Bounty Hunter (The Rover series Book 1)

by Amelia Shaw

  I rolled my eyes. “You should know by now I don’t back down in a fight. Besides, I don’t think it’s a great idea to leave a powerful fae with this crowd.”

  They had painted a black circle on the floor the size of a large SUV. No way in hell I would walk over the edge. Dark, dirty magic radiated from it like a mirage. I couldn’t just feel it; I could see it in the air.

  He tugged me closer so he could whisper against my ear. The motion started a throb deep in my clavicle. “I’m serious, Zoey. If you can escape, do it. When you get out of here, go to my house and talk to the captain. He’ll know what to do.”

  This man had apparently zoned out the entire time we’d been together.

  “First, that’s a dumb ass plan. Second, I wouldn’t be able to find your house even if you had the time to draw me a map. Something you did on purpose. Third, I’m not leaving until I can rip out Olivia’s hair one clump at a time.”

  He jerked away, maybe only now realizing how much crazy I also possessed. No, that was probably in my file. He simply hadn’t witnessed it himself yet.

  “Let’s finish this, pretty boy,” I said, “so I can get paid.”

  He nodded, and we faced the room together. His arm touched mine, and I used him to ground myself. My heart had already started a slow climb toward my throat. Adrenaline suffused my limbs and tricked my brain into thinking I would make it home if I fought well enough.

  Thank you, adrenaline.

  The circle of soldiers converged at once. Fin struck out first, grabbing the closest man in hand and grappling him.

  I started slicing at anything moving in my line of sight. I’d had about enough tonight.

  Arms came around my waist and lifted me up. I kicked back and hit his soft bits. He dropped me and I landed on my feet. His curled-up form tripped up a couple of his friends. I used the opening to get my back to a wall. Not exactly an advantage, but it would keep anyone else from toting me around.

  Five men advanced on me. I pulled a second knife from my boot, one in each hand.

  Before I could draw the men in, they fell back, and Olivia stepped between them.

  “This one is mine, boys,” she said.

  I charged her, but her magic reached me first. It washed over me, and pressed me into the lumpy wall of the cave. With my back bowed, my hands locked around the knife blades grinding into the stone, I thrashed. Only my hips moved and only the barest inch upward.

  I settled and stopped fighting. She approached slowly.

  That’s right, bitch. Come closer. I’m harmless.

  When her lips were kissing distance from mine, she reached up and wrapped her hands around my throat. She would like an up close and personal kill.

  I fought for breath, for freedom. I refused to die this way. Not at the hands of a psycho bitch with a God complex.

  But the desire to live couldn’t compete with the magic holding me down and Olivia cutting off my oxygen supply. The room rippled around me; darkness closed in at the edges of my vision.

  Fin fought a few feet away, and I wished I could have said goodbye to him. He and I weren’t finished with each other yet.

  Under another wave of soldiers, he folded, pressed down to his knees. I tried to focus, but I couldn’t gather my thoughts.

  The men dragged him into the painted circle, and I tried to scream at them. No. No. No. Take me not him. But nothing came out. I dropped the knives and inched my fingers up the stone toward Olivia’s hands. Her magic pressed tighter, and it felt like a boulder situated itself on my chest. What little air left to me escaped under her pressure.

  Fin jerked in the circle and flipped onto his back, reaching out, rolling around. Despite the odds, he tried to escape.

  “I should make him watch you die,” Olivia whispered into my ear. “It would break him so deliciously.”

  He continued to scratch and claw at the ground, invisible forces obviously torturing him. And when he slowed and finally stilled, something inside me broke.

  I focused on Fin, begging him to get up. It didn’t matter if I died. No one would be safe from the Black Mage if they took his magic for themselves.

  “Fin,” I croaked out.

  His leg twitched and his chest stopped moving.

  Darkness closed over my head and then a blinding flash of light broke through. The weight on me lifted, but I’d already surrendered.

  In the darkness, my mom’s voice whispered in my ear telling me to come home.

  The scent of my father’s cologne surrounded me.

  The rough hands of the chief held me up.

  Finally, Fin’s perfect petal lips grazing the cupid’s bow above my mouth.

  Death seemed quiet and peaceful. It felt like home.

  Chapter Nineteen

  As gently as I could, because even my eyelids throbbed, I pried my eyes open and stared up at the rocky cavern of the ceiling. Bodies lie around me, fanned out as if a bomb had gone off right where I lay. Steel clashed with steel somewhere nearby, but damn, sitting up to investigate, didn’t appeal.

  A flash of red near my shoulder caught my eye. Olivia lay face down, her hands flat on the ground by her face. Her eyes remained open, fixed forever in the distance. She’d tried to kill me, or maybe she had, and something out there decided it wasn’t my time yet. Either way, she was dead.

  A grunt and more fighting filtered through the buzz in my head.

  Fin.

  I sat up and my head swam. The room spun around me in swirls of black and gray. That was what happened after being deprived of oxygen and crushed by invisible magic. I glared at Olivia’s corpse and carefully stood.

  Fin stood in the circle on the floor, body after body stacked up around him. But the bad guys kept on coming. He fought with his magic.

  I stepped forward to help him take on some of his opposition, but when my foot hit the ground pain shot through me in a lightning strike. It burned and sizzled its way through my body from my toes to my ears.

  Unable to walk, I wouldn’t be able to help him. Distracting attention would only get me slaughtered along with everyone else here. I wouldn’t leave him here though. He’d told me to run, but we both knew how well I followed orders.

  Especially when they came from him.

  I crouched through the pain and snagged a boot knife from the closest fallen goon. One guy attacking Fin turned toward me. I tried to smile at him, beckon him closer, but he didn’t bite, only loomed closer.

  I wished I had a gun right now. For weapons, knives were my preference, but a gun would keep this guy enough distance away from me that maybe I wouldn’t get stabbed.

  “Look, I’m tired,” I sighed. “And I am really sick of killing you people. If you wanted to walk out of here, I won’t say a word, and I won’t come after you.”

  For a second, he appeared confused, his eyes narrowing. Then he advanced again, slashing out fast enough he caught the back of my forearm as I moved to block his move.

  Blood, red and thick, welled up and slipped down my arm. Another slice of pain mingled with the rest, and I barely noticed.

  “I see why you guys wear black so much. It hides the blood pretty well. My tactic is usually not getting hurt, but it seems to be failing me tonight.”

  I was talking to my opponent, like he cared what I had to say. I must have had a concussion or internal bleeding, making me delirious.

  Fin groaned in pain from my left. We needed to get out of here now.

  I squared my shoulders and fortified myself against the pain about to drag me under. “Sorry, dude. I gave you the chance to walk away. Now I have to kill you pretty painfully.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but I shoved the knife into the side of his neck before he could get the words out. A fountain of blood erupted from his mouth and dribbled down his chin. He fell sideways when I jerked the knife from his neck. One down, a fuck ton more to go.

  I took another step toward Fin, but the floor stuttered under me, or my body thought it did, and I went down hard on
my knees. Damn. For a second, I had thought I would actually survive this. That we might make it out of here alive. Esteban hadn’t even bothered to show up.

  I slumped over and lay down at the edge of the painted circle. The magic barrier there waned as if the battery faltered. I touched the edge, barely sliding a finger across, and the vibration emitted from it stopped completely. The wood edges were higher than the black surface. The texture was smooth, like some kind of metal. Black steel? I’d heard of objects being created and infused with magic, but I’d never seen anything like this. A trap or an open channel to magic itself?

  A goon approached, and I had nothing to fight with. The knife had fallen from my hands and I didn’t have it in me to stand up and punch him. Part of me wished I’d had the sense to stay down after Olivia killed me. Doing so would have saved me from an intense ten minutes of pain, only to die on the edge of a magical who-knows-what.

  “Don’t bother,” I whispered to the looming goon. “I’ll be dead in a minute, anyway.”

  He knelt down to slide his knife into my side. Of course, he’d go for a kill shot that hurt the most. It took a few minutes to bleed out from a belly wound, then you eventually choked on your own blood.

  He pulled his hand back to slide the sharp edge home, when he froze, mid-strike. He seized up, and the knife clattered to the stone floor.

  Fin appeared behind him, staring down between us. “Am I interrupting?”

  The bad guy toppled over and landed a few inches from my head.

  My breath wheezed between my lips. “Not interrupting. I was just luring him in, letting him think he could win one before I killed him.”

  Fin crouched beside me and cocked his head so he could look at my face. “I thought you were dead.”

  “Me too.”

  He reached out to help me up, but I pushed his hands away. “Stop it. I’ll stand on my own. Did you finish off the good squad? Oh, did you see this circle? I think the magic is in the ring’s metal.”

  Carefully, he hovered his hand over a section of the ring, but didn’t touch it. “Perhaps you’re right. But we need to leave now before reinforcements show up.”

  I pushed up to sit. “Reinforcements, why didn’t we think of those for ourselves?”

  “Because neither of us trust anyone else? And we barely trust each other.” He cupped my elbows and pulled me to stand. I couldn’t get my feet to stay under me, so he swung me up into his arms. “Let’s go.”

  “What about the Black Mage? He didn’t even show up.”

  He shook his head and clutched me tight to his chest. Pain shot through me with every step he made.

  “No, you were right. We should have left when we had the chance earlier. I thought Olivia killed you and all I could think was your death would be my fault since we didn’t go when you asked me to.”

  Darkness seeped into my vision and I lay my face against his torn shirt. He’d lost his tux jacket at some point. I didn’t remember when.

  “I’m going to close my eyes for a second. Take a little nap.”

  “No, Zoey...”

  I opened my eyes in a dark room exactly like the rubber-floored interrogation rooms. I would be afraid, except some part of my brain knew it was just a dream.

  Awesome, I could add nightmares to my PTSD symptoms now.

  “This isn’t just a dream,” Olivia’s voice said from behind me.

  I spun, and she stood in front of me, wearing Esteban’s tux, although it looked better on her than him, and that said something considering how determined I was to hate her.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  She cupped my cheek in her manicured hand. “It means you’ve broken something in yourself, Zoey. I don’t know if it was there as some kind of protection for you, or for everyone else.”

  I jerked back. “Awesome. I killed you and now you’re going to haunt me.”

  She smiled, ruby lips matching her nails, to display her white teeth. “Mi reina, you killed a puppet, nothing more. She wasn’t useful in life, but I’ll make her more useful in death. When she killed you, and you her, you forged a connection. A bridge between you. It is the way with every mage’s death.”

  The little nickname reminded me of... “Esteban?”

  “Now you are understanding. You danced with me as Esteban, and then you danced with me in Olivia’s form in a different way. I admit, I’ve underestimated you and your fae prince. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  My voice wavered, and I hated it. But this was all likely in my head, so what the hell.

  “If you really are the Black Mage, then you should know we aren’t done with each other. I plan to rip out your heart and set it on fire.”

  He reached for my face again, and I swatted his hand. “Stop touching me.”

  My reaction earned me a chuckle. “I’d expect nothing less from you, my dear.”

  “Is that it? You just wanted to invade my mind to scare me? Threaten me?”

  “No,” he said. I heard the timbre of his voice under Olivia’s sultry one. “I came here to ensure you hadn’t died yet. If I can speak to you, then you’ll live.”

  “Goodie.”

  “I have plans for you, mi reina. Take care until we meet again. I’d hate to lose you before I get my hands on that incredible power of yours.”

  “Power?”

  He disappeared, and I blinked awake to stare up at Fin shaking me, hard, yelling at me. “Wake up, Zoey. You can’t sleep if you have a concussion. Wake up.”

  I slapped him. “Stop it.”

  “Where did you go?”

  I shook my head even though it hurt. “Nowhere, just nodded off for a moment.”

  My mind hadn’t assimilated the little meeting with Esteban, and I wouldn’t tell Fin about it until I knew for sure it wasn’t a pain-induced hallucination. Or until I knew he wouldn’t use me as bait again in another of his plans.

  He carried me down the long hallway and up into the light of the main house. No one popped out and attacked, so I counted us lucky. We made it to the driveway and Fin planted me on my feet. I leaned heavily on him so I didn’t fall over on the driveway.

  “I have to call a car. Something tells me the valet isn’t around to help us out,” he said, and fished a phone from his pocket.

  “You’re such a dick. You brought knives, and you brought a phone. I got lipstick and a sparkly handbag for accessories.”

  He ignored me and hit a few buttons on the phone before dropping it on the driveway and smashing it. I assumed on purpose.

  Still glued to his side, holding myself up, I glared at him. “If I haven’t told you I hate you yet today, consider this yesterday’s. I reserve today’s declaration for after I see the doctor.”

  He chuckled. “We’ll see about that. My doctor has a very extensive collection of prescription pain medications. You might change your tune by then.”

  A few minutes later, a black car wound up the drive and stopped in front of us. The captain rushed from the driver’s side and helped us into the backseat. I didn’t bother with my seatbelt. At this rate, with my luck, we would get into a head on crash before we reached the hospital.

  “Take me home,” I said, forehead pressed against the cold window.

  Fin shifted on the other side of me. “No, I’m taking you to my house. My doctor is already there waiting for us. You won’t die, Zoey. I won’t allow it.”

  “Oh, if you forbid it then.”

  He let out a frustrated groan. “Why do you have to be difficult? I have round-the-clock servants, food, medical care. And you want me to take you to your tiny apartment to care for yourself? How is that logical?”

  I shrugged but regretted it when the pain shot down my arms. “I don’t trust you. I don’t trust magic or this world of yours.”

  “Ours. Don’t think I am oblivious enough not to notice the power coming off you now.”

  I grunted. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “In the cave, somethi
ng happened when you died. Like a binding on you broke. You have magic. I don’t know how or what, but I feel it pouring out of you. Our first task will be to teach you to shield it so no one else can see or feel it.”

  I turned to look at his perfect profile. “So, what now, you take me home, lock me up, and use me as a guinea pig?”

  “Damn it, woman. No. I plan to continue our mission to catch the Black Mage and bring him down. My resolve in that aspect has never wavered.”

  Why did he always have to be strong? Always make me feel like the childish woman who doesn’t have any idea what she’d gotten herself into.

  He took my hands in his and gently turned my face enough to meet my eyes. “You aren’t alone anymore, Zoey. I want to work with you. I want to fight by your side and help you figure out your magic so you can amplify your already indomitable spirit. I want to be your friend. Let me in.”

  Great. Now I felt like an asshole. A tear slid down the side of my cheek and I lied to myself, blaming the overwhelming pain.

  “I don’t...”

  “Need anyone. Yeah, you’ve made that clear. But you can’t live your life shutting everyone else out. Not everyone wants to fuck you over.”

  I sat up and shoved him back. “You used me as bait, and I’m supposed to trust you?”

  I hadn’t accepted how much he’d hurt me. If he’d confided in me, I didn’t know if I’d have gone through with it, especially knowing how it ended. But the bastard didn’t give me the choice. He’d made it for me, thinking he knew best.

  “You didn’t let me choose to help,” I said. “You used me and now look at me.”

  His frown deepened, and he reached out to touch my face. I pushed him away. If another person petted me, they would see the business end of my knife.

  He dropped his hand. “I apologize. I see now how stupid I was. I thought I’d prepared for every situation, but I hadn’t considered one expensive elaborate trap for us.”

  A trap. It had been a trap.

  We weren’t hunting the Black Mage. He was hunting us.

  Chapter Twenty

  I woke to someone poking me in the arm. Without the strength to defend myself I went with, “Ouch.”