Spell Bound (Darkly Enchanted)

by Stephanie Julian

  Leo walked over and held out one little hand to shake. Instead, Gabriel picked him up so they were eye to eye. “Listen to Matt, okay? He’s a good trainer.”

  “We could come with you, Gabriel,” Leo whispered. “We could help.”

  The pain in his chest tripled. “I know you could, bud. But I couldn’t concentrate with you and Shea around. I’d worry about you too much. This way, I won’t worry.”

  Tears popped into the boy’s eyes. “Will we see you again?”

  Gabriel nodded, every movement an agony. “Count on it. And the next time I see you, I’ll expect you to have mastered those knives.”

  Leo’s tears never fell. He blinked them away as Gabriel set him on the ground. Fuck. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t supposed to go down like this.

  He turned to find Shea staring at him through dry eyes. She was royally pissed, whether at him or Matt or life in general, he wasn’t sure.

  Grabbing her hand, he drew her to a corner of the room, far enough so the others couldn’t hear. “I’ll come for you and Leo. As soon as I’m done here. We’re not finished, you and I.”

  That made her smile for a brief second but something flashed through her eyes. Something that scared the shit out of him. “Be careful, Gabriel. I need— You need to stay safe.”

  She leaned up, pressed her lips against his cheek. Then she walked to Leo, took his hand and let Matt lead them away.

  * * *

  Serena was gone.

  Mentally, Gabriel kicked himself backwards, sideways, up and down as he stood in the garage staring at the empty space where the Jeep had been. He should have known she’d do this, should have seen it coming.

  But he’d been so fucking furious at Serena and so damn heartsick at sending away Shea and Leo. He should have realized she’d been planning something like this.

  “Jesus, Gabe, where the hell do you think she went?” Digger shook his head. “Why the hell didn’t she wait for you?”

  That second question he could answer. The first… He didn’t have a clue where she was headed.

  But he bet she knew exactly where to find Dario. Had probably been in contact with the bastard when Gabriel had been stupid enough to leave her alone in the garage.

  Gods-be-damned. She was going to give herself up to Dario for Quinn, and Quinn would do something so fucking stupid to try to save her that he’d get himself killed.

  Crushing weight dropped on his chest like a solid block of iron, the one metal grigori could not manipulate.

  He had to find them all and he had to be prepared to kill Dario when he did.

  * * *

  Matt had an old Chrysler with a front seat the size of a church pew.

  Shea and Leo sat in the front with Matt…because he had an arsenal in the back. A rifle, two handguns, a few boxes of ammunition, two sets of wrist sheathes and throwing knives, and a few miscellaneous blades. A custom-made carrier held it all steady on the backseat.

  She studied their new grigorio, their uncle, in silence as Matt drove with an intensity only madmen have, though his handsome features and curly, golden brown hair made him look more like a California surfer than a powerful protector. The shadow of whiskers on his square jaw added to his air of danger.

  He looked like their father, enough so that her heart ached as they left the building. Except for his eyes. Matt’s were bright blue and sharp, able to see through lies and into all your secrets. He turned those eyes on her now, only briefly.

  “What?”

  A man of few words. So unlike Quinn. So much like Gabriel. She hated him for sending them off with someone else, even though she knew he was doing what he thought best.

  “Nothing.”

  Matt’s right eyebrow lifted slightly but he didn’t say anything.

  “You look like Daddy,” Leo said, his tone subdued. “Are we going to live with you now?”

  Shea drew in a short breath, ready to punch the man if he so much as looked at Leo the wrong way.

  Matt surprised the hell out of her. “Yeah, I’d like you to. You two are all I have left in the way of family. And frankly, I miss your dad. He was some years older than me, and…” Matt took a deep breath, “your parents raised me when my mom and dad were killed.”

  He now had their undivided attention. Their father had never talked about his parents. In fact, he’d never talked about Matt, but Shea wasn’t about to mention that now.

  “What happened?” Leo voiced the words Shea couldn’t get past the lump in her throat.

  Matt’s fingers tightened around the steering wheel, and his foot goosed the gas pedal before settling into a slower speed for the city streets. “Car accident, if you can believe that. Drunk driver ran ’em down on the side of the road. They were walking home from a dinner party. Mom was killed instantly. Dad hung on for a few days until we pulled the plug. I was twelve. Your mom and dad took me with them after that. Kyle trained me, even though I wasn’t sure I was going to be a grigorio. I thought maybe I’d follow my dad into the service first.

  “We traveled for a few years, until I decided I could take care of myself when I was seventeen and set off to see the world.”

  The look he shot Shea said something she couldn’t understand, but there was something…

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Thirty-eight.”

  She gasped. “You knew. About me. You were there when I was born.”

  “Yeah, I was.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “Did Mom…did she tell you how…how I’m supposed to break the curse?”

  His expression softened, and he released one hand from the steering wheel to squeeze her shoulder. “Sorry, hon, she didn’t. She never said a word about it.”

  The hope that had flared briefly but so fiercely for those few seconds died with a sharp pain in her chest, and she silently cursed herself for being a fool. She knew what she had to do. Her grandfather’s journal and Serena had made that so clear.

  This was a blood curse and it would demand blood in payment. Her blood.

  And it was going to be soon. She just needed to know that Leo would be safe when she was gone. Then she’d finish this.

  “Where are we going?” Leo’s voice broke into her morbid thoughts and she waited for Matt to brush him off. He didn’t.

  “New Orleans, see Gabe’s sister, Maddie. Then Dallas. I got a house there, been in the family for nearly a century. We should be safe for a while. If not, then Mexico. I got a few spots tucked away.”

  As Leo continued to ask questions, the buzz in Shea’s head grew louder. It had started the second Matt had pulled away from the warehouse. She hadn’t worried about it. Now that she knew what that buzz was, what it meant, she’d accepted it and didn’t try to block it. She still couldn’t make out what the women were saying, though, and it was beginning to drive her a little crazy. She knew they wanted to tell her something, something important. About the curse.

  And that they were going in the wrong direction.

  Matt finally hit the ramp for Route 222 and took it at sixty miles an hour. He pressed his foot to the floor when they hit the straightaway and shot over the Schuylkill River.

  The inarticulate buzz became louder, more annoying, until her head started to throb. A migraine wouldn’t be far behind.

  But she knew what she had to do.

  “Matt. Stop the car. I have to go back.”

  Matt’s jaw dropped, and he took his intense concentration off the road for one brief second. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I have to go back. There’s something I have to do. Pull over and let me out.”

  “Shea, there’s no way in hell—”

  She grabbed the wheel and forced Matt to pull the car to the side of the road. A chorus of horns and raised fingers from the other drivers didn’t faze Matt at all as he hit the brakes. She threw an arm out to stop Leo’s forward motion.

  “Jesus H. Christ, girl, do you wanna get us killed?”

  Before h
e could stop her, she’d twisted the keys and pulled them from the ignition.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  She ignored Matt and looked at Leo, pasting on a smile for him.

  “I’ve gotta go, bud, but you need to stay with Matt, okay? I need you to promise.”

  Leo shook his head once, vehemently. “No. Daddy told me I couldn’t leave you. Never.”

  Shea shook her head, unwilling to thinking about the implications of that statement. She refused to put Leo in danger with her.

  Matt’s hands stilled on the wheel and his tone got deadly serious. “What else did your dad say, Leo? Can you remember?”

  Leo nodded. “He said I’d know what to do when I had to.”

  She continued to shake her head, but Matt sighed. “Shea, give me the keys.”

  “No!” Gods, no. Her heart hurt just thinking about it. “There’s no way I’m taking Leo back into this mess. You have to protect him. I want you to take him away from this.”

  Matt held out his hand. “Honey, sometimes you don’t get to make the rules. Sometimes the rules are already laid out ahead of time. If Leo says Kyle told him to stay with you, then he stays with you.”

  No, no, no. This wasn’t what she wanted. She wouldn’t allow Leo to go with her. “He can’t. What if something happens to him? I couldn’t live with that.”

  “Shea.” Matt’s voice got soft, softer than anything she’d heard come out of his mouth. “Your dad, he had the sight. You know that, right?”

  She refused to acknowledge anything he had to say, but she couldn’t tear her gaze from Matt’s blue eyes.

  “If the kid says he has to stay with you then you need to listen.”

  Looking into Matt’s eyes, she knew he wasn’t going to budge. And she knew Leo well enough to know if she ran, he’d follow.

  She took a deep, ragged breath. “Will you promise me you will give your life for his if it comes to it?”

  Matt nodded. “Absolutely. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure he’s safe. You, too.”

  With a sinking heart, she handed over the keys.

  “Then we need to find Dario.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Serena sat on one of the benches in City Park facing the band shell.

  She wondered if the eteri who gathered here for summer concerts ever looked closely at the markings around the pond, if they suspected that the decorative carvings were really runes blessing Egeria, Goddess of Fountains, and Nethuns, God of Springs.

  Germans may have been the first Europeans to settle the area and the architecture of the older sections of the city reflected their influence.

  But the Etruscans had made their mark in other ways. The city still held a powerful magic, fed by the Etruscan descendents who’d flocked here a century or more ago with Italians seeking a better life.

  Today, Reading had all the problems of its larger counterparts, like Philadelphia, but the outlying areas of Berks County retained or had reclaimed some of its original wooded glory.

  Her home on Mt. Penn was in one of those areas.

  She hoped she got to see it again.

  Taking a deep breath, she shook her head to clear it of the fear in her heart.

  “You can do this. You can do this.” She’d been repeating the words over and over in her head since she’d left Gabriel and the others at the warehouse. After she’d made a phone call to the one number she’d been afraid to write down anywhere.

  After a few minutes of disbelieving minions, she’d been connected to the man she sought.

  Dario had sounded almost sad to hear from her but had agreed to meet her here. With Quinn.

  Fear gnawed at her, mocking her decision to come alone.

  “No. No! This is your mess. Fix it.”

  But what if she couldn’t? She’d tried once before and look how that had turned out. She’d been so sure that plan would work. Yet she’d created another mess. She loved Gabriel more than her life, but she’d hurt him by keeping the truth from him. She feared he would never speak to her again.

  Closing her eyes, she shut out her surroundings and tried to put herself into the dream state where peace was found.

  Only to open them when she felt a familiar presence.

  Gabriel.

  He stood in front of the pond, leaning against the split-rail fence, staring at her. She wanted to go to him, throw her arms around those broad shoulders and hug him to her, but wasn’t sure he’d let her. And she wouldn’t survive his rejection.

  He looked calm enough, but her son could hide so much behind those dark eyes. At the moment, though, she was too glad to see him to wonder how he’d found her.

  She loved him so much. “Do you want to hear my side?”

  He sighed and moved toward her. “I think I’ve figured it out. You thought I’d be the one. The female.”

  Goddess, bless him. “Yes. I believed if I could produce a child with the blood of the boschetta mixed with the blood of the Paganellis, the curse would be broken.”

  He sat on the bench next to her and stared straight ahead. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  That was easy. “You loved Davis. I never wanted you to know you weren’t his son. Stupid, yes?”

  He sighed, and she heard more of his anger slide away with the breath. “No, just ill-advised, given how Davis died.”

  “Yes, it was. Davis had been my grigorio since he’d turned twenty-one. He kept me safe, kept me hidden, and he helped me get to Dario. Then, I wiped his memory of that night, and I never spoke of it again. Davis believed you were his. But he and I were never together until after I had been with Dario. When I knew I was pregnant, I seduced Davis.” She grimaced. “Not one of my better moments. But I did love Davis. You have to know that.”

  Gabriel nodded. “What about Dario? Didn’t he know who you were? Why didn’t he recognize you?”

  “He’d been away at school much of his life so we didn’t have much contact with one another in our village. I went to him as a prostitute, one of the many he’s had over the years.”

  “So you’ve known where he’s been this entire time?”

  “Yes, but I couldn’t let the grigori kill him, Gabriel. Not even after…” She couldn’t bring herself to say their names. Not now. “Dario is one of the keys to breaking the curse. I know it in my heart. I just don’t know how.”

  “But you didn’t have a daughter. You had a son. Celeste had the girl. Why?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have any idea.”

  Gabriel sighed, frustration in every molecule of air. “You know I love you, right?”

  Her heart flipped as only a mother’s could when her child says those three little words. “Yes, and I love you with all my heart.”

  “Dario will never be my father. I may have his genes, but he’s nothing to me.”

  She nodded, aching for everything he’d lost, for all she’d put him through. “Davis was your father. He loved you more than his own life. You and Nino.”

  An invisible weight seem to lift from his shoulders. “What do you want me to do about Dario?”

  Grabbing his arm, she squeezed. “You can’t kill him, Gabriel. You can’t. And I don’t believe he’ll harm you.”

  “No, but he’ll cut off your head and tear out your heart in a second.”

  She shook her head. “I think…he’s as tired of this game as we are. Maybe he’ll be ready to talk.”

  “Let’s hope.” Gabriel threaded his fingers through hers and squeezed. “But I’ll be ready just in case.”

  And she knew if Dario harmed Quinn, Gabriel would try to kill him. She couldn’t let him do that.

  But if Dario harmed Quinn, she would kill him herself.

  * * *

  Dario sat in the back of the BMW sedan, waiting for the driver of the van behind him to signal he was ready to go.

  She would be waiting for him, had tracked him down to let him know where to meet. He felt an unlikely twinge of respect for the woman and had refra
ined from asking the question uppermost in his mind.

  How?

  He had a son. Gabriel had to be his son, they looked too much alike to be anything but blood relation. An emotion he couldn’t place burned in his chest. How the hell had she managed it? The boy looked to be in his mid-twenties, but after you’ve lived five-hundred years, you begin to lose perspective on age.