I pushed her hair off her face and counted the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and realized I had learned almost each and every one of them, that was how imprinted on me she was. I touched her forehead with mine and whispered, “This. Pulling Kash back from the brink of death, easing his suffering. Avery’s. Mine. I won’t let you.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” she sighed, and kissed me soft and sweet and it felt as though time lived in her touch. “It’s not up to you.”
“This time, yes, Juma. Please. Let it be up to me.”
It was emotional blackmail at its finest. She knew I never begged anyone for anything, I never laid my fears and vulnerabilities out in the open for inspection and dissection, but I was doing so now. I was letting her know I was thinking of the time she’d saved me from a poison blade, brought me back from certain slow death, then succumbed herself. I was asking her to hear my darkest fears and hold them close to her heart, keep them safe, give them a home.
Juma traced a finger along my throat and bit her lower lip, and I could tell she was contemplating all the secrets I offered her in those eleven tiny words.
“I’m not going to die,” she said with finality.
I released her and ran my hands through my hair and patted my pockets because holy fuck, this woman. I needed a goddamned smoke. I needed a drink. I needed something to cope. Instead, I had her.
Juma grabbed my hands and placed them back on her hips, holding them still and, in essence, making me still as well.
“I’m serious. I will not die.” She smiled bright and looked so alive, but all I could picture were the times I’d seen her anything but. “I promise you.”
“You can make all the promises you want,” I replied, “but I was there the last time you saved a dying man—I was that dying man—and I watched you succumb.”
She cocked her head to the side and stilled and all of her was focused on me. Her eyes flicked over my eyes, mouth, brow, hair. Everywhere. She took me in and surmised and I could see her wheels spinning as she curled her fingers into the hair at the nape of my neck and my skin goose-bumped because her touch.
Her touch.
It was magic.
My body reacted to her even when my mind was racing around some serious shit, mostly because my body had its own agenda where Juma Landry was concerned.
“Dutch,” she whispered, and pulled me close and her skin was warm and soft and made me want to burrow deep inside her, and her breath on my ear made my dick hard as a goddamned rock. She glanced down between us, licked her lips, then pulled me close again. “Kiss me.”
I wasn’t expecting those words at that moment, and pulled away from her fast.
“Please.” She spoke into my hesitation and I paused only for a beat because I couldn’t bear her begging for anything. I bent low and ghosted my breath over her parted lips as her fingers knotted in my hair and she licked me, her tongue the taste of every fantasy I never knew I wanted. My dick jumped as I pressed my lips to hers and our tongues slashed against each other, a dance of passion and sex and deep fierce love.
I pulled away and she smiled, eyes closed and so beautiful, and I couldn’t help myself, I licked her tongue again, lapped at the sweetness of her everything. She moaned low and just for me and I knew heaven had nothing on her. She was the reason my left lung was smaller than my right—it was all to make room for her, she was my heart.
“God,” she moaned, and it sounded like pure sex, “that was a kiss.” She smiled and dug into her back pocket and pulled out her wand. “I wasn’t kidding, Dutch,” she said, and pressed her palm into my hand and I could feel the wand’s heat. “I’m not going to die. Not this time.”
I took her hand and flipped it over and watched the wand flash bright with its unknown life force. And I grinned and probably looked stupid, but I didn’t give a fuck. I was goddamned happy.
“How was I supposed to know you were going to use your wand?” I asked, hardly expecting an answer to the question, not really caring either.
“Do you think I run around town putting my mouth on any man who crosses my path?” She winked and stepped away from me, ready to set herself to work. “Don’t answer that question,” she said with a mischievous grin, “just know that treatment is reserved for you, Mr. Mathew. You and you alone.”
She walked back to Kash’s bedside and I watched from the doorway as she spoke to Avery and Kash, showed them her wand, then cracked a joke that made all of them laugh. She was wondrous and wonderful and impossible not to fall for again and again, and despite all the times I’d warned myself against her magic, I was so thankful my brighter selves had won the battle and sought her out in every dark corner and quiet street of my soul.
“Here.” Frist came up beside me and offered me my smokes. We stood in silence, watching Juma go to work.
“Can she save him?” Frist asked the question I was afraid to contemplate.
I shrugged my shoulders and lit my smoke.
“She says she can,” I replied, and exhaled. “I guess we’ll see.”
“Come on,” Frist said as she took a step into the room, toward the bed, and held out her hand to me, “let’s watch.”
I glanced at the bed and Avery’s face, his eyes full of despair and tragedy and unrestrained hope, and I shook my head and waved Frist away. “Go ahead, I’m good,” and because she knew me as she did, she didn’t ask twice. She joined the bedside vigil, and after listening to Juma’s instructions, blew on her hands to warm them, then took to the task of rubbing and kneading and massaging the spots on Kash’s feet that Juma ran over with her wand.
It was a slow, very deliberate process, and after watching them work on his feet for over an hour, I slipped from the room and walked back into the darkened kitchen. The far corner of the living room was turned into a makeshift bedroom for Juma’s parents, blocked off by some of Avery’s shōji, those beautiful Japanese partitions he collected like a sickness, stacking them in every corner of every building where he rested his head. I could hear him and Kash arguing in their quiet away about those shōji, and how Kash didn’t want them in his Italian homes, his French villas, and yet I always found them stacked safely in a corner because even though Kash said no to Avery, he never really meant it.
Avery was always his favorite yes.
My eyes filled and I pressed my fingers into the sockets as I sank into a low chair in the living room, leaned my head back, and let Frida watch over my dark soul. I felt weary and ached in places I couldn’t quite reach, as though they were right under my skin, and yet nothing soothed them into repose. I pulled a smoke from my pack and rolled it between my fingers as I sipped some Scout, and somewhere in all of that, Shema came to me, memories of her filled with distance and unspoken disdain. And I found it difficult to marry the woman Rani spoke of with fondness and warmth to the woman I once upon a time considered my mother.
As much as I hated admitting it, I realized with a slow start that I envied Rani that intimacy she’d shared with a woman who held me in her womb for nine months, nursed me at her breast for another fourteen, and then gradually shed the vestiges of motherhood for the prestige of The Gate. When she did choose to return to a gentler, softer version of herself, one that considered others and their stakes in this game of lives, Shema chose Rani as her holder of secrets, and I couldn’t help but wonder: Why not me?
I fell asleep this way, my brain awash in unanswerable questions and troublesome thoughts, twitchy and uncomfortable. My skin crawled with unease until she came to me and cupped my face and all of me calmed and quieted.
Juma.
Somewhere in the early morning hour, when the light was soft and pink, that perfect shade of morning, and the city was quiet, she padded into the room, curled into my lap, and we slept. Wrapped around one another, we were shared breath, warm skin, peace. So locked in our togetherness, the singular duality of our souls, I knew when she awoke without her saying a word.
“Did it work?” I asked in the hushed q
uiet of the hour.
Juma balled herself smaller and kissed my chest and all of me tightened, prepared for the worst.
“It did,” she replied, her voice laced with exhaustion, and I exhaled my anxiety long and slow.
“Thank you.” I kissed her hair and she held me tighter and we remained quiet for a few moments of total bliss.
Then.
“Rani texted me,” Juma stated. “She found Sevyn, and then the Copse found her.”
“Please tell me they killed her,” I said as I leaned my head back and squeezed my eyes shut.
Juma laughed low and pushed me. “Stop it, Dutch.”
I smirked and kissed her fingers. “You think I’m kidding.”
“I know you’re not,” she replied, her voice sultry with sleepiness and a hint of amusement.
“But you’re going to tell me we have to help her, aren’t you?” I asked as I twirled a lock of her hair around my finger.
“I’m going to tell you we need to talk to Sevyn,” Juma replied.
“Fuck Sevyn,” I said.
Juma sat up and I could feel her watching me.
“What?” I asked.
“Dutch.”
I opened an eye and met her stare. “Juma.”
“Fuck me instead.”
I opened both eyes and she smiled slow and wide and holy mother of god, she killed me.
“Then we’ll find Sevyn,” Juma clarified as she fisted my shirt and pulled me close and her breath was warm and sweet. “But first, fuck me, Dutch.”
I carried her into the bathroom, locked the door, and did just that.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: JUMA
The Hoia Baciu Forest lacked komorebi, teemed with ill will, and was considered the world’s most haunted, so of course Rani would hide there. It was obvious and amateur and if I knew her well at all, I would have said so and told her to meet me on Green Street instead, in the middle of London’s Little India for some chai and a chat because when you’re being hunted, what seems most obvious never is.
I knew this.
I’d spent a lifetime being hunted by her kind.
The shadows that hid a body best were the bright ones, those full of shoppers and children and couples with barking dogs.
Not a haunted forest in the darkest, most remote hills of Romania.
“This is some goddamned fucking bullshit.” Dutch muttered behind me and I smiled because of course that man would verbalize my thoughts in his most perfect, succinct, foul-as-fuck way. I turned back, caught his eye, and offered him my hand, which he took with a grumble. “Rani’s lucky there was a portal right into this crap-hole.”
“The fact you have a portal and I’ve worked this forest before is exactly what bothers me,” I said, voicing my concerns with the vulnerability of Rani’s chosen hiding place. “Those Copse assholes would love a place like this.”
“Let’s not start speaking of them as if they think for themselves,” Dutch said. “I like them much more as Veda’s minions. They start thinking for themselves and we’re all fucked.”
We kept picking through the woods for another mile or so, surrounded by quiet, everything so still and devoid of life and yet a strange energy pulsed through the entire place. It was like this the last time I’d worked here, crossing that creepy Deader Barlow back to his tiny castle in a valley so he could keep tracking the paranormal activity of the woods. He lasted another ten years until the things that go bump in the night got sick of him and his tools of the trade—he was found by the river with his throat ripped out and his heart missing.
A fitting death for these woods.
“We getting anywhere, Juma?” Dutch asked. His clipped consonants cut through the discomfiting darkness as I stepped into a clearing high on a hillside and gazed down into the valley. He joined me and smirked. “I guess this is the moment where you tell me to stop bitching already, huh?” he asked as our eyes rested upon a small gray castle, a miniature version of Dracula’s Transylvania home.
“Barlow was his name. Barlow Lefevre, from some old, wealthy French family who disowned him long before his retreat to these woods,” I explained as we began picking our way down the overgrown path into the valley below. “He was obsessed with the count.”
“You don’t say,” Dutch replied, and smoked and followed my footsteps toward the dark castle.
“I insisted he wasn’t right, drinking the blood of small animals and whatnot, but the Mistress didn’t care. She found him amusing and was fascinated by his study of the paranormal, so she gifted him one more chance at this life.” I spoke as we walked the path side by side, fingers twined, a rare moment alone. “And sure enough, that asshole drained every animal in this godforsaken forest. That’s why it’s so quiet out here, nothing dares come within fifty feet of the outskirts, lest the ghost of Barlow rises, full of the hunger.”
“Your stories are the makings of bestsellers.”
“My stories are for your ears only, gorgeous,” I said, and kissed him fast. “Hold them safe for me.”
“Always,” he replied as we came upon the last bunch of trees before the castle, and he glanced my way. “I see what you mean about this not being the best hiding place.”
“Right?” I raised a brow and asked as I scanned the area, not sure what I was watching for, uncomfortable with the locale nonetheless. My fingertips tingled and I pressed them into a tree trunk to ease the sensation. I watched Dutch step into the clearing, his eyes as wary as mine, all of him ready to pounce. “It’s like she couldn’t pick a more obvious—”
I stopped midsentence as the sensation in my fingertips rolled up my arm and into my shoulder, a wave of black-clad ill will.
“DUTCH!” I shouted at his back but he was already running, blades in both hands, as the trees came to life with a contingent of Black Copse, ninjalike in their silence and demeanor, poison blades glinting in the moonlight. But I had time for little else as another ripple coursed through me. I sidestepped an attack from above, sliced Simone across the Copse’s belly, then sank her deep into the chest of another on my left.
I could hear Dutch dropping bodies left and right, their soundless thuds filling the valley, the scent of their strange blood accosting my senses. On we fought, my arms sliced open in three spots and bleeding profusely, my side slashed and my thigh a gaping wound, but I cared little because we were winning. The two of us cut through their numbers with such speed, I knew if they could think for themselves, those still living would have taken to the trees by now.
But they were on a mission, sent no doubt by Veda with instructions to kill anything breathing, so on we fought, covered in blood and viscera and the smell of death everywhere until movement slowed and our weapons chimed out each kill for the other to hear and my body returned to itself.
“Dutch,” I called to him as I killed my last Copse with a fatal blow to the neck, sending its head flying in the air as I kicked its body away from mine and spun into the black-clad killer aimed for Dutch’s blind side. I sliced once twice thrice and watched his limbs and head drop like weights as he fell to his knees and died, all without a sound.
“Thank you,” Dutch said as he wiped his brow with his forearm and the forest around us slipped back into its eerie silence.
“Any time, gorgeous.” I smiled at him, then caught my breath as I glanced at his arm. “You’re cut,” I said, nodding in his direction and our eyes locked as I checked his wound and I knew exactly what he was thinking. “It’s not like Kash’s,” I noted as I touched and smelled his skin. “I don’t smell any poison, but I do smell magic.”
He furrowed his brow and then his eyes widened and we spoke at once: “Shema.”
“She must have known about their poison blades,” I said, “and made sure your blood was flush with the proper magic to counter it.”
“Fuck outta here.” Dutch laughed and rolled down his sleeve, but I could tell the idea of Shema doing something for his benefit kind of messed with his idea of how the world worked, and he needed a
few minutes—fuck that, probably a lifetime—to parse the shift.
Instead.
“You felt them?” he asked as he scanned the night and sidestepped around anything having to do with Shema and how she might have saved him twice in one lifetime.
“We killed all of them,” I replied when he turned back to me. “And yes, I did feel them, but it wasn’t like before where my body kind of rippled with their presence. This was a weird sensation in my fingers and built from there,” I explained, “which makes me wonder if what Shema feared is already beginning.”
“They’re becoming more powerful and able to manipulate the magic?” Dutch asked as he watched me clean Simone and replace her at my hip. “Good fucking god,” he said as he stepped toward me and touched my arms, “you’re a bloody mess.”
I pushed him away. “It’s okay. Their magic does nothing to me.”
“Shit, it’s not the magic, Juma,” he said, and kneeled to check the gash on my thigh, “it’s your wounds. They’re goddamned deep.”
I looked down at my thigh and watched as he took off his jacket and then his shirt, ripped the too-expensive tee down the middle, and tied it around my injury, the white of the cotton turning bright red seconds later.
“I could see the bone,” he said, and stood to slip back into his jacket and zip it closed.
“It’ll heal,” I replied, and grimaced as it smarted. “Don’t get me wrong, it feels like hell, but it won’t kill me.”
“The blood loss,” Dutch mumbled aloud.
“I don’t really work that way,” I said with a shrug of my shoulders while I wiped the bloodstained sweat from my brow.
Dutch barked a laugh and I figured he was recalling some Poocha that gave him fits. “Tell me about it. Learned that shit the hard way—it’s gotta be limbs and heads and main arteries and even then, you’ve gotta hit every main artery. I know a thing or two about how your kind dies.”
We stared at each other, the hunter and the hunted. At least under typical circumstances, but there was nothing typical about Dutch and me. We really were the oddest of odd couples.
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