“I did not say it isn’t real.” He allowed himself a smile. “When I give the word, and it becomes conscious, if it touches you, it’ll hurt like hell. Or worse.”
Her eyes widened. “Ah. All right, then.”
They began. He opened himself to her, aware that he was trusting her with a great deal. Her oath of fealty ensured her loyalty and bound her to protect his physical safety. Emotional safety was another matter entirely. He had not connected with any of the kin at this level in too many years to count. The psychic connection between them tightened. Once he’d surrendered his usual psychic blocks, he could feel her absorbing the physical knowledge of his centuries of work. It was exhilarating.
They moved even more quickly through the defensive moves he’d shown her. When he began the offense, he used moves that, with the proper magic behind them, could kill at a touch. He showed her the magic, too, something he had never allowed anyone else. Until it was too late.
When he drew on her magic, shaping his pull as he had with his own, her traceries deepened in color. They extended farther along her arm and around the side of her face. The magic came alive between them to the point where it was difficult to tell which one of them he was pulling from. They moved as one. Sinuously. She slid in close to his construct, and Durian knew that had the construct been physically alive, she would have had her first kill.
They stopped, on an unspoken and mutual agreement, and for a time they just looked at each other. Magic rocketed through them both. For a split second, he was in her head completely and the sensation was better than anything he’d felt in his life.
He pulled back, shaken that he had succumbed for even a moment.
Gray stood less than two feet away, with her hands on her hips, her fingers curled around her pelvic bones, sweat dripping down her face, her arms, her hair damp with it.
“Jesus, Durian,” she whispered. “You are one hell of a demon.” A grin curved her mouth. “That was good. Really good.”
He nodded. Her pounding heart and racing pulse echoed in his head. And something far more elemental. His hand settled on her shoulder and she stepped toward him because he was pulling her forward, and she knew exactly what was happening to him. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and he growled, low and soft.
He was reacting according to an ancient instinct he wasn’t sure he wanted to resist any longer. As a species the kin were hardwired for psychic connection with a human. Gray knew that. Just as she knew it was normal, perfectly normal, for him to crave physical contact to go with the psychic.
He wanted to touch her and feel the rush of arousal, his need for the pleasure of human skin beneath his hands, under his mouth, in contact with his body. He wanted to caress her, put his mouth on her, kiss her, taste her blood. The side of his thumb slid over her skin and the next minute he felt her flinch at the cut he made along her throat. He drew her closer yet and lowered his head to that place. Her inhalation was a soft sound.
His mouth touched her skin, his tongue swept away the welling blood. He slid a hand over the back of her head, threading his fingers through her hair. Her torso tipped toward him. She was willing. Compliant. He wanted to strip off her clothes and put her flat on her back. He could. She wouldn’t resist him.
He bowed his head and steadied himself. “This is not safe,” he said. “Not now.”
CHAPTER 10
One Week Later
Christophe dit Menart sat with his back to the computer desk built along his office wall. Behind him three monitors winked to black. His MacBook was on his lap with one of his less sensitive e-mail accounts open on the screen. He ignored the mage sitting on the couch opposite him in favor of making his point about where the other man ranked in Christophe’s estimation: not very high.
While Kessler waited in silence, Christophe tapped away on MacMage, the nickname he’d given his twenty-first century aluminum beast, doing nothing more exciting than deleting unwanted e-mails and sending offers to enlarge his penis to the spam folder.
A year ago, he would have considered Rasmus Kessler a mage who needed to be killed before he took control of the local magekind in this, his adopted homeland. Ironically and rather wonderfully, Nikodemus and his band of hellspawn had made that unnecessary. He deleted several more e-mails. Not until he was certain Kessler must be seething with resentment did he close MacMage. He turned on his chair to set MacMage on the counter behind him, speaking as he did. “Thank you for coming.”
Kessler made the interesting choice of going on the offensive. “Are you certain we are safe here?”
With an expansive gesture at the room and a smile intended to hide only minimally the degree to which the question offended him, Christophe said, “This room alone cost me five million euros.”
The other mage kept one hand in his lap, attempting, Christophe knew, but failing, to hide the tremor of his thumb and first two fingers. The extent of Kessler’s injuries had been the subject of much speculation among the magekind. A vulnerable mage or witch was at risk of losing his magehelds and with the loss of magehelds came a loss of power. Indeed, Rasmus Kessler had suffered just such depredations from other magekind. He had not been able to maintain his ranking.
Christophe had to presume his injuries were permanent since he hadn’t been able to heal himself by now.
“Forgive me,” Kessler said. “I am unclear how that expense keeps us safe from intruders.”
Us. Us?
The hubris, Kessler lumping himself in with Christophe as if he were an equal.
He resisted the urge to grind his teeth. What was Kessler but some pissant mage unable to retain control of his own magehelds or replace the ones he had lost? By all accounts, Kessler had come within inches of burning out his magic, and not so long ago, either. The Dane ought to be on his knees begging for help, not doling out insults.
“Five million euros is perhaps a small sum for you. It is not for me.” He heard the French cadences creeping into his voice as happened when he was under the grip of strong emotion. “Even with my limited need for skilled human labor.” He pointed. “That door is custom built to my own design, cher Rasmus, so that a seal may be achieved at every conceivable angle and plane. That is wood paneling over a steel shell which itself contains a layer of crushed rubies.”
“Where did you acquire the rubies?”
Rubies, encapsulated in this manner, prevented outside magic from coming in and inside magic from going out. The result was a shield that permitted a mage to use magic in formidable amounts without drawing unwanted attention to the effort. Such a carefully prepared room was all but impregnable and Kessler knew it.
“Burma, naturally. Why do you think the cost was five million?” Lab-grown gems could be used, but there was a marked diminution in efficacy. The better the stone, the better the result. He smiled again. “The walls and ceiling as well contain pulverized ruby. Even the insulation is made with a slurry of ruby dust.” He gestured. “This marble floor across which we have walked was reformed with rubies. I spared no expense and cut no corners.”
“Yes, I feel the effect.” Kessler shook his long blond braids behind his shoulders. There were dozens of tiny braids, each of them with ruby beads worked in that lent him a piratical air. He looked older than he ought to given his reputation. Still young looking, still an attractive man, but at the farther edge of maturity now. “With all respect, Christophe, I have seen a similar room breached.”
He waved a hand. “Perhaps you were careless.”
Kessler gazed at Christophe. “The room I saw breached as if it were butter instead of six layers of steel and ruby was in Álvaro Magellan’s house. And that mage was never careless.”
By design there were no windows. From floor to ceiling, the walls were painted with stylized runes and sigils, some of which had been drawn in blood. His personal work, made with his blood and the blood of one or two of his magehelds. Others were drawn in ink or painted in oils; those too in his own hand. The smell of linseed oil and tu
rpentine lingered still. The effect of his ruby-fortified walls was at once colorful and disorienting. Hallucination was a risk of staring too long at certain of the patterns.
“By the end,” Kessler said with his attention downward rather than at the wall behind Christophe, “Magellan was dead.”
The unspoken fact was that Magellan, the greatest mage ever to have lived, had not survived. And Kessler had. That was something, indeed. If Christophe’s information was accurate, the Dane’s injuries had come some months after Magellan’s death, in an entirely separate incident. Offended as he was, Christophe decided he would be unwise to dismiss Kessler out of hand.
“Perhaps Magellan was not as good or careful as we were led to believe.” He let his smile slip. “Whatever happened that night, or on any other, Rasmus, I attest that here you and I may speak safely.”
Christophe leaned back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. A disturbing pulse of magic came from the other mage, stronger than he would have expected from one so severely damaged. “Seven of my magehelds stand guard outside the door. If this room were to be breached, unlikely as that is, those seven will die saving my life. In this room, we are as safe from harm as is possible. For men like us.”
“If your magehelds are severed?” Kessler’s gaze was unblinking. “What then?”
“You jest.”
“No, mage, I do not.” Despite his damaged hand, Kessler no longer looked quite so ineffectual.
Christophe’s stomach clenched. The thought of someone with both the will and the ability to sever a mageheld demon put the whole of the human race within sight of their doom. If such were true, mankind needed more mages, not fewer. “Stories,” he said, feeling sick. “Stories parents tell to frighten their children into behaving. This is not a skill anyone today possesses.”
“Not stories.”
“Has this happened?” He speared Kessler with his gaze. “Of your personal knowledge?”
“Yes.”
“Merde.”
“My question stands. Are we safe here?”
Christophe jumped up from his chair and paced the length of his computer desk. He kept his hands clasped tightly behind his back. “If what you suggest were to happen, then no.” He was not pleased at this conversation. “In such a case, no one is safe.”
The other mage nodded.
Christophe stopped pacing. “Given the unlikelihood of such an occurrence, I represent to you that here you and I are as safe as it is possible to be.” Kessler had been there the night Magellan breathed his last. Damaged Rasmus Kessler was the only one who knew what had happened. Therefore, whatever he thought of the mage now, it behooved him to listen and to believe. He kept his attention on the Dane. “I was in Paris at the time, as you know,” Christophe said. “We heard a great many rumors in Europe. Each more fantastical than the other.”
“Kynan Aijan killed Magellan.”
He had to steel himself not to react. That rumor had been one he had dismissed as impossible. “His own mageheld?”
Kessler remained impassive, too. “By then, he was no longer mageheld.”
“How?”
“A witch severed him.”
“Who among us would do such a thing?” Christophe wanted to sit down but didn’t because that could be taken as a sign of weakness. “Who would free a creature such as that? To let him loose among the innocent?”
“Nikodemus found a way to bind a witch to him.” Kessler leaned forward, releasing his hands. Both of his hands, the damaged and the undamaged, remained still. For now. “She was Magellan’s witch. From a very young age. He would not have been able to use her for much longer. She got away somehow, survived and now does the warlord’s bidding.”
Christophe’s breath left him. A captive witch? Worse, one who was now enslaved to a warlord. In his mind, he saw Erin, his lovely, beautiful Erin, in thrall to a creature like Kynan Aijan or Durian. His heart turned to ash at the horror of thinking she could be lost to a demon. Turned against her own race, the people she loved. Turned against him. Even her own child. He crossed himself, muttering familiar Latin under his breath.
The Dane didn’t relax.
“What more?” Christophe asked.
“I think,” Kessler said, “that if I am to tell you anything beyond what I have already, we should have a firm understanding between us.”
“Go on.”
For the first time since the mage had walked in, Rasmus Kessler smiled. “You cannot act against Nikodemus. Not directly.”
Christophe understood what Kessler meant. The Dane did not live in the warlord’s territory. Therefore, Kessler was not bound to the agreement with Nikodemus. He gestured at Kessler’s hand. “Forgive me, my dear Rasmus, but what can you do?”
“As I am now? Nothing.” His smile widened. Once again Christophe felt the pulse of magic in the other mage. He was damaged, yes, but not without power. “If I had thirty magehelds there would be a great deal I could do on your behalf.”
“Five.”
“That’s not enough, mage, and you know it.” He leaned against the couch and crossed one leg over the other. “Fifty is a better number, but I understand the scarcity of the resource and can make do with thirty.”
Thirty was not an outrageous number. But he wasn’t about to give Kessler the resources to fully restore the standing he’d lost. Not unless there was no choice. “Ten.”
“Thirty, Christophe.” The mage’s eyes were steady. Ah, Christophe thought. There was a reason for the dozens of ruby beads in his hair. “I’ll even throw you a bone. There is another demonbound witch.”
“Who?”
He held up his hand, with the useless digits trembling. “Thirty of your magehelds, Christophe, and I will tell you the rest. I might even be persuaded to eliminate the demonbound witches for you.”
Christophe stared at the runes painted into the wall behind Kessler. Two witches bound to a warlord. Inconceivable. Had he underestimated Nikodemus so badly? He tore his gaze from the written symbols. “Do you require assistance with the ritual?”
The mage inclined his head, but not before he saw the rage in the white-lipped set of Kessler’s mouth. Not directed at him, but at the humiliation of having to admit he needed help with what must once have been easily mastered magic for him. “Yes.”
“Twenty-five, then. Including the ones you kill tonight. And you will assist me exactly as I ask, until you have replaced the magehelds I give you.”
Kessler blinked. “Very well. Twenty-five.”
“Who is the other witch?”
“My daughter, Alexandrine.” At Christophe’s shock, Kessler made a dismissive motion. “She did not pass her initial tests so she was fostered out. As it happens, she had magic after all and survived the onset.”
Dieu. “And is now demonbound.”
“To another of Nikodemus’s sworn fiends.” He held up his hand again. “She is responsible for this.”
Two demonbound witches. Worse than he had imagined. Far worse, if there was more than one fiend capable of that kind of magic. “You understand that both your daughter and Nikodemus’s witch must die, yes? This cannot be allowed.”
“Agreed.” Kessler tipped his head to one side. “There is another witch. Not demonbound yet, but a danger nonetheless.”
This, at least, was not news. “I assume you mean Maddy Winters.”
“I do.”
Christophe hid his smile. “Eliminate her and I’ll send you ten more magehelds.”
“Since my resources will be limited, I make no promises about when or where.”
“Easier to kill her than get to the demonbound witches.” Christophe walked to the door and released the lock. He pointed to two of the magehelds on guard outside. “You. And you. Come in. And you.” He pointed again. “Bring down two to replace them.” Whether the magehelds he’d selected understood their lives were required was no concern of Christophe’s. They came inside. When the door was closed and resealed, he said to Kessler, “There
is another task for you. Another witch.”
“You have but to ask, mage.”
He let out a breath. “She betrayed me, and I fear may already be demonbound.”
“Who?”
“Her name is Anna Spencer, but she’s calling herself Gray these days. I want her brought to me alive.”
CHAPTER 11
A few days later. Muir Woods National Park, Marin County, California
Durian parked but left the keys in the ignition. He tapped a finger on the steering wheel. Even here in the parking lot, this island away from concrete and glass soothed him.
From the passenger seat, Gray looked out her window. “Why here?” She still had the horrific red hair, now with fading pink streaks and black roots showing. Despite the money she’d spent, her choice of clothing was—the best he could come up with was eccentric. Jeans and an electric blue shirt worked with an intricate white pattern that looked like paisley in outline. The shirt underneath that one was mustard yellow. He wondered if she was color blind.
If he could tell anyone what this place meant to him, it would be her. “Sometimes, it’s good to get away from the city.”
His fealty to Nikodemus had not been given lightly. He had served the warlord well and loyally. Perhaps no longer. Two other kin sworn to Nikodemus had come by the house: Kynan Aijan, a warlord in his own right, though he did not at present have sworn fiends of his own, and Iskander, a former blood twin who continued to struggle without the woman whose magic had once been intimately bound with his.
Both Kynan and Iskander behaved themselves as best as they could while attempting to find out with varying degrees of subtlety what was going on with Nikodemus’s assassin. The plain fact was, Durian wasn’t prepared to deal with questions about him and Gray. Kynan had given him a hard look and told him Nikodemus was starting to worry. Iskander had told him he looked like he needed to get laid.
Gray interrupted his mental lapse when she reached out and grabbed his hand, stilling the tattoo he’d been beating on the steering wheel. “Hey.” She gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “What’s up, Durian?”
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