“A gadozen gadozens.” He pitched the damp towel into the bathroom and grabbed the boxers I’d brought for him.
“Will you take me to Paris for dessert?” Rohan stilled. I hadn’t meant to say that, especially since I only knew about this part of his romantic history because I’d been eavesdropping. Except, I guess I had meant to say it, to let Rohan know that I knew about the lengths he went to for Lily. I didn’t like that about myself. I didn’t want to be the girlfriend threatened by his past.
“Cheeseburgers,” I said gaily, to cover the impending awkward silence. I hopped off the bed, picked up the receiver, and hit the room service button. I ordered for both of us, then stared at the phone, wondering who else I could call so I wouldn’t have to deal with the loaded tension.
He wrapped his arms around me. “Do you want dessert in Paris, Sparky? You can have it.”
“I don’t. Not really.” I turned in his embrace and raked his damp strands of hair out of his eyes.
“I gave Lily that, but I never fully gave her myself. Not like I do with you.”
“It’s fine, honestly. I mean, Cole never had me like this, either.” I snapped my lips together against that final truth that had just slipped out.
“Phrasing,” Ro snickered.
I rolled my eyes, but I was secretly thankful to put things on a more lighthearted track.
Half an hour later, we were eating cheeseburgers in our underwear and T-shirts, watching an old Fugue State Five documentary that Ro had bitched about putting on. The mattress dipped under his weight as he returned to the bed and tossed me one of the two tiny bottles of Scotch he’d liberated from the mini bar.
“You’re one classy motherfucker, Mitra.”
“Right? L’chaim.”
We lifted our bottles in unison and clinked them. I shot back a hefty swallow, clenching my jaw against the burn.
“Cheeseburgers after bondage are the best.” I couldn’t shovel the food in fast enough.
He licked ketchup off the corner of my lip. “Agreed.” He grimaced, watching his younger self talk at length about the poetry of his lyrics. “Please shut this off. It’s painful.”
“Your lyrics are beautiful.”
“My lyrics are fine, but I was hardly Leonard Cohen. Fuck, I was pretentious.” He polished off his cheeseburger and lay on his side, propped on his elbow, inching his hand up my thigh.
I snorted my laughter, pointing at the screen. “Oh my God! They did make you guys take dance lessons!”
He sighed and flopped back against the bed in resignation, pulling a pillow over his face to hide his embarrassment and deter further questions until the interview finished or I changed the channel. And it would have been the perfect night, cheeseburgers, and lyrics, and Rohan and I all wrapped up in a warm bed with good jokes and music, except that’s when the Man in Black broke in.
Chapter 19
A balaclava obscured his features and black leather gloves covered his hands, but this guy had to be Rasha. He had the build and that familiar coiled tension. His presence wasn’t random either, because he went straight for Rohan as the greater threat. Ro held his own, the two of them grappling for a hold on the other with a flurry of punches and kicks.
Magic would only escalate the situation and I wasn’t about to have him unleash some unknown power. I grabbed the wooden toy bat.
Rohan slammed a fist into the attacker’s body. He grunted, his entire frame curling around Ro’s punch but recovered pretty damn quickly, slamming both hands to either side of Ro’s head. Rohan’s blades flickered out for a second, snapping back inside him under the thin coat of ice that formed over his skin.
I swung the bat at the back of the attacker’s head but the weapon froze and splintered before contact. The Man in Black turned on me with a menacing smile. Still deep-freezing a struggling Rohan, he grabbed my arm, wrenching it up my back.
Ice filled my veins. Literally. My heart stopped and my blood crystalized into miniscule sharp-edged snowflakes. The world crackled black.
He dropped me on the floor and cracked Rohan’s skull into the wall. Once. Twice. Frost slithered down the wall. “One warning. Back. Off.”
He stepped over me and left.
I curled in a ball, dragging in a deep breath. Big mistake. I shook with a wracking cough, air hitting my half-frozen, tortured lungs.
Blood dripped out of Rohan’s ears as he knelt over me to scoop me into his arms, the drops falling in slow motion. Each plump droplet hit the carpet with a rumbled thud before fracturing, staining the fibers.
He ran the water in the jacuzzi in the bathroom, only letting go of me long enough to strip us of our clothes, before lowering me into the tub braced against his back.
“Cold.” My words came out a garbled mumble. My teeth wouldn’t stop chattering.
“Here.” He shifted for maximum skin contact, wrapping his legs around me.
There was enough hot water in the tub that feeling seeped back into my toes. I cried out, breathing through the blazing agony of having what amounted to my entire body coming off the world’s worst brain freeze.
Ro’s tears hit the water in pretty pink streaks. “Don’t cry,” I said, my chest tightening at how upset he was over my injuries. No, he wasn’t crying. It was blood. His hair was matted with it. My too-tight ribcage convulsed with fear. The water was only a few degrees below boiling and if he was concussed, hot water was a bad idea.
I peeled myself off him. “Out.”
“Yeah.” He climbed out of the tub and collapsed on the floor.
“Ro? You okay?” Still trembling and seeking heat, I slid further into the tub until only my mouth and nose peeked out above the water. I didn’t have the energy to move. Defrosting took a lot out of a girl. Now I finally understood why my Chickeny Delight always tasted so exhausted.
“Dizzy. Need a sec.”
Eventually we recovered enough to throw on our evening clothes, grab our stuff, and get the hell out. Rohan had cleaned up any traces of his blood and had reached the end of his patience with me checking his pupils for a concussion.
“Hey.” Ro took my purse from me. “You’re shaking.” He pressed a hand to my skin. “Are you still cold?”
“No.” My reflection in the burnished gold elevator doors showed a rosy cheeked Nava. I stabbed the elevator button, storming inside the empty car when it opened with a ding. I curled my hands around the metal railing, trying and failing to get my fury under control. “They tracked us here tonight. Came after us, trying to scare us.”
“The further we go down this road, the more the Brotherhood will be gunning for us. We won’t even be able to properly watch our backs, because it might be a friend who sticks the knife in.” Rohan tilted my chin up to face him. “You heard the guy. One warning. Do you want to stop? Walk away?”
“We can’t. And I wouldn’t. Would you?”
He shook his head.
I slid my hand in his. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“You were fighting the guy but it wasn’t because you were trying to protect me.”
The elevator opened into the parking garage, revealing the Shelby. Ro had snagged a spot right by the elevators.
“Slugger, you didn’t need protecting.” He unlocked my door and placed my bag on the floor mat.
“Still,” I said. “Thank you. We need to be smart and way more stealthier from this point on.”
“Plans C through Z. Be more careful. Told you.” Rohan blocked me from getting into the car. He brushed my damp hair out of my eyes. “You’re hooking into me, Sparky and I want to be caught for a long, long time.”
The words didn’t scare me this time. He wasn’t saying them because he was under the influence of a demon drug or even because of the Man in Black. Our night together had shifted something between us–stripped us down and gently deposited us here–a place of cautious optimism.
I curled my toes, rolling onto the sides of my feet. “You’re hooking into me, too.”
>
Rohan glanced down at the ground, a pleased smile tugging at his lips. “Well, all right, then.”
The first person we called back at the chapter house was Kane. Rohan and I had holed up in my room, leaving our Brotherhood phones downstairs. We used my burner phone and called the landline in Kane’s hotel room in Osoyoos, a small town in British Columbia’s interior.
“Sorry to disturb you.” I put the call on speaker, the cell sitting on the mattress between Rohan and me. “But we’ve got a situation.”
Kane yawned. “This better be an emergency. We’ve got a gong show on our hands between the demons and this flooding.”
“Put your cell in the bathroom and turn on the shower,” Rohan said.
Kane muttered about paranoia but did as he was told. “Speak freely.”
I told him what had happened.
“What do you need?” He sounded wide-awake.
“What Rasha has ice magic?” Rohan said.
“Hang on. Gotta get my laptop.” We heard Kane moving around and keys clacking.
“Is it secure from Brotherhood prying?” I asked.
“Don’t insult me.” More typing. “Hold off on telling your brother about this, babyslay.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m more than mildly annoyed hearing what went down, which means Ari will go ballistic and I need his head in the game right now.”
“Got it.”
“Let’s see what we’ve got.” Kane hummed under his breath. “Fuck.”
I leaned forward. “What?”
Kane didn’t answer me.
“Kane,” Rohan snapped.
“Wait,” Kane snapped back. “Fuuuuck!”
I gripped Ro’s hand. “Kane?”
“There’s only one Rasha in the past fifty years with ice magic. Ferdinand Alves.”
I needed a moment to absorb the fact that a supposedly dead man had attacked us.
Ro paced in a tight circle. “Search for all Rasha killed in the past, say, six months.”
Kane came up with a list of twelve. Four of the men were the hunters that had been killed in Askuchar.
“You sure those Rasha are dead?” Kane asked.
“Yeah. Mahmud saw their bodies and I trust Mahmud.” Ro pinched his nose. “Any correlation between missions? Chapter houses?”
“No and no,” Kane said. “Other than the fact that they all supposedly died, there’s nothing connecting them.”
“Thanks, Kane,” Ro said. “Be careful, man. We don’t know what the Brotherhood has managed to piece together about who’s working with us, but just being our friend is enough to throw you in the danger zone.”
“I’m hard to kill. And no one else is getting hurt on my watch.”
As soon as Kane had hung up, Rohan grabbed the burner phone. “I’m gonna call Drio. He needs to be warned.”
I flopped back against my mattress, rubbing my eyes. “He’ll want to come back here because it’s safer for us to be together.”
“It is safer.”
“And if he decides to bring Leonie with him?” I stared at the print Leo had given me, wishing I could grab her and disappear into that neon cityscape.
“I’ll convince him there’s no point coming back here tonight. But she has to tell him.”
No, that was the one thing she could never do.
Ro’s conversation with Drio was short and to the point. True to his word, he assured Drio there was no reason to come back tonight. Ro didn’t expect any more visits and the attacker had done what he came for. At least until we made our next move.
We had one final call to make and I insisted on making it.
Rabbi Abrams took the development in stride, even the news about my witch status.
“I always knew you were an interesting girl,” he said.
I switched the phone to my other ear. “Does this change anything?”
“Should it?”
“Well, no?”
He chuckled. “Beseder. Then get some sleep.” He said he’d arrange privately to beef up the security at the chapter house. A ward could be set to keep all Rasha out, but that would include us, so Muggle security solutions it was.
I chucked the phone onto my rug and rolled myself up in my blanket like a burrito. If Rohan was able to confirm that those eight hunters left on Kane’s list weren’t actually dead, then they had to be the ones working with Mandelbaum on whatever was going on. I edged my head out of my cocoon. “Can I see the photo you got at Ferdinand’s house?”
“Sure thing.” Rohan jogged downstairs, returning with the snapshot.
In his forties, Ferdinand was ruggedly good-looking, with a crew cut and the deep tan of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. His clothes were neatly ironed. He had his arm around a woman with long blonde hair with gray streaks, wearing a tie-dyed dress in brilliant swirls of color.
“One of these things is not like the other,” I said.
“Huh?”
I tapped the photo. “He looks like he’s in the military and she’s a Woodstock refugee.”
“Love is blind.”
“Is it? Really? Check out her pendant.”
“A crescent moon. Witch?”
“I’d say love knew exactly who it was tapping.” I yawned. “I’ll see if Gelman can identify her.”
“First, sleep. We need to hit up the sugar refinery in a few hours.”
“The excitement never stops around here.” I didn’t bother leaving my blanket roll.
Rohan crashed out on my bare mattress.
I was woken up by someone shaking my shoulder. “Five more minutes, Mom,” I mumbled.
“Sparky, wake up. Sarah needs to install the safety bars on your window.”
I flung a pillow at Ro’s head.
“Sorry.” A dimpled woman who had to be close to retirement poked her head in to my room. She had a large red tool box in one hand. “I’d have let you sleep, but Uncle Isaac told me this was urgent.”
I blinked through my grogginess, squinting at my clock. I couldn’t see it from this angle, but my room was flooded with bright sunlight. “Yeah. Of course.” I had never been so happy to be wearing sweats and not my dress from last night.
Last night!
I stumbled out of bed, scanning every available surface for the purse I’d so cavalierly tossed somewhere and any bondage systems that may have tumbled free.
“Smooth,” Ro murmured, brushing my hip. “I put it in my room.”
“But it’s mine.”
He grinned, booped me on the nose, and left.
Sarah tested her cordless drill. “You two are adorable. New relationship?”
“Yeah.” I shrugged on Ro’s hoodie that was draped on my chair. “I’ll get out of your way.”
I followed the rumble of the coffee maker down the curved staircase, my hands jammed in the pockets of his hoodie. I rubbed my cheek on the shoulder because the fabric smelled like him.
“Navela.” Rabbi Abrams beckoned at me from the front porch. I almost tripped off the last stair. The man wasn’t in a suit. Just dress pants and a long-sleeved shirt. “Come see what we’ve done.”
I threw a longing glance back down the hallway toward the kitchen and found Rohan behind me holding out my already doctored coffee. “Remind me to thank you in sexual favors,” I whispered.
Rabbi Abrams showed off the new front door. He hadn’t changed the hand scanners because he didn’t want to alert anyone, but this door was some heavy duty shit. It had rebar running in a “T” pattern. When the door was locked, the rebar sunk deep into the frame of the house. No one was breaking in through this puppy. The back door was now the same model.
My burner phone trilled. I glanced at the text as I finished off my coffee.
Thank me in sexual favors.
I snorted my drink out, coughing. Ro patted me on the back, a pious expression on his face as he asked the rabbi questions about how the new security bars on all the windows opened from the inside.
Ra
bbi Abrams walked us around the house, pointing out all the hidden camera that would be recording twenty-four seven with the data on a server in-house for our eyes only.
“Does your niece own the security company?” I said.
“She’s not really my niece. Daughter of my wife’s best friend. But yes. She’s discreet, trustworthy, and very good at her job.” Rabbi Abrams lowered himself into a chair on the back deck, rubbing his knee. “Do you have your phones on you?”
We shook our heads, having left the Brotherhood-issued phones in Ro’s room, and got comfortable on the wicker sofa. I leaned against my boyfriend, my legs curled into my chest.
“Update me,” Rabbi Abrams said.
Rohan told him about the list. Rabbi Abrams asked for each individual name, closing his eyes. Once again, I’d have sworn he was asleep if he hadn’t been fidgeting with his kippah. “Stop,” he said at the seventh name. “Ilya. He trained here as an initiate many many years ago. His brother still lives here. Mischa didn’t carry the Rasha gene, but they were inseparable. I can put you in touch.”
“Wouldn’t his brother have been told he was dead?” I asked.
The rabbi opened his eyes. “Most definitely, but Mischa was his twin. How well did you believe being told Ari was no longer Rasha?”
I pulled Ro to his feet. “We’re in business. But first I have to see a witch about some demons.”
Gelman was in-between chemo treatments and looking a lot better today. In fact, she was dressed and waiting around for her green light to return to her sister’s house. That was the good news. The bad news was that when she glowered at me, holding the photo of Ferdinand and the woman tight enough to turn her fingers white, she was healthy enough that if she decided to blame the messenger, I was toast.
Fuck it. What was one more target on my back? “Do you know her or not?”
“This photo is a fake.” She flung it back at me.
I picked it up off the ground and brushed it off. “Based on your savvy Photoshop skills?”
“Based on the fact that Tessa would never have anything to do with a Rasha. She isn’t working with one and she certainly wasn’t involved with one.”
I picked up the photo and shrugged. “Looks pretty chummy to me.”
The Unlikeable Demon Hunter Collection: Books 1-6: A Complete Paranormal Romantic Comedy Series Page 108