by Bast, Anya
Gently gripping her hair, he pulled her head to the side, displaying the vulnerable column of her throat, then dropped his mouth to the gentle curve, pressing his lips to her skin. He groaned against her neck and she stifled a small sound of need. With one hand at the small of her back, he dragged her up against his chest.
Broder trembled against her, and then slanted his mouth across hers once more, his tongue pushing aggressively between her lips. She shivered as his tongue stroked up against hers, her body blooming for him. The towel between them became suddenly like so much air. She might as well have been naked.
His hand cupped the nape of her neck as his tongue delved deeper in her mouth. Her knees went weak, but Broder caught her around the waist and held her up. His lips skated over hers, his mouth making love to hers.
Abruptly he broke the kiss and set her away from him. Her body burned as if on fire and Broder looked in the same shape. Without looking at her, he brushed past her and left the room.
After the door had closed behind him, she stood motionless, trying to sort out what had just happened. It had been insane for her to kiss him, maybe even a little cruel, but there had been no way she could have stopped herself.
She stared at the closed door, her body yearning to go after him, but her heart telling her to resist.
Pressing her lips together, she turned to the sheaf of papers. She needed to distract herself from him. Those papers held such promise, but she was so afraid they’d disappoint her.
After she’d slipped into a warm sweater and a pair of soft jersey pants to sleep in, she took the pile of papers and curled up in a chair near the fire with a reading light turned on above her head.
Paging through them she quickly saw that these were mostly notes made by the Brotherhood on the seidhr, specifically about the enclave in the northernmost reaches of Scotland, how it functioned and who was in charge. She held up a grainy picture, printed off a computer file without colored ink, of the man in charge of the enclave. He was old, old even for a shaman, and he’d been in charge for a very, very long time. His name was Thorgest Egilson.
She squinted at the photo, at the merciless set of the man’s mouth and the cold glint in his eyes. Jessa was thinking that immortality—or what amounted to it—was not a good thing at all. This guy looked like someone not to be messed with. She wondered if this had been the man who’d ordered her kidnapping. Broder had said it had come from the top.
The printed files told her the nature of seidhr magick. Male and female magick was different, hence the difference in their titles—witch for a female and shaman for a male.
Seidhr magick for a female was of a type that affected the mind by inducing illusion, forgetfulness, fear, sometimes even insanity, on the recipient of the magick. It was referred to as sjónhverfing, deception of the mental senses.
That made sense, considering her own ability to Jedi mind trick people into doing what she wanted them to do.
Seidhr women apparently also had special ability in the realm of intuition and precognition. Huh. She’d never had anything like that. Too bad. Could have been useful. Maybe she would have seen that demon in the parking garage coming. Of course, she’d had a feeling about the shaman, but it had been too little, too late.
Another little trick Jessa had never experienced was the ability to spin spells into cloth and the laying-on of hands to heal. Maybe that and the intuitive ability were things that needed to be cultivated, trained in a witch.
Witches seemed to be more powerful than shamans and their magick more versatile. For example, spellwork was used for finer magickal work and spells were typically worked by the females. The seidhr women, she noted, seemed to carry more sway in the organization. It made her wonder why the head honcho was a male.
She read on that shamans primarily used runes for their magick. They had the ability to shape-shift into animals or, if they had enough genetic material from the target, to take the shape of a specific human. Yes, she had firsthand experience with that. Shape-shifting was a specialized talent that not all shamans possessed, although most all of the men could at least project their awareness into an animal, or even into another human being, sort of like remote viewing.
Ugh, Jessa thought, creepy. The potential for spying was huge. Hopefully the wards protecting Broder’s keep would block such activity.
In history, she read on, seidhr males would don animal skins and pound on drums while they used ecstatic dance to work magick. That had to be why they were called shamans.
Late into the night she read about the community of shamans and witches who lived on a large piece of protected land to the north. They were very secretive and tended not to trust any of the other supernatural races, though the Brotherhood and the Valkyrie were technically their allies. They kept close track of all their shamans and witches. The community was small, suffering from a fertility problem that the Valkyrie also seemed to endure. Jessa didn’t fault them for their protectiveness; the Blight really wanted them dead.
All of them.
How the hell had she ended up on a different continent? Was she some kind of stain on their bloodline? Was there something about her that was harmful to them or dangerous? What made these people push her away, want to keep her hidden?
She wanted answers so badly.
A longing for her biological mother welled up inside her, making her chest ache. She squeezed her eyes shut against the sudden swell of grief for the woman she’d never known. She shifted on the chair and the papers dropped from her lap.
Slithering down to the floor, she began to gather them, but one particular sheet caught her attention. She held it up, seeing something that was structured like a poem. A closer look revealed that it was a spell for finding a lost object. She studied the ingredients. Mostly it called for various flowers and herbal tinctures. No eye of newt or rodent testicles. But even though they were run-of-the-mill ingredients, Jessa still had no way to gather what she’d need for this spell, at least not easily.
That was a good thing since the witch running through her veins fairly itched to work this magick, mundane though it might be, and she knew she wasn’t ready for spell casting. Not by a long shot. Maybe she never would be. Maybe it was too late. Maybe she was too old. The thought depressed her.
Gathering up the papers, she shuffled them together and set them away, then went to stand at the window, pushing aside the heavy drapes to look out at the crumbling ruins of the towers, battlements, and ramparts.
Seeing a smudge of black where it shouldn’t be, Jessa did a double take and looked closer. It was gone. She shook her head. Great, now she was seeing things.
She let the drapes fall back into place.
• • •
Broder stared hard at the wall in the kitchen, trying not to punch it. It had taken every ounce of his willpower to walk out of the room when Jessa had kissed him. She had no idea how alluring she was … and how crazy she drove him. She was playing with fire and she had no idea just how hot it could burn.
Seeing her in only a towel, her long hair in damp skeins against her skin, had done enough damage. Watching her cross the floor, seeing all that soft, pale skin, her tiny toes painted a light pink … All of it had been enough to give a lesser man a heart attack.
But that kiss.
The soft slide of her lips against his, the gentle, sweet flutter of her tongue, the scent and feel of the supple skin of her throat—it had made him harder than steel. All he’d wanted was to rip that towel off her, throw her onto the bed, part her thighs, and bury himself deep inside her. He wanted to lose himself in her, to drown in her skin and kisses and never come up for air.
Erik walked into the room, took one look at Broder, and gave him a wide berth. He headed to the refrigerator, opened it, and pulled out ingredients to make a sandwich. For some reason Broder had headed into this room after leaving Jessa, but all he was doing was standing at the center island, gripping the edge nearly hard enough to rip it free.
“S
andwich?” Erik asked.
Broder grunted at him.
“I see.” Erik pulled a plate from the cupboard and started piling bread with ham and cheese. “If you should manage to make more than monosyllabic grunting sounds later and want to tell me why you’re trying to destroy the counter, you’ve always got my ear.”
Broder couldn’t tell him that he wanted Jessa. He wanted not only her body, but her heart. He couldn’t tell Erik how frustrated he was that Jessa could never be his. Most of all he could never tell Erik that Jessa’s being a witch was a haunting problem.
So instead of saying any of that, he grunted again and left the room.
Jessa turned over in her bed and groaned. Squinting against the light coming in through the window, she pulled the blanket over herself and tried to go back to sleep. It had been hard to fall asleep after reading through the information about the seidhr.
The light intensified, almost as though a prism were being winked across her closed eyelids, and she opened her eyes, feeling groggy and exhausted. She grunted in frustration. What was that stupid light keeping her awake? She sluggishly pushed the heavy blankets off her, her hair a tangled mess around her head, and shivered in the cool air of the room.
Her muscles slow to warm up, she crawled out of the soft, warm bed and staggered over to close the drapes. Hadn’t she closed them before she’d gone to bed? The moonlight was bright tonight. Reaching up to yank the heavy material across the window, she caught sight of a figure swathed in black standing out on the battlements. She blinked hard, trying to process the image through her sleep-clouded mind. Someone was standing out there.
Maybe she hadn’t been imagining things earlier that night.
She let the velvet drop from her hand and stared at the black form, the fine hair on the nape of her neck rising. The figure shuffled along the length of the battlements, dressed in a long black cloak.
She shook her head, wondering why she was so fuzzy headed. Her limbs were heavy, almost like she was moving in a sea of molasses. She turned and looked back at her bed. For a moment she thought she saw herself still lying there. Clearly her mind was just as sluggish as her body.
What was going on? She blinked, seeing that the chair in the corner and the night table beside the bed were both upside down and hanging from the ceiling. The fire was flickering in shades of blue and pink as well.
Ah. That explained a lot. She was dreaming.
This was not the first time she’d become lucid in the middle of a dream. In fact, she’d been doing it since childhood, so she recognized the signs. It was part of the witchiness that was her, she now realized. In fact, she’d even seen mention of witches having a natural inclination toward lucid dreaming in the information Broder had given her.
Now less alarmed by the apparition, she gazed out the window. The figure stopped in the middle of the walkway, reached up, and pushed back the hood of the cloak. Then the person looked up.
It was a woman with white blond hair, done in two old-fashioned plaits, one on either side of her head. Her face was oval and familiar looking, her mouth full and expressive. Her skin was smooth alabaster and she looked to be around Jessa’s current age, maybe just a little older. Jessa recognized her from the pictures she’d seen in her aunt’s attic. Long hair, brown eyes. Jessa had stared into that face for hours on end. She would know it anywhere.
This was her mother.
Even though Jessa knew this wasn’t real, a jolt of emotion still rocked her. She had to remind herself that the figure on the walkway was not connected to her mother at all; instead it was a symbol from her own subconscious. That didn’t stop her from racing out of the room, down the steps, and out into the moonlit turnabout, though.
She’d sought to have conversations with figments of her subconscious while she dreamed lucidly before. Sometimes they offered great insight into problems she was facing—and she had no shortage of problems right now. It was a little like do-it-yourself psychoanalysis.
“Mom?” she asked, stepping onto the gravel. The dream was incredibly real; she could hear the crunch under her bare feet and feel the rocks and grit. It even hurt a little.
Nothing. No reply.
She scanned the immediate area and caught sight of a dark, hooded figure on the opposite side of the fountain.
Jessa stepped closer. “Mom?”
In a blink, irrationally, as dreams were, the figure disappeared and reappeared much closer. Another blink and the dream figure stood right in front of her. She sucked in a breath and fought a moment of fear as she stared into the shadowed hood. This was just a dream, she reminded herself, not real. It was important to calm herself, since a rush of adrenaline might wake her sleeping body.
“Mom?” she whispered at the black-hooded figure. It was like staring into the face of a grim reaper.
Silence.
Jessa fidgeted, aware that this dream might be fast becoming a nightmare. Anything could be secreted inside that hood. Even though this was only a dream, it didn’t stop her heart from pounding. Consciousness flickered as a result. She could feel her body back in her bed, shifting and whimpering, caught in a bad dream.
How she wanted this to be her mother. She just wanted to talk to her, even if she wasn’t real.
Suddenly the hood flipped back to reveal her mother’s face. “Beware!” she yelled, the veins on her face and neck nearly bursting and turning icy blue. Her brown eyes bulged with terror. “Beware the Valkyrie!” She reached out toward her, as if to catch hold of her—as if Jessa were about to fall.
Surprise jolted her. She took a step backward … slipped, and truly did fall. She wasn’t jolted back into consciousness in her bed; that would have been a normal awakening from a lucid dream.
This was not normal.
She plummeted like Alice down the rabbit hole. Darker. Deeper. Shadows enveloped her and she grabbed for something, anything, to slow her descent, but there was only more blackness.
In the blackness there were lighted flashes of a struggle, brief awakenings in her bed as she fought someone weakly who attacked her as she slept.
FOURTEEN
She hit bottom.
“Gurgh.” Jessa forced herself to roll to the side and open her eyes. Two people were talking somewhere near her, but she couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. Her thought process seemed oddly sluggish, even more than it had in the lucid dream.
Flopping onto her stomach, she dug her fingers into the earth, trying to gain traction on … well, she wasn’t sure what to do. All she knew was that she was supposed to be in her bed asleep right now, dreaming of her mother in a grim reaper cloak and not out here on the green hills of the Scottish Highlands feeling like she’d been … drugged.
Oh, God, had she been drugged?
She groaned, hazy memories filtering through her brain. Frowning, she caught a flash of a dark shape leaning over her bed, the glint of a needle, the upward swoop of her arm to knock it away, a struggle. She’d scratched the tender skin of someone’s arms. She’d grabbed hair and pulled….
Jessa flopped onto her back and held up her hands to the moonlight. The long strands she’d yanked out were still curled around her fingers. She squinted, trying to focus, but it was like she’d had one too many beers. In the dim light it was impossible to tell for certain, but she’d bet anything those hairs were dark red.
She let her arm drop to the ground. Oh, Halla … just when I’d started to like you.
The voices stopped and Jessa knew her window for escape was closing rapidly. Forcing herself to her knees, she tried to move forward, but collapsed after moving only a few feet. Behind her she could hear the footsteps of the thing she knew was hunting her. The only question was whether it was a shaman or an agent of the Blight.
Huge hands lifted her. She swiped him, reminding herself of a puppy being picked up by the scruff of its neck.
“Now, now,” clucked the man. “None of that, you silly thing.”
“Put … me … down,”
she slurred.
“Oh, you’ll be put out of your misery soon enough. No worries, lass. I’d drain you now, but I don’t want that nasty drug in my body.”
Drain? Ah. Question answered. This was an agent of the Blight. Demon.
Awesome.
“Well,” the man continued cheerfully, “shall we be off?” He carried her toward his car like she was a long dress draped over his arms, like she weighed nothing. She was too drugged to fight him and she wondered, even if she hadn’t been drugged, what kind of chance would she have?
He’d parked a white cargo van not far down the drive from the gates of Broder’s property. For an irrational moment, thanks to the drugs in her veins, she wondered why all criminals and murderers seemed to favor white cargo vans.
