for a moment, before touching her cheek. She found something stable in the cool lines of his fingers, the utter stillness in his eyes.
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
They stood there for what felt like a long time, his hands on her, their faces close together. At first, Sloane told herself she would just stay there until the rage receded again. But then she couldn’t bear to move. His breath smelled like chocolate—he had probably eaten some on the way back from the vending machine. His cheek was rough with five o’clock shadow. She brought her hands up to his wrists, not moving him, just holding him there.
“Kiss me,” she said in a low voice. “Now.”
He obeyed, gentle hands turned strict, buried in her hair. She backed him up against a wall and pressed into him, their hips and stomachs and chests warm against each other. It felt like the burn and tingle of magic but without the destruction, just the warmth and the intent. But magic was there too—and no wonder; Mox was drowning in it, suffused with it. Electricity danced over his fingers, and it was bright against her eyelids. She stopped to watch the lights play over his knuckles and laughed.
“Sorry,” he said with a small smile. He looked smug.
“No, you’re not, you ass,” she said, and she kissed him again.
She thought of Matt only briefly, when she realized she didn’t know the choreography anymore, didn’t know how it worked when you were kissing someone so much bigger than you were, someone who wasn’t so careful of you, who had just watched you send a dry gale through a train station that bowled over grown men and knew that you had murder in your heart because he had it in his too. Mox’s arm wrapped around her back, and he lifted her clear off the ground. She laughed as he dropped her on the mattress and stood back to take off his shirt and his shoes without a trace of self-consciousness.
Sloane felt like the air was pressing in on her from all sides, and she wasn’t sure if it was magic or just how it felt when you were with someone and you had stopped pretending.
She pulled him to her, and there was so much that he wasn’t—wasn’t shy about touching her, wasn’t delicate as he slid her pants down over her ankles and tossed them aside, wasn’t apologetic as he traced a new path up her body, wasn’t put out when she laughed and tugged his hair to offer a suggestion. And God, his hair, tangled around her fingers; his teeth, teasing at her fingertips as he removed the siphon from her hand; his eyes, fixed on hers with unwavering focus as they discovered how to move together.
Sloane wanted everything, and then she had it—fire and gale and laughter; rage and warmth and comprehension.
She had just enough presence of mind to notice when all the objects in the room—pad of paper, bottle of water, bags of pretzels, grimy remote, ancient TV set, dusty soap wrapped in lavender paper—jerked up into the air and slammed back down again. She wasn’t even sure if that had been his doing or her own.
When Sloane woke, it was dark outside, and Mox was asleep on his stomach with his hands folded under his head. His hair was rumpled, but one curl trailed over his forehead, making her grin.
The spine siphon caught her attention, and she leaned over Mox’s shifting shoulders to get a closer look. Its structure was essentially the same as any other siphon, with a sturdier plate at the top of Mox’s spine that, she assumed, held all the mechanics of the thing, and the line of plates trailing down to the middle of his back. She was sure they served their own function—greater skin contact might provide a power source—from thermal energy, perhaps? Or it gave the device added stability?
She couldn’t tell how it stayed put. It wasn’t screwed into Mox’s vertebrae, but it was so stable it might as well have been. If magic held it there, then magic had to be able to remove it, but as both Mox and Nero had said, it was only the particular magic of the one who had placed it that could remove it. That meant that every person had a unique magical signature or fingerprint—that each person related to magic differently, irrespective of ability or capacity.
But she couldn’t get away from the idea that it was just a