Page 114 of Into Darkness (Night Prowler 6)
The words came out harder than he’d intended, but she simply smiled. “Gregor MacGregor.”
A snarl ripped through his chest before he could stop it. Bizarrely, that made her laugh. She curled into him, nuzzling his throat, sliding her foot between his calves. “Who, by the way, isn’t as bad as we thought.”
“Not as bad as we thought? He betrayed us! He’s a dead man! I’m going to track down that son of a—”
She shushed his outburst with a finger to his lips. “I admit his methods are questionable, but his intentions were good. Eliana told him about Demetrius’s . . .” she glanced up at him, hesitant to speak of the Dream that had foreseen his death, even after all that had happened. “Gregor didn’t tell her, but he had connections to a group of Dissenters inside the Peace Guard. He didn’t know where the prison was, but he knew they would. He also knew the only way to get me inside without exposing them was to make it look like he’d found me himself, and was turning me in.” Her voice turned wry. “I’m sure the enormous bounty helped in the formulation of the plan.” She sighed. “So he hedged his bets. If things went badly for us, he wouldn’t be suspected and neither would his allies, and if things went our way, he’d still have a giant pile of money. But he was trying to save you, Magnus, by sending me alone.” Her voice gentled, and she gazed at him with the softest, warmest eyes. “And for that I count him as a friend, no matter what his other faults might be.”
“You could’ve been captured,” he growled. “You could’ve been tortured—”
“But I wasn’t.” Her voice was firm. “And in the end, I did what I went to do.”
Magnus held himself still. The possibility of success hadn’t occurred to him before now; he’d just awoken from being dead, after all, had just found out he’d never have to go through that particular experience again. The shock of being alive, of seeing her again, had trumped everything else. Slowly, his eyes searching her face, he asked, “So . . . you mean . . . we won?”
She lifted a shoulder, nonchalant. “Well, if by won you mean did I reunite with my parents, and release everyone from the prison, and not get myself caught in the process, then yes. We won.” She gazed up at him, eyes shining, and Magnus was so thunderstruck he could barely catch his breath, or form words. He supposed there was only one word he really needed to speak.
“Thorne?”
Her eyes hardened. “Dead. And unlike you, that bastard is going to stay that way. Permanently.”
He rolled to his back, pulling her on top of him so they were chest to chest, pelvis to pelvis, her naked body draped across his. He turned his face to her neck. “Tell me everything,” he whispered, flush with awe and love, holding her tight against him. So she did.
She told him about Dieter, how he and his inside group of Dissenters had taken over command of the Peace Guard once it was confirmed Thorne was dead. She told him about the uprising in New Vienna, citizens turning against Enforcement, how quickly their reign had collapsed when the news media, freed from control and informed by Dieter, disseminated proof that Thorne’s regime had been the true force behind the isotope clouds and the war that followed the Flash, not the creatures that had been so wrongly labeled Aberrants.
She
told him how Leander had arranged transport by Thorne’s own fleet of planes for all the Ikati who couldn’t Shift to Vapor to escape the city. How he and her mother were on their way to Wales, right now.
“And the sky is blue there now, just as blue as it is here. As blue as it will be everywhere soon. Dieter accessed Thorne’s mainframe computers; he discovered how the isotope clouds were manufactured and kept in rotation in the atmosphere. They’re going to shut the whole thing down. No more Phoenix Corporation. No more Thorne. No more hiding.”
The future was rushing at Magnus, even brighter and more beautiful than he’d ever imagined. He stroked Lumina’s hair off her face and gazed up at her, his heart a mad, teeming circus of joy and euphoria and most of all, love. So much love he went hot with it, a whole body fever burn of blazing rapture.
“Magnus? Are you all right? God, you’re burning up—”
He crushed his mouth to hers before she finished. His kiss was wild, devouring, and by the end of it, she was panting and laughing, her forehead pressed against his.
“I love you,” he said, delirious with it. “God I love you. I love you so fucking much it feels like I invented it. Like I’m the first man who ever loved a woman in the history of the universe. Like it was me loving you that caused the Big Bang, and brought everything else into existence.”
She sobered, a glint of humor in her eyes. “Yeah, I think you’re kind of okay, too.” She slid a hand between their bodies. Nimble fingers curled around the erection already growing between his legs. Her voice breathy, she leaned down to whisper in his ear. “But I’ve been told that demonstrations are more effective than conversations, so . . .”
The noise he made was part laugh, part groan, all pleasure. Then she kissed him, and showed him exactly how she felt about him, and it was more than “kind of okay.”
It was flat-out, full-bore, once-in-a-lifetime love.
And it was forever.
EPILOGUE
The sunset was the most spectacular one Lu had ever seen in her life. Which wasn’t saying much; it was only the third sunset she’d ever seen, after all.
“Why does the sky turn orange?” She watched in fascination as the blazing disc of the sun finally slipped below the black crags of the mountains on the far horizon. She’d never tire of seeing that sight, or the vivid sky left behind, painted an outrageous, jewel-tone array of sapphire, crimson, and gold.
With an air of authority, Beckett said, “Air molecules and airborne particles change the final color of the light beam you see as the sunlight travels through the atmosphere. The shorter blue and green components are removed, leaving the longer red and orange hues—”
“Magic,” interjected Honor, cutting Beckett off. When he pursed his lips, peeved, she rose on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “Magical molecules,” she amended, winding her arms around his shoulders. She grinned up at him, and Beckett’s peeved expression turned into one of dazed adoration.
Leaning back against Magnus’s chest, Lu smiled. Even more than seeing her sister so happy, she loved seeing a strong man brought to his knees with only a look from his woman.
You should be getting used to that by now, Magnus said silently, wrapping his arms around her and squeezing. Seeing as how you do the same thing to me every few minutes. He kissed the top of her head and she sighed, utterly content.
