Paranormal Magic (Shades of Prey Book 1)

by Margo Bond Collins

  An escort of soldiers and Gwyneth galloped into camp, bringing their mounts to a stiff-legged halt in front of his tent. The Captain of Umargo's guard dismounted and lifted his mistress from the saddle. Smiling as she sauntered forward with fluid grace, her long, dark hair shimmered beneath the low-burning campfires. She swept past him, her ebony eyes half-shuttered against his bold perusal.

  Umargo drew his gaze from her and turned to the Captain. "What news of Locke Cress?"

  "They make haste for battle, sire."

  "Roldan?"

  The Captain shook his head. "The coward remains in hiding, but were he to appear, what harm can such an old man inflict?"

  "Never." Umargo clenched his teeth. "Underestimate the man's power. He did not become King for paltry reasons."

  "Aye, sire." The Captain bowed at the waist. "Do ye have further need of my services?"

  He glanced over his minion’s shoulder. "Nay, and it would behoove ye to see I am not disturbed until the sun replaces the moon."

  With another bow for his master, he retreated.

  Umargo closed his eyes and drew a deep breath, more than ready to partake of Gwyneth's charms. Emitting a groan, he stepped into the tent.

  Small in stature with luscious teats and curves in all the places a man found comfort, Gwyneth stood at the far end of the abode. Her hands clasped and resting between her thighs, her saffron dress took on an incandescent sheen against the quavering torchlight. Contrary to the whisperings among his ranks, Gwyneth was anything but an ice queen.

  "Ye arrived undetected?" he asked, his voice hoarse with desire.

  "Aye, your faithful Captain saw to it."

  "What did ye tell the Light-Prince ye were about?"

  A frown creased her brow. "Balion's mind is elsewhere these days."

  "Immersed in battle stratagem?"

  "Aye and more pressing matters."

  Studying her, he sensed her displeasure. "Speak, what other matters?"

  "A girl consumes his thoughts."

  A humorless chuckle left his lips. "That should please ye, Gwyneth. If Balion's mind is elsewhere, he can not know what ye are about."

  "It is not his mind she has captured," she said, her voice pained. "But his heart."

  "What care ye? Ye only wish to wed the man, not bed him." His member grew hard as he walked toward her, aware of the slight tremors passing through her slender body. "Is that not so?"

  "Ye speak the truth, sire, but that is not the dilemma. From the moment the temptress arrived, he does not wish to speak of our marriage. I dare say his brain has taken flight, his every thought on the lass and the godforsaken talisman she carried with her." Her dark eyes turned sultry. "I did my best to recover it for ye, Umargo, and was about to send word of its re-emergence into our lives."

  "Ye need not fret about the medallion. Your brother left but moments ago. I have promised to adorn my broadsword with his head if he does not bring the talisman to me within two suns."

  A shiver straightened her spine. "Something is amiss. I sense a terrible foreboding and―"

  He cut off her words with his mouth. Before long, she was panting beneath him like a wild beast, her lips sweet, soft and yielding; all the things he was not. He crushed her to his chest and buried his hands in her long, silky hair before backing her into a mound of pillows on the floor. Her lips parted to allow him full exploration. His hands swept over her breasts before he fumbled with the tiny buttons of her dress. Patience, he reminded himself, he must show restraint. It wouldn't do to tear her garments. By the time she helped him remove her clothing, he had ceased to think. The throbbing in his cock was unbearable. His mouth sought her perfect nipples before he suckled her and felt the volcanic blood pound through his veins.

  Like a wild cat, she strained beneath him, sobbing out his name as he entered her hard and swift. Her muscles clenched around his swollen member and her hips gyrated with every savage thrust. Her long nails tore a path across his back, but mindless with lust and desire, he barely felt their sting. This is what he had returned for, the breathtaking goddess who loved him with all her heart and he, her. All thoughts of the medallion and the war looming on the horizon fled from his mind. Only Gwyneth existed, the Light-Prince's betrothed.

  Chapter 11

  Rhode Island, present day

  It rained bullets the morning Frank Kissel pulled onto the Interstate and headed for Wickford. As the tires of his Escalade swallowed miles of highway, he pictured Kira–her face held captive in the soft lines of a smile. His feelings for the girl were paternal, and shrouded in guilt. His daughters were about the same age, and he couldn't imagine losing either one. Throughout his forty years in the FBI, he'd spearheaded countless cases of missing children, most resolved unsatisfactorily. But most had been resolved.

  In the last month, he'd spent hours interviewing David Standish, aka The Scarlet Angel, redirecting him time and again to those final moments in the warehouse. The man admitted he'd killed the other four women, so surely he'd admit it if he had killed Kira. Arriving on the scene, hardest to reconcile was Standish himself. Bound with yards of twisted vine, the man babbled like an idiot, and the abandoned warehouse couldn't have looked worse if a cyclone had torn through with the speed of a freight train.

  Standish claimed someone came. He couldn't describe the person, swore he didn't see a face, and couldn't give a description. Flashes of lightning, booming claps of thunder, hurricane winds and flashes of brilliant light, is how he described the nom de plume's arrival. About to cut the girl's throat, his body flew across the room, and the next thing he knew, he spun around faster than a top and ended up hog-tied with grape root. When things settled down, Standish said he took in the room and looked for her body believing whatever attacked him had done her in too. Oh yeah, he said one more thing. "I've never seen anything like it, except in Lord of the Rings."

  While Frank waited for the traffic light on Main Street, he thought about the last time he saw Kira Barton. He should have known she would take to the streets to bring The Scarlet Angel to justice. In hindsight, he should have sensed she'd try some sort of crazy stunt. It was there in her face all along, more so, when she looked at the pictures of the dead girls. Kira's indigo eyes had glossed over with pain, and her slender body had stiffened. More than an aversion to slashed throats and crimson ribbons of blood, her sorrow ran deep, and he should have sensed it. Kira, damn it, wasn't the type to leave dirty laundry for someone else while she idled lazy hours away fingering documents and glossies.

  "Son of a bitch." He looked skyward and then parked the Escalade next to the curb in front of the mansion.

  Twin gargoyles greeted him as he walked the cobblestone path, and another smiled down at him when he lifted the gold knocker and rapped three times. Moments later, a woman opened the door, the female progenitor of Kira.

  "Good Morning," she said with a smile. "How can I help you?"

  "Morning." He extended his hand. "Frank Kissel, FBI. We've never met, but I knew your―"

  "I know who you are, Mr. Kissel." She extended a slender hand. "Please, come in." Leading him down a long hallway, she turned to him. "I'm Arabella, Kira's mother," and moments later, stepping under the archway leading to great room, "This is Nicholas, Kira's father."

  The man rose from a chair near the hearth to greet him. Tall and well muscled, the intense green eyes assessed him with the sight of a wild animal. His long, unruly hair fell below his shoulders, but the beard and moustache were trimmed—compliments of the woman's gentle hand Frank thought. An aura clung to the man, mysterious and migratory, as if he hailed from a far-off place.

  Nicholas stepped forward with his arm outstretched. "Your overcoat is wet." Taking it from him, he tossed it over the back of an overstuffed club chair. "Ye should sit in front of the hearth." He pointed to it.

  Arabella took a seat next to her husband before the fireplace, her hands folded in her lap, his resting on the arms of the chair.

  "Sheriff Broderick tells me
he called on you last week," Frank said.

  "Yes, he brought us a copy of the most recent report on The Scarlet Angel."

  "Good, very good. I hope you're comforted that we have him behind bars forever."

  Arabella closed her eyes.

  "And my daughter, do ye also have her whereabouts secured?" Nicholas asked in a voice anything but bland.

  "I wish I could tell you I've brought good news. But," he swallowed a sigh. "She's disappeared."

  The woman hid her distress well behind her stoic features, her husband not so well.

  "David Standish—The Scarlet Angel—has been interrogated for hours. He hasn't been of much assistance in finding your daughter, claims she was alive when all hell broke loose in that building."

  "What did Standish say, Mr. Kissel? The newspaper claims he managed to cut…." She stumbled on the last word. "Cut Kira before you arrived."

  "Yes, we found her DNA on a blood splatter. I hope you don't mind, but her assistant, Eva, was kind enough to turn over a cup Kira drank from that morning."

  "A double latté." Arabella glanced toward the driving sheets of rain outside.

  He nodded. "So we know it was her blood. Standish insists he didn't have time to finish her off before…."

  "Spit it out man!" Nicholas closed one eye. "What happened to my daughter?"

  Frank squirmed in the chair. What happened to their daughter remained a mystery. He'd been over Standish's account of those final minutes a thousand times and it always led back to the same crazy ending. "I wish I knew what happened to her. Somehow, she managed to extradite herself from beneath the man and ran off. Maybe she hit her head during the scuffle, became disoriented and got lost?"

  "Got lost, Mr. Kissel, as in amnesia?" Lavender eyes sparked. "She wandered away and can't find her way back?" Arabella rose from the chair and looked out the window as if she knew sunshine waited on the far horizon. "No," she whispered, "I don't believe that's what happened."

  Nicholas looked at his wife before returning his gaze to Frank. "What did this evil man say happened to Kira?"

  "Nonsensical gibberish, something one would expect from a maniacal killer."

  The man's eyes turned hard, setting Frank's already strained nerves on edge. "I wait for ye to tell me, man."

  "Okay. Standish said he had the knife at her throat and an eerie chant came to the room. Lightning flashed and thunder rolled." Frank shook his head. "Not your usual storm, but something sent by the hand of God. The wind roared with all the strength of a typhoon before the girl spit in his face."

  Pride shone in her father's eyes when his wife turned from the window to look at him. "What happened then, Mr. Kissel?" she asked.

  "He tried to finish her off, but his body flew through the air and he was pitched against a wall. After he regained consciousness, the girl was gone, as if she'd never been there at all, and he was trussed tighter than a turkey ready for the spit."

  "I see." Arabella lowered her chin. "Trussed up with what?"

  "This." Frank pulled the foliage from his pants' pocket.

  Nicholas took the vine from him and walked to the window to show it to his wife.

  "It appears to be a twisted branch of some sort." Arabella said.

  "It does. Do either of you recognize it?"

  Something peculiar passed between them as they studied it and then Arabella lifted her head. "I'm sorry, Mr. Kissel, I'm afraid we aren't familiar with the plant. Perhaps Standish brought it into that room."

  "No, Standish has never seen it before, but I took the initiative of having it analyzed at the University of Rhode Island, Science and Technology Division. They've never seen it before either, but they're all agog over it, sent it off to the Carnegie Institute of Science in Washington, D.C."

  Had the woman said under her breath, Good luck to them there?

  Frank hadn't told the Bartons about the call from Doctor Kincaid at Carnegie and wouldn't until the species had been verified. He knew only what Kincaid had told him. "Hard as it is to believe, much less imagine, we don't have a match. Period. Whatever tree family, it didn't come from this hemisphere, this continent or for that matter, this universe." The scientist's rambling explanation about the unknown history of the tree and possible reasons for its extinction fell miles beyond Frank's comprehension.

  The man who reminded him of Conan turned to him. "It still doesn't answer the question of what happened to Kira."

  "No, it doesn't. Look, I'm sorry about all of this and feel it's my fault. I asked Kira to get involved, take a closer look at everything. I had no idea she'd take it upon herself to find the man."

  "We knew it was a viable possibility, Mr. Kissel. In fact, before she disappeared, Kira came to us, said she'd visited Paula Decker's grave." Arabella's eyes misted over. "We begged her to let the FBI handle it."

  "I wish she had listened."

  "Kira has a heart bigger than Texas and determination enough to take on an army single-handedly." Arabella looked at the blank air over his shoulder. "Kira is very allegoric; precisely why we call her our little metaphoric minx. She is a visual being. Everything she sees is linked to something she's done or seen in her life."

  He could relate, being somewhat of a symbolism freak himself. Maybe it went with the profession—associating people or things to incidents or visuals from one's past. Still, he wanted to know what her mother meant and perhaps it would help solve her disappearance. "Give me an example."

  "All right." She placed a finger to the crease of her lips. "She would refer to Standish metaphorically; call him Michael Myers or Freddie Kruger."

  "Michael Myers? I'm sorry, that one slips by―"

  "Characters from horror movies. Everything in Kira's world is symbolic, that's how she processes things, and Nicholas and I miss that about her, miss her more than you can imagine."

  "I can imagine, and again, I take full responsibility for―"

  "Nay," her father interjected. "Her mother and I should have known this would happen."

  Frank stepped into the question delicately. "What do you think happened to Kira?"

  They exchanged glances again before the woman spoke. "You wouldn't understand even if we could explain."

  "Try me."

  "Nay," her father said. "We're not certain we understand at this point."

  The woman changed the subject. "Did you happen to find a necklace?"

  "A necklace? No, just her cell and her purse." Warning bells went off in his head. "About the necklace, Standish mentioned a medallion of some sort, said it looked like a large red brooch."

  Arabella's chest rose and fell on a subtle sigh. "What were his exact words?"

  "Verbatim? 'She clutched the brooch in her hand just before this supernatural shit came down.'"

  "Yet you say it wasn't anywhere to be found once you arrived?"

  Frank shook his head. "We searched that room with a magnifying glass." Several strained moments passed. "Did the necklace have sentimental value?"

  "Yes," Arabella said. "Kira's father gave it to her before she met up with The Scarlet Angel. We hoped it would protect her from harm."

  "Let's hope it did, Mrs. Barton. All right." He found his feet. "Here's my card. If you need anything at all, call me at this number."

  Arabella spoke. "Wickford is hosting a candlelight vigil for Kira, day after tomorrow. Will you attend, Mr. Kissel?"

  He plucked his coat from the chair. "I'll be there. If anything turns up before then, or you remember something, you can reach me 24/7 at that number."

  When Arabella showed him to the door, her hand lingered on his forearm and her eyes found his. "Thank you for coming. Our Kira is alive out there somewhere, Mr. Kissel."

  "I pray you're right, ma'am. She was a lovely young woman."

  "Is, Mr. Kissel, is."

  Frank started the engine and spent the entire drive back to Providence reliving his conversation with Kira's parents. They were hiding something, from him and from the rest of the world. It had to do wit
h the twisted branch, and they were confident she left that room alive.

  God, he hoped they were right.

  Chapter 12

  Locke Cress

  Kira passed more than a thousand trees draped in twisted vines and slithering black serpents. On a fool's mission, caught in a hopeless labyrinth of never-ending circles, twists and bends, despair found her. For hours, she'd been in the forest, running in circles, trudging through sweltering swamps and breath-sucking tropical forests. She dropped onto a stump, buried her head in her hands, and wept.

  At every pause, she'd held the medallion in her hands, closed her eyes, and repeated the chant. "Full moon, winter's night; hear my call, see my plight. Come daughter of hope, savior of grief, come with me to a place of peace." She waited, and when nothing happened, wailed. The air around her wove a thread of malevolence through her befuddled brain. She knew with certainty if she didn't find the spot where she'd landed soon, she'd no longer need air.

  Courage and determination had knocked on her door that morning, and then led her to the medallion in Balion's bedchamber. Tired of playing the pawn in their silly war games, and weary of attending a one person pity-party, she lifted the talisman from the table and reminded herself she'd almost died in this strange land three times. If she hoped to see her parents again, the time had come to take matters into her own hands. She was a psychological profiler, for God's sake, an intelligent, educated woman who could outsmart a bevy of medieval characters from a distant, albeit very distant, past. Out of temper, not to mention options, reality smacked her in the face harder than the rain that had suddenly materialized. Hopeless, her situation loomed hopeless.