Covetous: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Marked Mage Chronicles, Book 2)

by Victoria Evers

  The man pinched his eyes shut as his grip tightened on the tool. And with that, he drove the iron down. I couldn’t bear to look, but I wept at the unmistakable crunch that followed as metal sliced into flesh and bone. Nothing more than a guttural rasp escaped Blaine’s lips. Another heavy blow followed, forcing me to open my eyes. The man staggered back dazedly, the tire iron slipping from his grip as a piece of rebar clattered to the floor from behind him. He tottered sideways, patting the back of his head. Blood soaked his fingertips. Had Blaine hit him? Had he made the rebar fly at him somehow?

  The man’s eyes rolled back into his head as his body collapsed. I yelped, knowing even before he hit the ground that he wouldn’t quite clear the load-bearing column behind him. With the full weight of his body driving him down, the base of his skull clocked the pole, leaving a pitched ring to resonate across the desolate space from the blunt impact. Though knelt on the ground, I could nonetheless see blood blossoming out from his head, fanning the floor around his fallen frame.

  “Blaine?” I turned back to him, still hearing shallow breaths scrape from his lungs. Trembling hands clung to his torso as he grappled at the skin surrounding the wound. He’d been stabbed nearly in the center of his chest, right by the heart. His father had missed…

  Someone had to save him. He’d been brought back. He had a Maker, right? Where were they?

  Moments ticked away, and yet no one was here. No one was coming.

  I couldn’t even touch him. My hands repeatedly slid through his body as I tried desperately to hold him, to assure him he’d be okay. I couldn’t help him. I was completely useless. All I could do was watch him as his body convulsed, watch him as tears streamed down his face, barely able to draw in a breath.

  I cried out at the top of my lungs, begging for someone. Anyone!

  Blaine startled.

  Did…Did he hear me?

  “Blaine?”

  A distant light abruptly gleamed in from the entranceway. He angled his head up, taking notice to the source as well. It appeared to be headlights, but they were far-off. Blaine croaked as he attempted to call out, but the words were breathless, clogging in his throat. Against all odds, he rolled over onto his stomach. With one hand pressed against his chest and the other arm outstretched in front of him, he began to crawl. Reaching the slanted walkway at the front of the warehouse, Blaine clawed onto a latch nearing the bottom of the door. He heaved himself through, clumsily dropping to the pavement outside. His knees buckled under his weight, but bloody palms pushed off the asphalt, forcing him back upright. Short, visible gasps expelled from his lips, the blustery wind taking away my own breath as I frantically followed him.

  The headlights came rolling up, eventually making the car behind them visible. Blaine made it not six more steps before finally collapsing to the ground.

  He’d stopped breathing.

  “Is this our boy?” The Englishman mused, climbing out from behind the passenger seat. He laughed as he approached the broken boy on the ground. “Gotta say, I was expecting him to be in better shape.”

  “Oh, he’ll be tip-top when we’re through with him,” crooned a familiar voice behind the wheel. A black leather racing jacket came into view as the driver joined his cohort outside, observing Blaine with evident amusement.

  Black inked over the Englishman’s eyes as he knelt down. “What say you, Val? Should we get to work?”

  ***

  The calm of the bedroom came back into focus as I jolted away, breaking my hold on Blaine as I gasped. I fell back, shaking. He shot awake, wheezing painfully for air. The blind panic in Blaine’s eyes vanished as he too acclimatized to his surroundings, realizing where he was. His whole body still convulsed, his hands shaking as he wiped them over his eyes. A damp, cold sweat had perforated all the way through his shirt, and there was an unnatural clamminess to his skin. Worst of all, he still looked petrified.

  “Blaine?”

  My voice only startled him more as he jerked at the sound, his eyes snapping up to mine. I slowly drew back, noting the serrated blade wielded in his grasp. Where had he been keeping a knife? Under his pillow? Shame filled his eyes as he dropped his gaze to the weapon.

  He hadn’t even realized he’d grabbed it, fetching the blade on instinct alone.

  The sight only made me want to cry.

  Cry more.

  Because I already was crying, feeling the warm streaks running down my cheeks.

  His eyes slowly drew back up to meet mine. He looked downright horrified, letting the blade drop to the floor. “I’m sorry.” The words were barely audible as he flung back the covers and darted into the bathroom, the door slamming shut behind him.

  I remained there, sitting on the bed, shaking, knowing the feeling all too well. After the accident, after what Russell did, I still woke up nights in blind panic. But seeing Blaine like this… I couldn’t rationalize it. He suddenly seemed…all too human. What other kind of horrors had he endured?

  I’d been sitting back in bed for about fifteen minutes or so, hearing the water running on and off from inside the bathroom. The faucet squeaked off once again. Silence hung in the air for a good half a minute when a walloping crash sent me hurtling out of bed. Blaine cursed as I could hear bits of debris shower down onto the countertops and floor of the bathroom. Without thinking, I grabbed the knob and forced the door open, seeing the small mirror over the single sink smashed with a circular point of impact. Blaine’s back faced me.

  “What the hell happened?”

  He slowly turned around, revealing a bloodied set of knuckles he was coddling with his other hand.

  “Oh my God…”

  “Don’t!” he warned as I stepped inside.

  I looked down at the broken fragments of glass around my feet and retracted back to the doorway.

  “Go back to bed,” he said lowly, extracting a sizable shard from the joint of his pointer finger. The skin sizzled.

  I didn’t move, watching blood slowly drip off between his fingers. “You need help with that. It’s silver-coated glass. If you don’t get all of it out, your body will heal with it still in there…”

  “Please, just go.” His breathing was jagged and his nostrils flared as he curled his injured fist. “Go!”

  Blaine had never yelled at me before. Not like this. I actually jumped at the order. He looked like a feral dog. Unable to argue, I slowly retracted from the doorway and turned the corner back into the bedroom area. The door remained open, and I could still see Blaine’s reflection in the remaining glass of the fractured mirror as I peeked around the corner, unable to muzzle my worry.

  He gripped the edge of the counter, his shoulders shaking with every aching breath as he leaned forward, his eyes locked on the tiles. After a moment, his hands finally slid from the counter, only to take residency in the front strands of his hair. He staggered away, his back slamming into the opposing wall as he crumpled over onto the floor with a shudder.

  I couldn’t breathe…

  An ache had settled in my chest, robbing me of air, along with my sanity.

  He’d been killed, same as me, but by someone who claimed to love him.

  I stayed curled up on the mattress, unable to shut my eyes. When Blaine eventually returned to the bedroom, he stood cowering back by the bathroom, his eyes focused on his clumsily bandaged hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he finally muttered, his throat raw. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  The very sight of him threatened the tears burning behind my eyes to pour out. To see him so vulnerable and…embarrassed.

  “May I?” I pointed to his hand, and he slowly extended it out as I climbed out of bed to meet him. Delicately undoing the dressings, I looked at the beaten skin and scathed knuckles. It was still too inflamed.

  “I couldn’t get a couple of the splinters out,” he muttered, flexing his fingers. The skin stretched, revealing a few tiny glints of glass.

  I didn’t have tweezers or anything to help remove them, so I did
my best, using the tips of my fingernails. Blaine kept steady, only letting out a low hiss as I removed the final particles. Before I even had time to clean the wound, the skin was already looking better.

  Properly rewrapping the injury, I fastened it and returned his hand to him. “Is it bound too tight?”

  Blaine flexed his fingers again and shook his head. “No, it’s good. Thank you.”

  His eyes finally met mine, but his gaze fell away just as quickly as he moved around me.

  “Are you okay?”

  He nodded, still unwilling to meet my eyes.

  It was a little chilly in the room, yet he still looked like he had fallen asleep in a sauna, his hair moistened across his forehead, his skin glinting in the low light.

  “Hey, I’m serious.”

  His chest rose and fell, still too fast, still too panicked, when he finally met my eyes. “What did you see?”

  One look at him, and I knew what he meant. He knew… “Everything.”

  He sank down onto the mattress, his back resting against the headboard. His eyes suddenly seemed to find everything else in the room to be infinitely more fascinating, because he looked everywhere but back at me.

  “Who was he?” My voice was so quiet, so weak, yet I could feel vibrations raking up my arm. I couldn’t explain why, but all I knew was that I wanted to slam my fist through something. “Your…your father?”

  Blaine grimaced at the word. “He wasn’t my father.”

  I know, I wanted to say.

  “I thought he was. Hell, he thought he was.” Blaine laughed, but his breathing was still uneven, making it all the more aggrieved. “Since full-blooded female Reapers are so rare, it’s customary for the women in their respective packs to be set up in arranged marriages with the Alphas, as to ensure they have the strongest offspring. The same thing happened to my mom. When she learned she was pregnant, she ran away. Donovan assumed it was because she didn’t want their child growing up in their world. He finally managed to track her down, but she’d already given the child up for adoption.

  “Donovan reached out to me when I was fourteen, explaining what had happened. He explained why I was the way I was, being able to heal so quickly and whatnot. He told me all about Reapers, and how he wanted me to join his pack. He told me that he was my birth father. I spent two years getting to know him, growing closer with him. We even started training together… And then I turned sixteen.” His eyes fell into his lap, at his injured hand. “I didn’t know what was happening to me. I started getting visions, seeing people’s auras, and then one day I got into an argument with Trace in the school parking lot. As soon as I yelled at him, all the windows around us blew out. The cars, the busses, the side of the building, all of it.”

  “I saw what you did,” his father had said.

  “Reapers weren’t supposed to be capable of doing that, and apparently, my old man witnessed it. It was only then that he started to put the pieces together.” Blaine’s injured fist curled, testing the bandages. “My mother never loved Donovan. She found out she was pregnant just before she was forced to marry him. It took her a couple months to plan her escape, and because she was only a month along when she found out, Donovan safely assumed I was his kid. But when he learned the truth…well, you saw how that went.”

  “But… Val. I thought he—?”

  “He’s my half-brother. Astaroth’s other heir. Same father, different mothers.”

  Blaine’s breathing finally seemed to calm, even if just a little bit, as I sat down on my side of the mattress. “If he’s older, then why isn’t he the Crown Prince?”

  “He was, for a short while. Val actually knew I was his brother when we met a few years back, but he didn’t want to tell me about it until I ‘came of age.’ As soon as he turned seventeen, Raelynd set his sights on him, and in consequence, it caused a chain reaction. Demons began talking, and then word spread to Hellhounds, and Mages, and eventually it got back to Reapers what he was planning. Val became public enemy number one.” Blaine rested his head back against the headboard, his gaze drifting up to the ceiling. “If you met him a couple years ago, you wouldn’t have recognized him as the man you see today. He decided to take the demonic approach, and turned off all his emotions. He doesn’t feel pain, even physical. And I can’t necessarily say I blame him. After what they did to him…no one comes out of that the same.”

  “What happened?”

  “Let’s just say he’s had it rough.” Blaine seemed rather disinclined to elaborate, so I took the hint. Conversation: terminated.

  But I couldn’t help recalling Raelynd saying something similar about Blaine as well. “The world has not been kind to him…”

  The only thing I knew now with any certainty was that I didn’t know the first thing about Blaine Ryder.

  Chapter 21

  Way Down We Go

  “Time to greet the day, lovebirds!”

  The low hanging sun flooded the room through the opened doorway, and I blinked groggily, still too exhausted to lift my head. Val chuckled, his body shading the early morning light as he stepped into the room. As pissed off as I was with him, I couldn’t bring myself to care enough to get out of bed. Maybe in a few hours. Or a few days. I nestled back into the warmth engulfing me and shut my eyes again.

  “Uh, Doll Face...”

  I groaned, blindly fishing around for the pillow that should have been next to me. The moment I got a hold of it, Val would be eating a cushion full of feathers…if only I could find it. My hand continued patting around the mattress, coming up short. I stretched my fingers out a little bit further, only to feel the edge of the…bedside. Wait, that couldn’t be right.

  “Ahem.”

  I peeled my eyes back open, looking up at the opened doorway. Val stood there smiling like the Cheshire Cat, while Reese—

  If looks could kill…

  I followed both of the guys’ gazes, realizing I was on the whole other side of the bed. I lifted my head to find a naked, muscular torso resting beneath me. Blaine just sighed and stretched indolently, his eyes still closed as I noticed his rune-covered arm draped around my shoulders. Feeling the rush of heat reach my cheeks, I tried to toss off the appendage so I could sit upright. The moment I attempted to, Blaine’s hold only pulled me closer, forcing my head back onto his toned stomach. He murmured something inaudible under his breath that I was pretty sure wasn’t English.

  The door slammed so hard, the old hinges rattled. Blaine finally opened his eyes at the thunderous disturbance, and I turned to see that Reese was gone.

  “Would you mind?” Blaine waved lazily at his brother, shooing him outside. “Some of us need our beauty sleep.”

  “You’re pretty enough, Sleeping Beauty,” Val said, lobbing Blaine’s discarded shirt at him. “We’ve got places to go, people to torture. All the fun stuff.”

  “What places?”

  “It’s not exactly safe here, so you two are going to be relocated. Probably to The Hideaway, at least for now. Raelynd’s sent a ride to pick us up. It’ll be out front in fifteen.”

  Relocated? I hadn’t allowed myself to think too much about the repercussions of last night, but hearing him say it out loud… It felt like a mallet had been thrown down into my chest. I had to leave. Just when I had been able to settle down and find some semblance of a home, I was going to have to leave it all behind again. Jenna, Hannah, Sam, school. Everything I’d rebuilt, gone.

  I finally managed to heave Blaine’s arm off me, and I hauled myself out of bed, realizing I didn’t have any clothes. My dirty pajamas were probably still on the ground in Reese’s room, and I didn’t even have shoes.

  Val must have noticed me uncomfortably fidgeting with the hem of my shirt as I kept pulling down on the fabric, desperate to make it cover more than the measly top inch of my thighs. He motioned to the little red luggage case parked beside the mini fridge.

  The little Epi Leather carry-on case was unmistakable. It was part of the Louis Vuitton luggage colle
ction my mom had bought me before our last family vacation. I cautiously approached it, pulling the bag up onto the couch so I could unzip it. Inside were a handful of my clothes, my picture frames, a couple pairs of shoes, and even my curling iron. If Val had gotten all this stuff...he would’ve had to have been in my aunt’s house!

  Before I could make the accusation, the Dark Mage snorted. “Relax, Doll Face. Your precious little magician was the one kind enough to pack your belongings. I never even got an invitation inside. Though, I did speak with your aunt. Told her you were going away with friends on a trip for Winter Break, and suggested that she perhaps go away for a bit as well. You know, until things settle down. Wouldn’t want any demons or Reapers swinging by again looking for you while she’s home.”

  I appreciated the thought, but there was only one person on my mind.

  Reese…

  Without bothering to grab some fresh clothes, I pushed Val aside and ran out the door. I could feel eyes burning on me from down the hall as I pounded my fists on Reese’s door. Val stood leaning against the worn brick wall outside Blaine’s room, his head cocked in amusement as my fist suddenly struck…

  Crap! I’d been so consumed in my need to give Val my most vicious glare that I hadn’t realized the door opened, making me pound my fist into Reese’s chest.

  “Oh my God! I’m so sorry!”

  He just scowled, also stealing a glance at the leather-clad asshole down the way. Reese merely nodded over his shoulder and pulled the door open enough to indicate my invitation. I immediately noticed the packed duffle bag resting on the corner chair. He was leaving, but where?