Night and Day (7 page)

“Huh,” Dion says. “Prohibition has been a gold mine for me.”

“You’re a gangster, and a successful one, so you know how it is. People will always drink. They’ll always go crazy. They’ll always—” You glance at Corinna and modify what you’re going to say. “—have carnal relations. Find your worshippers there. Corinna’s right—this isn’t your time anymore. And your idea wouldn’t have worked, anyway. Rick’s not a god to me. He’s just a man. A man who sets things on fire occasionally, yeah, but still just a man.”

You feel Rick’s hand fall away, feel the coolness at your back where he had been standing. You glance back to see his face blank. And then you think…
oh….

And you add, “The man I love.” But you say this to Rick, not to Dion. Dion doesn’t matter anymore. “I don’t care if you’re Apollo or Vishnu or Buddha….”

He’s laughing now. “I’m not Vishnu or Buddha!”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re Rick Bellevue, and I love you.”

“Finally,” Corinna says.

THEY LEAVE
Dion there, trying to get up the nerve to yank the arrow out of his chest. “It won’t kill him,” Corinna says as she and Rick escort you to the gold chariot that waits in the trees. “It’ll just hurt like the very devil. We can’t be killed by ordinary means. We can die, we can kill ourselves, but a mere arrow is nothing.”

“She left the killing arrows at home,” Rick says to you in an aside.

“Of course I did. He’s an idiot, but he’s still family.”

Rick sets his bow down on the floor of the chariot at his feet and picks up the reins. Corinna somehow looks right with a bow in her hand, even in the filmy white dress she is wearing, but Rick looks plenty strange in his white seersucker suit, holding a bow. Of course, the
suit
looks plenty strange on a man standing in a gold chariot and driving a team of four white horses. Not even white, really; incandescent, like Rick the morning you’d seen him on the roof.

A road opens up through the trees, and as Rick drives the chariot, the air gets fuzzy again; something whacks you in the back of the knees, and you sit down hard on the backseat of the Lincoln, and Corinna pulls out a filmy white scarf and wraps it around her hair. “You lost your hat,” she says over the back of the front seat, and hands it to you. You put it on, but you feel ridiculous with your sliced-open shirt, the edges stained with blood.

“Are you all right?” Rick asks again.

“I’m fine,” you respond. And you are. The cut stings a little but not much. “Where are we?”

“I want to make a stop,” Rick says.

The road starts to look familiar—or rather, the switchbacks do—and you see up ahead the little restaurant on the bluffs. This time when he pulls into the parking lot, there’s no Delphie to come running out to meet him. “Come on,” he says, and opens the door for Corinna. “You can leave the bow—I’m not going to kill either of them.”

You follow them up the path to the little cottage. Delphie’s waiting outside on a bench, with Auntie in her rocker in the doorway. The restaurant owner’s face is set.

“You listened in, didn’t you?” Rick asks her. “When Auntie spoke about Nate.”

“Yeah,” she admits. “And told Dion. Sorry. It’s just hard to say no to him, y’know?”

“Yeah,” he agrees, “but you’re my employee, not his. Next time he asks you to do something like that, you tell me, okay?”

“You aren’t mad?”

“Oh, I’m plenty mad,” he says, “but where am I going to get someone to watch over Auntie?”

She lets out a breath of air in relief. He adds softly, “But that doesn’t mean you aren’t getting punished.”

“Oh, crap….” And suddenly it’s a baboon crouched on the bench. It howls pitifully.

“You get your real form back when I think you’ve been punished enough,” he tells it. “Plus this way you can eavesdrop all you want and not have to worry about anyone pressuring you to blab.”

“What did Auntie say?” you ask finally.

“That you were the perfect sacrifice if I wanted to get back what was lost to me,” Rick says distantly, his eyes on the roof of the house. “That you were the key. You were wrong, you know, back there, when you stood up to Dion. It
would
have worked.” He drops his eyes to mine. They’re dark and sad and
human
. “But I would have lost you. And, my Orpheus, I love you.”

“Finally,” Corinna says.

YOU’RE NOT
unchanged by your experience. When the usual crowd files in the next night (you and Rick take that night off, you to recover from Dion’s tender mercies, Rick because he can’t bear to be away from you), you see scattered among them not ordinary humans of whatever shape or color or gender, but the small gods and monsters Dion referred to. Some have horns, and webbed hands, and cloven hooves for feet; they’re brown and green and gray, and some of them have leaves growing out of their head, and one woman has snakes for hair. (You’d wondered why she’d always worn sunglasses, even inside the dimly lit club.) And when you walk down the street, some of the people you see aren’t exactly people. But you’re still human. And so is Rick, more or less… just a little more than less.

“You won’t live forever,” he told you that night as he ran a hot thumb over the tear from Dion’s knife, sealing the cut with just his heat, “but you’ll live a damn long time, and you’ll stay young and healthy that whole time. I can still do that much. Will you stay with me until then?”

“On one condition,” you say lazily, running your hands through his hair as he kisses your belly. “Put Delphie back the way she was. It’s not fair to her or to Auntie to leave her like that. She couldn’t help that Dion scared her—he scares me, and not a lot does anymore. And she’s just a woman.”

“Don’t let Coco hear that,” he murmurs, and starts kissing his way back up your chest. “Well, I was planning on leaving her like that for a year, but I guess I can compromise to six months.”

“A week.”

“Four months.”

“A week.”

“You’d dare argue with a god, puny human?”

DELPHIE IS
human again a week later.

For five years, Zach Tyler, son of one of the world’s richest software moguls, was held hostage, tortured, and abused. When he is rescued at last from the Venezuelan jungle, he is physically and psychologically shattered, but he slowly begins to rebuild the life he should have had before an innocent kiss sent him into hell.

His childhood best friend David has lived those years with overwhelming guilt and grief. Every relationship David has tried has fallen apart because of his feelings for a boy he thought dead. When Zach is rescued, David is overjoyed—and then crushed when Zach shuts him out.

Two years later, David returns home, and he and Zach must come to terms with the rift between them, what they feel for each other, and what their future could hold. But Zach has secrets, and one of them might well destroy their fragile love.

Art history professor Daniel Wollek is delighted to assist the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in cataloguing a cache of Renaissance artworks uncovered by an earthquake. But when a second earthquake pitches him headlong into the fifteenth century, Daniel finds himself more involved than he expected in rescuing precious artifacts from a fanatic’s bonfires. Then he meets Leonardo di Vinci’s assistant, Giacopo di Careggi, and finds in the beautiful young model a treasure even greater than art from the past.

Brian McCarthy is a cynic who hates Christmas, doesn’t keep in touch with his family, and likes quick hookups and faster goodbyes. The only real relationship he’s ever been in was with the subject of his best-selling book, “Caged,” a young man held hostage for five years. Unfortunately, it was entirely one-sided, since Zach was already involved with someone else.

So the last thing Brian expects when he goes in for treatment for an injured knee is to develop feelings for his physical therapist. But Jerry seems intent on either avoiding Brian or demanding more than he is willing to give, and Brian doesn’t know if he has the courage to face his past to forge a future.

Charming rascal Tristan Northwood seems to have it all: an ancient name, a noble inheritance, a lovely wife, and a son he adores. Women love him, men admire him, and it seems there is nothing he can’t do, whether it’s seducing a society wife or winning a carriage race. Little does Society suspect that the name means nothing to him, the fortune is in his father’s controlling hands, and he has no interest in his wife except a very distant friendship. Society bores him, and he takes dares because he only feels alive when he’s dancing on the edge... until his wife’s brother comes home from the wars.

Decorated war hero Major Charles Mountjoy jerks Tris out of his despair by inspiring feelings of passion Tris had never suspected himself capable of. Almost as terrifying as those feelings for Charles are the signs Charles might return his affection—or, even worse, that Charles sees the man Tristan has been trying so valiantly to hide from the world.

Three years undercover with one of the worst gangs in the country left FBI agent Joshua Chastain shattered. Battling nightmares and addiction, he leaves the concrete jungle for New Mexico horse country, hoping to start over on his uncle’s ranch.