Retrievers - Burning Bridges Part 19

She ran out of words, or hit a brick wall, or something that made her just stop.

He tried to keep his tone mild, even as she could feel him tense up. "We've had this...discussion, before. In all the years you've known me, you never once even implied that I was a liability to you, that I could not keep my side up in a fight. Now, suddenly...at the risk of sounding like the girl in this, why does s.e.x suddenly give you any right to say what I can and can't do?"

She pushed against him, just enough to create a small s.p.a.ce between them. "It doesn't, and that's not...it gives me the right to worry out loud, rather than biting it back because I didn't have the right. Except I always did because you're my partner, d.a.m.n it, and if I know something's coming that's meaner and nastier than you are, and fights with things other than fists and guns, I have to say so."

"Except they do fight with fists and guns, " he pointed out. "And baseball bats and knives. All things I have more experience with than you do."

"Stop being logical! This isn't about logic, d.a.m.n it!" she cried out, frustrated, and then collapsed against him, shaking.

He knew her well enough to know, instantly, that the shakes were from giggles, not tears. Slightly hysterical, perhaps, but her innate sense of the absurd was rea.s.serting itself, rather than letting drama take over.

"You're an idiot, " he said.

"So're you." The words were m.u.f.fled, but understandable.

He smiled into the sweaty tangle of her hair. "So let's be idiots together, as the saying goes."

That, apparently, was the right thing to say. Her hands weren't cold anymore, he discovered, as she reached down his torso, this time raising s.h.i.+vers of an entirely different sort. Faint flickers of current trailed in her wake, dancing on the surface of his skin, carefully not sinking into the flesh. He could only imagine the concentration it took, to keep control of the current even after it left her, while still focusing on other parts of his body. Or was she even aware of it? He wondered, sometimes, how clear the delineation was between Wren and the current she carried within her.

Then she s.h.i.+fted, and took him into her mouth, and he didn't much care how she did it, or why, only that she kept on exactly whatever it was she was doing. He didn't know which felt better, the current on his belly, or her tongue flicking at the head of his c.o.c.k, or when she slid...all right, he thought, definitely, that feels best of all.

She played him like that, back and forth, s.h.i.+fting him through the sensations magical and merely physical, until he felt like a twist-tied rubber band in dire need of release. He would have agreed to anything she asked of him, at that point, and loved her all the more for knowing that-and not asking anything of him at all.

And even so, something inside, some devil of the purely human sort, niggled at his brain and twitched his nerve endings.

Don't do it.

Angeli were b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. You could ignore what the angel on your shoulder warned. Right?

You're an idiot.

It wasn't idiocy. It was okay. She had been grounding in him for a decade, and he was a little battered, but okay. And she grounded in P.B., when the Toscanni creature was trying to eat him, during the summer, and P.B. was okay....

He didn't like the thought of her grounding in P.B., not even to save his, Sergei's life and soul, and so pushed that thought down quickly.

No, this was between the two of them. She needed to use current; it was what she did. What she was. It was part of her. And he wanted to know that part, know everything. Just a little bit more of her, just a bit...she was in control. He trusted her to keep control. He just wanted...a little bit more....

Idiot, and then the angel was gone.

"Wrenlet...more. Let go just a little more...."

She tensed, and his fingers dug into her shoulders, ma.s.saging the knot forming there, encouraging her to go on. Letting her know that it was okay, he was okay.

She said she trusted him. He trusted her. It was all about the trust, wasn't it? He could take anything she gave. He wanted it. He was her partner, not that half-sized fur-toy. Something so much a part of Wren, so essential...he would be the one to ground her, not him.

You're an idiot, even the devil said, then faded, as well, as his vocal cords took over.

"Wren. Please. Just a little more, you're making me crazy, finish me off..."

At any other moment, under other conditions, he would never have asked. Under other conditions, she would have-and had-read him the riot act just for asking.

He knew his partner. Knew that, once committed, she didn't back down. Not during a Retrieval, not during...anything.

"Wren, please..."

She heard him, he knew she did. The pressure of her hands on his thighs lessened, then increased again, her efforts redoubled in order to drive the thought out of his larger head.

"Ah, Wrenlet, you're killing me...."

The wrong thing to say. Completely the wrong thing to say. Her fingers dug into his flesh in response, nails probably leaving nasty little marks. But even as he realized it, and backtracked mentally if not verbally, the current dancing on his skin sizzled and sank into his flesh, shocking his nerve endings in a way that was almost enough. Then her mouth covered him one last time, and everything from his toes to his heart clenched, as though he had been gut-punched, only in a good way. Sergei wasn't one for talking when he came, but he let out a heavy, labored sigh that could have been her name, could have been a swearword, but probably wasn't any language at all except satisfaction.

And then his entire body went cold as she was out of bed, a pale white blur in the darkness, backing away from him with the uncertain steps of someone reeling from a deathblow.

"Wren?"

"You...I didn't mean to do that."

He started to tell her that it was okay, that he was okay, when what she was saying clarified in his head. Her letting go of the current, allowing it to go beyond the borders of his skin, hadn't been a result of his somewhat incoherent pleas, or even an instinctive response to what he needed.

She had done the one thing she-and every lonejack-feared the most. She had lost control.

"Wren..."

But she was gone, a sudden, totally unexpected zap of current taking her elsewhere, and leaving everything in the room-including himself-quivering in the aftermath.

"Oh, f.u.c.k."

Seventeen.

In retrospect, P.B. thought later, it was probably a good thing he had decided to put off clipping his nails until another, even more boring evening. Otherwise, when the naked human female appeared in his living area, he might have lost a toe. And even for demon, toes were tough to regrow.

"Hemeltjelief!"A beat, then: "Jesus-Valere!" Something Didier had said once, tugged at the back of P.B.'s head. He remembered it the same instant that the woman fell forward onto her hands and knees, and began puking all over his rug.

She's not very good at Translocating. Screws her system up seven ways from Sunday.

He grabbed the blanket off the back of the sofa he'd been sitting on, and threw it over her shoulders. Not so much to cover her nudity-it didn't do anything for him, and he was pretty sure Wren wasn't much on modesty-but because it was bra.s.s-nuts cold outside, and not much warmer in the apartment. When you have fur, you tend not to worry so much about if the furnace is working or not.

"Okay, okay, it's okay." She kept retching, so it wasn't okay, but he didn't know what else you said to naked lonejacks who appeared and then poured their dinner out over your floor. It wasn't covered in anything Emily Post had ever written.

"Oh G.o.d."

"No, just me." It was a feeble joke, but all he had at the moment. "Come on, come on, Valere, come with me." He led her, like a child, into the bathroom. She stood there in the middle of the dingy white tiles while he pushed aside the shower curtain and turned the water on, as hot as he could make it. He remembered that, from taking care of her after the Frants case: she liked her showers hot.

"Get in."

She stood there, still huddled in the blanket, but at least not throwing up anymore.

"Valere. Tub. In. Get."

Her shoulders hunched, she swallowed once, hard, but otherwise might as well have been made out of mannequin-plastic, she was so unresponsive. He finally gave in and hauled her, unresisting, into the tub. The twelve inches or so difference in their height made it awkward, but he onlylooked cute and cuddly-demon were, by design, solid muscle and bone.

The blanket came off a second too late, and landed, already waterlogged, in the tub.

"Needed to wash that, anyway, " he said, then drew the curtain and sat down on the toilet seat to wait. He'd give her privacy to recover from whatever it was that sent her here-there was no blood, no damage that he could see, so he wasn't going to freak out just yet-but she was clearly in some kind of shock, so he wasn't going to be more than a paw's grab away. Just in case.

He'd told her once that she could always count on him, that she could ground in him; that was what he'd been made for.

Looked like part of her, at least, had heard and believed him. And remembered, when she needed to remember.

Wren didn't remember anything. Her first, last, and only memory was standing under a heavy fall of hot rain, surrounded by the smell of something musky, and...baby shampoo?

"No More Tears?" she guessed, her voice, to her ears, too high-pitched and squeaky to actually be hers.

"I get tangles, all right?" P.B.'s voice was rea.s.suringly grumpy, from the other side of the waterfall.

She opened her eyes, and saw white tile, and a green-and-black striped shower curtain. At her feet, tangled, was the waterlogged weight of a blanket of some sort, now totally ruined.

"Where am I?"

"My apartment. Specifically, my shower."

"How did I get here?"

"d.a.m.ned good question, Valere."

And then she remembered...

"Don't you dare throw up again!" P.B. warned, when she made a noise somewhere between a choke and a scream, caught midpoint in her throat.

Translocating made her toss her guts. Always and every time, whether someone else sent her, or she went under her own dubious power.

She had done this to herself; Wren was pretty sure about that. There was comfort, and afterglow, then the sickening thud of realizing something-Sergei! I hurt Sergei!-followed hard on the heels by a memory of him lying there, looking at her, all right, unhurt, at least as far as she could tell.

"I lost control. I said I would control it, and I didn't." But she said it quietly, letting the water keep the admission to itself, not letting the demon on the other side hear her secret.

"Everybody loses control, Valere."

d.a.m.n demon hearing. She kept forgetting that, because he was so good about-usually-not hearing what he wasn't mean to hear. She tried to work up the energy to get mad, then supposed, considering the circ.u.mstances, she'd waived the right to privacy.

"Is anyone dead?"

A fair enough question. She considered it. "No."

"Then there's nothing that can't be dealt with. Come on, Wren. You're going to drown."

She waited a moment, as though weighing the possibilities of drowning, then reached forward and shut the taps off. The water went away abruptly, and the cold air hit her skin and made her shake with the realization that she was a. naked and b. freezing.

"Here." A towel appeared around the edge of the shower curtain. It was huge, blue, and thick enough to hide in.

"Thanks."

"There's stuff here that might fit you. I'm putting soup on."

She wasn't hungry, but the thought of something warm and salty to get rid of the taste in her mouth-and replenish the electrolytes she had undoubtedly lost-was appealing. Plus, you didn't refuse hospitality, when offered, from the being who wasn't making you clean up after yourself. He might just change his mind and hand her a mop.

The "stuff" was a pair of sweatpants that, when cuffed three times and the string tie pulled in to a ridiculous degree, stayed on her hips and didn't trip her when she walked. They were thick, and fleecy, and bright red, and Wren didn't want to know whose they had been, originally, or how they'd ended up in P.B.'s possession. The sweater was an easier guess-it had been a gag gift to him from her, Christmas the year before: the Coca-Cola polar bears wearing Santa hats and cavorting with penguins.

It really was impossible to look at penguins, and not feel better.

P.B. didn't have a kitchen, not even the walkthrough-and-turnaround she laid claim to, but the corner stove was more than adequate for heating a couple of cans of soup and serving them up into clunky white bowls. They sat on the sofa-the rug mysteriously rolled up and sent away while she was drying herself off-and lifted spoons until she started to feel the warmth come back into her bones.

"Want to talk about it?"

"No."

"Right. You appear in my home, bare-a.s.sed like the day you were born, shocky as h.e.l.l, like a soldier that's been ga.s.sed, and ruin a rug I've had for years-okay, it was a c.r.a.p rug, it was still mine-and you don't want to tell me why?"

"No."

"Okay."

The sound of spoons sc.r.a.ping stoneware filled the room, accompanied by human and demon slurps and swallows. It was a rude, homey noise, and Wren started to feel like she might not shatter if she moved too suddenly.

"You think maybe you could call me a cab?"

"Poof, you're a cab."

She looked sharply at the demon, and he met her gaze evenly, his dark red eyes unblinking. Most of the time she could forget he wasn't, well, human. Suddenly, tonight, she was completely aware of his alien-ness...and it didn't matter in the slightest. The only thing in those eyes was a compa.s.sion and concern on a level she had only ever seen once before: in her mother's eyes. Grounding.

"Whatever it was you were doing, you were somewhere comfortable enough to get comfy. That means you were home...or at Sergei's. If you were at home and something spooked you, spooked you enough to use current to get the h.e.l.l out of there, it's fifty-fifty where you would have ended up." He reconsidered. "All right, seventy-five-twenty-five. But there was still a chance that you would have gone there, not here.

"But you weren't surprised to be here. You haven't asked me to contact Sergei. You haven't worried about him at all."

He blinked, then, and she could almost hear the cogs turning, slipping into a new configuration.

"Did he do this to you?"

If she said yes, Sergei would be dead. Wren understood that, in a flash like understanding current, like knowing how to call lightning down from the skies, power from power lines. One word.

"G.o.d, no!"

The demon blinked again, and he was P.B. Her friend. Her companion.