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  "That's the biggest crock of crap I've heard in a long time, but you're right about one thing. You're going to end up sitting around on your butt while I risk my life over and over again killing people I don't have any quarrel with so a pair of queens can have some kind of pissing match over whose boyfriend can beat the other one's boyfriend up. The least you can do is not make my job harder by coming within inches of getting us all executed out of hand."

  It had been a mistake to come looking for Celeste. I still wasn't sure why I'd done so, but one thing was certain. I didn't particularly care whether I ever saw her again.

  I turned and stalked back to the cave where I'd left Ash and Kristin without looking back.

  Chapter 14

  Isaac Nazir

  The Lamia Enclave

  It wasn't a very good excuse, but with all of the craziness that had happened since we'd arrived in Louisiana, I completely forgot just how many different shapes I'd worn in such a short time. It was all the more ironic considering that I'd been worried about that very thing less than two hours before, but once I made it back to the cave, instead of settling down for a long stretching session to minimize the inevitable cramps, I just flopped down on one of the empty beds and let myself fall asleep.

  The cramps blindsided me. I woke up to excruciating pain as every muscle in my body simultaneously tried to rip itself free from the bones it was connected to. I'd pushed the envelope before and transformed too many times in too short of a time period, but the cramps had never been this bad before.

  Maybe it was the result of being wounded, or maybe I really hadn't ever pushed quite so many transformations in such a short time. Either way, two seconds after the cramps began I started wishing I was dead. Trying not to scream never even entered into my mind, the pain was simply too intense to allow for rational thought.

  I writhed on my bed for what felt like forever before the pain started to subside enough for me to register anything else. Even at that point I was still hurting pretty badly, but I was able to at least open my eyes enough to see that I wasn't alone inside of my room.

  Celeste had slipped into my room and was busy stretching and rubbing my legs in an effort to shorten the duration of the muscle spasms. It was still hard to think of much else other than the pain, but I noticed that she was exceptionally good with her hands.

  I'd fallen asleep on my stomach and the muscles in my neck had pulled my chin all of the way down to my chest, so it was all I could do to breathe, let alone turn my head to the point where I could see Celeste, but I knew it was her based on her scent. After another micro-eternity of pain she finished up with my second leg and moved around to my right arm.

  The arms went faster. Nearly everyone's strongest muscles are in their legs, and I was no exception to that rule. The muscles in my arms were still impossibly strong compared to most humans, but then again Celeste had the same kind of preternatural strength and she was able to rub out the spasms and knots in both arms in about half the time she'd taken with the legs.

  By that point the pain had lessened substantially, but the muscles in my core were still fighting against each other like they wanted to rip me in half.

  "Sorry, Isaac, but these beds weren't exactly made with human bodies in mind. You're up too high for me to get the rest of you from here. I'm going to have to climb up there and straddle you."

  She was right. I hadn't paid it much attention, but everything inside of our cave was sized for seven-foot tall lamia rather than for sub-six-foot-tall females. The lamia apparently liked their beds taller, wider, and longer than I was used to.

  A few seconds later Celeste was up on the bed with me, kneeling with her legs on either side of my waist as she tried to relax the muscles in my back and shoulders. The pain was getting down to manageable levels, but I still couldn't speak, and fighting my own muscles to make them unknot enough for me to breathe had tired me out more than I'd realized. Even as the pain decreased, I found that I was having more and more difficulty breathing.

  Celeste was apparently listening closely enough to realize what was going on.

  "I'm not done with your shoulders yet, but we'd better get you flipped over or you're going to be in real trouble soon."

  Celeste hopped back down off of the bed and then pulled me to the very edge of the bed before climbing back up next to me and turning me over. This time she straddled me just above my knees and went to work on my diaphragm, pushing in on my upper stomach when the muscles seemed to want to contract, and then pulling back away to give them a chance to relax again.

  It wasn't as efficient when it came to relaxing the muscles in my abdomen, but the sheer amount of pressure she was putting on my stomach compressed my lungs even beyond what my diaphragm was doing. It hurt more than the cramps, but she was effectively breathing for me because whenever she let off the pressure my lungs naturally expanded, at least a little, even when the muscles had other ideas.

  Over the next few minutes my abdominals slowly started to relax and I was able to breathe at least a little on my own. Once I wasn't in any danger of suffocating, I stopped panicking and Celeste moved up so she was straddling my stomach. She wasn't sitting on it, her weight was all on her knees so as not to make it difficult for me to breathe, but I was relaxed enough that I could start processing other things now as she started on the muscles of my chest.

  Her hands were firm, but surprisingly soft. She was too focused on her task to look up and meet my gaze, but that was probably a good thing. Before I'd gone to sleep I'd showered. Once the swamp water, blood and dirt had all been cleaned off I hadn't been able to bring myself to put one of my dirty, bloody ha'bits back on, so I'd just pulled on a pair of jeans and fallen asleep without a shirt on.

  Apparently Celeste had felt much the same way. She'd showered while I'd been asleep, and then slipped into the clothes from the boat. She was wearing a soft, black tube dress that trailed across my skin as she leaned forward to work the last of the spasms out of my pectorals, and I could feel her bare legs rubbing against my sides.

  It was the kind of situation that I'd never expected to find myself in, and I felt a kind of paralysis take hold of me. Celeste was undeniably beautiful, but I wasn't some mindless animal to act without concern for the consequences of my actions.

  I'd spent months pursuing Jess without any success, but my lack of headway didn't necessarily mean that I was prepared to give up. We had a history together that went back almost as long as I could remember. We'd grown up as friends and then later it had turned into something more than just friendship.

  Jess and I had been together for something like four years and I wasn't ready to throw that away if there was still any chance of getting back together with her. Even if I was, pursuing any kind of relationship with Celeste was a bad idea on almost every level.

  She was Ash's sister. Ash and I didn't particularly get along as it was, the last thing we needed to throw into that dynamic was for me to date the sister he'd been estranged from for more than ten years.

  All of that was true, but they were the kinds of things that you think about after the fact to justify a decision that you'd made originally without even thinking about them. The truth was that I wasn't going to make a move on Celeste because I barely knew her. I didn't know if I could trust her, and I certainly didn't know her well enough to decide whether I liked her.

  I needed to keep her at arm's length for the foreseeable future, needed to fish or cut bait where Jess was concerned before I even thought about anyone else, but I was having a very hard time pulling my eyes away from her.

  The light from the plant globes above us had dimmed down sometime when I'd been asleep so the light hitting her was achingly soft. Her hair was a loose blond tangle and her bare shoulders were exactly the kind of delicate perfection that I'd imagined dwelt underneath her clothes the first time I saw her.

  She caught me looking at her legs, bare up to mid-thigh where her dress ended, and her hands slowed.

  "Are y
ou okay now?"

  I wasn't sure I trusted my voice to not give away more than I wanted it to, but refusing to speak would be just as bad.

  "Yes, thank you. If you hadn't come when you did then I'm not sure that I would have made it."

  "You're welcome. I don't know that I've ever seen cramps that bad. You had me really worried there for a while. Does that happen often?"

  I shook my head. "No, it's never been that bad before. I'd say that I lost track of how many times I'd shifted, but that wouldn't be true. I knew I was riding the ragged edge of what I could manage, but the threats just kept coming. I should have stretched rather than just falling asleep like that, but by then I wasn't thinking very clearly."

  Celeste looked at me with eyes that I couldn't begin to read and I was struck again by the fact that her human eyes—the deep gray eyes looking at me at that moment—were the same eyes she had in her hybrid form. That wasn't unheard of, Alec and Jasmin had blue eyes in both their hybrid and human forms, but their hybrid eyes were a paler shade of blue than they had as humans.

  It was as if she'd cast some kind of pagan spell on me with her eyes. She was still kneeling over my stomach and she showed no sign of moving other than to pull her hands back away from my chest.

  "You've been through more in the last two days than I gave you credit for. Ash and Kristin are lucky to have a friend like you. Not everyone would put everything on the line like that for their friends."

  That drew a chuckle out of me. "I'm not sure you can say that Ash and I are friends. More like comrades in arms. To be honest, it wasn't as though I had any other choice; the Coun'hij and Onyx were all after me too."

  She cocked her head. "You could have dropped Ash off at the hospital and made a run for it."

  "It was Ash's car."

  "Which he discarded without a second thought after the three of you arrived."

  She had me there. I hadn't been bluffing when I'd told Ash that I had enough cash to go my own way. There hadn't been a compelling reason that I couldn't have left Ash and Kristin. I didn't want to admit that though, not to her, even if I wasn't sure exactly why.

  "It's okay, Isaac. You don't have to say anything. Just spend some time thinking about what you'll do when you don't have to be the dependable rock." Celeste suddenly shifted back a little further away from me. "Listen to me, I don't even know what I'm saying. This isn't what I was hoping to say to you."

  "What did you want to say to me, then?"

  "I wanted to apologize for how I treated you earlier. You didn't deserve that. You've done nothing but deliver despite all of the things working against you. I should be better than that, I just…well, I just know better. I'm sorry."

  "Apology accepted, and thanks again for coming in to save my bacon just now. I understand that probably wasn't the easiest thing you've ever done."

  "Thanks. I'm also sorry about the fact that Ash and I dragged you here. I can understand your frustrations. Just remember that once we know where Dream Stealer and the rest of the Coun'hij are we can finally take them down. Over the long run that will save a lot of lives."

  She looked away from me—apparently embarrassed, although I couldn't tell whether her sudden bashfulness was driven by our conversation or the fact that she'd been sitting on top of me—and then jumped off of the bed. I grabbed her arm before she could make her escape.

  "Don't worry. I'll see this through. We'll get their queen to tell us what we need to know and then Ash will be willing to give you a chance. The two of you can work things out, it will just take some time."

  She looked at me like I'd just grown a second head and then ran out of my room. One second she was less than a foot from my bed and then all that was left of her was a single bare leg disappearing around the corner.

  Apparently I still had a lot more to learn about women than I'd realized.

  Chapter 15

  Isaac Nazir

  The Lamia Enclave

  Celeste and I kind of tiptoed around each other for the next two days. Neither of us seemed quite sure how to handle the moment that we'd shared our first night in the enclave.

  We worked together well enough to make sure that Ash and Kristin were taken care of, but beyond that we avoided each other whenever possible. I was actually grateful to have some time to myself to think. I couldn't remember the last time that I'd had more than a few hours away from the constant, intrusive stress of pack life.

  Celeste still seemed to be holding to our original bargain of not settling the issue of who was dominant to whom, which meant that, for the first time since I'd first shifted forms, I wasn't worried about protecting myself from someone higher up the food chain or keeping whomever was submissive to me from taking a run at me.

  It was pleasant in a way that was hard to describe, but I figured it was probably how most people felt on vacation. For a short time I was able to forget about all of the things that usually drove me and just enjoy the moment. The only bad part was that I knew it wasn't going to last. Eventually I was going to have to go back.

  I slept a lot more than normal, which was odd, but when I mentioned it in passing to Celeste she told me that she thought it was a side effect of the food. Her ancestors had reported similar changes during their visits to the lamia, along with an increased ability to heal quickly from wounds, which would have been nice except that it didn't seem to be happening for any of us who'd entered the enclave injured.

  I chalked it up as just one more instance where the rules had changed since the last time the enclave had hosted visitors, and hoped that Ash and Kristin would wake up soon. It seemed to bother Celeste a lot more than it bothered me, but I already knew that there was something going on there that I didn't understand.

  Usually when I had free time on my hands I spent it with my nose buried in a book or online trying to keep up with the latest developments in IT security. Neither option was available inside the enclave. I turned on my tablet the morning of our first full day in the enclave and confirmed that it worked, but then just turned it back off when it failed to register any GPS satellites. There wasn't any point in running down the battery when I didn't have any way of recharging it.

  I ended up spending a lot of time out in the valley sitting next to the stream and thinking. I must have gone back through the first few days after Oblivion left Jess without any memories a hundred times while sitting on a rock and listening to the stream.

  I'd made such a mess of things. I guess the biggest problem had been that I hadn't been able to believe deep down inside that the Jess I'd known for so long was really gone. She'd changed—she obviously didn't remember any of us—but I kept seeing glimmers of the old Jess peeking through the amnesia.

  The way she held her head when she was confused and trying not to admit it, the fact that she loved vanilla bean ice cream more than any other flavor, the way that she sometimes still smiled at her dad, they all pointed to the same thing. I'd been thinking that I just needed to jog her memory, that I needed to keep exposing her to old places and people until the old Jess came back to us. It had made sense to me at the time, but now I wasn't so sure.

  The old Jess would never have thrown herself into the arms of some dashing, mysterious stranger she'd known for less than a month, but that was exactly what the new Jess—what Jessica—had done. I'd spent months wooing Jess when we were younger. Even back then she'd been such a tightly coiled ball of hurt that she'd been extremely slow to trust.

  Even after Jess had chosen to go off with Wyatt rather than staying with Andrew and me, I'd been convinced that she'd been tricked, that he'd fast-talked his way into her heart. The more I thought about it though, the less I believed that had actually been what happened. If anything, I'd pushed her into his arms.

  She'd walked around the estate for months knowing that she had a history with everyone there, a history that she couldn't remember, but most of them had at least left her alone to decide when and how she wanted to proceed with them. Not me though. I'd pushed and pu
shed, never happy with the tiny measures of progress when she'd opened up to me, always wanting more, wanting things to be just like they'd been before. It was no wonder that she'd latched onto the first new guy who had shown an interest in her.

  The freedom to just be herself must have been intoxicating. No need to worry about a shadowy shared history, no sense that she was competing against the old Jess, it must have felt like paradise.

  I was still turning all of that over inside of my mind, but that process of self-reflection had to take a back seat on the morning of the third day when Set came calling. Set was the only lamia that had spoken to me so far. I'd been hoping to be able to ask him more about his people and their culture, but when I'd approached the entrance to the main cave and asked the two lamia guards there if Set was available they had just waved me away with threatening looks in their eyes.

  Seeing Set waiting outside the cave he'd assigned me was simultaneously a relief and cause for alarm. I'd been wanting to talk to him, but I suspected that he wasn't there to talk to me about lamia history or culture.

  "Are you ready for your next challenge match, sun person?"

  "Do I have a choice in the matter?"

  "There is always a choice. Your queen could withdraw her request for hospitality and you could all withdraw."

  A part of me wanted to agree with him. I wanted to tell him that we would pack up and go within the next five minutes, but I knew I couldn't do that.

  Kristin still hadn't woken up, but as soon as the morphine they'd given her at the hospital had worn off she'd gone back to thrashing and moaning in her sleep. She wasn't my girlfriend, but that didn't mean that I didn't understand why Ash was willing to do whatever it took to save her.

  Besides, Celeste was right about how many lives we would save if we could find the Coun'hij's base and take them all down. If it had been up to me I would have tried the hacking route first, but now that we were here I needed to keep winning fights as long as I could, to give Ash and Kristin time to heal if for no other reason.