No Rest for the Witches

by Karina Cooper

  Maybe it was the magic she’d wound up inheriting, some kind of healing gift, that kept her from stomaching the kill. Maybe it was watching her boyfriend get knifed.

  It wasn’t a bad decision, but as her shoulder all but vibrated beneath his hand, he knew she still struggled with whatever war she waged in herself.

  Killing made things so much easier to solve. And that was the problem with it.

  He crouched lower as the operative’s head turned. “Do you see an insignia?”

  She shook her head.

  Right, then. Missionaries didn’t sport anything but the holy tattoo stamped somewhere on their bodies, but he’d been hoping. The thought of coming face to face with a Mission team made his stomach twist into a knot of bile. “I’ll take him. You get through the door.” Her body snapped to attention. “I’ll meet you in the—”

  A gunshot split the quiet street. The additional muzzle flash in the third-story window of the safe house made anything he had to say worthless.

  Naomi leapt to her feet, panic harshly drawn on her too-pale face.

  The operative raised his gun, a sleek matte black piece he couldn’t pick out in the dark, and Silas pushed her hard enough to send her staggering. Brick splintered into shrapnel, just where her head had been seconds before.

  Gunfire erupted from the operative’s shadowed niche. Diving out of the alley, he crouched behind a faded blue car missing two tires and returned fire in the direction of the muzzle flashes. “Go, go!”

  Naomi was a blur behind him, a slick shadow moving with all the grace of a panther on the hunt.

  She’d been a hell of a missionary.

  He popped off two more rounds, ground cover to keep the operative off Naomi’s ass, and pressed his back to the rain-slick metal. It creaked and pinged as bullets tore into the siding, shredding the rusted metal.

  His heart slammed in his ears. Adrenaline spiked through his body, tightened his muscles, turned him into the hyper-focused machine the Mission had made him. Bracing one hand against the gritty, broken pavement, he held his breath as he counted the shots.

  One man, he thought. Situated at his ten. Squeezing off rounds nice and measured. No real gaps, no rush.

  Standard tactics. Was he facing down an old Mission teammate?

  Eckhart? Or that kid, what’s his name . . . Miles?

  He gritted his teeth, forcing himself not to go down that mental road. He’d made his choice. He’d protect Jessie until the end of the earth. He’d keep Naomi’s ass covered and do his part, no matter what.

  They’d had to make their choices, too, and they chose the Mission.

  Fine.

  Safety glass shattered out in a spray of glittering shards, raining down on him. Silas rose, gun tight in one hand, and sighted down the length of his arm. One squeeze, and a bullet sheared through the dark.

  Vaguely, he heard a cry, a muted thud, and he slammed back to his knees as another round of gunfire splattered the car. It rocked back on its only two wheels, shuddered.

  What the hell kind of gun was the operative using? Not semi-automatic, but it packed a kick his old Colt didn’t.

  Shaking his head, he turned, dug his feet in, and sprinted for the tenement door. Gunfire peppered his wake, and as he barreled through the unlocked door, the wood splintered around him.

  Musty air and gloom enveloped him. Silas braced himself against the wall, one hand flattened on a bloodstain still damp on the peeling paint, and gasped for breath.

  Goddamn, his joints hurt.

  At thirty-five years old, most of it spent straining his body to the breaking point, he was getting too old for this shit.

  The gunfire stopped. He’d have been more relieved if it hadn’t, but the fact the operative had ceased fire meant he was trained not to waste ammo on an impossible shot. Unless Silas had done more than just tag him, which was a possibility.

  They’d have to hole up in the safe house and hope to hell no one was dying.

  Given the smeared red streaks on the wall beside him and the gunshot earlier, it was a thin fucking chance.

  Damn it. Silas cupped both hands around the gun stock and hurried down the hall.

  The safe house was one of two he kept maintained in the city. He, Jessie, Naomi, and Matilda all knew about them, and so did Naomi’s boyfriend. Phinneas Clarke was a topsider, under investigation for the events at Timeless that culminated in nearly a dozen bodies, including the rogue missionary who was responsible for the murders.

  Naomi had come out of it looking like hell, and he couldn’t blame her. She’d had her heart ripped out and wrung out, and it hadn’t been until Clarke went looking for her weeks later that she’d started to act like the Naomi he’d known.

  The fact that Jessie had seen Clarke in all this blood was a frightening concept. If Phin died . . . Hell, Naomi.

  A thud rattled the ceiling above him.

  Silas sprinted for the stairs, took them two at a time, and burst out of the stairwell door in time to see Joel Evans, Clarke’s right-hand man, hit the wall beside him. The whole sloppy tenement rattled, dingy plaster falling like dusty rain. The operative who’d thrown him raised his head—definitely a broad build under all that black body armor and face plating—and Silas raised his gun.

  “Don’t move,” he ordered.

  The operative froze.

  Did he recognize Silas? It was impossible to tell; no light made it through the faceplate to reveal who stood on the business end of Silas’s gun. And he said nothing.

  Silas hoped to hell it wasn’t anyone he knew.

  Joel pushed himself off the wall, cradling his face in one hand. Blood dripped from his nose, down the front of his steel gray button-down shirt. His curse growled.

  “You okay?” Silas demanded, glance flicking to him.

  A mistake. And the only chance the operative needed. He reached behind his back, turning away, and Silas saw the wicked gleam of a knife thin enough to throw. Sharp enough, if it was standard issue, to pierce through bone. Fuck.

  So much for questions.

  Silas squeezed off a shot. Then a second.

  Body armor, even the hybrid plasteel kind this man was wearing, wasn’t meant to stop a bullet to the throat. They didn’t make armor that way, and he knew it. The shots cracked, shockwaves causing plaster to shake loose from the ceiling, and crimson glinted in the flickering hall light. The operative dropped, gurgling.

  “Oh, my God,” Joel gasped through the hands over his face.

  Silas didn’t holster his weapon. Not yet. “Two down,” he said. He wanted to check the face behind that mask, didn’t dare take the time. “Stay away from the windows.”

  Joel was a shorter man, just under six feet, with dark, nearly black hair and green eyes framed by the lurid beginnings of double bruises. The bridge of his nose was crooked, blood dripping from his fingers as he covered it, but his jaw was set hard enough to break teeth.

  Silas didn’t give him a chance to decide between pissed and afraid. He knew that line all too well. “Freak out later,” he advised. “Where’s Clarke?”

  “Inside,” Joel told him thickly. “It’s bad.”

  Shit. “How bad?”

  “Silas!” Naomi’s voice, pleading. Panicked.

  Shit. Silas blitzed into the shabby apartment, the door slamming open under his elbow.

  Like every other safe house he’d ever used, it wasn’t much. Dilapidated furnishings provided the barest minimum of livability, the sofa was a strange shade of green, and the brown curtains hanging from the windows were threadbare.

  The normally mud brown carpet had seen better days, turned nearly black underneath a tall, lean man wearing designer clothes. Compared to Naomi’s worn black denim and fitted shirt, he looked like a slummer taken a bad turn. His clothes would get him jumped in the middle of a crowded street down here.

  Or would have, before his blood had colored his light blue dress shirt vibrant red.

  Even with his basic first aid training, Silas kne
w the man wasn’t in any shape to be fighting off Naomi’s weight as she knelt at his hip and pushed his shoulders flat to the floor.

  Phinneas Clarke still tried, his lips white with strain as he struggled to get to his feet. “Get off!”

  “Stay down,” Naomi gritted out, her own skin ashen. “Phin, fuck, stop.”

  If he didn’t, he’d do himself some serious damage. Silas didn’t dare put away his gun, not yet. Not until he knew they were in the clear. “You.” He motioned to Joel. “Pin him down, quickly.”

  “But he—”

  “Goddamn it, Joel, just do it!”

  Even Silas blanched at the anguish in Naomi’s order. Circling around them, he stepped between the bloody, rabid struggle and the window, placing himself at an angle guaranteed not to offer a clear shot.

  He wasn’t that far out of the game.

  Phin all but snarled as Joel caught his hands, holding them to the floor. Anything he said was lost in the thick-tongued gibberish Silas knew meant the man had lost a lot of blood. The hole in his shoulder and matching graze on his thigh must have made getting down here a bitch.

  Naomi tore a strip out of the bandages she’d taken to carrying, fighting to bind the worst of the two. His shoulder still oozed sluggishly; a bad sign.

  Silas glanced at Joel, who met his eyes over Clarke’s weakening struggles. The man’s mouth turned down into a hard, desperate line. “They got her,” Joel said, voice cracking. “They got Lillian.”

  Naomi froze, her knuckles white around the straining fabric.

  Fuck me. “Finish up,” he ordered, deliberately keeping his voice even. Calm. “Get him bandaged and we’ll get him out of here.”

  “No!” Phin snarled, raw with pain. With more emotion than Silas felt right hearing, somehow. “No, I have to—”

  He watched it happen; saw the way Naomi’s face closed. The life leached out of her expression, drained it of everything until all that stuck was a mask. Barely human. It reminded him of the Naomi he’d found once he came back to New Seattle. That perfect missionary.

  The one that had been so lousy at everything else.

  He half-turned. “West—”

  Too late. She crooked her arm and delivered a punch that made Silas’s jaw tingle in shared misery. It wrenched Phin half sideways, snapped his teeth together and rolled his eyes back into his head. Silas could only watch as Phin’s thrashing limbs went limp. His head thudded on the carpet, the fibers squelching where his legs splayed and went still.

  Joel froze, half-standing.

  Silence filled the room. Silence, and the coppery stench of blood.

  Naomi rose to her feet, perfect missionary mode.

  Or nearly so. Silas saw her fingers shake as she wiped her bloody palms down her artfully shredded black jeans. “Is the operative dead?”

  He hesitated, then nodded. “If he hasn’t come after us, then I hit something vital. Odds are, he had enough time to radio in.”

  Her eyes flicked away. “Fine. We don’t have the time to heal him here, so let’s get the hell out of here before his backup shows up.”

  “Joel, did you come with anything?” The man shook his head, white with strain where his own blood hadn’t streaked him red and brown, and Silas handed him his gun. “Shoot anything that moves.”

  He bent, pulled Clarke into a fireman’s carry, and straightened to meet Naomi’s hard, desperate gaze.

  A million words floated there; he didn’t need to ask to know it.

  But she didn’t vocalize any of them. Full mouth tightening, she turned away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Among the scars she’d earned from Timeless, beside the grief and anger and the soul-wrenching realization that she’d fallen in love with a man who represented everything she hated, Naomi West had walked away with something else.

  Witchcraft.

  Timeless had been New Seattle’s foremost spa and resort, the premier gateway to a vacation of leisure, relaxation, beautifying treatments, and massages. And, of course, discretion. Phin Clarke and his mothers, Lillian and Gemma, had made it a haven for the wealthy and the elite.

  More like a prison. Pretty and gilded, sure, but fuck all for freedom.

  When the Mission had sent her in to infiltrate the ranks, she’d been under orders to locate Joe Carson, a missionary gone rogue. What she and the Mission didn’t know was that under all the glitz and glamour, the Clarkes were running an underground escape operation for people the Church accused of heresy. And for good fucking reason: Gemma Clarke had been a witch. The keeper of something they called the fountain.

  A heretical power that she’d passed to Naomi when Carson killed her.

  Now, as Naomi surfaced from the healing trance that always left her feeling out of sorts, she blinked down at Phin Clarke’s sedated figure and swallowed hard as a rush of tears clogged her aching throat.

  The stupid son of a bitch.

  But he was an alive son of a bitch.

  The part of her that had been given over to the fountain knew it; it translated the certainty of his recovery to her in gentle waves of serenity, of calm. It wasn’t her that mended the ragged flesh of Phin’s wounds, or that filled his body with something that would allow him to heal his wounds at an accelerated rate.

  Most of the time, Naomi felt like she wasn’t anything but a glorified vase for the damned thing.

  But it did its job. She lifted her hand from Phin’s warm, bare chest. It rose on a slow breath.

  Relief nearly buckled her.

  Getting him down to Old Seattle, navigating him along the one safe path through the ruins of the pre-quake city, and making sure he arrived at Matilda’s sanctuary in the Old Sea-Trench had been touch and go. And a strain on her already frayed patience.

  She’d agonized between hope and despair, ignored everything but Phin as she’d struggled to keep one part of herself focused on the here and now, and enough of the fountain’s magic on him so he didn’t bleed out. She’d never had to juggle both before.

  Now, exhaustion licked at her.

  But she didn’t have time to give in, tempted as she was to crawl in beside Phin and crash. She straightened, easing off the bed and to her feet, wincing as her joints popped loudly in protest.

  Someone moved behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, saw Joel’s haggard face. He’d sport dual black eyes for a few days and the swelling at the bridge of his nose looked painful, but at least his nose was straight again. Probably Silas’s handiwork.

  She’d been too focused on Phin to care.

  Joel jammed his hands into his pockets—a pair of Silas’s jeans, she noted. Too big for the shorter man, but belted in place. His shoulders remained hunched. “Is he . . .” His voice came out on a croak.

  “He’s fine.”

  As if her short reassurance was enough, he blew out a hard breath and collapsed back to the wooden chest he’d claimed as a perch. It creaked alarmingly, but held. Most of the junk Matilda collected was in pretty good shape. She’d seen the woman restore the strangest pieces to working order, bits and things Matilda brought back from her many and mysterious travels.

  “Thank God,” Joel was saying, and repeated it again on a harsh whisper.

  Thank nothing. It was a miracle Phin had survived the trip, much less had it in him to hang on long enough to let the fountain of life do its thing.

  And the thought tore open a hole inside her chest she didn’t know how to cope with.

  Phin’s nut brown curls were longer than when she’d seen him last, as if he’d forgotten to make time to see his stylist. He was paler, too, though that could have been the blood loss she’d fought hard to fix. He slept peacefully, lines of pain finally eased from his face. But they’d been replaced with lines of something else—worry. Fear.

  She hated it. Hated that he was stuck topside while she was locked below. Hated that she still woke up in her modified tent, aching and alone.

  But they’d known that going in.

  It was all part
of the life they both led. Phin was a topsider, a wealthy man from a prestigious family who’d dedicated his life to helping the kind of people Naomi had once been tasked to hunt. After Timeless—after Gemma had died in Naomi’s arms—they both knew the Holy Order of St. Dominic would be all over them like flies on shit. There would be investigations, questions, scrutiny.

  And Phin—the stupid, noble man that he was—was determined to stay where he was, to provide as much safety as he could for the accused witches he’d failed to help before Timeless had gone up in smoke.

  Naomi reached out, ran her finger along the line of his leanly muscled bicep, and held her breath when it threatened to shudder out of her chest.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Joel’s whisper jerked her head around. He bent over, his elbows on his knees, face buried in his hands. Part of her wanted to tell him to relax, that it all ended up fine.

  The rest of her wanted to jump his shit.

  Naomi gritted her teeth. “It’s fine.” It wasn’t, but she was three seconds away from losing her goddamned mind.

  She was better than this.

  The bedroom door opened. Silas stepped in, soundless. He moved like a cat when he wanted to; a hell of a trick when he topped out at six-three and was built like a brick wall. His gray-green eyes met hers, then slid to the bed.

  “He’s fine,” she repeated, and because he raised one questioning eyebrow, she added, “It’s going to take him time to recover his strength, and he’ll need to eat steadily to replace whatever he lost with all the blood, but he’ll live.”

  Joel got to his feet as relief replaced Silas’s silent question. “It was my fault.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Silas countered.

  Naomi’s fingers clenched. “It was someone’s.”

  Silas’s gaze pinned on her.

  She ignored it. “Someone dropped the ball up there,” she said, staring at Joel. He blanched, face twisted in a mire of guilt and anger. She didn’t care.

  Someone had fucked up.

  Someone had nearly gotten Phin killed. Had gotten Lillian taken.

  Joel stared at his fists, clenched in front of him. “We’d gone out to locate a couple of our contacts. Mr. Clarke wanted to come this time—”