by Tricia Owens
The boys didn't linger long after that.
I thought about them, and tried to guess what kinds of magickal beings they'd been. Shifters? Probably. But either or both of them could have been warlocks or sorcerers. Or something rare like a water fey or one of a dozen entities whose powers hadn't been fully cataloged by the people who liked to do such things. The truth was, the magickal community was wildly diverse, which was great if you were trying repopulate the Earth but not so great if you were trying to pinpoint a poorly described creature.
Sunset came quickly, thank goodness, and fortunately, so did Vale.
And he was such a jerk. He brought roses.
"Who are those for?" I demanded. I surged up off the stool as though he'd walked in carrying a loaded shotgun.
He smirked. "Who do you think?"
He looked good. Too good, like he was intending to use his hotness as a weapon against me.
"You go off to find Diana's body and you come back looking like that?" I accused, waving at his black sport coat over a black button down and dark jeans. His wavy hair fell in a sexy tousle over his eyes. He'd brushed it that way deliberately; I was sure of it. Just so I'd want to brush it back with my fingers.
"I found her body and it's fine. Two minor bruises on her upper arms, like someone had grabbed her there, but otherwise her physical form is unharmed. I already visited her at Celestina's and told her it was safe to go back." He stopped on the other side of the counter. The smell of the roses began to fill the shop like a cloud of gargoyle pheromone. "I thought we'd celebrate."
I eyed him mistrustfully. "Celebrate what?"
"The fact that we're all okay? Isn't that enough?"
"Well, sure, but it's just weird. Unexpected, I mean."
The hand not holding the roses came up to rub the back of his neck. "Seeing her body that way, empty like a corpse, hit me in a particular way. It made me think of you."
"You thought of me in association with something mindless?"
"Moody…" he said with a strange, quiet chuckle. His gaze dropped to the roses and held there. "You're not making this easy."
I finally got it then: he was flustered.
He'd been worried about me.
"Oh," I said, like an idiot. Fair enough. I was one. "That's…sweet, Vale. I—wow, I really like that."
I felt myself blushing and it was a good feeling. It proved to me that I wasn't cynical and jaded, that something as simple as someone caring about me could still make me feel happy. I always tried so hard to be strong…it was nice to be soft for a change.
He looked up from beneath his fringe, part bashful, part hopeful, part I'm getting in your pants with this look, aren't I? Vale knew what he was doing.
I didn't mind it, though. Who wouldn't want to be seduced by someone with those eyes? Vale didn't strip your clothes off with a look; he laid you bare, inside and out.
"I thought if you were interested, we'd swing by my place so you could take a look at where I live. Learn a little more about me." He turned to look back at the shop. A Goth man was at the back, his back to us as he perused the shelves. He'd entered the shop about ten minutes earlier. Vale faced me again with a quirked brow. "If you manage to close up before sunrise, that is."
"As soon as the shop clears I'll close it," I told him, fighting off a fluttery feeling of anticipation. It was a girlish feeling and I liked it. I was probably in denial, pretending everything that had happened with the Oddsmakers hadn't happened, but I didn't care. "Should I get changed?" I tended to favor comfort over fashion most of the time, but I was no stranger to Sephora and I had a few cute outfits that I knew would turn Vale's head.
He brought the roses up to his face and smelled them while his gaze roamed over me, leaving my skin tingling. "I think you're beautiful as is, Moody. And what you're wearing is fine for what I have planned."
Ooh, now that had possibilities.
I propped my hands on my hips. "Are those flowers your security blanket or do you intend to actually give them to me?"
He blushed.
I nearly squealed with delight.
Then the cursed cameos, prophets of doom, chimed in:
Betrayed! Betrayed!
He's nothing but trouble!
You're a fool to trust…Anne Moody!
That's right. I'd totally forgotten. Someone was supposed to commit a betrayal.
Would it be Vale?
I held out my hands for the roses. "Gimme."
~~~~~
The Goth guy took his sweet time. He must have browsed for nearly a half an hour. I was pretty sure he fondled every item I had for sale, including the zombie nutcrackers, one of which bit the guy's thumb.
Vale had settled himself behind the counter with me, leaning against the shelves like a sentinel. Or maybe he was only staring at my butt.
I was highly conscious of his presence behind me in a variety of ways, some good, some not so good. Now was the time he could hurt me. As soon as this last customer stepped out the door I could find myself with a back full of gargoyle claws. But my body was equally aware of Vale in other ways. Womanly ways. My heart remained attracted to him even though my mind screamed at me to arm myself.
I was limp with relief when Goth guy finally approached me at the counter.
He reached into his black duster and removed something from the inner pocket. Very precisely, as though he were placing a landmine, he set an amulet that looked to be formed of blood red wax on the counter. He said with all the gravity of Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg address, "This is evil."
I scrubbed my face with both hands. "Really."
Vale was utterly silent and motionless behind me, but his amusement buffeted me like the winds that periodically blasted through the valley.
"Why is it evil?" I asked. I wasn't in the mood to play along. I had somewhere to be, and hopefully with someone I wouldn't need to kill by the end of the night.
"You can't tell?" the Goth guy asked me with a shade of suspicion in his voice.
"Aura reading isn't my thing, sorry."
That didn't sit very well with the guy, who made a show of flexing all ten of his fingers where they rested on the edge of the counter as though he were struggling to maintain his patience. What was he going to do? Go Super Saiyan on me?
Now that he was near, I noticed the tattoos: a snake curved along the top of each eyebrow, like each was resting on a furry log. They weren't ordinary tattoos, though. The one above his right eyebrow was a cobra. It periodically rose up into the middle of his forehead and flared its hood at me.
I waved generally at his face. "You don't worry that someone non-magickal would notice that?"
He frowned like I'd just spoken German to him, and raised his hand to his eyebrow. He hissed and jerked his hand away when the snake tattoo struck at his finger. Two tiny beads of blood welled on his finger before he touched it to his tongue and licked it away. He lowered his hand to the countertop again. I watched him close his eyes and scrunch up his face, like he was trying to launch himself into space using the power of his mind. The snake lay down along his eyebrow, matching its sleepier twin on the other side.
He opened his eyes once more. His face went eerily still.
"This is evil," he intoned again, staring at me and then at the amulet he'd set between us.
"Yeah, I heard you the first time." Why were magickal beings such weirdos?
Just to freak him out, I carelessly picked up the amulet. An impression of a ram's head decorated one side. I'd seen one of these before, a green one. A witch made these and sold them to ordinary people at craft and art fairs as occult relics. Completely harmless and this guy should have known so.
"Look, do you want to sell it or pawn it? I'm closing up soon so I need to hurry this along."
Goth guy raised his eyes beyond my shoulder to Vale. The misbehaving cobra twitched its tail.
"This is evil," he repeated for the third time, "and so is that."
The red amulet turned i
nto a puddle of hot wax in my palm. I yelped and tried to fling the wax off but it seized up tight around my hand and then it began to climb up my wrist and onto my forearm, increasing in volume and encasing my arm in rigid wax.
I yelled for Vale but he was already in his gargoyle form, zooming over my shoulder straight for Goth guy—
Snakes exploded from within the guy's black duster, causing the fabric to flare back. At least a hundred of them, all black, but all different sizes and lengths, probably different varieties but I was no herpetologist. The snakes seemed to be attached to something within the duster, or hell, were attached to Goth guy himself. He held his arms out, an eerie, beatific smile on his face like he was cleansing the world by attacking us with his wriggling, fanged friends.
Vale's gargoyle dive-bombed the guy, weaving skillfully between the writhing, snapping snakes, avoiding them just as it had managed to avoid me when I was in my dragon form out in the desert.
Two of the snakes managed to strike Vale's gargoyle, sending it spinning sideways and out of reach, leathery wings flapping hard to propel it away. I prayed the snakes didn't possess actual venom, but I couldn't spend much time worrying about it. I was about to become an exhibit in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.
The red wax had reached my shoulder and was beginning to spread across my collarbones and up the side of my neck. I tried smashing it with my other fist, but the wax was too thick. The wax climbed up my throat and curled over my chin.
Lucky blasted into the room like an explosion, immediately ramming into Goth guy, sending him and his snakes staggering into the nearest shelf of merchandise. I punched the wax on my neck and this time the red menace cracked. Like a self-hating Mike Tyson, I punched myself repeatedly and rotated my trapped arm until the wax began to flake off me in chunks. I had Lucky fly at Goth guy to head butt him again to make sure he wouldn't reactivate the wax.
Goth guy spun beneath Lucky's attack to sprawl across the floor, his black snake pals writhing angrily beneath him. It looked like the guy had fallen into a nest of snakes, but it was worse knowing the snakes were a part of him, or at least under his command. As Lucky reared back for another strike, Vale's gargoyle zipped in and raked its claws across the back of Goth guy's duster. The guy howled and the snakes beneath him either retracted or were absorbed into his body. In seconds, the guy lay alone on the floor. He twisted his head back to give me a baleful look from over one shoulder.
"You deserved that and worse," I told him as I shook off the last bits of red wax. What a mess on my shop floor. I couldn't even re-melt it into a candle. Not without risking that it'd try to smother me in my sleep.
Just for a little added indignity, I had Lucky bite the back of the guy's duster and drag him to his feet. Goth guy angrily shook off the dragon once he was upright. I had to give him points for not being intimidated by a thirty-foot golden Chinese dragon that was near enough to bite his head off. But I subtracted all of those points for him being an asshole.
"Who are you?" I demanded. I heard the clicking of the gargoyle's claws as it settled on the floor on the other side of Goth guy, facing Lucky. My dragon, hovering in the air, seemed torn between watching the man in black and Vale's gargoyle. This wasn't the first time Lucky had shown a less than thrilled reaction to Vale in either form.
Lucky has had an issue with him and his gargoyle from the beginning. You thought it was jealousy. What if it's not? What if your dragon knows what you're afraid to face? What if Lucky knows he's your enemy?
"Who are you?" I repeated, because I'd rather face down a known baddie whom I hadn't slept with.
Goth guy calmly brushed himself down. He appeared to be in his late twenties, but with magickal beings you never really knew. Vale was a perfect example of that.
"It doesn't matter who I am," Goth guy said, finally lifting his gaze to me. His eyes were a medium shade of blue, but it was difficult to look at them when the snake tattoos above his eyebrows continued to rear and twist across his forehead as though they faced off against a mongoose. "I'm not your enemy. I was trying to keep you safe."
I stuck a finger in my ear and wiggled it. "Come again? You were about to asphyxiate me with wax."
"It wouldn't have covered your face. It was meant to keep you immobile while I dealt with that." Goth guy aimed an icy glare at the gargoyle.
My throat went dry. "What are you talking about?"
"You've been deceived. He's been tricking you. That's what they do." Goth guy shook out his coat, but snakes didn't fall out around his feet; he was simply adjusting the fit. He looked back at me again. "We know you're a dragon sorceress, but you have no idea what you're dealing with. We do. As I said, I was sent here to save you."
"Who the hell are 'we'?"
"SOS: the Society of Shapeshifters. We're an advocacy group for the protection and preservation of shifter rights."
"SOS?" I had to shake my head. "You realize that he's a shapeshifter, right? Of course you do. You freakin' saw him shift right in front of you."
Goth guy's eyes narrowed with apparent affront. "But he's cold-blooded."
I stared at him for a long moment. "Buddy, in case you missed it, about a hundred snakes just burst out of your coat like jazz hands and I'm pretty sure every last one of them was cold-blooded."
To my surprise, he flushed. Hell, he turned beet red. "The snakes are a spell. They're tied to my tattoos. I'm not a snake shifter. I'm a—" He mumbled something I couldn't make out.
I leaned forward. "Say again?"
His cheeks grew even brighter. "I said I'm a hedgehog shifter, alright?!"
I had to bite my lips and hold my breath. Once I was no longer in danger of bursting into hysterical laughter, I nodded. "I see. So the snakes are an attempt to make you look…tougher. Than a hedgehog. A cute little—I have to tell you, you have the cutest little feet and your nose—"
"Make fun all you want," he hissed, "but we won't stand for his kind. And if you protect him you'll go down, too."
Great. A zealot. Vale had mentioned these guys during the drive to Christian's house, right before I burned it to the ground during my mini-faceoff against Vagasso.
"So you're one of the purists." I crossed my arms, even more annoyed than when I'd been scraping wax off my body. "Vale's not cold-blooded. That's a big mix-up with some gargoyles back in Europe that are actually demons. You saw him a minute ago. Tall, dark, and handsome? Definitely not a cold-blooded demon."
"You're compromised," Goth guy stated.
"And you're insulting me," I shot back, "for making me sound like I'm some sort of idiot."
Goth guy pressed his lips together. The snakes above his eyebrows rippled but slowly lay down again, though they looked twitchy. "You don't know what he's capable of," he said quietly.
It was one of the few things he could have said to make me think twice. As if he sensed that things were going south for him, Vale shifted back into his human form. He didn't appear to care that he was stark naked in front of Goth guy, whose only reaction to his transformation was to curl his hands as though he wished he could strangle Vale.
"I know the SOS," Vale said. If there hadn't been venom in the snakes' bites, there was plenty of it in his voice. "I don't know you."
"My name is Gareth. I just arrived from California. They called me to deal with you."
"I thought I taught the SOS to leave me alone." Vale took a step toward the other man, his nakedness doing nothing to diminish the danger radiating off him. "You dare attack me in my friend's shop? You attack her?"
"I waited, hoping you would go outside. I couldn't wait any longer." Gareth didn't move, though the snakes on his forehead were wild again. I thought I saw movement beneath his black duster, too.
"Vale," I warned.
He didn't take his eyes off Gareth. "I saw. It doesn't matter how many snakes he has." His smile was a predator's. "I'm going to kill him no matter what."
"Wait!" I cried out. "This guy's from California. Don't you think that's a strange coi
ncidence?"
If Vale had gone ahead and killed Gareth at that point, it would have sealed the deal for me that Vale was behind the attack on Diana and was trying to cover it up. But to my relief, my comment gave him pause.
"It was no coincidence," Gareth confirmed, oddly defiant. His attitude reminded me of Kleure's, which sent a shiver of revulsion through me. "I saw what you did to that woman."
I sucked in my breath. "You saw—"
"What?" Vale said softly, leaning ominously over Gareth. "What do you think you saw?"
"I saw your gargoyle, and nothing you can say or do will change that."
Chapter 7
I locked up the shop and turned off the Open sign. The wards were up so nothing could come in and bother us while we interrogated Gareth. Lucky took a form that was as thin as rope and twenty feet long. He wrapped around Gareth, binding him in the haunted rocking chair while Vale and I took turns pacing in front of the guy.
"What did you see?" Vale demanded quietly, menacingly. He'd pulled his clothes back on but left the jacket off and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. I think he was trying to show Gareth that he was ready to begin waterboarding him or whatever, but I just appreciated the reveal of strong forearms and broad shoulders.
"I saw you," Gareth shot back triumphantly. He acted as though his announcement had struck a nerve. "Your gargoyle broke into that woman's apartment through the kitchen window. You were waiting for her when she came home."
"Why didn't you warn her?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I wanted to see what he would do to her."
"Remind me not to ask you to watch my back," I muttered.
"My orders were specific: find Vale in whatever form he was in and apprehend him."
"Not kill me?" Vale asked softly.
Gareth tried to act tough but I caught the way he shivered. "I was just supposed to immobilize you."
"Because you think he's cold-blooded. That is the stupidest reason ever."
"That's not the only reason," he shot at me. "It's because his kind are in league with demons. He paves the way for their invasion. When the city is covered with gargoyles, tell me how you'll know the difference? You won't be able to!"