Deadly Descendant (27 page)

I kept going until I finally broke through the trees and into the clearing.

The silver-blue moonlight revealed Jamaal’s tall, imposing form as he stood in the center of the clearing. He was facing me, but his eyes were closed, his face a picture of concentration. His muscles were taut with tension, and despite the cold, there was a faint sheen of perspiration on his brow.

I stopped at the edge of the clearing and just watched him stand there, fighting whatever personal demons were troubling him. If he was in the process of
trying to curb his death magic, I had a feeling it would be a very bad idea to interrupt him.

On the other hand, I felt like a voyeur for standing there and watching him like that. Especially when I couldn’t resist drinking in his masculine beauty. As long as his eyes were closed, I could finally drink my fill without worrying about the consequences.

Moonlight and shadows accentuated his high cheekbones and sensuous mouth, and his stark white T-shirt fit tightly across his muscled chest. If I’d been wearing a top that light, I’d have been freezing, but he showed no sign of being cold. His breath frosted the night, but the sweat on his brow shone in defiance.

As I watched, Jamaal began trembling with strain, and I bit my lip in worry.

I didn’t know exactly what he was doing, but I suspected the trembling and sweating was not a good sign. I took a careful step backward, thinking that now might be a good time to make myself scarce. I’d seen Jamaal out of control before, and I never wanted to see it again.

I should have retreated, but something inside me held me rooted in place. Jamaal’s trembling increased, his chest heaving with heavy pants. Then his legs seemed to give out under him, and he dropped to his knees.

“Jamaal!” I cried in alarm, and I found myself running toward him instead of away.

Even on his knees, he was swaying, and he propped himself up with his hands, his head bowed to his chest. I scrambled to a stop beside him, my body
working on autopilot as I knelt and put a hand on his shoulder.

Heat seemed to radiate from his body, and I almost snatched my hand away in surprise. He was burning up.

“Jamaal, are you okay?” I asked, wondering if I should be running back to the house to get help. “What’s happening?”

He made no effort to jerk away from my touch, and I took that as a bad sign. Or maybe I should have considered it a good sign, in that he wasn’t going berserk and attacking me, which was what I might have expected him to do if he’d just lost a battle against his death magic. I moved even closer to him, sliding my arm around his shoulders in hopes that I could help keep him upright. If he collapsed, I wouldn’t be able to get him back up again.

Sweat soaked his thin cotton T, but even in the few moments I’d been by his side, the intense heat of his body had begun to recede. He was still breathing hard, and his muscles quivered beneath my touch, but I hoped his cooling off meant that whatever it was had passed.

“Do you need me to get help?” I asked, and he shook his head. It was the first sign he’d given that he even knew I was there. His teeth started chattering. I hastily unzipped my jacket and threw it over his shoulders. It was probably too small to be much help.

Jamaal had recovered enough to give me a withering look at the gesture, but I ignored it. As long as I didn’t know what was wrong with him, I thought the
chances were good he needed the warmth more than I did.

“What happened?” I asked again.

He took a shaky breath and raised his head. The sweat had cooled on his brow, but his eyes seemed to have sunk deeper into his head, and he looked exhausted. He glanced at me quickly, then looked away. I thought that meant he wasn’t going to talk, but he surprised me. In more ways than one.

“You were right,” he said, with a grimace that said it physically pained him to admit it. “What you said the other day about channeling the death magic.”

My feet were falling asleep, so I shifted so that I was sitting on the ground instead of kneeling on it. I gave Jamaal a slight smile. “I know I was right. But which point are you conceding? I think I made a bunch of them.”

Jamaal didn’t smile back. But then, his sense of humor never had been exactly well honed.

“Take it easy,” I said, still smiling despite the chill of his stare. “I’m just trying to lighten the mood.” He seemed to be inching his way back toward normal, and I couldn’t see that as anything but a positive sign. “Tell me what happened.” Third time was the charm, right?

“I just tried to channel the death magic. Tried to make it manifest like Kerner does. Only I have no idea how to do it.”

Considering how violently he’d rejected the idea when I’d suggested it, I was pretty surprised he’d even tried it.

“Well,
something
happened,” I said. “Aside from the fact that you collapsed, you were burning up when I first touched you. Is that normal for you when you use death magic?” I remembered how he’d collapsed after killing Kerner’s last human victim. Obviously, the death magic had some serious side effects.

Jamaal slipped my jacket off his shoulders and dumped it in my lap.

“I’m not cold anymore,” he said when I opened my mouth to protest. “And to answer your question, no, that isn’t normal. It exhausts me when I unleash it, but that feels different.” He touched his chest, then made a face and pulled the damp cotton away from his skin. “It doesn’t make me sweat like this.”

And it probably didn’t make him into a human radiator, either.

“So maybe that’s a sign that you’re on the right track,” I suggested. “If it were an exercise in futility, it probably wouldn’t have had any effect on you at all, right?”

Jamaal might not be cold anymore—though I suspected that was a bit of alpha-male posturing—but
I
sure was, so I slipped my jacket back on. It was still warm from his body, and I hugged it around me to chase off the lingering chill.

Jamaal shrugged. “That’s one way of looking at it.” He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out his tin of cigarettes and a book of matches. His hands shook slightly as he flipped the tin open and selected a half-smoked joint.

“But I’m guessing from the fact that you’re skipping
the cloves and going straight to the pot that it didn’t relieve the pressure at all.”

Jamaal lit up and drew in a deep drag, closing his eyes as he allowed the smoke to linger in his lungs. He blew it out slowly, and some of the tension in his shoulders eased.

“Nope,” he said, offering the joint to me.

I declined with a shake of my head, and he took another drag.

“I’m sorry,” I said, wishing I had something more productive to say.

“I’ll try it again later, when I don’t feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. You’re right that
something
happened.” He met my eyes, and for the first time since he’d snapped out of it, his gaze held. “I’ve never
tried
to use the death magic before. It’s always been something to fight against, something to suppress. Even when Emmitt and I were venting, it was more like I was letting the magic go than I was actually trying to
use
it.”

He was scared of it, I realized, though I was smart enough not to say it. No one else I knew, except for Anderson, had so destructive a power. If I could kill someone without even touching them, and I didn’t know exactly how my power worked, you can bet I wouldn’t go around experimenting with it, either. It would be like going into a nuclear submarine and pressing a random button just to see what it did.

Jamaal cocked his head at me. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”

“Looking for you.”

The wariness in his expression was almost insulting. “Why?”

I took a moment to rethink my decision to confide in Jamaal. Spending more time with him than absolutely necessary was dangerous to both my physical and my mental health. Not to mention that he still looked kind of out of it.

I couldn’t tell whether that was the voice of wisdom talking or just cowardice. Either way, I couldn’t stop Kerner by myself, and though I couldn’t say I trusted Jamaal unreservedly, I thought he was the most likely of Anderson’s
Liberi
to help me without telling Anderson. Besides, I’d already determined that once I’d stopped Kerner, I was going to have to bite the bullet and leave to protect myself and Steph from Emma’s malice. So even if I found myself getting more attached to Jamaal, it wouldn’t matter, because I’d be gone.

Crossing my fingers, hoping I wasn’t making a big mistake, I told Jamaal about Emma’s ambush.

“You should tell Anderson,” was Jamaal’s prompt response. “If you tell him what happened, she won’t have anything to blackmail you with.”

I hadn’t been expecting that response from Jamaal, so I hesitated a moment before I responded. “But even if I tell him what happened, Emma will just give him her side of the story afterward. Which one of us do you think he’ll believe?”

Scorn lit Jamaal’s eyes. “Any fool can see that Emma is out of her fucking mind. She was always a drama queen, but she’s gone completely around the bend.”

“Yeah, any fool can see that. But can Anderson?
He’s in love with her, and love does funny things to people’s perceptions.”

“He’s too smart to fall for such blatant manipulation,” Jamaal retorted, but there was doubt in his voice.

“I don’t think smart has anything to do with it. He blames himself for what she went through, and he’s going to put up with a hell of a lot of shit from her he wouldn’t take from the rest of us.”

Jamaal chewed that one over for a bit. I figured the fact that he hadn’t dismissed my argument out of hand was a good sign, though he wasn’t jumping up and down with enthusiasm at the idea of keeping secrets from Anderson.

A wisp of chilly air made me shiver, even in my jacket, and I couldn’t imagine how Jamaal could be sitting there in his short-sleeved T-shirt without seeming to notice that it was freezing out. My teeth were starting to chatter.

“Do you think we could continue this conversation inside somewhere?” I asked as I hugged myself for warmth. “You may not have noticed, but it’s the middle of winter.”

I thought I saw a hint of amusement in his eyes. “You’re the one who came out here looking for me, remember? You could have just waited until I came back to the house.”

I gave an indelicate snort. “Yeah, because I was really in the mood to sit around twiddling my thumbs waiting for you. Can we go back to the house now, or would you rather sit out here and freeze your tail feathers off some more?”

I rose to my feet and brushed off the seat of my pants, then offered Jamaal my hand to help him up. I wasn’t at all surprised when he didn’t take it. Nor was I surprised when he got to his feet and swayed dizzily. Even knowing that he wouldn’t appreciate my help, I couldn’t stop myself from reaching out to steady him. His biceps twitched under my hand, and I couldn’t tell if that was from tension or from the aftereffects of death magic.

He pulled away from me, but for once, there was no rancor in the gesture.

“All right, you win,” he said. “Let’s go back to the house.”

I bit my tongue to keep from offering him any more help, even though he still looked unsteady on his feet. I already knew the answer would be an abrupt refusal. Instead, I settled for walking intimately close to him, ready to help prop him up if gravity started winning the battle of wills. Based on the way the corners of his mouth tugged downward, I guessed he knew exactly what I was doing. The fact that he didn’t snap at me for hovering told me that somewhere behind the testosterone, he knew he might end up having to lean on me whether he wanted to or not.

Jamaal’s footsteps steadied as we neared the house. We entered through the back door near the kitchen, and I was severely tempted to take a detour for some coffee or hot chocolate. But Jamaal was being relatively accommodating at the moment, and I didn’t want to risk any interruptions.

Even though he seemed to be doing much better
by the time we were inside, I kept hovering, sure the stairs were going to get the better of him. We hadn’t discussed exactly where in the house we were going to continue our conversation, but I’d assumed we would go to my suite, which was, unfortunately, on the third floor.

Jamaal seemed to handle the stairs just fine, but when we got to the second-floor landing, he veered off toward his own suite instead of tackling the next flight. He didn’t gesture for me to follow, but I did so anyway.

I’d never seen his suite before, and I have to admit to a great deal of feminine curiosity about it. I imagined his rooms being cold and austere, with a bare minimum of furniture and decoration. He just didn’t seem the type to live in luxury or to care about appearances. But when he pushed open his door and I got a glimpse of his sitting room, I was immediately slapped upside the head with the realization of how little I knew Jamaal.

Most of the mansion’s walls were painted a generic shade of ivory meant to be ignored. Jamaal’s walls were painted a rich, golden tan that immediately lent warmth to the room. Burgundy drapes and a burgundy futon sofa added to the warmth. A small but elegant cherry-wood dining set was tucked into one corner, and the wall beside the door was covered in floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Those bookcases held mostly large, coffee-table-type books, some of them displayed face out so that their covers served as further decor. If those books were any indication, Jamaal had a connoisseur’s
taste in art, particularly Eastern art. Several of the proudly displayed books were catalogs from museum exhibits, though it was hard for me to imagine someone like Jamaal strolling through a museum.