Hot Blooded

walked up, and
his beautiful body was on sweaty, magnificent display. Grace had taken one look
and fallen for him with the embarrassing intensity only a teenager can manage.
    After that, she'd followed him around like a puppy every minute she wasn't
with her dying mother. He'd rebuffed her clumsy adolescent advances with such
delicacy he barely broke her heart at all. Then, realizing the depth of her
loneliness and grief, he'd taken her under his wing, teaching her swordplay to
keep her busy when he wasn't running interference between her and Morgana.
    So finding herself the target of Lance's determined erotic pursuit put a
serious strain on her emotional defenses. It was far too tempting to give in,
especially when he made the experience so utterly delicious.
    Unfortunately, Grace couldn't afford the price of another surrender. Not when
she risked ending up like Clarice—a psychotic threat to anyone with the
misfortune to cross her path.
    Sighing, she stepped from the shower and began to towel off. Though her mind
spun in worried circles, her body still floated in the boneless relaxation that
follows really good sex. When she glanced up at her own face in the mirror, her
eyes looked heavy-lidded, sated. "You are not going to let Lancelot du Lac get
within twenty feet of you again," she told her languorous reflection sternly.
    She thought it sneered.
    With a grimace, she grabbed another towel and flipped it over her wet hair.
"You're a cop, Grace Morgan," she muttered at herself sternly, briskly rubbing.
"And a cop is all you'll ever be."
    Finished, she lowered the towel and straightened, glancing toward the mirror.
    Her own reflection was gone. In its place, the mirror showed the darkened
front of a building with a wide stone staircase. A blonde woman descended the
steps, a backpack stuffed with books slung across her shoulder.
    Grace froze, staring at the mirror, feeling every hair on her body rise to
attention. She knew that building. It was the library on the Tayanita Community
College campus.
    The image moved, as though the viewer walked quickly toward the blonde. The
girl glanced up. She looked young, nineteen or twenty at most, with a delicate
cameo face and a small mouth. Her eyes shone a clear green in a shaft of light
from the building's windows. Then she was gone as the viewer continued past her,
up the steps toward the library door. A male hand reached out into the frame to
pull the door open…
    And Grace was staring into her own stunned face.
    "Shit!" She jumped back. "What the hell was that?" Obeying an instinctive
impulse to get as far from that mirror as possible, Grace shot out of the
bathroom.
    She'd never had a vision. Had the contact with Lance triggered the latent
psychic abilities that were part of being a Maja? The raw panic of that thought
made her want to break into a run.
    No, dammit
. She stopped in midstride, fists clenching. Grace Morgan
was not a coward, and she didn't run. Not from a fight, not from witch
grandmothers, and certainly not from whatever was happening to her.
Straightening her shoulders, she wheeled around and marched back into the
bathroom to glare defiantly into the mirror.
    Which showed nothing but her own reflection.
    Had she imagined it? Was she beginning to get the Gift? Or—and a chill blew
across her skin—was she just losing her mind?
    Like Clarice… Oh, God.
    No. She dragged her galloping imagination back under control. She'd heard
Latents sometimes had fleeting psychic experiences following sex with a Magus,
but the powers weren't permanent. Not, anyway, if you didn't sleep with him
again. She'd just have had to make sure she stayed the hell away from Lancelot
du Lac.
    Whether she liked it or not.
    Â 
    IT was three in the morning before she managed to get to sleep. And even
then, her dreams were far from restful, a disturbing mix of erotic images of
making love to Lance and… something else. Violent, half-seen glimpses of blood,
of the blonde college student, of… someone. A man. Not Lance, but someone else,
someone whose face she never quite saw.
    And a knife.
    She woke too early the next morning, though she worked second shift and
wasn't due at the station until three o'clock in the afternoon. She tried to
keep busy and avoid brooding, but her thoughts kept drifting to Lance. And
worse, to those disturbing dreams.
    It was a relief to finally slide behind the wheel of her blue