by Dani Harper
“Just a spell? A goddamn spell did this to you? Did all this?” He waved at the room around them, and suddenly her eyes and brain coordinated to tell her what she was looking at. Her spacious, open workroom with its sweet calming energy was missing. Instead, the sun was pouring through a massive hole in the high ceiling and reflecting off clouds of dust motes that still hung in the air. Broken glass glittered on the floor in all directions, and a pile of twisted debris near the far wall could only be the sad remains of her once-beautiful skylight.
“What the hell were you doing, Brooke? What did you do? It looks like the goddamn apocalypse in here!”
It did indeed, and she pressed her fingertips to her mouth to stifle her gasp. “I needed some help with my magic. It wasn’t working, and…” And she’d tried to summon El Guardia, an unknown spirit dog, to her circle. The circle that had been obliterated under a seeming ton of wreckage. She looked at the front of the enormous room, and this time she saw that most of the windowpanes were missing, as were the blinds.
“There’s glass from hell all over the sidewalk, chica. I thought there’d been a fucking explosion.” As sensible and steady as her friend usually was, he was all but wringing his hands. It made him look incredibly like his mother, despite the blue mohawk and the reptilian contact lenses. How scary had it been for him to find her in the middle of this disaster?
“You must have had heart failure, G. I’m sorry.” She patted his arm and smiled up at him. “I’m glad you came.”
“I still don’t think you should be sitting up,” he declared. “What if something’s broken? What if you have internal injuries? What if you’re paralyzed?”
“I can’t be paralyzed, George. I can move everything—see?” She wiggled fingers and toes. “Really, it’s just my head that hurts.” Brooke ran her hand through her hair and hissed as she discovered a goose egg the size of, well, a goose egg. “Ow.”
“I’ll get you some ice. Some water. I could call 911—I should have called 911 when I first got here, but, Dios, all I could think of was finding you and making sure you were okay.” He swiped his face on the back of his hoodie sleeve and blew out a breath. “Fucking hell. Don’t you scare me like that again. And I still think you should get checked over. You look like you’ve been in a fight and I don’t think you won.”
“My building sure didn’t win,” she said as she surveyed the ruins.
“Come on, let me take you to the hospital.”
Brooke shook her head—and the damn goose egg made her wish she hadn’t. She snatched up George’s T-shirt that he’d tucked around her and pulled it over her head (ow, again). As she gingerly tugged it down, she happened to look past her friend, across the room. Near the far wall, across a sea of broken glass, the entire wrought-iron framework of the once-beautiful skylight lay not only broken but also twisted and tangled by some unearthly force. A movement beneath a corner of it caught her eye, a strange glittering shape that—Holy crap, it wasn’t alive, was it?
“What. The hell. Is that?” She pointed past George, who looked over his shoulder and immediately threw his lanky form into full battle posture in front of her.
There was a long, low moan, followed by a string of what could only be curse words, although she didn’t recognize the language at all. The heap of debris moved again, and a man—a very large man—managed to draw himself to his knees, heaving up from beneath the heavy iron window frame. His head hung down, and Brooke couldn’t see his face for the tangle of dark blond hair that obscured it. What she could see, however, were the hills and valleys in his skin that marked powerful musculature. Bits of glass slid slowly from his back to the floor with a crystalline plink, and she realized he was crisscrossed with a multitude of scratches and cuts.
She realized something else then too. “He’s naked!”
“Then that’s him, isn’t it? That’s the effin’ pervert who did this to you.” George drew his phone like a gunfighter pulling a Colt. He’d already punched the 9 and the 1 before Brooke managed to yank hard on his baggy jeans to get his attention. He had to grab his pants to keep them up, and he fumbled to reposition the phone so he could dial one-handed.
“G, stop! Put the phone away.”
“Hell no. I’m calling it in, then I’m gonna kill him.”
“I said no!”
“You’re right, I should kill him first—”
“Just stop it, George! I don’t want you to do either one.”
He paused, finger poised over the final 1. “Are you kidding me, chica? A naked guy crashes through your ceiling, and you don’t think calling the cops is a good idea? I find you lying here with no clothes on and with bruises and who knows what and I should put the phone away? Maybe I should just get naked too and join the goddamn party!”
“He didn’t touch me, George. Not. At. All.” She emphasized every word as she gripped his arm. “For crying out loud, I haven’t even met the guy—hell, I didn’t even know he was here! Whatever happened has to have been some kind of a magical accident. He must have gotten caught in my spell somehow.”
“Wait a minute. You did this to him?” George put the heels of both hands to his forehead, taking a moment to absorb the implications of that. “I hope you have really good insurance, chica. We better call him an ambulance so he doesn’t sue your witchy ass off! What is that, a twenty-foot drop? He should be dead.”
“Eighteen. It’s eighteen feet,” she murmured. And yeah, the stranger should be the one needing an ambulance after a fall like that. Her attention focused on him, seeking, sensing, but the energies she felt were like nothing she’d ever encountered. One thing she was certain of: “He’s not dying, and if he’s injured, it’s not bad. I can feel that much. Just let me go look at him.”
George shook his head. “No effin’ way. I’m not letting him near you. What kind of weirdo hangs around on the roof with no clothes on? I know witches have this thing about working sky clad.” He made quotation marks in the air. “But use your head, Brooke. He has to have been spying on you.”
“I am using my head, thank you.” It might be damn sore, but it still worked.
“Really? Because he could have been watching you ever since you moved in here. Seriously, if you won’t let me call the police, at least let me call an ambulance for him.”
“Gimme a break, G.” She snorted. “I know what you’re up to. If you dial 911, everyone shows up, including the police and the goddamn fire department. My calling is to use my abilities to help people, right? So the Gift will protect me. Just let me do my job, okay? I’ll be able to tell if he needs an ambulance, and I will also be able to tell if he has evil intent.” Actually, she wasn’t a hundred percent certain about that last bit, but she sure hoped she could tell.
“If it turns out he’s some kind of voyeur, I absolutely promise”—she crossed her heart for emphasis—“I will let you beat him into next week, right after I do. I swear I’ll figure out a spell that’ll tie his private parts into a goddamn knot so he won’t be spying on anyone else ever again.”
George narrowed his eyes, deciding whether or not to believe her.
“Besides, if I somehow did this to him, don’t you think I need to figure out what the hell happened, what I did wrong?” Brooke continued. “If he leaves now, I’ll never know what needs to be fixed, and goddess only knows what might happen the next time I work a spell. I mean, last week I put a hole through a solid brick wall, and now this? I don’t know about you, G, but that’s got me scared. It’s like something’s wrong with my magic, and that makes it dangerous.”
Brooke knew her friend was bursting to argue, but she held his gaze solidly—not a small task when he had those damn lizard contacts in. With their elliptical pupils, it was uncomfortably like trying to stare down a velociraptor, and a stubborn one. Finally, George shrugged an assent, although she could tell he was far from convinced. For one thing, he was muttering under his breath in solid Spanish, a rarity for him. True, he was fluent in Spanish and sprinkled it libe
rally throughout his everyday English, thanks to his mom’s influence, but he’d been born in the same city Brooke had—Spokane, Washington—and his boxer-turned-schoolteacher dad had been more Irish than anything else.
Rarity or not, she didn’t have to be fluent in Spanish to know exactly what George was saying: she was crazy, and so was he for listening to her. But like the true friend he was, he nodded a reluctant agreement and held out his hand to pull her up.
Brooke was far steadier on her feet than she’d expected, although her head throbbed. For once she was glad that G wore his shirts almost as baggy as his pants. His black-on-black skull-patterned T fell to midthigh on her. She tied the sleeves of his red hoodie around her waist for good measure and was about to step forward when George seized her arm in an iron grip.
“Duh—glass.”
She looked down at her bare toes and rolled her eyes. So much for trying to convince her friend she was fine. “Right. Okay, you stand right here and make sure the guy doesn’t go anywhere. I’ll get some shoes on.” And don’t you dare call the cops, she added silently. Not yet, anyway. Not until she figured out what the hell was going on around here. Brooke slipped into her apartment and was immediately accosted by her three cats. Murmuring an apology for the rush, she ripped the top off a new box of Little Whiskers and dumped the entire thing on the floor to distract them. It bought her enough time to glance around her living quarters and determine that glass hadn’t ricocheted in from the catastrophe on the other side of the walls. A loud crash made her wonder if even more of the ceiling was coming down out there. The cats didn’t even flinch, however, being much too involved with chowing down on the tasty kibble. Thankfully, their focus allowed Brooke to pull on a pair of jeans, get her shoes on the right feet, and get back out the door again without feline help. Most important, their focus kept any of the furry trio from escaping into the mess and hurting themselves.
As she closed the door behind her, she realized George had been right: it did look like ground zero of the apocalypse in here. Part of her wondered how she was ever going to get this disaster cleaned up. The other part was worried that if she didn’t get some answers about what the hell was happening to her magic, she wouldn’t be able to stop it from happening again.
Frowning and shirtless, George looked like a pissed-off marine, but he had been as good as his word and hadn’t moved. He was standing with his feet braced and his arms folded, keeping a wary eye on the stranger. Meanwhile, the man in question had gotten one foot underneath him and was resting on one knee. The twisted metal skylight frame lay a few feet from him, as if he’d flung it off himself—that would certainly explain the noise she’d heard. He still wasn’t looking in the direction of her or George, however. Instead, he was holding his hands in front of him, studying one, then the other. Flexing his fingers. Checking them for damage?
Nothing looks too damaged from here, Brooke thought. In fact, everything looked pretty damn good—with an emphasis on the everything part. He was better built—ahem, his muscles were better built—than most of the guys at George’s mixed martial arts gym. Good grief. She shook off those kinds of thoughts and tried to focus instead on how to help.
If the man was injured, she had no traditional first aid supplies other than a handful of sparkly Band-Aids one of her girlfriends had given her as a joke, and a plastic cone that Bouncer had to wear around his head after being neutered. She could fall back on ripping up bedsheets, she supposed, like the characters did in old movies…although the hot fuchsia ones on her bed right now would look neither medical nor particularly masculine.
“Are you okay? Do you need help?” she called out, and then took a step in the guy’s direction. “I’m really sorry about what happened to you. Maybe we could talk. You know, try to figure it out?”
Her friend was trying to stay in front of her like some kind of human shield, but she kept elbowing him out of the way. “Hey! Hey, you!” George shouted at the stranger, not feeling conciliatory in the least. “What the hell are you doing here?”
The man looked up at last and pushed the shoulder-length tangle of hair out of his face as he did so. Clear gray eyes gazed out from beneath an intelligent brow. A close-trimmed beard accentuated his strong jawline and stronger chin.
“Oh, great,” said George. “Hey, the Fellowship of the Ring called and they’re missing one of their extras.”
“Don’t be such a drama queen, G.”
The stranger was staring at her with a mixture of amazement and wonder and a host of other emotions she couldn’t even name. And then he slowly smiled, showing even, white teeth.
“Annwyl? A yw’n chi?”
George’s mouth fell open. “¡Dios mío! He really is from Middle Earth,” he whispered. “What the hell kind of door did you open?”
Brooke shushed him and focused on her unexpected guest. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you said. You speak English, don’t you?” Please say yes or things are going to get a lot more complicated. Her spell surely couldn’t have snared the man out of some other country—could it? And where the hell was El Guardia, the dog spirit she’d been trying to summon? He was supposed to facilitate difficult spells—not destroy the premises and leave hot naked men in his place.
The man’s smile disappeared, replaced by a frown of confusion. He stood up then, still staring at her—and oh, great, now she had to work double time to avoid staring at him. She was no prude, being comfortable with her own nudity whether she was working with magic or just puttering around the apartment on a hot day. But that didn’t mean she was equally at ease with naked strangers. Even rugged, well-built, naked strangers of the type that G’s sister Lissy would often post on Facebook as eye candy of the day.
As for George, he’d had enough of the stranger’s lack of clothing and stepped in, literally. He risked his latest pair of Doc Martens by crunching through the debris off to her left and pulling free the circle of dog-printed vinyl that had acted as her altar cloth. He shook the glass from it with an indignant-sounding snap, bundled it up, and tossed it to the stranger. “Hey man, how about covering up your junk in the presence of a lady? What kind of perv are you, anyway? How long you been spying on her from up there?” He nodded in the direction of the yawning hole in the roof that had been the skylight.
The bunched-up vinyl was too light to make the entire twenty-odd feet to its destination, but it didn’t matter. It fell to the floor unnoticed, and the stranger walked right over it as he took several steps in Brooke’s direction. He was much taller than she’d first thought, and his broad shoulders and arms were heavily muscled in a way she hadn’t seen before. Maybe he bench-pressed city buses for a living. Whatever he did, she instinctively knew that his deep-chested physique hadn’t come from anything as simple as a gym. Strangely, she didn’t feel any fear at all—except for cringing inwardly at the sound of glass crunching beneath his bare feet. He took another step and paused.
“Annwyl,” he said again, and then in English: “Is it you? Are you really here?”
Annwyl. It was a name. The stranger thought she was someone else. Damned if Brooke didn’t feel the teeniest tiniest twinge of disappointment.
Meanwhile, her friend had reached the limits of his strained patience. George placed his body solidly in front of her and squared off against the advancing stranger, though the man was a head taller than he was, and Brooke was trying to hold him back. She might as well not have bothered. The man didn’t spare her friend a glance, not when G warned him to stop, and not even when G struck that square chin with what she knew were his best punches: an uppercut followed by a blindingly fast left hook. She’d seen him knock opponents out cold with that combo inside the octagon ring. Of course, all of his opponents were in his weight class, and the tall stranger definitely was not.
Incredibly, the stranger brushed past her friend as if he wasn’t even there. George used his jiu jitsu skills to make a power leap onto the man’s back, where he worked to get an arm around the guy’s cord
ed neck. Brooke recognized the hadaka jime hold from watching G in the ring. More commonly known as the rear naked choke (although nobody was actually supposed to be naked!), it would have quickly disabled a normal human being, or forced him to tap out or pass out. But again the stranger proved more like a force of nature. Despite G’s carefully honed skills, he was shaken off with apparently little effort. It might have been comical if Brooke hadn’t been the obvious target of this unknown male—and she had no idea what he wanted.
She’d always been the type to stand her ground, but in this case, she took a couple steps back.
Memories all but swamped Aidan, as if some inner dam had burst asunder. Perhaps whatever spell had prompted the unexpected return to his human body had also dissolved the thick, impenetrable fog that had settled over his mind in the faery realm. He fully realized who he was—so much more than a name alone—and he knew the family he sprang from and the faces of each and every person who had ever been dear to him.
Dearest of all, however, was the face of his betrothed. Surely, it was deliberate fae malice that had kept him from recalling her, leaving him with only a tantalizing sense that he had once loved someone, that he had been loved in return. In all the damnable centuries, he’d been unable to remember so much as her fair face or her name.
Annwyl. He recalled her name with joy: Annwyl, and it meant “beloved.”
Now, Aidan wasn’t letting anything get in the way of his reunion with her. Not piles of glass and iron, not his lack of clothing, and certainly not the pugnacious defense launched by this spike-haired barbarian guard. Aidan didn’t understand what his beloved was doing here in this place and time—nor was he totally sure what place and time it was—but somehow he and Annwyl were together, and that was all that mattered.
Yet she was backing away from him, and that stopped him in his tracks as nothing else would.
“Surely, you do not fear me, beloved?” he said to her. “True it is that I have been gone a long time, but I am no ghost.” With the barbarian pacing him every step of the way, daring him to make a wrong move, Aidan approached Annwyl again, much more slowly this time and with his hands up in a peaceful gesture. An arm’s length away from her, he stopped, still studying her face with hungry gaze. It was Annwyl, his betrothed, and yet…and yet…He struggled as he searched the memories flooding his mind. His beloved’s eyes were the color of sea glass, weren’t they? Had they darkened? Could they? Or were his memories still muddled by his time in the faery realm? For there was blue mixed with the green in these lovely eyes.