Seized: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Thrice Cursed Mage Book 4)

by J. A. Cipriano

  “That just leaves one of you,” Vassago said, glancing at me before settling his gaze on Jenna. “Are you satisfied, Keeper?”

  Jenna broke his gaze and stared at me, sadness etched into every line of her dark face. Very carefully, she shut her eyes and sucked in a deep breath. When she opened them, I could just see the barest edges of darkness fading back beneath the surface.

  “Yes,” she said, and the word came out in a choked whisper. “I am satisfied.”

  “Good. I’d hate for you and yours to feel unsatisfied by our little partnership.” Vassago grinned mischievously as he turned toward me. “Mac, would you be so kind as to escort Miss Carmichael from my humble abode? I know she can take care of herself, but I feel it would be horrible of me to send her off without an escort.” He blushed slightly. “Forgive this old demon one last act of chivalry, and I will see our bargain done.”

  “Sure thing,” I said, glancing at Jenna. “As long as she’s going where I’m going.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that won’t be a problem,” he said in a way that reminded me of a brothel owner assuring his patrons that all the girls in his establishment were still virgins. “Is it?”

  “No,” Jenna said, not meeting his eyes. Instead, she stared at the floor and chewed on her bottom lip. “Thank you.”

  “Nice dress by the way,” he said, looking her up and down and licking his lips. “You’re certainly the total package my dear, but something’s missing.” He snapped his fingers, and I couldn’t tell you how, but Jenna was instantly clean, but not only that, her dress was as good as new. She looked up at the demon, her already pretty face accentuated by perfectly done makeup.

  Now, I may have had a girlfriend, but that didn’t mean I didn’t find Jenna’s new look attractive. In fact, the way she looked in her little black dress had to have been a WMD of some type because it definitely could have launched an armada the likes of which would have put Helen of Troy to shame.

  “Thanks,” she said, swallowing so hard I heard it.

  “Not a problem. I always enjoy looking at a pretty lady,” he said with a wink. “Are you ready to go, Mac?”

  “Yeah,” I said, still looking at Jenna in awe. I don’t think I’d ever seen someone look as nice as she did in that moment. I tore my gaze off of her and looked at the demon. “My girlfriend will have missed me.”

  “Perhaps,” Vassago said, wrinkling his nose at me. “But you should shower before you meet her. The children aren’t the only ones who stink.”

  “You know, you could do the whole clean and press thing to me too,” I muttered as he turned his back to me and made his way back to the bar.

  “I would, but I don’t want to do that,” he said, sitting down and going to work on his steak with his knife. He held a piece of bloody meat in the air with his fork. “Please see yourselves out.”

  The door on the far side of the bar opened, and as I stared at it, I could see the street just outside the hospital where my family had been. Admittedly, my first instinct was to race toward it at breakneck speed, but I held myself in check. Barely.

  Instead, I turned back to Jenna and offered her my elbow. “Care to blow this pop stand, Jenna?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. Her voice was so quiet I almost didn’t hear her. I nodded, and we made our way to the doorway, leaving behind Marvin, Vassago, Vitaly, and the reunited family. Part of me wanted to make sure they got out alright, but honestly, I was pretty sure Vassago was going to live up to his end of the deal. He seemed like the type. Besides, I was anxious to see my family.

  Still, as we crossed the threshold, and I found myself standing in the clean, cool night air outside the hospital, a silly thought struck me.

  “Say, what did Vassago offer you, Jenna?” I asked, making my way toward the lobby. “And why did he call you Keeper?”

  “Nothing much,” she said, tagging along behind me. “And no reason.”

  “Oh?” I asked, turning to look at her as the hospital’s automatic doors opened. I wasn’t sure what I would find inside. For all I knew, I’d been gone long enough for my family to have gone home, but I was still going to check. “It seems like a lot of work for nothing much and no reason.”

  “You’re right, Mac.” Jenna blushed hard and reached out a hand, tracing it along my demonic arm. “He offered to help me find you.”

  “Huh?” I asked, but before the word was even out of my lips, she lunged forward, planting her mouth on mine and pulling me into her.

  I tried to pull away, but as I did, the world around me shattered, and I tumbled head over heels into a memory, I’d long since forgotten.

  Chapter 24

  Jenna and I stood on a butter-colored cliff overlooking a desert in the middle of BFE and nowhere in particular dressed in skin-tight camouflage. The sun was high overhead, and it beat down relentlessly on our backs. We’d been watching our target for the last three days. He was also no one in particular, and his only claim to fame was simple. Our employer wanted him dead. We hadn’t asked why.

  He didn’t seem particularly hard to kill, but then again most people in our line of work never did. That was why I had decided to go with Jenna’s approach. A high caliber bullet from these cliffs would put him down, and by the time his men figured out that their assholes weren’t holes in the ground, we’d be, to quote Hans Gruber, “sitting on a beach earning twenty percent.”

  “I don’t like this, Mac,” Jenna said, shaking her head as she looked up from her binoculars. “It’s too quiet down there. Normally, there’s lots of people and stuff, but it looks like a skeleton crew.”

  “What don’t you like specifically?” I asked as a thread of worry wormed its way into my gut. I’d long since learned to pay attention to Jenna’s gut feelings. Unlike mine, hers were always correct. It was uncanny. We could be anywhere, and she’d know what was about to happen. On a job like this, it worried me doubly so, especially since it seemed so easy.

  “I’m not sure exactly—” The bullet caught her through the right side of her back, punching through her lung and pitching her forward in a spray of crimson. I hit the dirt as more shots rang out, slamming into the sand around me.

  I fired back in the direction of the shots, emptying my M16 in a few strategic bursts while I crawled toward Jenna and pulled her behind a rocky outcropping. It didn’t offer much cover, but then again, from the way she was bleeding, she didn’t have much time, anyway.

  “Jenna, it’s going to be okay!” I cried, trying to staunch the blood with my hands as it poured out of her with every wet-wheezing breath. Her suit constricted around the wound in an effort to staunch the blood flow, but I wasn’t sure it would be enough to keep Jenna alive without immediate medical attention.

  “No, it’s not,” she coughed, spattering me with blood as she spoke. “If you run right now, you can get away.”

  “I won’t leave you,” I said, pulling her close to me, and as I felt her hot blood soak into my chest, something inside of me shattered. I was going to kill them all for this. I would burn this camp to the ground. I would hunt down the families of every man, woman, and child in there, and not only that, I would hunt down their families’ families. They would run, looking over their shoulders for me, and then, just when they took one moment to relax, I’d leave them lying bleeding and broken in the desert.

  “You have to leave now. If you don’t, they’ll get you too. Mac, you have to get out of here. Regroup and get Armand. You must finish the job.” She swallowed hard. “If you don’t, you know what will happen. They weren’t lying when they said they’d kill everyone you loved.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said as my voice went cold and empty. All the color had drained from my vision as I watched Jenna convulse in my arms, shaking so violently everything inside me broke. “You’re the one I love.”

  A faint smile crossed her lips. “Love… you too…” A bullet pinged off the rock next to me, so close to my ear that shards of stone peppered my skin, and as I turned back to Jenna, her eyes dr
ifted closed.

  “Go…” she whispered as something exploded to my right. The shockwave threw me backward off the cliff. I tumbled downward and slammed into another outcropping of rock far below. My bones shrieked in pain as I lay there staring up at the cloudless sky. It seemed to turn red as I saw men high above. If they spotted me I’d be as good as dead.

  I rolled, pulling myself close to the cliff even though the only thing I could feel was pain. Blood filled my mouth as a spray of bullets sliced across the ground in front of me, inches from my toes. As the sound of the blast faded, I heard voices in Arabic high above, followed by a single gunshot.

  Jenna. Had they shot her? No. They couldn’t have.

  I sucked in a deep breath and tried to ignore my throbbing head, tried to ignore the gut-wrenching agony ripping me up from inside me. I had failed her. She had trusted me, and I’d failed to keep her safe. Tears gathered at my eyes as I stared up into the cloud-ridden sky and heard motorcycles roar to life.

  The whole scenario screamed of a setup, only I wasn’t sure who had set us up. I would find out if it was the last thing I did. No one had known we were coming except our employer. We’d barely arrived in the country a few days ago, and there was no way anyone would have known we were here. I shook my head. I was going to get to the bottom of this if I had to kill every last demon in Hell.

  “Asmodai,” I whispered, and the name of our employer carried on the wind, drifting into space, and as it did, the memory broke apart, leaving me back in the hospital with Jenna wrapped around me.

  “I’m guessing you remembered that,” she said, looking me in the eyes. Tears gathered around her eyes, and as they did, she put her forehead against my chest. “I’ve been looking for you a long time, Mac. It’s funny. You date someone for five years, and because you’re you and I’m me, I realized I never knew the first thing about you or where you came from. Trying to find you after you burned our contact was like trying to find a ghost, and just when I was close to finding you, well, that’s when you chose to vanish off the goddamned planet.” She touched my demonic arm. “Now I know why.”

  “I saw you get shot,” I said, staring at her in disbelief, and before I could stop myself, I touched the spot where she’d been shot. Beneath the thin fabric of her dress, I could feel a hard knot of scar tissue.

  “I was shot,” she said, looking at me, “but after I put a bullet in Armand’s skull up on the cliff, the rest of those bastards dragged me back to their camp, stitched me up well-enough to keep me from bleeding out, and had their way with me. They gave me blood transfusions, Mac. Blood transfusions.” She shook her head, suddenly angry. “I did the only thing I could. I reached out to our employer and begged for him to save me.”

  “You called Asmodai?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. I couldn’t quite remember who that was, but as I said the name, a chill ran down my spine. “I came back to storm the camp a day later and found every living creature inside burned to a goddamned crisp. Not just the men, women, and children, but the dogs and camels too.”

  “They deserved it,” she snarled. “Asmodai shattered the ground beneath the camp and rose from it like an avenging angel. His touch filled me with the power to avenge what they had done. I slaughtered every living thing in that camp before he pulled me to his side and whisked me away to Hell.” She took my hand and pressed it against her stomach. Her flesh felt like it had been branded. I couldn’t make out what the shapes and symbols were from touch, but it seemed exceedingly intricate. “And you know what, Mac? It was worth it.”

  “Jenna, I’m sorry,” I said, the words stinging my throat. “Why couldn’t you wait? I came back…”

  “I’m sorry too, Mac,” she said, and as the words left her lips, she pressed her Baby Eagle to my stomach and fired two quick shots. My world exploded in a whirlwind of agony as I collapsed backward onto the hospital floor. Blood streamed out of my gut as agony turned everything into lightning-filled bursts of agony. People started screaming all around us as others rushed in every which way but toward me.

  “Jenna, what are you doing?” I cried, but the words left my mouth in a hoarse, barely audible whisper.

  “My job,” she said, wiping away tears with the back of her hand. “As a representative of the council of seven, I hereby claim this land in the name of Asmodai.” Lightning the same color as her bleached-blonde hair crashed outside, striking the street in front of the hospital in seven precise bursts. “If you can, dispute his claim.”

  Jenna raised her pistol and pointed it at my forehead. “Goodbye, Mac Brennan. I love you, but love can’t save you. Love can’t save anyone, and when it comes down to it, the only thing we have left to fill the holes in our heart is the cold solace of vengeance.”

  As her finger pressed through the first action on the double-action trigger of her Baby Eagle, a blurry shape slammed into Jenna with enough force to send the woman crashing through the tempered-glass hospital doors. Ricky stood in front of me, a look of abject hatred plastered across her face. Her hands clenched and unclenched as she took a menacing step toward Jenna.

  “How dare you come into my town, shoot my boyfriend, and try to claim it for a goddamned demon!” she roared, before glancing at me with suddenly concerned amber eyes. As she saw the wound, something inside her seemed to melt. She dropped to her knees, ignoring Jenna and scooping me into her arms. “Someone help him! Quick!” She cradled me like a baby as she stood even though I wasn’t sure you were supposed to do that to people who had taken two rounds to the stomach. Then again, I was in so much pain, I couldn’t really have done anything about it, even if I’d wanted to.

  “You can run, but you can’t hide, Mac Brennan!” Jenna called as Ricky burst through two double doors with the word “Surgery” stenciled across the top in big block letters. “The council has spoken, and now that they know where you are, they will come for you!” Her voice cracked as thunder crashed outside. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t mind her, she’s a dead woman,” Ricky said, her voice a soft, pained coo in my ear as she dropped me onto a gurney and wheeled me into a room filled with doctors and nurses ducked down behind a pair of steel desks. “I will protect you from anyone!”

  She turned her gaze toward the doctors, and as she did, the smell of wolf filled my nostrils. Two doctors jumped up, eyes flashing amber as they sprinted toward me at inhuman speed.

  “Fix him!” she said, but she needn’t have bothered because the amber-eyed doctors were already on it.

  “I need surgery prepped!” one called, snatching the gurney from Ricky. He sliced open my shirt as the other came up to Ricky, worry painted across his face.

  “We’ll do all we can, but if you really want to make sure he survives, he’ll need vampire blood,” he said. “Otherwise…”

  “I’ll get it, just keep him alive until I get back,” Ricky said, turning and pushing through the doors as a nurse shoved an oxygen mask over my head. “And alert the pack. We’ve got a whole lot of people who are going to try to kill him. Make sure it doesn’t happen.”

  I tried to respond, tried to say anything, but as I raised my arm to try to pull off the mask so I could speak, everything faded to black.

  Thank you for reading Seized. If you wouldn't mind, please leave a review.

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