We stepped out, and the noise level dropped. A couple of women got on their phones, saying stuff like, “He’s here today,” and, “Get over here, stat.” Still more women either texted or took his picture with their phones. He was somewhat of an Internet sensation, and he was either oblivious or just didn’t care. It was fun to watch, all the while knowing he’d be going to bed with me at night.
Delight shuddered through me. Not a gloating delight. More of a delight of disbelief. If someone would have told me two years ago I’d be spending my nights with this man … well, I might have believed them, but only because one look at him and I would have offered my services. But to be spending those nights with him in a marital capacity? Priceless.
He walked to the men’s restroom and dragged me inside.
“Hey, mister,” I said, playing coy. I batted my lashes and gave him my most innocent look. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers. Or follow grown men into restrooms. What would my daddy say?”
He pulled me against his chest, shoved a hand into my hair, and devoured my mouth with a kiss that should have been X-rated.
As soon as Donnie, our bartender, finished making pee-pee, he left without washing his hands. I could only hope the alcohol would sterilize them. In his defense, the kiss was rather sexual. With sexual undertones and a sexy, noir slant to it.
Reyes broke off the kiss and stared down at me. “You keep talking like that, and I’ll have to take you into a stall.”
“You romantic, you.” In truth, he left me completely breathless, and the stall sounded pretty freaking good.
“Ready?”
“For stall sex? Hell, yes.”
The grin that slipped across his face bore a strong resemblance to the one he’d worn the night he’d performed a vaginal exam with kitchen utensils. I melted. Or I started to until he took hold of me and said, “This time, I’ll steer for both of us.”
Celestial storms slammed into me and around me and through me, and then a sun brighter than I’d ever seen—and I was from New Mexico, thank you very much—blinded me. All I could see was a single shade of blue and a single shade of tan.
I cupped a hand over my eyes and kept the fingers of the other one curled in Reyes’s shirt. The image around me slowly came into focus. Actually, it was already in focus, I was just now figuring it out.
“We’re in a desert.”
Reyes nodded. He had yet to actually look at our surroundings. Instead, he chose to look at me, and I could not fathom why.
“Oh, my God, Reyes.” I turned and surveyed the area. “This is stunning.”
We were surrounded by exactly two things: a sky so blue it glowed and a desert such a rich golden red it took my breath away. My feet sank into the sand. It formed little hills around them. I reached down and sifted it through my fingers, then fell onto my knees. They sank into the warmth beneath them, too.
“Are we where I think we are?”
He kneeled beside me. “If you think we’re in the Sahara, then yes.”
I gasped. I was standing—kneeling—in the Sahara. “Reyes, I don’t know what to say. I’ve never seen anything so … so perfect in my life.”
“I brought you here for a reason.”
“Yeah?” I sat down and played in the biggest sandbox in the world.
He watched me, and I wondered what he must think of me. I must seem like the craziest kind of loser, fumbling around in his world, trying to navigate it like a child in a walker, running into walls and cabinets and knees.
I shook off the sudden feeling of insecurity, chalked it up to the freaking Sahara. If there were any one thing that could make a person feel insignificant, it would be this vast terrain. Beautiful and deadly at the same time.
I tossed sand, as blisteringly hot as it was, onto his jeans. “You could have warned me. Sunglasses would have been nice.”
He flashed his perfect teeth and picked up a handful of sand. Let it slide through his long, strong fingers. Then he began the lesson of the day. “Pick up one grain of sand.”
I picked up a handful and showed him proudly.
He grinned patiently, so I sifted it down, trying to get down to one grain. I had to wipe my hands together and start over. Finally, after much effort, I had one grain of sand in my palm. I named him Digby.
He took Digby, much to my dismay. I’d worked hard for the little guy.
After placing Digby in his palm, he held him out to me. “This is how much of you is human.”
“Okay.”
“Look around you.”
I did and then looked back at the man I’d always believed sane.
“In comparison to this desert, this is how much of you is human.”
“I don’t get it. That’s impossible. I’m human. I’ve always been human.”
“So, in your mind, you believe that you are, what? Half-human and half-god?”
“Well, up until a few months ago, I believed I was 99 percent human and 1 percent reaper. Then I was told that 1 percent had been split in two: half-reaper and half-god.”
“You can’t be half-reaper. That’s like saying a postman is half-human and half-postman.”
“Or a lawyer is half-demon and half-human?” I heard that a lot.
One corner of his mouth tugged. “Something like that. Reaping is your job, not your heritage, for lack of a better phrase. But you can’t be half-god and half-human. The human side of you is one grain of sand among the 3.6 million square miles that make up this desert. The god part is too powerful. You need to get past that, because it doesn’t work that way.”
I studied Digby. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“You keep talking as though your human body can die. And, yes, it can, but it would take something very powerful to achieve it.”
I stood and abandoned Digby by walking a few feet away. “So, if I’m cut up and thrown into a wood chipper—”
“Did the truck kill you?”
“Well, no, but we went incorporeal. On purpose. If I were unconscious or bound—”
“Dutch, this one grain of sand doesn’t control the shape of the desert. It doesn’t control the drifts. The hills and the valleys. It is infinitesimal in comparison to the desert as a whole.”
“Okay.”
“The part of you that is a god, the whole that is you. A sentient being with immense power.”
“The wind shapes it,” I argued. “An outside force.”
“Just like on the mortal plane, outside forces influence, but the body is still one. The more you understand that, the less your human part”—he held out Digby—“this miniscule aspect of your makeup, can control you.”
“And this is important, I take it.”
“There is another god loose on this plane.”
Ah. Figured we’d come back around to that eventually.
“Right now he is more powerful than you are because he knows one thing to be true above all others.”
“And that is…?”
“He cannot die. Not at the hands of anything less than a god.” He stepped closer. “And neither can you.”
I nodded, trying to let it sink in, to force it to, but there was still a part of me that just couldn’t believe it. “I could trap him like I did Mae’eldeesahn.”
He bit down, the subject clearly raw. “You got lucky.”
No way on heaven or earth could I argue that. “I agree, but—”
“We may have to fight him. But we have an advantage.”
“Yeah?”
“He is one god, just like I am one god. You, Elle-Ryn-Ahleethia, are thirteen. As far as I know, you are the most powerful god to ever exist.”
I nodded again, feeling about as powerful as Digby at that moment.
“You don’t believe me.”
“No, I do. I get it. Sort of. It’s just kind of hard to comprehend the vastness of it. It’s like when you take a native out of the rain forest he grew up in to the open plains and he sees cows in the distance, he thinks they’re flies. His mind can’t comprehend such vastness. Such distance.”
He reached out, ran the back of his hand along my cheek, his touch as light as air, but it was enough. The celestial realm hit me like a tidal wave, tossing me about again, tumbling me through space. Just for a second. Then we were on pavement.
I swayed and looked down. Not pavement. After a quick scan of the area, I realized we were on top of a building. A very tall building.
I wasn’t exactly afraid of heights, but they weren’t my favorite of the three dimensions. I much preferred depth. Deep buildings. But Reyes had placed us on top of the Albuquerque Plaza, the highest building in the city.
Still feeling like a light breeze could send me hurtling to my death, I took hold of Reyes’s T-shirt again. Curled my fingers into it as though that one article of clothing could keep me from falling off, because Reyes hadn’t placed us on the center of the building top. Oh, hell, no. We were smack-dab on a nifty edge looking over a 350-foot drop.
In his defense, the very top wasn’t flat. If he’d placed us there, we would have slid off. So there was that. But we were on the highest edge, and while the world looked super cool from that viewpoint, it was not a place I wanted to be.
“Reyes, this isn’t funny.”
“I didn’t mean for it to be.”
“Why are we here?”