on confused. "I'm going to place a drop of something sweet on your tongue, darling, to relax you. It is not fitting to go in there with your fists balled up at your sides the way they are now, your shoulders set to take a blow, and ready to reach for your Isis." Nefertiti shook her head with a smile as she removed the stopper from a small, ruby-crusted vial.
Damali opened her mouth and allowed the warm droplet to hit her tongue without questioning the elder queen. As her eyes slid shut and reopened half-mast, Nefertiti sighed.
"Now, darling, how do you feel?" Damali's fists unclenched slowly, her shoulders relaxed, her spine became fluid, and every pulse point lit. Her breaths were so shallow she was becoming dizzy. "What's in that stuff?"
"How do you feel?"
Curious gazes passed between the other queens. Damali looked at Nefertiti. "Horny."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
C arlos sat on the deserted beach, his intense gaze focused on the stars in the sky. Where did she go? The darker it had gotten, and the later it had become, the more his resolve to just wait for Damali to return ebbed away. He really didn't want to know the answer to the question of where she'd been, but at the same time, he did.
Initially it had been easy to lie to himself, to tell himself that she'd just secreted herself away to get some head space. Then he'd nursed the concept that perhaps she'd been abducted and was in some type of danger. That, he told himself, was the valiant reason he needed to go on a search-and-definitely-destroy mission to find her, even though his gut never registered any pending threat. But with the surf pounding before him, a sound and motion too reminiscent of what might really be going on, it was hard to shield his mind from the probable--she was with Cain.
Complete knowledge was a terrible thing; half-knowing a brutal horror. Fuse that with a true understanding of just how hurt and angry his woman had a right to be, and the recipe created devastation. Carlos closed his eyes, remembering all he'd forgotten.
"I never had anybody to show me the way," he admitted in a whisper, hoping Damali would hear him. The fact that she wasn't responding to a mind lock increased his sense of quiet panic.
It was the truth, the rawest version of it, and he hoped she'd key in on the honesty of the vibration in his whisper and simply come home. There hadn't been any male role models for him, dead or alive. Every male had shown him violence, power lust, how to hustle, game, but no one other than Father Pat had given him anything to really teach him how to run a household like Marlene expected of him. Plus, he reasoned, Father Pat was a priest--and that definitely wasn't him. So how was he supposed to fix this, rebuild?
"D," he said softly, just putting the quiet truth out on the evening breeze for her to catch, "I never had any guides, not like you did. No real Neteru team just for me... no male version of your rites of passage. They left me hanging. I had to figure it out on my own and made a lot of mistakes. I'm so sorry, baby."
He drew a ragged breath and kept his line of vision on the stars. "The old kings... they made me and left me, D. I was free-falling." He chuckled sadly. "They gave me the tattoo on my throat to seal the turn wound, gave me another one as birth control, told me not to mess up and not to make no babies, and then threw me back on the old block-- no instructions, no serious insight, just basically said 'Be a man,' and rolled." Carlos sighed. "I know this ain't making no sense to you, and I'm not making excuses for any way that I hurt you or the family... but... Damali, with all my heart and soul, what I wouldn't give to have had the lessons that might have avoided all of that."
His peripheral vision caught a glimpse of gold in the corner of his eye and he immediately stood and turned toward it, anticipation rushing through him. The splinter of radiance on the beach quickly became a twelve-foot-long golden obelisk the width of a door, and he held his breath as he waited for Damali to walk through it. But the entity that came out of the light made him