by Anya Breton
“I’m better without the concussions or burnt face,” I said. “Thank you for having someone Heal me.” I wouldn’t dare thank him for what he’d done to Ascencion even if she had been trying to kill me.
“It was the least I could do.” A soft smile formed on his lips. “You wouldn’t have been in the situation if it weren’t for me.”
He was partially right about that. His girlfriend’s jealousy and wish to impress him had prompted her to steal my ring. But vengeance had made her set me on fire. That part was my fault.
In any case, it was time to get the ring back. I gave him a feigned smile. “You kept my ring safe.”
His lips curved a little higher. “Yes.”
“May I have it back?”
Maximo drew in a soft breath. “I enjoy having something of yours near at hand.”
I couldn’t rightly become angry about a flirtatious answer like that, even if it were pure bullshit. Nevertheless I was angry. The ring could prove disastrous in the wrong hands. And the only reason it hadn’t already was because Maximo didn’t know how to invoke it. I was desperate to get it back before that changed.
I stretched out my awareness until I sensed the magical energy swirling around me in the aether. Within it I silently called on Water. The cool energy drawn directly from the Earth rushed up my feet, flooding the seed beneath my heart that held my magical ability.
I drew out a small tendril of power from my cache. Then I directed it toward the vampire while also willing it to be undetectable. I sensed caution through the empathic link, Maximo’s caution. He must truly believe I didn’t need the ring to access Fire.
“How flattering,” I said. The words were a distraction while I drew in more energy. Something told me I’d need all the help I could get to impose my will on him and have any hope of it working.
I didn’t sense so much as a twitch. He hadn’t noted my invasion? Maybe this would be easier than I’d thought.
I took a quick breath and then sent everything I had at him. “I’d really like my ring back,” I said, verbalizing my will. “Give it to me, please.”
Maximo stared at me without blinking.
That wasn’t right. He should have reached for his pinky. I frantically drew in more power, directing it toward him with the silent request for the ring.
His resonant voice dipped into a sensually low register. “I could be persuaded to part with it were something more substantial to replace it.”
I stared at him in absolute shock for several seconds before my brain worked out that I’d failed.
Charon, take it! Water manipulation always worked. Had the ring provided him with defense, or was Maximo unaffected by Water magic? Were vampires unaffected?
I should know these things! But it wasn’t as if I could search the Internet for it. Unlike the undead, true witches were still creatures of myth. And my mother wanted it to stay that way.
I dropped my link to Water. An uneasy lump formed in my throat. I forced myself to swallow it down so I could speak. “What do you want?”
“Dinner.”
A spike of fear shot through me. I remembered his girlfriend’s idea of dinner.
Maximo’s nostrils flared as if he’d scented my reaction. “To start,” he said in his neutral tone. “Mexican perhaps?”
Hades’s hair! The dead guy wanted me to eat Mexican food with him less than twenty-four hours after he’d murdered his long-time girlfriend? That seemed in spectacularly poor taste.
I struggled not to grimace. But there was really no way around telling the truth. I’d just have to break it to him gently. “I wouldn’t feel right. Not so soon after what happened.”
Though his lips formed his indulgent smile, Maximo’s eyes darkened to an angry sable that matched his hair. “It’s perfectly understandable.” His voice went authoritative. “Saturday evening would work better.”
My heartbeat quickened. He wouldn’t like a second refusal. I needed that ring back.
But how horrible would it look to be seen in public with him within days of Ascencion’s death? The assumption would be I’d killed her to make room for myself. Or that he had.
Hera help me. Had he?
“Margaritas and tacos,” Maximo said in his amiable way. “And we’ll dance. I haven’t danced in decades.”
A nauseous feeling sloshed within my stomach. But I needed the ring, and dinner was the persuasion he’d said he needed to give it up.
I forced myself to answer. “Okay.”
The vampire’s shoulders lifted as if he’d been rigid until then. “Excellent. I’ll pick you up here at nine.”
I nodded my agreement, silently praying Trip would scare him off before then.
Maximo paused at the shop’s door. He sent his soft smile over his shoulder. “I like what you did with your hair.”
I gaped after his retreating figure. A murderous vampire liked my new rocker hairdo while the Water witch who had nearly kissed me could barely look at me without revulsion.
Didn’t it just figure?
****
The knock at ten after eleven made me terribly uneasy. Desmond had yet to call as he’d said he would. It could very well be him standing on my porch. Then again, someone worse could be out there.
Maximo could appear and make me tell him the invocation word for the ring on his finger … provided he’d enthralled me with a vampire’s nasty blood bond while I’d been unconscious at his house. Come to think of it, he could have already asked for the invocation word. And he could have made me forget all about it. For all I knew he was gleefully shooting fireballs at targets and had merely asked me to dinner so he could taunt me. Considering my track record with nemeses, that wouldn’t be surprising in the least.
The view through the peephole showed me shoulder-length brown hair and a tan face. One of three people matched that description. Since one of the three wouldn’t bother with the door, I suspected the figure out front was Ryan Steele, my shapeshifter neighbor.
I tugged open the door.
“Lemme in.” Ryan shoved past my shoulder into the apartment. “I’ve got news.”
I closed the front door, frowning when I noted he’d plunked himself down on the beanbag chair in my living room. That item of furniture happened to be my mother’s preferred chair. Would she be miffed if someone else sat there? Especially someone who could transform into a wild animal?
I didn’t entertain often, so I had few furniture options.
Okay, I never entertained.
“Want that beer?” I headed to the fridge.
“Yeah,” he said with a grin, clearly recalling why I’d offered.
I shuffled toward the living room with a bottle of Dos Equis and a bag of Fritos in hand.
“Since you’ve kept my secret so well, I’m keeping my part of the deal.” He took hold of the frosty bottle, popping the cap with little fanfare. “The Centralized Coven Coalition is having an emergency meeting as we speak.”
That might explain why Desmond hadn’t called me. As the head of the Water witches, he was a part of the coalition.
Ryan sat forward and lowered his voice. “Dea Woods—that’s the ambassador plenipotentiary for the Earth Witch Monarchy—returned from a business trip to Las Vegas and immediately stepped down from her position.”
I hadn’t needed the reminder of who Dea was. But Ryan didn’t know I’d met her at the solstice ball. She’d hadn’t been warm, but she’d been civil. It was more than I could say for most of the witches.
“Any idea why?”
“My friend Henry—” Ryan flushed, probably because I knew exactly what kind of “friend” Henry was. He cleared his throat before continuing at a rambling pace. “Knows Dea’s Guardian, Richard. Rich is beside himself. Henry has been sitting with him for the past four hours on suicide watch. I don’t know how much you know about the role of Guardian. It may be archaic now, but those who give the vow take it very seriously. I’m surprised Rich hasn’t already offed himself. Dea is alive.�
� Ryan had answered the next question I would have asked. “But she no longer feels she can accurately represent her faction.” He waited a beat, perhaps for drama’s sake. “Because a vampire enthralled her.”
“Fuck.”
Dea was correct. If a vampire had enthralled her, then she was at their mercy. Anything that came out of her mouth would be suspect.
“Do they know who?” I asked.
The nausea from earlier sloshed in my stomach again. What if Maximo had used the ring to disable Dea so she could be enthralled?
That didn’t make sense. Maximo had lived in Wipuk for at least a century. He’d had plenty of time to enthrall the witches, and yet no one had made mention of him doing so. And I doubted he needed my ring to do it. Ascencion certainly hadn’t.
“Nadir Khan,” Ryan said.
I shook my head, signifying I didn’t know that name.
“Think Prince of Persia only dead. He’s not really a big deal in our country, but he’s powerful on the international scene.”
“Why would a foreign vampire want to enthrall the ambassador for the American Earth witches?”
Ryan lifted his broad shoulders. “Dunno. Rich said he knew who had done it but not why, and Dea doesn’t remember it happening. The only reason we know about it is because Rich walked in on the vampire telling her not to remember. He wasn’t able to stop Nadir in time. The kicker is her career is ruined, and there’s not a damn thing she can do about it because the vampires consider enthralling perfectly acceptable.”
I mentally sifted through everything I knew about vampire and witch relations. “But there have been peace agreements between the undead and covens for decades, ever since the wars of the turn of the century threatened to wipe them both out.”
Ryan nodded. “But peace agreements between American vampires and American witches mean little to a foreign visitor.”
“That isn’t right.” I grunted. “Vampires are ridiculously powerful.”
I knew. I was ridiculously powerful, and yet it hadn’t been enough to save me.
Ryan’s cherry brown eyes ensnared mine. “Rumor has it Ascencion Boleda is dead.”
A knot of unease formed in my stomach along with the sloshing. News travelled incredibly fast in Wipuk.
“And that you know why,” he said in a lower voice.
“I didn’t see it happen.” My response was quick and defensive because the whole situation weighed heavily on my conscience. I could have done things differently, and maybe the woman would still be alive. Even though she’d been a murderous bitch.
“I was a little preoccupied with my head being on fire,” I said upon recalling that bit. “Hence the new hair.”
“It looks cute.” The observation had been delivered in a light tone before he lifted his beer.
How could he be dubious about my involvement with the death of the vampire in one moment and complimenting me in the next? It would have made more sense if he were heterosexual. But he wasn’t.
“So that’s the gossip.” Ryan drew the bottle up to his mouth again and chugged a good portion. “Dea is enthralled. Ascencion is dead. Rich is suicidal. Just another week in lovely ol’ Wipuk.”
He tipped the bottle so he could drain the remaining liquid. Hopping up, he tossed it toward the blue plastic waste bin I’d bought at Target weeks ago. The bottle slid smoothly into the plastic trash bag, clinking against something glass.
“I’ll let you know if I hear anything else,” Ryan said on his way to the front door. He gave me a little wave and then disappeared around the corner, tossing the thing shut with a noisy thud.
I stifled a sigh. The gesture had been a little too much like Trip. I still wasn’t convinced it was a coincidence that my neighbor looked disturbingly like my lifelong nemesis. Ryan hadn’t been a torment before. But now that Trip was absent—probably intentionally ignoring me—the shapeshifter somehow was. And that made me furious.
I forced myself up and into the bathroom. The spiked hair in the reflection was impossible to ignore. Now I had two votes for cute, one who was completely disgusted with it, and Nell the fence-sitter. I couldn’t help but wonder what Trip would say.
That’s when I decided I needed a nap.
Chapter Three
I shot a guilty look over at Nell when I saw the name flash on my phone—Desmond Marino. A phone call was better than a visit from him, but I didn’t know what he wanted. If it was what I thought it was, then I needed to be out of earshot.
“I need to take this,” I said when I was already halfway to the stairs.
She made a gesture of understanding that I caught out of the corner of my eye before I ducked into the stairwell.
I pressed the button to accept the call. “Hello?”
“It’s Desmond. I’m sorry I didn’t call last night. There was an emergency.”
“I understand emergencies.”
He cleared his throat, perhaps recalling I’d dashed out of his place on Monday after he’d been millimeters from kissing my fingers.
“You wouldn’t have a … charm to nullify a blood bond, would you?”
Desmond’s hesitance before the word “charm” made me want to hiss. He still believed I trafficked in spellweaves. I didn’t touch the illegal and unpleasant things. Why would I when a weave required a witch to permanently sacrifice a portion of their power? I’d thought we were past this.
“No.” My tone was sharper than usual.
“Dea Woods has been enthralled,” he said, shocking me with his candor. “She’s stepping down. She was a damn good priestess. Her replacement…” His voice trailed off into a heavy sigh. “Let’s just say I don’t get on well with her.”
“You get on well with the others?”
“Yes.”
His terse reply made me nearly laugh. I adopted a drawl to push him a little further. “That’s surprising.”
“Is it? By all accounts I’m a charmingly charismatic individual.”
“Charmingly charismatic,” I said sourly, not liking his answering drawl at all. “That’s just another way of saying manipulative dick.”
“And here I thought we’d called a ceasefire, Ms. Walsh.”
It was a little surprising he’d voiced the words in his blank, professional tone without so much as a huff or puff of irritated air. I must be losing my touch because he wasn’t all that ticked off yet.
“That was before you demanded a demonstration of my abilities,” I said.
“I demanded a demonstration of your access to certain schools of magic,” he said quietly, as if he were in the office and didn’t want his assistant to overhear him. “I didn’t demand a demonstration of your abilities.”
Was that the innuendo it seemed? Or had he merely mentioned that I had mundane abilities like running a business? I truly hoped it was the latter. Fortunately he couldn’t see my warming cheeks.
He cleared his throat again, seemingly proof it had been an innuendo. “I’d wanted to talk about what we discussed in the car, but now isn’t a good time.”
“Then why did you call? Needed a daily dose of verbal bitch slapping?”
Desmond inhaled a breath that could have been an irritated sigh or a laugh. I couldn’t tell which without seeing his face.
“No. I called to apologize … for not calling.” The slowed pace of his last three words might have been indicative of embarrassment.
“It’s not like we had a date for phone sex, Marino. Relax.” My cheeks were burning by the time the words left my mouth.
What was I thinking? Yes, his behavior made me uneasy, but I wouldn’t improve the situation with quips like that.
A lengthy silence followed my answer. I shifted uncomfortably without really moving.
And then he cleared his throat. “The timing on what I am going to say next is certainly suspect now.” There was another pause, perhaps for me to comment. When I didn’t, he said, “Will you be available to … talk tonight?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yes, I’l
l be available tonight, but if another emergency comes up, you’re S.O.L. for Saturday.”
“You have a date.”
“Not as such, but I do have plans.”
I winced. The odds of no one seeing Maximo dancing with a cerulean-haired girl at a Mexican restaurant in Sedona were slim. Desmond would hear of it. Everyone would hear of it.
How could I explain the situation without damning myself?
Perhaps I’d merely say the dinner was gratitude for his assistance. Whatever happened, it had to be the only dinner I had with the vampire.
“Tonight then,” Desmond said. “Good day, Ms. Walsh.”
“Good day, Marino.”
The beep of his Bluetooth headset disconnecting sounded in my ear. An image flashed in my mind of him standing before the windows in his office. His hands would be clasped behind his back, a fine suit covering his sinewy body. I dropped my head down, banging it against the display case. And then I repeated it until a different sort of pain replaced the image of Desmond.
****
My shop was in the red. Big time. I needed a way to bring in business.
Downstairs was doing as well as a shop in a bad location could hope to do. No, that wasn’t right. It was doing better. But the Wipuk side’s level of commerce was pathetic. I brainstormed ideas for improvement because it was better than wondering what Desmond wanted or dreading my dinner with Maximo.
Maybe I could throw a party and invite Nell’s witch friends. If I raffled off a few rare items as door prizes, it might get the word out that I wasn’t selling weaves. I’d gotten along well with those girls at the solstice ball. Perhaps they knew a few others who wouldn’t be horrible. I could do it on Monday or Tuesday when the shop was ordinarily closed. We’d get pizza, soda (because Nell and her friends were underage), and plenty of chocolate. Then I’d ply them with magical sweets.
Nell’s attention was on the employee only entrance by the time I burst through. Her laptop hung loose in her hands. I plunked myself in front of the display case. And then I explained my idea.
