by Bast, Anya
“We believe you.” Roan shifted on his feet, trying not to let Thorgest’s raw emotion affect him; he had plenty of his own.
Empathy was a problem for all trained seidhr shamans and witches, but controlling it had always been a particularly hard struggle for him, especially now. Any hint of the woman he’d once loved more than his own life was enough to undo him completely. He directed his focus past the antique furniture in the fussy room to the large picture window at the end and stared as he gritted his teeth against the flow of Thorgest’s rage.
The leader of their enclave swung around and speared him with his light blue eyes. “Ye believe me? Ye know she’s here? Then find her. Bring her to me.” Roan had never seen him so upset about anything, not in the five hundred years he’d known him. That was saying a lot. He wasn’t even making sense right now and that was a rare thing.
“I need more details. You say you know she’s here, but we thought she’d perished with her parents. We don’t know the name she’s using, don’t know why she’s here. She may not even know she’s a witch. Without something of hers, material or immaterial, it’s going to be difficult to locate her.”
Abigail and Michael had disappeared thirty years ago to escape Thorgest’s displeasure over their union. Six years after they’d run away, Thorgest had discovered Abigail was pregnant and had pleaded with his granddaughter to return home to Scotland, but the controlling and manipulative things Thorgest had done had driven a permanent wedge between them. Abigail had remained estranged, putting herself and her infant at great peril from the Blight.
Thorgest’s granddaughter had been a powerful witch, just as Michael had been a strong shaman, yet the very fact of their bloodline had made them a target. It was a testament to the strength of Abigail’s feelings about her grandfather that she’d fled the enclave and lost herself in the United States.
More than one year after Thorgest and Abigail’s fiery final conversation, one of the witches had sensed the death of Abigail and Michael, but they’d not known the fate of the child. They’d assumed the baby had perished in the car accident along with her parents.
Apparently Thorgest had begun to sense Abigail’s daughter through trace magick, leading him to believe she’d arrived in Scotland. It seemed impossible. Roan could not yet rule out the possibility of some kind of trick by the Blight, but he couldn’t reveal this suspicion to Thorgest without insulting him. Yet Roan was head of security for the enclave; it was his job to be suspicious. They were constantly on guard against demon attacks and sometimes their enemy could be insidious.
The thought of Abigail’s daughter present in Scotland was very interesting. He’d tracked every moment of this story, lived it over and over again in his heart and his mind, since Abigail hadn’t broken only Thorgest’s heart when she’d left—she’d broken his, too. Roan had been the man meant to marry her, the one Thorgest had groomed for her and had tried to push her toward. Roan had hoped for her, had loved her. Her rejection of him stung to this day.
Thorgest studied him with narrowed eyes and Roan steadied his stance. Thorgest was a strong man and ruled with iron not only in his fist, but in his backbone. When he had that look in his eye, it meant he wasn’t happy. However, there was no way Roan was going to quail under his scrutiny.
“Last I checked, we were seidhr,” said Thorgest. “That means magick, does it no’? Gather the witches, gather the shamans. Do what ye must.” He paused. “Break whatever rules ye must, take whatever risks, but bring my great-granddaughter home.”
• • •
Broder knew he should stay away, so why couldn’t he?
He moved across Jessa’s room in the pitch-black of early morning. She was a witch and he … well, he was Broder Calderson. The two should never have met.
And then they had.
He shouldn’t want her, shouldn’t even be in the room, yet there she was on the bed, covers kicked off, T-shirt tangled around her midriff, and her cotton shorts exposing the long, pale length of her legs. He wanted to kiss and lick every inch of them.
Being around her made him crazy, but not being around her gave him the shakes, like a man in need of a fix. Either way he was damned. It was the story of his life.
He hated Loki for this more than he’d ever hated him and that was saying a lot.
Crossing the room, he stood at the end of the bed. She rolled to the side, throwing her arm across her face, and let out a sigh in her sleep. The sound made every nerve in his body sing for her. Without even knowing he was moving, he crawled onto the bed with her.
Moving her hair away from her face, he jerked in surprise when she sighed and pressed her cheek into his palm with a smile on her face. “Broder,” she murmured.
Broder went still, the center of his chest warming where before there had only been cold. He rubbed his thumb over the soft porcelain of her skin.
Mine. The thought came unbidden and it was definitely unwelcome, yet there it was anyway, beating fierce in his heart and in his head. Mine.
He wanted her to be his for always, no matter what the gods decreed.
Lowering his head, he softly sampled her lips. “I need to touch you, Jessa,” he whispered against her mouth.
She made a purring sound of assent, though she never opened her eyes. “Yes, Broder, please touch me,” she answered breathily. “I want you.”
NINE
His cock was already as hard as steel. If it could have, it would’ve grown even harder. It was the words he’d heard in all his fantasies since the moment he’d met her. He moved down her body.
She hardly made a sound when he eased her shorts down her legs and spread her thighs. In the moonlit room, her skin looked like milk and he wanted to take a long, deep drink. He parted her thighs and she sighed. He lowered his mouth to her and she made a small sound. She liked it—but no more than he did.
The flavor of her spread over his tongue and he groaned. She tasted so damned good. He found her clit and laved it, hearing her pleased reaction. Under his tongue, the small bud blossomed. He’d only wanted a taste of her, but now that he was here he wanted more. He wanted to make her come. He craved the sound of it, the sweet tension in her body. He fed off of her pleasure, since he couldn’t take his own. Not yet.
A new sound made him lift his head. Jessa’s eyes were open and staring at him. He smiled at her, then lowered his head again. Unexpectedly, she moved. Her foot struck him square in the chest.
With an oof, he fell backward. She’d used every ounce of her strength to kick him and it had taken him by surprise.
She yanked the blankets up over her. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she screamed at him. “It’s the middle of the night. What do you think I am, your personal blow-up doll?”
He stared up at her from where he’d landed on his ass. “What? You told me you wanted it.”
She gaped, her jaw dropping. “I was sleeping!”
“Sleeping?” He blinked. She’d been talking in her sleep? “You seemed like you were enjoying it.”
She stared at him like he’d gone mad. “I was unconscious. I wasn’t given a choice.”
Broder absorbed that. “Who were you dreaming about?”
After hesitating a moment, she leapt from the bed. She looked good wearing only a T-shirt. “None of your business.”
Interesting.
He pushed to his feet. “Let’s say, hypothetically, it was me. Wouldn’t it be just as if you’d been awake?”
“Get out!” she roared, advancing on him.
He stood his ground for a moment. He loved the flash of anger in her eyes. “Tell me you didn’t like it, Jessa. Tell me there isn’t a part of you that wanted me to continue.”
She stalked up to him and stuck her finger in his chest. “That’s not the point. This is the twenty-first century, Broder, and in this century women are in full control of their bodies. You touch me when I say you can. Now get out!”
He was in hell.
He was in hell and un
able to relieve the ache in his balls from touching her. Over the centuries he’d been able to manage his sexual desires—he’d had to learn how or go insane. But Jessa had unraveled every bit of the control he’d managed to amass.
“How can one tiny little woman have that much power?” he growled as he guided his motorcycle into a narrow space between two hatchbacks on a street in Inverness. He kept a bike here as well as in the States.
He found motorcycles gave him speed and maneuverability and that could be a big advantage when chasing down Blight. Of course, a motorcycle wasn’t very practical in a place like the Scottish Highlands, where the weather was unpredictable and it was chilly for so much of the year, but such things bothered the members of the Brotherhood little.
He cut the bike’s engine, drawing appreciative looks from passersby, and got off to enter the Quill and Dragon, one of his favorite pubs.
The scents of pipe smoke, alcohol, and polished wood enveloped him as he entered, soothing a little of the tumult in his soul.
How the hell was he supposed to know the woman had been sleep talking? She’d been more than willing back in the States and in the airplane. It wasn’t such a big leap for him to have assumed she’d been willing again, was it?
Women. Apparently they were just as complex and perplexing in this century as they had been ten centuries ago.
He headed to the bar, letting the soft sounds of the place—casual conversation and laughter—filter through the noise in his head and quiet him. He signaled the bartender. “Johnnie Walker Black.” The bartender gave him the glass, which he downed in one gulp. “Leave the bottle.”
The bartender slid the bottle over to him and Broder tossed him a few bills and a nice tip. He grabbed the bottle and walked back out of the pub with it in hand, ignoring the call of the man behind the bar. The bartender could try to stop him from leaving with an open bottle, but it wouldn’t get him far.
He needed to kill Blight and a lot of them.
On his way out, he pushed past a well-built man with dark hair who gave off a tingle of something supernatural through the runes in his coat. Broder ignored it. There were all kinds of supernatural beings in the world, but the only ones who had his attention tonight were the ones who’d been created in Hel.
Inverness teemed with demons and they were nocturnal. It wouldn’t be hard to find low-level Blight prowling the streets, preying on the humans who had gone out to party on Saturday night. It was what the low-level Blight had been expelled from Hel to do—create terror and havoc on a base level. They had free rein—well, almost free rein—to feed from whoever they wished as long as they didn’t reveal their presence to the masses. That little revelation was meant for later, when Ragnarök grew nigh.
Taking pulls from his bottle, he walked the streets around the pub, tuned into the area, searching for the sensation of the hair rising on his neck—a sure sign an agent was somewhere close—or the little pulse the runes in his coat gave off.
He found his first one dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, its hair cut in a swoopy long emo-boy style that made Broder grit his teeth. The cold scent of ice caught his nose and told him more than the unmistakable sensation in his gut that the guy was a demon. He was busy stalking a drunk woman who was trying to make her way to her car.
Soon Broder was busy stalking him.
Waiting for the moment before the agent leapt from the shadows, Broder smashed the now-empty bottle over the agent’s head. The demon turned and hissed at him, fangs bared. Broder wasted no time, yanking his dagger from the base of his spine and slamming the blade to the hilt in the agent’s gut. He exploded into a shower of ice pellets.
One down. More to go.
The woman being stalked had run at the sound of the bottle breaking in the shadows behind her and had now sped away from the curb in her car, tires squealing. She probably wasn’t fit to drive, but that wasn’t his problem.
Several figures rushed him from behind. The demon hadn’t been alone.
Broder turned and laughed, a cold sound that made the three hesitate. This was what he needed tonight, a fight to help him deal with Jessa’s rejection.
The first agent met him with a snarl and Broder laughed again, a frigid, joyless sound, the ecstasy of the fight rising hot and hard within him.
Bring it on.
• • •
Roan watched from the shadows as Broder Calderson cut an ice-scattered swath through the alleys and streets of Inverness. He fought like a wild thing, almost like a dancer. Broder made killing an art form, in holding with his reputation. No agent of the Blight could stand against this man and survive. That was the impression he gave, anyway. He seemed to revel in the destruction and the chaos that the Blight brought, his laughter making the hair on the back of Roan’s neck stand up.
But then, he was Brotherhood. Broder hadn’t been made for this—but he’d certainly been molded, just as all the Brotherhood had been. Killing the Blight was their raison d’être, unlike the seidhr, who had their magick to develop and pass down through the generations.
The continuation of those generations was why Roan was here.
Magick had drawn him to this location tonight, magick put to the use of finding Abigail’s daughter. That was his raison d’être right now, tasked to him by Thorgest. So he had created runes using birch bark, his chosen element. The scattering of those runes had pointed him in this direction, told him to come here, come now.
It was a risk to use magick this way. The blatant scattering of runes outside the safety of the compound tended to draw Blight. It may very well have drawn the Blight that Broder Calderson now fought with such joyous abandon. It was ironic that he had such a man to thank for his safety.
Following the trail the runes had marked for him, he’d ended up outside the Quill and Dragon when Broder left. He’d been confused about why the runes had led him there until he’d caught the faint peppermint and rose scent, with a hint of fresh lemon, that lingered in the air as Broder passed. The scent of a witch. More specifically, that hint of lemon combined with the rest had been the scent of Abigail; Roan would recognize it anywhere.
So it appeared it may be true. It was possible Abigail’s daughter was alive and the lass was with Broder. That was what the runes seemed to be telling him, anyway. Roan’s jaw locked as he watched Broder slide his blade into a hulking black-haired agent that poofed into ice pellets.
Thorgest wasn’t going to like that Abigail’s daughter was in Broder’s care. He didn’t like it, either.
The Brotherhood and the seidhr were uneasy, chilly allies in this war. The Brotherhood kept vulnerable witches and shamans safe when they needed protection and the seidhr provided them with certain types of protective magick in return. It was good that Thorgest’s great-granddaughter was in the Brotherhood’s care because she would be a huge target of the Blight. However, Broder Calderson was not an acceptable choice to be guarding Thorgest’s daughter.
Not an acceptable choice by far.
Roan melted back into the shadows. He had unpleasant news to deliver. Then would come the task of extricating Thorgest’s kin from the grips of a monster.
Jessa slammed her fist into a punching bag in the training room and pain exploded through her hand. “Damn it!” She cradled her fist and stepped away from the barely swinging bag with a look of righteous anger on her face.
Okay, she was no hard-ass.
After that disturbing encounter with Broder, she’d thought coming in here to work out might help her get into a better frame of mind. All she’d done back in her room was replay the events over and over and that wasn’t helping the delicious tingle in her body that still lingered from his touch.
A very unwelcome tingle from very unwelcome touching. Or so her mind told her. Her body was saying something else entirely. She wanted to tell her body to shut up.
Giving the punching bag one last look of doom—as if she could actually deliver doom with her wimpy punching skills—she headed to the bank
of cardio machines. She couldn’t handle the punching bag and she definitely couldn’t handle Broder, but at least she could handle the StairMaster … for a few minutes, anyway.
Why did the man have to be so luscious? And why did she shudder every time she thought about the way he looked at her—like she was something he wanted to eat. Yet there was something else in his eyes, something … guilty. Whatever that guilt sprang from, it wasn’t stopping him from pursuing her.
But no matter how delectable a man like Broder was, or how starved her libido, she shouldn’t indulge. Well … she shouldn’t indulge any more than she already had, anyway. Why? She would illuminate the reasons.
Number one, she had no firm footing here and her life was in free fall. Right now was not the time for her to engage in an affair, no matter how transitory. Number two, she didn’t do affairs. Never had. She might want Broder’s body and he might want hers, but she needed more than that. It might be fun for a night or two, but in the end she’d just end up feeling like trash. She’d been down that road before; she knew.
