My Immortal Assassin

by Carolyn Jewel

  “Let’s walk. If you don’t mind.” He turned his head to look at her. He ought to be appalled by her appearance. He wasn’t.

  “Sure.”

  Before he had time to go around to her door, she got out. When he joined her, she looked around, head craned up. “I’ve never been here before, and I grew up less than an hour away. Crazy, isn’t it?” She turned in a circle. “You see pictures and they don’t really convey what it’s like.”

  Durian relaxed. “Shall we?”

  He paid the park entrance fee and they walked into the shade and cool of the coastal redwood rainforest. As always, he immediately felt better being out of sight of what passed for civilization. Gray stayed close to his side. Though he set a quick pace, she didn’t have trouble keeping up. Each day brought her more strength, better endurance. Better control of her magic. One day she would make a fine assassin.

  As they walked, their psychic connection strengthened, not from intent but from familiarity and habit. The fact that he was comfortable with anyone maintaining that sort of link with him was extraordinary, but then he trusted Gray as he trusted few others.

  They left the groomed trails for a rougher path through trees that had been old long before he came to the continent. Eventually, they emerged from the redwoods onto an open hillside where, after the shade of the redwoods, the sun felt all the more delicious for the shock of heat.

  Fifty feet above them a road cut into the hillside; out of their direct sight but occasional traffic noise dispelled the sense that they were far from the city. At their backs was the forest. Downslope, oak trees made their own dense forest, a deeper, dustier green against the fading green of the late spring grass. Already there was more brown here than green. The pure blue of the Pacific shimmered at the horizon.

  The path curved sharply behind a boulder. Durian veered off the trail to the front of the massive rock and leaned against the sunbaked surface. Gray stood next to him and after a moment’s hesitation, he put his arm around her shoulder.

  Their link deepened. And then a bit more, yet he remained content with that, when he had never been before with any of the kin. He wished, even, that matters between them would go further. Her life had been in turmoil for too long. She, too, needed the emotional quiet a place like this offered. She leaned into him.

  He turned so that he faced her, his palms on the boulder, just above her shoulders.

  “It’s pretty here,” she said. She tipped her chin up, closing her eyes while she basked in the sun. “Very restful.”

  “Then I’m glad I brought you here.” He was aware that his chest was inches from hers.

  Their gazes met when she opened her eyes again. He didn’t look away, or do anything but enjoy the first shiver of arousal that zinged along the connection between them. “Come here a lot?” she said.

  “Not often enough.” He slid the fingers of one hand along the side of her neck, then along her jaw, the outside of her face. The heat of the sun felt good against his back. He glanced between them and dropped his hand to the skull charm that dangled from her navel. Horrible thing, that, and yet it suited her. He even liked the fact that he didn’t like the piercing. He flattened his hand on her belly, and she didn’t move away. “Would it be disastrous for us if I kissed you?”

  She smiled. A soft, slow smile full of inappropriate challenge. “Probably.”

  His slipped his first and second fingers through the belt loop at the side of her jeans. This was safe, he thought. They could explore what was happening between them without things getting out of hand—whatever that might turn out to be. “No doubt you’re right.”

  She grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him toward her. He let it happen, and it turned him on more than he expected. Her smile was too cheeky by far. “There’s only one way to find out, Assassin.”

  “Only one?” His magic sparked, and he let that happen, too.

  Gray angled her head toward his as she slowly brought him closer. The wait was delicious. Would they? Their bodies were close. So close. Then closer. He curved his fingers around the side of her hip and savored the moment. Her breath flashed warm between them. “You’re supposed to kiss me,” she said against his mouth.

  “Excellent point.” He leaned in hard and opened his mouth over hers with an aggression that was not usual for him. The women he took to bed weren’t anything like Gray. None of them had ever challenged his control. None of them had mattered to him.

  Her tongue swept into his mouth and he reciprocated with a kiss that wasn’t polite or controlled or any of the things that it should have been. The intimacy burned through him and he reveled in it. She answered his demand and he didn’t have to worry that he would do something that would give away something about what he was.

  Her body was lovely, and he wanted to strip her naked right here and do the same himself and get inside her.

  She tasted good. She smelled like his soap. His.

  Here in the open air was not the place to take this where he needed to go.

  He drew back and for a while he gazed into her eyes, struggling to keep himself from deciding if he should just take his chances on them not being interrupted. With some effort, he stepped back and straightened his clothes. She’d just done the same when a flurry of pebbles rained onto the path from above them. He and Gray turned and looked up at the same time. Durian expected to see some animal, a feral cat perhaps, or a deer for some reason startled out of its daytime hiding place. But that wasn’t it.

  Two men careened down the hillside from the road. From this distance they might be taken for college students using a dangerous shortcut into the redwoods in order to save the entry fee. In their sloppy jeans and T-shirts, they slipped in the slick grass as gravity propelled them down the hillside. They fought for balance during their mad, barely controlled run to the path.

  “Idiots,” Gray said. “They’re going to break their necks.”

  They moved swiftly. Too swiftly. Too sure of themselves. He pulled to have his magic at hand. She keyed off his magic and pulled, too. Moments before the two reached the path, Durian knew what they were. Or, more precisely, what they were not.

  They weren’t human. He felt nothing, of course, but their eyes didn’t reflect normally in the sunlight, and there was only one reason for that catlike effect in broad daylight: magehelds with a hell of a lot of magic on tap. Beside him, Gray stiffened as she reached the same conclusion he had.

  The two magehelds jumped the last ten feet, landing on the narrow path with a spray of dirt and gravel. With hardly a pause, they sprinted toward Gray. There was no way to retreat. He and Gray would have to fight.

  The ferocity of Gray’s response when her oath triggered took him aback. She lunged in front of him and dropped into a crouch as the two magehelds reached them. In a flash, she had more magic at hand than he’d ever felt from her before, focused and laser sharp, that sent ripples through him. The traceries underneath the skin of her right arm made her forearm glow like a beacon. Underneath all that was the tickle of her other magic, no longer quiescent.

  Interesting, he thought, that the magic that ought to be antithetical to what he was seemed to have been triggered in his defense.

  She darted to one side, stuck out a leg and tripped the first mageheld. Sparring with a construct was different from fighting a living creature, but she executed the move perfectly. In the same motion she sent a bolt of heat into the creature that slammed it down hard. The backwash of her strike sparked through the air. The mageheld didn’t die, though, because her magic was off. For obvious reasons, she’d never used a lethal strike before. Durian moved in closer, ready to intervene if Gray ran into trouble.

  The downed mageheld didn’t stop. Instead, it lurched to its feet and attacked Gray again. It should have known it was outmatched and beat a retreat until its situation could be remedied or reinforcements called. The other mageheld closed the distance to them, heading for Durian.

  With a sound straight out of a Bruce Lee movie
, Gray shot forward before Durian could do anything. She grabbed either side of the other mageheld’s head, braced her shoulder against its chest and twisted her arms. When she released the other mageheld fell dead at her feet.

  While this was happening, Durian slid in closer to the first mageheld and stretched for his touch just as it reached for Gray. The enslaved fiend went down and stayed down. Beside him Gray’s chest heaved, but she hadn’t taxed herself. Her pupils, however, were huge, with only a narrow rim of color around the black.

  Durian stood over the mageheld Gray had killed. “Brash,” he said, like her, no doubt, feeling the effects of having survived the attack. “Not as elegant as I would have liked for your first kill.”

  “Fuck you,” she said, but she was grinning. He grinned back as she said, “It’s dead, and you’re not, right?”

  “I don’t argue with the outcome. This was well done,” he said.

  “There’s something wrong with them, though.” She shook her head. “They didn’t feel normal.”

  “No, they did not.”

  She wasn’t looking at him, but rather to the side. Her head whipped around. Her other reaction sizzled through him. “More coming.”

  Durian turned toward the forest. Too fast for normal humans, two more men tore out of the woods heading directly for them. Faces misshapen, their bodies lost coherence while they transitioned from human to something else.

  Caught up in the surge of Gray’s magic, his own physical state snapped from the dampened senses of his human body to the hyper-awareness of his other form. This close to changing, all his senses were exquisitely responsive.

  On the road above them, a car door opened. The vibration that shot through him meant a mage of significant power was nearby. He looked up and saw that their encounter with the magehelds had been observed. A man in a dark suit stood at the edge of the pavement, a car with the rear passenger-side door open just behind him. His blond hair was long and braided. Sunlight glinted off the beads worked into the braids. Rubies, every single one. Then, Durian had more immediate worries.

  The two new attackers came on with a frenzy that obliterated the cunning that marked a mageheld fiend. It was as if all intention had been stripped from their minds, leaving only the barest sanity to maintain their functions. For these two, nothing remained between thought and action.

  Gray’s strike at the first reverberated in Durian’s bones, a psychic blow focused enough and deadly enough to be worthy of Kynan Aijan. She got better every time. The mageheld she hit slowed, stumbled, but didn’t go down and, damn, it ought to have. The second one continued on a trajectory straight at Gray. Neither one gave him the slightest look. As with the first two, they were after her. Had she realized that yet?

  The nearest one went for her back, the other careened off the path to get at her from the other side, but it slipped on the slick grass and that gained Gray and him precious seconds.

  As if in slow motion, Durian saw the first mageheld’s extended claws, the color of old blood and a thousand times more deadly. Those talons arced through the air, ripping apart the very molecules of oxygen, reaching for Durian because he was physically blocking the way to Gray. Her magic arced through the air. She whirled with one arm extended, fingers curved into hooks, as if she, too, had talons. Durian forced a connection to the mageheld’s mind and found nothing but a mad intention to take Gray alive.

  Durian launched himself and stretched for his touch. The mageheld nearest him died before it landed. Durian hit the path and rolled, ignoring the scrape of gravel along his arm and ribs. He got his legs underneath him and leapt to his feet, pulling more magic then he’d ever needed for a sanction. The other mageheld wasn’t close enough for him to touch. Gray darted in, a reckless, dangerous move that would have ended badly had she missed. But she didn’t. The second mageheld died, too.

  Movement on the road above them distracted Durian. Rasmus Kessler stood unmoving. He moved a hand in a ritual signal.

  Durian charged up the hill, holding nothing back, knowing he was going too fast for Gray to catch up and that her oath compelled her to try. At half the distance, he heard the mage muttering, saw the movements of his hands and knew in his heart that Kessler was sending more of those damaged magehelds after Gray. Durian dug his hands and feet into the ground, just soft enough for him to gain purchase. He exploded up the hillside.

  He hauled himself closer, nearly blind with the desire to see the life fading from the mage’s eyes. Durian scrambled toward the road, intent on reaching Kessler before he finished whatever spell he was casting.

  The mage spoke, raising his voice just enough to be heard. “You have two choices, fiend.”

  Durian knew that voice, and he had to bury his reaction fathoms deep. After he’d regained his freedom, he’d spent months imagining all the ways he would kill the mage when he had the chance.

  “Come after me.” Durian heard the smile in Kessler’s voice. “Or return to the witch. But not both. Which will you choose?”

  He looked downhill and saw three more magehelds burst from the redwoods, racing along the path. Gray was below him, a quarter of the way up the hillside. She wasn’t fast enough to escape them. If he went after Kessler, those three would catch her, and he already knew they didn’t intend to kill her. Gray was capable, but this was her first encounter outside the do-jang. The smallest mistake would be deadly. Worse, these were not normal mageheld. Kessler had done some something profoundly and horribly wrong to their minds. Durian wasn’t even sure he could deal with them.

  He leapt toward Gray and the magehelds speeding toward her.

  Above him, the car door slammed over the churn of wheels against the pavement edge.

  Gray reversed herself when Durian launched himself past her to intercept the first of new magehelds. He killed two with the same strike, but she got to him in time to take down the third with a clean touch that exploded the mageheld’s heart.

  Durian’s chest bellowed in and out as he hovered between human and something else. He ignored the pain that ripped through him, furious in a way that he hadn’t felt in far too long. Not at Gray, but at mages who thought his kind were no better than animals to be killed.

  “Durian?”

  He reached for his control and found it. At last. “Yes?”

  “You have blood here.” She touched the side of her forehead and made a face. “Is it yours?”

  It was his blood, because his skin stung when he touched the spot she meant. His fingers came away smeared with red. His back, too, was scraped, and both knees. Nothing that wouldn’t heal before they made it back to the car. Gray wrapped her hand around his wrist.

  Durian stilled.

  She brought his fingers to her mouth. He shivered when she licked away the blood. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and the sound that came from him wasn’t human in any sense. Durian found it in him to take a step back. He didn’t like the way he felt right now—his rising sexual response, the burn of his oath to protect her, his desire to connect and fall into the shared mental space with her.

  The inevitable aftermath of what they’d done here would hit them both, soon. “We need to get out of here.”

  She released his wrist.

  He did what was necessary with respect to the corpses of the magehelds they’d killed, though in any event without the magic that sustained them, their physical bodies would not last long. But the kin had learned from bitter experience never to take the chance that someone would steal such magic before it, too, was gone. Not ever. That lesson his kind had learned too well.

  He and Gray began a lope through the woods. They could talk about what it meant that she could feel magehelds later. When he was sure they were both safe.

  Right now, they weren’t. Not with Rasmus Kessler one of the mages intending to find out exactly who and what Gray was.

  CHAPTER 12

  Broadway near Baker Street, San Francisco

  Are you hungry?”

  Gray yawned even tho
ugh she was still jumpy from the fighting. Her need to protect Durian hadn’t yet receded, despite the danger being more or less past. He hadn’t been joking about the obligations of her oath. A human’s oath relied on honor and, she supposed, the punishment of a guilty conscience. Both could be powerful forces. She felt elements of both with Durian, but as she now understood, the moment Durian was in danger, she could no more have failed to attempt to protect him than she could have failed to breathe. Both were reflexes over which she had no control.

  In her head, she continually replayed her touches as if her brain were stuck in an infinite loop. How she’d missed at first, what she could have done better. What would have happened if she’d failed.

  The experience wasn’t anything she’d been prepared for. She’d killed to protect Durian. Compelled or not, those magehelds would have killed him. The very thought kept her edgy. The sound and feeling of the mageheld’s neck breaking wouldn’t go away. When she wasn’t getting flashbacks about that, she got them about the magehelds she’d killed with a touch of her magic. Killing shouldn’t be that easy. The fighting, that was hard, but once she pulled her magic the way Durian had so painstakingly taught her, killing was easy.

  She knew she’d do it again, too, if required.

  Durian put his arm around her shoulder. “Gray?”

  She yawned again. His arm tightened around her, and she got another shot of adrenaline because she remembered what they’d been doing before the magehelds came after them. She got shivers in the pit of her stomach just thinking about the way he’d kissed her. Who’d have thought the original stuffed shirt could turn on the sexual heat like that?

  “Ah,” he said. They were at the bottom of the stairs, not far from the doorway to the living room. His arm remained draped around her. “You are tired.”

  Unlike humans and the magekind, demons did not sleep. “I still need a few hours.”

  “A downside of your fealty to me.” His low voice reminded her of sex. Hot and wild sex. “There is a cost to everything.”