by Sarah Piper
An invitation witches like Jaci never received. Not without a whole lot of strings and sharp objects attached.
“The kitchen is fully stocked,” he continued, gesturing around the open-plan apartment like some kind of vampire real estate agent. “Down the hall you’ll find the bedroom and bath, toiletries, linens, clothing. If there’s anything else you need, leave a list outside the door and one of my associates will attend to it.”
“Your vampire henchmen are now my personal shoppers?” She stifled a laugh, picturing a bunch of fanged goons in black leather jackets selecting ripe mangoes from the market, picking up her feminine supplies, rifling through the half-price underwear bin at Macy’s for her size.
Gabriel folded his arms across his chest but said nothing. Not unless sighs and grunts could be considered a language.
Jaci headed into the kitchen, always her favorite spot, trying to tamp down her bubbling curiosity. The cupboards were the same gleaming oakwood as the floors, the walls painted a deep olive, the countertops ridiculously spacious. A massive granite-topped island stretched across the center, perfect for making spell jars and hex bags. A bay window took up most of the far wall, a large pantry nestled in beside it. Against her better judgment, she was already picturing the shelves stocked with jars of dried herbs and other magical ingredients, the sunny window seat overflowing with her favorite plants.
The whole place was a dream.
“What’s the catch, Prince?” She tried to sound more irritated than excited, but judging from the smug look on his no-right-to-be-that-handsome face, she didn’t pull it off.
“Catches,” he said. “Plural.”
Jaci laughed and rolled her eyes. “Here we go.”
“First, for obvious security reasons, the apartment will be monitored at all times, including the main living areas, the bedroom, the outdoor space, and the exits and exterior hallway. Your only true privacy is in the bathroom. All other rooms are fitted with cameras with a live feed.”
“Cameras?” Jaci’s excitement died in a flash, the faint taste of smoke roiling up from her lungs.
“Not in the bathroom,” he repeated.
“So you’ll spy on me when I eat and sleep, but not when I shower or pee? Wow, thanks for being so considerate.”
“Your cell phone will also be monitored.”
“Are you serious? No. That’s—that’s a complete violation.” She reached into her back pocket, only to come up empty.
Gabriel removed her cell from his shirt pocket and set it on the kitchen counter, again with that maddeningly sexy smirk-and-eyebrow combo she was pretty sure had caused the spontaneous loss of more panties, virginities, and dignities than there were supernaturals in this city. And rats. And supernatural rats.
When the hell had he swiped her phone? Last night, as she’d dashed into the wine cellar to avoid the slaughter? This morning, when he’d nearly bitten her artery in the VIP room? Right in her back pocket, millimeters from her ass, and she hadn’t even felt him lift the damn thing.
Not that it mattered. The only people she ever called or texted were Renault and his bloodsucking minions, and those assholes—the few that’d survived the Redthorne attack on Bloodbath—were long gone by now.
“Next,” he said, “you’ll have free rein of the apartment and balcony, but you’re not to leave the premises without an escort—myself or one of my associates. If you attempt to leave without my permission, our deal is null and void.”
“Deal. Right. You mean the part where you let me live to see another sunrise, provided I can give you what you want and obey your every command in the process?”
Gabriel cocked his head, cold eyes glittering like ice. “You’re free to counter, witch, but unless your negotiating skills are as finely honed as your necromancy, you’ll find yourself on the losing end.”
A draft rolled over her skin, poking its cold fingers through every tear in her clothes.
Rubbing her half-bare arms, Jaci turned toward the kitchen window and peered down onto St. Mark’s Place. The street was lined with bars and cafés and trinket shops, sidewalks bustling with people and dogs. Across the way, a guy with green dreadlocks stood on a plastic milk crate, waving his arms and warning about the end times.
“What if I just want to run out for a quick coffee?” she asked.
“No need. There’s an espresso machine on the counter, along with several varieties of beans, a grinder, sweeteners, syrups.”
“What about bagels? Pizza? Chinese?”
“Like I said, make a list. All of your requests will be accommodated.”
Soft and silent, her bare feet padded across the kitchen floor, one step, then another and the next. She didn’t remember telling herself to move, yet there she was, inching closer to him, swept up in his evergreen scent and the magnetic pull of his eyes and the thin line between danger and death she always found herself straddling. Balancing.
Yearning for.
“All of them?” she asked, voice thick with something that sounded annoyingly lusty.
Get it together, slut muffin!
Gabriel looked down at her again, towering a full head taller, a wall of muscle and ice. “Within reason, witch.”
“And who’s judge and jury on what’s reasonable?” Her breasts brushed against his chest, making her nipples ache.
Gabriel’s nostrils flared, heat gathering between them once more, and she wondered if he was thinking about that moment in the VIP room, just like she was. Remembering the way their bodies had melded together, however briefly. The brush of his lips on her skin, the heat of his touch on her body, two hearts banging against the walls like wild animals.
He lifted a hand to her hair, looping one of her curls around his finger like he’d done earlier. In a soft, seductive voice that belied the tension in his body, he said, “My intention isn’t to starve you, Jacinda, or keep you in squalor.”
“Then what is your intention?”
He closed his eyes. Shook his head. Breathed out her scent as though he needed to be rid of it, his deep exhale tickling her cheeks.
“Don’t,” he whispered.
“Why not?” She mouthed the words, not even certain he’d heard them. Not even certain she knew what she was asking, what he was warning against, what the fuck was happening between them. For whatever reason, her mind turned to mush around this man—this monster—and despite the red alert from her nipples, she didn’t like it one bit.
He opened his eyes. Took a step backward, shaking his head as if his mind betrayed him too. “Ours isn’t a social arrangement, witch. You’re an acquisition, just like Bloodbath, claimed by the royal family from a lesser foe to be put to use or put to death.”
Wow, tell me how you really feel, dickhead.
Swallowing the inexplicable burn his words left in her chest, Jaci forced a hollow laugh. “Thanks for the reminder, Prince. For a minute there, I thought you were trying to get into my pants. What’s left of them, anyway.”
She’d meant it as a joke, but the moment the words were out, a flash of anger rippled through his muscles, quivering beneath his blood-caked clothing. He spun around in a blur and stalked toward the exit, leaving a gust of winter in his wake.
Yanking open the door, he paused on the threshold and turned to issue one last command. “Take the day to settle in and gather your wits, Jacinda. Starting tomorrow, you’ll work on locating Duchanes.”
“What about the curse?”
“Priority one, Duchanes. I’ll inform you when that changes.”
“But I need my—”
The door slammed shut. The vampire was gone, his sudden absence taking up even more space than his presence.
“—grimoire,” she finished, then slumped against the island counter, wondering what the fuck just happened.
She hadn’t imagined the fire between them, that spark back at the club, the crackling flames here in the kitchen. It was real, but it was like they’d both been entranced by some otherworldly force.
/> He’d snapped out of it first.
And he couldn’t get away from her fast enough.
His earlier words rang in her head like a warning bell.
I despise witches almost as passionately as I despise demons…
Jaci wondered what he’d do if he knew the truth—that his “acquisition from a lesser foe” was actually a two-for-one. A witch and demon, born and bred, all rolled up into one fucked-up little package who couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried, get her shit together.
“Jacinda Colburn,” she admonished, “you are a hell-hot magical mess.”
Hellfire flared once more in her chest, itching for a worthy target. She had half a mind to waltz out that door, chase him down the hall, and light his ass up like a firecracker. One taste of her dark flame, and that ice-cold vampire prick with his stupid smirk and eyes the color of a misty-morning forest would be incinerated from the inside out, turned to ash before he could even bark another insult.
Hell, she’d almost done it in the VIP room, just to prove her point about not being easy prey.
Thankfully, common sense won out—then and now. With no coven of her own, Renault in hiding and his allies dead or scattered to the winds, and no friends or family to speak of, Jaci was on her own in every way that counted, as broke and homeless as she’d been when she’d first crash-landed in this city seven years ago.
By now the Redthornes had seized the rest of Renault’s property, which included the basement she’d lived in and most of her worldly possessions. Without a place to study and practice her magic, she had no hope of surviving, let alone completing the spells she’d spent her entire adult life trying to master.
The spells that would free her father’s soul from hell, reunite it with his body, and buy her that brand-new life she so desperately wanted.
She glanced around the apartment once more, acceptance settling into her heart. This was the best she could hope for right now. Whatever his true motives—and she wasn’t dumb enough to think it was just a matter of locating Renault and unraveling some old curse—Gabriel clearly needed her, and that meant job security. A roof over her head and food in her belly. A chance to end her father’s torment.
Besides, she’d been in worse predicaments before, and she was pretty damned sure life wasn’t done fucking with her yet, either. That didn’t mean it was time to curl up on the floor like a dead centipede. First of all, she had much better legs. But also, she had things to do.
Circumstances changed, but the plan was still the plan. Craft those spells, save her father, and get the fuck out of New York. By the time hell’s demons realized she’d betrayed them, it would be far too late for them to do anything about it. Jaci and her father would be off the supernatural radar for good, living the high life on some no-name tropical island, leaving all things magical in the proverbial dust. Demon dust, vampire dust, Jaci didn’t care. So long as she didn’t have to step in it ever again.
She took a deep, cleansing breath, feeling marginally better than she had when she’d first walked into the place. Now that the vampire was gone, she could finally think. Could finally get down to business.
Step one, take a shower.
Step two, make some coffee.
And step three?
Summon a fucking demon.
Chapter Five
Scrubbed clean and dressed in a brand-new sweatshirt and leggings from the stash Gabriel left, Jaci snapped into explorer mode, rummaging through the cupboards and shelves and taking inventory.
Food, clothing, basic household stuff—all present and accounted for.
But she found no overt magical supplies. None of her grimoires, herbal blends, or crystals. No Tarot cards, no potions, no ritual blades. Even the knives and scissors had been removed from the drawers, and she couldn’t find any candles either.
Smart thinking on Gabriel’s part, de-witchifying the place. But like most bloodsuckers, he lacked imagination and severely underestimated his opponent.
God, she loved when they did that.
Witch versus vampire? It’s on, dickhead.
Absent her anointed black candles and summoning potions, Jaci had three options for calling upon the hell realms:
Astral travel, which was risky and unpredictable, given some of the other entities that traveled those roads. A blood spell—messy, painful, and exhausting. Or, drumroll, please… Straight up dying, sending her own soul to the eternal pits.
Jaci huffed out a sigh. Blood spell it is.
She just needed something to amplify the signal. A decent herb or crystal or… apple?
Her lips curved into a wicked grin as she spotted the overflowing fruit bowl on the kitchen countertop. “Hello, lovelies.”
Technically, pomegranate was the original forbidden fruit. But apples had been maligned for so long, they were just as effective in dark magic these days. It was mostly a matter of intention, and right now, Jaci had every intention of besting that asshole vampire.
Just thinking about him again had her shaking with rage.
Perfect—more fuel for her dark spell. All she had to do was picture his smug face and replay the sounds of his even more smug accent, and boom—anger, hatred, and disgust rose up at her command.
The feelings were almost certainly mutual, but the guy’s emotions were encased in ice. Any time Jaci had tried to get a read on him, all she felt was that chill. That hardness.
She thought back to the battle last night. She’d spent a good portion of it hiding in the wine cellar, but from what she’d pieced together later, she was pretty sure one of the other Redthorne princes had been killed in the chaos. Yet her captor hadn’t shown so much as a flicker of grief over his brother’s death.
Jaci wasn’t judging him—hell, if someone bumped off her sister, she’d be dancing in the streets in a sequined mini-dress, dousing herself in champagne and singing songs about the good times—but she was curious. If the royal vampire family was so fractured that the death of one of their own didn’t even cause a ripple, clearly they had bigger problems than worrying about one little witch.
And that one little witch planned to take full advantage of it.
With Gabriel’s spy cameras watching—and possibly listening, too—Jaci reached for an apple, trying to keep the evil gleam out of her eyes.
“Healthy choices make for healthy witches,” she sing-songed, pocketing the fruit and heading back down the hallway. The bedroom had a speaker on the night table, so she plugged in her phone and queued up her favorite dark techno playlist, hoping it would drown out the noise she was about to make.
Plus, summoning a demon always went better with bass.
Closed away in the gleaming white marble bathroom, she removed one of the glass shelves from the medicine cabinet and wrapped it in a towel, then smashed it against the edge of the clawfoot bathtub. She plucked out the biggest shard and used it to bisect the apple at its equator, revealing a pentagram of seeds in the center of each half.
Jaci smiled. The dark path had never been her choice, and in her twenty-five years of life, it’d caused more pain and death than she cared to think about. Mostly, she couldn’t wait to leave it all behind—to burn her spellbooks and walk away from the craft for good. Still, in moments like these, she found herself marveling at the clever ways nature tucked hints of pure magic into everything it created.
Standing before the antique mirror hung over the sink, she ate the bottom half of the apple, seeds and all, picturing the demon she wanted to call.
Then, taking a deep breath and focusing on the five-pointed star in the half that remained, she sliced her palm with the glass and made a fist, letting the blood run over the fruit, binding her magic to the seeds. Energy gathered around her, hot and prickly, raising the hairs on her arms. The moment she felt the magic crest, she called on the swirl of dark emotions Gabriel had stirred inside her, held the bloodied apple in her left palm, and pressed her right palm against the mirror, chanting her spell.
Blood of darkness, bloo
d of fire
Heed the call of my desire
I summon thee with blackened breath
To part the veils of life and death
The channel is open, the path made clear
Now show yourself behind the mirror
The blood coating the apple glowed as bright as an ember, then faded, the mirror darkening before her eyes. The air filled with the scent of brimstone. The scent of home.
Fear tightened her throat, an instinctive reaction she still hadn’t outgrown, even though she’d been free of hell’s clutches for seven years.
Some wounds just never healed.
The black mirror wavered, and a new vision appeared in its place. A demon with long purple hair and eyes like polished obsidian stared back at her.
Jaci let out a sigh of relief. “Meech, thank the devil!”
“Stole the words right out of my mouth, Jay-Jay.” Her cousin Demetria glared at her, those coal-black eyes narrowed with a mix of concern and suspicion. Normally, her dimples were on prominent display, but the woman’s scowl erased them now. “It’s not like you to go off-grid. I’ve been worried sick!”
“I have a valid excuse—I swear.”
“Lemme guess. You finally got some? And it was so hot and wild you’ve only just now awoken from the sex-induced coma? The one that landed you in the hospital for over-sexed witch-demons where they don’t even allow you to call your favorite cousin?” Meech tried to deepen her scowl, but a flash of dimple peeked through anyway, and Jaci returned it with a grin of her own.
Damn, she’d missed the purple-haired bitch. Of all the residents of hell—natural-born or transplanted—Demetria was the only demon Jaci trusted. The only maternal blood relative who’d never tormented her, never waterboarded her, never poked her with needles or drugged her or set her on fire.
Meech saved those special tortures for the monsters who actually deserved them. And she was damn good at her job. Along with Jaci’s father, Demetria was at the top of the list of demons Jaci wanted to bust out of hell, but her cousin loved her work, loved the darkness, loved the fire. Nothing would get that demon out save a total collapse of the realms, and even then, Meech would probably insist on going down with the proverbial ship.