Thea Harrison - Oracle's Moon

Oh gods, what he had done. Even more than the sheer physical impossibility of the lovemaking, he had broken her wide open.

He hissed a curse. She jumped as all of the upstairs windows slammed shut, and the ancient air-conditioner unit that was propped in her bedroom window clacked on.

Her eyes flew open as he took her by the shoulders and hauled her upright. “I said pay attention,” he snarled.

He looked entirely disturbed, and despite their nudity, not at all loverlike. Suddenly she felt wide awake. “I’m paying attention,” she told him. She frowned as her mind kicked into gear. “I was having a weird dream before you woke me up.”

“I woke you up,” he said between his teeth, “because you were acting weird.”

“What happened?”

“That old Power you inherited. You know how you said it sits deep at the edge of your consciousness?” She nodded. Now that she was really paying attention to him, his hard grasp on her relaxed. He smoothed back her hair. “I can sense it. It feels just as you described, very deep, like it sits at the edge of thought. While you were asleep, it…rose up.”

She frowned at him. “What do you mean, it rose up?”

“It filled you up like you were an empty glass. Then it spilled out of you and filled the room. That’s when I woke you.” His sharp diamond gaze searched her face. “What happened?”

She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know. I just had a dream.”

“About what?”

“It’s hard to describe. It was very dreamy.”

“Try.”

The air-conditioner was running at full blast. The window unit blew frigid air on her exposed skin. Shivering, she pulled the bedspread and top sheet down and climbed under the covers. After a second’s hesitation, Khalil joined her. He pulled her into his arms, and she settled against him gladly and rested her cheek against his smooth, hot skin.

It wasn’t just that his heat had suddenly become welcome. He chose to hold her. Maybe he did it for her, but he did it unasked, so he must have done it for him as well. His presence wrapped her up as securely as his arms did, and he didn’t try to take her strength away. He offered her a chance to rest against his, and it felt so good.

Once she started talking, she didn’t stop. She started with the dream and worked her way backward, and she told it all wrong, because everything came out in a tangle.

The dream. The goddess. Hitting Phaedra with an expulsion spell that knocked her across the cavern. How everyone acted earlier that day, everyone except Olivia. Either Brandon or Jaydon or somebody had lied, or she simply didn’t understand, or maybe she had misheard, but it was strange how the story had shifted from eighteen people who had planned to come to work that day to twelve. The talk she’d had with Isalynn, postponing her duties as the Oracle, practicing with the Power until she could call it up at any time, whether it was daylight or not, no matter where she was.

Talking to him was as beyond perfect as his lovemaking had been. It was such a relief to unburden herself. Although he occasionally asked her for clarification, he didn’t rush her or appear impatient in any way, and he didn’t try to stop her.

At least not until she told him about the ghost of the serpent woman.

His physical form dissolved, and caught by surprise, she fell forward. Her nose squashed in the pillow he had been leaning against, and the hair at the back of her head whipped around as a cyclone rampaged her room. Cautiously she braced herself on one elbow and lifted her head to look around.

She had never been very interested in knickknacks, and earlier her small jewelry box had traveled downstairs along with her dresser. That was probably a good thing, since her bedside clock, along with three somewhat dusty paperbacks and the lamp, crashed to the floor. The window curtains blew into knots, all the upstairs doors banged shut then blew open again, and the windows rattled.

Somehow the lightbulb in the lamp hadn’t broken. The light shining from the floor threw elongated shadows over everything. The familiar surroundings looked ominous and strange.

And he felt absolutely furious.

Was he having his version of a shit fit?

She sank back down on the pillows and put an arm over her head. She said to the cyclone, “I hope you know you’re picking everything up again and replacing anything you break.”

He cursed, and the light flickered wildly as the lamp jerked off the floor and landed back on the bedside table. “You tell me that your sanity and your life might have been in danger, and I find this out days later ?”

Yep. Shit fit. She told him, “Stop yelling.”

Still disembodied, he plummeted down on her. The entire cyclone seethed with rage on the space of her double bed. The air felt heavy, far too dense, and the change in pressure made her ears pop. Was this her problem? Yeah, she thought this one probably was. She pulled the covers over her head.

He yanked them down again. “Gods dammit, Grace, how could you do something so dangerous? Why didn’t you call me? You’re supposed to call me!”

Her nose prickled, and a tear leaked out. She swiped at it with the back of her hand. She said, “You’re making some pretty big assumptions.”

He snapped, “Like what!”

“I didn’t know it would be dangerous,” she said softly. “The petitioners were having a problem with going into the cavern, and I just thought if the Power came out once in the daylight, I could make it come out again. I had no idea the ghost existed until she showed up. By then it was too late to do anything but deal with the situation. I certainly didn’t have time to think about calling you or anyone else, and even if I had…”

“And if you had?” he prompted when her voice trailed away.

“Even if I had thought of calling you, it wouldn’t have done any good,” she said. “Because you wouldn’t have been able to do anything. Nobody would have. Everything that happened, the conversation with the ghost and the whole struggle was internal. By the time I had anything to say to anybody, it was all over.”

He took form behind her on the bed and turned her so that she lay on her back. His hands were so gentle that when she opened her eyes, she was completely unprepared for the severity of emotion that transformed his face. He said coldly, “I’m calling in the favor you owe me.”

Jolted, she said, “What, right now?”

He interrupted her. “Are you able to pay your debt?”

“Of course,” she told him. “As long as it doesn’t affect the kids—”

He cut off her words by simply putting a hand over her mouth. Eyes blazing, he leaned closer until the only thing she could see was him, and the only thing she could feel, all around her, was him.

“You will call me,” he said. “For the rest of your life, you will call me. I don’t give a shit whether or not you’re in the mood. I don’t care if your cause is useless or if I am too late or if you can fix the whole damn problem by yourself or if you just get scared. You will call me, Grace. You will call me. ”

Her eyes widened. He was not quite in control of his physical form. It rippled, or his hand simply shook with the same emotion that shook through his voice. His eyes weren’t just blazing. They were too bright, even for him. She listened to not only what he had said, but to what he had not said. Underneath his anger was another emotion.

You scared me , he had said earlier, and he wasn’t used to experiencing fear. He was too arrogant and Powerful, too accustomed to the complacency of living a very long life.

She curled her fingers around his wrist and urged his hand away from her mouth. His jaw worked, but he allowed her to shift his hold. The tips of his fingers stroked across her lips.