Demon Bound

by Meljean Brook

  Why was he going girly over a string?

  Hell. Maybe spending more time with the Black Widow would be good for him.

  Alice fed the spiders, bathed, and settled her nerves before she heard the novice’s return. Two hours. She moved to her front doors, musing that Jake must have been surrounded by passive and forgiving people during his formative years if he thought that was enough time for tempers to cool.

  Or he was just clever. He waited on the opposite side of Remus and Romulus’s web, and when Alice emerged from her quarters, he said, “There’s no hourglass. Just these red dots.”

  So these will be our safe zones, Alice thought. Arachnids and artifacts.

  “Only the females have the hourglass mark,” she said.

  Jake leaned his shoulder against the column. A casual pose, but his alert gaze didn’t leave her face. “So they’re just two guys sharing a web. Alone.”

  “It’s for their safety.” At his questioning look, she explained, “Only the females live upstairs. Remus and Romulus will sire the next generation, but unless I rescue them after each mating . . .” Alice shrugged lightly. “Well.”

  “A good way to go, though.”

  “Better than some, I suppose.”

  “You suppose? Then you obviously haven’t had—” He stopped. Started again with “Did you take a bath?”

  A laugh startled from her. “How on Earth did you decide that question was preferable to your original statement?”

  “It’s why I’m here.” He shook his head. “Not to bathe you, but—Where’d you get the hot water?”

  He’d already leapt out of their safe zone, but Alice followed him, curious now to where this led. “Irena’s smithy.”

  “So you brought it from Earth in your hammerspace? That’s a good idea.”

  “Indeed. But—”

  “I thought you might be going to Seattle. For Charlie’s thing at Cole’s.”

  Another leap. But was this a new direction? “I am.”

  “I came here to see, but I couldn’t tell if you were going, because you’re still wearing that black thing. But the air’s humid, so you must have taken a bath.”

  Guardians could remove dirt from their bodies and clothing by vanishing it into their cache—so Jake apparently thought that the only reason a Guardian woman might bathe was to prepare for a party.

  Amused now, Alice said, “I did.”

  He sighed. “Look, I just didn’t want to insult you. I was trying to decide if you knew about it. I’ve known people who become all offended if they don’t get a formal invitation, even when it’s just a thrown-together thing like this is.”

  How surprisingly thoughtful. “I’ve known several people like that, too.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re here to offer me transport?”

  “Yeah. But it might be a little bumpy.”

  That was of no consequence. Teleporting would save her an hour’s flight—and if Ethan knew Teqon’s location, it would allow her another advantage, as well. She couldn’t carry living things in her cache or through the Gates, but they could be teleported.

  “May I bring a passenger?”

  Jake appeared confused for all of a second. Then he grinned. “A spider?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go for it.”

  Alice focused her Gift upstairs. Most of the widows were sleeping, full and lazy after their feeding. But although her body was heavier than the others’, Lucy was awake and moving restlessly beneath her web.

  Alice caught hold of Lucy’s mind and pushed.

  “So that’s how you knew where you were going in the temple,” Jake said. “You had spiders in there.”

  “Yes. I brought in cave weavers.”

  Lucy reached the window. Alice stepped out into the courtyard, watching her descend on a gossamer dragline.

  “What happened to them when the temple vanished?”

  Nothing should have happened. Alice usually took the spiders with her when she left—but, preoccupied by thoughts of Teqon, she’d forgotten.

  “I don’t know,” she finally said. With her Gift open like this, she couldn’t hide the sorrow in her psychic scent.

  Sorrow, for weavers she hadn’t even bred and raised.

  Her crimson markings gleaming against her ebony exoskeleton, Lucy dropped into Alice’s outstretched palm. She lowered her Gift to a soothing hum, hoping to quiet the widow’s anxiety—and her own.

  Jake looked at her curiously, but he only said, “Grab on to me, then. And she’ll have to be touching me, too.”

  He only tensed a little when Lucy crept onto his forearm and secured herself with silken thread. Alice took his hand.

  And waited.

  His brow had creased with concentration. A powerful wave swept over her psychic senses—his Gift. His mind was strong, his effort undeniable. Yet they hadn’t teleported.

  “Would you like help?” She adjusted the focus of her own Gift until she heard the rapid click of Nefertari’s claws from inside her quarters.

  “I don’t think it’d work this time.” He expelled a long breath. “Not when I know it’s an illusion.”

  The skittering paused just long enough for Nefertari to push open the front door.

  He glanced over Alice’s shoulder—and laughed. “Come on. You can’t expect me to believe that.”

  “Jake.” She tightened her grip on his hand. “Am I projecting anything?”

  His eyes widened.

  “You wanted to meet her,” she reminded him, just as Nefertari jumped.

  He lay on short, dried grass that pricked and itched, even through his shirt. He opened his eyes. Stars shone above, too bright to be near a city.

  At least he hadn’t screamed, Jake thought. He’d just landed on his back in the middle of God-knew-where. A little awkward, but not emasculating.

  Warm fingers brushed his arm, and Jake lifted his head. Alice knelt beside his hip, murmuring to the spider she’d scooped into her palm.

  “That wasn’t a tarantula,” Jake said. “That was a bear.”

  “Oh, come now. She isn’t that large.”

  “A dog, then. A wolf.”

  “She’s more like a cat. She even purrs.”

  “I’ll bet.” Probably while eating kittens. “A mountain lion.”

  “Perhaps an ocelot.”

  “Too small.”

  Alice met his gaze, and instead of freezing him, the ice in her eyes sparkled with humor. “But she so loves to jump.”

  Hot damn. So the Black Widow didn’t always bristle with disapproval. And with her mouth set in that prim, trying-not-to-laugh line, Jake remembered why kissing her in the temple had seemed like such a good idea.

  He must’ve hit his head. “How’s your friend?”

  The spider wasn’t in her palm now, and he was pretty sure the itch on his left arm wasn’t just the grass.

  “She’s fine. The disorientation only lasted a moment.” She got to her feet in that disjointed, creepy way. “Shall we go?”

  “Just a second. Let me figure out where we are.”

  He rolled onto his knees. They were in a farmhouse’s backyard—the kind that was just a scraggly patch of dead grass cut out of a larger field. Judging by the smell, chickens scratched out here during the days.

  There was something familiar about the lay of the fields, the neighboring houses, but he supposed there were thousands just like it in the Midwest.

  “Oh, dear,” the Black Widow said.

  He followed the direction of her gaze to a window on the second floor of the farmhouse. A dark-haired girl stood in her ruffled nightgown, her eyes wide, her breath fogging a circle in the glass.

  Her arms tightened, bending in half the pink rag doll she clutched. “Princess Mandy, look,” she whispered. Her psychic scent boiled with more excitement than fear. “It’s the Wicked Witch.”

  Jake fell forward onto his hands, laughing so hard he thought his gut would burst.

  Small, running footsteps sounded from upstairs, and th
e girl yelled for her grandma.

  “Shall we go?”

  They’d be lucky if anything could get him to teleport now, but Jake nodded through his laughter and stood. The spider clung to his left arm, so he wiped away his tears with his right before taking Alice’s hand. She frowned, gestured for him to quiet.

  He tried. Damn, but he tried.

  Alice’s bristle was back. She signed, Shall we fly? Do you know where we are—or how far it is to Seattle?

  He shook his head, turning in a circle as he attempted to narrow their location, pulling her with him.

  Halfway around, he stopped. At the opposite edge of the yard, an old red tractor and a Mustang with pancake tires rusted next to a weathered shed. Recognition stabbed through his chest, killing his amusement.

  “Jake?”

  From inside the house, a woman’s voice joined the little girl’s.

  “We’re in Kansas,” he said, wishing they were anywhere else.

  Instantly, they were.

  He was the damn cowardly lion.

  Jake slumped in his chair and watched the foam on his beer dissolve. Now and then, he felt the concern of the others around the table, but their chatter went over him.

  He’d leapt to Seattle—but he couldn’t get his flippin’ head out of Kansas.

  Of all places, the Hopewell farm. The silo and barn that had been behind the house were gone now, but he couldn’t mistake that tractor. He and Billy Hopewell had tinkered with that thing and ridden it around the Hopewell fields—down the roads, through town—too many times.

  But the car had been Jake’s. Cherry, back in the day, and he’d lost count of how many bales he’d tossed, how much slop he’d waded through to buy it.

  A piece of shit now.

  And the woman he’d heard inside that house . . .

  Goddamn. Nineteen years he’d tried to get out of that town. It just wasn’t fucking right for his Gift to send him back now, when there was nothing he could do for anyone he’d left behind.

  “Jake.” Charlie scooted her chair closer to his and leaned in. When she spoke in a whisper, the rasp in her voice all but disappeared. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” He sat up straight, scrubbed his hand over his face. He was such a dick. “Just one too many jumps today.”

  She smiled and squeezed his hand before turning back to the table.

  Jake picked up his beer. Drifter was a lucky, lucky man. Charlie was the kind of girl you took home to Mom—if Mom was the kind to appreciate a girl with fangs, cold skin, and a right jab that could knock a Guardian’s tooth loose.

  Strange, then, that it’d been a while since Jake had wondered what she looked like naked.

  Was it just that she’d been away from Seattle these past two months? Just for the hell of it he imagined undressing her, and mentally covered her up again an instant later.

  Jesus. If he’d had a sister, Jake thought that was pretty much what taking a peek at her would have felt like.

  And Selah, sitting on the other side of Charlie, was out, too. God knew she had a body worth stripping—but with her light blond hair and flawless face, she actually looked like an angel.

  She’d also assisted Hugh in mentoring Jake when he’d first come to Caelum—and as the only other Guardian besides Michael who teleported, Selah constantly gave him pointers, helping him get a handle on his jumps. It’d be like turning his Sunday school teacher upside down to see if her skirt went up.

  Then there was her partner, Lucas Marsden. The vampire was all right, but Jake could happily live the rest of his life without imagining any guy naked.

  Selah suddenly laughed at the vampire, who was shaking his head in embarrassment. Jake finally tuned in, and realized that Charlie was halfway through a story. In Charlie’s hands, what had probably been a mildly amusing exchange became an epic encounter, with Marsden heroically resisting a geriatric vamp’s increasingly desperate attempts to sex him up beneath a spotlight.

  The last two months, Charlie had been learning the ropes at Marsden’s theater in preparation for opening a similar theater for the Seattle vampire community. Chances were, she had many years’ worth of these stories now.

  And he’d probably feel more like laughing at them later. Jake finished his beer just as she wound up her tale, and used his empty glass as a non-dick reason to get up and head to the bar.

  Old Matthew Cole didn’t need to ask his preference. A new beer was in front of Jake almost before he slid onto the bar stool.

  Jake took a deep swallow. It didn’t do anything for him—and he’d have sworn beer tasted better when he’d been human.

  But even though they didn’t need to eat or drink, Cole’s bar had become the unofficial gathering place for Guardians and vampires in Seattle. Ordering helped them fit in with the humans, and made sure that Old Matthew wasn’t stiffed for his hospitality—not to mention his silence about their true nature.

  But then, Old Matthew probably enjoyed flipping the bird to whatever authority he thought might take exception to their existence.

  Jake watched the old man make change at the register, then glanced in the mirror behind the shelves of bottles. Shit. The “old man” was his age. And it was possible the only reason Old Matthew wasn’t sitting in Jake’s place was that instead of being drafted, he’d been in prison—making time for murders he hadn’t committed.

  From the direction of the table, Jake heard a chair scrape, and he tracked Charlie’s approach in the mirror. She was already smiling at Old Matthew, and his dark face wrinkled when he grinned in response.

  “You come on back here, Charlie girl.”

  “I thought I quit,” she said, but she rounded the bar, and wrapped her arms around his waist. “You’re going to make me work?”

  “Well, now that you mention it, I could use five. Robbie called in sick.”

  “I can give you more than five if you need it.”

  “Not at your own to-do. And not when your man isn’t here. You got trouble tonight, Charlie?”

  “I hope not.” She tied on the apron Old Matthew gave her.

  “Cora and Angie called when we were on our way over here. They found a vampire ashed up in the University District, and the partner was missing. The partners hated each other, so it might have just been a fight and she took off, but . . .” Her shrug hid the worry from Old Matthew, but Jake could feel it in her psychic scent. “They’ve got to check.”

  One nephil had moved into Seattle last spring and picked off the leaders of the vampire community. Drifter had managed to slay the nephil, preventing the full-scale vampire massacre that had followed similar assassinations in other cities—but there was no way of knowing if the nephilim intended to move against Seattle again.

  Cora and Angie were the Seattle community’s new heads, and the probable targets if the nephilim’s MO held—but Drifter made a point to investigate any unusual vampire death, and rule out nephilim involvement.

  “Golly gee,” Jake said. “I bet Drifter’s having a great time.”

  Charlie rolled her eyes, but her worry faded. “And I bet you’re glad you got in too late to go with him.”

  “You’d win that bet.” Cora and Angie required more patience than Jake had in supply.

  “I thought you came in with Alice, Jake.” Old Matthew looked over at the table. “Did you lose her?”

  Charlie answered for him. “When Irena showed, they went over to the theater. They haven’t seen it since we’ve started re-modeling.”

  “I’ll tell you, Charlie girl—I sure am looking forward to you opening up. We didn’t get many coming over from the theater before, but it’s been feeling quieter in here since they closed.”

  Jake grimaced, and slid a stack of fives across the bar. Old Matthew began to frown at him, but nodded when Jake said, “The money talk reminded me. It’s to cover Alice’s bill. Whatever she drinks or eats.”

  Charlie clubbed her hay-colored hair into a long ponytail. “What did you say to her?”

 
“Something stupid.”

  Old Matthew fanned the money. “Son, that’s a lot of stupid.”

  “Yeah. Well, part of it is an advance payment.”

  The bartender laughed and turned toward the employees’ door. Charlie stepped out of his way, then grinned at Jake, the tips of her fangs barely visible.

  Jake had been responsible for those fangs. Charlie hadn’t wanted them—but he’d failed to protect her. And because she hadn’t been willing, the transformation had almost killed her.

  Her smile faded. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah.” He set his beer down, faced her squarely. “I told you I was sorry, right? For letting Sammael get to you.”

  “Only about twenty or thirty times.” She leaned in and her tone softened. “Jake, he unloaded six bullets into your head. But you still managed to teleport, and send Ethan after me.”

  His first jump, and how he’d discovered his Gift. With his brain shot to pieces, it’d been pure fear and instinct. Not exactly the stuff of heroes.

  “As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have much to be sorry about.” She arched her brows. “But if you’re feeling guilty, there is one thing you can do to make it up to me.”

  Jake eyed her warily, not trusting the laughter in her voice. “What?”

  “Just hold still.”

  He did, then had to chuckle when she began rubbing her hands all over his head.

  “God. I’ve wanted to do that since I met you,” she said when she finished. “And Jake—you know more than anyone that everything’s good with me. Better than ever. So if you’re going to beat yourself up over something, don’t pick that.”

  “All right. I’ve got more to pick from anyway.” But he grinned. “I know I haven’t told you that you’re just all-around swell, Charlie.”

  She snorted out a laugh. “Don’t,” she said. “That ‘swell’ shit and ‘golly gee’ crap just isn’t playing fair. And . . . and . . .”

  Her gaze shifted beyond him, and Jake didn’t need to see Drifter in the mirror to know the Guardian had entered the restaurant.