He glances from Damon to me and back again. I look at the map, trying to make sense of the scrawls over it. Dean has terrible hand writing. It’s impossible to figure out what exactly he’s doing.
“He’s been in town longer than you might think,” Dean starts, pointing at a location on the map. “It’s far enough away that he could go unnoticed, but not so much that he couldn’t keep an eye on this place.”
My heart sinks. He’s here for me, I already knew that. The fact that he’s been here for longer than we thought? Well, that just makes me wonder how much he knows.
“His master owns a hotel further down the strip. There have been some incidents around that area in the last six months. Incidents that have been written off by the police as accidental deaths or suicides. He’s not being very smart about this, but maybe he’s been trying to draw you out.”
I don’t like the sound of that. “It wouldn’t be the first time, but he has a master and as far as he knows, I do too.”
I hope. If he knows who my master was, then he probably knows he’s dead. He might not realize what that means, but I’m pretty sure seeing me walking around with Finn unburdened will have given him suspicions at the very least. My stomach starts to churn. If he knows I’m free, he’ll think I can help him get free too.
“We don’t know how closely he’s been watching you,” Dean tells me. “If he’s aware of who your master was, he’ll know he’s dead. It’s one less barrier between you and him.”
Damon puts an arm around me. “He has a master, Dean. No-one’s going to free him. He’s an asshole. There’s nothing he can do to get to Maeve. We need to take a step back, keep an eye on him from a distance and kill this crazy plan you’re cooking up before you get the casino burnt down to the ground.”
I look at Damon, surprised by the authority in his tone. Dean frowns at him, as if he doesn’t quite understand what he just heard.
A creeping feeling comes over me as I pull away, and Damon pulls me back into his arms, a very familiar smirk appearing on his lips. My stomach flips and clenches, as if my body can’t decide what to do with this new information.
“Maeve, I’m disappointed in you,” he tells me, his tone extremely self-satisfied. “I thought you would have sensed me immediately. We are true mates, after all.”
I feel my face flush. I want to push him away, but at the same time I don’t want him to let go.
“What the fuck?” Dean sputters, as he rushes Damon, pushing him away from me.
I spin around to look at him. He smirks once more and blinks out of existence in front of us. I shiver on the spot, as Dean rushes around the room and cracks the door to peer outside before letting out a loud, “Fuck!”
Well, if Nero didn’t already know my master was dead, he knows now.
Dean paces in front of the desk, waiting for one of his staff to get back to him. Our staff, I guess. Maybe mine. I’m not sure entirely where we landed with the whole who owns the casino now thing, and right now I couldn’t care less what the answer to that question is. We can’t find Damon on the security cameras and he isn’t answering Dean’s calls. A team comprised of humans are searching the building, inside and out. The sun is scorching the sky outside, but we don’t have a clear timeline on when Damon might have been taken.
I sit in the chair behind the desk, shell-shocked over what just happened, and terrified that something has already happened to Damon. Surely it couldn’t. The good fortune I’m always rubbing off on my lovers couldn’t actually allow something fatal happen to him. I might be more convinced of that if we weren’t dealing with a limitless djinn right now.
“Fuck,” Dean curses. “He knows you don’t have a master.”
I just nod. It’s true, he knows.
“Maeve, I need you to answer a question.”
I blink as he stops and kneels in front of the chair.
“Is it true what he said about you being his mate?”
I know Dean is possessive of me, but this seems like a horrible time to be taking it personally that I have a psychotic ex-boyfriend. I ignore the fact that the whole mates part of things has deeper implications. I don’t want to deal with that right now. I cross my arms under my chest.
“We were lovers once, you know that.”
“That’s not what I’m asking,” he reminds me, softening his tone. “I know you loved him once. That doesn’t matter now. Was he your mate?”
It feels like a loaded question, and I’m afraid to answer it.
Dean takes my silence as an answer, and curses softly under his breath.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I insist. “I was young and stupid.”
He just curses some more and I sigh. I knew this would come up if Nero ever found me.
“It isn’t important right now. We need to find Damon.”
“He should be in the casino, but he’s not.”
Neither of us say it, but we’re both thinking the same thing. That Nero took Damon.
I clear my throat. “He wouldn’t be able to take Damon’s form if he wasn’t still out there somewhere.”
It’s one weakness in his otherwise virtually limitless array of abilities. He can only take the faces of those who still exist. It because the illusion has to be believable, apparently, though I’m not sure how that works exactly.
Dean just nods. He already knows. My vampires make it a point to be well versed in threats both human and supernatural. It makes it difficult for those threats to strike, but I suspect Damon didn’t get the chance to know about this threat before it took him out of the picture.
“This is where his master lives?” I ask, pointing to the place on the map.
Dean taps the location. He chews on his lower lip thoughtfully before he looks back up at me.
“Damon is capable of looking after himself.” His expression tightens.
“Are you serious right now?”
“This feels like a trap, Maeve. We need to be careful.”
“We need to find Damon,” I tell him, not quite believing him right now.
He sighs and ruffles a hand over his caramel-shaded hair. “We need to take a step back and think about this rationally.”
I bite back my knee-jerk response. He’s right. If we jump in too quickly we’re playing into what Nero wants, and that’s the last thing we should be doing.
“The only way to end this thing is for me to go speak to him.”
He stares at me, pain in his golden eyes, but he doesn’t try to tell me not to go.
“I’ve changed. He’ll see that and leave me be.” It sounds like bullshit, and maybe it is. Nero was never much good at listening.
“Fine,” Dean says. “We’ll go talk to him.”
I bite back a protest at his refusal to let me go alone. I just smile at him. “Look after Finn while I’m gone.”
I teleport to the street I need to be on before I can think twice about it. It’s the middle of the day and the sun is scorching the sky. It would have been difficult, near to impossible, for Dean to make this trip with me even if I had decided to let him come along.
I move toward the big house with the locked golden gates. This is the house of a master of a limitless djinn if there ever was one. The guy’s probably a major league asshole. I ring the buzzer and wait next to the speaker. No-one answers, but there’s a buzzing noise and then the gates open.
Nerves creep over me as I make a move onto the property. There’s no going back now. It’s time to face my past and tell it to leave me the hell alone.
The restaurant was nice. Cozy and warm with a welcoming atmosphere. The food tasted delicious, and the wine was strong enough to help with a nice, warm glow from within. My focus was entirely on the man in front of me. Well, aside from my mind wandering to what our child might look like. My human appearance being entirely at my will, I suspected he or she would look just like Finn.
Thinking about it was jumping the gun, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. Our relationship was already a run
-away train and I kind of liked how fast we were going. He seemed to like it too.
“So you came to the casino to save your house?” I asked, glad to finally find out what he fell into such a desperate situation for.
He nodded. “Me work is unreliable so the low rent at the apartments was ideal. Finding out the landlord was gonna have to sell if she couldn’t come up with twenty grand for repairs in time, I knew I only had a couple of weeks to try and find the green.”
“So you saved your apartment building?”
“Not only that, I bought it from the landlord.” He shrugged. “I found out I can do some of the repairs meself, and I can keep the place going on the rent from the other tenants. Seemed like money well spent.”
“Wow, that’s so…” I trailed off as the odd feeling started to come over me. It was like all of my senses were suddenly on fire. I wondered if this was the spell to help me get pregnant kicking in. That answer didn’t feel right, but I couldn’t figure out what else it could be.
“Are you okay, Maeve? Yer looking sort of pale.”
“I’m fine,” I told him, trying to brush it off with a smile. The feeling wasn’t going away, but I wasn’t going to let it ruin the night.
“Yer sure?” He took my hand in his.
The touch settled me, like an anchor, at least until the table started to rattle. We looked around, realizing quickly that everything was beginning to shake. Someone cried out, “Earthquake!” and rushed out of the building, but everyone else seemed to view the shaking as a mild annoyance.
I moved back and my gaze found him. Nero in his demon form, staring at us from the open doorway to the kitchen. His form flickered and he became the waiter who’d served us more drinks a moment before everything started to shake. Suddenly the weird feeling I’d had made sense.
The bond we shared was volatile; strong but unpredictable in nature.
Seeing him there shocked me at a surface level, but deeper down I knew this day would come and it only made sense that it would happen now, when I’m looking to the future. He’s a reminder that I’m not out of the woods yet, even if I no longer have a master.
He moved from the doorway, pulling a corkscrew from his pocket and striding purposefully toward a man with a panic-stricken look on his face. The man got up, ran. And I followed Nero out of the restaurant without a word.
He chased the man down an alley and captured him. Slaughtered him easily and let his body fall to the ground. I felt drops of blood spatter my shoes, turning my stomach at the brutality of what I just witnessed. Nero turned to me and I could hear Finn calling out my name as he rushed to catch up.
“Don’t worry, he wasn’t a good guy.” Nero smirks.
I can’t find any words as Nero runs his eyes over me, still wearing the waiter’s body.
“You look good, Maeve,” Nero tells me. “As much as I’d love to stick around and chat, my master is calling.”
He vanished in front of me, just as Finn caught up, his gaze drifting to the body.
“What was all that about?”
The door to the house is open, which I know Nero expects me to take as an invitation. I fight back against the shivers that claim me as I step inside the mansion. I can sense he’s close, and I start to question why I came here. The decision to come and talk to him seemed like the sensible option, but in reality there were others.
Will he still have the same hold over me? Are we truly mates, or is he just a selfish prick who finds it fun to play games with a lower class of Djinn?
“Ye came,” he tells me, using Finn’s rough but musical voice.
Desire rushes through me when he moves to the doorway of the room he was hiding inside. The vision before me isn’t real and I know that, but still, seeing Finn’s well toned, tattoo adorned arms and watching his blue eyes fill with hunger as he stares at me makes my knees weaken and my nipples prickle into sharp points.
“Won’t ye let me take yer coat, Maeve?” he asks, bringing out a smirk that is entirely Nero as he holds out his hand in wait.
I clear my throat, feeling my skin flush and realizing how big a mistake this really was. I can still see the demon I loved and hated in equal measure hiding under the guise of my human lover and I still want him as badly as I did all those centuries ago when we were together.
“I don’t think so,” I tell him, crossing my arms under my chest.
“Fine then,” he says, smirk fading to a smile. “Make yer demands.”
“Where is Damon?” I ask, trying to keep the emotion out of my tone.
He raises an eyebrow. “Who?”
I bite back my initial response, knowing it’s only playing into what he wants. I keep my gaze steady.
“You know who he is. He’s the last image you used.”
He rolls his eyes, leaning against the doorframe. “Oh. The beta vampire. Ye could do so much better than a couple o’ simpering half breeds and a pathetic human, Maeve. I’ll be doing ye a favor in removing them from yer life.”
Anger rises within me, somehow combining with the latent pulse of arousal being in his presence pulls through my body, and making me furiously horny. The only barrier between us now is a paper-thin wall of mistrust. I’m in trouble. I never should have come here.
“You need me,” he says, self-satisfied smirk reappearing. “You always will.”
It takes all of my energy just to keep my lips shut and my body glued to the spot. I want him. I’ve always wanted him. It doesn’t matter how selfish he is, or how many evil things he does. I want him to pin me down and claim me as his. That’s never going to change.
He moves closer. “Ye can feel the heat between us. I know ye can. It’s eternal, Maeve. It will never go out.”
“I don’t want you,” I whisper, not able to meet his gaze.
He leans in and whispers back, “I can feel how much ye want me.”
Oh hell. Focus, Maeve. Don’t let him twist everything to his advantage here. No matter how much you want him right now. I clear my throat and remind myself he took Damon. He’s the bad guy in this scenario, not the romantic interest.
“I would never want a man who would set out to hurt me like you have.” I keep my gaze on his, letting him see my anger. “Tell me where Damon is, or I’ll give your master a heavy dose of bad luck.”
He snorts, backs up. “Ye tink I couldn’t undo a little spell o’ hard luck? I’m limitless, Maeve. Ye know what that means.”
“I know what it doesn’t mean,” I murmur, almost regretting it when interest lights his eyes.
“Oh?” he asks. “And what would that be, exactly?”
“Tell me where Damon is, Nero.”
He sighs after a few tense seconds of silence. “He’s in the basement. Me master wanted to know what it was like to kill a vampire.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” He’d damn well better be, but by the careless expression he’s carrying I doubt it. “Where the hell’s your master now?”
He steps back and pushes the door to the room he came out of open wider. A tanned thirty-something in swim-shorts and a pair of shades is passed out on the couch in an awkward pose that almost makes him look dead. I only know he isn’t because Nero wouldn’t still be topside if he was.
“Where’s the basement?” I hate having to ask, but this place is so big it could take forever if the door wasn’t in any of the usual places.
He motions to the right and I follow him when he starts to walk, ignoring the slickness that dampens the tops of my thighs as I move. My body’s still flushed and desperate right now, and I want to make it out of here without providing it any release.
Nero maintains Finn’s form as he walks me through the corridors of the mansion, and I try to tell myself that’s the reason why I’m so aroused around him. I know it’s not the whole truth, but I have to stick to it or I’ll go crazy.
He stops at a locked door and takes the key from his pocket, sighing as he gets it out.
“He isn’t worthy of ye, Maeve,” he
tells me. “Are ye sure ye don’t just want to let me master stake him?”
He’s only halfway serious, but I know he doesn’t get why I could ever possibly fall for someone like Damon. A half breed.
“Open the damned door.”
“I will.” He puts the key in but he doesn’t unlock it. Instead, he turns to me. “Look, keep your pets, Maeve, but we both know when the earth burns I’ll be the one by yer side. We’re forever. They are not.”
I smile as his arrogance cools the heat that’s been building since I stepped into this house. He frowns at me when I don’t respond to his goading. I raise my eyebrows and he unlocks the door.
Finally. I push past him to march down the stairs. The lights are out but he turns them on as he follows me down. I see Damon chained to a wall and I rush over to him.
“Damon!” I cry out his name, my breath catching at the state of him.
He’s been beaten badly, and without replenishment by means of feeding his wounds aren’t healing. He coughs a little as I move closer and touch him. His neck is bruised and he sounds pained when he talks.
“Maeve, you shouldn’t be here.”
“No,” I tell him, tears blurring my vision. “You shouldn’t.”
I turn back to Nero. “Stay away from me.”
He frowns at me, shooting a dark look at Damon. “You have feelings for him.”
“Of course I do, you asshole.” I look around for the key to Damon’s manacles but I can’t see one. “Cut him loose.”
“Yer crying,” Nero says softly, his expression confounded.
“I said get these off of him. Now!” I shout, smacking my fist off his stupid chest.
“That’s not Finn,” Damon whispers behind me.
I sob, and put a hand over my mouth as Nero sets Damon free. Damon immediately attacks and Nero backhands him into the wall.
“Leave us,” I spit at Nero, venom in my tone.
He backs up but stays in the basement, watching us silently.
“I have to…” Damon starts, before he coughs up blood.
“You need to feed.”
“Ye can’t take him outside right now,” Nero says.
Hard Luck Page 3