by Bast, Anya
“Mean you harm?” Erik gave a little laugh as though what she’d said was preposterous. “That’s what you think?”
She frowned at him, screwing her face up in an expression of disbelief. “Back in D.C. you agreed with Broder.” There was definitely something up. Erik didn’t strike her as flighty or forgetful. “What’s wrong with you?”
Erik began walking to the SUV again. “Long trip.”
“I guess. It gave you amnesia.”
“Look, I don’t think the seidhr mean you harm.”
“How do you know? We don’t know anything about why I was separated from them. Maybe there was a reason.”
They reached the SUV and Erik opened the back door. He glanced back at the house … a little furtively, in Jessa’s opinion. What the hell was that? Erik, furtive?
All her alarm bells went off.
“You’re not—” She bit off her sentence and yelped as “Erik” grabbed her and tried to push her into the backseat.
She kicked, fought, and scratched, but he had her up against the car and was about three times her size. She managed to work one hand free and popped it up fast and hard, fingers bent back, and took him in the nose with the heel of her palm. Bone snapped and cartilage gave way. Blood gushed. He yelped and swore, and she was able to free herself.
Jessa bolted, but he grabbed her by the upper arm.
Then Broder was there, yanking Erik away from her. She stumbled and fell to her hands and knees. Turning over, she crab-walked out of the way, watching the two men, her stomach in a knot. She expected a clash of the titans, a battle of behemoths, but Broder swung Erik around and punched him in the face once. That was it. That one punch sent Erik flying backward to slide along the gravel-strewn courtyard and then collide with the concrete wall of the fountain and go still.
Jessa watched as the illusion of Erik faded to the form of a tousled, dark-haired man with a lean, muscular build, wearing a pair of black jeans and a blue shirt.
She pointed at the prone figure, thick blood leaking from his nose where she’d hit him. She hoped she’d broken his nose. “Who is that?”
Broder stood staring at the man as if in shock. “Shaman,” he whispered roughly. “He’s a shaman using magick to try and kidnap you. He must have waylaid Erik from the airport, used one of Erik’s hairs or something to shape-shift into his form.”
“Wait.” The words soaked through the befuddlement that had overtaken her brain. “That man is seidhr?”
“Yes.”
“And he tried to kidnap me?”
“Yes. They know you’re here and they want you.”
The words went unspoken—for some reason. That was the big question. Why did they want her?
Inexplicably, tears rose to prick her eyes. She’d been hoping that her situation wasn’t the worst-case scenario, that, somehow, impossibly, her people wanted her back—that she was important to them.
Apparently she was important to them, but maybe not in the way she’d been hoping.
She swallowed hard and hugged herself, pushing away the ridiculous sense that she’d been betrayed. “Where do you think Erik is?”
Broder passed a hand over his face. “A shaman would need some type of genetic material to pull off an illusion like this. Like I said, they waylaid him. They’re probably holding him somewhere.”
She tried to imagine anyone being able to hold Erik against his will and failed. “How would they do that?”
He shrugged. “I’m guessing it’s with the help of a witch. She would have the ability to cloud his mind, confuse him for a time, with a skill they call sjónhverfing. I can’t believe they’d try this with a brother. It breaks the Brotherhood/seidhr alliance and is incredibly reckless.” He studied her. “They really want you.”
She swallowed hard. “Great. Everybody wants me.”
He stalked over to her, knelt, and held her face cupped between his strong hands. “Did he hurt you?”
She thought about that for a moment longer than she needed to, still sort of distracted and shaken up. “No. I hurt him first.”
His jaw locked as his eyes searched hers. He nodded. “Good.”
“There’s nothing good about this.” She shivered and gazed past him to the bleeding man. She felt betrayed, which was stupid … yet there it was.
“There is,” answered Broder roughly. He forced her to look at him, take her attention off the treacherous shaman. “And once that shaman wakes up, I’ll show you just how much good there can be.” His voice held a dark threat. “And I don’t mean good for him.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ll find out things you’ve wanted to know for a long time.”
She blinked, realization dawning. Oh, right, he would make him tell them everything. The man may have tried to kidnap her, but she couldn’t wish a pissed-off Broder on anyone. He would hurt that shaman for merely upsetting her.
“What happened?” asked Halla, running out into the courtyard. She stopped short when she caught sight of the shaman.
“Shaman broke in and tried to take Jessa.” Broder still hadn’t moved his hands from cupping her face or his gaze from hers. She stared into his eyes for a long, deep moment—it was as though she could see forever in there. Pain. So much of it. And fear. He’d been really worried about her.
Suddenly uncomfortable, she pulled away from him and stood.
The sound of a car engine starting up met their ears. A dark figure sat behind the wheel of the SUV. She looked to the prone shaman and saw the image of him—illusion, she guessed—was fading. He’d tricked them. Again.
“He’s getting away!” yelled Halla, running after the SUV, which had gunned its engine for the closed and locked front gates, tires spitting up gravel.
All of them ran for the SUV—as if they could halt a moving vehicle with their bare hands … well, maybe Broder could. The SUV hit the gates with a horrible crash and an ear-splitting groan of twisting metal, forcing them open.
And then the SUV was gone, along with all of Jessa’s answers.
She stopped running at the mouth of the twisted gates, watching the dust rise in the wake of the fleeing automobile.
A motorcycle roared out of a nearby garage and went flying past her a moment later.
Halla came up to stand beside her. “We should pray.”
“What?”
Halla jerked her chin in the direction of the SUV and the cycle in pursuit. “We should pray for that shaman if Broder catches up to him.”
TWELVE
Broder raced after the SUV along the narrow, curving roads near his keep. He couldn’t let the shaman get away. This was his one chance to figure out what they wanted with Jessa. The problem was that a motorcycle didn’t have much of a shot against an SUV when you compared mass, and he had a feeling they’d soon be dueling for road space.
Luckily he had a really fast bike.
He sidled up alongside the SUV, keeping his eye on the twisting road in front of them. The shaman veered to the left and Broder moved with the vehicle to avoid being bumped off the road, driving in the ditch for a moment. He had a plan for getting the SUV to stop, but it wasn’t time yet to make his move.
He knew these roads like the back of his hand and he would bet anything the shaman didn’t.
Regaining speed, he sidled up again, only to be almost run off the road once more. He moved to the other side and the SUV swerved right. Back and forth he baited the shaman, doing his best to distract him from the road and push him into driving faster.
There was a particularly hellacious curve coming up. Broder just hoped the shaman survived it.
The shaman headed into the curve way too fast and Broder hung back, letting the road do his work for him. The SUV swerved from side to side as the driver tried to regain control, but it was a lost cause. The vehicle headed into the ditch and hit an embankment, nearly rolling over, but came to a rest on all four tires. Smoke curled from under the hood.
Broder came to a skidding halt
by the side of the road and leapt from the back of the bike. The shaman sat stunned behind the wheel.
He yanked the door open, breaking the locks, and hauled the man out. “What the hell do you want with Jessa?” Broder bellowed into the man’s face.
Blood trickled from a cut in the shaman’s forehead where he’d bashed himself against the steering wheel. His head lolled and his eyes were unfocused.
Broder shook him. “You can die after you answer my question.” The man groaned.
“Kill me. I don’t care,” the man slurred. “Once Thorgest finds out I failed, I’m a dead man anyway.”
So the order to kidnap Jessa had come from Thorgest Egilson, the head of the seidhr enclave. Broder snarled into his face. “What do you want with her?”
“She’s a powerful witch. She’s kin.”
“So why try to kidnap her?”
The shaman made an angry hissing sound. “Because she’s with you, Calderson.”
“Do you mean her harm?” It seemed a stupid question. He’d tried to stuff her into the back of a vehicle.
Something emotional moved through the man’s eyes and Broder wondered what it could mean. Then the shaman yelled into his face with a surprising amount of anger, “I’m not answering any more of your questions, brother.”
“Answer my questions and I’ll show you mercy.”
He smiled. Blood stained his teeth. “My sister died trying to put her entrails back into her stomach. Don’t talk to me about compassion or mercy. You know nothing about that, Broder Calderson.”
Broder pushed the shaman away violently and turned from him, taking a moment to rein in his rage before he did something that would prevent him from getting the answers he needed. A second later he turned back.
The man was gone.
“Shaman!” he bellowed in the direction of the wrecked vehicle.
No answer. No sign of him. He’d vanished.
Jessa was curled up on the couch near the fire with her legs tucked under her when Broder returned later. He tossed the keys to the motorcycle onto the coffee table with a ringing clatter.
She looked from the keys to his face. “You didn’t catch him, right?”
“I caught him, at least for a little while. He used magick to escape.”
“Did you find out anything useful?” She sat up a little straighter.
His gaze caught hers and she had a moment to see bare torment in them before he looked away. “Nothing much that pertains to you.” His voice sounded hard and cold. “He got away before I could get anything useful out of him.”
She took a moment to answer. “Okay.”
“I did find out the order came from the highest person in the seidhr power structure. That’s definitely pertinent information.”
Something in her stomach twisted. She paused, twisting the edge of the blanket over her lap in her hands. “In the excitement over everything else, I totally forgot about this until this afternoon, but right before the demon attacked me in the parking garage I had a strange encounter with a man near the elevators. He told me to be careful—that ‘they’ knew who I was and that I was being watched.”
She had Broder’s complete attention now. The raw flash she’d seen in his eyes a moment before was now replaced with the more protective look she’d grown accustomed to seeing when he looked at her.
“He wasn’t human, I don’t think,” she added.
“Was he a shaman?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Is it possible he could have been … Blight?”
“What would make you think that?”
“He scared me and I got angry. When I showed my temper, his eyes went black … totally black, just like the demon who attacked me. But this demon seemed to be warning me, protecting me. Are there good ones? I didn’t see any fangs, but the eyes … He said his name was Dmitri.”
Broder went very still and his eyes narrowed. “Dmitri. I haven’t heard that name in a very long time.”
“So you know him?”
“Yes.”
She waited. And waited. Finally she sighed. “Do you think you could enlighten me a little?”
“Not until I know for sure it was him.”
She stood and faced off with him. “I’m sick of being treated like a child. Tell me what you know, Broder. Haven’t I proven I can handle it?”
He stared down at her with that forbidding, don’t-fuck-with-me-or-I-will-fuck-with-you way he had. It didn’t make her flinch and it didn’t scare her. She had him wrapped around her finger and she was just starting to realize that.
She had him wrapped around her little finger. Big, strong, immortal warrior. She owned his ass … and a fine ass it was, too.
Feeling pretty damn self-satisfied and confident, Jessa raised an eyebrow. “Well?”
“Many years ago”—he paused and thought about it—“centuries ago, there was a high-level demon who went rogue. His name was Dmitri.”
“Went rogue?”
“He decided he didn’t want to play his role in bringing about Ragnarök.”
“Oh. I didn’t know they had free will.”
“The agents in the upper levels of the Blight hierarchy have great intelligence and free will. Dmitri was one such agent.” He rubbed a hand over his mouth. “He disappeared. We all thought the Blight had killed him.”
“So he’s a good guy?”
“No agent of the Blight is a good guy.” He paused. “But he could be considered an ally. One we can’t really trust.”
She gave him a look of indignant ire, although why she felt the need to defend a demon was beyond her. “He warned me I was in danger.”
“Then did nothing as you walked right into it.”
Her thoughts strayed to the underhanded shaman. “Guess I can’t trust anyone these days.”
“Wrong. You can trust me.”
She relaxed her stance and looked up into his face. He was studying her with that characteristic intensity. “Can I? You want to fuck me.”
“I do want to fuck you, skatten min. I want your bare skin moving against mine. I want to smell the trace of perfume at the nape of your neck. I want my hands on you, making you moan.” He paused, his gaze never leaving hers. “I want to be inside you.”
Whoa.
A tremble went through her body as she reacted to his words and the intention in his eyes. She took a step back from him and he caught her, dragging her up against his chest. “Tell me you don’t want those things, too, Jessa.”
She opened her mouth to say she didn’t and her lower lip quivered. It wasn’t because she was about to cry—it was because she was having trouble saying no.
He slid his hand around to cup the nape of her neck and dropped his mouth to hers. Right before his lips touched hers, she thought she heard him whisper, “I don’t deserve you,” but then his mouth touched her and she dissolved into lust and she forgot all about it.
For a man who hadn’t been with a woman for a thousand years, Broder had some moves. His kisses made her body ignite and her brain lose at least half its capacity for rational thought. His mouth slid slowly over hers, as though savoring the flavor of her.
She wanted his tongue to penetrate her lips and stroke up against her tongue, but he denied her, teasing her instead. He nipped at her lower lip, dragging it through his teeth slowly until she feared spontaneous combustion.
If she didn’t get away from him now, she’d end up on the couch and the promise she’d made to herself would be broken.
Making a sound of torture, she broke the kiss, though she couldn’t quite pull away from his embrace. “Don’t you understand? I can’t do this, Broder. I’m not this way. I don’t have sex with men that I don’t have emotional ties with.”
Pain clouded his eyes, chasing away the lust. “You think I have no emotion for you?”
“I think you want to fuck me.”
He stared down at her for a long moment. “I want more than that. I want you in every way. When I look at you, I see
—” He broke off, swearing in some foreign language under his breath.
“What do you see?” she pressed.
“When I call you skatten min, it is not just an endearment. You are a treasure, beautiful and precious. If I could lock you away in this keep forever to protect you and keep you close, I would do it.” He looked as if he were about to say something else, but instead he released her, turned away, and stalked from the room.