the kiss, press my body up against his. I wanted to take him upstairs and get him out of his clothes, see if his body was as beautiful as his face.

But this was wrong on so many levels. Jamaal and
I didn’t even like each other, and I’d never seen any sign before now that he shared my attraction. He was violent and dangerously unstable, and he was kissing me because he wanted to shut me up—although I had to wonder why he hadn’t just pulled free and slammed into the house.

I tried to pull away from the kiss, but Jamaal wouldn’t let me. His hand was still buried in my hair, strands wrapped around his fingers as he tasted the inside of my mouth. I put my hands on his chest and pushed, but I might as well have tried to move a tank. He pressed me closer to his chest, close enough that I could feel the impressive bulge in his pants. He might be doing this just to make a point, but he wasn’t completely unmoved by it.