Night Shift

The shakes quieted bit by bit. Thunder in the distance. There would be flash floods out in the desert, the gullies and cha

I'd just hit the wall, bigtime.

Finally I rested against Saul, awkward, my upper body twisted and my cheek pressed against his shoulder. His hand had moved down from my nape, stroking my back evenly. Stopped, his fingers playing with the arch of a rib. Came back to my spine, tracing muscle definition through my T-shirt.

"I don't even like you," I whispered mournfully into his shoulder. Could have kicked myself, taking a deep breath of him. Then one more. Maybe just one more. You do much more of this, Jill, and you're not going to want to stop.

He didn't take offense. Maybe he even understood. "Give it time. I'm told I grow on people."

"Why are you doing this?" I squeezed my eyes shut until starbursts of red and gold burst, my blue eye still seeing the complicated strings of energy in his aura that shouted, Were.

A shrug, careful not to dislodge me. "Because you need it. Because I want to." A careful tone, giving nothing away. "Good enough for now?"

Not nearly good enough. I don't even know what it is you're doing. You're fucking up my head and I need to be clear for this. "You need to stop." I couldn't make the words louder than a whisper. "I can't afford this." I can't afford any of this.

"No strings, no payment, no bargains. I'm not hellbreed." Was that a new coolness in his tone?

I hoped so, and I didn't hope so. "I didn't—"

"Shut up." No anger, just flat finality. His pulse beat steady under my cheek.

I did. He held me, and for a while it was enough. Long enough for me to promise myself a hundred times that this next breath I took of him would be the last—and to break that promise, each and every time.

Chapter Twenty-four

You spend a lot of time on rooftops as a hunter. The high ground is always best, it's another cardinal law.

Of course, when you're tracking someone else who hangs out on the roof as a matter of habit, it can get a bit tricky. But my quarry didn't even look up. He glided through shadow and streetlamp light, flickering through belts of orange glow, pausing only to catch the rhythm of a street before sliding along on the tangent least likely to draw notice.

When you have the preternatural sensitivity of a hellbreed, you can afford to stay far back. But the scar burned and prickled so much, the welter of sensation so deep and terrible each time, Mikhail had suggested covering it up. Galina had copper cuffs, and they seemed to work just fine… but I could still hear the slight scrape of Mikhail's boots against concrete, his pulse hammering. I could almost taste his pheromones on the air, a lingering trail of phosphorescence.

I hung back, just at the very edge of his sensing range.

But he wasn't watching for a tail—who would follow him?

Nobody except a stupid girl, that's who. Just finished with her training, and curious about where her teacher had taken to disappearing so frequently. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back—that was one of Val's sayings.

I tried not to think about Val.

The new coat made a slight flapping noise and I cursed silently, stopping still. But my teacher didn't even break stride. He had a bounce in his step, and plunged into a network of alleys at the fringe of the barrio.

What was out here for him? I fell further back, following him only as a faint faraway song, more a pressure against sensitive ear membranes than music.

It was wonderful, and I couldn't wait to surprise my teacher with this new dimension to the mark we'd bargained so hard for. Although how I could do that without him knowing I'd tracked him … that was the question.

I was so busy thinking about it I almost stepped over the silent edge of Mikhail's field of awareness. He had stopped in a deep well of shadow in the lee of an alley, and the air itself listened when he told it to.

Silence folded itself around me, my heartbeat smoothing out. I dropped into a crouch and drew that silence like a blanket around my shoulders. It was a trick he himself taught me, and the small burst of pride inside my chest from performing it so successfully warred with caution and growing unease. What was he doing?

Did it matter? He had a right to privacy, didn't he? That was why he wasn't sleeping in the same bed with me anymore. I had my own room and my own blankets now.

A slim shadow unmelded itself from the end of the alley. I would have held my breath, but training had me in its grip—you do not rob yourself of the advantage of oxygen while you're on a rooftop watching a shadow in an alley. You just don't.

She swayed toward him, blue silk whispering, and my mouth gaped open, both to provide me with soft shallow breaths and also so the shock could escape my throat in a soundless puff. Long dark hair and pale, pale skin, she was willow-graceful and must have smelled of incense and honey.

Under that smell of female attractiveness was an edge. It was rusty, blotted with old iron blood, and somehow wrong. My left eye twitched and watered, seeing the strings under the surface of the world resonate in response to sorcerous pulsing.

Whoever she was, she wasn't wholly human. But Mikhail stood still, light gleaming in his pallid hair, as she swayed toward him, moving so supple and soft I could imagine anything but legs under her skirts. A faint murmur reached me, satin-soft; she was talking to him.

My hackles rose.

Mikhail reached for her like a drowning man grabbing at buoyant wreckage, and they drew back into the alley's shadow. The clink of his belt buckle unloosing under those pale fingers was as loud as a shot to my tender ears, and I looked away, my face and ears burning with a shame that poured down my throat in a river of bitterness.

The soft sounds—her murmurs, his gasping for breath, the wet sound of lips and tongues meeting—tore across my eardrums like copper spines. Heat and shame alternated with burning cold, laid on my skin like a heavy fur coat. The scar prickled, ru