Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Margo Bond Collins

  “So what do you want to do while you’re in New York?”

  “You aren’t understanding me,” Becca said. “If you won’t help me, I’ll go sit at his door again until he comes home.”

  Lange sat up straight.

  “No,” he said. He put his hand across the table, touched her hand, thought better of it and shook his head as rested he his hands on the edge of the table, tapping his fingertips quickly. “No. You can’t do that right now. I know this is the most important thing in your world, but there’s always stuff going on that’s the biggest thing in someone’s world. And Carter deals with all of them. And right now, I need you to believe me that you are not the most important person in his world, and yours is not the most important problem in his world.”

  “Then the faster he talks to me, the sooner he gets rid of me,” Becca said.

  “He will send you away and never speak to you again,” Lange said. “And that’s if you’re lucky.”

  “Then why aren’t you helping him? If it’s so important?”

  Lange’s fingers hadn’t slowed.

  “Because I’d just get in the way. I show up and kill things. I’m not a researcher, and I’m not an interrogator. He…” He looked at the table with a slight smile. “He’s an artist at it. I mean, it makes sense, considering. But I’ve never seen anyone better.”

  “Considering what?” Becca asked, her interest piqued. He shook his head.

  “Too much story with no point,” he said. “Come on. Are you done?”

  She flicked her fingers over her plate.

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded, getting up and grabbing her hand.

  “Come on,” he said. “What do you have to wear?”

  She tipped her head at him and he grinned.

  “That’s what I thought. If you’re going to go out in New York, you at least need to be dressed for it.”

  “I’m not going out in New York,” she said. He grinned.

  “Oh, yes you are.”

  She opened her mouth to argue, but they were already out the door and halfway down the street.

  He took her into shops where the women fawned over her retro look and her sense of style, and then promptly started handing her things they thought would suit her that looked nothing like what she wore.

  Which was unavoidable, because nothing she saw in any of the stores looked like what she wore - she’d made most of it herself, and what she hadn’t, she’d bought from Makkai shops around the country.

  She did like the jewelry. Myriad fine chains woven into patterns with dramatic pendants, sturdy leather with relief carvings or metalwork. She didn’t let him buy her any of it, though, because while it was a reasonable argument that her clothes stuck out literally everywhere they went, she didn’t need new jewelry, and buying jewelry meant something.

  “I don’t want to go out with the demons again,” she said.

  “So we won’t,” Lange said easily. “Hey. Hey. When’s your birthday?”

  She twisted her mouth to the side and he grinned.

  “When is it?”

  She told him.

  “That was only a couple of weeks ago,” he said. “You’re eighteen. You have ID?”

  “Yes,” she said. He nodded quickly.

  “We’re celebrating.”

  “No,” she said. “Makkai don’t celebrate birthdays after sixteen.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because any more are just old,” she said with a smile. He laughed.

  “Here’s to that, then,” he said, “but when you’re with us, every birthday is a big deal. Because we don’t get many.” His enthusiasm was damped slightly for a moment, then he shook it off. “And in the real world, eighteen is a big deal. Up there with twenty-one for worth celebrating.”

  “But I’m not one of you,” she said.

  “Are today, babe,” he said with a grin. “Go pull the tags off of that stuff and let’s go.”

  She started to argue again and he waved her away. She sighed with exasperation and went into a dressing room and changed.

  She almost didn’t recognize herself. Makkai clothes were heavy, with lots of fabric for hiding things and for being difficult to get through to skin underneath. Her skirts barely fit back into the shopping bag. What she wore instead was thin and close-fitting. It made her curvy in a way that she was unaccustomed to, and it made her hair huge. She looked pale against the dark of the clothes, and she wished momentarily for a rouge for her lips and her cheeks, then pressed that thought away with scorn.

  She would not change herself because she was in new clothes. She was Makkai, and she was not trying to impress the man outside of the dressing room.

  She was not.

  Lange grinned when she came out, nodding.

  “Wow,” he said. “I mean, the other stuff, there’s nothing wrong with it, but… wow.”

  She gave him a faux exasperated look and he grinned wider. Offered her his elbow.

  “Not a chance,” she said, sliding past him with a look that made him laugh.

  “Yup,” he said. “That’s the girl I know.”

  She shook her head, feeling her curls bustle across her back.

  “Come on,” he said. He went out and looked up at the sky. “We should be able to get there by dark.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a few friends who have good contacts in the human world, and they tell me where the big parties are going to be,” he said. “If we can get there by the time the sun goes down, we shouldn’t have to stand in line.”

  “Stand in line?” Becca asked. “Really?”

  “It’s what you do,” Lange said. “I’m special most places, but the humans don’t know that and I have to stand in line like everyone else.”

  “To do what?” Becca asked.

  “Go inside,” he said. She lowered her face and looked at him. “Go inside,” he said again. “Sit, drink. Dance some.”

  “You dance?” she asked, even though she’d guessed it.

  “Of course,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  That cocky brow. It was fake.

  “Are you ever real?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” he said playfully. “But not tonight.”

  “What if I’m only interested in real?” she asked.

  “So you’re interested?” he teased. “Thought you thought I was old?”

  “Maybe I’m old, too, now,” she said, having no idea where this was coming from. He laughed.

  “What a difference a few months makes,” he said. “No. I’m not real very much. Real is heavy and dark and mostly boring. And tonight… tonight, I want to go out with you and have fun. And that’s going to be pretend, because we don’t have fun. We don’t remember how.”

  “That’s tragic,” Becca said without dropping her smile. “What kind of people forget how to have fun?”

  “Ones who don’t have any Makkai in their lives reminding them,” he said with a wide smile. “So? You’ll come out, just have fun with me? Stop asking about Carter, worry about it tomorrow?”

  “You’ll help me get some time to talk to him?” Becca asked.

  “You think I’m keeping you away for my own benefit?” he asked. “Do you really think I’d do that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her tone light but her eyes serious. “I’m not sure I’ve ever met you.”

  He nodded, stopping in front of her, causing a disturbance as people tried to get past them on the sidewalk. He took her hands in his and looked her hard in the eye.

  “Life and death,” he said. “That’s why I am what I am. Because life and death matters. And Bella is life and death for more than herself. I know that. I will not do anything that risks her life. When I tell you you aren’t going to be able to get Carter’s attention right now… that’s the truth.”

  She read his eyes, blinking once, twice very slowly, and he held her gaze. He was a powerful man, underneath the play and the bravado. She no
dded.

  “Okay,” she said. “I believe you.”

  He nodded and spun on a toe, coming to walk next to her again. She glanced at him.

  “It doesn’t mean I’m just going to go along with anything,” she said. “I know how to have fun, and I see no proof that this is going to be anything like fun.”

  He grinned, the big personality coming back over top of whatever it was she’d just seen.

  “That’s a challenge, ma’am. One I intend to rise up to.”

  “Mmm,” Becca said. He grinned and picked up his pace a fraction more.

  The party was at an abandoned warehouse by the docks. It smelled of fish and generic dirt, and there was a line.

  Becca thought this might be approaching the stupidest thing she’d ever seen, but she let Lange’s enthusiasm carry her, and they got their spot in line.

  “So I’d ask where you’re from,” Lange said and Becca laughed.

  “A gypsy doesn’t have an answer to that.”

  “Do you have any place that feels like home to you?” he asked.

  “Do you?” she answered.

  “New Orleans,” he said.

  “You’re from there?” she asked and he nodded.

  “I should have ended up with Peter, but I haven’t got the magic for it. My parents are into some really weird stuff, so I knew who Peter was, and he pushed me at Argo when I got too persistent for him to train me.”

  “Your parents are still there?” Becca asked. He shook his head.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “Haven’t talked to them in a long time.”

  She frowned.

  “That’s sad.”

  “No, it’s necessity,” he said. “We cut off contact with anyone we aren’t going to be able to protect every single day. Makes it so that they aren’t useful targets. If I never know what happens to them, you can’t get to me through them.”

  Becca thought of her infrequent calls to her mom. She didn’t live for them, certainly, but she couldn’t imagine how it would break her heart to know she’d never hear her mom’s voice again.

  “What about you?” he asked, taking a fresh breath and forcing a bit of bounce into it again.

  “What about?” she asked.

  “You have a gypsy mom somewhere?”

  She laughed.

  “Somewhere,” she answered. “A dad, too, even more somewhere than she is.”

  “They aren’t together?” Lange asked. Becca shook her head.

  “I thought gypsies settled, at some point, to raise families and stuff,” Lange said.

  “Some of us,” Becca said. “The road is pretty powerful, though.”

  “I’m sorry,” the man in front of them said. “Did you say you’re a gypsy?”

  “Yeah,” Becca said.

  “That’s so cool,” he said. “Do you tell fortunes?”

  “Twenty bucks,” Becca said, catching Lange’s surprise with a certain amount of satisfaction.

  The man dug in his pocket and handed her a bill. She took his hand and ran her thumb along the lines there for a moment, just long enough to get more attention from the rest of people in line.

  “You,” she said, looking up. “You are way too trusting to ever be rich.”

  She handed him his money back and shook her head.

  “You aren’t a gypsy?” he asked.

  “Oh, I am,” she said. “But I don’t do fortunes for money any more than you play basketball for money because you’re black.”

  He scratched his chin as several of the women nearby giggled.

  “He your boyfriend?” the man asked.

  “Nope,” Becca said. He nodded.

  “I’ll see you inside, then,” he told her. “I’m going to buy you a drink.”

  “Under age, dude,” Lange said. Becca glowered at him and he shrugged.

  “Matters here,” he said. The man in line dropped his head forward.

  “Seriously?” he asked. “You aren’t twenty one?”

  “Old soul,” she said. He sucked air through his teeth and shook out a hand.

  “Damn.”

  She grinned and shrugged one shoulder.

  “I’ll take the drink anyway,” she said. He laughed.

  “We’ll see,” he said. The line shifted forward and Lange put his hand to the small of Becca’s back.

  “You trying to make me jealous?” he asked.

  “No,” she said simply and he nodded.

  “No, that’s just how you are.”

  “Take it or leave it,” she answered, and he lifted an eyebrow playfully. She refused to back down and they moved forward toward the door without looking forward. He nodded.

  “You do know how to have fun,” he said.

  “I do,” she agreed.

  It took two more surges of the line for them to get in, and Becca wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but this clearly wasn’t it.

  Projectors put videos up on screens all around the huge room and waitresses walked around in short skirts carrying trays of drinks above their heads.

  “You drinking?” the man at the door asked as Becca looked in past him.

  “No,” she said absently, giving him her license. He looked at it briefly and she went in without Lange. She heard his complaint as she walked away and it made her smile.

  The music was loud; small, tall tables with stools ringed a large dance floor with an elevated cage in the middle of it.

  Girls up in the cage made a scene of themselves and men at tables and in the crowd watched, some more openly than others. Becca wouldn’t have gone so far as to say she would have been uncomfortable in her own clothes, here, but she certainly stood out less than she would have.

  Lange caught up with her and put an arm around her waist.

  “You hungry?” he asked into her ear.

  “Is that supposed to mean something?” she answered, head still up.

  “No,” he laughed. “They have food. Couple of chefs went in on the place with the party guys, and there are people who just come here to eat.”

  She grimaced.

  “It’s loud.”

  “That’s the point,” he said. “No place better to lose yourself than in the middle of a noisy crowd.”

  She shrugged.

  “I could eat.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll go find us a table and order something. Don’t get lost.”

  She grinned. That was something she was good at, the getting lost. She nodded and moved away, sliding behind a waitress in toward the more dense section of crowd, where the dancing was more social and less musical. She made eye contact with a couple of women her own age and laughed, and they laughed back, and then she was dancing with them, arms up over her head, hair wild and catching at everything, hips so very hippy. She had no idea how long Lange waited for her, but eventually she extricated herself from the crowd of men and women and found him where he was munching on something battered and fried.

  “You take to it well,” he said as she sat. “Not so much of an outsider, are you? Down deep?”

  “I’m not the outsider,” she said with a smile. “You are.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I have no idea what that means.”

  She laughed.

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  They ate and watched people dancing. Becca saw a couple at the next table, watched as they leaned in closer and closer to talk, and then he was chewing on her and her hands were on his face. Completely unaware of her, mere feet away, watching them quite openly. Lange followed her gaze and laughed.

  “No better place,” he said.

  She finished off the basket of breaded crustaceans and sucked her fingers clean.

  “You want to show them how it’s done?” Lange asked, leaning out over the table slightly on his elbows.

  She looked away.

  “I’m not sure you’ve got the goods,” she said casually, and he laughed, taking her hand by the fingers and sweeping her off of her stool and out into the cr
owd.

  The music had sort of a hypnotic rhythm, just now, and his hands found the middle of her back, down low, and the back of her neck, one of the most powerful leads she’d ever felt. Her cheekbone was against his jaw, just a slight rasp of stubble there and the heat of his face, the smell of his body and the feel of his hair as it brushed across her forehead.

  This wasn’t what she had expected, not what she’d been prepared for. She’d anticipated something livelier, flirtier, but this was exactly what suited him, she found, as his body moved next to hers. She found her heart racing and her hands tingling where she had to remember not to close them on his shirt.

  “I don’t do this,” he whispered into her ear. She hadn’t been aware of just how close his mouth was and it startled her, her head turning in toward him slightly. “I know you think I do, but I don’t.”

  “Do what?” she asked.

  “This,” he said. “I know better, know I can’t. I can’t do this.”

  “Then why are you?” she asked, turning further to look him in the eye.

  “Because there’s no one out there like you. Someone who can take care of herself, that no one can find. Happy.”

  She smiled to herself, and he kissed her temple, running his fingers up deeper into her hair. It made her scalp sizzle.

  They danced.

  He took her back to her hotel in sort of a muted mood. He held her hand closed in his, fingers twined through hers, and he didn’t seem to know what to say for the first time since she’d first met him. There was a sense of some sort of spell that, like a soap bubble, was poised to burst at any moment, that they wouldn’t even know it was going to happen until it did.

  The air was cool with the hint of rain to come, and the sidewalks were populated, but not busy like they’d been before.

  “Do you like your room okay?” he asked.

  “Not really,” she said. It wasn’t what she was supposed to say, but she wasn’t going to lie to him. That wasn’t who she was.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Lange asked. “I can make sure they fix it.”

  She laughed dropping her head to lean it against his shoulder.

  “It’s empty,” she said. “It’s completely clean and there aren’t any people in it.”

  “Is that an invitation?” he asked, his voice deep, low.