Sebastian

by Hazel Hunter

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Book Description

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Logan (Excerpt)

  Note from the Author

  Copyright

  SEBASTIAN

  HER WARLOCK PROTECTOR

  BOOK 2

  By Hazel Hunter

  SEBASTIAN

  Her Warlock Protector Book 2

  Nicolette Erling is a survivor, hiding in plain sight. As she moves from city to city, disguised as a psychic in a traveling circus, her real Wiccan ability remains hidden—from everyone except Sebastian.

  Major Sebastian Corcoran of the Magus Corps has made Nicolette his private project. Though he’s determined to bring the beautiful rogue into the safety of the Wiccan community, he’s unprepared for the fiery passion that erupts between them.

  Desperate to remain on her own and unable to leave the brutality of her past behind, Nicolette can’t let herself fall for Sebastian. When duty calls him back to the Corps, he can’t force her to come. But can he leave her vulnerable to the enemies that may find her?

  CHAPTER ONE

  The gates had opened just a few hours ago, but Nicolette was already willing to call it a day. There was a lull between customers, and she hastened to pour out a little more cat food for Karas. He clattered on his perch, looking as restless as she felt, and she let him butt his head against her hand a few times.

  “Just get through tonight, and we'll have a nice long lie-in soon, okay, handsome?”

  The African crow flapped his black and white wings at her as if to tell her what he thought of that nonsense, and she scratched his crest consolingly. The work never seemed to get easier or shorter, and when her pet coughed, signaling another person approaching the tent, she scooted behind the table again.

  The couple who came in were young. She would guess that they came from the college nearby. They blinked at the darkness of her tent, and when they took their seats across from her, they looked as apprehensive as they were entertained.

  “We don't need to hear the phony accent or nothing,” the boy said. “We don't really believe in this junk.”

  Nicolette allowed herself a tight smile, and she turned instead to the girl.

  “What about you?” she said, and no, there wasn't much of an accent there unless you counted the slight sharpness of her New York vowels. New York was almost a decade ago, though, and as she had learned, everything changed.

  “Me?” squeaked the girl. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think this is junk?”

  The girl burst into nervous giggles, and the boy rolled his eyes. It didn't take any magic to know what they were like.

  “I, um, I don't know? I guess I'm mostly open-minded,” she said.

  “Ah, that is a fine thing to be,” Nicolette said, letting her voice warm up a little. Open-minded was something to work with.

  “I don't pretend to be in touch with spirits,” she said, though that wasn't her line with other people. “I just feel things, and some of my tools allow me to see what others might not.”

  The boy looked skeptical, but he laid down the fifteen dollars willingly enough. Nicolette made it disappear, and then she spread out her Tarot cards. She had stolen them a few years ago from a bookstore in Seattle and spent some time sanding them and spindling them until they looked fissured and worn.

  As she shuffled the cards and explained their long and vaunted history to the pair, she let her own consciousness open and expand. She glanced between her cards and their faces, letting herself focus where she could. It only took a few moments before she could see the customary swirl of colors around their heads.

  The girl's colors were uniformly soft, rose, amethyst and coral. Threaded through the softness, however, were veins of silver. A girl who was gentle and sweet, Nicolette thought approvingly, but that vein of silver spoke of ambition and ferocity. The boy, on the other hand, was a dull morass of beige and gray, smeared and smudgy with an unpleasant hint of green. His colors were significantly more standard when it came to the people that Nicolette saw regularly, and the green was familiar enough.

  She laid down the cards, and was happy to see that the seven of swords came up. It made things easier in some ways.

  “This card signifies deception,” she said, keeping her voice almost bored. “Someone is trying to get away with something.”

  The words were barely out of her mouth when she saw the boy flinch and the girl glance sideways at him, her eyes narrow.

  Ah, good. She might be infatuated, but it looks like she's no one's fool.

  “Deception comes in many forms,” Nicolette continued, “but in many cases, it is simple and stupid, easy enough to ferret out, and simpler still to remove from your life.”

  The last she directed to the girl and, as she did so, she could see the rose in the girl's aura deepen to a vibrant crimson. The boy's aura turned a sickly greenish shade, and Nicolette knew that she was right.

  “I'll bet it is,” the girl said softly. “What else does it say?”

  Nicolette stuck with the cards after that. She liked Tarot fortune telling. Though reading auras was really her power, the cards were an excellent tool. They were all about patterns, and once you pointed people toward a pattern, you could largely let them do most of the work on their own.

  The couple left, but not before the girl tipped her another five dollars. She looked like she was going to go off and give her boyfriend hell, and Nicolette silently cheered her on.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sebastian watched the young couple make their way from the tent. They had a distinctly different body language than when they’d gone in. He smiled a little as they walked briskly into the crowd. Nicolette’s ability could sometimes have that effect. Though he told himself that watching her tent was for this exact purpose—to establish the extent of her abilities—he knew that wasn’t strictly true.

  Shadows moved inside the tent, and he knew the one on the left was her. Even her silhouette hinted at the classic beauty that had struck him from the start. It seemed to come from another era, like the trade she plied. He watched, riveted, as echoes of other places and times, other carnivals and festivals all melded. But as the two dark forms took their seats, he came back to the moment. Though the Magus Corps didn’t require he sample her talents directly, he wondered for a moment what it would be like to sit across from her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next customers were easy enough, and the last, a cheerful old man with a missing arm, even managed to make her smile.

  “Pretty girl like you, how do you feel about running away with me, eh? You ran away with the circus, but maybe you'd rather run off with a fella who heads the local historical society. Come on, you can bring your wacky bird with you.”

  Nicolette stifled a real laugh, and out of curiosity, she checked his aura. It was a deep, pewter blue, fine and strong, but there was an edge of drab gray to the edges. Depression, she thought, or perhaps even
mourning.

  “I can't come with you today,” she said, “but someone else is going to say yes.”

  “You think so, huh?” he sighed theatrically. “Well, I'm an old man, and every day I get older. I had my yes, forty years of it as a matter of fact, and though I may hope, well, I won't be surprised to hear that that was it.”

  Nicolette's heart ached, and she took the man's hand, turning it to look at the palm.

  “No, see how strong your love line and life line are? Life is long, and love follows it all the way.”

  The smile he gave her was as sweet as honey, and he squeezed her hand gently.

  “It is good of you to say so, pretty girl, and I hope it is for you, too.”

  He left, and in the lull, Nicolette sat with his words, letting them fill the air around her until Karas fluttered off of his perch and came to sit on her shoulder.

  “What, are you worried he was competing with you for my attention, sweetie? Don't worry, you're the most handsome male I know.”

  The crow preened at her words, but then he hopped nervously, fluffing up until he was as big as a basketball. The coughing sound he made was a warning, and Nicolette looked up just in time to see her newest customer.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The man entered the tent, and it was as if he sucked all the air out of the room. He simply took up too much space, and Nicolette felt a brief lick of panic run up her spine. Her mother would have said that a goose walked over her grave, but this felt like someone wanted to put her in it.

  “You are the fortune teller?”

  The words came out thickly, as if they were dipped in tar before being spat out. It took Nicolette a moment to respond.

  “Yes…yes, I am Madame Nicole. Please, tell me what you are looking for tonight?”

  Her patter sounded false even to her own ears, but the hulking man didn't seem to notice. He dropped himself into the seat across from her, and even then she found it hard to really see him. He was dressed in jeans, a plaid shirt and a baseball cap, all very common to the crowd the circus was serving that night, but he wore them badly.

  Like a disguise, she thought with a shiver, and she braced herself. She had had brushes with strange and dangerous people before, and for the most part, they were simply on their way elsewhere. Nothing told her that she needed to call security. Yet.

  “I am looking for my fortune,” the man said, and he held out his hand.

  “You wish to have your palm read?” she asked, not taking it yet. “That will be thirty dollars.”

  She doubled her price, hoping that he would leave, but instead he counted out a small stack of greasy fives and ones. She took the money, and reluctantly took his hand.

  “You are a man who works very hard at what he does,” she began. “You are someone who believes in right and wrong, and that you stand on the side of the angels.”

  The man's laugh was a dark thing.

  “That I do, that I do, madame. Tell me what else you see.”

  Nicolette had read palms from South Dakota down to the Gulf, and she wasn't sure that she had ever liked holding a hand less.

  “I see a life behind you of sacrifice. Some regret, some joy. You move forward no matter what, and every day it brings you closer to what you seek.”

  “That it does, madame. Tell me, how close am I to what I seek?”

  “Will you tell me what you are looking for? It makes it easier for me to sense–”

  “I am looking for a woman,” he said, interrupting her as if he had intended to speak all along. “She's been running for a long time, but I'm sure she can't run forever.”

  “That’s–”

  “She's a bad one. A wicked one, and she and those like her, they must be found. They must be punished.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Something about a man alone approaching a psychic’s tent was unusual. But when Sebastian heard the loud, forced laugh, the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He glared at their huddled and unmoving silhouettes. Something was wrong.

  He instinctively moved forward, but stopped himself. Barging in could do as much harm as good. Meeting her under these circumstances was not how he’d wanted it to go. He took a step back.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Nicolette's instincts were screaming at her now. When she tried to pull her hand back, the man instead gripped it tightly. She could no more tear herself away than she could uproot an oak tree. He simply stared at her. Now she could see how dark his eyes were and how tight his smile.

  Without thinking, she opened her awareness to truly see him, and what she saw made her hackles rise. The man's aura was a stark and sickly white, shot through with gray patches that looked diseased. She had never seen anything like it, and her panic rose up even higher.

  “Let me go,” she said through clenched teeth, all pretense of making a show forgotten. “I don't know what your damn game is, but it is over now.”

  There was a knife strapped under the table. She didn't want to use it, but if the next thing out of this man-monster's mouth wasn't a mumbled apology, she would have no compunctions about doing so. She reached for it with her free hand, but she never took her eyes from the man's face, watching for a flicker of violence or a whisper of what he intended to do next. On her shoulder, Karas hunched down and hissed like a snake.

  The man smiled and opened his mouth, but then the flap of her tent swept back.

  “I was told I could get my fortune told while I was here, and I couldn't resist,” the man drawled, and suddenly the dire atmosphere dissolved as if it had never been.

  The man-monster dropped her hand as if he’d never pinned her there in the first place. Now he stood, eying the newcomer with something between contempt and disgust.

  “Fortunetelling's a witch's art and a woman's art,” the man with the white aura said in his tarry voice. “Real men have nothing to do with it.”

  “Real men,” the newcomer said smoothly, “don't talk about women needing to be punished.”

  He stood back to let the man out of the tent. With a seething glare first at her and then the newcomer, the man-monster stomped out. When the flap swung closed behind him, Nicolette felt as if she could breathe again. She wanted nothing more than to collapse into a heap and sob with relief. Though she knew she was being stupid, she felt as if she had escaped something deep and dark, something that wanted to drag her down into the muck.

  Karas pecked gently at her earlobe, a comforting gesture, and she reached up to touch him. He had calmed as soon as the man had left, and now he was putting his own feathers back into place as well as soothing his mistress.

  Instead of asking her if she was all right, the newcomer sat down in the chair across from her. He let her regain her composure while ostensibly studying the crow on her shoulder.

  “Is that an African pied crow?” he asked.

  She smiled at him automatically. “You know your corvids. He is.”

  “And young too. At least, he looks all shiny and new.”

  Nicolette laughed a little, feeling a little more at ease.

  “He is. He was just a chick when I found him at a flea market. Some terrible man had him in a little cage with nothing but sunflower seeds. Can you believe it?”

  The stranger's eyes crinkled when he smiled. Though Nicolette was always wary of men, clients especially, she felt herself warmed by it.

  “And I suppose you found your heart couldn't take it,” he said, “and you rescued him immediately?”

  “I suppose I must have,” Nicolette said.

  It was a little more like she had cornered the vendor behind his truck and threatened him with dire hints about something that he felt very guilty about. By the end of it, he would have given her the truck and everything in it, let alone one traumatized exotic bird.

  She took a deep breath to steady herself, and pulled some of her professional demeanor back on as she regarded the man across from her.

  He was tall and lean, built for strength and dexterity. In the
dim light, she could see that his short hair was as dark as ink, and that his eyes were wide and friendly, though she couldn't tell what color they were. Dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, he looked as casual and unassuming as anyone else on the thoroughfare, but there was something else to him as well.

  “Do you like what you see?” he asked, and there was a gentle tone of amusement in his voice.

  Instead of allowing herself to blush or stammer the way that she would have just a few short years before, Nicolette let her glance travel up and down his body slowly. There was a lot to like. She let a slow smile cross her face.

  “I think I’ll keep that to myself until after I have read your fortune. You did me a favor there. Would you like a free reading?”

  To her surprise, he shook his head.

  “Where I come from, we pay people for their talents,” he said softly. “If you care to use your gift to see for me, I would want to pay you. In the old days, we crossed our fortuneteller's palms with silver. I'm short on silver, but I'd be ashamed to ask you to read for me without paying.”

  He opened his wallet and set down two bills, and she was surprised to see that they were both twenties. Handsome and apparently rich as well. With only a little bit of wariness, she put the money away in her voluminous robes and shuffled her cards.

  The cards clicked in their familiar timeless rhythm, and she regarded him carefully.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked. “Do you seek guidance on the future, on your health, on your money? Perhaps it is love that you are after.”

  His laugh was short but friendly.

  “I am looking for anything you can tell me,” he said, and she could sense no dishonesty in his words. “I am looking for...well, I am looking for direction.”