“Ugh, then why are we here?” Midnight frowned.
“This is where Merlin told me to go. He said we’d find a clue to the lamia and how to stop it here,” Dred said.
“A clue? Is this a treasure hunt? Why are you ruling types always so damned cryptic?” Middy huffed.
“There are certain rules; we’re not even supposed to be here now,” Grace said.
“Oh. Well, thanks?” Middy seemed to be at a loss for words.
“Yeah, well, seriously, guys. This lamia thing is on the apocalyptic scale of doom, just so you know. You have to stop it or everyone is screwed. Yeah, no pressure, right?” Grace rolled her eyes.
Sera Ann poked her head around the corner. Dred saw her horns before he saw her very large, violet eyes.
“Daddy?” she asked softly.
“No,” Grace answered for him. “Whatever you found, you can’t keep it.”
“What is it?” Caspian asked her.
She emerged with a baby gargoyle in her arms. It wasn’t old enough to have developed its humanoid features and was still almost birdlike, but its eyes were huge, blue, and obviously sentient. It blinked with long lashes and let out a pitiful wail and snuggled deeper into the child’s arms.
It wasn’t plump like a baby should be, but thin and un-dernourished. It also had stumps sticking out of its back where its wings should have been. They were caked with dried blood and oozing with infection.
The effect that the sound had on Middy was instanta-neous. Her eyes filled with tears and Dred felt as if something had stabbed him in the chest. He realized it was her pain at seeing the creature suffer. Damn that bond! He thought he was only supposed to share her feelings when they were fucking. That he could deal with. This was shit of another color. Perhaps it was during any extreme sensation?
He didn’t want to know that about her. It would make what they had to do all the more difficult, unless he really did marry her. His mother had given Middy the potion; it wasn’t really a question of “if ” anymore. It was when.
Dred knew she deserved better than what he had to offer her. That realization in itself was something new for him. He’d always thought any witch should be pleased to have him, down on her knees thanking Merlin for her good luck. Not Midnight Cherrywood. She deserved to be loved.
He kept saying that to himself, but why, he wasn’t sure.
Perhaps he should try to love her. It wasn’t as if she was unlovable; it was just that Dred didn’t want to be in love.
Love was a weakness he couldn’t afford. If he was really going to give Middy what she needed, he’d have to give up spying for Godrickle, and that just wasn’t something he could do.
Dred watched her as she held out her arms for the baby gargoyle. Sera Ann squinted at her for a moment as if judging her worth, but something about Middy earned her approval and she carefully handed the hatchling over to Middy’s waiting arms.
Midnight held the child close to her heart as the tears rolled down her cheeks in a caravan of sadness. She sank to the floor, rocking back and forth, and words Dred couldn’t understand poured from her mouth in a kind of litany.
He realized it had a cadence to it, but he knew it was no language he’d ever heard spoken.
She rocked faster and the hatchling’s tiny claws grasped her shoulders, drawing tiny spots of blood on her shirt.
Middy didn’t notice. Though he did feel the pain in his chest ebb as Middy’s rocking slowed. Those strange words became a hum and when she collapsed against the wall, her arms limp at her sides, the hatchling was still clinging to her.
Its bright blue eyes were bold jewels in a chubby face, humanoid features had replaced the reptilian, and its wings were fully formed and whole, fluttering like twin butterflies on its back.
Dred tried to go to her and it growled at him like a rabid dog. He ignored it and when it nipped at him, he growled back. He took Middy into his arms. “Midnight!”
Her head lolled against his shoulder and her eyes fluttered. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” He looked at Grace and Caspian, but they shook their heads in unison.
“Mama,” Sera Ann began. “You were right to help them.
Look what she can do!”
“Middy is the key,” Caspian said decidedly. “Only magick wrought of purity and sacrifice could heal wounds like that. And only the same can stop a lamia.”
Merlin stuck his head through the remnants of a window.
“You’ve been here long enough. Time to go. Or Bad Things . . .”
“Coming, coming.” Caspian shook his head.
“Did she have some bad seafood?” Merlin said, nodding to Middy.
“No, she healed this baby gargoyle though.” Sera Ann plucked him from Middy like a recalcitrant puppy and held him up for Merlin’s inspection.
“Give me that. There’s still another clue. The portal is closing. Move your”—he paused to look at Sera Ann before he decided on his vocabulary—“bottoms.”
Dred was suddenly alone with Middy as the strange crew vanished. That had been weird, but he supposed weird was a relative term. He lived in a magickal world, so logically, nothing should surprise him.
“Midnight, are you okay?”
“My back hurts,” she said softly.
This was another one of those brutally honest moments he didn’t want. Dred had a feeling that he knew what he was going to find if he looked at her back, specifically, her shoulder blades. He was sure that there would be blood and infection. He had to get her out of here.
“It feels wet,” Middy said.
“Lean forward just a bit.”
She made a small sound of protest.
“A little more. It’s okay. It will be okay.” Not that he had any right to promise that, because he didn’t know. He couldn’t make okay happen either and that irritated the piss out of him.
“I think I’m bleeding. Wait, where’s the hatchling?”
“Middy, you don’t remember? You healed it.”
“Good,” she whispered as he pulled the back of her shirt up to reveal the open wounds on her shoulders.
“At what cost to yourself though? Did you know you could do that?”
“Dred, seeing it suffer like that, it just broke my heart.”
“I know. But you didn’t answer me. Did you know that you could do that?”
“No. I don’t know if I could do it again either. All I could think about was how it had suffered and my magick was suddenly hot in my veins like lava.” Midnight was quiet for a moment. “Is it bad?”
“There’s no infection, thank Merlin for that at least,” Dred said. He knew a pitiful healing spell that was good for skinned knees and bar fights, but nothing else.
He did what he could and enchanted her shirt to act as a bandage until he could get her to a Magick Medic.
“Do you think maybe I could have an aspirin spell, too?”
He pulled her to him gently and rested his chin on the top of her head as he spoke the words that would ease her pain. That at least was something he could do.
“Hey, if you keep holding me and petting me, I might start to think that you like me.”
“Never said I didn’t like you, Middy.”
“So, dipping my hair in potions and causing my yogurt to sour—that was all you liking me?” Middy asked as she settled against him.
“I was a snot-nosed kid who didn’t know what to do with his obsession with a certain witch’s silky hair,” he admitted.
“You’re full of unicorn piss.”
“Don’t forget vinegar.”
Middy laughed. “I love you.” She said it quietly and sin-cerely, unlike her initial unhappy eruption. “I know it’s probably the potion talking, but it feels so real.”
“What do you want me to say?” Dred asked, his voice equally soft. He didn’t know what she wanted from him.
“You shouldn’t tell someone that you love them with any expectation they’ll say anything. Love is a gift and wh
ether you want it or not, mine belongs to you.”
“Thank you.” He wanted to give her something in return, he wanted to say it back, but he just couldn’t have those feelings. Not for her, not for anyone. He wouldn’t lie to her.
That’s what he could do for her, he could be honest. “If I could have those feelings for anyone, Midnight, it would be you.”
“Now that you’ve said it, it feels true.” She snorted.
“That sounds stupid.”
Her heart was so big, big enough to love him when he had nothing to give back. Dred knew that even thinking those thoughts was grounds to suspend his man card, but he didn’t care.
Because he was a bag of dirty dicks.
Now was as good a time as any to tell her about the wedding.
“I guess it’s a good thing that you love me.”
“Oh, why is that?”
“You have to marry me now.”
“Look, I said I would plan the thing and—”
“Middy.” He let his fingers tangle in her hair. “You took the potion. We have to get married in ten days or you’ll lose your magick.”
“If we get divorced, you’ll lose yours,” Middy cried.
“Not unless you have the tattoo,” Dred said as if he were teaching a class on the matter. “Those words that were in-scribed on the ring you were asking about? It’s fine as long those didn’t manifest in the tattoos.”
“These?” Middy turned her wrist so he could see the words of the ring that were twined in her engagement tattoo.
“Where the fuck did that come from?”
“So, now that you’re tied to me as well, I’m a scheming bitch. I can feel what you’re thinking.” Middy moved away from him.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. Let’s just find whatever it is we’re supposed to find and get the hell out of here.”
Middy stood up, but it was a slow and painful process.
When he tried to help her, she jerked away.
“Middy, what am I supposed to believe? We’ve got this inexplicable connection and now we’re bound together forever. Do you really want to live without your magick?”
She turned to him, her dark eyes like coals. “No, but I will. Just because I love you, that doesn’t mean I’ll spend my life married to a warlock who doesn’t love me.”
“Then I guess I’d better figure out how to love you. I won’t live without my magick. I can’t.”
He realized then that he’d jammed a sharp object into a tender place. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“But you did.”
“Middy, you can’t live that way either. Look what you did for that hatchling. There’s great power in you and it would be selfish of you to give that up, not when there are so many you could save.”
Her eyes were pools of despair, deep and endless as his words cut into her further. Oh, he was worse than a bag of dirty dicks. He was a bastard, the same bastard that he’d promised himself he wouldn’t be.
“You’re right.” She nodded her head slowly. “I could do something for a change. Something real, something tangi-ble. Not just be arm candy on some spy mission. I could be worth something.”
“Midnight . . .” he trailed off. He wanted to tell her that she was worth a lot of something. That she was worth it to him, but that was too close to a declaration.
She turned on her heel and left the room to explore the rest of the ruins, but promptly tripped over Tristan Belledare.
He was dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Hero at Rest
The face that had last looked at her with such concern was now frozen in a pale death mask. Those lips that had sought hers were cold and blue. The hands that wanted to touch her could feel nothing. Not even her fingers as they intertwined with his.
Middy hadn’t really liked him in life, no. His death hadn’t changed that, but she couldn’t help feeling that his death was tied to her somehow. She wondered where he’d gone with Tally and if she’d been the last witch to see him alive.
There was something in his hand. Something firm, like cardboard was tucked into his palm. She let go of his hand and found a matchbook. It was black and highly processed, with a satin finish. The gilded imprint read “Donatien.”
What the hell was that?
The cause of death wasn’t readily apparent until Dred rolled him over. Tristan’s back was nothing short of a horror. It had, at one time, been a bloody mess. Now, it was just gaping flesh and hanging fascia. Bloodless. Middy could see inside of his body and ribs were missing. So were precise sections of vertebrae: the axis bone of his cervical spine, two from the thoracic, and one from the lumbar. It appeared as if another from the lumbar had been chosen, but abandoned. There were score marks that could only have been made by powerful teeth set into even more powerful jaws. Something had drained the blood and the marrow from him.
Something like a lamia.
Tristan hadn’t deserved to die like this. He’d been a hero.
She stole a glance at Dred. He was a hero, too, but if he died, his funeral wouldn’t be a warlock holiday. His coming and going would be noted with a column in Magickal Finance and no one would ever know he’d tried to save the world.
Middy wasn’t angry because he didn’t love her. She was angry because she’d trusted him enough to confide in him and he didn’t trust her the same way. He assumed that because he felt something between them, that she’d done something to manipulate him when he’d been shortening the strings himself all along.
Would she marry him? Probably. He was right about her responsibility to use this new magick she’d found. She couldn’t do that without marrying him after Aradia had cheerfully stuck her finger in the pot and stirred.
Dred pulled out his Witchberry and snapped pictures of the crime scene, excruciatingly efficient while she was pondering the unfairness of life. She watched him work and understood why he was the way he was, but that didn’t mean she had to like it.
Middy had to turn away. “I can’t look anymore, but when I look away, I still see it.”
“That never changes, you know.”
“How do you keep all of this in your head?”
“Someone has to,” he said, taking a last snapshot before he rolled Tristan on what was left of his back.
“Why does it have to be you?”
“Why does it have to be anyone?” Dred shrugged.
“I wonder how he could have been right outside the door all this time without Sera Ann tripping over him when she was exploring.”
“Unless he wasn’t there for her to trip over. That would mean someone or something dumped the body here for us to find.” Dred frowned, his mouth a grim line. “It’s no accident that this convent is so close to Shale Creek.”
“Do you think Tristan’s death has something to do with what happened there?” Middy asked.
“Did you really believe what you said to Belledare in the library?”
“I said a lot of things to him in the library. Which thing do you mean?”
“Let me ask a different question. Do you believe that I tried to kill him for a Hand of Glory?”
“No,” Middy said without any hesitation.
“How can you be so sure?”
“I just know.”
“Because of the potion?”
“I knew that before the potion. For a spy, who is supposed to be aware of all things at all times, you’re awfully thick in the head.”
“No one else has ever believed me innocent. Even Hubert.”
“A Hand of Glory is powerful magick.”
“I still have it. Does that change what you think of me?”
Dred asked carefully.
“No, but why does it matter?”
“I’m going to need you to trust me for what happens next. And you jumped from a broom at thirty-some-odd thousand feet in the air because you thought I was going to hurt you.”
“You startled me.”
�
��Midnight Cherrywood, you thought I was trying to hitch a ride on the Hershey Highway without so much as a ‘Do you like gladiator movies?’ ”
Midnight blushed and turned away. “Well, what would you do if you tried to sit down and found your chocolate cherry about to be snatched from you either by unhappy accident or devious device?”
“Devious device?” Dred snorted.
“You sound like a pig.”
Dred looked around for a moment as if considering.
“Yeah, kind of. I’ll own that. Sure. Why not?”
“So, you were saying something about trust? This isn’t your perfunctory ‘Do you like gladiator movies?’ is it? Tally has told me some stories about the trust conversation and for some reason, it always comes back to the chocolate cherry. Or an orgy.”
“Midnight, I will try anything that turns you on or gets you off, but I’ve had my share of chocolate cherries, orgies, and pretty much anything that you can think of. Which brings us back to the trust.”
“See, Tally told me the trust conversation always comes back to some strange sex act. Well, hit me with it. Goddess, if this what being married to you is going to be like, I don’t know if I can take it. And you’re certainly not going to have anything on the side because I—”
“That matchbook you found in Belledare’s hand, it was stamped with a name. Donatien.”
“How did you know that? I didn’t even show you the stamp.”
“Because I’ve been there. I recognized the box. It’s a sex club not too far from here.”
“We’re going to a sex club?” Middy’s voice hit a rather high pitch.
Dred laughed.
The bastard.
“Not just any sex club, my sweet. Donatien caters to a specific sort of kink. It’s named for Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade.”
“The guy who liked to write dirty stories with his finger up his ass?”
“I see you’ve watched Quills.”
“And you want me to go to this club? Have you lost your mind?” Middy asked him in all seriousness.
“No, Midnight, I have not. In fact, I think you’ll rather enjoy it.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I suppose since I’m asking you to trust me, I should be honest.” Dred looked a bit bashful. “Whenever someone tries to access a function that I’ve not okayed for my centerfold, it sends feedback to the company. Which just happens to be part of my financial portfolio.”
How to Marry a Warlock in 10 Days Page 17