Heroines and Hellions: a Limited Edition Urban Fantasy Collection

by Margo Bond Collins

  “Focus,” he said, hissing the s-sound through his teeth like a snake.

  So I did.

  First, I concentrated on his voice, imagining how his lips moved when he talked. I also focused on his warmth and the heat emanating from his hold behind me. Then, I let my concentration shift to our surroundings, almost as if it were a rubber band stretching, wrapping us up and securing the perimeter of our bodies.

  As I honed in on each molecule of our bodies, our souls, I kept a single finger in the water, relishing in the feel of it as the liquid lapped around me. It felt so good, so soothing, so… cold.

  The water was also made up of molecules—millions and more. So, I focused on them, separating them out individually to solidify and take shape. I could feel them slowing and changing, attaching to each other and arranging into fixed positions. It was simply stunning, like snowflakes on the first winter’s snowfall.

  “Nice,” a voice whispered from behind me. “Go ahead and open your eyes. Look what you’ve done.”

  I did as he requested, slowly allowing my lids to open and gaze upon the water in front of me.

  My finger was surrounded by ice, a feint cracking sound coming from it like ice cubes in a cup of water. It almost looked like a glacier—a graceful masterpiece floating all serene like in the middle of the ocean.

  I gasped, jerking my hand away in surprise, and watched as the ice quickly melted away, the water around it consuming it like it was a meal to be devoured. I didn’t know what to think. I just froze a pretty substantial amount of water with my eyes closed.

  Of course, I wasn’t sure what this meant when it came to fighting off the different malus that were after me, but I sure as hell saw the possibilities if Branton was able to help me open up this quickly.

  Once the ice was completely gone, I lifted my head and looked around. The sky had grown dark, only a hint of purple and blue on the horizon where the sun had disappeared.

  Branton jerked me upright using the back of my jeans, and I couldn’t help but squeal in surprise at the sudden movement. Before I knew it, he had turned me around to face him, his amulet hidden behind his shirt once again. Even though it was a magnificent-looking piece of jewelry, I was thankful he had it covered. It meant I could kiss him again without the fear of it scalding my skin.

  But instead of a kiss, all I got were his light brown eyes staring at me inquisitively, like he was waiting for an answer.

  Wait, did he just ask me something?

  He must’ve noticed the confusion on my face, because he repeated himself patiently. “How did that feel?”

  I smiled wide, nodding in acceptance. “It felt fan-fucking-tastic,” I admitted.

  “Good!” he nearly shouted, and I simply adored his enthusiasm. “I think that’s plenty for tonight. Now, we look at the stars.”

  The expression on his face as he gazed up into the heavens, his skin illuminated by the moon and the night sky, was pure joy.

  Branton and I tried to work on my powers nearly every night, and I had to admit I was getting pretty damn good at trying… and failing. All I wanted was to feel confident enough that I could protect myself and my siblings without help. I could only imagine how good it would feel to know I wasn’t limited.

  According to Branton, I wasn’t doing half bad. The control over my powers was increasing day by day, and I was getting much better at projecting—using senses other than my sight. Soon, he wanted to see if I was able to hold back my powers with my glasses removed. The possibility of me losing all control and not having my crutch to save me scared the crystals from my blood.

  The only thing that seemed to plague me over the few weeks we’d been practicing was that not a single malus had tried to approach me. It was as if something was running them off, or maybe they’d realized I didn’t have The Relic, or whatever it was they were looking for. I was chalking the last few weeks up to nothing more than some fun time with a great guy.

  A great guy who hadn’t even bothered to kiss me since our little boat adventure.

  I had to wonder if it was something I'd done wrong. Or maybe now he saw how powerful I really was and started acting threatened like every other male on the planet. Then again, that was pretty self-centered of me. He probably just didn’t want to distract me while we worked, and my schedule at the bar didn’t exactly lend to much free time.

  Still, I missed his kisses… I missed his touch.

  And I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get to experience them again.

  After spending nearly every day with the man over the past month, well, at least a few hours of every day, I was beginning to build a serious case of unresolved desire, especially since I knew he could kiss me and still protect himself. To me, that was what I wanted most in a man… the ability to suck face without hurting him.

  Well, his looks didn’t hurt matters either.

  I was beginning to sulk about my lack of a love life. I mean, really. Here I had a man who I found attractive and who found me appealing—well, I hoped anyway. Yet, it seemed the man was in this relationship for nothing more than to help me build my powers.

  …or learn more about your powers for his own gain, dimwit.

  My subconscious would’ve had a point if I’d thought Branton had any ulterior motives. But seriously, why would a malus help their prey build their power and strength? And he’d been so close to me in the past, so intimate, that he had plenty of chances to hurt me—to take what these assholes were after.

  He never did. Which gave me confidence in knowing he was there for me, because he liked me, not because I had something he desired.

  Well, not in the material sense of the word anyway.

  It had been quite some time since I was able to go home from the bar without Branton escorting me, making sure I got home safe, or helping me train.

  Tonight was an exception.

  I had to be frank—I was a bit elated to just go home and crash without the exhausting necessity I felt to impress him. I could go put my holey sweats on, eat straight out of the ice cream tub, and give zero shits about the goddamn laundry, or my hair for that matter. To top it off, the walk home was eerily uneventful, as was the norm over the past few weeks.

  With everything rather humdrum, I was surprised to see my roommate, Calder, home at two-thirty in the morning. The dude usually stayed out all hours of the night, only coming home before dawn to then crash out in his room.

  “Hey, C—what are you doing home?” I asked as I hung my keys on the hook by the door and turned to meet his eyes.

  “Uh, I live here? Plus, you’ve been out all hours lately too, so I didn’t think you’d be home,” he admitted, looking a tad bashful.

  Totally not like him.

  It made me curious to know what he was hiding.

  I looked around, peering as far as I could into the living room from around the corner. “So, got a hot party going on I should know about?”

  “Nah,” he said with a shake of his head. “You know me. Not the partying type.”

  “Well, okay then. I’m just gonna go upstairs and crash,” I said as I walked past him toward the stairs.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a faint glow coming from the couch area, but before I could get a good look, it disappeared.

  I must’ve been more tired than I thought.

  With sluggish feet and heavy eyes, I climbed the stairs up to my bedroom and locked the door behind me. My phone was going on vibrate too. My ass did not want to be disturbed.

  Within minutes of laying my head on the pillow, I was out. I had put my blackout curtains back in place on my windows, which meant it even kept the glow from the moon out of my face. I was damn grateful for such a marvelous invention.

  What seemed like only seconds later, I was startled awake by something, but once my eyes flashed open, I saw nothing.

  Curses, my exhaustion was making me hallucinate.

  But before I could close my eyes, I felt more than saw a presence in my room. While I was never good a
t pinpointing the different sancti, I knew exactly who… or what… this was.

  “Hello?” I said audibly, hoping to get a response from the ghost that was clearly somewhere nearby. Yes, living with a necromancer made it entirely possible to encounter ghosts from time to time, but they usually never came into my room. He only summoned them when he had something to gain from their presence. This was considered my turf, not Calder’s.

  The silence unnerved me, and I knew I had to do something, say something… freeze something.

  But I knew from past experiences I couldn’t use my powers to protect myself against a ghost. The beings weren’t actual beings at all, but a form of energy my powers couldn’t possess.

  I knew it and whoever was in my room knew it too.

  One thing I knew—smells were attached to spirits the way memories were to the living. They’d usually smell the same way as they did in life. So when I smelled Old Spice, I was immediately reminded of my father.

  That did it. My interest was piqued. There was no way Calder would summon my father… there was no reason to. Necromancers only brought those back from the dead who would benefit them, not someone else. Their black magic while dealing with the dead never came for free—there was always a price. And he had no reason to spend his energy on my father—or me, for that matter.

  I’d been practicing this for quite some time, but never really nailed down how to do it. But without hesitation, knowing my life was on the line, I sat up in bed and closed my eyes, trying to feel the little bit of humidity lingering in the air.

  I needed water or vapor, any type of moisture for that matter, to feel the essence of others around me, especially in the dark. If I wanted to know where this entity was, I needed to focus.

  Again, like a rubber band, I stretched my senses, focusing on every single molecule of moisture in the air.

  And it didn’t take me long to find the culprit.

  If only I could punch the ever-loving fuck out of a body-less entity.

  As I drew my band of awareness back toward my mind, I could feel the malus breaking through the water vapor in the air and getting closer… and closer… until it was practically hovering over me.

  In an attempt to avoid the spirit haunting my bedroom, I dodged quickly from beneath the covers and darted toward the light switch, my fingers hovering over it, but hesitating to flick it on.

  Yes, I knew how it sounded… most ghosts made their visibility scarce in the daylight or in a lighted room. But something told me this malus was different… he was there to help, not hurt.

  Then again, that was probably wishful thinking. What the hell did I know?

  He didn’t smell like death—an obvious difference from the other evil beings that had stalked me over the past months. Again, I got a whiff of Old Spice, and it made me miss my dad.

  Of course, I wasn’t born yesterday. I knew an evil being had the ability to trick me, make be believe they were up to good instead of evil. Yet, with the familiar scent filling my room, I couldn’t help it when my mind continued to think of my father and the wonderful times we had together.

  I didn’t hesitate any longer as I flicked the light on, bound and determined to see who had invaded my space.

  And there he stood.

  14

  “Dad?” I whispered, still unsure of what I was seeing. I had to question whether I was dreaming or not. Pinching myself didn’t seem appealing though, but neither did seeing my father as a ghost, especially uninvited. “Curses. What are you doing here?”

  “Watch your mouth, young lady,” he scolded, just like my father would've in life. Yet I wasn’t going to listen to a spirit standing before me, no matter how much he looked and smelled like Arvo Ranta.

  “I have every right to speak how I want in my own home,” I insisted, crossing my arms over my chest. “You have five seconds to tell me what you’re doing here.”

  Most mortali would wonder what a ghost looked like, and every mainstream assumption was normally correct, aside from the white sheets with holes in them. Most spirits took on their human form, but often appeared translucent with a bit of a colored glow around their perimeter. Of course, the color depended on their aura as a human, and blue was common for males because it depicted a very masculine, strong being in every sense of the word.

  Black… now, black was what I knew I had to worry about.

  And now, as I stared at a spirit taking the form of my father in almost every sense of the word, I couldn’t settle on the fact his aura would be black.

  It was clear as crystal… his aura was black, only visible by a very faint orange outlining the smoke-like effect surrounding him.

  I knew then that this spirit was not my father… not in the essential way I needed it to be anyway. His essence was guaranteed to be healthy, honorable… and black was anything but.

  Black was death.

  And death seemed to be dead-set on manipulating my mind into giving up The Relic, whatever that might’ve been… I still couldn’t figure out exactly what they were after, but giving up on the battle was not in the cards.

  “Five… four… three…” I began to count, putting some urgency under this spirit’s rank essence. What I had planned once I reached zero was still to be determined, but I damn sure wasn’t going to stand there in my own room and be threatened by a malus in disguise.

  “It’s me, Kirsi… please believe that,” he said, his voice just like my father’s, or at least what I remembered it to be.

  People usually wished for nothing more than to hear their loved ones’ voices once again after their passing, needing the memory of the sound, the feel of the vibration. But I could guarantee once they were given the option to actually hear said voices because of the manipulation of an evil entity, they’d never wish for it again.

  To even think that my father was being manipulated by such evil forces, or gods forbid, he was actually on their side, made my skin crawl.

  “Two…” I continued, keeping my defensive stance by the door.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, his hands upheld as if to protect himself from my wrath. Hell yeah, he’d better protect himself. I just had to keep repeating in my mind that he wasn’t my father, no matter how much he looked like him. “You want to know why I’m here, but once I start, I won’t have much time.”

  I looked at him in confusion. I wasn’t giving him much time, so he’d better start talking sooner rather than later. With my head cocked to the side expectantly, he continued.

  “I am your father, K-love,” he said, using the nickname he gave me when I was little and used for as long as I could remember. “I promise I am. But I am not to be trusted. Just saying those words mean they’ll yank me down before I’m done talking to you. I just need you to listen. They’re after The Reli—”

  And just like that, he was gone… his ghostly figure vanishing in thin air. I’d never seen a spirit dissipate as if they’d never existed, but there he went, causing my temper to fly off the fucking rocker.

  “Calder!” I screamed, unlocking my bedroom door and stomping down the hall toward his room.

  I hated this side of me—hated I had to point fingers in order to get some fucking answers. But considering I lived with a necromancer, and my dead father just visited me, it meant someone who had control over our wards invited him in.

  “You’d better have some answers, Cal—” I said as I bolted through his bedroom door without knocking. I regretted it as soon as I twisted the handle, yet I couldn’t seem to take the necessary control to stop.

  “What the hell, Kirsi!” Calder hollered as he attempted to toss the covers over himself and his lady friend… or… the pseudo lady friend who was on top of him.

  Any other time, I’d tell him I was sorry, but I honestly wasn’t at this moment. The only reason I regretted my intrusion was because I just walked in on my roommate making boom-boom with a fucking ghost.

  Her afterlife aura was a delightful purple, but it still didn’t make me any more comforta
ble with the situation.

  I didn’t even bother to look away, stomping over to the side of his bed and looking straight into his face. “Why the hell did you summon my father?” I asked and planted my feet, my stance shoulder-width apart and my arms crossed over my chest.

  “Are you fucking insane?” he screeched, still scrambling to cover himself and the ghostly bimbo who was now by his side. Yeah, I even scared the afterlife to climb off their mount. For that, I was proud.

  “The only thing that’s making me insane is that my father just so happened to show up in my room while you’re home during abnormal hours. Since you seemed nervous when I got home, not to mention he wouldn’t have been able to come to form on our property without an invitation, you must’ve been the necromancer who brought him to me. I demand an explanation.” I was seething.

  As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I remembered what Branton had said to me not long before. It didn’t take a physical invitation to allow someone beyond our wards. Even a mental or hidden emotional invitation would be enough.

  Did I subconsciously want my father here, no matter who sent him?

  That didn’t matter. Whether I wanted my father or not didn’t matter. What mattered was my asshole of a roommate bringing him to earth when he knew it would do more harm than good to my fragile mind.

  And no, I wasn’t at all afraid to admit how fragile I was emotionally when it came to my family—well, everyone but my mother.

  “You do know I’m not the only necromancer in Relic, right? Hell, I’m not even one of a dozen, Kirsi,” he explained while wrapping a sheet around his waist, leaving the thin quilt for his…. his… whatever she was. Lilac… that was what I would refer to her as in my mind from here on out, because that unique, purple aura was something to remember.

  “I’m aware of that, Calder. Don’t act like I’m stupid. I just want to know why you brought my father back,” I demanded, my words dripping with contempt. I pointed my finger at him, damn near poking him in the chest… if only a ghost weren’t on him a few moments before, I totally would’ve made contact. For some reason, the afterlife gave me the icks. I couldn’t help but think the remnants of their lives would somehow cling to me like leeches.