I stuck my hand in Peter’s pockets again, then remembered he had no money in them. Without a word, Gregory handed me a couple more coins, which I threw at Andrew’s head just as Peter walked over to me (again) and, taking my arm, hauled me backward toward the tent.
“What the hell?” Andrew yelled, ducking to avoid being struck by the coins.
Peter ignored him, gently pushing me to the tent. “That was uncalled-for.”
“What was?” I asked, trying to appear innocent.
“You stole time from him.”
“Yes, but he called me a whore. Twice. Wait just a minute.” I would have stopped, but I was conscious that if either of the women had looked out the window of her respective RV, she’d get another eyeful of Peter. I waited until we got back inside the tent to ask, “How do you know that I stole time? Everything was reset when I did it, wasn’t it?”
“In a manner of speaking. It’s possible to steal time from Travellers, but only very small quantities. The greater the amount of time you try to take, the higher the chances are that you will fail.”
“So you can’t take big chunks of time from other Travellers? Damn.” There went my plans to have Peter steal time enough to make Andrew an infant again. If he wanted to act like a big ole baby, then he could just be one.
“I didn’t say that. I said that if you try to take a large amount of time, you have a higher chance to fail.”
“Fail meaning you don’t get the time?”
“Fail meaning you risk killing the Traveller or yourself.” His voice was grim, but his expression was grimmer. “Kiya, I know that you have not been exposed to Travellers before, but you need to listen to me when I tell you not to steal time. It is not only morally wrong; it is dangerous. I thought you learned that fact.”
“Yes, but doesn’t the intent have something to do with that? Mrs. Faa said that it was the shuvani person that you had to appease when it came to paying for the debt, right? So if you do take time from someone bad, isn’t it easier to get away with it than if you do what I did with that motel hussy, and steal time solely for your own benefit?”
“What do you think you just did with Andrew?”
I plumped down on the sleeping bag. “He had it coming. The rat.”
“I agree that he was acting inappropriately, but I was attempting to deal with the situation in a manner that won’t have karmic repercussions on either of us,” Peter grumbled.
“Yes. Stark naked.” I shot a look at his groin, which was now quiescent. “In full view of your cousins-in-law. I have to say, I don’t mind that you aren’t an overly modest person, but I really don’t like you parading around in front of other women while naked. Nothing good can come of that.”
He zipped closed the flap of the tent and gestured toward the mattress and sleeping bag. “Your jealousy is gratifying to my ego, but unnecessary, I assure you. I don’t particularly care what my cousins’ wives think of me. Would you please lie back down so that we can recommence?”
“You’re crazy if you think we’re going to continue.” I pointed to the back wall of the tent, which faced the compound. “Not when someone could be lurking just outside listening to us.”
“Then we will have to be quiet, won’t we?” he said, picking up my ankle.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Was that another dig about me talking too much?”
“No. It was a hint that I am so desperate to make love to you that not even my annoying family can stop me. Lie back, please.”
In the end, I let him have his way. I liked to think it was because I was altruistic and caring, and obviously the man needed a sexual release, but my id and egos have never let me lie to myself, and they weren’t about to start now.
Peter started kissing his way up my leg, murmuring words that caressed almost as much as his mouth, his hands stroking my flesh in a way that had me whipped into a frenzy in no time. I writhed, I squirmed, I stroked and touched and teased him just as much as he stroked and touched and teased me. I kept my moans to a whispered level, and by the time his mouth had moved up to very sensitive ground, I was more or less one giant blob of orgasmic Kiya.
“Please,” I begged when he lifted his head to gently bite my hip.
“Please what?” he asked, his voice soft and husky at the same time.
“Please do whatever else you want, because I really like your list so far,” I managed to get out.
He chuckled against my belly, then moved upward, catching my legs under his arms as he did so. “My list is long and varied, my fair beauty, and I plan on enacting every single item on it. But for now, this will have to do.”
“Condom?” I gasped as he nudged forward into me.
He paused, looking down at me with eyes so beautiful, they made me want to dive into their violet depths. “Do I need one? We are going to be married.”
“Possibly. Maybe. I don’t know. Oh, hell, no, we don’t need one. I’m on birth control, and I assume you don’t have any diseases, and I don’t either, so—hooyah!”
He took my breath away with his thrust forward, making me want to shout with the glory of the feeling of him so deep inside me, but I remembered in time that we were being quiet, and bit his shoulder instead. He groaned when I dug my fingers into his wonderful behind, pulling my legs up higher in order to accommodate him all that much better.
“Please tell me you are close,” he groaned into my neck, his hips working a rhythm that had me seeing not just stars but entire galaxies filled with planets, moons, and several asteroid belts. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to last much longer. I’m trying, I’m really trying to not give in to your heat, and your muscles that grip me so tightly, but by the saints, if you move like that again, it will be all over.”
I crossed my legs around his hips, and made the little swiveling move that had him rising back, his eyes blazing with passion. “Finish it,” I demanded, and pulled him down again so I could kiss the orgasmic yell right out of his mouth.
He did. Oh, how he finished it. I felt just like I’d been struck by lightning again, my entire body tingling with static electricity. Which explained why, when I recovered from the orgasm to end all orgasms and opened my eyes, I found that we were both bathed in a blue white aura of moving, snapping lines of…I didn’t know what. Electricity?
I froze, unsure of what had happened, and whether it was dangerous. “Um. Peter?”
“Do not ask me to speak now, woman,” he mumbled into my neck, his chest heaving on mine as he fought to catch his breath. “You have exhausted me. I am depleted of energy. You have worn me out to the point where I may well die of sexual gratification. Speaking is not possible. Breathing barely so. I will lie here and recover, and when I’ve done so, say a week from now, then I will be able to talk to you again.”
I watched little tendrils of electricity snake out down the length of his back, snapping and crackling in the air. Tentatively, I lifted my hand from where it was still clutching his butt, and pursed my lips at the sight of little blue-white fingers of electricity curling and lashing in the air. “Huh. It doesn’t seem to hurt.”
“I should hope not. I may be beefy, but I don’t think I’m anything out of the ordinary so far as that goes.” He lifted his head from my neck, and for a moment, I saw a flash of something in his eyes.
“Holy shit, Peter! You have lightning in your eyes!”
He started to say something, but then his eyes (thankfully back to their normal appearance) widened and he pulled back a bit to look down at me. “I could have sworn…what on earth are you doing?”
“Lying here?” I asked, putting a hand to my face to see if my lips had blown back up or something like that.
“You have…there is something emitting from you.”
“From you, too,” I pointed out, nodding toward his torso. He disengaged from me, rolling off to stare down at first his body, then mine. “It’s just like we’re in one of those plasma balls they have at the science museum, huh?”
“I’ve heard of this, but never seen it in person.” He examined his hand. Slowly, I was aware that the tingling sensation was fading, and with it the light show faded, as well.
“What is it?” I asked, feeling a vague sense of regret. The odd electrical effect hadn’t been unpleasant—if a bit visually startling—and had left me missing the tingling sensation. “Was it some form of lightning? Because you had lightning in your eyes there for a second.”
“So did you. It’s an effect called porrav, which is an old word that the Travellers took from…I don’t know where. Probably from the Romany or some other Indo-Aryan group a few millennia ago. Regardless, to Travellers, it means to open up. The term is used when two Travellers, bound together, open themselves up to the elements.”
“You’re kidding me.” I looked at his chest, had a moment wherein I went off to the land of wanting to kiss and lick it, and with an effort recalled what we were talking about. “So when we get down and boogie, we, what, turn into lightning rods?”
He scratched his chest, then shrugged. “I don’t know much about what the actual form of energy is that we manifest. I’m told it’s fairly rare, and that only couples who are attuned to both each other and the elements can conjure it up. I imagine it has something to do with our ability to channel lightning, yes, although on a much smaller level.”
I stopped him when he reached for his clothing. “Wait a second—we channel lightning? Like…channel it? How is that possible?”
“We are Travellers. Why do you think you’ve harnessed lightning twice, and bear the mark of the Traveller?” He touched the lightning flower on my upper arm. “It is your nature to control lightning, just as you can steal time. It is what we are, Kiya.”
“I didn’t harness anything,” I argued, absently watching as he donned his clothing. “I was struck by lightning. Wham, bang, pow, knocked-on-your-ass sort of struck.”
“That is because you were not raised to know how to control the lightning that is attracted to you.” He handed me my shirt and bra. “I will teach you what I can, but I am far from an expert on the subject. We will find someone better versed in the art to help you, if you like, so that the next time you attract lightning, you are not harmed.”
“I wasn’t harmed, just kind of discombobulated—wait, next time? There’s going to be a next time?” I shook my head, having a hard time absorbing this strange new world into which I’d been thrust. “And what about that poorab thing? Is that going to happen again? Because I have to tell you, Peter, if it is, I want to film us. Not for kinky sex reasons, but because we were like living plasma balls! It was really cool, if a bit weird, and I’d like to see it happen where I’m not so out of my head from the fabulous sex that I can’t focus on anything but how wonderful you are.”
He smiled. “And yet I prefer that you stay thinking that. The word is porrav, by the way.”
I whomped him lightly on the arm, and quickly got into my clothing. “Of course you want me thinking you’re superfabulous at nooky; you’re a man. That’s all you guys normally think of.” I held up my hand to stop his protest. “Most of you, anyway. I know you can think beyond your penis. So what do we do now?”
He finished tying his shoelace, and sat down on the mattress, his arms resting on his knees. “We wait for the family to go to sleep.”
“OK.” I scooted over next to him, and put my hand possessively on his thigh. My fingers tingled, and not the porrav sort of way. “Speaking of that—”
“Speaking of what?”
“Porrav.”
“I didn’t realize we were speaking of it.”
“Hush. I’m thinking aloud. Where was…oh yes. Speaking of porrav, why is it that we, two people who aren’t full-blooded Travellers, can do the sparkly plasma thing? If it’s that rare, I mean.”
He looked vaguely uncomfortable before making a little gesture of defeat with the hand nearest me. “So far as the rest of the world—the Otherworld, that is, the part of the world where immortal beings reside—so far as they are concerned, we are Travellers. Our mortal blood is discounted due to the Traveller parent. It is only within the Traveller society that we are viewed as tainted, stained by our brush with mortal life, and unfit to truly be a part of the family.”
“So, if you marry outside of the Travellers, you’re ousted out of the family?” I asked, feel incredibly sad for some reason. “William wasn’t, and I assume he…er…was fooling around with your mom.”
“But he didn’t marry her. Travellers can, in very rare circumstances, marry outside the group, but the spouse is always considered mahrime, and often the children of their union are, as well. It’s only by integrating them at birth that they are later accepted.”
“And your dad didn’t do that. Oh, Peter, I’m so sorry.”
He waved away my sympathy, but put both arms around me and hoisted me onto his lap, where he rested his cheek against my hair. “William could have brought me into the family, and made a case for them to include me since—well, I am a bit different from other Travellers. But he did not. He and Lenore Faa spurned my mother’s pleas to have me recognized as a member, leaving us with nothing.”
I snuggled into him, relishing the scent and feel of him, and feeling even more of my resistance to his outlandish idea of marriage fading away. He didn’t say it in so many words, but I knew instinctively that marriage to him was the real deal. It would be an all-or-none sort of thing, no “let’s try it out for a little bit and if it doesn’t work, there’s always divorce.” Binding myself to Peter would mean a lifetime. Which brought up another thought. “So, you guys really are immortal, then? You said that you don’t die of disease and stuff, but what about old age?”
He shook his head. “Travellers do not die of normal causes, because they steal time.”
“I don’t…nope, I don’t understand it. How are the two things related?”
“What happened when you stole time from Andrew?” he asked, his breath ruffling my hair. It was all I could do to keep from slipping my hands inside his shirt to stroke that gorgeous chest.
“Oh, to hell with it, I’m going to.” I suited action to words, and pulled up his shirt until I could slide my hands under it. His skin was so warm, it felt like heated satin. “When I stole Andrew’s time, I put him back a couple of seconds, like a reset.”
“That’s not all you did. You added his time to your life. Your life span is now what it would be, plus the two or three seconds you stole from Andrew.”
“It might be more like twelve, after adding all of them up,” I admitted.
He pulled back to give me a look that I disregarded, saying, “I paid him. Or rather, Gregory did, because your wallet was in here.”
“Kiya, not that I condone stealing time, but if you ever do it again, you must pay for it in silver. Anything else is not acceptable.”
“Really? Why?”
“It is just the way things are done,” he said with another half shrug before tightening his arms around me.
“So Travellers are immortal because they don’t die of normal stuff like old age, but you have to steal time to keep going past your normal life span?” I asked, trying to get a handle on the obscure idea. “That assumes that you buy into the whole fate theory of each person having a specific amount of time allotted to them, and nothing you can do will change that. I don’t believe in that, Peter. I believe each person makes their own fate.”
“As do I. It helps to think of time as a physical object rather than a dimension.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a couple of silver dollars. “Imagine that this coin is a piece of time. It is mine because it is in my possession. The number of coins I have at any given time is not a set figure—some days I have more coins, some days I have less. It is a fluid number that I influence by whether or not I spend the coins.”
“I’m with you so far,” I said, eyeing the silver dollars. “What happens when I steal the time from you?”
He looked to the side, the coins still i
n his hand, clearly offering them to me. I took one, and he looked back at me. “Now I have one less coin, and you have one coin more than what you had a moment ago. To Travellers, time works the same way. We take it from the person who has it, and it is added to our possessions. In that example, it’s added to our time, the time that we hold and exist within.”
“It’s a bit too metaphysical for me,” I told him, putting the coin back in his palm. “I’m willing to accept that you steal time to stay alive…unless…” I eyed him. “You told me that you don’t steal time.”
“I don’t.”
“Then how do you stay alive? Wait, maybe I should be asking you this: how old are you?”
“One hundred and three.”
I slid off his lap, too startled to speak for a few seconds. “You aren’t!”
“I am. I was born in 1910.”
“But…but…” I waved a hand up and down his body. “You’re gorgeous! You’re male-supermodel gorgeous! You can’t be a hundred years old! Especially not if you don’t steal time.”
“I do not steal time; I purchase it. From a troll who runs a home for unwed poltergeists.”
I rubbed my forehead. “I think my brain just exploded. Yup, my id fainted with an overload of information. My ego is staggering around with a bottle of whisky in his hand.”
“And your superego?” Peter asked with a smile that melted me into a big puddle of Kiya goo.
“He’s running up and down the hallways of my mind with his arms waving in the air. I think he’s gone mental, if you know what I mean, and no, no pun is intended.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve overwhelmed you, Kiya, but these are the facts of what it is to be a Traveller.”
“You buy time? How is that different from stealing it and paying for it?” I asked, still rubbing my head.
“The troll from whom I purchase time is willing to give it to me. He is immortal. He would rather trade some of the time he possesses for money, which he uses to—”
“Take care of pregnant poltergeists, gotcha.” My mind skittered away from the idea of lusty ghosts. “So that’s how you live, and how you expect me to live, too? By purchasing time from folks who have too much of it?”