Alterant (Belador #2)(71)

Kizira crossed the room, her body appearing to flex and reshape as though she’d been caught in one of those warped circus mirrors. She moved silently, but her usual intense glow had dimmed to almost nothing.

He asked, “Why aren’t you glowing?”

“You obviously have a volcanic headache, and as I recall, light hurts your eyes.” The powder blue gown poured down her body, hugging curves and falling to her ankles. Her flame red hair—now a soft brunette—hung in a long braid over her left shoulder, falling past her breasts.

Beautiful breasts when she’d been naked.

He closed his eyes and indulged a moment of self-loathing at his mental track.

She’d stand out among all the women in contemporary clothes stalking around Buckhead outside his hotel because Kizira was like no other woman.

And she was his enemy.

He needed to keep that thought forced between the erotic images determined to crowd his mind.

The mattress depressed next to him when she climbed on.

“Kizira,” he warned. He didn’t want to use any kinetic power on her and frankly didn’t know if he had it in him to raise a decent defense. Had to keep his energy focused on locking down the walls of his mind.

The ice pack disappeared from his head. The pounding kicked his skull. He released a noise that sounded pitiful to his ears.

Her cool palm covered his forehead.

He tensed, then groaned out a sigh of relief at the instant change from brutal pain to just a splitting headache. “Go, Kizira.”

She hushed him. “Shh. Let me help you while I’m here.”

Bad idea. But bloody hell, only a fool would refuse her help, especially when he needed to get back on his feet for Tzader and Evalle.

He’d let her do her majik, then he’d thank her and send her on her way.

“Do you miss me?” she asked again. Her words came to him soft as a caress, calling to him as dangerously as the sirens who lured sailors to their deaths. But he’d been the one who’d allowed disaster to happen last time.

Too young to think past the need to have her when she’d given herself so easily to him.

Not this time.

“Quinn?” She said his name as though no one had that name but him. “I’m asking a simple question. It’s just me and you.”

Why did her words sound like music? She wasn’t singing.

Should he tell her he thought of her only twice a day?

When he was sleeping and awake.

That he’d never touched anything as soft as her skin since parting ways or that he still remembered the way sunshine had come through the open window of the mountain hut and shimmered around her when she’d leaned over to kiss him?

He should lie, but he couldn’t bring himself to hurt her, when she was easing his pain. “Yes, I miss you, but that doesn’t change . . . a simple fact. I’m Belador and you’re Medb.” Sworn enemies. “You should hate me. I should never have taken advantage of you.”

She kept soothing his head with her hand and laughed. The sound came and went as though fading in and out. “I was fully a woman when I met you.”

“You were eighteen. I was older than you—”

“By two years only.”

“—and should have kept my hands off.”

She placed a kiss on his head, and gentle coolness spread across his forehead, dropping the headache to a moderate ache. He relaxed his shoulders for the first time in hours.

Kizira chided him in a cheerful voice. “Your memory must be failing, and such a shame to age so poorly at thirty-three.”

He smiled at her jab. Some worry pressed at his mind . . . something he’d just had a grip on a moment ago.

Whispering in his ear, she told him, “I recall when we met that you fell to my charms, not the other way around.”

“So you used majik on me then?” He couldn’t recall, but he should. His memories bumped into each other in a confusing tangle.

“Only my personal charms,” she assured him. “Now you wish me to think that only worked because you were so badly injured?”

Pieces of the memory poked at him.

He’d been alone on patrol in the mountains surrounding Chechnya and found a village destroyed by Medb warlocks. When he heard the scream of a woman being attacked, he intervened only to be captured by three warlocks who turned Noirre majik on Quinn before he’d been able to engage his mind-locking powers. He hadn’t developed the skill much at that point. They beat him to his knees.

Then two warlocks had held him in place for the other one to torture so they could peel his mind open.

Quinn hadn’t known at the time that the woman he’d saved, Kizira, was a Medb who had just been given her first task on her way to becoming a priestess. She was to capture a Belador and bring the warrior to her queen. A dangerous task for any eighteen-year-old woman, but Kizira had never been an average young girl.

She’d told him later that no warrior who fought so honorably should die by torture. So she’d interfered with the three warlocks, forcing them to stop hurting Quinn.

That had been a grave error on her part. The warlocks had been trained to kill any traitor in the Medb, no matter who.

To interfere with their handling of a Belador had sealed her fate without judge or jury.

They’d dropped Quinn in a heap of torn flesh and broken bones to turn on Kizira as one.