by Rachel Shane
And then Derek had disappeared without a trace, moving out of his apartment in the middle of the night and leaving no forwarding address.
Cole’s whole body felt primed and charged as his legs stomped across the room with a heavy kind of march. A battle march. He readied his weapons for attack, his words.
Derek stayed exactly where he was, continuing to glare at Cole, continuing to sip his drink casually. He forced Cole to come to him in a clear game of chicken. Cole practically mowed over people to get there and when he did, he moved right up into Derek’s face, staying silent for long enough for Derek’s mouth to pop open. Derek blinked first. Cole won after all.
“So,” Derek said, a shit eating grin etched on his face. “From your expression, I gather you’re surprised to see me here.”
Cole grabbed a fig and brie tart off a tray and stuffed his mouth, taking his time chewing and using the same move Eli had used on him. “Not surprised. After all, you’ve made a habit of cheating. I’m sure you cheated your way into this.”
“Ah. I see you’ve been talking to Britta. Send her my regards, will you?” Derek tipped back his drink. “And I’m sorry to break it to you, Bud. But I didn’t cheat my way in. Someone had to drop out because of an emergency this morning and I was next in line.”
Cole flinched at the word bud. And then again at the fact that someone got eliminated so suddenly. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. “What kind of emergency?”
Derek shrugged. “Freak accident from what I hear. Struck by a fallen telephone pole. Critical condition.”
A cold crackling sensation raced up Cole’s spine. Freak accident. Cole guessed it wasn’t freak at all. It was preemptive after McCoy discovered the victim had an affinity for magic.
Derek set his drink down on a passing tray and then plucked two more from it, handing one to Cole. “To good friends and good competition.”
Cole clinked glasses as his stomach filled with dread. The tournament hadn’t even began and already Cole would have to up his ante.
CHAPTER FIVE
DELILAH
Delilah couldn’t step foot inside the Golden Leaf—or within a fifty feet radius thanks to Kendrick’s new age restraining order, a contract she’d tried to break numerous times. But like her Bindings and Entanglements class from law school that reappeared bigger and bolder on her schedule every time she tried to drop the unwanted class, every time she tried to break the protection spell, it came back stronger. Fiercer. With harsher punishments for those who dared try to cross it. She couldn’t step near the Golden Leaf…but the ballroom at the generic Las Vegas convention center down the strip was fair game. And Delilah guessed Kendrick had chosen this location for the famous pre-tournament banquet there for the sole reason of sussing out anyone with a proclivity to magic without actually harming them. She’d seen it before, when she was dating Kendrick. Back when she could and did waltz through the Golden Leaf like she, too, owned it. Back then, when Kendrick’s magical sensors lit up like five alarm fires, he’d send his team to swoop in and eliminate the entrant before the game even started. It would leak to the press as a cheating scandal. Or some other factor that violated the clauses of the tournament. There would be hard to deny evidence like a video tape. Or email trails. Delilah wasn’t sure if Kendrick employed magic or skilled computer hackers to plant the false evidence on the victim, but it didn’t matter. It worked.
Of course, most of the victims had no idea they had an affinity for magic. Most of them probably just had the spark sitting latent in their blood, untouched and undeveloped. Magic was something you were born with. Nature chose you, not genetics. But there were a few that did know. That retaliated with hexes and magical force. That always lost against Kendrick, and when they lost, it wasn’t email trails that eliminated them…it was a body bag. He was a walking contradiction, despising cheaters but cheating at every corner when it came to himself.
Delilah didn’t have an invitation to the tournament but she had a fool proof brew of compulsion tea to fool the bouncers, who were usually of the non-magical variety. Sure, Kendrick’s magical sensors would pick it up instantly once she slipped inside the room but so would her face, so it wasn’t any different. She brewed the tea earlier today and slipped it in a thermos in her car before dusk settled. Before her vigilante curse seized her. She’d just finished her makeup and slipping into the lacy ball gown she opted for instead of a slinky black dress that might help her blend in somewhat. She figured if she was going to waltz into the room for the sole purpose of gaining attention, she might as well go all out with it, bustle and all. Delilah stretched her fingers behind her back to zip up the dress when all of a sudden she bolted up right like a dog sensing a sound a mile away.
An itch pulsed through her body, growing stronger and more intense with every bulging second. Her legs felt restless, like they couldn’t stay still. She abandoned zipping up her dress and raced to her car, the alert blotting out all thoughts in her mind except one. Someone needs help. Her foot slammed down on the gas, her hands twisting the wheel on auto-pilot, following a GPS deep within her. She had no idea where the vigilante curse was taking her, but she sped through yellow lights at twenty miles over the speed limit. Who cared about getting a ticket when someone’s life was on the line? The curse steered her from the Strip, carrying her ten minutes into the outskirts of Vegas, to a rusty, dilapidated playground where a group of teens were lounging on the climbing apparatus. One boy dangled upside down from the monkey bars, his shirt hanging over his face. A girl lounged on the slide, combat boots kicked up on the brushed metal. A few others sat on a platform at the top of interwoven metallic bars. Delilah slammed her car into park and wrenched open her door, causing the kids to glance up at her. She marched toward them with a fierce look on her face, arms crossed, full skirt swishing against her sweaty legs.
Instantly, they leaped off the platform and scattered as fast as their legs could carry them into backyards of neighboring houses. Delilah kept marching toward the jungle gym as her itch subsided into a light tingle. Whatever she’d been sent here to do, she’d succeeded. She zipped up her dress and spotted it. Two six-packs of beers. A few were popped open, the contents only a third of the way empty. She let out a large sigh. Underage drinking. That was why her curse had ripped her from her life and deposited here. Who knows what would have happened though if she hadn’t shown up. Maybe one of the kids would get behind a wheel and crash into someone innocent.
With that thought, she dumped out the contents of each beer into a trash can and wiped her hands on her dress, choosing to think of this as another win and not simply a nuisance.
Two more vigilante calls kept her away from the banquet hall for another hour. The first had her handing over twenty bucks to cover someone’s groceries after the woman left her wallet at home. The second involved breaking up a shouting match between two tourists who were indecisive about where to have dinner. Sometimes her curse prevented real crimes. Burglaries. Gang knife fights. She once saved someone from identity theft. But these small time acts of kindness were why she did this. So she could help people who needed her, in whatever form it took. Money. Mediation. Life saving. She would do it all. But she also had to get to the banquet hall.
She was on her way there when her vigilante curse pinged again. She started to let out a groan but her mind locked in on the curse’s location. The banquet hall itself.
She stepped on the gas, cold panic sluicing through her blood. Her mind flashed on all potential scenarios of victims, all of them with Cole’s face. Her knuckles turned white as she gripped the steering wheel.
Delilah parked her car across three different spaces and kicked open the door without bothering to remove her keys from the ignition. In her glazed over vigilante state, she had enough clarity to let out a thankful breath at her own foresight to brew the compulsion tea in advance. All it would take was one drop seeping into someone’s flesh and they would fall under Delilah’s beck and call. At least for a few min
utes. She plucked the thermos from the cup holder and stomped toward the hall, her mind focused on only one thing. Saving the person in danger.
Two big burly bouncers stood outside the entrance while a woman with a clipboard and a headset paced in front. She glanced up at Delilah. “Name?”
Normally Delilah preferred the subtle route when dousing someone with the compulsion tea. A quick ruse. An accidental spill. But she had no time for subtleties. Someone in there needed help. Someone that might be Cole. Delilah unscrewed the cap of the thermos and tossed the liquid in a spray toward the three door keepers. The woman shrieked, pawing at her dress as the bouncers rushed forward.
“Stop,” Delilah commanded, infusing extra power into her voice.
The bouncers each froze in mid-air like suspended cartoon animation. The woman’s hands paused exactly where she had been rubbing, on her breasts.
Delilah released a breath. Good, it worked. “Let me inside and do not tell anyone I’m here.”
The bouncers stepped aside to let Delilah pass. She brushed between them, then glanced behind them once more. “Actually, you have all been dismissed. Go home, get a good night’s sleep, and when you wake up in the morning, you’ll decide you do not want to work with Kendrick anymore. In fact, you don’t want to be in Las Vegas anymore. Pack a small bag and leave the state immediately.”
There, that should save them from both Kendrick’s control and his wrath.
Inside, Delilah didn’t even need to search the room to find her victim. Her legs carried her right there. Every person in the place blurred in her vision, unimportant except the girl and guy in the far corner. The blonde twisted to grab a mini quiche from a passing tray and the guy made his move, cupping his hand over her champagne glass as he dumped a small vial of liquid into her drink and then hid it in his palm until he could slide the evidence into his pocket. When she turned around, he clinked his glass with hers to get her to drink. She picked hers up and lifted it toward her lips.
Delilah’s stomach clenched and she broke out into a sprint, mowing people down to get there fast. But she was too far away. So she did the next best thing. She used magic to send a gust of wind whipping across the room, making people’s hair fly upward. The gust knocked over glasses in its path, glass shattering all over the floor, until it blew into the woman so hard, she stumbled backward and slammed into the wall. Her palms opened and the glass fell from her hands, breaking on impact. The guy who had tried to roofie her opened his mouth in horror. Horror that his crime had failed, of course.
People were rubbing their hands over their arms, shivering from the sharp blast of cold air or hopping out of the way of the new mess covering the floors. Delilah overheard a woman asking a waiter to lower the air conditioning. Someone else declared there must have been an earthquake.
Delilah kept stomping toward the man and woman but someone else got there first. A guy with a fedora with red hair poking out the bottom. He placed his hands on the culprit’s shoulder and gave him a polite smile. “Sir, I’m Johnny, one of the Producers and I’m going to need you to leave. You’ve been disqualified.”
The guy didn’t even question it. He simply walked right out the front door as if he were in a zombie trance.
Delilah glared at the fedora guy, her eyes falling to the geode watch on his wrist. Sometimes the geode took the form of a necklace, or a ring, or even a dick piercing, but it was always somewhere on his body to keep the glamour in effect. Kendrick.
Her breath caught at his new glamour, new face. Half a foot shorter than last time. One hundred percent douchier. He replaced the hard chisel of his cheek bones and his smoldering brown eyes that sent shivers down her spine for days with a pudgy leprechaun face, pointy ears poking out on the sides of his hat and all. Delilah drew in a shaky breath, her bones feeling strangely watery in his presence. Or maybe it was the swell of magic, practically suffocating her as it buzzed against her skin like a prickle.
Kendrick’s jaw clenched when he spun around and spotted her. “Hello, Delilah,” he said in that velvety, breathy way of his that used to make her weak in the knees.
“Ken—” she started to say but he waggled a finger in her face to shut her up. Her tongue continued in the revolution of his name but nothing came out. She tried to scream but her mouth only opened in silence.
“Uh uh uh,” he sang, still wagging his finger back and forth in front of her face as if she were a naughty child. “Name’s Johnny today.” He pursed his lips. “Shame you’re here. I was enjoying playing a smarmy producer.” He sighed. “But I’ll enjoy finding a new face for tomorrow more.”
Her fists clenched against the urge to strike him. Weren’t ex-boyfriends just supposed to be annoying on social media?
With a wave of his palm, her voice slammed back into her, lodging like a bug stuck in her throat. She gasped and choked for a few seconds, her hand flailing in front of her neck.
“You’re always much more enjoyable when you wield your witty comebacks.” He placed a palm on her shoulders and led her farther into the corner, backing her into it until her shoulder blades slammed against two joining walls. His body stepped in front of hers, blocking any exit. The threat raised the hair on Delilah’s arms. Her eyes locked over his shoulder where Cole stared at her in a shock of horror.
Kendrick whipped around, searching for the source of her attention, but Cole had already returned to sipping his drink, his mouth stretched in a smile toward a guy with shoulder length hair. “In cahoots with someone?” Kendrick asked, guessing her lapse in judgment.
Delilah struggled to brush past him. She wasn’t a poker player but she knew how to bluff. “Just scoping out my escape routes. You know what they say, never walk into a trap without a backup plan.”
Kendrick let out a sharp, elated laugh. “And why exactly would you walk into this particular trap? Itching for closure after our breakup?” He raised his red-tinted brow, the freckles on his face stretching from his devious grin.
“I think you killing my parents was plenty of closure.”
He clucked his tongue. “I had nothing to do with that.”
Delilah’s stomach clenched at his words. “I’m not an idiot.”
“Oh? But you waltzed in here. I’d say that act requires a complete defiance of common sense.”
Delilah’s fingers slipped into the folds of her dress. She grazed her fingertips over the lacy material until she found the weapon she’d stashed, smooth against her skin. She plucked out the tiny sewing needle, and without hesitation, stabbed it directly into his hand to draw blood. Maybe she didn’t need Cole to win the tournament. She could end this right now with a single prick, Sleeping Beauty-style.
Except the sharp silver needle bent like it was made out of rubber, bouncing right back into form. It didn’t even leave an impression on his skin. When she lifted it back up and tested it against her own finger, a bead of blood popped.
“As I was saying, I think you’re declaration about not being an idiot is inaccurate.” He gestured to the needle with his chin. “Furthermore, do you think I’m stupid? I’ve disabled use of all weapons, both practical and magical. Nothing you do.” He studied her. “Or say.” His eyes focused on her lips, where any kind of incantation or curse would flow. “Won’t even penetrate me.”
She let out a large growl.
“However, I can’t say the same for you.” His mouth moved fast and silent, uttering legalese under his breath. Suddenly a gust of wind swirled around them, whipping hard and fierce until her vision blurred. Her hair slapped her cheeks, as hard and abrasive as crow bars. Words rushed away, replaced only with a high pitched bleat of high winds. Icy coldness surrounded her, squeezing every pore until they all burned with frost bite. She tried to scream but her voice was snatched by the raging wind.
As quickly as the tornado had swept her up, the wind subsided, leaving Delilah’s cheeks stinging, her eyes burning, and her stomach roiling. Her pulse quickened as her vision returned and met a dark, dingy basement r
ather than the glitz and glam of the banquet hall. A sharp jolt of fear rocketed through her.
“Where did you take me?” Delilah jerked forward, but met resistance. Ropes scraped against her wrists, blood straining in her veins as her arms dangled above her heads. More ropes encircled her ankles, like she was a dead chicken carcass tied up on a spit to roast.
Kendrick flitted around the room, lighting white and black candles and humming something to himself. His fedora glamour had faded back into the chiseled one that made Delilah’s heart quicken, both from nostalgia and terror. His dark hair and dark eyes blended into the dark room. He picked up a glinting silver dagger from a nearby table, whistling as he did so.
Delilah thrashed against the wall. “What are you doing?”
Kendrick pricked his own finger. He added a drop of his blood to a vial and rubbed a clean cloth back and forth over the dagger as he tilted his head at her. “The same thing you were planning to do to me, of course.”
She rattled against the ropes with all her energy, panic pulsing with a techno beat deep in her gut.
Kendrick swaggered around the room, dumping various herbs and ingredients into a boiling cauldron. Of course Kendrick used a cauldron. He loved to be cliché like that. Delilah preferred the modern equivalent: a hot pot.
He picked up the dagger again and came toward her, pursing his lips as if he were an artist assessing a canvas.
