“My dad and uncle.”
Carla was fascinated. “What about your mom?”
He shrugged, his hands tightening on the steering wheel. “She wasn’t there.”
No mother? “Ever?” The psychologist and the witch inside of her were horrified. A mother’s love and nurturing the first years of life gave a child a strong foundation.
He looked over at her, the starkness in his eyes filling her with a need to ease him. “She left when I was three.”
“Why? How could she leave her own child?” It wasn’t right. Many fathers have raised their babies with all the love they needed, but Carla factored in a dad and uncle probably trying not to go rogue, and she didn’t like the odds of them lavishing love on Sutton. More like, they lavished structure and discipline.
He rolled his head and stretched his neck like the memory was cramping up his muscles. “The curse. Someone they knew went rogue and killed his family. She couldn’t deal, so she left.”
Instinctively, she put her hand on his forearm. Her chakras opened and her power bubbled up like a geyser, pouring out to him. “I’m sorry.”
“Pull back your powers.”
She saw the sweat bead on his forehead, felt the tightly coiled energy under his skin begin to simmer. Yanking her hand from his arm, she clasped her fingers in her lap. “Sorry! I didn’t think.” She’d just reacted, wanting to comfort him. And maybe wanting a little comfort for herself. Every time he touched her, she felt real and whole and more than a sum of her magic and intellect. Max’s reaction to discovering she was a witch felt like a painful betrayal. Turning away, she looked out her window. “You should have let Joe take me home. I can’t keep doing this to you.” She watched the gray horizon begin to lighten.
“I want to take you home. I’d rather take you to my house, fill up my bathtub and take you in there, washing away everything you had to see and feel tonight. But I can’t do that … I can’t trust myself to touch you like that and control myself.”
She turned to see his hard profile. “The bloodlust?”
“This second, yes. It’s eating me up. But the instant I touch you, it’ll be a kind of lust that has no words. I won’t stop touching you until I’ve sealed the bond.”
With sex. But it wouldn’t be just sex, but a joining of two souls, or not. If she wasn’t his soul mirror, if she touched him as her own then found out he belonged to Keri, it would shatter her. “Sutton, I’m not …”
His blue eyes blazed in the cab of her car. “You wouldn’t stop me. I can feel how badly you need me to touch you. How your skin prickles with the need, how your heart is hurting. How much you need comfort because a man you cared about in some way, either love or friendship, hurt you tonight. Deeply, in a place where no simple magic can fix it.” He ripped his gaze from her, his forearms bulging as he gripped the steering wheel.
“How can you know that?” It felt like her shell had been ripped back to reveal her insides. Every time she was with him, she was exposed. “The men I dated, I always had to be careful. I could only show them my scientist side, not the witch. I couldn’t ever tell them I was a witch.”
“Like you couldn’t tell Max?”
She looked at Sutton’s hard profile and found herself telling him why. “I told Doctor Lorenzo Zellweger. He was a well-known psychiatrist and author. I was working on my PhD in psychology at the time, and I thought I loved him. We were making dinner together one night when he knocked over a wineglass and cut his hand badly. I figured that was as good a time as any, so I healed the cut. He …” The memory seared her with shame. Why had she started this?
Sutton’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “What did he do, Carla?”
She remembered the disgust in his eyes, and the clamminess of his skin as he backed away from her. He looked at her like she was something growing in a lab dish. “He was freaked out. Sickened.” She wrapped her arms around her waist, trying to hold it together. “He wouldn’t answer my phone calls for a week, and then he called. Said he was sorry, that I just surprised him.” She stared out the windshield, remembering how quickly her hope had bloomed. Maybe she’d just shocked him. He’d needed time to process it. But he’d called her and everything would be fine. She’d looked up to Lorenzo so much, and she’d wanted his approval.
“What happened? Did you see him again?” Sutton’s voice was neutral.
“Yes. He asked me to meet him at his office.” Why was she telling him this? “I went, thinking we were going to talk.”
Sutton turned his gaze to her.
“He wanted to examine me. Blood work, EKG …” She turned away, looking out the side window. “He already had on latex gloves when I got there. Didn’t want to touch me.”
The car swerved to the side of the road and Sutton put it in park. He reached over and took hold of her wrist, pulling her arm from her waist. Then he wrapped his big fingers around her hand. “That son of a bitch. I’ll find him and kill him.”
His touch warmed her right to her soul. “Keri said the same thing. Then she filled his Porsche with sea water. He opened the door and the water poured out.” She grinned at the memory. Keri had always been on her side.
His mouth twitched. “Almost as good as killing him.” His thumb rubbed circles on her skin. “I like touching you, love touching you.” He sucked in a breath. “My problem is that it is almost impossible for me to stop touching you once I start.”
She looked down at his hand around hers. She could feel the pain building in him, the compulsion. “Thank you,” she said softly. She lifted her gaze. “I’ve learned to face the truth. And this … thing … between us, we have to face the truth about that, too.” She took a deep breath, gently pulled her hand away, and said, “The Ancestors told Darcy that Keri could be projecting through me and you might be reacting to her, not me.”
“Bullshit,” he growled, turning back around. He put the car into gear and pulled back out onto the road. “My eagle knows you. I know you.”
Oh, Ancestors, she wanted to believe that. Like she’d wanted to believe that Lorenzo would love her, both as the scientist and the witch. But Carla had worked with her dad in genetics, and she was a witch. Both sides of her knew that it was all too possible that he was reacting to Keri, not her. To get some distance and bring her wild thoughts under control, she parroted what Darcy had told her. “If we are soul mirrors, sealing the bond will break my connection to Keri. I won’t be able to find her. How am I supposed to choose? You or my twin sister?”
Sutton would never make her choose. He pounded through the woods surrounding his cabin, doing his damnedest to outrun the monster in him.
He had slept a couple hours on the ground behind her house to make sure she was safe. He’d been careful taking her home last night and knew they hadn’t been followed, but still … he had to be sure. Then he’d called Joe, got a couple guys to watch her house, and gone home to his cabin. But the minute he walked inside, he’d smelled her. Felt her. Needed her. He’d spun around and left the cabin to go for a run.
He’d gone five miles when he slowed and walked back. He’d grab a shower and go to the warehouse, start working. He wasn’t getting any hits on missing person reports for Pam or the girl that the rogues killed in Carla’s clinic. The program was still working, though the Department of Motor Vehicles might be a dead end if Pam was from out of state. He was hoping that finding out where Pam came from would give them some idea of how she’d crossed paths with Styx. They were getting these girls from somewhere.
Finding the rogue that killed Carla’s sister two years ago was going to be even harder. He’d start by going through his rogue files and narrowing down all the names that had been in San Francisco at the time, but it was a needle in a haystack. There had to be a way, he just needed to …
Sudden dizziness stopped him in his tracks. The trees and thick brush began to spin around him, moving away as a blue fog swirled in, like he was in the middle of a vortex. All the weight of gravity dropped off and he smelled lavende
r.
Oh, hell, she was pulling him into the astral plane again. Briefly, he worried about leaving his body unprotected outside his cabin; then he caught sight of Carla and nothing else mattered.
He could see her perfectly in profile, her long white-blond hair falling straight, eyes full of confusion and underlined by dark fatigue as she stared at something. But everything beyond her was fuzzy. “Carla?”
She turned to look at him. “I don’t know where I am. I was asleep.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Can you hear the screams?”
His eagle started that clawing shit until Sutton moved to her. Once he put his arm around her shoulder, the eagle settled down, except for the sensation of feathers trying to slide across his skin to reach her.
Then the feathers froze when the first scream sounded in the distance. “What is it?” He tightened his arm, bringing her in closer to his body.
“Witches. They are cutting witches. Where are we? How did we get here?”
If she didn’t know, then they were in trouble. Something else was controlling them. How did he fight what he couldn’t see and didn’t understand? Sutton turned and saw some kind of small room, maybe twelve by twelve, and a huge naked man pacing back and forth as if the walls couldn’t contain him. He and Carla were looking down on the scene, as though they were hovering eight feet off the floor. “He doesn’t see us, does he?”
“No.”
Sutton watched the man turn to walk away from them and was slapped with shock. “It’s Brigg.” He recognized the outline of an unfinished crow on his back.
“Your missing witch hunter?”
“Yes,” he said, then called out, “Brigg? Can you hear me?”
The man kept pacing, showing no sign that he’d heard.
Another scream made Sutton grit his teeth, and he felt the goose bumps on Carla’s skin beneath his hand.
Brigg’s head snapped up.
Sutton saw it then, the faint trace of fading blood on his chest and abdomen. “Jesus. They’ve blooded him.” The man’s blue eyes were nearly black, his pupils dilated fully. Sweat ran rivers down his body. In a sudden spasm he dropped to his knees, rubbing his hands across the fading blood on his stomach.
“What’s that?”
He knew what was coming. Everything in him screamed to stop it. “They put witch blood on him, then left it to sink in and take hold. Carla, can we reach him? They are turning him rogue! We have to stop them!”
“I can’t! I’m not controlling this.”
Helpless fury whipped through his words. “Who the fuck is?”
She closed her eyes, and his stomach went tight, then began to vibrate. He could feel her powers, and so could his eagle. The creature thrummed with new life, clearly wanting to help her. Carla’s words jerked his attention to her.
“He has a lock on me. My power. Oh!” She shuddered and opened her eyes.
The power streaming through him shut off. “What?”
Her eyes filled with yellow and she shuddered. “He’s fighting me for control of my mind. I can feel his excitement to destroy me. Like a game.”
The terrified, pain-filled shrieks jerked both their attention back to the scene before them.
“No!” Brigg bellowed but his head snapped up, his nostrils flared, and Jesus, his dick went hard. Not for sex, but blood. Two witches were dragged in, naked and bleeding from too many cuts to count. They were dropped in front of Brigg like an offering.
Then a rogue put a silver knife in Brigg’s trembling hand.
“Please, no,” Carla whispered.
Her plea wrenched his heart. The scene before him inflamed his rage. He snatched his arm from Carla and took a long stride forward, determined to put a stop to this nightmare.
“Sutton, no!” Carla grabbed his arm. “I don’t think this is real time, but something that’s already done. That’s why Brigg can’t see us. We can’t stop it.” Her voice broke. “We’re seeing what’s already happened.”
He looked down at her, saw her desperate eyes, and brought himself under control. She was being torn apart and tortured by some animal, and he was adding to that by making her feel guilty for not being able to stop it.
Neither of them could stop it but it didn’t mean they would stand here and be forced to watch it.
He reached out to her. “Carla, concentrate. Come here.” He pulled her into his chest. He had to get her out of here. Putting his hand to the back of her head, he held her tight against him. “Feel my arms around you?”
“Yes.”
“Put your arms around me.” Her neck and back muscles were viciously knotted.
She lifted her slender arms and wrapped them around his waist, turning to him the way he’d desperately wanted her to after the rogue attack in her clinic. He and the bird stroked her. “All right. Good. Now you’re going to take us out of here. Can you take us someplace where we can talk? Someplace safe?”
Screams bounced around them, horrible sounds of flesh being cut, innocent witches being tortured. And he knew then, Brigg had made his choice. This was what it sounded like for a man to lose his soul. Brigg could have turned that knife on himself—could have died with his soul intact. Sutton had seen some bad shit in his life, but even he didn’t want to look. He talked to her, drowning out as much as he could. “Come on, baby. Fight. Break that bastard’s hold on you. On us. I mean us. I’m not leaving you alone here, not a chance, so don’t even …”
A quiver took root inside of him and built with the beat of her rising magic. “That’s it, baby.” She was doing it was his last thought as the world began to spin into a white and blue fog and they were pulled, pushed, and hurled, and then they were feeling the wet spray from the waterfall.
Sutton held on tight to Carla and lifted his head to see that they stood on the same stone path they’d been on before. They were surrounded by the leafy foliage with the blooming flowers that mixed with her lavender scent. They were damp with mist from the waterfall just ahead of them.
Asmodeus had found them here before, but for a few minutes, it would do. He ran his hand down her long hair. Beneath her hair, he could feel her skin.
They were both naked again. It meant something that they were both naked in her safe place. She trusted him that deeply. He pulled her head back, looking down into her haunted, tight face. “This isn’t your fault. We couldn’t save those witches or Brigg.”
Some of the rich brown and green began to darken in her eyes as she relaxed into his hold. “I know that intellectually. But I still wanted to.”
“I know.” As awful as realizing exactly what had happened to Brigg was, as terrible as seeing witches slaughtered, holding Carla in his arms was a gift. He knew they only dared stay here a few minutes. “Are you all right? Tell me what he’s doing to you. Who is doing it to you?”
“Asmodeus must have zeroed in on more than just Keri; he found the wavelength of my bond to her. Someone is slipping in and pulling me into visions they want me to see. It’s a psychological game to break me down so he can get control of my mind.”
Sutton didn’t know how to fight this. Armed rogues, yeah, he could fight them. But this? “How? Why?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t … I was scared. Maybe a demon witch but I don’t know. I’ve never had to trace it before, never had it happen before.”
The feel of her in his arms, the absolute bliss of touching her with no curse threatening to erupt, eased his pulsing rage. His dick had gone hard seconds after they landed here, but this wasn’t the time. “How did you pull me in?”
She leaned back and said, “The only other person I could pull into the astral plane from a distance was Keri.”
“Did you ever try anyone else?”
She hesitated, and finally said, “My father. He had me try it on him after …”
The scent of incense floated on the mist of the waterfall, threaded with the sound of laughter.
Carla went stiff, then pushed out of his arms. “Keri? Where are you?” She turne
d around, her hair swinging out to brush his chest. “Keri?”
From the corner of his eye, Sutton thought he saw a starburst of lights that formed into two young teenage girls dancing amid swirling fog next to the waterfall. They were both in fancy dresses that made them look like girls playing dress up. When he turned his head to get a better look, the image disappeared. Chills danced over Sutton’s skin.
The scent and laughter faded.
“Did you see that? What was that?” He turned to find Carla staring at the spot where the image had been, her hands lifted and reaching.
She dropped her hands. “That was me and Keri. The first time I pulled her into the astral plane from a distance. Our dad had been doing one of his endless tests on us, and Keri was bored, restless, and miserable.”
He reached for her hand. She was more beautiful than ever, the glow of the memory warming her skin, lifting her breasts. Tugging her closer to him, he forced himself to focus on her words. “What test?”
“Dad was testing our powers. He’d have us perform various magic, then test our blood in an attempt to isolate the genetic markers in witches. On that day, he was doing it with us separated. Keri hated the testing, but forcing her to be alone in a room like that was worse. Keri was a strong telepath, and I could feel how miserable she was. So I reached out in the next room, grabbed her spirit, and took us both out of our bodies to the astral plane. We summoned music and danced and laughed at thwarting Dad.”
Sutton could feel her joy in the memory. “Why were you in those dresses? Yours was delicate gold, and Keri’s was white.”
Surprise widened her eyes. “You can tell us apart.”
He frowned at her and squeezed her hand in his. “I can always tell and so can the eagle. So why the dresses? They almost looked like wedding dresses.”
A real smile warmed up her face, making her eyes sparkle and her witch-shimmer dance over her skin. “They kind of were. Keri and I had this fascination with the Ancestors. What they look like, who they are. We thought they must be like princesses or goddesses. We imagined that they wore these long flowing dresses, sort of like a bride. We’d pore over magazines, and when we had enough power, we’d create our Ancestor Dresses. Kind of like little girls dreaming of their wedding.”
Soul Magic Page 11
