by Jory Strong
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Analia give him a quick look, but she didn’t tense and her expression held only curiosity.
Uncertainty pressed along the edges of his suspicion. It beat back some of the anger and hurt.
Was he wrong to suspect her?
“You’ll have a long wait,” the astrologist said. “I’m expecting someone to arrive momentarily. I’m no longer available for an IRE consultation.”
Kellen didn’t bother suppressing the growl of frustration. The astrologist only laughed and said, “Whatever’s gotten your tail in a sudden twist, I hope you get it sorted out before irreversible damage is done.”
The astrologist turned toward Analia and took her hands in his, and despite the confusion of emotions in Kellen’s chest, he had to stifle a snarl.
“The visit was far too short,” the astrologist said. “I hope to see you again.”
“I’d like to come back, and bring a friend.”
“Do that.” The astrologist gave her a warm hug before stepping back into his house and closing the front door.
Fucking player, Kellen silently growled.
He strode purposely toward Analia’s tin can of a car. He alternated between anger and hurt with each step, only to reach the fence and have uncertainty swell, blocking out the other emotions.
The apple charm lay on the walkway between car and short wooden gate. Analia caught up to him and he heard the catch of her breath when she saw the charm.
She opened the gate and stepped through, immediately swooped on the charm and examined the clasp, eyebrows scrunched together in the way he found adorable.
His chest felt hot and tight. Was he wrong about her being untrustworthy? Or was she a superb actress?
“Let me see it,” he said, and saw her tense.
He reached for the charm, determined to take possession of it and steeling himself to wrest it from her if necessary.
She relinquished it, reluctantly. And the words were ripped out of him. “Did you take it off and drop it?”
Her breath caught again though this time it was a sharp sound of pain and not the sound of surprise. “No.”
He glanced down at the charm between his fingers, turned it over, rubbing his fingertips against its smooth surface, searching for some indication of magic he’d missed earlier.
There was nothing. If anything, the charm felt inert, as if it held less than the little bit of magic needed to find it at the beach.
He thought again of the magical resonance that had caused him to awaken. There were artifacts that were, to some extent, sentient.
Blades that hungered for blood were fairly common when it came to the artifacts IRE agents confiscated and removed from the human world. Chalices that could mesmerize unwary victims who looked at their reflection in gold or silver were less common but still findable in this realm, as were books that had the power to send humans on various tasks.
Was it possible the charm had some awareness? That it’d dropped away from Analia’s bracelet during the mugging to prevent itself from being found by whoever had paid her assailant? That it’d fallen from the bracelet before passing through whatever wards or magic the astrologist had in place at the boundary of his property?
“Where did you get this?” Kellen asked.
“It might have come from The Magic Shack.”
It might have come from The Magic Shack sounded like an evasion. Just as It might take some effort had rubbed against his hound senses like the backward stroke of fur when he’d asked her if she remembered where she’d acquired each of the charms she’d claimed held special meaning.
Suspicion beat back some of the uncertainty, allowing pain to edge in. He’d been a fool to start believing again in love—not that he loved her, or that she’d claimed to love him—but…
He shook the thoughts off.
Obviously he’d been spending too much time around Taine and Saffron.
Rather than press Analia for answers about the charm, and risk hearing her lie, he opened the passenger door and said, “Get in. We’ll head to The Magic Shack next.”
She held out her hand. “My charm.”
He knew his smile was more a baring of teeth. “Not until I get better answers.”
The lick of her lips still had the power to send a surge of blood into his cock, though the anxiety in her eyes said the swipe of tongue over luscious mouth wasn’t an attempt at seduction.
“I can’t give you better answers,” she said, her voice strained, a silent pleading in her eyes. “I need to keep the charm in my possession.”
He pounced. “Why?”
“I can’t tell you.”
He pocketed the charm on a silent howl of frustration at not having her trust, a frustration tinged with hurt. He spared a glance at the astrologist’s house and very nearly gave in to the urge to jog up the red-stone pathway and pound on the door until he got a response, followed by some answers.
Instead he got into the driver’s seat. And if he slammed the car door, he had reason to. But damned if he was going to rub the place above his heart—though he caught himself doing just that and jerked his hand downward, aggressively starting the car. Fuck!
The drive was done in tense silence, her anxiety seeming to increase the longer he had the charm in his possession. Several times he opened his mouth, determined to get the truth out of her, only to shut it on a wave of emotion he didn’t want to name.
They reached The Magic Shack, the drive there ending with the stomp of his foot on the brake. “Time for some answers,” he growled, thrusting the car door open, her increasing agitation the longer he kept the charm like a continued backward stroke to fur.
As places catering to those who believed in magic went, The Magic Shack was more thrift shop than boutique. It was in an old section of town, one that hadn’t yet been revitalized and gentrified.
The two-story building was narrow, the white paint of its exterior walls faded in places to reveal gray stucco. It was separated from a pawn shop on the right and a sewing repair shop on the left by alleys with weeds emerging from cracks in the pavement.
Kellen shoved his hand into his pocket and fisted the charm. Had she really gotten it here?
His thoughts flashed back to the supernatural fair, and the first time he’d encountered her scent. Woman and magic.
But all that gained him was a renewed surge of demand from his cock, to ignore everything else but the rightness and bliss it found while held deep inside her. A demand that only intensified when she caught up to him, put a tentative hand on his arm and said, “The charm was supposed to lead me to my perfect mate. Please, can I have it back?”
A growl tried to surge up his throat, not because he feared the charm was responsible for his interest in her, but because she might even now be hoping to meet some other male, might even now be fantasizing about that perfect mate instead of recognizing that he—
“No,” Kellen said, the growl escaping with his answer.
Her hand fell away from his arm, producing a protest from his heart and his cock.
Fuck!
She was twisting him up inside, putting him at odds with himself. He reached the glass door to the shop, with its etched scene of unicorns and flying horses in an idyllic, flower-carpeted meadow.
There were protective sigils hidden in the imagery, though previous encounters with those managing the shop made him suspect it was more luck than design that this particular door had ended up at The Magic Shack.
He opened the door, setting crystal chimes in motion. The nervous swipe of Analia’s tongue over delectable lips had him fighting against grabbing her arms and holding her against the door as he plundered her mouth and got the truth from her.
She preceded him into the shop. Dust motes floated in the air, visible because the shop’s lighting came from old-fashioned lightbulbs set in a wide variety of sconces, each light source sporting a small, white price tag hanging from its base.
Mismatched bookshelves proba
bly salvaged from Goodwill stores and found along curbsides ahead of garbage collectors were placed back to back without regard to height, forming rows. The shelves were loaded with merchandise, some of which had no obvious scheme for sorting, other than by item color.
Along the wall to the left, an old woman stood in front of a display, dusting a collection of ceramic gnomes, elves, leprechauns and other of what the humans called small people. Near her, but at the front and behind a counter with a cash register, a thin, red-headed and freckled teen stood with a phone pressed to his ear. He glanced in their direction, smiled a greeting than went back to describing something to whoever was on the other end of the phone.
Kellen didn’t have cause to visit The Magic Shack often, but on each occasion—at least during the last hundred years or so—the shop had been run by the Tallard family.
He felt a shock of cold, the touch of mortality, at remembering the old woman as a baby in her mother’s arms, then later as a rebellious teen the same age as the boy. They were human and had been of little interest to him, so he hadn’t given that girl any thought when she’d disappeared. Or when she’d returned a decade later with a daughter of her own—the boy’s mother.
If he took a human mate, her mortality, at least in this realm would become his own. It was the only way to sustain the magical balance. That’s what Taine had willingly embraced in binding himself to Saffron, that he’d age and die.
True, both Taine and Saffron would be reborn in the dragon’s realm, and because of the mating, her first form would be dragon and her second human. The same was true of the fey, though the vainer of them—the Sidhe in particular—often took their mates back to the fey world while in the prime of their lives.
There was truth in myth. And if a human ate or drank in certain of the fey realms, they stopped physically aging, but paid the price by not being able to return to their own world.
He turned his attention to Analia, felt the squeeze of his heart at imagining her aging, dying, lost to him forever if they weren’t a mated pair.
She moved away from him, heading right, toward the back corner. He’d seen charms in that area before, though he’d seen charms scattered throughout the shop.
Some of the ache in his chest eased. Maybe she hadn’t lied about getting the charm from The Magic Shack.
Possibly getting, he thought, reminding himself of the way she’d carefully phrased her answer.
He hardened his heart against trusting her again, asked, “Who was working the day you bought the charm?”
She tensed, glanced in the direction of the old woman and teenaged boy. “An old man.”
Kellen’s hand snapped out, locked around her upper arm and jerked her to a halt, facing him steps away from a standing, full length antique mirror set in a carved wooden frame.
“You’re lying,” he snarled. “The only people who work here are the ones you just saw.”
She wrenched her arm out of his grasp. “Then I didn’t get the charm here, because I distinctly remember getting it from an old man!”
“At the supernatural fair.”
She flinched, the guilt there and gone in her expression. And he wanted to howl at being proven right. All along she’d lied—if not directly, then by omission and misdirection.
Fury had him saying, “Is it all a lie, Analia? Am I just a means to an end for you?”
“No,” she whispered. “You have to believe that. All I wanted… All along, all I’ve wanted was for this,” she motioned weakly between the two of them, “to be real.”
Her eyes glistened with sudden tears, sending shafts of pain through his heart—a heart he hardened with memories of Cosette standing tearfully in front of him, pleading with him to believe her feelings for him, and not for his brother Cason, were real.
“I don’t believe you,” he said, though fuck, a part of him—a large part of him—wanted to ignore all evidence and believe every word that left her lips.
He turned away from her, fist tightening around the charm. The need to put some distance between them drove him forward a step, a second step, a third and he stumbled as magic slammed into the charm with a force that jarred his entire body.
He pulled the charm from his pocket, heard the shattering of glass then Analia’s shocked gasp and stifled protest.
Kellen wheeled around. His heart leapt upward in his throat.
Analia was gone.
The antique, standing mirror was now jagged edges of glass framing a view of the bookcase behind the mirror, the shelves stuffed with old, wind-up mechanical soldiers and porcelain dolls, many with thinned hair and visible cracks on their painted faces.
Kellen lunged forward. But there was no foe to fight or magic to grasp and use to catch Analia and pull her back into his presence. Only her scent remained, mixed with that of apples.
Fuck!
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!
The mirror had to be, what? A portal? A magical gateway to somewhere in this world or another?
There were myths to that effect, but in the centuries he’d worked for IRE, he’d never encountered such a thing. And even now, he couldn’t sense or scent any magic around the mirror, though the charm in his fist throbbed with it, seeming to grow heavier and heavier with each pulse.
Footsteps pounding toward him had Kellen whirling to face an attacker. The teen skidded to a stop, hands lifting though his gaze went to the broken mirror and his voice held determination when he said, “You’re going to have to pay for that.”
Someone would pay. If anything happened to Lia…
Kellen shoved the charm into his pocket, pulled his wallet and flipped the kid three crisp, folded hundred-dollar bills. “Stay away from the mirror. Do not come any closer. Do not allow your grandmother to get near the mirror. Touch nothing. Clean up nothing. Understood?”
The boy’s eyes had widened with each of Kellen’s orders, making the freckles on his face more pronounced. His gaze flicked to the mirror and back to Kellen, flicked and returned and Kellen could read the exact instant when the teen realized a man and a woman had entered the shop, but now the women was nowhere in sight.
The teen’s mouth opened, his gaze dipped to the money in his hand, then returned to Kellen. “The mirror was five hundred.”
Despite everything, Kellen barked out a laugh. Apparently the shop was going to be in good hands when the boy eventually took over its operation.
Kellen peeled another two bills from the folded bundle in his hand, added a couple more, though he’d have given the teen the entire wad of cash for answers to where Analia had been taken. He stepped closer to the boy, catching the flicker of fear and excitement in the teen’s eyes.
“This is officially IRE business,” Kellen said, offering the additional cash. “You’ll stand there and keep the scene from being contaminated until another agent relieves you from the duty. Understood?”
A nod from the boy and Kellen strode toward the shop’s door, shoving the remaining bills back into his pocket and retrieving his cellphone. Maksim answered on the first ring, “What do you have?”
Ache flared through Kellen’s chest. “Analia’s been taken.”
“By who? Or what?”
“I don’t know. I turned my back for a fucking minute and someone or something came through a mirror and snatched her. All they left behind was the smell of apples.”
“A mirror? Where?”
“The Magic Shack.”
“Anything trigger the grab?”
Kellen’s hand dropped to his pocket and the ache in his chest deepened. “I’ve got one of her charms.”
He couldn’t bring himself to admit that all along, she must have known that’s what someone was after, that she’d played the innocent so convincingly he’d been taken in. “Until a few minutes ago, it was dormant, a little residual magic, but that’s all. Now it’s like a fucking beacon.”
“What kind of magic?”
He pulled the charm that had gone from feather-light to brick-heavy from his
pocket and brought it close to his nose. He inhaled. “A combination, sorcerer and something fey. The second scent confirms what the astrologist said, that interest came from one of the fey realms.”
“Nothing more specific?”
The ache in Kellen’s chest grew claws and dug into his chest. If he’d known about the charm, if it had gone into the astrologist’s house, if Analia had trusted him…
“No. The astrologist didn’t have any more.”
“You still claiming she’s not your mate?”
Kellen swallowed against the sudden burn in his throat, then forced the answer out. “Yes.”
“Your call. I texted Kristof. Luck is finally smiling on us. He’s close and on his way to The Magic Shack. The scene secured?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Come to headquarters. Now. We’ll get the charm into one of the vaults and figure out who’s after it. Chances are they’ll release Analia once they determine it’s not in her possession. She’s human and not tied to the supernatural. They won’t want the trouble that’ll come with harming her. But just in case, Crew or Gaige can take charge of this investigation and recover her if necessary.”
“The fuck they will,” Kellen growled. “This is my hunt.”
“Was your hunt when I believed Analia was your mate. But if you haven’t claimed her, then I must have been wrong. Get to HQ. I should already be hearing the sound of a car engine.”
Kellen’s lips pulled back in a savage baring of teeth. He didn’t bother to remind Maksim that rather than driving the Hummer, he had Analia’s ecofriendly vehicle, which was almost completely silent.
“I’ll be in touch,” he said, ending the call and very nearly tossing his cellphone to prevent being tracked and brought back to headquarters in magical cuffs.
The fuck he was going to trust anyone else with finding Analia, even his best friends. She was his concern. His to fetch.
He reached the Prius and got in, started the engine and stomped the pedal, peeling away from his parking place along the curb with an unsatisfying lurch forward.
In the rearview mirror, he caught sight of Kristof about five blocks back, driving the crime scene van, and a block behind him, Crew in a dark silver Lamborghini Veneno.