Natural Evil

  His pain reached her again. She had to swallow because a lump had grown in her throat. If she could just get some time alone, she might be able to find a way to insulate herself from shit like this.

  He still gripped her shoulders hard. She put her hands over his, her palms sliding over their wide, corded strength. “I wish you could have seen it too,” she said. “Right now, though, you need to explain to me what’s going on. It has something to do with the mine, doesn’t it?”

  That snapped his gaze back to the present.

  He said, “Yes.”

  A quick rap sounded at the door, then it opened and Jackson stepped in, carrying a bundle of clothes. “I dunno, Precious,” Jackson said. “I guess you might be able to find something in this to tide you over for the night. Do you still need the keys to my truck?”

  A sudden twinkle lit Claudia’s green gaze, and Luis bit back a grin. Reluctant to break the connection with her, he didn’t look away, nor did he release his hold. He said, “My name is Luis Alvaraz. Now that Claudia is back safe, apparently the transportation issue is no longer quite so urgent.”

  “Huh,” said Jackson. “Well, that’s got to be a good thing, right?”

  “Yes, it is,” Luis said. “For the moment.”

  Then he had to give in to the inevitable as Claudia pulled gently out of his hold. She said to Jackson, “I still want you to leave for Fresno, as quickly as possible. Would you do that, please?”

  Jackson nodded thoughtfully. “Guess we no longer need that all-night poker game, do we?”

  “No,” Luis said. He accepted the bundle of clothes from the older male and looked through them. He added, “Please tell Stewart that I will make sure his clinic is reimbursed for the healing potions.”

  “Will do,” Jackson said, and he paused. “You ever gonna tell me what’s going on?”

  “There’s trouble with the mine,” Luis said. He glanced at Claudia and fell silent.

  Jackson poked his tongue in his cheek, and looked back and forth between the two of them. Then he sighed. “All right, I’ll leave, but only if you promise to tell me the whole story sometime.”

  “I promise.” Luis offered his hand and said gravely, “I owe you more than I can repay.”

  Jackson shook his hand. “So that means I can sock you with your own vet bill?”

  He grinned. “I expect you to.”

  Then Jackson and Claudia looked at each other. Jackson’s voice turned gruff. “You’re not gonna just disappear when my back is turned, are you?”

  She shook her head, her eyes smiling. “I owe you too, at least a few Heinekens. Maybe even a diner dinner.”

  “Right,” Jackson said. He heaved a sigh as he looked around the trailer. “Don’t bother to lock up when you leave. I keep hoping somebody’ll steal that old TV.”

  Chapter Six

  Death

  Claudia followed Jackson to the door. Luis turned away, giving the other two their moment alone. He shook out a pair of faded blue sweatpants, held them against his waist and considered the length. They ended mid-calf.

  The door opened and closed. Then Claudia expelled a soft gust of air, and he knew without looking that she was laughing. “You’re going to look like the Incredible Hulk.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Give me those,” she said. “I’ll hack off the elasticated hem.”

  He handed them over and inspected the T-shirts in the bundle. They were all too small for the width of his shoulders. He gave up on the clothes, tossed them aside, and went to raid the fridge for the beef dinner. Suddenly he was ravenous. He didn’t bother to heat the meal in the microwave. He found a fork and started shoveling food in his mouth.

  Claudia remained silent. Without looking at her directly, he was aware of everything she did, every breath she took. She picked up the blankets from the floor, folded them and set them in the shadowed alcove on the bed. Then she rolled up her sleeping bag. She didn’t waste anything, not a single motion in anything she did or a single word urging him to explain. She waited for him to speak in his own time and every spare, fluid movement she made was pure poetry.

  Fuck, his whole body tightened at the sight. He wanted her more badly than he had wanted anyone or anything before in his life, and to be frank, up until this point, he had been a promiscuous bastard. Desire was a fire dancing underneath his skin.

  All too soon the dinner was gone. He used the last of the rolls to sop up the cold gravy and gazed at the empty container. Then Claudia spoke, sounding amused, “There’s more food in the fridge. Eat anything you want. Eat everything.”

  He gave her a grateful look and dove into the fridge to polish off all the lunch meat, a half loaf of bread and several individual containers of yogurt. He ate quickly, to fuel his taxed body rather than for enjoyment. He was just finishing the last container of yogurt when he heard an odd noise, and he remembered he had heard it earlier as well.

  Shuffle, flip.

  He looked at Claudia, sitting at the table on the end of the L-shaped couch. She had finished hacking off the elasticated hems of the sweatpants and set the pants on the table. Now she was shuffling a deck of cards. She flipped over the first seven cards, scooped them up, reshuffled the deck and flipped over the top seven cards again. The deck gave off a faint glow of Power.

  Intrigued, he walked over to her, and his reaction to her proximity was so strong, his cock stiffened and began to tent the sheet. Quickly he snatched up the sweatpants and held them in a casual way so that they draped in front of his groin.

  Claudia looked up. He noted with deep satisfaction that she glanced at his bare chest and averted her gaze quickly. She had so much innate poise that any slight, telltale sign of reaction she had was as loud to him as a shout, and her clean scent, still with that hint of gun oil, now carried dusky notes of sexual attraction.

  He loved it. He loved her. The carved, sensual maturity of her features was totally unlike the girlish, rounded faces of the young women he had known. She was so far beyond anyone he had ever been involved with, complex and nuanced, sleek as a bullet and just as dangerous. He’d had no idea that someone could embody everything he admired and also capture every ounce of his desire, until she had.

  He knew without being conceited that nature had been prodigious in its gifts to him. He had more than his fair share of looks, physical and intellectual strengths, and abilities. Until now he had cruised through life at half-throttle. He played at dating and wallowed in sex, and it all came too easily for him.

  It was all too simple, until he encountered Claudia. Now something that had been curled tight inside of him and asleep his whole life awoke, and expanded, and said, Now there’s a challenge worth striving for.

  And hell’s bells, his body was out of control. He could not get his flag to fly at anything below half-mast.

  He felt the sudden urge to growl, bend over and kiss her lavishly. He wanted to fling all the rest of the world’s considerations away. He wondered what she would do if he did, if she would kiss him back or push him away… Man, he had to grab at the nonsense galloping around in his head and rein it in hard.

  Because the rest of the world’s considerations mattered, so much so he had shed blood and nearly lost his life over them.

  Her attention had turned back to what she was doing. He watched her deal out the first seven cards from the top of the deck, and he recognized the god on each card as she turned it over. Nadir, Camael, Hyperion, Taliesin, Will, Azrael, and Inanna. The Depths, the Hearth, Law, the Dance, the Sacrifice, Death, and Love.

  Then she scooped them up, shuffled the deck—really shuffled it, he saw—and flipped over the first seven cards, and all the gods appeared again.

  Well, damn.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, growing fascinated, despite his runaway hormones.

  She said, “I’m giving my hands something to do until you’re ready to talk.” Was her voice a touch huskier as she replied?

  He could give her hands someth
ing to do. It almost fell out of his mouth. Somebody should hit him.

  He gestured to the cards laid out on the table. “How are you doing that?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. The cards have been doing that ever since someone in New York gave them to me.”

  He held his palm a few inches over hers as she handled the cards. Warm, aged Power pressed gently against his palm. “These are old,” he said. “Really old. How long have you had them?”

  “Since January. Some strange woman stopped me in the street, told me the cards wanted to come to me and pushed the box into my hands.”

  “Objects of Power often have wills of their own, and they influence the world in ways we don’t understand,” he said. She frowned, clearly not liking that thought. He asked, “What happened to the woman who gave them to you?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. That was the last I saw of her, and the cards have been doing this ever since. I found a discussion about it in an online forum. The general opinion was that it meant upcoming events would have ‘life-altering significance’. I feel like the cards are shouting at me, only I have no idea what they’re saying.”

  Life-altering significance. Yeah, he could agree with that, but for all seven of the Major Arcana to keep showing up repeatedly, he was pretty sure the significance was about much more than one person.

  Somehow she had ended up in Nirvana at exactly the right time to save his life. As an old object of Power, the deck might be exerting influence on the world in ways that had nothing to do with her understanding what the cards might be trying to tell her. He had heard sacred stories of items that the gods threw into the world to enact their will. The Machinae, they were called. The machines.

  But those were legends. As far as he could tell, this was just a deck of cards.

  “When we have time, I’ll do a real reading for you,” he told her.

  Her head snapped up. “You know how to read the Tarot?”

  “I’m not as good as my grandmother. She’s a bruja,” he said. At her blank expression, he added, “A witch. She lives in New Mexico. I learned what I know from her, since she raised me.” Talk about nature’s prodigious gifts. He hadn’t even grown up poor. A competent bruja made good money, and his grandmother lived in a stylish three-bedroom ranch in a suburb of Albuquerque. She’d paid all of his college tuition and even indulged his serious obsession with snowboarding.

  Claudia set aside the cards, ran her fingers through her sleek, pale hair and massaged the back of her head in a tired-looking gesture. “So what are you doing getting shot and beat up in Nevada, Precious?”

  Arousal pulsed again as he watched her, and his unruly penis stiffened further. He wanted to push her hands away and take over the massage, to soothe away that tiredness until she turned to him with as much desire as he felt. He wanted any damn excuse to put his hands on her again. Fuck. He pivoted and stalked down the miniscule hall toward the bed alcove until he was out of her sight.

  “I’m a Peacekeeper with the Elder tribunal,” he said. He snapped the sheet from around his waist, wadded it and threw it hard at the bed.

  “You’re with the Elder tribunal police force? That’s an elite posting.”

  For crying out loud, his cock jumped just at the sound of her voice. “I’m not a senior officer. This was supposed to be a minor assignment.”

  “Involving the mine.”

  He palmed his erection, thought of her sitting just a few steps away, and his hand might have slipped a little so that he stroked himself once or three times.

  Yeah, he was pretty sure that masturbating as he talked with her while she was unaware of it was sixteen ways to wrong. Which also had abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with the greater issues at hand. As it were. He turned and let his body fall forward until his forehead hit the wall with an audible thunk.

  Claudia said, “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “I need to splash off some of this antiseptic smell. I’ll be just a sec.”

  He sidled into the Lilliputian-sized bathroom, flipped on the cold water and stepped into the shower. The shock of frigid spray was like a slap in the gut, and just what he needed. After ninety seconds and a swipe or two with the soap, he stepped out, toweled off and yanked on the sweatpants. They were tight all over, stretching across his thighs and buttocks, and they were extremely snug across his pelvis, but at least they provided a minimal kind of covering.

  This time when he strode back into the living area, Claudia’s gaze fell lower than his bare chest. For the briefest moment she looked stricken again. He could have sworn a touch of color washed over her cheeks.

  Do not, he said sternly to his cock.

  For a wonder, this time his cock listened to him.

  She bent her head and rubbed the back of her neck. Then she looked at him from underneath her brows, and her gaze was steady and level. Damn, this woman had emotional ballast. Was he going to find everything about her a crazy kind of hot?

  “Luis, we need to talk about the invisible elephant in the trailer, because there isn’t room for it here,” she said.

  That sounded like it might be a prologue to a brush-off. He wasn’t sure, since he hadn’t ever been on the receiving end of a brush-off before. He decided he wasn’t going to be on the receiving end of one this time either, and he went on the offensive.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m insanely attracted to you, but we don’t have time and it isn’t appropriate right now.”

  He had surprised her. Her sleek eyebrows rose. “No, it isn’t.”

  “Since we have more important things to think about, we should shelve this as a topic of conversation.” Unable to resist touching her again, he laid a hand on her shoulder. She turned her head and looked at his hand, then up at him. As her gaze came up, his head swooped down, and he kissed that clever, strong woman. As he did so, he poured every ounce of his hunger into it. His mouth did a quick recon as he learned the touch and shape of her lips. He could feel the shock of his touch jolt through her body. Her lips moved under his, either to cuss him out or kiss him back, and walking that line was so damned hot. He pulled back a fraction, breathing hard, and said huskily, “So we’ll talk about this later.”

  Dusky color darkened her fine-grained skin. “Luis,” she said, very low, in a warning he would be all too pleased to ignore, and wouldn’t it be a fine thing if she turned out to be more than he could handle, if she could make him stretch and reach farther than he had ever reached before.

  “Now to get back to the subject at hand,” he said.

  There was that hand again. Seriously, someone should hit him hard.

  But even though all of his instincts were driving him forward, he forced himself to straighten and pull back.

  Because he didn’t actually believe they had until dawn.

  If someone had asked her at breakfast what her day was going to be like, her answer would have been far different from how it had turned out so far. She contemplated Luis thoughtfully while her lips burned from that smoldering kiss. He had pulled away before she could overcome the shock of it, and the shock wasn’t just that he had kissed her. Her own forceful reaction sent her reeling inwardly.

  What to do. She could pack up her car and leave. She didn’t have to have answers. Her unit hardly ever got a big-picture explanation when they were sent on assignment. Information had always been on a need-to-know basis.

  Car doors slammed outside, and the house lights darkened. One final engine started, a vehicle pulled out of the driveway, and Jackson was well on his way.

  She could leave now. Jackson would be fine after a visit in Fresno, and Luis was remarkably better. He was actually on his feet again.

  On his bare feet. The material from the aged sweatpants strained over every single muscle and bulge from his waist downward, and the thick biceps in his arms bunched as he crossed his arms over a wide, bare chest. He had retreated until he leaned back against the counter, watching her intently.

&nbs
p; “Tell me why I shouldn’t leave now,” she said.

  He said immediately, “Because I need you.”

  Hell, she knew that. He had no weapon, and she wasn’t giving him hers. Damn it, the man wasn’t even decently dressed and it had to be thirty degrees outside. But it wasn’t what he said. It was how he said it, while he watched her like a hungry wolf.

  “Fine,” she snapped. “But if you don’t tell me what’s going on with that mine in the next five minutes, I’ll shoot you myself.”

  A white grin slashed across his handsome face. It disappeared almost at once.

  “The Nirvana Silver Mining Company has been in operation for almost a hundred and sixty years,” he said. “It’s been owned by the Bradshaw family that entire time. I won’t bore you with how complicated and time-consuming it can be to obtain and maintain mining permits. What’s relevant is, an area has got to be surveyed before a mine can go into production. It’s important to establish legal boundaries of ownership, especially when you’re talking about gems and precious metals. Those boundaries never include Other lands, so crossover passages have to be mapped and the entrances clearly defined.”

  She frowned. “Okay. All of that makes sense. I know federal law states that Other lands can’t be owned by inhabitants on this side. That property belongs to whoever—or whatever—may reside on the other side.”

  “Yes,” said Luis. “And if the Other land is uninhabited, then the land belongs to nobody.”

  “I’m with you so far,” she said.

  “The Office of the Elder tribunal holds records of every known crossover passage in the US. It also holds the original surveyor maps for active and inactive mines. There’s no crossover passageway on any of the original surveyor maps for the Nirvana Silver Mining Company,” he said. “But they have one now.”

  She sat back in her seat. “How did that happen? Was the original surveyor bribed?”