The lopsided moon flaring brightly against a navy blue night confused me, as I'd just watched the sun come up in dream-walk world. Two heads appeared above me, haloed by that moon.
"Better?" Sawyer murmured, sounding completely calm, not at all freaked out by what had to have been a pretty freaky situation. There were a few good things about Sawyer, and that was one of them.
"What are you?" Luther sounded freaked out enough for both of them.
I sat up, touched my head, which still throbbed but appeared to be all there, though sticky with things I didn't want to think about. Then I glanced around. We were amazingly alone.
"No one heard?" I asked.
I'd been in too big of a hurry to worry about the noise and I should have been. This wasn't L.A. A gunshot should have brought the whole town running—at the least Whitelaw should have looked out a window.
"He did some fancy hoodoo shit," Luther said, "People came, but they couldn't see us."
That was another good thing about Sawyer. Magic. Centuries of it.
"I need a shower," I murmured.
"You need more than that," Luther said. "You healed a bullet in the brain."
"In that case, it sounds like I don't need anything." I stood up, swayed a little. The headache was fading but not fast enough.
"Why did you do it?" Luther's voice wavered.
"Sorry." I put a hand on his arm. "I should have warned you. That wasn't fair."
He bit his lip. Shrugged. I'd scared him. Pretty badly from the way he was shaking. Poor kid. He had the heart of a lion, literally, but he was still just a cub.
I rounded on Sawyer. "You couldn't tell him I wasn't in any danger?"
"I was a little busy keeping the invisibility bubble around us."
I stared at him a minute, trying to figure out if he was joking, but I didn't think he knew how. I shouldn't blame him for my own hasty behavior. I'd gotten the knowledge I needed, but at what cost to those around me? I hoped I hadn't scarred the kid more than he already was.
We'd told Luther the basics of the federation, about the Grigori, Nephilim, the leaders of the light and the dark, but there was so much that had happened, so many things we could do, I guess I'd left out the empathy part of my program.
"You absorb powers through sex," he repeated when I'd finished explaining. Then shook his head. "That makes no sense."
I'd never tried to make sense of it. What was, was. What happened, happened. It wasn't as if I had any choice. But now that Luther was questioning things, I had to wonder "What the hell?" myself.
"There's a reason for everything," Sawyer murmured. He didn't seem like the "reason for everything" type. More in the "life is chaos" category if you asked me.
"And the reason for me being the way I am?" I asked.
"Sex requires opening yourself."
I rolled my eyes. We'd gone round and round about that in the past. I wasn't exactly an "open" kind of gal. It had taken me a long time and a lot of hassle to be able to open myself the way that I needed to.
"For a woman, sex is the ultimate commitment," Sawyer murmured. "Giving yourself to someone isn't easy."
That just might be the understatement of the year.
"You give of yourself, but you also take," he continued. "The level of dedication required to do that assures that you won't be absorbing powers willy-nilly."
I choked. Had Sawyer actually said willy-nilly? If I didn't know the end of the world was on the way, I'd think it was already here.
"Powers are not to be acquired foolishly, just as sex isn't to be engaged in lightly."
Except for him. He engaged in sex pretty willy-nilly, which made his explanation of my empathy bizarre to say the least.
Even more bizarre was that it made complete sense within the boundaries of this clandestine world we inhabited.
Luther was nodding. It made sense to him, too. At least I wasn't completely delusional.
"Where's Sanducci?" Sawyer asked.
"You're so certain I found out?"
"Because dream walking requires great risk, it works."
That was comforting. I'd hate to have blown my brains out for nothing.
"New Mexico," I said, then paused. "I think."
"What makes you doubt?"
I'd been so certain when I'd seen the sun splash over the landscape, but as I thought back—
"The mountains were wrong. When I first saw their outline, I recognized them. They were yours, but from a different angle. Maybe the other side. But now ..." I waggled my hand, wincing at the blood speckled across it. "I think of them, and I see green rolling hills, instead of pink, red, and orange. The flowers are different— more lush and . . . floaty. There's mist everywhere."
"It's the fairy. She does that."
"Does what?"
The three of us began to stroll toward the Impala, which stood a few hundred feet away, passenger door still hanging open, revealing that Luther had gotten out in one helluva big hurry.
"She makes my mountains look like the hills of Ireland," Sawyer said.
"Ireland? Why?"
"A lot of the fairies went there after the fall, which is how all the Fey stories began. It must look just like heaven to them."