I closed my eyes while the pounding and scraping outside continued and imagined his face. Not hard to do.
Kason Fields, where are you? My atern ticked down two to fifty-five. Locator spells were usually a pretty basic spell—but messier—when they were done outside the head. But these were desperate times.
Reykjavik’s high rises glowed in the distance, the center of the city where the fae lived. Surely he wouldn’t be hidden away there. He’d be in the outskirts of the city, which was maybe twenty short blocks total, surrounded by witches who could protect him.
KASON FIELDS, WH—
A shiver in my navel swiveled me around to face the street. He was close, then. Maybe just down the road, but still not close enough.
The orange orb surrounding me shimmered with falling snow. It was fading, gradually becoming nothing more than air between me and the Diamond Dogs. I had maybe two minutes left, and even if I knew exactly where Kason lived, he probably wouldn’t throw open the door when I knocked and invite me in for a cup of tea and a nice game of hide the sausage.
Rows of razor sharp canines as long as my fingers snapped above my head from something that no longer resembled anything close to who had sat across from me at Hell Here. Their arms had elongated to the length of their legs. Their heads had warped into a shriveled, fleshy mess, and their giant mouths were a fanged gash that took up most of their faces. Black fogged wings lifted them on top of the orb to bite and scratch and shrink my resolve to a whisper.
I closed my eyes to block them out and wilted in on myself. No. I could do this. I had to find Kason, especially if he was close. I had to at least try, even though it would lead the Diamond Dogs right to him. But what else could I do? Clutching at my navel where I’d felt his pull, I reached into my mind, and my atern ticked down one to open up psychic communication.
Kason Fields, listen to me. I need to get to your house right away, but I need you to have your door open because—
A loud pop sprang my eyes open again, and I thought for one awful second the shield had vanished. But no, it still held but was shrinking in on itself like a dried grape from the thrashing it took outside. It rubbed against my shoulders as it caved in, and the sound reminded me of flesh sliding off bone.
A choked cry retched out of my mouth. PLEASE, KASON!
I don’t know you, a deep voice growled.
I jumped, thinking he was somehow inside the dying shield with me. You can trust me. You can— And then my mind, with a will to survive fueled by desperation, flashed him an image. My mouth on his, rough and hot. My body, naked and aching, sliding along his well-muscled form. My hands, without any pain whatsoever, tracing his happy trail down the inside of his pants.
The images pounded a hum through my body, but I pushed it aside and bolted to my feet. Maybe the images I’d shown Kason would work, but the chances were about as substantial as my disintegrating shield. It shrink-wrapped to my body and face like a second orange skin, and then it vanished.
Head down, I mowed down a Diamond Dog and sprinted as fast as my legs would carry me, half blinded by the falling snow and the night and with little idea where I was supposed to go. Fangs bit at my heels. Too many feet pummeled the snow after me. I searched for an open door, any open door, but didn’t see anything but my own hope blast out with my ragged breaths.
Teeth clamped down on the heel of my boot. I jerked sideways and smashed into a snowdrift. Nasty went flying. My boot sailed in the other direction. A rush of fangs and diamond collars wrapped around furry necks swarmed in, but this would not be how I died. I’d survived my family’s slaughter for a reason. That reason was given to me tonight, to end fae power and eternal winter and seek revenge. I refused to go out like this before I’d barely had a chance to prove myself as something more than a physically and emotionally scarred drunk.
I twisted left toward Nasty and swung with my one booted leg. It connected, hard, to the Diamond Dog who had part of a glass bottle sticking out of her side. I swept up Nasty and smashed it against the head of a charging fae dog. Something cracked inside my laptop, and I glanced down at it in horror.
Oh. Oh no. A rush of heat boiled within me and surged out in an enraged scream.
I whirled at another approaching dog. It charged, head down. I ducked into a squat, elbowed my fallen boot to my side, and flung it, aiming for its gaping mouth. And scoring. The boot lodged between its gnashing teeth. The one with a bottle stuck in its side stained the fresh snow with major blood seepage, and the third, who better not have broken Nasty with its skull, struggled to get to its feet.
Behind it, across the street, a door opened. A red one on a two-story house. I didn’t see anything but shadows on the inside, but I didn’t care. I sprinted for it with renewed determination, even as claws tapped the slick street at my back. I would keep going. They would keep chasing. But I was almost there.
As I approached the open door, magic swelled from inside and jolted warmth over my skin. I just hoped it would be enough to keep the Diamond Dogs out.
As I leaped up onto the porch, a figure appeared in the doorway, a scowl on his face, a shotgun in his hands, and one accusatory finger pointed at me.
“You don’t play fair,” he said between gritted teeth.
I barged past him and slammed the door behind me. “Get used to it.”
3
My atern ticked down and down as I hovered my hands over the locked front door while chanting every spell in the online version of the Witch’s Grimoire. My breaths came ragged, and I couldn’t stop shaking.
Two sonic booms in one night were possible only if the Diamond Dogs had enough magic credits on their aterns. Plus, a spell of that magnitude required energy. I imagined whoever had performed that spell, maybe Claudia, had drained her physically, which could be why I’d managed to escape their chase. That or dumb luck.
But they might call in reinforcements. Adrenaline roared between my ears, drowning out most of the grumbling coming from behind me.
“Who are you, lady?” Kason was saying. “You can’t just use your sexuality to get what you want, you know.”
“Okay,” I said and continued my chant without turning from the door. If I wasn’t so hyped up on terror, his lecture was sure to put me to sleep.
“You shouldn’t lower yourself to such standards.”
“Watch it,” I said, brushing past him, and hiked a thumb over my shoulder. “Sometimes they come in through doors.”
“Pretty sure that’s the way it usually works.”
The house was clean and open, with a warm, orange fire popping in the fireplace and enormous, thick rugs spread over a gleaming wooden floor. Red bricks decorated the walls, punctuated with large bookshelves, all the way up to large wooden beams that supported the ceiling. Soft, almost calming, violin music filtered from somewhere unseen. The place smelled like chocolate and cedar and was so much homier than what I was used to.
I moved past a plush, red couch to the living room window to reinforce the house’s spells with my own. Whoever had worked their magic in here had their aterns hiked up to the hundreds before they’d spelled the house. It was protected like a fortress around one, lone human who held the key to end Isa fae rule. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
“Who put you here?” I demanded while feeling the powerful magic out.
“No. I go first. What was that out there with you? What’s your name? How did you know who I was, and why are you here?”
I turned to look at him straight on, and the resulting thunderous pull shot static over my skin. Ty’s photo of Kason hadn’t done him a disservice, but up close and personal highlighted everything a picture couldn’t. A nose and cheekbones sharp enough to cut a woman’s self-control in half. Thick hair as dark as the shadowy cleft in his whiskered chin. Deep brown eyes that seemed to lose some of their severity the longer they took me in. He wore black flannel pants that rode low on his hips, a white flannel shirt with black stripes that had been buttoned up wrong, and nothing o
n his feet. The whole tantalizing package was beautiful.
“Jesus, are your lips blue?” he asked.
His steady gaze directed at my mouth stirred a tight coil through my middle, but we didn’t have time to put a name to that and explore it, to fulfill the sexual fantasy I’d planted in both of our heads. Survival mode still powered my actions, or it needed to anyway, so I could check and secure the rest of the house.
“You ask a lot of questions,” I said and skirted around him.
“And I deserve some answers.” He stopped me with a firm hand on my shoulder. “Get your clothes off.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “You first.”
“I mean… Fuck.” He pressed massive hands to his eyes as if to dig out the hidden words he meant to say. Then, with his mouth pressed into a thin line, he took a breath that lifted his wide shoulders and uncovered his eyes. “Sit. Please. I’ll make coffee while you get warm.”
“No, I—”
“Hypothermia,” he said, much too loudly, and took hold of both sides of my face.
His touch zinged heat to my cheeks, fanned hotter by his nearness and the way his fingertips stroked my hair behind my ears. My heartbeat stuttered. This was the closest I’d ever been to a man, close enough to see firelight blazing in his eyes, and it made it hard to breathe. Sure, I’d been close to boys before—I’d lost my virginity to one in the girls’ bathroom my sophomore year of high school—but never a man.
“Why don’t you look hypothermia up on your laptop you got there,” he said, voice softer, warmer. “My house. My rules. Sit.”
He pushed me back so the couch cushion caught my knees, and I sank into it while he strode past the front door to the kitchen. His slow steps held a faint stiffness, as if putting one foot in front of the other hurt.
I stared after him, not used to anyone giving me orders. I’d directed myself just fine for the last two years, and I turned out okay, all things considered. Yet this couch felt nice, soft and firm at the same time, not like the lumpy one back home. I leaned back into it, a combination of extreme fatigue, too much wine, and an adrenaline dive weighing heavily on my shoulders. Today had been too much for my couch potato level ten status.
“Check if they’re still out there,” I called.
“They are,” he said, the words echoing over the wooden floor. “Think I should invite them in for coffee, too? They probably have better manners than you do. Maybe they even say please and thank you.”
I shook my head. Just my luck that the human thought he was a comedian.
He came in carrying two cups of curling steam, set one down on the coffee table in front of me, and took the other to a chair next to the fire. “Drink up. It’ll warm you,” he said, pinning me with a dark look when I didn’t move.
A hefty sigh lifted Nasty, which I clenched tight to my chest, as I gazed down at the piping hot cup. I had never had coffee before—it was a luxury my parents had never bartered for—but maybe it tasted like wine.
“Got any straws?”
He eyed me over the brim of his cup. “You sip coffee. You don’t drink it through a straw like some kid. How old are you anyway?”
“Nineteen,” I bit out. What the hell was he implying? “I just… I need a straw.” I had never had to explain myself to anyone before, probably because this was the first day I had ventured out of my house. Twice. Both times were horrendous, and I promised myself I would never leave again after this was all over. “Just get me one. And some fennel seeds.”
His jaw ticked as he rose stiffly from the chair, towering over me as he strode closer, and he set his cup on the coffee table to glare me right in the face. “Give me another reason not to throw you out of my house.”
“If you don’t like me here, then why did you open the door?” A pang of regret speared my chest because I knew I wasn’t playing fair.
He closed his eyes and groaned, likely haunted by my sexual fantasy I’d flashed him.
“Straw. Fennel seeds.” I shrugged. “That’s all I need.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” he growled then shuffled to the kitchen.
“Thanks.” I figured I owed him quite a lot of gratitude, but that single word didn’t seem to do it. He was hobbling around his house for me, after all. “I’d get them myself, but I don’t know where you keep them.”
To escape all these feelings, I busied myself with Nasty. My gut churned at the sight of five cracks zigzagging across the outer shell, which distorted the N in Nasty to look like an H. But hallelujah on a stack of rainbows and kittens, it powered on with no trouble. My voice-activated keyboard, on the other hand, was toast. Good thing I had a working tongue and elbows I could still type with.
I checked my emails for any word from Ty, and amidst the orders from clients, there was one with a single word: Outie. I breathed a sigh of relief. Hopefully, he would go somewhere safe―like another parallel dimension or something―until spring.
Kason came back in with an unwrapped straw and a little tin box of fennel seeds which he practically threw on the coffee table before stomping back to his chair. I could feel his wrathful gaze watching my every move as I rolled the straw across the table with my coat sleeve, braced the plastic against my knee, then plunked it in the cup. Part of the fennel seed lid hadn’t been snapped down so I was able to maneuver about half of it—oops—into the cup.
“Have a little coffee with your seeds,” he said, sarcasm on full drip.
“I will, thanks.” With the hot cup tucked between my side and elbow, I took a long draw of the bitter drink that scorched a trail of lava on the way down. “Oh.” I shook my head and scraped my top teeth over my tongue. “That’s awful.”
His narrowed gaze zeroed in on the enlarged keyboard on my laptop and the way I held my cup. “And yet you’re taking another drink.”
I gave a one-shouldered shrug while I sucked down more coffee and watched him watch me. There was curiosity in his gaze, and for some reason, that was better than pity. What would someone like him think about me when he found out I was broken? And why did I care? He was just a doable human who somehow had the power to defeat the fae. Ours would be a short term working relationship, with minimal licking, if any. Yet the longer he stared at me, the more aware of him I became until it seemed he filled the whole room with his presence, eyeing my soul.
“Are you going to tell me what your name is?” he finally asked.
I gasped, suddenly remembering what he made me forget. “Necromancer’s Piss.”
He choked and sputtered into his coffee cup. “What?”
“Do you have any?”
“No,” he said, drawing out the word. The space between his eyebrows puckered as he set down his cup on the brick fireplace hearth. “Sorry, I’m fresh out.”
I nodded, screwing my lips into a disappointed twist. Well, I guessed I would just have to deal. “Hadley. Hadley Hawthorn.”
“Hadley Hawthorn,” he repeated.
Something about the way he said it, the timbre or the huskiness maybe, made me smile. A genuine one that felt like it cracked my thawing face. His steady gaze changed then, like he was seeing something for the first time in a long time. Like spring. Like hope, and I thought his lips twitched before he cleared his throat and erased all signs of having any actual emotion ever.
“Hadley Hawthorn, why did you come to my house tonight?” he demanded.
“Because you know how to stop the faes’ rule and end winter.”
“Uuh,” he said on a chuckle. “No, I don’t.”
I steeled my voice with barbed wire. “Yes. You do.”
“Don’t you think I would know if I knew something like that?” He stood, wincing with a hand on his lower back, and walked his coffee cup across the living room to the kitchen.
“You know. You do.” I tipped Nasty onto the couch, shoved my empty cup on the table, and rage-walked after him.
He whirled around, his dark eyes flaming mad. “The only thing I know is that I’ve been living alone in this house
for six months. The house before this one for eight, and the house before that for thirteen months. And if I try to walk out the front door to leave, I wake up in my bed. Over and over again, Hadley. I can’t leave this house.”
“Then how did you get from house to house if you can’t leave?”
“I have no memory of the times between.” He shook his head. “None.”
“Protection. Someone’s trying to protect you because they know what you can do.”
“I can’t do anything,” he said, his words deadly quiet. He turned toward the kitchen again. “I don’t do spells or magic. I’m just a human living in this fucked up world with…” He waved a hand behind him in my general direction.
“Witches.” I puffed my chest up to unsnap the few buttons on my coat and let it fall on the floor as I followed him into the kitchen. “And Isa fae.”
“And strange dogs with wings. You ever feel like you’ve just had a psychotic break?” he asked the inside of a steel sink.
Almost everything in the kitchen was made of steel—the refrigerator, other squarish things I didn’t know the names of, the hanging lights over a long, thin table in the center. And on top of that table were flowers, a glass vase filled with actual flowers in the dead of winter. Bright red with a deep brownish center. Yeah, pretty sure those were poppies, which might sort of explain the whole sleeping while attempting to leave thing. They would put you to sleep if you chowed down on them, though I doubted Kason often ate plants. So for the poppies to put him to sleep anyway when he tried to leave … That was some potent magic.
“I always feel like I’ve had a psychotic break,” I said, unable to tear my gaze from the poppies. They were beautiful and somehow alive and filled me with a warmth that had nothing to do with hot coffee or a fire. “Where did you get those?”
Legacy: Faction 11: The Isa Fae Collection Page 3