"So I stayed here," he continued. "And I became chan camazotz."
Her eyes were glued to his face. It was pitch-black outside, and the bedside lamp cast a warm yellow glow that bronzed her pale skin. Her dark hair had fallen from its ponytail. With it hanging down, her bangs cut straight across, and her thick lashes outlining her eyes like kohl, she could have come straight from a tomb painting, an Egyptian princess. A priestess.
Don't go there.
"Demons . . ." she said softly, almost to herself, still touching the locket.
"They're not demons," he said firmly, doing damage control by trotting out the second layer of his prepared story, which he'd never used before because nobody had ever gotten close enough for him to need it. "There's no such thing. The camazotz are an evolutionary relic, an archaic species that should have died out a long time ago, but somehow managed to keep going in this one little section of rain forest."
"Okay." She nodded. "All right.That makes more sense than demons arising from the underworld." But something changed in her expression, almost as if she knew he was lying . . . or she was lying to him in return. "What I don't get is why you're hunting them by yourself."
"What's the alternative? Call in the scientific community to 'study' them?" He emphasized the word with finger quotes. "No, thanks. Next thing I know, the fuckers are a protected species with a growing population, and the village is being moved again." He'd seen too many forced relocations to allow that to happen unless Rez and his people wanted to go, which they adamantly didn't. And he sure as hell wasn't leaving; nor was he letting a bunch of eggheads get in there and start experimenting on the ' zotz. Especially not this close to the zero date.
The secrecy, too, was programmed into his genetic code.
"They need to be exterminated," he said, "not studied."
She nodded slowly, her eyes going shadowed. "So what happens now?"
The question hung in the air, taking on meaning beyond the words.
JT slugged back his water, stalling while his desire to get her the hell out of harm's way jammed up against other, far more selfish needs. He'd partway blown his cover by admitting that he'd lied about not being into her. But he couldn't blow the rest of it, not even for her.
That wasn't just because of the secrecy bred into his bones, either. It was a kindness. It wouldn't be fair to warn humanity that demons were real, and that they were massing for the 2012 doomsday war, only to follow that with the info that the magi who were supposed to protect the earth plane were gone, killed twenty-some years ago by their despot leader.
He couldn't— wouldn't—do that.
Go home and live your life not knowing what's coming , he wanted to tell her. It's better this way. But he couldn't tell her that without telling her the rest, so instead he said, "Your team will be waiting for you at the embassy. From there, you can either head up to the States, or back out into the field."
"I take it we're not welcome here anymore." It wasn't a question. More, she didn't mention their breakup. Instead, she sat there with her pointed chin tilted slightly, as if to say that if he wasn't going to say anything about their relationship, she sure as hell wasn't.
That should have been a relief.
He grated, "I'll want your word that you won't come back, and that you won't tell anybody about the ' zotz."
Logic said he shouldn't let her go, but what was his other option? He didn't have the power to wipe her mind, and he sure as hell wasn't keeping her here, no matter how tempting the option.
There was no way he could deal with the ' zotz with her around, distracting him.
Something unreadable moved in her eyes, but she nodded. "Okay. If that's the way you want it."
A hard pressure shifted in his chest. "It's not—shit." He couldn't say what he wanted to, didn't want to say what he ought to. So he said nothing.
She set her glass aside and slipped off the bed. "I need a shower."
He closed his eyes. "Yeah." There's no point in wasting effort on could-have-beens, he reminded himself, but that didn't take away the hollow ache.
"So do you."
It took a second for her words to register, another for him to turn and find her standing there, holding out a hand to him.
His mouth went dry even as his gut fisted on a bolt of lust. "Natalie." His voice caught on the word. "We can't."
"We can. We already have." She dropped her hand, but didn't back down. "I get the rules—just tonight, no harm, no foul, walk away tomorrow and don't look back. I can do that. Hell, I'm an expert at it. Just ask Javier."
"But you said—" He broke off, not wanting to repeat words that had haunted him, taunted him.
"That I was falling for you," she filled in. "Trust me, your reaction took care of that. This is just-a-good-time sex." Something wistful moved in her eyes as she closed the distance between them, leaned in, and brushed her lips across his. "It's thanks-for-saving-my-ass sex." Another soft kiss.
"It's I-missed-you sex." A deeper, longer kiss that heated him, hardened him. "What do you say?"
But his mind had seized on three small words that meant far too much: I missed you. She said it as easily as she had said, I think I'm falling for you. They were facts, and she shared them with an honesty that he could never return.
The past three days had royally sucked, and the next two years without her—or however long he lasted before the ' zotz got him—would undoubtedly be far worse than he'd imagined, now that he knew what he was missing, what kind of light was being snuffed when the end-time came. But he couldn't tell her that any more than he could admit he wanted her to stay.
So instead, he cupped her face in his palms and kissed her long and deep, until the throb of lust blotted out everything else. Then, still kissing her, he started backing her toward the bathroom, where his solar-heated shower was glassed in on three sides, the panels steamy with the tropical night.
Even as he did so, a warning chimed deep inside him, one that said he should watch his step, that he was in danger of acting like the selfish bastards he'd escaped from. But in that moment, he didn't care.
It was the equinox. And he wanted to make love to her.
Chapter Four
Natalie's entire body hummed with strange, fluid warmth as she gave herself over to the night and the moment. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, JT was right for her; they were right for each other.
But as they paused in the bathroom doorway and eased out of their clothes, piece by piece in the short pauses between long kisses, she knew, deep down inside, that he was wrong about the camazotz.
They didn't come from any species that was meant to walk the earth. More, she was somehow connected to them through the parrot glyph, the crystal skull, and the bone-deep instincts that had pulled her to this forest. Was she supposed to fight the creatures, like one of the warrior-priests in Cooter's stories? She didn't know, but the idea both scared and excited her. So did the humming warmth that sparkled somehow gold at the edges of her vision and dulled the throb of fear.
Magic, she thought, the idea not seeming nearly as impossible as it had before. There was magic in the air, and in the way JT groaned when she raked her nails along his biceps, then down along his tattoo.
He turned on the shower, spun her beneath it, and pinned her to the wall with his hard, heavy body, his kisses going rough and needy. He ran his hands up her sides, into her hair, then down her arms to link fingers as they swayed together. In his touch she felt the heady urgency that pounded in her veins, a combination of relief at being back together and the painful awareness that it was only for tonight.
She wanted him, wanted to hold him, have him. They were protected inside the compound; the skull was locked in the Jeep, safe because nobody knew about it except her. If one night was all he would give her, then she'd take it. And she would deal with tomorrow when the sun came up.
The solar-heated water was at once both warm and cool on her skin, adding an edge to her pleasure as they twined together beneath the spray.
Outside the glass-walled shower, the night was seamlessly dark, broken only by a few stars high above, showing through the hole he had punched in the canopy. Before, she hadn't understood why he had pushed back the rain forest rather than living beneath it. Now she got it, and the perimeter made her feel safer. But still, she was acutely aware of how little separated them from the dark rain forest and the creatures that walked within it.
The knowledge added an edge that had her reversing their positions and pushing him back against the wall so she could taste him, biting lightly at his neck, his shoulder, the flat planes of his chest, and then lower down. As she closed her lips over the wide, blunt tip of his cock, he hissed out a breath and leaned back against the warm stone that formed the fourth wall of the shower, one arm braced to hold him upright as the muscles of his powerful thighs moved in time to the slow, grinding rhythm she set.
A harsh groan rattled in his chest, and his free hand dug lightly into her shoulder, her neck, the back of her head, not holding or directing her, but more proving to himself that she was really there.
Or maybe not. She didn't know, but in that moment all that mattered was that they were there together. She could ride the golden hum inside her, the one that made her feel powerful, reckless, and wicked as she ran her tongue along the thick, distended vein on the underside of his shaft, savoring the places where the texture of his skin changed, and where the touch of her tongue and hands could make him shudder.
"Natalie." He said her name like a prayer, the gritty tone sending new heat sizzling through her as he swept her up in his arms, lifting her and spinning so the warm stone wall pressed against her back and she was the one at the mercy of pleasure. He tongued her breasts, making her arch up against him with the unfamiliar rasp of a three-day beard and the exquisite familiarity of his touch.