Natural Evil (Elder Races #4.5)(28)

That last time, they had managed to get to their feet. The sun had set but the light was not fully gone, and he’d finally kicked off the last of his clothes. He swiped the cards out of the way, bent her over the table and took her from behind.

He knew she was wrecked, exhausted. He had wrung every climax he could out of her, so that last time was pure, greedy selfishness on his part, an orgiastic wallow in her magnificent, athletic body. She just laughed as he plunged urgently into her. She reached behind, gripped him by the back of his neck and held on as he bit her shoulder, growled and twisted up in one final, exquisite spasm.

Afterward, he stood at the counter, still nude, and ate a lukewarm dinner, while she sat at the table and collected the scattered cards with slow, tired movements. She had grabbed a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around her torso. Her hair was tangled and she had bite marks down her neck.

He stared at the marks he had made. He’d really gone to town, marking her, and she had egged him on. She had marked him too, and he had loved her ferocity. It was the only time he had ever been frustrated with his own rapid healing, because he wanted to wear every single scratch she had given him.

Gods, he couldn’t wait until they made love again. When Wyr mated, they did so for life, and the mating period was a bit frenzied for a couple of months.

She haphazardly stacked the cards together and set the deck aside.

“I don’t know if I got them all,” she said, her voice blurred with tiredness. “I don’t think I can count right now.”

“We can check later.” He put the other two meals in the fridge.

She put her head in her hands. “Luis, I’m still leaving in the morning.”

He walked over to the table as he thought of how to answer. “I know. Let’s go to bed.”

He happened to glance down at the Tarot deck as he spoke. Inanna, the goddess of Love, lay at the top of the deck. The hand painted card was quite stunning, actually. Inanna was a golden woman, and seven lions pulled her chariot.

He tapped the card. Yeah, there was a reason why the goddess was so fierce and surrounded by lions. Sometimes love was a dance, and maybe sometimes, for some people, it was hearts and flowers.

Occasionally it was an all-or-nothing battle.

He figured things might get downright tricky for a little while. He didn’t need the message from the Tarot spread he had laid out earlier; he already knew he was at a crossroads.

He still had time. He could pull away from Claudia. He didn’t have to mate irrevocably with her.

But if there was anyone in this wide, wicked world who deserved the kind of devotion he had to give, it was her. He might have to leverage and scheme, but he would do his goddamn best to convince her of that. And well, damn it, once you started walking a warrior’s path, you pretty much had to accept that you ran the risk of living a short life.

They would burn each other up. They would burn too fast. But they would burn brightly.

You gonna help me out any here? he asked the goddess. He supposed it was a prayer of sorts. Inanna smiled out of the card and said nothing.

He followed Claudia to the bed alcove and curled his body around hers. She turned her face into his shoulder and fell asleep immediately, while he held her for the rest of the night.

Things were going to get interesting in the morning.

Early the next morning, Luis left.

“Good-bye,” Claudia said gently when she kissed him.

His expression set, he returned her kiss, hard, and said nothing.

She refused to let that hurt her feelings. Once Luis was gone, she ate part of her meat loaf dinner for breakfast and threw the rest away. Then she straightened the trailer one last time. She did count the cards in the Tarot deck to make sure she’d found them all. On impulse, she shuffled them and flipped over the first seven. Not a single one of the Major Arcana showed up.

Somehow that didn’t surprise her. She stacked the cards in their box, threw the box in the bag on top of the paperbacks again, and set the bag in her back seat. Much later, she distinctly remembered that, when she looked for the deck in every nook and cranny of the car but couldn’t find it.

When she was done packing up the car, she went to hug Jackson good-bye. He gave her a rib bruising in return. “You better not disappear for good,” he said.

“I’ll call you next week,” she said. “And I’ll come back to visit late summer.”

He sucked a tooth and grumbled. “That’s all right, then.”

As she pulled away from the house, her heart emptied until she felt hollow and light as air.

A dusty Jeep pulled up behind her as she drove down the street, and when she saw it in her rearview mirror, suddenly she was full up again and twisted with riotous emotion.

Damn it, what was Luis up to?

He followed her sedately through town. The Jeep turned into a parking space at the gas station/fast-food joint/casino, while she pulled up to a pump.

Her jaw angled out. She decided to ignore him, as she went about the business of filling up her gas tank.

A full Greyhound bus pulled into the parking lot. She gritted her teeth and watched with resignation as the occupants disembarked and headed indoors. There were several small family units, a few retirees, a couple of Light Fae teenagers, and a young medusa wearing goth makeup, with her short, slim head snakes wrapped for travel.

So much for short lines and a quick getaway. Claudia wasn’t about to head into the desert without at least a couple bottles of water in the car, even if she was traveling on a major highway. After filling her tank, she sucked it up and went inside to the Food Mart.