by Wood, Vivian
Tee-Elle was well-connected in The Gray Market since she sometimes rented a stall there to sell her pastries and some special gris-gris when she came upon the right ingredients. Though Tee-Elle had never studied enough to become a Voodoo priestess in her own right, she was very powerful and deeply connected to her beliefs and the spiritual community.
“Ain’t nobody gon’ mess with my girl,” Tee-Elle assured Echo, patting her hand. “Go on in the parlor and watch you some Jeopardy like you like, baby. Let me make some calls.”
“Thanks, Tee,” Echo said.
She grabbed one more praline and her glass of milk and left her aunt to it. In ten minutes’ time, Echo was stretched out on Tee-Elle’s faded blue sofa, her eyelids growing heavy as a post-praline nap beckoned. She might have fallen asleep for a few minutes, but when Echo awoke Jeopardy was still playing. She stirred and yawned, wondering why she’d woken up. She was still dog-tired, nowhere near refreshed enough to want to get up.
She heard a sound, a very soft scratch. Frowning, Echo sat up and tried to shake off a little of her stupor. She heard it again, sort of like a tree branch brushing the aluminum front door. Only the front door was open, the metal mesh screen door keeping the bugs out. That, and the fact that there were no trees in Tee-Elle’s front yard.
Echo’s pulse picked up as she got up and walked over to the screen door. A dark figure loomed in the doorway, making her jump and gasp, her hand flying to her chest. In the next moment, the figure turned to face her, and Echo released a great gust of breath.
“Antoine! You scared the daylights out of me!” Echo scolded her cousin. Tall, light-skinned, and handsome, Antoine was a perfect representation of every man in Tee-Elle’s family. Tee-Elle’s nephew twice removed, Antoine wasn’t usually around her house much, but Echo was glad to see him.
He stood on the porch and stared at her for a long moment, and Echo started to wonder if Antoine had started smoking a bunch of weed again. His usual broad smile and easy manner were gone, replaced by something Echo didn’t much like.
“Are you going to come in or not?” Echo asked, giving him a skeptical glance.
“Come in,” he repeated back to her. “Yeah, yeah.”
He wrenched the screen door open and shuffled inside with a limping gait, the motion so unfamiliar that Echo took a couple of steps back. Had something happened to Antoine since the last time she’d seen him, some kind of terrible accident? He was obviously totally out of sorts.
“Antoine, are you okay?” she asked, her heart beginning to really pound now.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. His chocolatey brown eyes were fever-bright as he moved closer, and Echo started to sense that something was truly wrong.
“Tee-Elle?” Echo called over her shoulder. “Tee, can you come here?”
Antoine froze, his expression warping to one of cartoonish fury.
“No Tee-Elle,” Antoine hissed, his words disjointed and odd-sounding. “You be sorry, witch.”
“What the hell, Antoine?” Echo said, growing more frightened with each passing second.
Antoine turned and pushed the screen door open again. His mouth opened in a silent scream, but no sound came out. Instead, a dark red stream of mist flowed from his mouth, snaking out and dispersing into the air. Echo gasped as she watched the red mist activate the warding spells on the house, tracing the intricate lines of each hex and charm. The red mist burned up the spells, creating bright sparks and smoke as it destroyed all of Tee-Elle’s handiwork.
“Oh shit,” Echo said, turning and running for the kitchen. “Tee-Elle!”
When she got into the kitchen, she was too late. A familiar-looking man in a suit was dragging Tee-Elle’s unconscious body out the back door. Echo screamed, realizing that she had brought her attackers down on her own family. She ran after Tee-Elle, hoping she hadn’t just signed all their death warrants.
7
Chapter Seven
Rhys
“There. That’s it,” Gabriel said, pointing at a tiny blue house down the block.
Rhys had already locked in on the house, a simple task since there were about ten dark-suited guys battling several local witches and sorcerers on the front lawn and porch.
“Got it,” Rhys said, trying to ignore the fear pooling in his belly. Rhys was not accustomed to feeling outright fear, and the taste of it on his tongue was bitter as bile. “Looks like we’re late to the party.”
Gabriel looked up from the scrying mirror and blinked, trying to let his eyes focus on the present. Rhys left him in the dust to recover, Aeric only a step behind as he dashed toward the chaotic fight.
“I don’t see her,” Rhys muttered to Aeric, knowing that the other Guardian’s sharp hearing would pick up Rhys’s quiet words.
“Here she comes,” Aeric said, jerking his head toward the front door of the house.
Echo flew out of the house, only to be caught by a wickedly handsome blond stranger. The man caught her by the arm and pulled her close. Echo’s frightened yelp made Rhys feel like he’d been kicked in the stomach.
As he got closer, Rhys’s pulse throttled for an entirely different reason. The man holding onto Echo was indeed inhumanly attractive, and he had a faint pink tint to his skin.
“Shit, he’s an incubus,” Rhys said.
Rhys and Aeric both clashed with suited henchmen in the front yard, and Rhys fought distractedly as he kept an eye on Echo. The Guardians always tried to avoid fatalities wherever possible, but if Echo was hurt in any way Rhys wouldn’t hesitate to dispatch any number of idiots to get to her.
Rhys knocked one assailant out and engaged another, wincing as the incubus drew Echo in and gave her a long, deep kiss. Rhys’s blood began to boil, and he took out two bad guys in his struggle to get to the porch. The closer he got to his mate, the larger the number of attackers that seemed to materialize out of thin air, jumping out of bolt-holes to keep Rhys and Aeric at bay. Out of the corner of his eye, Rhys saw Gabriel join in the fray.
Up on the porch, Echo’s body went languid as the incubus’s seductive charm took her over. The incubus began to glow, his skin getting more and more pink as he drank from Echo’s energy stores. The kiss grew more intense by the moment, and Rhys felt his bear clawing to the surface.
The shift began without any intention on Rhys’s part, mostly due to being too distracted to control it. Moments later he was a seven-foot-tall grizzly, waving his paws around to bat away the couple of bad guys stupid enough not to run the second they saw him.
As Rhys swatted away one last attacker, he saw that things had changed on the porch. Echo had gone totally rigid, and she seemed to have turned the tables on the incubus, somehow drawing energy out of him. Rhys had never seen the like, especially when Echo broke away from the man altogether and threw her hand out, banishing the incubus with a blinding flash of light and smoke.
Dropping to all fours, Rhys started to move toward her, then stumbled. Pain lanced his side, and he looked back to see that one of Pere Mal’s guys had struck him with a dagger. The guy’s arm moved, his intent to stab Rhys again. Rhys let out an enraged roar and swiped the dagger from the attacker’s hand, clawing the guy and then knocking him unconscious for good measure. After a moment, Rhys blinked, feeling dizzy. His back legs went out under him, and he seemed unable to regain them.
“Rhys?”
Rhys rolled his massive head around to find Echo standing only a couple of feet away, her eyes fixed on his wound. He let out a grunt, though he wasn’t sure precisely what he was trying to tell her.
“That’s you, isn’t it?” Echo asked him.
Rhys bobbed his head. Echo shocked him by stepped right up to him and putting a hand on his shoulder, attempting to comfort him. Either their bond was very strong, or Echo was brave bordering on insane.
“You’re hurt,” she said, crouching down to look at his flank.
“Shit,” Gabriel said, joining Echo. “I tapped myself out scrying. I can’t heal him yet. We need to get him back
to the house.”
Rhys looked around the yard, surprised to see that it was now empty of villains.
“We can’t move him,” Aeric said, jogging over. “We have to bind it first.”
“Guys…” Echo said.
“We have to move him now, before more of Pere Mal’s guys come,” Gabriel argued.
“No. It might kill him,” Aeric groused.
“Guys…” Echo said.
Aeric and Gabriel kept arguing, but Echo turned away from them and spread her hands out above Rhys’s wound.
“I’m sorry about this,” she whispered, looking Rhys in the eye. “It might hurt.”
Rhys just bobbed his head again. He trusted her implicitly, another first for him. He wasn’t worried about the mating bond’s effects just now, he could obsess over that part later.
Echo bit her lip and closed her eyes, concentrating. A soft white glow emitted from her outspread hands, growing brighter and brighter until it touched his fur. The second the light reached his skin, Rhys released a startled bellow of pain. The light felt like a thousand shards of glass digging into his flesh, pushing and pulling it at once, slicing bone-deep all the while.
Through the pain, a second sensation emerged. Though the feeling of his flesh rejoining and knitting was foremost, he could also feel a secondary presence within him, similar to the way he’d felt when he was first joined with his bear.
Rhys turned the feeling over in his mind, probing and examining it for a long moment before he realized that the sensation was Echo herself; in healing him, she had somehow joined with him on a disturbingly deep and subtle level. Even with his eyes closed, he could sense her every movement. When he explored her presence with his mind, he got a few quick flashes of Echo in other settings: Echo as a teenager, hugging a petite dark-skinned witch, her heart bursting with familial love; a very young version of Echo, no more than a schoolgirl, laying flowers on a tomb, staring up at the grave’s guardian angel statue with tear-bright lilac eyes; Echo only hours before, heart thrumming in her chest as she saw Rhys for the first time, a strange force pulling her toward him.
The light from Echo’s hands flared, and Rhys was too distracted to hold in a yelp of pain as her healing energies focused on the worst part of his wound. The more profound inner connection with her was broken, and Rhys wondered if she had even noticed his prying.
Echo faltered and shot him an apologetic look, then started again. Rhys groaned but kept most of his pain to himself, afraid that Gabriel or Aeric would interfere. They couldn’t know that Echo had suddenly become the center of his universe, that he instantly trusted her more than he did them, despite only knowing her for a matter of hours.
To be fair, it was nonsense. But it was nonsense that he couldn’t and wouldn’t sort out now, not when Echo was doing something to him that was mind-shatteringly painful.
He concentrated on keeping himself still and quiet, and in another minute Echo was finished.
Rhys tried to move a little, grimacing at the intense pain that remained, but he could tell that he was mostly healed. He turned his mind inward and forced himself to shift back, focusing on making sure that his human form was intact, complete with clothing and weaponry. A distracted shift often resulted in someone ending up bare-assed and ashamed, and Rhys wasn’t in the mood for that just now. He was too damned worn out.
Gabriel came up to check on Echo, helping her to her feet as Aeric helped Rhys up.
“There she is!”
All heads whipped toward the street, where five more black-suited goons sprinted toward them. Aeric and Gabriel started to push Rhys and Echo back, but Echo growled and pushed Gabriel away.
“No! No more!” Echo said, tossing back her blonde mane. Her hands shot out and her head snapped back as she released an enormous wave of power. Orange this time, instead of the white healing power she’d used on Rhys.
Each of the approaching men staggered and dropped to the ground, still as stones.
“What in the—” Rhys began, but he was cut off when Echo’s eyes rolled up in her head. She simply collapsed, like a marionette whose strings had been cut, every inch of her body going limp and lifeless. Rhys actually had to throw himself in her direction just to keep her head from hitting the ground, landing with her in an awkward heap.
Rhys looked up at Gabriel and Aeric, who were staring at all the bodies on the ground. A battered red Toyota turned onto the block, stopping at the sight of five unconscious bodies. True to New Orleans form, the car just backed up and drove off without a word.
Aeric and Gabriel looked at each other and sighed, then began pulling bodies from the street to the yard across from where Rhys and Echo lay. After they’d tidied that up, Aeric came back to stand over Rhys.
“I’m going to clear the house, make sure there are no injuries or casualties,” Gabriel said, heading toward the bungalow.
“I’m going to have to help you with your woman,” Aeric told him, the other Guardian’s gaze warning Rhys not to fight it.
Rhys gave an assenting nod and Aeric scooped Echo up, throwing her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She didn’t so much as twitch, which spurred Rhys’s fear to new levels.
“Careful with her,” he growled at Aeric, who only stared back at Rhys with a blank expression and hitched Echo higher on his shoulder.
“Alright,” Gabriel said, returning. “The house is empty. There are photos of your girl on the refrigerator, though, Rhys. She must have run straight here.”
Rhys nodded, wondering why the house was so empty. If Echo had been visiting a friend or a family member, where was the homeowner now?
Gabriel pulled up the SUV and helped Rhys to his feet. Rhys got in first and accepted Echo’s unconscious form from Aeric, cradling her on his lap as they returned to the Manor once more. Every fiber of his being thrilled at the chance to touch her, though he was also concerned about her state.
He checked her pulse on the drive back and found it normal. From that, Rhys determined that she’d likely just given herself a nasty case of magic burnout, which happened when a witch wielded and expended very large amounts of energy from their inner wellspring. Magical energy was usually derived from a natural source of power, perhaps a mystical object such as the power stone buried in the Manor’s back yard. It could also be gained by harnessing the energy from certain natural phenomenon like large waterfalls, or from darker sources like ritual sacrifice. The offering of one’s lifeblood, or much worse. Echo must have used a long-stored buildup of energy from within, completely tapping herself out, because she didn’t move a muscle all the way back to the Manor. Gabriel offered to help Rhys carry Echo upstairs, but Rhys declined. He’d only just found her, and he’d already managed to nearly lose her once. Rhys needed to touch her, needed to keep her by her side, and he didn’t want to share that privilege with anyone else.
Not tonight, and if he could help it, not ever.
Echo finally stirred as Rhys pulled off her shoes and tucked her into his bed. She opened her eyes the faintest bit and squinted at Rhys.
“You’re… good…” she slurred. “Not hurt…”
Rhys sat on the bed next to her with a sigh, tucking a long blonde tendril of hair behind her ear. His bear was fighting to surface, wanting to touch her, taste her. Claim her.
His bear was an asshole who didn’t understand context, and he’d be unsatisfied tonight.
“I’m not hurt, thanks to you,” Rhys said as he peered down at Echo.
“Good.”
Her eyes started to drift closed, and Rhys thought she would sleep again. She surprised him by struggling to push herself up a little bit, her eyes opening wider.
“Tee-Elle,” she said, her voice growing thick with concern. “Where’s Tee-Elle?”
Rhys paused, unsure how to answer.
“I don’t know who that is, lass.”
“We were at her house,” Echo said. Rhys could tell what an effort it was for her to speak clearly, and he pressed her back into
the pillows with a gentle touch.
“Just relax. Is that your friend?” he asked.
“My aunt,” Echo said, her words coming out as a whimper. Her lower lip trembled, those big amethyst eyes filling with tears.
“Okay. It’s okay. I’m going to get Gabriel and Aeric, and they’ll find your aunt. Don’t worry, lass.”
Echo studied him for a long moment, then gave a nod of agreement. Some part of Rhys was pleased that she trusted him with this, to care for things when she could not. He brushed a thumb over her cheek and withdrew before he could seek more of her warmth and softness.
After he alerted Aeric to the situation, Rhys shucked his boots and tactical pants, climbing into bed beside Echo. He couldn’t resist pulling her close and inhaling her sweet, bright scent as his eyes grew too heavy to stay open.
Rhys drifted off, his sleep deep and dark and dreamless.
8
Chapter Eight
Echo
Wake up, darling…
Wake up…
Wake up, Echo, darling…
Echo floated up into consciousness from a lovely dream. A dream in which she’d wildly kissed a tall, dark, and handsome stranger, someone who made her whole being tingle with pleasure and excitement. A dream that she was not very happy to end, thank you very much.
She frowned, not quite ready to open her eyes and deal with the world. Where did Rhys get off waking her up after she’d expended herself protecting him?
Also, where did he get off calling her darling?
When Echo finally peeled her eyes open, she found the room dark. It took her several seconds to identify her location as Rhys’s bedroom, and Echo nearly swallowed her tongue when she turned her head to find Rhys sprawled out beside her. She couldn’t help but lift the heavy comforter and peek underneath; when she found that he still wore a t-shirt and boxer briefs, she wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.