“This is what Damian brought me.” He opened it, and Casey peered inside. She frowned. It looked almost like a child’s collection of memorabilia. A small book, ancient and frayed, handwritten in a language she didn’t recognize. A wicked-looking claw, big enough to be from a huge animal, though she had no idea which one. A fired ceramic figurine of a black bear, fierce and, yet, almost delicate, with golden eyes that were small chips of what might be topaz. And one last item—a child’s ring of some thin metal, but with a bronze sunburst on the wide, flat surface. That one snagged her attention. It was Damian’s. He’d told her about it, but even if he hadn’t, she’d have known. She reached out as if to touch it, pulling her hand back at the last moment.
“What do you feel, Casey?” Nick asked quietly.
“Magic,” she whispered. But the energy surrounding the objects was so fragile that she feared it would shatter if she got too close. “How did Sotiris get hold of these? Damian said you were betrayed.”
Nick nodded. “We had a valet, someone whose family had worked with mine for generations, someone we all trusted, and considered a friend. And he traded all of that—the generations of loyalty, the trust and friendship of those good and honorable men—for gold. I tortured him for weeks, pulled out every last screaming excuse from his miserable soul, and I still don’t understand why he did it.”
Casey shot Nick a startled look at his casual mention of torture. She tried to cover it by brushing a stray hair behind her ear, but he caught it. He gave her a knowing smile. “You’re shocked at the idea of torture? You should talk to your boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she snapped, but almost immediately knew how stupid that sounded. So did Nick apparently, because he laughed.
“So you’re what . . . just sleeping together? You don’t do casual, babe.”
“Whatever.” The last thing she wanted to discuss with Nick was her love life, and especially not her sexual relationship with his best friend. Indicating the box and its contents, she asked, “Can you use these to reverse the spell?”
Nick shook his head. “It’s too late for that, even if I knew precisely what he’d done, the elements he’d used. Which I don’t. But these were the foci for his casting. You felt the magic yourself. I’ve already used them in a counterspell to weaken the fabric of Sotiris’s spell even further, beyond what the lifting of Damian’s curse has already done. Whereas before, the magic worked actively to conceal itself, and hence my brothers’ stone prisons, it will now draw toward itself the very elements needed to break the specific curses.”
Casey thought about that. “You mean like . . . a person? Like me?”
“Exactly. Damian’s curse required a female warrior; that was you. Had you not already released him, the effect of this new counter-casting would be to draw you to his side. The curses will now want to be lifted.”
She nodded, deep in thought. She’d always been fascinated by magical theory, and here she’d been working with a bona fide expert, a fucking ancient sorcerer, and never known it. She slanted a scowling look at Nick, still pissed about that.
“Give it up, Case,” he teased. “You know I did the right thing.”
“Give what up?” Damian’s welcome voice intruded. “Are you tormenting my girlfriend, Nico?”
Nick gave her a smug look at Damian’s use of “girlfriend,” which she ignored.
“What are you—” Damian’s question broke off when he spied the wooden box and its contents.
“Nick was telling me about the curse,” she told him. “And how he hopes to counter it now that you’ve brought him these.” She lifted her chin to indicate the ancient mementos.
Damian shot Nick a hopeful look. “You really think it will work?”
Nick clapped a hand on his shoulder, and his eyes were suspiciously moist when he said, “I do. We’re bringing them home, brother.”
Casey watched as the two of them embraced. Two beautiful men, energy radiating off of them that had little to do with their powerful physiques, and everything to do with sheer force of will. And magic. Their link went beyond blood, beyond love. And she felt suddenly alone. They belonged together in a way she could never be a part of. She took an involuntary step back, almost as if preparing herself for the pain to come. But as if he’d felt her sudden distance, or maybe the hollow ache in her heart, Damian reached out and pulled her into the circle of his arm, including her in their little group hug. She wanted to be cynical about that, but she didn’t feel that way. She felt relieved. She felt loved. She slipped her hand under his arm and up over his shoulder, tipping her head against his cheek. He kissed the top of her head, and she flushed with happiness.
Nick winked at her. “I’m sorry to break up this little love fest, but I have work to do,” he said, pulling out of the group hug, and hustling them out of his vault. Closing the door behind them, he said, “You two go ahead and do . . . whatever it is that young people do these days.”
“Oh good grief,” Lilia said, walking into the office. “Is he pulling that old-man routine again? Nick, your appointment is here.”
“Oh, right. Thanks, Lili.” He turned to face Casey and Damian. “Seriously, you guys take a week off, get settled, play in the sun. But then I need you back here. My counterspell will only go so far in finding the others. The rest will be up to us and old-fashioned investigation techniques. Casey, now that you know what’s what, I can target your particular skills much more effectively.”
She met his golden-brown gaze from across the room, and saw understanding there.
“You got it, boss,” she said, putting into her response all of the feelings she could never say to him out loud. Things he probably didn’t want her to. “’Bye, Lili!” she called, then grabbed Damian’s hand and pulled him down the hall and out the front door. But when they reached her truck, she hesitated. She looked up at him. “You don’t have to come with me, if you don’t want. I mean, I’d understand—”
Damian silenced her with a kiss. Although “kiss” was such an insufficient word for the way his lips teased hers open, the way he seduced her tongue into dancing with his, sending sparks of desire shooting from the tips of her breasts to her belly and deep between her thighs. She melted against him, her arms around his waist.
“There’s nowhere, no when, I’d rather be than with you, Cassandra. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she whispered, tears filling her eyes. “So, I guess we’re going home.”
“Home,” he repeated then gave her a wicked grin. “Can I drive?”
Epilogue
Los Angeles, California
GRACE VAN ALLEN peered at the ancient scroll beneath her illuminated magnifier, ignoring the ache in her back that said she’d been at her task too long. Again. Her friends had all but given up on her, knowing their attempts to get her out of the basement and into some semblance of a social life were doomed to failure. She loved her friends, and certainly didn’t want to lose them, but the main reason they went out was to meet men, specifically the man who would become the husband with whom to create the proverbial white picket fence and 2.5 kids. Grace had nothing against picket fences or kids. She just didn’t think she was going to find her perfect mate in a poorly lit club with too loud music.
“Good God, Grace,” she muttered. “You’ve become your mother.” She grinned at the thought, and didn’t know who should be more horrified by the comparison—her or her mom. “Mom, definitely,” she said, then realized she was doing it again. She had a tendency to talk to herself when she was working all alone in the museum where she’d been lucky enough to secure an internship while working on her PhD in Archaeology. More specifically, ancient scrolls and texts. A new collection had come in this week, an acquisition from an aging private collector who didn’t think his heirs were smart enough to appreciate their value. Their historic value, that was. He wa
s afraid they’d sell his treasures to the highest bidder after he died, and they’d end up in the vault of some soulless billionaire, never to be seen again.
She tended to agree with his assessment of the collection’s likely fate, and was thrilled that he’d donated them to the museum instead. She’d been cataloguing the new acquisitions for days now, but tonight was the first time she’d found something unexpected. The thrill of finding something new, something no one had seen before, was making her heart pound and her stomach churn. The scroll was in horrible condition. It had obviously never been restored. But it wasn’t the physical condition that made this scroll unique. It was the language it had been written in. She’d been at it for hours, and still hadn’t found anything familiar. In fact, she wasn’t certain this was a language at all. The lines of text looked more like symbols than letters.
Puzzled, she walked the length of the basement, from her small corner to the very opposite end where the more senior researchers worked. She was hoping someone else might be working late, maybe someone who knew ancient architecture rather than language, and would recognize what appeared to be mathematic symbols on the scroll. She wasn’t convinced that’s what they were. But if it wasn’t language and it wasn’t math, what did that leave?
When she reached the opposite end of the basement, no one was there, of course. No one but the warrior who’d been standing guard in the same dark corner for as long as she’d been studying at the university, and probably a lot longer than that. She didn’t know his story, where he’d come from, or why he’d never been moved upstairs, and the few people she’d asked hadn’t seemed to know either.
Holding the scroll, she stopped to talk to him as she always did when no one was around. He always looked a little sad to her, his eyes conveying a loneliness that spoke to the skill of the sculptor. It drove her to reach out to him, to break his terrible solitude when she could.
She paused now, holding up the scroll in one hand, her fingers resting on his powerful forearm with the other. “I bet you know what this is, don’t you? I wish you could come to life. We’d have a nice cup of tea—or you’d like something stronger, wouldn’t you?—and you could help me decipher this damn thing.”
She peered up at him, frowning. Was there a spark in those stone eyes that hadn’t been there before? She stared until her own eyes watered, then she blinked and shook her head. “Time to go home, Grace.” She patted the warrior’s arm. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she told him. “You think about it and let me know.”
She walked back to her cubicle and locked the scroll away with the others, then took her purse out of her desk drawer and left, turning out the lights behind her.
At the other end of the long room, a noise penetrated the darkness—the gritty sound of sand hitting the linoleum floor.
To be continued . . .
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank my editor, Brenda Chin, for seeing the possibilities in this book, and helping me bring it to life. I’m a better writer for having worked with her. I also want to thank Debra Dixon for giving me the leeway to tell my stories, and for designing such a beautiful cover for Damian.
My fellow writers—Angela Addams, Steve McHugh, and Michelle Muto—are always generous with their friendship and their talent, and make the solitary task of writing a lot less lonely. I want to thank Karen Roma for everything she does to promote my books, and for doing a beta read on a very short schedule.
As always, I have to thank my family for their love and support, and especially my wonderful husband, who’s shown me every day we’ve been together what makes a true hero.
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About the Author
D. B. Reynolds arrived in sunny Southern California at an early age, having made the trek across the country from the Midwest in a station wagon with her parents, her many siblings, and the family dog. And while she has many (okay, some) fond memories of Midwestern farm life, she quickly discovered that LA was her kind of town and grew up happily sunning on the beaches of the South Bay.
D. B. holds graduate degrees in international relations and history from UCLA (go Bruins!) and was headed for a career in academia, but, in a moment of clarity, she left behind the politics of the hallowed halls for the better-paying politics of Hollywood, where she worked as a sound editor for several years, receiving two Emmy nominations, an MPSE Golden Reel, and multiple MPSE nominations for her work in television sound.
Book One of her Vampires in America series, RAPHAEL, launched her career as a writer in 2009, while JABRIL, Vampires in America Book Two, was awarded the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Paranormal Romance (Small Press) in 2010. ADEN, Vampires in America Book Seven, was her first release under the new ImaJinn imprint at BelleBooks.
D. B. currently lives in a flammable canyon near the Malibu coast with her husband of many years, and when she’s not writing her own books, she can usually be found reading someone else’s. You can visit D. B. at her website, dbreynolds.com, for information on her latest books, contests, and giveaways.
The Stone Warriors: Damian Page 36
