by Cassi Carver
Dedication
For Angela—my sister, my friend, my fellow secret agent.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my parents, Kathy, Diane, and Bob, for continuing to celebrate my writing—even though you’re forbidden to read my books.
Thank you, Melissa Cutler, for being the rock in my writing storm. Who knew when we first exchanged chapters that a critique partner could become a beloved friend?
Thanks to the happy hour crew and all my friends at RWASD. I may be biased, but I think we have the best chapter on the planet.
Jennifer, I hit the jackpot when I scored you as my editor. Your insight and guidance make my books so much stronger. Plus, you navigate the mysterious universe of commas like a starship captain.
And thank you to my amazing husband, John. You are the hardest worker I know, yet you still spend quality time with our children and take me on fun dates. That’s one of the many reasons I love you.
Chapter One
Kara looked down and almost lost her lunch. Tiny bits of gravel slipped past the toes of her boots and fell several stories to the dark sidewalk below.
She watched the men jog down the length of the adjacent rooftop and stifled a growl. There was no way she would let some saggy-jeaned punks get the best of her. Stuffing down her fear, she backed away from the ledge, then made a running leap to the rooftop beyond.
She hit the roof and tumbled into a somersault but then jumped to her feet and kept going. Who were these guys that they could keep up with her? Not Demiáre, or she’d sense it—but certainly not human.
When they made the next jump, this roof a full story below the last, Kara’s cell phone rang. She pulled it out and glanced at the number. Abbey.
“Yeah?” She took a moment to judge the distance and what the next jump might do to the soles of her new gray suede boots. Was getting her questions answered worth it?
“You’re off work now, right? Are you going to make it to dinner before the movie? Jaxon made his famous spaghetti and meatballs.”
“Hold on.” Kara shoved the phone into her pocket and got a running start. The next building being at least ten feet shorter, she didn’t think it would be a problem, but as she rocketed through the air, it occurred to her too late that the damn thing was farther away than it appeared.
Hitting the edge of the roof hard and bouncing back from the force of the impact, she clambered for a fingerhold, clawing at the ornate façade of the newly renovated offices. The swirly cement caps that hung over the roof cut into her hands, but she clung tight. If she couldn’t hold on, she would plummet six stories to her death. Granted, as long as they didn’t cremate her, her death wouldn’t last long, but she wasn’t in the mood to see how many days or weeks it would take to regenerate from a fall like that.
“Kara?” came the muffled question from her pocket.
“Yeah, I’m eating with you,” Kara called, mouth angled toward her hip. She worked one elbow above the lip of the landing, then finally swung her leg over and hefted herself up. She pulled the phone out and took off at a preternatural run. “You want me to pick up anything? Are we out of milk?”
“What are you doing? Are you hunting without me?”
Kara’s expression was pure, sweet innocence when she answered into the phone. “Hunting? No.”
“Yes, you are! I hear you.”
“This is no sexual predator. Promise. I was just curious, is all.” Curious as to why those two guys had been watching her so closely during her shift at the bar and why she felt a strange, detached menace surrounding them. It was an unsettling sensation she’d never experienced before.
Abbey’s voice shrilled from the phone. “Tell me where you are. Jaxon and I are on our way.”
“Abbey…”
“Don’t make us track you!”
“Shit,” Kara mumbled under her breath. Who needed parents when she had Abbey and Jaxon treating her like a fourteen-year-old girl sneaking out for a hot date? “There aren’t addresses up here on the rooftops, but judging from what I can see, we’re heading north on 4th.”
“Rooftops?”
“Yeah. And these guys are good jumpers.”
“Well…crap.”
“Yep. See you soon.” Kara quickly stashed the phone in her pocket. The men were gaining ground, and she didn’t like that at all. But seeing as the next building was a good two stories taller than the last, unless they had wings, the roof was going to be a climb.
She made a leap to the next building, aiming for the fire escape, and hit with a loud clang, her feet scrambling for purchase. Suede was a bitch to get clean, and if she wore the toes off of these boots, there would be hell to pay. As she pounded up the steps, lights flickered on in the windows below her.
When she made it to the roof, she was almost surprised to see the men had given up running and were twisting the handle on the stairwell access door, until she looked around and realized they’d made it to the end of the block. Any further jumps would land them flat as a pancake on the intersection of 4th and G.
With the way they were fumbling with it, the door was obviously locked from the outside. Now that the foot chase was coming to an end, and Kara had them where she wanted them, what in the hell was she going to do with them?
“Hey,” she called as she approached them from behind, her hands raised.
The men whirled around and the shorter one, a man with sandy blond hair and olive skin, stepped in front of the other. “Stop!” he shouted, his accent thick and foreign to Kara’s ears.
“I just wanted to talk with you,” she continued in a calm voice, taking another step closer. “Did we really need to do the whole roof thing?”
The shorter man squared his shoulders and put his hands palms out in front of him, but it didn’t take a genius to see that he wasn’t surrendering. If hands could be loaded, his were packing major heat. “Stay where you are.”
She stopped midstride. If they were Demiáre, even wingless demibreeds, she would know. The fact that she didn’t want to rip their clothes off and lick them like push-up pops was indisputable proof that they weren’t her kind. “Witches,” she decided aloud. “Why are witches coming to my bar and staking me out?”
The taller, dark-haired man called her something that sounded like daisy-mother-plucker, but the man in front spoke for them both. “I heard this was a free country. Can we not have a drink where we choose without being chased down like dogs?”
“It wasn’t your drinking that bothered me. It was the three hours of drinking while you watched me and mustered up your courage. You see, boys, I can sense things. And you don’t like me. Your attitude was getting uglier with every drink. So why don’t you tell me why you were visiting me tonight? And while you’re at it, why don’t you explain to me how witches get as…athletic as you two?”
The shorter one sucked air in loudly through the gap in his front teeth. “My friend is right. You are crazy. Crazy for imagining things that did not exist—and crazy for thinking that two bruxos will tremble before a woman. This is your last chance to turn around and go back to that filthy bar where you belong.”
“Or what?”
She felt a spell stirring the atmosphere around her. Something designed with craft and skill, and likely something that was going to knock her on her butt. At times like these, she wished she were a witch so she could counter magic with magic, but she was just a young fallen angel hybrid. And wingless, at that. Her only skill would be to survive whatever he threw and then beat his ass.
She ground her molars together and shook her head. “All you needed to do was answer my question. I can’t help where this goes from here.”
“As you say.”
When he brought his hands back and then plunged them forward, relea
sing what looked like a neon-red swarm of bees, Kara dove. She knew enough about witchcraft to know that if she got out of the path of the spell in time, she’d be okay.
But as she rolled behind an air-conditioning unit, out of his line of sight, the swarm circled around behind her and struck her exposed back. She shrieked and curled in on herself, feeling like the insects were boring straight into her spine with inch-long, red-hot pokers for stingers. The pain was so intense, it was all she could do to draw her next breath.
She heard the men arguing with fevered voices and used the moment to simply focus on expanding her lungs. She stretched and flexed, but it felt like her vertebrae had been injected with molten steel. After another moment, she sensed the pull of more magic and heard the bigger man chanting, then registered the sound of the door handle clicking.
Willing her bones and muscles to obey, she launched to her feet and sprang for the door. The shorter man seemed surprised when she yanked him back onto the roof by his shirt collar just before he made it into the stairwell. She tossed him on his ass and drove her knees into his stomach as she pounced on him, mounting him like a wakeboard in choppy surf.
Without giving him time to prepare something else to throw at her, she rocketed her right fist into the center of his face, then followed with a left jab to his temple. Those blows would knock most humans out cold, but these guys were some sort of special witches, using magic she hadn’t even heard of.
His cheek cut and bleeding, the man reached up and grabbed Kara’s hands with a sneer just as his buddy trotted back up the stairs. “I’ve never hit a woman. I’m delighted you will be my first.” Before the last syllable left his mouth, he threw his head forward, clearly intending to connect with Kara’s mouth. With blinding speed, she broke free of his grip and rolled to a crouch, her fingers curled before her.
The taller man by the door lifted his hands and swirled his palms together, conjuring something sticky, green and unpleasant that smelled like a dinosaur-sized rotten egg. Kara didn’t care to learn firsthand what it did, but if it could turn corners like the burning bees, she probably would soon.
Out of nowhere, a stream of clear, translucent magic cascaded through the air, heading straight for the man’s ball of slime. It hit him with all the power of a spit wad against a brick wall, but it was enough to surprise him in the instant before he flattened Kara with his spell.
She barely had time to look in the direction the magic had come from before a silver-winged shape swooped in and slammed into the man hard enough to send him flying to the other side of the rooftop.
Jaxon and Abbey. The cavalry had arrived.
“Get back, Kara!” Abbey shouted, moving toward them with her willowy legs and graceful stride.
The shorter man leapt to his feet, eyeing Abbey and her crackling fingers with a little more respect than he’d shown Kara. “You brought this on yourself, Fallen,” he said to Kara, but his gaze was still on Abbey as they faced off. “We would have come and gone from this city with no bloodshed…but now…”
“Shed this, jerk!” Abbey threw everything she had at him as Kara stumbled out of the line of fire. The crystalline bolts pinged off his chest, ricocheting like bullets and scattering in all directions.
A fragment clipped Kara’s forearm, catching her skin like the scratch of a playful kitten. When the man laughed, Kara looked at Abbey, her mouth gaping open. She hoped to hell she hadn’t just witnessed the “kick-ass spell” Abbey had been practicing for the past three weeks. “Hey, Abbs, I think we’re gonna need something a little stronger.”
At Abbey’s blank roadkill-meets-tire expression, Kara wheezed, “Oh, screw it,” and flew at the man, tackling him to the roof and taking his short blond hair in her hands as she slammed his head down with every ounce of strength she possessed.
After the second whack of his skull against the whitewashed bits of stone, he stopped fighting. After the third, Abbey’s slim hand encircled Kara’s wrist. “Stop! You got him. He’s not going anywhere.”
Kara had enough sanity remaining not to snarl at her best friend, but relaxing her top lip and quieting the rumble in her chest was harder than getting to her feet after the bastard had torched her spine. “Okay. Okay. Let go.”
When Abbey dropped Kara’s wrist, Kara dropped the man’s head. Yes, it was at a height that might have provided one last little thunk, but this wasn’t the penthouse suite at the Ritz-Carlton. She didn’t need to provide him with a goose-down pillow and a mint for his trouble.
“I swear…I did not going to hurt dat girl,” someone said in broken English—and it wasn’t the guy under Kara.
She and Abbey walked quickly to the edge of the building where Jaxon was crouched. She couldn’t see anything but his strong, gracefully arched silver wings and his slim, tapered waist just above his jeans.
Kara peered over the roof, her back protesting at the bend in her vertebrae. Jaxon was dangling the dark-haired man by the wrist. How embarrassing. Now her warrior would really think she needed him around for her protection. And she didn’t. “I had it under control, Jaxy. We were just having a talk, is all.”
He glared at her from under lowered brows. “Yes. That’s what it looked like when I arrived, mistress. This man was not about to assault you with a gelatinous orb of who-knows-what.”
Now that the situation was under control and blood was pumping to her brain again, Kara sighed. She couldn’t read witches as easily as humans, but she wasn’t feeling anything ominous coming from the guy dangling seven stories above the street.
“I don’t think they really want to hurt me. You can let him go now.” When Jaxon nodded and let out a satisfied grunt, Kara’s own words played back in her ears. “No! Don’t let go! I mean you can release him—on the roof.”
Abbey glanced over the side and groaned. “Jaxon, if you drop him I’m going to hurl. You’ll be picking vomit out of your feathers for weeks.”
Jaxon exhaled an angry breath through his nose, but if he was mad, it was at Kara. He’d let Abbey get away with murder…or the prevention of murder, as the case may be. “You cannot be serious. If I don’t kill him now, then I need to turn him over to the Mercury Lords for questioning. Releasing him is not an option.”
Kara reached out with her mind, scanning the energy around her one more time. Someone in the apartment under them was peeved—probably at the racket they were making—but everything else was quiet. She inwardly cringed.
“It’s possible…that there is some chance…that I might have overreacted when I followed them from the bar.” Her words tasted worse than warm beer in August.
True, when cornered, the men hadn’t been very compliant, but judging from the bruise on the guy’s throat and chin, Jaxon had taught him all the lessons he needed for one night.
The dark-haired man, his body tense in Jaxon’s grip and his feet pedaling in the wind, watched the discussion with wide eyes. “I swear I not want to hurt her.”
A growl of indignation tore from Jaxon’s chest. He stood in one smooth motion, setting the man on his feet and then giving his chest a little shove for good measure. “There.”
Kara regarded the man. “All you had to do was answer my questions.”
“All you had to do,” he mimicked, “was allow us enjoy vacation in America.”
Sheesh. What was he going to do, report her to the Board of Tourism? Kara forced a smile and stuck out her hand. “Hey, let’s just put it behind us. No harm, no foul.”
The man looked fairly happy to be getting out of there alive, but he ignored Kara’s proffered hand and jabbed his index finger in her direction instead. “No. One foul—you.”
He walked past her with his head held high and helped his friend to his feet. Then, with one last glance her way, they hobbled down the stairwell.
With pursed lips and nostrils flared like a drug-sniffing dog, Abbey narrowed her eyes at Kara. “Dinner is getting cold.”
Kara twined the pasta loosely around her fork, then locked it on with
her last meatball. “Mmm… That was great, Jaxon.”
Abbey speared another bite of salad, taking out her frustrations on the massacred produce. “I’m glad everything ended up okay tonight, but you should have called one of us the moment you thought something was off with those guys. You’re getting a little reckless out there, don’t you think?”
Good thing Demiáre didn’t get heartburn. “The Mercury Clan has scouts posted around the city. How many more babysitters do I need?”
Jaxon rolled his shoulders as if to ease the tension there. His food sat untouched. “Babysitters, indeed. I was there when you cornered Lord Aiden and demanded the scouts keep to the outer limits of the city.”
Kara scuffed her boot over the floor and leaned back in her chair. “They don’t need to be any closer than that to sniff out a black-wing.”
“Seeing as they can’t stop the Aniliáre, wouldn’t it make more sense to have them around for times such as these?”
Kara shrugged. “Come on, you guys. It wasn’t a big deal.”
Abbey held up her loaded fork like she might bash Kara over the head with the cherry tomato. “Maybe not for you, but I’d still like to be included.”
“I know.”
Abbey sighed, probably realizing that was the best she’d get from Kara. “So are you gonna change for the movie?”
Kara stood and carried her plate to the sink. “I’m not really in the mood for a romantic comedy tonight, but thanks anyways. Just go and have fun, you two.”
“It’s not good for you to be alone,” Jaxon told her. “Trouble seeks you out like heat rash on the devil’s ass.”
“Is trouble seeking her out—or is she looking for trouble? That’s the million-dollar question,” Abbey added.
Kara scoffed as she scrubbed her plate. There was nothing wrong with spending another Friday night at home, right? “I’m not saying I don’t love your and Abbey’s company, Jaxy, but I’m pretty good at being alone. I always have been.”
“Yes, you were,” Abbey agreed.
