“Are you involved?”
He nodded again.
“Are you thinking about binding her over?” He meant a permanent bond with her.
“Not yet.”
“What she can do,” Nikodemus said, “that’s important to us.”
“I know.” He crossed his arms over his chest.
“But I still can’t tell you it’s okay to take out Kessler.”
Iskander gave a vicious smile. “I’ll kill him before I let anything happen to her.”
Nikodemus let out a breath. “If it comes to that, I’ll do the damage control.”
Meaning if Iskander ended up killing Kessler, Nikodemus would try to sever his fealty oath to ease the consequences of breaking a direct order from his warlord. “Thanks.”
Nikodemus gave him a quick grin. “Like you said, fuck politics.”
“I’m fine with that.”
CHAPTER 21
A few days later, 1:00 P.M., Los Altos Hills, California
Paisley walked up the hill behind Iskander, on their way back to the truck after delivering a very large wedding cake. The pickup was halfway up the hill because there wasn’t any parking near the house. Workmen blocked the driveway, unloading folding tables, chairs, and crates of dishes and flatware for the wedding of a cousin of a friend of a friend of hers. The couple had paid obscenely good money for the made-to-order cake. Good enough money for a personal delivery to the private home where the reception was to be held. With Iskander’s help, the delivery was done, the cake safely in the house, assembled, frosted, and decorated, and now they were heading home.
They kept walking. Twenty or so years ago, this street had probably been rural. Now, any open fields there might once have been were filled with large houses on large lots. Mature firs lined the street on both sides so that even on a hot afternoon, there was a cooling shade. There wasn’t any sidewalk, just a swath of pine-needle-covered soil between the trees, the ditch, and the road.
Things were a little awkward between her and Iskander, and she wasn’t sure why other than plain bad timing. There hadn’t been time to talk after they got home from the farmhouse, because she had to go directly to work, and when he picked her up later, she’d fallen asleep in the truck. She hadn’t woken up until her alarm went off for the morning shift. In her own room. Alone. After her shift, she’d had the wedding cake to start on and Iskander was off doing something for Nikodemus and then too much time had passed.
Halfway to the pickup, the back of her head got cold, and she slowed down. Iskander kept walking. She was still adjusting to the nuances of her oath to the warlord. Now that everything was in the open, Iskander’s otherness seemed even more intense. She was still coming to terms with a world where there really were demons and mages, and they were balanced at the brink of war.
The word from Nikodemus was that the mages were now officially aware of what she could do and had been informed that she worked for Nikodemus. As she understood it, that made her off-limits for retaliation. The warlord had given the magekind thirty days to either give up the magic they’d acquired through the murder of one of the kin or leave his territory. Starting on day thirty-one, magekind in his territory had no cause for complaint if his new girl took back what they’d stolen. This announcement had not been met with universal approval by the magekind. Iskander had been busy for Nikodemus. She didn’t think that was a coincidence.
Her head stayed cold. Out of habit, she scanned for Rasmus, even though Nikodemus had warned her there would be magekind besides Rasmus looking to remove the threat she represented. About twenty yards away, she saw a familiar car parked on the pine-needle-covered ground on the opposite side of the street from Iskander’s truck. She stopped walking.
The Mercedes was pointed downhill, the wrong way for that side of the street. While she stared, the rear passenger door opened and Rasmus got out. Two more men got out on the other side. She reacted to them as soon as they got out. Iskander stopped walking and looked at her. He smiled. “Company,” he said.
“What do we do?”
“Nothing.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Yet.”
They started walking again, closer together now. About twenty feet from the pickup, she stopped walking again, because she was getting more chills.
“What?” he said.
She tipped her chin down the hill. Two men—magehelds, she knew now, were at the bottom of the incline, walking at a good pace. Two more men got out of Rasmus’s car and stared at Iskander like he had a target painted on his forehead.
“Here.” Iskander took his keys from his pocket and tossed them at her. “Get in the truck.” He was smiling like he was about to see his favorite band. Live. For free. “If something happens to me, you get the hell out. Don’t go home. Call for help and drive directly to Harsh’s place. You know where that is, right?”
She shook her head, and he gave her an address in the heart of Pacific Heights.
By then the two men were running up the hill. In their suits. In the heat. Moving faster than any normal human. Heart banging away in her chest, she did as Iskander asked. She didn’t make it.
Rasmus moved to intercept her. Screams reverberated in her head, deafening her, searing the inside of her head until she could barely think, and her stomach turned. He walked toward her, smiling as if they were old friends. This time, she felt him drawing on his magic. The sensation was a pressure between her ears. His lips moved, but if he was speaking out loud, the screams in her head kept her from hearing the words. More than anything, she wanted to see Rasmus brought to his knees.
She stood her ground. The closer he came, the louder the screaming in her head got. Rasmus, not expecting her to move toward him, collided with her. Off balance, she reached for the nexus that was the source of the screams. He caught her by the shoulder, and his fingers seared through her shirt. It was like sticking her finger in a light socket.
He threw his arms around her, preventing her from making the contact that would let her take back the magic that screamed into her head. He dragged her toward his car.
Paisley kicked and bucked, half mad from the screaming in her head and the painful burning wherever he touched her. Somehow she managed to trip them up, and they both crashed to the street. His arms popped free of her and she rolled away. When she realized he was momentarily dazed, she sprinted for the truck.
Rasmus lurched to his feet. He was fast. Hellishly fast. At the truck, there wasn’t time to mess with the keys. She pounded on the driver’s side door, and with a thunk, the window fell down. She threw herself inside, her skin burning where he’d touched her. Her shoulder slammed into the gearshift. By the time she had herself upright, Rasmus was almost to the pickup. His mouth twisted as he ran, a hand pointing at her. The air around him shimmered. Farther down the road, Iskander was straightening from two bodies. She saw him look in her direction. Rasmus hadn’t come unprepared. Six more magehelds raced toward them from the top of the hill.
She shoved the key into the ignition, turned it, and put the truck in gear, all the while sitting on the edge of the seat in order to reach the pedals, because Iskander was quite a bit taller than she was. Which meant she had an unimpeded view of Rasmus and Iskander.
Iskander ran for the truck. The six magehelds flashed past her, converging on him. They were big. Too big for him to handle alone. His name tore from her throat. The truck shuddered, and she yanked hard on the steering wheel and let the truck roll into the street. Two of the magehelds caught up with him. Or maybe he caught up to the fastest of the six.
She hit the gas and aimed the truck for Rasmus. He stood motionless. Their eyes connected, hers and Rasmus’s. The bastard didn’t believe she’d actually run him over, because he didn’t get out of the way until it was almost too late. She braced herself for the impact. The side of the truck hit him and spun him away. She kept going.
Four magehelds and Iskander, and she wasn’t going to get there in time. At what looked like the last second, Iskande
r whirled, stepped to the side, and slammed one of the four in the forehead with the heel of his palm. He got the second one with a strike to the back of the head. They both went down and didn’t move. He shouted her name and sprinted toward her.
The remaining two caught up with him. She saw the blur of his hands and an arc of red mist and the first one went down. Then the other one. Iskander veered off for Rasmus, who was only now standing up. Without a doubt, Iskander intended to kill the mage and a part of her wished he would. But the thirty days weren’t up, Rasmus’s magehelds were dead, and he was so unsteady right now, she didn’t think either of them was danger anymore. She knew Nikodemus was serious about the consequences for her and Iskander if Rasmus died like this.
Paisley turned the truck toward Iskander and jammed on the brakes. The truck shuddered to a stop. She leaned out the window and shouted as loud as she could. “Iskander, no!”
He turned and she locked eyes with him.
“Get in.” She threw the truck into park and practically kicked the door open before she slid over. In five strides, Iskander was there. He wasn’t even breathing hard. He slid in, took a look in the rearview mirror, and put the truck back into gear. She twisted to look.
Rasmus stood in the middle of the street with his mouth open in an angry snarl, blood pouring from a gash on the side of his head. Even from here, Paisley could tell his eyes were jittering.
She stuck out a hand and braced herself against the dash as Iskander gunned the pickup down the hill. He took the first corner and they fishtailed hard. He slowed, took a few more turns, and ended up on a shaded residential street. He parked underneath a tree. “Are you all right?”
“Of course.” A lie, but Iskander didn’t need to know that. She wasn’t all right. Not even close. She hurt wherever Rasmus had touched her, and her head felt like someone had set her brain on fire.
“Let’s see your arm.” Blisters covered her arm wherever Rasmus’s fingers had come into direct contact with her skin. He pushed up her sleeve. There were red welts everywhere. “Where else did he touch you?”
“Shoulders. I don’t know. It was hard to keep track.”
“Shit, Paisley.” He yanked at the shoulder of her shirt.
“Ouch.” She sucked in a breath when he touched her shoulder.
“Not as bad as the marks on your arm. You’re already healing.”
“I tried to take back his magic.” Now that she wasn’t running for her life, she was feeling sick and shaky.
“You shouldn’t have.”
“Like you should talk.” Inside, she was a void. Empty. His eyebrows drew together, and he touched her forehead. He didn’t use any magic, but the contact rocked her all the same.
“Good trick with the truck.”
She could still hear and feel the thud of the truck hitting Rasmus. Maybe later she’d worry about not caring that she’d wanted him to die. “I wish I’d killed him,” she said.
He cupped her head between his hands. “You were amazing back there.”
She put her hands around his wrists, figuring she’d disengage from their embrace in a minute. Her stomach went all loopy from remembering what he was like in bed. Better than chocolate. Her mind turned to mush when he lowered his head.
God, it was a mind-blowing kiss. Slow and tender but wild around the edges. Then he had his tongue in her mouth and she was doing the same right back, and she had a hard time thinking at all, even once she realized his hand was underneath her shirt and halfway up her back and that her bra was unfastened.
She watched his eyes get dark, and he moved his hand, and she didn’t budge; then his hand was cupping her breast and her mind just slipped away entirely, and she didn’t even care. He unfastened his seat belt and leaned down, and his mouth opened over hers, and it was hard to think much at all because his fingers were on her bare breast and it felt good, so good. She returned the kiss—with all the heat racing through her, how could she not? Iskander was lovely and she liked him more than was safe. Besides, he made her laugh, and he was never mean about anything. Oh, Lord, could they do it in the truck?
His other hand got underneath her shirt, too, and he pushed her down onto the seat, or maybe she lay down and he just followed; it didn’t matter to her which it was. Her belly exploded into shivers when he pushed up her shirt, and his mouth was on her breast, on her nipple, and his other hand was just as gloriously busy. She wound her fingers into his hair and kissed him hard. She got her hands busy, too. He was warm and his body was so amazingly male, all that delicious bare skin right next to hers. She wanted more. Much, much more.
They were both breathing like racers at the finish line when he pulled back, and his eyes were doing that flickering thing again. “Hell,” he said on a whisper. He pulled her shirt down.
“No.” She grabbed his arm and squeezed. “Don’t you leave me like this.”
“Paisley, I am absolutely not going to do you in the truck where anyone could come out of their house and see my naked ass.”
She closed her eyes. He was right. Of course.
“Because I do not want to explain to Harsh why he has to bail us out of jail and then stand in front of Nikodemus and explain the same damn thing.”
She wriggled around and got her bra fastened, and he reached over and pulled down her shirt again. They got their seat belts on, and then he stretched an arm along the back of the truck’s seat, almost but not quite touching her. “Later,” he said, and he sounded determined. “We’ll pick up where we left off later.”
CHAPTER 22
About 11:30 P.M., Rasmus Kessler’s house on Wildcat Canyon Road, the Berkeley Hills
Rasmus Kessler sat in his office, a room that overlooked Wildcat Canyon Road and acres of open space. There wasn’t much traffic at this time of night. Through the open window, he could hear owls and the ever-present dull roar of distant traffic from down the hillside where there was never any quiet. For these few minutes, he had his sanity, and he could pretend his life belonged to him. His body was sore and he had a bruise on the side of his head. Most nonmagical wounds healed quickly. The cut on his head and the surrounding bruise remained tender enough that he wondered how he’d gotten it.
Footsteps echoed on the steps that led to his refuge. His heart thumped. Maybe she would turn right at the top of the stairs instead of left, and yet, at the same time, Rasmus hoped she would come to him and that things would be as they had before. Like him, she had her moments of sanity.
At this moment, he was lucid, and that was a rare mercy. He knew he didn’t have much time to enjoy his solitude. Fen had roused herself from her sulk over the debacle of her confrontation with Iskander, and if he was lucky, she would fail to recall that he had advised her against contacting him in any fashion just yet—for more reasons than just the plain fact that few men cared to have their current lovers thinking of past ones.
“Rasmus!”
Her voice carried up the stairs. He knew from the light tone that she was at least marginally in control of herself and that, thank God, he had a moment or two longer of solitude before he had to deal with whatever she was right now.
Before him on the desk sat a black notebook. It was his habit at such times to make quick notes of whatever snatches of memory remained to him. He closed the notebook, the pages of which were filled with Danish. His native language was not one that Fen had troubled herself to learn to read. He slid it underneath the desk, back into the corner where even the housekeeper wouldn’t find it.
His right hand still didn’t work correctly, not since the day his daughter Alexandrine Marit had managed to injure him. Badly. That should never have happened. She was magekind, yes, but with so little power as to make her insignificant. Since that day, his slow recovery from the damage had forced him to write left-handed.
Once, he had loved Fen so deeply he would have done anything for her. Anything. Even offer his life to her. He’d done so, and she had accepted. There had been a time when he wanted nothing more than
to see Alexandrine dead along with every fiend who’d ever helped her. Tonight, all he had left were memories of the woman he’d loved. Tonight, he knew that if he was to survive this, he might need to beg for his life. An unlikely outcome.
“Here,” he called, because if he did not, Fen might misinterpret the reason for his failure to respond. They both knew she could find him no matter where he was, but that wasn’t the point. He used the toe of his shoe to make sure the notebook was out of sight. He’d been speaking English for three hundred years, the last fifty here in America. It was his hope that if somehow Fen happened across the journal, she would not recognize the language as something relevant to the present. His entries were, of course, undated. They might have been written anytime during the last seventy or so years.
Fen made it to the top of the stairs. She had yet to traverse the length of the hallway to reach his office. A few moments more, then.
On this night, when he had awakened, sore and stiff, to find himself in rare possession of his wits, he’d slipped out of bed and come here to write what he could recall of the events since the last time he’d been in his right mind. His memories were ragged and incomplete, but when he’d finished writing what he could call to mind, he had, as usual, scanned back through the entries, looking for patterns, anything that would help him guess what was going on during his blackouts. Anything that would help him save his life. Or Fen’s, if such a thing were possible.
The pages held names he recognized. Harsh was one; translated literally from English to Danish. Harsh Marit had been Fen’s gift to him, or so he had thought. Rasmus now believed Harsh had been Fen’s first attempt to stabilize her deterioration by bringing in someone from her old life. The decay in her mind had likely begun before he ever encountered her. Her deterioration had accelerated the moment she’d betrayed Iskander for him and found herself cut off from her blood-twin.
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