Shadow Blade (23 page)

Khefar knew Kira Solomon was not weak. But he wondered how—
if
—she remained truly sane.

Chapter 19

H
e
felt .
 . . wonderful.

Kira shuddered as her fingertips slid over Khefar’s exposed skin. Her hands burned, but not because of her power. No, a different sort of heat infused her, a heat she felt might consume her from within.

His skin was amazing, the finest dark mahogany, stretched tight over his muscles. A scattering of wiry hair tickled her fingertips, contrasting the silk of his skin, the hardness of his physique.
The body of a warrior, lethal artistry.
Such power and grace contained by muscle and bone and skin. She could feel his heart pounding beneath her fingertips, strong and sure and constant, not stuttering and struggling as she drained his essence.

Memories tangled with the present: the warm feel of a man’s body thrumming with life beneath her.
Sliding her hands across skin with greedy abandon, reveling in the sensations, the pure, basic drive to touch another living person, to be wrapped completely in another.

She wanted him to stop her. He’d have to be the one to stop this because she couldn’t. Not with all that beautiful skin beneath her just waiting to be touched, to be explored and discovered. The padded floor of a workout room was neither the time nor the place to be thinking such thoughts, though she had no idea if there ever could be a right time and place.

Khefar swallowed thickly when she shifted backward to stroke lower across his chest. “Whatever you do, do not tell the spider how easily you pinned me. I’ll never live it down.”

Kira laughed. She knew what he was doing and appreciated it. Khefar was, she
realized,
a gentleman as well as a warrior. She rolled off of him and stood. “You knocked me on my back twice. I think you’re still ahead.”

She held out a hand to help him up. He locked his hand around her forearm as she pulled him to his feet. She dropped her gaze. She didn’t know why, but being upright with him so close seemed more intimate than pinning him to the floor. “Thank you, for letting me
do
that.”

“You’re welcome.” He held on when she started to move away. “When was the last time you touched someone, Kira?”

She felt her smile freeze. “Does pinning you to the floor or wrestling with a seeker demon count?”

“You know I’m not talking about dusting hybrids or Shadow Avatars,” he said.
“How long has it been since you touched another being—human or not—without the intent to subdue them?”

She broke free,
then
crossed to her gym bag, her movements jerky as she pulled the band from her hair. “Why?”

“How long?”

“Six years,” she
whispered,
her voice flat with the effort to repress her emotion. “Six years, four months, and sixteen days.”

The significance of the tally wasn’t lost on him.
“A family member?”

She shook her head in denial, braids swinging free. “Nico was more than
family
. He was my teacher, my first handler. And for one weekend in Venice, he was my lover.”

“Was?”

Pain, unmuted by time, welled within her. “He was killed by a Shadow Adept while all I could do was
scream
and try to hold his chest closed.”

“Kira, I’m sorry—”

“No, if you want to know the story, I’ll tell you.” Her eyes briefly met his,
then
she looked past him. If she didn’t look at him, she could tell the story. She needed to tell the story if only to remind herself why something like the time with Nico could never happen again. “I wasn’t supposed to be in Venice. We disobeyed a direct order from the Balm of Gilead, but I was nineteen, continually headstrong, and in love with my handler. Nico said he’d found a way for my powers to be temporarily blocked, and I jumped at the chance. I didn’t think about the costs, the ramifications, the consequences. All I cared about was that for once, for a little while, I could see what it was like to be normal.”

She shoved her belongings into the bag, still not looking at him. “We had three days.
Three amazing beautiful days in the most romantic city on the planet.
And then one night we were attacked. I still don’t know why they didn’t kill me, why they chose to attack him instead. But they did, and I couldn’t do anything to stop them.”

She zipped the bag shut. “The awful thing is
,
I still can’t, to this day, say that I would do anything differently. I wish Nico didn’t have to give his life to teach me that lesson, but that’s the only thing I know for sure I’d want different.”

“What lesson do you think you were taught that day?”

“That some people aren’t meant to have normal lives. Some people aren’t meant to have what everyone else has or could have. Some of us are meant to be in this world, but not really and truly be a part of it. So I gave up those wishes and concentrated on others.”

“What do you wish for now?”

She didn’t hesitate.
“To be good at my job, at both jobs.
To protect those who don’t even know they need protecting. To try to keep people who know me from being killed because of me.” She pulled on her gloves. “And sometimes I wish I could stop wishing for more than that.”

He looked stricken, as if he’d regretted pushing her for answers. She didn’t want his pity. Yeah, maybe he understood what she was going through, but their paths weren’t the same. He’d been alive for four millennia so he could repay his crimes, but that didn’t compare to being unable to ever touch another human being, to know that your touch could hurt or kill. She was being punished, cruelly punished, and she hadn’t committed any crimes. No one in the world would look at Kira’s life and not think her cursed. What else could not being able to touch anyone, ever, be?

But she could touch him. She could touch him and neither one of them would hurt.

He stepped toward her. “Kira, why don’t—”

She stepped back, something close to panic suddenly pounding in her chest. “I’m going to go take a shower. I’ll,
um,
I’ll meet you out front in about twenty minutes, okay?”

“Okay.”

She ran. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was running away from.

Instead of heading for the showers, Kira headed for the loaner SUV. She wasn’t running away. Shadowchasers didn’t run. No, she just needed a little space. Maybe, she thought as she stalked toward the parking lot, a drive would clear her
head,
ease the crazy pounding of her heart. Maybe it would keep her from wondering what the Nubian had been about to ask her.

Goddess, he’d felt nice.
All that beautiful mahogany skin, so smooth and silky over his muscles and veins.
How wonderful to feel the steady rhythm of his heart beneath her palm. And he’d been willing to let her touch him as much as she wanted.
Which was a lot.

She still didn’t understand why she could touch him. Was it because he was more than four thousand years old? Was it because he was sort of immortal?

Did it matter why? She could touch him. He would have let her keep touching him. Maybe even—
She
shook her head. She wasn’t sure if she was ready for anything like that, whatever
that
was. It was enough to have a physical connection to someone, skin to skin contact, that didn’t end with him slumping unconscious to the floor.

It wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t know exactly what she was missing. Six years ago she’d been young and stupid and eager, blithely confident in her ability to control her world. Nico had given her everything she could have wanted—except forever.

Khefar had forever.

She shook her head. No, she reminded herself, Khefar had a mission. Save a life for every life he’d taken, then move on. With two lives to go, he wouldn’t be around much longer. Then again, as a Shadowchaser, she had a short shelf life herself. Her line of work almost guaranteed she wouldn’t be around long either.

Wynne’s words echoed through her mind. She was a healthy twenty-five-year-old, nearly twenty-six. She did have needs, needs that she’d suppressed for more than six years. No matter how normal she wanted to be, she didn’t want a traditional relationship even if she could have had it. Khefar seemed like the answer to prayers she didn’t even know she’d petitioned for, at least for right now.

Her new Gilead-provided cell phone
buzzed,
a most welcome distraction. She stopped and dug it out from the side pocket of her gym bag.
“Solomon here.”

“Chaser Solomon, I have a message from Logistics.”

Kira immediately tensed. The sweepers must have found something.
Finally.
“Tell
me.
”

“We’re showing elevated levels of Chaos energy near the
Fulton
County
Airport
. It seems to be fluctuating but it’s not changing location.”

“Good. Send me the details.” She had a passing acquaintance with that area of Atlanta, west of the city proper. It was mainly an industrial area thick with tractor trailers and large warehouses interspersed with budget motels that became a ghost town after dark.
Perfect place for an Avatar to set up shop and not be noticed.

“Transmitting.”
The operator paused. “The sweepers tell me there is a special response team on site. How do you wish to proceed?”

“What?” Kira kicked her pace up to a jog, her talk with Khefar all but forgotten. “Instruct the team to withdraw immediately. Under no circumstances are they to engage. I repeat: do not engage.”

“Understood.”
The operator paused,
then
broke protocol with a whispered curse. “We’ve lost contact with the team. Standard procedure requires us to dispatch backup.”

“I
am
your backup.” What the hell was Sanchez thinking, sending a special response team to confront an Avatar? Even if the section chief had a Level Five Light Adept on call, they were no match for an Avatar fully charged with Shadow magic.

“I’m on my way.” Kira broke into a run. “Do your best to re-establish contact and pull the team out. And do not under any circumstances think of sending anyone else.”

She disconnected, then climbed into the SUV, and keyed it to life.

As she pulled out of the parking lot, the Shadowchaser calculated how much time driving from the Carlos to the west side of Atlanta would take, time the SRT probably didn’t have.

Evening slid into night as she schemed and planned her way toward the highway. She almost circled back for the Nubian,
then
decided against it. With all they’d left up in the
air .
 . . she had to focus, to prepare for what lay ahead. She didn’t want emotions and confusion to distract her concentration. Kira had
work
to do. Work she’d always managed solo.

Even if she didn’t work alone, she couldn’t take Khefar with her on this mission. He was a target. Or rather, his blade was. Kira knew he’d be angry at her when he figured out she’d taken off without him and it would definitely erode the rapport they’d developed over the past two days—well, up until her messy confession anyway. While she admitted they probably could work well enough together to take down the Avatar, it wasn’t worth the risk of losing the Dagger of Kheferatum to Shadow.

She whispered a prayer of thanks that Atlanta’s notorious traffic had thinned enough for her to cruise above the speed limit. She checked the GPS as she took the off-ramp. She was roughly another mile away. No further calls from Gilead meant they still hadn’t heard back from the special response team. Did they abort but were unable to radio in? Had they been captured? Taken out
themselves
? She had to hope that they’d extracted themselves but needed to maintain radio silence until they entered a safe zone. She didn’t want anyone else to die. Not if she could help it.

Extinguishing the vehicle lights, she turned off the main road into a parking lot the Gilead-programmed GPS indicated,
then
killed the engine. There was no sign of the Gilead team or their vehicle. She dialed up her extrasense, allowing it to slowly spread outward. Nothing,
nothing .
 . .
there.
Something from the southeast corner of the building, near the loading dock, a steady yellow glow.

She slipped out of the SUV, drew her Lightblade. Not a seeker demon. If it had been, she’d be fighting it already. It had to be the Avatar. He was inside, just past the loading dock, waiting for her.

Apprehension raised the hairs on the back of her neck. It was a trap, with the Avatar using himself as irresistible bait. Kira knew it and the Avatar probably knew she knew. The perfect lure and all he had to do was wait to see what she’d do next.

Leaving wasn’t an option, especially since she didn’t know if the Gilead team had safely retreated. The only person she’d dare call as backup was the one person who shouldn’t come. Kira had no choice but to engage the enemy alone.

She advanced slowly, her blade and the Glock at the ready. Just because it was a trap didn’t mean she had to rush headlong into it. Her goal was to get in and back out as close to unscathed as possible.

Something whizzed by her ear. Not a bullet; she knew those sounds. Georgia had some giant flying insects, but none that flew that
quick
—

Sharp stinging pain blossomed in her neck. Kira had only a moment to realize that it wasn’t a mosquito, but a dart.
Stupid, stupid, to be so careless.
Her extrasense flared, responding to the presence of the potent toxin. She pulled the dart out of her neck, tried to focus on it in the deepening dark that invaded her.
Since when did Shadowlings use high-tech darts to neutralize people?

Her heart pounded loud and slow, the bass beat filling her ears. The Glock fell from her grip, the sound of it clattering to the asphalt echoing through her brain. Despite the paralysis sweeping through her, she still held on to her Lightblade, even though the sudden weight of it made it impossible to lift.