“No one asked you to.” He began rubbing her back in small, soothing circles. “I like taking care of you. Let me do it.”
Ten even, deep breaths didn’t slow Callie’s mind any, but at least she’d curtailed the fear free fall. If only she’d met Derek earlier, when it was still possible to buy Josh out. It was too late now. It was this, or nothing. “Maybe.”
He kissed her forehead, and followed it with a second light one on her temple. She tilted her face toward his and met his lips with her own. The soft touch was sweet and caring and conveyed all that protective talk Derek loved to share. Callie liked it, but the day had left her raw. Acting gently was out for her. She curved her palm around the nape of his neck and pulled him toward her. Hard. He jerked forward and, surprised by her aggression, firmed his lips. He recovered quickly, though, and soon he parted them to let her deepen the kiss. She’d expected him to match her fervor, to push back, but he accepted the onslaught. He met her energy, but let her maintain control.
Callie’s hands were shaking—whether from excitement or overload, she wasn’t certain—but she brought her mouth to his neck. The heady scent of leather lingered on his skin, the perfect complement to the touch of salt against her tongue. He groaned and she licked the same spot again.
When their lips met the next time, his body had gone rigid with tension. She wasn’t the only one shaking. They had big problems to solve and a whole lot to talk through, but she needed an emotional outlet beforehand. He offered an escape, even if just for a half hour.
“Bedroom?” she asked between panting breaths.
His response was fast and firm and what she needed.
An hour later they were both slicked with sweat, stretched out on Callie’s bed with only a thin sheet covering them. It was good to be whole again. Or as complete as she could be. Revelations from Zara, Tess, and Joey had shaken her, but Derek had proven reliable.
Thinking about her mom brought more questions to her mind, ones that hammered at her post-coital bliss. Who in their right mind thinks about their mother while lying naked next to a man who looked like Derek? Soul magic wasn’t necessary to push her over the edge; she was already certifiable.
“I can hear you thinking.” Derek’s bemusement would fade if he knew the direction her thoughts had taken. His affection was more than she’d earned.
Callie smiled at the ceiling in a fleeting moment of normalcy. “A lot happened between when you left this morning and now.”
“More than what we’ve talked about?”
“Significantly.” This is why she never bothered with snuggling. Vulnerability coupled with honesty transformed her into the ultimate mood killer.
“I believe we’ve established my good listening abilities. What happened?”
Her mirthless laugh didn’t scare him off. It should have, but if he was brave enough to stay, she was bold enough to divulge. He’d discover her next-level fucked-up qualities soon enough. “My hands went icy at my mom’s place, for starters.”
The black plastic blades of the ceiling fan spun slowly enough she could track each one’s rotation. Focusing on inanimate objects was a key to blocking emotions during confession. She locked onto those blades the same way she’d counted beads while confessing at church. If she focused hard enough, she could almost pretend she was alone.
Derek swallowed. “Anyone else there?”
The poor guy was trying to give her an out. It was too late for that.
“Just me and her. She wanted to talk about Josh, and I wanted to know why she’d used souls. Neither of us were satisfied.”
The bed shook as he propped himself up on one arm. He reached for her, lightly stroking her upper arm, and despite her nerves she leaned into his touch. He’d cracked her walls, and now she couldn’t repair her defenses fast enough.
“It could have been a long time ago. The effects never go fully away.”
His attempts to soften the blow weren’t working, but the effort was still appreciated. Zara was a shitty liar—one of her few admirable traits. Her reaction had told Callie all she needed to know. She knew she hadn’t called her mom out on old behavior. This wasn’t akin to a thirty-year-old acid flashback. “It was recent.”
“Are you sure?”
The awe in his voice tripped a wire in Callie, one of those gut responses borne out of years of mistrust. The resulting internal explosion sharpened the barbs Callie threw. “My hands don’t provide a timestamp on magic, Derek. That’s not a skill I’m going to build over time, right?”
His hand stilled on her arm above her elbow. “What?”
“I had a second encounter today. Tess found me. She knows all sorts of shit about me and my life and my deal with the Charmer.”
Her emotional shrapnel was filling the growing void between them. Derek was infuriatingly quiet.
“She informed me this little bit of magical infusion in my fingertips isn’t going away. Ever.” She was tempted to wiggle her fingers at him, but she needed to hold what remained of mind together.
“She’s full of shit.” God, he sounded so sure.
“How do you know?”
“The Charmer wouldn’t give up his magic permanently.”
It always circled back to the Soul Charmer. He’d been a part of her life for less than two weeks, and yet his insidious presence had woven itself into everything she touched: her mom, her lover, and even her goddamn skin. He was everywhere. She was right to fear him and whatever he had planned for the future.
“He’s still got plenty of magic.” Did she sound afraid, or too far gone? She couldn’t tell anymore.
Derek’s lips curled into a vicious sneer. “Yeah, but he actually put part of it in you. You don’t know him like I do. He will want every bit he’s given you back.”
She wanted to believe him. “How can you be sure?”
“The Charmer isn’t much for sharing, and he will want his power back. Always has.”
Callie’s mind yanked the reins hard. “Has he done this before?”
“This? No, but I’ve seen him work with others before. I can’t explain it, but he never let anyone keep his magic.”
Callie could tell he meant the words, but she hadn’t forgotten the glint in the Soul Charmer’s eyes when she’d last visited.
Derek continued. “I am not going to let him control you.” The possessive tinge was inherently sexual. Their mutual nudity didn’t help matters.
“I trust that.” He didn’t want to share her, and perhaps that could save her. There was just one other problem. “Though, I need to know if you knew about my mom.”
“No.” His fierceness rocked the bed. The sheet slipped to her waist, but his gaze remained fixed on Callie’s eyes.
Even the single squeak of a bedspring wouldn’t deter her. “You’ve never seen her in the shop?”
He hesitated. “What’s her name?”
“Zara.”
He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know her. I can’t promise you she never bought from the Charmer. If she was good about paying her debts and returning the goods, I might have never seen her. But I swear, Callie, I would not have kept this from you.”
Biting the inside of her cheek didn’t clarify anything. The pain was barely a distraction. “Do you think he knew?”
“The Charmer?”
She nodded.
“I can’t say, doll.” He tucked a few loose strands of her hair behind her ear. “He might have, but I doubt it’s why he hired you.”
That shouldn’t have calmed her, but it did enough that she didn’t get hung up on his use of the word “hired” instead of “blackmailed.” She rolled on her side to face him. His eyes were lighter now, a rich sky blue. “What was, then?” The need for insight clawed past her insecurities.
“It could have been a lot of things.” Could he tell how badly she needed this? Perhaps, because he continued, “I think he knew you could handle the magic. I told you before, it’s not exactly a common deal. The wrong person with that
magic would go manic.”
“And you still think he’s going to take it back?” She almost said “let me go.” Where had that come from? Callie’s barter with the Soul Charmer had clear terms. She worked for him for fourteen days, and that’s it.
“If he doesn’t on his own, I’ll convince him.” Flashes of Derek pinning marks and punching men rushed to the forefront of her mind. His muscles seized. His pecs flexed a hair’s breadth from her face, presenting the gift of a loaded weapon at her disposal. The violent streak still stirred unease in her gut, but the potential safety it promised simultaneously lured her in. A double-edged sword could be mighty shiny.
“Okay,” Callie said, hoping the sense of finality she’d imbued the word with would actually help her let the issue go.
“Okay. Good. Now, can we talk about Tess?” At least he had the good sense to wince.
“We probably should,” she admitted, “but we need to talk about Joey first.”
“Joey?” He angled closer to her, as if hearing another man’s name while lying in bed with her stirred some natural territorial instinct.
Smiling was out of the question, but it was oh so tempting. “The boring guy we retrieved a soul from the other night. The one who was freaked his wife would see us.”
“I know Joey.” His shoulders relaxed. “What about him?”
“Tess stripped him of another soul.” That was the nice way to put it. Derek sputtered for a moment, but eventually let her explain the encounter.
“And there were cuts on his chest?” His questions were focused. He knew what to ask, but didn’t explain why.
“Yes.”
“Did Joey give her the soul?”
“He said he refused to give her permission, but she took the rented one he had inside him anyway. How is that possible? To straight up rob someone of a soul?”
“It’s possible, but not good.”
“Obviously. Joey looked like one of those corner tweakers, ready to start rocking.”
“There’s that, but the cuts and the theft sure sounds like she’s pulling the souls into her body instead of collecting them safely.” Oh, fuck. So what Tess had done wasn’t weird because of the whole stealing business, but because she didn’t put it in a goddamn jar in the process?
Her incredulity couldn’t be contained. “So it’s cool she robbed him?”
He flopped on to his back, shaking the bed. “Of course not. It’s just when you extract a soul without tools—like your flask—it’s dangerous.”
She imagined the Charmer’s creepy claws at her neck, ready to snatch her soul, and she shuddered.
“We’ll take care of this. Of Tess. She’s probably batshit because of all the souls she’s holding in her body, but if she doesn’t have the power to create her own tools, it means she’s weaker than we originally anticipated. The Charmer can take her out. Easy.”
She’d believed all but that last word. There was nothing easy about this. Tess knew too much about Callie and her relationship to the Soul Charmer already. “Tess is on to him.” She winced as she spoke.
She didn’t scrimp on the details of her awkward meeting with Tess, though she left out the size of the pie slice she’d devoured. It wasn’t the time to talk frivolity, or coconut.
When she was done, Derek raked his fingers through his hair and rolled onto his back again. “She wants you to work for her?”
“That’s what she was after. Though, I’d trust her about as far as I could throw her.”
“You believed her about the magic thing, though?” Perhaps it was easier to insert his foot in his mouth when he wasn’t wearing his boots.
“I believed—and still do—that the Charmer is a liar.”
He pursed his lips before agreeing. “Fair enough.”
“She puts on a better face than he does, but she still made my skin crawl. There’s something not right about her.”
“Feeding off souls will do that to a person.” No matter how causally he said it, the truth rang clear and hollow.
“Feeding off souls?”
“She’s doing more than siphoning energy at this point. It’s like she’s hoarding souls to create an internal armor. The more souls squished in a single body, the crazier the person becomes.”
“She talked about saving the city. Pretty sure the lady has a god complex, and enough information to freak people out with what she knows.” Callie totally meant herself.
“She has power. That’s normal. She wanted to meet you, though, and that means we know where to find her.”
“I really don’t want to see her again.” Especially now that it was clear to Callie the soul vampire business was an everyday thing for that lady. “But I know you’re right. The longer she’s out there, the bigger threat she’s going to become.”
“Agreed. The sooner we bring her to the Charmer, the sooner you’re done with both of them.”
“Do you think we can talk him into going himself? Like give him the information, and let him handle the rest? What else could you or I possibly do at this point?”
“You were in the same meeting I was. He wants this done by us. That’s not going to change.”
“That was before we knew she could nullify her magic around me.”
Derek’s sullen smile made Callie’s stomach sink. “He probably knows. I bet with the right motivation you’ll still be able to bring the heat, though.”
Motivation? She had more than enough threats and life-or-death balance shit in her life. “I think I’m full up on motivation.”
“Well, then, it’ll go fine.”
“You’re bad at this pep talk thing.”
He kissed her. “Nah, you just haven’t been properly pepped before. It can be hard to recognize. You’ll do fine once we’re there.”
—— CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ——
The desert had a way of swallowing construction. During the day, the Desert Outlet Mall stood out like a shimmering mirage amid the sand and rogue juniper bushes. At night, though, without sunlight to cast the squat adobe buildings’ shadows, the entrance to the frontage road leading to the shopping cluster was practically invisible. On the third try, Derek managed to spot the cutover. “Would a streetlight kill them?”
Callie shrugged. “Just because it’s outside the city doesn’t mean they don’t have the same light pollution ordinances.”
Riding as a passenger in her own car was weird. The vehicle took on new tones from the other seat. The rattle of the muffler wasn’t as bad here. The gouges in the dash Josh had sworn were there before he’d last borrowed the car weren’t nearly as deep.
“It makes even less sense out here.”
“I would have thought you’d like it.”
“Why? Is all this dark and mysterious doing it for you?” He waggled his eyebrows. He’d been playful most of the afternoon and evening. It had to be a guise to calm her nerves, but it had worked, for the most part. He’d even agreed taking the motorcycle to a meeting with Tess was a bad decision. The only problem was, that left her riding bitch in her own car.
She cast him a side eye glare, but softened it with a sweet smile. “No, but isn’t it easier to do business in the dark?”
Derek stiffened his spine. The comment wasn’t meant as a jab, but she’d put him on high alert. Needling at unknown touchy issues shouldn’t count against her, right?
“I didn’t mean—” she started to apologize.
“Oh, no, that’s fine. Though you do keep forgetting I do a lot of my job by talking to people. I’m starting to get the impression you think I’m far more nasty than I actually am.” He grinned at her before she could get self-conscious over that comment, too. Her neuroses placated, he continued. “Tess was smart to pick this place. Yeah, it’s dark like everywhere else, but these buildings have a lot more space between them. More alleys mean more hiding places.”
“Hiding places work for your half of the plan.” Callie injected as much enthusiasm into her words as she could muster.
“We c
ould have waited until tomorrow,” he muttered. An extra twenty-four hours worth of planning might have been nice, if Derek was right, but Callie couldn’t handle another day of worry. He eventually acquiesced, and anyway, his mere presence had been enough to calm the tense situations they’d been in so far. Callie didn’t have that same talent. Being fast and hiding her emotions were basically her top skills. And neither was particularly useful in this situation.
What she really needed was a healthy dose of fake confidence, but Tess had knocked Callie off her game. Placing all bets without knowing the odds was just asking for someone to take your cash. Derek’s money was on mental agility. He thrived there. She’d witnessed the way he could assess a room and leverage his lethal grace. She didn’t pack a stash of secret weapons.
“No need to wait,” she finally told him. Fear of the unknown shadowed her words.
He nodded. “You know the plan.”
Ah. The plan. “Yeah, but it’s too simple. How do you know it will work?”
“Just don’t let her touch you first.” The plan—if they had to call it such—consisted of keeping Callie’s magic in play until Derek could take action. But she’d demanded to rush the timeline, which meant they were mostly banking on luck.
“What am I going to do if she dampens my magic again? If I need to defend myself, I’ll be screwed.”
“Kick her in the bits.”
Derek laughed at her you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me stare.
“You’ve never been kicked there,” he added. It wasn’t a question.
“You’re aware I don’t have balls to crush, right?”
“Intimately. Still, if you’d been kicked there, you’d know: it’s a fucking vicious thing, regardless of your parts.”
“I’ll trust you on that one.” She’d rather not find out if he was telling the truth.
Derek parked the car outside of a furniture store. Before he cut the engine he asked, “You’re sure the tarot spot is on the other side?”
“Positive.” After racking her brain as to why the address Tess had given her seemed so familiar, she finally realized: her boss Louisa actually frequented the place. Her stomach tightened until a pang forced her jaw to clench. Lou’d had a rough life, and Callie wouldn’t accept Tess mooching energy from her friend.
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