by Paul Duffau
“We don’t have time for this.” Sasha placed a hand on Kenzie’s shoulder and murmured, “Æsculapium.” The fingers dug in, the pressure painful over Kenzie’s collarbone as the grip tightened.
The relief from the healing spell opened like a flower, starting in a tight bud and blossoming out to her limbs. A warmth trickled through her veins and left her light-headed. Kenzie checked her legs and massaged her arm. Faint white marks gave evidence of the repaired damage to her legs. Her arm showed not a single mark to suggest a source of injury. “Thank you.”
Sasha wore a peculiar expression. She hesitated, and said, “Go clean yourself up, please. When you come back down, we need to have a discussion.” She stepped back from Kenzie as though frightened. “Go. I’ll make something to drink to soothe your nerves.”
Disturbed at Sasha’s reaction, Kenzie didn’t answer but complied. She went upstairs, collected clean clothes, and headed for the shower. She turned the temperature up high, stripped, and stepped under the spray of water. The heat needles from the showerhead sluiced away the fuzz in her brain.
What the hell had just happened? Steam filled her lungs. It was totally irrational, but the imagery of Mitch writhing in the same agony she’d just faced made her heart race. Kenzie changed the showerhead to the massage setting and faced the back of the shower. The rhythmic thrumming at the base of her neck designed to relax her did not allay her alarm. Stepping away from the deluge, she worked shampoo into a lather with trembling hands, and then scrubbed her body of the dust and sweat from the Glade. She shifted the knob back to a wide spray and rinsed and added the conditioner.
The feeling wouldn’t shake loose. Mitch hovered in the back of her mind, not in the good way, close like a cuddle, but pregnant with danger. She drew a stuttering breath, did her final rinse, and turned off the water.
She had more immediate worries. She dried off with a towel as long as she was tall and slipped into her undies. Two minutes later, barefoot but dressed in clean skinny jeans and a white short-sleeved blouse that showed off her tan, Kenzie went to meet Sasha, heart thudding against her ribs hard enough to hurt.
On the way back downstairs, she tried to invent an excuse that would hold water for being at the Glade. The last thing she wanted to do was tell Sasha the truth. The woman would freak if she knew that Kenzie could bypass the security at the grotto any time she wished.
Security. Drat. Kenzie hung her head. She’d have to deal with both of them.
Kenzie found Sasha in the kitchen. The broken plate had been cleaned up, and the air bore a sweet scent of spearmint. Two large mugs, the kind she liked, that she could wrap both hands around, stood on the counter.
“These are ready,” said Sasha, her words carrying no warmth. “Sit.”
Kenzie went to the table overlooking the backyard, skipping the stools at the counter. She flopped into a chair and crossed her arms. “Now what?” If she couldn’t come up with a good lie, maybe she could distract Sasha into an argument.
Sasha’s face twisted into an ugly mask that disappeared in a flash, but the downturned curl of her mouth that remained made it clear what she thought. She carried over the tea and handed one mug to Kenzie.
“Now you talk,” said Sasha, taking a slow sip.
“About what?” A flutter of movement outside captured her attention. Just a hummingbird, flitting from the feeder to the garden flowers. Kenzie’s chest constricted at the idea of its freedom.
“I think telling me how you left the house without Mr. Jackson would be an excellent place to start.”
Yeah, thought Kenzie, no. She stalled by taking a sip of tea. Unexpected flavor filled her mouth instead of the usual black tea that Sasha preferred. Surprised at the sweetness, she savored the honey-mint taste and took another sip.
“Who said I left? Jackson?” She contorted her face into a grimace. “Why would I want to leave, it’s just so perfect being cooped up in the house all day with nothing to do.” Shocked at her mix of lies and honesty, Kenzie took another sip. The tea was really good.
“I should think that you found things to do,” murmured Sasha.
Kenzie shrugged. The fluttering of the hummingbird doubled as a vibrantly colored male joined the female at the feeder. Their wings beat the air so quickly that they were a blur. They darted to the right and Kenzie blinked as her eyes couldn’t follow fast enough. Where did they go? Lazily, she searched for the tiny creatures.
“Are you enjoying the tea?”
The question dashed against her like a cold wave. Hummingbirds forgotten, she shifted in her seat. A satisfied smile sat cruelly on Sasha’s face.
“What . . . ?” Kenzie couldn’t even get the whole question out. What was in the tea? Dumbly, she lifted the mug, so much heavier now, to put it on the table. It took all her strength.
“Do you think that you’re the first to try the patience of the Family, to practice heresy.” Kenzie’s vision constricted. Sasha’s eyes held her with their fervor. The woman’s voice rose. “Did you think that you would not face punishment for violating the sanctity of the Glade and cavorting with Meat?”
Kenzie’s head lolled.
Sasha reached across the table and lifted Kenzie’s chin. Staring into her eyes, Sasha spoke in a soft voice fraught with malice. “You are not so special.”
Chapter 36
The air smelled of noxious molten rock and the echo of the blast still reverberated in Mitch’s ears. Through the red gauze of pain emanating from his arm, he observed the reaction to the attack. With military precision, the Rubiera compound came alive with wizards converging to eradicate the threat to their Family. Each member took up defined positions in pairs.
Mitch slid away from the railing on his butt, supporting the bad arm with the good one. He propped himself against the wall, away from the windows. That put pressure on the holes in his back from the rock splinters. Compared to his arm, those were tolerable. He surveyed the scene in front of him. From this vantage point, he could see the pattern. Four sets of defenders had formed a semicircle facing the attacker with the mansion anchoring one end of the line. One member of each pair weaved the same spell. They would be in charge of protection. The second wizard in each pair would be the offensive force, since none of those spells seemed the same.
Of the three Rubieras he had bowled over, Hunter was by far the quickest to his feet. His hands moved in a slashing pattern that raised hairs on Mitch’s arms. A blue-bright flash seared Mitch’s retinas and a rolling thunder answered.
He searched the expanse of lawn, expecting to see a smoldering hole. To his surprise, the grass was greenly pristine except for the fallen guard and the red-robed intruder. Something niggled at the back of his mind, triggered by her, but he could not place it.
“That should have dropped her,” complained Hunter. He took a brief glance at his parents and switched to the defensive spell.
His father was laid out in a heap, his white shirt splotched with red from a dozen slashes, and a nasty gaping wound over his brow. Hunter’s mother struggled to sit upright. She laid a hand on the elder Rubiera. The gash stitched itself closed, scabbed over, and then faded to a thin white line inlaid against the swarthy complexion. In the space of a few seconds, an incapacitating injury disappeared. Hunter’s mother’s face wore the strain of the effort.
A second explosion sounded against the mansion, but this time it was deflected by Hunter, who grunted under the impact. Clay tiles fell with a clatter from the roof. “Crap, she’s strong.” He glanced at his parents as they joined him.
To Mitch’s left, the pair of wizards on the far end of the line disappeared behind a shower of fiery earth. Their bodies littered the ground, broken dolls covered in dirt.
“Find whoever is protecting her,” commanded Hunter’s father. Meanwhile, his mother took over the defense.
Hunter scanned the tree line. “I can’t see anyone.” He repeated his first spell. Hunter channeled so much energy it was like a lightning bolt erupted from his hand
s. A patch of dense undergrowth burst into flames under the assault.
Mitch remembered when Hunter complained about having all that energy, comparing it to drinking from a fire hose. The guy had clearly learned to direct and control it.
With their leader back on his feet, the other wizards coordinated their attack on the woman. A rolling barrage of elemental magic descended on the lawn.
Suddenly, Mitch gasped as his arm radiated a warm glow. As he watched, the cauterized hole in his bicep went through the same process as the gash on Rubiera, except there was no one here to minister to him. He flexed his arm. Neat trick, but who to thank? Either Kenzie or Mercury.
Fire consumed the pair of wizards closest to him. The stench of charred meat rose on the slight breeze and left him clenching his teeth.
A blast hammered the veranda. Hunter’s mother staggered backwards before falling in a heap.
“Defend,” said his father, dark rage coloring his features.
Hunter took up the defense while his father crafted an exquisitely complex spell.
Two more wizards died before it was ready.
The woman in the red robe paused and Mitch finally got a clear look at her. Shock filled him. He had seen her before, but not alive, not like this. This was impossible. The wizard was the spitting image of the 3rdGen sexbot, right down to the sultry, curvaceous details. He went numb, remembering how he’d ogled over the artist’s rendering of the soft-tissue bot. Had this wizard been a model for the artist?
Or was this a robot, one that could handle the MAGE device?
Whichever, she was raining devastation on them.
She caught sight of Mitch, and a seductive smile played across her face, completely out of place amidst the dead. Mitch felt his face heat.
“Do you know her?” demanded Hunter, seeing the interchange. His hands were active and his face strained.
Mitch paused before answering, unsure how to explain. “Not really.”
In the next instant, his world was upended in a roar of broken stone and fire. Groggily, he tried to right himself. Hunter was still standing, but his father was down. Mitch scanned the perimeter. All the teams but one were down. He rolled to hands and knees, and then forced his way to his feet. He held fist-sized chunks of the wall in his hands.
Hunter absorbed another stunning blow. His face, transformed into a snarl, dripped with sweat. He sent another bolt at the wizard. It crashed with thundering ineffectiveness three feet from her.
“My, but aren’t you quite the powerful young wizard.” The woman’s voice matched her appearance, throaty and intimate. She moved her hand to the right and clenched it. A large ruby on her middle finger burned with the intensity of the sun and the last of the protective detail died, squashed into a gruesome jam of blood and mangled flesh.
“We should get to know each other.” She made a bare scratch of a hand sign and Hunter gasped, a line of red cut down his cheek. “You should relax and enjoy.” A sultry pout accompanied her words. “I promise I’ll make it worth your while.” She pinched the air.
Hunter locked up, rigid as a statue. He looked like an anatomy mannequin, the type that showed every muscle and tendon in stark relief.
The woman sashayed toward them. Mitch bided his time, long arms at his sides as though he was defeated. When she reached the bottom of the steps that led up to them, she glanced at her feet. Mitch sprang into action. The first rock sailed on a trajectory to hit her in her shoulder, but her image wavered as though she were an apparition, and the rock thumped to the grass behind her.
The second rock never arrived. It disappeared in a plasma-hot flame.
A pile driver crushed into Mitch and knocked him into the side of the house. The pressure ratcheted up and lifted him from the ground. He’d had the breath knocked out of him before, and Hunter had worked him over with spells that immobilized, but this was infinitely worse. Black spots formed and he knew life was being squeezed out of him. His hands scrambled for a weapon, fingernails ripping on the stone, seeking anything that might give him an advantage.
The old anger, the one that he turned on himself, burst to the surface, along with his favorite excuse.
I tried.
His anger mocked his feeble effort, all the way down to the pit of unconsciousness.
Mitch tracked the red wizard with his eyes. She stood wistfully gazing out over the water with one shoulder leaned against an alabaster column, a beautiful flame of red licking at the cold edifice. Uncomfortable urges stirred at the voluptuous outlines. To his eyes, she looked nude under the robe. He tore his gaze from her to the other survivors of the attack.
She had arranged the Rubieras and him like set pieces on a game table, facing each other. He was the only one who could observe the woman. He and Hunter stood at two vertices of a triangle, and she was at the other boy’s back. Hunter stood at attention at the rail. His initial rigidity had dissipated, but he seemed totally immobilized like the rest of them. His struggle against his confinement left him with furious, frustrated eyes.
Hunter’s parents made the last vertex. His father was propped against the railing, glowering with undisguised rage. Next to him was his wife, wild-eyed with mad fury. She was the last of them to revive. Both faces wore the promise of slow murder if they got loose.
Mitch took a quick accounting of himself. His ribs ached and deep breaths drove spikes into his lungs. The back of his head was tender from getting slammed against a wall. He experimented with testing his range of movement. Fingers twitched, his eyes could move, his tongue roamed the inside of his mouth. He blinked and added that to the working list. On the non-working list were all the voluntary skeletal muscles. They were numb like they had been shot full of Novocain.
He was alive. It was a start.
Could he talk?
A rumbly sound deep in his throat attracted the wizard’s attention. She made a languid, cat-like turn and walked to him with hips swaying. She stopped very close to him, close enough he could feel heat from her body.
“Oh dear, Mitchell, did you want to say something?” she asked, with big blue eyes and a false innocence. She ran the back of her fingernail down his jaw in a caress that made him quiver.
Feeling rushed back to his face like cold water splashing across his skin. Mitch tested it, rotating his lower jaw in a circular pattern. Voluntary control stopped at his neck. Everything below that was still immobilized. Taking a shuddering breath first, he asked, “Are you fricking crazy?”
Shock flashed across the wizard’s features, followed by desperation. The rapid transition took Mitch off guard and unnerved him. The part of his brain that decoded patterns set to work on the puzzle while he held his breath waiting for her to punish him.
“Would you like crazy?” She nudged closer, still not touching but close enough that he could detect the scent of her. She wore her sexuality like a perfume and his breath caught in his chest, trapped between his twin desires to flee or to submit to her. She ran her finger along his face again. “Is that what you want, Mitchell?”
He ignored the impulses his body was sending. “Don’t call me Mitchell,” he said in a hoarse voice, staring down at her.
She was right under his chin. In a throaty whisper exuding promise, she asked, “Isn’t that what your mother called you?”
“You . . . aren’t . . . my . . . mother . . .” He could hardly breathe, and cold shivers rippled down his neck to his shoulders. His body shook despite the witch’s spell.
She touched him again. His skin recoiled as though contact with her would bring a deadly contagion.
“What a shame,” she said. Abruptly, she turned away and swayed over to Hunter.
Mitch saw Hunter’s eyes range over the woman’s body, knew he’d reached the same conclusions that Mitch had, and for a brief moment, had some sympathy for the dude.
“Two strong young men, but one of them isn’t interested in me. Are you interested, Hunter?” She stood farther back from Hunter than she had with Mitch. She
pivoted a quarter turn, dropped a shoulder, and let the edge of her robe slide down. Nothing private was exposed but the whole pose was outrageously provocative.
She was daring him to check her out.
Mitch did, even as pangs of guilt poked at his conscience.
Hunter did, too. If he was having any internal qualms, Mitch couldn’t see it. The other boy’s gaze darted up and down, lingering at the woman’s breasts and at the perfect bare skin of her shoulder. Finally, his eyes came level with the woman’s. A curious mixture of emotions paraded across Hunter’s face.
She smiled and moved closer to Hunter. “You don’t know how powerful you are, do you?” She spoke as though they were alone and intimate. “I could feel it”—she ran a hand down from the notch at the base of her neck, past the dip in the front of her robe, to a point on her torso, fingers directing attention lower still—“right from the start.”
An outraged grunt came from Hunter’s parents. Mitch had forgotten they were there. Hunter’s mother looked like she was near apoplexy. His father watched, his face cold and black as death.
Without a backward glance, the woman squeezed her hand, the same spell she’d incapacitated Mitch with. Startled grunts turned to labored breathing.
“You will be the patriarch of your Family one day, Hunter.” She gazed innocently at his surprise when she used his name. “Of course I know who you are. I know who is in your Family and in the Graham clan, too.” Now she did look at the strangling parents. She released her spell on them. “Raymond sends his regards, by the way.”
Mitch’s mouth fell open. The sense that he was suffering from mental whiplash grew. Kenzie wouldn’t have anything to do with this, and, while Graham hated his guts, he seemed like a straight shooter. Well, as far as wizards went. They all seemed a little bent except for Kenzie.
“Who are you?” asked Mitch, recovering from his surprise.
She didn’t answer him. She leaned into Hunter and rubbed against his chest. “I’m looking for a wizard, a strong one, who will let me be his queen while we rule the world.”
