by K. F. Breene
The spiciness marked it as a vampire, and it had the dustiness of an elder, but it had another dimension to it. One thing was in our favor: the vampire wasn’t hostile, and he didn’t want us to turn around.
He just wanted us to know we were in his domain. His territory.
“A vampire owns this floor,” I said, my legs locked and not wanting to go any farther. “It’s not Ja, and I don’t feel any actual magic, but I would really rather not accidentally wake up an extreme elder again.” I looked hard at Darius, because his lack of preparedness had already put me in one uncomfortable situation. I’d hoped the partial destruction of his house would teach him his lesson, but who was to say?
Darius turned to me slowly. “An elder owns this building. What are you feeling?”
“Like…this place…belongs to someone…” I shook my head because I didn’t quite know how to explain it.
“Like someone peed on the walls to mark his territory?” Reagan nodded, staring down the hall. “Vampires like other creatures to know who owns what.” Reagan glanced back at me before walking forward. “I could only sense that after I bonded Darius. Is this the first time you’ve noticed it?”
I swallowed around a dry throat. “Yes. It’s incredibly…”
“Disconcerting. You’ll learn to deal with it.” Reagan glanced at Darius, paused for a moment, and lightly nodded. “Interesting, indeed.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask what she was talking about. Before I knew it, we were all walking again, Emery’s hand on my back keeping me from running off toward the double doors at the end of the hall.
Reagan tried one of the artful handles, which lacked a keyhole of any kind, only to find it locked. The walls beside the doors were smooth, no pad for a keycard.
“Knock, enter, or bust our way in?” Reagan asked Darius.
“This is a meeting of minds. We want to make a positive impression,” Darius said, knocking softly.
“Right.”
One of the doors opened in a swirl of air and fragrance, revealing a gorgeous woman in a leather duster, her cleavage popping out of her tight corset. She stood in incredible high-heeled boots in a balanced sort of way that didn’t hint at the discomfort she had to feel. The overall look was as dazzling as it was sexy, but it had to be ten times more painful. I wasn’t sure beauty was worth such a steep price, even for a vampire.
Reagan barked out a laugh, Darius turned to me slowly, and Emery bent to hide a chuckle. It was then I realized that, in my nervousness, I’d muttered my thoughts out loud.
“Sorry,” I said, my face heating. “I was thinking about something else.”
“Just stop while you’re…where you are, Turdswallop,” Emery murmured, a laugh riding his words.
“Off to a great start,” Reagan said with a giant smile.
“Mr. Durant, we’ve been expecting you,” the female vampire said in a lush, smooth voice so dense it practically worked at my pants buttons.
“Awkward,” I whispered, desperately trying not to do the heebie-jeebie dance.
“Yes, of course.” Darius stepped forward at an angle, cutting Reagan off from following. He bent his head toward Reagan.
She nodded, like he’d said something, and he disappeared through the doors. Moss and Marie followed him without a word, both on edge. Reagan didn’t take a step, and instead waited until they’d closed the doors behind them, locking us in the hall.
“Well…that was unexpected,” I said, staring at the doors.
“He thinks you need a moment to collect your thoughts. He doesn’t realize that this is you with collected thoughts.” Reagan leaned her back against the door and pulled her phone out of her fanny pack. She lit it up, then dropped it back in. “We’ll give him five minutes to get everyone comfortable before we head in. What do you guys think? Should we go in on offense, defense, or just stir the shit?”
“Some of the most powerful people in the magical world are in there, right?” I yanked at my suit jacket. She nodded. “Okay, so let’s go in normally. Just walk in.”
Reagan sighed. “Fine. But tell me this: how hard should I kick in the door?”
“Would you—” I ran my hand over my face. There was no talking sense to her. To my dismay, Emery was chuckling again. He clearly didn’t realize she was serious. That she wanted to rile everyone up so she could gauge their weaknesses. She was awesome at winning a fight, but subtlety was completely lost on her. Completely lost. “Go in meekly,” I said through clenched teeth. “Just go in meekly.”
“Ah.” She wiggled her finger at me, as though we were sharing an inside joke. “I’m hearing you.”
Oh no…
In one perfectly practiced, smooth movement, she turned, balanced, and kicked, all while I yelled, “Noooo!”
Both doors burst open, swinging hard before slamming against the walls. As Reagan strutted in, loudly saying, “Ah crap—really, Darius? Him?” Emery stepped over to me quickly, pushing me a little to the side before bending to whisper in my ear.
“I wasn’t supposed to say anything, but Darius went in first to set the stage. He wants us to each go in how we feel most comfortable. Okay? You’ll be great.”
“Wait, you mean there was an actual plan for once, and no one thought to—”
He was gone, strutting through the door after Reagan, holding his head high and his shoulders straight like he owned the whole room.
“—tell me,” I finished, suddenly standing on my own in a pressurized situation. More times than I could count, it was in this exact type of situation that things went painfully, horribly wrong for me.
Darius had clearly not learned his lesson.
7
My spine collapsed immediately and my confidence totally deflated. I hated being the center of attention and worried I’d accidentally do something crazy, like blast one of the shifters, or start a war with a vampire. I drifted to the doorframe, getting a quick look in before anyone noticed me.
A large conference room greeted me, with an oval table in the middle surrounded by plush chairs. Moss and Marie each stood in a corner, standing tall with their eyes directed straight ahead. In another corner, a block of a man took up residence, clearly a vampire on the same detail as Moss and Marie.
Darius sat on the side facing the door in the windowless room, his elbows on the table and his fingers steepled up near his face. Opposite him sat a burly guy with tree-trunk arms and dirty blond hair, his broad back to me. The seat to his right was open, but the one beyond it was filled with another stack of muscle with dark brown hair, wearing a suit that pulled at the seams, fighting to stay in one piece over his large expanse of shoulders. Shifters, both of them.
Reagan sauntered around the end of the table toward Darius, exchanging words with the muscular blond guy. Emery walked behind her, drawing the attention of everyone in the room. He pulled out the chair at the head of the table and sat down like the room should praise him for showing up.
It was clear he could really strap on the ego when he thought it fitting.
A slight shifting drew my notice to the left, and a little lean-in revealed two more people, a woman and man, each with a certain pose and balanced stance that yelled fighter. Another couple shifters. The woman in the corset was out of sight, which meant others might be, too.
Knowing I couldn’t, on my best day, strut in like I owned the place, I figured I’d take Darius at his word. Hoping to stay hidden, I skulked into the room, veering right, and slipped toward the corner, where I was happy to notice a big, bushy office plant. It would do swimmingly to hide me from these extremely intense individuals who really didn’t seem like they should be cooped up together in a confined space.
Having achieved my partial hiding spot, I put my back to the wall and finally took a glimpse at the other end of the table. I sucked in a quiet breath, which I then held.
The most unbelievably gorgeous man I had seen in my entire life, on the big screen or otherwise, sat in the high-backed chair at the foot of the
table, his posture perfect and his manicured hands on the table. With cheekbones and straight nose seemingly etched out of marble, he looked like one of those pictures in a history book depicting nobles. Lean body exuding power, he was refined grace and infallible charisma wrapped up in a perfect package.
Like…almost too perfect. He didn’t even look real, he was so incredibly attractive.
I wiped drool from my chin with the back of my hand. He was so hot he literally made me drool. That was a first.
“Now, since we are all here…” the stupidly attractive man said, his voice so perfectly pitched and smooth that I caught myself leaning forward a little bit, anxious to get it to my ears just a little more quickly.
Son of a marmalade maker, Penny, get a hold of yourself!
“Sabrine, please, if you would?” the man said, and I forced myself to lean back again.
Ms. Corset—Sabrine—strutted toward the doors, her hips bobbing and swaying so much that I almost got queasy watching them. She passed the shifters a little too closely, skimming their comfort bubbles and smirking when each of them stiffened, before fitting the doors into the frame as best she could. She didn’t so much as glance my way.
Vampires and shifters didn’t like each other, I remembered. No, that wasn’t right. They hated each other. And hating, in the magical world, often resulted in death.
And here we all were, in the same room. Spacious or not, the room was still much too small.
“I am overjoyed I could host such a group of people. What luck that this location was agreeable to you,” Unnaturally Handsome said with a smile that tightened my body in worrying ways: arousal and fear and excitement.
The brown-haired shifter at the table moved in his seat, clearly not as overjoyed. He leaned forward, resting his large arms on the table. His biceps strained his suit jacket to the point of absurdity.
“You didn’t introduce anyone around. Is that the other mage?” He pointed at Reagan.
“Nope,” she said, leaning back in her seat. The low light glinted off her bald head. “I was only invited because I’m banging this guy.” She hooked a thumb Darius’s way. Cleary this group didn’t know what she really was.
“She was the first to thwart the Mages’ Guild in Seattle,” the blond-haired shifter said, his voice deep and rough and his posture tense and ready.
“But she’s not a mage?” Bursting Jacket asked.
“Not a mage, no. But rest assured, gentlemen,” Darius said. His voice, once smooth as silk, now sounded a bit gravelly. Unnaturally Handsome was doing a number on me. “She will be an infallible asset. Now, if we could move on…”
“Wait.” Bursting Jacket leaned forward then back, practically buzzing with pent-up energy. He glanced at the blond shifter. “Am I remembering this wrong? Weren’t there two mages that battled the Guild in Seattle? I was told they’d both be here.”
“And so they are,” Unnaturally Handsome said.
The blond shifter clasped his hands, and I could tell it was in confusion. It occurred to me that neither of them had noticed me enter. They didn’t know I was in the room.
Reagan clucked her tongue and shook her head, the light moving around her shiny skin scalp like a disco ball. “Roger, I’m surprised at you. I mean, your nitwit friend I get—lots of brawn, no brain—but you? That’s a big miss…”
Ah, so that was Roger. I sank a little closer to the bush, because Reagan’s joy of riling up shifters was not in the best interest of this overall meeting, and also because the shifters were on my side of the table.
As expected, Bursting Jacket puffed up, putting that jacket under even more strain. Shifter magic exploded through the room, jagged and hot, smacking into me and putting my energy on boil.
Attack. Kill.
A weave sprang through my fingers, unbidden, ready to slice Bursting Jacket in two if he so much as flinched in Reagan’s direction. I clenched my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut, focusing on keeping calm. In this room of power players, I was not needed for defense. I needed to mind my own business so Darius could talk everyone around.
“Oops. Now look what you’ve done,” I heard—Reagan, as calm as a spring day. “You went and got the other mage all riled up. That’s okay; I like your beta better anyway. It would probably do everyone a favor if she took over.”
That intensely powerful shifter magic continued to pump into the room, burning my eyes and making me grind my teeth.
Shred. Rip.
I felt the energy building, the shifter close to changing shape. I wondered if it would have a spark like that goblin, and if it did, if I could just reach in…and quell it. Stop the change.
“Calm yourself,” came Emery’s voice, a whip crack of command. Rough and masculine, it flowed over my skin like a caress, so much better than Unnaturally Handsome’s voice. “Get it under control, or things are going to get violent.”
Another wave of shifter magic vibrated toward me, more potent than the first, whispering of trees, cold mornings, and the thrill of the hunt. It must’ve been Roger’s magic, and I savored the natural feel of it. How it sang through my bones and seamlessly blended into my surroundings.
The power soaked into my body, and my already raging energy flared. Elements flowed through my fingers again without my consent, weaves half realized before I could force them to dissipate.
I shouldn’t have come. This was a huge mistake.
“Darius, calm it down, now,” Emery said.
A warning sounded somewhere in the back of my head. The train was a little too wobbly on the tracks. And while this might’ve happened a lot when I was first learning to use my magic, I knew better now. And, on the flip side, I also knew a lot more deadly spells.
“Gentlemen,” Darius said, an edge to his voice, “may I present Penelope Bristol?”
Fabric groaned, and I wondered if Bursting Jacket would tear out his seams when he looked around.
“You see,” Unnaturally Handsome said, “vampires have a tendency to keep track of the most dangerous person in the room, even when he or she is disguised in such a perplexing way.”
Like the tide going out, the magic receded slowly, leaving me shaky and trembling in its wake. I peeled an eye open in time to see Bursting Jacket smirking at me through a big, square face and small, beady brown eyes. He turned back around and his magic diminished to the point of a whiff. The other shifter’s magic followed suit. I sighed in gratitude.
“Most dangerous person in the room?” He chuckled. “She looks terrified. She’s not even trained, right?”
“Precisely,” Unnaturally Handsome said, his finger firmly on the pulse of the situation.
Bursting Jacket shook his head, still chuckling, clearly thinking this was a farce. I bet I could still reach in and flick off—
“Nope.” Reagan stood. “This might not work, boys. I can control my dislike of that meathead because I mostly dislike everyone. I’ve had practice. But she hasn’t, and she is planning horrible things. I can feel it.”
Emery nodded and shifted so he could look back at me, his eyes sparkling with confidence. He wasn’t passing judgment. He was ready to fight with me, if it came to that. I could see it in his posture, feel it in his magical chemistry as it connected with mine.
His chemistry? What the hell was going on with me?
“Let’s start again, shall we?” Darius stood and gestured me over.
“I must admit, Darius, you have come a long way,” Unnaturally Handsome said, his perfectly smooth voice filled with delight. “That was a fabulous demonstration. If only we’d had the resources to let it continue.”
As I drifted toward Emery, trying to straighten up but wary of what a little confidence would do to the energy still surging around me, I realized the blond shifter, Roger, hadn’t stopped assessing me, staring with one brown eye and one blue. He hadn’t written me off as the other one had.
His magic simmered on low heat, pleasant and wholesome, and I knew, without a doubt, that he was someone I coul
d trust. I felt it so deeply that I didn’t think to wonder how I knew. To have any shot of winning, we needed him on our side.
8
“No big deal, and it’s totally fine,” I said quietly to Emery as I grabbed the back of a seat near the end of the table and rolled it closer to him. I didn’t want to sit too close to Bursting Jacket, for fear he’d set me off again, and nor did I want to be on the other side so Roger could continue to stare at me. While I didn’t question his trustworthiness, he had a crazy kind of intensity that liquefied my bones and turned my stomach to mush. I could see why he was Alpha. “But I’m cracking up a little. Just a little, and it’ll probably pass, but I don’t feel entirely normal.”
Emery glanced at me, his gaze guarded. “Can you make it through this?”
I sure hoped so.
“Did you not smell her?” Reagan asked Roger.
“No,” he said, his gaze pounding into the side of my head. “Not even a whiff. I didn’t hear her, either.”
“She was encased in a spell, of sorts.” Emery scooted over a little and dragged my chair even closer to share the space at the end of the table. “We have what’s called survival magic, and Penny uses it in ways…I’ve never seen. This time she was blending hers with mine to create a sort of…shield, I would call it.”
Oh. That made sense, but it was my first indication I’d done any such thing.
“Yes,” Unnaturally Handsome said, delicately clasping his long fingers on the tabletop. “Her person was obscured from view. My eye wanted to move along, but in a way I haven’t experienced with similar spells. I just…didn’t want to notice her. I wanted to forget her presence.”
“Penny has an innate ability to feel out the perfect spell for any given situation. Unfortunately, in dire circumstances, she does it unconsciously,” Darius said, drawing everyone’s attention my way. “We’re working to change that, of course. In Emery she has found someone who can train her exactly how she needs to learn, and in Reagan she has found safe chaos in which to practice to her full potential. She is progressing rapidly.”
