Fire & Frost

by Meljean Brook

Too soon, he bit out her name against her throat, biting down on her again. And that made the orgasm skyrocket, until she was nearly passed out from bliss. She felt him come again, and then he collapsed on top of her.

  After a few moments of panting, he moved away from her neck and leaned in to kiss her. In contrast to their rough, wild lovemaking, his kiss was tender and sweet. “Love you,” he said gruffly.

  Tears pricked her eyes and she ran her fingers along his hard jaw. “Love you, too.”

  “Your heat?”

  “Still there,” she admitted. “We might have to do this a few more times.”

  He grunted. “I see you plan on wearing your mate out.”

  Estrella grinned. “Are you telling me that I mated with a man with no stamina? That’s disappointing.”

  “No stamina?” He gave her a mock-offended look, and then rolled his hips against hers in a seductive manner. “You want me to show you ‘no stamina’?”

  She moaned. “Yes, please.”

  They rolled in the snow and made love for hours on end, oblivious to everything but their own desires. Afternoon faded into dark, the moon came up and went away again, and sometime toward morning, they fell into an exhausted sleep in each other’s arms.

  When Estrella woke, the skies were orange and purple with the coming dawn, a blanket of snow was thick around them, and she was shivering from the cold.

  Finally. Her heat was quenched. She gave a loud sigh of relief. Marathon sex was fun, but she was ready for the heat to be gone. Thank goodness shifter women only went into heat a few times in their lives. The intense craving — and hormonal craziness — was not something she wanted to experience on a regular basis.

  A hard arm tightened around her hips, and she felt Vic nuzzle her shoulder. “You feel cold.”

  She burrowed closer to his warm body. “I am cold,” she admitted, and couldn’t keep the happiness from her voice. “Heat’s gone.”

  His hand slid lower, to her belly. “So that means…”

  “Yes.” When he was silent, she began to worry. “What are you thinking?”

  He kissed her shoulder again. “I was thinking about names. What do you think about Vic Junior?”

  A happy giggle escaped her throat. “Uh, I think that’s the worst name ever.”

  He gave her a mock growl. “That’s my name.”

  “I didn’t say your name was a good name. It’s simply tolerable because it’s yours.”

  He pulled her closer to him. “I see my mate is full of sass in the mornings.”

  “And afternoons. And nights,” she told him happily. “Get used to it. You mated a woman who’s not going to let you walk all over her.”

  “Good.” Vic nipped at her shoulder again, and despite the exhaustion in her body, she felt a stirring of desire. Not because of the heat, but because of Vic.

  She smiled. “Besides, what if it’s a girl?”

  He paused for a minute, thinking. Then, “How about…Vickie?”

  She groaned. “You’re clearly terrible at picking out names.”

  Vic’s hand slid to her breasts, caressing them, and she sighed with pleasure when he began to stroke her nipple. His lips moved from her shoulder to her jaw, and he began to kiss her lightly. She turned her face so he could brush his lips against her mouth. “I suppose it’s a good thing we have nine months to decide on a name, then. I’ll bring you around to my way of thinking.”

  “I’m going to need a lot of persuading,” she breathed, leaning into him.

  “I know.” His eyes gleamed. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  Conjuring Max

  Carolyn Crane

  Chapter One

  January 12th, 1985

  Malcolmsberg, Minnesota

  MAX DRUMMOND SAT IN THE OLD stuffed chair, sketching the snow boots piled up by the fireplace while half watching Miami Vice.

  Veronica lounged on the couch, fully watching Miami Vice. She slid the lid of her rectangular tin of lip stuff back and forth. Click, click. The clicking sped as a car chase heated up. The synthesizer music swelled. A truck slammed into a wall.

  But all the crashing and music didn’t keep Max from hearing a twig snap just outside the window. The distinct two-part crunch of a human foot. He sprung up, pulled out his piece, and flicked off the TV. “Hey!”

  Max put his finger to his lips.

  “Nobody’s out there. My wards are perfect,” Veronica said. “Turn it back on.”

  “Someone’s out there,” he said, listening for more snaps.

  “Oh, you just hate Miami Vice.”

  He did hate Miami Vice. Don Johnson wasn’t any kind of detective. “Your protective wards failed, Veronica.”

  Veronica tilted her head, one dark brow raised over blue-shadowed eyes. She was gorgeous and brilliant and cool as hell. Bitch Queen of the Witch World, he sometimes called her, which just about summed it up. “FYI, my wards don’t fail,” she said simply. “I’m feeling them now.”

  “FYI.” Max turned off the lights. “I heard what I heard.”

  The moonlight reflected off the snow outside, brightening the night and sharpening Veronica’s fine features. She blinked at him once, a long blink of patient annoyance.

  Veronica’s magical wards usually made the air crackle a good twenty minutes before a hit man would arrive. There had been no crackling this time. Never mind, he’d take care of whoever it was all the same.

  Rich people had maids to clean their houses, cities had sweepers to clean the streets, and Veronica had him there to kill the hit men being sent after her. She could handle it herself, but she preferred to expend her energy on her computer experiments and her ogling of Don Johnson, aka Detective Sonny Crockett.

  He motioned with the gun. “Get over there. Hide next to the clock.”

  Her brows knit. “I don’t hide.”

  “Humor me,” he said. “You think I don’t know my business?”

  “Fine. I’ll go work in the basement while you handle this.”

  “You think I’m letting you waltz through that fishbowl of a kitchen right now? Wake up, Veronica. There are people out there looking to shoot you. They broke your wards without you knowing it.”

  She crossed her arms. “I don’t see how.”

  “Maybe they brought a witch of their own.”

  She sniffed her haughty little sniff. “I very much doubt that. No witch would come after me.”

  “How about two witches? How about a group of really strong ones? You telling me there’s nobody who could bring you down?”

  With an air of amusement she tightened the flowered scarf that separated her dark, floppy bangs from the rest of her hair. “Let me think…” Oh, his witch had a very high opinion of herself. It was hot as hell, but it wouldn’t do her any favors in a real fight.

  “You want to stay alive?” he growled. “Let me do my job. You think Salvo didn’t get curious about how eight of his hit men died trying to kill you? You think he hasn’t got wind of the townie tales about you by now? Figured out witches exist, and that you might be one? You got the attention of somebody very dangerous. You think he’s stupid? Then it means you’re stupid.”

  A slight smile played on her lips and her green eyes glinted against her porcelain skin. She liked his tough talk. The woman was addicted to cop shows—Columbo, Baretta, Hill Street Blues. He sometimes wondered if he was there partly for her entertainment.

  “How would a mobster know about witches?”

  “How about you check for witches out there all the same,” he said. “You can check that, right?”

  Her bracelets jangled as she made the hand motions that told him she was doing magic. It was her power that he loved most. Not her magical power, but her inner power. She was a scrapper who’d keep her chin up through anything. She thought he didn’t know her, but he did—he knew all about her. He was in love with her.

  Alarm replaced her weary expression. He’d never seen alarm on her face. “It’s the Council.”

 
“What does that mean? Can you fight them?”

  She wasn’t listening. “Salvo sent the Council? A man like that shouldn’t even know witches exist.”

  “What is the Council? What does that mean?”

  “Four witches,” she said. “The four most powerful.”

  “In the world?”

  Her silence told him yes. He’d never heard of a Council before. He’d put it together that she was some sort of outcast in the witch world.

  “Can you defeat them?”

  “Could you defeat the four best cops in the world, Max?”

  “It would be a mother of a fight.”

  She smiled. She liked that.

  Max listened for more snaps. “So. You got Salvo’s attention and he’s gone with the biggest guns he could find. If I was him, hiring witches for the first time, I’d team them with my best hitter—something familiar, something new.” He had wondered if this day would come.

  “They could kill me, Max. And we can’t let them get ahold of the computers.”

  “I’ll keep you safe.” He motioned at the grandfather clock. “You’re going to stand in that shadow.”

  “Stand in a shadow? That’s your answer?”

  “We do this the old school way,” he said.

  She winced as she pushed up from the couch, puffy bangs brushing her pale forehead. She wore a baggy cardigan sweater over leggings and leg warmers. He’d figured out that she liked the way leg warmers covered her mangled leg. He always wanted to tell her she didn’t need to cover the leg, not for him.

  Never for him.

  As if she’d care about his opinion. He was the help, the thug of a cop who knew the Salvos better than anyone. The man who killed because killing was beneath her.

  “Hurry.” He motioned at the clock. “Keep down.”

  “I am,” she whispered, disguising her limp. She didn’t like him knowing things about her, but in the past three months, he’d learned plenty. Like the fact that her haughtiness was camouflage for desperate loneliness. And that her vast power was supposed to protect her, but it made her weak in all the ways that counted. And he knew that the way she was living was no way to live.

  He nudged the curtains aside with his Glock, wondering who the hitter would be this time. He caught movement in the woods, somebody heading around back, it seemed. Moving like military. More distinctive movement some yards away. “Two. Two hitters. At least. Gotta think there’s more in back.” He pulled his other piece from his ankle holster.

  “We’ll fight them together,” she said.

  “Can you or can you not take these four witches?”

  “Well…if you killed two. But they’ll punch through my protection. They’ll leave me open to gunshots.”

  This was bad. Max took a deep breath. “Your computer lab—those witches would have trouble getting to you in there, right?”

  She sniffed. “Alls they’d need is ten days, a case of candles, and a few buckets of blood.”

  His Veronica. Cool and snappy under fire. Alls they’d need. She’d picked that speech tic up from him. It made him idiotically happy.

  “We’ll use your devil computer advantage.”

  “Oh, suddenly somebody likes the devil computers,” she said.

  “I like that it’s the big thing you have that other witches don’t know about. Here’s the plan—everything I do now is to cover you on the way through the kitchen and down to the basement, got it? Whatever fireworks are going, you get down to that lab. You go, go, go. You hole up and you conjure reinforcements.”

  “And what do you do while we wait the 24 hours for them to appear?”

  “I can handle a group,” he assured her.

  “For 24 hours?”

  “If they kill me, you’ll just conjure me back from the photo again. I’ll pop in with the reinforcements.” His witch could do that sort of thing with those devil computers of hers—bring things and people to life off photos.

  “Oh no,” she said. “That won’t do.”

  “You conjure me from that photo every week.”

  “It’s different if they kill you. For one thing, I’d have to conjure you off a different photo. I could never use that press conference photo again.”

  “You have other photos.”

  “And you’d remember your death,” she said.

  “So I remember my death.”

  “Don’t talk of death so casually, Max. You won’t enjoy remembering it.”

  “I remember plenty of things I don’t enjoy,” he said.

  “Standing outside my front door tomorrow remembering your own death as if it just happened? You don’t think that would be a problem? I don’t want you losing effectiveness.”

  “Your concern is touching.” She was probably right. He wouldn’t want to remember his death.

  He didn’t remember the first time he died.

  That’s because the version of him she brought to life every week hadn’t yet died. That version of him had been speaking at a press conference a few days before he’d died.

  Needless to say, it had been quite a shock. He’d been standing in front of cameras in downtown Chicago one second, and then found himself 500 miles north, with a witch explaining to him that she’d made him appear off some newspaper picture, that he’d actually died weeks ago, and that he was her bodyguard now.

  “You’ll hole up in the lab with me and fight from behind the wards with me,” she said. “Your duty is to me.”

  “We have an arrangement, sister,” he said. “And me cowering is not in it.”

  “Your suicide is not in our arrangement.”

  Did she really not believe he had at least a chance against a group? He felt a little stung. It depended on the group, of course, and what the witches did to him. But he wanted her to believe he could handle more than one guy in a fight. God, what had he become? A Don Johnson primping peacock, all concerned with what she thought?

  “It’s not suicide if I fight them to the death and you bring me back to have at them some more. I’d call that a pretty big boon. Anyway, if that’s how it’s going down, that’s how it’s going down. Can’t you do some anti-magic on my gun? Alls I need is a fair fight.”

  He caught the movement of her hands, the jingle of her jewelry. “This will work for a bit.”

  “You’ll bring me back.” A statement, but really a question.

  “You don’t get away from me that easy. Catch.” She threw him a coin. It felt cool in his palm. “Protection. Imperviousness to spells,” she said. “The Council witches will try to contain you and your gun. It won’t hold up for long, but the witches will be going for me first. I’ll rip off everybody’s protection, but they’ll be doing the same to us.”

  “Then we’ll cancel each other out.” For a while, anyway. It didn’t sound like she had good odds against these witches unless she got into her basement lab. He slipped the coin into his pocket, wishing she were down there now, safe. A lot of killing was about to happen here; he knew it in his bones. He’d done a lot of killing as a Chicago cop on the organized crime beat, and he’d done a lot of killing as Veronica’s personal thug. He was killing killers, but it was still killing. He liked to get their bodies out of there before she saw. He wanted to protect her from everything.

  “Don’t forget, I’ll probably know the hitters. Which means I’ll have a big ol’ element of surprise when they bust in here and see me back among the living,” he said. “And then I’ll cover you through the kitchen. It means I shoot like crazy and drive them to hide while you scoot to the door, got it?”

  “I get the concept of cover, Max.”

  “This isn’t like Miami Vice. It’ll be loud and you’ll want to hide, but you just focus on getting downstairs. That’s how you help me.”

  “FYI, I won’t want to hide.”

  He rolled his eyes. FYI. Her pet phrase ever since that show with the Barney Miller guy. “Okay. There are only two outcomes here—I kill them, or they kill me. There’ll be no Max lying on t
he floor bleeding, needing you to rescue me, got it? So don’t let anybody trick you.”

  Silence. What a stupid thing to say. Why would she come up to rescue him? She’d just wait for him to die and reconjure him. They had a business arrangement: he killed the hit men, and she re-upped him every week. It was probably all wrong in some divine way but he loved getting the chance to rid the world of killers. To make the world safer for cops, safer for his little girl. He loved being alive.

  And he loved Veronica.

  Aloof and imperious as she was, he loved the hell out of her. Or, he wished he could, anyway. She wouldn’t even let him see the leg. She didn’t understand how completely he would love her.

  Twig snap. She gave him a dark look.

  “You’re okay,” he said.

  No reply.

  He smoothed his thumb up and down on the grip of his Glock, wishing he could touch her, hold her. He tried to make out her expression in the shadows. Was she frightened?

  She was a classic overachiever—good at everything, and at the height of her powers. He’d put her age around 40, same as him. She liked to boast how no witch could best her. But now there were four witches working with hit men. The god-like power her computers gave her didn’t apply to battles. It gave her the power to create.

  And it took time to manifest.

  Crackle crackle. More twigs. He’d purposely put them around the place, not trusting her wards. There had to be a half dozen people out there. He told himself Veronica could do this.

  Crack-crash!

  The mudroom door crashed in.

  Intruders in the kitchen now.

  A voice. “Veronica Harding?” A slight drawl. It sounded to Max like one of the Kite brothers. He’d arrested the Kite brothers numerous times in his cop days.

  Max stole nearer to the doorway and made a patting motion. Down.

  She complied.

  Max’s heart pounded in his ears like it always did before a firefight. The voice again. “We just want to talk. We want to talk about Benny.”

  Ah yes, the familiar drawl: We jess wow-n-talk about Benny. This was Kenny Kite, a Missouri hitter. Which meant there were likely five Kite brothers in play—three back, two front, no doubt. Max had been worried that Salvo would send the Kites one day.