“Don’t bet on it,” she told him, pulling her legs up tight to her chest and closed, finally. “In fact, why don’t I just bottle a little blood for you next time and we skip this ridiculous . . .”
He was licking his fingers. Just a couple swipes of his tongue, like she did, when licking chocolate frosting after indulging in an eclair on Sunday mornings.
It was so good and she only allowed herself the treat once a week, so she had to make every last lick of frosting count.
“Sweet, soft, and submissive,” he said. He reached behind her for the helmet he’d left on the back of the bike.
She’d kept her legs up between them but he simply plopped the helmet on her head, firmly pulling it down and doing up the snaps. She retied the strings on her scrub pants.
“I am not submissive,” she protested, feeling a bit braver behind the helmet.
“A liar and a cheat,” he added. “And, most definitely, a virgin.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“I warned you not to lie to me,” he said, hand under her helmeted chin to tip her gaze up to him.
She stuck her tongue out. He’d have to take her helmet off again if he wanted to do anything about it.
“I’m glad you turned down my claim,” he said. “This is much more interesting than a favour to my sister.”
He reached down and made her straddle the bike, pivoting her on the seat and pulling her knees apart. He let go as soon as she complied.
His own helmet was snagged from the handlebars and he ran a lazy hand through the waves of his dark brown hair, failing to tame his messy style before putting the helmet on to flatten it down. Jill just stopped herself from offering to comb her fingers through the waves.
No more petting for her.
“Victoria warned me about your perversions,” Jill complained as he buckled his helmet. It might have sounded a little sulky.
Victor smirked down at her. “Fingering a mouthy witch until she submits is hardly that perverted.”
“It was in public!” she insisted, blushing.
“Where no one saw you,” Victor challenged. “Not that an audience would have stopped me,” he added.
“Good to know you’re into exhibitionism,” Jill said, reaching out to grab both of Victor’s hands.
She dropped his blood pressure in a few seconds and he thumped to the ground next to the bike, his helmet knocking loudly on the pavement.
Safety first, she thought with a dark, mad laugh.
It had been a mistake to hold back on her real strength earlier.
Victor made a error, too. He had thought her defeated. He forgot what a witch would do for her family.
Or even a vampire, she thought, for one guilty moment. Victoria had warned them her brother would come for her.
Stripping Victor’s jacket off and slipping it on herself, she debated how much clothing to leave him.
She needed him slowed down, but getting him arrested by the human police for indecency would be too much.
Deciding that embarrassment could be achieved without illegal exposure, Jill yanked his boots off and modified his shirt and jeans using her bare hands and earth strength.
She needed to make a statement, so he would think twice about trying for her again.
As her fingers brushed his bared, muscled abdomen, she sensed his blood pressure already recovering.
He was fucking fed and strong already. The pushy bastard never needed to feed on her.
Shoving the boots and clothing scraps into the bike’s boot, Jill straddled the metal beast and turned it on.
How hard could it be, if so many meatheads could ride these things?
It was the ride of her life.
Backdraft
Maeren
Phillip
Phillip examined the soot stained mantle in the king’s bedroom.
Marble didn’t burn, but nearly everything else in the room had melted or turned to ash. It looked like a firebomb, sent by catapult, had landed on the fireplace and exploded outward.
The ash was an inch thick in some spots. He trailed a finger along the mantle hitting some cinders, still burning.
“There’s a portal through the back of the fireplace. That’s where Daemon escaped,” William said, indifferent to the destruction around them.
Earth healers saw the worst side of battle, frontline amputations and deaths as common to them as milk added to tea.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Phillip said, turning to take in the room’s total destruction again. “Daemon was already on the throne. None of us would have challenged him if he wanted to stay on it.”
“The kingdom wouldn’t have continued to follow a demon king,” William said. “You know the lords were already rebelling. Our father would have replaced Daemon, for you, to settle them. I told you the maid had overheard father talking about abdicating and crowning you.”
Phillip swept the ashes from the mantle with his air, ignoring William’s cursing as the embers left lit up and rained down around them. Phillip snuffed every hint of fire with a mere thought, closing his eyes and sucking all that heat into his chest.
Their father had been one of the greatest fire kings Maeren had ever seen and he had been burned to death in his bed.
Had his father’s mind been so gone that he couldn’t defend himself against his own element?
“Open the door to the portal,” Phillip demanded.
The mantle looked like solid brick but an earth prince should be able to find any fault with ease.
William had said the portal was open and a piece of the marble displaced up, when he entered with the guards earlier. Whatever vampire had disturbed the room to close it again would be answering for his actions to Phillip by the end of the day.
William touched the mantle with reluctance.
Phillip didn’t have any patience for his dirt phobia today.
“Get on with it,” Phillip said. “If you can’t stand to be in the room, then send me up an earth lord with a bit more grit.”
“It should be me,” William said, finding the break in the mantle and lifting the stone with his magic. “Our father, at least, deserves his remaining, loyal sons to personally investigate and avenge his murder. I had been so close . . . If only, I’d insisted on the guards breaking down the door sooner or if I had taken the maid’s concerns more seriously, when she told me Daemon had gone into a rage after Father called him to his room, throwing her out.”
William smashed his fist against the mantle, obliterating the clever lever built into the marble and slamming shut the door he had been opening to the portal.
“Oh Maeren, I’m sorry,” apologized an embarrassed William, coughing from the dust of the broken stone.
Was William serious right now? His brother had always looked down on ham-handed earth lords as buffoons unable to control their own strength.
“Can you just shift the door open without the lever?” Phillip asked, biting back his own curse. He bent down to see the back of the fireplace. “Just open it enough for me to squeeze through.”
William concentrated and something shifted in the fireplace, even more dust raining down.
This time Phillip coughed before he could use air to clear the space.
“I don’t think it’s stable,” William warned, stopping. “Maybe it’s my power. I healed so many injured guards earlier from the fight with Daemon, at least, those left alive. If you give me a day to get my strength back, I can hold up the entire structure for you to safely pass or I could get you another earth lord now, if you prefer.”
Phillip straightened back up. “No, you’re right, it should just be his sons in here. The portal can wait another day. You said it led to a cave and there was a second, dead-end portal there?”
A dead-end portal bounced the user back to his origin, the original destination either destroyed or not powered enough for transport. Phillip could wait to chase that less promising lead.
“You should come to see t
he amplification circle in Daemon’s room. I’ve left the witch’s body undisturbed in his bed. We’ll likely find more evidence there than the ashes left here,” William pointed out.
“Not yet,” Phillip said.
He was sure William hadn’t gone over the room as thoroughly due to his personality quirks as much as his lack of fire.
Phillip could feel that there were still unburnt objects left in the remains of the room. He used his power to draw him to the other side of his father’s bed, forcing himself to look at the blackened slats that had no body to hold any longer, simply a pile of deep ash, marking where his father laid for his final rest.
A metal bowl and a straight razor were buried in the ash, which he uncovered as he reached purposefully under the bed’s burned skeleton.
“There won’t be any blood or hair for identification,” William said, eyeing the partly melted discovery.
It had been a point of contention between them that there was nothing left to provide a positive identification by earth of their father’s remains.
Phillip had insisted on calling three other earth lords after William told him the disappointing news. He had them stay at the threshold of the room and bury their hands in the ash, spilling over into the hallway. All they could sense was the remains from a strong fire lord, nothing else.
“What did you say Daemon and Father were doing before the fire?” Phillip asked, putting the metal items for shaving back, next to the ashy remains of his father’s body.
“Daemon called for feeders for the king. He probably had thought it would take longer for the witches to be prepared because he seemed surprised when I arrived at the same time and knocked on the door with the guards to tell him about the dead witch in his bed,” William said, repeating the details of the story almost verbatim to the one the guards had given.
“You said he refused to open the door?” Phillip asked. He looked across the room to the ensuite, just a few feet from the room’s entrance, but quite far from the bed. “He told you that Father needed to use the facilities first?”
“Daemon had an air barrier around the room. I could hardly hear what he said, but it doesn’t matter. He lied. Father died in his bed. I don’t even know if our father was still alive by the time I got here. Perhaps Daemon was in the middle of his escape and was using the air barrier to cover it up.”
“Or he was in the middle of murdering our father and smothered his screams,” Phillip darkly added.
He felt savage, wanting to put the screws to William, although he knew better than to expect more of his brother.
The witches called to feed their father had been killed in the fight with Daemon, once the guards combined magic to overcome the air barrier and barge into the room.
A prince of William’s power should have been able to protect the witches. All Phillip had left were a few lower-level guards to question, and he was going to have to be the one that told the twins that their mother had been murdered.
“None of us knew Daemon’s plans,” William defended. “The slow poisonings of father started after Lady Norwood left the court in shame, failing to heal the Blue Queen from the assassination—”
“She saved the Blue Queen’s life,” Phillip interrupted. He knew the story, although it had taken some digging, once he had Jill investigated for his harem. The Norwoods hadn’t wanted to announce their past, even the heroics.
“A soulless witch may as well be dead,” William rebutted, his tone cold and hard, so full of hateful resentment. “Daemon was an infant, so I’m sure his plotting didn’t start at that age, but Lady Norwood would have had all the reasons in the world to kill the king that banished her and her noble husband from court to their crumbling castle next to the Wastes.”
Phillip couldn’t deny the motive his brother presented.
He pushed his magic out as he walked the room, feeling for anything else that may have survived the fire.
“Why did our father allow Lady Norwood back into court if she was such a risk?” Phillip asked, only half listening for his brother’s response.
“Jill,” William said. It got Phillip’s attention. “It was all because of Jill.”
Phillip prowled back to William from the window he had been examining, looking out to see what rooms or lookouts had a view into his father’s suite.
He and William were both on the bigger side of the vampire spectrum, but Phillip had the lion’s share of muscle and presence. He used every ounce of it to challenge the curled lip of disgust William had made as he said Jill’s name.
That wasn’t the look of a vampire in love. It was the malice of one spurned.
Jill had no idea the enemy she had made in his brother. Even if Phillip didn’t truly care deeply for the witch, he still felt his protective instincts aroused.
“Jill is being brought back by Victor for a fair trial,” Phillip reminded him. “She might have the magic to do something like this, but she was hundreds of miles away when it happened.”
William sneered at Phillip, flicking some ash off his sleeve. “I warned you about Jill the first night. I even took on the claim to keep you at a safe distance. She and her mother planned to use you for your harem.”
“All the witches use me for my harem,” Phillip said, not bothered by the fact.
William had been the one to beg Phillip to take Jill into his harem, tempted by her earth blood. His brother possessed a convenient memory, twisting his recollection of the events.
“Father let the Norwoods in because of Jill’s fire. You know he can’t deny a blue witch anything,” William insisted.
“Jill never asked for anything other than for us to provide the usual protection expected for a harem witch and extended to her widowed mother and unmarried sister. I would do that for any of my harem.”
William slid his gaze back to Phillip.
“Exactly,” William said. “She wanted you to take that weak little air witch into your harem. When you weren’t quick enough, Daemon snatched her up. He isn’t even allowed a harem but suddenly, he had his own witch under his thumb and he even stole Victoria.”
Phillip dismissed this as completely irrelevant. “Daemon wanted under Elizabeth’s skirts. She wasn’t another common feeder that he could tumble without offering something in return, like the prestige of a royal harem. She was almost worthless as a feeder, in fact, she was so weak,” he said.
The one handshake exchange of magic between Phillip and Elizabeth had bordered on pathetic next to the strength of Jill’s magic.
Although, Phillip’s second taste of Elizabeth’s lips had a bit more spark that still puzzled him.
“Victoria wanted out of George’s reach for years. I’m sure she was clever enough to create the opportunity to be Elizabeth’s Lasier herself, nothing to do with Daemon,” Phillip added.
He’d always felt sorry for the twins, indebted to George’s family. There wasn’t a clan who held longer grudges or would go to the manipulative lengths of George’s clan.
“You’ve always been blind to Daemon’s foibles,” William complained. “The first witch he takes an interest in fucking, just happens to be the sister to the most powerful fire witch to come to court in a decade . . . and the daughter of a blood witch whose reputation our father ruined.”
It sounded worse put in those terms. William really had hated the Norwoods.
“How did you ever feed on Jill’s wrist if you thought she was going to kill us all for her mother’s revenge?” Phillip asked, feeling bitter himself.
William was as two-faced as the witches he was accusing. His brother used Jill. William had never planned to court her seriously or honour his claim.
“She did poison us,” William reminded him.
As if Phillip would be allowed to forget! “I know!” he bit out, turning from William to walk over to the ensuite door and kick it in.
The incinerated frame gave easily and the husk of what had once been a thick, engraved door fell into the ensuite, with its hinges intact.
The entire bathroom was firebombed as well, the porcelain tub, toilet and sink dusted with ash, but still fairly intact.
Phillip picked up the door from the floor to lay it on its side, noting the inside of it was burned even worse than the outside, and the handle melted beyond recognition.
That knob had been a custom gold lever, in the shape of an eagle’s wing, that Daemon had forged when they were younger. The soft metal had been no match for the fiery rage that had exploded here.
“He didn’t leave any evidence behind,” William said from over Phillip’s shoulder.
Phillip disagreed, but the evidence was scant and he needed time to sit down and think about it.
William was rushing him. They both wanted retribution delivered swiftly, but Phillip wouldn’t act until he was certain.
The burn pattern bothered him.
“Do you think the fire started here?” Phillip asked, backing out of the ensuite.
“No, it was probably the fireplace, where Daemon escaped, and it blew the ensuite door open,” William said. “One of the guards may have shut it again,” he admitted, likely aware of how angry Phillip had been with the fireplace being shut, as well, after the guards had explored the portal.
Tampering with the scene made an already difficult investigation impossible.
Phillip turned around to face his brother, not bothering to explain that his account was out of keeping with what Phillip’s magic was telling him.
Someone had stood in the bathroom with the door closed and burned hot and fast, the flames climbing to the walls and door to get to the ceiling and then back down to the source.
If the arsonist had used his hands to fire his magic, it would have been at the right height to melt the doorknob with concentrated power.
William had definitely missed something.
“We should send messengers for George,” Philip said, wanting his younger brother’s opinion.
George had the battlefield experience that William’s healing earth magic lacked. Besides which, George was also better at investigating crimes against the king and court.
No Witch Way Out (Maeren Series Book 2) Page 23