“Looks like Smoke’s here,” Tristan said dryly. “And he’s pissed.”
“Definitely.” Belle gripped the pewter cat. Its eyes glowed so brightly, they illuminated the scene like tiny flashlights.
They’d been back at the hotel when she’d sensed the roaring force of Smoke’s magic suddenly activating. It had taken fifteen precious minutes to trace the pulse and cast a gate that led to its source. Which had evidently been more than enough time for Smoke to express his extreme displeasure to whatever werewolf had pissed him off.
Tristan’s helmeted head lifted suddenly, and he silently pointed toward the corner of the building. That was when Belle heard the soft murmur of voices.
Despite his armor, Tristan could move with surprising silence when he wanted to. Belle followed him, her own armor creaking and scraping, plate against plate. She was considering a spell to silence it when they rounded the corner.
And saw Smoke. Or actually, they saw a nine-foot were-beast that shared the cat’s dramatic coloring of blue-black fur and silver stripes. Behind him stood a female Dire Wolf who looked delicate next to the cat’s menacing brawn.
“Oh, God,” the female said, “what now?”
With a rolling, vicious snarl, the werecat leaped at Tristan. The knight went down with a shout and a clatter of armor under the massive beast’s weight. The cat dove for his throat, only to be frustrated by his enchanted gorget.
“Smoke!” Belle shouted, “we’re friends! Don’t hurt him!”
But before she could get anything more out of her mouth, something hit her like a four-hundred-pound running back. She slammed into the ground so hard she saw stars and tasted blood. Claws raked her armor with a metallic screech.
It was the female werewolf, snarling and savage.
Though the wolves were immune to magic, that only meant energy attacks did nothing against them. They still couldn’t tear their way through armor spelled to resist physical attacks. The Dire Wolf growled in frustration as she tried to get her claws in Belle’s neck.
“Get off, dammit!” Belle slammed a backward kick into the werewolf’s thigh she didn’t even seem to notice. “We’re Smoke’s friends!”
“Yeah, right. That’s why you showed up with the rest of the assassins.” The werewolf paused, as if to consider a better place to rake. Belle twisted for an elbow slam. The armored joint hit the werewolf right on the end of her sensitive nose, and she yowled in pain.
Belle had spent a thousand years learning how to fight dirty. As the werewolf jolted up in pain, Belle twisted onto her back and slammed a fist into her furry groin.
A groin punch hurts regardless of gender, and the female tumbled backward, yelping as she cupped her abused sex. Belle rolled, grabbed her fallen sword, pounced on the wolf, and slammed the pommel into the girl’s temple. Dark eyes rolled up. It was a blow that would have killed a human, especially delivered with a Maja’s supernatural strength, but Belle knew it had only bought her a moment to think.
She bounced to her feet and looked around for Tristan and Smoke. Unsurprisingly, the knight was having a far harder time with his opponent than Belle had had with hers. The huge cat raked his claws across Tristan’s armor, fighting without success to get through to flesh. Tristan was giving as good as he got, but since he didn’t really want to hurt Smoke, he was handicapped. All he could do was punch and kick, while battering the beast with the flat of his sword.
Smoke should have recognized Tristan; the two had been buddies since he’d rescued Logan more than twenty years ago. That the cat was attacking his friend now suggested that Warlock had done something to his mind, just as Belle had suspected.
She reached into the pouch on her weapon’s belt and grabbed the pewter cat. Being a creation of Smoke’s, the cat was a direct link to his mind and magic. She pulled off one gauntlet and tucked it in her belt before curling her bare hand around the cat and reaching for her magic. The spell took hold with a snap, and she sent a message rolling along it. “Stop, attacking us, Smoke. We’re your friends. We’re trying to help you.”
The cat froze with his jaws wrapped around Tristan’s gauntlet. He released his fanged grip, though he still held the knight down with massive clawed hands. Crystalline blue eyes flicked from Belle’s face to the fallen werewolf girl. Rage curled his lips into a savage snarl. “You hurt her. Get out of my mind.”
He rose off Tristan with a rumble of rage. And sprang.
Five hundred pounds of pissed-off werecat shot toward Belle like the space shuttle. She had only a fraction of a second to cast her power toward the great beast in a net of energy. Chains of force materialized around huge paws even as she spun aside like a bullfighter.
The cat hit the ground hard, tumbling in a tangle of magical energy. It was such a near miss that the tip of his tail brushed Belle’s arm as he passed. Smoke roared, a deafening bellow of rage.
Tristan raised his sword and raced toward them in a desperate sprint. “Belle!”
She blinked at the note of fear in his voice. Fear for her? “It’s all under control, Tris.”
He slammed to a stop, sucking in hard breaths as he watched the cat fighting the chains in a spitting, clawing fury. “I can tell. Offer him a blow job or something and get him to calm down.”
Typical Tristan. Just when she thought he might have some glint of basic humanity, he turned back into a jackass. Belle flipped him off and moved cautiously closer to her prisoner.
A glass door rolled open somewhere overhead. “What the fuck is going on!” someone roared. Other voices lifted in alarm.
Damn. Bystanders. Belle inhaled and called her power from the Mageverse, breathing it out in a sleep spell that rolled over the complex in a wave of sedation. Silence fell as various innocents decided they’d dreamed the roaring tiger and wandered off to bed.
“Somebody probably called 911,” Tristan pointed out, moving over beside her. He sheathed his sword with a scrape of steel on leather.
“Let me know if you hear sirens.” Belle told him absently, fighting to keep the cat in his magical chains. He hissed and growled as he struggled just as hard to break them. “I’ll cast a nothing’s-wrong-here spell to send the cops away.”
“Let. Me. Go!” the cat snarled. He stopped fighting the spell chains; either he’d decided he couldn’t break them or he was gathering strength for another attempt.
Belle dropped to her knees, the better to meet his infuriated blue stare. “Look, Smoke, we have no intention of hurting you. I’ll be happy to release you as soon as you promise not to eat us.”
“Because quite frankly,” Tristan muttered, crossing his muscular arms, “you’re not my type.”
“Ignore him, he’s an asshole,” Belle told the cat.
“Whereas you are the soul of charm.” The cat gave her a smile that showed far too many teeth. “I promise not to eat you. Now get the magic chains off.”
“Somehow I’m not reassured.” Belle eyed him and sighed. “Look, I have no idea why you don’t seem to know this—but we’ve known each other for twenty years, ever since you rescued Arthur Pendragon’s son.”
The cat went still, the rage draining from his eyes, leaving only bewilderment behind. “The boy. The one the dragons were trying to eat.”
“That’s right.” Belle smiled at him, encouraged. “His name is Logan, and he’s a grown man now. He’s very worried about you. We were all afraid Warlock had killed you.”
Smoke studied her for a long moment before he spoke. She could feel the cat deciding whether to trust her. “He almost did. He cast some kind of spell that stripped me of my powers and memories. It’s fragmented me. I have managed to get some of it back for short periods, but then he rips it all away again. If he holds true to form, he’s going to attack again very soon. And I won’t be able to resist.”
“Can you help him?” Belle started as the voice spoke behind her. She whipped around to find the female werewolf towering over her, her eyes glowing with reflected moonlight.
&nb
sp; They didn’t smell like liars or crazy people. There was none of the acid reek Eva had come to associate with people who were just pulling her chain, nor was there the frightening stench she’d smelled from the schizophrenic who’d wandered into the shop last year.
These people believed what they said—and it sounded an awful lot like what Cat had told her, right down to the stuff about King Arthur. Besides, when they looked at David, there was genuine affection in their eyes, despite the overlay of fear in their scents. Given how big and furious he was, she really couldn’t blame them for being alarmed.
“They’re telling the truth, David.” Eva turned to examine the glowing golden chains that bound him. The fetters looked like really good film special effects, but David couldn’t seem to break them. What’s more, she could feel the magic radiating from them like a current of electricity tingling across her skin. “Weird as that sounds. You really did rescue the son of King Arthur? It wasn’t just a dream?”
“Apparently.” He studied the witch warily, his pointed ears gradually rolling forward as he sniffed delicately, sampling the strangers’ scents.
The blond woman started to reach for him, then stopped as his eyes narrowed. “May I touch you?”
He considered her a moment, then nodded. “If you free me.”
The big armored man took a half step closer. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Belle.”
“That’s because you’re a professional paranoid, Tristan,” the woman said lightly.
“Wait, Tristan? As in Tristan and Isolde?” Blinking, Eva gave the woman a closer look. “You’re Isolde?”
“God, no,” the woman and Tristan said in a chorus so fervent, Eva was surprised into a grin.
“I’m La Belle Coeur,” the woman explained. “Everyone calls me Belle.”
Eva still remembered a little high school French. “The beautiful heart?” She frowned. “But what happened to Isolde?”
“She’s dead.” Tristan’s harsh tone did not invite further questions. He turned toward his partner and flipped up his visor, apparently so he could glower at her. “So are you going to help the kitty cat recover his memory, or what?”
“Is that what you want?” Belle met David’s gaze.
For some reason, his blue eyes flicked over to Eva’s face, and he hesitated.
Eva remembered something Cat had said. “If our enemy does not kill us, sooner or later we will be one again. Will you think we’re not David enough then?” A chill crept over her, but she shook it off. “David, as long as you can’t remember who you are—as long as you can’t control your powers—you’re at Warlock’s mercy. What if you turn into a house cat again? What the hell would we do?”
“He likes being a house cat.” Tristan folded his arms and leaned a thick shoulder against the vinyl siding of the apartment building. “It makes people underestimate him.”
“Except this time I could not turn back.” David’s tail lashed in agitation.
“And Team Fido tried to gang rape me and eat him,” Eva added. “Which they’d have done, if he hadn’t managed to turn into the Incredible Hulk with fur.”
The knight winced. “Yes, I can see how that would suck.”
Eva snickered, amused at the thoroughly American phrase spoken in Tristan’s precise English accent.
“You’re right—I need my memory,” David said, his eyes meeting hers. “I have to control my magic.” He looked at Belle. “If you can help me, do it.”
Belle murmured a chant, dissolving the spell that held Smoke chained. She reached out and touched the cat’s big head with one hand while she fished out the pewter cat with the other. Smoke’s fur felt thick and surprisingly soft under her fingertips. She closed her eyes and called her magic, wrapping it firmly around the pewter cat. Because Smoke had created the spell when his mind and powers were whole, she should be able to use it as an anchor for the spell to reintegrate him.
Then she dove into his consciousness like a cliff diver plunging into the ocean.
Belle had contacted Smoke’s mind before, in a particularly rough patch during Logan’s teenage years, and she vividly remembered the Demigod’s thrumming power and the great depths of his consciousness.
The mind she touched now was nothing like that. Belle frowned. It felt as if holes had been ripped in his psyche, as if he’d been savaged by some kind of magical shark that had devoured hunks of his soul. And the pieces that were left were scattered, disconnected. Confused and bleeding.
She plunged deeper, sensing that some vital part of him had been severed. Something responded to her psychic touch with a rumbling, wordless question. The Cat, Belle realized, the most primal part of him, all animal instinct and elemental power. Her hand curled tightly around the pewter figure as she drew hard on her magic, then sent it pouring into him, drawing Cat up out of the darkness, so that she could bind him and the Sidhe warrior together again.
“No,” Cat’s voice rumbled. He began to fight her, pulling away, resisting her attempt to reweave the connections between them. “Our mate will reject us.” To the Sidhe he added, “I would not cost you her love.”
“She swore she wouldn’t turn from us,” the warrior said. “She knows we need each other to defeat Warlock. Otherwise he’ll kill us all, including Eva.”
“That is logic,” Cat warned. “There is no logic in the heart.” Belle could sense his sadness. “But I suppose we have no choice. And I have missed you, my brother.”
She felt them reach for each other. Acting on pure instinct, she poured magic into them to make up for the elemental’s missing energies. Something clicked, snapping home as if some magnetic force had kicked in, unifying them into one.
David sucked in a hard breath as Cat’s mind brushed his consciousness with feral energy that felt as if it had always been part of him.
Not always, Cat said, but close enough.
The alien beast extended a great paw and touched him, and he gasped. Memories streaked through his consciousness, striking like lightning bolts, illuminating his mind with sensations, thoughts, with parts of his consciousness that had been lost. You’re back, he thought in incandescent joy.
Yes, but we’ve more of us to find. Warlock has the elemental, and we’ve got to get him back.
Cat was right. He could feel his spirit brother out there in the hands of his enemy, aching and cold and lost.
We can’t let Warlock use us as a battery to power his insanity, Cat said.
“I can anchor you,” Belle said, her voice a smooth, silken whisper. “But I’ll have to remain with our bodies or Warlock could send someone to kill us all.”
That would be wise. David couldn’t tell who’d thought the words, and it really didn’t matter anyway.
It would matter to Eva, Cat thought grimly.
It might, David replied. But I want her alive, whether she loves me or not.
So he and Cat dove deep, swimming along the Mageverse’s most hidden trails, leaving the witch standing guard over their empty flesh.
Searching for the elemental.
SIXTEEN
“Oh, Jesus,” Eva said, stiffening in alarm as she stared at David’s limp, furry form.
When Belle had first touched him, a web of energy had sprung up around his body, the pattern following the jagged silver stripes cutting across his shoulders and haunches. He’d stared into Belle’s eyes, his own wide, absorbed. And then his gaze went fixed, the expression draining away from his face.
“What’s happening?” Eva demanded, her gaze flying to Tristan, who at least seemed aware of her. Unlike the witch, whose eyes were as blank as David’s. “Is he dying?” She heard the panic sharpening her voice and clenched her fists, trying to contain the frantic need to hit something.
Tristan’s mailed hand fell on her arm, restraining her. “It’s all right. They’re just working some kind of magic. He’ll be back.” His voice dropped to a murmur. “She’ll be back.”
Unfortunately, he didn’t sound all that convinced.
They found the elemental swimming slowly in a cage of light. David/Cat remembered Smoke as sleek and powerful, a blazing thing of energy and joy, not at all physical.
Pure magic.
Now the poor creature looked tattered, so dim as to barely burn at all. Starving and desperate.
Oh, gods. David felt sickened. What has that bastard done to you?
It’s you, it’s you! At last ... oh, free me, Smoke begged in a voice so faint, they could barely hear him through the containment spell’s buzz of magic. I grow so weeaaak. I sent our power to you, but I used too much of my own to do it. I die ...
Damn Warlock. Shared rage burned through David and Cat, a blazing anger that Warlock would dare so abuse the elemental. But with the fury came fear. If the sorcerer could do something like this to Smoke, near god that he was, how could the two of them stand a chance?
Screw that, David growled, rejecting the fear. Once we get Smoke out of there, we’ll kick Warlock’s ass.
Cat rumbled a feral growl of assent.
Do you know if the cell has a weakness? David asked the elemental, slipping closer to the bars to examine them.
Stay clear! Smoke’s faint voice went high with alarm. If you get too close, it will suck you in. It’s very powerful.
Yes, it is, rumbled a deep voice. And so am I.
Warlock had discovered them.
A vision flashed through David’s mind: a huge white werewolf crouched in the center of an intricate pattern inlaid in silver in the center of a stone floor. A focus spell. He held an enormous double-bladed battle-axe in massive clawed hands. Magic swirled around the great gemstone set in the axe handle, glowing an intense crimson. Somehow David knew the axe was called Kingslayer, presented to the Saxon sorcerer by Merlin himself fifteen hundred years ago.
And I’ll use it to kill you, you little bastard, the werewolf snarled. Leaving your body was a serious miscalculation. You’re mine now. You’re dead, you and your cat. And once you’re gone, the godling’s power will be mine. As it should be—because I deserve it.
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