Inked

on my shoulder and Caleb said sharply, “Lia,” in the tone that meant he’d said it at least three times before.
    I grabbed on to him, breathless, queasy and more than a little freaked out. That just didn’t get any easier. Especially not when viewed through someone else’s eyes.
    “What is it?” he demanded. “What happened?”
    “Nothing.” I got my legs back under me. “It’s just…I think we might be in the right place, after all.”
    Caleb looked uncertain, staring past me into the drain like he thought something was about to jump out at us.
    And then something did.
    “What! Hold!” Jamie threw a shield up, which knocked Caleb’s spell awry. It bounced off and crashed into the water on our left, sending a great wash of steam into the air. “Are ye daft, man?”
    “Sorry.” It looked like I wasn’t the only one who was a little jumpy. But Caleb recovered fast. “Why’d you go in without us?” he demanded. “What if you’d had a seizure in there? What if it left your head under water?”
    “What if you stop acting like I have one foot in the grave?” Jamie shot back. “And I went in because I needed to check on conditions.”
    “How are they?”
    “Bad. And going to get worse. It’s raining in the mountains.”
    “So? We’re here,” I pointed out.
    “Vegas sits at the bottom of a basin,” he said impatiently. “It’s surrounded by mountains and a lot of hard desert soil used to four or five inches of rain a year. When it gets a couple all at once, like the forecast for today, it can’t handle it and all that water comes running down here. That’s why the drainage system was created in the first place.”
    “I think we can handle a few inches!”
    “Inches in the mountains translates to feet here. And of all the drains in the system, this is the worst to be caught in during a flood. It runs all the way under the Strip, with no manholes or cross tunnels to catch you. If a wall of water came up behind us, we could be washed for miles.”
    “We have shields,” I reminded him.
    “And how long do you think they’ll last when we’re slamming into concrete like three idiots in a pinball machine?”
    “So you’re saying we need to do this fast?”
    “I’m saying we need to do this later!”
    I shook my head violently. “Cyrus is in there. It has to be now!”
    I pushed into the drain, which at this point mostly involved just letting go of the outer edge of the inlet. It swept me through the mouth of the tunnel and onto what remained of a sandbar. The noise was deafening, with the small, enclosed space amplifying every sound. Each car rattling overhead sounded like a 747 taking off, and the river around my legs roared like the ocean. But at least I couldn’t hear Jamie cursing anymore.
    Once I got back to my feet, I discovered that the tunnel itself was fairly spacious. But that was the only good thing. The air was murky and the same shade as the water, but I didn’t dare use a flashlight. In the inlet, it could be mistaken for sunlight; farther in, it would immediately announce the presence of an unwanted visitor.
    But without light, it was difficult to imagine how I was supposed to find anyone in here. There were no markers, no stuttering wards, no anything. Just a long, dark tunnel and me. If there was ever a time for metaphysical bread-crumbs, I thought, just before an image vivid enough to touch slammed into me.
    Cyrus ended up on his back, with Lia prowling up his body. She’d left her hair undone and it flowed over her shoulders in a dark wave, tickling his chest after she stripped his shirt off. His hand slid under that shining mass, the strands sliding silken-slick between his fingers, to grasp her nape. He brought her down for a scorching kiss before skimming down her back and over the sweet curves below. She groaned and that combined with the skin-to-skin contact to bring a growl to his throat.
    “Down, boy,” she told him, sitting up to straddle his shoulders. Her eyes were a perfect ice gray in the moonlight filtering through his bedroom curtains. Wolf eyes.
    The brief glimpse into Cyrus’s brain flickered out, leaving me staring into the dense gloom of the drain. That was all right, I told myself as I pushed off from the wall. It looked like I had a guide.
    The pressure against my legs doubled as I moved forward into the channel, because the water was compressed into a smaller area. Making things even more interesting were the seams in the concrete