My Demon Warlord

by Carolyn Jewel

  “No.”

  She found the device buried under the splintered remains of her living room floor. The ringing stopped. “LaShawn’s, probably. It must have fallen out before.” The ringing started again, and a name flashed on the screen. “Ugo Cifai.”

  Kynan snatched the phone from her. Her skin goose-pimpled when he drew on his magic to get past the lock screen. He answered in a voice that was perfect in its mimicry of Vahid. “A moment, mage. A moment.” He fished his earbuds from his pocket and connected them to the phone. He put one in his ear and, eyebrow cocked, held out the other. She moved close, and he stooped so she could put the other earbud in her ear.

  “Here,” he said.

  A man, presumably Cifai, said, “The witch’s oath is broken?”

  “Yes, mage.” He sounded like every mageheld she’d ever heard addressing his master, angry and sullen, rage boiling beneath the surface. But then, Kynan knew exactly how to play a mageheld, didn’t he?

  There was a brief silence from Cifai, then, “You have control of her will, yes?” He was being careful with his words. No witch or mage could fully trust a demon they’d enslaved, and for good reason. Magehelds lived to follow the letter of their instructions and as little of the spirit as possible.

  “I do.”

  “Is the warlord bound to her?”

  “As you ordered.”

  Again there was a brief silence from Cifai. The voices of Kynan’s sworn rose up in chorus, kill the witch. Kill her, kill her, kill her. Maddy struggled to block the distraction.

  “Put the warlord on.”

  “Momentarily.” Kynan held the phone away from his mouth. “You,” he said in Maddy’s voice. Alarm shot through her at his spot-on imitation of her. “Ugo Cifai wishes to speak with you.” He waited another few seconds before he put the phone back and spoke in his own voice. “Fuck you.”

  “Kynan Aijan.” Cifai said something in a language Maddy didn’t understand. One of Kynan’s many gifts was language, or maybe it was just that he’d been around so long he’d learned them all. Kynan replied in curt, angry tones. There was another exchange with Magellan being the only word she understood. Across the room, Vahid twitched in his prison of air. Kynan must be forcing a psychic link with the mageheld, no doubt extracting the information he needed to deceive Cifai.

  Kynan fell silent a moment, then switched back to the mageheld’s voice. “As you say, mage.”

  “Bring them to me.” Cifai’s accented English turned crisp. “Do not delay. Make no stops not required.”

  “I will do exactly as you say.” Kynan’s performance was perfect, down to the scornful twist of exactly so that Cifai would worry his mageheld had seen a loophole to exploit.

  “You will do all that is required to bring me Maddy Winters and Kynan Aijan. Alive. In the condition in which they are now. You have two hours. No more. Garzon and I will call you with instructions when we arrive.”

  “I hear you, mage.” His unctuous tone was fingernails over a chalkboard.

  “Remain in control of the witch until Sessani or I tell you otherwise.”

  Maddy glanced across the room. A grin contorted Vahid’s mouth. She hoped she was right that he was glad to see Cifai fooled.

  “You will obey. Every word. You will die badly if you do not.” Cifai disconnected the call.

  Kynan stared at the phone’s black screen. “Obey this, mage.”

  She snatched the phone away from him and swung it out of his reach. No matter how screwed-up things were between them, he was on her side. Right now, nothing mattered except that. Nothing. She nodded at Vahid. “Cifai thinks he succeeded. That’s all that matters.”

  “So?” Kynan said.

  “We should go there. Wherever Cifai told him to take us.”

  “The house is not in Nikodemus’s territory.” Kynan, with his deceptive college-boy looks, had completely shut down. The ache in her chest returned in full force, sharper than ever. “Don’t.” She put a hand to her upper chest. “Please don’t do that. It hurts.”

  Kynan’s eyes turned bright turquoise, then settled back to their normal golden brown. The nauseating shift of their bonds slowed. “What’s your plan? We go there and?”

  “Stop whatever Cifai and Garzon intend to do. If this Sessani person shows up, we stop her.”

  He shook his head. “Anytime you sketch out a plan where someone can say ‘how?’ or ‘and then what do we do?’ that’s a sign your plan sucks.”

  She let out a frustrated breath. “There’s nothing wrong with improvising. We have an opportunity to stop the people responsible for that. We’re not going to get a second chance.” She pointed at Ashley’s body. “The people who wanted to enslave you again. Using me. I don’t care if they wouldn’t have succeeded. They meant to. Aren’t you the least bit curious about why?”

  “Improvising is fine. Except,” Kynan said, “when your plan is unfinished. That’s the same as no plan at all. Where’s the part where we tell Nikodemus not to sanction us? If he hasn’t already. You realize we have no way to call Nikodemus right now and tell him what’s going on, right?” He lifted Vahid’s phone. “You can bet Cifai monitors his boy Vahid.” He was right about that. Their phones were bricked, and so was her computer, and if they used Vahid’s phone they might as well just tell Cifai what had really happened here. “If he hasn’t already, Nikodemus is going to send someone here to find out what happened.”

  “Is there time to drive to Tiburon and still get to wherever Cifai was talking about going?”

  He glanced at Vahid, and her chest flexed again. “Bodega Bay.”

  No, which she ought to have known. Cifai wasn’t going to give his mageheld time to get into trouble.

  Kynan glared at Vahid’s phone. “Cifai knows every call and text in or out of that phone. He tracks its location and every byte of data in or out. We probably shouldn’t even be talking.”

  “First, I seriously doubt his IT is anywhere near as good as ours, and second, I’m counting on him tracking the phone.”

  “Talk until you’re past the ‘what the fuck?’ part.”

  “We go to Bodega with the phone, and Cifai thinks everything is going as planned. We deal with whatever the hell is going on there. Like you said, Nikodemus is going to send someone after us”

  To her surprise, he did not object. “We’re going to have to move fast.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Nothing in Kynan’s expression changed, but he shifted his weight between his legs and focused on the wall behind her. With everything that had gone down here in the last hour, he was feeling everything more than usual. He focused on her. “Minutes,” he said. “Not hours. And we take Vahid with us.” He was so attuned to her now, he felt the thump of her pulse. “If we leave him here and take the phone, there’s no telling what happens to him. Cifai will know the minute his mageheld dies or gets severed.”

  “Agreed.” Winters nodded curtly. She knew as well as he did that one of those two things was just about inevitable. “They’re probably watching the place, just in case. And until we’re in touch with Nikodemus, we need him to think that’s what happened here. Otherwise Cifai and Sessani are going know something’s up. They’re going to expect him to take action.” She took a deep breath. “Have enough of the wards gone off?” she asked.

  “Probably not. If you’d managed to take me mageheld, more than a few would have gone off.” She was his. Maddy Winters belonged to him, free of Nikodemus. His.

  “Probably all of them, am I right? Close to it, I think.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right then. Set off as many as it needs to look good.” She gave a wry grin. “Try not to kill me, okay?”

  He made sure his expression didn’t change. “I’m still not hearing much of a plan besides go to Bodega with Vahid and his phone.”

  “The situation is too fluid to plan very far ahead.”

  He loved the way she looked when she was concentrating. Her intensity always made him want her.


  She gestured with both hands. “We go, they show up, we find out what they’re up to. We stop them.”

  He needed to make sure she was on board with his idea about how this needed to go. From experience he knew she needed persuasive arguments from him. He also knew he needed to listen to her ideas. She had a lot of good ones. But not this one. This particular idea sucked balls. “That’s not a plan, that’s a prayer.”

  “Are you backing me up on this or not?” But that wasn’t lawyer Winters talking to him. She wasn’t dug in on this point. “Or are you okay with Sessani setting a trap like this for someone else?”

  He could fall into her eyes and never come out. Maybe he already had. “Do you accept the consequences of what you’re asking?”

  “I do.”

  “I can’t break my oath to Nikodemus.”

  Now she was annoyed, but he was used to that, too. “I’ve never asked that. Never.”

  Nothing wrong with tweaking her a little. “I hope the bed is comfy for you, then.”

  Hands on her hips, she looked him square in the eye, and yeah. She was feeling the pull, too. “I’ll grab a few things, you blow the wards, and we’ll get on our way.” She came close enough to pat his chest. He knew she was winding him up so he took it without comment or reaction. “You just try to keep up, sweetie.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Good.”

  He waited a few minutes before he followed her to her bedroom. She’d grabbed the bugout bag they were supposed to keep on hand in case they needed to leave on short notice. Bag in hand, she headed back to the living room. Or she would have, if Kynan weren’t in the hallway blocking her way.

  He put a hand on either wall and leaned toward her. He was a foot taller than her, so it was easy for him to loom. Her reaction to him rippled through the air around them, and he was slammed with a recognition of what she was, which was Nikodemus’s number one witch and advisor. She didn’t look dangerous, but she was, and that was a major turn-on for him. Always had been. He loomed a little more. “The wards need to go off with us inside.”

  “Fine.” She never had a problem taking advice from a subject-matter expert, and in this area he was the expert. She took a step forward, but he stayed square in her path. “Do it.”

  “Winters.”

  She scowled at him. “What?”

  “Honey, we need to talk.”

  “About?”

  “A better way.” His implacable words fell like boulders between them. All of them immovable.

  “This better be good because you’re wasting time we don’t have.” She dropped her duffel and leaned against the wall, arms crossed. Her power curled around him, trapping him as if she intended that when he knew she didn’t.

  “I’m worried about that, too,” he said. “There’s more than one way this could have gone down. We need to be clear on what that was. Otherwise, it won’t look right to Durian or whoever Nikodemus sics on us. Or to anyone Sessani or this Cifai asshole sends. You want this to look right, don’t you?”

  She nudged her duffel with the toe of her shoe, and he knew he’d won the moment. “What’s your idea?”

  “We make it look like I really am your mageheld.”

  She didn’t react, a sign he had more persuading to do. She was always amenable to logic. “How is that a better plan than mine?”

  “If you want to do this, I’m in, but we do it right. Fully committed.” Briefly, she closed her eyes, and he knew he had her. “Details matter.” He leaned closer, and he wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms and persuade the hell out of her. “You know I’m right.” He reached around her and took her nonfunctional phone from the back pocket of her jeans and turned it into a smoking heap of circuitry and glass and then nothing but ashes.

  “What the hell?”

  “It doesn’t work. Even if it functions later, for this to be convincing, we have to be out of contact with Nikodemus and everyone else.” He took out his phone and did the same thing. “You said it yourself. Sessani is monitoring Nikodemus and this house. She’s watching for Nikodemus to sanction one or both of us. If he doesn’t send someone after us, she’s going to know something is wrong and all this is a waste of time. We won’t find out anything. Whoever Nikodemus sends here, it sure as hell needs to be believable. We don’t bring any phones except Vahid’s. As it is, I’m going to have to wipe all traces of our conversation here and every trace of our friend Vahid.”

  She looked into his face, and that was serious turn-on, the way she could look at him without being vulnerable to him. She was fucking fierce. “You’re serious about helping me. Really and truly serious.”

  “I have obligations to Nikodemus still. About you. About what happened here. But Sessani targeted you, and you are mine. Mine.” He put a hand under her chin and leaned close. “Mine. You better believe she’s going to regret going after you.”

  “She targeted you, too.”

  “We’ll see who’s still alive after this is over.” He dropped to his knees, face tilted to hers. He took out the vial of paralytic that had been concealed inside the knife and held it out. Revulsion wasn’t a strong enough word for his response to holding that vial. “I want those fuckers taken down. This is the only way it works.”

  “No.”

  “Come on.” He grinned at her, hard and ugly, because he was fighting a surging panic. This was no joke. They both knew he was about to trust her with his freedom. “You never took a mageheld in your life?”

  “You don’t know me at all.”

  “No worries, because I have.” He opened to her, more than ever before, and the bonds between them came alive, and he couldn’t stop his smile when her magic joined eagerly. “At least a hundred times for Magellan. I’d pour this shit down some poor fuck’s throat, and the mage did his thing. I know exactly how this works. It’ll look real. More important, I’ll feel real to everyone else.”

  The beat of her magic was going to drown out everything else. He knew the impact he had on her in this state, he could feel it, and he deliberately amplified the effect. For as long as he’d known her, she’d had clear limits on what she would and would not do for him, so this was a turning point for them both. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  “It’s not for real.” His mouth quirked. “Mostly.”

  Her pupils were huge. “Not for any reason.”

  “If this is what it takes, this is what we’re doing.” He pushed the vial at her. “We need to get this done before Nikodemus or Cifai figures out this isn’t what it seems. Stop dicking around, and do the needful.”

  She didn’t smile at his use of the idiom the way she should have. Instead, she closed her eyes and tipped her head toward the ceiling. “I can’t.”

  Kynan took her chin in his hand, but she closed her eyes to prevent the kind of eye contact that could be dangerous. Her skin was so soft, so tender here. If he wanted to, he could get past her natural resistance, but he’d never do that to her. He couldn’t. Fucking rules. “I’ll bind myself to you if you won’t.”

  “You can’t.” She met his gaze steadily, and he imagined, for the briefest of moments, that they’d solved all their difficulties and that she didn’t hate him anymore. “You can’t do that.”

  His fingers stayed on her chin. “There’s no official rule against that. Not if I’m willing.” His voice softened because he understood and admired the reason for her resistance. For her, there was no question that the enslavement of the kin was an abomination that must not be tolerated. “Honey. If I couldn’t control myself, you’d have been mine the first time you needed me.” He released her chin and immediately wanted the contact back. “I’ll keep the wards from killing you.” One corner of his mouth curled. “Like any good mageheld would.”

  “Stop it,” she said. Cutting hard. “Just stop it.”

  He held out the vial. “I trust you.”

  “I’d just turned eighteen when they taught the ritual to me.” She gave a sharp laugh
, and her emotions ripped through him like fire. What she’d done, her regrets, her fears.

  “That’s not you now.”

  “I know what you’re asking me. I know it’s the only way, but the magekind imitate the kin. We pervert everything about what it means to have sworn. We’re like warlords. Every mageheld makes us a little stronger. We feel it, except it’s twisted and ugly and there isn’t any consent. Not ever. I liked it. I liked the power. I’ll like it again because sometimes it’s impossible not to like things that are bad for us.”

  “I wouldn’t make this offer to anyone but you.”

  She bit her lower lip, hard, and some of her thoughts and emotions came to him through their bonds. “You shouldn’t.”

  “Only you.” He gripped her hand and bent his head to kiss the top of her knuckles. “You are the only one, and this is the only way.”

  He changed his side of the bonds first. Winters tightened her fingers around his. “Layer it,” she said in desperation. “Make it feel like you’re mageheld, but don’t you dare make it real. Don’t you dare.”

  He nodded once and steadied her with a hand to her hip when the magic settled on her side of the bonds with a sickening jolt. He swayed as that perversion of magic oozed through them both. He told himself it wasn’t real, but the change didn’t feel fake. With every second that passed, he was tied up even tighter with her. His fingers gripped her arm hard enough to flex the muscles of his upper arm.

  Full access. She had full access to him now. He brought up the vial again and wiped away her tears.

  “Kynan, please.” She was trembling. “You said we’d be faking it. If that’s true, there’s no need for you to take that.”

  “If you’ve done this before, then you know every mage in range can feel it. There’s a signature. If I don’t take it, they’ll know.”

  “Layer that, too.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake.” He rolled his eyes. “There’s a dead human here because the layering was imperfect. Layering to fake the mageheld bond, that makes sense. That’s an acceptable risk. It’s a good compromise, and you were smart to think of it. Layering this when the risk is so much less doesn’t make sense.” He made a fist around the vial. “In this case, the real thing doesn’t put you in any danger.”