Demons and DNA (Amplifier 1)

by Meghan Ciana Doidge

  My mind blanked, all desire washed away as a hit of adrenaline numbed me through and through.

  I had seen wounds like that before.

  I saw the reminder of those claw strikes every time I happened to catch sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, stepping into or out of the shower.

  My scars — currently hidden underneath my cotton sundress — were little more than a twist of flesh now. Three ridges slightly darker than my skin, running from my lower left ribs, across my belly, and ending near my right pelvis.

  Aiden’s scars, once healed, would match mine.

  Matching scars.

  The sorcerer had gone still, wary. The T-shirt was still bunched in one of his hands, his other hand slightly raised toward me. “Emma?”

  He thought I was going to attack him.

  I dropped the manila envelope, and it tumbled down the stairs behind me. But with my gaze still riveted to Aiden’s wound, I stepped forward, unbuttoning my dress from just below my bra to the top of my lace-edged underwear.

  Thinking that maybe I was misremembering, maybe I was projecting, I glanced down at the seven-year-old wound on my own stomach. A wound that had never wholly disappeared, even though my skin was smooth, unmarked by any other magical assault I’d endured. My healing abilities had been stolen from so many different Adepts over so many years, I couldn’t remember the exact number anymore. And I’d never known their names.

  I glanced back and forth from the wounds on Aiden to my scars. The angular form of the three slashes was definitely the same — thicker where the initial strike had penetrated the skin, then thinning to narrow points.

  Aiden took a step toward me, drawing my attention to his face. His blue eyes were brilliant even in the low light, but I couldn’t read his expression.

  Another wave of adrenaline washed down my spine as I realized that I’d exposed myself to him without preamble, without saying a word or asking permission. I found my voice. “You were attacked by a greater demon?”

  Shaking his head, Aiden took another step toward me without otherwise answering, his gaze flicking between my scars and my face. Then three more slow, measured steps, as if he was afraid I’d move against him. Then, inexplicably, he kneeled before me.

  I swayed back, instinctively releasing my hold on the fabric of my dress to free my hands. The buttons clacked softly together, once.

  “I asked you a question. You were attacked by a demon?”

  “I … I must have been,” he whispered. “I thought it was a shapeshifter when I first saw the marks, but … the shape of the wounds was wrong. Only three strikes. And once I could feel it again, the residual magic felt wrong, off. Even drained, I should be healing quicker. A demon … a demon would make more sense. And that gives some credence to the memory charm.”

  “If the witch summoned a demon, she wouldn’t want you to know? Why? Trade secrets?”

  He shook his head once, attempting but failing to smile. He glanced up to meet my gaze, then stilled.

  I didn’t step away.

  Silence stretched between us, filled with all the filtered noises of the old barn, the chickens in the yard, the breeze, and the whisper of our combined breath.

  Moving deliberately slowly, Aiden raised one hand, then the other. Snagging the edges of my dress, he widened the opening again. He didn’t touch me, but I could feel the heat of his skin, the light shimmer of his magic within reach.

  “It can’t be,” he murmured. His breath brushed my belly.

  Inhaling, I contracted the muscles of my abdomen, but then forced myself to remain still. I desperately wanted to touch him, to run my hands through his hair.

  “How old is this wound?” he asked.

  “Seven years.”

  “Seven years,” he repeated. “Yet the width of the strike is almost identical. So your wound was … deeper. No one could walk away from a wound like this.”

  It wasn’t a question, but I answered anyway. “I didn’t.”

  He chuckled quietly. The noise somehow curled in my belly, beyond the scar that his attention was riveted on, blooming in a flush of warmth, urging me to invite the sorcerer to run his fingers where his eyes already rested.

  Aiden looked up at me, blue eyes locking to mine, a question in his piercing gaze. But he didn’t vocalize it, so I didn’t answer.

  We hovered there, eyes locked and with him holding open my dress. Not touching, but close enough to feel his magic. And even as tightly as I held onto my own power, I didn’t doubt he could feel it as well.

  I forced my attention away from the desire pooling heavily in my lower stomach. “Did you see the demon?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “And the witch?”

  “Magenta.” He laughed harshly. “Her I remember all too well.”

  “No last name?”

  He twisted his lips. “You know how witches are. Go black, and they disown you.”

  “What are the chances that the ability to summon certain demons is passed down through families?”

  He frowned. “Might be.”

  “Anything else you remember of the attack that left you with that wound?”

  “No … not yet. I woke up on the side of the road. Then I instinctively followed your magical signature to the diner. I didn’t even notice the bandages until I showered here.”

  “No pain.”

  “Mundane drugs, I assume. Given my depleted magic, a spell wouldn’t have held as well. They wore off.”

  Heavy painkillers certainly would have added to his disorientation upon finding me in the diner. More questions flitted through my mind, but none of them were anchored strongly enough to actually be articulated. Not with him less than an inch away from me.

  I toed off my sneakers, suddenly wanting to be barefoot.

  A smile softened his intense expression. Again, I stopped myself from touching him, skin to skin, in order to solve the mystery of what he was feeling, if not thinking. I had never thought that using my empathy would be, could be intrusive. That it could rush, maybe even crush, the moment that was building between us. Ruin the anticipation, force the … climax.

  I answered his smile with a curl of my lips.

  Aiden’s grin sharpened, becoming slightly edged. Holding my gaze, he ran the folded edge of my dress between the fingers of both hands. Then, painstakingly slowly, he began unbuttoning the rest of the dress until it hung all the way open from just below my breasts.

  He gathered the fabric behind me in one hand, so that my entire midriff and legs were exposed. I was idiotically pleased that I was wearing pretty, light-pink lace panties.

  Aiden shifted his attention back to my scars, his whisper warm across my skin. “Did you vanquish your demon, Emma?”

  “No.”

  “And the witch who summoned it?”

  “Her I crushed.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  He hovered the fingertips of his free hand over the scars, tracing over them as close as he could without actually touching me, high to low.

  “Aiden,” I murmured, aching with my need to grab him, to shove him back on the floor and have my way with him. Instead, I gently brushed my fingers through the hair at his temples. It was thick and silky.

  “Emma.”

  Magic, energy, heat shifted between us, slipping up and across from where we were barely touching each other, riding the licks of desire spreading through me.

  Aiden loosened his hold on my dress, so that it fell around me again. Then he settled a hand on my right hip, with only the fabric of the dress between us. He ghosted his fingers over my scars again, achingly slowly, leaving a hum of his magic in his wake.

  “Aiden …” I breathed his name, swaying toward him, twisting his hair in my fingers, then immediately loosening my hold.

  “Emma.” He wasn’t smiling now, yet there was laughter in his voice. No, not laughter. Anticipation. A hunger. But there was nothing dark about it.

  In a moment, I was going to tug h
im to his feet and plaster myself against him. In a moment, he was going to slip his hands up my thighs, hook his long, dexterous fingers around the sides of my underwear, and tug it off me.

  But sex with me wasn’t — couldn’t be — that easy. Sex with me was complicated. For multiple reasons. He’d already been assaulted and drained of his magic without consent. I couldn’t move forward while he was ignorant of my own magic.

  “Aiden.” I touched his shoulder lightly, drawing his focus up to me.

  “Emma,” he said, grinning, thinking we were still just murmuring each other’s names back and forth. Claiming each other.

  I laughed. “No. I am … I’m an amplifier.”

  He grunted in acknowledgment, as if the revelation didn’t change anything that was about to happen between us. “I know. Hence the no touching until invited.”

  I laughed. Unbuttoning my dress had been a pretty wide-open invitation, even if I hadn’t intended it that way at the time. “How long have you known?”

  “Since Christopher flipped the ginger card.”

  I sighed. Three days had passed since then. The sorcerer was not stupid.

  “Admittedly, my understanding of herbology is rusty. But paired with your … demeanor, the connection to you was fairly obvious.”

  “Demeanor?”

  “You don’t touch. Anyone. Not even Paisley.”

  “I pet Paisley!”

  He gazed up at me, deliberately and gently pressing his entire hand over my stomach. Three of his fingers aligned with the scars, the warmth of his hand making the rest of my skin feel cold. “I don’t want your magic, Emma.”

  A hint of his lust, his anticipation, flowed through my latent empathy, filtered through skin-to-skin contact.

  My heart rate ratcheted up. I took a breath, just watching him, feeling his skin on mine, his magic dancing underneath his fingers. He was maybe at quarter strength. “It’s not only that. I don’t just amplify …”

  He waited, not moving his hand. Just kneeling before me, patient and steady.

  I struggled with the next part. The further explanation of what amplification meant when wielded by me. Then I decided to set that issue aside for the moment. I wasn’t going to accidentally drain his magic while having sex, which was where I assumed we were going despite all the conversational interruptions. The amplification continually seeped, especially if I was touching someone skin-to-skin or while I was sleeping. But draining someone’s magic was deliberate and intentional.

  “The truth seeking?” he asked teasingly.

  “Empathy.”

  He frowned. “Paired with the …” He smoothed his expression and didn’t finish the question. Boosting someone’s magic and reading their emotions were completely different abilities. It was true that touch- or mind-based magic — amplification, telepathy, empathy — could appear in the same bloodlines, and witches often wielded similar power with the help of spells and charms. But a typical amplifier could amplify other magic and nothing else. A typical empath could only read emotions, though the more powerful ones didn’t need to touch their subjects, as I did.

  I understood there was occasionally some minor magical crossover, such as Aiden being able to cast spells learned from his mother to fix the bowl. Or a witch being able to wield an object of power, or to cast using runes as a sorcerer did.

  Aiden cleared his throat as if carefully considering his next question. Then he grinned up at me as if something had just occurred to him. “Does it go both ways?”

  He couldn’t mean the amplification. There was no way he could have figured that out. “Does what go both ways?”

  “The empathy.” He slid his hand over my hip, pressing into the small of my back. “Can you project as well as pick up emotions?”

  He pressed a kiss to the tip of the scar nearest my lower ribs, instantly stoking a hot flood of desire that had seemingly been simmering while it waited for his touch. I swayed forward, threading both my hands through his thick hair.

  “No projecting,” I said.

  “Well, that is terribly disappointing.”

  “You are not remotely disappointed.”

  He laughed, delighting in being read. “You’ve got me figured out, oh empath.”

  I laughed. Then I stepped away.

  He instantly let me go, swaying forward.

  I took a step to the side, turning around as I undid the final few buttons on my dress, exposing my bra.

  Aiden remained on his knees, a lusty grin lighting up his eyes as he watched me slowly prowl backward toward the suite, toward the bed situated within.

  Then a distressed male voice ripped through the playful magic that had been building between the sorcerer and me. “Socks …”

  I went still.

  “Socks!”

  Christopher. His voice was full of the thunder of his magic — a thunder I hadn’t heard so intensely in years.

  Christopher. In pain. In the grip of a vision.

  I ran for the stairs, brushing past Aiden as he stood.

  I jumped off the top landing without even thinking of the display I was putting on for the sorcerer. A feat of strength that revealed in an instant that I was more than just an amplifier with latent empathy.

  I landed hard on the cement floor of the garage section of the barn, running past the Mustang and out into the yard. Momentarily blinded by the setting sun, I blinked my eyes.

  Christopher stood about three meters beyond the open doors. He was unsteady on his feet, white magic ringing his light-gray eyes.

  He took me in, sweeping his gaze upward from my bare feet to my face. Taking in my open dress, and all my bare skin underneath. He looked over my shoulder, his expression distraught, likely spotting Aiden as he scrambled down the stairs behind me.

  “Oh, God. Oh, God. I’m so, so sorry, Socks. I —” He choked on whatever he was trying to say, straining his head back. Magic flooded from him, blazing from his eyes.

  He reached out for me, fingers splayed, falling to his knees in the gravel.

  I lunged forward, not thinking. My fingers brushed his before I remembered I shouldn’t, couldn’t touch him.

  I froze, my outstretched arms mimicking his. Aiden, still shirtless, slipped by me, kneeling and wrapping his hands around Christopher’s forearms. The naturally tanned skin of both of them, deepened from time spent in the sun, was closer in tone than I would have thought, though the clairvoyant’s complexion was darker.

  “No!” I cried.

  Ignoring me, Christopher gripped Aiden back.

  I stood, simply shocked that the sorcerer would touch a clairvoyant in the middle of an intense vision.

  “It’s okay, Emma,” Aiden murmured. “My magic is too dim to change what he’s seeing, not once he’s in a full-blown episode.”

  Christopher pinned the sorcerer with his intense white gaze. “Aiden Myers. The last son of Azar.”

  Azar.

  Azar …

  Christopher’s words ran through me like an ice-cold knife, washing away all my lingering desire.

  I’d been all kinds of a fool. The feeling of having always known the sorcerer, the matching scars …

  He was somehow related to Kader Azar. The sorcerer Azar. Who the Five had rescued in Los Angeles over seven years before. Azar of the Collective.

  “I hear you, oh clairvoyant,” Aiden said, his smooth, cultured tone underlaid with stress.

  Azar. Azar. Azar. This was all about the Collective. Even if there’d been no way to have known for certain, even if Christopher hadn’t seen the Collective coming, I was such an idiot. I wanted to shriek, to scream, to demand all the answers I hadn’t even known I needed a moment before. But now wasn’t the time, not with whatever was manifesting for the clairvoyant.

  Now was the time to be rational and ready.

  Christopher shook his head almost harshly, as if shaking off the vision. His magic receded to a simmer. He loosened his grip on the sorcerer’s forearms, then clapped him on the shoulder. “Ha
ve no fear, sorcerer. You’ve got Socks between you and disembowelment. For now.”

  Aiden frowned, opening his mouth to protest.

  Christopher turned his gaze on me. “You’re going to need your blades.”

  “Are the blades magic?” Aiden asked, clearly confused and trying to piece clues together.

  Christopher snorted. “Socks is magic. But the blades help her decapitate things.”

  I hadn’t needed to wield my blades in seven years. “And when will I be needing to decapitate things?”

  “Now.”

  I ran. Leaving Christopher and Aiden behind me and swiftly buttoning my dress as I did so. I leaped onto the front patio and burst through the front door without closing it behind me.

  I shoved away my questions about Aiden’s connections to the sorcerer Azar, focusing on the immediate. I always functioned better in the present. Cooler, connected.

  I could interrogate the sorcerer after I faced whatever future Christopher had seen.

  The blades were in a box under my bed. Hastily braiding my hair, I grabbed a T-shirt out of the pile of laundry on top of the bed, still warm where Christopher must have dumped it just before the vision hit. I pulled the T-shirt on over my sundress, leaving my hair tucked within so it hopefully wouldn’t hinder me in whatever was coming. Whatever demanded the reappearance of my blades in the glimpse of the future Christopher had just seen.

  I kneeled, pulling the long wooden box out, then placing it on top of the bed, next to the laundry. I flipped back the lid, revealing the black, nonreflective, double-edged eighteen-inch blades within. The three raw gemstones embedded in each hilt were dull — drained of the spells that had once enhanced the weapons. But the blades were still perfectly suited to me, the right balance, size, and weight for simultaneous wielding.

  Catching the murmur of voices from out back, I grabbed the hilts without further preamble. The weight of the blades was slightly heavier than I recalled. I made a note to start working with heftier practice dowels.

  Instead of crossing through the house and doubling back through the kitchen or around the outside, I slipped out onto the narrow balcony off the bedroom. The sun had set, kissing the horizon. I jumped up onto the white-painted railing, looking out across the property. All was still before me. No breeze, no unusual noises. No magic other than Christopher and Aiden below, and Paisley skulking in the shadows along the garden fence. There was no foreign power that was close enough for me to feel, at least.