"Well," I said, and stood up. "I guess we might as well get out of here."
"Might as well." He stood up, too. Taller than me. Broader. Standing too close.
I looked up into his eyes and slid the jacket slowly down my arms, and held it out to him. He took it and dropped it on the floor somewhere behind him.
I looked down at myself. The blouse hadn't quite dried; my nipples were still clearly visible through the thin fabric.
He took one step forward and put his hands on my waist. When I didn't step back, he moved his hands up along my sides, thumbs out, up, along the underside of my breasts. Those thumbs settled on the second most sensitive area on my body, where he moved them in a slow, gentle circle that took my breath away.
"So," he said, and his voice was coming from somewhere much deeper than it had before, "we're supposed to be researching energy, right?"
"Energy," I agreed. My voice was shaking.
"Heat."
"That, too."
He leaned down, and our lips met and melted. No shortage of heat there, or friction. I was shaking all over again, but I'd never felt so alive, so fully in my skin as I did at that moment.
Rain, and rain, and rain. His jacket made a pillow on the floor behind the lab table. We fumbled at each other's clothes until they slid away. The sting of cool air on naked skin, then the flare of shared warmth. Not a lot of foreplay, but hell, I didn't need it; the storm combined with the energy passing between us had made me as ready as I'd ever be. The pain took me by surprise, and so did my sudden desperate desire to make it stop, make him stop.
And with the tearing of my hymen, something else happened. Power. Power raced into every nerve in my body and snapped me into full awareness. I knew the man who was making love to me, every cell, every nerve, every pulse beat that echoed between us. I felt . . . everything.
I felt the huge rumbling cascade of his power as it flooded me, making me arch hard against him, and the extreme pain of it, the pleasure . . . sparks snapped between us, blue-white, bleeding off energy that our bodies weren't built to contain. Power, echoing between us, waves bouncing from one of us to the other and getting stronger with every second.
He wasn't prepared any more than I was. We were swept away on a rhythm like the sea, and when the tide came, it came high, and I drowned on waves and waves of a pleasure I'd never felt before, felt him drowning with me, clung to him for dear life.
I heard things shattering around us. Lightbulbs. Glass windows. I felt wind scream over us in whipping, out-of-control gusts.
And then it was over, and we were lying together, sweating, weak, and still feeling the power building between us.
He realized how dangerous it was before I did. He pulled away from me and kept going, far away, scrambling backwards until his back touched the wall. I scuttled back and hid under the lab table. All around us, the wind whipped and screamed and overturned tables and chairs until it finally faded to a breeze, then a sigh.
Stillness.
"God," he whispered, and put his head in his hands. I sympathized. My head was pounding, too. Every nerve in my body felt crisped.
I licked my lips and said, "It's not supposed to happen like that, right?"
There was blood on the floor where I'd been lying. I stared at it for a few seconds and saw he was staring at it, too.
He looked utterly stricken. "No," he whispered. "God, I'm so sorry. I didn't know-"
I didn't know whether he was apologizing because I'd been a virgin or because we'd almost destroyed the campus. I didn't really have time to find out.
The man was, of course, Lewis Levander Orwell. And so far as I know, he never again touched a girl who was in the Program.
I was still looking for my panties when Professor Yorenson arrived to find out what the hell was going on.
I don't know what I'd been expecting. A message from above, complete with cherubs and singing choirs, inviting me to join Lewis in whatever hole he'd crawled into? Crap.
We cruised around I-40, looking for signs from the heavens while I restlessly cycled through radio stations, hoping for a cryptic message.
Nothing.
If Lewis was here, evidently he didn't want to talk to me.
I finally pulled up in the parking lot of a La Quinta Motor Inn.
"He's here?" David asked, frowning. I was on the verge of hysterical tears or worse, hysterical laughter- worn down to nothing by the strain.
"He's around," I lied. My voice was shaking. "I need a shower and a good night's sleep in a real bed. If you've got a problem with that, thumb a ride."
He shook his head and followed me into the hotel lobby.
I checked us in with the last of my cash. I was so tired, I would have taken a cell in a monastery, but La Quinta turned out to be quite a showplace, with an indoor pool and a bubbling jewel of a hot tub that we passed on the way to the elevators. They'd booked me third-floor accommodations, facing the parking lot and the approaching storm. That was perfectly fine with me. Always best to keep your eye on what's coming.
The room was spacious, tasteful, with a huge king-size bed and pillows big enough to qualify as mattresses in their own right, or maybe that was just my exhaustion talking. David went straight to the far corner and set his backpack down.
"Why the hell do you carry that? It's just window dressing, right?" I was pins and needles all over, aching, itching for a fight. "Like the clothes. To make me think you're really human. Well, give it up. I know better now."
"Do you?" He sat down on the bed and put his hands on his knees, watching me pace back and forth. "I doubt you know any more about the Djinn than you do about the Demon Mark."
I couldn't look at him. I liked the way he looked, and I knew what I saw was constructed, artificial, something he'd put together to please me. Which was just-wrong. Obscene. And it pissed me off. "I know everything I need to know about the Djinn."
Dangerously quiet on that end of the room. I paced restlessly to the windows. Rolled the curtains open on a night sky rich with stars.
"Maybe I will claim you," I said. "Maybe I'll claim you and order you to get the hell away from me for a change. Wouldn't that be a stitch?"
He knew I was baiting him. "Don't start this, Joanne. I don't want this."
"Well, news flash, I didn't want any of this! I didn't want to be gang-raped by Bad Bob and his pet Djinn. I didn't want to end up with this thing inside me. And I didn't ask for you, either! So why don't you just-?"
He stood up. I turned to face him. Energy crackled the air, and it wasn't entirely emotional; it couldn't be separated that way. Djinn were creatures of fire, and I was ... whatever I was becoming. Water. Air. Darkness.
"Just what?" he asked in a soft, dangerous, purring tone. "Let you throw yourself on the pyre of your own arrogance? Don't tempt me."
"Just get the hell out," I said flatly. "I thought you didn't want to fight."
"I don't! I've tried to help you! I've tried to make up for-" He stopped himself. His eyes were molten bronze, glittering with gold flecks. Shimmering hot. "Say the words. It's the only way you're going to get out of this alive-you know that."
"Oh, so now you're going to kill me? Oh, hell, why not? There's probably a Let's Kill Joanne club, with cool little membership cards and souvenir rings. You can be the president, and Bad Bob the Ghost of Honor-"
He grabbed me by both arms and shook me. Hard. "No! Stop being a smart-ass bitch and listen to me! You have to say the words and give me the Mark, now! Just do it!"
I put my hands flat against his chest and shoved. It was likes pushing at a block of David-size concrete.
"Say the words!" He yelled it at me. Shook me harder, so hard my head snapped back and forth, my hair fell in a blinding curtain over my eyes. "In the name of the one true God, say it or I swear I will hurt you so badly, you'll beg me to kill you! I will hurt you!"
He was hurting me. His hands were tight as vises, crushing skin, bending bone. God, it hurt. It was like dying from the inside out, and the Mark, the Mark was fighting back, ripping at my flesh with invisible claws. . . .
"Say it! Be thou . . ."
I wanted it to stop. I wanted the pain to stop. "Be thou bound to my service!" I screamed. "There! Happy?"
His face went pale, but his eyes burned brighter. His fingers squeezed tighter. "Again!" He shook me again, just to be sure, as if he could rattle it out of me. "Say it again!"
"Be thou bound to my service!" I didn't want to say it, but it was ripping itself out of me, the words like knives in my throat. The pain was incredible, blinding, suffocating. My skin was burning where he touched me. Scorching. I could smell my skin cooking under his hands. . . .
"Again!" David shouted. "Say it again!"
Three times the charm. Three times would bind him to me for the rest of my life. Three times for him to trap me into doing what I did not want to do.
I remembered Lewis's Djinn back in Westchester, burning my hand where it touched the door of the house.
I choked on tears of rage and pain and croaked out, "Nice try, asshole. No way."
He froze, staring at me, and I saw something incredibly vulnerable in his face-a kind of ashen despair. It was instantly gone.
The pain vanished just as instantly-bruising, no broken bones, no burns. Illusion.
He hadn't even left a mark. His hands were gentle on me, and the only heat there was skin on skin. Human heat.
"Say it," he whispered. "Please. Just end this, and say it. Please don't make me watch it rot you inside. I can't stand that."
I sank down on the bed and cradled my head. "Why the hell do you want to do this for me?"
He went down on his knees on the carpet next to me, started to touch me and then stopped as if he didn't trust himself. "It's the Mark. Can't you feel it? It's seeping into your thoughts, your feelings. Soon you won't want to be free of it. It's got to be now, or you're lost."
He was right, of course. That's where the anger was from, the constant, itching fury. From the Demon Mark. It was growing, developing, taking me along for the ride. I could feel it tapped into me now. Its power was at least partly mine. Soon, we'd be joined, and there'd be no going back unless I was ready to give up my soul with it.
When I looked up we were at eye level, close as lovers. I put my hand on his cheek and said, "I swear to the one true God, David, you will never take this Mark. So give it up. Just go away. Let me have a little peace, while I still can."
It hurt, that moment. It was a wire stretched between the two of us, buried deep in our hearts, pulling and singing with tension.
I broke it. I got to my feet and stepped around him. He caught my wrist. "Where are you going?"
"To take a shower," I said. "I stink like a cattle truck. Don't worry, I don't think the Mark is going to wash off and spoil your chance to be a martyr."
I walked calmly to the bathroom, shut the door, and locked it. All the normal bathroom hotel amenities, like a coffeemaker and a hair dryer, complimentary shampoo and lotion . . . Life looked so normal in here, preciously, wonderfully normal.
I sat down on the closed toilet seat and stared at the spacious bathtub for a while. I was too tired to think, but luckily there was no need for it; I stripped off my filthy clothes and piled them in an untidy mess under the bathroom counter, started the water, and got in while it was stingingly cold. As I started to cry, I felt the Demon Mark moving inside me, stretching lazily, like a bully waking up from a nice long nap. I sank down to my knees in the tub, hugging myself, letting the warming water pound my neck and back. Water sluiced away, sluggish with dirt, but even when it ran clear, I felt far from clean. I would never be clean again.
Soaping and rinsing my hair was oddly therapeutic, though. By the time I rinsed for the third time some of the chill in me had started to thaw.
I was going to live, I discovered. Even though turning down David's offer had effectively signed my death warrant, there had to be something left. If Lewis came through, fine. If not . . . there were options. There had to be. I could read, research-find out how to fight this thing.
Still, it took every ounce of courage I had to get myself out of the tub and through the ritual of drying off.
When I ventured out of the steaming bathroom again, David was gone. His backpack was there, still leaning drunkenly in the corner; his long olive-drab coat was hung neatly in the closet, and his clothes were in a drawer. Even his shoes were present and accounted for.
As I hunted around for clues, I discovered he'd left me a present. There was a bikini laid out neatly on the bed. Turquoise, teeny, outrageously daring. I stared at it, baffled; the hotel gift shop was long-ago closed, and I hadn't rescued any clothes of my own; surely David wasn't in the habit of carrying around a thing like that in his pocket.
I remembered the beautiful blue jewel of the pool below and the quietly bubbling hot tub. Ah. Of course. The invitation was silent, but it was there. I could either accept or crawl in bed and go to sleep.
I dropped the towel and put the two tiny pieces on. It fit like it had been made for me. Which, I knew, it had been. It had that aura about it, that warmth of David's skin.
I checked it in the mirror.
It was . . . the perfect bikini.
I grabbed a hotel towel and the key card, and went to find him.
David was sitting in the hot tub. Bare-chested, eyes like shimmering copper that got brighter when he saw me. I laid my towel and key on a nearby table. He held out his hand to help me down the steps into the hot, silken water. I eased in slowly, one inch at a time; it felt like I was dissolving, all my worries and cares bubbling away. The kindest acid in the world. I sank down to my neck, then back up, slowly, gliding closer to him.
"Ground rules," I said. "Don't you ever threaten me again, or I'll bind you all right, I'll bind you into a bottle of drain cleaner and bury you at the bottom of a landfill. If you're lucky, some archeologist might dig you up in a few thousand years."
His hair was damp at the ends, dark and curling. I lifted my hand and touched it, trying to comb the curls back under control, but my fingers weren't interested in his hair, not really; they glided down to the smooth, hot landscape of his skin. Down the column of his throat, to that sexy bird's-wing sweep of his pectoral muscles, and I felt him tensing in a slow, pleasurable way.
"I'm going to die," I said. The tension turned dark. "No, it's okay. If I can die and take this bastard thing with me, I'm doing the world a favor."
"No." His eyes burned, shimmered, not human and not concealing it. Somehow, that made the absolute humanity of his body that much more powerful. He was human because . . . because he wanted to be human. Because of me. "You can't."
I put a damp finger on his lips. "Ground rules, David. You don't tell me what I can and can't do. If you like me even a little bit, you'll let me have this freedom, okay?"
His hand came out of the water and traced the line of my bare shoulder. Where he touched, shivers followed. God, such a touch . . . caramel warmth, spreading through me like a slow orgasm. Maybe it wasn't magic, but it felt that way. Felt. . . bewitching.
I felt him surrender to it, too.
"I don't like you," he said. "Like has no pulse. No fever. No fire." His right hand came out of the water now, joined the left in gliding up my shoulders, my neck. I could feel my pulse pounding wildly. Both my hands on his chest now, mapping the golden territory of his body. "Like isn't what I feel for you. It never was."
Our lips met, slowly. Damp, hot, hungry. He tasted darkly exotic, like a fruit from deep in an undiscovered jungle. Jets from the tub pushed us closer together, closer, until all that was separating us was the practically nonexistent fabric of my bikini and whatever he might have been wearing under the bubbles. It felt deeply right, utterly wrong. Forbidden. Natural. Perfect.
He'd been so careful to stay in control, but now I could feel the fire in him, wild and raging like a nuclear core. His hands touched my breasts and traced the hard outlines of my nipples under the water, and the bikini might as well have been imaginary, the way my nerves caught fire. I didn't want to ever stop kissing him, but I had to breathe; when I pulled back for a gasp of air, he let me do it, and a necessary rush of sanity came between us.
"A little too public," I managed to say, between deep breaths. His hands were still on my breasts under the water, thumbs gently caressing thickened, aching nipples under thin turquoise fabric. His eyes weren't anything like human now; they were glorious, alien, beautiful beyond anything I'd ever imagined. I couldn't fathom how I'd ever mistaken him for just a guy, no matter what kind of magic he'd worked.
"Don't worry," he murmured. His voice was deeper now, richer, almost a purr. He drifted closer again, put his lips right next to my ear. "They can't see us."
There were jacketed hotel employees at the desk right beyond the windows, chatting among themselves. Nobody looked in our direction. A grumpy-looking businessman wheeled his suitcase past and didn't spare us so much as a glance.
David put one finger under the stretch turquoise fabric of my top and pulled me right up against him. I couldn't stop touching him, tracing the hard, yielding planes of his chest, the flat ridges of his stomach. My hand slid down, and I felt a thin layer of waterlogged fabric gathered at his waist.
"If they can't see us," I breathed into his mouth, "get rid of the bathing suit."
Before the words left my lips, there was nothing under my fingers but wet skin. Nothing to hold me back.
David braced himself on the ledge, watching me with those unbelievable eyes the color of burning pennies, as I stripped off the wet bikini top and tossed it onto the side of the hot tub. Before I could reach for the bottoms, his hands were on the job, sliding them down my legs.
