Spell of Shattering

by Anna Abner

  A bubble of hysterical laughter floated free, but then she pictured Derek’s expression when he’d pinned her beneath his body weight, and she lost her sense of humor. The look in his eyes. It was difficult to categorize, but she was certain she had never seen him so dangerous or so disturbed.

  Holden’s arm tightened imperceptibly, and Jessa struggled against another inappropriate giggle as he led her inside.

  “Attention, friends,” he announced to the customers in the dining room. “There’s an emergency in the kitchen. I’m sorry, but you have to leave everything as it is and exit the building as quickly as possible. I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” he said, abandoning Jessa to usher a young family out the front door. “Next time you drop by, your meals are on the house.”

  There were a few grumbles, but everyone vacated the premises quickly and in an orderly fashion. Even the cook and the waitress collected their things and, after a word from their boss, filed out.

  Jessa smiled tightly at the last person to leave, but when the door closed, she spun on Holden. “Call the police. Derek kidnapped me, he’s bleeding, and he’s acting insane.”

  Holden didn’t say anything, just locked the door, sealing her inside.

  “Did you hear me?” she demanded.

  Derek stumbled in through the kitchen, interrupting her plea for help by knocking over a tray of plastic cups as he weaved around the counter. The bloodstain on his shirt and jeans had grown noticeably bigger.

  “Please listen,” he said, dropping into a vinyl booth.

  Under the unflinching fluorescent lighting, Jessa got her first good look at him.

  She remembered the old Derek. The man who cared about his appearance, maybe more than she did her own, who smiled and teased and retold hilarious customer encounters. The man who loved improving stranger’s homes the way most people loved eating and breathing.

  The Derek Walker before her was unrecognizable. Not only was he covered in blood and scratches, but he’d let his hair grow shaggy around his ears. He wore cheap jeans and tasteless flannel, both of which had seen better days. But it was his eyes that kept her in the building and not running for the nearest phone. His eyes were haunted. As if he’d been tortured since the last time she’d seen him.

  “Here.” He slid her cell phone across the table toward her. “I’m sorry.”

  She snatched it off the table and, ignoring the fact that it had blood on it, checked her messages. One missed text.

  I know Derek is back in town, Paul wrote. I want to meet him this morning.

  Pushy. Jessa replied, I need time with him. I’ll call you later. That should buy her a couple hours, maybe a couple days.

  She turned off her phone and slipped it into her pocket. “Why couldn’t you just talk to me?” she asked, sliding into the booth across from him. “Why did you have to carry me out of my home like some caveman?”

  Holden typed on his cell, the keyboard sound effects shattering in the quiet room. “Sorry,” he grumbled, his fingers flying over the tiny buttons. “I’m texting Becca to get back here, that you brought the cabal’s second target to my diner.”

  Cabal? Target? Jessa glanced at Derek for clarification. “Tell me what is going on so I can get you to a hospital.”

  “The mayor wants to hurt you,” Derek began slowly.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Paul had been nothing but kind and respectful. Hell, he was her one and only client, her ticket out from under Ryan’s yoke. He was the opposite of dangerous.

  “He’s trying to,” Derek continued in that disconcertingly quiet and measured voice, “p-possess you with a demon.”

  She wasn’t even tempted to laugh. It would be too cruel. “I don’t know what happened to you in Alaska,” she said, rising to her feet, “but you need serious help. More than medical. You need to talk to someone Derek because it’s obvious you have issues, maybe from your car accident—”

  “I wasn’t in a car accident,” he exclaimed, startling her with the desperation in his tone. “Holden stole my memories and, and—” He swallowed with difficulty. “Left me in a ditch.”

  He didn’t look at Holden as he said the words, but Jessa did. The large man didn’t appear surprised by the accusation, but rather genuinely remorseful.

  Derek aimed the full force of his intense stare at her. “Paul’s getting back at me. Because you’re special to me.”

  Enough was enough. Jessa cared about Derek’s health, but she sensed he wasn’t receiving information at the moment. He was in the middle of some kind of episode, and her presence was making it worse.

  “I’m worried about you,” Jessa admitted. “Let me drive you to the emergency room.”

  Rebecca Powell swept into the building, and Jessa was relieved someone sane and in charge had arrived. Rebecca was a driven woman, and Jessa had learned a lot from her, but she’d worked Jessa and Derek hard, kept them up all night, asked them to do things above and beyond their employment contracts. There had been many late nights when Jessa and Derek had grouched and complained, tucked into a corner of the office, laughing and sharing their pain over coffee and donuts.

  So much had changed since then, and with a pang of grief, she realized she missed the late nights she and Derek had shared at Rebecca’s office.

  “Oh, my God,” Rebecca exclaimed, catching sight of Derek. “He’s bleeding. Holden, you have to heal him.”

  “No,” Derek said weakly.

  “He told me not to,” Holden explained.

  “You can’t leave him like that.” She gestured at the sorry state of the wounded man.

  “I’m fine,” Derek assured.

  Rebecca did not appear convinced, but when she glanced at Jessa, all further argument died on her lips. “Is that what mine looked like?” she asked in a hushed voice. But Jessa got the feeling she wasn’t talking to her.

  Holden nodded.

  “Amazing,” she murmured as her eyes scanned the area around Jessa’s head.

  “Rebecca,” Jessa said, hoping to finally have someone on her side in all the chaos. “Derek carried me out of my apartment. This isn’t a kidnapping, right? So, can you explain to him that I want to go home?”

  “Nobody is kidnapping you,” Rebecca said, chuckling uneasily. “But something awful is happening. I know because the same thing happened to me.”

  “I’m okay,” Derek proclaimed, obviously not following the conversation in real time. “I’m fine.”

  As if to prove it, he placed one bloody hand on the tabletop, the other on the back of the booth, and pushed himself into a standing position. His face lost any trace of color, and his eyes rolled up in his head. Jessa tried to grab him before he keeled over, but one second he was up and the next his head thunked against the shiny black-and-white floor tiles.

  “Call 911,” Jessa commanded. She felt for a pulse at his throat. He was cold and clammy. “Please.”

  Rebecca grabbed a wad of paper napkins off the table and smashed it against the seeping cut. Jessa pushed her away, taking the makeshift bandage from her.

  “Go. Call for help.”

  “Holden can heal him.”

  “Heal him?” Jessa retorted. “Are you insane? What is wrong with you people? He’s going into shock. If he doesn’t get help he’ll bleed to death.”

  “He asked me not to,” Holden said again.

  “Do it anyway,” Rebecca said.

  “You could do it.” A telling look passed between them that Jessa didn’t grasp.

  “Holden…”

  “It’s okay,” he said abruptly. “I got it.”

  Jessa laid her fingers against Derek’s throat, and his pulse pushed back. But for how much longer? The napkins in her hand were soaked in blood.

  At a series of scratching sounds, she looked up and found Holden drawing a chalk circle on the tile floor.

  These people were insane. And they had always seemed so normal and nice.

  “You’re not allowed to die,” she hissed at Derek. “You hear me?
”

  Irrationally, she thought of the kiss he’d planted on her earlier. It wasn’t their first kiss, but it had definitely been their best. God, passion had nearly oozed from his pores. His entire body had vibrated with it. Where had that come from? The last thing she remembered of their very platonic working relationship had been him telling her to go away.

  “You didn’t survive the crash and bounce back from major head trauma to die here today. Derek?” No response. It was like sitting beside his hospital bed in April while he recovered. Then, too, she had worried over him and talked to his closed eyelids, hoping he’d get better and fearing he never would. She certainly hadn’t anticipated going through it all again so soon.

  For several seconds Jessa heard nothing but her own breath chugging in and out of her lungs, and then Holden’s voice boomed into the quiet space.

  “Medeor.”

  “Hurry, darlin’,” Rebecca fretted.

  “I’m not strong enough,” Holden said. “Becca, I need you and Jolie.”

  Jessa overheard the name, but her dead sister was the least crazy thing she’d thought of since Derek rushed her front door.

  “I don’t know if I can,” Rebecca said.

  “Please,” Holden said. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

  Jessa glanced over her shoulder at Rebecca and Holden clinging to each other as they chanted in Italian. Maybe Latin.

  “What is wrong with you people?” she fumed.

  When Derek had been found unconscious on the side of the road four months ago, the hospital had tried contacting his family. Except he didn’t have any. So, they’d called numbers in his phone. Jessa wasn’t the first person they had reached, but she was the only person to come and sit by Derek’s bed.

  At the time, the hospital had run every conceivable test.

  Blood work, normal.

  Blood pressure, normal.

  CAT scan, normal.

  But he wouldn’t wake up, and no one could say why or if he ever would.

  Jessa stared into his face, pale and lifeless, and it was like being back in his hospital room. She shifted on the cold tile floor, her palm slid in a streak of blood, and she fell to her elbow.

  “Oh, God,” she gasped, her nose inches from the blood-streaked floor. The world telescoped into a twelve-inch square tile. All the fear and grief swelled until she was submerged in it, unable to breathe, unable to escape. “I can’t do this again.”

  She hadn’t lost hope, then, that Derek would recover. Not for a second. But now? She wasn’t sure she possessed the energy to stay by his sickbed a second time.

  He was supposed to be better by now…

  She struggled to sit up, to get out of the warm mess, and in all the fuss, his makeshift bandage fell off. Derek’s shirt rode up revealing bloody, but uncut flesh.

  “He was stabbed right here,” Jessa exclaimed, fingering the spot where she’d seen a gash only moments before. “I saw it.”

  Derek’s right arm twitched, his head jerked, and then he was coughing and retching.

  “Oh, my God!” Jessa grabbed him in a tight hug, probably hurting him, but she didn’t care. He was okay.

  Jessa looked up at Rebecca sobbing quietly in Holden’s arms. “What the hell,” she asked, suddenly exhausted, “is going on?”

  “You’re all right,” Holden soothed, ignoring Jessa as he rubbed Rebecca’s back. “You did it. Thank you, darlin’. Thank you. I know you didn’t want to.”

  Derek sat up, wiping blood all over his shirt. “Who cast the spell?” he whispered to Jessa. “Was it Holden?”

  She did not believe for a moment that a spell had been cast, but Holden and Rebecca had been doing something in their chalk circle.

  “They both did.”

  With a little support, Derek climbed to his feet. “I told you not to cast on me,” he said to Holden.

  “You’re welcome,” Holden said in a decidedly unfriendly tone. One arm around Rebecca, he tossed the other man a rag from behind the counter. “Go in the bathroom and clean up.” When Derek hesitated, he added, “She’ll be here when you get back.”

  Jessa returned to the booth, her left hand fisting spastically.

  “I need that explanation now,” she said.

  Rebecca poured hot water into a mug, chose a tea bag, and brought them to Jessa. “Drink this. It’ll help calm your nerves,” Rebecca said, pulling herself together like the pro she was. “This is going to be a shock, but I went through the same thing when I met Holden. And everything they tell you is one hundred percent true, even if it sounds crazy.”

  “I’ve had a lot of crazy already,” Jessa admitted. “But I’ll hear you out.” Because unless they had drugged her, some very strange stuff was happening. Otherworldly, unexplained stuff.

  She dunked the bag of English black tea into the mug and it swirled through the hot water.

  “Look,” Holden knelt beside her until they were eye-to-eye. “I’m going to lay it all out. Derek is going to protect you. But,” he glanced sidelong at the closed restroom door, “if you don’t want him hanging around, then I’ll do it. Because someone has to. You’re dangerous to yourself and others. You can’t be alone until we solve this.” He gave her a sad facsimile of a smile before rejoining Rebecca.

  Oh, if only they knew how dangerous she was. Just ask her sister, Jolie. But they couldn’t. She was dead. Because of Jessa.

  “Have you noticed any strange occurrences?” Rebecca asked. “Are you having headaches? What about lights flickering, picture frames falling, or furniture moving by itself? What about insomnia?” she asked, eyeing Jessa critically.

  Jessa hadn’t thought of her symptoms as connected, but when Rebecca laid them out like that, it made her uneasy. She took a hesitant sip of tea, but it was too hot, and she set it aside.

  “Yeah, I guess so. I’ve had a headache for a couple days, but I blamed it on the stress of trying to close this deal. And the wiring in our building is old. It goes in and out. There are shorts all the time.”

  “It’s not stress.”

  Jessa got chills at Rebecca’s somber tone. “Wait,” she exclaimed, remembering something off about her meeting with Paul. “My headache started the day I took Paul to see Derek’s house.”

  “They cast on you,” Holden said. “They wanted you to be present when they did it.”

  Across the dining room, the bathroom door opened, and Derek appeared at the far end of the room. He’d removed his ruined shirt and crossed to her in nothing but jeans and filthy sneakers. And more than his mental state had changed in the last four months. She dragged her gaze up and over his body. His new and improved body.

  His bare chest was nearly twice as big as it had been last time she’d seen it. And it was chiseled too. Wide, tanned, and thick. Alaska had been good to Derek.

  “Did you start working out?” And then she flushed so red her headache thrummed. She hadn’t meant to say that aloud.

  Thankfully, no one responded, though Derek shot her a quizzical look.

  She hid her blush behind her mug of steaming tea as he slid into the booth across from her, his knees cocking protectively around hers.

  “Go ahead,” she prompted. “I’m listening.”

  “You can’t talk to the mayor again,” Derek began. “Ever.”

  “What was your relationship with him anyway?” Rebecca asked.

  Jessa bristled at the insinuation that she was too small time to ever meet the mayor or do business with him.

  “He hired me to acquire a property,” she said, refusing to make eye contact with her former boss. Instead, she focused on deciphering Derek’s expression. “He was a perfect gentleman. I mean, he can be condescending sometimes, but I didn’t take it personally. He’s like that with everyone.” She thought of her deal, her ticket out. She thought of his insistence that Derek return to Auburn and meet with him immediately. “But you’re telling me I can’t talk to him because he’s trying to possess me with a demon?” She huffed a l
augh at the absurdity of the conversation even as her gaze lowered to the spot—now healed—where a stab wound had been ten minutes earlier.

  Jessa couldn’t wrap her head around anything they were saying. Demons didn’t belong in her rational world. And yet, she’d just seen something fantastic, hadn’t she?

  “How did you heal so fast?” she asked, concentrating on the concrete evidence in front of her.

  “They,” he jerked his head in Holden and Rebecca’s direction, “did it with a healing spell.”

  “You’re welcome,” Holden said again, his tone even snarkier.

  Something shifted in Derek, as if his insides transformed. One moment he was gazing into her eyes, and the next he was on his feet, the table rattling from the force. He faced off with the larger man.

  “I told you not to cast on me,” he growled.

  “Should I have let you die?” Holden pressed Rebecca behind him. “You ungrateful little shit.”

  “You stole everything from me,” Derek said, marching a hostile step toward him.

  Holden took a step nearer. “You came after the love of my life. You’re lucky I didn’t kill you.”

  Derek closed the gap, and Jessa knew what was coming next. Someone would push, then someone would throw a punch, but she’d seen too much blood for one day.

  “Enough,” she shouted, wedging between the two men and bumping Rebecca as the other woman did the same thing.

  Jessa’s hands went to Derek’s bare chest, and she found his heart racing.

  “You promised me an explanation,” she said, peering into his warm, brown eyes. “So far all I’ve gotten is a bunch of mumbo jumbo I don’t understand.” She nudged him in the direction of their booth.

  “Fine.” Derek sent Holden a final, threatening look, and then let her guide him to the table.

  Before he sat, though, she grabbed the side of his chest, her fingers finding his ribs, and explored the spot—now washed clean—where she was certain he’d been stabbed.

  “How did you do it?” she wondered aloud, pressing and pulling at his skin. Was it possible the flesh had swollen and it only appeared sealed closed?

  But no, after searching carefully, she found no evidence of a recent wound, let alone a two-inch gash. His abs were smooth, well-defined dips and valleys beneath the sensitive pads of her fingers. Eventually, she was just standing there massaging Derek’s very warm, very taut skin. Embarrassed, she snatched her hands away and flopped down in her seat.