“To spy on them,” Clive teased.

  “To figure out the answer to yet another situation where we’re trying to figure out just exactly what the Kentucky fried fuck is happening. Because that mess today was so amateurish. And for what? Why antagonize someone you need?”

  “Why indeed? It seems the question we can apply to multiple situations as you mentioned earlier. Still, if anyone can keep you out of trouble or at the very least protect your back should trouble come, it’s Genevieve. When I’m not there, naturally,” he added and gave her a smug look.

  “Naturally,” she said, tone dry.

  “As it happens, I too have a meeting at Fleur right after sunset. I’d rather thought I’d be unable to accommodate them but now it looks as if our schedules align,” he said lazily, just to rile her up. Goddess help her, she loved it.

  “What a coincidence,” she said with a snicker.

  “Isn’t it just? We can ride over to your offices together afterward if you like, so that I can read Katya.”

  “We’ll see. I don’t know what I’ll be doing right before that so I may have to rush over to Fleur instead of coordinating with David.”

  He just patted her thigh, which was his way of saying he’d do whatever he liked and if he really wanted to drive her to her office, he’d make that happen so she should just give in.

  Normally she’d poke at him over it. She couldn’t let him steamroll her very often or he’d be in her business all day every day. But she liked their little work sessions, and she knew he secretly loved it when she shared gossipy tidbits.

  “Darius is not terrible,” she told Clive. “He drove us to the meeting today and was the guard. Do not make that face at me! David was on overwatch.” Rowan pointed a finger at him. “Also, I don’t know Darius’s whole story but he’s powerful enough to level a city block and absolutely motivated to protect Genevieve—and by extension, me—at all costs. Speaking of protection. The car he drove had these windows.” She told him all about the opaque thing and that she’d ordered an installation of at first three vehicles and then three more in the following months, working around their schedule, which apparently was incredibly busy but because he had smooshy feelings for Genevieve, he fit them in.

  “Not terrible. Such high praise,” Clive said.

  “It is! There are so many truly terrible beings we have to deal with regularly. Anyway, he’s still spooky as fuck, but he’s warming up to me, I can tell. Plus, he’s on Genevieve’s side, which is my side by extension.”

  “Goddess help me, but that made sense,” Clive teased, pulling her into a hug.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Darius found himself on the patio just outside her bedroom and he wasn’t sure why and that was total bullshit. He knew why. Because he couldn’t be anywhere else. Because she called to him and he didn’t want to ignore it anymore.

  The sheer curtain panels wafted in the breeze through the open doors. He caught her scent easily and then she was there, her dark hair free in a fall of lush curls. The curve of her lips as she opened the screen and beckoned him inside was a smile just for him.

  Face bare of makeup she looked even younger than usual as she indicated he sit wherever.

  “Lorraine is long asleep,” Genevieve told him. “But she made some tea for me to drink and brought two glasses so she must have had a feeling about an early morning visitor.”

  “I knew I liked her,” he murmured before turning his attention to Genevieve again. There were lit candles all through the space bathing her in tawny liquid gold as she padded around, feet bare. The deep blue silk pajamas she wore fluttered around her, caressing and accentuating the lines of the body beneath the fabric.

  His palms tingled as he thought about sliding his hands over her curves while his lips felt the phantom of her skin right at the juncture of her jaw and her throat.

  She chose the chair across from his and tucked her feet up under herself before smiling over at him, leaning on her elbow to get a little closer. “What brings you to my lair tonight?” she asked, delight in her eyes.

  Truth was, Darius could make up a dozen reasons to be there without admitting his craving for this witch. He’d been many, many things over the many years he’d been in existence, but never had he been a liar. And if he didn’t lie to others, why do it to himself?

  He was there because she was all he thought about every moment he wasn’t doing something else. And even then. Even then the song of her power, of her magic and energy and yes, her gorgeous fucking face, haunted him in the background.

  “Lair?” He leaned closer to her, placing his elbows on his knees. “That sounds dangerous.”

  “Or adventurous.” She fluttered her lashes and a lightness only she seemed to bring bubbled through his belly and chest.

  It had been centuries since he’d been teased this way. He wanted more.

  “I came because you were here, and I wanted to see you.”

  “Oh. Well.” Her pleased smile stole his breath a beat or two. “I’m glad you did. I was thinking about you and there you were. As if I’d conjured you,” she said. “Normally I might say to a human or someone like Rowan, tell me about yourself. But I find that question harder and harder to answer the older I get. I imagine for you it might be the same. I like to ask more specific questions. Or you can tell me random facts. I’d like that too.”

  “You first. Why did you come to Las Vegas?” he asked.

  “First it was because of Rowan. I’d come here to see her during a previous investigation. Investigation. Isn’t that a fun word? I love it. And then I liked it. Not the heat. But the simplicity of everything. It’s clean. It’s spare but not desolate. So much magic.” Her gaze flicked to his. “And then there were the Devils and...you. I wanted roots. Wanted to pause to choose to live a different way. I’d wandered for a long time before that. There’s purpose here. That’s why I stayed.”

  He liked it. Liked knowing little things about her, though what she’d just shared wasn’t little at all.

  “I came to Las Vegas three years ago. Marco is someone I’ve known for a few thousand years. I came out here and those things you spoke of were true for me. But also there was peace. There’s a great deal of background noise in the world. All those emotions just flowing like a churning sea. It’s beautiful and savage at the same time. I hadn’t planned on staying until I’d been here three days. My first sunrise here. We’d been out on a ride and we stopped right there in the middle of the road and just watched as the sky began to gray, then blue, purple with crowns of orange and gold and then boom.” His magic had exploded into life, digging itself into the metaphorical dirt and he’d agreed. “Out here in the desert the human noise fades so it’s just the roar of that churning power. Soothing. I never left.”

  “Where were you before you came here?” she asked next after nudging a tall glass of mango iced tea toward him.

  “In the few decades before I came here I was in Brussels. Or, rather just outside the city itself.” He paused. “Before that though I stuck to North Africa mainly. You are old enough to know how the names for places change over time.” The physical place itself had changed too. More desert, less green. “It pleases me that the Nile still flows. I used to fish in it. Back when I was...before I became a Devil.”

  “I’m so very curious, but feel free to not answer anything you don’t wish to. How does one become a Dust Devil?” she asked.

  He sipped the tea, appreciating the peppery bite of the mango. “We all come by it in a unique way. In my case, something terrible happened to my family. It drove me.” He stopped speaking as he searched for the right words about how he’d felt over four thousand years before. “I lost myself in vengeance and then in loneliness. I went to one of my wife’s family members. She was a witch. There was a ritual. Then after a time I was offered a choice by another Devil. I accepted.”

  “I’m sorry for whatever happened to your family,” she said with a brief touch of his hand.

  “It was a very long time ago.”

  “Memory doesn’t work that way. Long time ago or not, it happened, and it clearly affected you and the course of the rest of your life deeply. Such moments in our lives are hard to overcome, but they don’t simply dissolve once we’re past them.”

  “You sound like you speak from experience.” He wanted her to share but knew bringing those old pains to the surface wasn’t an easy process. Darius found himself not wanting her to experience even the tiniest bit of discomfort.

  “I was little more than a small child when I was sent to my first teaching. My father believed it was necessary and important for all Auberts to learn not only how to use the magic they’d been born with, the magic that was easy to use, but to learn every manner of practice possible and master it.

  “My first tutor was what today is a cliché of a witch. She lived in a shack. Threw bones. Read spit and blood. Tea leaves. Whatever. She was quick with a backhand and there were plenty of times I learned something because it was the only way to avoid a beating.” Genevieve halted as if her words got stuck and suddenly Darius wished he hadn’t pushed because whatever she was about to share had torn her to pieces.

  “You don’t have to go on,” he murmured, and she waved a hand. He smiled a moment. “You don’t wear your bracelets to bed, obviously, but it’s strange to see you make that movement without the jingling.”

  Genevieve smiled softly. “I’d trusted her. She taught me many things. I...had no real mother figure at that point so when she told me to take a bundle to the home of an influential man in a nearby village, I obeyed.”

  “How old were you?” he interrupted, afraid, so very afraid of where this story was going.

  “Twelve.”

  He blew out a breath. Back when she’d been twelve, plenty of girls her age had been in the process of being contracted into marriage. But that’s not what happened, or she’d be telling a different story.

  “He was on me the moment I got inside. I fended off his advances and ran. He followed me to the shack where I’d retreated. I thought she’d protect me. Tell him to go. But she hit me and shoved me out the door and told me to do what I was told.”

  He barely breathed, not wanting to interrupt.

  “He raped me in the dirt just outside her door. She knew what was going on and did nothing. Didn’t even open her door. So when he turned his back to fasten his trousers, I killed him with the rock he’d used on my face at the start.” She touched a spot at her temple. “Again, she never came outside to see what the sound was. When I used my magic to open the door she’d barred against me, I walked inside, covered in blood that was mostly my own, I... I killed her too. Too bad she couldn’t have seen that in her fucking bones, eh?” Her laugh was dark and bitter.

  Genevieve was so much more than she appeared at first glance. A goddess in many ways. One that included vengeance. Something at the core of how he’d come to be who he was that day as well.

  Like calling to like.

  She continued, “I panicked that he’d gotten me with child, but I hadn’t bled yet and fortunately fate had other plans.” Her gaze, which had been on a faraway horror, returned to his, clear. “I loved her. I trusted her. She threw me away like I was nothing.”

  “I’m glad you killed them both. I cannot go back in time to do so myself, you see. Neither of them deserved to take up space here. I’m sorry you were betrayed that way.”

  Her mouth hardened into a tight line and even then she was breathtaking. “It taught me many important lessons. Mainly that until I was powerful enough in my own right, I would be vulnerable to those who wanted to use me. That experience hardened me in ways that have saved my life more than once since. But that heartbreak, those hours when I was alone and betrayed and on the run? Every once in a while, I dream of it. I’m past it. I’ve healed emotionally and physically. I’ve grown into a power great enough that most would never dare to take me on. But that day will be in my mind forever, I think.”

  Darius took her hand and turned it over, pressing a kiss to her palm. “Thank you for sharing that.”

  “It was a very long time ago. I just wanted you to know you weren’t alone. Those big important memories don’t just die forever. Nor should they or how else would you remember your sons and your wife?”

  Most women wouldn’t so easily bring up a man’s old loves. But Genevieve wasn’t most women.

  “There are times when I wake up panicked I’ve forgotten them. My oldest son was ten, the youngest barely walking. Even millennia ago they were children. They played and got dirty, harried their mother, quickly learned how to care for our animals and to fish. They wanted to help.” He smiled. Gods, those little faces. “But then something will happen. A sound, or a smell, something will trigger those memories and I can see, so clearly, Huy’s big brown eyes, his arms folded across his middle as he laughed. Or Nimlot’s shaky little steps on his chubby legs, always following his brothers, looking for mischief. Or snacks. He had his mother’s nose and lips. Mery, he was our middle. Ferocious. Fearless. Curious about everything. The first thing he did upon waking was tell us something he’d learned. How an insect may have walked the day before, or how the river rose and fell. I think in today’s world he would be endlessly pleased by the ability to find out information. Huy was solid, like a little tank, you understand?”

  Genevieve nodded, wearing a sweet smile, her hand still in his.

  “Mery was the tallest. Long and lean like his mother. His mother. Ah, my Tiya. We knew one another from childhood. From those early years it was simply assumed by our families that we would end up together and they were right. She had the most beautiful hands. I used to simply watch her as she helped me with the nets, or when she cooked. We were friends as well as lovers. I miss her laugh and the exasperated way she said my name when I got the boys excited right before it was time for them to sleep.”

  He missed the way she’d felt against him as they’d slept. Missed the sound of their small house as no one else was awake but him. He didn’t miss the lack of mattresses, running water, or electricity, but he missed the way time moved then. When the world was younger and he was still human.

  “I’m glad you remember them all.”

  He was too. The memories of those sweet people he’d loved so fiercely no longer made him sad. They made him glad he had that time. But he wasn’t that man anymore. In the multiple lifetimes he’d led in the millennia since, he’d let go of the guilt that he wasn’t home when they’d been attacked. The insanity that had come after, the blood and the ritual, the night he’d made the choice to give up his humanity. Back then it had been about the ability to locate and punish those who’d broken his wife and children. It had taken him a good thousand years to let it go.

  Time had made that long-ago humanity feel like a movie he’d seen once. He’d been wrapped up in the Trick and their business and that had insulated him. But nothing could insulate him from the way every moment he spent with Genevieve tempted him further away from that cold isolation and into a chair in the bedroom of a woman he very much wanted to strip naked and pleasure until she said his name in the dark with nothing between them but skin.

  “What things do you like most about being here in Las Vegas right now?” he asked, changing the subject because his cock was very interested in that and perked up.

  “Pancakes. There’s a diner Rowan and I go to regularly. They have pancakes the size of the plate. Fluffy. They’re amazing.”

  “Would you take me there? I haven’t had pancakes in a very long time.”

  Her smile seemed to send a wave of her magic over his skin.

  “What are you doing in the morning? Later, after ten or so?”

  “Taking you to get pancakes.”

  “Would you take us on your motorcycle? I would like to ride on it. It looks enjoyable.”

  The things she said...it was as if she’d read through a list of all the things he wanted from her and then delivered.

  “I’d like that,” he said. “What are two other things you’re enjoying about the city right now?”

  “I’m quite pleased with the work I’m doing with Rowan. I think it’s that purpose I was talking about earlier. There’s this feeling that each step I take I’m supposed to be. It’s been a while since I’ve felt so certain about where I’m supposed to be.”

  She stood and walked over to the sliders overlooking the yard, peering out.

  “Three is this. This house. This land. The Dust Devils.” She turned to face where he’d remained sitting because if he stood she’d see his dick because he was so hard. “And you.”

  * * *

  Genevieve could scarcely breathe with the weight of his power hanging in the air around him. Humming with so much sexual energy her own stood at attention.

  She wanted him.

  “Would you like to go out back with me for a few minutes?”

  If he was surprised, he hid it as he came to his feet in one fluid motion, all power and deadly grace. Her mouth watered.

  She took his hand and led him out into the yard, away from the pool and into a little spot she’d set her working circle into.

  His intake of breath at her back told her she wasn’t the only one to feel the raw power all around. It was their land that had unlocked this potential inside her. As if it had been waiting her whole life for that connection so it could fully bloom.

  “You’ve been busy,” he murmured, taking the space in. He kept her hand and she strolled with him as he checked everything out.

  “I’ve spent some hours when I could over the last week to set it up. The stillroom is just over there.” Marco had shown up with a few others and they’d cut a door into the wall so there would be easy access from that part of the house out here to where she’d be performing workings. “The door they brought is exquisite,” she said of the beautiful wood and glass creation covered in detailed woodwork.