In Graves Below Page 4

  “I didn’t make them.” The demon sounded like a politician parsing the truth.

  “No, but you gave them the materials. That’s against the treaty.” The shaman’s tone was unyielding. “As all from your realm know.”

  The demon reversed course and circled right, and again the shaman countered. Without warning, the demon’s spiked tail made a vicious strike that impaled the shaman’s left lower leg. It didn’t seem to hurt him, but it restricted the shaman’s movements. The demon rained down blows against the shaman that he couldn’t duck.

  It made Riya mad, like when she was a child, and bullies ganged up on a younger kid. If she had her favorite slingshot and some nice stones, she’d show the blotchy green demon a thing or two. Suddenly, she felt a weight in her hand, and there was the slingshot she’d made in Dublin when she was eleven, and her other hand held perfect-sized, oval stones. She grinned. Her dream magic was even better than a teleportation device from a science fiction show.

  She took aim and waited for her shot, then nailed the demon right on what looked like its nose. It roared and arched back, a yellow ichor flowing freely. The spiked tail jerked free of the shaman’s leg, but the movement pulled him off his feet. Riya shot three more stones as fast as she could, to keep the demon off balance until the shaman could scramble up again. The rocks had more impact than she would have expected.

  The shaman’s feathered leg had a hole in it that didn’t bleed. Riya’s dream self realized it must be a prosthesis, like the veterans she’d seen at the rehab center, which also explained his syncopated gait.

  The demon made one last assault, but the shaman’s skill and a couple more of her well-aimed rocks drove it to its knees in submission.

  “Banish me, then, Warrior,” said the demon. Despite the newly nasal tone, it sounded resigned to its fate, almost despairing.

  “What say you, woman of the rocks?” The shaman’s voice was loud enough to echo off the rest of the rock walls that were revealed when the mist faded.

  There was no point in staying hidden anymore, so she jumped down onto the rust-colored ground with an impossible-in-real-life, somersaulting leap. Unfortunately, the shaman was focused on the demon and didn’t see her stick the landing like a champion gymnast. “What do I say about what?”

  “Shall this kaga be banished to…” The shaman glanced at her, then did a double take, his eyes riveted on her. “What are you?”

  She looked down and realized that while she’d been concentrating on the fight, her subconscious had dressed her in the East Indian-style costume she’d worn for a piece last summer’s dance concert, about a Hindu warrior goddess who defeated demons. “Just a dancer from the Mile High City.” She shimmied her hips to make the bells sound and stomped her feet to create a rhythmic phrase.

  She was liking this dream. She was really liking the shaman’s plainly avid interest in her body, because his was drawing hers like a lodestone. She had to fight not to move closer to him, even though the spike-tailed demon was still a threat.

  The shaman licked his lips, making her wish she could do that for him to find out what he tasted like. She never allowed herself those kinds of thoughts in real life, but in her delightfully lucid dream, it felt good to allow her lascivious fantasies free rein.

  He cleared his throat. “Shall the kaga be banished to its realm of origin?”

  Her sexy fantasy dream had gotten politically weighty all of a sudden. “Is deportation the usual punishment for breaking the law?” She frowned. “Do ugly, no-ass demons even have rights here?”

  A smile twitched across his mouth. “It’s open to interpretation.”

  Riya shrugged. “Since it’s my dream, then, I say let it off with a warning.” She put her fists on her hips and glared at the demon. “Don’t do whatever bad thing you did with those window thingies again, or the hot, sexy warrior will kick your sorry excuse for an ass into, uh, the zombie zone.”

  She materialized an oversized red bandanna into her hand and lobbed it toward the demon. A puzzled expression crossed its surprisingly humanoid face, if she discounted the whole head-growing-out-of-the-chest thing. “For your bloody nose,” she said. The yellow ichor still streamed from it, dripping steadily into the absorbent red dust. “Assuming that is your nose, and not some body part I don’t want to know about.”

  The shaman said something in a Native American-sounding language. The demon nodded and picked up the bandanna, then rose to its clawed feet. “I am called Moth Dust. I acknowledge the debt.” It carefully folded the bandanna and slipped it under a flap of skin on its belly she hadn’t noticed until then. With a mighty leap, it bounded away like a disturbing kangaroo.

  She shook her head in amazement. “Its name is Moth Dust?”

  “Demons have inexplicable ideas about public names.” Even as he spoke, her feet started walking her toward the shaman. She was relieved to see that he was walking toward her as well. His fascinating tattoo was almost alive, like watching a plasma cloud, and his strength was palpable. “What about your leg?” She pointed to the through-and-through hole where the demon’s tail spike had impaled it. “Can it be fixed?”

  “Yes, with a little magic.” He pointed to the slingshot still in her hand. “Where did you learn to shoot like that?”

  “Secondary school in Ireland.” Her eyes traced the tattoos down his body, noting they skirted his brown nipple and curled onto the sculpted ridges of his abdominal muscles and down his hip. “Are you really a warrior?”

  “Yes. What are you doing here in dreamwalk?”

  “Enjoying the view,” she said honestly. She stopped about three feet away from him and smiled, pleased that he was five or six inches taller than she was. “You’re outrageously sexy. This is the best dream ever. I should try lucid dreaming to solve my choreography problems a whole lot more often.”

  “You’re a stunningly attractive woman. Very distracting.” He tilted his head. “You think you’re dreaming?”

  “Well, yeah.” She gave him a saucy wink. “I sure as hell wouldn’t do this”—she closed the distance between them and put her hands on his shoulders—“if I was awake.” She drew in the scent of him. Human male, crushed pine needles, and freshly groomed horses. The feel of his skin under her hands warmed her like they were making an electrical circuit. She could drown in his deep brown eyes. “Or this.” She slid her hands to the sides of his face and rose up on her toes to kiss him. After a moment’s hesitation, he kissed her back.

  It felt so wonderful, and so perfectly right, that she had to do it again, this time with abandon. The taste of him when he sent his tongue into her willing mouth sent a thrill through her body that had her nipples aching and her core clenching.

  He moaned, or she did, as his hands glided down her back and onto her hips, where they caressed and kneaded, pulling her close. The feel of his feathered leg on the skin of her thigh was erotic. Her panties dampened. She slipped a hand between their bodies to rub a light thumb over his puffy nipple and felt it pebble. He definitely moaned that time…

  …and she awoke on the lumpy couch in her cold studio, breasts tingling and nipples aching to be touched, core pulsing, and ready to kill whoever set off the car alarm that had awakened her.

  The clock said it was twelve midnight. Great. She was a freakin’ modern Cinderella.

  When she sat up, blearily rubbing her eyes, she hadn’t known if she was relieved or disappointed to find out she was still wearing the same old rehearsal sweats she’d been wearing when she’d fallen asleep. Her subconscious had obviously raided recent and childhood memories for the plot of that vivid and unforgettable dream. In real life, she would never even think of kissing a total stranger and wondering how to get him out of his loincloth, especially not with her recent boyfriend track record. But in the dream, with the mouthwateringly sexy, painted shaman, hell yes, and she’d do it again.

  Apparently, her subconscious had taken that to heart and created a whole series of dreams about the smoking-hot shaman i
n the past month. Unfortunately, her stupid imagination decided she had to be some sort of exotic bird creature that followed him around, rather than a human woman who wanted to take up where the kiss left off.

  In her dreams, the warrior enjoyed her companionship and talked to her about things magical and mundane, like the fact that the fear-eater demon they’d defeated occupied a useful niche in the “dreamwalk.” Or the fact that he was rightfully called a medicine man, and the only one left in his tribe who could dreamwalk. Or the fact that he missed his grandfather, who’d recently died. She’d spoken to him with words, but all he apparently heard was birdsong. She had no idea what her subconscious meant by that, other than her desire to please her mother by finding her bird form at last, or that men and women sometimes didn’t communicate as well as they should. Her subconscious apparently had an idea file full of clichés.

  The fight with the demon had, however, provided the ideal storyline for her choreography, and she’d snagged the perfect company dancers for the roles. The dream had looked like magical realism to her, and that’s what she’d worked with the dancers and costumer to achieve. She loved the piece and hoped the audiences would, too.

  Which brought her back to the immediate problem of what to do about Jonathan St. Peters. She stared up at the reflected moonlight on her darkened ceiling, knowing she should be sleeping, but her brain was unwilling to shut down yet. No real, live man could match her dream warrior, but she knew she could do better than St. Peters.

  She owed him the courtesy of a professional relationship, but after only a few weeks’ worth of dreamy nights with her medicine man, a whole year’s worth of days with St. Peters wasn’t going to change her feelings. When he’d tried to kiss her cheek before he let her get in her car, the squick factor of having his lips anywhere on her made her evade him like a mixed martial arts fighter ducking a strike. And no matter what Denise suggested, it wasn’t right to let St. Peters believe that Riya’s feelings would change.

  As she finally drifted off to sleep, she hoped her subconscious would send her to the warrior again, to distract her from her melancholy musings.

  Chapter 5

  Idrián eased himself carefully into the last row of main floor seats of the Wilhelmina Dryer Theatre. His magic hid him in the semi-darkness, unless someone knew how to look, but he didn’t want to make more noise than necessary. The audience seating sections were shallow, only fifteen rows deep, but very wide, with four aisles, to accommodate the equally wide stage. The wispy ghosts of the factory workers said it had been built in the twenties as a shoe manufacturing plant. They liked show business.

  The drive north to Denver had been easy enough, once he’d hit I-25. Over the years, he and his grandfather had magically tinkered with the truck to make it fast and invisible to police radar, so he’d only had to stop for food, bathrooms, and to stretch his right leg. The brace was still rubbing hard in one spot. Once in Denver, a stop at a coffee shop with free internet gave him the names of dance companies and schools to try.

  It has taken the rest of the day and a couple of spells to track down a turquoise-haired choreographer and the place where she’d be that evening. He’d used a little magic to slip into the theater unseen and conceal himself in the audience area to wait. Black Fox offered to scout around, and Idrián gratefully agreed, looking forward to a brief respite from his company. He loved his grandfather, but his new spirit form gave him the freedom to pop in and out without warning, and he was as opinionated as ever.

  Idrián was just in time to see part of a rehearsal on the stage, where a blond man, whose name was apparently St. Peters, was capturing video of it using his tablet. To Idrián’s untutored eye, the three dancers’ movements looked intriguing, and he wished he could have seen the rest of it. He recognized the music they were using immediately—his cousin Roman had composed it.

  The dancers left, and St. Peters kneeled down on the front of the stage, tapping on the tablet rapidly. When he was finished, he closed the tablet’s cover and slipped it into a messenger bag on the floor, then pulled out a phone and stood while he made a call. He was in good shape and carried himself with the confident ease of an athlete. He was handsome enough to be a model, and dressed like it, too—a blue velvet shirt and sleek leather pants with a low-slung belt.

  “I just sent it,” St. Peters said. The theater’s acoustics were good enough for Idrián to hear him easily. “Tell me what you think.” He listened for a long moment, nodding, his smile growing with each second. “Thank you.” He grinned and gave a fist-pump gesture.

  Idrián was suddenly distracted by the feel of a slight breeze that became a blaze of tingles dancing across his skin. He looked to his left and saw a woman entering from the swinging doors that led to the lobby, about twelve feet from where he sat. She was using a low-power spell to make most people look somewhere else besides at her, but the magnetism of her physical presence made it hard for him to look at anything but her. He didn’t need his grandfather’s ghostly whispering to tell him that she was the woman from dreamwalk, with her shaded turquoise hair, beautiful face with wide mouth and large brown eyes, and curvaceously sculpted body. Her wildly patterned leggings hugged her legs like a second skin, and the unzipped black hoodie she wore gaped open to show a tight, red crop-top that contained her lush, full breasts.

  Dreamwalk was the dream version of the world, and reality often didn’t match it, but in this case, the woman in real life beat the dreamwalk version, hands down. The scent of her, feathers and tangerine and incense, hit him squarely in the chest and traveled instantly to his groin, making the front of his jeans suddenly too tight. He barely stopped himself from standing up to get closer.

  The oblivious blond man on stage was focused on his call. “No, no, she only did the rehearsing for Red Dust Warrior. The choreography is all mine. I only let them put her name on it in the program because I felt sorry for her. They’d already selected the music, and she really tried, but…” His voice sounded regretful, but it was belied by a huge grin as he listened. “Exactly, Mr. Emerson. I love nurturing talent wherever I find it, too. It’s so rewarding.”

  The rising anger from the woman near him was like static electricity shocks on Idrián’s sensitive scarred skin. She stalked quickly down the aisle, shoulder bag thumping against her hip. She gestured, and both doors of the loading dock slammed closed like a gunshot. St. Peters jumped and fumbled his phone, but caught it. He looked at the doors, then turned toward the right wing. “Sorry, the wind blew a door shut.” After another long pause, he said, “Yes, that works for me. Look, I’d better let you go. I have a lot to do tonight to get this performance in shape. Regional companies can be so clueless.”

  As St. Peters was finishing his conversation, Riya approached the stage and quietly walked up the stairs on the left side. Idrián felt it in his chest when she dropped her “don’t look” spell. She stood with her legs apart, arms crossed, staring at St. Peters as he finished his conversation.

  “You, too, Spencer.” The blond man pressed a button on his phone and slid it in his pocket. The woman cleared her throat. The blond man whirled around, then stepped back, clearly startled. “Good God, Riya, you scared the life out of me!”

  “Tempting,” she said bitingly. “Care to explain why you told Spencer Emerson you choreographed Red Dust Warrior?”

  “It’s not what you think.” He smoothed back the hair that had fallen in front of his face. “I did it for you. For the company.” He spread his arms wide. “Mr. Emerson was going to pull his foundation’s funding because he thought the company lied about how much I was involved in the program. You wouldn’t have gotten paid, otherwise.”

  Riya looked nonplussed. “I don’t know what—”

  “What are you doing here so early?” His interruption was laced with accusation. “I thought you’d be at work.”

  “When you insisted the dancers be here early because you needed to fix things in my piece, Whitney called me.” Her tone took on a sharp edg
e. “The message to me must have gone astray.”

  “Must have. It’s my job to make this program the best it can be, sweetheart.” He gave her an indulgent smile. “Denise asked me to look at all the pieces, as the new artistic director.”

  Idrián felt an irrational stab of jealousy at St. Peters’ endearment for her. That’s your dick talking, he admonished himself, but it didn’t help.

  Riya whipped a phone out of a pocket in her hoodie and used one hand to dial. She put it on speaker, so they all heard when the call was answered.

  “Maruaway Dance Theater, Denise speaking.” The sound was tinny but audible.

  “Hi, it’s Riya and Jonathan St. Peters on speaker. He says he’s the new artistic director. Is that true?”

  The woman on the phone was silent. Riya’s face paled. Idrián wanted to kill whoever it was on the phone, right after he killed St. Peters, whose pretend-sympathetic look wouldn’t fool a blind man.

  Black Fox waved a spectral hand like a strobe in front of Idrián’s face. “Time to go.”

  “What?” whispered Idrián, bobbing his head so he could keep watching Riya.

  Black Fox floated so his face was in front of Idrián’s. “You’re slow. You have to be ready to catch her. She’ll be leaving soon.”

  Idrián glared at Black Fox. “How do you know that?”

  “I’m an expert in mad women. Up.”

  Idrián knew he’d get no peace until he complied. Besides, Black Fox did know mad women, because he was usually the one making them mad. Idrián grabbed his cane and levered himself to his feet in the narrow space.

  Down on the stage, the woman on the phone said, “It’s a temporary appointment, for the summer. I… that is, the board and I felt you needed a mentor, someone more experienced in sponsor relations. I was going to talk to you about it after open… er, tomorrow.”