by Julie Kenner
Looking around again, Tomas now saw the damage to the room that his need for normalcy had blinded him to moments before. Superimposed across the neat-as-a-pin bedroom, charred streaks marked the ceiling and walls. Rips tattered the yellow curtains. The longer he looked, the more quickly normalcy faded to this new reality. A sulfuric stench seared his throat and lungs, almost as sharply as his burned hand, and several red-black, otherworldly, lizard-looking things lurked in the corners and on one of Marcy’s bedposts.
Salamanders?
In Chicago?
“You’re hurt.” Marcy started into the bedroom but Tomas quickly intercepted her, shouldering her back out to the kitchen.
“This is crazy.” He shut the door behind him with a second kick. He wished his abuela was there, fully there, so he could tell her he was finally taking her magic seriously…and maybe get some help! “Something crazy is happening.”
“You’re hurt.” Marcy hitched up her slipping towel, opened the freezer and retrieved a bag of frozen peas to press onto his burned hand. “It hurt you.”
“Damn thing’s real after all,” he admitted, barely noticing the hand.
Marcy, he noticed. She lifted one foot and stood on the toes of the other, drawing from a cabinet what had to be the biggest first-aid kit he’d ever seen outside of an ambulance. Reality may have pulled a fast one on him in her bedroom…but it was also shifting right here in the kitchen.
And no burn could keep him from appreciating those long, bare legs, or this woman’s fingers on his.
“We should get out of here,” he murmured.
Gentle, healing fingers, attached to long, bare arms…and softly rounded, pale shoulders…and the slope and swell of breasts, barely hidden beneath pink terry cloth…
The way Marcy peeked at the damage under the bag of peas, wincing at what was barely worse than a sunburn, reaffirmed her sheer niceness. So did her surprisingly firm “I won’t leave my cat.”
Now that she was spraying a cooling burn treatment onto his hand, then blowing on it, nice was surprisingly attractive. Lifting her clear green gaze toward his, fingers on his wrist, she didn’t seem as scared of him, either. Had he thought her annoying before?
She smelled really good. And clean. And naked.
They stood very close, together against whatever lurked on the other side of those last two doors. Together in the danger. Together in this new, freakish reality. Together in understanding as he leaned closer, human warmth to human warmth, breath to breath…
“MROWRM!”
With a cry of delight, Marcy Bridges spun away from Tomas.
Marcy recognized that cry from over her head. It was Snowball’s “Mommy!” cry, the one she used when she climbed a tree and couldn’t get down, or when Marcy got home from a long weekend away, or when someone she disliked disturbed their home. The cat, clearly upset, drew it out into two syllables. “MRO-WUM!”
“Snowball!” Turning toward the call was an instinct even more deeply ingrained than whatever had compelled her to gaze up into Tomas Martinez’s tiger eyes and…
And nothing. Of course nothing. The important thing was that Snowball was all right, crouched on top of the refrigerator, green eyes wide and accusing, white fur puffed spikily along her spine. Marcy raised a hand to her and Snowball completed the ritual by delicately sniffing, making sure Marcy was no imitation.
“MROWR!” the cat then wailed in displeasure, opening her mouth wide, showing most of her sharp little teeth.
“Oh, poor baby.” Marcy reached over her head to catch Snowball and draw the cat’s silky, warm body to her towel-wrapped breasts. “Were you up there the whole time? I was so scared!”
The towel began to slip. Marcy caught it up again. Snowball helped. Marcy didn’t believe in declawing.
“Mommy was so scared for her baby,” she murmured, kissing the sleek top of Snowball’s head before the cat burrowed into the crook of her elbow, the way she might at the vet’s. Marcy felt so relieved, she didn’t even care if Tomas heard her talking baby talk, or referring to herself in the third person. “She was so scared.”
“Mommy should be scared,” Tomas reminded her, finally stepping away from the bedroom doorway. Either he figured nothing was coming after them from there—or he figured something was. “Mommy has a gate to Hell in her closet!”
Marcy felt somehow more sane hearing that he, too, thought it was a gate to Hell. Naming something gives one power over it, right? That’s what her magic books said….
Then she remembered she couldn’t necessarily trust her magic books. “That’s what it looked like to me, too, but I wasn’t sure…I mean, how could it be?”
Tomas said, “I can’t fix hell.”
No, she didn’t imagine he could, no matter how complete his toolbox. She shouldn’t have called him here, gotten him involved, gotten him injured.
And yet she was so glad he was here. As relieved as she felt to have an armful of Snowball again—to be gently rubbing behind the cat’s ear, to feel Snowball’s purring attempt to comfort them both—Marcy was just as relieved not to be alone in her kitchen, her apartment, her dilemma. Even if she was a horrible person for involving Tomas, even if she’d somehow damned herself—
—further—
—she was so very glad to have him here that she could have wept with relief.
If she was lucky, she could weep on his shoulder. It really was some shoulder.
Even better was when, with a single nod, he took charge.
“Come on,” he said decisively, striding toward the front door.
She followed willingly, putting more weight on her hurt foot. “Where to?”
“My place.”
In other circumstances, Marcy would have balked. She didn’t know this man very well, and what she knew about him worried her. What made his apartment so safe?
But of course, that would be the absence of portals to Hell.
He was the one who stopped in her living room. “Wait.”
That was less of a relief. She wanted to believe he was good at being in charge. “What is it?”
“You’re only wearing a towel.” His gaze slid down her in an extra, lingering reminder. “Me, I have no complaints. The other tenants…no need to worsen suspicions they might already have, if you know what I mean.”
Marcy stared at him while Snowball burrowed deeper between her elbow and her towel, purring more frantically. Snowball wanted to leave, too. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Reputations?” He said it like a teacher trying to walk a student through what should be an easy question. “Suspicions about what people might be up to…?”
“Oh! You mean them thinking you’re a thug?”
Tomas scowled. His tiger eyes narrowed, and his lips thinned. Marcy’s stomach flip-flopped. As long as he was on her side, she supposed she shouldn’t mind the murderous look, but if he ever changed sides—or got hungry—she was in trouble.
He said, “People think I’m a thug?”
“Isn’t that what you meant?”
“I meant your reputation, Miss Too-Quiet-and-Keeps-to-Herself.”
Marcy stared. Snowball, in her arms, purred and burrowed.
“Miss Must-Be-Up-to-Something,” Tomas prompted. “Miss Never-Brings-People-Home.”
“You’ve been spying on me?” The only thing more unsettling than that thought was the momentary, politically incorrect trickle of delight that accompanied it. He was interested? Too bad he was a voyeur. “How could you spy on me?”
“I don’t spy on you. Mr. Gilbert across the hall spies on you, and so does Mrs. Roberts downstairs, so you should probably wear something other than a towel before leaving with me.” Tomas scowled. “Who is it thinks I’m a thug?”
“Uh…nobody?” She wouldn’t even mention Ms. Hurt, from the second floor, even if Ms. Hurt was awfully obnoxious by the mailboxes. Not unless Tomas tortured her for names. “Anyway, I can’t put on anything else.”
“Why not?”
> Dramatically, she turned, stretched out her cat-free arm and drew big, invisible loops in the direction of her bedroom door. “Hello? Gate to damnation in my closet?”
“Don’t you keep any clothes…?” Apparently he remembered the dresser in the walk-in. “Who the hell keeps all their clothes in one closet?”
“It was an idea in an article from Living magazine,” Marcy protested. “To clear one’s bedroom and make it more airy.”
Tomas squinted at her, clearly not up on the different home-and-living magazines.
“The one Martha Stewart puts out,” Marcy clarified.
“Like Mr. Clean,” he muttered.
Marcy said, “You can’t blame this on—”
But she fell silent as Tomas Martinez began to undress, right there in her living room. Wow.
He shrugged off his black leather vest, careful of his hurt hand, then started tugging his T-shirt out of his jeans. Marcy stood completely still—except the slow sinking of every cell in her body, melting down into hot-sugar-goo somewhere below her stomach.
Somewhere. Right.
He pulled the shirt up and he had such abs. Such ribs. A chest that could grace a beefcake calendar. Shoulders. Upper arms with working-man muscles, and all of him a warm, toasty brown, like the most beautiful tan…. She felt meltier and meltier….
The spell of his beauty only released its hold on her when the collar of his T-shirt caught momentarily around his head, like some kind of nun’s habit. Tomas Martinez might be sexy as hell, so to speak, but Sister Tomas….
In that momentary reprieve, Marcy managed to form words. “What are you doing?”
“My shirt should be long enough,” he explained, holding it out to her. Some of his hair had pulled out of its braid to sweep across his cheekbone and tickle at his neck. That and his bare chest more than made up for that momentary nun image. “Put it on.”
Now he was giving her the shirt off his back?
“I can’t.” Marcy felt unable to move for more reasons than her precarious towel, the purring cat she held, for even more than the melty feeling. He looked so…bronzed. Half-naked. He had some kind of thorny pattern tattooed around his wrist. And he smelled of something rich and earthy and just a little spicy.
Thinking suddenly seemed difficult.
Dangerous.
“Here,” he sighed, taking the cat to give her the shirt.
Marcy extended a hand in warning—Snowball hated strangers!—but her cat had already twisted into action. Snowball growled, and squirmed, and hissed and dug her claws into Tomas’s beautiful, bare arm.
Tomas narrowed his eyes in big-cat warning and hissed right back.
Snowball put her ears back but sat coiled and still, purring sulkily to comfort herself.
Marcy studied the Spanish words on the shirt, trying not to look as if she were inhaling Tomas’s scent off of it. “What’s that say?”
“Maybe you should put it on inside out.” He looked a little embarrassed.
So she turned away from him and did so, breathing deeply. Only once she’d smoothed the shirt down all the way to her midthighs did she undo the tuck of towel underneath, letting peach terry cloth fall to her feet.
Funny…she felt even more naked wearing just the shirt. But he was right. They shouldn’t stay in here any longer than necessary. Not until they knew what to do.
By the time she turned back to him to reclaim Snowball, something had changed. The energies in the room had changed—and Tomas looked more dangerous than ever.
“Take the book, too,” he growled, with a nod toward the coffee table. In her panic over her cat’s absence, she hadn’t gotten around to clearing it. Apparently he’d just noticed Magic for Beginners.
Oh.
Marcy wasn’t sure whether the weight of foreboding was because she’d been a fool to keep her spell from him…or because his immediate assumption mirrored her own worst fears.
Whatever was happening might well be her fault for playing with magic.
That scared her even more than the voice, the sort-of voice that curled through her head as she and the maintenance man left her apartment.
There is no place you can run, it seemed to warn. I am everywhere.
And you are mine.
Part 2
So Little Miss Good Girl was a witch wanna-be. That was the only assumption Tomas could make from the paperback, since Magic for Beginners wasn’t exactly the kind of dusty, handwritten tome he’d sometimes seen at his abuela’s.
Great.
The part that annoyed him the most was that, clearly, she wasn’t even any good at it. If she were a highly skilled magic user, at least he could admire her competence. But the idea that she may have been sitting in her neat living room foolishly summoning God-knew-what, for heaven knew what purposes…
It was almost enough to distract him from her wide, worried mouth.
Nowhere near enough to distract him from her legs.
In his shirt, and nothing else, she looked as if she’d just gotten out of bed. After sex. With him. He should be so lucky, her having legs like that…
Witch, he warned himself. But his abuela had been a witch.
Summoner of portals to Hell, he reminded himself, which went further toward keeping his distance.
“Should we warn Mr. Gilbert?” asked Marcy, shifting from foot to foot while they waited for the lumbering, old-fashioned elevator. He’d given her back the demon cat as quickly as possible, and she was cuddling it to her chest. Now she looked past him, at the other doors on her floor. Her leaning hitched the shirt up sinfully higher. “Or the Kendalls?”
“Warn them about what?”
“Whatever’s in my closet! If the fire spreads…”
“It’s not really a fire.”
When she stared at his gauze-wrapped hand, he clarified. “We can pretend otherwise all we want, but you and I both know it’s something magic. And it’s after you, not them.”
Still eyeing his hurt hand, she raised her eyebrows and looked stubborn. Sometimes he got the feeling she had more guts than she let on. But the feeling was usually fleeting.
“I got in the way,” he said.
“But we should tell them something. If they were to get hurt because of me…”
Fine. Since the elevator was so slow, Tomas went to each of the doors and knocked. Nobody home at one place. Nobody home at the other. Thank heaven for Saturdays. The third apartment was vacant—good. He dug some Fumigating: Please Keep Out signs from his toolbox and hung them on the doors. Done.
Marcy watched him with something close to awe. He didn’t know why, but that unsettled him. She didn’t expect him to be the good guy here, did she? He’d fix what he had to fix, sure…
But he had his own reasons. His own responsibilities.
With a rumble, the old-fashioned elevator finally made an appearance and sat there, waiting for them to pull open its grillwork doors.
“In case of fire,” murmured Marcy. He thought maybe she memorized those kinds of safety tips for fun. But looking at the elevator’s close, closetlike interior, he kind of had to agree.
“Stairs,” they said, deciding together. But when she lingered, forehead furrowed, as if the elevator might gobble up some innocents once left unattended, he reached in and switched it off. One more sign from his toolbox to hang on the inside door—Out of Order—and they were in business.
Only once they reached his first-floor apartment—a far messier place than hers—did Tomas confront his meekest tenant about her attempts at magic.
“What did you summon?” he demanded, pacing back from his bedroom with another T-shirt.
She said, “Do you have a pet?”
He stared at her, flat-out confused. If she’d summoned that thing in the closet as a pet, she was sure as hell breaking her lease!
She said, “If you have a pet, I should put Snowball in the bathroom so there won’t be trouble.”
Trouble? As opposed to her place?
“I don�
�t have a pet,” Tomas said through gritted teeth, so she reluctantly put down the cat, front paws first. The cat immediately hunkered low, wide green eyes surveying this new locale, then stretched out its neck and delicately sniffed an empty beer bottle on the floor. Then it glared at Tomas.
Pulling on the new shirt, Tomas refused to feel guilty about the mess. He hadn’t planned on having guests. Compared to the magical mess Ms. Bridges had made, a little casual clutter hardly mattered…though his abuela would have disapproved of both kinds of messiness. Cleanliness being next to godliness and all.
Tomas didn’t figure he’d been next to godliness for some time, either way. “You summoned something out of that book, right?”
“You keep saying that.” She looked embarrassed. “I did a spell, but I didn’t summon anything.”
Right. It was just a coincidence that she was doing magic right before a portal to Hell appeared in her closet. “What kind of spell?”
“A direction spell, I guess you’d call it. I wanted some insight about my life—where I’ve been, where I’m going. My ten-year high-school reunion was last night,” she added, and at first he thought it was another nonsequitur. “It was so strange, seeing how far so many of my classmates have come since I knew them last. Some had these great careers, and most of them were married. Some people have died already! A few seemed stuck in the past, and I really didn’t want to become one of them. It got me thinking…so since I’ve been reading about magic for a while now, I decided to try the spell.”
Frowning, Tomas took the book from her. “Which—?”
The page was marked with a pink Post-it note. Hardly eye-of-newt, toe-of-frog stuff. The glossy cover showed three pretty, young women of different ethnic origins, smiling as if to imply that even beginner magic users could find happiness and good looks if they would only shell out $14.95 for the book.
The whole mass-market presentation weirded him out. He imagined Marcy trying to decide whether to pick up a new Russell Crowe DVD or a book of spell craft. This was definitely not his grandmother’s magic.
But he’d known that when he’d seen the portal.
