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  He imagined her breasts filling his palms, tightening at the tips as he applied just enough pressure to pull her body against his chest. He’d thumb her nipples lightly at first, then he’d pinch them—not too hard. The pain might set off her orgasm and he didn’t want that yet…well, hell, it was his fantasy after all. So yes, she’d come just from having him pinch her nipples and rub his cock against her ass. She’d keen with it and shiver and he’d have to hold her up because her knees would go weak from it.

  Once she’d calmed, he’d strip her bra away and lower his hands to her pants. A dainty button, a short zipper and he’d be peeling back the camel-colored material and sliding them over the swell of her hips. She’d shimmy for him, and each time her ass touched the hard tip of his cock, she’d let out a little gasp of appreciation. She’d want him in her but she’d have to wait until he was done playing her out.

  Now she’d be wearing only panties. Black satin. Not quite a thong, but close enough. He’d admire the way the strip of material split her ass cheeks. He’d follow the thorns of the rose vine along her lower back and lay a kiss on the pink blossom on her hip. Then he’d rip the fabric barrier away with his teeth.

  By now his cock was iron hard and burning for release. He slid the shaft through his hand, imagining he’d bent her over his chair and spread her legs with his own. He’d find her hot center with his fingers first, part her pussy lips and guide himself inside. She’d raise her ass for him to give him better access and she’d brace her hands on the cushions of the chair.

  He squeezed the ring of his fingers hard around the base of his cock. Almost there. A deep thrust or two and he’d be done, but what about her? In his fantasy, one orgasm was only the beginning for the woman he chose. So while he fucked her, slowly at first, then fast, her mound would rub against the chair, causing another orgasm to tighten her pussy convulsively around him.

  That would do it. He squeezed and thrust, letting the head of his dick slip through his tight fingers and pop out. The shower spray drumming on his glans added to the sensation. The slight sting of the soap in the slit made the whole thing more urgent. He drew up and he let out a groan as he climaxed, picturing Rihana’s gorgeous ass spread before him while he did.

  He kept pumping until the last drop of cum fell to the tub and washed away and then he let out a long, low whistle. This one had been far better than the one after he’d been with Tanesha. He wondered how real life would compare, but he couldn’t dwell on something that would never happen.

  He dialed back the temperature on the water to help cool his skin and his still-pulsating balls. Now that his head was clear, the big head at least, he could concentrate on what to do about getting the hell off this world before the Gemii assassin succeeded in eradicating the Verakos bloodline for good.

  * * * * *

  Rihana woke from an uncomfortable sleep with her clit pulsing. In her fevered dream she’d been with Heath. She still felt the pressure of his hands on her hips and her nipples were sore from him pinching and plucking at them. Sweat plastered her clothes to her body and left her feeling like a badly wrapped package left out in the rain.

  She struggled to sit up on the couch where she’d dozed, fighting with the throw pillows and the old crocheted blanket she must have pulled over herself before she nodded off. Memories of an erotic encounter that hadn’t actually happened swam through her muddled brain. Echoes of the satisfied sigh he’d let out when he came teased her senses. It all seemed so real. Her clit still pulsed and her thighs were damp. She felt like she’d been fucked.

  Embarrassed by her dreams, she rubbed her eyes and squinted around the dim room. It had to be close to dawn. Everything was gray in the pale light filtering through her filmy curtains. She heard minimal traffic sounds coming from the street three stories below.

  Drawing herself up, she stretched out the kinks in her back and yawned. Time to get over Heath Gyland and move on.

  The clock on the table next to the couch read four-thirty. That left two hours to sleep properly and pull herself together before she had to be back at the station. Pull herself together. She banished Nathan’s condescending phrase from her mind and pointed herself toward the bedroom.

  An unfamiliar sound stopped her. She tensed from head to toe, sacrificing those few glorious moments of relaxation for nervous vigilance. Had something moved in the shadows?

  A creak echoed through the apartment, loud as a gunshot, and Rihana gasped. Was it a footstep or just the floorboards in this old building cooling and contracting? The ticking of her kitchen clock seemed more like the dull thud of feet striding across the linoleum. The refrigerator compressor kicked on with a feral hiss and she whirled around to glare into the other room. Get a grip. There’s no one here.

  There were three locks on the front door. She remembered turning them all in succession when she got home. The windows all had safety catches on the frames. The coat closet next to the front door held a good old-fashioned wooden baseball bat and a modern, standard-issue billy club. Her gun, a department-issued Glock, lay in a box in her closet. Since she was technically a civilian, she couldn’t carry it off duty and generally only brought it to active crime scenes, such as when she’d helped track down a kidnapping victim. She hated the weapon, but right now she wished she had it in her hand.

  Something rustled, a sound so faint she wasn’t even sure she’d heard it, but her heart began to pound nevertheless. Two more tentative steps carried her close enough to the bedroom door that she could peek around the frame.

  Nothing moved, at least nothing she could see. She thought of entering the quaking. Then she could thrust her consciousness into the room ahead of her body and see what was there without it seeing her. If someone had broken in to her apartment, she’d be able to read their thoughts and know their intent but at the expense of leaving herself vulnerable.

  The choice was not whether to use her abilities or not, but whether to plunge into the bedroom and sweep her hand across the light switch or slither back toward the entryway closet and ease the baseball bat out from behind her winter coat. Her training told her to step away, head for the door and let herself out, snatching her cell phone on the way to call for help. Her instincts told her to rush in and find out just who had the audacity to think they could enter her home and get away with it.

  The closet won. She backed up all the way there, stopping between each step to listen for more movement. Tanesha Wain intruded on her thoughts as she reached for the closet door. The dead girl’s posture had told a horror story. Twisted limbs and clenched fists meant she’d been afraid. She’d died trapped by the bulky furniture of her bedroom, unable to run. Rihana refused to end that way.

  She flicked open the closet and rummaged inside. The satisfying weight of the bat gave her confidence as well as a boost of self-preservation instinct. She turned the locks on the front door over slowly, not allowing the tumblers to make a sound. Then she opened the door. Two steps would have put her safely in the hall, but it wasn’t her plan to run away. Instead she heaved the door shut, making as loud a bang as she could. She hit the wall switch and flooded the entryway with light and, brandishing the bat, she charged for the bedroom.

  When she burst into the room, shadows seemed to fly in all directions like a startled flock of black birds. She heard wings flapping and that otherworldly hiss again just before her shaking fingers found the light switch.

  “Down on the floor, you muthafu…”

  Nothing moved. Rihana stood in the middle of her bedroom, the bat raised over her shoulder like she was lining up a pop fly. Her panting breath moved her whole body back and forth, and the drum beat in the middle of her chest reached a crescendo that threatened to choke her.

  Nothing stared back at her. All the shadows had fled. The hiss of a serpent’s tongue, the flap of wings, the footsteps of a stalking killer all amounted to absolutely nothing.

  She was alone.

  And arguably insane.

  On a deep but unsteady br
eath, she lowered the bat. If she’d been embarrassed before after waking up aroused for a man she’d just met, this had to be worse. Running around her locked apartment—well, it was unlocked now—with a bat, hoping to crack the skull of an intruder, put her squarely in the company of the people who tied up the 9-1-1 phone lines on Halloween calling in reports of ghosts and goblins.

  She sank against the doorframe and dropped the bat. This had to end. Whatever Heath Gyland had done to her, she had to overcome her reaction to the man and get her head on straight or she’d need that aluminum foil beanie Brogan always teased her about.

  She needed that hot shower and a dose of the mild tranquilizers her doctor had prescribed a year ago. She’d only taken one of the pills so far and she knew one was enough to take the edge off. God, right now, she needed the edge off.

  “Gramma,” she said to the ceiling. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I need you to give me strength or let me go before I lose my mind.”

  There was no answer from Gramma. There never was. Even the times she’d tried to contact her through the quaking, the woman from whom she’d inherited this “gift” had remained strangely silent since her death four years before. With a forced sigh, Rihana scooped up the bat and headed back to the living room to put it away and relock her front door. Not for the first time, she wondered just where her grandmother had gone after death and if she had any idea what kind of suffering she’d saddled her only granddaughter with in this life.

  Chapter Five

  If he’d intended to remain in business, Heath might have been bothered when the police showed up at SkIntense early the next morning. His clients certainly might have wondered why three armed police officers and a plainclothes detective needed to be snooping around the shop.

  He’d let them in without a hint of reluctance and stood back while they pawed through his equipment and supplies.

  “Do you keep ink anywhere else, Mr. Gyland?” the detective asked. Brogan looked just as sour as he had in the interrogation room, but now his perpetual sneer also held a hint of satisfaction since he had the privilege of waving a search warrant in Heath’s face.

  “It’s all in the trays next to the chairs and on the shelves in back. There may be a bottle or two in the lower cabinets near the sink.” It didn’t bother him to cooperate. They wouldn’t find what they were looking for, not that they really knew what they were looking for.

  Brogan accepted his answer with a skeptical sigh and directed the uniformed officers to check all the cabinets and collect samples of dark inks—blues, blacks and browns—as well as needles, cloths and everything from the trash bins. Heath wanted to laugh at their methods. Did they expect he was dumb enough to kill a woman by giving her a poisoned tattoo and then leave the evidence of the crime lying in his garbage cans? “Check the dumpsters out back too,” Brogan said while he nosed around the coffeemaker as if it might be an instrument of death.

  “Would you like some espresso, Detective?” Heath made his offer with an innocent smile. He refused to let his agitation show, but this delay made his head spin. He’d wanted to show up at Makena Brady’s apartment this morning, knowing he’d find Darq there, but he couldn’t walk out now. He had to subject himself to this search to avoid any appearance of guilt or face another stint of useless questions. Perhaps the Gemii had planned this all along. Rather than kill him, if they framed him for a murder they could have him incarcerated for life and prevent him from someday returning to Verakos.

  If only the Gemii were that crafty.

  Brogan only shot him a disparaging look. “Your apartment is upstairs in this building, am I correct?”

  “Your search warrant only covers my place of business, am I correct?”

  Brogan held Heath’s gaze for a second. “So you’re not going to cooperate with us?”

  “I am cooperating, Detective. To the letter of your warrant. If you wish to search my home, get another one.”

  “We will.”

  Brogan barked a few more orders then rounded up his men. The uniformed officers carried out their evidence bags and filed past him toward the front door. Heath made a quick mental inventory of the items they’d taken—bottles of ink and small pieces of equipment, nothing he would miss if he planned to continue servicing clients. The last officer in line, however, didn’t carry a bag. Instead he held something up with the tip of a ballpoint pen and showed it to Brogan. The detective turned a questioning glance toward Heath.

  “A woman’s scarf,” he said. “Looks like Gucci.”

  Heath swallowed. That was Rihana’s. He remembered removing it from her slender neck just after his guardians had rendered her unconscious.

  “One of my clients left it here.”

  “Could it be Tanesha Wain’s?”

  “She was never in my shop, Detective.”

  “But you were in her apartment.”

  “I was, but this scarf wasn’t. It’s not hers.”

  “Hmm. Leave it.” Brogan dismissed the officer with a wave. “Even if it is hers, it won’t prove anything, so you can keep it. For now.”

  Heath pushed the scarf out of his mind. He couldn’t dwell on it, but he did have a pressing question. “Detective, I’m surprised Miss Daniels isn’t with you today. Isn’t this her case as well as yours?” He’d convinced himself it was only concern for her well-being that prompted his question.

  “She didn’t come in today. I’m not her keeper, so I can’t say why. I guess proving you innocent isn’t her top priority.”

  Heath ignored the twinge of concern growing in his gut. “Is that her job, to prove my innocence?”

  “Her job is to get ‘feelings’ and ‘impressions’ about things and lead the rest of us on hunts for psychic evidence and boogey men. Good men with families to support are taking pay cuts because the city is out of money, but there’s cash to hire palm readers and ghost hunters because they think dead people can solve crimes faster than live cops. This is not her case, Mr. Gyland, it’s mine. And the conviction will be mine too.” Brogan punctuated his derisive statement by shoving the warrant into Heath’s hands. “Keep this for your records, sir. Thank you for your cooperation and have a nice day.”

  He swept out of the shop and Heath spared just half a second to watch him go, then locked the door behind him and headed out the back. He hadn’t wanted to get any more involved with Rihana Daniels than necessary, but dammit, he couldn’t just go about his business wondering if something had happened to her. He’d put her in danger by touching her, by wanting her, and he had to make sure she was all right before he took Darq and Makena and left this world for good.

  * * * * *

  The insistent drumming of the shower spray on her back and the swirl of thick steam around her head made Rihana pleasantly sleepy. After a night filled with anxiety, she finally began to relax to the scent of hot water and herbal soap.

  The hiss of the water leaving the shower head helped lull her at first, until she realized the thin, silvery sound had nothing to do with the shower. It rose and fell in intensity, growing slightly louder, then fading.

  She froze despite the liquid heat sluicing over her body. An inner chill caused all of her skin to prickle and tightened her nipples to aching peaks. Before she could react, and shut the water off, her mind’s eye exploded in a vision recalled from her brief, unsuccessful foray into Heath Gyland’s mind.

  The serpents, depicted in such startling clarity on his muscular forearms, appeared before her, their heads raised and drawn back like striking cobras. Crimson and black, they writhed in tandem. The startling colors told her she hadn’t slipped into the quaking but was experiencing a different, rarer type of vision, one she didn’t understand.

  The serpents must have sensed her confusion because they wove closer, their yellow reptilian eyes flashing like warning beacons.

  Rihana reared back, gasping when a black forked tongue shot out at her. The urge to escape overcame her and she flailed at the shower curtain. Her movement sc
attered the images before her and the snakes faded into serpentine curls of steam then disappeared entirely.

  Shaking, Rihana stared at the now empty space before her. Her heart thundered and her hand trembled when she reached out to finally draw the curtain aside and survey the rest of the bathroom. Solid and black, her department-issued gun lay safely on the vanity where she’d placed it before locking herself in the bathroom.

  Silly. It was only a memory, nothing more. She was safe and alone in her apartment.

  She breathed out slowly and her breath condensed, attesting to the chill that now permeated the room. A shiver traced a lightning path down her spine and she stepped back under the warm spray just as the quaking came on her, unbidden. Usually she had to direct her subconscious mind into the between place, like stepping through a doorway in the back of her brain that led to a cold, dead wonderland. She hated the place with a vengeance, but grudgingly admitted the stark beauty of the gray, sunless landscape awed her. The things she saw there sometimes made her sick to her stomach, but she never failed to look beyond where she needed to go, to peer into the distance or around the next corner hoping to catch a glimpse of something amazing.

  This time was no exception, even though it hadn’t been her choice to go.

  All around her the world drained of color. The sound of the shower became her only focus, as overwhelming as the rush of a waterfall and as desolate as the howl of wind through abandoned streets.

  Barely breathing, she stepped out of the tub. In the real world, the porcelain was light pink, but here it was bone white like the tiles of the bathroom floor and the fluffy rug that lay atop them. The brass doorknob was black, as was her hand when she reached for it.

  The old hinges hadn’t made a sound, but the damp slap of her feet on the floor beyond the mat sounded like boulders crashing down a mountain side. The bedroom beyond lay partially in shadow…no…the shadow was within the room, not a trick of the directionless light but a presence coiled and crouched next to the bed.