Mindbreaker (A Cassidy Edwards Novel Book 3)

by Carmen Caine

  Mindbreaker

  by

  Carmen Caine

  Published By

  Bento Box Books

  Edited By

  Louisa Stephens

  Cover Art By

  Lind

  Copyright © 2016 Carmen Caine

  Ebook Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and didn’t purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, return it to MyBentoBoxBooks.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Dedication

  To Angie

  Bless you for your hawk eyes and your willingness to use them!

  Table of Contents

  Revenge

  A Symbol of Mystery

  A Venetian Surprise

  A Blast from the Past

  The Never-Ending Contract

  Riddle Me This

  The Art of Bluffing

  Caught Before Even Starting

  To Run or Not to Run

  Unmasked

  Selective Memory

  An Unwanted Gift

  More than Enough Truth for a Lifetime

  Doors You Can’t Open

  A Mystery to Unravel

  Interessante … er … Interesting

  Famiglia

  Bad Night, Worse Morning

  Back to the Fringe

  Harp Strings

  Mannaggia to Infinity

  Puzzle of Horror

  Nano-Party

  Case Closed

  All is Not What It Seems

  The Opposite of Black

  About the Author and Other Books

  Revenge

  I will not tolerate one single mistake. Not one.

  I stared at the back of Lord Lucian Rowle’s dark, sexy, warlock head in the SUV’s passenger seat as his soft, lethal tones echoed in my mind, again and again.

  Yeah, our relationship had changed. I’d known it would. After all, I’d just broken his puppet curse and freed Dorian Ramsey, the Scottish highlander of a vampire he blamed for his family’s hereditary misfortune. With a ‘crime’ of that magnitude, even one single brain cell of suspicion would extinguish the attraction sizzling between us. Judging by the waves of cold anger rolling my way, more than one suspicious cell prowled in Lucian’s brain.

  I will not tolerate one single mistake. Not one.

  Crud.

  Revenge had unintended side effects.

  Yeah, by freeing Dorian, I’d scored a direct hit on my nemesis, Emilio. He’d had an apoplectic fit. I’d enjoyed witnessing it. Immensely. But then he’d demanded an immediate investigation led by the best and the brightest to uncover just how Dorian managed to have his puppet strings severed. Again, expected. Evading prosecution would just require some fancy dancing on my part.

  What I hadn’t planned on: Tabitha, playing the role of lead investigator.

  Suddenly, I was in the hot seat, and not just hot, more like molten. Tabitha despised me. There was no doubt she’d find a way to pin the crime on me even if I’d been innocent. And if I’d inadvertently made her life easier by leaving just one DNA strand of evidence behind—well, it was game over. Game, as in Life.

  Yeah, as a monster and a puppet-cursed member of the Specter Kindred, I couldn’t die … but with having committed such treachery on that grand of a scale, I knew they’d find a way.

  For me, it was all or nothing. No middle ground. No shades of gray.

  Tabitha had to fail.

  Period.

  Again, I heard Lucian’s voice in my head, stuck on repeat: I will not tolerate one single mistake. Not one.

  Forget Mr. Icy Blue Eyes.

  Right now, I couldn’t allow myself one single mistake.

  A Symbol of Mystery

  The sleek black SUV pulled out onto the freeway, speeding through the dead of night towards Strix, the Nether Reach keeper who had just broken the curse that saved Lucian’s life. I knew where we were headed: Anya’s townhouse, the one on Park Avenue with the gargoyle knob crouched on its obnoxiously green-painted front door. Heck, I’d told them about it. Maybe I should be reminding Lucian of that little factoid. Forget Strix. If not for me, Cassidy Edwards, the last Rowle warlock would be lying cold next to his family skeletons in that crypt right now.

  But no one cared about any of that with Dorian Ramsey free, traipsing around New York City in the dead of night. Opportunity lost.

  I settled deeper into the SUV’s soft leather seats, inhaling that new car smell as we zipped through traffic. It was past midnight, but it was New York City. The traffic never really stopped. Pulling off the freeway, our purple-lipped driver took a side road, zooming past an auto repair shop. A white pavilion had been set up in the parking lot, and the ground was littered with the leftovers from some celebration. Most likely, a grand opening. Streamers and deflated balloons hung forlornly from the chain-link fence. What would it be like to live a normal life? Have a day job? Go home at night? Actually sleep through the wee hours and worry about cleaning the mess up in the morning? I worked for a warlock reporting to a vampire, and that meant my job was 24-7.

  The streets passed in a blur. I began to think of all the CSI: (insert city here)’s I’d seen over the years. What evidence had I left behind? What did I need to clean up? I didn’t have much time to think it over before our SUV pulled up to park on an angle in front of the gargoyle-adorned door. The place was dark except for a single lamp shining through the living room window. The rest of the buildings on the street stood equally dark and silent.

  After opening the door, I hopped out of the sleek SUV, but just as my feet hit the asphalt, I heard a happy little burbling hiccup.

  Great.

  I tossed a quick glance over my shoulder to witness my imp, Ricky, slide off the leather seat behind me to pool at my feet and melt into a boneless puddle of smoky, intoxicated ooze.

  Crud. He’d found turmeric. We’d just come from a graveyard in New York City in the dead of night. Where the heck had he gotten the yellow spice? Rotten timing.

  “Where did you find turmeric?” I growled under my breath.

  Two big eyes blinked up at me and then crossed. “Sweet nothings … in … me ear,” he hiccupped.

  “Really?” Lucian’s slight British accent huffed from behind me.

  I arched a brow the warlock’s way as his gorgeous, pale blue eyes flashed in a familiar display of impatience. Handsome as sin, yeah, with straight, black hair, and a square jaw covered in a sexy stubble … but definitely borderline jerk.

  I shrugged. “That’s what you get for being cheap.” I had no problem pointing the finger of blame. After all, he’d saddled me with the cheapest, bargain-basement reject of an imp. “Look in the mirror, Lucian.”

  He looked at me instead. Sourly. But his carved lips remained closed this time.

  As Ricky began to hum, I rummaged through the SUV, searching for something to stuff him into. Rehabilitated imp? Riiiiight. I had to contain my turmeric-addicted puff of smoke before he broke out into the latest overplayed iTunes hit and woke up the entire block. I spied a discarded Starbucks cup on the floorboard. Good enough.

  Popping off the plastic lid, I crouched next to Ricky and attempted to scoop him up. He was basically smoke. Not easy corralling that into a cup.

  “Get inside,” I ordered through gritted teeth.

  Perhaps it was the turmeric, or maybe the tall, dark warlock waiting behind me with an even darker scowl. Whicheve
r the case, Ricky obliged by inching along the ground and pouring himself inside. Mingling with the faint aroma of coffee, he gave a contented burp.

  I slammed the plastic lid over the top and jammed the cup into my jacket pocket. “Sleep it off.”

  “Appalling,” Lucian murmured under his breath and turned away.

  Funny. All the irritation I’d felt towards Ricky transferred to Lucian with just that one word. “You reap what you sow, Lucian.” I didn’t hesitate driving the point home as I stalked after him.

  He paused mid-step and peered down at me, a strand of dark hair falling over his face. “The same applies to you, Cassidy,” he replied softly, his silver-laced eyes piercing mine.

  Crud. Talk about veiled threat. No doubt about it. He knew I had something to do with Dorian’s escape. Curveball time. “Absolutely, Lord Rowle,” I replied a little breathlessly and lowered my lashes, using every feminine wile at my disposal. “I count on growing all sorts of things, dreamy farm boy.”

  His eyes narrowed a fraction, enough to betray his confusion over my response. Good. Keep ‘em guessing. Especially since I didn’t even know myself what I’d meant to convey. It didn’t matter. I’d accomplished my purpose: deflection.

  I sidestepped him and headed towards the front door, but it opened before I got there. From the way the criminal barcode sizzled on my hand, I knew without even looking just who’d opened it. Strix, the Nether Reach keeper. The silvery lines embedded in my flesh always burned whenever he was around. Strange. I squinted at them. This time, they’d turned dark and moved a little, too. I wondered what it meant.

  Lucian took the cement steps two at a time, joining Strix who hovered in the darkened doorway. The blond keeper had pulled his hair back into a ponytail and had tied a scarf over the lower half of his face. The scarf made me pause. I’d only seen him cover his face during our battle with the Terzi.

  “How many attacked?” Lucian asked, brushing past him to enter the townhouse.

  Strix tugged the scarf down, revealing a tightly clenched jaw. As far as jawlines went, his wasn’t bad, ranking right up there with Lucian’s. “There were three.”

  The warlock’s broad shoulders tensed, but his expression only appeared calm. Collected. Suave. “Only three?” he asked, cool as a cucumber.

  Strix drew his lips into a thin line and pointed a finger at me. “Can you trust her?” he asked with a frank rudeness.

  Yep. I’d dubbed him Mr. High-and-Mighty precisely because of that arrogant attitude. He never failed to take a shot at me.

  As I opened my mouth to retort, Lucian responded with, “Someone has to walk through the door first.”

  My head snapped his way. It wasn’t surprising that he’d gone through so many spellfinders before me. “So, I’m to be cannon fodder yet again?”

  “Do your job, spellfinder,” he merely replied, waving me into the townhouse. “Remember, not one mistake. Find the spells in this house before we trigger them.”

  Fine. I knew I was basically the team equivalent of a bomb-sniffing dog, but I didn’t appreciate the lack of gratitude. After things calmed somewhat, I’d have to sit Lucian down for a nice tête–à–tête. But right now, I needed to get the finger of suspicion hovering over me pointed towards someone else. As I pushed past Strix and stepped inside, I wondered if I could get it pointed his way and solve two problems at the same time.

  “Anya?” Lucian asked as I stalked further into the dimly lit hallway.

  “Escaped. I had to destroy her spider first to break the curse on you,” Strix replied. “Afterwards, I took down three vampires, but that’s all I found here. Except this. It’s why I called you.”

  At Lucian’s sharp intake of breath, I turned to see both men gazing at the ceiling.

  Spiders.

  Well, dead spiders. But it wasn’t Anya’s lifeless pets that I found so disconcerting. It was how they’d clustered their bodies, forming the Mindbreaker’s Celtic circle with an eight-pointed star embedded in the center.

  As we stared, one of the spiders fell, landing on the floor with a barely discernable plop.

  “Spiders,” Ricky gurgled from my pocket. “Creepy blighters. You simply don’t need eight legs. Though methinks it’d be fair useful in football—”

  I clamped my hand down, giving the cup a little jerk. “Sleep it off,” I ordered again, this time in a low, warning half-growl.

  “Know anything about this symbol of the Mindbreaker, Cassidy?” Strix asked, his tone pregnant with silent accusation.

  Nervy. My criminal barcode burned again. Yeah, Strix’s hell-bent desire to slap me into a Nether Reach prison hadn’t mellowed one bit, nor, apparently, his obsession with all things Mindbreaker.

  “Why would I know anything about it?” I asked him emphatically. “Never heard of the Mindbreaker until you started spouting off about him. He lived over a thousand years ago, right? Doesn’t make sense that he’s my father, regardless of what you want to be true—and for whatever reason.”

  “You’ve seen your mana signature yourself,” Strix snapped in reply, his lean jaw taut.

  “Well, I’ve seen something,” I admitted. Twice. The first time in the elevator. The second when I’d switched to specter form and the Fallen One had bowed before me—right before I’d fainted. Yeah, the patterns appeared similar, burning in threads of flame. “Can’t say for sure it’s identical, though.”

  “As a Nether Reach keeper, I’m uniquely qualified to say that it’s the same,” he replied with conviction. “And mana signatures are more reliable than DNA or fingerprints. They’re never identical. Never.” He pointed up at the ceiling. “Tell me, why is your mana signature on the ceiling?”

  I cocked an outraged brow. “You should be asking the spiders that, not me.” I snorted indignantly even as an uneasy ripple of fear shivered down my spine.

  Lucian waved his hand then, his gaze falling on me in momentary speculation before moving onto Strix. “It’s a mystery, to be sure,” the warlock granted. “But Cassidy is rather unique. Tell me, Strix, are you certain there’s nothing else here? Spells? Curses? Lingering misfortunes?”

  “Nothing here. The place is clean,” the blond Nether Reach keeper answered in short, staccato-like syllables.

  He wheeled on me again, and I took a deep breath, preparing to defend myself some more, but a sudden plethora of mana assaulted my senses. Interesting. I’d been so distracted that I hadn’t noticed the townhouse practically reeked.

  “On the contrary, Strix, this place isn’t clean at all,” I took great pleasure in refuting. There was plenty of mana here. Something pretty powerful welled up through the floorboards. “Is there a basement?”

  “No,” Strix grated, folding his arms.

  “Are you sure? There’s something big underneath us. A massive spell,” I said, relishing the fact. I couldn’t resist a further dig. “Looks like you’re wrong again, Strix.”

  His blue eyes seethed and his lips parted, but Lucian cut him off by demanding, “And what is it, spellfinder? Details! And quickly!”

  I shrugged, and ignoring both men, concentrated on sifting through the scents eddying around my nostrils. The spicy scent of death. Yep, vampires. Fairly close, but dampened. Buried and bricked, maybe. And something ancient, vaguely familiar, although I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  Following the trail, I moved towards the living room. The aromas grew steadily stronger, and as I stepped over the threshold, I sensed a current of mana flowing through the room, like cold air from an open door. Odd. My sensitivity to mana had sharpened. Had shifting to specter form enhanced my abilities? Wakened them, maybe?

  I glanced around.

  Anya had a strange taste in décor. Dark gray curtains with red fringe hung over the windows. A faded, green shag carpet adorned the floor. There was only one piece of furniture, a mustard-colored velvet couch appearing to be some relic of a previous century. All in all, a pretty dismal, depressing place.

  I followed the mana trail to the wa
ll neighboring the next room. Curious, I ran my hands over its smooth surface. Yep, the scent was much stronger. I recognized it. The Terzi clan—my mother’s.

  “Vampires for sure,” I murmured. “Can’t tell if they’re awake or not though. Or maybe they’re far away? Hard to tell. And some kind of object. Big.”

  A growl sounded from behind me. Looking over my shoulder, I spied Heath arriving, his surfer-dude physique already morphing into wolf-form as two massive gray wolves padded up from behind to join him. “Good timing,” I said.

  Heath’s werewolf mouth widened into a smile. He was such a friendly guy. Nice. Loyal. I’d always liked him from the start.

  “How many vampires are we dealing with?” Lucian asked, striding guardedly into the room. “Terzi?”

  “Can’t tell and yes,” I replied, turning my attention back to the wall.

  Strix watched me warily. “Specter abilities,” he noted aloud.

  I ignored him and focused on the mana instead, giving the flat surface another swipe. There it was, a bump. Was it some kind of spell? A gummy, sticky residue rolled off beneath my fingers. Mana. A fleeting glimpse of Anya’s angry, gray eyes flashed in my mind as I consumed it.

  As the spell broke, a hidden door appeared in the wall, an old door with carved oak panels and an old-fashioned latch instead of a knob.

  Strix caught his breath in surprise.

  Satisfying.

  “Hmmm, wrong, were we?” I purred under my breath but loud enough for him to hear before adding, “Hidden catch in the wall.” I didn’t want him to know I’d just broken a spell by eating it. Only Lucian knew that secret.

  “Interesting,” Lucian’s deep voice sounded from right behind me. “What are we dealing with, Cass?”

  Cass? I cocked an irate brow up at him. “The name is Cassidy,” I retorted. Yep, in theory, the deliberate butchering of my name shouldn’t really be important right now. After all, I’d just been accused of some ancient, conspiratorial crime by a Nether Reach keeper. And I probably stood on the verge of springing a monstrous Terzi trap snoozing right under my feet. But right now, it mattered the most. “You really need to stop calling me that, Lucian.”