Kinked

SEVEN

By the time Aryal finally parked the car in a gravel parking lot at a deserted campsite, it was late afternoon and clouds obscured the nearby mountain peaks. Tantalizing hints of land magic had begun to tickle at her senses for the last half hour or so of the drive. She longed to take flight and hunt for the elusive feeling, soar over the mountain range and kick her feet in the thick clouds.

The day had warmed enough to melt the patchy snow at the lower altitudes, but sunset came early in March in the Czech Republic, and the temperature was already falling again. When she opened the car door, the damp chill air was like a cold, wet washcloth slapping her in the face. The fresh air smelled wonderful, and it felt good and bracing, but it wasn’t enough to cool the heat pouring through her body.

Grateful to be out of the confinement of the car at last, she stretched her aching back. Instantly an image of Quentin stretching in the car flashed in her mind. He looked like a great, lazy cat as he did it, his blue eyes vivid in his tanned face. He smelled like virility and feline Wyr. The scent got up her nose and made her crazy. Her Wyr side wanted to claw at him. Hell, her human side wanted to claw at him too.

Gods, this had turned into a long trip already, and they were only on the first day. And she had lost her only comfort, the conviction that everybody would be better off if she just committed a quiet, itsy-bitsy little murder.

Aryal flew by her instincts, and every instinct had screamed for so long that Quentin was a dangerous man. And he was dangerous. Not many creatures could get her down on the ground with their hands around her throat.

Had she let that skew her perspective? Is that why she had pursued him so relentlessly? After all, a dangerous man would make an exceedingly dangerous criminal.

But he had been telling the truth earlier, and so had she—she really didn’t care about the smuggling he had done. If she pushed it and continued to squander her time digging into his past, maybe she could get enough evidence to kick him out of his sentinel position, but what would it cost her?

He was already well liked, and he was Pia’s special friend. And Aryal had taken sober note of not only Dragos’s words, but of Grym’s as well, along with the cold assessing way that Graydon had looked at her when she had gone to talk to him in the cafeteria. She had already used up all of her considerable free rein with not only Dragos, but with almost everybody else too. She was riding high on everyone’s annoyance radar and low on tolerance. Nobody’s first impulse was going to be to give her any slack.

So she spent the drive doing something she rarely did, which was considering the possible consequences of her actions. The exercise hurt her brain and offended her nature. But the bottom line was, all that effort and upheaval would be to pin him for crimes that she didn’t give a shit about anyway. Gah, if only he had been a spy, or involved in some super secret assassination plot against Dragos or somebody else she loved!

At least she didn’t have to give up her hate on him. She just had to give up the whole “hunting for an act of God to squash him like a bug so she could innocently present his crushed and lifeless body to Dragos” plan.

She had to admit, that did make life a lot simpler.

And besides, giving up on the plan was one thing. She could still hurt him a whole lot if he gave her any reason to. She cheered at the thought.

They were going to have to leave the car, maybe for some time, so she had parked in an unobtrusive spot underneath some trees for whatever shelter that might offer from the elements. As she looked around, she noted that the campsite had permanent metal grills for cooking. Probably small animals had built nests in half of them. She preferred setting up her own fire ring.

It was early to stop for the day, but there was also no reason to wreck themselves. This land was beautiful, but it would not be friendly terrain in mid-March, and it was not like they could push hard, finish their assignment and go home early. And Dragos had already said they couldn’t show up again in New York before two weeks were up.

They’d already had a sleepless night and a transcontinental flight, and Aryal had eaten only one full meal since yesterday. Granted it was a big meal, but her body was telling her that it was ready for another one.

Quentin had exited the car too. He studied the scene with one arm resting on the car roof. Lifting his head, he scented the breeze. He said, “There are wolves in these mountains.”

Sentinel or no, a large enough pack of any kind of predator could bring one of them down, but the wolves weren’t really a threat to either her or Quentin. Any wolves would sense that they were the more dangerous predators and normally give them a wide berth. A wild pack would have to have an overriding reason to attack them.

She could also take to the air and leave behind any confrontation, and if Quentin couldn’t outrun them, he could go to high ground, maybe climb a tree, and wait them out. The weather wasn’t bitter enough to turn any wild pack desperate enough to tree him for days until he became desperate enough to take them on.

But wolves could become a nuisance, especially when they cooked food, so they would still need to stay wary. She said briskly, “We should set up camp.”

He tilted his head from side to side, stretching his neck muscles. “All right. I did the bulk of the work this morning, so I’m going to take off and see if I can hunt down some fresh game for supper. You can set up camp.”

“Hey!” she exclaimed. Hunting was the fun chore.

He didn’t stay to argue with her. Instead he shapeshifted into a massive black panther and after one expressive glance at her, he glided away. She made a face, looked around at the deepening dusk and set to work.

She was tempted to erect just one tent and claim it, but if he came back with fresh meat, she wanted some, so she set up a proper camp with a tarp strung between two trees in case of rain or snow, and the two dome tents set on more tarps on opposite sides of a ringed campfire. Modern materials made camping a breeze. The dome tents were light, portable, and erected within five minutes.

Not only had Quentin bought sleeping bags, but he also had picked up thin insulating pads that would protect them from the bitter chill of the ground. They weren’t as comfortable as air mattresses, but they weren’t as heavy and bulky either. Everything he had bought was top of the line and lightweight for serious, long-distance hiking.

The most time-intensive thing was gathering wood for a campfire. She worked on that quickly, and after she had gathered deadwood from the immediate area, she jogged around the larger campsite to see if anybody had left wood behind from the previous season.

She was in luck and found a couple of armloads. She hauled them back to camp, started the fire, and opened the bottle of twenty-six-year-old scotch she had found in one of the bags in the car. As she took her first pull from the bottle, the black panther slipped out of the gathering darkness, two winter hares in his mouth.

Reflected light from the new flames flickered in the panther’s strange, brilliant blue eyes and gleamed along his glossy black pelt. He was an oddity in that his Wyr form was so black, yet in his human form, his hair was a dark blond. It was probably a product of his mixed-race heritage. As he padded toward her, his heavy, graceful muscles flowed underneath his skin, causing the light to ripple along his long, powerful body.

The skin at the back of her nape prickled. This was why she was so convinced he was dangerous. If she dove at him as a harpy, he had the speed, power and size to snatch her out of the air.

She refused to let her reaction show, so she sniffed, took another swig from the bottle and told the panther, “You’re the one who wanted to hunt. You’d better not be bringing those to me to clean. The fire’s going to be ready in a few minutes. Hop to it.” The panther stared at the bottle of scotch then up at her with an unblinking gaze. She shooed him with one hand. “Go on, you stinky cat.”

The panther let the hares fall to the ground, then he shapeshifted into a crouching man who was every bit as dangerous as the animal. He said pointedly, “That is not your scotch.”

Up until that very moment, she’d had every expectation of sharing the bottle with him. After all, sharing resources was what camping mates did, but his attitude spun her in a sharp one-eighty.

“Of course it is. I found it, didn’t I?” She took another long swig, capped the bottle and tucked it securely under one arm. Then she pointed out, “I set up your tent. I didn’t have to.”

He glanced around at the camp she had made. “That was not worth a twenty-six-year-old bottle of scotch,” he said. Still, he scooped up the hares and strode off, returning very soon with the carcasses skinned and cleaned.

By then the flames were burning steadily. She had already constructed a roasting spit from forked branches, with a third branch set across the fire. In no time, they had the hares set on the spit.

The wind had turned bitter as the last of the light fled, but the campfire threw off light and heat, and the liquor was a smooth fire that slid like golden lava down her throat. Aryal knew Wyr urbanites who would shudder at having to spend the night out in weather conditions like this, but they had been tamed so much by civilization, they had grown soft and dependent on modern conveniences.

She didn’t understand those Wyr. They had lost part of their souls, or bartered them away for their flat screens and hot tubs, electricity and refrigeration, and deadbolts that kept out other things but most importantly locked them in.

She loved the night.

After their supper had been set to cook, Quentin straightened from his crouch, turned and glowered at her. “Hand it over.”

He looked moody and pissed. But then he always looked moody and pissed around her. It always startled her whenever he smiled at anyone else. First, that he was capable of smiling at all, and second, that he looked so damn good when he did it.

Why did she feel the compulsion to constantly rile him? Honestly, she wasn’t contrary all of the time, just usually around people who made her crazy. She shook her head. “Finders keepers. Possession’s nine-tenths of the law. And besides, I don’t want to.”

“I hate you,” said Quentin, “so goddamn passionately.”

She shook her head and tsked. “You young Wyr feel everything too much—”

This time he didn’t launch at her. Instead he advanced on her slowly, his eyes full of intent. She smiled as she uncapped the scotch and held it up to her mouth.

He snatched at it, hooked his fingers around the bottom of the bottle and kept her from drinking. She pulled and he pulled, and amber liquid sloshed out of the top.

“I’m curious,” said Quentin. “Is every harpy like you?”

She braced herself and tugged harder on the bottle. She couldn’t budge it from his grasp. More liquid sloshed out. “We’re pretty rare,” she said cheerfully. “I’m considered one of the more sociable ones. Most harpies don’t tolerate living in society well. They get around too many people, and they get all whacked-out and slashy.”

“Sociable.” He barked out a laugh and advanced more, until the bottle was sandwiched between their torsos. He gripped the bottle neck, his hands sandwiching hers.

She tilted her head and assessed him. Hell if she was going to retreat just because he decided to get all aggressive and push into her personal space. Heat came off him in waves. It felt more delicious than the heat from the fire.

She said softly, “What are you doing, Quentin?”

“Honestly,” he said, just as softly. “What does Grym see in you anyway?”

She exploded. “How many times are you going to bring that up? We’re not lovers! Grym and I are friends. Here’s a newsflash for you. I. Do. Have. Friends. Maybe that concept is a little difficult for you to grasp.”

He put a hand over her mouth.

It brought his scent up close and personal under her nose. His palm felt hard and callused against her lips. She almost licked it to find out if his skin was salty.

She said telepathically, That’s got to be one of the more stupid gestures I’ve ever seen.

He growled, “But it looks so pretty.”

She remembered the woman who had been with him, soft and feminine, handcuffed and obedient. What would it be like to give control over to him? To feel his powerful body moving over hers, in hers, while he did anything he liked to her? Anything at all.

In her case, he’d probably take the opportunity to throttle her again.

What would it be like if he gave control over to her? Her skin prickled, a hot shivering sensation.

She jerked her mouth away from his hand and heard herself saying, “I was going to kill you.”

Well, she hadn’t exactly planned on admitting that. She watched his lean face warily as he laughed, a low wicked chuckle that vibrated through the bottle between them.

His gaze had turned reckless. “I was going to kill you too.”

Her eyebrows rose. “You might have tried.”

Actually he might have succeeded, just as she might have. There had never been a time when sentinel had fought against sentinel. Each of them had highly individualized talents. Even the gryphons’ talents differed from each other. But they were all comparable in terms of strength, agility and cunning.

He tugged again at the bottle and this time, losing interest in the tug of war, she let go. He took a long pull. She watched the long muscles of his throat work as he drank. When he finished, he said, “I still might try.”

Her smile turned mocking. Was this their version of détente? He wouldn’t be talking about it, if he really meant to try. Neither one of them would. They wouldn’t give away that much of their intentions. She told him, “Now you’re just flirting.”

Fat from the cooking meat dripped onto the fire and it hissed. One corner of his sexy mouth hooked up as, moving at a leisurely pace, he turned away from her.

She nearly grabbed him by the jacket and yanked him around to face her again, but she controlled the predatory impulse and watched as he squatted to turn the hares on the spit. He splashed both hares with the liquor. It caused the flames to flare up, searing the meat.

She liked the sight of him on his knees. She would like it better if his head were tilted back in supplication. The alpha male, subjugated to her.

She didn’t know why the impulse to change into her Wyr form took her over. She just did it, and walked up behind him. Even though she was silent, his back tensed. He was aware of her every move.

She reached out to trace the shell of his ear with a talon. “You like to dominate pretty, soft girls,” she whispered. “The hors d’oeuvres. It feeds something macho inside, doesn’t it? Makes you feel like a big, strong man.” He turned his head to stare up at her, the firelight gilding his hair. She stroked very lightly at the sensitive whorls inside his ear and smiled as she watched the shudder that shook through his body. “You play such pretty games. A strip of leather, toy handcuffs. None of it is real. You would never dare to really give up control yourself, would you? You don’t have it in you.”

He glanced at her wings and down her body. His face blazed with something hotter than the fire. Deliberately he straightened to his feet and looked at her. He said, “You have no idea what I would do, or what I would dare.”

Her wings flared out. With a forefinger, she pressed the razor-sharp tip of her talon against the curve of his lower lip. Pressed very gently, until a single ruby drop of blood welled.

He never moved or turned away. All his bones stood out, the shadows accentuated with the force of whatever it was he felt.

The harpy leaned forward and licked the drop of blood away. His blood tasted rich and heavy, and his lips tasted like whiskey.

She smiled, barely containing the hectic urge to hurtle into space. “I dare you to give up control to me,” she said.

“That’s twice you’ve drawn my blood,” he said between his teeth. “I owe you something for that.”

She had no way of knowing what he was feeling, only that it was something powerful enough to cause him to breathe heavily, as if he had been running for a very long time. He licked his own lip, touching his tongue where hers had already gone.

And he smelled like sex again, hot and sultry, and more intoxicating than any liquor. She hissed, “I dare you to give it up.”

His eyes flared as he took her by the chin. His claws had come out. “I’ll take that dare,” he growled. “Just as soon as you give up control to me.”

Her laughter pealed out over the clearing. She yanked her chin out of his hold. Then she gave in to the desire to leap into the night. She winged away from the clearing without looking back.

No one controlled the harpy.

No one.

Quentin ate both hares, because, screw it. If Aryal chose not to stick around, she forfeited any supper he had caught and cooked.

Then he sat with his head in his hands. Every now and then he fed logs into the fire and took pulls off the bottle of scotch. A fitful wind gusted through the trees overhead. They didn’t get any rain or snow, but the weather in the Bohemian Forest at this time of year was unpredictable at best, and that situation could turn in a matter of minutes.

Him, give up control. To Aryal.

It was the most self-destructive, cockamamie idea he’d ever heard.

Yet as he faced the harpy, his reaction to her had been more uncontrolled than ever.

He had never before been so close to her when she was in her Wyr form. The sight of her took his breath away. She was still recognizable as Aryal, but her features had become more upswept and pronounced. Her piercing eyes would be able to pick out prey from miles, and good gods, those wings. They spread out behind her in a huge fan. Short, dark gray feathers covered the tops of the wings, close to the powerful humerus bones that held them aloft. They darkened down the wing to the long primary feathers that were pure black.

Like her face, the racy, slim bone structure and musculature of her nude body was accentuated. Her slight high breasts were tipped with small nipples, and from the waist downward, her hips and long legs were covered in small gray feathers that looked like they might be soft. He wondered what she would do if he ran a hand down her thigh.

If only she wasn’t so goddamn magnificent.

She looked alien and completely wild, and then she had leaped into the air, defying gravity. That was when he got it, when he really understood what Grym had meant, because he didn’t just grasp it with his head. He felt it with his gut.

She didn’t fit the concept of what a modern female should be like, and that made her even more annoying to a modern, entitled male such as he. She didn’t defer to his opinion or mask her own spiky personality to fit the concept of any modern behavior, because she wasn’t modern. She was truly one of the most ancient and wildest of creatures.

The fact was, she had probably already curbed herself in some way to fit in at the Tower as much as she did. For the most part, she kept her slashes down to verbal jabs and her predatory instincts focused on her investigations. The rest of her was just plain ornery.

He chuckled without much amusement. He couldn’t even say that he had just grown obsessed with her, because he had already been obsessed with her for some time. Now that his obsession had turned sexual, he couldn’t seem to turn it off. Or maybe it had been sexual all along, and he had only just come to realize it.

She had been right. He had never given up sexual control to anybody else. What would it be like to give it up to her, that pure, wild creature? It was never going to happen, so he would never know.

The nape of his neck prickled, and instinct made him tilt back his head and look at the cloudy night sky. There a gorgeous nightmare spiraled, wings outspread to their fullest as she cocked her head and looked down at him.

How long had she been up there, circling overhead and watching him?

His body clenched. The panther in him wanted to leap at her and drag her down to earth. The man wanted to cover her with his body, and make her give all of that purity and wildness over to him.

She came down and landed a short way away from the trees, snapped her wings back, and shapeshifted into her human form. Then she strode into the camp. She must have flown high, because her black hair sparkled with wetness.

She seemed centered somehow, revitalized. Flying for her must be what taking to his panther form and running in the woods did for him. That was when he had an epiphany.

She had a whip that drove her, just as he did.

She squatted in front of the fire without saying anything. They sat in silence for some time. Oddly enough, it was almost companionable.

Quentin looked at the scotch. The liquid was significantly low in the bottle. What the hell. He offered it to her, and after a moment’s hesitation, she took it.

“When you spied on me in my bedroom,” he said, “you liked it.”

She cocked her head at that, considering it for a moment before she shrugged. She drank a mouthful of scotch and passed the bottle back to him. “I loved your cock. The woman and the toys annoyed me.”

He burst out laughing, and a smile hovered at the corners of her mouth. “I’ll confess,” he said. “The woman and the toys annoyed me too.”

Aryal looked at him sideways. “Then why do it?”

He took a deep breath and straightened his back. It was a good question.

Why did he do it?

He could have said several things, and any one of them might have been true. He did it because he wasn’t quite the loner he wanted to be. Because he had a high sex drive, and he was looking for something. Whatever it was, he hadn’t found it yet.

Because the games weren’t right, but they were on the road to something, to a place where he needed to be. Because the games gave him a structure, a way to hold himself back so that he didn’t damage someone who was more vulnerable than he.

He drank then said, “It’s complicated.”

“No, it’s not,” she said. “You’re bent, like me.” He looked at her closely. She was not angling to get him angry. She was simply speaking the truth as she saw it.

“What are you talking about?”

“You can dress it up in those designer clothes you wear at the bar, and turn on the charm, but strip off all the clothes and the charm, and what lives underneath is raw and dark.” Her voice was flat and quiet. “You’re never going to really find yourself the way you’ve been going. You’re always going to feel restless and dissatisfied, until you realize that the games you’ve been playing don’t feed the animal that lives inside of you.”

“You’re full of bullshit,” he snapped. Her words bit him to the bone. He tried to push them away by scoffing at her, while the part of him that had torn loose and was running renegade ran harder than ever.

“Am I?” She stood and stretched with abandonment, as free and wild in her human skin as she was in her Wyr form. She looked down at him, and there was a strange expression in her gaze, something he’d never seen in her before. “There isn’t anything wrong with the darkness, you know,” she said, almost kindly. “It’s just as beautiful as anything else.”

He stared as she walked over to one of the tents, unzipped the flap and crawled inside. A muscle in his jaw twitched. He rubbed at his cheek to make it stop then finished off the scotch. There was no reason in the world not to.

Then, because there was no one to fight with, he crawled inside his own tent. He took off his boots, but kept the rest of his clothes on as he climbed into the sleeping bag. Within minutes, his own body heat had warmed up the bag and he was comfortable enough, at least physically.

Mentally was another matter. He stared at the shadowed ceiling of his tent until the fire outside died down. Then he closed his eyes and pretended to sleep while silence roared in his head.

Where it was so dark.