Free Captive Spirit by Anna Windsor Page B

another breath of boiling air. “Am I dead, too, John?”
    “You’re hard to kill.” John laughed, staying shoulder to shoulder with Duncan as they walked faster, as if speed would somehow beat the heat. They found a rhythm, a left, right, left, right that suited them. Duncan could almost hear some stiff-dick drill sergeant calling cadence. Sweat coated his face.
    He thought he should probably wake up.
    Shouldn’t John being trying to—he didn’t know, find the light or something? Duncan would have asked him, but he knew John wouldn’t answer.
    A minute, or maybe it was an hour or half a day later, John said, “There is a woman, Duncan.”
    When Duncan turned his head to answer John, his friend was gone.
    In his mind’s eye, even as he tried to charge through his nightmare desert, Duncan saw the woman. Her dark hair. Her dark eyes. He remembered a sword and leather. A light scent of almonds and berries. The way her lips felt against his ear.
    Keep fighting this .
    That’s what she’d told him, and he’d felt her voice all over his body, like it was inside whatever made him breathe and move.
    Duncan kept walking, because that’s what he did, and what he knew how to do. “Now that’s a woman worth living for,” he told the desert, like the desert cared about anything at all.

(7)
    “He’s handsome, isn’t he?” Andy moved beside Bela, her footsteps loud and clunky on the Central Park path. Camille was walking to their far right, and Dio was a few paces behind them, in typical broom position in case they had to fight while they were on patrol.
    “Duncan Sharp almost changed into … something.” Bela glanced at Andy, who had her leather face mask on but unzipped. The ends of the zipper gleamed in the moonlight. “He said a bunch of crazy shit, and I thought he was going to eat me.”
    Andy snickered. “Yeah, but he’s drool-level gorgeous.”
    “Yes, damnit, Andy, he’s handsome.” Bela rested her palm on the hilt of her sword and wondered what Camille and Dio were thinking. Neither had said a word since they headed into the New York City night.
    Did they have a clue that she barely had her mind on tonight’s patrol? That where she really wanted to be was back at the brownstone, checking on Duncan Sharp’s progress with the Mothers?
    Some mortar I am. I can’t even unify my own quad, and I’m worrying about a stranger instead of what might be lurking in those trees .
    Andy, who hadn’t and probably never would master the art of silent movement, definitely had a clue. She kept giving Bela a look like, cha-cha-cha . Plus, she kept talking, like she knew Bela needed the distraction. “Mrs. Knight, the new neighbor, came by and asked about all the noise and shaking and shit. I told her we had a water heater malfunction.”
    The rich smell of dirt and trees and dew-coated grass grew stronger as they moved farther into the park. The creak and whisper of battle leathers mingled with a light breeze, and Bela heard the tap of Camille’s sword’s leather scabbard against her leg as she drifted in closer.
    “Water heater,” Camille muttered. “That’ll work exactly once.”
    “Maybe a few times.” Andy shrugged. “Could be a lemon of a water heater.”
    Dio spoke up, the sound of her voice startling Bela. “Mrs. Knight won’t stay. Nobody lives next door to Sibyls very long.”
    “I bet that realty company would love to burn down our brownstone.” Andy glanced to her left, into a dark clutch of trees. The leaves shivered as they passed.
    Bela’s instincts itched, but she couldn’t sense anything unusual, at least not anywhere close to them. She let the quad walk a little farther, just to be sure nothing really crazy was happening on the streets.
    So far, it was quiet.
    Too quiet?
    Her instincts itched again. More like a tickle, or a shiver.
    One more time, Bela let her earth senses spool away from her, into the fertile ground on every side of them. Here and there, her terrasentience