Captive Spirit

by Anna Windsor

  Bela ran across Fifth Avenue without waiting for the light, and she kept running, into Central Park and off the sidewalks, until she could feel grass and dirt and take off her shoes and dig her toes deep, deep, and try not to burst out of her own skin.

  Time got away from her again, and she didn’t know how long she had been standing there when Camille, Dio, and Andy arrived. They were wearing their leathers and weapons, and carrying hers, which they placed on the ground at her feet.

  “Get changed,” Dio told her, “and let’s do this.”

  Bela searched each face, Dio’s, Camille’s, and especially Andy’s, and she saw the same resolve. They meant to do this, and once and for all bring her—and maybe all of them—some peace.

  She stripped out of her street clothes and stepped into her leathers, then belted on her sword and put her shoes back on her feet. The copper charm at her throat tingled against her skin when she touched it, pressing it close. Then she released it and took Andy’s hand. Dio took her other hand, and Camille joined them in a circle.

  “You start,” she told Bela. “It’s your hunt, and you know what you’re looking for. We’ll help you find it.”

  Bela’s heart beat so hard she couldn’t hear herself think, so she stopped trying and reached for her power instead. Down, into the earth, into what made sense, and what always waited to whisper its secrets to her. She touched it, found the energy, and opened herself to it completely.

  The earth roared into her and burst outward, showing her energy, showing her New York City and Central Park in ways she’d never seen them before. Heartbeats and breathing, heat and light—so much activity, everywhere! Traces of every type of life. She moved her awareness outward in all directions, until she came to Mrs. Knight’s brownstone.

  Yes. That was it. The new energy signature she had picked up through the walls, a muted gold, just a wisp of energy, brighter in some places, darker in others.

  Bengal.

  Fire energy laced into Bela’s earth power, and Bela formed an image of Duncan in her mind, as a man and as a tiger. For the first time, it didn’t shred her soul to think about him like that.

  Bengal.

  Duncan as a tiger, as a man, as both.

  Bela took her awareness back to their own brownstone and sorted through old and new energy traces until she found his. It was strongest in her bedroom, and when she touched it, she had no doubt it was Duncan’s energy.

  Air power added fuel to her senses, and she held both the Bengal trace and Duncan’s earth “scent” in her mind as she moved back to Central Park, to her quad.

  Sweet Goddess! There had to be a thousand golden filaments of energy, obvious to her now, crisscrossing every field and byway, many of them heading to or from Mrs. Knight’s brownstone.

  But of course there were.

  Mrs. Knight’s place functioned as a way station, a stop on an underground circuit that ferried Bengals into hiding.

  Bela moved through the park in various places, sampling the strands of energy one at a time, finding nothing that set any of them apart from the next one.

  Water energy spilled into her terrasentient power for the first time, and Bela almost let go of Andy’s hand to slow the influx of awareness. Her brain seemed to widen in her head, and for a few painful seconds Bela felt like she could track anything and everything on the face of the planet.

  Have to focus.

  I’m a mortar. I can do this. I can take in whatever my quad has to offer, and I can hold it all.

  She forced the image of a stone bowl into her mind, the bowl she had spent so many hours holding at Motherhouse Russia, when she learned to meditate.

  I’m the mortar. I can hold it. I’m the mortar.…

  At the park wall, very near the exit closest to their brownstone, Bela saw the thin golden strand she sought. The one that smelled like Duncan, and tasted like him, and smelled like him when she let her awareness sink through it.

  He’d been in the park. He’d been near her home, maybe looking at her even as she searched for him—and he’d been there many times.

  Bela’s heart flooded with emotions, too many to name, and too much to process while still keeping her focus, so she pushed it out of the bowl.

  I’m the mortar.

  She picked up the brightest strand, followed it across the earth, into the city—

  Somewhere around Broadway and Amsterdam, she ran into two giant glowing golden blobs of energy that could only be Nick and Creed Lowell.

  And with them—

  Bela’s eyes came open, and the power of all the elements charged through her, echoing in one word so loud even the trees in Central Park leaned away from her voice.

  “Duncan!”

  (40)

  “Strada’s been here.” Duncan sniffed at the alley wall, using his tiger nose and tiger senses, but keeping his human form. “It’s recent, but it’s weird.”

  “How so?” Creed examined the spot in his Curson form, so his own elemental instincts would be enhanced, then swapped back to his human form.

  “It’s the smell.” Duncan took another whiff. “We have good samples from the warehouse ruins of him and his two brothers. This is definitely Strada—but it’s also … not Strada.”

  Nick Lowell’s big Curson hand chipped off a piece of the brick into an evidence bag. “What else do you smell?”

  “Don’t know, but it’s familiar.” Duncan thought about the golden circle of power Camille Fitzgerald had created three months ago, to save his life. All that energy moving between his body, his mind, his dinar, Camille, and Strada—but just for a moment, Duncan had thought there had been a fourth person in that circle.

  John Cole.

  He’d had a face, a shape, an energy signature—and a scent. This scent.

  John?

  Duncan had assumed that John’s spirit had moved on, crossed over, or whatever ghosts did when they got set free—but then, after the golden circle, when Strada was standing there in the form of a human man, he’d said something he couldn’t have known to say. He’d come up with something that John Cole would have jabbed Duncan with at exactly that moment.

  Can’t hide, sinner.

  Duncan was about to ask Nick and Creed to let him take another whiff of the tracking sample Nick was carrying when he sensed her.

  Every muscle in his body tightened.

  Bela.

  She was coming like an earthquake, shaking the city behind her. She was coming like a woman who’d had her heart broken and intended to do a little breaking of her own. She was coming, mad enough to shatter stone, and the only thing he could feel was joy. Then grief. Then more joy.

  Bela.

  “We might have a problem,” he said to Nick and Creed, but they felt her before he finished his sentence.

  Nick shifted to full Curson and with complete demon resonance growled, “Fuck.”

  “We don’t want to get in the middle of this, Sharp.” Creed started his shift. “We won’t let her kill you, but—”

  “Don’t you touch her,” Duncan snarled. “If she wants to kill me, then I’m just a dead Bengal. All I want from you is a promise that you won’t let me hurt her.”

  “That won’t happen.” Creed took his demon form—and just in time.

  The alley walls rattled.

  Bits of brick and dust and mortar rained like gunfire on the fire escapes and dumpsters. A howling windstorm moved into the space, pitching Nick and Creed away from Duncan. A bomb blast of fire drove them toward the far alley wall, and a roaring, snarling tidal wave of puddle water and sewage splattered them against the bricks.

  Duncan saw her standing at the mouth of the alley, an angry goddess in leather, with three more standing behind her, ready for battle.

  Wound one, wound them all. It was always that way with women, and a hundred times more with Sibyls.

  God, she was incredible.

  Bela walked into the alley alone, her dark hair whipping in Dio’s remnant breeze. All she had to do was l
ook at Creed and Nick, and the big Cursons hulked off to a respectable distance, taking their sewer stink with them. One turned to guard the alley’s other entrance, and the other kept an inconspicuous eye on Duncan.

  “So beautiful,” he said out loud when she came to a stop in front of him and crossed her arms over her leather-clad chest. Close. Close enough to touch.

  Duncan fought to hold himself in human form as he stared at Bela. From the second he’d gained the barest control of himself, alone at the landfill where he’d hidden himself after he changed, he’d wanted to see her again, up close and in person. Just not yet. Not until he’d learned enough from Creed and Nick and had himself better managed.

  “I know what you are now.” Her dark eyes took him in, exploring him with no mercy at all. “I’m not afraid of you. I can take care of myself, Duncan.”

  “I’ve known that since I met you.” He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to kiss her until he couldn’t remember his own name.

  She touched a pendant at her neck, a crescent moon that looked like it was made out of copper. “Camille made me my own charm, like the dinar she’s wearing. It helps with terrasentience, and magnifies my other powers.”

  “I see that.” He glanced at the debris in the alley, and deduced that her whole quad had charms like that now. Look out, world.

  One corner of her mouth twitched. “Think you could take it off me?”

  “I wouldn’t try.”

  “Why, Duncan?” The question came out soft, and he knew she was asking why he’d kept himself hidden from her. “Why did you go to Creed and Nick instead of coming to me? I’ve stood by you since the moment I met you. I would have stood by you through every bit of this, too.”

  He closed his eyes, but there was no way to fend off the pain in her voice. He’d have done anything to soothe it, to make it go away. Anything short of injuring her in other ways. “Creed and Nick can teach me self-control. They know what it’s like to be dangerous to people they care about—so I knew they’d keep my secret, even from their wives, until I was absolutely safe.” He made himself look at Bela again, and withstand the wounded look on her face. “I can’t take chances with you. I’m still in love with you, Angel. I’d die if I hurt you.”

  Bela seized his T-shirt in both fists and drove him back against the alley wall as she kissed him, her lips soft and warm and wet. The pulsing heat of her body and the almond-woman-musk smell of her made him want to roar. He grabbed hold of her and didn’t want to let her go, ever.

  Her nails dug into the sides of his face as she broke the kiss and pressed her forehead to his. “I love you. I’m not whole without you, and my family’s not complete. Come home, Duncan. We’re all safer together than apart.”

  Duncan’s animal instincts tore through him, and before he could get a grip on himself, he spun her around, trapping her against the bricks. His kiss was too hard, too wild, but she took it, and she moaned, and she kissed him back, and when they finished, he had more fur than skin.

  He held up one clawed paw for her wide, dark eyes to see. “I need you to give me time,” he growled, trying to manage his voice, but nothing about Bela made him feel controlled. “I need you to believe that one day soon, I’ll show up at your door, ready to do everything I can to make this work.” He shoved his paw into the bricks beside her head and lowered his face to hers.

  She closed her eyes.

  “When I ask to come in, will you leave me out in the cold?”

  Her eyes came open, and her lips found his. She bit him, then shoved him away from her with some of that new earth force her charm had given her. If he hadn’t used his demon strength, he might have made a Duncan-sized hole in the alley wall.

  When she walked up to him and rested her palm against his chest, right where John’s coin used to be, what she said was, “I don’t know, Duncan. You’ll have to knock and find out.”

  Then she left without looking back, and that did break his heart.

  Snow fell in Central Park, turning the whole park silent and white.

  The brownstone glowed in the cold darkness, looking warmer than Duncan could imagine.

  Was that Bela, standing in the window?

  The thought of her made Duncan’s heart surge.

  God, he’d done this so often since he’d changed, stand here and wish for a glimpse of her. He had wanted to see her, hold her, touch her—he’d imagined every moment of it, over and over again. Hell, most nights he would have given up his still all-too-human soul just to hear her voice. Each time it had tortured him worse, but he’d made himself use that agony and go back to his training sessions with Creed and Nick, and with the other Bengals he’d met. He’d kept working until no amount of rage or pain or emotion could force him into his tiger form or make him lose control of the demon essence now mingled with his own.

  But tonight …

  Duncan shook his head. Closed his eyes. Tried to gather his nerve. Wondered where the hell it had gone, then found it again.

  When he stepped out of Central Park and started across Fifth Avenue, he thought maybe he’d misplaced his mind, too, because for a minute he felt like he was walking in the desert again.

  Or … out of it.

  After all these years, maybe he was finally leaving his desert behind.

  When Duncan climbed the steps to the brownstone, his chest felt so tight, he wasn’t sure he could breathe.

  In the window next door, the neighbor, Mrs. Knight, was watching him, but she just nodded and made a motion like, Hurry up already, idiot. It’s cold outside.

  Then she disappeared from view.

  “Yeah,” Duncan said to himself, wondering what the hell that was about before he went back to not breathing.

  It was just a door. All he had to do was knock. Just knock.

  And hope like hell she answered.

  Then hope like hell she didn’t shove him so hard he knocked down the wall in front of Central Park.

  Duncan straightened himself into a semblance of military posture, lifted his hand, and knocked.

  Before his knuckles could hit the wood a second time, the door opened, and she was there.

  Bela was standing right in front of him.

  Every animal part of Duncan screamed to break through his skin, but he held himself in check, and knew he could do it now. He knew he was ready.

  But Bela—

  She looked like a vision in her jeans and white sweater, with her dark hair spilling loose down her shoulders.

  Duncan wanted to ask her—

  Beg her—

  John Cole was long gone from his head, but Duncan knew he was the captive spirit now, completely at the mercy of this woman he’d love for the rest of what would likely be an unnaturally long life.

  He couldn’t speak at all.

  He had no words.

  “You should know that the strangest Sibyl fighting group in New York City lives here,” Bela said. “If you throw in with us, you may get way more trouble than you bargained for.”

  The vise around Duncan’s throat loosened enough to let in a little air. “That’s fine. I’m all about trouble. I can be trouble myself—so whatever you do, Angel, don’t let me in.”

  Bela’s smile started slow and small, but it spread to fill her whole face.

  Duncan felt that smile in his chest and his heart, in his mind and his soul, and the gentled tiger in his mind let out a roar of untamed joy.

  Then Bela stepped aside to let him in, and she was already kissing him before he could get the door closed.

  (acknowledgments)

  As always, my thanks go first to my readers. I hope you enjoyed Bela’s tale as much as I enjoyed writing it. Bela and her entire fighting group call to me in special ways, and I intend for their stories to rock their world—and yours.

  Thanks, Chey, for not letting my opening get off track, and for always thinking I can do it. Thanks to my family, for letting me vanish and get this written. And to the people I work with—now do you believe I’m not ju
st working there to research a book? I put it in the dedication and everything!

  To my editor, Kate Collins, thank you very much for being patient. I’ve never tried to write a book during a natural disaster before, and if you’d been irritable, I think my hair would have fallen out somewhere between the five-degree temps, endless carbon monoxide alarms, and the month with no power. Kelli, thank you for paying attention to all the tiny details and making sure everything gets where it’s supposed to go.

  And Nancy—you’re in Italy right now, so I hate you. No, seriously. More chocolate. More chocolate!

  Read on for an excerpt from

  CAPTIVE SOUL

  by Anna Windsor

  Whatever was following Camille, she didn’t think it was happy. Sibyls could sense states and traits, and fire Sibyls were particularly adept at judging emotional energy. The strange part was, she didn’t pick up much negative feeling from the thing. It seemed … intent. Almost overly focused on its mission—which appeared to be following her.

  Well, that’s nothing new in my life, is it?

  Camille had spent more hours than she cared to count sneaking through Motherhouse Ireland to dodge other adepts hunting for her, or hiding out in one of the castle’s hidden rooms to avoid angry Mothers who wanted to teach her a lesson. She could hold her own in any battle, but when everybody wanted to pick a fight at the same time, she had learned it was best to minimize opportunities.

  Not exactly what she was doing now, out alone in Central Park, almost daring something to give her grief.

  Camille walked faster, purposeful, not panicked. She wasn’t prey, so she didn’t intend to look like prey. She tugged the zipper on her battle leathers as high as it would go. The bodysuit was designed and treated to deflect elemental energy, but it didn’t shield her from a fresh round of shivers. She thought about pulling on the leather face mask she had stuffed in her pocket. Thought about it, but didn’t do it. The stupid thing made her feel like she was suffocating.

  Camille’s fingers flexed. The worn ivory hilt of her Indian shamshir felt cool as she brushed her palm against it, though these days she usually called the weapon by its Americanized name—scimitar—because she heard that so often from her quad. Her mother had given her the weapon before she died, and she had taught Camille how to take a head with a single strike. Scimitars had a curved edge made for hacking, and Camille liked the fact that nobody expected a small woman to draw such a long, deadly blade, much less swing it like the Grim Reaper.