Three Trials (The Dark Side Book 2)(39)

I give him the winning words, and start perusing his store as he dials three different people, cursing them for not answering. I strain to listen, making sure he’s not calling someone else to come take away the crazy naked girl burning holes in his shop floor.

“Yeah?” a hoarse voice asks, sounding very unhappy to be answering the phone. The word is so gravelly, I’m not sure whose voice it is.

“Got a pretty little naked girl here looking for you,” Harold tells him.

Hmm…that might work too.

“Don’t give a fuck,” the familiar voice of Gage says with a little more definition in his tone.

Harold glances over at me, and I give him the get-on-with-it look.

“Comoara tr?d?toare, is what she says—”

His words are cut off, when Gage is suddenly in the room and throwing him up against the wall with his hand clutching Harold’s throat. Harold’s eyes widen in horror, as the phone slips from his hand and he struggles to pull Gage’s hand away.

“Where’d you hear that phrase?” he growls, putting his face right in front of Harold.

“From the treacherous treasure herself, of course,” I drawl, wiggling my fingers at him.

Harold collapses in a heap as he heaves for air, while Gage turns a black-eyed murderous glare on me, his lip snarling as he moves toward me in a less-than-ideal manner.

He looks pissed instead of apologetic for having buried me.

In a blink, his hand is suddenly on my throat as he tosses me against the wall and starts strangling me. “Who the fuck are you?” he snaps.

I shove his chest so hard he’s launched across the room, hitting the wall with so much force that he bounces to the ground beside Harold.

Harold grabs his abandoned sword, racing toward me, but a renewed sense of energy is swirling through me after having felt Gage’s touch. I sling him across the room without even touching him.

That sword clatters across the ground, and Gage grabs it, his eyes on me as he slowly stands, weapon in hand.

“Have you lost your damn mind?” I shout. “How long did I have to be dead before you assholes forgot me?!”

I see just a spark of hesitation.

“You have a handful of seconds to drop that sword before I sling you like sleeping Harold,” I warn him, gesturing at Harold, who is unconscious. “I would rather be hanging on the side of a mountain or plummeting from a fiery lake than be so near a sword. Neither of the first two ever actually killed me. And I hate waking up trapped in boxes now too, by the way. Quit piling on.”

The sword clatters to the ground, and he staggers back like he’s seeing a ghost. Speaking of…

I change to phantom form easier, but it’s still a strain to hold it. Sensing them still proves difficult as well.

“Where’d she go?” Harold groans from the floor, looking around.

Gage continues to stare at me with a stupefied expression. “Keyla?” he asks as though he’s scared to say the fake name aloud.

“I already told Jude I desperately need a new, more badass name. Now I’m certain. Not even Keyla could have just climbed out of a grave without freaking out.”

The second I go whole, Gage is suddenly blurring to me again, and just as I’m about to defend myself, I stop. Because his lips land on mine, and he pulls me to him in a crushing embrace as he kisses me stupid.

“I’ve been alive too long,” Harold grumbles from somewhere nearby.

Gage’s hold is a little painful against my still bruised and battered body, and I break the kiss. But he immediately starts kissing me harder, even as the wall behind us starts to catch fire.

A loud whooshing mixed with something high pitched forces us to break apart as Harold goes to using a fire extinguisher on us and the wall. An alarm wails over our heads as though we can’t see the fire and need to be squealed at by the infernal contraption.

Still crabby.

“What the fuck?” Gage roars.

“She’s going to burn the whole place down. Get her the hell out of here.”

Gage snatches me at the waist, and we’re gone in a dizzying instant.

His lips are back on mine in the next, and we’re backing up against a familiar feeling kitchen island. That also starts burning against my skin.

He rips me away from it, staring at it like he’s confused, and I leap onto him, since his clothes are already falling into ashy heaps. The rest of him is clearly fireproof, which is the important part.

Then again, I never questioned if I could hurt him. It’s like I knew I couldn’t.

“What’s going on?” he asks on a rasp whisper, even as I cling to him like a spider monkey. “Am I mad?”

“Mad like crazy or mad like angry? Because I was thinking a little of both, since you threw me against a wall. What the actual hell?”

My legs tighten around his waist, and my arms tighten around his neck, as he reaches up and cups both sides of my face.

“You’re fucking dead,” he finally says, as though he’s trying to convince both of us of this. “And never recycled.”

I push away from his hands and start rubbing my cheek against his like a cat starving for affection, because the pain seems to lessen the longer he’s touching me, or maybe he’s just that distracting.

“I gathered as much when I woke up in a damn coffin,” I tell him, still rather unhappy about that. “You could have at least buried me in the backyard so I could find my way home. Or just let me keep the west wing of the house.”