by Wood, Vivian
“What are you doing?” he growled. “This book is over six hundred years old.”
Echo’s lips parted in surprise, but she didn’t quite know how to respond to that. In the face of Aeric’s relentlessly sullen attitude, her momentary attraction to him withered.
“Sorry,” she said, snatching her water bottle from the table. “It was an accident.”
When she sat down at the table across from him, Aeric arched a brow.
You have a lot of nerve, sitting by me, he seemed to say.
Echo struggled to keep from rolling her eyes. Maybe every time Rhys frustrated her, she should just think of what it would be like to be paired with Aeric for the rest of her days. That ought to make her appreciate the big, bossy man who’d taken over her life.
“I need to talk to you,” Echo said, ignoring Aeric’s continued glare. “I can’t just stay here in the Manor forever, no matter what Rhys thinks. I have a job and a life that I want to get back to.”
Well, at least the job part was true, Echo mused. The social life part… not so much.
“Why are you telling me this?” Aeric asked, shutting his book with a snap. The gold lettering on the front caught Echo’s eye; most of it was incomprehensible, German maybe, but the word Magick was clear enough.
“Because I can’t leave here until this Pere Mal thing is resolved. The only person outside Pere Mal’s inner circle that can give us information about what he’s up to is Tee-Elle, and he’s got her hostage. Ergo,” Echo explained, “I need to find Tee-Elle. She’s been gone for almost a week, and y’all haven’t found her yet. It’s time to try something different.”
Aeric stared at her for a few moments before responding.
“And you think you can find her?” he asked, taking the bait. Echo nearly squealed with excitement, but she held it in.
“I have an idea, at least,” she said, letting her unspoken criticism of the Guardians’ scrying abilities hang in the air. “But I also have a condition.”
Aeric snorted and crossed his arms, leaning back in his seat.
“You need my help and you have a condition. Wonderful.”
Echo blushed, but she refused to let Aeric’s grumpiness cow her. She leaned her elbows on the table and gave him a hard glare.
“Your job is to protect the city,” she reasoned. “Pere Mal is a huge threat to the whole world, much less New Orleans. I would be helping you as much as you would be helping me.”
Echo could’ve sworn she saw Aeric’s lips twitch, humor lighting his eyes. She had the distinct impression that he was currently pitying Rhys for getting stuck with someone who Aeric so clearly found to be annoying.
“What is your condition, then?” he asked.
“I don’t want you to tell Rhys. If this works, I want to go with you to find Tee-Elle, and I think we both know that Rhys would have a problem with that.”
Aeric gave a disbelieving cough.
“I’m certain he would.”
“So?” Echo asked.
Aeric studied her for a long moment, then shook his head. Echo thought he would refuse her, but he took her by surprise.
“Let’s hear your idea, then,” Aeric said, pushing the book aside.
“I’ll need the scrying mirror,” Echo said, biting her lip for a second before adding, “And somewhere private to use it.”
Aeric narrowed his gaze before giving Echo a stiff nod.
“Meet me on the second floor in twenty minutes,” he said. He scooped up the book and went out the back door, heading for the gym.
When he didn’t reappear, Echo went to Rhys’s guest room and exchanged her wedge heels for flats. She fidgeted and flipped through a magazine for a few minutes, distracting herself until it was time to go upstairs. Before she left the guest room, she found her purse and pulled out her Swiss army knife, taking it with her.
When she slipped down the central staircase to the first floor, she saw that Aeric had left the first door wide open. She snuck over to it and hurried inside, halting only a few feet in, mouth hanging open.
Though Aeric’s living area had precisely the same layout as Rhys’s, the two rooms could not have looked more different. For one thing, Aeric’s living space was lined floor to ceiling with book cases crammed with books of every shape and size, covering every inch except the picture window on the far size of the room.
For another thing, the walls and bookcases were all black, the floor was covered in black rugs. A few pieces of minimalist furniture were clustered near the window, and though Aeric had a library table identical to Rhys’s, it had been painted black. Hell, the ceiling dark, with black fabric hanging low to make the whole room seem much smaller and darker.
The strangest part was that the lovely window was draped with blackout curtains to kill the daylight, meaning that the only light in the room came from a couple of dim lamps perched atop the library table.
“Are you just going to stand there?” Aeric asked, giving her a bored look.
“N… no…” Echo said, wrapping her arms around herself as she walked over to the table.
Aeric had laid out an ornate scrying mirror on the table, a pad of paper and a pen next to it in case Echo should need to make notes.
Echo held up her Swiss army knife, and Aeric arched a questioning brow.
“I’m going to scry with blood,” Echo said. “I read about it yesterday, how people who are deeply connected can be sought through one another’s blood.”
Aeric pursed his lips, then gave Echo a slow nod.
“It can be done, if the bond goes deep enough. Usually it must be family,” he said.
“It will work,” Echo said, her stern tone intended to bolster her own wavering faith in her plan.
“Go ahead, then,” Aeric said with a shrug.
“Okay. I just…” Echo hesitated. “If something goes wrong, I want you to stop me. Knock me out if you have to, okay?”
A muscle ticced in Aeric’s jaw, but he just gave her a noncommittal shrug. Echo decided to take that as assent, so she leaned over the scrying mirror to begin her work.
Echo used the knife to cut her left palm, trying not to wince at the pain from the dull little blade. She gave Aeric a nervous glance, then pressed her open palms against the scrying mirror and closed her eyes. Concentrating on Tee-Elle and their history together, Echo summoned the bonds between them.
The search unfolded in her mind, the scrying mirror’s inner workings appearing to Echo as an endless map of finely-wrought circuits all connected to one massive motherboard. Small and large sections lit up and dimmed as Echo worked to eliminate all the thousands of extraneous thoughts in her mind, pushing away everything that was not connected to Tee-Elle.
Sweat broke out on Echo’s forehead as something tickled her mind. She focused on it as hard as she could, trying to zoom in on the right circuit. A frustrated moan slipped from her lips when the strength of her spell overcame her and sent her spiraling, blowing past the connection she needed to find.
“Shit,” Echo said, opening her eyes.
Aeric was staring at her with something like genuine concern.
“You haven’t moved for an hour,” he informed her. “I was very close to rendering you unconscious. Rhys would have my head if I let you hurt yourself.”
Echo blew out a breath and wiped her forehead with her clean hand. She pulled her other hand away from the mirror, now sticky with drying blood, and sighed.
“I overdid it a little,” Echo admitted. “My magical strength has been uneven since I got here. Sometimes it’s boundless, other times it is very weak.”
“It is weak now, is it not?” Aeric asked. He set a bottle of water before her and waved at it, indicating that she should drink some.
“Yeah,” Echo said, uncapping the water and taking a long sip.
“It’s Rhys.”
Echo narrowed her gaze and drank some more water.
“What do you mean?” she asked, not sure whether she really wanted to know.
“Witches�
��”
“I’m a medium,” Echo snapped, not liking the word.
Aeric gave her an impatient glare before continuing.
“Mediums are a kind of witch,” he said, flapping a dismissive hand. “As I was saying, witches gain power and stability from their life mates. I am surprised you do not know this.”
Echo set down the water bottle and considered his words.
“I don’t have any mediums to ask,” she said.
“You must have inherited the ability from your mother,” Aeric told her. “It is how one gets the gift.”
“Well, my mother is dead,” Echo snapped. “She can’t, or won’t, tell me these things. Tee-Elle is the only witch in my family, and she’s got different abilities.”
“Gris-gris witch,” Aeric mumbled.
“What?” Echo asked.
“Nothing, nothing,” Aeric said, shaking his head. “I did not know of your mother.”
Echo lost her patience.
“It doesn’t matter. Go back to what you were saying before, about life mates.”
“Yes,” Aeric said with a nod. “Witches are like… lightning rods, maybe. They attract power from the world around them, but they attract it in large, quick draws. The life mate helps the witch balance, store the energy. Keeps the witch from blowing out her…”
Aeric paused, obviously trying to find the right word.
“Fuses?” Echo suggested.
“Fuses, yes.”
“How does the life mate do that and not get… you know, struck by lightning?” Echo asked, letting her lashes fall over her eyes. She desperately wished she was having this conversation with anyone other than Aeric, but she needed to know the answer more than she needed to protect her modesty.
Aeric grinned then, revealing shockingly perfect, white teeth.
“Mates are protected. You cannot blow Rhys’s fuses, Echo.”
Echo’s whole being blushed beet red, and she had to take several calming breaths to ignore Aeric’s sudden amusement.
“Let’s just get this over with, okay? I almost got it last time,” Echo muttered.
“One moment, before you start,” Aeric said, holding up a finger.
He dashed out of the room, returning a few minutes later with a bundle of cloth bunched in one hand.
“Here,” he said, thrusting it out.
Without even asking, Echo recognized it as Rhys’s. She could actually smell his distinctive scent from six inches away, which was sort of creepy. Echo reached out and tugged the shirt from his fingers, less because Aeric was forcing it on her and more because she wanted to hold it. She wanted everything that belonged to Rhys for herself, didn’t even want his fellow Guardian holding his t-shirt.
“I think I might be going crazy,” she wondered aloud.
Aeric tsked and took the shirt back, laying it over Echo’s shoulders. Rhys’s scent invaded her senses, and some tension deep inside Echo eased; until this moment, she hadn’t even known the negative feeling was present.
“Better?” Aeric asked, looking smug.
Echo glared at him but didn’t answer, turning back to the mirror instead. She bit her lip and cut her other palm this time, slapping it down onto the mirror.
She opened her mind again, willing the broad circuit board image to appear. This time when she examined the network, her senses were much clearer. She felt the tickle of a possible connection right away, and she followed it without hesitation. Keeping her tracking smooth and slow, she closed in on a flickering section of circuits.
“Ah,” Echo breathed. A light flickered, a tiny piece of information ripe for the picking. Echo plucked at it, closing the light within herself, and images began to form in her mind. Echo found Tee-Elle first, then began slowly pulling back, giving herself a little more of the whole picture each time.
Tee-Elle, trying to pick a lock in a tiny, dark room. A three-story house covered in peeling white paint. The numbers 227 on the front door. The neatly-kept, familiar-looking street. The neighborhood, complete with a sign.
Welcome To Historic Algiers Point, it read.
“I found her!” Echo cried.
She let the vision fade, opening her eyes with a relieved grin. For a second, she was wildly confused. Then she realized that Aeric was nowhere to be seen. Rhys stood in his place, looking thunderously angry.
“Uh… hey?” Echo said, wrinkling her nose. “What are the chances that Aeric didn’t tell you my plan?”
“Zero,” Rhys said, crossing his arms. His eyes had darkened from emerald to near-black, and he seemed to be making a great effort to keep from unleashing the full measure of his temper on Echo.
Rhys grabbed her hands and turned her palms up, his jaw tensing as he examined the cuts she’d made with the Swiss army knife.
“You did not need to hurt yourself. I would have found your aunt without your blood,” he growled.
“When was that going to happen?” she asked, the words out of her mouth before she’d thought them through.
Rhys released her and turned to pace. Every line of his form was tense, and Echo could see him clenching and unclenching his fists.
“We already knew she was in Algiers Point. We would have found the house in a matter of hours,” he gritted through clenched teeth.
“Oh,” Echo said, wincing. She’d managed to insult his ability to do his job and insinuate that she didn’t trust him, all in one smooth sentence.
She watched as Rhys paced to the window, twitching the blackout curtains aside to let in a much-needed swath of sunlight.
“Tell me the house number, Echo,” Rhys said, scrubbing a hand over the back of his neck.
It took everything in Echo’s power to keep from just giving him what he wanted, just so she could soothe the wound to his pride.
“I want to go with you,” Echo said.
Rhys stilled, and for a moment Echo thought the vein pounding in the side of his neck might actually burst.
“Are you trying to kill me, woman?” he growled. “First you avoid my bed. Then you doubt my ability to do my job. And now you think I need a babysitter while I’m fighting?”
Echo bit her lip and shook her head.
“I don’t… I didn’t mean that, Rhys.”
Rhys turned to her slowly, pinning her in place with a steely glare.
“You are not going with us. You’re going to stay here, where I know that you are safe.”
Echo dropped her gaze to the table, tracing a whorled wooden knot with her fingertip.
“Look at me!” Rhys thundered. Suddenly he was next to her, pulling Echo to her feet.
Echo stared up at him, surprised at the vehemence of his insistence.
“Tell me that you’re going to do as you’re told,” Rhys demanded.
“I—” Echo faltered.
“Mate, so help me, if you step foot outside this house, I will punish you,” Rhys told her. “Now tell me you will behave.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Echo nodded. Rhys studied her face for several long moments before releasing her. She thought he’d storm off, but instead he grabbed her wrist and led her out of Aeric’s rooms.
“Don’t come onto this floor again,” Rhys muttered as he guided her up to his rooms.
Echo held back the sigh that threatened to escape, merely nodding instead. Rhys took her into his bedroom and sat her on his bed, making her wait as he fetched first aid supplies.
Silence reigned as Rhys cleansed and bound her palms, tightening the strange tether between them with every touch. He was surprisingly tender, especially after seeing the dominant need driving him only a few minutes earlier.
Once Echo was thoroughly aided, Rhys sat on the bed next to her and put an arm around her waist, pulling her close. He tilted her chin up and sought her lips, giving her a deep, hungry kiss.
It seemed that her would-be mate was as affected by their unsatisfactory sleeping arrangements as Echo was, which made her giddy.
“Tell me the house number,” Rhys sai
d as he broke the kiss.
Echo frowned, wondering if his kiss had merely been intended to entice her to divulge the information. One look into Rhys’s shimmering green eyes and the mating bond tugged at her heart, making her lips part without her consent.
“Two Twenty Seven Pacific Avenue,” spilled out before Echo could resist.
A touch of humor lit Rhys’s features as he dropped another kiss to Echo’s lips. He withdrew too soon, leaving her wanting.
“You should be in my bed when I get back,” Rhys said, his bluntness making Echo blush. “I think you'll enjoy it as much as I will.”
With that, he turned and headed downstairs, no doubt rounding up the other Guardians for their mission. Echo stuck her tongue out at his retreating back, then flopped back on the bed with an angry groan.
“Asshole,” she whispered, but her heart wasn’t in it.
Rhys was an alpha male, his dominance an essential part of his personality. He was bossy and demanding, and those things made him as attractive as he was aggravating. There was no use denying that the same things that made Echo want to pull out her hair also made her panties dampen.
Still, that didn’t mean that she had to lay down and just take it, right? What man wanted an unresisting, lifeless partner? Echo’s guy friends at Loyola University had a name for women who lacked a certain spark, whether in bed or in personality: starfishing, they’d called it.
Echo’s lips twisted as she repressed a giggle. She was many things, but a starfish was not among them. She sat up and looked around Rhys’s room, thinking. She puttered around for a while, trying to come up with a good idea. She thought of several things, then discarded each as being useless or too close to breaking her word to Rhys.
Finally, a light bulb went off in her brain, and she grinned.
What if… what if I could just watch, without being there? I wouldn’t even have to leave the Manor at all.
Echo jumped up and snuck back upstairs to Aeric’s rooms, deliberately ignoring Rhys’s command to stay out of them. She grabbed the scrying mirror and ran down to the ground floor, laying the mirror out on the big dining room table.
She didn’t need blood this time — her connection with Rhys was already so strong that she could practically feel him. She was pretty sure that would be enough to scry for him. Then she could just watch the scene play out, assuaging her anxieties without defying Rhys.
