Life Cycle (18 page)

“I need someone to ground me.” She was afraid to
outright ask him, but he was the only person there. Obviously he
was the one she’d have to use.

They exchanged a look, and she dug through her bags
for the book she needed, a sage stick, matches, a clay dish, and a
large container of salt. She flipped through the book to the spirit
summoning spell and re-read it to refresh her memory. She’d done it
many times over the years, but it was always wisest to recheck for
things like this. A small mispronunciation could have unpredictable
results. Right now she needed predictability.

“Could you have done this with your sister? Call
her, I mean?” The care of the phrasing and gentleness in his tone
startled her and dampened any ire she might have felt at being
asked. He thought her sister could have given them information they
needed about Jack’s location.

Tam tried to keep the tears at bay. She’d mourned in
short bursts, not letting the grief wash over her yet. She
couldn’t. And she’d convinced herself it wasn’t necessary. If Cain
was going to kill her for real, she’d see Naomi soon enough. But
the belief that he would was fading, and along with it, her ability
to keep her emotions in check.

“I doubt Jack would be that sloppy. He changed
locations after each kill for that reason. It wouldn’t give me
anything real to use, and it would be too painful.”

“He could change his location now,” Cain said.

“True, but if Henry can make use of the brief
connection he made while it’s still fresh and get a track on him,
it won’t matter. He’ll be able to follow him.”

She poured the salt in a circle around Cain and lit
the sage stick. When he looked anxious—an odd look on Cain to be
sure—she reassured him.

“I need to cleanse the space, first.”

“But I’m a demon.”

“Yes, and that’s why you’re
inside
the circle.” She
waved the stick around the cave, glad it was large enough for so
much smoke.

She entered the circle and sat cross-legged on the
ground, placing the clay dish in front of her. She laid the sage
stick on the dish, allowing it to continue to burn, the thin ribbon
of smoke curling upward. Cain sat across from her and took her
hands without prompting when she held them out.

Despite what he was, he felt warm and solid. She
couldn’t ask for better grounding. She closed her eyes and breathed
deeply, inhaling the scent of the sage, letting go, while her
anchor held her steady.

***

Cain’s grip on her hands tightened when she began to
intone a chant. It was unlikely she was working magic against him,
especially knowing about the ring and the danger such an attempt
could bring. But old reflexes died hard. It wasn’t easy letting
one’s guard down with a witch.

He didn’t want to think about why he’d held her hand
on the way to the caves, or why he’d allowed her to snuggle in the
pillows and blankets with him before letting her know he was awake,
or why holding her hand right now felt more possessive than
perfunctory.

Now that he’d let his guard down,
feelings rose to the surface that he’d pushed down. She was right.
He didn’t
need
her in a war. It would be nice. It would be helpful. But Cole
and the others could cobble together a coven to stay protected if
necessary.

Deep down he’d known what all of this was all about.
She had enough life experience to relate to him. She was pretty,
sure, but pretty women weren’t rare in his world. He could have
anybody he wanted, even her—without promises or commitment. He’d
proven that already. But he didn’t just want a meal or toy. If he
suspected he was covering a confusing collection of feelings, he
had no doubt the witch was doing the same. Why would she keep
sleeping with him if she really had a death wish, given how many
times they’d done it in the preceding weeks, with no sign of her
death on the horizon?

Of course, now he’d played up the whole
you’ll-beg-me-to-keep-you thing so hard that she’d never trust he
wasn’t toying with her. What had that been about? Because he
couldn’t risk his own ego? Was it that he needed to know she wanted
him before making a fool of himself? Hadn’t he lived long enough by
now to survive a little ego bruise? And if she bruised his ego,
couldn’t he put the whammy on her and kill her?

It wasn’t that he wanted forever, he just wanted time
to figure it out. The idea of Tam in his life felt strangely
comforting. Whether they were fighting or fucking didn’t even
matter to him, just so long as she was there and he didn’t have to
pretend he was the happy-go-lucky hedonist, wearing a mask for the
other demons. It wouldn’t do for them to know the man upstairs had
finally succeeded in breaking him. He was the symbol of what a
demon could be: free. There was no need to be tortured about it or
succumb to one’s prey. If he broke down and gave in to the twisted
plan to remake him—set in motion long before Tam came on the
scene—then it was only a matter of time for the other demons.

He looked back at Tam. She was glowing again. Her
voice had taken on an ethereal quality. If he hadn’t been holding
her hands, he wouldn’t be sure she was solid at all. She seemed
more like a vision or hallucination than anyone who could possibly
be real.

The smoke curling off the sage stick grew thicker as
it rose between them, and then, out of the smoke, came the shape of
a raven. The image of the raven swirled and became distorted, and
out of the distortion rose a more human shape, transforming from a
smoke-created image into a spirit, someone so real, you could
almost touch him.

“Hey, Tam, did you ever look at your cards again?”
the apparition asked, by way of introduction, as if they’d recently
had a conversation.

How often did she call this guy up? The spirit eyed
Cain with a smirk that the demon didn’t particularly care for.

Tam opened her eyes and smiled up at him. “Hey,
Henry. I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“You mean up here in Stepford Heaven?”

Tam giggled and Cain had the odd urge to kill someone
that was already dead. She seemed so relaxed around this Henry guy,
and Cain knew that even if it wasn’t like that now, at one point in
time, they’d been lovers. He could just tell these things. He
growled.

The witch arched a brow.

“Looks like your boyfriend is getting a bit
territorial over here,” Henry said.

“I’m not her boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

The indignant rebuttals came out of the two of them
simultaneously, but the therian just chuckled. “Young love,” he
said with a sigh. Then he laughed. “Or is that an inappropriate
description for two people of your advanced ages?”

Cain was ready to let go of Tam’s hands to make the
guy disappear. Worse than someone he might have to compete with was
someone who could see things a bit too clearly. Not love, just that
something was brewing. It was easy for people to confuse sex with
love. He saw it all the time. Powerful attraction and love weren’t
the same thing. He knew it, and he assumed Tam knew it. Where that
left them, he wasn’t sure, but he was ready to break the connection
and end the séance before it had really begun if it meant he
wouldn’t have to keep thinking about it.

The witch held on tighter and shot him a glare. “No,
I haven’t looked at my cards again,” she said, turning her
attention back to Henry. “My stuff has been locked up. But we’ve
got something more important to talk about. I’m sure you know Jack
is on the hunt again. He came to me in a dream a little while ago.
I was wondering if you could sense the connection, and if so, if
you could help us find him.”

The apparition closed his eyes, seeming to be in deep
concentration. When he opened them, he said, “The connection is
thinning, but it’s there. I can try to trace it and see what I can
find out from there. Do you want to call me back here tomorrow
night for the report?”

“Yes, thank you,” Tam said.

Henry looked at Cain in an assessing way that made
the demon’s skin crawl, then he looked back at Tam and smiled.
“You’ve got your tools back now, right?”

The uncertain way she looked at Cain made him feel
guilty for some reason.

“Do I?” she asked.

“Yes,” Cain said, not looking at the spirit.

“Look at your cards again, and really listen to them
this time.”

Tam let go of Cain’s hands and Henry disappeared. She
put the sage stick out in the clay dish and Cain began to get
up.

“Wait,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “I need
to take down the protective barrier first.” She closed her eyes
again and whispered something, then opened them.

“That’s it?” It was less of a show than Cain
expected, which made him leery of the whole situation.

“That’s it,” she said.

He ran a finger through the salt on the ground,
smearing the circle. He didn’t feel any push-back.

“What? You don’t trust me?”

“You better hope for your own sake that I can,” he
retorted, flashing the ring that protected him. He didn’t want to
think about the fact that he was using a small piece of jewelry to
protect himself from a girl. It wouldn’t do anything good for his
reputation.

She gathered her things, making a convincing show of
ignoring him.

“I hope you don’t think you’re leaving now,” he
said, moving toward her, glad he hadn’t bothered with clothing. It
made it easier to tempt her when her access was so easy. Now to get
her out of those jeans. Annoyingly Anna and Luc had done her
laundry, and she was back to wearing jeans instead of the clothing
from the trunk. He much preferred her in the demon-concubine look.
If she were his mate, he’d use her first power against her and make
sure she wore what he wanted at all times. She wouldn’t be able to
sneak off without his knowledge and change, seeing as it wouldn’t
be possible for her to be solid or interact with physical things
unless he was there touching her. He’d always liked that perk of
the demon mating.

He grimaced, trying to dislodge the
thought from his brain. Not about wardrobe, about mating. He wasn’t
taking a mate. Why would he do such a ridiculous thing and give up
his freedoms? Lonely or not, the mating ritual was irreversible.
And if it had seemed like eternity alone, it really
would be
eternity
together. At least now he had an option to end his loneliness. If
he took a mate, he wouldn’t have the option to go back. On the
surface, he realized such reasoning made him look crazy, but
forever was a long time. He’d gotten the tiniest taste of it in his
eight thousand years as a demon, and he knew that was only the
beginning.

Tam dropped her bags. “Did you have something else in
mind?” The tone in her voice made it clear she knew exactly what
was on his mind. What was always on his mind.

He backed her against the wall of the cave. “You woke
me from a nice dream. Then you had the audacity to stop me because
you needed your energy for magic. I was very accommodating for you,
I expect you’ll be accommodating for me.”

He smirked when his double
entendre
,
complete with filthy mental pictures, hit their
mark. She was lovely when she gasped and flushed like that. Her
gaze drifted south and then back up again to his face quickly, as
if caught with her hands in the cookie jar.

“Touch me,” Cain said. He gasped when her small hand
closed around him, touching him like only a woman with over a
thousand years experience could. He’d never understand the male
fixation with a virgin. It didn’t matter who else had been there
first. Every bit of experience was something you didn’t have to
teach her.

Despite how good her hand felt on him, his mind was
too distracted. He wondered if the thing about conserving her
magical energy to do the séance was true. Maybe the amount of bells
and whistles didn’t indicate how much energy one was using. Maybe
it took a lot of energy and magical concentration to hold a spirit
to this plane long enough for a chat. What did he know about the
finer details of magic? He’d spent the better part of his existence
avoiding it as much as possible, just as someone highly flammable
would avoid fire.

She sagged against him as his mouth found hers. She
was so warm and sweet and pliable this way. He needed less and less
of the demon thrall to get her to this place. He suspected if he
held out, she’d beg him to keep her, no matter what she said to the
contrary. Her body told truths that her mind could only begin to
imagine. And what would he do then? Laugh and kill her like he’d
said?

He growled angrily against her mouth. If this game
went on much longer, he’d lose because he’d keep her. And if he
went down that road, how much farther before he lost his mind
entirely and became so attached that what Luc had done with Anna
started to look good?

He’d already had the urge to mix their blood to
protect her, but from what? It only worked against demons, and no
one in his dimension would dare defy him on this. No, it was simply
a need to possess, and now that his immediate fears over her hexing
him were gone, that need made itself known more loudly.

“Oww!” Tam said.

A second later he was on the ground across the cave,
smarting from an energy ball burn. He rubbed his shoulder. They
didn’t usually do the fighting thing after the foreplay thing had
started. No matter what she said, she liked screwing him too much
to interrupt their momentum.

“What the fuck did you bite me
for?” She wiped the blood off her lip with the back of her hand,
looking equal parts hurt and angry, like for a moment she
had
trusted him. At
least within certain perimeters.