by Anna Abner
“I’m with you,” Ali swore to Connor. “That’s my mission statement.” He leaned over and kissed her gently on the mouth.
“Don’t make me drop kick you both out of here,” Roz threatened, only half teasing.
Ali giggled breathily, but they separated.
Connor caught Roz’s eye. “Anyway, we don’t have the resources Anton and Natasha had, but we have our own strengths. We need to start playing to them.”
“They may have had unlimited money and connections, but we have a vampire, a glow worm, and a witch,” Roz said, calculating.
“We have enough weapons to outfit an army,” Ali added. “And Roz is a wiz at technology.”
“Thanks,” Roz said. “Don’t forget Ali disintegrates a six-foot sphere of space when she loses her temper.”
“Ok.” Connor cracked a lopsided smile. “It’s a start. So, you girls will help me locate the decent vampires out there?”
“Definitely,” Roz said.
“Of course,” Ali said.
“Then how do we find them?” he asked. “Any ideas?”
“I’ve been toying with a vampire locator spell,” she said. “I haven’t perfected it yet.” Translation: it hadn’t worked. “But if I tinker with it, I might be able to track the horde with magic.”
“Good,” Connor punched his left palm with his right fist. “I like that. What else can we do?”
“We could sit back and wait for Volk to show up,” Ali suggested. “It worked before. He was one step behind us for days.”
“I’m surprised we haven’t heard from him,” Roz agreed. He’d been like a hungry stray dog around Ali. They couldn’t shake him. After Olek bit it, he disappeared. Must be spending time building up his new empire. One she’d be happy to tear down.
Chains rattled softly against porcelain, and she glanced at the shifter. His blue eyes, ringed in bruises, cracked open, and he growled.
“Settle,” she whispered as Connor abruptly stood and pushed Ali behind him.
“Let me out,” he exploded. The shifter thrashed, kicking so hard the bathroom cabinetry split into shards of wood and ceramic. “Now!” he roared.
Roz edged toward the door, but something under his left arm caught her attention.
“You’re bleeding,” she observed. She didn’t move any closer—she wasn’t dumb—but she squinted for a better look. An X had been carved into his ribs, and something told her it hadn’t been the mob last night.
“Is it magic?” she asked. How did a wound glow and bleed uncontrollably without having witchcraft behind it?
“Fucking witches,” he shouted. “I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them all!”
Connor ducked out and returned in a rush with a loaded tranquilizer gun. “He’s uncontrollable.”
“Me?” the shifter screamed, writhing. The toilet shattered, and water gushed onto the floor. “I’m not the threat!”
Connor aimed the gun at the other man’s chest and pulled the trigger. A moment later, a tranq dart quivered from his pec.
“You think that’s enough to put me down?” the shifter shouted, straining at the chains until the muscles in his shoulders stood out like cables.
Connor fired three more times before the shifter slumped onto his side into a shallow pool of gurgling water.
“This fucking guy,” Connor said, shaking his head, as if at a loss, “We can’t set him free to walk the Strip. He’s too dangerous. Let me think for a minute.”
“Is it possible we scared him worse than he scared us?” Ali asked, her arms crossed tight to her chest.
Ignoring Connor and Ali, Roz hunched onto her heels and, after twisting off the water at the base of the toilet, she inspected the shifter’s still bleeding wound. She lifted one heavy, muscled arm by the wrist to expose his ribs. His lax fingers bumped her arm and for a strange moment, it seemed as if he grabbed hold of her.
But that was ridiculous. He was out cold. If she hadn’t imagined it, then it was an unconscious spasm.
She shook off goose bumps to study the injury. Though she’d never learned such a wicked hex as the one affecting the shifter, Roz sensed the magic seeping out of it. Some witch had cursed him with a strong and malicious spell meant to wound him permanently. But Roz had never cast a permanent spell. All she knew of magic was temporary. Her spells lasted hours, a day at the most. How did their magic persist? By the very pale color of the shifter’s skin, he’d been slowly bleeding to death for a while.
Roz had never considered cursing her enemies, but here was living proof witches cast evil and hurtful spells on people. The Coven slipped even further in her book.
“Okay,” Connor decided, clearly uneasy, “I’ll take him out into the desert northeast of here where there aren’t any people and dump him. Hopefully, he’ll leave the area and we’ll never see him again.”
“I’ll go along with that,” Roz said, unable to think of a better idea. “But before you do, I want to investigate the mark under his arm.”
“Yeah, fine.” Connor left, still murmuring unhappily about the state of the bathroom and the trouble with shifters.
Roz grabbed her laptop and then sat in the bathroom doorway, her back against the door jam. With her phone, she snapped a photo of the mark, uploaded it to her MacBook, and then ran an image search. She didn’t find anything, but it had been a long shot. Magic, particularly the heavy hitting stuff, didn’t exist online for public consumption. The Coven kept it secret and off-limits.
Next, she ran some of her personal investigative tricks. Sometimes searching in the periphery of a topic revealed more than searching directly at it. Finally, she tried her favorite occult sites and dumping grounds for all things witch-related.
After some crosschecking, she was eighty percent certain the mark was a hex cast by a powerful witch. It tortured the victim with pain, disease, or even death. Very few cases were recorded. Mostly, they were rumor and legend.
A Coven witch had cursed the shifter. There was almost no other possibility.
Fascinated, Roz leaned nearer. Maybe she could reverse the effects. Or at the very least, reduce them. It’d be the biggest spell she’d ever attempted, but she was willing to try. With Connor’s words of confidence still ringing in her ears, she debated the spell she’d speak.
Not twenty minutes after being hit with four tranq darts, the shifter stirred.
Roz had to act fast. She called her power, whipping magical wind around the bathroom.
“Heal,” she said, in rapid repeat. “Be strong. Be whole. Break the curse. Heal.”
She could sense her spell working, so she pushed her magic further, hoping for strength, hoping to give him some relief, even temporarily.
As her magic intensified, the shifter opened his eyes.
“Dum häxa,” he slurred. “I’ll eat your throat out.”
Roz persisted in her spells, not intimidated by his bluster or his foreign insults. Increasingly, he seemed a lion with a thorn in his paw. If she could just pull the thorn…
“It’s time.” Connor stood at the door with a syringe of sedative in one hand. “Before he wakes up any further.”
Roz cut the spell and the wind died down. “Okay. Just be—”
Connor injected the sedative directly into the side of the groggy shifter’s throat. “This should keep him down for a couple hours. I’ll take him as far as I can away from the city, but still have time to get out of his sight before he wakes up. While I’m gone, call maintenance and ask them to clean up this mess.”
#
Lukas Larsson woke up pissed in a ditch in the Nevada desert wearing nothing but torn sweatpants and a plaster cast.
“Jävel,” he growled, rolling to his hands and knees and puking until he thought his eyeballs would liquefy and dribble past his cheeks. Son of a bitch.
Lukas had been hung over before, but never like this. Then the past few hours came back to him. Those shitheads in the hotel had kept pumping him full of sedatives. Enough to kill a human man. Enough
to almost kill him.
He’d stayed in the States, rather than return home to Sweden an orphan, to exact his revenge. Why not add three more worthy contenders to his list?
He climbed to his feet and sniffed the air. Nothing but sand, snakes, and mice for miles. Traffic hummed softly, and so he started west, though he saw no obvious signs of civilization.
Unstable on his cast, he moved awkwardly through the sand. What a bunch of dickheads, leaving him in the middle of nowhere—crippled, sick, and ready to die of dehydration. Were they trying to kill him? Because they were doing a pretty fair job of it.
He lifted his left arm to inspect the bleeding hex. For the first time in days, it didn’t hurt, and it wasn’t bleeding.
The witch.
The dark-haired, dark-eyed häxa had cast on him. He remembered now. Against all his understanding of the corrupt breed, she’d taken away his pain rather than pile it on. He stepped into a gopher hole, crushing it, and caught himself just in time.
And then a ghost of a memory struck him upside his head. Him and his little brother at soccer practice. There was absolutely no connection between his current situation in the American west and coaching Oskar’s soccer team in Sweden, but the brief flash of memory hurt like a knife to his ribs, carving him into pieces. Oskar would never play soccer again. He’d never do anything again because a hungry vampire had snuffed out his young life and the lives of Lukas’ mother and stepfather.
If Lukas weren’t supernatural, he’d be dead too. Deep down, he regretted surviving the trap laid by a skilled and heartless predator. The pain of living without them hadn’t faded in the past three weeks. Maybe it never would.
If it weren’t for the fucking trio from hell, Lukas might have died a fiery and long overdue death the night before. The people who’d captured him certainly seemed bloodthirsty enough. Another reason to find the three stooges from the trailer park and make them pay.
He thought back to the bathroom they’d kept him in. During his time in Las Vegas, he’d strolled through most of the major casinos and resorts while hunting the horde. They were relatively easy prey when they stank of fresh blood. The three stooges stayed in a nice hotel, not one of the shitty ones downtown. And all the gold and fluer di lis made him think it’d been Le Sort Hotel on the Strip. It was the only fully French-themed casino in the area.
Lukas tripped in a gully and stumbled through a row of prickly sticker bushes. “För helvete,” he swore, barely keeping his footing. God damn it.
His fingers itched for his tennis ball, the kind he preferred to bounce to blow off steam. It was miles away in his hotel room, though, and there was nothing within reach to ease his anxieties.
The nervous energy made him think of his job in Stockholm and how it had all gone to hell since he’d basically quit. He still hadn’t answered his school principal’s dozen or so phone messages in the last several days.
Lukas, we heard what happened. Come back to work when you’re ready. The kids miss you. We all miss you.
The truth was, Lukas didn’t know what to say or how to explain the disaster his life had become in the past three weeks. His family was dead and their murderer was at large. Maybe when he caught and killed the vampire responsible, he could think about going home and resuming what passed for a life.
After another mile through a field dotted with brittle creosote bushes and the occasional yucca tree, Lukas stumbled upon a narrow strip of blacktop. A green sign in the distance read: Las Vegas 45 miles. Lukas didn’t bother trying to wave down a vehicle. Men who looked like him—six feet six inches of supernatural muscle currently wobbling on a dirty cast and naked from the waist up—would never convince anyone to pull over and pick him up.
The long walk only amped up his anger and seething resentment. By the time he reached the outskirts of town, he was ready to kick some ass. A taxi picked him up, and he made a pit stop at his hotel to retrieve his wallet, a shirt, and shoes before going straight to the Le Sort to try to pick up the three stooges’ scent.
Lucky for him, a red pickup drove out of the underground parking lot as he stepped out of a cab, its windows down and blowing the trio’s scent into the air. Lukas ducked right back into the cab. “Follow that truck.”
Chapter Five
Roz stood at her armoire, clean and dressed in shorts and a crocheted top, but still feeling smudged from her experience with the shapeshifter.
Once Connor returned alone, everybody seemed to exhale en masse. The shifter had rattled her. He hadn’t been what she’d expected. He was unpredictable. Aggressive. Taller and wider than Connor, who was no lightweight.
“Roz?” Connor called from the living room.
The tone of his voice aroused her suspicion, and she met him by the front door. “What’s up?”
He offered her a long white envelope. “Someone slipped this under the door. It’s addressed to you.”
Brows creased, Roz accepted the sealed envelope and inspected it. The return address was a fancy, multi-name law firm. Before opening it, she peered out the door and checked the outer hallway, but whoever had dropped it off was long gone.
She ripped the envelope open and pulled out a thick sheet of high quality paper. Typed across its surface were a lot of sophisticated legal jargon, but the lines that jumped out at her were: We have proof of your unsanctioned use of magic. To avoid legal ramifications… And it went on to prohibit her from performing any kind of magic not supervised or authorized by the Coven.
“It’s a cease-and-desist letter,” she explained. “From the Coven’s lawyers.” She stared sightlessly until the words lost all meaning. “Those hypocritical bitches.”
“Let me see.” Connor snatched the letter and read it silently while Ali looked on. “This is just stupid,” he finally declared.
“They hexed that shapeshifter,” Roz said, feeling a rant building. “They’re out there cursing people and supernaturals. They don’t do shit about the horde. And they deny my application for no good reason at all. And now they want to tell me I can’t practice magic?” She spread her arms at her sides, snapping into position. “Blessed is my power. I call upon thee.” The room erupted in angry energy. “Burn that piece of trash.”
The letter burst into flames, incinerating to ash in seconds, startling Connor who was still holding it when it ignited.
She was over eighty-five percent certain she’d just cast her first permanent spell.
Blowing on the tips of his fingers, Connor said, “There’s my badass, trash-talking witch. Where have you been all night?”
“I want to contact the Oracle,” Roz announced, ignoring the jibe. “I’ve been thinking about the new prophecy, and I need to know more.”
Connor immediately grew serious. “Okay.”
“I can’t port myself to her,” she reminded him. “But I can send you.”
With a last look at the gray ash at his feet, Connor crossed the room and flopped onto the sofa. “If the Oracle will speak to me, I’ll ask her anything you want. I can’t guarantee she’ll be lucid,” he sent Ali a telling look, “but I’ll do my best.”
Good enough. Roz collected a candle and matches. “Hold this,” she told Connor.
“I remember.” He lit the wick and resettled more deeply into the sofa.
Ali sat beside him and snuggled his arm. “Is it okay if I stay here?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem.” Roz exhaled an anxious breath. “Ask her if prophecy one thousand eight is about me. If it’s not, then who is it about? Maybe this person can be an ally down the line.”
“And if it is about you?” Connor asked.
What if? “Get as much info as you can, I guess.” Without allowing him any further chance to question her, Roz called her power and spoke the portal spell that would send Connor’s spiritual self to the Oracle’s physical location. She’d done this spell once before and sent Connor to Ilvane’s bedroom.
But then, Connor had been half-dead and separating his incorporeal form from his b
ody had been easy. Now, he was healthy and stronger than ever. Forcing him into two pieces, basically, caused sweat to pop up across her brow. A minute passed. Two. Three.
It was obvious to all in the room, including Connor, that nothing was happening.
Wiping perspiration from her chin onto her shoulder, not daring to cease speaking magic, she pushed harder. Her glossy, dark hair whipped into her face as her invisible swirl of magic raged.
Maybe the Coven had done something to her, poisoned her through the letter and somehow shackled her abilities. Or maybe they’d merely meant to make her doubt herself.
The power motes swirled faster, nearly choking her.
Please, she thought. Don’t embarrass me like this.
Roz pressed until beads of sweat rolled off her neck and wet her collar.
With a quiet exhale, Connor went limp, and Ali grabbed the candle to keep it from spilling.
Closing her eyes in sweet relief, Roz focused hard to keep the spell smooth and consistent, regulating everything from her body posture to the tone and pace of her voice.
Gasping, Connor sat up off the couch. “Oh, Jesus, that’s still weird.”
Alarmed, Roz stopped speaking spells. “What happened? It didn’t work?” she guessed.
“No, it worked.” Connor blew out the candle, stood, and paced to the balcony doors. “But Caitlyn’s Caitlyn.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I saw her,” Connor said, keeping his back to the room. “She told me to mind my own bleeping business. And then she kicked me out.”
“Mind your own business?” Roz marveled. “Is that some kind of joke?”
“I told you, she’s not always coherent.”
The Coven was actively annoying her, she was possibly heading toward a one woman versus the entire organization situation, and the Oracle wouldn’t even talk to her?
“This is my business,” Roz snapped. “What a brat. Did I ask to have my identity spoken from her spoiled little mouth?”
Neither answered, though Roz didn’t expect them to. It wasn’t them Roz was mad at. Her rage was much broader—her spotty so-called power, the Oracle, prophecy in general, Connor’s sudden love affair, the Coven’s rejection, the insulting cease-and-desist letter, and Natasha’s numbing silence. There was so much to be angry about, Roz couldn’t even focus it in a single direction.
