“We’ll drive up in the Land Rover,” she told him. “Sir Pup—you go on around.”
The driveway bent to the right and down a small rise. Maggie studied the house longer than she might have if Geoff weren’t looking through her eyes. A columned veranda wrapped around the front of the house. It rose three stories, topped by a widow’s walk. Exits in the front, she noted, and likely in the back.
For a demon, though, any window could serve as an exit.
“I walk ahead of you,” Geoff said. And before she could protest, he added, “So I can see where the hell I’m going.”
And when he could see where he was going, Maggie realized, he moved as smoothly and as confidently as any of the operatives she’d worked with. He took the front steps and moved to the side of the door. He held up his hand before she could kick through.
Geoff pointed to his eyes, then the door. It took her a moment to understand.
The demon was waiting for them—and looking at the door from the other side.
On the stairs, he mouthed clearly.
Her pulse raced, and she couldn’t stop her grin. The British and American governments had no idea what they were missing.
He reached down and depressed the door handle. It opened easily.
Maggie swept through low, aimed—and froze. Katherine stood on the stair landing. Tall and dark, just like Geoff. Her eyes widened, and she raced down the stairs.
Geoff came in beside Maggie and raised his arms. His gun.
Oh, Jesus.
“No!” Maggie launched herself at him—too late.
He fired. Katherine’s cheek opened up; blood spit across the wall beside her. She staggered, fell.
Maggie’s weight knocked him to the side. He caught his footing, caught her with his free hand.
“Maggie! What the bloody . . .” He stopped, and his brow furrowed. “What are you seeing?”
She looked back at the stairs. Katherine stared at them, her gaze clouded with death. Crimson soaked into the cream-carpeted stair pillowing her head.
Coldly, Geoff aimed again. “My sister’s eyesight isn’t that good, Maggie.”
And the wound on her cheek was healing.
The tricking, lying bastard. Maggie clenched her teeth and opened fire.
The demon lifted his head, the ragged wound opening with his grin. But he didn’t stay Katherine and let them shoot him full of holes.
And knowing that a demon couldn’t hurt them didn’t make him any less terrifying when he shape-shifted.
The change was instantaneous.
If Geoff was looking through the demon’s eyes, he wouldn’t see the scales that covered the massive body, the glistening fangs, the ebony horns that curled back over his head. Hands became claws.
But it was the knees that made Maggie want to sink whimpering to the floor and curl into a ball. They were just the wrong way. Like a goat’s hind legs, but she couldn’t look at them without imagining her own knees snapping backward.
Maggie instinctively stepped back as the leathery wings snapped open and air gusted over her face. Her heart jumped into her throat as the taloned wing tips slammed into the stair-well walls, forming a barrier.
The message was clear: The demon couldn’t harm them. But it didn’t have to let them pass, either.
Where the hell was Sir Pup?
Geoff’s gun clicked. Out of ammunition. And Maggie almost screamed as something brushed by her leg.
A dog. Golden retriever. Wearing a guide harness.
Oh, thank God.
“Yours, Mr. Blake?” The demon’s grin spread wide over his fangs. A sword appeared in his hands. “Foolish. The Rules do not apply to animals—”
Sir Pup shifted as he leapt. Maggie grabbed Geoff’s arm and swung him around, dropping them both to the ground.
She looked, but couldn’t follow what happened. The demon crashed through a wall. A painting thumped to the floor beside Geoff’s head, then tipped over them. The house shook. Sir Pup yelped, once, and the echoing growl that followed it turned her blood to ice.
Geoff squeezed her hand. Maggie pushed at the heavy frame. Beside them, a ripped piece of wing bled onto the floor.
“If Sir Pup uses his teeth,” Maggie began, then shrank back as something huge rushed by them—demon or hellhound, she couldn’t be sure. The floor trembled.
Geoff pushed her tighter against the wall, shielding her with his body as she finished, “If Sir Pup bites him, his venom gets into the demon. Paralyzes him.”
Paralyzes him was said into sudden, deathly silence.
Maggie sat up, and her hand flew to her mouth.
The once beautifully decorated house was destroyed. Plaster and drywall gaped open, exposing the walls’ support posts like wooden bones. Carpeting had been shredded. There was blood . . . everywhere. On the furniture, the floors, the walls. Her stomach roiled.
“Bugger me,” Geoff whispered beside her.
A shadow darkened the dining room wall. A shadow, Maggie realized, with three heads.
With his left head, Sir Pup dragged the demon beside him, knocking chairs out of his blooded path. He was limping, Maggie saw. Limping and bleeding.
The demon had the stump of a right arm and a bite taken out of his torso. And he was still alive.
She swallowed down the bile that rose and held back her shudder. “Hold him here, Sir Pup,” she said. “We’re going to get Katherine.”
Geoff went up the stairs ahead of her. The door was locked. He slammed his shoulder against it, and it splintered open.
Katherine stood on the other side, holding the heavy antique lamp like a baseball bat. Uninjured, but obviously scared out of her wits.
Maggie reloaded her gun through their hasty reunion.
They weren’t yet done.
Geoff dragged James inside while Maggie brought their rented vehicle to the house. Sir Pup could vanish the blood. They’d leave the broken mess.
Katherine found food in the kitchen and brought it out to the living room while they waited for James to wake up. Geoff’s sister didn’t kick the mutilated and paralyzed demon when she walked by him, stretched out motionlessly on the floor beside James. Which meant, Maggie thought, that Katherine was a better woman than she would have been.
Geoff spent twenty minutes on the phone with Ames-Beaumont. “Uncle Colin has canceled his and Savi’s flight,” he told them. “And has scheduled ours for this evening.”
Maggie nodded. It’d be enough time. James was already stirring.
“And he wants to know what they were looking for,” Geoff said.
Katherine frowned. “I told you. Dragon blood.” She looked at Maggie. “They said it was something that your congressman had. That he’d kept it since the war of the heavens, intending it for a time when it could be used. Now that your demon is dead, he wanted it.” She pointed at the demon. “It’s not much to speak of. A few drops trapped in a crystal rock.”
Maggie forced herself to look again at the demon’s missing arm, the wound in his side. How much power did a few drops have that the demon had gone through this?
“Do you know where it is, Kate?”
“Yes.” She flipped over a blood-spattered cushion on a sofa and sat. “And I’ll tell you where you can find it once we’ve reached San Francisco. You can hand it over to Uncle Colin, and he can give it over to the Guardians. If I don’t, I suppose I’ll soon be repeating this experience.”
Geoff’s face was grim. “And someone else will be forced into a demon’s service.”
It could have been me, Maggie thought. She sank into a shredded armchair and brought her legs up.
Langan would’ve known when he’d given James the assignment to kill Thomas Stafford that it couldn’t be completed. It might have even been plotted by both demons, so that they would have—if they needed one—a hold over a human who could carry out assassinations, who didn’t have to follow the Rules. It wouldn’t have been the first time Stafford had used a human to kill for him.
If the Guardians hadn’t slain Stafford, what might have happened? Would she, too, have found herself trapped in a bargain—forced to kidnap or kill to save her soul?
She laid her cheek against her knees and closed her eyes. But it hadn’t happened. Karma, luck, or maybe something else . . . She had escaped that fate, and ended up with Ames-Beaumont instead.
And Geoff.
Opening her eyes, she looked up and met his. They were slightly unfocused; they were never like that when he was looking through her. Her gaze moved to Katherine. His sister’s stare was as intense as Geoff’s could be.
She heard him say quietly, “Just a few more seconds, Kate.”
How wonderful to have family, Maggie thought.
Especially this one.
Chapter Nine
They made it simple for James.They sat him on the sofa and explained what would happen if he ever spoke a word about Ames-Beaumont’s family, or about what Geoff and Katherine could do.
They waited on the veranda while Sir Pup killed the demon in front of him.
When the hellhound was finished, Maggie cut through James’s handcuffs and let him go.
Maggie awoke in a familiar bed that wasn’t hers, with the most powerful vampire in the world glowering down at her.
She sat up, clutching royal blue satin to her chest. A chest that was, thank God, covered by the tank she wore beneath her uniform.
“Sir,” she said, and in the course of the word, tried desperately to remember how she’d ended up sleeping in his mansion.
She hadn’t fallen asleep on the plane. She did remember disembarking, and that her employer and Savi had met them at the airport. She’d said “Sir.” He’d said, “Good God, Winters. You’re bloody exhausted.”
That was the last she could recall. Which probably meant that Ames-Beaumont had given her a psychic shove and put her to sleep.
He sat on the edge of the bed, avoiding the sunlight streaming in through the eastern windows. When she’d first met him, she would have sworn the sun rose every morning purely out of hope it might shine on his face. There was beautiful, and then there was Colin Ames-Beaumont. He . . . glowed. Not physically, she knew, but psychically. The first weeks of her employment had been filled with humiliating leaps of her heart every time he’d entered the room she was in. Then she’d adjusted, the psychic effect had worn off, and she’d finally been able to look at him without catching her breath.
His deep frown could still affect her heart rate, though. She waited, holding her breath.
“I am disturbed, Winters.” His gaze, when it met hers, was slightly accusing. “I believe my nephew plans to steal you away from me.”
Her fingers clutched the sheet more tightly. God, she wished whoever had put her to bed had left her uniform on. “I have no intention of giving up my position here, sir.”
He tilted his head, and the sun hit the wild disarray of his hair, lighting the burnished gold. Mirrors were of no use to him, and Maggie knew he didn’t possess a single comb. “I can hear them plotting downstairs. My own family. She tells him where the dragon blood is, and he says he will persuade me to allow you to accompany him while he retrieves it.”
Maggie’s expression was a perfect blank. “It would be prudent, sir, for someone to accompany him—and to protect him.”
His gaze narrowed. “He also intends to spend a good fortnight flying about the world, so that if he were to be followed by some unknown party, they would lose track of him.”
“That also seems a well-conceived plan, sir.”
“A bloody expensive one, if you ask me. And what will I do, Winters? You cannot serve me if you are family.”
“I do not serve you, Mr. Ames-Beaumont. I am employed by you. I do not see any reason for that relationship to alter, whatever my relationship with Mr. Blake may become.”
He stood and slid his hands into the pockets of his tailored trousers. A pleased expression lit his features. “If you do become family, Winters—I suppose that means I will be able to pay you less?”
“I think, sir, you would have to pay me more.”
The vampire heaved a melodramatic sigh and turned toward the sitting room. “Do not break his heart, Winters, or we will have words.”
Maggie began to breathe again. She must have been breathing his entire visit—she only just now realized she was able to.
“And if he breaks mine, sir?”
He looked back and flashed a grin that seemed to be all fangs. “I would have to thrash him quite soundly. I have many nephews, but there is only one Winters.”
She was still clutching the sheet to her chest when Geoff came through the sitting room doors.
And she couldn’t allow this to happen again. Geoff in her bedroom? Yes. In her employer’s house? In his bed?
Far too awkward.
Geoff stopped at the foot of the bed. His hair was still damp from a shower, his jeans and T-shirt new. His gaze locked with hers.
And he couldn’t see her at all.
Her heart slipped into a heavy, steady beat.
“Uncle Colin said he spoke with you.”
“He did.” She threw back the covers and held his gaze as she walked on her knees to the end of the mattress. “And apparently, we will be spending the next two weeks in each other’s company.”
He reached out, his fingers brushing the sides of her waist. Her skin tightened and prickled with delicious sensation. “I’ll be happy with a fortnight in your garden, Maggie.”
She touched his jaw. “I wouldn’t be.”
“And I lied.” His laugh rumbled over her fingers. “I wouldn’t be, either. Ah, Maggie. I’m pushing you into this too fast.”
“What makes you think I can be pushed anywhere I don’t want to go?”
“No, I don’t suppose you could be.” He drew a deep breath. “Look, I ought to tell you—I crossed lines, Maggie. I had reason to go over your files, but I went over them again and again, and I went deeper than I should have. I was desperate to know you. If James hadn’t taken Katherine, if we’d met later, after I’d moved here, I’d have pushed you then. And if you’d said no, I’d likely have followed you everywhere in hope that someone would look at you, so that I could, too.”
Did he expect her to back away because of that? Not a chance. She didn’t know what they had now or what it would be, but she was going to grab on to it—on to him—and hold tight.
“So, stalking and surveillance.” She shook her head, smiling. “To someone like me, that’s either a precursor to killing someone . . . or to sleeping with them. So I think we’ll work out fine.”
He was still laughing when she bent forward and eased her mouth over his. Last time, she’d surprised him. It had been just a press of lips, her hands through his hair. Now she took her time, explored his taste, sought more of him to touch.
His hands at her hips pulled her closer, and he was warm, hot, would burn her alive.
Her pulse raced when she pulled away. “Not here,” she panted. “I can’t here.”
His large hand cupped her cheek. He kissed her again, then nodded. And she felt his disappointment when he let her go.
She walked past him, into the bathroom, and closed the door. A wall panel, when she slid it aside, revealed the one mirror in the house. He would see her there. She would lean back against the door, and he would lift her, and watch her face as she welcomed him in.
And it would be hard the first time, and rough, because she cared so much she knew that she’d be a little careless.
But it wouldn’t be her employer’s bed. She cracked the door open again and called out softly, “Mr. Blake?”
ove Hellhounds, Charlaine Harris
Charlaine Harris Page 30