Page 42 of Countdown to Murder
I grinned. “I bought a ton of broccoli and clarified butter. So that’s good. Are you hungry now?”
“Yes, but my stomach is full. Can we go for a ride? Mordecai told me about a power spot, some cliffs by thesea, and he suggested I go there and meditate under the sun.”
“I know the spot.” My hands formed into fists and I squeezed them tight. “Please tell me he didn’t tell you to stay a virgin?”
She smiled. “He encouraged me to exploreallof life’s pleasures, and to work to strengthen the bond you and I have already begun to form.”
My hands relaxed, then my forearms, biceps, and shoulders. Even my neck let go of some tension I hadn’t realized I was holding.
“Will you be meditating as a woman or a snake?”
“I think he wants me to stay in human form this week, or however long we have together here.”
“The slayers will likely want to test you in both forms.”
She nodded. “Yeah, he explained that part. I’ll be okay, I just need some time to adjust before my willpower is fucked with.”
We drove for a while in silence, and I let her have all she needed.
When she finally spoke, it wasn’t what I expected.
“I’ve met lots of people since I’ve had my supposed freedom. None made me feel the way you do. Why is that?”
“Some people say it’s chemistry, but I think that’s just a way of describing something we don’t understand. Thething is, having chemistry gets you started, but if the relationship is going to work, there has to be a lot of communication, and you have to work past a lot of quirks and shit. So far, I haven’t seen any quirks that bug me. The important thing is that we talk about them when they show up.”
“Quirks?”
“Sometimes it’s something silly, like putting the toilet paper on different ways, but even though it seems silly, it’s something you’re confronted with many times a day, and all of those add up to something like two thousand times a year. So even if the quirk is something bigger, if you only have to deal with it two or three times a year, it might be easier to deal with.”
“Like?”
Try as I might, I couldn’t think of an example. “Nothing comes to mind. I’ve had a few women break it off with me because of my job. They wanted someone who’s home every night, and that’s never going to be me. If this works out between us, we’ll have to work around our assignments to see each other, but we’ll both understand that you can’t just walk away from an op because your partner is having a rough day.”
I pulled into the parking area and turned the car off. “We walk from here.”
* * **
Panda
Mordecai’s suggested spot seemed perfect for Mira’s energy. She walked out near the edge, sat, and meditated for two hours.
The wind blew her hair, her clothes, and I could sense it interacting with her aura. Her life-force. Salt and water and lots of positive energy. The god-of-old had been right — this was exactly what she’d needed to ground herself and begin to get intimate with her new abilities and energies.
While she sat, I considered what I felt from her now, as opposed to before.
More power, certainly, but also more abilities. Going up in power, gaining a hunger,andexpecting to be tested within a week was a huge ask, but Mordecai and Nathan seemed to think she could handle it.
I’d called Nathan from the grocery store parking lot, and he’d warned me Ryan would have to tear her apart worse than he wanted in order to satisfy Apollonius. I’d known it, but hearing it made me want to take her somewhere else and hide her away forever.
But I knew I couldn’t do that. Vampires, deadly snakes, honey badgers, crocodiles, and a dozen other species have to go through testing that takes them to the brink of death, or at least feels like it.
Any shapeshifter who gains a hunger later in life, especially during a power-up, also has to go through testing. The fact she’s a king cobra and possibly a demi-goddess would certainly add to that. She was going to be tested, so we’d have to make certain she was ready.
The fact Mordecai wanted us to strengthen our bond worried me. Was she going to need to lean on it during her testing? Or was she going to need a reason to want to live?
Either way, it probably meant we needed to have sex sooner rather than later.
I thought back to everything I knew about virgins, which wasn’t much, and then something I knew about bad-assed women — most of them don’t get flowers and chocolate very often.
