CHAPTER 28

I kept my fingers clenched. He’d hidden his past from me before, shown me only what he wanted me to know. Now he was inviting me in, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. Knowing Sawyer, the blast of his past might just short-circuit my brain.

“I can make you,” he said.

I was so tired of being pushed around, threatened into doing things I didn’t want to, ordered by angels and demons and ghosts to kill that, fuck this, save everyone. I was supposed to be the boss of this side of the Apocalypse, but you’d never know it.

“Break my fingers,” I said tightly, “crack my wrist, force me any way that you like. You’re the one who taught me to block the view. If I don’t want to see, Sawyer, I won’t.”

“You keep on believing that.”

Then he was touching me, his dark clever fingers gentle yet sure, cupping my breast, thumb stroking the nipple back to a tingling peak. He ran his other palm over my ribs, tracing each and every one before inching beneath the waistband of my jeans, then the lacy strip of my panties, and stroking me where I was still wet from before.

I couldn’t help it; my legs fell open, my breath coming fast and hard, as my hands splayed wide, fingers reaching for . . . him.

“Touch me,” he whispered again.

I sat up, then slowly placed my palm on his stomach where there were no tattoos. I didn’t want the distraction of the beasts when they called.

His skin was smooth, the muscles stone-hard; I flexed my fingers, drawing my nails along the plane, and he caught his breath, tightening the muscles even further. Closing my eyes, I reached with my mind, caught just a flicker before it was gone, so I dipped my thumb into his navel and gently scored the rim.

Bam. Flash. Light. Dark. I thought I saw his hogan, but—

“I can’t be sure.”

“You know what we have to do.”

I opened my eyes; his were right in front of me—silvery gray surrounded by a thin thread of black. So familiar yet so cool and distant. I had been as close to this man physically as I’d been to almost no one else, yet I hardly knew him at all.

“Just tell me,” I said.

He kissed me instead. I caught where this was headed. We’d been there before. The only way to truly open—for me and for him—was to give ourselves over to the power of our magic. For Sawyer, his magic was based in sex, and now mine was too.

So be it, I thought.

I pulled him onto the bed, running my fingers all over his back, chest and arms, getting flashes of wolf, cougar, shark, interspersed with the silhouette of a bird in the sky—at night, dawn, noon.

He yanked off my shirt, nearly ripped my bra in two, filled his palms with my breasts and lifted them to his mouth. His hands were so hard, yet clever and true. He teased my nipples with tongue and teeth, then worked his way downward, tracing my belly, tickling my navel as I’d tickled his. My pants fell on top of the golden chains as he meandered lower still.

I tried to focus, to see into the darkness of his mind, but his breath stirred the curls between my legs, hot, almost scalding, and I moaned, my fingers tangling in his hair, my thumb rubbing over the spike of his cheekbone, then tracing the curve of his ear. Hard and soft, so many contrasts in just one man.

His tongue flicked over me—once, twice—then he suckled, rolling me in his mouth. I tried to buck away.

“No, we should—”

I grasped at his shoulders, tried to pull him up and over, then inside, but it was like trying to move a mountain. He slipped his hands beneath me, grasping and lifting me, tilting me so he could feast.

My arms flopped limply to my sides as my legs first opened, and then, when he began to flick his tongue back and forth, back and forth, harder and faster, clamped around his shoulders and tightened.

He must have felt me swell, the bud of my clitoris going tight against his tongue in that instant before I came, because then he did rear up and over me, plunging within before going completely still.

“Wait,” he whispered. “Just . . . wait.”

I was on the verge, in that place where everything in the world narrows to the circle of body on body, body in body, body surrounding body. The very air seemed to pause; silence engulfed us. There was only us.

At last he moved, drawing himself against me so I could feel every inch of the slide. I was so wet, so swollen, so ready that when he grew and jerked and spurted, it only took me a milli second to erupt.

I might have screamed if he hadn’t put his hand over my lips; as it was, I bit him. The taste of his flesh in my mouth, the salt of his skin, the promise of blood, made me come harder, and I clenched around him so tightly he froze, holding himself motionless as if he didn’t want this ever to end.

Eventually it did. Someone had to move, and that someone was him. He rolled to the side, then stared at the ceiling too.

“That was supposed to open me,” I said. “Or maybe you?”

“Mmm.”

“I’m not getting much of a news flash.”

“Wait,” he murmured.

“Sawyer, if you did me just to . . . do me, I’m going to—”

Suddenly, he rolled back on top of me, toe-to-toe, hip-to-hip, chest-to-chest. He pressed his forehead to mine, his eyes widened, the whites blazing like lightning through a clear midnight sky. The bed rattled; the windows did a thrumming dance.

He groped for my hands, drew them next to my head and then pressed down with his own, palm-to-palm.

I was drawn into the past with such force the breeze stirred my hair. In one-quarter of my mind I knew I was still on that bed in Cairo, but the other three-quarters was full of him.

He’s laughing, teeth bright white against the bronze of his skin, and he looks younger, but not because of any difference in his face, or his eyes or his stance. Perhaps it is just that he’s happy.

Have I ever seen Sawyer happy? I don’t think so, and I have to wonder why. Sure, our lives aren’t fit for a Disney movie, but there should be a little joy somewhere; otherwise, really, what’s the point?

The terrain surrounding him is both familiar and new—the Southwest from the shade of the dirt, the shape of the rock formations, the incredible blues and golds, reds and pinks and oranges of the sky at dusk, or is it dawn? Miles and miles and miles of desert, distant mountains, but not a road, a telephone pole or the hint of a house anywhere at all.

Sawyer lifts his face to the sun. He is naked. The colors of the sky cascade over him, tracing his skin like a rainbow. His tattoos writhe wherever the light hits.

He doesn’t have as many tattoos as he does now. The wolf stalks across his biceps; the tiger strolls along his thigh; the snake twists lazily between his legs. Then light sizzles so brightly nothing can be seen but white, and when it fades a tiger stands where Sawyer had been.

The wild cat continues to stare upward; a shadow cants across his face, and he watches the great bird sail overhead, then trots after, loping along with tiger grace, so beautiful, so deadly and strong.

Thunder rumbles, and the earth shakes. Dust rises on the horizon. Something is coming. Yet still the tiger follows the black V in the sky that is the bird.

A long, low, moving dark cloud appears; the thunder becomes the pounding of hooves. A hundred, no, a thousand, buffalo race toward the single tiger in their path.

They don’t appear afraid of the huge cat that does not belong. Perhaps they’ve never seen one and therefore don’t know enough to be afraid.

Before the herd tramples him, the tiger veers off, loping around them, hunkering down, tail twitching as he waits. His gray-green eyes remain focused on the whirl of brown stampeding past like props in an old-time western. He springs, straight up and onto the back of a huge bull with massive hooked horns and a shaggy, matted ruff.

The buffalo stops, snorts, bucks. The others gallop around them, managing not to turn both the bull and the tiger on his back into dust.

Sawyer sinks his claws into the beast’s hide for leverage, then leans over and tears out his throat.

I wait for the buffalo to stumble, perhaps throw Sawyer to the ground where he’ll be trampled by the stragglers. Blood will spray everywhere, and if the animal is lucky, he might be able to gore the tiger once, even twice, before he dies. Obviously none of this will kill Sawyer—in reality he is still alive and right next to me—but it will be bloody and ugly and painful.

Instead, the buffalo bursts into ashes, disintegrating beneath Sawyer like an imploding Vegas casino. Sawyer lands on all fours, and as he races away gray particles swirl off his coat like mist.

The sun, which had been rising, not setting, now blazes with fury from a crystal-blue sky. When the bird circles back, diving toward the earth like a missile, it is easy to see what kind of bird it is.

Peacock-bright feathers mixed with red and gold, a huge wingspan. Definitely not a bird found in America. Technically not a bird found in nature.

The Phoenix dips close to the ground, shifting in a flare like a sunburst so that when my mother’s feet meet the earth they have toes.

She is naked. If I were actually in the desert I’d turn away. Who wants to see their mother like that? But this is merely a memory, and not even my own.

Lifting her face to the sun, she breathes in as if its rays are liquid gold, then runs her fingers along Sawyer’s ruff. “I told you he’d be here.”

The tiger shimmers beneath her hand and becomes a man, naked, gleaming, exquisite. “You did.” He looks down at her; she is much shorter than me, and his gaze is softer than I’ve ever seen it. “And as always you were right.”

She tilts her head as if someone has called her name, the move birdlike; then her gaze lifts to the sky, focusing fiercely on the sun. Her eyes flare, yellow, then orange, the black pupil forming the shape of a bison.

“There’s another,” she intones.

“Show me,” Sawyer says.

The Phoenix lifts her arms, and they become wings that carry her into the sky. A flash of light and Sawyer is again a tiger loping after the bird, and I tumble back into my body, still trapped beneath Sawyer’s on the bed in Cairo.

“She was a seer,” I whispered. “Like me.”