I shook my head and turned in his arms to put my hand over his mouth. “You have a sister? You’ve never mentioned that before.”
He shrugged and chafed my upper arms, ostensibly to keep me warm, but I thought he just wanted a moment to think before he answered. “She’s in Europe, somewhere.”
“Just ‘somewhere’?”
“I know where, but it’s not important. She’s married and has kids—none of the family business for her. I think she still writes to my mom and calls her, but she’s making her own life without the rest of us and it’s probably safer to leave it that way.”
That I understood. I also sensed that her decision had hurt Quinton in some way that he didn’t want to discuss. I let it slide and leaned against him. “You never told me Solis knew who you really are.”
He kissed my temple. “Nope. He swore to tell no one, and that included you.”
“So . . . should I start calling you by your real name, now that you’re in from the cold?”
Quinton laughed. “What, as if I were someone out of a John le Carré novel? You do, and I shall be forced to take drastic measures.”
“Oh? How drastic?”
“Like this,” he said, and swooped his head down to blow a loud raspberry against my belly.
I squealed and wriggled around in the blanket as he tickled me and made more ridiculous noises against my skin. It was silly and it hurt a bit from the pulling of my scars and unevenly healed muscles, but I was more than just warm now and I sure as hell wasn’t going to complain.
In a few minutes he stopped tickling and began stroking and kissing my skin instead. It felt strange without the soft rasp of his beard and the silky trailing of his hair, but the heat of his mouth and tongue still wrung a gasp of pleasure from me. He moved lower, sliding his hands and lips down between my legs.
He licked and nibbled, his fingers sliding over moisture, then pushing deep. I put my hands on his head to pull him into me and was frustrated by his short hair. I felt him chuckle against my hot, wet flesh, and the sensation made me moan. He continued, without remorse, building a scalding tension in my body with every touch, driving me tighter, higher, until it burst apart, pushing outward on my cry of ecstatic release.
Liquid and hard, he slid up and into me as I was still gasping. He groaned and buried his face in my neck, biting lightly as he thrust and then licking where he’d bitten. He nipped at my earlobe and then pressed his lips against my ear. “I love you.”
I shuddered under him, arching into his movement, and turned my head, capturing his mouth with mine. I didn’t need to hear what I knew. I loved the feel of him, the touch and the taste and the depth of his motion inside me, drawing me tight again. I only wanted to feel, without words, to come with him in that breaking, crystal instant.
He gave me my way, making love with only the conversation of our bodies and the upward-spiraling cadence of our gasps and moans, the depth and speed of his thrust and my response. I felt the tension in his body snapping as he groaned and shuddered. A wave of awesome sensation burst into me, like a million sparks dancing over my skin, igniting something that burned across us both. I clenched my eyes shut against the brightness of it through the Grey as I shattered and came with him, feeling our energy twine together, blazing into a circle encompassing us alone and illuminating the world within, then fading softly, slowly. . . .
He laid his head against the crook of my neck once again, breathing deeply, slowing, until his body eased and he slid over to lie beside me. I watched him and smiled until he fell asleep. Then I laid my head down and stared into the dark, feeling his contentment and my own anxiety winding over me. How could I feel warm and fuzzy while I also felt like a lying bitch? I didn’t know how I was going to protect him, or how I was going to live up to him. What Quinton feared most, what he had given up his freedom and anonymity for, was all too possible. When my father’s ghost had gone, he’d taken away the thing that made me nearly immortaclass="underline" my deepest kinship with the Grey, the growing inhumanity that had enabled me to hear the song of the energy, to change the structure of the grid and kill a god. That was gone and I had lied to Quinton: I was no longer bulletproof; I could die as easily as anyone and leave him forever.
We got up while the sun was still low and went out to search for the yellow silk banishment and see how much mess the creeping dead had left behind. We had no luck with the missing spell, and I guessed it had probably been carried off by a bird that was now living in the silkiest yellow nest in the world. The remains of the zombies weren’t very identifiable except that most weren’t human. The stink of decomposition had already attracted scavengers that had done a good job of carrying bits away and spreading the rest around. It was a pain in the ass to scrape up the glop and parts left behind and bury them, but at least none of these dead would be walking again.
Over a cold breakfast afterward, I looked over the lists I’d gotten from Faith. I swore and laid the papers aside. “Useless. The people on the list are the people I already know about. There used to be more full-time residents, but now there’s only a handful and they’re all accounted for. I’m still looking for someone who’s here, but not here. It’s not seasonal renters or even the nonresident owners, because most of the overt violence has happened in the late winter and early spring before they come up here.”
“What about Ridenour?”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure. He doesn’t seem to have any magical power. He doesn’t seem to even see the magical things going on.”
“He could be acting. He was married to a demon for a while, after all.”
“But he didn’t know what she was until Willow told him. And the huli-jing is gone now, so his connection to the grid through her was cut.”
“Doesn’t mean he can’t have started to play with it on his own, if he was so desperate to get his wife back or take revenge.”
I nodded. It fit to a degree, but I wasn’t quite satisfied with it. Still, it would explain Ridenour’s not coming to find me after Willow had escaped from the greenhouse, since he’d have gone after her himself. I respected Ridenour enough that I wanted more proof before I accused him of bashing in Strother’s head and killing Leung. Ridenour didn’t seem to have any Grey abilities of his own, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have borrowed some. After all, whoever had moved the Subaru into the lake had needed help. If the killer wasn’t very good at magic, it would explain why the crimes themselves were sudden and violent and why only the aftermath and cover-up had the tang of the Grey. Ridenour didn’t live at the lake, but he was around constantly. . . .
Quinton pointed at the other list. “What about that one? Anything there?”
I picked it up and scanned it. “List of what was found in Leung’s Subaru.” I shook my head. “They’re going to have a great time trying to figure out what’s significant in this bunch of rotting junk. Not a lot survived the fire in the front of the car, but the stuff in the back was mostly intact until it hit the water. Leung was a real pack rat,” I added. Then I summarized the list: “A big lump of wet paper—probably maps—that started to rot as soon as it got into the air; pocket change; keys; a rifle and a box-worth of unfired cartridges to match; a large rock; the remains of what was probably a pair of boots—in addition to the pair he was wearing at the time; a tire iron and jack, badly rusted; a spare coat that was mostly rot and guesswork; a plastic crate of rusted canned goods; a surveyor’s transit in a waterlogged wooden box; two baseball caps in dubious condition; the remains of two blankets—”