From Jennifer Ashley, With Love: Three Paranormal Romances from Bestselling Series

by Jennifer Ashley

  Mick held the pot as carefully as he would a newborn baby. He turned it around in his hands, examining every line, every minute crack, while I sipped wine and watched.

  Mick passed the pot to Gabrielle, who took it just as gently. I expected my zany little sister to do something like smash the pot against the wall and laugh, maybe blow out all the glass in the cases with her magic to prove she could.

  But it wouldn’t matter even if she did dash this pot against the nearest wall, because it was a fake.

  Gabrielle lifted the pot to her eyes and examined it as Mick had. She was no expert, I was pretty certain. She was only copying what Mick had done, but she did it very well.

  “It’s a fake,” she announced.

  Young blinked at her. “What are you talking about?”

  Mick glanced at me for confirmation, and I gave him the barest nod.

  The thing had no aura, or very little anyway. It was beautiful, a work of art, but it was no antique. This pot had been made recently, within the year, at a guess. Age can be faked to the naked eye, but not to the inner eye of someone who can see auras. A broken pot in the case behind Young, the pot’s design barely discernible after all these centuries, carried far more vibrations than this vessel did.

  “She’s right,” Mick said. He reached to take the pot from Gabrielle, who surrendered it willingly. Mick lifted the pot to his nose.

  Then his expression changed. It was just a flash, his eyes going from blue to deep, dragon black. They shifted back again before Young could see, but I’d caught it.

  I moved closer to him and looked at the pot in his hands. I saw it then, or rather, smelled it—the faint tinge of Nightwalker. And I knew which Nightwalker.

  Young’s expression went from that of a smooth-faced, wealthy man showing off a treasure to a man realizing he’d been conned. And beneath his shock and anger, I saw stark fear.

  Fear?

  “That can’t be right,” he said. “Check again.”

  Mick shrugged and set the pot back into its case. “It’s not more than a few months old at best. If you tell me who sold you this, I’ll do what I can to have them prosecuted, and possibly get your money back.”

  Young’s chagrin changed to anger. “No,” he snapped. “You tell me that this pot’s real and sign a paper to prove it.”

  Mick looked at him in surprise. “I thought you were willing to let me tell you whether you’d been sold a fake. You have been.”

  “You don’t understand. It doesn’t matter what I bought. You have to declare that it’s real.”

  I could tell Mick was dying to know why. I was too. The only one calm and smiling like a smug cat was Gabrielle.

  Mick said, “I wouldn’t maintain much of a reputation if I signed off on a fake.”

  Mr. Young’s hand dipped into his suit coat and came out with a small pistol. “Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear,” he said.

  He pointed the pistol not at Mick, but at me.

  I hate guns. They’re unpredictable, deadly, terrifying. Anyone can point one at another person and shoot him or her dead, a life taken in the blink of an eye.

  To a Stormwalker or a Beneath magic user, guns just get in the way. They are as liable to blow up in our hands as they are to be of any use as a weapon.

  A twenty-two was now aimed directly at my chest. I didn’t raise my hands, as movies teach us to do. I had a glass of wine in one hand, the other folded across my stomach, and I didn’t much feel like moving.

  Thunder rumbled outside. Close. The storm was at last rolling down out of the mountains to engulf the town.

  Mick’s smile spread across his face. “You might not want to do that,” he said to Young.

  “Yep,” Gabrielle said. “Janet can be a real bitch.”

  Young’s gaze flicked to me, and he really looked at me for the first time. He took in that I was Indian, a biker chick, and had the remnants of bruises on my face from my fall in Chaco Canyon plus the tussle with my Nightwalker. I saw him note the singed piece of hair I’d had to cut away. He didn’t look impressed.

  “I dictated a letter in anticipation of our appointment,” he said to Mick, the pistol not moving. “All you have to do is sign it. I promise not to kill your girlfriend, but I do guarantee that I can put her in the hospital. Your choice. Sign, or watch your lady here rely on a feed tube for a while.”

  The gun was cocked, loaded, and I could tell by Mr. Young’s eyes that he’d pull the trigger. And that he knew the difference between shooting to wound and shooting to kill.

  “Maybe you should look at the letter, Mick,” I said.

  “Maybe I should.” Mick’s voice was rumbling, the dragon edge coming into it. He knew the storm meant that I could take care of myself, but he was dragon, and I was his mate. Every one of his instincts was telling him to flatten Young and put me out of danger.

  Young nodded at his lackey, who wasn’t fazed in the slightest that his employer had pulled a gun on one of his guests. Lackey went to the desk and returned with a thick piece of stationary paper containing two typed paragraphs. I saw Mick’s name at the bottom of the page, with a line for his signature.

  Mick took it, and I craned to read. The top paragraph was a note from Mr. Young explaining that he’d employed Mick Burns, an expert with a string of qualifications from different museums around the country, to authenticate the pot. I’d love to know whether those qualifications were true. The second paragraph said that Mick stated he’d examined the vessel and found it to be real.

  “Who’s the letter for?” I asked.

  Young glared at me but spoke to Mick. “Just sign it.”

  Lackey moved to Mick’s other side and handed him a pen. Lightning flared outside the high window, closer now. The lights inside dimmed, and a roll of thunder scooped its way through the room, rumbling on and on and on.

  Sparks snapped to my fingertips, which I hid by balling my hand into my stomach.

  Mick studied the greeting. “Someone called Pericles McKinnon. Interesting name. Never heard of him.” He glanced at me. “Janet?”

  “Nope. I wonder why Mr. Young is so afraid of him.”

  Young’s lips tightened. “Sign the damned letter or your girlfriend bleeds.”

  “Who is he?” I asked Young. “Why is it so important he thinks the pot is real?”

  Gabrielle broke in. “Because Mr. McKinnon probably paid Mr. Young a gob of money for it already, and he might get testy if he thinks Mr. Young is trying to hand him a fake.”

  “Then Mr. Young should have had it tested before he bought it,” I said.

  “I did,” Young said. “That DiAngelo bitch and her boyfriend had it authenticated, and so did the museum in Flag. It was real then. I swear it. But McKinnon told me I’d better be absolutely sure. When you called wanting to have a look at the pot, I decided to ensure that it would be deemed real, no matter what. So sign this and make him happy, all right?”

  “If you’ve been duped, why should McKinnon be pissed off at you?” I asked. “Give him his money back, and Mick will make sure you get yours returned. What’s the deal?”

  Gabrielle laughed, a sunny sound in the gloom. “I bet McKinnon wants the real one for more than its value, or the fact that it’s pretty.”

  Gabrielle, my crazy little sister, could be astute. Or else she knew more about this pot than she was letting on.

  “Your entire collection is pretty illegal,” I said to Young. “I can’t believe you’re rubbing it in the faces of two Indian women, all the while trying to woo us with good wine. The feds can put you in prison for pot hunting, and all this—” I waved my hand at the glass cases “—is pretty much evidence.”

  Young’s face went chartreuse, and he shoved the pistol at me. “Shut up. You’ve just made sure you’re dead.”

  Lightning cracked outside, and all the electricity went off. Gray light from the high windows glinted on the glass cases, and the next lighting strike glared against them all.

  Perfect.

&nbs
p; Young pulled the trigger. At the same time, I grabbed the lightning and all its reflections around the room and directed it at the pistol.

  “Down!” Mick roared.

  Gabrielle dropped flat, and Mick followed her to the ground. Even the lackey hit the floor with the swiftness of a man used to dodging gunfights.

  The pistol exploded. Young screamed as he dropped it, or tried to. Lightning crawled up his body and wrapped him in a blanket of white arcs.

  Arcs that I controlled. The lightning didn’t touch his body—it flowed around him, its deadly charge kept from contacting his skin by me and my whims.

  The thunder kept rumbling, strike after strike of lightning landing outside. Mountain storms could be hell on earth.

  “Who is Pericles McKinnon?” I asked him.

  Young continued to scream. The lackey on the ground leapt to his feet as several more equally well-dressed lackeys burst through the door. All were armed.

  “Oh, now,” Gabrielle said. She flicked her fingers, and every single one of Young’s bodyguards cum servants hurtled toward the ceiling. They fired wildly at us, but their bullets stuck in midair as though they’d hit a wall of gelatin.

  “Gabrielle,” Mick admonished her.

  “What? You want bullets ripping through you?” Gabrielle’s eyes widened. “I promise I won’t kill them. Much.”

  I made no such promise. I was angry, both at Young for assuming he could manipulate Mick, and at a certain Nightwalker skulking in the basement of my hotel. The slayers might find only a pile of sinew and dust when they finally caught up to him.

  “Who is McKinnon?” I directed my question upward to Lackey Number One, the one who’d let us in. His body was pressed against the ceiling, his face white in the gloom.

  “Not sure,” Lackey said in a choked voice. “Some badass Mr. Young agreed to get the pot for. Don’t know why he’s so scared of him. He’s a little dude.”

  “Unless he’s some kind of powerful magic being.” I looked at Young. “What is he? Nightwalker? Shaman?” I didn’t say dragon, because dragons were happy if not too many people knew they existed—as dragons, that is. If McKinnon was Drake under an assumed name, I’d smack him.

  “I don’t know,” Young managed to say. “But he does some powerful shit. More powerful than what you’re doing.”

  That hurt my feelings. Right now, I was pretty hot stuff. The entire force of the storm filled me and made me stronger than anyone in this room. A ball of Beneath magic waited deep in my core, there if I needed it. I could hold onto the earth magic of the storm and roast the entire place with the ball of Beneath magic. Nothing could stop me, not even Mick, and Mick knew it.

  I borrowed Gabrielle’s idea and lifted Mr. Young off his feet. Higher and higher Young rose, still wrapped in the lightning. His pistol, on fire, burned his hands.

  “Why does this oh-so-powerful mage want this pot?” I asked. “The real one, I mean. If he’s a mage, he’ll know it’s a fake as soon as he sees it. I knew as soon as you opened the box.”

  Mick answered. “But Mick Burns will have authenticated it. Not Young’s fault if he didn’t know it wasn’t real. The mage still gets mad, but he goes after me instead, to find out what I know, and to kill me if he wants to make himself feel better.”

  I shoved Young a little higher. “Hmm. I’d like to see that fight.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Young said down to me. “McKinnon will kill you in a cold minute. All of you. Doesn’t matter how much lightning you play with.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “See, I’m not playing with the lighting—this is me being nice. I’m not letting it touch you. Where can we find Mr. McKinnon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I shoved Young upward until his back slammed against the smooth, plastered ceiling. “Where was that?”

  “I swear to you, I don’t know. He gets in touch with me when he wants me. I don’t know where he’s from.”

  I believed him. Powerful mages didn’t hand out business cards with their addresses printed on them. The problem with being a powerful mage is that other powerful mages are always ready to go after you. Mages can steal each other’s powers, usually when the first mage was dying.

  I’d met an ultra-powerful mage this past spring. He called himself an ununculous—no, the ununculous, the only one in the world. Emmett Smith had gotten the position by killing the previous ununculous. He’d made no secret of the fact that he’d murdered his way to the top, absorbing and stealing the magic from the mages he’d killed along the way.

  “Why does he want the pot?” I asked.

  “For spells,” Young said. He looked pathetic stuck to the ceiling like a bug in a spider’s web. “Don’t ask me what kind. He just said he needed it for spells.”

  Which made me want to have a good look at the original pot. Magic could cling to artifacts from the past, building up over time—like a sword from the European middle ages, or an ancient Native American pot, or my hotel basement. I suspected that the vessel known as the Holy Grail had started as a simple table cup from ancient Rome, which by the Middle Ages had contained vast magic, building quietly year after year.

  Such artifacts are hard to find, because they’re powerful enough to hide themselves. They aren’t sentient, exactly, but they somehow obscure themselves from the naked eye, or even the magical eye. The Holy Grail must have been picked up and tossed aside hundreds of times. After millennia of trying, no one has ever found it, have they? Claims in novels and movies notwithstanding.

  All of which made me suspicious of Ansel’s story that he’d found the pot after such a brief search. Something smelled.

  Something really did smell. Young. He was on fire.

  My speculations had only increased my rage. Young’s clothes were singeing, and the odor of burning wool curled inside my nose.

  “Janet,” Mick said warningly.

  I wasn’t allowed to hurt and kill people with my magic. Dragons and Hopi gods would appear out of the mists to stop me, by my death if necessary.

  So not fair. I whipped the lightning away from Young. His face and hands got a little burned in the process, and he screamed. Oops.

  I also let him fall. Mick shot a look at Gabrielle, who gave him a stubborn glare back. At the last minute, she rolled her eyes and cushioned Young’s fall with a bubble of Beneath magic, the same kind that held the bullets suspended in midair.

  Young hit the floor with a loud thump. Well, Mick hadn’t told her to make the landing soft, just not lethal.

  I still had all this lightning in my hands, with nowhere to go. The Beneath goddess in me wanted me to crash it into Young and his lackeys, killing them for the petty criminals they were. I knew damn well Young hadn’t come by all the stuff in his house honestly.

  The auras of the artifacts both here and in the giant room below continued to knock at me. Ancient pieces, wrenched from where they’d been buried, torn from the people who’d been buried with them. Angry, lonely, and scared, they yearned to return to the places from which they’d come.

  I brought the lightning back to me, gave it a little spurt of Beneath magic, and let it loose on all the glass cases.

  The doors shattered, one after another, and the tops of the floor cases smashed in one long, spectacular crash. The lightning whipped through objects inside—pieces of history, pieces of lives. My Beneath magic nudged the auras, and they rose, black and angry, seeking vengeance.

  Chapter Twelve

  Each potsherd and artifact had only the smallest of auras on its own, but put every tiny piece together, and they filled the room. The lackeys on the ceiling screamed as bullets of darkness, like tiny shards of glass, tore at their faces.

  Young got to his feet, swaying. “No! No, what are you doing?”

  The auras from the floor cases shot into the air. First came the pottery shards, then knives, bones, and finally the blackest auras from the shriveled skins. They swirled around each other, faster and faster, taking on the force of a to
rnado, then they threw themselves at Young. The man threw up his hands as the gathered spirits of his beloved collection descended on him.

  The windows high above us exploded. Mick hit the floor, dragging Gabrielle down with him.

  I laughed with my power. I’d awakened a thousand years’ worth of rage, the rage of captives finally turning on their captors. My storm magic fed the artifacts the power of the earth in which they’d rested, and the Beneath magic gave them the nudge they needed to be deadly.

  Wind blasted through the open windows, and with it came hail. Round stones of ice cascaded over the remnants of the cases, splintering wood, shattering the last of the glass.

  Mick got under one of the heavy tables, Gabrielle huddling next to him. My breath fogged in the freezing cold air. The hail struck me, nicking my skin and staining it with blood, but I didn’t feel a thing.

  The next lightning strike came right through the window. Fat and white, it blew me down the length of the room and slammed me into the door. The ceiling sprouted a giant hole, and the beams and smooth plaster slowly buckled and fell inward.

  The ceiling carried the lackeys down with it, and buried Young. Ripped wiring crackled, and pipes spewed water. The lightning bolt had gone right through the floor, and acrid smoke came up through the hole in the carpet.

  I could no longer feel my body, and could hear nothing after that explosion of sound. I seemed to be on the floor, but had no recollection of falling there.

  Men were crawling out of the wreckage, only to find the whirling black auras of ancient anger dancing before them. Blood flew as the tornado of rage whipped into them.

  “Janet!” Mick’s shout sounded from somewhere in the maelstrom. “You have to stop it!”

  I had to try a few times before my voice worked. “I didn’t create the lightning strike. It’s a storm. Nature.”

  “You’re attracting it. This whole house could come down. Shut it off.”

  He made it sound so easy. Like all I had to do was snap my fingers, and everything would go away.