With the last of her strength, Daphanie gathered her will, gathered her breath, and screamed.
Twenty-five
For there is no greater magic in all the world than that of love.
—A Human Handbook to the Others, Frontspiece
Asher crouched on a thick branch high in the canopy of the elm tree and watched the scene unfolding below him with fear, impatience, and barely suppressed rage.
He growled low in this throat when he saw Sosa bend the object in his right hand and heard Daphanie cry out in shock and pain, crashing to her knees at his feet. He wanted to launch himself straight onto the man’s back and break his neck with a quick brutal twist. That wasn’t the plan, though, and Asher knew that their best chance for retrieving Daphanie alive and unhurt rested with the plan.
Still, his resolve nearly deserted him when the bokor grabbed Daphanie by her long, high ponytail and dragged her across the small churchyard with brutal disregard. Hell, reason nearly deserted him. All he could think of was rage and revenge. He half rose from his crouch, his intention to swoop down, grab Daphanie, and fly away before Sosa even realized what had hit him. Only a supreme exercise of will stopped him.
He had been through this with the others. Of course, his first instinct had always been to fly directly to Daphanie’s rescue. What good did it do a man to have wings, after all, if he couldn’t use them to save the woman he loved? As Rafe had pointed out, though, removing Daphanie bodily from Sosa’s grasp wouldn’t save her from him; not while he still possessed whatever charm he had bound to her energy. Asher needed both Daphanie and what he now suspected was the voodoo doll the bokor had concealed in his trouser pocket.
Asher waited anxiously for Rafe to pick his way along the yard’s back wall to the sacristy door. The Felix used the shadows cast by the structure to his advantage, and the growth of moss and ivy in patches along the brick surface contributed to the camouflage of his roseate-spotted coat.
While Asher kept one eye on the man’s progress, most of his attention remained fixed on Daphanie, ready to leap forward on a moment’s notice, plan be damned. If he saw an imminent danger to his woman, he would act, and to hell with the consequences.
Fate allied itself with the good guys.
Everything came to a head in a single instant. After several tense minutes of scattering ash over the exposed dirt and shouting foreign words over the frantic beat of the drums, Sosa threw back his head and Asher could feel the change in the air. The ground seemed to tremble, the vibrations racing up the trunk of the mighty elm. Daphanie screamed, loud and shrill. And Asher’s powerfully acute hearing picked up the soft scratch of feline claws on the antique wood of a darkened door.
Showtime.
Before Rafe even had his paw back on the ground, Asher gave a deafening roar and beat his wings with one powerful motion. The action lifted him from his concealed spot, sending secondary and tertiary branches cracking and tumbling to the earth.
He dove into the yard at a breathtaking speed, letting his wings sweep him toward his target. A powerful backward beat halted him just before impact, allowing him to land on his feet before a startled bokor .
With one hand, he chopped the back of Sosa’s wrist, deadening the nerves and loosening the man’s grip on Daphanie’s hair. With the other, he grabbed her around the waist and pulled her aside, shoving her away from Sosa and his minions.
He need not have worried about the hounsi . By the time Asher landed, the Lupines had burst through the church’s rear door and fallen on the drummers and dancers like a pack of wolves. Which, at that moment, was exactly what they happened to be. Only Graham had remained in his human form, shouting orders as his packmates overwhelmed Sosa’s men and pinned them to the grass.
Asher didn’t even spare them a glance. All his attention was focused on Sosa and the fear and pain he had inflicted on Asher’s woman.
“Asher,” Daphanie shouted, pointing to the bokor. “The doll! He stole my hair!”
So that was what had sealed the spell; not the scrap of Daphanie’s top, stolen that first night at Lurk, but strands of her hair probably gathered during the break-in at the Callahans’ apartment. Not that the when and how mattered to Asher at this point. What mattered was confiscating the doll and watching Sosa die under his hands.
The priest turned out to be a smarter man than Asher would have guessed. Instead of instigating a physical fight he couldn’t hope to win, Sosa pulled the voodoo doll from his pocket and placed his thumb over its mouth, cutting off Daphanie’s urgent words.
“I can kill her, you know,” the man snarled, his teeth bared and his eyes wild. “Just squeezing her like this is all it took to hold her paralyzed. I can stop her heart with my finger or break her neck with a flick of my thumb. But I don’t want to do that. Maman Manon will not like it if I damage her new body before she even gets a chance to ride it.”
The ground continued to tremble, a low quaking of the earth, and Sosa swayed from side to side, clearly unbalanced physically as well as mentally. Asher eyed the doll in his hand warily. What would happen if he dropped it? Would Daphanie’s body be slammed to the earth as if from a great height? Would the impact snap her bones? Snap her neck?
Asher couldn’t risk it. He searched his mind frantically for another way and glimpsed Rafe out of the corner of his eye slinking slowly around the perimeter of the light cast by the roaring bonfire. The Felix was slowly placing himself in a flanking position behind Sosa, pinning the man between himself and Asher. To the left, Daphanie stood frozen in the firelight, once again paralyzed by the bokor’ s grip.
Silently, Asher urged the Felix to hurry.
“I wonder, though, if Manon would really mind so much. After two hundred years in the grave, she will likely be glad to feel anything, even if that includes a little pain.” Sosa gave a maniacal giggle. “Shall we see?”
He jerked the doll’s right arm behind its back, and Daphanie screamed. Asher’s glance flew to her, and he could see by the way her limb now hung at an unnatural angle that the priest’s little game had dislocated the shoulder. Her face had gone the color of kindergarten paste and a cold sweat beaded along her brow. She breathed in soft, agonized whimpers, and Asher felt hatred like he’d never known.
“Touch her again, and I will rip your heart from your chest and make you taste it,” he promised, his voice low and tight and murderous.
“But I didn’t touch her,” Sosa giggled. “She’s all the way over there, see?” He pointed to her and grinned. “I never touched Daphanie. Only ’tite Daph’nie, non ?”
He reached for the doll’s left leg, and Rafe sprang.
Asher moved almost simultaneously, and the two men—one Guardian, one jaguar—caught the bokor between them in a living vise.
Sosa screamed.
Rafe the cat clamped his powerful jaws around the man’s left arm and dragged him to the ground, glowing, golden eyes fixed on the doll in his hand.
Asher pinned the man’s legs beneath his own body and wrapped his hands around Sosa’s throat the way he’d fantasized about doing a thousand times. Without his meaning them to, his fingers began to tighten, choking off the man’s windpipe.
The priest fought fiercely, using his right hand to claw at Asher’s compressing fingers. His eyes widened and began to bulge as Asher continued to press, and he renewed his desperate struggles to free himself, twisting and thrashing against the fingers pressing on his throat and the jaws clamped around his arm. The harder he struggled, the deeper Rafe sank in his teeth, until blood began to flow into the dirt.
The trembling of the earth intensified.
“Asher, no!” Daphanie shouted, her voice barely audible over the fury and hate roaring in his ears. “You’re giving Manon what she wants! You’re making Sosa her sacrifice!”
He heard the words, but the meaning hardly registered. Nothing mattered but taking revenge on the man who had hurt his woman.
Dimly, he was aware of Rafe releasing the priest’s arm
and snarling at him, but he was too far gone to care. The Felix grabbed him by the ankle and tried to pull him off Sosa, but he struck out blindly with one leg, kicking as hard as he could and knocking the big cat halfway across the yard.
As if from a great distance, he heard Daphanie shouting his name and begging him to stop. He saw her turn and stumble toward the obelisk that marked Manon’s grave. The earth heaved and knocked her down, but she dragged herself right back up again, cradling her injured arm to her belly.
He felt Sosa’s struggles begin to weaken, and a thick, oily, black fog began to creep into his mind, obscuring his consciousness. He watched impassively as Daphanie dragged her feet across the ground, obliterating the vévé the bokor had drawn there, but a gleeful, unfamiliar voice in his head whispered that it was too late, that the girl was pretty, but Asher was strong and he would do just fine for a new chance at life …
Daphanie screamed again and ran toward him, but the earth buckled beneath her and drove her to her belly in the dirt.
“Asher! No!”
Using her one good hand to brace herself, Daphanie levered herself to her knees and began to crawl.
Sosa was almost still now, and Asher’s awareness was shrinking until all that remained was a tiny pinprick of light through which Daphanie’s face was barely visible.
She reached out to him, sobbing in pain and fear, and the voice in his head told him to ignore her, but her hand brushed his cheek and she whispered, “Don’t,” and the pinprick of light got a little bigger.
“Asher, don’t,” she begged, her palm cupping his face. “I love you. Please don’t.”
And suddenly, the earth went still.
Light flashed in Asher’s mind. The fog disappeared and took the strange voice with it. His fingers flexed and fell away from Sosa’s throat. The bokor drew in a desperate, choking gulp of air, and Asher focused on his woman’s tearstained face.
He reached out and brushed away the moisture with fingers that trembled. “I love you, too.”
Daphanie smiled, her mouth curving and her whole face lighting up in an expression of such pure joy that his heart could barely contain the pleasure of it.
She grabbed his hand and brought it to her lips, kissing the fingers that had very nearly taken a man’s life. For her.
“I love you,” he repeated, his voice stronger, more certain.
Daphanie laughed. “And that,” she told him with quiet certainty, “is magic.”
Epilogue
And they all lived happily ever after.
—This Book, Right Here, Right Now
Daphanie set the last book back on the shelf beside the entertainment center and grinned with weary satisfaction. It was done. Finally, the apartment was put back together and ready for Danice and Mac’s return.
“Not a moment too soon.” Asher’s arms closed around her waist and gathered her to him, careful of her still-sore shoulder. She leaned back against his chest and savored the magic of his presence. “Their flight should be landing any minute. A few minutes in a cab, and they’ll be walking through that door.”
“Good,” she sighed. “I can’t wait to see Niecie again. Three weeks might have seemed like a tiny little interlude to her, but it felt like forever to me.”
“That’s probably because she was on her honeymoon and you weren’t,” Asher pointed out.
“Oh, right. She was soaking up the sun on a tropical beach—and breaking up the monotony of it with hot bouts of newlywed sex—while I was being possessed by the spirit of an evil voodoo queen. I have no reason to be jealous, and absolutely no reason to resent the fact that she wasn’t here to help me out through the most difficult nine days of my life.”
He raised an eyebrow at that and she smiled sheepishly.
“All right, that last bit might have been a little irrational, but I can’t help it. When you think about it, she’s the reason I got into that whole mess to begin with. If it hadn’t been for her and her wedding, I wouldn’t have moved back to New York, learned about the Others, and met that obnoxious imp who deserted me after placing me in the path of the man who turned out to be a psycho black magic voodoo priest.”
“Tru-ue,” Asher acknowledged, “but without all those things you also wouldn’t have met me.”
“I know.” Daphanie grinned. “That’s why I haven’t asked you to hunt down the imp and strangle him for me, because without him, I wouldn’t have been at Lurk that night. It’s also why I cleaned up Niecie’s apartment instead of letting her find it like it was. Because she led me to Quigley and Quigley led me to you. I don’t know whether to hit her or hug her.”
“Wow, you’ve got a mean streak.”
“A potential mean streak,” she corrected. “After all, I didn’t use it just now, and I almost never do.”
“Hm, then maybe I shouldn’t leave that extra wedding present I got for your sister in the guest room. After all, we wouldn’t want her to think we were being mean…”
Daphanie pulled back and eyed him curiously. “What extra present? You didn’t tell me anything about an extra present.”
Asher just gestured to the door down the hall.
Daphanie looked at him suspiciously for a moment before turning and hurrying down the hall. He followed, grinning.
When she opened the guest room door and gasped, he was standing behind her looking quite pleased with himself.
“What do you think?” he asked.
Daphanie burst out laughing and had to slap her hand over her own mouth to muffle the sound. After all, she didn’t want to wake Niecie’s “present.”
The guest bed was the only piece of furniture still visible among the stack of boxes and bags piled up around the spare room. Daphanie herself had made it up last night, smoothing the pale blue coverlet into place and plumping the pillows to downy perfection. And that was how she had left it, empty and pristine. Asher had laid his present right in the middle.
Passed out and snoring, a bright silver bow pinned to his chest, Quigley the imp lay amid the wreckage of a sixpack of empty root beer cans.
“I think it’s perfect,” Daphanie whispered, stepping back out into the hall and closing the door firmly behind her. “Now let’s get the hell out of here before she comes home and finds it.”
“Do you think she’ll like it?” he asked as he locked the apartment door behind them and led her to the elevator.
“I think she deserves it, and that’s even better.”
Asher gathered her to him once more and leaned down for a kiss. “I don’t think I deserved to meet you,” he murmured, his lips curving in a tender smile, “but I’m going to try deserve you in the future.”
“It doesn’t matter if you deserved me or if I deserved you,” Daphanie told him. “We had to find each other.”
“We did?”
She nodded firmly and rested her head against his chest, knowing she would be content in his arms for the rest of her life.
“We absolutely did. It was fate.”
St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles By
Christine Warren
Prince Charming Doesn’t Live Here
Born to Be Wild
Big Bad Wolf
You’re So Vein
One Bite with a Stranger
Walk on the Wild Side
Howl at the Moon
The Demon You Know
She’s No Faerie Princess
Wolf at the Door
Anthologies
The Huntress
No Rest for the Witches
Praise for New York Times bestselling author
Christine Warren
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