JJ snorted. Sure he cared. He had no problem helping others—he knew no other life than that—but lately it’d occurred to him that making a difference meant having to always put his own needs and desires second. Or, in a city of two million, was it dead last?
Warren dropped a hand on his shoulder. “I think you’re burned out, son.”
“Maybe,” JJ conceded, rolling his glass between his palms. “Though I’ve never heard of an agent burning out after only three years.” Some superhero.
“It’s been three years since your metamorphosis,” Warren said, referring to that critical moment when a troop member turned from mere initiate into a full-fledged agent of Light. “You’ve been fighting for over twenty.”
Their eyes met, but neither man spoke. His parents’ deaths were long ago, and remembered from different vantage points, but horror and sadness still plagued both of them.
“Look,” Warren said, “I think you should take some time off. Go fishing. Get laid. Fucking shave, for God’s sake.”
“I’m fine…and stubble looks good on the trading cards.”
Warren didn’t laugh. “You’re cold.”
“I’m calm,” JJ corrected. His voice was low, but his glance was sharp.
Warren wasn’t intimidated. “Well, we need you committed if we’re going to acquire our priceless little package before the Shadows do. Understand?”
JJ wanted to say he understood his own life was passing him by, unlived, while he toiled in service to some pampered elite, but he was already talking too loud, and his eyes were probably pinwheeling from the adrenaline still trailing through his system. He could sit here and argue with Warren, or he could agree with the man and get on with drinking. So he nodded his head, hoped he looked contrite, and waited for his leader to leave.
When Warren did—after an order, disguised as a warning, to go home and sleep it off—JJ glanced up at the television, where a local station was reporting on the latest antics of some vapid society sisters: a blond who’d just shown her physical talents to half the Western world in some men’s magazine he used to read for the articles, and her sister—her dark-eyed, unsmiling opposite—who had no reason that he could see to look so pissed off. He downed the rest of his whiskey and held up a hand for another bottle.
And then, in a roundabout fashion, the “package” Warren had mentioned appeared on the screen. JJ squinted at the image of one Tonya Dane, a psychic who’d appeared on a local morning show the previous week to predict an earthquake on this side of the Sierra Nevadas. That alone wouldn’t have been cause for worry, or even note, not among his kind. But the prediction had come true, which was why the footage continued its loop on the tube.
What they kept cutting was Dane’s lead-in prediction, the appearance of the Kairos, a powerful woman who would tip the metaphysical scales in favor of whatever side—Light or Shadow—she chose to endorse. Mortals, having no idea what that meant, dismissed it as nonsense, but those words had been long coveted in his world. Previously, the Kairos had been buried in mythology, but Dane’s prediction brought that epoch to an end, and now both sides were searching for her in earnest.
Unfortunately, Dane had since disappeared, without even a tarot card to point them her way.
The bartender—mustached, built, and apparently uninterested in parapsychology—flipped the station. He caught JJ’s gaze through the mirror, and quirked a brow. “You watching that?”
“Nah, bro. Flip it.” JJ shakily brought his shot glass to his lips, muttered into it. “Here’s to free will, and all that shit.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
It was a testament to his drunkenness that he didn’t sense the woman’s approach. He turned, and she was just there—slim-limbed, doe-eyed, with a cascade of raven black hair. She quirked a brow at the bottle in his hand, clearly accustomed to getting what she wanted. JJ didn’t mind, though. She smelled good.
“Have a name?”
“JJ, or just Jay.” He didn’t bother lying. Unlike his glass fingertips, hers appeared printed, like any mortal’s, and again, she smelled like a dream. “You?”
“Yes.” She licked cherry lips, coming on strong out of the gate. One way or another, JJ seemed destined for a head-on collision tonight. Besides, he thought, letting his eyes travel the length of her body, Warren had said to take some time off. “That your convertible outside?” she asked.
His focus sharpened marginally. “How’d you know?”
“Anyone else in here look like they can manage that ride? Besides, Mustangs are my favorite. Though I usually prefer a dark-haired man driving it.”
“Really? So…” He leaned forward, into her space, testing, angling in further. She met him halfway. “You willing to overlook that glaring fault and go for a little ride?”
“If I wanted a little ride,” she said, pointedly, “I’d be talking to the guy over there.”
He laughed, throaty and loud, surprising himself, then threw down some bills. Draping his arm over her slim shoulders, he turned her toward the door. “Come,” he said, already sure she would.
2
She did love the car. She purred when he revved the engine, laughed when the tires bit into the curb, and stood in her bucket seat, hands gripping the windshield as speed and desert air—pregnant with a summer storm—played havoc with her hair. Bolting up Charleston, he left the false cheer of Las Vegas behind, driving so fast it was like he was burying them in the night.
He jerked the wheel right before Spring Mountain Ranch, the turnoff coming more quickly than he remembered, though the view from the asphalt top was as spectacular as always…and theirs alone. Wild burros and rattlers regularly canvassed the dusty range, but as the first bolts of lightning pinged off the desert floor, all that flashed back at them were Joshua trees, sagebrush, and the red sandstone range framing the basin. JJ killed the engine, and for a moment they were both silent, enjoying the beginnings of a storm that would turn the dry washes into rivers sure to flood the valley.
Then the woman rose, straddling the windshield in one liquid motion, skirt rising to her hips. She challenged him with a downward glance as her bare foot carelessly crushed a wiper. “I love a good desert monsoon,” she said, and licked her lips as the sky cracked open.
JJ moved so fast she was pinned to the glass before the first raindrop fell. His hands were in her wind-whipped hair, his mouth eating her laughter. He had to remind himself to be careful with her—she was mortal and more fragile than his kind—but her hunger was spiced, and it fueled him. It was probably just the drink, but with his eyes closed, his mouth open, and his body spread atop hers, he felt pieces of him shifting inside, as if loosening from tethered moorings, suddenly unbound.
When JJ finally opened his eyes, he was surprised to find their positions reversed. He was pinned to the hood, her clothing pushed aside, his jeans half down his thighs. She lowered herself over him, a private smile revealed in a sharp crack of splintered light, but when her hips began pistoning above him, he forgot even to be surprised.
He decided later that despite her aggressiveness, she was a closet romantic. Why else wait until the storm had heightened, and they were both about to climax, to pull out the weapon? The need for symbolism, coupled with raw power, obviously motivated her…him, too, which was why he happened to open his eyes in that moment, wanting to watch her rain-streaked face as she cried out into the wild night. Instead he saw her wide, dark eyes hard with intent, and the honed edge of a tomahawk barreling toward his chest.
JJ barely pulled his palms from her waist in time to counteract the lethal blow, but once it’d been deflected, adrenaline lent the sobriety needed to disarm her. He flipped, crushing her against the car she so loved, her slim frame denting the pristine hood. The glyph on her chest began to smoke. “Guess I don’t have to be so gentle after all,” he said, and made a second, deeper dent.