At first he thought the warmth was just the two of them, the heat of bodies side-by-side – but quickly enough it became apparent that was not the case.
Like her he said nothing (also like her, he thought his companion’s ego needed no further encouragement – what a match they made) but he was glad of the heat, and pressed nearer to her side, so every couple steps their shoulders or hips brushed. So he could feel the warmth roll off of her.
More than that he was glad for her, the way her skin glitters like sunlight on snow in the desert, the way the gleam picked up, too, in her eyes. As she tossed up those spheres of energy, sizzle and spark, his gaze traced their arc – but if he thought of his own magic, his own magician’s tricks, he said nothing of it.
He had not played to a crowd in a long time, now, and there were more pressing interests to him than even his own true magic.
If, she began, and already that crooked grin bloomed on his lips at the mere promise of the word. It lingered through the rest of the question she directed back at him, as full of spark as one of her electric spheres, but Acton laughed and shook his head.
“If you were a god I’d be dead,” he said, and his mane was a black cloud against hers, the antithesis to her white-gold. “And I doubt I’d be the only one.” Were he anyone else, he might think it was a frightening idea, Bexley Briar as Divine – she would be an Old Testament ruler, all retribution and rage. Blood and floods and ashes-to-ashes.
Though that wasn’t so different from now, after all.
This thought slimmed his grin into something leaner and he appraised her with his tinder-flint eyes, burning now with a slower kind of heat. The slant of his mouth is still amused, but there was little light-hearted about his breath on her throat, his white teeth at her ear.
“If, though,” he said, still playing along with his voice smoke-thick and low, “how would you have me pray?”
Acton has never been the religious type – not even now, when the gods cast shadows and brought down destruction, sure as anything in any old story – but that in no way meant he didn’t know how to worship.
Even he could play at holy, if she wanted him on his knees.
@
all the gun fights
and the lime lights
and the holy sick divine nights
