Semi-Charmed

by Isabel Jordan

  “Did the VCU get the guys who did it?”

  Mischa nodded. Lowering her voice to a near whisper, she said, “Two days after Riddick got out of the hospital, the cops found five guys on the front steps of the police station. They were bound and gagged, and they all had signed confessions pinned to their chests. Not to their shirts, mind you. Pinned to their chests.

  “Okay, eeewww,” Harper said with a shudder.

  “They confessed to attacking Riddick and to killing five other slayers. And…one of them was…uh, missing an arm.”

  Again, eeewww summed up Harper’s feelings nicely. “His arm had been cut off?”

  Mischa’s olive skin turned a bit pasty. “Not cut off.”

  Harper swallowed. Well, that explained how he’d managed to get a confession out of them.

  Okay, she needed to think this through logically. Not always her first impulse, logic, but it was worth a try.

  First of all, even though he’d—gulp—ripped a man’s arm off, Riddick could’ve easily killed his attackers, and he hadn’t. He’d handed—no pun intended—them over to the cops. That told Harper he probably wasn’t as cold and ruthless as Sentry legend made him out to be.

  “He saved me from that vamp last night,” she reasoned. And gave her his coat. Not exactly the actions of the big bad wolf. “I just don’t get the idea this guy’s a killer.”

  Mischa pushed her glasses up with her index finger and fixed Harper with a cold stare. “Make no mistake: Noah Riddick is a killer.”

  Harper’s chin came up involuntarily. “No, he was a killer. It was his job. But it’s not his job anymore. There’s no reason to assume he would hurt a human, especially a girl.”

  Besides, she thought, she'd seen her fair share of killers, and they didn't have eyes like Riddick’s. Warm eyes that she could feel on her even when she couldn’t see them on her. He had the kind of eyes that could stare at her intensely without freaking her out.

  Intuition told her Riddick wasn’t one of the bad guys. True, her intuition regarding men was often…off, but hell, she needed him. And no one’s intuition could be wrong all the time. As her mother always said, even a blind squirrel gets a nut every now and then. Maybe she was due to pick a winner.

  Mischa frowned. “There are things about his past you don’t know. You can’t trust him. He’s…unpredictable.”

  Harper thought of the stack of bills on her counter at home, the home she was in danger of losing. The only thing that was predictable in her life these days was imminent foreclosure proceedings on her building. She didn’t have the luxury of being afraid of Riddick. She needed him too much.

  “He was one of your slayers, wasn’t he?”

  “Yeah. I found him and recruited him.”

  “So, you probably have a list of his common aliases, right? Like the one he’s probably renting an apartment under?”

  Mischa sighed and let her head fall back on her neck, muttering something about wasted breath. “I imagine that if I refuse to give it to you, you’ll just find another way to get it.”

  Harper grinned. “I’m very resourceful, you know.”

  Mischa snorted. “That’s not really the word I’d use. Listen, just promise me you’ll be careful, all right?”

  Harper’s grin split wider. “I’m always careful.”

  Chapter Five

  “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”

  Ernest Hemingway said it; Noah Riddick lived it.

  Riddick lay on his bed, hands behind his head, and waited for the sun to go down. Waited until it was time to hunt again.

  Hunting was a habit he just couldn’t seem to break. He’d been trained from the age of sixteen to track vampires, and although he’d tried, he’d never been able to shut those instincts and that training off.

  Without a seer to guide him to new crimes, all he could do was work off of the list of known predators he’d kept in his head since Sentry disbanded, hunt them down one by one and deliver them to the cops like Christmas presents.

  Not nearly as satisfying as killing them had been, but at least he was getting vamps who were still slaves to the blood thirst off the streets and away from innocents.

  Riddick knew all about blood thirst. It was every bit as bone-deep and instinctual as his need to hunt. Blood thirst made men weak, unaware, and completely unconcerned with anyone’s needs but their own.

  He knew that in his need to satisfy the thirst, he was capable of hurting anyone at any time, which is why he’d chosen to isolate himself from society.

  He rarely regretted his isolation. Now he found himself despising it. Because of her. Harper Hall.

  Everything about her screamed life, reminding him that he really didn’t have one. She was the embodiment of living, breathing, energy. And a selfish part of him he thought he’d killed off long ago wanted to situate himself right in the middle of all that life and absorb it.

  Riddick groaned. Christ, give him a few more days alone with his thoughts and he’d be spouting poetry about a woman who—no matter how alive and interesting—was obviously insane.

  A rhythmic pounding on his front door jerked him thankfully back to reality.

  Riddick was out of bed and at the front door before he remembered that no one ever came to see him. He paused with one hand on the doorknob and the other on the hunting knife he kept tucked under the back waistband of his jeans, weighing his options.

  “Don’t you dare pull a knife on me, Noah Riddick,” a disgruntled female voice said from the other side of the closed door.

  He yanked the door open and gave her his best dead-eyed stare, hoping she’d take the hint and run for her life.

  She rolled her eyes and elbowed him out of the way, letting herself into his apartment. “Don’t give me the stink-eye, either. I’m not afraid of you.”

  He watched as she shrugged out of a leather jacket and tossed it onto his couch, too stunned to wonder what a stink-eye was or why she wasn’t even bright enough to be afraid of him. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Son of a bitch,” she muttered, glancing around. “I always knew Sentry paid slayers more than seers. This place is huge.”

  For some reason, he didn’t want her to know that his Sentry money had run out long ago. Vampires faced with the thought of heading to jail were quick to bribe him into letting them escape. He usually let them…then he turned them over to the cops anyway.

  She finally turned to him, hands on her denim-clad hips, and frowned. “No, ‘nice to see you’, or ‘thanks for saving my life last night’, or ‘gee, how’d you know I was going to pull a knife on you,’ huh? Boy, you’re just a wealth of social missteps, aren’t you?”

  He returned her frown. “How did you know I had a knife?”

  She turned away from him, not bothering to hide the fact that she was checking out his apartment. “Oh, every slayer I ever saw had one just like it. It’s like a fraternity pin for you people.”

  When she turned back to him, her expression was something akin to pity. “This is where you live? This is…home?”

  He looked around his apartment, seeing it for the first time through someone else’s eyes. Everything looked…cold and sterile, temporary. Nothing at all like her place. No books, no TV, no photos…no life.

  And he suddenly was faced with another new emotion: embarrassment. To have this woman see him here, pitying him, was embarrassing and emasculating and infuriating all at the same time.

  He latched onto the anger, as it was the only emotion he was even remotely comfortable with. “How the fuck did you find me?”

  She fixed him with a haughty glare. “Hel-lo? Detective?”

  He merely raised a brow and crossed his arms over his chest. “I saw the stack of bills on your counter. If you were good enough to find me, you’d be able to pay some of those.”

  She scowled at him, but didn’t bother trying to argue he
r skills. “Okay, so I didn’t detect so much as I asked an old friend of yours.”

  “I don’t have friends.”

  “You’re kidding!” she deadpanned. “I spoke to Mischa Bartone and she gave me your list of aliases, then I had a friend on the force track one of them to this address.

  “Mischa Bartone,” he said more to himself than to her. Now there was a name he hadn’t uttered in a while.

  “Yeah, you know, your old—”

  “I know who the hell she is,” he snapped.

  Her eyes widened a fraction. “Jeez, chill out. I just needed to talk to you, and knew she could help me.”

  “Why would you need to talk to me?”

  She plopped herself down on his beat-to-hell brown leather sofa and tucked one leg underneath her, looking to all the world like she intended to stay. “I have a proposition for you.”

  Riddick leaned against the wall and eyed the impressive expanse of cleavage exposed by her low-cut t-shirt. There were several propositions he’d be willing to entertain at the moment, but he somehow doubted he’d get that lucky.

  Harper cleared her throat and he lifted his gaze back to hers. “Look, I need help. The police department offered me a job. Actually, they’ve offered me and Romeo a job, but he’s run off to Vegas, so unless I want to wait tables for the rest of my life—and I don’t—I need you to work with me to find a kid who was taken by a vamp coven…”

  Her nervous ramblings were painful to hear. She obviously wasn’t accustomed to needing anyone, let alone a man of questionable morals and character like himself.

  “Let me guess. The cops don’t want to hire just a seer. They also want a slayer who can go in with SWAT and help the VCU boys bring the vamps in,” he interjected.

  She blew out a relieved breath. “Yes, thank you. Will you do it?”

  “No.”

  She pursed her lips. “Give it a second, quick draw. Let it roll around your brain a bit before you shoot me down.”

  He pretended to think it over, then said, “No.”

  “Well, why the hell not?”

  “I work alone.”

  She pushed herself off the couch and moved toward him, stopping only when she had to crane her neck to look him in the eye. He didn’t much care for the effect her nearness—or the warm, sweet smell of her perfume—had on his pulse.

  “But you can’t do this alone,” she reminded him quietly. “Even if you tried, by the time you were able to track the kid down by yourself, the vamps could’ve moved on to another victim.”

  “Why do you care? Do you know this kid or something?”

  Her brow furrowed. “No. I don’t know him, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t care about him. He’s a little boy. A little human boy. Don’t you care about what happens to him?”

  Oddly enough, he did seem to care. But he didn’t want her to know that. It would be much better for both of them if she’d just leave, thinking he was a complete asshole. “How much is in it for you?”

  “Not a lot, but enough to pay my bills for a while.” She shrugged. “But even if you don’t agree to work with me, I’m going to help the police for free. Because it’s the right thing to do,” she added pointedly.

  He cocked his head to one side. “Are you telling me I should work with you because it’s the right thing to do?”

  Harper swallowed hard. “If that doesn’t do it for you, then you could work with me so that I don’t go to the cops about last night. I mean, that vamp probably won’t report the assault, but you know how gung-ho the new vamp squad is. They might come after you just to make a point.”

  He couldn’t help it this time. He smiled at her. By God it had been a long time since anything had actually amused him. “Are you trying to blackmail me, sunshine?”

  A thousand expressions flared in her green eyes, but the most obvious was anger. It should have been fear.

  “Don’t call me sunshine,” she whispered through clenched teeth.

  “You’re blackmailing me. I think I could probably call you worse.”

  She stared at him a few moments, silent, defiant, before blowing out an exasperated breath. “Damn it. I can’t do it. I can’t blackmail you when you only did it to save me. I thought I could, but I can’t.”

  He’d expected her to come at him—all bravado like she had last night—and threaten him, giving no thought to consequences and danger. She’d thrown him off guard, and surprise had him backing up and crossing his arms over his chest again.

  She groaned and started pacing his floor. “I can’t even do blackmail right. All I want to do is the one damn thing I’m good at in this world and be able to pay the fucking electric bill every now and then. Is there something wrong with that?”

  Apparently it was a rhetorical question, because before he could decide whether or not he was supposed to answer, she plowed on.

  “I mean, if I can’t do this, if I can’t use these stupid, painful, ugly premonitions for something, what’s the point?” She stopped pacing, but didn’t face him. “Why am I like this if I can’t even help people?”

  She’d said that last part so quietly he imagined most people wouldn’t have heard her. But he had. Probably because he felt exactly the same way.

  Still not looking at him, she moved to the couch and grabbed her jacket. “Look, I’m sorry I bothered you. I’ll just go.”

  He grabbed her upper arm as she brushed past him to leave. She stared at his hand on her arm for a moment before slowly raising her gaze to his.

  “I’ll help.”

  She looked as surprised to hear him say it as he was to hear himself say it. Hell, he hadn’t meant to agree to help; it had just slipped out.

  And he’d like to say it was because he hated to think of a kid suffering a grizzly death. Or even that he’d done it because he understood what she was going through. But the truth was much more pathetic and selfish than that.

  He just wasn’t ready to see her walk away from him.

  Harper blinked those big green eyes at him. “You will?”

  No, he begged himself to say.

  He nodded.

  A confused frown creased her smooth brow. “Can I ask what I did to change your mind? For future reference?”

  He let go of her arm. “Don’t push your luck,” he said, knowing all the while she couldn’t help herself.

  She squealed and threw her arms around his neck, jumping up and down a little. “You won’t regret this. I’m a great partner, I swear. You won’t even—”

  Riddick disengaged himself from her embrace and set her away from him with a gentle shove. So much for sleeping anytime soon. The feel of her firm breasts pressed to his chest would doubtlessly keep him up nights. Jesus. He smoothed a hand over his face. “Look, we’ve got to get a few things straight.”

  Her expression grew somber, but her eyes were still dancing, which told Riddick she was only humoring him and pretending to listen. “I mean it,” he growled. “I’ll only do this if we do it my way, so we have to agree on a few rules right now.”

  She cringed at the mention of rules, but after a moment, she nodded her agreement. “Okay, lay ‘em on me.”

  “First of all, you’re not going in with us to get the kid. You tell the cops and me where he is, and then you’re done. You will stay out of danger this time, Harper. Do you understand me?”

  Harper twirled a curl around her pinky and affected a high, ditzy voice. “Gee, I’m just a girl. Why would I even want to go in with all you big, strong men?”

  He threw up his hands and started to turn away from her. “Okay, never mind. We’re done here.”

  “No, no, no.” She grabbed his arm to keep him from turning his back on her. “I’m sorry. I was just teasing.” Putting one hand in the air and the other on an invisible Bible, she added, “I will stay out of the way and out of danger.”

  He frowned, realizing he was having trouble staying irritated with her. Not a good sign.

  “Second of all, we’re not partners. A
fter this one job, we go our separate ways. No more coming here, asking me for help.” Looking like an angel and smelling like heaven just to torment me.

  She glanced around his apartment, brows raised. “Yeah, I see how I’ve interrupted your busy schedule.”

  “Third,” he went on, ignoring her smart-ass comment, “We’re not friends. We don’t have to…talk about things.”

  “Conversation. The horror.” Before he could comment, she tacked on, “Is that it?”

  He should tell her to go now, that he’d changed his mind and this was a terrible idea. Instead he said, “Yeah, that’s it.”

  She held out her hand. “Then I agree. Not partners?”

  He took her hand, trying not to notice how cool and smooth and delicate it was. “Not partners.”

  “You won’t regret this,” she called over her shoulder as she practically skipped out of his apartment.

  “Probably not,” he answered ruefully. “But you might.”

  Chapter Six

  The boy’s room was the size of an average walk-in closet. And with two large men in it with her, Harper felt like she’d been crammed into a shoebox.

  She scooped up a signed baseball, tested its weight in her palm, then replaced it on the boy’s nightstand.

  “Anything yet?” Lucas asked.

  Harper gritted her teeth as his hot breath stirred the hair at her nape. “Nothing yet.” Then she spun around and smacked him with an open palm to the center of his forehead.

  He jerked back. “What the fuck was that for?”

  “If I can do that, you’re standing too close to me. Back off.”

  He moved to lean against the doorjamb, doing the macho equivalent of a pout. She tossed a challenging glare at Riddick, but he wisely kept his mouth shut and avoided asking her any annoying questions.

  She rolled her neck from one side to the other and took a few deep breaths. If she didn’t have a stupid premonition soon, she was going to scream. When she didn’t want premonitions, she was drowning in them. When she was trapped in a tiny room with two hulking men breathing down her neck, she couldn’t have a premonition to save her life.