“Just got done training with him,” Leandra said, her lip curling in a snarl.
A faint grin curved Lori’s mouth. “And does Malachi look like you do?”
Leandra just snarled.
“I guess not,” Lori said with a smile. The smile faded fast, though, and she ducked her head, covering her face with her hands. Thick strands of hair fell forward, shielding her face.
Once, Lori’s hair had once been red, a pretty, fiery shade. It was still red—mostly. But it was streaked all over with strands of pure white. Not from age. Lori was barely in her thirties. No, the white came from a spell she had built a few years ago. It had exploded through her, burning her, as she used magick to kill the followers of the Scythe that Leandra had once fought with.
Finally, Lori looked up and smiled weakly at Leandra. “I can see that you’ve had a rough night, but I’d wager mine was worse.” She nodded to the door with her head. “Nasty bitch in there. Jonnie found her trying to grab a kid from his own bed in town.”
“Grab a kid? Why?” As she asked, Leandra lowered her shields. She felt it, like a punch in the gut, and she barely heard Lori’s response.
“I . . . I think she just wanted to kill him. She’s . . . evil, Leandra. I’ve felt evil before, but this—she’s just so young.”
Evil, oh yes. Leandra could scent it. Her belly pitched and rolled from the stink of it. Bad move. When she tried to reach out, the shields Lori had erected welcomed her touch, and Leandra was able to touch that evil.
True evil—the kind that fouled the very air.
Her heart froze in her chest, swelling to a knot that seemed to make her throat close. Blood turned to ice in her veins, and she sank to the floor, pressing her face against her knees.
“Nasty, huh?”
She heard Lori’s familiar voice through the roaring in her ears, and she lifted her head, nodding dumbly. She swallowed as she took a deep, cleansing breath and forced her shields back up.
As they closed around her, the awful stink receded, and she could think past it once more. “Who the hell is in there?”
Lori angled her head and replied levelly, “Go look.”
Leandra didn’t want to. She really didn’t want to. But she couldn’t walk past that door without opening it. With the wall supporting her, she shoved to her feet. Her knees wobbled for a minute, and she closed her eyes. Should have gone to feed . . .
Her feet felt like they were encased in leaden weights as she moved toward the door, and her skin was icy. Before she could go inside, Lori reached out and closed a hand over her wrist. “You need to feed.”
Leandra forced a weak smile. “Too damned tired.”
“Then take this.”
The rush of power was a cool, gentle kiss that chased away the cobwebs in Leandra’s brain and eased the aches in her body. Witch power could be shared or given; Leandra felt a rush of relief as Lori helped replace the empty reserves. Although true hunger was still a dull roar in her belly, the weakness and clouded thoughts were gone.
“Thanks,” Leandra said with a smile.
Lori just shrugged, her hand falling away. “You need to stop being so afraid to ask for what you need, Leandra.”
The smile faded, and Leandra stilled. “I am not afraid.”
“Then why haven’t you ever asked for anybody here to feed you?” Lori asked quietly.
A muscle throbbed in her jaw as Leandra glared at the witch. She said nothing, but her skin crawled, heating, as she realized that Lori had been talking to the other Hunters.
Lori said softly, “I’m the Enclave’s Healer, Leandra. It’s my job to take care of the people here. All of them.” Her lips quirked in a slight smile as she added, “Whether they like it or not.”
Looking away, Leandra stayed quiet. She heard Lori sigh. “You’ll do what you want,” the other witch muttered.
Now it was Leandra’s turn to smile. “Don’t I always?” Without waiting for an answer, she reached out and closed her hand around the doorknob, opening it with reluctance. She stepped inside quickly and pushed the door shut behind her.
The stench of evil was worse in the room, thick and cloying, almost choking the air. Leandra breathed shallowly through her mouth, but it didn’t help. The nasty miasma was enough to make her stomach churn; the hunger that had been gnawing at her was gone as nausea kicked in. Leandra did her best to bolster her shields, and eventually it faded.
“Jonathan, couldn’t you have just brought home a pizza?” Leandra drawled into the tense silence as the two Hunters glanced at her.
Jonathan snorted. “I wish.” His long brown hair fell in a loose tail down his back, and his face was dark with fury and disgust. There were four angry furrows on the outside of one muscled arm, slicing him open from bicep to tricep. The bleeding had stopped. She could sense the faint warmth of a spell clinging to it; Lori had already cleansed it.
Across from her, Eli stood with his arms folded over his chest, his face set in cool, unreadable lines. He flicked a glance her way and asked quietly, “Have you seen Mal?”
Leandra said softly, “He was in the training center a few minutes ago.”
Unable to avoid it any longer, Leandra followed the source of evil and found herself staring at a woman. Barely. The body was lush and ripe, but the soft curves of the face still held the innocence of youth. She looked like little more than a child.
Until you looked into her eyes.
A chill ran down Leandra’s spine as she stared into those limpid green eyes. Soulless. The girl smiled at Leandra and then looked back at Jonathan, licking her lips like a cat presented with a bowl of cream.
Pretty, with pale blonde hair that was most likely natural, big green eyes set in a heart-shaped face, and a figure that looked more suited to the cover of Playboy than a girl who should be in high school. She wore black, clothes so tight they looked like they’d been painted on. Around her neck, she wore a necklace of matte black metal set with a stone of solid red.
Just looking at her gave Leandra chills.
The girl turned her attention from Jonathan to Leandra, a wicked smile curving her lips. As their gazes met and locked, Leandra felt it.
Her breath hissed out between her teeth as Leandra felt something dark reach out. It tried to grab her; Leandra could feel it trying to pull her in.
The aura of menace was coming directly from the girl—something entirely too similar to the fear a Master vampire or an alpha wolf could use. Something conscious, controllable, and completely deliberate.
Leandra’s eyes narrowed as she recognized that as a crucial piece of information. Something focused and deliberate—was something Leandra could shield against. It wasn’t magick she needed to block out but emotion, and that was why fear kept snaking through her shields to dance down her spine.
Leandra erected the same shields she used with Malachi, and the fear and menace began to melt away almost immediately. As it did, Leandra’s skin stopped crawling, and she began to breathe a little easier.
“And who is this?” the girl drawled, her voice cool and mocking. “Yet another white hat coming to save me?”
Leandra arched a brow and replied just as coolly, “I only save things worth saving.”
For one second, the girl seemed a little startled. Expecting me to be scared, are you? The fear wouldn’t affect Eli and Jonathan; in a few more decades, it wouldn’t have affected Leandra either.
Both Eli and Jonathan were Masters, and the only way fear could be used against them was if the girl was the more powerful.
The cloud of fear swelled, tightening the air, centering around Leandra, battering at her shields. With a subtle flex of her power, Leandra was able to redirect it, sending it flying back to the girl.
She just absorbed it, although there was a flicker in her eyes, a wariness. Only another witch could do something like that, and the girl knew it.
Leandra watched as the girl blinked, her expression changing. A smile spread across her pretty face, and she ba
tted her lashes and cooed, “Does that mean I’m not worth it?”
Levelly, Leandra said, “You’re beyond saving.”
Slowly, a smile spread across her face, and she purred, “Oh, I certainly hope so. I’d hate to turn into you.” She reached up, stroking the skin just outside her left eye, staring at the tattoo on Leandra’s face.
The small black mark seemed to pulse as the girl said quietly, “You had a taste of true power—and you gave it up. For what?”
“For something you could never understand, kid. And evil just offers the illusion of power. I don’t care for illusions.”
Pointedly, she looked away, glancing at Jonathan. He looked grim and angry, and he was obviously disturbed. “You look like you had a bad night.”
Dark brown eyes met hers, his lips quirking in a tight smile. “I’ve had better.” He glanced at Eli and jerked his head toward the girl. “What the hell are we going to do with her? We aren’t allowed to execute children.”
“Are you so sure that’s necessary, Jonathan?” Eli asked, his mouth twisting as though he’d just taken a bite of something distasteful.
Jonathan glanced at the girl. “There’s nothing in her that can be saved, Eli.”
The Master sighed. “You’re most likely right. But that being the case, with her age, she is the Council’s problem,” Eli said, shaking his head.
All this time, the girl had studied them, listening intently. Now she started to laugh. “What’s the matter, sexy? You afraid of me?” She stalked toward Eli, her hips swinging from side to side, her jeans riding so low, they barely covered her ass.
Eli stepped to the side when she reached out, but as she moved forward again, he stopped. As she reached up to touch his face, she whispered, “Come on . . . give me a taste. I do love vamps.”
Leandra shoved off the wall with a chuckle, bringing three pairs of eyes her way. “You wouldn’t survive after taking a taste of this one, precious. His wife wouldn’t leave even a piece of you behind that the Council could recognize.”
The girl turned, flipping her blonde hair back behind her shoulders before planting her hands on her hips and staring at Leandra with something that looked like greed. “Hmmm . . . then how about you?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Leandra said, moving until she was just an arm’s length away. “What is your name?”
Instead of answering, the girl reached out and trailed her fingers up Leandra’s midsection. “Maybe I’ll tell you . . . after.”
Baring her teeth in a smile, Leandra said, “No. You’ll tell me now.” Then she caught the girl’s wrist, pressing her fingers to the pressure points on the inside and used her hold to flip the girl’s arm up, putting pressure on the shoulder joint. It sent the girl to her knees, and while she was squawking from the pain, Leandra reached in and grabbed the information she needed. “Thank you, Morgan. That was all I wanted to know.”
She let go and stepped back, laughing as Morgan surged to her feet and tried to rake her nails down Leandra’s face. Under the bubbling anger, Leandra got a sense of the girl’s power. Holding still, she waited until the girl was nearly on her before she flexed her own power. Morgan went flying back, striking her head against the wall with a resounding thunk.
Those pretty green eyes rolled back, and she groaned, reaching up to touch her head.
Leandra waited until Morgan’s eyes cleared, and then she said, “Don’t bite off more than you can chew, little girl.”
Morgan’s eyes flashed with hate, but she stayed on her ass, with her back planted against the wall.
The door opened just then, and Leandra watched as Agnes, leaning heavily on her cane, stepped inside the room.
Her eyes looked a little dull, and her skin had an odd gray cast.
The old witch didn’t look very well.
Agnes was vaguely aware of the others, but her attention was caught by the girl in front of her.
It was like looking through a mirror.
A distorted mirror.
Agnes hadn’t seen her reflection until she had started to age a bit, probably sometime after the seventeenth century. But she could remember what she looked like. Through the eyes of her lover—the memories of her husband had dimmed a bit, but looking at the girl, it was like she was seeing herself through Elias’s eyes.
But Agnes hadn’t had that sense of evil clouding the air around her. What she felt coming from the girl was cloying, noxious; it was as though the very air around her had been tainted by the evil inside her.
Glancing up, she met Eli’s eyes. “Nasty bit you have here, lad.”
Eli’s mouth twisted in a mockery of a smile. “Aye. I have hopes that Malachi will take her off my hands and turn her over to the Council for me.”
Leandra stood across the room, her hands tucked in her back pockets. The look on her face was of bored indifference. But what Agnes saw in Leandra’s eyes said something else.
“Our guest’s name is Morgan,” Leandra said. “But she doesn’t seem interested in talking with us. A little rude, if you ask me.”
“Who’s the fossil?”
Agnes smiled a little at Leandra and then she turned her eyes to the girl. And she was just a girl. Probably the same age Agnes had been when Elias . . . Agnes forced those thoughts aside. “Morgan, is it?” she mused as she started to circle around the petite blonde.
Morgan smirked. “At your age, don’t you think you should get a hearing aid?”
With a faint smile, Agnes replied, “Oh, I hear just fine.” Her other senses worked fine as well, including her sense of smell. “I smell blood on you, girl.”
A nasty smile spread across Morgan’s face. “Not enough. At least, not yet.”
Agnes had lived a long, long time. She knew what evil was, had faced it, fought it. But it was rare that she had met one who reveled in the very essence of evil the way this girl did.
“She’d broken into a house,” Jonathan said quietly. “I trailed her there. Thank God I got there in time. She was in the boy’s room.”
Narrowing her eyes, Agnes moved a little closer. “Was he harmed?”
“No.”
Morgan curled her lip in a sneer as Agnes neared. She shoved off the wall, flipping her heavy fall of blonde hair back behind one shoulder. “What are you going to do, old woman? Send me to bed without dinner?”
Chuckling, Agnes said, “Dinner is the least of your concerns, child.”
“Or yours,” Morgan whispered just before she lunged.
The others were moving, but the girl was quick.
However, Agnes wasn’t as helpless as she looked. Moving to the side, she struck out with her cane as Morgan tried to swerve and catch her. She caught the girl between the legs with the cane, and Morgan landed on the floor on her belly. She tried to shove up onto her hands and knees, but Agnes flipped her cane and swung the hooked end down. The curving piece of wood struck Morgan right at the base of her skull, connecting with a sickening thud.
The girl collapsed to the floor without a sound.
Lowering her cane to the floor, she turned and started to slowly make her way across the room. On her way out the door, she murmured, “She will be a bit of a problem.”
LEANDRA LAY ON HER BELLY, BREATH WHEEZING IN and out of her lungs. Mike sprawled across her legs, his head resting in the dip of her spine. She could feel his breath caressing her skin as he sucked in air with breaths as ragged as her own.
“You left the door unlocked,” he muttered against her skin.
“Did I?” she asked blearily. She didn’t remember. It had been a long, tiresome night, and she’d ended up heading for bed before sunrise. She remembered leaving Eli and Jonathan once Malachi arrived. Remembered heading to her bedroom on legs that shook from exhaustion.
Remembered going to bed—that was clear.
And then feeling his hands on her, the heat of it bringing her awake as she moaned in arousal.
He brushed his lips across the upper curve of one buttock, and Leandra shive
red. He pushed to his knees, and Leandra felt the fire leap to life inside her, even though she ached inside. But instead of bringing her to her knees, and pushing inside, he crawled upward to lay on his side, pressed against her. She could feel his cock, warm and wet, against her hips.
Draping one arm over her back, Mike sighed. Between the heat of his body and the lethargy left from his touch, she felt sleep closing in around her. But before she fell completely under, he trailed his fingers down her spine and asked, “Who is the girl Jonathan brought in?”
The fog of sleep was suddenly gone, leaving her thoughts clear. A shiver rushed down her spine as she remembered looking into those soulless eyes. “Trouble,” she murmured. “The girl is trouble.”
“Is she as young as I’ve heard?”
Leandra pushed up and rested her weight on her elbows, staring at the soft green patina of the aged bronze bedstead. “I don’t know how young you’ve heard she is, but she’s young. Just a kid.”
“Jonathan found her getting ready to kill a little boy.”
Leandra lowered her lashes. “I know.”
Mike rolled onto his back, and she shivered, chilled by the sudden loss of his body heat. “Killer kids.”
Killer kids . . . It was a phrase that had appeared often in news headlines over the past few years. It left a sick ache in her belly. She’d been seventeen the first time she’d killed a man. It had been one of the Scythe’s soldiers—a werewolf recently changed, one still learning control, and one who didn’t care that she’d said no.
She’d killed him, and even though it had been justified, it left a mark on her soul.
Leandra knew without a shadow of a doubt that Morgan had killed, and more than once. But it hadn’t left any sort of mark. Morgan hadn’t suffered through guilt and regret. She didn’t have the ability. It was almost like the girl was incomplete.
Missing her soul.
“Eli doesn’t want to deal with her. Because of her age, it’s likely he won’t have to. I think she’s more the Council’s responsibility,” Leandra murmured. “With both Malachi and Agnes here, perhaps they can handle her.”
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