No Rest for the Witches

by Karina Cooper

  Why had he betrayed the coven?

  Not precisely.

  More like, why the hell had he wrapped her body around him like silk and rain? Lost himself in her, pulled her apart with anger and need and mind-scorching heat and then betrayed everything she’d ever believed in?

  The fact that he’d murdered her sister was something she didn’t know to ask. Fuck.

  And you promised!

  God, he wished he hadn’t. “Why what?” he asked, and because he already knew the answer, added, “Why didn’t I say no when you threw yourself at me or—”

  The fingers in his hair tightened, wrenching his head back at an angle that threatened to pop his neck. She leaned over him, body pushed forward to thrust her face over his. Her eyes were wide, too wide, shimmering with tears that crawled deep inside his chest and twisted. Bloodier than the knife at his throat.

  Darker than the rage that beat at the iron chains of his self-control.

  “You know!” The words broke on a ragged sound. “Why did you kill them? Why? When we—”

  “We,” he said flatly, cutting her off with barely leashed scorn. “There never was a we.”

  She blanched. Recovered so quickly that he wasn’t sure he’d seen the blood his verbal dagger had drawn. “We,” she repeated through gritted teeth, “as in the Coven of the Unbinding. We as in your friends!”

  “Liar.” Her knee dug into the hollow beneath his left shoulder blade. Neon flashed, and only part of it was the monotonous color outside the seedy motel. The rest popped and sparkled behind his eyes, accompaniment to the ruined skin she pushed on.

  “They were your family—”

  “Bullshit,” he rasped, all but a growl under the pressure. “They were users. Curio only kept you for your magic.” And, rumor had it, for her body.

  He didn’t ask. Even as the words leaped to his lips, he didn’t want to know.

  He’d had that body, too. One of many things he’d shared with the late coven leader.

  The knife lowered, a fraction. “You killed them. All of them,” she accused, a sharp whisper. “They gathered because they trusted you—”

  Fuck. They’d gathered because they had intended to sacrifice Caleb and his sister for their power-hungry cause.

  “—and you just . . . killed them.” Her voice trembled.

  “Most of them,” he agreed. Some, like her, he’d managed to distract. Some he’d gotten free.

  Her eyes flickered, her face upside down but still so fragile, it stole the breath from his body. Black hair dye wouldn’t make her tough. “Why?”

  His jaw locked. Ticked hard. “Because I could.”

  He hated himself for doing it. He hated that it had to be done. But Caleb was a lot of things, and gentle wasn’t one. Reversing her flimsy position of power was simple. Reaching up, he seized the back of her jacket and hauled her bodily over his head.

  His scars stretched, felt as if they split from the root to the skin, and the angry buzzing in his ears almost drowned out her howl of rage and surprise as she hit the ground on her back. The knife went flying, and Caleb rolled off the mattress seconds before it embedded itself into the wall beside them.

  Plaster drifted lazily on the air as Caleb knocked her fist away, seized both hands, and pinned them above her head. The motion barked his knuckles on the rusted bed frame, and he grunted a curse as her knee found his gut. Twisting, he pinned her legs, clamped his thighs around hers, and locked her down.

  She strained, but succeeded only in turning herself red with the effort. Dust puffed languidly around them. Sweat dripped from his nose as he stared down at the face he’d hoped to hell to never see again.

  Love. God damn it, it had never been his to feel.

  “Stop it,” he ordered roughly as she twisted her hips.

  “You traitorous son of—!”

  “Son of a bitch. Yes, I know.” He transferred her wrists to one hand, dropping his forearm to her throat. He shoved hard, forcing her head to lie still against the dirty green carpet, and met her eyes precisely because he didn’t want to.

  The accusation in them didn’t quite hide the helplessness she struggled to bury. The grief.

  Guilt had a punch like a prizefighter.

  What the hell could he say? He’d done so much more to her than even she knew.

  He knew, though. It was enough. His mouth thinned. “Let’s get this straight, girl. Yes, I turned on your coven. Yes, I killed Curio—” He pushed hard as her back arched, fury snapping through her like a conduit. The beads on his bracelet scored her pale skin, and he set his jaw. “I killed Curio,” he repeated curtly, “and probably about two dozen other witches who didn’t know when to get out. If I had to do it all over again, I’d make the same choices.”

  But he wouldn’t, he thought as tears shimmered in her narrowed glare, choose to touch her again. He wouldn’t commit his body and soul in a single moment of mind-blowing weakness, and he sure as hell wouldn’t promise the impossible to Cordelia Carpenter before he killed her.

  But life gave only one chance. His bed was made; he was damn well going to lie in it.

  Alone.

  “We can play this all day, Jules,” he said, thrusting his face so close to hers that she flinched. “You’re on your own, and I’m stronger than you.”

  Her lips twisted, teeth baring as if she would try to bite him. Under the strained pressure of his forearm, her skin flushed nearly purple. It colored her cheeks, her lips. Her eyes flashed, hatred and fear.

  Protect her. He’d promised. Shit. Just shit.

  Caleb relented. Loosened enough so she could breathe.

  She coughed, choking. “I hate—I hate you,” she managed between rough spasms. “I’m going to kill you!”

  He stared at her. Then, his smile a grim slash, he reached over her head and drew the serrated knife out of the wall. She flinched as plaster crumbled around them. “Fine,” he said, and put the metal hilt in her hands.

  Her lashes widened, and he noticed the smudge of mascara that made them thicker. Darker.

  He didn’t know what color her hair was naturally, but it sure as hell had never been black.

  Caleb forced her fingers to close on the knife and rolled off her and to his feet, a fluid motion that belied the torturous effort it took to make it. His left side was rapidly going numb. Blood slid down his arm from the flesh wound she’d already inflicted, and he watched her eyes trace the wet gleam as she, too, clambered to her feet.

  He spread his arms. “Do it.”

  Juliet’s full upper lip curled under her teeth, her tongue sliding along it in that way she did when she was nervous.

  Just thinking it made him clench his fists. Not his to know, damn it. But the unfamiliar memories wouldn’t fade. Not for as long as he lived.

  Not for as long as Cordelia’s lifeblood mingled with his.

  “Come on,” he said flatly, his voice rough. Impatient. “You want to kill me so badly, do it.”

  Conflict. Determination. Uncertainty. He read it all in the trembling of her hands, her white-knuckled grip around the hilt. The way she studied the livid scars on his chest.

  And the flash of empathy she couldn’t hide. Not from him.

  Exactly the point.

  He took a step forward, seizing her shoulder, relief and fury entangling together to grate across his nerves. “Then for Christ’s sake,” he began roughly, and she moved. Sudden. Erratic. The knife flashed once in red neon, sketched an upward arc.

  Agony snagged on four inches of sawlike steel.

  Juliet shuddered as she clung to the metal handle, her hair hanging forward in a black curtain. Sweat turned her skin clammy.

  In front of her, his fingers tight on her upper arms, Caleb stared at the blade half buried in his shoulder. Blood welled over the puckered wound, trickled like a crimson tear down the sculpted planes of his pectoral. It slid past his nipple, and for a wildly crazy moment, Juliet wanted to lick it away.

  The world froze around her.r />
  “Oh, God,” she whispered, jerking her hand from the hilt as if it had burned her.

  Caleb fell to his knees, expression transfixed: shock, anger, and pain. Lips white with strain, he reached up and wrenched the knife out, swearing as flesh and muscle shredded beneath the jagged edge. It made a sound like wet paper, like gristle parting. Blood splattered the peeling wall.

  Juliet slapped her hands over her mouth as his eyes, shockingly blue, met hers. Stunned. Accusing. “You . . . missed,” he managed, and slumped over.

  She sobbed out a laugh. It cracked. Her knees folded, dumped her gracelessly on the floor, and the unforgiving surface jarred every aching bone in her body. Raising a hand to her face, she saw the blood—Caleb’s blood—gleaming wetly on her fingers and squeezed her eyes shut.

  She swallowed down a violent surge of bile.

  Blood. His blood. Wasn’t that what she’d wanted? To kill him for everything he’d done to her friends? To make him suffer?

  Yes!

  Not like this.

  Oh, God. She wasn’t a killer. But it was too late now.

  Or was it? She opened her eyes, very cautiously forced herself to check. His chest rose and fell. He was breathing. White-faced and clammy, but breathing. The shoulder wasn’t a vital organ, after all.

  And yet he’d pitched over as if she’d gotten him through the heart.

  She scrubbed her hands along her thighs. Had she really taken down the soothsayer? The man who could read the future like it was a book? He hadn’t seen her coming, had he?

  Now what?

  She couldn’t kill him. The queasy knot in her stomach told her that; the screaming denial in her head told her she couldn’t just . . . just murder a man. Okay. She got it.

  But she could give him to the people he’d hurt the most.

  Now, she needed her comm line. She needed to contact whatever was left of the coven. Would they be glad to hear from her?

  She’d be bringing them the betrayer. Of course they would.

  Maybe they’d take her back, forgive her for not being there when everything had fallen apart.

  She could be part of them again.

  That meant something. Didn’t it?

  But only if the comm frequencies she remembered actually worked. It had been over a year. She’d returned to find the coven in ruins, most scattered or hiding or captured or dead.

  She took a shaking breath, and the metallic smell of Caleb’s blood drilled into her nose. She pressed shaking fingers into her eyes, gouged deeply until she could see through the panic forging chaotic lines through her brain.

  No. She had to be honest.

  She hadn’t tried to reach them. Hadn’t bothered to do anything but look for her sister. In the empty, desperate months that followed, with her world turned upside down and everyone she’d known dead or gone, Juliet had focused only on her sister. She’d traced every lead, every rumor, every damned ghost, but it was as if Cordelia had just . . . disappeared into thin air. Leaving no trace of her passage.

  There was no reason. Delia wasn’t a witch like Juliet, she was a prostitute—one of the amazingly pampered women who worked at Waxed. She’d enjoyed her life. Loved Juliet.

  Then she’d vanished.

  Despair had set in. Ridden Juliet hard until she’d found that the lower street bathtub gin was the best medicine she could find. It cured everything. Sorrow. Anger.

  Guilt.

  “Oh, God, get a grip,” she whispered, hand to her throat where a manic beat threatened to choke her. There wasn’t time for this. The soothsayer was out cold, but for how long? Could she tie him with anything? She hadn’t brought any rope, no cuffs, nothing.

  She’d thought no further than killing him. Hell, it was all she’d thought about in her alcohol-fueled anger. She didn’t have a plan for this!

  Maybe she should have borrowed some of the fake fur sex cuffs off the girls at the bar. Hysterical laughter threatened to bubble out of her throat. It wouldn’t be the first bondage play this filthy place had seen, she was sure.

  The motel room wasn’t any different from the thousands of rooms just like it in the streets below the civilized edges of New Seattle. It was the kind of place that charged by the hour, loved and loathed by prostitutes and the johns they serviced.

  The faded carpet was threadbare and stained beneath her boots, and the neon glow of the omnipresent electrical net of city lights couldn’t hide the water stains eating at the plaster, the slimy mold gathering under the single curtained window, or the dingy pile of blankets flung into the far corner.

  It smelled like dirty laundry and old vomit; like sweat and rot and the lingering aroma of hours upon hours of cheap sex that soaked into every available surface. It was a scent as familiar to her as her own name, branded into her brain from too many years surviving in a city that didn’t care. Juliet resisted the urge to cover her nose, but her stomach clenched, roiled.

  Later, she promised herself. Later, she’d curl around a toilet and puke until her stomach didn’t remember the quantity of gin she’d cleaned out the night before.

  Then she’d start on a new bottle until Caleb Leigh’s face was a distant memory.

  It’d have to be a really, really large bottle.

  He wasn’t moving. Sprawled out in the flickering light, his skin gleamed white and red and sallow yellow, and the wound at his shoulder bled sluggishly in a steady rivulet.

  The months hadn’t been good to him.

  Caleb had always been lean, but the past year had scraped the last vestiges of excess weight from his body and hardened him into something rangier. Wiry. Her fingers trembled, and she shoved them against the floor by his inert form before she did something stupid. Like touch him.

  Instead, under the sparking wash of red and orange neon, she surveyed the sinewy muscle defining his pale skin.

  His shoulders weren’t overly broad, but they were strong. She wasn’t made of feathers, and he’d practically pinned her to the wall with one arm. His chest tapered to a narrow waist framed by the unbuttoned vee of his jeans. Shadows gathered in the well-defined edges of a physique that put most of the men she’d ever known to shame. He’d changed.

  And it had hurt.

  Before she could catch herself, before she realized what she meant to do, the very tips of her fingers skimmed the morass of scars carved into his body. Rough ridges rippled across his left shoulder, twisted the flesh and muscle of his arm into a grotesque pattern of hardened tissue and shiny, melted skin.

  She flinched as his muscles leaped under her touch. And the wildly knocking pulse low in her belly warned her that whatever her mind was telling her, her body remembered a whole different side of Caleb Leigh.

  The man who’d stripped away every defense she’d ever had. Who had filled her mind and body and tapped into something she never knew she’d wanted, and then . . .

  And then betrayed her.

  “You sorry son of a—” She bit her lip.

  Son of a bitch. Yeah, I know.

  He’d always been cold.

  She traced the nodules of tight, healed rivulets across his left pectoral. They rasped against the sensitive nerve endings at her fingertip. The wounds climbed up his shoulder, up the left side of his throat to splay like twisted claws over the hard line of his jaw.

  Any boyishness the high cheekbones and sculpted planes of his face might have maintained was stripped forever, marred by monstrous furrows of bone-white skin at his cheek. It touched the corner of his mouth, giving his lips a permanently flippant quirk.

  The tip of her finger settled there, tracing the line where smooth skin met rough. Her throat closed on an unwanted wash of sympathy.

  She swallowed it down. Hard.

  He deserved a hell of a lot more than a few ugly wounds.

  The amount of charms he wore said he knew it. Colored threads knotted around both wrists, thick with beads and bits of unpolished rock. A rough cord wrapped around his neck, braided twine that she knew without having
to look would have threads of hair woven in. White flint hung from a wire catch, effective at breaking bonds.

  Amber, jade, and labradorite shared strings with stone beads rudimentarily carved. He used every trick in the book to stay hidden. With warding charms like those, it was no wonder it had taken her a year to track him. Never great at rituals and charms herself, she’d had to settle for plain sleuthing, and even that hadn’t worked until now.

  Finally, he was out of tricks.

  Jerking her hand back, she got to her feet, stepped over his inert body, and pulled the bloodstained sheets off the dingy mattress. Using the knife, she cut strips and bound his arms behind him. Her fingers hovered over the puckered, oozing wound at his shoulder, and her stomach pitched again.

  She’d done that.

  Before she could talk herself out of it, she wadded more material against the seeping hole and wrapped strips of the dingy sheet over it. He muttered something in his sleep, and Juliet jerked back quickly.

  This had been easy. Not as easy as she would have liked it, but a hell of a lot easier than she’d ever expected.

  Was it paranoia that made her wonder when the other shoe would drop?

  Shaking her head, she fished out her battered comm unit and flipped the lid. The hinges popped threateningly; the old thing would break soon. Getting another would be hard, but she’d deal with that when the time came. She dialed an old frequency, typed out a message, and sent it with the press of a worn, disintegrating button. Hopefully, someone still monitored the feed.

  What would she do if no one came? Kill him herself?

  Could she?

  She snapped the lid closed.

  “How soon until they get here?”

  Surprise spun her around. She met intense blue eyes across the dim floor and fought the urge to raise her chin in challenge. To make excuses.

  His gaze was speculative, and filled with pain.

  But his mouth thinned into a hard, white line. “You called them,” he prompted, voice impatient. It wasn’t a question. “Did they know you were coming here? Did you tell them you found me?”

  Juliet very carefully pushed the unit into her jacket pocket instead of answering. Why, damn it? Why now?