He could see it so clearly, the two little witches playing their own kind of dress up. “It was a game you only played with Keri, right?” And Keri had shown him, somehow she’d given him the gift of seeing Carla as a girl, and shown him how close the two sisters had been.
“Right.”
Touching her face, he shifted to the subject that seemed to trouble her. “Your dad—”
Her joy dimmed. “Is the psi-geneticist Jerome Wagner. Keri and I were his test subjects. I haven’t talked to him since Keri’s murder.”
Sutton pulled her against him. Time was ticking by and he needed to get her to some form of safety. He wished he could keep her here forever where he could touch her and make love to her, but the risk was too great. “If Keri was the only other person you could pull from a distance, how did you pull me into that vision?”
She lifted her head, taking a deep breath.
Sutton drifted his gaze down her face, her long neck, to her breasts. His dick twitched hard against her stomach, seeing her nipples peak as he stared. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His hands tightened on her back, wishing he could stroke and tease her breasts.
His eagle quivered, feeling the same desperate excitement, lust, and sheer joy of just being able to look. The eagle recognized Carla as his and didn’t understand that they couldn’t complete the bond that would truly free him and make them all whole.
She finally said, “I think I’m going to have to ask my father for help.” Dryly, she added, “Maybe all those years of study will actually mean something.”
When Carla awoke from the vision, she found her mom in the kitchen talking to the computer while rolling out cookie dough. “Tawny, I have to stay here. What’s the problem exactly?”
“We have two parties that want us to provide magical cookies!” The young witch’s blue eyes were wide, and panic had paled her face so that her freckles stood out.
Chandra set the rolling pin down, picked up her glass of ice water, and leaned her hip against the counter. “When?”
“Two weeks. One’s a bridal shower and the other is a charity event for an animal rescue center.”
“Relax, it’s a piece of cake. I can whip those up in two days. All I need is for you to get them to fill out the spell sheets.”
Carla made herself a cup of tea while listening to the conversation. Spell sheets were actually questionnaires to find out how many guests, the theme, and all the details her mom would need to create the right cookies, each with its own rolled-up spell and wrapped with a pretty ribbon. Carla and Keri had spent a good number of their growing-up years in Chandra’s cookie shop. Carla had created quite a few disasters with her scientific/witch experiments she’d attempted while her mom worked. Carla took each and every disaster as a personal insult for about three seconds, but Keri would be laughing so hard, Carla would end up laughing, too.
Just like they’d laughed when they had escaped their dad to the astral plane. She missed Keri.
Her mom said goodbye to her assistant, Tawny, picked up star and moon cookie cutters, and got to work on the dough. “Stalling won’t make it any easier to tell me.”
Carla set down her tea. “How do you know I’m stalling?”
Her mom moved with a sweeping grace, cutting the cookies, arranging them on the sheet, taking one batch out of the oven to cool, and sliding the next batch in. “Honey, Keri was the one who would rip the Band-Aid off in one pull. You’d design a scientific protocol for removing a Band-Aid painlessly as a delaying tactic.”
Grinning in memory, she said, “Keri would get so annoyed, she’d rip my Band-Aid off.”
Her mom laughed. “She was our brave, take-on-the-world girl, wasn’t she?”
The ache in her chest matched the pain in the scar on her lower back. “You know she saved me. The day she died, she connected to my chakras, and threw me across the room. It’s not fair that she’s dead and I’m alive.”
Her mom stood up and turned, her eyes filling with tears. “Carla, don’t. You would have done the same for her if you could have. You know that.”
“But I wouldn’t have been so reckless! Trying to bind herself to my armband was too dangerous. She should have gone on to Summerland, not risked her soul to save me. Now she’s trapped in that knife. I can feel her, Mom, but I can’t reach her.”
“Honey.” Her mom rushed over, putting her arms around her. “You’re trying!”
Miserable, she said, “Something else is getting in. I don’t know how. I can’t track him or her. They are trying to destroy both Keri and me. I’m not going to let them hurt her anymore.”
Her mom leaned back to look in her face. “Carla, you listen to me. If it comes down to a choice, you will let Keri go. Do you hear me? I won’t lose you! I won’t! Somewhere in that oversize brain of yours, you think I would have picked Keri over you. But I love you both. You’re my girls. I could never choose.”
Carla knew she was acting like a child. It was Keri who was emotional and reached out like this when she needed comfort. Not Carla. It was Keri who’d curled up on her bed and hugged her stuffed eagles when she was sad. Carla would work on something in the lab until she got her dad’s approval, that was how she got her comfort. Carla reached out and hugged her mother tightly. “I know that, Mom. I mean it. I never thought you loved Keri more. You always made us both feel special.” It was true. She’d accepted each of them for who they were. Maybe in some ways, she understood Keri better, but she had loved Carla as much as Keri.
“I can feel the witch hunter on you.”
Carla took a deep breath to get control of herself and let her mom go. “While I was sleeping, I got pulled into some kind of vision, and Sutton was there, too. He’s in the bond with Keri and me.”
Her mom’s green eyes deepened in color. She reached down and took Carla’s hand. “Then he must be your soul mirror.”
“Or Keri’s.” How did she explain it to her mom? “Sutton would rip the Band-Aid off.”
“Like Keri,” her mom said softly.
Very much like her. But every time she heard his voice, or saw him, or felt his touch, she wanted to crawl into his arms and curl up against him. She wanted to claim him as hers! She wanted him to fill her up and make her feel whole again. Sutton had understood that Max had hurt her without even understanding how. She had told him about Lorenzo, and he’d understood that, too. It was like he saw inside her. But would he be able to do that as Keri’s mate because Keri could see inside her? “I need help, Mom. Twin witches are rare, and this is way out of the Circle Witches’ realm of experience. Something is tracking me using Keri’s bond. Something evil. I don’t know how it’s doing it.”
Her mom firmed up her expression. “Okay, tell me what you’re thinking. Spit it out, Carla.”
“Dad.”
Her jaw dropped and she stepped back almost as a reflex. “Jerome?” She jerked and said, “Cookies!” She turned, waved her hand to open the oven door. The hot cookie sheet floated out to sit on the counter. A new one slid into the oven and the door closed.
Carla waited, letting her mom work and have a moment.
Chandra turned to her daughter. “You haven’t talked to him in two years, have you?” Carla shook her head. “No.”
“He blames himself for Keri’s murder. It’s taken a toll on him.”
She refrained from reminding her mom that Jerome had blamed her. Carla knew Chandra had tried to stay in contact with Jerome, and she never wanted to put her in the middle.
Chandra went on. “He sold his research lab, and basically became a hermit. He won’t let me see him. He hasn’t written a book, given a lecture … nothing.” She paused, then asked, “How do you think he can help?”
Surprised at the twist of sympathy she felt for her dad, she wondered if she had been too harsh. Keri used to tell her that it wasn’t good for her to hold on to a grudge. “I don’t understand the link, the magic, or the force that’s pulling me into the vision. He’s studied Keri and me exhaus
tively. I think he might be able to help me figure this out.”
“Are you sure you’re not just looking for a scientific protocol to a magical problem?”
Carla was honest. “I don’t know, Mom. But I don’t know where else to turn. When I took Sutton back to my spot on the astral plane, Keri seemed to be able to connect with both of us for a few seconds, then she was gone again. But she wasn’t the one who showed Sutton and me the vision. That was something else.” She took a breath and said, “I’m scared, Mom. I never thought I’d have to go to Dad and ask for help, but right now, I’ll do whatever it takes for Keri.”
Her mom’s skin bleached white. “You think Asmodeus has her?”
Carla put her hand on her mom’s shoulder. “Not the demon specifically. Keri’s not a demon witch so he can’t pull her into the underworld. But he may have sent his henchman, Quinn Young, after her.”
“How will we get the knife from him? He has the Immortal Death Dagger!”
“I will. Whatever it takes.” There had to be a way, whether through magic, science, or both. “I’ll call Dad.” She lifted her hand, and her cell phone floated out from where she’d left it in her bedroom. She made the call before she could talk herself out of it.
The first ring set her heart to pounding. The next two rings twisted her nerves tighter and tighter. What would she say? How would she ask him for help when they hadn’t talked in two years?
“Huh?” A bleary voice answered.
Carla checked the clock. It was almost noon. “Dad?”
“Charra?” There was the sound of fumbling, then he was back on the line. “Carla?”
“It’s me, Dad.”
“Are you and your mother all right?” The words were carefully enunciated.
“Yes, but I, we, need your help.” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, then back again, trying to ease the tension in her muscles.
Silence.
“Dad?”
“Help with what?” The words came out in a slur.
Her stomach jiggled with nerves. Had she thought this would be easy? Before she lost her nerve, she blurted out, “It’s Keri, Dad. Her soul is trapped in a rogue’s knife and things are happening that I don’t understand. You’ve studied magic …”
In a hopeless voice, he said, “I’m out of it. I don’t study magic anymore. I’m a mortal, I can’t help you. Go find a witch who has real power. Keri never wanted my help. None of you did.” He hung up.
Carla dropped her hand holding the phone, staring at her mom. “He said no. Hung up. He didn’t sound right.”
Chandra seemed to shrink a couple inches. “I heard he was drinking.”
Years of rage grabbed her by the throat. “Keri needs him this one last time and he’s too busy getting drunk.”
“Carla …”
“Don’t defend him. Don’t. I’ll find Keri without him. He can drink himself to death and he’d better not come crawling to me when his abused liver poisons him! I’m not going to use witchcraft to heal him when he wouldn’t lift a finger to help Keri.” She would not cry. She would not fall apart. What the hell had she been thinking to believe her dad would help her and Keri? He’d only wanted them for their magic.
Her cell phone rang, and she snapped it open. Caller ID told her it was Max. She dropped the phone on the counter and stormed out.
A beep told him there was another match. Sutton was in the warehouse working at the large computer console that took up an entire corner of the huge room. He looked up at the two pictures displayed side by side on the largest monitor. The image on the left was his digital shot of Pam. The one on the right was a Pamela Lynn Miller of Glendale, California.
Not their Pam. He shifted back to the keyboard and deleted that picture. The program hummed along looking for the next match to the criteria he’d set.
Sutton turned back to working on hacking into the Rogue Cadre’s computer network. He had taken a BlackBerry off one of the rogues he had killed at his cabin. Now he was working on tracking the computer that sent the rogue the directions to kill Sutton.
The email had been routed through anonymous proxy servers. Sutton had been raised a tracker, and computer tracking wasn’t much different. It took the same concentration and patience. He would find the computer that sent this email eventually, he just had to keep picking up each thread and following it. He’d discovered that the Rogue Cadre was using a complicated pool of proxy servers and that it switched them around in a random order, routing emails through several of them.
Hitting another dead end, he shoved his roller chair back, stretched out his legs, and crossed his arms over his chest, studying the monitors. He needed to get into the Rogue Cadre’s network to see what the hell was going on. For one thing, it could lead him to the knife that Keri was trapped in. There might be communications in there about that knife. Sutton had a partial list of rogues known to have been in the San Francisco area two years ago, but it wasn’t leading anywhere helpful. He’d known it wouldn’t, there were too many variables, the biggest one being Asmodeus. The demon had done something with the knife after he’d found Carla on the astral plane. That knife had something to do with pulling Carla into that vision.
Then she, or someone, pulled him in, too.
His mind hummed in time with the computer, trying to arrange all the pieces into a pattern. Asmodeus, Keri in the rogue knife, Styx, the brainwashed woman who they could tie to Styx from what Pam had told Carla … were they all connected? How?
Who the hell was Styx and where was he?
Where was Styx getting these women he was brainwashing? Did he have more of them imprisoned? A number of women disappearing would send up an alarm. Pam wasn’t a druggie or hooker that no one noticed missing.
Who or what managed to get control of Carla’s mind?
How were these things connected? There was a pattern, he just had to find it.
The eagle shifted and fretted in the cage of his skin. He was as restless and agitated as the bird. They both needed Carla, were desperate for her. But he knew that if he got near her, if he smelled her rich Arabian-spiced blood, the curse would rise with a vengeance. The dual drives yanked him out of his chair as he tried to pace off his pounding frustration. He stalked past the pool table in the center, ignored Key’s drafting table, and turned right into the open gym area.
Since they were all in one place, Sutton told them what he’d learned with Carla. “Brigg is rogue.”
Linc’s gold eyes were defiant. “You saw him? Saw him actually kill a witch?”
“In a vision. Carla pulled me into it. When we left, two witches had been cut and dumped into a locked room with him.”
Linc slammed down three hundred pounds of barbell and rolled up from the bench. His skin was nearly the color of his gold eyes and soaked with sweat. His chin thrust out. “You didn’t see him go rogue. He could have fought …”
“We found his knife,” Axel said. He had stood back by the treadmills, letting Sutton break the news. Now he walked forward and handed Linc the knife.
The witch hunter dropped his gaze. His gold eyes darkened, his hands curled into fists. “He fought, they killed him. That’s the only way a rogue got his knife.” He lifted his boiling stare and dared any of them to argue. Then he snatched up the knife and stormed out the alley door.
Sutton looked at Key doing curls, Ram cleaning weapons, and Phoenix fiddling with his earbuds from his iPod. “He went rogue. I didn’t watch him cut the two witches, but I heard it.” He had practically felt the man’s soul die off. It pissed him off. Brigg got a raw deal, but in the end, he’d had a choice. He could have used the knife on himself instead of the witches.
“The knife tells me he’s dead or rogue, and if he shows up stinking of copper, I’ll kill him,” Phoenix said, yanking out his earbuds. “Second broken pair.”
Ram held out one hand. “Let me see.” He took the ear-buds and examined the wires. “I don’t doubt what you saw or heard, Sutton. But I am really wor
ried about what you and Carla are getting pulled into. You couldn’t tell who was doing it?” Ram slanted a glance to Phoenix. “Hand over your iPod.”
Sutton shook his head. “All I could see clearly at first was Carla. Then when I touched her, Brigg came into focus in the cement room and I could hear witch screams from somewhere nearby. Carla was there first.”
Axel said, “The soul-mirror bond pulled you in.”
“Yes.” He and Carla both believed that the problem was that she wanted to believe he was her twin’s soul mirror.
“Powerful for being incomplete,” Key mused, as he switched the free weight to the other hand.
Axel pointed out, “All we know about the soul-mirror bond is what we learned from Darcy and me. Each pairing could be different.”
Ram handed the iPod and earbuds back to Phoenix. “Nothing wrong with them. They sound fine.”
Phoenix’s dark-as-death eyes glared at the offending unit, then shifted to Key. “Then someone’s been messing with my playlist. You screwing with me, Dragon Boy?”
Key dropped the dumbbell to the black mat on the cement floor. The jewel-colored dragon tattooed on his chest almost looked like it was grinning. “Nope. Maybe the mortal that shot you shorted out your hearing.”
“I hear fine. It’s the damned iPod. It keeps playing ballads.” He shuddered in disgust and walked out of the gym area. “I’m going to delete and resync my playlist.” His footsteps echoed as he crossed the large warehouse to the banks of computers Sutton ran.
Key laughed. “Hell, wish I’d thought of it. I’d have filled your playlist with boy bands!”
Sutton ignored them. “Damn it, we need a break. Styx hasn’t popped and we haven’t heard anything from Quinn Young. That rogue I killed the other night was terrified when I just mentioned Young’s name.”
“Only reaction I get, too,” Key said. “It’s that death dagger burned into his arm. The bastard’s crazy.”
Soul Magic Page 12
