“You merely delay the inevitable,” the mage said. Christophe planned to argue that the woman had been his at the time of the agreement, that given her attempt to kill him, he was entitled to have her back. There was a chance Nikodemus would agree.
His connection with Gray thinned. She dropped to her knees, clutching her head between her hands as Christophe worked the magic that would bind her to him as his mageheld. It was an ugly, soul-stealing magic, and every atom of his being objected.
Durian took a step past Christophe and with quicksilver speed, touched each of the three magehelds in turn. He held back enough that he didn’t kill them, but his anger made it a near thing.
Two were immediately inert. The other hit the sidewalk and convulsed. At the end of the movements that got him his three touches, Durian grabbed a handful of the mage’s shirt and cotton jacket and pulled hard enough to bring Christophe to his toes. The remaining four magehelds sprinted toward their mage, but he’d counted on the natural hesitation of a mageheld. He had the seconds he needed.
“She wasn’t mageheld before.” How easy it would be to kill Christophe. Oh, how he wanted to. “Therefore, under the terms of our agreement, you cannot take her now.”
“She’s mine.”
“No longer, mage.”
“She stole from me.”
“I do not give a damn.” He glared at Christophe and got the distinct sense that Christophe had not been talking about Tigran’s magic. “Do not break your promise to Nikodemus. Release her. Now.”
Christophe flicked a hand in Gray’s direction and the magehelds stopped their dash to protect the man who enslaved them. They retreated to their original places. What pain Durian had been able to divert from Gray vanished from his body. His chest ached with familiar pain. One of the fallen magehelds groaned. The other two didn’t move. He pushed Christophe away.
On the ground, the woman’s arched back flattened out. She squeezed a hand into a fist and pressed it to the ground. She hadn’t screamed. She hadn’t made a sound despite what Durian knew to be shattering pain.
Christophe straightened his hoodie. Two of his three downed magehelds got to their feet. The third wasn’t moving yet. Gray breathed slowly, getting her mind back under her control. Durian buried his anger, taking refuge in the darkest parts of his magic.
“Tonight, with no provocation whatever, she tried to kill me.”
“You think she won’t try again?” Durian’s attention stayed on Christophe and his magehelds, but he was aware Gray had recovered her wits. He stuck out a hand and helped her to her feet. She stumbled once, but Durian didn’t change his grip on her. She was now within striking distance of the mage with three of his magehelds compromised by what he’d done.
Well played.
Christophe pointed at her but he looked at Durian. “Return her, and all is forgotten, fiend.”
Her decision flashed into Durian’s consciousness.
Now.
She was faster than he expected. She lunged, a thin metal rod clenched in her left hand because Christophe and his magehelds would expect her to attack from the right. What a shame he was required to stop her. Durian didn’t move. He didn’t need to. Besides, he took a vicious pleasure in watching the fear in Christophe’s eyes as he saw Gray charge at him. He waited a hair too long. Or perhaps not long enough.
As before, things happened quickly.
The human shouted, not in pain, but frustration. Her fingers popped open and the metal rod fell from her grasp. That was Durian’s doing. Not a compulsion but the far simpler solution of superheating the metal. His act saved the mage’s life. Such a shame.
Two of the magehelds lunged for her, but they hadn’t recovered from Durian’s touch and weren’t as quick as they should have been. Christophe attacked as well. He tangled his fingers in her hair and made a fist, muttering to himself. She reared back, but Christophe yanked her toward him, forcing her head back so she had to look at him.
The hatred pouring from her was a match for anything a mageheld ever felt for a mage. He could practically touch it.
Christophe bent over her. “You’re an animal, Anna Grayson Spencer. One of them now.”
A mageheld emerged from the shadow of a tree and leapt an inhumanly far distance to the mage’s side. When he landed, hands stretched toward the woman, Durian put out an arm and shoved him away. He put enough magic into the contact for the mageheld to shriek in pain.
“You belong to me, Anna.” Christophe’s accent was heavily French now. He said something in French so old Durian couldn’t make sense of it. Not that it mattered. The mage was finishing what he’d started.
It would be interesting to let him do it and see how Nikodemus reacted to a blatant violation of the agreement. He wasn’t callous enough to leave her to that fate.
Gray brought up her hands and punched the heels of her palms into the mage’s face. He staggered back, ripping out some of her hair when his hold slipped. She would have launched herself at him except Durian caught her around the waist and hauled her back in an unsettling moment of déjà vu.
“That, Christophe,” Durian said, “is perilously close to breaking your word.” He held up a hand. “You will take no one mageheld. That was your promise. Your bounden promise to Nikodemus. Break it, and he will give me your sanction and you will die.”
Christophe’s cheeks flushed red. His nose and the side of his face were a deeper red where Gray’s palms had struck him. Durian hoped she’d broken something. “She attacked me.”
“She’s one of us,” Durian said. “An animal. Did you expect more from an animal?”
She lunged again, but Durian tightened his arm around her. She didn’t say a word. Not a sound escaped her as she fought to free herself. He outweighed her by nearly a hundred pounds, and he was using magic on her, too, slowing her movements until her limbs must have felt to her like they were moving through cement. She could have kicked and clawed until she puked, and it wouldn’t have done any good.
“Calm yourself,” he said. The words were low and soft and pitched to penetrate her psychic blocks. And still, he wasn’t sure he could get through to her.
“He killed my sister.” The words tore from her throat. Durian had both arms around her now. “He didn’t even have the courage to do it himself. He had to send Tigran to do it for him.”
Christophe bent to pick up the metal pick. “She is a liar. A delusional, burnt-out copa-addicted witch. You cannot trust anything you find in her head.”
“Thank me, mage,” Durian said with a calm he didn’t feel. “For taking her off your hands.”
“I want her returned to me.”
She took a step forward, or would have if he hadn’t prevented her. “Fuck you, Christophe.”
Durian suppressed his smile while he carefully kept his attention on the mage. “We have nothing further to discuss.”
“I will bring a formal complaint to Nikodemus.”
“By all means.” He was furious with the mage for trying to take her mageheld. That was so near a violation of their agreement that he wondered why Christophe had risked it. At least now he understood exactly why she wanted to kill the mage. In her place, he wouldn’t have felt any different. “Good evening, Christophe.”
“This is not over.”
Durian smiled, and it felt uncharacteristically good. “I imagine not. But in the meantime, she is under our protection.”
Even as the words left his mouth they felt oddly prophetic.
CHAPTER 5
Gray’s awareness of the demon didn’t change even when she tried to block him out. It was like he was permanently lodged in the back of her head. She wasn’t sure if that was cause for panic yet. She surveyed the now empty street while she worked to regulate her breathing and her emotions. Life lesson number one: never give a fiend a way into your head. Especially when you were otherwise defenseless. You might never get him out once he was there. She was still alive, though, and that was something.
“
Christophe’s not going to let you get away with this, you know,” she said to him.
The fiend strolled to his car and opened the passenger door again. He held it for her. His expression was impossible to dissect. “I am well acquainted with his dislike of losing. Particularly to someone like me.”
“Yeah.” She shoved her hands into her back pockets. “You animal.”
His gaze was steady. Opaque. No sense of humor. Gorgeous man, but honestly, she liked a guy who smiled more than once a century.
She held his gaze. “How long have you known Nikodemus?”
He tugged on the top of the car door.
“You’re good buddies, though. Right?”
“Buddies?” He put a hand to his chest and looked appalled.
“Don’t go having heart failure over it. Pals? Amigos? Chums, acquaintances only in passing?”
“Please get in the car.”
She sighed. “It’s not like I have anywhere else to go. I need a new plan for killing Christophe anyway.” She walked to the car. “Mind if I pick your brain on that one?”
“Gray.”
She shrugged and got in. Most cars had something of their owners about them. Papers. Gadget chargers. Gum, mints, spare change, or a travel mug. There wasn’t anything like that here. The interior was pristine.
“Where we going?” she asked when he was in the driver’s seat.
“Someplace we can talk without interruption,” he said in a voice as sterile as the inside of his car.
“Can’t wait to hear all about you and your BFF Nikodemus.”
After ten, maybe fifteen minutes of silence while the guy drove like an old lady on her way to church, he pulled into the garage of a house on Broadway up near the Presidio, a rarified neighborhood of mansions with views that hurt your heart to look at. It was still dark, so there wasn’t much to see right now. He walked her through the side door of a large house. A very large house.
She looked around and didn’t see anyone. The house wasn’t empty, and she couldn’t figure out why she thought that, given how quiet things were. There was an awareness in her head, a sense of someone else. Whoever it was, he outranked her, whatever that meant. The worst part, the creepy part, was that she didn’t know why she felt that way. The markings on her arm were going crazy again. Her skin ached as if she had a bad sunburn where the green markings had shown up. They were moving again, shifting into new patterns. She gritted her teeth while she tried to ignore the feeling that something was alive underneath her skin.
Most of the lights were off and she didn’t hear noises like you’d expect to hear when someone was home. No TV. No hey-I-live-here sounds. The kin, she knew, didn’t sleep. When they were passing as human, they faked it when they had to. As she and the demon walked through the silent house, she had no problem making out high ceilings, carved moldings, and museum-quality furniture. He knew his way around, that was clear.
They ended up in a twenty-by-twenty room on the first floor, an office of some sort with a glass desk and some crazily curved bookshelves. There were a few books on the shelves, a pair of jade Foo Dogs and several blown glass vases in neon colors and warped shapes. All the vases were empty. There was a sound system with an iPod dock. Against one wall was a smallish couch of crimson leather. A set of tall windows in the wall opposite the desk looked onto darkness. The wood floor was laid out in strips that formed a broad arrowhead pattern.
She looked down at her ragged pants and shoes, then at the fiend in his ensemble of meticulously tailored black and more black, then around the room again. She thought about her sense that someone else was here. Wherever she was, this wasn’t his house. Just why she thought that wasn’t clear to her, but she did think so. “Is this where Nikodemus lives?”
He stood by the door, hands loose at his sides. The guy was scary just standing there. “No. Nikodemus does not live here. The owner is attending to business outside the country.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
After a brief hesitation, he said, “Yes.” He closed the door and motioned to the couch. All business.
“Can I assume I’ve found the free kin Tigran told me about?” Maybe she hadn’t found Nikodemus himself, but this might just be close enough.
“Yes. Do please sit down, Gray.”
She sat at one end of the couch. The far end. The demon sat at the other. There might as well have been an ocean between them. He didn’t say anything. She settled her foot across her knee and wrapped her fingers around her ankle. Upstairs, someone walked a short distance, then settled down again.
“So. Whatever your name is. What are we going to talk about?”
He inclined his head. “Durian.”
“Durian.” She nodded.
“Some background is in order.” He plucked at the crease of his pants leg until it ran straight down to the top of his shoe.
“All ears.”
“As perhaps you have guessed already, I am sworn to the demon warlord Nikodemus.”
“What does that mean?” She leaned forward. “Is it anything like being mageheld?”
He had a way of looking at her that made her think about creatures that hid in shadows and that you never knew were there until it was too late. He was looking at her that way right now. “I have free will, Gray.”
“You’re not footloose and fancy free, either, though.”
“No.” His dark, dark eyes watched her. Scoured her, actually. “Are not all of us bound by constraints of some sort? We agree to conventions of behavior and, most of us, to the rule of law.”
She forced herself not to move, to keep her expression as blank as his. Inside, she was a mass of conflicting emotions. “Part of me wants to walk out.”
“You are free to do so.”
“I’d be safer on my own, far away from the kind of creatures that can take over my mind. Force me to do things I don’t want to.” She held up a hand to stop his interruption. “For as long as I could survive without anyone to show me how to manage Tigran’s magic.”
“You understand your situation, then.”
She nodded. “Can you help me?” Colors flickered in his eyes, mostly shades of purple, but other colors, too. That didn’t startle her. She’d seen that effect before, after all. His silence, however, freaked her out. “Can you at least tell me who might help me?” Filled with a nervous and desperate energy, she jumped to her feet. “I haven’t got any money, but I can get a job and pay my own way.” She paced a few steps. “All I need is to know how to deal with this. With having Tigran’s magic. It’s not—not what I thought it would be like.”
“I might be of assistance.”
“Might?” She shook her head in a tight negative as she paced. “I’m no good at subtext. Not when my life is at stake. How about you explain that might?”
“Tell me what happened, and I’ll be in a position to know if I can help you. Clear enough?”
She stopped pacing. She’d found the free kin, just like Tigran had wanted her to. She wasn’t going to throw away his sacrifice because she was afraid. “Okay. Here’s the thing. We figured Christophe was eventually going to find out what we were doing—I’ll explain that better in a bit—and that he might kill Tigran when that happened. We knew that was a risk. He taught me what to do in order to take his magic if it came to that, and when it did… I did. Only, somehow I think I ended up with some of Christophe’s magic, too.”
“Did you have magic before this?”
“My sister was the witch. Never me.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” His gaze stayed steady.
“Me, too.” She sucked in a breath. It hurt to think of her sister. The loss was as sharp as ever. “Look. I don’t know what you’re like. Right now, you’re scaring the hell out of me.”
“I can see that.”
“It’s like I spent all this time with a tame panther and you’re a wild one. What I know might be completely wrong. Enough to get me killed.”
“What is it you know?�
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“Magehelds like Tigran are cut off from the normal psychic links with the free kin. You can’t sense each other the way you should.”
“Go on.”
“The more powerful the demon, the better looking their human form tends to be.” She laughed, but she sounded nervous because she was. “Well. I mean look at you. Jeez.” That got her what she was starting to think of as the glare of doom. “Tigran said that’s because there’s more magic to create and hold the human manifestation. You have alternate forms, some more than one, and you reproduce with human women. You aren’t fertile unless you’re in your alternate form.”
“So far that’s not inaccurate.”
“A mageheld is a slave to his mage.” She swallowed. “There are ways for them to resist, but an order is an order. Nikodemus is a warlord and he’s organizing a resistance against the magekind. Tigran wanted me to join up, but I would have wanted to anyway.”
“Please sit down, Gray.”
“Right.” She sat on the couch again. “Sure.”
“I am interested in hearing about what happened between you and Tigran such that you ended up here. Asking to join a resistence movement.”
“Is it true?” All that got her was silence. She stared at the ceiling. Words flew around in her head but none of them seemed adequate to shape any kind of reply about what she and Tigran had done. Or, more specifically, what Christophe had ordered him to do to her, and what she and Tigran had done about that.
“It is remarkable you were able to thwart Christophe in any respect.”
She realized she was tapping her heel against the floor. Faster and faster. She stopped. The room with its crazily tilted bookcase and vases that looked like they’d been left in the oven too long was getting to her. Her entire life was getting to her. “Right. So, okay.” She rubbed her hands over her face. “I understand completely that Tigran was not acting from his own choice. There were probably things he couldn’t tell me that he should have. All right?”
My Immortal Assassin Page 4
