Babel gave the moth a quick, wry smile. She shook the curtain and it rose and banked away as Babel closed and locked the window. She leaned back against Lohengrin once more. When his hands went to cup her breasts, she didn’t stop him, just turned so they were facing each other. She stared up into his face.
“Not here,” she said. “Too many eyes—of all kinds—and cameras with long lenses.”
Klaus grinned at her and touched his eye patch with a finger. “I only have one eye, and it’s looking at you.”
She gave him a halfhearted, sad smile at that. “We have an early morning tomorrow, you know. It’s already late.”
“Does that mean we can’t have an even later night, meine Liebe? After all, tomorrow’s just for show. As for our infestation of voyeur moths, we’ll just close all the curtains.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible. Not as far as I’m concerned.”
“As long as we work together, you mean?” she asked him, and he gave a sniff of amusement.
“As long as we’re working together, then,” he growled. “Yah.”
She took his hand, smiling back to him, and led him to their bed.
The moon had climbed well above Huayna Picchu before they went to sleep.
Marcus Morgan slid out of the barn. Normally, he was smooth and powerful, propelled by serpentine muscle that began at his waist and stretched twenty feet to the tip of his brightly ringed tail. He cut an impressive figure, snake on his lower half, a well-muscled young African-American man from the torso up.
He didn’t feel impressive now, though. He tried not to wince with the pain of moving, but he couldn’t help it. Getting shot was a bitch. He was hurt. Bad. He knew that now even if he hadn’t fully understood it in the chaos of the arena or in the exhilaration of fleeing from it. If he had to fight now he wasn’t sure he’d be any good; the rage that took him over in the arena was gone. He hoped fighting was behind him. Now he just needed to stay alive and get home. That was going to be hard enough.
Looking around at the nondescript buildings and the dim, sputtering streetlights, he thought, Would you look at this? Me, gunshot, stuck in Kazakh-wherever-the-hell-we-are …
He turned as a young woman crept out of the shelter. She wobbled on her stilettos. Like everything she did, she made that wobble look sexy as hell. Marcus had fallen for her the first time he saw her, when she slipped into his cell back in Baba Yaga’s joker gladiator compound. She’d looked like she’d stepped out of Vogue. She’d been too perfect to be real, with her light blue eyes and short black hair that reminded him of a movie star from the 1920s he’d once seen on a postcard. It was hard to place her age, except that everything about her glowed with the raw beauty of youth.