Because he couldn’t deal with that just then, and maybe because he wanted her to see, he waved toward the bedroom door on the right and said, “Have a look in the spare room.”
He followed her, stood too close to her when she paused at the threshold and breathed, “Oh.” Just that one word. Oh.
It still caught him the same way too. His old nursery, preserved intact for nearly twenty-five years, telling him that he’d come from somewhere, that he’d been loved. That love was in the boxed photos stacked in the closet too, though he didn’t want to show them to her now, couldn’t bear to go through them again so soon.
He wanted to shy away from the snapshots of his parents and his infant self, taken here and there around Skywatch and elsewhere, pictures of his parents with the other magi, his father standing slightly apart from the group, pictures of Nate with other babies and Nightkeeper children. The images were difficult for him to look at, knowing that everyone in them was dead except him, and because he’d spent his entire life not caring about the parents who hadn’t cared enough to keep him. It probably should’ve helped to know that they’d cared, and cared fiercely. But somehow it was worse knowing that he should’ve been with them, or, failing that, with a winikin, growing up like Alexis had, pampered and groomed, always having someone to tell him that he could do better, that he could be better.
It was worse knowing he should’ve grown up thinking he was important, when instead he’d been taught that he was nothing, that he had to scrap to survive, steal when he wanted a little extra, and defend himself every second of every day.
Alexis seemed to sense at least part of that, though. She took his hand, threaded their fingers together, and squeezed gently. “I’m here because of who you are in this lifetime, not who you might’ve been.”
He turned to her then, and lifted their joined hands so he could kiss her knuckles, where a faint bruise darkened the skin. “And I let you in the door despite who you are in this lifetime, because even though I keep telling myself I want something—and someone—else, it keeps coming back around to you. To us.”
Her eyes flashed at that and her jaw went a little hard, but then she shook her head ruefully.
“There’s that honesty again. Refreshing, if not always complimentary.” Then her lips turned up and she tipped her face to his. “Kiss me before I remember that you annoy the shit out of me and start to wonder why I’m here.”
“You’re here because I annoy the shit out of you,” he said, then obliged by touching his lips to hers chastely, letting the contact kindle warmth as he murmured against her mouth, “You’re here because I won’t pander to you like the boys down at the marina, and because you know that I won’t make promises I can’t deliver on. I might be a gamer, but I’m not a game player.”
She was silent for a moment, then settled against him a little and said simply, “I’m here because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
Nate would’ve said something glib in response, but the words jammed in his throat, backing up against the realization that the same was true of him.
Before, he’d resented the demands of a bloodline responsibility he’d never asked for, never sought.
He’d wanted to be back in Denver, working the life he’d built for himself, the one that played by familiar rules, with familiar people. The life he was good at. Somewhere along the line, though, that’d changed. Denver seemed far away. He knew he could be there in a few hours, faster if he asked Strike for a ’port. But the city—and the life he’d lived there—had dimmed in his brain, his new life as a Nightkeeper seeming so much more important now.
Granted it was more important on a save-the-world scale. But now even on a smaller, more personal scale, he realized that he didn’t want to be back in the city. He wanted to be where he was: in his parents’ homey, outdated bungalow with the woman he’d never managed to convince himself to leave all the way. Which, in all honesty, wasn’t fair to either of them.
“I’m sorry,” he said, the apology coming out of nowhere, from deep inside him.
Nonsequitur though it might be, she seemed to get it, shaking her head. “Don’t be. We move forward. Everything that happens from here on out, whether good or bad, is new. It’s just you and me, guy and girl. Humans, for what it’s worth.”
Which was so not like her usual rhetoric that he drew back. “What happened to the whole ‘time is cyclical, what has happened before, blah, blah’?”
She smiled, and this time it reached her eyes. “We’re not our parents. We were raised human. I think we’ve got the right to claim something for our own, don’t you? Well, I claim this, for as long as it lasts.”
He saw the truth of it in her eyes, and tasted it on her lips when he dropped his head for a second kiss, this one longer and moister, and bringing more heat to the moment. When it ended, he glanced out the window to where stars shone over the Pueblo ruins at the back of the box canyon. “I can promise you until morning, at least.”
He’d meant it partly as a joke, but her eyes were serious when she said, “That’ll do for starters.”
Using their joined hands to tug him along, she urged him in the direction of the bedroom, then stalled.
“Um. Will this be too weird for you?”
“You don’t want to do it in my parents’ bed? What are we, sixteen?” The laughter felt good, as did the rush of heat and joy as he reversed their positions, with him urging her along. “Don’t worry.
Carlos made some changes once I started hanging out here. That includes the mattresses and bedding.”
Along with a few personal items he didn’t bother mentioning, because, having made the decision, he was done talking.
He got her inside the bedroom and left the lights off, so the space was softly lit by the illumination coming through the door from the main room. The bedroom was sparsely furnished and decorated, as were the other rooms, but with the same few deft touches of character and magic. Another of his father’s paintings hung over the bed, this one of a green sea and an achingly blue sky, a helicopter’s-
eye view approaching a verdant island of sand and trees, and a limestone cliff with a Mayan ruin at the top. The domed silhouette marked it as one of the ancient celestial observatories, where Nightkeepers and Daykeepers alike had tracked the movements of the stars and used them to tell the future and the past.
A shimmer of that same mysticism walked across Nate’s skin as he stripped his shirt over his head in one yank, then tossed the garment aside and took Alexis in his arms and kissed her, letting his body tell her what he didn’t always get right with words.
In response, she pressed her hands to his chest, touching his medallion, which grew warm with their body heat as she leaned into the kiss, opening to him. And as the night waned and became a new day, he took her to bed and they became, perhaps for the first time, lovers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It wasn’t until Anna had been back in the glyph lab for a few days following her quick trip to Skywatch that she finally admitted, to herself at least, that the balancing act wasn’t working. Not the way she was trying to pull it off, anyway.
It’d taken some serious crystal magic to jump-start her itza’at powers and get a peek inside Iago’s cesspool of a brain. She didn’t regret the magic, but she sure as hell could’ve done without the aftereffects, namely the fact that she’d been unable to close the lid on the visions once she’d called them. Granted, she’d known that could be the outcome. She just hadn’t known how much being a full-