Wrath: The Niteclif Evolutions, Book 2

by Denise Tompkins

  “So you’ll do that voodoo you do and shazam. You’ll have an answer? Seems too easy.”

  “No, Madeleine, it’s not voodoo. We’re talking very technical magic, difficult spells that focus on elemental and personal disclosures,” he snapped, rocking back on his heels and losing the easy-going façade. His hands made lumps in his pockets where he’d shoved them with force, the fabric straining against the continued downward pressure.

  Truthfully, I didn’t know what he was capable of other than the dematerialization thing. And while it was impressive, the novelty had worn off after the sixth or seventh trip we’d made together. I said as much to Hellion and he sighed heavily, closing his eyes and rubbing the bridge of his nose. I’ve been known to have that effect on people.

  “Obviously you have no concept of whom you’re dealing with,” he said, his voice serious. Holding out a hand, he breathed across it, and a flame sprung from his palm. With the other hand, he extinguished it.

  I watched his little performance in silence but it was impossible not to comment. “If you’d ever been a Boy Scout you would have undoubtedly earned your fire-starter badge with no trouble.”

  Hellion gaped at me, his mouth hanging open just a little, his brows arched and bared hands falling to his sides. “I can call down the stars from the heavens, cause the earth to quake and split, destroy someone where they stand with little more than a thought.” He stepped closer to me, leaning over me enough that I was forced to either step back or lean away from his building fury. I did neither, craning my neck to meet his gaze but holding my ground. “I travel through space and time and heal death blows in others with my will, and you compare me to a Boy Scout?” he hissed, seething with rage. His eyes had gone flat black, the irises eating at the whites, and a fine wind blew around him, whipping his hair about and stirring his clothes.

  “Sorry,” I whispered, and I was…mostly. But the intimidation act was pissing me off since we both knew he wouldn’t physically hurt me. “Really. It’s just that I’ve never seen you do anything other than move me around and cure the tail end of that curse, so I don’t know what you’re capable of. Maybe instead of getting mad at me for my lack of understanding you should show me what to expect. I never even saw you fight at the big showdown with Tarrek.” He opened his mouth to object and I quickly continued. “No. That’s not what I meant. I know you fought, I just didn’t witness it myself.”

  Hellion nodded tersely before turning to storm off, his movements jerky and uncoordinated as his anger drove him away. I stood in the fringes of the lantern’s glow and shivered in the damp, cooling air. The noises of the night seemed louder, more threatening, the minute I was alone. They seemed to feed on the all-encompassing dark and my escalating heart rate, the scent of my perspiration, the twitching of my fine muscles. The implied threat of that darkness circled without apology or compassion. The sudden cessation of noise transcended everything I thought I’d known of fear in that space: the crickets stopped chirping, the rustling noises of prey mammals ceased, the wind held its breath.

  A figure shoved me as it rushed by, swiping at the back of my head as it passed me from behind. It was so sudden I didn’t even have time to gather a breath to scream, but instead grunted in pain as I slammed shoulder-first into the dirt. I pushed myself up, gritting my teeth against that initial blow. I was getting really tired of getting my ass kicked as the Niteclif, and this newest fight had just begun. Regaining my feet, I turned on unsteady legs to face my assailant. There was no one there.

  I was slammed again from behind, my head snapping back, the impact so hard my teeth clacked together and I bit my tongue, the coppery taste of blood flooding my mouth as the fight-or-flight response kicked in post-shock. I raised a fist and swung out, connecting with a shadowy mist. It was like a blast of nitrogen to the skin, and I involuntarily jerked my hand back. Following the retreat of my hand, the mist knocked me off balance with a blow to the solar plexus, and I gasped for the air I couldn’t convince my lungs to retrieve. I stepped into the ruts and fell. The shadow flung something at me but I was too slow to roll out of the way before it pelted me on the forehead.

  The assailant rushed me just as Hellion broke through the brush at a dead run. He shouted something and cast out a hand in my general direction, and the shadowy attacker dissolved into wisps of smoke. I rolled onto my hands and knees, and my breath came in short gasps. I was shaken, and the shock of recognition the gold coin evoked only added to the riot of emotions clamoring for my immediate attention. Settling on nausea as the most relevant physical feeling and anxiety the domineering emotion, I studied the coin closely. I’d seen coins like this twice before: first, weeks ago in a dragon’s den and, more recently, when Darius passed a mate to Hellion at the henge.

  How could I be sure they were the same? Because they were distinctive, and I’d studied the first one very carefully, admiring the monarch’s likeness and the raised horse on the back after the dragon had tossed it at me. That time I’d caught it. In a rush of cognition, I put the pieces together—the member of the blue weyr who could cloak himself in night, who would fight dirty when the situation called for it, who in dragon form could have easily gouged the earth or…oh shit. He could control even a partial shift and turn his hands into claws, and what better to behead a woman with than dagger-sharp claws? Bahlin.

  I pushed myself to standing, promising my body that if we got knocked down again we’d just stay there. It was the best I could offer my aching shoulder and bruised chest. I held out the coin, and Hellion snatched it out of the air as I dropped it. “How did you know I was in trouble?” I asked, my voice wheezy with the rasp of my breathing.

  Hellion pocketed the coin and, kneeling in front of me, began going over me very carefully to assess the damage. I protested at his fussing but when he lifted my shirt to look at my sternum, I really balked.

  “Hush,” he said, moving my hands aside gently but unrelentingly and pushing my shirt up so my chest was revealed. “I’d already turned to come back to you when I heard the scuffle. I got here as fast as I could but it wasn’t soon enough.” He traced the bruise forming between my breasts, the points of knuckle contact deepening faster than the rest of the fist-shaped discoloration. Making a fist, Hellion laid his knuckles against the bruise, and I started. His fist was almost exactly the same size as the imprint on my chest.

  His head was bent so close to me that I unthinkingly reached out a hand to stroke him. He grabbed my wrist just before it made contact with his mane of hair. I gasped and jerked my hand back, and Hellion let go to continue his triage.

  “Hu—” I cleared my throat. “How did you know I was going to touch you?”

  “You forget, love, I’m a wizard and, under the right circumstances, a warlock. The first uses magic for the right reasons while the second uses magic as a means to an end. There’s little I wouldn’t do to protect you, right or wrong.” He lifted his eyes up to me and they were black…all black. The whites had been consumed by the black pupils, and the depth of soul they opened up to me was terrifying. Seeing my reaction, Hellion stood and spun away from me. “Let’s get back to the house where I can better protect us and help you with your current condition.” And he walked away.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We rode back to Hellion’s flat in an uncomfortable silence. He parked the car in his regular spot and turned off the engine, and I reached over and grabbed his hand. “Thank you,” I said. “I wasn’t handling having my ass handed to me so unexpectedly. You saved me a seriously worse beating at the very least.”

  He nodded in a short, jerky movement, his eyes avoiding mine as he stared at some point over my right shoulder. Sighing, Hellion turned away and moved to get out of the car but I yanked on his arm, hard, to get him to face me and see me.

  A muscle ticked in his jaw and his eyes were flat and cold, guarded, when he met my gaze. “What do you want from me, Maddy? I’m still angry with you, but I’m angry at myself for leaving you alone, as well. Nothi
ng’s supposed to be happening the way it has with you, from working with you to falling in love. I’m not a qualified detective or even a detective’s assistant, so I’m not sure what I’m about, but it seems I’m working with you more and more, and it has me out of sorts. Had anything happened to you tonight after I lost my temper, I wouldn’t have forgiven him—ever. I’m half inclined to go after him myself and solve this once and for all. Great Odin,” Hellion bellowed, slamming his fist against the steering wheel.

  “So you’re thinking of Bahlin too.” I studied Hellion’s face in profile, the corded muscles standing out in his neck, the flexing jaw muscles, the fingers of one hand wrapped around the steering wheel and the others clutching his knee. The empath in me hurt for his insecurity and rage. In a split second I decided to share with Hellion one of the few true secrets I had about the paranormal world. “You know how I’m related to Aloysius Niteclif?” I asked, to which he nodded. “Want to know why Bahlin seems so good at this stuff?”

  He nodded. “It might help me maintain some semblance of sanity. I feel like I’m always one step behind him when it comes to you.” His voice seemed to leak sorrow the way an old pipe seeps water, slow but persistent.

  I searched his face looking for some clue to his ricocheting emotions. Dishonest or not, I’d never intended to share with Hellion any of my lingering doubts about the two of us but obviously I was doing a piss-poor job of keeping my feelings to myself. I took a deep, shaky breath, and the next words rushed out in a blur of sound. “Aloysius was Sherlock Holmes. When he was fictionalized as Holmes, his partner was, too. Bahlin was Watson. He lived next to Aloysius. That part was true. But the story left out that Watson was not only a doctor but a dragon. So he’s had years and years of experience working with the greatest sleuth of all time. Of course he seems more adept at this shit.”

  Hellion’s jaw relaxed, and the nervous tapping of his fingers slowed and finally stopped. “I knew Bahlin worked with the other Niteclifs, but I had no idea his level of help was that intensive.” He glanced over at me and looked away again. “Are you serious or are you placating me?”

  “Dead serious. Which, uh, brings me to one other thing.”

  Hellion waved me on but said nothing. He turned in his seat to face me squarely, bracing one hand on the headrest of my seat and looping the other over the steering wheel.

  “My job is to walk between both worlds, to keep one foot firmly planted in each existence, and to not let mythology take over my life entirely.”

  “I think that’s pretty common knowledge within our world. Why bring it up?” He looked confused, but the good stuff was just getting started as far as I was concerned.

  “I need you to understand that if I fail, and become more seated in the mythological world, I won’t be able to go back to my humanity when my twelve years are up.”

  Hellion sat staring at me uncomprehending of the import of this tidbit of information. I started counting slowly and reached fourteen before I saw understanding dawn across his features. He looked horrified. “But—”

  I gently laid three fingers over his lips, and his reaction was to kiss them. It broke my heart a little because I couldn’t think of a single time I’d reacted the same way to this familiar gesture of his. I’d just shut up, not taken the opportunity to turn it into easy affection. Shying away from the reality of my emotional dysfunction, I told him the truth as I understood it. “If I can’t be human, and I’m not mythological, then I’ll have nowhere to exist, and history will consider me to have never existed at all. I’ll fade from both realms, and a preselected storyteller will immortalize me in print as a sort of consolation prize, I suppose. The bottom line is that I’ll cease to be. So when I tell you I really need to work on the case, I’m not being overly dramatic. If I don’t work at balancing the two worlds and my place in each of them, I worry I’ll fail. Then I run the risk of losing myself, literally.”

  Hellion stared at me, his eyes pulsing as strongly as they had in the park. Finally he raised a hand to continue to hold my fingers against his lips as he spoke. “There was speculation among the Council members about the Niteclif’s responsibilities, as well as rewards and consequences, but it’s always been this way. The prophecy is all we’ve ever been given, and the Niteclif has been historically silent as to the rest.” He pulled his hand away from mine and laced our fingers together. “What happens if you fail to solve a case?”

  “I would imagine I begin to fade, just more slowly, because I won’t be serving a purpose for either world at that point.”

  “And knowing this, Bahlin has left you to solve these murders yourself?”

  I jerked as though I’d been shocked. I hadn’t thought of it that way. “I suppose he has.” The acknowledgement felt pulled forcibly out of me. What sick part of me insisted on holding on to his innocence? I wasn’t sure, so I put that away to examine later. “Regardless, I don’t want to talk about him anymore tonight. We looked at a couple of sites, I got attacked by some corporeal projection of the killer’s psychotic self and I learned next to nothing. I want to go inside, have a bath and a glass of wine, and plot out our next steps before crawling into bed and sleeping eight straight. That is, if you’re not opposed to working with me on this?”

  Hellion was recovering nicely. “The only thing I’d ask you to do differently is change the wine to whiskey, neat, and have it in the bath, which we’ll take together. And if you think I’d not agree to work with you…”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  We got out of the car and held hands as we rode the elevator up to his flat.

  Hellion and I got out of the bathtub nearly an hour later. I was slightly tipsy from the whiskey taken on an empty stomach, but I don’t think I was alone in the feeling. He had consumed about three times as much alcohol in half the amount of time I had. Irish refortification, he’d called it. He had taken the time to treat my bruising with some type of tincture, and while it smelled really bad, the bruises were already fading. I’d be a little sore tomorrow, but he assured me the majority of the damage would be healed in twenty-four hours.

  Hellion insisted on drying me off, head to toe, and I found myself blushing at the inordinate amount of attention he paid to my breasts, lower belly and the juncture of my thighs. He was kissing my hips, licking along the top of my pubic bone and making my legs feel like cooked pasta when a loud knock sounded at the bedroom door.

  “Sir?” called Mark.

  Hellion laid his cheek against my bare stomach and let out a soft string of inventive curses.

  I stroked his damp hair and whispered, “I’m not sure that’s physically possible, Hellion.” I felt his smile against my skin. “He wouldn’t have come to the room if it weren’t important, would he?”

  “Mark’s a bit of an overachiever, so it could be anything.” He sighed. He stood and wrapped a towel around his waist, but there was no hiding his erection. He gave it a look of consternation, and I laughed out loud.

  “I’ll get the door,” I said, still smiling, “and we can shock him senseless.” I could imagine Mark’s horrified expression if he realized what he’d—almost—interrupted.

  “You get in bed and cover that luscious body up. I’ll get the door and be done with him.”

  I scurried to the bed, crawling under the covers and tucking them up to my chin while enjoying the view of Hellion’s body as he stalked across the hardwood floor to yank the door open.

  “Sir—” Mark began.

  “Quickly, Mark, unless you’ve a desire to watch me weep like a lad,” Hellion said, looking over his shoulder pointedly at me.

  I smiled at Mark and did a little finger wave. The man blushed so ferociously I thought he ran a very good chance of passing out. I watched Hellion pinch the bridge of his nose and try not to laugh. He reined in his expression before turning back to face the young butler.

  Mark cleared his throat and said, “Sir. The mundane police are at the door. They claim to want to ask you some questions regar
ding the recent murders.”

  I felt my stomach fall as I watched Hellion pull himself to his full height, his relaxed demeanor gone. “Hellion?”

  He turned to me, his gaze guarded and his face friendly but neutral.

  “How did they know we were here?” I asked.

  “They claim to have seen the car at the park this evening where they watched you return to the scene of the crime with an unidentified female.”

  Hellion ripped his towel off and stormed for the closet. I didn’t even have the opportunity to get embarrassed about him shedding the towel in front of Mark before he was in the closet with the door closed. We could hear him rustling about, undoubtedly getting dressed.

  “Mark? Give us a minute, would you?”

  “Yes, madam. The police don’t know you’re here.”

  “I’ll stay upstairs for now,” I said. He nodded and went to shut the door. “Mark?”

  “Madam?”

  “Did anyone come to the house tonight?”

  “No, madam. The wards held, and no alarm indicated they were attempted by any other than you and Hellion.”

  “Thanks.” He shut the door quietly, and I got up and headed to the closet just as the door opened. “You look nice,” I managed after taking in the gloriousness of Hellion in a businessman’s navy power suit, complete with silk handkerchief.

  “This is going to complicate things,” he muttered, stalking to the chair in the corner of the room and sitting to put on his shoes. Yanking at the laces, he snapped one off in his hands. “Fuck,” he muttered, taking the shoe off and hurling it across the room.