Oracle's Moon (Elder Races #4)(45)

For the first time, she had worn shorts in public that day and simply ignored the sidelong looks people gave her scarred legs. The cool, moist cloth felt good on her overheated skin. She couldn’t twist her bad leg and lift it in the air to wash, nor could she balance her whole weight on it to lift the other leg, so she had to sit at one of the kitchen chairs when she washed her legs and feet. She rinsed and remoistened the cloth, sat down and—

Khalil’s tremendous hand came down gently over hers.

She froze. She didn’t blink or breathe, and she didn’t look up. She just stared at his hand as he eased the cloth out of her unresisting hold.

“You will allow me,” he said. Said, didn’t ask.

She would?

He knelt on one knee in front of her, an immaculate giant with his regal, severe expression still closed to scrutiny. She blinked as he took her bad leg and lifted it with care. He began passing the washcloth over her overheated skin, from midthigh, down very lightly over her knee to her calf.

“I saw you limping earlier,” he said. “You should have put on the brace.”

Lightning danced through her muscles. The washcloth felt cool and refreshing as he stroked it along the contours of her leg with a delicate sensitivity that surprised her. She could barely hold herself still. She managed to articulate, “I’m hot and cranky, and I didn’t want to wear it.”

“That was foolish,” he said.

“It was none of your business,” she said.

“Have you begun checking the babysitting roster yet?”

“I haven’t had time,” she said shortly. What did he think she was capable of, anyway? There were only so many hours in a day. Then she realized she had never told him what had happened in the back meadow. The realization felt odd, and it led her to another realization: just how very much she had begun to confide in him.

He didn’t seem to take offense at her tone. He merely nodded as he curled the washcloth around her bare ankle. Then a prince of the Djinn washed her foot, set down her leg gently and reached for the other, and she couldn’t stand it. She grabbed him by the wrist and told him, “Stop it.” Her voice sounded as raw and as graceless as the rest of her.

He stopped and looked at her. Kneeling as he was, their heads were at the same level. She fell into forever again as she looked in his diamond eyes. He looked stern, still rigidly contained and impossible to read. He said to her, his tone deliberately even, “We will play the truth game now, just one more time.”

Would they? She was getting tired of being told what to do. She said between her teeth, “I don’t hear you asking me.”

He leaned an elbow on his upraised knee, his crystalline gaze steady, ruthless. “I can always leave.”

Her mouth threatened to wobble. “Why do you want to play?”

“I would have this exchange balanced,” he said tersely.

She was bewildered. She didn’t understand why the concept of a balanced exchange was so important to him. Maybe it had something to do with control? Then she remembered what he had said before, about wishing for information and not wanting to be beholden to her for it. Her expression tightened.

Well, it wasn’t as if she had anything real to lose. She folded her arms and said, “No. We’re done with the truth game. Ask me what you want to ask me, and I’ll answer or not if I like. I’ll ask you anything I want, and you’ll answer or not if you like. No forfeit, no control, no balance. No more favors or deals or measuring shit. We’ll either have a real, messy conversation, or you can get the hell out.”

He grew angry. She could feel it shifting through his energy, slow and sulfurous like slow-moving lava.

She liked it. His anger felt satisfying. It meant he wasn’t indifferent to her. So she pushed him harder. “Go on, go.”

Ever since he had kissed her, Khalil had felt wrapped in invisible chains.

He had attended to his various duties with a surly attitude, snarling at anyone unfortunate enough to get in his way or to look at him strangely. He sat in on a Demonkind legislative committee hearing because it was his responsibility and he must, but he didn’t listen or participate. The committee chair put the subject to a vote, and Khalil looked around at the people with whom he most often shared a common point of view. He raised his hand when they did. Nobody remarked upon it, so he must not have voted for anything too out of character.

He left the legislature and let go of his physical form as soon as he was able to. Then he took to the winds. Releasing his physical form wasn’t as satisfying as he had thought it would be. Nothing he did that day was.

He could not seem to put enough distance between himself and thinking about Grace and the children. He wondered what they were doing that day. Finally, in exasperation, he chose to leave Earth altogether. He materialized into his physical form on the moon.

There was no sound, because the moon had no atmosphere. There was no wind, no air. The sun was a piercing roar of flame. The sun’s reflected light off the moon’s surface was silver white; fragile, unshielded human eyes would have been blinded by the radiance. It did not discomfort Khalil in any way, because his form was a focus. He did not need to breathe. He crossed his arms, staring at the milky green, blue and white ball that was Earth, while he soaked up the blast of inexhaustible energy from the sun.

The moon was as far as the Djinn could travel from Earth without traversing one of the many crossover passages that led to Other lands in other dimensions. Many theories had been put forth about the Other lands, but Khalil thought that the lands were, in the end, either shadows or mirrors, reflections or folds, of the Earth itself.