by Sarah Piper
In the momentary confusion that followed, Jaci wrenched herself free of the demon’s grip and dropped into a crouch. Reaching between her legs, she grabbed his ankles and pulled hard, lunging backward and dropping his ass to the pavement like dead weight.
Gabriel grinned, a sight that made her happier than it probably should have, considering how much trouble she was in.
“Nice work, witch,” he said, that whiskey voice giving her chills. “We’ve got it from here.”
Chapter Fourteen
Gabriel pounced on the felled demon. While the fucking cunt was still conscious, he grabbed his arm—the one that’d been wrapped around Jacinda’s throat—and ripped it clean off. But he didn’t like the asymmetry of it all, so he tore the other one off too.
The demon’s tortured screams were a damned symphony. Gabriel let him sing for a few more seconds, then grabbed his head and bashed his skull into the ground. In that moment, he didn’t care if the demon’s essence found another human vessel to occupy. Let him come at Jacinda again—Gabriel would rip off the new arms just as swiftly as he’d ripped off the old.
While Cole went after the vampires and grays, Aiden took down the second demon, tearing out his throat.
No singing for that one, then.
A burst of hellfire exploded behind him, and Gabriel whipped around to see Jacinda grappling with the last demon, the front of her coat singed black.
In a blur, Gabriel barreled into them, shoving Jacinda out of the way and slamming the demon face-first into a brick wall. He punched a hole clear through his back, wrapped a fist around his spine, and yanked it right out.
He would’ve loved to piss on the corpse too—really send that message home. But there was no time.
“Cole!” he shouted, and Aiden nodded, both of them charging into the fray. He and Aiden took down the bloodsuckers, leaving the grays to Cole. The wolf had already sliced-and-diced one of them, its heart destroyed, but the vile beast hadn’t turned to ash.
Fuck.
“Cut the amulets!” Gabriel shouted, frantically searching for the tell-tale pouches they wore, the dark magic that allowed them to rise from the dead.
“I don’t see any.” Aiden charged at one of them—another heart torn loose, another killing blow.
But it didn’t kill the beast.
Gabriel, Aiden, and Cole were much more powerful than three uncoordinated grays, but no matter how badly they wounded them, the grays just wouldn’t stay down. Skulls bashed in, hands severed, hearts torn free, guts spilling from broken flesh, and still the monsters fought.
“We can’t just leave them here,” Aiden said. He managed to grab their chains and hold them at bay, but the beasts refused to die. “What the fuck do we do?”
Cole lunged at one of them, biting into its femoral artery. Blood sprayed from the wound. Yet even with the wolf’s jaws clamped around its thigh, the creature didn’t fall.
“Nice work, boys. I’ve got it from here.”
Gabriel turned toward the sound, the unmistakable voice of his witch.
She stood before them, three bloody hearts clutched in her hands. The look in her eyes was as feral as the grays’.
“For fuck’s sake, witch. Get back before you—”
“Move.” Without waiting for a reply, she raised the hearts over her head, blood falling on her face like rain. Magic crackled around her, a thousand tiny sparks of lightning that flashed and sizzled.
“Now!” she shouted.
Stunned by the power in her command, Gabriel and the others obeyed, dropping the chains and darting away from the writhing, clawing tangle of grays. The witch stepped forward, chanting her spell.
Hearts of darkness, beasts of hell
This breath shall be your last
Death has come to break the spell
Unbind the magic that was cast
With every word, the magic surged around her, wrapping her in a storm of pure, pulsating energy. After her third recitation of the spell, she pitched the hearts at the grays’ feet.
The bloody mess landed with a plop, then exploded in a dark flame.
The grays and every bit of ruined flesh around them turned to ash.
Jacinda’s magic vanished. On a deep exhale, she fell to her knees.
No one spoke. No one moved. No one even drew breath.
Two barely-civilized vampires and a wolf, who’d just spent the last ten minutes basically bathing in blood and gore, and the witch had managed to immobilize them all with shock, awe, and—if Gabriel were being honest—a good dose of straight-up terror.
“Well.” Aiden finally broke the silence, scooping up a handful of gray ash and letting it sift through his fingers. The creatures were well and truly gone. “Not one to judge, of course. But Gabriel… She’s a bit spooky, mate.”
Cole, who’d just shifted back into his human form, let out a low whistle. “If I still had my pants, pretty sure I woulda just pissed ’em.”
Gabriel passed his phone to Aiden. “Call Enzo. Tell him to send a cleanup crew. And do a quick sweep—make sure there weren’t any witnesses. Cole, find something to cover yourself, for fuck’s sake.”
“Who the bloody hell is Enzo?”
Ignoring Aiden’s question, Gabriel headed over and crouched down next to Jacinda, gingerly helping her back to her feet.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, scouring every inch of her with his eyes. Whatever those demons had done to terrorize her, they hadn’t drawn blood—even with the mess of demons and grays, Gabriel would’ve scented it.
But there were worse things than drawing blood, especially when it came to demons, and he had no idea how long they’d been batting her around before he and the others arrived.
Jacinda looked up at him. Blinked. Swayed on her feet.
Gabriel gripped her shoulders, steadying her. The coat she wore was a black, ruined mess. “Did that bastard burn you? You smell like hellfire.”
The word seemed to shake her out of the trance, and she glanced down at the coat. A gasp escaped, but she shook her head. “That wasn’t—no. It missed me.”
“Jacinda, what—”
“Holy shit.” She pulled out of his grasp, heading back toward the demon carnage. “Are those… arms?”
“They never should’ve touched you,” he said plainly. Blood leaked down his face, sliding into his mouth.
Jacinda stared at him, her face a nearly identical reflection.
It reminded him of that time in Bloodbath, the interrogation after the massacre.
Once again, he felt Death’s whisper on his skin. Too close.
“How did you do that?” he demanded. “And how were those grays able to resurrect without the amulets?”
She turned in a slow circle, still taking in the scene. It seemed the shock of it was finally catching up to her.
“Just… magic,” she said softly.
“And you’re all right? The demons—”
“They were just trying to scare me. You heard them—they were trying to lure you out.”
“So they didn’t—”
“I’m fine. Just tired.” She found a clean spot on her sleeve and used it to wipe the blood from her face.
Relief rushed from him in a deep sigh he quickly couched as irritation. “Why did you leave Obsidian in the first place? You were expressly forbidden—”
“I had something important to take care of.”
He glanced up at the building behind her—the only place open at this hour.
The hospital.
All that relief evaporated. “Are you ill?”
Could witches even get sick? And if so, couldn’t they just whip up a miracle cure? She was a self-proclaimed herbalist, for fuck’s sake. Now she was sneaking out to go to the hospital?
Gabriel clenched his jaw, sucking in a breath of cool air, waiting for an explanation that never came.
“Tell me what’s going on, Jacinda.”
“It’s not a big deal. I told Maritza I needed to run out—it’s no
t like I wasn’t planning on skipping town.”
His hands shook with rage. He wanted to shout at her. Wanted to remind her about the consequences of disobeying him, of pushing him. But every time he opened his mouth to try, an image flashed before his eyes—that sodding demon, his arm wrapped around her neck. The fear in her eyes.
Jacinda swayed on her feet again, damn near breaking an ankle with those spiked heels.
Gabriel bent down and scooped her into his arms, lifting her against his chest. He expected her to put up a fight, but she merely sighed, her body going limp with exhaustion.
Inexplicably, he drew her closer, pressing his nose to her temple and taking a deep breath.
Lavender and damp earth. Flowers and secrets. Magic and darkness.
A shiver rolled through his body.
“Despite my brother’s alliances,” he said softly, doing his best to hide her effect on him, “House Redthorne still has many enemies. You are now a target of those enemies. I can’t protect you if I don’t know where you are.”
“Protect me?” She glanced up at him, her blue eyes full of confusion. Full of vulnerability. Full of gratitude he hadn’t earned and did not want to accept.
A wall of ice slammed down around his heart, cutting him off.
“I told you,” he said coolly. “I always look after my investments.”
He had no idea what flashed through her eyes next. He refused to look. He kept his focus on the street, walking in the direction toward home, trusting Aiden and Cole to meet up with Enzo’s guys and take care of the demon mess.
But Jacinda’s body stiffened, heating in his arms. If she had any strength left, Gabriel knew she’d be clawing his eyes out to get away.
“Fear not, Prince,” she snapped. “Your investment is safe and sound. So instead of protecting me from your enemies, why don’t you take all that Ragey McRagerson bullshit and channel it into something productive. Knitting, perhaps? Interpretive dance? Yoga for Dickheads? I hear it’s all the rage. Pun intended.”
Gabriel sighed. When it came to the vampire and his witch, why did it always feel like one step forward, thirty-seven steps back?
Because you’re a monstrous asshole who should’ve been put out of his misery centuries ago…
He dismissed the voice of reason. Reason had no place in this city. No place with this witch.
“In light of this evening’s events,” he said firmly, “I’m adding an addendum to our arrangement.” He brushed his lips against her temple once more, whispering his final warning. “Disobey me again, little moonflower, and you won’t have to worry about the bloody demons. I’ll send you to hell myself.”
Chapter Fifteen
Hell was a complicated clusterfuck of a place.
Born and raised in its fires, forced to fight through its deadly realms for the first eighteen years of her life, Jaci knew it all too well. And while lots of people liked to toss it around as a curse or a threat, when it came down to it, sending someone there wasn’t all that easy.
Lucky for her.
Unlucky for her, that fact didn’t stop Gabriel from making her life a hell on earth.
Fucking vampire.
After “her little stunt” on opening night, as he’d taken to calling it, the dickhead had her working back-to-back shifts at Obsidian for the past ten days, keeping her in his sights at all times. Even when the club wasn’t open for business, she was still expected to show up. The one time she’d tried to blow him off, he’d shown up at her apartment, scooped her into his arms, and carried her there, dressed in nothing but a short bathrobe and slippers, a towel wrapped around her head.
Every day since, she’d arrived as expected, trying to keep their interactions to a minimum. By day, she was helping with inventory and supplies, polishing bottles, rearranging bottles, polishing them again. By night she was slinging her addictive concoctions, flirting shamelessly, always keeping one ear to the ground for the scoop on Renault Duchanes—an endeavor that had so far proven useless. It was as if the asshole had literally dropped off the face of the earth.
The only time she could find any peace was in the bathroom, and even then, if she took just a little too long, Gabriel would barge in and bang on the stall door, demanding to know if she was okay.
To make everything shit-suckingly worse, he still expected her to work on breaking his curse, and she was still searching for the spell to bind Viansa. The two challenges were intimately connected—that much was certain. Viansa had bound the Redthorne curse, which meant the solution to both problems likely existed in the same magic—a variation on the same spell, perhaps.
Jaci had performed bindings before—Renault was constantly cursing witches and demons he’d thought wronged him in some way, using Jaci to carry out his revenge. She knew the basics of the spells, but when it came to Viansa, she also knew the basics weren’t going to cut it.
That meant dragging her grimoire, research books, and Tarot cards to the bar every day, and squeezing in time between Gabriel’s ridiculous bouts of busywork to make her notes and theories.
She was working on another one of those theories today, books spread out on one of the cocktail tables, grimoire open in her lap. Every few minutes, she’d find a reference to some arcane spell, some curse, and make a few notes in her grimoire. But after an hour of skimming through an old tome on demonic possession clearly written by a drunk priest in the fifteenth century, Jaci was done with third-hand accounts. She needed a different sort of guidance.
Setting aside the library books, she pulled out her Tarot deck, shuffling as she concentrated on the problem.
Viansa’s power. The blood curse. The key to binding her. The missing ingredient. The magic. All of it.
She fanned out the cards across the table, selected three that spoke to her, and turned them face up.
A silver-haired girl sitting in a snow-covered cemetery stared up at her from the Three of Knives. She clutched a dagger in one hand, a blood-drenched white rose lying in the snow before her. The look on the girl’s face was one of sadness and vengeance, like a scorned lover who’d just carved out a man’s heart.
The Death card appeared next, a white corpse lying in repose, black serpent coiled around her body, a crown of dead roses circling her head. Something about her wasn’t entirely lifeless, though—it was almost as if she were resting, preparing to rise once more.
Fighting off an inexplicable shiver, Jaci turned her attention to the final card—the Ten of Knives. A raven-haired woman lay on white silk bedding embroidered with black roses, a dagger shoved through her chest, blood spilling from the wound as the life leaked from her eyes.
Betrayal.
Jaci studied the cards, trying to piece together the messages.
Roses and snow. Daggers and blood. Death and betrayal. What was she missing here? She felt as if the answers were right within her grasp, but hidden with veils and cobwebs. Every time she swiped one clear, another appeared in her mind.
Roses and snow. Daggers and blood. Death and betrayal.
If she could just see past that damned veil…
“Jacinda. What are you doing, woman?”
The icy tone broke Jaci out of her trance, her gaze snapping up to find Gabriel looming over her, brooding as always.
The sight was nothing new. The tie, however, was. White silk, embroidered with black roses.
She shot up from the chair so fast, she knocked the cards from the table.
“Bloody hell.” Gabriel crouched down to pick them up. “We open the doors in ten minutes. You need to put this stuff away and get behind the bar.”
“But… ten minutes?”
How was that possible? It wasn’t even noon when she’d shuffled those cards. She glanced around now, noticing how dark everything had gotten. Music she hadn’t heard earlier drifted to her ears. Two other bartenders were already setting up behind the bar, chatting with one of the cocktail servers.
Gabriel rose to his feet, handing over her cards. She plastered on
a smile, trying to ignore the sight of his tie, trying to calm the wild thing hammering in her chest. When she reached for the cards, their fingers brushed, the contact making her flinch.
The vampire took a step closer and grinned. “Don’t tell me my dark little witch is afraid of Death.”
She glanced down at the cards, Death’s white corpse staring up at her. The words whispered through her mind, a dry wind scraped across ancient ice.
Vita mutatur, non tollitur.
Life is changed, not taken away.
“Jacinda.”
She met the vampire’s eyes again, green and mysterious. His brows pinched together with something that looked like genuine concern, and he reached for her face, tucking a lock of loose hair behind her ear, the touch making her shiver.
Making her want.
She pulled back, tucking away her cards. “I’m not afraid of anything, Prince.”
Gabriel only nodded, his eyes as veiled as the answers she so desperately sought.
Chapter Sixteen
Vita mutatur, non tollitur.
Hours later, the whispers still haunted her. Still eluded her.
Life is changed, not taken away. The dead shall rise. The dead shall return.
Pouring three glasses of cabernet for one of her cocktail servers, Jaci thought again of the cards—Three of Knives, Death, Ten of Knives.
Blood and vengeance. A severed heart.
Death. Resurrection.
Blood on the sheets. Betrayal.
She slid the wine glasses across the bar, then turned to toss the empty bottle into the recycling bin.
The dead shall rise. The dead shall return.
Vita mutatur, non tollitur.
Blood on the roses. Blood on the sheets. Blood on the snow. Blood on the grave.
Blood… Was that it? No. It couldn’t be that simple.
Sure, the Redthorne blood was connected to Viansa’s power—that’s how the demon was able to momentarily slip into Gabriel’s body. His blood and Jaci’s spell had essentially summoned her, and Jaci was already thinking about how to work that knowledge into her spell. If she could summon Viansa here again, and somehow trap her in a different vessel long enough to do the binding, she wouldn’t have to travel to hell to hunt the bitch down. She could trap her here, force her to reveal the location of her dad’s soul, and send Meech to retrieve him.