“The thing is…” She covered his hands with hers, guiding them from her face to wrap his arms around her. She softened as she leaned into him.
He relaxed from fierce, fight readiness as she welcomed his embrace. “Tell me why the cave’s hidden entrance scares you.”
“Because I come with baggage. Not my family. Mom and Dad wouldn’t intrude here. But the Old School network, my friends from Minervalle, they’re important to me. I’m close to a number of them and they’re gregarious. Your team is pretty low key.”
“Wait till Austin relaxes,” Rest interjected.
She smiled. “The reality is, getting involved with me means being connected to the Old School and socializing. There is visiting and laughter and emergencies. I’ve been part of huge parties and I always dreamed…I want my kids to run around with my friends’ kids.”
“They’re your family,” he said simply.
“Yes. And before you say that it’s okay, you need to understand what you’d be signing up for. I’ve seen this happen with Old School girls’ partners. If we’re together, they’ll unofficially adopt you. There’ll be demands, but also ‘help’ whether you want it or not. It’s crazy, loving chaos. I don’t want you to resent it.”
“I wouldn’t. Donna…we’ve known each other as kids, and that makes some things easier now. We’re comfortable together?” He waited for her nod, just checking. When she agreed with a smile, he continued. “But we also have to learn about who we are as adults. You did the right thing asking, not hiding your concern about the cave.”
It was her turn to interrupt. “It’s wonderful here. A fairyland. Thank you for sharing it with me.”
He kissed her, a quick silencing reassurance. The kiss changed into something hotter and more compelling as she responded with growing passion. He broke it off with his lungs heaving and the cave’s chill more than banished. “We’ve got this. We’ll work out the logistics of where we live and work, how we socialize, the team’s role, everything. Step by step.”
“Hand in hand.” She slipped hers into his, and curled her fingers tight.
“Yes.” He raised their clasped hands to his lips and felt her full body shiver. “Loving you won’t force me to do anything I don’t want.”
Her voice shook. “Love?”
His voice deepened. “I loved you in the hospital, when you waited with me, mourning Wayne and praying for Darius. I thought I’d keep you safe by leaving.”
“Never do that again.” But if she’d hoped to sound stern, she failed. Joy was in her eyes and voice.
“I tried to send you away at the diner, still trying to keep you safe, and it tore the heart out of me. Do you know how beautiful you are? How you make me ache for everything life offers?”
She kissed him. “You do that to me, too,” she murmured against his mouth. “I love you, Rest.”
Her words reached into his chest and squeezed his heart. It unlocked something in him that he couldn’t express. He could only kiss her frantically, touch her urgently, pull her as close as possible and regret that the cave was hard and cold, magical but not suited for seduction.
But she was warm in his arms, and her caresses just as passionate.
He burned with the need to make her his in the most primal and beautiful of ways; to give himself to her. “Up the ladder.”
“Pardon?” Her eyes were dazed, their pupils wide with arousal.
“I refuse to make love to you on a cold cave floor,” he said bluntly, and moved against her to show just how ready he was.
“Oh.”
The way she melted against him was gratifying, but hardly helped his self-control. “Donna, have mercy on me and get up that ladder.”
She giggled.
He nipped at her earlobe, and her giggle turned to a sexy gasp. He shaped her curvy butt with his hands, urging her to the ladder. “Up you go.” But when she stretched up her arms to grip the ladder, he groaned. The temptation was too much. He cupped her breasts as they strained upward with her position, one foot raised on the lowest rung of the ladder.
She moaned as he massaged the generous fullness of her breasts.
Even through her t-shirt and bra, he felt the aroused tightness of her nipples. “I want to suck your breasts. Will you come when I do?”
“Rest.”
His name said in her breathy, urgent voice flashed lust through him. He ran his hands from her breasts, down her body, along the inside of her thighs, and found that they quivered with tiny, excited shivers. That was sexy. He growled. “Climb.”
“While you’re doing that?”
“I want to do so much more. But not here.”
That got her climbing.
He watched her every inch of the way, imagining her legs wrapped around him. Then she cleared the trapdoor, and he launched upward, barely noticing the few steps up the ladder.
The heat of the shed was noticeable after the chill of the cave.
As was Austin’s shout. “Rest! Hey, Rest! Where they hell are you? If you’ve portaled out…”
Rest swore under his breath. “I’m here!” He dropped the trapdoor down but didn’t kick the cardboard box back over it. “Sorry,” he said quietly to Donna.
“It doesn’t sound like anything’s wrong.” She walked out of the shed behind him.
Austin came around the front corner of the house in time to see them emerge. “A shed? You showed your woman a shed?”
“Why are you shouting for me, Austin?”
“Man.” Austin shook his head. “I was feeling bad for interrupting you two, but…a shed?”
Donna grinned. “I’ll go back to the house.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed Rest briefly on the mouth.
For an instant his hand lay on her hip, instinctively possessive, then she was gone.
When he looked back at Austin, Rest was surprised to see a wistful expression on his friend’s face. Then Austin noticed him looking, and hid the genuine emotion with a grin.
It left Rest momentarily unbalanced. In the cave, he’d responded to Donna’s concerns about his concealment of the entrance with the seriousness required for building their relationship on solid foundations. However, he hadn’t actually given much credence to the heart of her concerns. Now, he wondered. If he had physically hidden himself in the desert, Austin hid in plain sight; behind his extroverted charmer façade.
Maybe the whole team had trust issues.
When he thought of General Olafur’s treachery and Wayne’s resultant death, Rest decided they had reason for their attitude. If anything, they hadn’t been mistrustful enough.
“What do you need?” he asked Austin.
“A few supplies.”
Rest locked down his emotions and concentrated on preparing for the mission.
Chapter 9
Rest chose a side fence as the site for the exit portal, the one that would get them to the outer perimeter of the wards on Paul Webb’s horse farm. The Maryland night was warm. There was no breeze to stir the air. Moonlight provided sufficient illumination that they left their night vision goggles on the top of their heads. The goggles were among the equipment Austin had had Rest courier him from the ranch to West Virginia to buy.
One of the other items Austin had insisted on was gripped in his left hand with spares tucked in his pockets. Webb might be a fire mage, but that didn’t mean that as a horse owner he wouldn’t be scared of fire around his animals. Smoke grenades could prove a useful distraction.
Gabe had a gun in either hand. Right would fire tranq darts. Left used real bullets. He lacked magic, but ambidexterity was just one of Gabe’s other skills.
Rest kept a hand on Gabe’s shoulder. They were all linked, ready to portal closer to the farmhouse as soon as Darius broke the outer ward. Meantime, Rest and Gabe kept watch, while Austin activated a fire shield spell for each of them. He’d warned them repeatedly not to rely on it against a fire mage.
A blast of wind hit them.
“Ward’s down,” Darius said.
No command was needed. As one, they stepped back through the portal. Rest reopened it between the house and stables.
They ducked into a situation where an alarm flashed blue in the yard, a siren wailed, and all the windows in the house shone with light.
Webb, if he was present as Gabe calculated, would know that the outer ward had gone down. Hopefully, he’d still lose a couple of seconds to the disorientation of being woken so unexpectedly. The team had chosen the far side of midnight for just that reason. Any edge was worth taking. They mightn’t intend to kill, but Webb and his staff wouldn’t hold back. They couldn’t afford to since they wouldn’t know who their attackers were or what they intended.
The stables and the smaller house beside them stayed dark.
Darius barely broke stride as they raced to the main house. “Ward’s down.”
That was incredibly fast. In the past, the team would have had to hold off an attack for anything up to seven minutes as Darius and Austin worked together to break a complex ward. Either this ward wasn’t complex or powerful, or else Darius’s magic had become both.
The French doors facing them blasted open as a fireball blew through them.
Rest dived to the side, but even as the fireball rocketed past him, he felt none of its scorching heat. So far, Austin’s fire shield spell held.
And they had fairly solid confirmation that Webb was in the house.
Gunfire erupted behind them. Rest resisted the urge to turn and return fire. Austin would back up Gabe; the two of them dealing with the three men employed to look after the horses, and possibly, to act as guards.
Rest’s role was to support Darius.
They had to get into the house.
Rest’s courier talent was strong, but beyond it, he was pretty much magically blind. He couldn’t rely on sensing other magic. He stayed low as he ran onto the veranda and crouched by the blown-open doors. He was in position.
Darius walked up the veranda steps as if there were neither bullets nor a new fireball coming his way. He relied on a personal ward, one that flared blue, but held, as the fireball broke around it.
At the edge of it, Rest felt residual heat, which warned him that Austin’s fire shield spell was failing. He glanced quickly around the doorframe to assess what they faced.
Paul Webb, easily recognizable from the many photographs of him at society and business events, stood in a large living room, midway between its internal door to the hallway and the French doors that he’d destroyed. He wore boxers that sagged below a middle-aged paunch and his dyed, dark brown hair was ruffled. But his hands were steady as he sketched another spell.
Ice blasted from Darius, and met a crimson fire ward enclosing Webb. A steaming pool of water formed on the floor.
Rest used the distraction to dive into the room and behind the questionable cover of a solid sofa. The polished wooden floorboards beneath him were scrupulously clean and even the back of the sofa smelled of leather treatment. Whether Webb’s housekeeper had magic or not, she evidently did her job to an exacting standard. He needed to look out for her and her husband.
He fired a tranq dart at Webb, more in hope than expectation of it reaching its target.
The dart erupted into flames as it hit Webb’s personal ward. Darius would need to break the ward before Rest fired again.
Rendering a person unconscious required finesse. In the movies, the hero simply hit the victim over the head. It was cartoon-style violence. But in the real world, that sort of recklessness could have severe consequences. You never knew how thin a person’s skull was or how the hit might rattle their brain. Concussion, even death, could result. The team needed Paul Webb alive and well to pass on their message to whoever had engaged him to contact Rest. Plus, they were making a wider statement about their don’t-mess-with-us competence. So it was either the tranq gun or magic that would take Webb down.
The gunfire outside was sporadic, replaced by an eerie whine that likely accompanied some form of magic. Then someone screamed.
When Wayne died in the ambush two years ago, he hadn’t had a chance to scream.
This scream didn’t sound like Austin or Gabe. Rest focused on his task. When Darius broke the fire mage’s personal ward, Rest had to fire the tranq dart.
But where were the caretaker and housekeeper?
With Darius and Webb still clashing in a hissing steam contest of fire and ice, Rest risked a glance back through the window.
Damn! There was his answer as to the caretaker’s whereabouts. A short, wiry man in jeans and boots was running from the back of the house along the veranda. A swarm of wasps materialized in front of his out-flung arm, which was directed toward Gabe and Austin.
Rest slammed the butt of the tranq gun at the window. As it broke, and the caretaker turned toward the sound, Rest threw a smoke grenade in the direction of the wasp swarm. “Wasps!”
Staring through the broken window, the caretaker’s fingers twitched with the start of a new spell casting.
Rest shot him with a dart.
The man collapsed.
Rest reloaded as he focused on the battle between Darius and Webb. Given how swiftly Darius had broken the ward on the house, Rest suspected he could have ended Webb’s personal ward faster than this, but Darius was a long-term thinker. They needed to impress on Webb and his staff that they were dangerous, but there was nothing to be gained in revealing all their cards on a minor mission.
Yet, even holding back on revealing his new power, Darius was making ground. He was inside the living room and the floor around Webb was awash with hot water.
Webb knew he was losing. It showed in the grim set of his jaw and the way his gaze flicked to Rest and back to Darius. He couldn’t risk using any of his magic to take out Rest. It was all Webb could do to hold off Darius.
So Webb retreated from the middle of the room. He backed into a cabinet and fumbled on a shelf, fingers closing around an ugly vase.
The odds were high that it was an enchanted weapon of some kind.
Before he lifted it, Darius shouted, “Now!”
The fire around Webb died in a deluge of water.
Rest shot the dart.
But as Webb fell, the vase dropped with him.
A hand span from the floor, it levitated. “I’ve got it,” Darius said. “Check on Austin and Gabe.”
“All clear,” Gabe said from the veranda doorway. “Three men unconscious, plus the one Rest tranq’d.”
“Which leaves the housekeeper.” Darius strode through the water that surged and eddied around Webb, obviously holding a residual magical charge that made it active. He picked up the vase, studied it a moment, and threw it to Austin. “Sleep bomb.”
Austin fielded it neatly. “Ironic.”
“Where’s the housekeeper?” Darius asked.
“Here,” a small voice answered from the hallway.
The team was already on alert, but their attention split in their old, trained discipline. Darius and Rest focused on the internal door to the hallway. Austin and Gabe took position against the wall either side of the external doorway in case this was a trick and the threat came from outside.
“Hands up. No magic,” Rest ordered.
Darius waited beside the cabinet, not immediately in view from the internal door.
“I don’t have magic.” The voice shook. “Please, don’t hurt me.” A woman walked slowly into view, and at Rest’s gesture, into the room. It was interesting that she didn’t look at her employer’s slumped body, but at Rest and the team, and then, at the water flooding the room. She focused on Rest. “Is my husband…?”
“Asleep.”
Austin could use mage sight to read a person’s aura. “She doesn’t have magic,” he confirmed.
None of them relaxed. Gabe was proof that being mundane didn’t make a person any less dangerous. However, if the woman lacked magic, then conventional means of restraining her would be adequate.
“Your choice,” Rest told her
. “Tranquilizer to sleep an hour like the men, or awake but cuffed.”
She drew a quick, sobbing breath. “Awake. Please.” She held her hands out together in front of her.
He sympathized with her obvious fear, but his own training held. “Hands behind your back. Turn around.” His tone was gentle. He used the plastic ties quickly before pointing to a chair. “Sit.”
She sat. “I told Hank I didn’t want to work here. I told him. But he had a debt…” She was talking to herself, her gaze on the water soaking into an old, and likely expensive, Persian carpet.
“Grab Webb,” Darius ordered.
Rest and Gabe lifted the man. Given that the fire mage only wore boxers and he was wet from all the water on the floor, holding onto him wasn’t so easy. But they managed it, and carried him out to the veranda.
Austin put the sleep bomb vase on the floor in a corner where it couldn’t be knocked over and activated. Then he stood where he could watch the housekeeper, and Rest and Gabe’s activities.
They dropped Webb at the top of the steps.
“I am not pinning the note to his boxers,” Rest said.
Gabe grunted a laugh.
Darius looked up. He’d been examining a couple of other items from the cabinet where Webb had grabbed the sleep bomb vase. “Nothing so impermanent.” He picked up something small enough that his hand hid it, and walked carefully back across the wet floor.
As he passed Austin, Austin flinched. “Death magic.”
Darius nodded, grimly. “I’ll take care of the note.”
Rest passed the sheet of paper to him.
“First, this. Look away.” Darius threw whatever he’d found out into the yard. The angle of his arm suggested he threw it high.
Rest and the others turned their backs.
Light exploded. A sound like thunder shook the air, followed by a violent wind that tore away whatever magic Darius had destroyed.
“There’s been too much death magic lately,” he said, and the price of what it had cost him in private agony to master the rune sounded in his voice. It, too, had been tainted by death magic.
Austin broke the silence. “If you have everything under control here, I have another surprise for Webb when he wakes.”
Desert Devil (Old School Book 5) Page 14
