She was even more beautiful in person than in his dreams. Copper hair, with golden strands that made it shine like precious metal, and pale creamy skin. Even though most of her lush, curvy body was hidden behind the table, he knew every inch of it.
He knew details he couldn’t even see from here. Like the light dusting of freckles across her cheeks.
He knew the curve of her breast, the deep pink of her nipples, the heat of her body. The beauty mark above her left hip. The way she looked, naked in the candlelight. Her eyes were cast down, focused on the table in front of her, but he knew their color better than he knew the color of his own. Deep blue-green, that could glint with anger or blaze with passion.
Blaze. For the first time, he knew her name. A perfect name for a fiery, passionate woman.
He was so riveted by the sight of her that it took him a minute to realize she was casting a spell.
Before her on the table was a small golden idol, surrounded by one hell of a circle of protection.
As he watched, she picked up a Tarot card lying inside the circle, holding it between her hands. Her lips moved, and he could hear her chanting.
Golden light streamed out of the card, coalescing into a 3-D image of a man’s head and shoulders. Zane strained, trying to get a good look at his face, but it all he could see was dark hair, slicked back, and a sculptured cheekbone and a strong nose, like a hawk. He couldn’t see the man’s eyes, but there was an aura of intensity around him that made a slight shiver ripple over Zane’s skin.
Blaze was gazing intently at the image, as if she were trying to memorize it—or maybe recognize it? Then, very slowly, she moved the card toward the idol, the image hovering over it.
She touched the card to the idol.
Black light emanated from the statue and surrounded the card. Blaze jerked her hand back, then laid the card on the table, handling it as if it were a tarantula or a scorpion. The man’s likeness shimmered like smoke, bulging as if his face were misshapen, and then regaining its form.
Zane, crouched on the ground, saw gray-black fog billowing slowly down from the statue, through the tabletop, gathering on the floor near Blaze’s feet. It looked evil; he could imagine the cold, oily feel of it as if it were touching his skin.
Was she conjuring it on purpose? Did she even know it was there?
The cloud of fog slowly grew bigger, its edges roiling like storm clouds. Zane stifled the urge to call out to Blaze and warn her.
She picked up the second card, taking a deep breath, and then repeated the ritual.
Another man’s head and shoulders formed in the air. It was…
It was Zane.
He caught his breath. Holy hell.
She gazed at the image of him, but he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Did she recognize him? Had she seen him in her dreams, the way he’d seen her?
The urge to call out to her grew overwhelming—the need to meet her in the flesh. To touch her.
His hand moved toward the glass, instinctively reaching for her.
Then he heard the whispering.
Like the murmur of a voice just below the threshold of hearing, but saying something important. Something he needed to hear. He strained, but he couldn’t quite make out the words.
Blaze moved the card, with his image hovering over it, toward the golden idol in the middle of the circle. Everything in him recoiled. He did not want any part of him to touch that statuette, not even his image.
He bent his will toward the image, willing it away from the idol. He saw Blaze’s hand slow down, and then go still. She frowned, straining against his resistance. Then her brow furrowed in determination.
For a few moments their wills locked—her trying to push the card toward the statue, and Zane trying to keep it away. Her hand began to shake.
Then, without warning, the card burst into flames in her hand. Zane felt the searing heat in his own hand, and without thinking, he tried to draw the fire into his body as if he could keep her from getting burned. Blaze dropped the card with an exclamation. It fluttered to the floor on the far side of the table, outside the protective circle.
Blaze bent over, reaching towards it, and a tendril of black fog snaked toward her from under the table, blindly seeking her flesh. With a gasp she shoved herself backwards, knocking over the chair.
Pointing at the statue, she shouted three words of power. White light flared around her. The fog under the table churned for a minute, as if trying to push forward, but then finally began to recede.
At the sound of Blaze’s voice, Tyr strode over and used his power to move the curtains a bit further apart, standing over Zane to peer into the room. He was just in time to see the black fog draw into itself and up through the table, disappearing into the idol.
“What the hell just happened?” Tyr murmured. Zane shook his head, unable to tear his eyes away from the scene in front of him. His beautiful sorceress was messing with something way beyond her pay grade.
She stood gazing at the idol, breathing heavily, her hands still partially extended as if she expected it to attack her once more. It was all Zane could do not to stride into the room and wrap his arms around her to offer her support. Power. Whatever she would take from him.
Which was crazy. He didn’t know who she was or what she was up to.
Except he felt like he did know her—inside, where it really mattered. She was his dream woman, the woman he’d been waiting to meet for a century, and she was a creature of love and beauty and light.
After waiting another minute, Blaze approached the table. With angry, brittle movements, she wrapped the gold statue in white embroidered silk and put it away in a black velvet bag covered with silver runes. She put the whole thing in a carved wooden box and closed the lid firmly. He could see her exhale in relief when it was finally shut away.
What was she doing with a thing like that?
Blaze dismantled the circle of protection, erasing the runes, blowing out the candles, brushing the salt off the table into a bowl, gathering up the stones and straightening the deck of Tarot cards.
He could see her moving slowly, deliberately, but every now and then her hands shook, betraying her state of mind. When everything was cleaned up and put away, she picked up the carved box and left the room, turning the lights off behind her.
There was silence for a moment. Then Tyr murmured, “That looked like some dark, dark witchcraft, bro. Any idea what she was doing?”
“No clue. Not our business, though. Our business is the Seal.” He was lying. It was his business. He needed to know. What was the idol’s purpose? Why had she conjured an image of Zane, and who was the other man? No one he recognized.
No one he wanted to meet, probably.
Tyr shook his head. “I told you and Thorne from the beginning we shouldn’t be doing it like this.”
Zane sighed. “Don’t start that again.” Tyr was obsessed with old legends and prophecies. One of them said that the Seals couldn’t be bought or stolen, only freely given.
Like that would ever happen.
“Fine,” Tyr said. “Then let’s go get that damned dragonfly and get out of here. This place is giving me the willies. I keep feeling like something’s watching me.”
“Vampire bats? Gargoyles?”
“Whatever. Let’s just hope she goes to bed now. Then we can break in, get the artifact, and head for home. Get yelled at by Thorne for taking too long. The end.”
And hope the Dragonfly of Morocco really was the Dragonfly Seal. And that Tyr was wrong about the legend. Then all they had to do was find the other two Seals, put them back in Vyrkos’ tomb without tripping any magical booby traps or accidentally releasing the ancient evil Draken Lord, and save the two million people in the Portland metro area from a horrible fiery death.
No pressure.
Chapter 4
Up on top of the house, a dark figure climbed over the roof ridge and silently made its way down toward the balcony. When she got near the edge, she f
roze.
There were two men on the balcony, dressed in black from head to toe—black pants, black turtlenecks topped with many-pocketed combat vests, and ski masks.
In fact, they were dressed exactly like her.
Shit. Did all the kids in the class call each other this morning and decide to wear the same thing? And rob the same damn house?
Silently, she cursed her ex-boyfriend. She should have known better than to get involved with any scheme involving Jack Harper. Or a sorcerer. Definitely not both. But the job seemed straightforward, and the money was too good to turn down.
She should have known that meant ‘too good to be true.’
She should ditch out on this job, right here right now. But there was another reason she’d agreed to take this on, a personal one.
Blaze McKenna was a rogue witch who made her money from dealing in dark artifacts.
Rebel hated rogue witches.
Rogues had killed her parents, putting her and her little sister out on the street, to claw their way up a food chain that had way too many predators.
And this one was living large off the misery of others, in her overpriced villa that spilled recklessly down the forested ridge overlooking Portland.
Now, according to Jack’s employer, she’d acquired a dark artifact that could put the entire city in danger. She needed to be stopped.
If Rebel could make a good payday at the same time, it was a win-win.
Rebel eyed the two men. Chances were good they were after the same thing she was. They had their heads tilted back, looking up at the master suite windows on the top floor. Watching for the lights to go out. Waiting for the witch to fall asleep.
She had to beat them to the artifact.
They were blocking her preferred entry point, but she had a plan B. Rebel always had a plan B. All she had to do was use her secondary entry point, and get to the vault first. As silently as she’d come, she crept back up the roof, keeping low and staying out of their line of sight so the movement wouldn’t attract their attention.
She felt the familiar thrill she always got when a job was underway. She loved everything about breaking and entering: the skill involved, the secrecy, the feeling of being somewhere she didn’t belong when all was dark and quiet, and everyone was asleep.
Knowing that she could slip in and out like a shadow, knowing that she was the best at what she did. That no one and nothing was safe from her skill.
She climbed back over the roof ridge at the end of the house and ducked behind the chimney. She clipped her grappling hook to the top of the chimney, tested her harness with a tug, and let herself down slowly until she was hanging outside the attic window, out of sight of the two men on the balcony.
She put her hands lightly on the sides of the window frame and concentrated, feeling for the electrical energy that meant an alarm, or the different kind of energy that meant magical wards. She’d always been able to elude both, sensing the energy fields and slipping through them, though she’d never been able to say how. It was an inborn talent.
The rogue sorceress had both magical and electronic alarms. Rebel tuned into the energy and directed its flow around her, as if she were part of the window frame.
No bells or whistles split the night. It was all good.
A minute’s quick work with a glass cutter and a suction cup, and there was a neat hole in the windowpane. Rebel reached in, unlocked the window, and slithered inside.
Blaze finished getting ready for bed and sat on the edge of the mattress in her nightgown, gazing unseeing at her cozy, comfortable bedroom.
Two men were coming into her life, and soon. Both linked to the idol. The first one she’d recognized—Silas. Just like she’d feared, he was still in power in the coven. And he was still hunting her.
But the other man… the Knight of Flames. Were they both members of the coven? Were they working together, or not?
Why had his card burst into flames when she got it near the idol? She’d never seen anything like that happen before.
It might mean he opposed the power of the idol. Or it might mean he was even more closely tied to it than Silas.
And that the fog… the image of it reaching for her, like some horrible monster’s dark tentacle, wouldn’t leave her mind. Goosebumps shivered over her skin.
Blaze closed her hands into fists, refusing to let them tremble. She’d been fighting that darkness for years, and she wouldn’t give in now. She wouldn’t let it take her.
But it had come so close.
She let her gaze rest on the overstuffed leather chair in the corner, where she loved to sit and read. An afghan was tossed over the ottoman—soft deep greens and blues, like the Caribbean ocean.
She’d always hoped to see that ocean one day.
For the millionth time, she thought about leaving town. Just getting on a plane or a train or a boat, going far away from here and never coming back.
But she’d never been able to do that. Taking the idol away from Portland would be a disaster—she’d sensed that whenever she’d tried. Leaving it behind, with no one to keep it from the coven, would be a worse disaster.
For ten years she’d kept that disaster at bay, knowing deep down they were coming for her.
Her coven. Her family. The people she’d betrayed and abandoned all those years ago, in the hope of saving them.
In the hope of saving so many others.
She’d hoped they wouldn’t find her, and feared they would. Feared that everything she’d sacrificed for them had been for nothing. That removing the heart of darkness from the coven hadn’t saved them, and they would come to take it back.
Now they were nearly here. She couldn’t run. The battle she’d hoped never to fight was coming, and it had to be fought here.
But not tonight. Tonight, the idol was safe in her vault, inside its lead-lined box and its rune-embroidered wrappings, with all the magical protections she could put on it. That was all she could do.
She picked up the music box off her night table and smoothed her fingers over it. The polished wooden lid was blank, but when she opened it a jeweled dragonfly popped up, sparkling with tiny gemstones, its wings shimmering with iridescence.
Music began to play—a Chopin waltz, “The Dragonfly.” Blaze listened to it, the music soothing her as it always did. Her mother had given her the music box for on her sixteenth birthday, just before she’d succumbed to the long illness that had claimed her life. The illness Blaze suspected Silas had sent, when her mother opposed him for using the idol’s power.
But she didn’t want to think about that. Holding the music box always brought her happy memories and soothed her fears, as if some of her mother’s love still lingered in it.
The music box was the last gift her mother had given her. Well, the second-to-last. The last one was her eternal love and protection, transferred by magic and emblazoned on the skin of Blaze’s lower back like a tattoo.
I’m doing this for you, Mom. And for her father, and the others in the coven. She still missed them, didn’t even know if they were dead or alive. She’d been afraid to know.
She thought again of Silas’s face. The King of Swords. The leader. She’d barely recognized the face in the image. It didn’t just look older, although he’d be thirty-one now. It had shifted and blurred, almost as if he were someone else. Cold. Cruel. Inhuman, with no kindness or compassion left in him.
All these years, she’d cherished a tiny hope that without the idol, Silas and the coven had somehow broken free of the evil it wielded. Now she knew they probably hadn’t.
And who was the Knight of Flames? What role did he play in all this?
Her fat black cat, Bucephalus, jumped up onto the bed and rubbed against her, purring. She slid her hand down his soft, sleek back, and he butted her imperiously, demanding chin scratches.
She wound the music box and let it play, her mother’s love washing over her with the sound, filling her with strength. Her life had already come crashing down o
nce, and she’d survived. Whatever was coming, she might not survive, but she would fight. She always did.
But not tonight. She wanted one more night of oblivion.
Chapter 5
When the bedroom light went out, Zane nodded to Tyr, and his brother put his hand on the lock of the balcony door.
It snicked open. With telekinesis, who needed lockpicks?
There was a security system as well as protective wards, but they didn’t worry about any of it. They could cloak themselves from any security system, and nearly any spell. Become, essentially, invisible and undetectable.
Being as quiet as possible, they slipped through the workroom. Tyr headed straight for the far door, but Zane lingered by the table, running his fingertips over the polished surface as if it would tell him why his image had been conjured there.
He got nothing—just the faint tingle of the magical residue from the spell. Shaking his head, he stepped toward the door—and noticed the Tarot card Blaze had dropped on the floor. The one that had burst into flames in her hand. Zane stooped and picked it up.
The card was whole and unharmed. It was the Knight of Flames, a handsome man with golden hair.
And he was riding a dragon.
Zane ran his fingers over the card. He’d seen it burn, hadn’t he? The image of the cardboard blackening and curling in the flames was clear in his mind. And yet here it was—whole and perfect. Untouched by fire.
Zane? What the fuck are you doing? Sightseeing? Tyr was standing in the doorway, looking impatient.
Nothing. He hesitated, then tucked the card in his pocket and went to burgle a vault.
Leaving Tyr on watch near the curving central stairway, Zane stole down the hallway towards Blaze’s gallery. According to Thorne’s intel, this was where she kept all her valuable pieces, and where she met with buyers.
The place Thorne most wanted to get into, though Blaze had ignored all his phone calls and emails.
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