by Michele Hauf
He set her on the cobbled street, and while Zoë’s body jerked toward her home, she maintained a jittering stance before Kaz. He stared at the flames, tears now rolling down his cheeks. Lower lip sucked in and jaw tight, he was not in the present, she felt sure.
Kaz had experienced a fire before and, she guessed, he must have lost someone. How cruel of her to insist he allow her to go inside. And yet, her heart broke to imagine what Sid must be going through if the windows were all closed up.
“Please,” she pleaded with the stoic slayer. “Sid is all I have.”
Tears spilling down her cheeks, she blinked through them to find Kaz’s expression was drawn, his mouth open in shock. “Zoë, you have me.”
Those simple words struck her hard, right in the center of her heart. “I—I do? But...”
She’d thought to have lost his respect after the accusations he’d blasted at her. And earlier, finding her with Switch surely had confirmed all the truths he believed about her. Because, as much as she hated to admit it to herself, they were truths. She hadn’t time to explain to him how wrong she had been.
“I may feel as if I want to hate you right now,” he continued, “but part of me screams to trust my heart.” He touched her cheek, stroking aside her hair. “You’re good, Zoë. You didn’t know what you were doing. At least, I hope you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t! I swear it to you.”
“Fine. But grant me some allowance of suspicion.”
She nodded. “You have every right to suspect me. I’ll have to earn your trust. I know that.”
“So besides the cat, you have me. Do you understand that, Zoë?” He clasped her upper arms and squeezed. “I will do anything to protect you, which includes keeping you from rushing into a burning building.”
He kissed her there in the middle of the street while her whole life went up in flames not three houses away. And for those few seconds of connection, Zoë surrendered to someone’s need to do right by her. To keep her safe.
She had chosen the right guy this time.
Zoë pulled from her savior’s kiss. “The fire scares you. Is that it? What happened to you with fire, Kaz?”
He shook his head. “Not now.”
“I’ll tell you everything,” Zoë insisted. “How wrong I was. How this whole awful business has turned into a nightmare. But please, we have to go in for Sid.”
Kaz’s jaw tightened, the muscle pulsing.
“Please,” she whispered.
Chapter 16
An hour later, Zoë sat across the row from Kaz on the Metro headed toward Kaz’s home. Sid curled on her lap. The cat had been dusted with soot when he’d come flying through the broken kitchen window and had landed in her arms. His whiskers had been singed close to his maw and the tip of his tail had been burned, as well.
Kaz had quickly tugged her away from the building, and she’d felt as if he were carrying away, not her, but some past demon that had risen with the flames to torment him.
The fire brigade had arrived and Kaz suggested to Zoë she only explain she’d been away shopping, and had no idea how the blaze had been started. She couldn’t confess that a gang of vampires had started the fire after removing equipment that would implicate her in the creation of dangerous recreational drugs. That would not have gone over at all with the authorities.
The fire brigade succeeded in getting the fire under control, but only after the roof and top floor had collapsed. The house was a complete loss. And witches did not have insurance. As well, if the Witches Council of the Light heard about the fire, they may ask questions Zoë didn’t want to answer.
Zoë had a little money in savings, but no more than enough to see her through a few years in a cheap apartment. But she could hardly feel devastated holding the shivering cat. What was most important to her had survived.
* * *
It had been one hell of a day. Kaz had woken this morning to learn the woman his heart had fallen for was the very reason he’d set out on a quest to track those dealing in Magic Dust. But now he wasn’t so sure she had known what she was involved in. How was that possible?
He’d wait until she volunteered the information, because Zoë looked tired. She needed to decompress and clear her head.
He leaned over and kissed her aside the eye and smoothed away the hair that had fallen over her lashes. “We’ll figure things out.”
“Thank you.”
Sid nudged his little black head against Kaz’s chin. A cat thank-you? He smoothed a palm over the feline’s body and gave it a pat.
Twenty minutes later, Kaz showed Zoë around his flat. The one-bedroom was large for the neighborhood, and most of it was empty because he only had a few pieces of comfy furniture, and nothing on the walls, save the map in the living room. He didn’t do home decorating beyond the spray-painted wards against vampires on his door and near his windows.
He offered Zoë the first shower, and then ran downstairs to borrow some cat food. Madame Malone had been delighted to fill a plastic container with dry food and then directed him to the basement storage room where the building owner kept tubs of cat litter for the residents to use. He found an empty plastic tub and fashioned a litter box for Sid then placed it outside his door at the end of the hallway where a multipaned window looked over a small, leaf-strewn playground in the back courtyard.
He’d never seen kids playing out on the swings, and that was a good thing, in case a vampire had followed him home. None had done so yet. He hoped his luck held out.
Now he stripped away his shirt, unlaced and kicked off his boots and stood in the bedroom looking out the window. From here he could see the road that circled Paris’s twenty arrondissements. Cars dashed madly to and from work. It wasn’t as noisy as one would expect, living so close to a major freeway. He liked the industrial scenery for reasons he couldn’t figure. Maybe because gardens were too fussy for him. The one plant he’d been gifted by Madame Malone as a moving-in present had promptly died two days later.
Out the corner of his eye he saw Sid jump onto his bed and before he could turn and give the critter a reassuring pat on the head, he felt the warm glide of Zoë’s hand slide up his bare back. Her cheek rested against his shoulder. His licorice-scented shampoo scented her skin and wet hair.
“You hungry?” he asked, uncertain about their relationship now.
He would love more than anything to abandon good judgment, turn and lay her on the bed and have sex with her, but he was leery now. And after watching her house burn—well, they needed to talk. About everything.
“Starving.”
“I’ll order a pizza before I hop in the shower. You like mushrooms?”
“Anything but anchovies.”
“My kind of woman. I put a litter box for Sid in the hallway outside the front door. It’s near the garbage chute. Got some cat food, too.”
“Aren’t you the industrious host?”
“I do what I can. This building is filled with crazy cat ladies, so everything was at hand.”
“Is it okay if I wear one of your shirts for a while? I want to put my clothes in the wash.”
“Yep.” Kaz walked to the door, avoiding the tempting heat of her scented skin. “Toss in the things I have piled on top of the washer, too, will you?”
“Sure. Kaz? I know you’re angry with me. I’ll make it better. I have to.”
He nodded, and, not trusting his ability to hold back an angry accusation, he headed out to the kitchen to call for delivery. Was it even possible to make things better? Humans had died. More humans would continue to die if he didn’t stop Zoë from making more Magic Dust.
But what caused the most worry? How to ransom the bits of his heart that he’d freely held out to Zoë on his open palms. She was everything he should hate. And yet sorting between right and wrong had never been mo
re difficult.
* * *
Kaz chowed down the last slice of pizza as Zoë sat back on the sofa and stroked Sid’s tail. It didn’t appear as if his skin had been burned, just lost some fur. Yet he may have sacrificed one of his nine lives tonight.
As had Kaz. She could not erase the look of terror that had consumed him as they’d stood before her burning house. Fire would frighten anyone, but it had been the first time she’d seen real fear on the man’s face. Not even vampires could bring up such raw emotion in him.
She hugged Sid and looked aside, catching Kaz’s sidelong glance at her. He smiled and leaned forward, elbows to his knees.
“What did fire do to you?” she asked carefully.
He lifted his chin, his profile growing hard and pensive. She guessed his thoughts had just jettied away from this room and into a different time and place. Her heart pounded, and Sid rubbed his face against hers, sensing her apprehension.
Catching his face in his palms, and threading his fingers up through his hair, Kaz eased the heel of one palm against his forehead, then exhaled. “My mom died in the fire that destroyed our family home when I was twelve.”
Zoë swallowed. Her heartbeats stuttered.
“It was a faulty heater. Old thing just up and exploded one summer night. I woke surrounded by flames, and heard my father’s voice calling to me. I ran out into the hallway and his big, strong arms...”
He closed his hands over his face, and Zoë could feel the pain of memory tighten his every muscle.
“He grabbed me and carried me out,” he finally managed. “I was choking and crying, and he was holding me and choking, as well. And then I called for my mother, and my father realized she was still inside. He left me there in the backyard and ran toward the house. I was so scared I called to him to come back to me. And when he paused before rushing back inside the burning house, the threshold collapsed and exploded, the force of it tossing him back into the yard.”
He tilted his head back. His eyes closed; his lip wobbled.
“The whole house went down with my mother inside.”
Zoë hugged Sid even closer, knowing that words could never heal such a wound, especially if the memory of it reduced him to a man who could barely contain the tears. Yet he did. “It must be difficult for one so young to comprehend such a tragedy.”
He nodded, sniffed back a tear she hadn’t noticed. “Yeah, well, it’s in the past, right? Bad things happen to people all the time. I’m no one special. Nor was my mother. I just, uh... Watching your house burn brought back the stuff I hadn’t thought about in a while.”
“I shouldn’t have insisted we go there.”
“You couldn’t have known. Besides...” He tugged gently on Sid’s tail. “This little fellow was worth it.”
She nodded against Sid’s head and hugged him even closer, knowing she could never soothe the hurt that had been embedded in Kaz’s very soul when losing his mother.
“Thank you for telling me about the fire,” she offered. “I lost my mother, too, when I was thirteen.”
He sat upright, turning to inspect her. “Really? I’m sorry, Zoë. I know how tough it is. Hell. You see? Everyone has bad stuff. Uh, how did you lose her?”
“Car accident. She didn’t have good night vision, and drove into a ravine one night. To this day I don’t like to drive or even ride in a car.” She slid a hand along Kaz’s thigh. “I’m glad you take the Metro everywhere.”
“Paris is a bitch to drive in,” he muttered, and then smiled.
The two shared soft laughter.
“We have things in common,” Zoë said. “We both managed our teen years without a maternal presence. It’s never easy.”
“Nope. It’s not.”
“Did your mother’s death have something to do with you running away a few years later?”
“Yep.” He closed the cover of the empty pizza box, and Zoë took it as his signal that this conversational thread was closed. She’d give him that. Memory was a tough conversation, and it always tended to linger in one’s soul, even after the words had been spoken.
This man was strong, and had been forged by his experiences, as had she. And her latest experience was nothing to be proud of.
“So I need to explain,” she offered. “Will you listen?”
“You bet.”
While Kaz cleaned up the pizza box and their plates and set them in the kitchen, Zoë explained everything to him. How she’d been compelled to concoct a blend of faery dust that could help Luc kick the habit, and Luc telling her it had worked, and how a vampire he knew wanted more so he could spread the goodness around. She’d been thrilled.
Until the truth had crash-landed upon her naive little world.
“So why do you think Luc was compelled to lie to you?” he asked, strolling back around with a dishcloth to wipe off the coffee table. “You trust vampires?”
“Of course I do. Most of them. There are good and bad vampires, just as there are good and bad humans.”
“Right, but you said you and Luc have been friends awhile?”
“Over a decade. We met—well, that’s a long and even weirder tale.” And as far as confessions went, they’d both shared their fill today. “The only thing that could have gotten into Luc was the dust. He began experimenting with faery dust after a tough breakup with a vampiress he’d been dating for two years. The guy was head over heels in love. I’d been giving him some space because of that, so I didn’t realize how deeply he’d gotten into dust. And when he finally did confess his addiction, I knew I had to do something to help him. A vampire can’t get clean of dust on his own.”
“Just like any other drug. The addict needs help, a whole team of professionals who know how to facilitate healing.”
“Yes, and I was determined to be his team.” Zoë caught her chin in her hands and sighed. “I’m skilled in a special kind of magic. I can’t talk about it, but my father taught it to me.”
“The kind of stuff that only warlocks do?”
“Kaz, I’m not a warlock.”
“Are you sure about that?”
No, she wasn’t sure. In the sense that her magic had altered the molecules of a sidhe substance, then yes, she was, and that she had harmed humans inadvertently—oh, hell.
“Zoë?”
“Maybe I am,” she said on a gasp. “Oh, Kaz, I never meant to cause harm. The magic I employed in the blend—the witches of the Light don’t approve of its use. It’s called molecular magic, and it alters the very molecules of a substance. Using it on faery ichor is tricky because the sidhe have a slightly different molecular structure than we creatures and the humans who exist in this mortal realm.”
“I can believe that. Faeries sort of flicker.”
“Exactly. They can never completely fit into this realm. I thought I’d mastered the ichor structure. But apparently, I had not. I can’t believe I thought the blend was actually helping my friend. Luc’s addiction must have stood up and cheered when he tested the dust I’d given him. And that same addiction wouldn’t allow him to tell me the truth.”
“Addiction can be rough,” Kaz agreed as he sat on the couch on the other side of Sid.
“You say that as if you’ve firsthand knowledge.”
He rubbed the heel of his palm over his stubble-dusted jaw, then finally confessed, “My father is an alcoholic.”
“I’m sorry.” An excellent reason for a teenager to run away, especially without a mother to shelter him. “It must have been tough for you as a child.”
He shrugged, dismissing it as casually as he’d mentioned it. “He picked up the bottle after the fire. Blamed me for my mom’s death. If I hadn’t called out to him to come back, he wouldn’t have stopped. The house wouldn’t have caved in....”
“You may have saved his life by
calling to him, Kaz.”
“Yeah, maybe. You can’t talk to a drunk, though. Anyway, I moved out when I was fourteen. Better that way. Dad can’t help the way he was or is. The booze became him. I suspect the dust became your friend, as well. The dust lied to you, Zoë, not Luc.”
That he brushed off his father’s problem as if insignificant clued Zoë it was a much sorer spot with him than the fire that had killed his mother. She wouldn’t touch those feelings. For now.
“Thank you for being so understanding,” she said. “You could have pushed me away—”
He caught her hand and squeezed. “Part of me still wants to push, so don’t get too excited. It’s been a tough day. And this whole warlock thing, I’m not sure what to think about it.”
He held her hand to his mouth and the warmth of his lips scurried up her wrist and tingled along her arm. Zoë exhaled softly. This knight was too good to her.
“But another part,” he continued, “an even bigger part, knows you’re too valuable to my heart—er, to me. I like you, Zoë.”
He’d almost confessed that she was valuable to his heart. He had confessed as much, but he’d quickly changed his words. Still, it meant a lot to Zoë to know his heart. He had become an important part of her life, and she would do whatever she could to ensure she did not lose his trust. She had to gain it back. She wanted to defeat that part of him that needed to push her away.
He’d been on his own since he was fourteen so he must have had to grow up fast. No wonder he led such a hard life. Slaying was not for those who valued family and relationships.
“The dance studio,” she suddenly remembered. “It was your one salvation.”
“Probably. Like I said, Madame du Monde had great cookies.”
“I’m glad you had her in your life. And when did you join the Order?”
“Couple years later. I was recruited on my sixteenth birthday. My life took a one-eighty that day. I’m thankful to the man who trained me, and a few others who I call friends. See? I’m not such a sorry case after all.”
“Whether or not you realize it, you have risen from the ashes, Kaspar Rothstein.”