Sebastian leaned against the edge of the desk and crossed his arms over his chest. For the first time, Carson took him in as more than another tall, hostile witch.
Or since he was a guy, did that mean he was a warlock? Could men be witches?
Sebastian looked a little like Lauren. At least they shared the same stature, bone structure and hair color. His hair was long and pulled back in a ponytail. His eyes were a haunting, inscrutable gray-green, an odd color against his pale skin. It made him appear otherworldly…as he pretty much was.
On his left hand and arm was a disturbingly realistic tattoo of a sleek black raven, and on his right shoulder was the start of an elaborate patterned tattoo that must have covered at least part of his shoulder and ended halfway up his neck.
His gaze, fixed on Carson with open intensity, seemed somehow connected to the piercing eye of the raven on his hand and forearm.
“Sebastian, I know Carson is mortal, but I need you to put that aside and listen to me.”
“I don’t help mortals,” he said evenly, his gaze finally settling on Lauren.
“There’s an exception to every rule, right?”
“Tell me why I should make an exception.”
Carson listened as Lauren recounted the story of the men who’d shown up in her apartment, her suspicion that The Order had found her because of the CNN interview, Carson’s stumbling upon her apartment and her fear that he, too, was now at risk.
“You don’t know if the men saw him?”
“No. I can only assume they planted a camera in my apartment and are probably watching it now. We’ve heard of that happening, right?”
Sebastian nodded. “Yes. You can’t go back there.”
“I’m worried about my other friends, too. One of them drove Carson to my house. And after fleeing my apartment, I ran to a friend’s house—”
“Both humans?”
Lauren nodded, her gaze fixed on the raven tattoo now.
Carson glanced down at it and could have sworn that he saw it move, but when he watched it further, he saw nothing. All this hocus-pocus crap had his mind tripping out.
“Your friends in San Francisco should be fine. And him,” he said with a dismissive gesture to Carson, “you should never have brought him here.”
“I know he’s supposed to help me, Sebastian,” Lauren said, then hesitated. “I had a vision.”
Carson blinked at this news. Was she telling the truth? Had she really had a vision about him?
Sebastian was glaring at Lauren now. “You are saying too much.”
“He knows everything. That’s the other reason I need you to help him.”
“I don’t protect mortals,” he said. “You know I don’t, and you shouldn’t be asking me to.”
“I have as much reason as you do to feel that way,” she said.
“You’re the one consorting with them.”
“You’re starting to sound like one of the elders,” she said in a tone of voice that let Carson know that was just about the worst accusation she could make.
Sebastian glared at them both.
“You were with me in the forest in Bretagne,” Lauren said, and then she started speaking urgently in French.
Carson tried to follow the words, but his one year of college French didn’t get him anywhere near understanding what she was saying. He watched her face, the cool intensity of it, and he watched Sebastian’s expression transform ever-so-slightly from impenetrable to perhaps willing to relent.
The uncaged feeling that had possessed Carson earlier was settling now into a sense of vague uncertainty. He wasn’t sure he wanted to glimpse real freedom, only to have it snatched away before he’d had the chance to taste it. Did he want to be confined here to Sebastian’s compound? Or was he intoxicated by the idea of being on the run with Lauren, destination unknown?
He was a fool, he realized, if he thought his lame little sense of adventure mattered at all in the face of Lauren’s life being in danger.
“One night,” Sebastian finally said when she stopped. “I’ll find a place for you for one night, and then you have to get him the hell out of here.”
But when he looked at Carson again, his expression said something different. His expression was—and Carson didn’t think he was overstating things here—murderous.
Carson found himself in a staring contest with Sebastian now, neither of them willing to blink, neither willing to look away. But then some movement from the man’s hand caught Carson’s eye again, and when he looked down the raven tattoo was gone.
LAUREN COULDN’T SHAKE the feeling of doom that had settled on her when she’d been arguing with Sebastian. Without his cooperation—and for more than just a night—they were screwed.
She had not been a visitor in her cousin’s world since the age of eighteen. She remembered it all, the freedom, the sense of living authentically. But by the end of that rebellious summer when she’d run away from home and toyed with a life of living underground as a real witch—instead of being the repressed, half witch she lived as now—she’d succumbed to Sebastian’s advice that she was far too intelligent and talented to not do something important with her life.
Her cousin had only one room left in the building, a bedroom with one bed and a cot he’d had brought up by an attendant with the understanding that Carson would sleep on it. World-weary as Sebastian was, he could be a little old-school about things on occasion.
“You look like you’re seeing a ghost,” Carson said as he sat down on the edge of the bed.
Lauren snapped out of her survey of the hotel room with its minimalist furnishings and its air of quiet where she’d spent that summer so long ago, hiding out from the world, a temporary rebel.
“I guess I am. A ghost of my own life, anyway. I was here once before.”
“This isn’t your first time running for your life?”
Lauren shook her head. “That’s not why I was here. I was just running away from my overbearing family back then. Fresh out of high school and refusing to go along with their plans for me.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed and winced at the throbbing pain in her foot. She didn’t want to risk going to a hospital, so she’d either have to have Sebastian sew up the cut, or hope it healed well enough on its own. She was too tired to think about it right now.
But then she thought of the broken window glass, and how she must have left her blood behind on it. The witch hunters could sample her DNA from the blood, and they’d know for sure that she was a witch. But no, they didn’t even have to do that, she realized. They’d surely take a hairbrush from her bathroom, and have all the evidence they’d need to kill her stuck in the bristles of her brush.
“Is your foot going to be okay?”
“Yeah, it’s nothing.” She hoped.
“So…you ran away to Hollywood and…?”
She shrugged, her gut twisting at the thought of a life she hadn’t had the balls to live out back then. “And nothing. I had a head full of stupid ideas, and I eventually realized I should be doing something productive with my life, so I gave in and went to Stanford just like Mother wanted.”
“I hate to bring this up now, when your cousin is probably eavesdropping outside our door, but what the hell was with that tattoo on his arm. Did that thing—”
Lauren cut her gaze at him so sharply he went silent. Her heart pounded in her ears.
“Did it what?”
“Nothing. I was probably just seeing things. I’m delirious from exhaustion.”
“Tell me what you think you saw,” she demanded.
She’d never met a human who could see the movement of a witch’s tattoo. She herself had a tattoo that did not move, but it was on the back of her neck, always hidden by her hair unless she chose to show it to someone.
She’d heard of humans who had witch blood, and who could see the supernatural even though they had no special gifts themselves, but it never would have occurred to her that Carson might be one of those
humans.
“That raven. I swear it was looking at me. And then it was like it moved or something, and then it was gone.”
“Are you sure?”
“I thought you saw it, too. I noticed you looking at it when it moved.”
He’d definitely seen what she had. Did this mean he had witch ancestry?
Lauren took his large, perfectly shaped hands into hers. She turned them over so that she could see his palms, both wanting it to be true and yet knowing it would make no difference. Even if he had a bit of witch blood, he was still off-limits to her according to the elders. He was still human.
“You’re not about to read my palms, are you?”
“No,” she said, studying them intently.
“Then what the hell are you doing?”
“Could you shut up for one minute?”
Carson went silent.
The lines of his palms intersected, like human palms, but two of the major lines did not intersect with any others—one of the marks of witch blood.
“Pure-blooded humans cannot see the supernatural in action,” she finally explained when she looked up at him. “You are not pure-blooded.”
“What does that mean?”
“One or more of your ancestors was a witch.”
His eyebrows shot up. “So I’m still wondering, what the hell does that mean?”
She shrugged. “Not much. You’re human, but you might show an occasional witch trait, like the ability to see Sebastian’s tattoo move.”
Carson’s expression rested somewhere between amused and freaked-out. “This is getting weirder by the minute.”
Lauren didn’t know how to break it to him, but it was going to get a lot weirder before they were all done, she feared.
“I know it’s a lot to take in at once—”
“And why the hell did your cousin look like he wanted to kill me?”
Because he probably did, but she didn’t think it would be very wise politically to point that out at the moment. Somehow, she needed to find a way to get Sebastian and Carson on a cooperative playing field, and Carson was going to be the easier party to persuade.
Maybe Carson’s bit of witch blood, if nothing else, would soften Sebastian up with regard to helping him.
“Sebastian has seen too much. To say he’s jaded would be a serious understatement.”
“He has a grudge against mortals?”
“You would, too, if you spent your life trying to save witches from the wrath of them.”
“So he basically operates an underground railroad for the witch community. Can’t he tell I’m a friend?”
“The witch hunters are subtle and have managed to infiltrate witch circles enough times to make Gandhi suspicious. Sebastian is only doing his job by being hypervigilant.”
“Vigilant is one thing. Looking like he wants to rip my head off is another. I don’t care how powerful a witch he is, I’m not going to sit around and let him treat me like dirt.”
“I’ll talk to him. It might help that you’re not a pure-blood. It’s actually kind of rare for a human to exhibit any witch trait.”
“What’s up with that tattoo, anyway? Why’d it disappear?”
“Sebastian is a shape-shifter. The raven can act as his eyes when he needs it to.”
“Wow. Pretty cool talent to have.”
“Trust me, I’m envious.”
Carson leaned back on the bed, shaking his head in disbelief. “I thought I’d seen and done it all.”
“You haven’t seen the half of it.”
“I guess that shape-shifting thing must come in handy during sex, huh?”
Lauren winced. “I try not to imagine my cousin having sex.”
“You haven’t been with any shape-shifters?”
There was that one guy in Paris, but Lauren thought it better not to mention such things to mortals. They tended to get intimidated.
“No. Against the rules. I’ve probably had more mortal lovers than witch lovers.”
“And you see the future?”
Lauren nodded, not sure how much more she wanted to reveal about herself. It was a new sensation, this telling her secrets to humans thing. It was beyond strange. And although it was kind of liberating, it was also scary.
“Occasionally, I have visions.” She’d briefly explained in the car earlier that she had premonitions, that her ability to predict the future on occasion was what set her apart from a mortal—along with her superior senses and heightened sexual abilities—but she had been purposely vague.
“And I’m in them?”
“I was lying to Sebastian,” she lied.
No sense in giving Carson all the information. And she knew it wouldn’t do any good for him to know he’d inhabited more than a few of her dreams and fantasies. It was no surprise he’d turned up in a vision, too.
Well, except…The surprising part was that her vision of him had happened before she knew him. Twenty-something years before she knew him, when she had been a little girl.
Lauren hadn’t realized right away when she met Carson that he’d been the man in her vision. It had taken a recurrence of the vision last week, identical to the one she’d had as a child—and had had on occasion every few years or so since—of a man and woman running scared on a beach in the half darkness, for her to understand a least some of its significance.
The couple was her and Carson.
“Why’d you lie?”
“He trusts my visions. It was a way of getting him to let you stay at least for tonight. I’ll have to do some more convincing to make him understand why he has to help us both.”
Carson had his arms behind his head. He looked tired, like a guy who hadn’t expected to get swept up in someone else’s life drama on an otherwise dull Tuesday night. Lauren felt a pang of guilt now for the first time. She had been so caught up in worrying about keeping them both alive that she hadn’t stopped to consider how screwed this situation could make Carson’s life.
How screwed it would make his life, because there really wasn’t any turning back now.
His gaze half-lidded, he asked, “How do these visions of yours happen?”
“Sometimes I can will one to happen, and sometimes I can’t. I can close my eyes and try to see some event from a different moment in time—usually the future, but sometimes I can get a vision from the past that I didn’t witness. Sometimes it happens, but sometimes it doesn’t.”
“There’s no rhyme or reason to it?”
“Witches are usually at their most powerful as children. Unless we practice and learn to harness that power, it fades with time. So as a kid, I could control it more than I can now.”
“Why didn’t you practice more?”
“I did practice as much as I could, but it was forbidden by the elders.”
“Who are these elders you keep talking about?”
“It’s our way of referring to the generation in power. They enforce the rules that have been handed down from antiquity, and they make new rules based on their own feelings about our time. The ruling generation is strictly opposed to the practice of our gifts.”
“Wouldn’t that help you defeat the people who want to kill you, though, if you could do your supernatural stuff?”
“They took the opposite strategy. Practicing our gifts can draw attention and therefore can make us more vulnerable to being detected, so the elders decided to stop using their gifts generations ago. Mine was the first generation anyone can remember who decided to resist that rule.”
“Why did you?”
Lauren stretched out on the opposite side of the bed, her tired body finally giving in to the need to relax. “Two things—my sister, and a vision I had.”
He frowned, obviously perplexed by her cryptic answer.
“What was the vision?”
“I can’t tell you right now,” she said, her voice revealing her exhaustion, but when she saw his disappointment, she added, “but I will eventually.”
“What about yo
ur sister? I didn’t even know you had a sister.”
She thought of pointing out that they knew almost nothing about each other. A shared Las Vegas fling may have taught them about each other’s bodies, but their lives were still a mystery.
The thought of Carson’s body caused her gaze to roam over him, and even now, she felt a warm buzz between her legs. They’d been amazing together. Explosive. Unforgettable.
And she had to get her mind as far away as possible from that particular train of thought.
She needed to adjust to the reality that she’d tumbled a few steps down on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and now she was supposed to be in survival mode, not I-need-to-get-laid mode.
“I have a younger sister named Corinne. She’s the most powerful witch alive, far as anyone knows, and she gave the younger generation the will not to suppress our powers completely. So we practiced in hiding. Even so, most of us have seen our powers fade over the years.”
“How about Corinne’s? Have hers faded?”
Lauren shook her head, a chill tingling along her spine at the strength of her sister’s power. “Not one bit. She’s amazing when she is disciplined about what she’s doing.”
“Why can’t she just wipe out the witch hunters then?”
“I have no doubt she could, if only it were that easy. Corinne is still young, and quite the rebel. She’s got a lot to learn about discipline before she’ll be truly effective.”
“So, you each have some different gift—what’s hers?”
“She can command the natural world around her. The wind, the weather, fire, water, even animals will do her bidding.”
“Wow. That’s intense.”
“We were once out hiking around in the hills near our family’s house, and we accidentally wandered into the territory of a mountain lion. I froze in terror, but my sister just stared into the animal’s eyes until it lay down and let us go without even the slightest aggressive gesture.”
“But she can’t do that kind of thing remotely?”
“No, she has to be within sight of the animal or element she wants to influence.”
“Must be kind of hard, living in the shadow of such a powerful sister.”
Call Me Wicked Page 4
