Raven sat back in her chair and sipped from the glass of white wine that was waiting for her, courtesy of Juniper and Hazel. “It’s a good thing I’m not a witch then.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he said, nodding but not breaking eye contact.
“But if I’m not a witch, what does that tell us about the symbols on my arms when you touch me?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Okay.” Raven drained her glass. “Why do you think it didn’t happen to Kristina? She had powers. If the tooth brought this out in me, why not her? Why not Agnes or Richard?”
Gabriel went absolutely still, all levity draining from his features. “I don’t know.”
Raven paused. Something didn’t add up. Being here in this apartment reminded her of a detail Agnes had mentioned. “Kristina has your tooth. That first night you saved me, you told me you had followed our bond. Why can’t you use your bond to find Kristina?”
Gabriel’s expression hardened. “I don’t want to talk about Kristina.” He stood, his body seeming to fill the room. “It’s late, Raven. I’ll call Duncan to take you home.”
Chapter Thirteen
Raven didn’t sleep that night. Her libido had gone from blazing inferno to bucket of ice in record time. And worse, after the way Gabriel reacted when she asked him about Kristina, she couldn’t help but be suspicious. Why didn’t he want to talk about her? Unless he knew more about her disappearance than he was letting on. As much chemistry as there was between them, her guard was up, and it would stay up until she knew what secret he was keeping from her.
Her suspicions only multiplied when Gabriel wasn’t at Blakemore’s the next day. Agnes said he was on a buying trip. His absence bled into a quiet and uneventful weekend where Raven spent far too much time in her room or sitting on the roof, staring at the stars and thinking about him.
He returned Monday, but he was different. Distant. He stopped in every afternoon to see her, but there was no more whispering in her ear. No stolen touches. He asked about the books and that was all. By the next Friday, she’d logged thirty-six grimoires, completing the section in the catalog, but when she showed the potential curse-breaking spells she’d bookmarked to Gabriel, he shook his head at every single one.
“How do you know they won’t work? You haven’t tried any of them.” She snapped the grimoire in her hands closed in frustration.
“I can read the magic,” he said. “Look at the ring. Do those spells look like the key that fits this hole?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” The last spell was a list of ingredients. It wasn’t a key at all.
“Don’t read them, Raven. Feel them. Take them in.” He gave her a pitying look and shook his head. “Never mind. Just keep doing what you’re doing and trust me.”
“Okay,” she said flatly.
“How is your… reaction?” He pointed toward her arms.
“If you’re talking about the burning, itching and crawling feeling, it happens every time I open one of these.” She pressed her hand into the cover of the grimoire in front of her. “If you’re asking about the markings, I don’t know. It only comes out when you… touch me.”
For a minute he stared at her, eyes smoldering as if they were back in his room and he had her against the wall. But then his expression turned on a dime and he headed for the door like the library was on fire. “Don’t forget to pick up your paycheck on your way out.”
Paycheck. That’s right, it was Friday. One good thing about today. She planned to split her earnings between her mom and Avery. She owed them. She wondered how much it would be. Gabriel had never disclosed how much he’d pay her, and she’d only worked two weeks, but anything was better than borrowing money from her family again. She finished logging the book she was working on and locked the room before jogging downstairs to Gabriel’s office.
“Your paycheck, Raven.” He handed her a paper check. Antiquated. But then when you were a five-hundred-year-old dragon with a total of four employees, she supposed setting up direct deposit wasn’t a priority.
She looked at the check. Looked again. Her lips parted. “Uh…” Her gaze darted between him and the check. “This is for four thousand dollars.”
“That is correct.”
“I’ve only worked here two weeks.”
“I gave you a raise. I felt you deserved it, considering.” He stepped closer, his gaze flicking to her arms. “Considering you have skin in the game. You’re important to me, Raven. I want you to be happy here. I want you to stay and do what you were hired to do, nothing more.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means exactly what I said.” The tapping was back, and Raven reached for his hand, but he slid it into his pocket. “Don’t you have a weekend of adventure to get to, little witch?”
Little witch. That was new. Did he believe what Delphine had said, that Raven was a sorceress? “What’s this all about? Why won’t you let me help with your hand?”
Richard rushed into the doorway. “Gabriel, there’s a man out front making an offer on the seventeenth-century armoire. He’s agitated. I need you.”
Gabriel gave him a little nod, then turned back toward Raven as he moved for the door. “I’ll call Duncan to take you home.”
“We’re running out of time, Gabriel. I could stay late. I could keep looking.”
He smiled sadly. “We had a deal, Raven. I’ve required too much of you already. You’re no good to me exhausted. Go home. Rest. Live your life.”
Raven tried to tell him she wasn’t tired at all, that with a break for dinner she could go another hour or two, but he was already gone.
It took every ounce of will inside her, but Raven refused to dwell on Gabriel’s hot-and-cold routine that weekend. She could tell he wanted her. More than that, he liked her. He’d said as much, said he was drawn to her like he’d never been drawn to anyone. So then why had he refused to touch her since the night they visited the Casket Girls? No, it wasn’t the Casket Girls. He’d kissed her after that. As she played back the night in her head, she realized he’d turned to ice after she’d asked about Kristina. What secret was Gabriel keeping about her?
Warning flags flew in her head. His reaction wasn’t normal. Maybe Gabriel was dangerous. No matter how drawn to him she was, she needed to remember how little she actually knew about him.
“You’re doing great, Rave,” Avery said from beside her, breaking her from her reverie.
Raven glared at her. She was not doing great. She wasn’t keeping up with the other kayakers at all.
Once she’d paid her mother and Avery part of what she owed them, she’d used some of her massive paycheck to do something she’d always wanted to do, kayak through the alligator-infested waters of Manchac Swamp. Although Avery had sworn she would never go, Raven succeeded in convincing her when it became clear she’d have to drive her anyway, forty minutes each way. Raven offered to pay, and Avery crumbled like an overbaked cookie.
Manchac Swamp kayak tours were well known in New Orleans, but before Raven had become ill, she’d always dismissed them as something only thrill seekers took part in. The swamp had a reputation. Skimming along the surface of the water at eye level with reptiles longer than she was tall rightfully terrified her. Not to mention it had long been rumored the swamp was haunted by the ghost of voodoo priestess Julia Brown.
As legend had it, Julia had worked as a traiteur, a folk healer in Louisiana tradition, in the town of Frenier that bordered the swamp. She was the closest thing to a doctor the area had ever known, but she was also creepy as hell. Eyewitnesses said she used to sit on her porch singing, “When I go, I’m taking you with me” over and over. She foretold her own death in 1915, and the day they lowered her into the ground, a hurricane swept in from the Caribbean, surging thirteen feet and bombarding the area with 125-mile-per-hour winds. The storm flattened the town of Frenier and the surrounding area. People still said it was Julia who did it, Julia and her voodoo. Some believed she haunted
the bayou to this day.
Raven was more afraid of Julia than the alligators. Her experience with Gabriel had sealed her acceptance of the supernatural. Even if she hadn’t believed in the ghost of Julia, just two years ago a skeleton had been found on the shores of this swamp. It turned out to be a 1915 hurricane victim whose body had likely been freed from its place tangled in the cypress roots and muck at the bottom of the swamp, the bones surfacing like a bad memory. Alligators and dead bodies aside, there were the mosquitos and biting flies. And the paddling. She wasn’t crazy about the paddling.
But Raven needed this. She needed to stare fear in the face. She needed to use her body in a way that showed it was healthy. She needed to prove to herself that she was alive and nobody’s prisoner, free to be as crazy as she chose to be. It was either this or she was getting a tattoo, and she’d never liked the thought of needles.
“Try holding your elbows higher,” Avery said. Poor Avery. She was stuck babysitting. They’d fallen to the back of the group, so far back she couldn’t make out what the guide was saying anymore. Raven skimmed her oar along the water, trying her best to use her core instead of her arms as their guide had suggested. But her kayak moved at a snail’s pace, and she was already exhausted.
The problem was, although she was healthy again and had graduated from physical therapy, it had been years since she’d participated in any outdoor activity. She hadn’t ridden a bike in five years. She’d never been kayaking. Her body was soft and her heart and lungs were out of shape. But she was here. She was doing this. Wasn’t this how life started again, with the first try?
“I’m not going to win any races, but I won’t get stronger if I don’t try,” Raven said, as much to herself as to Avery.
“You can do it. Don’t worry about them. We’re all going to the same place.” Avery smiled supportively. Her curly black ponytail had expanded in the humidity, turning into a pom-pom at the back of her head. Raven sensed her own shorter haircut was wild too and pushed her bangs back with one hand. She should have worn a headband.
Using her paddle like a rudder, she navigated around a cypress tree and gazed longingly at the tour guide up ahead. He was pointing his paddle at something offshore. She paddled faster, hoping to gain some ground before she lost sight of him altogether. As hard as she tried though, her form was sloppy and she was working twice as hard to go half as fast.
“Rave…”
“I’m trying, okay.” Raven sat up straighter and squared her shoulders. “I can’t get this thing to move.”
“Rave…” Her sister stared over the front of the kayak, eyes wide. Raven slowly turned her head. An alligator at least ten feet long was watching her from the shore with interest. Although its body didn’t move, the vertical slits of its eyes did. That cold reptilian stare locked onto her. She stopped paddling.
Too fast for a creature that large, the alligator slipped into the swamp with the splashless stealth of a predator. Absolutely silent, it became instantly invisible aside from its snout and eyes. A few yards from her kayak, it dove.
“Where did it go?”
“Don’t panic,” Avery said. “Hold still. They’re usually not aggressive. He’s probably as scared of you as you are of him. He’s swimming away, I’m sure.”
Raven froze, the arm of her paddle across her lap. Her gaze locked onto a fat drip of water rolling down the paddle’s blade and she lifted it slowly, meaning to swing it inside her vessel. The drop fell into the water with a plop. Suddenly the swamp rose beside her, the water surging with the alligator as it thrust and twisted. Rows of razor-sharp teeth opened inside a long, deadly snout that snapped her paddle. The plastic splintered and was wrenched from her hands. Worse, the gator’s scaly body brushed the side of the kayak as it reentered the water, tail thrashing.
Raven’s kayak rocked onto its side. Avery screamed and reached for her, but she was too far away. Raven was going over. Capsizing. The alligator was out there, and she was about to join it for a swim. Almost parallel to the water, she gripped the side of the kayak and took a deep breath in anticipation. Her heart pounded against her breastbone. Her mind raced with terror.
The swamp rose again. Raven could swear she saw a brown hand, a woman’s hand, surge from the surface. Yes, there was a woman under the water, her long black curls floating around her head, her black eyes staring up at Raven, her full mouth smiling. Raven grabbed her outstretched hand. Light. So much light. Raven’s skin lit up with symbols the same as when Gabriel touched her. She locked her arm, hand in hand with the woman, and held on.
She shouldn’t have been strong enough for this, but the woman was pushing back, holding her out of the water. An unnatural force shifted her weight in the opposite direction. The kayak tipped and then the bottom slapped the water so hard her teeth clacked together.
“Holy shit, Raven! Are you all right? I thought for sure you were going over.”
“Did you see her?”
“The alligator? Yeah. I couldn’t miss her.” Her hands were trembling.
“No, not the alligator. The woman.”
“What?”
Raven looked at her sister, feeling as if she were having an out-of-body experience. All she could see was the brown hand rising from the water and those arresting black eyes. She searched the swamp beside her. The alligator was gone, but there was a skinny brown stump protruding from the water, the top of which roughly resembled a hand. She rubbed her palm.
“Nothing.” Raven shook her head. “That was close.”
Avery stared at her with unmasked concern.
“Hey!” the guide yelled, moving toward them at a speed she’d never seen anyone paddle a kayak.
Avery stared at her. “Damn, Raven. That was so weird. When you went over, there was a flash of light like the sun was magnified off the water. It was blinding. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Raven turned toward her. “You saw that too?”
“How could anyone miss it?”
The trees beside them moved. Raven bristled. Without a paddle she was helpless. But it wasn’t another alligator. It was Gabriel, and he looked pissed.
“What are you looking at?” Avery asked.
Raven didn’t answer. The guide hooked on and began towing her to shore.
What was she thinking taking such a risk? Gabriel waited at the dock, his head burning, although the January weather was temperate. All that fire came from the inside, from the anger and terror that had drawn him here at supernatural speed. He gazed at his ring, at the dark eye at the heart of it, now bigger for the use of the power. When Raven’s terror had shot down their connection like a bullet, neither God nor the devil could have kept him from her. He’d landed in the swamp near her, then flew here to the dock when it was clear she was no longer in danger. Still, he wouldn’t be happy until she was out of that damned kayak.
The group of adventurers paddled nearer, and he held out his hand to Raven.
“Uh, er. Give me a second to help,” the tour guide said. “Well, okay, that’s one way to get out, I guess.” He laughed nervously as Gabriel lifted Raven straight out of her kayak as if she weighed nothing.
Gabriel ignored the guide and took Raven by the shoulders. Why was she taking unnecessary risks? Didn’t she know how much he needed her? Didn’t she realize how valuable she was to him, to the world?
But as he looked at her, that tug was back, his dragon sniffing and chuffing close to the surface. She smelled of tears and panic, and when she met his eyes, she started to cry. Without a word, he wrapped his arms around her and tucked her under his chin, against his chest. “You’re okay,” he whispered. “Everything is okay.”
Her tears soaked his shirt as she sobbed.
“Are you Gabriel?” A woman who resembled Raven came up behind her on the dock. She was dark-haired and blue-eyed but curvy and taller. Confidently, she held out her hand.
Raven lifted her head. “Gabriel, this is my sister, Avery. Avery, Gabriel Blakemore.”
&nb
sp; He shook her hand, but didn’t release Raven.
Avery noticed. She gave him a strange, quirky smile. “So, uh, what are you doing here?”
Raven’s eyes widened as she looked between him and her sister. Her lips parted while she tried to think of an excuse.
“Raven and I have a date,” he said. “I came to pick her up. Couldn’t wait.” He kissed her on the temple.
Avery’s eyebrows shot toward her hairline. “You’re dating my sister—your employee?”
The way her mouth twisted told him everything he needed to know. Avery was the type of woman who assumed things about a man, assumed that every man was attracted to the same kind of woman, and only under the same sort of circumstances. It bothered Gabriel that her question seemed to assume that Raven was less than worthy of his attraction. Nothing could be further from the truth.
He gave Avery a lazy smile. “I’m enamored. Do you have a problem with that?”
Raven looked up at him from the shelter of his arms.
“No wonder your paycheck was so big,” Avery murmured under her breath.
If Gabriel didn’t have a dragon’s hearing, he would have never caught the comment, but he did. He coughed into his hand to hide his laugh.
The guide appeared beside them. “Your life vest, please.” He pointed at the floatation device Raven was still wearing.
“What kind of tour are you running?” Gabriel snapped, his anger rising to the surface and cracking like a whip. “She could have been killed. Why weren’t you with her? Why hadn’t you taken precautions and guided them away from known alligators?” Without even meaning to, he’d placed himself between Raven and the guide, backing him up to the edge of the dock.
“I, uh—”
“I don’t want to hear it. You are lucky she is uninjured. I’d have your head—”
“Here.” Raven shoved the life vest into the guide’s hands and firmly thrust him in the direction of the shore, her other hand pressing into Gabriel’s chest.
The man didn’t hesitate. He took off toward the parking lot where other guides were helping him load the kayaks into his company’s truck.
The Dragon of New Orleans Page 13