by Cherry Adair
Contents
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
EPILOGUE
PREVIEW FOR THE EDGE SERIES
EXCERPTS OF EDGE OF DARKNESS
ALSO BY CHERRY ADAIR
COPYRIGHT
To the incredible team at Levy Home Entertainment. Howard Reese, John Lindsay, Mike Hesselbach, Pam Nelson, Emily Hixon, and Kate Mirsky and to the wonderful readers who joined us, for making me feel at home among friends during the fabulous Authors at Sea Cruise. It was an experience I’ll never forget. Next round of drinks by the pool on me! Until then we’ll have the memory of that special, unforgettable table number to keep us entertained until we sail again.
And to Carla Neggers
who makes me laugh.
Duty o’er love was the choice you did make
My love you did spurn, my heart you did break
Your penance to pay, no pride you shall gain
Three sons on three sons find nothing but pain
I gift you my powers in memory of me
The joy of love no son shall ever see
When a Lifemate is chosen by the heart of a son
No protection can be given, again I have won
His pain will be deep, her death will be swift,
Inside his heart a terrible rift
Only freely given will this curse be done
To break the spell, three must work as one
MONTANA
Zzzft. Thud!
A flash of orange lightning lit the room, followed by the sudden materialization of a man, dumped unceremoniously in the middle of the conference room table. He was soaking wet. Water runneled on the wood surface around him, then started to pour over the sides.
Duncan Edge merely raised a brow as he shifted his chair out of the way. The other five T-FLAC/psi operatives taking the meeting jumped to their feet at the unexpected interruption, grabbing up computers, paper, and assorted crap before everything was saturated.
“What the hell…?”
“Hey!”
“Holy shit!”
“Jay-zus!”
“Who the f—”
Shaking his head, Duncan prevented the water from cascading into his lap, or onto the floor, with a swift telekinetic thought. He knew the who and the why.
Serena Brightman.
One of her strongest powers was her mastery over water. Clearly she hadn’t changed. She still had a bad temper, still couldn’t control it. And still had to have the last damned word.
The woman was a menace.
“This is personal,” he told the others. “Take five.”
“Hell, take ten. Color me intrigued,” Connor Jordan told him affably, closing his computer and setting it on the credenza nearby. There were general murmurs of agreement from the others.
Great. Duncan had never allowed his personal life, such as it was, to filter into his professional life. But of course he’d never tried to help Serena before. No good deed goes unpunished. Now he had five freaking witnesses to his folly. Crap.
He waited patiently as his man gasped for air like a beached whale, trying to regain use of his lungs. Understandable, since the guy had hit the solid wood of the table hard and fast. While he waited, Duncan retrieved the note pinned to Chang’s crumpled shirt.
“‘I believe this belongs to you,’” he read the curlicue handwriting out loud. Oh, yeah. He knew the who. Absently he touched the scar bisecting his left eyebrow. Damn woman had lost her temper that time, too. He’d almost been blinded by a flying pencil. “You gonna make it, buddy?” he asked the young half-wizard.
“S-she made me,” Chang managed, gray-faced and still spread-eagle in the middle of the polished koa wood table. He’d had the air knocked out of him. His pride, too, if Duncan knew Serena.
“Yeah. Figured that one out for myself,” he said dryly. “Told you she was sharp.” Too damn sharp, Duncan thought with a stab of irritation. He’d sent Chang, Jensen, and Prost in to watch her back. Serena had been a stubborn pain in Duncan’s ass since wizard grade school. But for some annoying reason he always needed to know where she was and what the hell she was doing.
Apparently time and maturity hadn’t improved her temper or her stubbornness one iota. He hadn’t seen her in what—five? Six years? Not since some charity fund-raiser for the Foundation he’d been dragged to by a date whose name he now couldn’t remember. Odd, since he remembered with photographic clarity the backless emerald gown Serena had worn that night.
The glittering material had clung to every curvaceous inch of her body, but had left the upper swell of her creamy breasts and one long, long leg exposed. The leg men attending the black-tie function that night had salivated when they’d looked at her, the breast men had their tongues hanging out, and every straight man with a pulse had wanted her.
That was Serena.
Help her echoed in his head like a stuck record. He recognized Henry Morgan’s voice, weak though it was. His old mentor was not only Head of the Wizard Council, he also worked in some scientific capacity for the Campbell Foundation that Serena now ran. He’d been “calling” Duncan for the past three days.
“Help her.”
The only “her” he and Henry had in common was Serena.
Serena was Henry Morgan’s goddaughter, and the old man loved and treated her as his own. Which had sometimes made his and Duncan’s friendship difficult.
“Help her. Stop her.”
A running litany with growing telepathic urgency but no clear explanation. Why didn’t the guy just pick up the damned phone? Henry was one of the few people who had Duncan’s private cell number. He knew he was impossible to reach, but Henry could have left a voice mail. He would have returned the call as soon as he was able.
God only knew, he’d tried to call Henry after the first mental SOS. Henry must be off doing Council business and unavailable. Telepathic communication, however iffy it may be, must’ve been Henry’s only way of getting through to him.
While Duncan waited to hear directly from his friend, he’d gone ahead and sent a few guys to see what Serena was up to.
Henry’s insistence that he help her, and Chang’s untimely return, were indicative of something. What, he had no idea. Now he realized it was time to pay both Henry and Serena a visit. If nothing else, it would be amusing to see if he could get a civil answer out of her. Probably not.
He’d contact both of them later this evening when he returned to London, he decided. See what was what. Helping Chang off the table, he noticed that the guy’s stick-straight black hair was covered with sand, as if he’d rolled around on a beach. Interesting.
Albert Chang ran a shaky hand over his jaw, his eyes still a little glassy, his breathing ragged. His triangular face flushed with embarrassment as he saw the other wizards in the room. “I can t-try again.”
“Don’t sweat it.” Duncan crumpled Serena’s note and lobbed it into the trash can in the corner. He could almost feel her animosity radiating off the light orange-colored, flowery-scented paper. “The others will keep tabs on her.”
“Man, I’m sorry, Edg—”
Duncan sent the kid home.
The men picked up their scattered papers and resumed their seats. “That was interesting,” Jordan said mildly, r
eaching for his pen. “Are you using Halves as minions these days?”
“Half” was the term for someone with muted wizard powers. Their claim to fame was that they couldn’t be detected by full-blooded wizards, which was why Duncan had sent the three to watch over Serena. They had a few powers of their own, but nothing major. They were neither fish nor fowl. Not fully integrated in the wizard world, but not part of the non-wizard world either.
“Just a little side job,” Duncan told them. Prost and Jensen had more experience working side jobs for him than Chang. Serena wasn’t going to know they were around.
Satisfied that he still had the Serena problem covered, Duncan glanced around. “Where were we?”
Zzzft. Orange lightning fizzled and blinked. “Ah, shit,” he muttered, shimmering all the shit off the table before it got soaked.
A saturated Eric Prost, swearing a blue streak, crashed into the spot in the middle of the table that Chang had just vacated. The coral Post-it note protruding from the top of his shirt pocket was dry, and read: And this!
Duncan got rid of the puddles and crushed the note in his fist. This was just bullshit, not to mention a serious waste of his time. “Get anything?”
“Other than she’s drop-dead gorgeous with a temper to match that red hair?” Gingerly, Prost swung himself off the table. “No.”
Duncan rubbed a hand over his jaw. “See anything suspicious? Dangerous? Out of place?”
“Not in the forty-eight hours I was tailing her. Just so you know, Mongolia is having an unseasonably hot January, and it’s one hundred and nine in the Gobi desert right now.”
Duncan was feeling a lot hotter. “Miss Brightman returned Chang as well,” he said through gritted teeth.
“You mean Mrs. Campbell? Yeah,” Prost said with a grimace. “She let me know in no uncertain terms that my presence was far from welcome. That woman can yell without raising her voice. Scary, that. Want me to go back in?”
Campbell. Right. As if he could damn well forget. She’d married. And buried Ian Campbell last year. “No. Jensen’s still th—”
Zzft.
“God damn it!”
It was the weakest of the three lightning flashes; Serena sucked at creating fire. Tom Jensen landed on all fours, just shy of the table, tucked and rolled, then sprayed water in all directions like a dog after a swim. He staggered to his feet and handed Duncan his note. It had been attached to his shirt with what looked like a diaper pin.
“I’m trying to help her,” Duncan said more to himself than the others. He glanced at the note: And this one as well! “What the hell is she doing sending you guys back?”
“Says, and I quote—she doesn’t need your freaking watchdogs following her around, and not to send any more. She’ll send all of us back to you, and she won’t be nice about it.” Prost caught Jensen’s eye before both men turned back to Duncan. “Think she pretty much means it, boss.”
“I gotta tell you, Duncan,” Jensen grimaced, tucking his shirt into his shorts and looking both embarrassed and annoyed. “That woman scares the shit outta me.”
Both men had clearly been out in the desert sun. Even in the few days they’d been wherever Serena was—the Gobi for Christ’s sake?—their skin was already painfully red and peeling.
“Nobody’s gonna hurt that one, believe me,” Jensen muttered. “She’d flay their skin open with that tongue of hers before anyone could draw a weapon.”
“But she was real sweet to everyone else.” Prost picked at the red skin flaking on his nose. “Man, that woman can sure switch moods on a dime.”
Yeah. Duncan knew that only too well. “Thanks for your help, guys. You did good.” All things considered. These half-wizards weren’t employed by T-FLAC, they weren’t trained in covert ops. They’d done as he’d asked. Kept a low profile, stayed invisible, and watched over Serena. Doing what, he wasn’t sure.
“Where can I send you?” Each man told him where they wanted to be teleported, and Duncan sent them on their way. The sizable deposits in their bank accounts would come from his own pocket.
“What’cha do?” Brown asked curiously, tapping out a beat with his pen on the table. “Send those yahoo Halves to observe a female tango?”
Worse than a female tango. “Serena Brightman Campbell.” The name said it all.
“Ah. The bimbo who married that multimillionaire old guy, Ian Campbell?” Chapman asked curiously. “He died last year, didn’t he?”
“Yeah.” They’d been married all of two years. It had made Duncan’s flesh crawl, seeing the front-page pictures in all the newspapers. Thirty-year-old Serena and that old fart arm-in-arm at her white—white for Christ’s sake!—wedding three years ago. There was only one reason a beautiful young woman married a guy like Campbell. Duncan figured not even the combo of Serena and a blue pill was going to get a rise out of the seventy-nine-year-old groom.
Still, they’d both been grinning like besotted fools in the pictures. Duncan knew that forcing himself to look at every one of the pictures was like holding his tongue to dry ice. Stupid. Unproductive and painful.
Serena Brightman Campbell had gotten the lion’s share of the estate when her doddering old husband had reached his expiration date. Word out there was that Campbell’s two sons, older than Serena by a good thirty years, were gunning for blood. Their pretty young stepmother’s blood. All of it.
By calling out to him telepathically, Henry Morgan had made Serena’s problem Duncan’s problem.
“She’s an old friend,” Duncan said, figuring discretion was the better part of valor. “I hired a few guys to watch her back.”
“You gonna send more Halves to keep an eye on your ‘friend,’ Edge?” Noah Hart asked curiously. “I’ve seen pictures. She’s beautiful. Shitloads of drachmas as well. Too plum an assignment for a Half. Beauty, bucks, and she’s a full wizard to boot. You’ve got some downtime coming. Maybe this requires your personal attention.”
“Not interested.” One freaking Curse on his head was enough. “Let’s finish this up so we can get out of here. Landis?”
“Assignments,” Gary Landis brought them back to business. “It’s not that far off course, but I’ll look into the new trajectory of that North Korean satellite.”
“Do that,” Duncan said absently, forcibly dragging his thoughts away from Serena and back to the task at hand. “If Lark brought up the slight shift as an anomaly, then you can count on there being something fishy going on. Chapman, work with him, see what you can discover.”
Another critical situation on the table was the brutal murders of two high-level wizards. The entire wizard community, small as it was, was in an uproar about the killings. “Let’s get to the murders,” Duncan said grimly. It was rare, if not unheard of, for a wizard to be murdered. Unless he was old, sick, or had somehow lost his powers. But in this case, both men had been in their prime.
“Whoever this son of a bitch is, he’s fucking powerful. Either the killer stripped them of their powers before he got the drop on them, or he was more powerful than they were, and took them. Despite their strength. Either scenario is serious, and chilling.”
The men started discussing various hypothetical scenarios, taking into account the powers of the two wizards murdered.
Duncan sat back in his chair to listen. The loss of his own powers was his Achilles’ heel. Even though he came from five centuries of wizards, he wasn’t sure if/how/when those powers could be, or would be, stripped from him. The Edge family had received their powers through an ancient Curse, and had only been wizards for five hundred years.
I gift you my powers in memory of me, the witch Nairne had told his ancestor Magnus Edridge when she’d cursed him and his descedants.
The whole thing went: Duty o’er love was the choice you did make/My love you did spurn, my heart you did break/Your penance to pay, no pride you shall gain/Three sons on three sons find nothing but pain/ I gift you my powers in memory of me/ The joy of love no son shall ever see/ When a Lifemate is
chosen by the heart of a son/No protection can be given, again I have won/His pain will be deep, her death will be swift/Inside his heart a terrible rift/Only freely given will this curse be done/ To break the spell, three must work as one.
Since he and his brothers had long ago agreed that the Curse would end with them, the threats were immaterial as far as Duncan was concerned. But somewhere in the back of his mind had always been the concern that if, somehow, the Curse were ever broken, the three of them would be stripped of their powers.
His brothers might not give a shit if they remained wizards or not.
But magic was who Duncan was.
Since he’d never do anything to jeopardize that, he straightened and refocused on the conversation.
“While the appropriate people been notified,” he told the others flatly, “the Psi branch is directly responsible for apprehending the killer. And make no mistake. He will be caught.”
The alliance forged between the wizards and the counterterrorist agency was crucial. The psychic phenomena branch of T-FLAC, known as T-FLAC /psi, had been started some twenty years ago. It was in everyone’s best interests to catch the killer sooner rather than later.
“Jordan, Brown, Hart, and I will investigate the murders.” Duncan picked up the communication Lark had sent minutes before Chang’s untimely appearance. “We’d better hope we catch this guy before he strikes again.”
“Amen to that.” Noah Hart closed his notebook computer and stuffed it into a black case before getting to his feet. “Whoever this guy is, he has some kind of plan. But I sure as shit can’t see any pattern here. Other than that he’s snuffing wizards.”
Jordan rose and shoved his chair under the table. “I’ll head to South America. Hart, you want to take Asia? See what we can find there? Edge, aren’t you a friend of Trey Culver? That dickh—guy’s a social animal. Plenty of time on his hands. Seems to know everyone that’s everyone in the wizard community. Might be worth contacting him to check out what he’s heard.”
“Yeah. Trey’s on my list.”
