I was forced by proximity to look him in the eye. It was a mistake. It had to be. Otherwise, I was somehow responsible for my next actions, rather than just being enchanted, or spelled, or mesmerized by the magic in those emerald-flecked golden brown eyes.
I opened my mouth to answer his questions. He curled his lip at me.
Then I reached out, stepped into him — close enough to touch chests but not — and wrapped my arms around his neck.
He had time to frown before I plastered my lips across his. It wasn’t a soft kiss. It was a terrified, lost, I-just-almost-drowned-and-can’t-find-my-friends kiss.
He didn’t kiss me back.
I closed the inch of space between us, pressing my full length against his nakedness.
He grunted — surprised, I think — and I attempted to soften the desperation out of the kiss. Except I was scared and alone, and it had been months since I’d kissed anyone. I just needed to kiss someone.
He lifted his hands to unlatch me from his neck, I think, but got his fingers tangled in my wild, river-washed, sun-dried curls instead. His touch was light as he combed my hair through his fingers. His lips softened underneath mine and I opened my mouth ever so invitingly. He offered up his tongue and I slid mine across his.
His magic coated every inch of him. It was utterly delicious. The fear, the tension, I’d been holding at the ready for three months melted away into the kiss.
His hand cupped the back of my head and he deepened the lip lock.
I melted further, completely sinking my body against his with the tiniest of sighs. I ran my hands across his too-broad shoulders, feeling every edge of every muscle. His skin was hot. His magic tingled underneath my fingers and palms.
He was being too gentle, as if he was afraid of hurting me. I imagined that might often be a problem for him, but I wanted to be held, to be crushed, to be taken away from all the uncertainty and pain. If I was going to drown, I wanted to drown coated in his delicious magic.
I ground against him, biting lightly down on his bottom lip.
He reached down — sliding his hand along the side of my breast, waist, and hip — and tugged my leg up around his to settle his groin tighter against mine.
Oh, God. He was a grower. I could feel the hard length of him across my pubic bone and lower belly.
I darted my tongue in his mouth and lifted my other leg up around his hips, now completely wrapped around his nakedness with all my limbs.
He took two steps and pressed me against the tree I’d been hiding behind. I remembered the first tree he’d pressed me against that terrible day when my sense of the world cracked along with my heart. I remembered complaining. I didn’t complain now. I pushed the thought away and clenched my hands into what little of his hair I could grab as I tried to devour his mouth and his magic.
He slipped his hands — his skin and magic were searingly hot — underneath my jacket and T-shirt as he ground against me. I could feel the girth of him even through my damp jeans, and I moaned quietly, welcoming the bloom of heat he generated between my legs. This pleasurable ache informed me that I was wearing way too much clothing.
I untangled my arms from his neck and wrestled with my jacket without removing my lips and tongue from his. He helped. Something tore. I paused the kissing to note that he’d ripped the arm of my Gore-Tex.
I chuckled and he grinned. The fabric, now freed from the shoulder seam, pooled down my arm and caught at my wrist.
I pulled my head back to focus on his face. He curled his lips into a toothless smile. His face was as relaxed and open as I’d ever seen it. He wasn’t so inscrutable and overly chiseled now.
“Good kiss,” he said.
I laughed. “Cool cat form.”
“All the better to stalk you with.”
I smiled and then leaned forward to continue the make-out session.
Desmond slapped his hand to his neck as if he’d just been bitten by a mosquito. I laughed again, but when he pulled his hand away, I felt something, some glimmer —
He slapped his hand to his neck a second time and took a step back. I loosened my legs from around his hips and dropped to the ground.
I felt another glimmer nearby, and without thinking, reached out and snatched it from the air.
Desmond and I stared at the wooden dart — more like a small arrow — I’d just caught. It dissolved into a pool of magic in my palm.
“What the hell?” I said. The dart had somehow been loaded with the magic I’d sensed earlier on Kandy. I tried to shake it from my fingers but didn’t get it all off. I wiped the rest across the ass of my jeans.
More glimmers sparked from the forest around us. My knife was in my hand before I could even think to pull it out, and I cut three more down before they reached us.
Desmond slapped his chest once more and then growled. A low warning growl. “Where and what are they?” he asked. His beast was very present in his voice. And by beast, I wasn’t referring to his mountain lion form.
I knocked two more magic darts away before they could reach us. “I don’t know. And four. Spread around us. Hidden beyond the trees there, there, and there. The fourth is moving … there.” I pointed toward the huckleberry and wild onion magic that emanated from among the trees. I’d been too focused on Desmond, and the gathering by the river had found us.
“Be careful where you step,” I said, just as Desmond trod on one of the downed darts. He stumbled and let out a fierce growl. Then his skin literally boiled with a blast of shifter magic, and his half-beast, half-man form poured forth.
This beast was no fuzzy kitty. No pretty, dangerous thing. This form was over seven feet tall — a trade-off between his human and cat forms, I guessed — and deadly ugly.
This beast was McGrowly in the terrible flesh. It was hard to look at him, all furred, clawed, and double fanged. I wasn’t sure he could close his mouth fully in this state — all the better to chomp the heads off prey.
Magic glimmers hidden in more wooden darts winged toward us. I knocked down four and missed the fifth, which hit McGrowly in the chest.
“Five now,” I shouted. “Two directly behind you.”
McGrowly whirled toward the magical signatures I’d pointed out. It was more difficult to protect him as he stalked away from me. Two darts hit him. I grabbed one out of the thin air right before my left eye. “Freaking hell!” I yelled. “My freaking eye?”
McGrowly casually knocked over a tree in his way. It wasn’t a two-hundred-year old, but was still a good forty or fifty years thick. He pushed it over like as normal person draws back blinds.
All the darts — five and then five more in quick release — winged toward McGrowly now. Four hit him. I wasn’t fast enough, and he couldn’t feel their magic as I could.
He stumbled. I tried to keep up with him, but walking backward was awkward. They weren’t aiming for me anymore.
McGrowly snarled, reached up into the boughs of a cedar, and cracked a massive branch right off.
A man fell out at his feet. A perfectly normal-looking plaid shirt, hiking boots, and all — Native American male. He looked completely terrified — so would I if hell-on-claws was standing over me — but still managed to raise a blow pipe to his lips and hit McGrowly in the face with his last dart.
McGrowly, who had been leaning over the man at the time of the hit, didn’t stop leaning.
I’d lost count, but I guessed even the alpha werecat of the West Coast North American pack couldn’t withstand a dozen or more magical darts. Sleep-spelled darts.
McGrowly tumbled over onto the native guy, whose shout was abruptly cut off. Well, that was one bad guy down at least.
I closed the space to them in two bounding steps, ready to defend McGrowly, and got hit with four darts for my inattention. It was easier to keep count when the magic exploded against you.
It got harder and harder to avoid the darts, and I couldn’t focus enough to burn off the foreign ma
gic — though that was another hard-learned power I could now access. By the time I fell, I was surrounded by four more native people. First Nations actually, but I didn’t feel like being particularly politically correct in this moment. Two women and two more men. Their ages ranged from sixteen to mid-forties at best guess. Their expressions were serious — unrelenting, and unforgiving of some transgression I didn’t know of.
I didn’t talk, didn’t try to bargain. I simply tried to defend McGrowly. I suppose I should have run, but I was tired of being lost. I was tired of not fighting for what I thought was right. And I was really, really cupcake deprived. Not that I had any hope of waking to find myself in a kitchen with all the right ingredients, but still … I had to be me to the bitter, tasteless end.
The huckleberry and onion magic flooded my senses, overwhelmed my body, and I fell.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Dowser,” a cool voice murmured in my ear. “You’re awake, dowser.”
“I’m not awake,” I answered, really pissed that I did seem to be coming out of some crazy deep sleep. Pissed, because I wasn’t exactly sleeping well lately, the vampire shouldn’t be in my bedroom, and my bed was made of sticks and rocks. Then I remembered.
I remembered that sleep was the least of my problems. That being sleep deprived was an issue from my old life. The nice, peaceful life where the cool voice of a vampire right next to my ear didn’t wake me into fear and uncertainty.
“Don’t open your eyes,” Kett continued, ignoring as he always did my penchant for childish statements. “You’re magically bound. You need to neutralize the magic, free yourself, and run.”
It drove me crazy when the vampire issued impossibilities as if they were everyday instructions. Neutralize the binds? WTF? With what? Baking soda? But damn it, my feet and hands were tied and I was missing my knife. Not a surprise, but still, I didn’t like to be without it.
“Dowser, now would be a good time. They appear to be arguing about our future. I’ve heard mention of fire. That wouldn’t be pleasant.”
Jesus, they were going to torch us? Who the hell would burn someone alive? Oh … the vampire was referring to himself. They’d obviously figured out what he was … but, I was fairly certain they were wrong about the fire thing in Kett’s case. Vampires grew immune to sunlight and fire — to a certain extent — as they aged. So, the older the vampire, the more powerful the vampire. As far as I could figure, Kett was pretty damn old.
I attempted to push through my groggy senses — my natural human ones — to hear this so-called argument that was going on. I picked up the noises of the forest — wind through tree branches mostly. The crackle of the fire — so Kett was right about that. And breathing. By the low levels of magic I could feel as I became more aware, both Desmond and Kandy were close by. Kett was beside me.
I really, really wanted to open my eyes, and not just because the vampire told me not to. I was fairly certain I was lying on my left side with my back to the fire, facing the others. By ‘others,’ I meant the five — no, now six — Native Americans from the forest. Now that I recognized it, their magic was unmistakable. That tart berry and onion combo that some of them held in larger quantities than others. I guessed that the eldest was the most powerful, if magic worked for them the same way it often did for witches.
My hands, tied behind my back, were numb. My entire left arm, on which I was lying, was deadened as well. The air shifted, a slight breeze tickled my cheeks, and by the smell and coolness of it, I guessed it was after dark. Voices came on the breeze as well. The Native American’s were indeed discussing us. I picked up concern and caution along with anger in their tone, but no actual words.
“Dowser,” Kett said. “The shifter is waking. He won’t react well to being bound. And they won’t be able to sedate him a second time without violence.”
Great, no pressure. Kett meant Desmond, though I didn’t know how the vampire knew he was waking. Heartbeat or breathing, maybe? Shapeshifters were known to be resistant to magic — though obviously enough of it could take them down — but Kett seemed to be indicating that the sleep darts wouldn’t work a second time. Damn. I was still hoping to get out of this alive.
I refocused on the magic binding my hands. I could feel rope of some kind on my skin, but it was magically imbued as well. Which made sense, because a vampire or werewolf could tear through normal rope like tissue paper. But obviously even Kett couldn’t break these bindings, just as he’d had a difficult time breaking Sienna’s binding spell in the bakery cellar. That magic had been fueled by blood and murder, but this magic was as earthbound as any true witch’s.
I shoved thoughts of Sienna out of my mind, wishing I had a physical compartment I could close and lock thoughts of my sister in. Then I tried to figure out what Kett meant by neutralize.
Magic — or energy as some preferred to call it — couldn’t be destroyed, but spells could be countered. Except I wasn’t a spell sort of witch. I combined or channeled. I had channeled residual magic into my necklace before, but that had been my own magic. I didn’t want to accidentally alter the protective power of the necklace by channeling the huckleberry magic into it. My knife, maybe … except I didn’t have my knife.
What I did have were the five jade stones I’d fished out of the river. The natural magic of the jade glimmered faintly in the pocket of my jacket. Kett always swore he could feel nothing magical about these bits of things that called so brightly to me. Supposedly, sensing magic was one of the talents the vampire retained from his previous life, before his death and transformation.
Were the stones large enough to hold the magic of the bindings on my hands? Magic had no mass or weight, really. Only my inability to perceive it as possible or impossible really mattered. Technically, I was touching the stones, or they were touching me, but could I combine magic through Gore-tex and jean fabric?
“Dowser,” Kett whispered. His voice wasn’t so cool anymore. The native grouping had splintered. Two magical signatures were heading toward us. Plus Desmond’s breathing had changed, not so deep now.
Just focus. Focus.
I thought about the magic binding my hands. I felt the way it coated the rope beneath it. I thought about the glimmer of magic in the stones. I remembered the way I had taken the residual magic from Sienna’s hair and the wedding ring from my necklace. How I had smoothed those together, using my own magic as a solder of sorts. I’d created a tracking device from those two glimmers. I hadn’t known it would work then, but it had. So it could work now.
I imagined the magic from the bindings moving through my skin, sinking in, riding my own magic through my body, through my jeans, into my jacket pocket to mix with the natural magic of the jade stones. Then I imagined the jade holding the binding magic at bay, containing it as I wished I could contain the thoughts of my sister.
The two native magical signatures grabbed Kett and began to drag him around me, toward the fire at my back. Kett fought, but — now that I had intimate knowledge of the binding magic — I could feel how much imbued rope they’d wrapped him in. Which was okay, because they’d underestimated me.
I opened my eyes. Two more of our captors had rushed to help with Kett. He was twisting and writhing, knocking them off their feet, but they were still managing to get him closer, bit by bit, to the fire.
I imagined myself ripping through the plain rope now binding my wrists, like opening a bag of chips. Then I did so.
I sat up. All eyes were on Kett, including an older woman and a teenager — a girl, barely old enough to be called a teen — who’d chosen to not participate in the vampire torching.
I wrapped my hands around the rope at my ankles, and with the briefest of thoughts, channeled the binding magic into the stones in my pocket. Yeah, it was easier the second time.
The older woman was frowning at the group struggling with Kett. She was also holding my knife.
I stood and broke the rope around my ankles at the same time. This
movement drew the attention of the older woman. I could see even by firelight — it was indeed after dark — the silver that shot through her glossy, straight black hair. As far as I could tell, without focusing too far away from my captors, we were still in the middle of the forest, nestled between looming mountains. I couldn’t hear the river.
“I don’t like people touching my things,” I said.
The teen turned to me, her eyes widening. The four others, only a few feet away from me, dropped Kett and turned toward me, fumbling in their pockets for blow pipes, I guessed.
The teenager grabbed my knife from the woman, stepping in front of the elder to brandish it before her. Brave but stupid. We were probably kindred souls.
“I was pretty clear. That’s mine.” I pointed to the knife, only to have it appear in my raised hand.
Well, that was new, and completely unintentional. Super cool move, though.
The four who’d been wrestling with Kett, rushed me, but they hadn’t noticed that Desmond had woken. He was back in human form, though I tried to not notice how sexy all that skin looked by firelight. He kicked out his legs and took two of them down. Then he spun his bound hands toward me.
I slashed through his bindings, hands and then feet, even as I pivoted away from the tackling move of the two other Native Americans.
Desmond grabbed Kandy, who’d been lying beside him. He swung her by me — she was still knocked out — and I slashed through her bindings.
One of the guys that Desmond had knocked off his feet leaped and tackled me below the knees. The alpha dashed off into the dark woods with Kandy in his arms. His priorities were always straight.
I fell, three sets of hands on me now, but managed to do so over top of Kett, who had rolled back toward me.
They’d wrapped the rope from his shoulders to his knees. Someone tried to grab the knife out of my hand as I awkwardly tried to cut the vampire’s bonds. The would-be thief screamed as the knife burned him.
Trinkets, Treasures, and Other Bloody Magic (Dowser Series) Page 4