“But no magic.”
He eyed me over his shoulder. “None.”
The first human I’d ever met. I guessed I expected them to be…taller? Different somehow. But other than the lack of an atern around his wrist, he looked just like any other witch.
“What else do you remember?” I asked.
“I got my tattoo.”
“And the idea for the tattoo, where did that come from?”
“I designed it myself.”
And that was when I learned he was a terrible liar. The beautiful, nature-inspired craftsmanship I’d witnessed in the garage—that was more his style than what decorated his back. His tattoo looked amazing, but it wasn’t Kason. It looked darker, more twisted, and not because it was a literal knot. It didn’t fit him. Strange that I knew that for a fact after only knowing him twelve hours.
“A word of advice?” I said. “Next time, think twice about putting random pagan symbols all over your body.”
He glared over his shoulder while he rinsed his dishes. “I didn’t ask for your advice.”
“That one was on me. You’re welcome.” I stood with my cereal bowl and started for the living room.
After a moment Kason followed then stopped next to the stairs. “I’m going upstairs to take a shower. By the time I’m done, I want you gone.”
“Wait.” I sat on the couch and adjusted Nasty so it aimed toward the fireplace. “I’m going to take a picture of your tattoo.”
He crossed his arms. “Why?”
“Because I don’t know what it means, and it might help explain why you’re here.” I shrugged. “Maybe I can help bust you out.”
His dark eyes narrowed. “In exchange for me helping you end fae power over you.”
“That would sure be an epic bonus, wouldn’t it? Just imagine the sun beating down, birds singing, trees with actual leaves…” I waved at the poppies in the kitchen. “Flowers blooming everywhere. But you would be trapped in your house and not able to enjoy any of it. How sad would that be? Now turn around by the fire and look pretty.”
“Make it quick,” he grumbled and stalked toward the fireplace.
“Why? You have somewhere to be?” I asked, unable to help myself.
He slid me a dark, dangerous look that stormed the blood through my veins faster. “Careful, Hadley.”
Suddenly a tad breathless, I fumbled with Nasty’s camera, aimed it, and a shot of his ass filled the screen. I quickly took a picture because I’m a pervert, then centered the camera on his tattoo. But his waistband covered the very bottom.
“Uh…” I said through a grin. “Lower your pants a little?”
He dropped his head back as if to implore the ceiling beams, then reluctantly wriggled his flannel pajama bottoms down. But not nearly enough. His waistband now settled just above the perfect rise of his ass and revealed two dimples on either side of his spine. The man had been sculpted by a pro.
“Lower,” I demanded.
Maybe it was the huskiness in my voice, the hitch in my breath, but he looked over his shoulder for just a second. Whatever he must have seen on my face reflected back in his eyes, triggering a slow coil between my legs. Then he quickly faced forward again, his fingers curling into fists, and dragged his pants down even lower. Much lower. The waistband of his pajama bottoms now hit below his crack, and that was where his tattoo ended. Or began. Whatever. His perfect, toned ass defied gravity, and I didn’t see a hint of underwear. He went commando. Sexy as hell.
“Done?” he asked, voice clipped.
I let out a slow breath and took the picture. “Done.”
He inched his pants up again, but not before his forearm disappeared in front of him for a moment. I swallowed hard while images of what he might be doing flashed through my head. Was he stroking himself?
“When I come back down, you’re gone,” he growled and stomped up the stairs.
I watched him go while heat bloomed over my skin, the muscles in my stomach clenched tight. That might have been the single most erotic moment in my life, but I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about it. Turned on, sure. But should I feel excited or terrified that I seemed to have affected Kason in the same way? And had it really been me or just the fact that he hadn’t stripped in front of another female in at least two years? I could’ve been any woman for all he cared. For only the second time in a long time, hacking into the faes’ computer system wouldn’t provide me with those answers.
This was why I hadn’t put on pants and ventured outside my own house in so long. Because people. I preferred to have my problems defined by how much juice Nasty had and whether or not my straw was long enough to touch the bottom of a bottle.
With a sigh, I propped my feet on the couch and minimized Kason’s back tattoo. Time to do some digging. And figure out a way to stay here. If Kason held all the answers, then I needed to be here and pester them out of him.
But several minutes later, I hadn’t dug up jack. Nasty had even less of an idea about what the runes around Kason’s tattoo meant than I did. The Diamond Dogs might be prepping to kick off another fun-filled night, and I was no closer in stopping them or the rest of the fae than I had been yesterday. I didn’t even know if I was on the right track in thinking his tattoo had anything to do with ending fae power. Maybe it was just a stupid tattoo.
Frustrated, my hands aching, I wormed out from underneath Nasty and headed toward the kitchen for some alcoholic inspiration. The water in the shower upstairs turned off, then bumps and thumps sounded as if he were pacing, punching random walls, or building a robot. Maybe all three at once.
With an open bottle of wine, I sucked greedily at the straw while staring out the window above the front door. A light, late morning snow flurried down from the perpetually gray and depressing sky, sealing the Diamond Dogs’ tracks with another flawless, shimmering layer. I bit down hard on my straw and scraped my inner arm across the nubby bottom of the wine bottle. Funny how much I hated something so serene and beautiful. Only not really funny at all.
The wine did a nice job at numbing the throb in my hands. It was much more powerful than Necromancer’s Piss, so much so that I became hyper-aware of my lips. I tapped my tongue against them. Yep, still there.
I turned toward the kitchen and knocked the vase of poppies into the trashcan beside the small table, not out of spite, but out of drunken curiosity. They reappeared on the table a second later. So, they had definitely been enchanted to keep Kason indoors and likely were what reinforced the spells on this house so they could never be destroyed. It seemed that whoever put him here had wanted to protect him. But if he was the key to ending fae power, why not use him right away? Unless he wasn’t put here for his protection, but someone else’s? But Kason wasn’t dangerous. I didn’t get that vibe at all, and I’d known him for almost a whopping twelve hours. I’d reached level expert at Kason, but I still couldn’t crack the most important code.
Ugh, too many questions. My mind wouldn’t shut up with them, and this house’s settling was ridiculously loud. It sounded like the foundation was shifting, like rocks rubbing against each other, like…
The whole house trembled. The bricks in the walls shimmied and scraped loose from their slots. Several crashed to the floor. I whipped my gaze to the living room, my drunken mind struggling to catch up. Bricks littered the floor there, too. And the couch… One end of it was creeping across the floor toward the staircase with a shrill squeal, the wall at the front of the house pushing against it.
The entire light fixture over the table, including the heavy metal pans dangling from it, swung wildly. Then they plummeted on a direct path toward my head.
I jumped out of the way, clutching my heart that threatened to leap out of my chest, and barely noticed the sudden sting at my temple. I smashed into the refrigerator which tilted forward at a dangerous angle. The wall behind it was sliding forward, too.
The floor space in the kitchen shrank. The walls, all of them, were slowly inching inward. The house was co
ntracting, and the key to my future couldn’t escape. Without him, I had no hope.
Panic filtered in with my next shaky breath. “Kason!” I shrieked. “What the fuck is wrong with your house?”
5
Maybe it wasn’t the Diamond Dogs. Maybe I’d laced my wine with something other than fennel seeds, but no. The four walls steadily skated across the wooden floor with a great racket. More bricks crashed to the floor. Dishes clanked in the cupboards. The poppies bounced wildly in their vase. The chaos robbed the air from my lungs and instantly sobered me.
I stretched my arms wide at either side. “Freir!”
Blue, smoky tendrils seeped along the sleeves of my sweater from my shoulders, cascading an arctic chill so strong, my teeth chattered. Before the tendrils reached my hands, they solidified into a bright light around my wrists and stormed outward in four directions toward the incoming walls. Ice cracked along the remaining bricks up to the ceiling and froze the walls’ slide across the floor.
Everything stood still. My atern ticked down three more. Forty-two clicks left. I held my breath in the sudden quiet, which was punctuated by popping and settling ice.
Kason burst into the kitchen. He took in what was happening with wide eyes, then he swept over fallen bricks and pans toward me and pulled me to him. “You’re bleeding. Again.” As if to prove his point, he touched my temple and showed me his fingers slicked with blood. “Are you okay?”
Of all the things to ask after your house had imploded.
“I didn’t do this. This wasn’t a trick to let me stay here, so don’t even think that,” I blurted, my voice sharp as razors.
“What? I didn’t even…” Kason’s ragged exhale caught in the chilly air while his gaze bounced around the frozen walls. “It’s them, isn’t it? The dog fae things? Will this…your ice stop them?”
I stared at the light fixture that had nearly taken me out. “Doubtful. They’re testing this place out and looking for cracks in the magic. And poking for literal cracks in the house.” They wouldn’t find any now through my ice walls. Unless they somehow melted, but with the glacial temperature outside, that probably wouldn’t happen anytime soon.
He dropped his head into his hand and heaved a sigh. “So, now what?”
“We check the house, just in case, and then I need to find out what your tattoo means,” I said and headed toward the living room. Luckily, the floors were only frozen at the seams where the walls met the wood. Otherwise, Kason and I would be gliding across ice and crashing into sharp furniture.
Kason peeked out the curtain in the living room. “They’re not out there that I can see.”
“Hopefully that spell did them in for a few more hours.” I checked the wine cellar in the basement first for obvious reasons, but other than a few broken bottles, Kason’s magic house had restocked the empty slots on the shelves. That right there made today a great day, with the exception of the Diamond Dogs, of course.
In the living room again, Kason grumbled as he picked up the fallen bricks and fireplace tools. I shook my head on the way past and swept upstairs. My ice spell had reached up to the second floor as well. There were three bedrooms and one large bathroom, in which I stopped in long enough to shove my bleeding head under the shower faucet.
It appeared that the house’s magic, along with my rapidly depleting clicks on my atern, would hopefully be enough fortification for a little longer.
While Kason cleaned the entire house, I swept up Nasty from the couch and continued researching his tattoo.
“You can go upstairs,” he said after a while. He glanced at the ice wall in front of the fireplace. “There’s already a fire up there.”
A shiver wracked my body. “Fine.” Normally, I preferred hacking while couching, but I would gladly make an exception for heat.
With a bottle and Nasty under my arm, Kason led me into one of the smaller bedrooms in the middle of the hallway where only one exterior wall had been pushed in. A double bed butted up against the ice wall below a window, and underneath the bed were long tracks across thick ivory carpet where the posts had moved. A large wooden wardrobe that smelled like cedar sat at the very foot of the bed, and diagonally across from it, a small fire burned in a white brick fireplace. It was warmer in here, and because the walls weren’t actually made of ice but of magic ice, they wouldn’t melt.
The room felt cozy and lived in, evident from the clothes hanging in the open wardrobe. Was this Kason’s bedroom? My gaze dropped to the bed unintentionally with its rich and deep reds and browns decorating the thick blanket on top. Did he prefer to go commando underneath this blanket?
Kason closed the wardrobe door and sucked in so he could slide between it and the foot of the bed. “I’ll build up the fire. You…do whatever it is you do.”
I plopped down on the bed cross-legged, shoving thoughts of what Kason might look like while he slept from my head, and opened up Nasty.
“How long do you think your ice wall will hold?” he asked, kneeling in front of the fireplace.
“No idea.”
“That’s comforting.”
“I do my best.” I opened up a chat window with Ty, another window for tattoo research, and the picture of Kason’s tattoo. “It depends on what else they have planned besides wall bumper cars. They know you’re important enough to bring me out of my house after two years, but I doubt they know why. And we need to keep it that way.”
“Well, that won’t be a problem since I don’t even know why you think I’m important.”
“That’s what I’m about to find out.”
Since my voice-activated keyboard had broken, it took a long time and a lot of hissing to tap out a message to Ty, but finally I did. Who told you about Kason? I need a name.
When that was sent, I folded my aching hands to my middle and breathed while my knuckles plucked at my nerves in a hellish song. My eyes filled with tears, but I didn’t dare look up even though I could feel Kason’s questioning gaze from where he sat by the fire. I took long pulls off my straw until a nice fog blotted out some of the sharper edges of the pain.
He crossed to the bed and sat on the edge. “You’re going to delete that picture when this is all done, right?”
His damp hair magnified his chocolate and cedar smell, and I inhaled it, tasting it, tasting him, until the screeching in my hands faded.
“There’s a lot going on in that picture,” I said, my voice shaky. I cleared my throat and nudged Nasty with my toe so he could see. “You have a pair of ass dimples to be proud of, so no. I won’t be deleting that picture.”
“What? Ass dimples?” He leaned closer, his head hovering over my shoulder.
“Please,” I said. “You never checked out your own ass in the mirror to see if you had dimples or any of your other…ass qualities?”
He looked at me, the whiskered scruff around his mouth so close that if I turned my head, I might feel it graze my cheek and be just inches from his lips.
“What other ass qualities?” he asked, a smile in his voice.
It almost sounded as if he were enjoying himself. How hard had I hit my head?
“The qualities that will feed my various addictions when I sell this picture on the ass black market.” I clicked away from his picture to Ty’s window, which still blinked my question but no answer, to the research window. “Now, stop fishing for compliments and shut up so I can figure you out.”
He laughed, and the rich baritone sound was so unexpected that it kicked my heart against my ribs. I turned toward him, and when our gazes locked, a current passed between us, unexplainable yet powerful.
His lips parted, and need shadowed his dark eyes. He tipped his head forward a fraction, his gaze dipping to my mouth before tracking back up my face like a feather’s caress. No one had ever looked at me the way he did now—as if I were so much more than a girl with a whole lot of baggage. As if my black heart and all its thorns could be melted into something alive and beating.
I twisted away fr
om him, and at the same time, he turned his head and made a pained sound low in his throat that pinged disappointment through my gut. Close call for both of us, then. Good thing we’d caught ourselves before we did something we might both regret, him likely more than me.
“I’ll help figure myself out for a cut of the proceeds you get on the ass picture black market,” he said, but his voice had lost its playfulness. He grabbed Nasty and parked it in front of him on the edge of the bed.
I almost protested but offered a shrug instead. He could likely type faster than I could. I scooted away from him and leaned back against the mountain of pillows propped against the headboard, faking like I had no idea what just happened between us. Which wasn’t hard, because I didn’t.
He appeared to do the same with his squared shoulders, stiff jawline, and the no-more-joking-around air around him. “What am I looking for?”
“Translate the runes around your tattoo.”
“Fine.” His shadowy gaze ticked back and forth across the screen. “How do I do that?”
“The fae have a database called Witchcraft Symbology so they can counter all witches’ hexes. Start there and wade through the section on runes until you find a match. I left off on page two hundred forty-three last night.” I peered over my shoulder at the iced over window, and through a small crack, the dead snow-covered branches of a tree down the street silhouetted in a dark gray sky. “Have fun.”
He scrolled through for a long while, his eyebrows digging together as he went. “There are over five thousand pages.”
“You’re the one who wants a cut of the money I get for your ass picture.”
He pinned me with a glare. “It’s my ass. It’s me who’s supposed to be able to stop these fae people. I should get all the money.”
“There won’t be any money if neither of us survives the night. The Diamond Dogs will be back, and a shrinking house will be the least of our worries.” I smoothed the blankets with my wrist, enjoying the velvet soft feel on my skin. “Besides, what would you do with that money? You can’t even leave here.”
Legacy: Faction 11: The Isa Fae Collection Page 5
