ShiftingHeat (18 page)

He switched on the bedside light and sat down before propping
his cane on the nightstand. “Did I feel thinner just now?”

“No.” He didn’t. He felt as strong and lithe as she’d ever
known him.

“It’s the devil’s work.” He gave a short laugh. “Or rather,
it’s the work of a Sorcerer, who planted certain suggestions in me—with my
permission. She said it was what they used to call a glamor. A bit like
fuzzing. People will see me as smaller, slimmer. Paler.”

“I never thought of you as particularly tan. But not pale
either.”

“Naturally pale skin plus years in L.A. leads to something
almost normal.” He shrugged. “Come to bed. Let me show you my drugs.”

How could she resist an invitation like that? She couldn’t,
but after she’d learned which of the three bottles of pills he had to take and
when, she tossed them back in the drawer and found something far more
interesting to do.

Chapter
Eight

Find out who killed Serena. Stop them. Find out who was
killing Talents with antique weapons.
Andros tried to keep his two
objectives clear in his head, but something kept messing it up. Faye. He wanted
her out of danger, but he knew she’d reject any attempt to get her clear.
Surely someone else could do it.

It did mean he got to see her every day, but it messed with
his head that he couldn’t care for her as he wanted to. Because he was back to
dragging himself around on crutches. Back to people staring at him, then
looking away hastily. He thought he was used to it, but maybe not, because the
sinking feeling in his stomach didn’t owe anything to the drugs he was taking.

But he worked better at his doctoral project than he had for
a while. Perhaps stress made him concentrate better. Whatever the reason, by
lunchtime the following day he’d solved a few of the problems that had been puzzling
him up to that point. He’d arranged to meet Faye in the largest cafeteria in
the university to try to show himself to the biggest number of people, declaring
their status as a couple and showing them what easy prey he could be. After
he’d finished, he’d try to visit the suspect vampire group. Andros had taken a
deep dislike to Sergiu.

He shrugged and then winced. Those pills emulated his prior
condition a bit too well.
Everything
hurt. Plunging back in to the
disease he’d thought he’d left behind reminded him why he’d spent most of every
day exhausted. But he couldn’t show it. Ever. Unless the mission demanded it.

Andros swung up on to his crutches and headed for the
cafeteria. People stared at him. Some looked away and some smiled. He smiled
back when he could and kept the expression of affability on his features. Even
if he hated the attention. He’d learned not to hate in the past—people were
what they were. But he’d had a therapist then. He’d turned emo to help cope
with that feeling. He’d gone the whole way, with the heavy, pitch-black hair,
lashings of eyeliner, and suitably slashed, studded and otherwise decorated T-shirts
and jeans. At least then he knew people would look at him, crutches or no. Ah,
fuck it. He could hate if he wanted to.

But his resentment dissipated as if it had never been when
he stepped inside the cafeteria and saw Faye. She made everything better, even
this. His smile turned genuine when he remembered last night. He hoped they
could share similar ingenious solutions to his disability tonight.

She looked up and their gazes locked. Everything else melted
away, nothing else mattered. How did she do that? He made his way to her,
heedless of the people who got out of his way where he’d usually have murmured
his thanks.

Faye was sitting with three other women. Moderately
attractive. He’d certainly have been interested in them, were it not for Faye
outshining them. He took her hand and tugged her to her feet for his kiss. At
the same time he murmured deep in her mind,
We’re being conspicuous,
remember?

Yes, but maybe with a little less tongue.

He added some more, just to show her he could. And to enjoy
her unique flavor. Nothing this cafeteria had to offer could compare with that.
He drew away reluctantly and smiled at her companions as she introduced them.
Rina, a curvy African American with stunning olive-green eyes. Lara, a
burnished redhead, not a hair out of place. Blue eyes and a very short skirt,
he couldn’t help noticing. Across the table sat Cathy, a blonde with dark
roots, which was fashionable these days, for some reason he didn’t understand.
But he was a man, what did he know? Pretty, though, her blue eyes smiling with
her mouth. Not something that always happened. He’d seen plenty of empty
smiles.

The tables at this end of the room weren’t so crammed
together. He’d often spent time here with a pot of coffee and a laptop,
reveling in the life going on around him, but not recently. Not since he’d
turned dragon. Maybe some habits were too good to give up.

Faye gave a shaky laugh as she sat. He stayed on his feet.
“Can I get anyone anything?”

Rina’s olive eyes opened wider, enormous in her face. “N-no
thank you. Do you want to sit and I’ll get you what you need?”

He shook his head impatiently. “No. I’ll be fine.”

He returned with a sandwich and a coffee on a tray. One of
the staff had provided him with a small wheeled cart, but she’d done it
discreetly, just pushed it to him as if she did it for every customer. Just how
he liked it. He exchanged a couple of jokes with her before he took his path
around the closely packed long tables to the smaller, more widely spaced ones
at the end. Several people stared at him and this time he knew it wasn’t
because of his crutches. It was that steamy kiss. Truly he’d only meant to give
her a soft kiss of possession, but she did something to his libido. She did
everything
to his libido.

He couldn’t feel sorry. Her embrace had lifted him out of
his self-pity into happiness. Now he could look people in the eye, smile, and
know that part of his problem was his introspection. Stupid mood to get into.

He took his seat and propped the crutches next to him. “Had
a good morning?”

She shrugged. “Okay, I guess. A couple of students tried to catch
me out, wanted to know if Dickens had a mistress. They thought I didn’t know.
Maybe they thought I was dead from the neck down.”

“They know better now,” Rina commented.

Lara leaned back and pushed her salad plate away. From what was
left, she’d hardly picked at it. “You could get into trouble.” She gave him a
hard glance. “It’s against the rules to mix with students. Hell, it might be
against the law.”

Andros kept her stare while he finished his bite of
sandwich. “Neither against the rules nor the law. I’m a doctoral student, postgraduate
with an MA. And I’m not a member of the arts faculty. It’s all fine. I
checked.”

Lara humphed and fished a piece of green leaf from her
salad, studying it as if she’d find the secrets of the world there. “Still,
Faye’s students will know for sure that she knows all about mistresses.”

“I should hope so.” He refused to allow the sour one to
poison his mood. He had a lot to look forward to. And a job to do. Part of the
reason for the kiss was to stake his claim, to see if anyone reacted. Because
he had a theory, one he was still turning over in his mind. The old weapons—too
much of a coincidence for his liking. He needed to discover how rare those
particular weapons were—the navy Colt that had killed Faye’s parents and the
Schofield Nordheim had used. Then he could work out some statistics, maybe
construct a filter and find out how many collectors had both models. Narrow the
field a bit. Find out which collectors were associated with cults or societies
concerning Talents. He could think of several possibilities, and not all of
them included Faye. There were some weird cults about, including the one that
had nearly killed him last year. They loved Talents, centered their efforts on
them in one way or another, wanting to worship them, experiment on them or just
destroy them. Nordheim had sold them. He hoped the bastard would rot in hell
for a very long time.

“So when did you two meet?” Cathy grinned and reached for
her coffee. “What’s the story? C’mon, Faye’s hardly told us anything.”

That sounded more like it. He indulged her, telling the
story they’d agreed on, that they’d met in the library when she’d offered to
climb the footstool to get a book for him that was shelved too high. Then she’d
told him about her class’ study of
Dracula
, then he’d taken her into
STORM to meet a real-life vampire. That introduced STORM naturally into the
conversation. “She thought
I
was a vampire,” he said with a grin. “I ask
you, do I look like a vampire?”

Rina shrugged. “I have no idea. To my knowledge I’ve never
seen one. Unless I’m looking at one now and it was a double bluff?”

His guffaw would have done Santa Claus proud. “Hardly.
They’re usually a bit bigger than me, even by day.”

“What are you then?”

The question was extremely bad manners among Talents, but he
couldn’t say he cared about etiquette right now. “I’m like you. Do you think
I’d still be using these things if I had a Talent?” He touched the crutches,
the metallic roughness marred by dents and scuffs, so familiar he could have
put them on without looking.

“I guess not. Then why don’t you get converted?”

He kept the smile, although it grew somewhat stiff because
he forced it. “It’s not that easy. Talents have a list, in case a Talent
offers, kind of like organ donation. I’m on that.” Unless anyone had taken him
off. He should really ensure his name wasn’t on it anymore. “I’m okay for a few
years yet. And I want to finish my thesis.”

“Can we ask what you’re doing?”

He didn’t mind telling them. It was the techniques he was
developing that he was keeping under wraps, not the item itself. “A keyboard,
to start with. Something that paraplegics and quadriplegics can use their minds
to control.”

“Wow.” Cathy flicked back a wayward strand of hair.
“Amazing. So you want to give them telepathy?”

He gave a crack of laughter. “Not give it to them. Everybody
has it. Do you realize that a few years ago we’d be laughed at as crackpots?
But I don’t have to give people telepathy. We all have it. We just have to
develop it.”

“And you’ve done that?”

“For sure.” To demonstrate, he touched their minds. The four
women sitting around the table, no one else. The playful touch gave him a way
in, and from there he could explore. So he gave them a tickle, a thrill.

“Amazing.” Rina gave Faye a sly grin. “Now I’m starting to
understand what you see in him.”

He waggled his brows. “Go to a few classes. It’s like when
Windows first came in—people thought it was hard until they went to a few
classes or picked it up. Now we all have computers. Using telepathy could
become common in a few years. It’s a technique, that’s all. Babies are all born
with the ability to communicate telepathically, but only Talented parents help
their kids develop the gift. For some reason the rest of us build a wall and
block it out in the first month or so of life. But we can contact the sense, if
we work at it. At least, most of us can.”

“You really believe that?” Rina, bless her, the cynic. The
world needed cynics. Just not an awful lot of them.

“I know it. STORM sponsors classes for people who want them.
Why don’t you put your name down?”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure.”

He tickled her again, just for the hell of it. She looked
startled, didn’t laugh. “That isn’t you.”

Yes it is.

He was delighted to startle a squeak of alarm out of her.

Leave her alone.

He grinned at Faye’s censorious tone.
It’s fun.
He
paused.
It’s also effective.

She sighed and touched his hand where it lay on the table. They
exchanged a smiling glance. She made him so happy. Simple happiness, an emotion
people often denigrated or ignored. Fools. He sensed the tension in her and
tried to ease it a little.
Hey, we’re doing okay. The sooner we get this
done, the sooner I get you to myself for a while.

He’d made her happy, saying that. He felt it.

Fuck, they were getting in deep. And he couldn’t feel sorry
about it.

Faye worried. She worried all the time, especially now he
seemed so vulnerable. She watched him shake out a few pills, blue ones, white
ones, and toss them back with a practiced hand. He swallowed them with a bare
sip of coffee. Then answered the girls’ questions about his condition and the
pills as if he still had the mentality of a disabled person. In a way, he did. Maybe
he always would, and maybe that could be a strength. It brought him
understanding and a gentleness belied by his lean but powerful figure, one only
she could see properly right now.

She felt the gentle, persuasive effect of fuzzing,
recognized it as other Talents here today would, if he directed it at them. But
he was doing something very clever, something Talents had developed to a fine
art. People saw what they expected to see when they looked at Andros. If they
expected him to have thin wrists, wasted muscles, then he’d have them. A sense
of fragility that was more than physical wreathed him too.

But he’d spread the news in the most effective way, in the
busy cafeteria at the most crowded time of the day. He worked at STORM and he
was weak, someone who might be approached if anyone wanted anything from STORM.
Or if anyone wanted to attack STORM. They could use Andros the cripple, the
weak spot, the man with a high security clearance because of the computer work
he did—he managed to slip that into the conversation too.

She worried about him, that someone would attack him. If she
were attacked, she’d go immediately into dragon mode, have to force herself not
to shape-shift if it wasn’t appropriate. Andros would have to think about the
shape-shift and work hard to force it, due to the cephalox in his system. That
split second could cost him. And her. Especially with someone who loved old
weapons running around.