by S. E. Smith
Palla kept his mouth closed, and his magic on tap enough to make Jeanne think he was in control of Wallace. The witch walked with them through the house as if they were honored guests. It was the most fucked up, amazing, ballsy thing he’d ever seen.
At the doorway, Jeanne leaned in to kiss Wallace’s cheek. A ward, a normal one, popped. The sound startled them all. Jeanne blinked twice, and then her smile twisted into a grimace as she realized she’d been had.
His oath triggered.
“Why, you little bitch.” She gestured to her magehelds. “Kill them. As slowly or quickly as you like, but make sure you start and end with her.”
Palla punched the largest mageheld with a backward elbow strike and drew enough power to bring down the house. Jeanne’s eyes widened.
“Sorry.” Wallace lifted her hands like she was apologizing for forgetting to bring dessert. Then she dead dropped Jeanne and every single mageheld in the room.
Chapter 13
Wallace yelped when the witch broke free. To her right, Palla had dealt with two more of the magehelds. The fourth did not go down as easily as the others. The crack of Jeanne’s power scared the hell out of her, but she and Palla had practiced defending against an attack so unrelentingly that she reacted on instinct.
Trust that Palla could take care of himself. And Jesus, their link went electric with his magic, and as she faced Jeanne she saw Palla touch the mageheld, and the other demon’s chest blossomed red. Trust that her magic would be there. And it was.
This time when the center of her flexed hard, she knew why, she understood what she intended to happen. She’d made this work before, and she could do it again. She grinned big and wide, and the river of magic Jeanne sent at her hit hers and vanished. Subsumed in the power she’d been surrounded by her entire life. She saw it now, the way Palla did; not just worthy of respect but deserving of it. Entitled to it.
Jeanne drew more magic; the air around her hissed.
Wallace shaped magic around the air. Sparks appeared then vanished at the border between Wallace’s magic and Jeanne’s. Hers gathered speed, sliding along the backwash and the trail and at the termination point, Jeanne grunted and staggered back.
She saw how she could kill the witch right now, but no one deserved a violent death. No one. She could end this now, and could not even though Palla was fighting for her life and his. One of the magehelds had flanked him, and he was bleeding from a wound across his back.
Jeanne called more magehelds, and they appeared from elsewhere in the house, and it was nothing, nothing at all to dead drop them. Some of them went down and stayed down. Others slowed, and a very few fought free of the effect. Jeanne drew power again.
She’d spent weeks working with witches like Jeanne. She’d failed at every turn, but all those weeks she’d learned how they used their power. Jeanne was no different. More magehelds rushed them. and Palla was in the thick of that mass of demons, some shifted into non-human forms, fighting, and when he touched then, red blossomed. The smell of blood overpowered. His and theirs.
He was drawing the magehelds away from the door, and now there were ten of them between Palla and her. He was not going die because of her. No way.
The magehelds resonated with the magic of the demonkind, she’d learned to recognize that; one of her rare triumphs, learning how her magic reacted to demons. She also felt the twisted, blackened core that was Jeanne’s enslavement of them. She gathered what no one saw and displaced the magehelds’ magic with hers. Not a reach for power to shape and use as a weapon; a container that pushed on air. She did not give her magic form, she created the container and the chaos of the temperature at the boundaries.
The magehelds she reached could not fight. The air around them prevented from from movement. Palla pushed into the nearest unaffected mageheld and touched him. Another mageheld down. She wrapped up more of them. Jeanne’s magic burned through the air, and Wallace stopped it dead because she could fucking do magic. She followed that with a dead drop focused on nothing but the witch, and that massive void blossomed out, and she saw that she hadn’t been bold enough.
She could stop all the magic in this house. All of it. She displaced everything demon or magekind had ever done to perpetuate the magic here. Every single mageheld standing went down, and Jeanne staggered. The air over the witch rained sparks, but there was nothing she could do. She did not understand how to combat magic used the way Wallace used hers.
Somewhere else in the house something popped. One of the overhead lights exploded. Then another. And another.
Palla grabbed her hand and raced for the door. “Go. Go. Go!”
Jeanne had done something to keep it from opening, but Wallace drew on her power, and there was a boom, and the door was open.
They headed for the car at a sprint.
Chapter 14
Palla drove down the hill like nothing had happened. He’d cut their link, and that was strange, not having that. The gash across his back was deep and glistening with blood and two separate streams trailed down his arm. She could see him healing, feel the magic. He was acting like he wasn’t in pain. “You okay?”
“We didn’t die, so I guess so.” She was okay. Mostly. She kept her hands on her lap because they wouldn’t stop shaking. If she closed her eyes, she saw Palla moving among the attacking magehelds, a machine. Those magehelds had been ordered to kill, and his oath to her meant he hadn’t had a choice about what to do. “You?”
“You have the talisman, right?”
“Yes.” Her purse was on the floorboard of the car, between her feet. The talisman was inside, still in the box.
“Are you sure?”
“I think it’s safer if I keep it quiet for now.”
“Probably.” He squeezed the steering wheel.
“Do you want to stop somewhere?”
He gave her a look of pure disbelief. “What for?”
“So you can deal with this.” She waved her hands. “I don’t even know how you stand it. Not doing something right now.”
“We’re not stopping.” He stuck his phone in the Bluetooth car cradle and a few minutes later music came over the car speakers. They did not share musical tastes. Death metal was not her thing, but she wasn’t going to complain. At least he was alive to listen to music she hated. After a few minutes of pure torture, he paused the music. “Why the hell they sing about him so much I cannot figure out.”
“Who?”
“Thoth. He was an asshole who loved being worshiped as a god.”
“I guess you’d know.”
“I guess I would.” He didn’t sound angry or tense. “Since we knew him and kicked his ass.”
His slip into the plural made her uneasy. She’d gotten more than enough of his mental state when he was fighting off that trap at Jeanne’s house—or fully in the sway of the talisman. “He probably didn’t like you either.”
“He didn’t, but he was hot for Avitas.” He turned on the music again, and she slunk down in the seat. More tortured, raspy, voices grated along her nerves, and just when she was getting the hang of how to listen, he switched off the music again and said, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. For what?”
“All of it. Jeanne. Avitas. You didn’t have to do any of that.”
“Yes, I did.” She ended up speaking softly, because maybe the words were better left unsaid. “You knew that about me.”
Quiet ate up the inside of the car. “I did.”
She stared out the window, sick at heart to realize how she’d screwed up. She’d slept with him. That hadn’t been the mistake. The sex had been fantastic. Totally worth it. But she’d let him see and learn things about her that she’d never talked about with anyone. And she could only sit here aware that if she wanted to cut him a break for horrible music, and then listen hard enough to understand why, she’d tangled up great sex with and now we have a future. There wasn’t any future, and he was going to go forward with his life in a world she didn’t b
elong in.
“No.” Palla rotated his healing shoulder.
“No, what?”
He sighed. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“No you don’t.”
“I don’t have to be in your head to know what you’re thinking.”
“Oh, really?”
He glared at her. “You’ve got yourself convinced we were all about the sex and nothing else.”
“Weren’t we?”
“Yeah, right. That’s all.”
They didn’t speak until they were in San Francisco and closing the door to the elevator in his building. He punched the button for his floor.
“I was thinking about doing you way before I realized Maddy was right to pull you in.”
“You were not.”
“Can you fucking read my mind?” He was healed now. Not a mark on him. No sign of injury except his ripped shirt.
“Not right now, I can’t.”
“That’s right. You cannot. I was thinking about it. I liked the way you looked when you smile. I was thinking you’d be something different.”
“Different.” Too many people used that word when they didn’t want to be more straight up. She was right to protect herself from this disaster. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. You tell me since I can’t read your mind right now.”
Instead of saying, why not, instead of asking him why am I shut out? she said, “I’m pretty damned different from your usual. Blonde and blue-eyed, am I right?”
He gave her a stink-eye. “Wait, are you saying it’s a problem I thought a black chick is hot?”
“No.”
“That is downright human of you.” He let out a breath. The elevator stopped, and he opened the door. “The way your minds work, sometimes I wonder why you humans even have brains, because you don’t use them when you most need to.”
She waited until they were inside. “Now I’m supposed to be something I’m not. Great.” She was too tired and hollow and upset to think straight, and there was blood on her shoe. Palla’s blood. “You didn’t know me. What else would you think is different besides the color of my skin? It’s the first thing anyone notices about me. Sometimes it’s the only thing.”
“How about nothing like Randi? And I don’t mean the blonde hair. How about you’re more like Maddy or Carson or Gray? Human women I admire and who wouldn’t give me the time of day if they were available.”
“So you settled for the black chick?”
He smiled at her. Not angry, and he was doing that on purpose. Controlling himself and keeping her locked out of his psychic state. “I said you’re like them. If you’re like them, then you wouldn’t give me the time of day either. So I wasn’t fucking settling for you.”
“But I did. Give you the time of day.”
“Because you didn’t think of yourself as available, Angel.”
She cradled her purse in her arms. “Wait just a minute—”
“There’s more. How about magic that isn’t like any other witch I’ve ever known? There’s a lot that’s different about you that doesn’t have anything to do with that bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit for me.” Tension knotted the muscles along the tops of her shoulders. “Why don’t you ask Tau how often he gets followed around a store? There’s a lot of baggage, Palla. A lot.”
He rested a palm on the wall beside him. “Sure. There’s none of that for a demon who was mageheld for five-hundred years.”
“Okay. Okay. This is ridiculous.” She took a deep breath. “This is not a contest, and I don’t want to fight.”
“Don’t. Don’t you pull that shit on me. If I want to be pissed off at you, I have that right.”
“Go ahead and be pissed off. Just don’t take it out on me.” She stared past his shoulder. She tried to find her serenity and couldn’t.
“Admit you’re picking a fight because you think I’m going to dump you now that I’ve got what I want.”
“Aren’t you?” The way she said that came out too serious, and all the emotions she’d been pushing away rushed in to make it even worse.
Palla got quiet. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
That was a slam to the heart. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to go home and not have anyone tearing her heart to shreds. “You don’t owe me anything. You really don’t. I said I’d help you, and I did.”
“It’s complicated. You know it’s complicated. It’s always complicated with the magekind.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not sworn to Nikodemus, and I am, and that matters, for one thing. And for another thing, I don’t like witches, and you are a witch.” He sighed. “Look, I don’t even get why we’re having this discussion.”
She kept staring out the window at the Bay. “You started it.”
“I’m pretty sure you did.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m not dumping you. I never said that. I am grateful to you for everything you’ve done. You’d never take a mageheld. You’d die to stop that from happening. But if you think I don’t have my own baggage, Wallace, you’re crazy. “
“I should have held out for more money.”
“Money is not going to be an issue.”
“Two million isn’t be enough to retire on at my age. I still need a job.”
“I told you Nikodemus is going to be interested in you. He takes care of his people.”
“You think a demon warlord is going to want me to join his A-Team.”
“After tonight, why would you think he wouldn’t? You saw Jeanne. How many magehelds did she have? Slaves. Everyone one of them. And then there’s all the ones we didn’t see because she killed them so she can look like she’s thirty instead of however many goddamned centuries she’s been alive.”
“I don’t want to fight.”
“We’re not fighting.”
“This is fighting.” She couldn’t close her eyes. Whenever she did, she saw him fighting for his life—her life—because she wouldn’t kill a woman who had murdered God knows how many others.
“I’m explaining.”
“Consider me fully explained.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Can you get out of your oath to me?”
“Why?”
“You don’t need it any more, and you almost died because of it.”
“Angel, I almost die every damn day. I lived today because of you.” He narrowed his eyes at her.
“I can’t go home with you still bound.”
He pushed away. “How about this. If I survive cracking the talisman, I’ll get Nikodemus or Carson to break the oath. Will that work for you?”
Chapter 15
“Yes, that works for me.”
“Glad that’s settled.” His oath to Wallace was quiescent for now. She was safe here. Part of him wanted to her not be here, and the rest of him wanted her to stay. Even more fucked up, he wanted her to want to stay. Even though an oath of fealty to Nikodemus would put a pacifist like her in a hard place. He faced her again. “You know, Wallace, ideas about living in peace are fine until you’re living in the same place as people who want you dead or enslaved.”
“I know that.”
He wasn’t good at reading expressions, but he could read all the signs he needed right now. In all the time they’d been talking, she hadn’t taken off her shoes or her jacket or put away her purse. In fact, she still had her purse clutched in her arms.
“You humans talk things to fucking death.”
“Yeah, we do.”
“I don’t share my feelings.”
“Don’t.”
“This would be easier if I was alone like I usually am.”
She was doing that trick where with him shut down tight, he couldn’t make head or tails of what she was feeling. Everything about her was neutral. She wasn’t the only human sensitive who’d learned to do that. Lots of Maddy’s street witches did that.
She walked away from the door, toward him, still without putting away her things, but digging in her purse. She dumped the fake wallet and the ID and the car fob on the floor and took out the box that held the talisman. “Here.”
His skin vibrated where it came in contact with the surface. One small blue-and-white tile box contained all that was left of Avitas. The color and scent of blood, and the ripping away of half his being were livid scars because he’d been there when it happened, complicit with Jeanne and dit Menart—he was sorry he hadn’t been the one to kill dit Menart and sorry he hadn’t killed Jeanne. “You can let go now.”
She knew he meant her magic because she said, “Okay.” A second later, he felt the shiver and pull of the disintegrating awareness trapped inside. All that was left of Avitas. She rested a hand on his upper arm, a light touch, and there was moment when he looked up and expected to see Avitas. But Wallace wasn’t Avitas. Nothing like. “Do you need to be alone?”
He gave her the brutal truth. “I don’t want anyone here.”
She walked away. Toward her room—the guest room—so that was good. A relief. He could get himself straightened out here, take care of what he needed to and worry about the rest later.
He took the box to the living room, sat on the couch, then stood. The skin across his upper back rippled, and his gut clenched. Now that they weren’t in the same room, it hurt to stay locked away from Wallace. His oath bit at him to be in contact, to confirm she was safe. Well, fuck that.
He put down the box and stripped off his clothes. The madness emanating from the box was less virulent that it had been at Jeanne’s, but it was still there. Whatever happened when he cracked the talisman, he was taking his true form. None of the limitations of a human aspect when he did this. The minute he touched the box the quiver in his fingers started again and spread up his arms. His oath to Wallace flared up, and though he pushed it back, it was there, and he knew she was in her room and that the wards protecting the building and his apartment were intact. He let his head drop back as he changed.