The knowledge that Harsh had regained his freedom remained clear in his memories, since those events predated the point at which his recollections became fractured or missing altogether.
He’d translated Iskander as the Danish equivalent of Alexander. Oh, he recognized that name. Like Fen and unlike Harsh, Iskander was a full demon. He was a former lover to Fen, bonded to her, in fact. Blood-twin Fen called it. Had been bonded. But no longer.
There was a time when Rasmus had been as in love with Fen as Iskander must once have been in love with his blood-twin. Desperately in love. Without subterfuge or reservation. Without coercion. Fen was beautiful and carefree and breathtaking in bed. When she had still been in possession of her sanity, she had been the delight of his life. Despite what she was. Despite what he was.
He would willingly have died for her. To have watched her descent into madness and now to bear witness to the wreckage she had become… that was agony, a kind of living death.
She was walking down the hallway now, her steps light, and he could no longer pretend that she would ever be all right. The damage to her was not something she could recover from. Not now. She was humming to herself, some melody without any real tune. Rasmus had learned the humming was a precursor to a cycle of madness, each worse than the one before. Each more heartbreaking than the last. And with each, his loss of memory extended from hours, then days, and now, sometimes, weeks as he learned from the calendar on his phone.
Rasmus turned on his chair so that he faced the door. The ruby beads worked into his braids clicked softly. He needed the power that could be drawn from the gems. He suspected that during his blackouts, Fen was entirely in control. She allowed him to keep the gems because the additional focus the rubies gave him helped when she controlled his power.
She was here.
After all this time, after all that had happened to them and between them and no matter how much he hated her now, his pulse still raced when he saw her. She was mad and dangerous and as beautiful as ever. Every time he saw her, he remembered the days when he had loved her beyond anything. He still did.
She carried a tray on which sat a French press, two cups, and two plates, each with a brioche. “Good morning.”
“Fen.” He knew better than to tell her it wasn’t morning. He’d left their bed and come here. For her, that meant morning. He cleared a place on the desk for her tray. “You’ve brought us breakfast.” He watched her face as he took the tray from her and set it down. Her blue eyes were normal right now. A smile curved her mouth and even reflected in her gaze. His heart turned over in his chest to think she was, if only momentarily, in possession of some corner of the sanity left to her.
It wouldn’t last. The word mercurial could have been defined with her in mind. While he had the time, he shoved all thoughts of his journal into a deep corner of his mind. And locked it away.
“I bought the brioche from that girl’s bakery.” She sat sideways on his lap and picked up one of the brioche from the tray. She held it while she looped an arm around his neck, underneath his braids.
“Did you?” He wasn’t sure what bakery she meant, and he didn’t dare think about anything he’d written down. If she indwelled again, those memories would be close enough for her to examine.
“She wasn’t there. The girl.”
“Ah.”
“Mmm.” She took a bite of the bread and rolled her eyes in delight. “Pour the coffee?”
“Of course.” He did so for them both. There was no scent of coffee in the air, because the French press contained cold water and coffee grounds, and there was no convincing her that coffee should be made any other way. Fen drank hers as if it were delicious.
He sipped his coffee, trying to leave the grounds behind, and took a bite of the brioche she held out to him. It was stale, but he could taste the butter and imagine that if fresh, it would be lovely to eat. Whoever the baker was, he was talented. But Fen had said that girl’s bakery. Therefore, the woman was talented.
“We have a lot to do today,” she said. She swung herself around so that she sat facing him, with her legs on either side of his. The bitch was insane and no longer the woman he’d loved. Unfair. Unfair of him to blame her madness for what was happening to him now.
The truth remained, however, that he and Fen had indulged in some dangerous practices. Besotted as he was, so deeply in love, he had allowed her access to his mind. The result, at first, had been beyond anything he could have imagined. He’d had a similar bridge to hers, but not in the way of the demonkind. Unlike Fen, he had no ability to control her mind. He could only touch. He had trusted her with his life. More than his life. He’d trusted her with his free will, and he was now paying the price for thinking he could control a creature as volatile as Fen. His magic was compromised, no longer his to pull. The last few times he’d tried to regain his control over her, she’d nearly killed him. He’d become what he’d dedicated his life to preventing.
Her madness broke his heart, but he had no one to blame but himself. The magic that bound Fen to him had never been meant for equals. What he’d done had likely broken her as thoroughly as the severing of her bond with Iskander had done.
“Do you love me, Rasmus?” she asked him. She put her hands on either side of his face. Her eyes jittered, slowly for now.
“I’ll love you forever.” It was true. If he had the choice to make again, he could not see a different outcome. He had loved Fen then and he loved her still, even though in his moments of lucidity, he understood the woman he loved was gone.
Her hands slid down his chest, and he touched the five copper stripes on her forearms. Her magic pulsed there, so close to the surface. Her eyes flashed from blue to orange. She lowered her head to his so that her lips hovered over his. “Rasmus,” she said. “I’m better now.”
“Yes, my love,” he said. “I can feel that you are.”
Fen worked at the buttons of his shirt. Rasmus felt the first push of her will against his. He knew better than to resist now. “You’ll make love to me?” Her hand was on the top button of his trousers and then the zipper, touching expertly.
“Of course,” he told her. He helped her out of her pants, removed her shirt and bra, and at the same time they removed his clothes, too. Her body was perfect, and he didn’t mind at all taking this extended moment of being almost alone in his head to allow his sexual instincts to come to the fore.
When they had sex, which happened less and less often now, they forgot everything but the satisfaction their bodies brought them. He moved the tray to the top of the desk and put her on the writing surface. She arched her back and opened her legs for him. There was nothing, nothing like sliding inside her. Nothing better than being the instrument of her sexual release. He denied her for as long as he could deny his own release. God help him. They ended up on the floor, with him grinding his hips against her pelvis, holding back his orgasm while she twined her long legs around him. She whipped her head to one side and levered up enough to sink her teeth into the meat of his right biceps.
He cried out at the first slash of pain. His elbow gave and he took more of his weight on his other arm. Her mouth fixed on his upper arm, and in the back of his head, he felt the echo of her pleasure at the taste of his blood. His braids swung in time with his hips. Since he was open magically, he drew from the rubies and, yes, his magic surged through him at the moment of his release. Fen shouted and fell over the edge with him.
“I love you,” he said, and he knew she felt his despair because she was in his head.
Fen repeated the words back to him, wiping a finger along his eyes. “Don’t weep,” she said. “Don’t weep. When we have Iskander back, everything is going to be better.”
“As you say.” If she succeeded in this, he intended to kill Iskander as soon as possible.
Fen kissed him on the mouth. “You’ll see. I’ve found a witch who can finish what we started with that girl.”
“What girl?”
She snar
led softly. “Paisley Nichols. He’ll come to me if I have her.”
He felt he ought to know that name. A woman’s name, but he could not remember everything that mattered in connection with that name. Among the snatches of memory left to him, he thought perhaps Fen had wanted him to bind this Paisley Nichols, whoever she was, with his magic. Doing so required a significant use of his abilities, but such was well within his power even now, damaged as he was.
Another memory floated up from somewhere in his brain. Paisley Nichols rented an apartment from Iskander. She was a human woman—the very sort it was his long life’s calling to protect. A face to go with the memory clicked into place. She was a lovely young woman, which was why Fen thought to use her to get to Iskander. As his tenant, she was in close proximity to the fiend, and a fiend’s affinity for the human female was well known. With even a little encouragement, so Fen believed, Iskander could be seduced. With the human woman under Rasmus’s control, and therefore under Fen’s control, Paisley would become the conduit that would get them to Iskander and make everything right.
So Fen thought, though it sounded now as if she planned a simple trade. Paisley for Iskander.
He wondered if he really had touched Paisley and sent magic into her or if that was something that came from Fen’s disorganized thoughts and wishes. It would be clever of him to do that. Fen wouldn’t understand the significance of sending his magic into someone else. The fact that it was Paisley Nichols was all the better.
“We need to make this work soon,” she said. Her eyes quivered, and, linked as they were at the moment, he knew she was losing her grip on reality.
Pressure built up in his head. “Fen, no. This is not necessary, I promise you.”
“I love you, Rasmus. You know I’d never hurt you.” She vanished from his sight and became his mind. His will. What little he experienced of the world was through Fen.
When he was alone in the room, he stood and drank his cold coffee, gritty with the unbrewed grounds, and he and Fen left to find the witch.
CHAPTER 23
A couple of days later, 9:30 P.M.,
Paisley Bakery and Café
Paisley closed her phone. Iskander was busy tonight, so he’d sent another of Nikodemus’s sworn fiends to get her safely home. Her private taxi had just called to tell her he was waiting outside. She locked up, then had to go back for some papers she wanted to go over at home.
Purse slung over her shoulder, she set the alarm and stepped into the alley. She didn’t see anyone, which was odd. She also wasn’t having a reaction to one of the demonkind. Odd. She should. Maybe her ride was waiting on Clay Street and therefore too far away for her to sense. She took a step forward to check and slipped in something wet. She flailed about to keep her balance and ended up stubbing her toe. On a body.
She about jumped out of her skin.
What she’d slipped in wasn’t water. It was blood, and it pooled around a man she didn’t recognize. His hair was medium length, and he’d probably been good-looking. Now, a black shuriken protruded from his left temple. Another body lay a few feet away, this one a man in a suit, his hair shorn close to his skull. She spun, heading for the bakery door.
Rasmus dropped straight down the side of the building, from higher than any human could have survived. By the time she had a physical reaction to his presence, it was too late. He landed on the ground with hardly a sound, between her and the bakery door. He tugged on his suit jacket and smiled. “Paisley, my love.”
“Go away.” Screams reverberated in her head. She tried to shut out the horrific sounds.
“Is something wrong?” His eyes had that fevered look that meant his hold on his sanity was precarious, and now he didn’t even sound like himself. The accent she’d found so charming when they first met was gone. “It’s dangerous to be out this late at night. Allow me to give you a ride home. We can talk things over on the way.”
She slid her cell phone out of her pocket. Her fingers trembled. The device beeped as the screen lit up.
“No phone calls.”
She scrolled for Iskander’s number. Right as she touched the contact, her phone died in her hands. Then it got so hot, the screen cracked and the back of the phone burned her palm. She dropped it with a yelp.
“I said no calls.” His voice sounded funny. Too high pitched for a man’s.
She made a dead sprint for Clay Street. Behind her, metal groaned and the next thing she knew, a Dumpster was flying over her head. She skidded to a stop as the Dumpster crashed to the ground and skidded several feet down the alley, the sound of metal against stone blasting at her ears. Refuse flew everywhere.
“Paisley.” Rasmus walked toward her. Behind him, three magehelds plummeted to the alley from the side of the building. High enough up that they, too, had been out of the range of her ability to sense them.
This was it, then. Even if she managed to take back Rasmus’s magic, there wasn’t anyone here to deal with the aftermath. Besides, that wasn’t going to kill Rasmus, and even if he was disoriented, she could count on his magehelds subduing her. She grabbed her keys and held them in her fist with the individual keys sticking out from between her fingers. The metal heated to the point where she was forced to drop them.
“You need to listen to me,” Rasmus said. “You must be with me. If you don’t do as I say, innocent people will die, and it will be your fault.”
He walked toward her. She grabbed a length of wood that had broken off a delivery pallet and wrenched it free. She faced him. “Don’t come any closer.”
Rasmus kept walking. She hefted her piece of wood, and then the back of her head turned to ice.
Someone else said, “You heard her.”
Paisley didn’t recognize the voice, and she didn’t dare take her eyes off Rasmus to find out who it was.
Rasmus, however, was just as surprised as she was by the interruption, because he whipped toward the mouth of the alley so fast the beads in his hair clacked and clattered.
A tall man she didn’t recognize stood framed in the light at the mouth of the alley. He wore a suit, and given her reaction to him, he was a mage. He picked his way past the ruins of the Dumpster and the scattered garbage to stand beside Paisley.
“Look,” Rasmus said in his normal voice. An indisputably masculine, accented voice. The change sent a chill down Paisley’s spine. “I do appreciate your concern. If I were you, I would do the same. Rescue the damsel in distress. But this is not what you think. I’m here to give my girlfriend a ride home.”
She didn’t know who the hell the other guy was, but thank God he showed up. “I am not his girlfriend.”
“She called me to come pick her up, and I was a little late.” Rasmus shook his head like he was commiserating with the guy. “You know how it is.” He lifted his hands, oh so reasonable. “I was late, and now she’s upset even though I told her I was sorry.”
“That’s a lie. I never called you.” The stranger wasn’t a screamer, but she was absolutely certain he was a mage. That meant she didn’t know if she could trust him, but it didn’t mean she couldn’t use him. “Call nine-one-one. Please.”
Rasmus raised his hands. “We had a misunderstanding. It happens, as I’m sure you know. It’s late, and she needs to get home.”
“There’s no misunderstanding,” the stranger said.
Rasmus muttered what sounded to her like nonsense syllables. At the end, he slashed a hand through the air from the level of his chest to his pelvis, and, swear to the heavens, a breeze lifted the stranger’s hair.
“Rasmus Kessler,” the man said. Paisley’s heart froze solid in her chest. He lifted a hand, too. The breeze stopped. “You are not yourself. I suggest you leave before you get into serious trouble.”
“For what reason should I listen to you?” Rasmus said in a voice of deadly charm. “You have no magehelds. You have no power to do me harm.”
The man in the suit moved the first two fingers of one hand in a semicircle. “As it happen
s, mage, I do not need them.”
A shadow appeared around Rasmus, so dark Paisley had to squint to see him. Within the bounds of that darkness, Rasmus didn’t move. Once his magehelds were enveloped, too, they stood as frozen as the mage.
“Oh, my dear Lord,” she whispered, retreating to the bakery door.
“Miss Paisley Nichols, I presume?” the stranger said. She nodded, and he stooped for her keys. “We ought to go before he works out a way to dissolve what I’ve done.”
“Who are you?”
He tossed her the keys. Unwilling to take her eyes off him, she let them fall at her feet. “My name is Leonidas. Nikodemus asked me to keep an eye on Rasmus, and that task led me here in timely fashion.”
Paisley wanted to believe him. She really did.
Leonidas smiled as if he understood her hesitation. He glanced at Rasmus, still enveloped in shadow. “We have a few moments. Perhaps you’d like to call Nikodemus to verify my bona fides.”
“Can’t.” She pointed to the mass of melted metal that had been her phone.
“I have his number.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, but stopped when Paisley stiffened. “I am retrieving my phone.” Slowly, he extracted a slim phone from his suit jacket. “You see?” He put it on the ground and pushed it toward her. It skittered on the pavement and stopped at the toe of her black clog. “You’ll find him in my contacts.”
She opened the phone, very much aware that you could label a contact anything you want. There was no guarantee the number wasn’t going to a buddy of his. She found an entry for Iskander and called that instead. No guarantee with that number, either, but she’d know if it was really Iskander.
He answered the phone on the second ring. “S’up, mage?” There was traffic noise in the background. “I’m a little busy here.”
She gripped the phone harder. “It’s me.”
“Just a sec.” The noise muffled, and he came back to the call. “Something wrong?”
“Do you know someone named Leonidas?”
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