A moment later, the door closed, and he was alone. On the wall, the clock read 8:10 a.m. And he thought of his cousin. She probably needed to sleep longer, but he doubted she’d really be asleep.
He went into the bathroom and cleaned up, and as he did so, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. He was starting to look like death. Like an addict, though he never used the drugs that some of the weaker witches used to mask their pain at being outcasts.
But sometimes it wasn’t a drug or a disease that drove people close to death. Sometimes, he knew all too well, it was simply pain.
His eyes had gotten hollow, with purple shadows beneath, and he’d lost weight, giving his bone structure a disturbing prominence. His long black hair had gotten limp and greasy, and always looked that way no matter how often he washed it. It draped his shoulders like the cloak of a dead man.
And yet he had other things he needed to focus on besides his own self-indulgent pain. Lauren was in trouble. Lauren, whom he’d adored since childhood, whom he loved more than a sister. They’d grown up with the common bond of knowing death could seize them any moment they made a wrong move—a bond made all the stronger by the fact that they’d chosen to tempt fate by rebelling against the elders’ rules.
He left the bathroom and headed upstairs to the room where he’d deposited Lauren and the mortal a few hours ago. He needed to talk to her while the mortal was still asleep. His anger flared at the thought of Lauren consorting with such an obviously smug, useless asshole.
Sebastian knew his cousin was too good for a mortal, but what could he say?
He’d have to think of something. He could not risk the danger of allowing a mortal to remain in their midst.
He stood outside the room about to knock on the door, when she opened it. She startled at the sight of him, then gathered her wits and covered her mouth with her finger to urge him not to speak. Over her shoulder, Sebastian could see the mortal still in bed sleeping.
Mortals were lazy—another of the ways they were inferior to witches, who only needed a few hours rest each day.
She closed the door behind her, and when they’d made their way down to Sebastian’s office, she finally spoke.
“I need you to help Carson, too, and for more than just a day,” she said, cutting straight to the issue.
She knew him too well. Sebastian bit his tongue. It wouldn’t do any good to argue at the moment.
“Sit,” he said, nodding at the chair across from his desk. “Tell me what you know about this mortal.”
“First off, he’s not totally mortal. He has some witch blood. I can see it in his palms.”
Sebastian stared at her, unimpressed by the news. “So what if his great-great-great-grandmother was part witch. He’s still mortal.”
“And he’s also part witch. Our blood runs through him, too. Keep that in mind.”
He shrugged. It didn’t really matter to him. Anyone who’d grown up as a normal mortal knew nothing of the fear and persecution that came with being a witch.
“He’s totally innocent, Sebastian. He’s a friend of my best friend, and I know for a fact that he’s not out to get us.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just know. He’s appeared in one of my visions, and I have the absolute feeling that he’s someone I need to help me—and that I have to help him, too.”
“I don’t help mortals, Lauren.”
“Do it for me.”
A sick feeling settled in Sebastian’s gut. He thought of the other mortals. Three had shown up here in the past two years, and he would have to tell her about them.
“The underground isn’t the safe haven it once was, I’m afraid.”
Lauren’s eyes grew startled. “What do you mean?”
“I’m afraid The Order may be infiltrating. Three times, I’ve had mortals show up here in the past two years, and they were all one of them.”
“Witch hunters? Found their way here? How?”
Sebastian shook his head. “I wish I knew.”
“So what happened? How did you find them out?”
He said nothing, but she glanced at the raven tattoo on his arm and understanding dawned on her expression. “You saw.”
“I don’t know where they came from, or how they found us, but they did.”
“But…what did you do?”
His gaze dropped to the surface of his desk. The truth many of their generation overlooked was that in facing down The Order, they had to also face that they had to kill, or be killed.
He leveled his gaze at her again. “I took care of the situation.”
“You…”
“Killed them.”
The color drained from her face. “But it’s forbidden.”
“A lot of what we do is forbidden. If we agree to break one of the rules of the elders, we are silently agreeing that it’s okay to break them all, are we not?”
She leaned over and put her elbows on her knees, and covered her face with her hands. She wasn’t crying, but he knew she was reeling. So was he, in his own way. It felt good somehow to hand the burden of his secret over to someone else, even if only for a moment.
“God, Sebastian. How did you—Where did you—”
“It’s better if you don’t know.”
“Maybe the more important question is how they found this place. We have to figure that out.”
“We don’t have to do anything. You’re on the run from The Order, so our first priority is keeping you safe from them. Let me worry about the other stuff.”
“I’m such a goddamn fool,” she said, and this time her voice broke, and she began to cry.
“We all are, in our own way.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I’d be endangering you by coming here.”
“It’s okay. It’s my job to protect you,” he said, but something in his voice sounded flat.
Dead.
She pulled herself together and wiped away the dampness in her eyes. “I can take care of myself,” she said. “You have your own problems to worry about.”
“Don’t start talking like that. I’m not going to let you go off on your own and get yourself killed.”
“I’m responsible for Carson’s safety, and I won’t let him down. So if you’re not going to help him, too, I have no need for your help.”
“You’d really let a mortal come between us?”
“It’s not as simple as that, and you know it.”
“It is, Lauren. We’re family. Nothing, especially not some punk-ass mortal, should stand between us.”
“He’s a friend.”
“More than a friend,” he said, his gaze pinning her with his accusation.
“Yes, he’s been my lover in the past.”
He didn’t feel jealousy, exactly. He thought of Lauren in the same way he would think of a sister. But he did feel a surge of protectiveness for her that verged on the irrational.
“Why?” he asked.
“You know why.”
“I don’t sleep with mortals.”
“You’ve got access to a lot more witches than I do. You’re surrounded by them. I, on the other hand, am surrounded by mortals every day.”
He tried to put aside his distaste at the idea long enough to imagine himself in her situation. All he could imagine was being celibate. He didn’t have the slightest desire for inadequate mortal flesh.
“I guess I’d have to be in your shoes to understand.”
“You’ve seen the worst of humanity. You have a lot more reason to hate mortals than I do.”
“Perhaps that’s true.”
“I worry about you. I think you let the hate consume you. You don’t look so good, you know.”
Sebastian thought of his own grizzly reflection and couldn’t disagree. “Thanks, cousin.”
“I mean, you look tired, and thin.”
She didn’t know about Maia. No one knew.
“What is it?” she asked.
He said nothing.
&n
bsp; “The killings…are they weighing on you that much?”
He shook his head.
“Something else then…girl problems?”
He said nothing again, but her expression said she knew that she’d nailed the truth.
“Who?”
“You don’t know her.”
“What happened?”
“One of the mortals—she led him here. He was her lover, and she came here for protection, but she didn’t realize he was the one she needed protecting from.”
“So you killed the guy.”
“I did, and she hated me for it. She thought I was a monster after that.”
“Where did she go?”
“I had to send her away. Gave her a new identity, helped her get started in Miami. I haven’t heard from her since.”
“But you fell in love with her?”
Sebastian stared at the black, scuffed surface of the desk again. “I don’t know why. I just looked at her and thought I saw my home.”
“She didn’t return the attraction?”
“In a weird way, I think she sort of did. Which made her want to get away from me even more after what had happened with the mortal.”
“She thought you were motivated by jealousy.”
He nodded. “Maybe I sort of was. But I had to kill him, regardless.”
“What was her name?”
“Maia,” he choked out before it could catch in his throat. He hadn’t said her name aloud in a long time.
“I’ve never seen you like this over a woman. How long has it been?”
“Eight months.”
“It’ll get better,” she said, but her eyes still looked worried.
“Don’t worry about me. Right now we need to think about where you should go.”
“Given my choice, I want to stay here with Carson.”
“No. That’s out of the question.”
Lauren leaned forward in her chair, resting her elbows on her knees again, and she looked at him the way she did when she wasn’t going to change her mind.
“You need help right now, and I can help you.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Maybe what we need is to lead the guys who are after me right here, so we can capture them and get information about The Order. This could be the opportunity we’ve been waiting for.”
“I’m not going to risk your safety like that. Someone else can be a decoy, but not you.”
“My visions have been getting more frequent. Corinne thinks that means something.”
Sebastian wanted to argue further, but at the mention of Corinne he went silent. His little cousin, of any witch on Earth, would know.
“What else did she say?” he finally asked, but he was torn between feelings of dread and curiosity.
The curiosity, he understood, but the dread gave him pause. Why? The answer came to him in an instant. All these years of hoping and looking forward to the uprising, he’d never considered the very real possibility that they might not succeed in it. He’d never considered that Lauren’s vision of their future might be wrong, or that they had all their hopes pinned o a pipe dream.
He’d never considered it, and he wouldn’t start now. They had no choice but to succeed.
6
OCCASIONALLY, LAUREN envied the power her sister’s name evoked. Mention of Corinne Parish was enough to send any witch of her generation into reverent silence. But with that considerable power came a huge burden, one Lauren didn’t envy at all. She’d never aspire to be the savior of an entire generation.
And as a big sister entirely too familiar with Corinne’s personality, Lauren wasn’t sure she wanted that burden to fall on her wild, impetuous younger sibling, either. But it was the way it was. It was the way it had always been.
Corinne, for her part, didn’t seem to mind. She was too headstrong and full of herself to slow down and consider the weight of her burden or think about the consequences her every decision had.
Lauren stared into Sebastian’s bloodshot eyes, and she knew she absolutely was not going to leave him here alone. He needed her help, whether he realized it or not, and she was going to find a way to give it.
“Corinne said she was beginning to feel like it was time. Like the season was coming.”
“The season?”
“That’s how she’s started describing the uprising.”
He nodded. “Makes sense, I guess.”
Corinne’s ability to control nature was stunning to the uninitiated. She could command the weather to change in an instant, shift the ocean tides, summon the wind, bring the animals to heel at her side. Hers was the rarest of powers among witches, because in harnessing the natural world, she could increase her own strength until almost nothing could stop her. An awesome power in the hands of someone who tended not to think before acting. This was compounded by the fact that the purity and intensity of her gifts were at levels higher than any witch anyone could remember.
The elders only had an inkling of how strong Corinne really was. If they’d known the truth…Lauren could not allow herself to think about what might have happened.
On top of her other activities, Corinne had a sense of intuition that was uncanny. While all witches were intuitive, Corinne could take any situation and foresee its logical conclusion more quickly than anyone Lauren had ever known. When her little sister said something was going to happen, it happened.
“What else did she say?”
“Only that I should keep myself ready to act, not go too far.”
“So that’s why you really want to stay here? You think Corinne will want us all together when it starts happening.”
It. The event they’d all been fantasizing about their entire lives.
“Yes,” Lauren said. “She will.”
“We’ve been living on the edge for so long, it’s hard to believe the revolution we’ve been waiting for might finally happen.”
“Tell me about it. I feel like it’s become this unattainable dream. Despite wanting it so much, I’ve almost accepted it will never really happen. Now even the suggestion that it’s imminent freaks me out a little.”
Sebastian nodded. “Have you ever tried to imagine how it will go down? What our lives will really be like after?”
“I’ve always imagined that we’d experience real freedom to be truly ourselves…But maybe that’s a little naive.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because in my mind I too often skip over the hard part—the actual uprising. I don’t know how it will go or how long it will take.”
“Your vision only told you it would be successful, right? No other details?”
Lauren nodded. “Yeah. I saw us celebrating victory against The Order.” It had happened so long ago without recurring that the image was fuzzy to her now.
And she sometimes worried that, because it had not recurred, it was perhaps a faulty vision, that her longing for a successful uprising had sparked it rather than insight into actual future events. But she could not let those fears dissuade them from what had to be done.
“I’ve thought about how to defeat The Order. We’d have to infiltrate it and bring it down from within, but they’re worse than the CIA when it comes to security.”
“No easy task, that’s for sure. How would witches get in without being detected? I guess we could use mortals but how could we trust that The Order didn’t brainwash them?” Lauren sighed. “I don’t doubt we can do it, but it’s such a huge maneuver it overwhelms me.”
“I hear you, but we have to hope Corinne will be up for it. Even if the rest of us aren’t.”
“You’re right,” Lauren said. She did want to believe they had a future in which they could live openly as witches without fear.
It occasionally struck her as odd to think of her baby sister launching a revolution—especially a baby sister as out of control as Corinne. Lauren was too familiar with the varied aspects of Corinne’s personality—too often had witnessed her being impulsive or self
ish or stubborn—to see only the leader who would guide them to victory. But then again, they’d know Corinne would take charge since their childhood. The basic plan they’d hatched in the hills near the vineyards under the cypress trees had never changed in all these years.
Sebastian studied Lauren intently before seeming to come to a decision. “Only because you say your vision includes the mortal, I will let him stay here for now. But the first time he crosses me or takes any unnecessary risk, I will remove him. His life doesn’t matter to me.”
Lauren’s stomach clenched at his words. Sebastian had changed since she’d seen him last. Something in him had hardened. And even though his earlier confession should have warned her, she now fully understood he was capable of things that she was not.
“Thank you,” she said. “I owe you my life.”
At least she had time to figure out how best to aid Sebastian, how best to protect Carson and how best to help defeat The Order. For the first time since she’d heard the men outside her door, she felt as though she had some tiny measure of control.
And with this reprieve Sebastian had granted, she knew she walked a fine line where Carson was concerned. Now, more than ever, she had to deny her desire for him so as not to piss off Sebastian and give him justification to remove Carson. Lust and concern for him battled within her. She only hoped that Carson did nothing to tip the lust advantage because she wasn’t convinced she could resist him.
CARSON WOKE UP with another raging, rock-hard erection. Or perhaps the one he’d gotten earlier had never gone away. Entirely and frustratingly possible. At least he hadn’t been plagued by any more unfulfilled erotic dreams. A guy could only take so much.
He stared down at his dick straining against his jeans and struggled to think past his sexually charged state to remember where he was and why he felt as though he needed to sleep for another ten hours or so.
There was also the simultaneous need to piss. An ache so deep he felt as if he hadn’t gone to the bathroom in ages.
He blinked in the morning light, and as soon as the fog began to lift from his brain, he remembered why his erection was so damn urgent. Lauren. Lying next to him. He looked over at where he thought she would be, but no one was there.
Call Me Wicked Page 6
