Had he made it?
“I’m not the one responsible for the blast, Danny,” Jason told her calmly. He held his hands up at his sides, a show of innocence. “I’m only responsible for pulling you out of it before you hit the ground,” he said, “and for the fact that you’re breathing now.”
“That’s impossible,” Danny insisted. She knew what he was now, and warlocks couldn’t heal people. In fact, no witch or wizard could heal people… except for her. She was it.
“Oh?” he asked softly, raising a brow.
Danny blinked. Actually…. Warlocks did have one particular ability. Some of them could manipulate your body, control it through touch. It was rare, but a gifted warlock could cut off a person’s air supply, speed up a person’s heart rate, or even cause all of the neurons in a person’s brain to fire at once. Normally, they used this power toward their dark ends. Warlocks were known to even get creatively nasty with it once in a while – using it to manipulate a lover’s responses in bed.
Danny never would have imagined a warlock using it to help someone. But just because it hadn’t been done didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. And apparently Jason had just proven that point.
Danny touched her hand to her chest, sensing the remnants of Jason’s magic now edging away like sand down a slide. In a few moments, it was gone. “Why?” she asked, not understanding.
“I would do anything to protect you,” he told her, his eyes more green than she had ever seen them. They were like emerald seas, shimmering in the torchlight. His tall frame was, as always, draped in black from his black boots and jeans to his black sports coat. He turned from her then, his gaze slipping to the stone floor, and paced away from her. His arms, he crossed over his chest, and Danny experienced a race of anticipatory fear at the sight of the black material stretched taut over ample muscles. She wondered where she was – and how she was going to get out.
As a reflex, she tested the waters of her powers, searching for transportation magic that could get her out of there in a hurry. But that particular magic wouldn’t answer. It simply wasn’t there. Everything else was there. She could have painted the walls pink, put out the torches, and morphed the chest against the wall into a pony if she’d wanted to. Or, at least she assumed she could. If they were magical items, then her powers would be up against Jason’s, and that was a contest she didn’t want to be in. But her ability to zap out of space and time and arrive somewhere else was gone. She wasn’t leaving this room unless she walked out of it.
“Why?” she asked again, referring to why he had saved her. She wanted to know everything then and there.
Jason stopped and gave her a side-long glance. “You already know.”
“You think you love me,” she said. Her voice sounded dull and dead. It was fear making it so heavy. “Is that it?”
Jason regarded her for a long time in silence. Danny tried to keep her wits about her. She was being eaten up inside though. Jason’s eyes were like frigid fire. He was a study in contradictions. He played with flames, but his touch was cold. He made her cry with fond memories, and he scared the crap out of her.
She thought she had known him. She had always considered him a friend. But Imani had never trusted him. And maybe she was right. Because it turns out that Jason was working with Gabriel Phelan and Phelan was the most evil creature on the planet. The things he had done to Charlie were unspeakable. And he would do them again and again – if he could.
If Jason had been helping him in any way…. Danny’s hands curled into fists at her sides.
She knew that Lucas wasn’t dead. The mark on her arm was still there. If he were dead, it would be gone. It was the only thing keeping her from blowing her lid and letting loose with a wave of her magic. Or her fists.
Finally, Jason turned away from her again without answering her. He slowly paced to the large black leather trunk against one carved-stone wall and gazed down at its closed lid. Danny wondered what was inside.
The mark on her arm began to tingle. She glanced down at it and a thought occurred to her. “How are you able to touch me without Lucas’s mark hurting me?” she asked, realizing that he had put his hands on her after she’d “escaped” Lucas in his cave the night before. Once a dormant was marked by her mate, she wasn’t supposed to be touched by other men. It was a really crappy, really unfair security measure that thousands of years of nature had seen to inflicting on dormants. Nature must have figured that even though an alpha would do everything necessary to protect his mate from danger, any extra little measure would help.
“Magic, Danny,” Jason replied easily. He sounded almost bored. He tossed her a slightly disappointed glance. “You shouldn’t have to ask.” And then he turned back to the trunk and crouched gracefully down beside it. His tall, strong body moved as a cat’s would, and Danny had to admit once again that Jason Alberich was a very charismatic man. He was handsome, wealthy, and powerful beyond most people’s imagination. If she had been any other witch in the world – any other woman at all, for that matter – he would have been an incredible catch. But she wasn’t anyone else, she was Danny.
“What happened back there?” she asked now, only wanting him to explain what was going on. She felt so confused. Her stomach felt tight. “Was it Phelan who planted the bomb?”
“Yes,” Jason said, without looking up. He calmly pressed the buttons on the latches of the trunk’s lid and they popped open. Then he stood once more, leaving the lid down. This troubled Danny, adding to her confusion and fear.
“What’s going on?” she asked, beginning to fidget under the angst riding her.
Jason turned to face her again. “What exactly are you referring to, Danny?” he asked, frowning slightly in a way that reminded her of a psychiatrist sizing a patient up for a dose of medication.
“Lucas said that you tried to kill him. That you sent Akyri after him.” She stopped talking when he took a step toward her, his boot echoing ominously in the enclosed chamber. Her gaze skirted past him to the walls. There was no door. Her heart skipped, but she went on. “You’re a warlock.”
“I won’t deny that I’m a warlock,” he said, shrugging as if it were nothing. “I was born this way. This is where my power has always resided.” Another step. “But as to whether or not I tried to kill Caige….” He stopped and cocked his head to one side. “Who will you believe, Danny? A man you’ve known your entire life and is now your herald? Or a werewolf who despises our kind?”
“He doesn’t despise me,” Danny insisted softly.
Jason shook his head. “No one could despise you, Danny. It’s simply impossible. But I doubt that someone like Lucas Caige could ever really learn to love you, either.”
Danny opened her mouth to say something when a slight wave of dizziness washed over her. She put her hand to her face, feeling suddenly a tad feverish. “What do you want from me, Jason?” she asked wearily. For the second time that week, she was struck with the helplessness of her situation. She was a dormant who had been dreaming of two men. One was evil, the other may be wrong for her. And the second had marked her. Had any woman in history ever been between more of a rock and a hard place?
“I want you to give me a chance,” Jason told her. Another step closer; she heard his boot echo. “Give us a chance.”
Danny’s eyes flew open and her hand dropped. Those had been Lucas’s exact words. Hadn’t they?
Jason continued to draw nearer – and there was nowhere for Danny to go. She hopelessly glanced around the room once more. No windows, no openings, no escape whatsoever. Were they underground? She imagined that Jason had created this room long ago, or maybe it had been here since the days of the inquisition, created by a herald several centuries past as another safety measure. A secret hide-out. Perhaps it was part of his mansion.
When Jason finally stood before her, Danny realized that her breaths were quick and shallow, her heart was racing, and she was feeling dizzy again. She really didn’t want to look up at him; she couldn’t brin
g herself to meet his gaze. It was just too unnerving. He was too dominant, his power too potent.
But Jason was having none of that. The warlock curled a cool finger beneath Danny’s chin and tilted her head until she had no choice but to look into his eyes. What she saw there terrified her. Again, she tried to call up a transportation spell; the words were on her lips. But they were unaided and fell dead before she could speak them.
Jason shook his head. “This room is protected from transport spells like yours,” he told her as if he could read her mind. “My transport magic is the only kind that will breach these walls.”
Danny exhaled sharply. Her lip quivered and, unfortunately he noticed. His green gaze shot to her lip and his thumb brushed the plump flesh with a tenderness that felt like the calm before the storm. “Jason, let me go,” she pleaded softly.
His only reply was to shake his head.
“I will fight you,” she told him, a promise softly spoken. It was enough.
“I know,” he said. “I want you to.”
*****
Lucas caught the scent half a second too late. There was a strange warping sensation around the bike and he squeezed the brakes, but by the time the other alpha’s scent wafted over him, Lucas felt the cold point of sharp metal shoved between his ribs.
It pierced his lung and kept going, sliding straight through to his heart. His grip went limp and the bike slid out from beneath his grasp, taking him down with it.
The world became a scraping, sliding, grinding mess of metal and screeching sound and tumbling skies. He felt tiny pin pricks of pain and hard, bone-deep thumps that jarred and moved him along, but there was no other sensation.
As he finally slowed, rolling to a stop in some patch of earth that fast grew wet beneath him, his mind worked with startling clarity. He realized what had happened. Danny had been abducted in the blast. Gabriel Phelan had taken her place.
And now he was torn and twisted, just like Meatloaf had foretold.
Lucas gritted his teeth as the pain finally came. It was so far down, so at the center of who and what he was, there was no agony in existence like it. It was his heart, the thing that kept him alive, that was ruptured and broken. It writhed and bled and pulled from his lungs a gurgling, horrid bellow of pain as its werewolf make-up began to force it into mending.
I have a broken heart, he thought. In Alice’s wonderland, it would have been funny.
A boot crunched the ground beside his head and Lucas opened his eyes. After all that, he wondered. I can still open my eyes.
“It does my soul good to see you this way,” came a hated voice, cruel and cold and dominant. Lucas could make out his boot in the grass and the hem of his jeans. “Especially since you owe me. Your witch stole my car.” The alpha chuckled. “And you put a dent in my Bugatti.”
Lucas’s mind was working too well for the state his body was in. At the mention of the Bugatti, he remembered the driver who had run his bike off the road several nights back. It had been Phelan. He’d been there all along.
“But all good things must come to an end,” Phelan said.
Lucas saw him move then; it was a blur of motion until it connected with his mid-section. Phelan’s boot broke what ribs had remained intact and ruptured some other organ within Lucas’s body. He felt it pop just before his vision began to tunnel inward.
“That’s it, Caige,” Phelan’s voice was muffled. “Kick the bucket like a good boy. Three’s a crowd.” He laughed then, harsh and deep. “Though I bet little Danny would make the most wonderful sounds while taking it up both holes. Maybe I’ll find out. She owes me, after all.”
Lucas’s gaze flashed red and he knew his eyes were glowing. Daniel Kane’s eyes glowed like sapphire headlights when he was angry. Malcolm’s glowed green. But Lucas’s had always gone straight to blood, demonic and different, as wild as was fitting for the nature of his soul.
When Phelan raised his boot again to finish the job, Lucas found the strength to roll. Pain assaulted his senses and tried to pull him under as bones cracked and scraped together where their jagged edges were snagged inside of his body. But he was healing. It wouldn’t come nearly fast enough, but it was happening.
Phelan followed him, his tall form moving with the inhuman speed and strength for which he was famous. But Lucas had Danny’s kaleidoscope eyes plastered to the inside of his brain. He saw her and felt her and smelled her vanilla and caramel and chocolate and his heart stopped mending because it was healed. As Phelan reached down to grab Lucas’s jacket front, Lucas pinned the man’s hands to his own chest and jerked to the side.
Gabriel Phelan had been training to fight for years. No one even knew how long he’d been doing it. Charlie had been his student at one point, and she had to be one of the best fighters the Council had ever known. Definitely the best female fighter.
Gabriel? He was danger, living and breathing. The man was pain incarnate, and he proved that now as he seemed to infer what Lucas was planning and cut him off half-way. As Lucas twisted, Gabriel twisted with him, leapt over Lucas’s fallen form, flipped in the air, spun, and slammed his fist down onto Lucas’s chest.
The world went black for a moment. It receded like a turtle in its shell and the red and the darkness swam in all around him. He shoved at it, pushed at it, flailed at it with every ounce of his consciousness – until dust moats swam in his vision, but so did the waking world. He remained conscious, barely, and only to catch Phelan preparing for another attack.
He couldn’t move out of the way this time. His lungs were both trying to heal and the agony was immense. His body wouldn’t respond fast enough.
But it didn’t need to. Phelan brought his arm back – and it was caught in a pair of strong hands. Lucas blinked, wondering whether he might be imagining what he was seeing. But Malcolm Cole’s deep British accent sliced through the space between them, confirming his very real existence.
“I think we’ve had just about enough of you,” Cole said before he yanked Phelan back and shoved his fist forward at the same time. There was a loud crack and another blur and once more, Lucas could not make heads or tails of what was happening around him.
So, he shut his eyes. For the time being, though it didn’t make any sense that Cole was actually there, it seemed the heat had been taken off of Lucas and his body could heal. All around him were the sounds of struggle. The scent of werewolves assaulted his senses and he realized there must be more out there; at least one of them female. He could hear flesh hitting flesh and grunts of pain and anger, but he let them go – he let it all go – and concentrated on his own aching, throbbing, bleeding form.
The lungs repaired themselves next and his bones began to shift back into place. It was nauseating, it hurt so bad. Once they were in place, Lucas swallowed hard, amazed that he’d managed to keep down the bile that had spilled into his esophagus.
Little by little, his body became whole once more, and he found the strength to push himself up onto his arms. He was weak, though. He’d lost a lot of blood and couldn’t return it to his body. He lifted his head and opened his eyes. The world tilted just once and then settled down into its normal, level self. Malcolm Cole and Gabriel Phelan were fighting several yards away. Around them were the signs of their supernatural struggle. A few trees had been toppled, the ground was disrupted in chunks and gouges, and blood stained their clothes.
Lucas watched as Cole knocked Phelan up against yet another tree that cracked beneath the impact. He had the handle of a dagger in his fist; Lucas could smell his own blood coming off of the blade and knew it was the one that Phelan had shoved into his side. But Cole curled his hand around it – and then shoved his fist into Phelan’s neck, keeping the blade well away from Gabriel’s flesh. “That one is for Charlie,” he hissed as he pulled his fist back and prepared to strike again. Phelan’s teeth gritted, his eyes squeezed shut, and his body went rigid. Cole had crushed his windpipe and broken his neck. “And this is for everyone else.” With that, Cole blurred
, shifted the dagger in his right hand, and plunged it forward.
He didn’t bother with his neck, however, or even his heart. Cole’s aim was cruel and perfect and he had obviously been harboring a vicious amount of anger toward Phelan, because the blade entered Phelan’s left eye and kept going, piercing the back of his skull and sticking him to the tree trunk behind him.
Cole stepped back. Phelan spasmed once and went still, a heavy dead specimen held aloft only by the strength of the bone in his head. Cole watched his opponent die, and then he turned to face Lucas, who was now standing once more, weak but healed. Lucas looked on as the green glow in his friend’s eyes died down into a cloudy jade.
“You okay?” he asked Malcolm.
Cole didn’t answer for a moment. Finally, with a slight glance backward toward the werewolf behind him, he nodded. Lucas caught movement in his peripheral vision and glanced over to see Lily and Daniel Kane making her way across the street. Daniel had his hand firmly wrapped around Lily’s arm and Lucas almost smiled. No doubt, she had wanted to join in the fray and he’d had to try very hard to keep her out of it.
Lucas nodded at Daniel and the cop nodded back. There was more movement behind Lucas and he turned in time to see three enforcers draw closer across the small clearing. They nodded at him and he nodded back.
“How did you find me?” Lucas asked, turning back to face Cole.
“Lily had a vision so we tried to call you,” he replied. “Your phone was dead.”
Lucas glanced at Lily Kane, who finally ripped free from her husband’s grasp and ran toward both him and Cole. “Are you okay?” she asked, turning from one alpha werewolf to the other. It was just too cute.
“I’m fine,” Cole replied. “But he’s weak. He’ll need blood.”
“You look like you could use some too,” Lily told him, her gaze traveling over the mess of his clothes with wary observation.
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