Water.
Thinking of the Nix, Eve pushed away from the car and shut the door. Alec appeared on the opposite side. Tall, dark, handsome, and brooding. He slipped shades over his eyes, hiding his thoughts from her visual probe. There was a huge gulf between them at the moment. Like the tide against the shore, they crashed together and drew apart.
“After we get a room,” she said, “I need to hit the convenience store for a soda and a prepaid cell phone.”
He smiled. “You’d make a good spy, I think.”
“I have a fondness for action flicks.”
Alec came around the trunk and offered his hand. She accepted, but the closeness was only superficial. Emotionally, he was miles away, which was why she took a room with two double beds.
“You two got any pets?” the desk clerk asked. He was a young man in his midtwenties, Eve guessed. Over-weight by about sixty pounds and a mouth breather.
She shook her head. “Just us. Please don’t put us in a room that has had pets before. I’m allergic to cats.”
“No problem.” He leaned over the counter and lowered his voice. “Someone in the area has been stealing pets and hacking them up. It’s in all the local papers. Just wanted to warn you.”
“Hacking them up?” she repeated, remembering the article she’d read earlier that morning.
“Nasty stuff. Disemboweling, removing the eyeballs . . . that sort of thing.” His tone was more gossip-monger thrilled than it was disgusted or disturbed. “I read once that most serial killers start out mutilating animals, then they progress to people.”
“So this area isn’t safe?”
“It is for humans.” He shrugged, straightening. “Not so much for pets.”
While she signed the paperwork, Alec paid the balance in cash. He stared at her from behind his shades, but didn’t say a word until they went outside.
“Something you want to say to me?” he asked as they skirted the front office and crossed over to the 7-Eleven parking lot.
“About what?”
“About the two beds?”
“No pressure.”
“Hmm.”
An electronic beeping announced their entrance into the convenience store. Out front, three cars were filling their gas tanks at the pumps. Inside, an elderly woman with big white hair manned the counter and two teens stood by the coolers against the rear wall, looking at the soda.
Eve grabbed a hand basket by the door and moved to the prepaid phones hanging on an end cap.
Alec gestured to the soda fountain. “Want something to drink?”
“Diet Dr Pepper, if they have it. Otherwise, I’ll get it in a bottle.”
“Okay.”
Alec walked away and she rounded the aisle, grabbing beef jerky, nuts, and Chex Mix. She had a vision of lying across her motel bed with junk food, soda, and a movie on the television. The mere idea of a few hours of decompression was heaven on earth. They wouldn’t head out to the masonry until night, so she had time to vegetate and make sense of life as she now knew it. With that in mind, she grabbed chocolate, too—Twix, Kit Kats, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
Eve was making her way around the next aisle when the Infernal stench hit her. She sought out the source of the putrid smell and settled on the teenagers by the rear cooler. One wore a hooded sweatshirt with the hood up. The other wore a Hurley T-shirt and unkempt hair. On his nape, a tattoo of a diamond animated. It rotated, displaying the glimmer of its various facets.
She gaped, unmoving. As if he felt the weight of her stare, the hooded boy turned his head toward her. Eve’s gaze dropped, her obscenely steady hands absently pulling unknown items from the shelf into her basket. She continued down the aisle, witless with fear.
Look harmless and busy, she told herself.
“Angel.”
Jumping a good foot into the air, Eve spun to face Alec, who approached with a rapid stride. He caught her elbow and drew her farther down the aisle, away from the Infernals.
They were everywhere. How could she have forgotten that for even a moment? The weight of the knowledge was crushing.
As they feigned a preoccupation with shopping, Eve and Alec furtively watched the two young men withdraw energy drinks from the cooler and head up to the register. The clerk greeted them cheerfully and rang up their purchases. Her eyes were rimmed with gobs of mascara à la Tammy Faye Bakker and her lips were rimmed with the wrinkles of a lifetime cigarette smoker, but her smile was genuinely warm and her manner sweet.
The woman had no idea what she was dealing with.
“You okay?” Alec murmured as the young men left the store.
Eve nodded and released her pent-up breath. “They just took me off guard.”
He rubbed her lower back.
“You know,” she said. “I appreciate being able to smell them. I think I’d always be terrified if I was second-guessing everyone I met.”
Alec nodded grimly.
“I guess my nose still isn’t working right, though,” Eve noted. “You smelled them from across the store. I had to get within a yard of them.”
“I didn’t smell them.”
“Then how did you know?”
He glanced at her. “One of those boys just got his number called.”
It took a heartbeat’s length of time before she understood. “You?”
“Yeah. Me.” He urged her to the register. “Our stay in Upland just got a lot more complicated.”
Reed’s fingers were sliding between Sara’s thighs when he felt the first wave of Eve’s terror. Like ripples on water, the distance between them made the feeling faint, but it was unmistakable nevertheless.
Squeezing his eyes shut, he rested his forehead against the window where he’d pinned Sara. There were other sensations to process beyond Eve and the woman in his arms—there were the other twenty Marks under his watch, orders from the seraphim, and the occasional check-in from Raguel’s switchboard.
“Tease,” Sara whispered, her lips to his ear.
Distracted, he moved by instinct, parting her and stroking through her slickness. She moaned. He knew just how to touch her, how to pleasure her, how to give her exactly what she wanted.
Her teeth nipped his ear and he reacted accordingly. The hand he had pressed against the window for leverage moved to her throat. Reed fought the urge to hurry the business along. He had to keep her busy long enough to make their agreement worth Sara’s while. Otherwise, she could withdraw her Marks from his command before they had a chance to be put into play.
Sara’s manicured fingertips dug into his waist and her lungs labored, pushing against his chest in an elevated rhythm. Sex was one of the few times when a celestially enhanced body responded without restraint. Orgasm-induced endorphins were the drug of choice for many, including Reed.
As Eve’s distress peaked, goose bumps swept across Reed’s skin. Sweat dotted his upper lip and pooled in the small of his back. The urge to go to her was so strong he quivered with it. He told himself it was because she was untrained and therefore dangerously vulnerable. It was an occupational reaction, nothing more.
“I love it when you shake for me,” Sara purred, her nails raking the length of his back.
Reed kept his eyes closed, imagining that the silky tissues that clutched at his thrusting fingers belonged to another woman.
I-I don’t normally . . . do things like . . . this.
Eve’s trembling voice whispered through his mind. She didn’t know it—and he wasn’t certain he would ever tell her—but their coupling in the stairwell had been raw in more than just the fierceness of the sex. He had compelled her away from the crowd, but once they were alone he’d done nothing to keep her there. He hadn’t been able to, because he was too focused on her—the smell of her, the feel of her, the depth of her hunger. It had been as intimate an encounter as he’d ever experienced.
Sara liked rough sex, period. The person administering the roughness was moot. It was the thrill and the acts that she relished, not her partner. Eve, on the other hand, had been completely taken aback by her enjoyment of his handling. It had been him she responded to. No other man could have reached her the same way.
“Hurry,” Sara hissed, her sex sucking voraciously at his pumping fingers. She released his waist and pushed impatiently at her wide-legged slacks. They fell to the floor in an expensive pool around her Manolos.
He stepped back long enough to shed his own pants. He briefly noted her black garter belt and silk stockings, then he gave a hard tug to her thong and dropped the ruined undergarment to the floor. She couldn’t shrug out of her jacket fast enough. Before she could loosen her tie, he’d shoved her back into the window, pinning her to the cool glass.
Her smile lit up the room.
There was a brief moment when Reed thought about bending her over the desk and f**king her from behind. But this way had memories he was relying on to perform over the next several hours.
With his hands behind her thighs, he lifted her. Then he paused, his gaze locked with hers. “You know what to do.”
Sara reached between them and positioned him at her entrance. He stepped forward and dropped her simultaneously, impaling her in one hard thrust. Her cry pierced the air and charged his nerve endings. With his erection clasped in slick, liquid heat, his body took over from his brain. Finally.
Using his arms and thighs, Reed moved her up and down over him, stroking deep and fast. The erotic slapping of their bodies filled the room and spurred his lust. He focused on the feel of her clenching and releasing around his aching cock, the sensation hardening him further, making him throb with the sudden rush of blood to the swollen head of his dick.
She moaned as he filled her, stretched her, the grip of her body becoming fistlike in its intensity. Physically, it was damn good. He worked her up and down his c*ck with greater fervency, charging forward in his drive to culmination. His balls drew up, his spine tightened, his lungs heaved with his exertions. Sara’s orgasm rippled along his length, bathing him in the creamy, fiery wash of release. Her moans only added to his pleasure. For all her angelic beauty, Sara sounded like a p*rn star during sex. It roused the animal in him, turning him on to a near fevered pitch.
Which was still nowhere near as hot as he’d been in the stairwell.
Emotionally, he and Sara were on different continents. Sara’s eyes were closed, her head thrown back, her thoughts her own. Reed’s mind was with Eve, his sexual energy focused on her, his soul directed toward soothing the fear he felt in her.
His rhythm faltered when he sensed her reaching back, a chaste touch, like a handhold in the darkness. Her spirit brushed across his as ephemerally as smoke, yet it rocked him to the core. With a roar, he cli**xed. Sara shivered into another orgasm with a high-pitched squeal.
Eve brought him to his knees before the glass, with Sara scratching at his back and hours of servicing her left ahead of him. In the aftermath, he gasped for breath and longed for a shower. Left unguarded by the force of his release, he wasn’t prepared for the sudden piercing agony that broke his connection to Evangeline.
One of his Marks was dying.
Reed groaned in agony and pushed Sara away. His back arched, thrusting his chest forward and his arms out. Pain and sorrow radiated from him with white-hot heat. His skin glowed with the effort to contain the herald of his charge—an instinctive cry for help from Mark to handler that was occasionally so powerful it was sometimes sensed by mortals. A sixth sense, some called it. The feeling of something being “wrong” or “off,” but they didn’t know what.
“Takeo,” he gasped, calling out the name of his charge. Takeo had waited too long to call for help; Reed could feel the power of the mark draining from him. It was an aching feeling of loss that was amplified through Reed and sent outward to the firm. The death of a Mark was news that was carried through the soul and not through secular lines of communication. As the force of the herald left him, Reed collapsed forward, gulping in air.
“I have to go,” he panted.
“You cannot save your Mark.” Sara’s lovely face was flushed, her lips red and swollen even though he hadn’t kissed her. “And if you leave before we are done, you will not save her either.”
“Her?” Reed reached for his slacks.
“Evangeline.” Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “You think a woman does not know when the man she is f**king is thinking about someone else?”
“Sara . . .” he warned, his fists clenching.
“It is too late to save Takeo and you know it. You just want to alleviate your guilt by consoling him in his final moments.” She stabbed a perfectly painted red nail into his pectoral. “I want you to live with that guilt. I want you to remember how you failed your Mark because you were whoring for your brother’s lover.”
He slapped her, open-handed across the face. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She laughed and rubbed at the red mark left by his palm. Then she spread her legs, revealing the glistening pink folds of her sex. “Get to work, before I decide you are not worth the inconvenience you have caused me.”
“How did you get called?” Eve asked, as Alec led her quickly across the parking lot back to the motel.
“The mark tingles,” he said, “then burns. Toss me the car keys.”
She did as he asked. “Like when you lie?”
He shot her an arch glance. “I don’t lie.”
“I did. And the mark burned.”
Alec gave a wry laugh.
“It also burned when I entered Mrs. Basso’s condo,” she said. “It gave me the energy to break through the locks.”
The line of his mouth thinned. “I know. The burning of your mark is just like getting an FTA—a failure to appear notice for a bail bond skip.”
He unlocked her car door, then rounded the vehicle to the driver’s side and climbed in.