Master of Shadows

by Angela Knight

  But Belle’s was more intense. More erotic.

  More.

  It seemed to burst on his tongue, distilled feminine sensuality, sizzling magic, and that lush something that was pure Belle.

  He knew he must have tasted her before. Probably several times, considering that Majae often bottled their blood as gifts, donated it to the Lord’s Club, or served it to guests. For God’s sake, he’d known her for a thousand years.

  But not really. Yes, he’d run into her at parties and served on the High Council with her, but there’d always been others around. And she’d been a court seducer, a job which had both kept her busy and encouraged him to keep his distance.

  Besides, she’d always reminded him a little too much of Isolde, another beautiful blonde who’d been adored by every man who met her. He’d assumed Belle would have Isolde’s darker edges, too.

  So he’d steered clear. Until last month, when Morgana had forced him to accept Belle as a partner, after Belle had suddenly acquired an inexplicable need to work field missions.

  He’d quickly realized she was far more dangerous than Isolde, magic notwithstanding. Yes, she had the same bright and flashing charm, but she also had a strength and intelligence Isolde had never possessed.

  He really should have anticipated that. Belle was, after all, a Maja, while Isolde had failed Merlin’s tests.

  Isolde had also been a the traitor who’d left his soul in bleeding desolation.

  Tris was coming to want Belle every bit as much as he’d ever wanted Isolde. Remembering the look in her eyes as she realized how the taste of her affected him was enough to get him hard all over again.

  “It’s not a good idea to become lovers with your partner,” he’d told Davon. And it wasn’t.

  But he didn’t always follow his own advice.

  He was planning Belle’s seduction when sunrise stole his consciousness.

  The creature that had been Dice Warren snarled, sounding like a chainsaw in the confines of the cavern.

  Warlock circled him warily. Dice was huge, easily the size of an Indian elephant. The wizard had been forced to gate them both into the largest cavern in the cave network for this little exercise. He wanted to give his monster room to learn who was dominant.

  Warlock was looking forward to this. He hadn’t had a really good fight since the battle with Smoke and his little werewolf whore.

  Nothing made him feel as alive as spilling the blood of something that could kill him.

  Dice could definitely do the job. The beast looked like a cross between a wolf and a tiger, with a long muzzle and triangular, upright ears. Yet his body was catlike, with thick, powerful legs that were proportionately shorter than a wolf’s. Each of his forepaws was the size of Warlock’s head, while his retractable claws were the length of daggers. His fur was long and bushy like a wolf’s, in a shade of rich, dark sable that contrasted with the yellow glow of his eyes. He was both beautiful and terrifying.

  Now all Warlock had to do was tame him.

  “What have you done to me, you bastard?” Dice’s voice sounded deep, growling. He also had an incongruous lisp, since he hadn’t yet learned to speak through his carnivore’s fangs.

  Warlock gave him a taunting smile. “I’ve made you my perfect weapon.”

  Yellow eyes narrowed. “You made me a monster. And I’m going to rip you apart.”

  Warlock smirked and gestured. A snaking length of blue light appeared in his hand, spilling to the ground to curl around his clawed feet like the lash of a whip. “Come on then, boy. Try for me.”

  “I ain’t a boy.” Black lips lifted off white teeth. “I ain’t even a man.” And he charged.

  Fortunately, he wasn’t used to his massive body, and inexperience made Dice slow and awkward. Warlock stepped aside like a matador teasing a bull. A flick of his wrist sent the spell whip flashing out to bite into Dice’s shoulder. The creature yelped in startled pain.

  Dice wheeled and struck out with a clawed forepaw. If he’d connected, he would have ripped Warlock’s head off his shoulders.

  The wizard was too fast and experienced for that. Ducking, he sent his whip licking out to curl around Dice’s foreleg. This time the creature’s cry of pain was more howl of rage. He spun toward Warlock and gathered himself, narrow yellow eyes watching his enemy with feral intensity. Yet he held back, watching for an opening.

  Warlock studied him with approval. He was beginning to think. He’d be deadly once he got used to his huge body and started using the advantages it offered.

  But first he had to be broken.

  “You are slow,” Warlock growled, cracking the light lash to send up an explosion of sparks. “You are clumsy and ignorant. You can’t take me. You can barely keep from tripping over your own big feet.”

  “Fuck. You!” Dice exploded toward him in a furious blur of fangs, claws, and massive muscle. Big paws flashed out.

  Warlock spun aside and flicked the whip to cut across Dice’s unprotected belly. The beast roared and leaped.

  Warlock dove clear, narrowly avoiding being crushed under the monster’s weight. As he hit the cavern floor, the werewolf spun, flicking the whip to flay the length of Dice’s ribs.

  “Fucker!” In his fury and pain, Dice opened his fanged jaws wide and roared.

  A torrent of flame boiled from his jaws and poured over Warlock like a blast from a blowtorch.

  FIVE

  “You put me in one hell of a position, you know that?” William Justice growled.

  Instead of replying to that opening shot, Belle gave him a sunny smile and lifted the two venti Starbucks cups she held. “How do you like your coffee?”

  “Black,” he muttered. “Like my disposition.”

  “No wonder you and Tristan get along.” She handed over one cup and kept the other. A quick spell doctored her coffee to her tastes: two sugars and a cream.

  “My brother wolves want your vampire’s head on a pike,” Justice told her, taking a sip of the coffee.

  “Instead they got the witch’s.”

  “What?” He glowered at her, suspicious.

  “Steve Sheridan’s bite killed Cherise.”

  Justice lowered the coffee and frowned at her. “How? He didn’t do that much damage.”

  “Apparently Direkind bites are poisonous to the Magekind. She died despite all our efforts to save her. We’re having the funeral later this week.”

  “I’m . . . sorry.” He looked taken aback. “We had no idea. I don’t think any of us has ever bitten one of you.”

  “It was a shock to us, too.” She studied the fire-blasted yard that stretched before them. Yellow crime scene tape meandered between trees and bushes, swaying in the light breeze as it surrounded the burned-out husk of what had once been a sprawling mansion.

  Now all that was left was the brick fingers of a couple of fireplaces and a few partially tumbled walls. Jagged studs stood here and there, broken and burned black. The ground was covered in soaked piles of ash and debris—tumbled bricks, burned insulation, chunks of wallboard, and bits of blackened metal.

  Belle sniffed. Charred wood, seared plastic, the chemical stench of God knew what. And something else, something like a cross between ozone and fur.

  Watching her, Justice took a breath too. “Smells like magic.”

  “Not Magekind,” she told him, frowning. “More like Miranda Drake. Tristan and I met her just the other day, and she had that scent.”

  Justice nodded. “At Joan Devon’s Grieving. I heard all about that from the ladies. Most of them said it was ‘tacky’ of you and the knight to show up to such a private moment. Especially as one of your people killed the man Joan was grieving for.”

  Belle snorted. “I didn’t get the impression Joan was doing much grieving. Which might be because the son of a bitch deserved it, since he died trying to blow up two kids and three hundred cops.”

  “Good point, but the ladies didn’t see it that way. The general opinion is that whatever crimes Gerald Dra
ke committed, he was driven to by grief over the death of his son.”

  Belle lifted a brow. “His son, the serial killer?”

  “That’s the one.” Justice took another sip of his coffee and meditated on the taste. “I’d have taken Trey Drake’s head myself if Arthur’s son hadn’t beat me to it. We still don’t know how many women Drake killed and ate.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t get those people at all. The Sheridans I understand. Jimmy’s dead, he was an innocent, and they want revenge. But the Chosen . . .”

  “Our aristocracy has never been the sanest bunch around. And they can rationalize the bloodiest fucking crimes you’d ever want to see, most of them against their own wives and daughters. What’s more, the women just seem to accept it, as if it’s the way things are supposed to be.”

  “Assholes,” Belle growled, and stepped over the police tape. She was picking up a lot of power coming from a point in the middle of the ruins. Setting her feet carefully, she started picking her way through piles of ash.

  “Yeah, but they’re powerful assholes,” Justice called, watching her. “And they’ll turn this thing around and hang it on you guys before you can blink.”

  “What, this fire?” She glanced over her shoulder at him. “We had nothing to do with it.”

  “Since when has fact had anything to do with a juicy rumor?” He cradled his cup and leaned back on one leg, a pose that made his broad shoulders look even broader. “Especially when there are five Chosen aristocrats willing to swear you and Tristan were about to kidnap poor Joelle’s daughter right in front of them.”

  “Miranda wanted to go with us, Justice. That’s not kidnapping.”

  “The way they look at it, Miranda Drake had a duty to obey her parents, so she had no right to go with you. Which, to them, would make it kidnapping.”

  Belle grunted at him, concentrating on her footing in the treacherous remains of the house.

  “Then an hour later, the Drake house burns to the ground,” he continued. “Doesn’t look good. Especially given that firefighters found Joelle’s body in the ashes with a broken neck.”

  “Well, we sure as hell didn’t break it,” Belle snapped.

  “So find me some evidence.”

  “Will anybody believe it if I do?”

  “Probably not, but it will satisfy my curiosity.”

  Belle’s magical instincts whispered, and she bent to dig carefully through the debris at her feet. When she stood, she held a fragment of a book. Most of the thing had burned away, but the left lower corner remained. Delicately, she fanned it open, casting a quick spell to keep the seared paper from crumbling to ash.

  “What the hell is that?” Justice crunched across the ruins to join her.

  “A magical gold mine.” She grinned at him. “Miranda Drake’s spell book.”

  It was very quiet in the cavern, especially after the howls and screams, the roar of flame and electric crack of the lash.

  Dice lay in the darkness, trying not to whimper as he bled from countless slices from the whip.

  Warlock stood watching him. There wasn’t a mark on the bastard, though Dice had tried to fry him, slice him open, even bite his head off. The wizard had conjured energy shields to protect himself from the magical attacks, danced around the physical ones, and basically run Dice into the ground.

  Exhausted, weakened from blood loss, Dice had finally collapsed after more than an hour of vicious combat.

  “Are you done?”

  Panting with pain and exhaustion, Dice opened his eyes and found the werewolf standing right in front of his nose. He considered breathing fire at his foe again, but he just didn’t have the power. He’d drained himself dry.

  He considered lunging forward to take a nice big bite, but he was too exhausted to move.

  Worst of all, he found he couldn’t meet Warlock’s orange gaze. He tried, but each time his eyes brushed the wizard’s, he felt the impact of Warlock’s will like the blow of a hammer.

  “Are you done, dog?” The wizard asked the question again, the words soft, menacing.

  “Fuck you,” he growled, even as his eyes skated away from Warlock’s.

  The whip licked out, slicing across his sensitive muzzle and tearing a gasp of pain from his lips.

  “Watch your tongue,” the sorcerer hissed, “or I’ll rip it out of your mouth.” Warlock lifted the whip as if to strike. “I asked you a question. Are you done, dog?”

  “I’m done.” The words escaped him despite his determination not to say them.

  Dice knew with a sinking heart that he spoke the truth. He could no longer fight. He no longer wanted to. Warlock would only hurt him worse and humiliate him more.

  The sorcerer smiled.

  Miranda Drake flipped off the lights and locked the restaurant’s back door, the keys producing a cheerful jangle as she turned the dead bolt. It had been a good night for tips, and she smiled, thinking of the sexy pair of red boots she had her eye on at the mall. She’d been saving for weeks to afford those boots.

  A hand hit flesh in a hard slap, and a woman’s voice yelped. Miranda’s head snapped up as she spun around.

  Two figures struggled in a pool of light cast by the parking lot safety light. A wiry male figure gripped a woman’s thin shoulders as he jerked her onto her toes and shook her hard. Her hair flew around her face, and she yelled again.

  His roar sliced through her cry like a razor. “I said give me the money, Hannah!”

  Hannah Davis was Miranda’s fellow waitress at Flo’s, a timid young woman with two children and a tendency to come to work spotted with bruises. “Eddie, Carey’s shoes have holes in the—”

  The crack of fist hitting flesh came louder this time. That was no slap. That was a punch, the kind that left bruises and fractured bone behind. Hannah cried out, her voice choked with pain. “Eddie! Stop it, let me go!”

  Memory flooded Miranda’s mouth with bile.

  She skittered back, calling her magic as she retreated from her stepfather’s snapping werewolf jaws. Her transformation raced over her body in a wave of fur, muscle, and bone contorting like soft clay in the grip of her power.

  “You dare change?” As she met Gerald Drake’s frenzied gaze, Miranda realized he’d lost control completely. And he intended to kill her. “You dare fight me? You dare?”

  But Miranda was tired of cowering from these bastards. “Oh, I dare,” she spat. “And if I get the chance to talk to Belle again, I’m going to tell her everything.”

  “Then I’ll have to see you don’t get the chance, you traitorous bitch!” He drew back a clawed hand as if to rip out her throat.

  Joelle threw herself between her daughter and the blow. “Ger—”

  His claws ripped into her face before she could get the rest of the word out of her mouth. She flew sideways, her body slamming into the base of the stairs with a crash. Something snapped.

  The sound seemed to echo in Miranda’s skull. “Mother!” Forgetting her father, she leaped to her mother’s side, landing beside her in a coiling crouch.

  Joelle’s head lay at an impossible angle, the life draining from her eyes.

  Miranda started across the gravel parking lot before she even knew what she was going to do, her strides long and angry as she headed for the struggling couple.

  “Eddie . . .” Hannah gasped.

  “Enough!” Miranda snarled, her hands curling into claws. She felt the prick of them on her palms, a warning that she was far too close to transforming. She struggled for self-control; it wouldn’t do to change in front of humans.

  Eddie Gibson shot her a glower over his shoulder. “Mind your own damned business, bitch!” He had a meth addict’s bad skin and missing teeth, his long, thinning hair pulled into a stringy dishwater blond ponytail. “This is between me and my—”

  He didn’t get the last word out of his mouth before Miranda’s magic jerked him off his feet.

  “What?” Hannah sank back, staring with helplessly wide eyes as her
boyfriend kicked and wheezed in the grip of Miranda’s power. “Miranda, how . . . ? What are you doing?”

  “Stopping him. For once. He’s been beating you since I came to work here. You think I haven’t noticed the bruises?” Miranda sucked in a deep breath, fighting the blinding rush of rage. She’d spent years at the mercy of a man just like Eddie. How many times had Gerald hit her, raked her open, threatened her mother to keep her in line?

  After Gerald murdered Joelle, he’d come after Miranda, and she’d killed him. It had been self-defense—barely. Eddie Gibson was cut from the same cloth. Another abusive bastard who beat someone smaller and weaker, simply because he could.

  So Miranda was going to teach the little creep how it felt to be on the receiving end.

  There was a glitter in Belle’s blue-gray eyes that completely infuriated Tristan. Primarily because she seemed utterly unaware of how much it turned him on.

  Somewhere in the ruins of the werewolves’ burned-out house, Belle had found the charred remains of Miranda’s spell book. It was only the left lower corner, and only a couple of the badly burned pages had readable words. But it wasn’t the spells Belle was interested in. She had plenty of magic of her own, and more spells at her fingertips than that poor werewolf girl would ever know.

  No, the power of the spell book was that Miranda had once concentrated on it fiercely, using it as the focus of her words and her power. Which meant Belle could use it to find her, whether she’d been taken or had simply vanished on her own.

  Which still wouldn’t make it easy. Belle was taking the project very seriously, so much so she was using the permanent magic circle in the basement of her house—an inlaid silver design comprised of interlocking Celtic runes.

  The circle lay in the exact center of the room’s slate floor. The surrounding stone walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves that held rows of mysterious jars and bottles filled with Merlin knew what. Other shelves were tightly packed with ancient books of spells written in languages that had been dead for centuries. There were magical objects, too: crystals, statues of stone or bronze or silver, blades of every kind, all of them humming softly with power.