“I agree,” Darius said before the other men could disagree. “Maddy’s right. If it had been Gaitha, I’d have smelled it on her when she first showed up tonight. It was a wretched smell, wasn’t it?”
“Like very fresh singed hair.” Without thinking, I reached up and fingered the small stubble where the hair had been shorn as I slept. I turned to Hellion with a feeling of horror snaking its way through my belly.
“Fair enough,” Hellion said, not seeing the look on my face.
Darius, though, saw me and stood quickly. “Maddy?” he asked, taking a step toward me.
“No,” I whispered and shook my head slowly. “No, no, no.”
Grasping that something was wrong from Darius’s movement toward me, Hellion turned and took me by the shoulders. “Maddy? What is it, love?” he demanded, giving me a small shake again.
I felt like a rag doll, even though he’d been gentle, my head lolling about on my shoulders. “Did you cut my hair?” I asked.
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “What? When?”
“When you sent the roses.”
He looked disturbed. “I’m not quite clear what you’re asking, love. I’ve never cut your hair, and I’ve never sent you roses.” Looking closely at me, he sat up straight. “You’re not suggesting—”
“The roses weren’t from you?”
“What bloody roses?” Hellion demanded.
“Remember? The ones in the hotel room when you came to get me the first time, and you pulled Clay out of bed?”
Disturbed, Hellion shook his head.
“Oh. They really weren’t from you,” I said softly.
“I’m not clear—“
“No? Okay. But what was you it you said about the dirt? The gouges at the park?”
His eyes searched my face. “You’re not making any sense, anamchara.”
“You said the magic was elemental, right?” He nodded. “You said you should be able to do something with it as far as a revelation spell because it was elemental and, as dirt, didn’t really belong to anyone. What could you do with hair?”
Hellion’s eyes widened as he began to understand what I was after. “Hair is a personal element, Maddy. It could be used in a thousand upon a thousand different spells, for equally as many reasons. Are you suggesting… I hate to sound dense, but what are you suggesting?”
I stood and walked on wooden legs to the fireplace, no longer feeling the warmth of the fire or seeing the leaping flames. Instead what I saw were the faces of the potentially damned. “I’m sorry, Mark, but I’ve got to ask you to leave,” I whispered. Hearing no movement behind me, I turned and repeated the request, more firmly this time. “Please,” I added with more pleading than I’d like to have had in my voice.
“Go,” Hellion said, “but stay here tonight. I may yet need your help.”
“Sir. Darius. Niteclif.” Mark bowed briefly to each of us. He walked out of the room and shut the door behind him.
I turned back to the fireplace, and all I could see were flames dancing merrily to the tunes of murder and vengeance playing through my mind.
Chapter Seventeen
Darius looked at me very carefully, watching as my fingers worried a loose thread on a throw pillow I’d pulled into my arms. I needed to have something to do with my hands. My heel bounced against the floor in rapid bursts of fidgety activity before I became aware of the behavior and willed the foot to stillness. His voice was gentle when he asked, “Should I stay or go, Maddy?”
“I’d like you to stay. Please.” This was firmer, and I was glad I didn’t sound quite so desperate.
He stepped up to me and wrapped me in a strong hug. “For you, anything.” Hellion cleared his throat and Darius turned to him, keeping his arm draped casually over my shoulder. “You’ll have to accept that I’m crazy about your lover, Hellion. Treat her well,” he said, a trace of jest in his voice but, underlying that, a note of heavy seriousness. “I’ll be here if you don’t.”
“We’ve been friends too long for you to threaten me,” Hellion said softly, standing up and lording his height over the shorter man.
“We have, but you’ve a real gem here, and for the first time in many centuries I find myself coveting the life of a mortal.” Darius kissed me quickly on the temple and slid back into his chair, lounging for all the world like there was nothing serious happening.
What the hell? Was I emitting some kind of pheromone? I cleared my throat. “The hair.” Both men nodded at me but never took their eyes off each other. I continued. “What could you have done with my hair if you’d kept it, Hellion?”
“Truthfully? Nearly anything involving your person. For example, I could have fabricated spells of lust, hatred, binding, wealth—”
“Tracing?” I interrupted.
“Tracing,” he said, nodding.
“What about breaching wards? Could hair allow you to do that?”
“The hair would either have to be taken from the warding source or else it would have to be taken from the magic practitioner and stationed inside the wards to provide grounding inside the magic. So yes, it could be used to breach wards.”
“Do you recall who admitted to us that they had a magus in their employ?”
“No, I don—son of a bitch,” he bellowed, turning to the table and swiping at the lamp so that it flew across the room and smashed into the wall in an explosion of glass. His chest heaving, Hellion turned back to me. “Aiden and the blue weyr,” he growled, low and fierce. He sank back to the sofa and dropped his head back against the high cushion.
I cleared my throat and swallowed hard. “Yes.” I began to step toward him and Darius was suddenly there, lifting me off my feet.
“No need to run the risk of getting glass in a foot,” he said softly. He deposited me carefully on the sofa next to Hellion, who stared at him unblinking before reaching out and gently taking my hand.
“It seems, again, I owe you an apology, Madeleine. So I’ll tell you with all sincerity that I’m sorry.” He lifted my hand to his lips and asked, “Forgive me?”
“I do. But you need to keep better control of your temper or I’m going to hesitate to share things I can’t afford to hold back, Hellion. I need to know you’ve got a level head and will keep it, at least while you’re working with me.”
“I won’t be so foolish as to make that promise, Maddy, but I’ll promise to truly try.”
I shrugged. I couldn’t fault his honesty. I let myself slip backward into the depression he made in the sofa, and he dropped his arm around me, kissing the opposite temple Darius had bussed. “So if we’re dealing with elemental magic, does that preclude a warlock from being a possibility?”
Hellion’s face softened and he closed his eyes, cupping the back of my neck and then gently moving his forehead to rest against mine. “No. Maddy, I think there’s an elephant in the room we need to address.”
“I don’t want to,” I whispered, closing my eyes and rolling my head back and forth against his.
Darius stood and looked down at the two of us. “I suspect I know where this is going. However, I’d like plausible deniability so that if you need more time to work out the specifics, I can honestly give it to you as a Council member. If I participate in this discussion, I can’t do that. So I’ll bid you goodnight and take myself off to find some entertainment.”
By the time I lifted my head and opened my eyes, the door was shutting behind Darius as he left the room.
“Do you ever get used to him moving so quickly?”
Hellion opened his eyes and squeezed my neck. “You’re asking someone who can move across space?”
“I suppose I am. What am I going to do, Hellion?” My voice inched back toward the precipice of grief’s canyon.
“As hard as it is, you’re going to do the right thing. You’re going to toss this around a little with me, privately, and then you’re going to get a good night’s sleep so you’re fresh to tackle it first thing in the morning. Tell me, please,
what made you put the pieces together.” He pushed gently on my shoulders until I lay back on the sofa and propped my feet in his lap. He began to rub my arches with long, deep strokes and I groaned. “Better than sex?”
“Don’t ask me that right now,” I said in a sleep-heavy voice.
He chuckled and pulled my big toe. “Fair enough. Then tell me why you’ve gone down this road.”
I sighed. “Your talk of elemental magic has been bothering me. Limited elemental magic would narrow down its practitioners, right?”
“Mmm hmm.” He lifted a foot to his mouth and kissed along the toes, his breath tickling the sensitive skin so that I jerked slightly. He grasped my ankle and held it firm as he laid kisses along the arch and licked the ankle. “Focus.” Dropping that foot, he picked the other up and began repeating the process.
“Um, from what I’ve learned, elemental magic is powerful stuff. There are only a handful of creatures that can successfully wield it, and each with limitations. Except for magi. So I started thinking about access to the most powerful wizards and witches in the paranormal world. Who had those connections?” He hit a particularly sensitive spot and I shivered, goose flesh breaking out on my lower body. “Uh, so, who had the connections and, equally important, who could afford to buy it if they needed it?”
Hellion ran a hand up my leg and stopped at the back of my knee, his fingers pressing lightly against the skin as they rubbed back and forth and circled around to the front of the leg. “Is it a matter of wealth, then?”
“No, not only wealth. Like you said earlier, wealth is something that runs easily among all of you who have the time, and an inclination, to amass it. No, it’s a matter of connections and, even more, intentions.” I pulled my feet from his lap and sat up, tucking them under me and effectively ignoring the minute trembling that shook me from head to toes. Scrubbing my hands through my hair, I continued. “I think what I need to know is the structure of the magi hierarchy. You said Amaly is your second, so she must be powerful, right?”
Hellion nodded, shifting to face me with guarded eyes. “Aye, she’s fiercely powerful, nearly so much as I am. But she’s also equally loyal and wouldn’t have thrown me over for a chance at power or wealth. She’s got plenty of both.”
“A bit defensive, aren’t you, over someone who means nothing more to you than a business partner should?”
Hellion instinctively reached up to tug his collar before realizing it was unbuttoned. He shrugged out of his shirt altogether, as if the weight of the material was too much. “No, I’m not defensive. Frankly I just don’t want to believe one of my people could be involved.”
I sighed. We were really going to have to talk about her at some point, but even I knew this wasn’t the time to do it. I stuck out a foot and pushed at his thigh. “No, I don’t think it’s anyone in your coven. I just want to understand a few things. First and foremost, what’s the balance of, well, light versus dark magi?” Watching Hellion shed his shirt had a direct result. Now I wanted to shrug out of my own clothes too. While it held a lot of promise for later, right now it seemed uncomfortably inappropriate. Another pound of proof that logic and lust didn’t belong in the same room together.
Hellion snickered, and it turned into a full-blown laugh. “‘Light and dark’ forces, Maddy?” He guffawed, and I bristled. Wiping the tears from his eyes he snorted in mirth, his eyes shimmering madly in the firelight. “Gods and goddesses, I needed that.”
I had to force myself to keep from hunching my shoulders. “Glad to help.”
“No, no, sweetheart. Don’t be cross with me. It was wonderfully adorable—”
“I’m not a child, Hellion.”
“No, you’re definitely not.” He let his gaze fall over me, and the weight of his eyes seemed to rake my nipples and make them stand on end, caress my cleft and make me gasp, and trace down the outside of my thighs and make me twitch.
“How…?” I asked, reveling in the lingering weight of his unseen touch.
“Oh, love, we’ve only just begun to explore each other’s talents.”
I felt a punch of lust, sure Hellion felt his own version of it too. We stared at each other for several long seconds before I managed to get out, “We need to finish this, Hellion, so we can go to bed.”
“That we do,” he said so quietly his voice was forced to compete with the hiss of the fire’s flames.
I cleared my throat and began to stand up, but Hellion quickly stopped me by grabbing my arm. “The glass,” he muttered. “I’ll have a maid come clean it up later. For now, won’t you just sit with me?”
“Fine, but stop distracting me.” I smiled at him gently to soften the harsh words and scooted a little farther away.
He nodded at me, licking his lower lip before catching it between his teeth.
“That! That’s what you have to stop!”
“What?” he asked with sincere innocence.
“Hell, you don’t even realize you’re doing it, do you? Forget it. Just forget it. Back to the topic at hand. What do you call good wizards and bad wizards?”
He smiled and shook his head, obviously thinking me daft. “‘Good wizards’ are referred to as wizards, or magi. Females are witches. ‘Bad wizards’ are warlocks, while bad witches are heaxags. The clearest definition between the two is that one is focused on first harming none, while the other side is into the preservation of one. But the thing to always remember is that wizards and witches all begin as humans, regardless of where they end up. It’s how we choose to use our gifts that define us.” Hellion leaned forward and grasped my ankle, and heat crawled up the leg and pooled between my thighs.
I gasped and clamped my legs together, unsure how he could invoke such feelings in me.
“A very important thing to remember, Maddy, is that we cannot create something that is not there. So I can conjure a storm because a storm exists somewhere for me to pull energy from. I can make a rose appear”—he mumbled something softly and held out one perfect, long-stemmed red rose—“because I’ve taken it from somewhere else. I cannot make you feel lust that you don’t already harbor, though I can redirect that which you have. By my oath, I cannot take without offering something in return. So by my nature, I seek balance.
“There are those, though, who do not hold themselves to higher codes of conduct. They take that which is elemental and taint it with darkness that isn’t inherent to the element’s nature.” I must have looked confused because he clarified it for me on the most basic level. “If I call a thunderstorm, it’s just a storm. But if I call the storm and direct the lightning to destroy or kill, I’ve harnessed a darkness not inherent to the storm, because the storm would never seek out a person or place to destroy. Do you understand?”
It made perfect sense, and I nodded. “You said to me once that you had both wizard and warlock within you.”
Hellion thought about his answer before speaking. “Doesn’t every man have the potential for good and evil?”
“Yeah, I suppose so. It’s just that most don’t come with the ability to back up their promise or, I suppose, their threat, so effectively.”
“Is this what you imagine has happened with the blue weyr?” he asked gently.
I shrugged, feeling like a traitor. But I knew this had to be discussed, and Darius had been right to leave Hellion and I to discuss it together, without witnesses. The implications were too great to risk such weighty allegations. “I don’t know.” I stopped myself and shook my head again. Justice weighed heavily on my shoulders, and I knew that if I didn’t get this right, someone ran the risk of being labeled a suspect. Shit. Who was I kidding? Bahlin ran that risk. “No, that’s not right. I do know. I do,” I emphasized, seeing his skepticism. “I may not want it to be so for a thousand different reasons, but I know that if I make this connection, the Glaaca runs the risk of being labeled a suspect.”
“Can you not even say his name?” Hellion’s face was curiously blank.
“What? Who? The Glaaca’s?”
“I suppose that’s my answer.” Hellion closed his eyes and took a deep breath, pulling his hand away from my ankle to rub the back of his neck.
Guilt washed over me like a wave rolling in to shore. “Bahlin,” I whispered.
Hellion froze, and movement only came back to him in stages. His eyes opened first, then his fingers flexed on his free hand, followed by the slow lifting of his chin and a relaxing of his stress-wrinkled brow.
“It’s difficult, but not impossible. Just bear with me.” I looked away from him and took a shaky breath.
“Let’s abandon emotion, Maddy, and pursue logic,” he said gently, laying his hand back on my ankle. “It will probably help us both where he’s concerned. Is that fair enough?”
I took a shuddering breath, held it, and let it out with a whoosh. “Yeah.” I lifted a trembling hand to my face and covered my eyes for a moment while I breathed through a near anxiety attack. While they’d been prevalent right after the death of my parents, I hadn’t had one in the last eight weeks despite what life’s little revelations had thrown at me. But one broken engagement compounded by a fractured heart and here I was, nearly hyperventilating in my effort to get air into lungs that felt surrounded by a steel band.
“Hey.” Hellion’s gentle voice broke through the labored sound of my breathing. “I won’t force you to do this, Maddy.”
I flashed back to my first Council meeting, the one held in the faes’ sithen, when I’d suggested to Gaitha that she not sit through the meeting if it was too hard for her. She’d barked at me that her station didn’t allow her to avoid things because they were simply too painful. At the time I’d been confused at her statement. Now it was perfectly clear. I stiffly stood, stepping around the worst of the glass and moving toward the fireplace despite Hellion’s sounds of objection. I let my arms hang at my sides and I shook my head, quick and harsh. He shut up. I rolled several ideas around, seeing which ones felt wrong in my head, disregarding my heart as nothing more than an organ that pumped blood for the good of my other organs.
Wrath: The Niteclif Evolutions, Book 2 Page 20