“All right,” Casey interrupted, feeling like a third wheel and not liking it. “When do we do this?”
“I’d rather wait for dusk, but we can’t take that chance. He could trigger the device at any moment.” He met her gaze directly. “You will be careful, Cassandra. Wait until I clear the way for you. No heroics.”
“What? You’re the only one allowed to be a hero?”
“I’m stronger, faster, and I can heal almost immediately from any attack. That doesn’t make me a hero.”
“Whatever,” she muttered, but he was still looking at her expectantly. “Fine, I’ll be careful, okay?”
He smiled. “Thank you.” Then he twisted around to address Nick. “Control yourself until we get closer.”
Casey turned to stare at Nick, then lifted a brow. “What does that mean?”
Nick offered only a wicked grin, but Damian answered her. “Nico likes to make an entrance. He burns brightly enough that Sotiris will sense him coming anyway, but there’s no need to draw his attention any sooner than necessary.”
“Do you feel him burning like that? Because I get nothing from him except a vague irritation.” She scowled at Nick, who winked back at her.
“Nico is like the sun rising on a new day,” Damian said, pretending not to get her sarcasm. Or maybe he really didn’t.
“You two like each other way too much,” she said sourly. It was stupid to be jealous of their relationship, but she couldn’t help it. “Can we just do this?” she snapped.
Damian’s answer was to open the car door and step outside. Nick was right on his heels, exiting on the same side of the car, while Casey moved more cautiously. Her side was visible from the truck, so she wanted to appear more casual as she climbed from the car and walked around to meet the two men. No big deal. Just a woman going to work. Nothing to see here. Move along.
“I’ll take out the two in the cab first. That’s your signal, Nico,” Damian said, gazing across the parking lot.
It was on Casey’s tongue to ask Damian, again, if he was sure he could do this, but they’d already pretty much covered that territory, and she didn’t want him to go into a fight thinking she doubted him. Because she really didn’t. But she couldn’t just let him stroll into danger either.
“Damian,” she began, not wanting to let him go, but she didn’t know how to finish. He smiled at her. It wasn’t his usual confident grin, but a sweet smile, as if he knew what she was fighting not to say.
“Come here,” he said, tugging her close. “Give me a kiss for luck.”
She went up on her toes and kissed him, her hand gripping the back of his neck, fingers twisted in his long hair, trying to keep him with her just a little bit longer. When they finally broke apart, his eyes gleamed with the kind of sexual hunger for her that she’d never thought to see in a man.
“Be safe,” he growled, then kissed her hard and took off.
He moved in that perfect silence of his—even his heavy boots on the gritty asphalt were soundless—and almost faster than her eyes could follow. One moment he was kissing her, and the next, he’d drawn his sword and was across the parking lot, pulling the door open and yanking the first guard from the cab, tossing aside the man’s dead body to reach across the seat, and grab the second, who barely had time to raise his weapon before Damian’s blade was taking off his head.
Nick’s low voice interrupted her fascination. “Wait for your cue,” he told her, and an instant later he was moving nearly as fast as Damian had, but with different intent. No blade for Nick. He circled wide to come in on the far side of the truck just as the back doors swung open. Sotiris stood there, his expression more one of irritation than anything else. Until he saw the dead guard’s body lying several feet away. His searching gaze fixed on her first, registering obvious surprise before he smirked and opened his mouth, probably intending to cast a killing spell. But then Nick stepped into the open and Sotiris’s eyes widened in shock. He shouted a warning, and tried to close the heavy doors, but at that moment, Damian came up on the other side of the truck, and grabbed one of the doors, nearly ripping it off its hinges.
Sotiris regarded Damian’s sudden appearance with obvious dismay, but he reacted quickly enough. Jumping from the back of the truck, he manhandled the doors into place and sealed them with a burst of power. Casey couldn’t catch the words, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she had. She couldn’t work magic herself, and so couldn’t have undone the spell. But she sure as hell felt it when the spell snapped into place, and all but welded the damn doors shut. Fuck. How would they get to the Talisman now?
NICK STOOD HIS ground as Sotiris stalked closer, letting his smug grin speak for him.
“I thought I was rid of you,” Sotiris said, the obvious hatred he felt for Nick making his words a low, vicious rasp of sound. “Thought you’d finally given up.”
Nick scoffed. “You thought I’d give up on the men who were closer to me than my blooded brothers? You’re a fool, but then, you never did understand loyalty.”
“So you got the warrior back,” Sotiris said dismissively. “He was always your favorite, your pet. But he’s only one, you bastard. You still think to find the others?” He laughed.
Nick smiled, knowing something that Sotiris clearly did not. “Have you checked your vaults lately, Sottie?” he asked, using Sotiris’s hated childhood nickname. “Maybe you should. Because I will find my brothers, every one of them.”
Sotiris scowled, both annoyed and puzzled by Nick’s confidence. “You won’t find anything if I kill you first.”
Nick laughed out loud, as if Sotiris had said something truly funny. And he had. Because they both knew the other sorcerer couldn’t kill him. He didn’t have the power. That had been the reason why he’d always hated him, why his hatred was so vicious that it had survived for millennia.
A car suddenly came flying across the lot, without a driver behind the wheel, just a handy couple of tons of metal that Sotiris had used magic to throw Nick’s way. He spun aside just in time, the gap narrow enough that he felt the wind of the car’s passage. He let his spin carry him full circle, back to facing Sotiris. He cast a deadly ball of energy at the other sorcerer, loading it with all the weight and density of a heavy medicine ball, slamming Sotiris with physical force on top of magical energy.
Sotiris grunted, not expecting the physical element to the attack. His back bowed as he struggled to repel the double hit of energy, fighting to remain upright. It was only seconds before he managed to dispel the energy, but both men knew that seconds could mean the difference between life and death in a magical duel.
But even as the hatred Nick felt for Sotiris burned in his veins, even as his magic roared, demanding release against this most ancient of enemies, he knew he couldn’t kill him. It was complicated, but the lives of his missing warriors were at stake. And that meant he couldn’t finish this. Not quite yet.
The arrogance was gone from Sotiris’s expression when he finally gathered himself enough to meet Nick’s gaze. Nick had always been stronger, but he’d also been very young back then. Aggressive and undisciplined in his attacks. He was none of those things now, and his enemy recognized it. He let a slow smile spread across his face. But it didn’t last. Sotiris’s eyes widened in something close to fear, and Nick knew suddenly what his enemy would do next.
“Damn it,” he swore. He couldn’t kill the bastard, but he could imprison him. He manipulated his magic feverishly, trying to contain the other sorcerer, to build a net that he couldn’t escape. But Sotiris had too much experience in running away, in deserting his own men to their fate. With an explosive build-up of energy and a pounding clap of displaced air, he was gone. Nick reached out with his power, tunneling through the ether, laying down a chasing trail of magic that he could follow. But just as he was about to send himself rocketing after Sotiris, a wave of energy burs
t loose out of nowhere, and Damian’s roar had him racing back to the truck.
CASEY HAD STUDIED the closed truck doors in dismay, feeling the heat of Sotiris’s sealing spell like a sunburn on her skin. But then Damian had yelled, “Down!” and she’d dropped to her knees and rolled into a protective ball as if she’d been doing it all her life. Damian’s blade sliced up and, with a shower of golden sparks, slashed through the bulk of the solid metal doors, nullifying the sealing spell. They fell open with a sizzling clang of fizzled magic and overheated metal, followed by the rat-a-tat of a submachine gun on full auto.
Bullets zinged through the now-empty space where she and Damian had been standing a moment earlier. She glanced at him from where she crouched on one side of the truck, meeting his eyes across the hail of bullets. What did they do next?
“On my mark,” he mouthed, and she nodded her understanding.
They took up positions on either side of the open back of the truck, where the doors hung from broken hinges and the metal was still distorted from the heat.
Damian stared at her meaningfully, then lifted a hand with three fingers showing. He counted down, dropping one finger after another, and then he was moving, swinging up and into the truck. Casey cursed, forced to follow more cautiously as gunfire erupted from deep inside the cargo space. Maybe god boy was immune to bullets, but she sure as hell wasn’t.
A body came flying out a moment later, and she took advantage of it, swinging up into the truck, and hunkering down behind one of the wooden boxes that littered the inside. She wondered what was in them, and if she needed to be worried about it. But then a bullet slammed into the metal siding next to her head, and she decided she should probably worry less about unknown crates, and more about the assholes who were shooting at her. She gripped her weapon, and was waiting for a break in the fire to shoot back, when abruptly the shooting stopped. Just . . . stopped.
She peered over the crate and saw Damian standing at the back wall of the truck’s big cargo area. He caught her eye and motioned her closer. The remaining guards, who’d presumably been firing at them earlier, now lay sprawled at Damian’s feet, bloody but no longer bleeding, since they were both quite dead. Apparently, Damian’s style of fighting didn’t include taking prisoners.
Stepping over their bodies, she was glad for her boots, but still kind of grossed out. The truck box was a contained space and the smell was . . . fragrant. She moved up right next to Damian, and looked around, somewhat puzzled. The Talisman should have been right here. She could feel it reaching out to her senses with a cold, oily touch, but. . . She studied the piles of boxes that cluttered the cargo space behind her, but almost immediately swung back around to the wall between the cargo box and the truck cab. She frowned.
“You said there was a fifth man in here, and that he was restrained. So where is he?”
“Could Sotiris have—?”
“No,” she interrupted absently. “He’s still here, with the Talisman.” She closed her eyes, shutting out everything except the pull of the magical device they were after. In less than a minute, her eyes flashed open. She stepped over to the cab wall and placed her hand against it.
“It’s back here,” she told Damian, absolutely certain she was right.
He cocked his head, staring curiously at the plywood barrier. “Be ready, Cassandra. There may be more guards than we saw earlier.” His blade came out and sliced through the fake wall like it was paper, and they both stepped back as a fresh hail of gunfire greeted them. Or at least Casey stepped back, taking cover behind a big wooden crate. And then, using the advantage of Damian’s fearless assault, she lined up her target over the top of the crate and fired three shots, hitting her man center mass all three times. He slumped to the ground just as a bloody Damian gripped a second man by the throat and choked off his air, waiting until his weapon fell from lifeless fingers, and then waiting longer to be absolutely certain.
Not all of the blood covering Damian was from the dead man, but she knew better than to make a fuss over his wounds, at least until they were out of the combat zone. She briefly touched his side, where blood had his T-shirt clinging to his ribs, and then looked up and waited for his studly nod that said he was fine. She permitted herself a tiny smile, but then caught sight of the man sitting in the corner and could only stare.
“Shit,” she breathed. She inched closer, meeting his terrified gaze and trying to project a confidence she definitely wasn’t feeling. “What’s your name?” she asked, wanting him to calm down as much as possible, to think about something other than the nasty magical thing about to go off in his face. There wouldn’t be an explosion, not precisely, but the energy release would be hellish nonetheless.
“Basil,” the man whispered.
Casey studied the setup with horrified fascination. She’d never seen anything like this, never dealt with this kind of brutality. Sotiris had shackled the man to the truck floor, then tied him to a chair and handed him the Talisman. Why? She studied him first, noting his sallow complexion, and the way his tendons and muscles were standing out, straining in stark relief. She’d bet Basil was a minor sorcerer, someone whom Sotiris had probably hired to work with the many devices he owned. Unfortunately for Basil, he’d actually been recruited for a suicide mission.
Willingly or otherwise—it was difficult for her to tell at this stage—he was feeding his energy, his very life force, into the Talisman. Casey forced herself to ignore the man’s terror, and to study the energy flow of the device, instead. She needed to figure out what was happening and how to stop it. That was why she was here. To save thousands of lives, not Basil’s.
But the poor bastard was the key. There had to be a reason why Sotiris had linked him to the device. And then she saw it. The Talisman contained a tremendous amount of energy within itself, an amount that was just short of an overload. That was constant, the magical energy imbued in the device by its creator. She still didn’t understand its purpose, but that wasn’t important right now. What was important was that the device was draining every ounce of energy contained in Basil’s body. Not only the magical energy of his sorcery, but his very life essence itself.
The danger was that very soon, the energy sucked up from Basil was going to force the Talisman beyond its energy capacity, at which point it would act to save itself from overload by releasing its energy on the world. That release would, in turn, set off a trigger effect, causing the Talisman to dump not just the overload, but all of its energy at once.
And from the way the terrified guy was clinging to the artifact, she had a pretty good idea that he literally couldn’t let go, couldn’t stop himself from becoming the trigger to one of the greatest disasters of modern times.
She sat back on her heels and studied the twofold problem, aware of the clock ticking in her head, reminding her that time was short. Her priority had to be deactivating the Talisman, but she had to at least try to save Basil. And she could think of only one way to do both of those things.
Flattening her lips, she slipped out of her leather jacket, which had a handy silk lining, then turned the jacket inside out just as Damian hunkered down next to her, his attention shifting between her hands, which were digging compulsively into the silk fabric of her jacket, and the green glow of the Talisman where it sat clutched in Basil’s trembling hands.
“What are you doing, Cassandra?” Damian asked, his tone clearly saying, “Don’t even think about it.”
“I’m going to take that thing from Basil before it sucks him dry.”
Damian shook his head slightly. “Not a good idea, sweetheart. Let me get Nico—”
“There’s no time,” she said calmly. “It’s sucking up his energy, and he’s a sorcerer, which makes the situation far more precarious. Am I right, Basil?” The man nodded wearily.
Damian growled. “Cassandra, do not—”
But before he
could finish his sentence, the device began to emit a deep, buzzing hum, and Basil’s eyes went wide in fresh terror.
“Too late,” Casey whispered. She dropped her jacket over the Talisman and wrenched it from the man’s hands, staring in shock as he shriveled to dust right before her eyes. A moment later, and the device’s magical signature begin to hammer at her own control. “Damian,” she whispered. “Get—”
“Nico!” Damian’s roar filled the tight space and pounded in her eardrums, but she was too horrified to care. She was no sorcerer. They had minutes before she lost control, before the device triggered itself and thousands of people died.
NICO VAULTED INTO the truck, his eyes going first to Damian, who was hunkered down in front of Casey, hands fisted as he fought against the protective instinct that was almost certainly telling him to grab the thing she was holding. But that would have been a huge mistake, and Damian seemed to realize it.
“Nico,” he growled, never taking his eyes off Casey.
Nick gripped Damian’s shoulder as he crouched next to him. “Talk to me, Casey,” he said, even as he scanned the thing beneath her jacket. It was the Talisman, no doubt about it. He’d only tasted its signature once, thousands of years ago, but it came back to him as if it had been yesterday.
Casey’s dark gaze met his, her pupils so wide that there was almost no brown left to her eyes. “He—” Her tongue swept out to lick her lips, and she swallowed, as if she needed that tiny bit of moisture to keep talking. “Sotiris bound Basil to the device. But he knew it would be too much.” A trace of horror filled her gaze as she stared at him. “It drained him dry,” she whispered, and her gaze shifted briefly to a pile of dust and bones on the floor next to her.
Nick’s mouth tightened in disgust. “He’s trying to trigger the device by overloading it,” he said.
The Stone Warriors: Damian Page 34