“She threw out the Rat Bastard.”
His smile took on a feral gleam. “It’s about time. I was about to lay for the creep in the parking lot.” Miranda wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the bruises.
“He finally pushed her too far.”
Williams frowned. “Hope there’s not going to be trouble.”
“He left town last night.” And he won’t be coming back.
“Good.”
Miranda noticed table eleven’s iced tea was getting low and headed over to refill it.
Hannah grinned happily at her on the way to the kitchen, and Miranda savored the warm glow she felt. At least one thing she’d done last night had turned out.
Unlike her panic at that magical contact. She’d blasted back at the source of that brush of power, then spent more than an hour heavily shielded. It was only after she’d calmed down that she realized the magical signature wasn’t Warlock’s. Though she did recognize it.
Dammit, she’d fireballed La Belle Coeur.
Miranda frowned, hoping the witch was all right. Luckily, Belle was very powerful, so she doubted she’d actually hurt her.
One way or another, Miranda had lost a valuable opportunity. If she’d been a little less paranoid, maybe she’d have been able to establish communication.
When they met at that damned tea party last month, Belle had offered to protect her from Warlock by taking her to Avalon. She’d have been truly safe for the first time in her life.
Miranda sighed. In retrospect, she should have taken Belle up on her offer, and dragged her mother along, kicking and screaming if necessary. Warlock and Gerald Drake could have kissed their asses.
At the time, Joelle had told her Warlock would declare war on the Magekind if the two of them accepted the protection Belle offered. Innocents would die, and they’d be responsible. Miranda had listened to her mother.
And Joelle had been the one to die.
After recovering from last night’s scare, Randi had spent two hours gingerly reaching out, hoping Belle would attempt to contact her again. Unfortunately, she hadn’t dared broadcast too strongly, because that might attract Warlock’s attention. She sure as hell didn’t want to do that.
Dammit.
Miranda would just have to hope Belle tried to contact her again. And next time, she’d make damn sure not to blast her.
In the dream, Belle rode him, her long legs straddling his hips, her sex gripping him in tight, liquid heat. He floated in the pleasure of the moment, savoring the sight of her lovely breasts bouncing with the rise and fall of her body. Her blond hair shifted and gleamed like strands of spun sunlight. Her skin glowed in the light of the candles that filled the room with dancing shadows. She looked pale and perfect in the dim light, an alabaster goddess of sex.
Tristan reached for her, unable to resist the temptation of those candy pink nipples. She purred in pleasure, but her head was tilted back, and he couldn’t see her eyes. He wanted to see those blue-gray eyes.
“Look at me, Belle,” he pleaded on a gasp. “I want to see you.”
She dropped her head and met his gaze. But it wasn’t Belle.
It was Isolde.
Her features twisted in hate as she raised the knife . . .
Tristan jerked himself out of the dream with a strangled shout, his heart pounding like a warhorse at a gallop. For a moment, he didn’t recognize the intricately carved bed with its fairies and dragons.
Belle. He was in Belle’s bed. They’d made love. But where the hell was she?
Tristan rolled naked out of the bed, his heart still beating hard with the aftermath of the nightmare. Sweat beaded on his upper lip, and he wiped it away.
Spotting a piece of cream stationery on the bedside table, he plucked it up and read the flowing lines in Belle’s lovely handwriting.
Tris— Morgana called to ask my help with Cherise’s memorial service tomorrow night. Merlin knows when she’ll let me go. Sorry. I was looking forward to feeding you breakfast.
Belle
Implication being that he would have drunk said breakfast from her pretty throat. In retrospect, it was probably just as well. He wouldn’t have enjoyed explaining why he woke sweating buckets and breathing hard. Isolde was not a memory he liked to share.
Feeling off-balance, Tristan looked around for his clothes. Thoughtful hostess that she was, Belle had conjured clean slacks and a fresh Polo shirt that matched his eyes. She’d left them stacked with his sword belt on the dresser, apparently knowing no Knight of the Round Table liked walking around unarmed. Tristan dressed, buckled on his sword, and wandered downstairs, feeling out of sorts and grumpy. Fucking dream. He hadn’t had a nightmare about Isolde in years. Apparently his subconscious had noticed the resemblance between his former wife and his new lover, and had elected to sound the alarm.
Which was just too bad. Damned if he’d go running because of a bad dream. It had been fifteen hundred years. It was high time he got over Isolde.
For one thing, Belle was nothing like his wife, despite the slight physical resemblance. She was funny and intelligent, loyal and courageous. Betrayal was no part of her honest soul. She wanted to save every man she met, even the ones who went blood-mad and tried to kill her. She took responsibility for their weakness and flogged herself for her failure to recognize it.
It apparently didn’t even occur to her to blame the Majae’s Council, though eliminating weak candidates was its job. Anybody she made love to had been first vetted by that group of witches. If her lover went mad, it was because the council had failed to predict he would.
But Belle never blamed anybody but herself.
All true. So why did unease crawl through his mind like a worm eating an apple?
Dammit.
SEVEN
Tristan left Belle’s house to find the night clear and almost painfully bright. Avalon stood around him in all its glory, its châteaus, castles, and palaces shimmering with moonlight and magic, surrounded by a riot of vegetation. Gardens, topiary, and old oaks were interspaced with burbling fountains and moonlit statuary. Vampires and witches walked the cobblestone streets, arguing and laughing and flirting, enjoying rare moments of downtime. Their happiness made him feel oddly empty.
Tristan frowned. He had no desire to go home to his silent house. It was too damned early for that anyway.
I’ll head for the Lord’s Club. Maybe Arthur would be there, or one of the other Round Table knights. He needed company to drive off Isolde’s restless ghost.
The Lord’s Club had been built in the style of an English gentleman’s club—a purely male bastion of solid redbrick and cream cornices, complete with oxblood leather armchairs and dark wainscoting. It featured an impressive library, a magical wine cellar with bottled blood from every Maja in Avalon, and a movie theater that featured flicks dear to the heart of anyone with an XY chromosome: The Three Stooges, Monty Python, the entire Quentin Tarantino oeuvre, and various dumb but entertaining action movies. If your mood was more violent than that, you could usually find a sparring partner in the state-of-the-art gym and dojo that occupied the lower floor.
All of which sounded pretty good to Tristan.
But as he walked in the door, a shouted battle cry rang out, a raw howl of rage and despair.
Jolting, Tristan drew his sword and broke into a run, plunging up the sweeping staircase in vampire bounds, following his brother knight’s voice.
Sir Bors stood at the top of the stairs, naked to the waist, a sword in his hands. Sweat painted glistening trails down the warrior’s chest, and his dark hair was plastered around his shoulders in sweating strands. He wore an expression of frenzied rage on his flushed, bearded face, and his eyes were wild.
And he was alone. There was no enemy menacing him as he leaped and spun, swinging his weapon in great arcs around the broad corridor.
“Bors,” Tristan snapped, “what the fuck is going on?”
His brother knight looked around at him, white surrounding his too
-wide eyes. Like Tristan, Bors was one of Arthur’s original knights. “What? I’m practicing.”
“At what, giving me a heart attack?” Disgruntled, Tristan slid his sword back into its sheath.
Bors shrugged. “I needed a fight. There was no one here, so I thought I’d make do.” His expression brightened. “Would you like a workout?”
Tristan had given him a closer look, and it wasn’t hard to put the pieces together. “You’ve been drinking.”
Bors shrugged. “Not all that much.”
“Enough. Bors, you know what Arthur told you about this.”
“I needed it.” He sheathed his sword and turned toward one of the huge stained-glass windows that lined the hallway. “It’s too quiet at home. I was hoping someone would be here, but there was nobody. So I hit the Majae’s Cellar. God knows there’s plenty.”
“That’s not the issue. It’s not good to drink that much blood, Bors.”
“Maybe not, but it makes me feel a hell of a lot better.” He flashed Tristan a reckless grin.
It was called being blood-drunk, but it was much more like being high. Too much blood gave a vampire a sense of invulnerability, speeding up the mind and body like a dose of amphetamines.
Luckily, Magi were a fairly disciplined crowd. Overindulging in blood was considered a weakness, and most vampires were far too proud to become dependent on anything.
Bors had never had a problem with the addiction either. Not until his son, Richard Edge, had gone on a rampage.
Richard had been enraged that he hadn’t been permitted Merlin’s Gift and the immortality of a vampire agent. He’d turned to forbidden death magic he’d learned from demonic alien invaders called the Dark Ones. Eventually, he’d kidnapped Arthur and tried to sacrifice him as part of a spell that would have destroyed the Magekind. Bors had fought his son and helped Arthur and Gawain kill him.
Richard’s betrayal had broken something in Bors, something that couldn’t be fixed. Now when he fought, it was with a fatal recklessness, as if he was deliberately courting death. His blood addiction only made that recklessness worse.
For a moment, Tristan considered ripping a strip off his friend’s hide. Then he sighed and drew his sword. “Come on, Bors. We’ll burn it off.”
Bors shot him a surprised glance. “I figured you’d give me a lecture.”
Tristan shrugged. “Hell, I don’t want to go home either.”
If they had a prayer of avoiding war with the Magekind, Justice figured Carl Rosen was it.
Carl was the chairman of the Council of Clans, an upright, graying werewolf with stern features and cool hazel eyes. Of all the werewolves on the council, Carl was one of the few with the courage to give the Magekind a fair shake. Even better, he had the power to make it stick.
As the Justice Committee met, Carl sat, listening without comment as the members argued about the murder of Jimmy Sheridan.
The five of them met around an oval table in a quiet briefing room located in the depths of the Livingston Corporate Center. The company was owned by Elena Rollings, nee Livingston, who was both a werewolf and a member of the Council of Clans. She let the council use company facilities for meetings, held after hours so they wouldn’t raise questions from the humans.
This particular room was a pleasant one, with thick blue carpeting and soft, gray-painted walls. It still smelled faintly of the coffee and apple Danish the company’s employees had enjoyed during the day. The massive armchairs that surrounded the black laminate table were made of soft leather that cupped the butt and back in expensive comfort. Elena wasn’t cheap with her employees.
Justice sank back in his very nice chair and eyed the other four members of the committee. With one exception, he didn’t trust any of them worth a damn.
Elena, who sat to his right, was Justice’s only real ally. Redheaded and delicately beautiful, she was married to a cop named Lucas Rollings, and held the Wulfgar Seat on the Council of Clans. Which made her about as aristocratic as it was possible to get. Yet she wanted to improve the lives of the werewolves they served instead of simply increasing the political and economic clout of the Chosen.
Unfortunately, the committee’s other members included a couple of assholes. Thomas Andrews IV always used his own full name, including the number, even though the other Thomas Andrewses had been dead for years. The tanned and manicured CEO of Andrews Oil, he was a werewolf aristocrat, and he didn’t let anybody forget it.
Then there was Robert Tanner, who was worse.
“The Magekind have gone mad, just as Merlin foretold.” Tanner tapped his fourteen-carat gold Cross pen on the council table in a continuous annoying rap that was slowly driving Justice crazy. “We have to stop them before it’s too late.”
“Merlin didn’t ‘foretell’ that the Magekind would go mad.” Elena visibly fought to maintain a cool, logical tone. “Yes, he was concerned there would be a problem. But we’ve got no reason to believe Arthur has suddenly gone insane with bloodlust.”
Tanner leaned forward, a muscle clenching and releasing in his lean jaw. He was a handsome, older man, lean and fit, his graying hair clipped short, his gray eyes intense. “Elena, you know what they’ve done. Davon Fredericks himself said Arthur ordered the Sheridan boy’s beheading.”
“I don’t believe Arthur gave any such order. Justice said . . .”
“My dear, don’t be naive.” Tanner dipped his lids and stopped just short of a sneer. “It’s obvious our Wolf Sheriff has lost his objectivity. He’s grown too . . . close to Tristan and the Magekind. He believes whatever unlikely tale they tell.”
Justice had heard about enough of that. “Tanner, I am first, last, and only a cop,” he growled. “Nobody influences me—including you. I look at the evidence, and that tells me everything I need to know.”
Tanner lifted a brow. “Does it?”
“Yes. And yes, Davon Fredericks admitted he killed Jimmy Sheridan. He seemed to believe that Arthur gave him the order to do so. But judging by his scent, he was also deeply confused and apparently under some kind of magical influence at the time.”
“From his own people, obviously.” Triumph rang in Andrews’s voice. “The Magekind are the only ones that work magic.”
“Except for the Sidhe, the Dark Ones, the Dragonkind, and damn near everybody who lives in the Mageverse,” Rosen pointed out. “Any of them could have cast some kind of spell to make Davon kill the boy in the mistaken belief it was under Arthur’s orders.”
There was a short, stunned silence. Tanner and Andrews exchanged a quick look; it was obvious neither had expected Rosen to enter into the discussion. The chairman usually remained aloof.
“But why?” Tanner demanded. “What possible reason would they have?”
“It would trigger a war between the Magekind and us, which wouldn’t be good for anyone,” Elena observed. “And it wouldn’t do wonders for the human race either. Maybe someone on Mageverse Earth has his eye on invading this planet. It’s happened before.”
This time Tanner did sneer. “So the Magekind says.”
“I don’t think we can dismiss the testimony of the Magekind out of hand,” Rosen said. “Don’t forget, Arthur and his knights—including Sir Tristan—have been protecting mankind for fifteen hundred years. I find it difficult to believe that King Arthur would suddenly start murdering children.”
“I move we have Tristan and Belle appear before the Council of Clans to testify about this incident,” Elena said.
Realizing that the two might be able to turn the tide, Justice seconded. The vote passed three to two, with Tanner and Andrews looking frustrated.
The others filed out, leaving Justice and Rosen alone as they got their papers in order. As Justice slipped his into a folder, Rosen looked up from the briefcase he was closing. “Do you think Tristan and the Maja will agree to testify?”
“I believe so,” Justice said cautiously. “Though they’re justifiably concerned they won’t get a fair hearing.”
“They don’t need to worry about that. I don’t want a war,” Rosen told him. “The death of this boy was a great tragedy, but I don’t think Arthur had a damned thing to do with it. And I don’t want to watch more boys die trying to avenge him.”
Justice considered him thoughtfully. “Tanner thinks we’d win a war with the Magekind.”
“Tanner’s an idiot. We might be able to defeat the Magekind if we could get to them, but as long as they can open dimensional gateways, we’re at a serious disadvantage. Think of the kind of damage they could do to us with the abilities they have. We may be immune to magic, but our young children aren’t. Neither are our homes and businesses.”
“And that kind of fight would be damned showy,” Justice pointed out. He’d been worrying about the implications of such a war since Jimmy Sheridan died. “We could end up revealing ourselves to the humans, and then we’d all be screwed.”
“We certainly can’t afford that.” Rosen shook his head. “Get Tristan and the woman to testify, Justice. I’ll do my damnedest to get everybody calmed down.”
Cherise Myers lay surrounded in great mounds of flowers. Roses, stargazer lilies, tulips, and orchids foamed around the gleaming mahogany bier in shades of white and pink, complementing the white silk gown she wore. Pearls and crystals shimmered on her bodice and sparkled from the folds of the skirt. A wreath of star lilies and white roses crowned her head, and more flowers had been woven through her long, shining blond curls. Her delicate hands clasped a great sword that lay the length of her slim body. To either side of the bier, candelabra burned, the ranks of candles illuminating the bier in a soft, golden glow. Overhead, the stars of the Mageverse night blazed in their brilliant glory, as if adding another layer of beauty to the service.
The Magekind surrounded the bier as it lay on the cobblestones of the central square, a solemn crowd of thousands dressed in medieval garb. Black velvet and silk trimmed in silver embroidery and jet beads rustled over the cobblestones.
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