JINXED: (Karma Series, Book Two)

by Donna Augustine

  Paddy cleared his throat when I didn’t move, bringing me back to the problem at hand. “Why can’t I watch?”

  “You can, but it might be a bit bright on your eyes.” He looked at me and then rolled up his shirtsleeve.

  He examined his arm, looking at it this way and that. “Ah, what the hell, it doesn’t matter.” He took his forefinger and thumb and pinched some skin near the inside of his elbow and then ripped it off.

  A light, brighter than the morning sun, shot out of where he’d ripped away a chunk of his skin, and the piece that had been torn was glowing in his other hand.

  “I told you to shut your eyes, but you young kids don’t listen to anyone.” He neared me, still glowing from multiple areas, and I backed up until I hit the headboard. “Yes, that’s a better position,” he said, as if I’d done it intentionally to help.

  I slid the side of my pants down while keeping my eyes tightly shut. “Is this going to hurt?”

  “Possibly,” he said, as if that were neither here nor there.

  My eyes, squinting and barely open, looked down at where he was trying to force the piece of flesh he’d ripped off himself into me.

  I expected a slimy feeling to touch my skin, but it was nothing like that. It was wonderfully warm and actually felt soothing against the still raw tattoo.

  Whatever he was trying to accomplish didn’t look promising. Paddy started applying more and more pressure.

  “Go. In!” He was now bent over me, pressing more weight into my body than I thought he was capable of. If he kept it up, I was going to end up with a fractured hip.

  “You sure this is going to work?” Before he answered, something happened. My body was absorbing the light and flesh he’d been trying to force. It slowly sank into where the tattoo was. Paddy was propelled away from me, colliding with the door, and at the same time I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.

  The door crashed open a second later and sent Paddy sprawling in the opposite direction.

  Fate stood in the doorway, looking ominous. His eyes ran the length of me and then he stepped closer, as if he saw something of interest. “Why are you glowing?”

  My eyes shot to Paddy first, thinking it was him, but the spot on his arm was already healed. If it wasn’t him…

  I looked down. I wasn’t actually glowing, my tattoo was. It looked like there was a flashlight from underneath my skin, pointing outward.

  “What did you do to her?” Fate towered over Paddy, who was holding his ground pretty admirably.

  “I only did what we discussed.” Nothing, not even Fate’s glowering expression or being banged about the room, seemed to dim Paddy’s satisfaction. “That’s just a little after effect. It’ll probably wear off,” Paddy said. “Maybe.”

  Fate walked closer and ran his fingers over the ying yang tattoo. “It tingles when I touch it.” He dropped his hand. “She’s reconnected?”

  “Through me,” Paddy explained.

  “Is that the same thing?” I asked. I trusted Paddy for no real reason other than an overwhelming gut urge. I mean, let’s face it, the guy had screwed me out of moving on. Yet here I was, still letting him do crazy shit to me, but it was just one of those things I couldn’t explain. I knew people, even if they weren’t actually human. Paddy was one of the good guys.

  “No, but I think it’ll be pretty close.”

  I think and my theory; there was a lot of guess work going on here from Paddy, and I hoped he wasn’t going to let me down again. I didn’t want to think he’d turned me into a nightlight for nothing. I tugged up the corner of the sweat pants to cover it.

  “You’re going to have to do more than that.” Fate was scowling slightly. Looking down, the light shining through the tattoo easily penetrated the cotton. “We’ll find something for you.”

  “Do you think it will dull?” I asked Paddy, as I moved my palm over the tattoo.

  “Recent events are causing me to step out of the box a bit. You can’t expect me to know everything. I’m not God.”

  “And what exactly are you?” I had a piece of him literally pulsing in my body; I could feel it, and I still didn’t know what he was.

  “And here we go with the twenty questions again. You give them an inch and they want a foot! We have other more pressing issues. Must we get bogged down with the trivialities of name calling?” He walked out of the room, yelling he’d be waiting in the living room.

  Left alone, Fate turned to me. “Are you okay?”

  He didn’t mean physically.

  “I don’t know what I am anymore.” I had too many emotions roiling within me to be able to claim just one.

  He shut the door and then paused a minute before he spoke again. “Are we okay?”

  I nodded. All my words about hating him last night came rushing back to me. If anything, I hated myself, because as I stood there, the strongest emotion I felt about what he’d done last night was relief. That relief boomeranged back at me in self-disgust.

  Fate, sensing the downturn of my emotions said, “No matter how you feel, it’s not your fault.”

  “I can’t…” I turned away from him. My tenuous grip on my composure didn’t leave a lot of room for introspection. The mixture of pity and compassion in his eyes alone was enough to unravel me if I looked too long.

  “I’m fine,” I said, and would’ve sworn to the lie just to get that look out of his eyes. “I don’t need your pity.”

  “It’s not pity.” His arms came around me, pulling me to him, even when I would’ve walked away. It felt good, and I could’ve fallen apart right then, but I managed to hold it together until he spoke. “I forced last night on you. If Kitty doesn’t make it, it’s my fault.”

  He was trying to shoulder the weight of her death again, and it undid me.

  In life, I’d become jaded. After being an attorney for a while, I’d started to develop opinions of people in fairly short order. I’d title them and file them away as this or that. Everything they did was then filtered through that title, whether it was accurate or not. But once in a very rare while, something would happen; a word or action caught me off guard and made me reassess, but nothing ever this dramatic.

  Fate’s file had been clearly labeled arrogant, egotistical and selfish, in big bold letters, written in a permanent, thick black marker. And in less than twenty-four hours, he’d blown apart that file into tiny shreds.

  I’d assessed every action of his by a miscalculation on my part, and now I didn’t know what to do with him. I didn’t know how to label him anymore, and his file had turned out to be completely wrong. But then again, maybe that was the whole problem. Maybe I never should’ve labeled him to begin with. People very rarely ever live up to their titles anyway.

  Pulling myself together, I took a step back from him, but needed a minute before I could meet his stare.

  “You know, Paddy could be the devil for all we know.” He was joking with me, lightening the mood because he knew I needed it. I knew he didn’t think anything of the sort.

  “True.” I nodded but didn’t believe it either.

  “And yet…I trust him.” Fate looked how I was feeling. Bewildered.

  “Yeah, me too.”

  I started to walk out, but his arm snaked across my front, pulling me back against his chest. His other hand shut the door in front of me and then wrapped around my shoulders, pulling me even tighter. His chin rested on the top of my head.

  My body tensed, and not because it didn’t feel good, but because I didn’t know what this was. It wasn’t to comfort me.

  Then he was letting me go, pushing me out the door toward the living room.

  Chapter 33

  Who did you say you were?

  Paddy was relaxing on the couch with a cocktail when we entered the living room. He lifted his glass toward us and motioned for us to take a seat on the other couch, as if it were his home. We did.

  He took a sip and then placed the drink on the table between us. Leaning back and looking m
ore serious than normal, he settled in and began to talk. “I think we’ve all come to the same determination. We’ve got a problem.” He pointed to me, “You’ve tried to deny it was a problem.” There was no defense against that statement, so I sat and played with the string on my borrowed sweatpants instead.

  He looked to Fate. “You’ve feared it was a problem but couldn’t stop it.” He paused and then leaned forward, picked up his glass again and finished off the remainder in one swig. “I’ve known it’s a problem.”

  Uncurling my legs out from the corner of the couch I’d tucked myself into, I got up and walked over to the wet bar. If Paddy needed a drink, it might be a good idea to join him.

  My hand went to the Cutty Sark when I couldn’t find my preferred brand. “Where’s the Maker’s Mark?” I knew he had some, and I was having a bad day. I needed my drink. My head swung to where Fate sat on the couch.

  “I don’t know.” Fate wasn’t looking at me when he spoke.

  I shifted some bottles around and lifted a few up to peek behind them. “There was a full bottle and I’m the only one who drinks it. Where did it go?” I wasn’t crazy. He’d given me a glass not that long ago.

  “Drink the Cutty Sark,” he said curtly, as if he had no interest in addressing the missing bottle.

  “I don’t want Cutty Sark.” I plunked down another bottle a bit harder than I meant to. “I thought we were in a good place?”

  “Darling,” Paddy said, in his older and slightly raspy voice. I immediately looked at him, wondering what was up. He’d never, ever, called me darling. He wasn’t that type of guy.

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve got bigger problems.” He didn’t raise his voice and delivered it in a teasing manner.

  He didn’t get it. That’s exactly why I needed my Maker’s Mark. You can’t throw my life into turmoil and then screw me out of my bourbon, too. I didn’t say any of that, though. I shut up and poured the Cutty Sark into the glass. I still couldn’t stop my internal rant from leaking out in some shape. I walked back over to sit on the same couch as Fate and narrowed my eyes.

  He looked at me briefly, turned away as if debating whether to engage or not and then spat it out anyway. “What? Just say it.”

  He didn’t have to ask me twice. “Why would you throw out only my stuff?”

  Fate scowled. “I didn’t throw it out. If you must know, it broke.”

  “How?”

  “Because that’s just what happens to bottles when they get slammed against walls.” He shrugged and leaned against the back of the couch with a shrug. His face said, sue me if you have a problem with it.

  I was aghast at the sad ending for a perfectly healthy bottle. “You couldn’t have thrown the Cutty?”

  “No. I didn’t want to throw the Cutty. I wasn’t upset about the Cutty.” He leaned forward, his body moving slightly in my direction, along with his hands before he clasped them together. “The Cutty didn’t make me angry.”

  “I’m just saying, it was a brand new bottle and now I’ve got to drink Cutty Sark.” I held up the glass to him, showing him what he’d done to me. My hand was shaking slightly as I did, and it hit me that I was still an emotional mess. It seemed like I was losing it over something as simple as what I was drinking, but that wasn’t true. Dwelling on the Maker’s Mark was easier than thinking of anything else, or remembering what I’d let Malokin and Luke do to me. What I’d been reduced to, and all for nothing.

  Fate’s eyes rested on my hand and then his palm was over mine, steadying it. “I’ll get another bottle tomorrow,” he said in a softer voice.

  Paddy cleared his throat. “Are we done figuring out your drink?”

  We both nodded.

  “I need to find out if Kitty is still alive.” I tucked my legs back up underneath me.

  “We will,” Fate said, with the same soft voice he’d used before.

  “I’m okay.” I wasn’t, but the more he looked at me like I was on the verge of falling apart, the more I felt like I would.

  He didn’t believe me though, and I could see it in the way he watched me.

  Unable to sit still another second under his watchful eye, I stood and started to pace the living room. This wasn’t the person I was going to let myself become, the basket case that others needed to worry about.

  “Paddy, what exactly do you know about them? I want answers.” My voice sounded stronger than I actually was, faking emotional control until I hopefully got my feet back under me. I’d never been the weak link in my life, and I wasn’t looking to linger in the position.

  “Time to put your cards on the table,” Fate said, in a show of solidarity.

  Paddy sat silent for a moment, then one side of his mouth ticked upward. “Okay.”

  That hadn’t been too bad. Probably should have put his feet to the fire a long time ago.

  Paddy lifted his empty glass. “Have any more of that Johnny Blue?”

  Fate walked around and poured him a generous measure. His eyes shifted to where I was pacing; that same look of concern made me force myself to stop and sit on the couch. Fate settled down next to me, this time sitting close enough that our sides were touching. What happened to the normal Fate that tried to bully me into what he wanted? Him I could handle. This new one, the guy who hovered, was making me feel more incompetent than ever.

  I leaned forward, elbows resting on my knees. “Well?” I asked Paddy, avoiding Fate’s concerned glances and trying to assert myself as anything other than how his looks made me feel.

  “Something is going wrong.” Paddy held up his glass and took another sip.

  I put my face in my hands before I dragged them through my hair. “I hope you’ve got more than that.”

  He cleared his throat. “I do. As you know, there are certain positions in your office. All of them were created by us.”

  “Who’s us?” I asked.

  “The four. We are a part of the Universe, but not in the way you are. The forces you see swirling in the air, tweaking things here and there; we were once just a part of that larger energy. At some point, we developed a conscious sense of ourselves. A self-awareness, shall we say.” He leaned forward and waved his hands over himself. “The four were born.”

  “So are you in charge of everything?” I’d known he was something more than just a recruiter, as he liked to describe himself. But I couldn’t get my head around what he might be.

  “No. We are just a conscious part of the whole. The Universe is way too vast for us to be in charge of containing all of it. Most of it is on autopilot, constantly seeking its own balance. We’re more along the lines of a maintenance crew, so to speak.” He waved a hand as he said the last line, again downplaying what his role probably was.

  “A maintenance crew? You glow like the sun.” The skepticism was thick in my voice and expression as I looked at Fate to measure his reaction. There was none. How could that be possible after what Paddy had just said? “You already knew about this,” I said to Fate. It was a hunch, and if I hadn’t seen the slight narrowing of his eyes, I would’ve thought I was being absurd to even think it.

  “No, I didn’t,” he denied.

  “Actually, come to think of it, how did you two even get in touch?” I pressed, as I looked at both of them.

  Paddy took another sip of his drink, never breaking eye contact with Fate. “It was purely coincidence,” he said.

  Neither of them spoke as they watched the other. What did they both know? Whatever it was, I could see they were arriving at some unspoken truce, which left me in the dark.

  “You know what, guys? Keep your secrets. I’ve got enough problems.” And I meant it. I’d had enough lights flipped on for the time being.

  Their silent truce in place, and me not pursuing it—at least for now—Paddy continued on with his explanation. “So, you have the positions that were intentional. But somehow, other forces that never should have existed are forming on their own.”

  “Just creating themselves?�
� Fate asked.

  I felt a little better that Fate asked. At least he didn’t know everything. Nobody likes a know-it-all, especially when they’re looking at you the way he was me.

  “Yes, and they’re getting a firmer presence in our reality every day. They’re already shifting the natural balance of things.” Paddy looked older as he spoke, if that were possible.

  My mind went back to my job in Montreal, how crowded the streets had been with people who were off balance. That was the first time it had hit me how out of whack things really seemed.

  “Do you know what positions they’re forming? What they’re after?” Fate asked.

  “The one man you’ve met, Luke, is Envy. We’re not sure what Malokin is, or any of the others, but there are others. I think he’s recruiting. You’d probably recognize several.” He shot me a look, as if to imply I’d know exactly what he meant.

  I didn’t, not right away. It took me a moment before it clicked.

  “My saves,” I moaned, and put my head in my hands. “He kills them eventually but not until the right moment when he can swoop in and recruit.” My mind started recounting the past weeks, mentally making a list of who I’d helped him with and the damage that would need to be undone. Looked like I might be giving Death a run for his money soon with helping people pass.

  Paddy stood and walked over to the kitchen, still in view over the island. He stuck his head in the fridge and then popped it back out. Paddy looked directly at Fate. “We’re going to need two things: your men, and take out. I can’t believe all the healthy food you’ve got in this place. How do you expect me to eat this crap?”

  “You want my guys?” Fate asked, ignoring the food comment completely. “They don’t even know you are aware of them, and they aren’t going to like finding out.”

  “I don’t want them. We need them.”

  “We need to worry about Kitty, first. I’m not leaving her.” I stood, ready to chase Paddy out of the kitchen if necessary to get our priorities back on track.

  Paddy nodded. “That’s what they’re for. You need to set up a meeting with Malokin. Tell him what happened. Tell him everything but what I did. The more you tell him, the more likely it is he’ll believe you. The last thing he knows is that you were fighting Fate.”