Naughty Karma

Chapter Twenty-Five The On Switch

“Karma-cita!”

Karma looked up from the follow-up email she was sending to a former client, a smile curving her lips as her new sister-in-law and horny-ghost-transcender-extraordinaire struck a pose on the threshold of her office, Shirley Temple dimples flashing.

“Did you miss me?” Lucy asked as she continued into the office, followed by Jo, Brittany and Mia, the pack of them carting an assortment of takeout boxes.

“Immensely,” Karma replied, a little surprised to find it was true. Jake’s absence had been a hole in her life. As much as she liked Lucy, she hadn’t expected to miss her, but she had. Now that they were back from their honeymoon, it felt like a puzzle finally coming together after a bizarre scavenger hunt to track down all the pieces.

She’d never really thought of her consultants as her friends—more as her errant children, and the strict and distant mother didn’t get to partake of the girl talk—but as Mia, Jo, Brittany and Lucy pulled over chairs and made themselves at home around her desk, she was beginning to realize she had a place in this circle.

“We come bearing Chinese and Thai, since we couldn’t agree on what to bring,” Jo said as she popped open a carton of kung pao shrimp.

“Not that I don’t appreciate lunch, and the company, but to what do I owe this feast?”

The others looked to Mia who made a face. “I lost a bet with Chase and my payment is that I have to spend lunch away from my lab being social with nonscientists. He suggested I harass you.”

Karma couldn’t help but grin. Mia would happily live in her lab twenty-four seven, and lately she’d been spending a lot of those hours running tests on Prometheus. Trust Chase to find ways to break her out of her scientific rut.

“And when Brittany said Mia had called to check your schedule because she was going to surprise you with lunch, Jo and I invited ourselves along because I am way behind on all the good gossip. Like a certain Karmic Consultants puppet master who appears to be getting rather cozy with a certain warlock?” Lucy scooted forward to the edge of her chair to pluck an eggroll from a box. “I need details.”

Karma felt a flush climbing her cheeks. She couldn’t exactly deny they’d been getting cozy. It had been a week since they’d found his heart and Prometheus had spent every night driving her capacity for thought right out of her head. She’d been sleeping soundly—even sleeping in, which had led to Brittany opening the office a couple times when Karma was late to rise. Her receptionist had seen Prometheus sneaking out several mornings. If their affair had ever been secret, the secret was out in the open now.

She’d been surprised when she’d woken up that first morning and he’d still been there, but he’d been so casual about it, as if it was the most natural thing in the world—and as long as he acted that way, it had been. They’d said goodbye with easy distance—nothing so intimate as a good morning kiss—and he’d gone to be prodded by Mia and look after his shop, only to return that night and back her against her desk, whispering about how he’d been fantasizing about spreading her out on it ever since he’d first seen her lording over the world behind it.

She still couldn’t quite look at her desk without flashing back to that night.

They’d fallen into something of a routine. Fierce coupling, lazy intimacy in the midnight hours, long, blissfully uninterrupted hours of sleep, and then cool, professional morning partings. It was comfortable, in its own way. But comfortable in the way a house of cards is comfortable. She was always watching for it to come tumbling down.

Luis had reported in that morning with his findings on the maenad who’d contracted with Prometheus for his heart. They knew as much as they could about her and were as ready as they would ever be to summon her and get Prometheus’s heart back in his body where it belonged. They’d scheduled it for two days from now. At dawn, since the handmaidens of Bacchus were said to be most potent at night and weakest in the breaking day. Not long now and Prometheus would be free.

And then what?

Karma accepted the pad thai as Brittany passed it to her. “I have been seeing Prometheus socially, but it’s casual, nothing more.”

Lucy’s jaw dropped. “My God, it’s true. She admitted it.”

“See? I told you she was doing him!”

“She is right here.”

Jo grinned, unabashed.

Lucy had the grace to blush. “Sorry. I was just so sure Jo was pulling my leg when she told me. I mean Prometheus. How did that even happen? Don’t you hate each other?”

Karma chose to ignore the don’t you hate each other part of the interrogation because she wasn’t exactly sure when she had stopped hating Prometheus. “He’s wanted to hire Karmic Consultants for some time now. When he sicced the demon on your wedding, I went to confront him and we ended up agreeing that Karmic would assist him with his issue if he worked for me for a while to make amends for the trouble he’d caused.” Though in retrospect, she’d been kidding herself to think a man like that ever worked for anyone. Never an employee, Prometheus. Always the master of his own domain, even if that domain was hers. “After that, one thing sort of led to another.”

Lucy shook her head. “Prometheus. Jake is gonna flip.”

Karma’s stomach clenched. “Lucy, about telling Jake…” Karma told her brother everything, but the thought of him knowing this made her feel lightheaded. Which was part of why she’d been dodging his calls all morning. Was she ashamed of what she was doing with Prometheus? No. Then why was she so scared Jake would think less of her for the way they were using one another? They were two consenting adults. Jake was a big boy. But introducing Prometheus to her parents, to her brother—God, she couldn’t picture it without shuddering. Worlds colliding like that wouldn’t be pretty.

“You don’t want me to tell him?” Lucy’s brow pulled into a frown. “I don’t want to lie to him. And you know he only wants you to be happy. If Prometheus is good for you—”

“I don’t know what Prometheus is for me right now.”

“Oh.” Lucy’s frown darkened—Shirley Temple in protective mode.

“I like him.”

All heads swiveled toward Brittany at her declaration, then Jo admitted, “I do too. I mean, he’s an ass, but I appreciate a good asshole.”

“He’s scary,” Mia added. “Not that that’s a bad thing. There’s something sort of magnetic about his scariness. Like looking at a great white shark. Not quite human. But then, he isn’t, not really.”

Lucy turned to Karma. “Is that why you like him? Because he’s a shark? For the adventure of it?”

She couldn’t deny there was something to that—the fear and fascination of being with someone so overwhelmingly primal, both in attraction and in his power. There was a certain allure, a spike of adrenaline that came with being with someone who could turn on you like a tiger, never entirely tame. It affected her, but it wasn’t why. Why was too complicated for gossip over kung pao shrimp. Why was conflicted and tangled up. There was no pretty, happy, fairy tale why. All she had was instinct, emotion and no guarantees it would ever be anything more.

Karma looked at the faces around her. Her friends. Would she ever have let them in this much, let them see this much of her vulnerability before Prometheus? “I don’t know why,” she admitted. “I only know when he runs his finger down the back of my neck, my mind shuts off and all I can do is feel. And everything feels good.”

Jo nodded sagely. “The On Switch.”

“What?”

“That spot where he touches you and it’s zero-to-sixty, hello sailor, all revved up and ready to go. Girls are supposed to be all sexually complicated and shit, but I swear every one of us has a spot that is like flicking a switch. Touch us there and we’re good for it on the spot.”

Mia pursed her lips. “I wonder if that’s physiological or psychological. With the correct experiment I’m sure we could deduce—”

“No science talk during lunch or I’m telling Chase,” Jo interrupted.

“So that’s it?” Lucy pressed. “He just flips your physical switches? It’s not, you know, love?”

“Love? No. Definitely not.” Karma stuffed pad thai into her mouth, stopping herself before she became the lady who protested too much.

In love with Prometheus? Not remotely. But she didn’t like to think about what would happen after they got his heart back. And whenever she thought about the possibility that they might fail, that he might die, she felt a spike of panic pierce deep. She flinched at the thought of him being hurt, but in love? In order to fall in love, you had to believe a future was possible, didn’t you? She and Prometheus, they weren’t the happily ever after types. This interlude was an illusion of romance with an expiration date. She couldn’t let herself think it was any more real than that.

But there were moments, late at night, when it felt disturbingly real. Moments that made her wonder if there was a chance for them, after his powers were gone and he was just Prometheus again, with a regular beating heart. She would wake up, groggy and disoriented from a dream vision, and he would be there, his rumbly voice soothing her back to sleep, or asking her about what she’d seen. She’d gotten better—even in the dreams—at distancing herself from the subject, gaining perspective and learning how to choose the visions she saw. Last night she’d fallen asleep thinking of Jake and Lucy returning from their honeymoon and slid into a muddy could-be-future of a very pregnant Lucy asking Prometheus for charms to keep ghosts out of the baby’s room. She’d woken with a jolt, startled to see Prometheus in an even remotely possible future that related to her, and he’d been beside her in the bed, asking her what the vision was about and so she’d blurted out the first thing that came to her mind—the truth.

He’d flinched, as taken aback as she was, then slowly nodded. “Good dream,” he said cautiously. “Do they want kids?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you?”

The question had startled her. She hadn’t expected it of him. It always seemed so loaded—especially when you were talking to someone who’d seen you naked. She’d hedged with, “I don’t know. Do you?”

And he’d said the words that gave her permission to be brutally honest about her own thoughts on the subject. “Hell no.”

If he’d wanted to turn her off, he couldn’t have done worse. She didn’t want kids. Never had. Her mother always told her that she’d feel that biological urge someday—with the right person, at the right time, when she saw her friends and family members having babies—but Karma had never even felt the first inkling of a maternal twinge. And she’d always felt a little guilty admitting it aloud. Until she and Prometheus shared their horror at the idea. His vasectomy, her IUD—they were a matched set of non-propagators, saluting one another for keeping the population down. He’d made her laugh with his Pledge of Anti-Procreation, and she’d fallen asleep with a smile on her lips, tucked against his side.

That had felt real.

But reality was a ritual to reclaim his heart in a day and a half. After that, it was anyone’s guess. Neither of them had ever mentioned a relationship, emotions or permanence. The casual could only go on so long. Karma couldn’t let it go on forever. Uncertainty only worked in her world if there was an expiration date. And her expiration date with Prometheus was rapidly approaching, hour by hour.

So she scoffed at the idea of love, pressed Lucy to talk about her honeymoon in Italy, laughing when she described the enthusiastic Italian ghosts who had stalked them from town to town, and forgot about uncertainty for a while. For now, things were good. It couldn’t last because it never did, but she was learning to worry less about the press of possible catastrophes and see the present more.

Or at least she was trying.