by Mina Carter
Pain exploded as something big and hard hit me in the ribs, hard arms wrapping around my body as I hit the ground, a heavy figure on top of me. The headless body sailed over us to crash into the side of the house behind us. I looked up to find my sexy werewolf crouched protectively over me, his amber eyes boring into mine.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “Vamp blood is dangerous… You’ll get hurt!”
For half a second my heart melted at his protective manner. Then I clocked the vamp sneaking up on us from the side. Shoving my wolf to the side, I blasted it with a bolt that seemed curiously more orange than black. It went “pop” and turned to dust. Halfpenny’s eyes widened.
“You’re one scary lady. You know that?”
I winked at him as we rolled to our feet. “You don’t know the half of it, handsome. Watch your back!”
From then on the fight was fast and furious, the two of us cutting a swathe through the crowd of vamps with claws and bolts of not-quite hellfire.
Finally, we stood back to back, chests heaving and a pile of vamp bodies and dust around our feet. My hands tingled from the power still coiled around them, but there were no more targets. I straightened up. We’d done it. All the vamps were dead or had fled into the darkness.
My triumph faded as I looked around, clocking the whimpers of pain and realizing just how costly the victory had been.
Chapter 6
There were bodies, mostly vamps that hadn’t helpfully crumbled to dust, but there were a few Shifter bodies in there as well. What was worse, though, were the wounded.
They lay at the edges of the green, having crawled there or been dragged by their friends out of the way of the fighting. Blood. There was blood everywhere. And the moans of pain, although I was used to them from back home, cut me through to the bone. It was the same pain that filled their voices, but without the defeated note I was used to hearing. It was sharp and immediate. Raw.
For a moment I was frozen in place, looking around. In hell, wounds are painful, agonizing even, but they don’t kill you. Can’t die if you’re already dead, can you? But there I could feel death crowding in, circling the edges of my vision as it stalked the injured on the green.
“Nononono,” I muttered, hurrying over and sliding to my knees next to an injured woman. She was a wolf from the scent that rose to my nostrils, but in human form, her hands spread over her blood-soaked stomach to stop her intestines falling out. She looked up at me, shuddering, and dark eyes tracked my every movement.
“Shit.” The curse slipped out without thought as I checked the wound. No way was she surviving that without help. I turned to look over my shoulder and yelled, “Hey! Rafe! Get your ass over here and heal this woman.”
Not-Rafe was by my side in seconds, his face pale as he looked down at the woman on the floor. A moan rolled from the back of his throat.
“Linette, oh god…”
I reached out and slapped him around the face. What? He sounded like he might go into hysterics, and the last thing I needed to deal with on top of everything else was a werewolf losing it.
The hard crack of my palm against his cheek made him look at me.
“You’re not Rafe Amatore, are you?” I demanded.
His pale skin went red and he shook his head, having the decency to look shamefaced. “No. I was going to tell you…I swear.”
My shrug was one shouldered. “I knew from the start anyway.”
He started in surprise. “How? You’re a witch. There’s no way you should have been able to tell…”
“Not just a witch, handsome. Might want to remember that.” The shuddering of the girl on the floor and an increase in the darkness of the shadows around her made me snap back to the matter at hand.
“Oh no, you don’t…” I swore as the shadows around her thickened even further. Death was coming to claim her. How I knew that, I have no freaking clue, but I did. “Not on my fucking watch.”
Reaching down inside myself to the part that was pure demon, I cracked open the darkness within and let it pour out to battle the shadows that were trying to take the girl.
As the world around me turned to shades of silver, I cut a glance at Halfpenny. “Get the real Rafe, now,” I ordered, my body tense as I lifted my hands and held back the shadows, creating a small bubble around the girl. “She needs healing and bloody fast.”
He nodded and ran off, an easy lope I was too busy fighting whatever the bastard darkness was to fully appreciate. My shoulders shook, the tension eating into my strength, and I bit my lip under the strain. The shadows fought back, trying to push against me, but then they pulled back, coiling and then sliding away.
Curses colorful enough to make even the most imaginative demon blush dropped from my lips as I spotted their next target, an older wolf on his side a short way away. Digging deeper, I pushed the bubble of protection around the girl outward. It bulged for a moment, and then moved, enveloping the other wolf with a pop.
The sound of an engine caught my attention and E-dub roared up on the hellbike, in human form again. His green eyes assessed the situation for a moment. Unlike the mortals around us, who had been rendered silver and grey by the strange light in this half world I was in, E-dub was in full, glorious high definition.
“Shit really hit the fan,” he commented, looking at me. I knew without asking he could see the shadows as well as I could, his lips curling back from his teeth. Teeth that were way too sharp to belong to the human he pretended to be.
“I got this. Secure the area,” I ordered. “Make sure all the vamps are gone.”
The hellcat nodded, revved the bike and was gone. A yell got my attention and I looked up as Halfpenny tried to stop E-dub riding off. Unsuccessfully. The wolf’s face was creased with anger as he helped the big warlock I’d noticed earlier over, a hand under the older man’s arm.
“Where’s he going?” Halfpenny demanded, his voice muted thanks to the… whatever the hell had turned everything living silver.
“To make sure those asshole vamps don’t double back,” I managed through gritted teeth as I extended the bubble to cover yet another wolf.
“What? They’ll kill him.”
“They wish,” I snorted, using humor to cover the fact that holding off the shadows hurt like a fucking bitch. “He’s kinda hard to kill…”
My gaze cut to the tall warlock. He didn’t look good, his skin pale and tendrils of darkness tracing thick lines over his skin. Regardless, he dropped to the ground next to the injured Linette.
Before I could say anything, he reached for her, his eyes closed and lines of pain on his face. I didn’t need to see the difference in her color to know he was healing her. The fact she abruptly went furry and I wasn’t having to hold shadows off her anymore were damn good indications.
“Rafe?” I asked Halfpenny, and he nodded, his expression as grim as mine while the healer worked through the injured one by one. I followed a couple of paces behind and my concern grew. For each of the wounded wolves he healed, his color got worse and the thick, black lines over his skin grew deeper and wider.
“Do you see them?” I asked Halfpenny, indicating the roadmap on the healer’s arms. I should say on my father’s arms, but I wasn’t quite ready to see him as that yet. I hadn’t had a dad all my life. I didn’t need to start now… all I needed was for him to heal Uncle Lucy, still tucked safely into my back pocket, and my life could go back to the way it was.
Happy days.
“See what?” the wolf asked.
I breathed a sigh of relief as the shadows dissipated, staggering a little as the world snapped back into full color. Halfpenny was there, though, wrapping an arm around me as Rafe finally looked up from healing the last wolf.
Deep chocolate eyes speared me with a direct look as he got to his feet. Even obviously exhausted and covered in whatever those black lines were, he still radiated power like a boiler going critical.
“Heard someone was looking for me,” he
rumbled in a voice so deep it felt like I heard it through my very bones. “Didn’t expect it to be someone like you. Want to tell me what a death witch wants with a healer?”
I blinked, still unable to believe that this was the father I’d wondered about my whole life. His intent look and sharp words proved he was intelligent, focused and knew his shit. Power called to power, so I could totally understand how he’d ended up with the mom.
“Good job I was looking.” I indicated the now-healed Shifters around us like I knew what the hell had just happened. He’d called me a death witch. What the fuck was a death witch?
I’d gone through the usual emo-goth phase when I was a teen, all black everything and pale makeup. (Ever seen Lucifer himself try and deal with a teen convinced she’s a pagan? Looking back on it, I so wish I’d recorded some of those arguments for YouTube. They’d been E-P-I-C.)
But even with all my teenage reading into smudging (which makes any demon sneeze by the way. I’d been permanently doped up on antihistamines.), crystals and everything Wiccan there was, I’d never heard of a death witch. And with Crowley himself downstairs, my education into all things dark on the witchy scale was excellent. Combine that with the awed looks I was getting from the Shifters around us, and I figured death witches weren’t common. Even my sexy wolf was eyeing me with new respect but thankfully none of the fear the little Shifter woman at the back of the group displayed as she tried to slink away.
“What happened here?” Offense was the best form of defense. That was a lesson I’d well learned in hell, so my demand was immediate and delivered in the tones of someone who was used to getting answers.
“I’ve never seen vamps with such hard-ons for working together before.” And I hadn’t. Unless they’d been sired by the same vamp, get a bunch of them together and there were usually more power struggles than the average PTA. “All the same bloodline, or…”
I let my sentence trail off and waited.
One of the best interrogators in hell is, surprisingly, a tiny little woman. She’s quiet, with a neat, blonde bob, her modern twinset and pearls teamed with a pair of jeans and boots. Her exact age is hard to pin down, but if I had to guess, she was somewhere between thirty and forty and looked for all the world like she’d taken a wrong turn at the pearly gates and ended up with us instead.
And she never actually asks questions. Never raises her voice. No guilt trips, no emotional manipulation, no using fear as a weapon to get what she wants.
Silence.
She uses silence. That lull in conversation that most people can’t stand and have to fill with something… anything, rather than hear the nothingness or, even worse, the chaos in their own heads.
I locked eyes with Rafe, knowing the power of silence, and waited. He held it out for a moment and then the corner of his lips quirked, as though he knew what I was up to. Good. I’d hate to think my father was too dense to know when he was being played.
“Bluntly put, we have a turf war. The local vamp head honcho decided he wants to expand his territory to include Boring. Needless to say, none of us are interested in moving out… or cozying it up with bloodsuckers.”
“This head honcho would be Darius?” I asked, brushing my hair back from my face. Then I grimaced as I realized I had blood and dust, or vamp remains, in it. Fuck. Now I needed to wash it and it would take for-bloody-ever to dry.
“Yeah. That’s him.” Rafe frowned. He slid a glance at the wolf stood next to him. “Lucas?”
Sexy wolf’s name was Lucas. Lucas Halfpenny. Nice. Good solid name.
My wolf shrugged. He still hadn’t come all the way down from the shift, his hair a little longer than it had been at the diner and his voice all levels of growly.
“A group of vamps jumped us over in Assjacket. We took care of it though. Got most, some ran.”
“Ah… no,” I corrected him. “E-dub got the one that ran. We don’t have to worry about him.”
“E-dub?” Rafe looked puzzled but I didn’t have time to answer him as blackness crowded in on my vision again.
Now, normally, whenever I saw that phrase in books it was a poetic way of saying someone had collapsed into unconsciousness. I hadn’t. Literally, black shadows were crawling over my field of view like some sort of bad horror effect. I looked at Rafe and Lucas quickly but they didn’t seem to see them.
I looked up, over Rafe’s shoulder, and the reason became clear.
There was a reaper standing behind him.
Shit.
Taking a breath, I found myself sliding sideways into the grey world again. Rafe and Lucas lost all their color but the reaper… she was still in full color as she walked toward me.
I called hellfire, the darkness within me leaping to do my bidding as it covered my hands, crawling halfway up my arms. Slipping around Rafe, I put myself between him and her.
“Pull a sickle and loose it, girlfriend,” I threatened but in a nice voice. Well, as nice as I could manage. “Sorry for the bitchiness, but I’ve had a shit day. Family issues, illness, vamps being assholes, you name it. Now, not being funny, but what the fuck do you want?”
Her gaze was sharp but curious as she stopped a few feet away. “I felt someone stopping the death call and I had to come and check it out,” she replied. Her voice was soft and melodic, and all I wanted to do was drop the hellfire and give myself up to her embrace. Enchantment designed to ensure I didn’t fight the call of the reaper.
Not. Happening.
I curled my hand and dug my nails into my palms, using the pain to distract me from her hypnotic voice.
“Yeah, well, you came, you saw… now get lost.”
She smiled, the expression not reaching her dark eyes. “I didn’t expect to find a death witch. Thought you guys had all died out.”
“That’s what he said.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder at Rafe. Who, like the rest of the mortals, seemed to be moving in slo-mo. Time must move differently here. “Didn’t say anything about us dying out though. As you can see, I’m alive and kicking.”
Her gaze flickered over me and the temperature dropped a couple of degrees. “Oh, we can change that fast. People should have died here today and I need to balance my books.”
My lip curled back at the threat and I twitched an arm, ready to throw but holding back. I didn’t know if I could take down a reaper, or if they could even be killed, but we had to be evenly matched on the power scale. Morningstar vs Reaper. It was a warped, supernatural version of fast draw… whoever blinked first lost everything.
I curled my fingers slightly, waiting and watching. If she so much as flickered an eyelid, I was going to hit her with enough hellfire to level a small city before she could hit me with those lethally sharp sickles.
A feline chirrup preceded a warm weight against my leg and I felt my power ramp up past nuclear. E-dub purred like a chainsaw. With menace. The reaper’s eyes widened as she looked down.
“Let’s start this conversation again, shall we?” I said, conversationally. “This town, and all its inhabitants, are under my protection. End of story. You got a problem with that, then I suggest you file a fucking complaint or something.”
I smiled. It wasn’t a nice expression. “I’m fairly certain you know who or what I am, and let me tell you, I’ve no fucking problem going toe to toe with your boss. With the firepower I’m packing, it might be you guys who end up wiped out. You reading me?”
She nodded. Once. Then blinked out of existence.
“Talk about making friends…” E-dub meowed as we stepped back from the grey world into the mortal one. “Is there anyone you haven’t managed to piss off today?”
Even though we’d stepped back into the real world at the exact point we’d left it, I found myself speared by Rafe’s sharp gaze. I managed a smile as I searched my memory for what point I’d left the conversation.
“This…” I indicated the big, violently orange feline winding himself around my ankles with a smile. “Is E-dub. Stands for E.W.… which
stands for Evil Wanker because he is. He eats just about anything, including chocolate cake and vampires apparently.”
“Uh-huh,” Rafe nodded, motioning us to follow him as he made his painful way across the green toward a large house just set off it.
The rest of the Shifters had started to dissipate, heading off to their own homes. Only a few of the more militant looking wolves remained to chat with Lucas.
“He’s the alpha,” Rafe explained, following my gaze. “And good people. Heart of gold, so don’t fuck him about.”
I turned innocent eyes on him. “Why would you think I’d do that?”
He snorted, the sound way too familiar for comfort. “Because you’re a young woman with secrets—lots of them. I can see them behind your eyes, and if your cat is a normal familiar I’ll eat my hat.” His smile disappeared. “Don’t think that I can’t sense the presence of a reaper either. Which means you banished her. What deal did you strike for power like that?”
I looked him directly in the eyes, no amusement in mine as I answered. “You don’t want to know.” I indicated the thick lines over his skin. “You just have to hope it was enough to deal with that curse you got going on there, don’t you?”
Chapter 7
“Well, it’s definitely a curse,” I mused an hour later as I studied the lines of corruption across Rafe’s skin. “And hellborn for sure.”
My fingers gentle, I pulled his skin this way and that. The thick, green-black lines didn’t move underneath the surface layer, almost like they were fixed in place. Which meant the corruption wasn’t running through his veins. A good sign, if any sign was good with curses like this.
I’d seen many, mostly in the later stages, back home. Usually after they’d already killed their victim. So it was a rare thing for me to see one in the flesh, so to speak. But I’d seen so many, that given enough time I’d be able to work out where and with what demon this one originated. It was tricky work and took more knowledge of hell, its structure and hierarchy than anyone topside would have. If I wasn’t careful, it could blow my cover six ways to fucking Sunday.
