The Touch Of Twilight (29 page)

“That’s how she found me at Master Comics,” I said, trying to think back to all the times the compound had itched, indicating the feed was live. “And tonight.”

“Where else did you apply it?”

“My calf,” I told him, then froze. Oh shit. “The back of my thigh.”

He lifted his gaze to mine, and for a moment wickedness lived in his smile. “Bend over, baby.”

“Ah, maybe I should do it myself,” I said, holding out a hand for the knife.

He sobered immediately, shaking his head. “You have to be sure to get it all, or else she might be able to lock in on you using the remnants.”

He wasn’t angling, and he wasn’t flirting. It was fact, and we both knew it, so I sighed and began taking off my clothes—including my tattered turtleneck—while Hunter went to retrieve a solution he said would neutralize the compound and a wide-angle edged scraper used for sculpting putty. “Is there a toy you don’t have?” I called as he retreated, but he dismissed me with a wave and kept walking.

The intervening minutes gave me time to order my thoughts. It was good that I’d come here. Warren might have had a few choice words to fling in my direction, but Hunter hadn’t gone on attack, and his words
had
loosened a knot that’d been forming inside me. I still needed to take responsibility for the results of my own actions…but I didn’t need to weigh myself down with Regan’s as well.

And as for Regan…

“Time to pay a little visit to the state prison,” I murmured, folding my pants. Because if Regan wanted to play hard and fast with lives she had no right to touch, then I would match her move to move. I’d attack her next by honing in on her soft spots, and when I reached the bruised center of her life?

I’d
push
.

• • • *
      

Hunter returned with a vat of what looked like water but smelled like petrol. He carefully sat it on the drafting table, then stood back to regard me in all his cotton-and denim-clad glory while I wore nothing but two swaths of silk and lace, utterly exposed but for my scars.

Turning my back, I decided, would at least hide my nervousness. So would being a smartass. “Geez, Hunt. Taking quite a chance being alone with the girl who spawns heart-eating look-alikes, allows herself to be tagged by a Shadow, and unwittingly injures mortals. Aren’t you afraid of my ill
chi
too?”

“You didn’t murder Jasmine,” he reminded me lightly, as if that would make up for the rest. “And I’m not afraid of much.”

I released a breath I hadn’t even known I’d been holding, and didn’t even mind Hunter scenting my relief. It was going to be okay. He was the one person who’d been inside me in all ways but the physical, and he thought I was fine. He always had, and though I was grateful, I still didn’t understand why. I hadn’t been exactly stable to begin with. But that wasn’t something I wanted to get into right now. “But you’re afraid of me working at Valhalla, right?”

“Worried,” he corrected, without looking up. The scrape of the blade gave way to a gentle tugging, the compound being removed. “For you.”

“I can take care of myself,” I said, still wondering why he was so against it.

“Clearly.”

Okay, so I deserved that.

Hunter placed a warm palm on my back as he deposited a skin-colored strip into the vat. It bubbled, disintegrated, and dissolved. The remaining solution looked cracked. It was the exposed wires of the tracer now that the makeup had been destroyed. Damned clever.

“The tracer was itching while I was here. Will Regan find the warehouse?”

He shrugged and dropped another strip into the steel vat, then moved up to begin work on the back of my thigh. “I’m neutralizing them pretty quickly. I can’t imagine she’d get an immediate bead on your location, but even so, this place has more traps than even your body could ever hold.”

I glanced over my shoulder at him and sneered. “Nice.”

He smiled now that he’d forced a fighting response from me. “She’d never get in, but I’ll lock the wires in the tool chest if you’re worried. The reinforced steel will interfere with the reception too. Here, I need you to move.”

He lowered the stool I’d been sitting on to knee height, then pushed me forward so I was bending over it. There was nothing sexual in the movement, but I caught our reflection in a pair of safety goggles across from us—Hunter bent over me, the muscles twitching beneath one of those gorgeous round shoulders as he did his exacting work, and me in pink panties and a bra—and knew the scene would replay itself in my midnight memories, but with a different ending.

“She might wait for you to come out,” I said, voice lower than I intended it.
Think of Ben. Think of anyone and anything else. Just don’t think of the man behind you, whose touch makes you totally insensible.

“Worried over my welfare? Touching,” he said, as he gently touched me. I braced my hands on the drafting table, trying to get my equilibrium back.

“Hey, she knows about you too, Hunter.” I shifted, sounding calm again as he pushed at my thigh. “She’s not one to easily forget.”

“So I’ll have to make sure I don’t accept any cover-up from her in the near future.” And before I could respond, he whipped his hand up to place a finger against my mouth, and smiled as he leaned close. “I know. Fuck off.”

But I was very suddenly aware of the length of him curled around my half-naked body, and the slight pressure against my lips didn’t make me want to either shut up or return the smile. God help me, it made me want to give that finger one good long lick, and suckle it until he brought me something more satisfying. My lips, pressed together and readied for a hard retort, softened at the thought, and Hunter’s eyes flashed dark. Humor fled us both, and the pressure against me increased fractionally.

“Do you remember before? When I was telling you about my templates and the way I fashion the conduits for individual agents?”

I’d have thought he was trying to redirect the sudden intensity, except he hadn’t moved; he was still too close and warm and overly physical, but I let him talk, mostly because I was afraid to move more than I had to. If I did anything more than nod I might just loosen my limbs, throw my legs around his waist, and rock.

“Well, there’s another reason some conduits feel like they’re made for your hand and others don’t.” And his left palm was suddenly warming my side, gliding, smooth-tipped. “See, your crossbow has a catch mechanism and lock, so when you’re controlling the conduit you can feel all manners of ripples and bouncing waves and vibrations.”

“And if there aren’t any catch mechanisms?”
Like on your whip
, I wanted to say, but even the thought of that slim piece of leather sent heat through me.

“Then you feel the lack of them, and for some, that’s the right fit. Either way, when the right tool meets with the right person, there’s a natural harmony of body and spirit. It’s so simple. And complex. It’s chemistry.”

“Hunter—”

He spoke over me. “It’s the same with people. Two people meant to be together will be drawn together again and again like they’re caught in a magnetic field. And every time they interact, the energy changes between them. They change each other. So while the elemental forces that initially drew them together are reinforced, others are deconstructed to alter into something new.”

I swallowed hard. I couldn’t argue because our chemistry
had
had physical consequences. We’d once fired the night with a single torrid kiss and created thunder between us.

“And when the two join, like conduit and controller…well, it’s not just the way they move together, the friction or the taste on the tongue or the sigh meant only for the other to hear…it’s how one single body affects the other. It’s elemental and—”

I knocked his hand aside, and tipped the stool to get away. I was breathing hard, the drawing table between us now, arms propped on it for support, head lowered as I kept my wary gaze on his.

Hunter righted the stool, straightened slowly, and after a moment, shook his head. “What are you so afraid of?”

I thought of the tattoo on his shoulder, the one stating fear was the opposite of desire. If I said I was afraid of him, he’d know I wanted him as well. And I did. My mouth watered with it.

“I fear myself,” I finally whispered. “You should too.”

“Yes.” His eyes did a slow crawl down my body, pausing in all the right places. Heat rushed through me. “Very scary.”

The taunt had me pushing away from the table, and I found that the momentum I carried inside me, that constant blind run away from him, still had some steam. “Are we done?”

“The compound is gone, if that’s what you mean.”

I began to pull my slacks back on. The turtleneck was ruined, but maybe I could temporarily knot the pieces together. I turned away from Hunter, hands shaking.

“I wouldn’t hurt you, you know.” His voice was a whisper, one I could’ve chosen to ignore, but doing so might make him think he had a right to say it, and he didn’t. Not with Ben and my long-standing
no
and little more than silk standing between us. It was an opportunity he should have let be.

“No,” I replied, gathering my shirt in front of me, “but you might charge me by the hour, and we have a long night ahead of us.”

“Ah, the bitch is back,” he said wryly, but didn’t defend himself as he cleaned up, lifting the wires from the bowl with metal tongs, depositing them in the toolbox as promised.

“I’d like to look through the panic room,” I said, ignoring the fat spears of guilt stabbing at my chest, and the spicy evidence of our lust hanging heavily in the air, threatening to choke me if I took too deep a breath. I took one anyway, looking right at him so he knew my mind was in control here, not my hormones, and told him how I wanted to study the map of breaches the doppelgänger had made in to our world so far.

The change in topic worked, or so I thought. He dumped the toxic solution into the floor drain, sprayed and wiped it clean with a red shop rag, and nodded slowly to himself. I didn’t expect anything more, so I turned toward the panic room…and was ambushed by his next words.

“You should let Micah erase his memory,” he said, and I froze in my tracks. The statement was bolder than his flirtations, and blunter than I’d have expected.

“I don’t want him to forget,” I said just as bluntly, without turning.

Because Ben would have to forget it all—me, our past, our potential future. All memories would stop the night I was attacked a decade ago, and Micah would rebuild a history for Ben that had me languishing in a forgotten childhood…and one that didn’t include me in his adult world at all. I would cease to exist for the last person on earth who’d truly known me as me. “We have a child together.”

“And you think that’s reason enough to hang on?”

I still didn’t turn around. “I do.”

“You sound obsessed.”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” I said, and though I did turn my head and meet his eyes, it was a dismissive gesture, my mind made up. “Why should I have to lose him just because I’ve found my true self?”

Laughter barked out of him, his bluntness turning cruel. “Because that’s what we do. We live
for
them, Jo, not with them…and not for ourselves.” He wiped his hands on another rag before tossing it on the floor. “You ceased doing that the day you metamorphosed, and the sooner you accept it, the easier it will be. For everyone.”

Like Hunter gave a shit if life leaned a little easier on Ben. Superhero, I well knew, didn’t mean saint. “I won’t ever accept it.”

I turned away before he could respond—because what I was saying was
I won’t ever accept you—
but not before I saw an emotion abandon his face, one that apparently had been holding it up. I hesitated in the wake of that broken emotion, feeling victory and loss at the same time, before walking away. There was no call from behind me asking me to return, no apologies or explanations or footsteps across the floor to stop or help or seize me. I reached the panic room and flipped on the light, but all it did was illuminate the silence. I hesitated a second more, then closed the door firmly behind me.

I remained locked in the panic room for most of the night, knowing—sensing—Hunter on the other side of the door, my mind flitting unbidden to the warmth that’d seeped from his body into mine before I’d pushed away. Again. After refocusing on the reams of maps for what must’ve been the hundredth time, I finally recognized that Warren’s tight handwriting wasn’t going to reveal any additional secrets to me just because I was the targeted double.

Yet there was an additional key located to the left of the map, where yellow, red, and green dots spelled out suspected activity, but this was in Hunter’s slanted script, probably marking for Warren his suspicions about how and where the doppelgänger would cross into our terrestrial plane next. The known entrances were yellow, and seemed to be mapped down to the square foot. The red dots represented places Hunter believed were most susceptible to the doppelgänger’s future breaches, and the fewest dots, represented by green, were a mystery entirely. No matter how long I stared at them I couldn’t decipher their meaning, and after the way we’d parted, I couldn’t exactly go out and ask Hunter.

I followed the green dots once more with my finger, tracing them in what appeared to be a written chronological order, then gave up and left the room long enough to brew a pot of coffee, to make a call to the hospital to check on the mortal woman, and take another from Warren—whom Hunter had phoned after our nonargument—before returning with a high stool to sit while I tried to predict where the doppelgänger might pop up next. The red dots ran right through the center of town, one right in the middle of Valhalla itself, which I thought was poetically ironic.

I finally found a secondary key to overlay the primary map. It contained all the suspected locations of Shadow entry into our alternate reality, though why Warren wanted that studied was beyond me. I pored over the maps so long my eyes blurred, and eventually even the insistent throb from the injury to my thigh couldn’t keep me awake.