Cimmerian Shade: A Limited Edition Paranormal Romance & Urban Fantasy Collection

by Kiki Howell

  “Is this because of the girl?” Nicholas asked out of the blue, his tone suddenly rougher.

  Jacob looked at him in surprise.

  “The girl? You mean, Kirsten? Why would it be about her?”

  “Because she doesn’t want you to fight,” Andrew picked up. “Does it change anything for her if you stop fighting?”

  Absently, Jacob wondered how much his dads had rehearsed this discussion. They seemed to have an answer to everything, and they took turns volleying back to him, keeping him just enough out of balance to get true answers out of him.

  “She’s busy,” he said, unable to hide his bitterness; over whom or what he felt bitter, however, he’d have had a hard time deciding. “Too busy to do anything but work. It’s got nothing to do with her. It’s my problem. I just need to get over it.”

  As if ‘just’ described the situation in any way...

  “What if you didn’t have to get over it?” Andrew asked quietly.

  For the first time in this whole discussion, Nicholas whipped his head toward him, his eyebrows raised high as if he couldn’t understand what Andrew implied. Jacob knew the feeling.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, frowning at his father.

  “I mean that if you can’t fight, there are other things you can do. You’re a Special Enforcer. Fighting demons was never meant to be our primary job. We’ve been neglecting the vampire part of the agency. If you don’t want to join us in those fights anymore, or can’t...” He shrugged, and his expression was unrepentant. “I never wanted you to join the agency in the first place, but only because I didn’t want you to fight demons. You’re a part of it now. I wouldn’t let you go any more than I got rid of Craig after he was hurt and couldn’t fight anymore.”

  Jacob’s mind was reeling at the suggestion. He’d barely been able to admit to himself what was going on and had not expected to tell his fathers, but if he had thought of it happening, he wouldn’t have expected this.

  And he wouldn’t have expected it to sound so appealing, too. Fighting demons was his life.

  Wasn’t it?

  At a loss, he gave a weak-sounding argument.

  “I’m not hurt.”

  “There are different ways to get hurt,” Andrew continued, still in the same calm tone of voice. “Flesh wounds are just the beginning.”

  He couldn’t have dreamed of more understanding from his fathers, could he? So why did he feel like, if he accepted, he’d be betraying everything he was—everything his fathers had taught him?

  “But... I have to fight demons,” he protested. “I can’t give up.”

  Nicholas reentered the conversation with a curt, “Why? Why do you have to do that?”

  Shaking his head, Jacob looked at him uncomprehendingly. “You know why. My mother—”

  “Yes,” Nicholas cut in. “Your mother. If we assume the magic she did brought the demons here, then all right, your mother was responsible. Your mother. Not you. You’re not responsible for what she did, not any more than you are for what Andrew did, or me. You don’t have to defeat the demons single-handedly because you’re related to her. You don’t have to fight until death either. And it might be time for both of you to understand and accept that.”

  He said that last part with a side look to Andrew, who looked about to say something but closed his mouth again and looked for a long time at Nicholas, who looked back unflinchingly.

  “He might have a point,” Andrew finally said, turning back to Jacob, and it was as startling to hear him say this as though he’d declared that vampires were now free to walk in the sunlight at their leisure.

  “But,” Jacob started; he had no idea how to finish.

  “It doesn’t have to be forever,” Andrew said, leaning a little more over the table as though by being closer he could be more convincing. “Work as a regular Special Enforcer for a while. Maybe in a few months you’ll feel ready to fight demons again.”

  “And maybe you won’t,” Nicholas jumped in, “and that’d be fine, too.”

  Jacob had this vague feeling that he should protest, object, argue that he could still fight. The truth, however, was that he didn’t want to fight. Feeling guilty about it didn’t change that. And if he was being given a way out, even if it was only for a few weeks... why not take it?

  WITH A GRUNT, ANDREW pulled himself from the car. Heavy steps carried him to the trunk to retrieve the swords stashed in there. Nicholas took them from him, motioning to Andrew’s arm with his chin.

  “I’ll clean those up. You see the girl and have her heal you.”

  Andrew’s first instinct was to protest that it was barely more than a scratch and he’d had far worse before. Cleaning a wound and bandaging it was enough first aid as far as vampires were concerned, and in a few days there’d be nothing left but a fading scar. The words, however, died in his throat, and he nodded tiredly before following Nicholas inside. He didn’t have a few days to heal.

  The demons had been appearing more frequently in the past ten days or so, and the agency received a call every night. More often than not, he and Nicholas accompanied either Rachel or Vinnie, or even both of them. Four against two or three demons was only decent odds when two of those four were human fighters. Vinnie was strong, Rachel was fast, but neither of them had Jacob’s skills. Andrew had never thought he’d get to the point where he wished for his son’s presence next to him on the battlefield, but after only two weeks he was already there.

  He needed to hire more fighters.

  He’d been saying as much for years, but while not as difficult to recruit as a good mage, a good fighter was still more elusive than he wished.

  The real issue was that this should have been a matter for the government to deal with. Soldiers would have been a more logical choice for this fight than Special Enforcers. Elsewhere in the country and all over the world, local or state governments taught their troops to wield blades, the only weapons known to kill demons. In this city, Andrew’s agency had been the first to take on the fight when the demons started appearing, and no one had ever really questioned its continued involvement. What if tomorrow Andrew called City Hall and told them to find someone else?

  “What happened? Is someone hurt? Is Jacob...”

  Kirsten’s voice drew him out of his thoughts and he blinked, belatedly realizing that his steps had led him to her office. Standing behind her desk, she watched him with wide eyes, her face draining of color.

  “What?” He shook his head, confused. “No, everyone’s fine. Nothing happened. Well, I’m hurt but that’s nothing you can’t fix in a second. Why do you think Jacob’s hurt?”

  He hadn’t seen Jacob since that afternoon, when he’d left to go check a possible lair of vampires. Vinnie had offered to go with him but Jacob had declined. Before he knew what he was doing, Andrew pulled his phone from his pocket, checking it for messages. Nothing. He’d have sent one to Jacob, but the ping of a message might betray him if he was in a situation where silence was required. He was fine. He had to be fine. Of course he was fine.

  “You just looked...” Kirsten shrugged, her hands shaking a little as she pulled small vials from her messenger bag and lined them up on her desk. “I don’t know. Really grim. Like something bad had happened.”

  “And your first reaction was to think something happened to Jacob even when I’m bleeding not five feet away from you?” Andrew snorted as he shrugged out of his jacket; it’d need another patch. “You do realize you’re not fooling anyone, right? Neither of you is.”

  He didn’t need her to turn a scowl on him to realize his mistake. Had he not been so tired, and in such a ‘grim’ mood as she said, he wouldn’t have touched the subject with a ten-foot pole. But the way these two were making each other miserable was ridiculous, and maybe it was time someone pointed it out to them.

  “With all due respect, boss,” she started, but Andrew didn’t want to hear it.

  “Save it,” he grunted, cutting her off. “He loves you. He never st
opped. And you flat out said you love him as well. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, keeping each other at arm’s length, but like I said—you’re not fooling anyone.”

  Her scowl had turned into outright glaring.

  “Sit down,” she snapped. “So I can have a look at your arm.”

  He sat, glowering back at her. She grabbed the torn edges of his shirt where the demon had cut his arm and pulled, ripping the fabric and exposing the wound. She didn’t say a word as she wet a few tissues with the water bottle on her desk and cleaned off most of the blood to have a better look at the wound, but as she returned to her desk and dropped whatever ingredients she had assembled into a small wooden bowl, her voice rose, tight and quiet, and yet filling the room.

  “I can’t be with him, all right? I can’t be that close to him and worry he’s going to get hurt. Or worse. By the time I broke up with him, I was making myself sick with worry every night. I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown and I couldn’t even tell him because I didn’t want to distract him and be the reason he got hurt.”

  She came back to stand by Andrew, applying the rough paste she’d mixed to the cut on his arm. It stung a bit, but no more than her words.

  “If you’d asked him—”

  She shook her head and he fell silent.

  “No,” she said, her entire focus still on his arm. “If I’d asked him to stop fighting demons back then, I know what he’d have said. And if I asked him now, he’d say the same thing. It’s his life. His duty. He’s not going to stop.”

  She set the bowl down and gripped his arm with both hands. Andrew kept quiet as he watched her brow furrow, her lips move with a whispered incantation. Warmth suffused his arm and he could all but feel his flesh knitting itself back together.

  “He’s not going to stop,” she said again, more quietly now, as she let go and pulled away. “Not unless I figure out a way to stop the demons from coming into our world. But I don’t know how. It’s been weeks and I still have no clue...”

  She stopped and took a deep, shaky breath. She had her back to Andrew, but he could smell her tears. Gently, he touched her arm with a finger.

  “Kirsten? I don’t know why no one mentioned it to you, but he did stop.”

  She turned her head to him, confusion inscribed in every line of her features. Her eyes gleamed, though the tears weren’t falling yet.

  “What do you mean, he stopped?” she asked, and even through her raspy voice, Andrew could hear her hope.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  AS WEEKS PASSED, Kirsten continued to dissect every word from the diary, every allusion, cross-referencing every ingredient Cara mentioned and analyzing the texts she had based herself on as closely as the diary itself. If the woman hadn’t been a genius, she’d been the next best thing to it. She’d used her medical knowledge and magical abilities in a way that, even now after studying those texts for more than a month, left Kirsten in awe.

  Kirsten was rather good at healing with magic, but she’d never put as much thought into it as Cara had. And she’d never thought about magic in that way before, as something as essential to existence as blood, never imagined it might be what kept vampires alive in the first place.

  Cara, on the other hand, seemed to have been certain of it. From additional research Kirsten had delved into, she’d been ahead of her time as the possibility was only now starting to be studied. Kirsten wondered what else the woman might have achieved if she hadn’t died so soon. She’d had a child with a vampire and, albeit unwittingly, opened a door between two universes. Maybe for Cara, figuring out how to close that door would have taken mere minutes.

  Or maybe she’d have been just as stumped as Kirsten felt.

  With a frustrated little grunt, she flipped the heavy tome in front of her closed, causing her desk to rattle. Another path that led nowhere. Leaning back in her chair, she covered her face with both hands and breathed in deeply, trying to calm down. Before she could order her thoughts, however, she was disturbed by two knocks against the frame of her open door.

  Annoyance flared through her, and it didn’t get any better when she saw it was Jacob standing there. She knew already what he wanted: the same thing he’d needed the last two times he’d come to her in the past month. And those were the only times he ever talked to her anymore. It was as though he were trying to avoid her.

  No, not ‘as though.’ He was avoiding her, period.

  “You busy?” he asked in a neutral voice, his gaze flicking to the closed book in front of her. “We’ve got a client who needs a disinvite spell.”

  Grinding her teeth, Kirsten started to gather her supplies. It was exactly as she thought. He needed her to do magic, and cast the most common spell required in a Special Enforcer agency: remove a vampire’s invitation to enter a human’s home.

  “Why are people so stupid?” she asked, annoyed and unable to hide it. “Vampires are dangerous. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. Why do they only ever remember it in the morning?”

  Jacob gave her a nonplussed look.

  “Not all vampires are dangerous,” he said. “Most people who have a change of heart the morning after are just panicking over nothing.”

  “Yeah, well, whether it’s over nothing or with good reason, the end result is the same: I’m the one who has to drop everything I’m doing to go do a spell anyone with the least amount of magical ability can perform. It’s a waste of my time. Your father should hire another mage to do those spells.”

  She swung the strap of her bag over her shoulder and walked by him on her way out of the room. She looked back when he didn’t follow right away.

  “What?” she asked as he continued to stare at her.

  “Nothing,” he said with a shake of his head. “Sorry to be wasting your time. I thought this was part of the job a mage working in a Special Enforcers agency is expected to perform. My mistake.”

  She wasn’t used to hearing such a cold, dry tone of voice from him. It was her turn to stare at him as he walked by her, leading the way out the front doors. She followed him to his car, climbed into the passenger seat and shut the door a little too forcefully. If he thought anything of her little temper display, he didn’t say, and started the car without a word.

  A heavy silence weighed on the car for a few minutes as he drove toward the suburbs. Kirsten’s annoyance started to fade, until she let out a deep sigh.

  “Sorry,” she muttered. “I know it’s my job. I was frustrated when you came in and you gave me a convenient target.”

  Jacob kept his eyes on the road and nodded.

  “That’s fine. I could tell you weren’t doing all that well to begin with. Still not getting anywhere with the diary?”

  She groaned, leaning her head against the passenger side window.

  “Nope. And running out of ideas on what to investigate next.” She sighed again. “The thing is, she wasn’t writing this for anyone else to come after her and try to figure out what she’d done. She was talking to herself, and I guess some things were so obvious to her that she didn’t think it was necessary to put them down on paper.”

  “Sorry,” Jacob said quietly.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  He let out a little snort. “I guess it’s not, no. But I can still be sorry you find it so frustrating to work with what she left. I know you had big hopes the diary would help.”

  Angling her body toward him with her back to the door, she observed him for a moment. Hadn’t he hoped the same thing she had? That she’d find a way to lock the demons out and stop him from having to fight? Or had he guessed before she did that she’d get nowhere with his mother’s words? Was that why he’d stopped fighting altogether?

  “Jacob?” she said softly. “Why haven’t you told me that you stopped fighting demons?”

  Almost a full month had passed since Andrew had told her Jacob wasn’t going out with the rest of them anymore and was working exclusively as a traditional Special Enforcer. She’d wa
ited all that time for Jacob to tell her, for him to say ‘See, you’re more important than the fight,’ and she’d had her answer ready.

  One month of waiting to kiss him, to step right into his arms and never leave again.

  And he hadn’t said a word. He hadn’t hinted at anything. Even now that she’d asked the question directly, he still wasn’t answering.

  “We’re here,” was all he said, parking the car along the curb. “Do you want me to come in with you?”

  “No,” she replied more sharply than she meant to. “You’d do nothing more than distract me. It won’t take long.”

  As she got out of the car, she wanted to tell him he might as well use the down time to figure out an answer to her question, but she managed to keep quiet. The most horrible idea had just occurred to her. Maybe he hadn’t told her because he didn’t care if she knew or not that he’d stopped fighting. Maybe she’d pushed him away one time too many. She’d always had this vague idea at the back of her mind that once the fight was won, once the demons stopped coming, she and Jacob might get back together—if he was still alive.

  But what if he didn’t want her anymore?

  She’d told Jacob doing the spell wouldn’t take long, but with her mind suddenly in shambles, it took longer than it should have.

  JACOB’S THUMB TAPPED on the steering wheel, following no particular rhythm except perhaps for the jagged and unsteady rhythm of his thoughts.

  She knew.

  Kirsten knew.

  He’d very deliberately chosen not to tell her that his duties at the agency had changed. He was reluctant to announce he’d stopped fighting when he still didn’t know for sure that it was a permanent thing. Even after all these weeks, a tiny part of him still wished he could go back to helping his fathers and the other fighters. Of course, it seemed rather unlikely when he still felt a little sick to his stomach every time he picked up his sword.