Witch Interrupted

by Wallace, Jody

  He shrugged. “You’re of age.” Juvenile wolves weren’t all minors. “I’ll say you belong to me.”

  “Like that will matter,” she scoffed. Tonya and Dad were downstairs filling a tattoo kit, per Marcus’s instructions. He kept glancing at the store camera, as did she, so she knew he wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable with the separation. “They’ll force us all to join the pack. Me, you, Ba, Tonya. You’re withholding my mask to bully me, and it puts us all at risk.”

  He adjusted the volume on the television. “How long will the mask last?”

  “Thirty-six hours.” Tonya was a master of disguises. Most spells lasted twenty-four hours, tops.

  “No can do. I don’t want you to have a mask on. I’m not using one either, so it’s not bullying. It’s procedure.”

  “You’re not masked?” she yelled, stiffening. “Jesus. They can sense you a lot farther than twenty feet away.”

  Calmly, he rubbed his chin as if reconsidering. “I don’t want either of us to have anything on tonight, Katie. At all.”

  She tried so very hard not to blush and failed. “Oh. Right.”

  “While we’re on the subject, are you ovulating?” Marcus’s expression didn’t change, but his stare unnerved her. “I’ll need to procure condoms.”

  Why was she insulted by the fact he didn’t seem enthused by the idea of sex with her? She shouldn’t care. But she did.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Your heart rate just increased.”

  “I’m stressed.”

  “Finish packing.”

  She stomped into the bedroom, grabbed the go bag from the closet floor and tossed it on the unmade bed. “I finished fifteen minutes ago. Tonya’s and Dad’s bags are complete too.”

  “I know. I put them next to the door. I just assumed since yours was in your closet, you weren’t done.” Coming up behind her, he reached for it. “Does it have more space? I’d like to pack extra simples.”

  She didn’t want him touching her luggage, so she tapped his watch. “We should go. If we’re not going to mask, we don’t have a huge safety radius.”

  “Large enough.”

  “Don’t be so sure. Have you considered that the two of us together might be more…noticeable?”

  “Tonya did say we make an attractive couple.” His hands settled on her shoulders, and he set her aside as if moving a piece of furniture.

  “Marcus,” she said, hoping to divert him from her duffel, “it’s a legitimate question.”

  “You mistrust my self-preservation instincts?”

  He was too close to the bed for her to wedge herself between him and her luggage without being obvious. “It seems like you’re being careless.”

  “I’m never careless. I’ve avoided Birmingham for six months. I know my radius well.” He unzipped her bag, the corner of his mouth curling up when she growled at him in irritation. He sorted through her possessions until he located the items she’d secreted with the more innocuous things. He pulled out the spell baggies and a small bottle labeled Shampoo. “Aren’t these supposed to be in the case with your organics?”

  “I was in a hurry.”

  He set the baggies aside and sniffed the bottle. “Tut, tut. What do you need with a strong emetic?”

  Dammit. It had been like pulling teeth to stow those things while he’d been staring a hole through her every move. If he found what was inside her tampons, she was really going to hear about it. “I figure at some point in the next five days I might want to puke.”

  “It’s harmful. It wouldn’t affect you. What could you mean to do with it? Are you old enough to remember when Arsenic and Old Lace was first in theaters?”

  “Are you?” she shot back.

  “Born in 1908.” Witches didn’t reveal their ages easily, and it surprised her that he’d just…shared. As if they were friendly. “You?”

  It shouldn’t hurt to share back. “1941.”

  “Not quite juvenile,” he said generously.

  “I was twenty-one when the council…” Took over her entire life and twisted her into a secret weapon he had good reason to hate. He didn’t want to know anything about her except what she could do for his research. “Never mind.”

  “I gather they don’t give convex witches much choice.” He refolded her clothing more neatly than she’d packed it. “Could your father not protect you?”

  Those were not the days of her life she cared to remember. “Why would he? Convex witches are unnatural and wrong. We warp the precious gift.” She fluttered her fingers at him. “Ooooh, evil. That’s what normal witches think.”

  Her father, in the past twenty years, had come around, but they’d not had a healthy relationship while she’d been with the keepers. She hadn’t had anything healthy or good while she’d been with the keepers.

  Marcus frowned. She wondered if he realized she was throwing his own words back at him. “Evil’s a strong word.”

  “I’m a strong witch.”

  “I could formulate a side study of convex versus regular magic.”

  She crossed her arms. “Why?”

  “The unknown causes fear. Fear makes people assume the wrong thing.” He cleared his throat. “Also, such a study could be fascinating. The keepers wouldn’t let me see their materials, but with you on staff, I could eliminate a lot of…unknowns.”

  “So I’m staff?” She let out an amazed laugh. “Will I be getting a salary? Perhaps a glowing letter of recommendation when we’re through?”

  He just smiled, that awful, awful smile that made her want to jump him in a sexual way. Setting her clothes aside, he returned to her bag. With a sniff, he located a packet of herbs in a pair of socks. Then, to her dismay, he opened her zippered pouch of feminine articles. “Sachets?”

  “Tampons,” she said. “You were curious about my menstrual cycle. Put those in your database.”

  He smelled the pouch anyway. “Interesting hiding place.” He withdrew the fake tampon, ripped off the carefully glued paper and held up the finger-sized tube of herbs. “But I assure you, you don’t need to give me the gift of extra libido.”

  He slid it into his trouser pocket while Katie did her best to maintain a poker face. If she’d sprinkled any of that delightful medley into his food, he’d have become as distracted as she was, and—maybe—she could have overcome her wolf lust long enough to neutralize a rapacious beast intent on having sex with her.

  A dangerous ploy if she didn’t want to be forcibly seduced. Lust spells and wolves were…combustible. But technically, Marcus was already planning to have sex with her. And she’d agreed. And she damn well wanted it, so she’d been willing to risk his combustion.

  “I forgot that was there,” she deadpanned.

  Marcus fiddled with the herbs in his pocket, studying her with narrow eyes. “Tonight you can fight me if that’s what you enjoy in bed, but can’t it wait? I have to ensure everyone’s safety.”

  Even her ears grew hot at the images now in her mind. “That’s hardly the reassurance I want.” Goddess. She needed to nix the fantasizing and behave like an adult.

  “What do you want?”

  Him. She forced her mouth to speak other truths, though.

  “I don’t want you to underestimate the situation. Out of negligence, out of a desire to scare me, I don’t know. I don’t care.” She took a deep breath and exhaled to calm the butterflies. “I’ve agreed to work with you and I understand your motivation, but I don’t want your choices to endanger my father and Tonya. And me, of course. I sure as hell don’t want the keepers to find out I’m alive.”

  “You’ve fooled Lars into thinking you were dead for twenty years,” Marcus said, repacking her bag. “I’m sure you have plenty of ideas for avoiding him.”

  “With magic,” she insisted. “That’s how we managed. My advice is, find a witch who can hide us until my magic comes back. That’s what works, Marcus. We can’t be shitting around with our lives. But I guess that’s out of the question because you think you�
�know everything.”

  He zipped her duffel. “Yep.”

  “Are you not going to tell me any of your plans?” Katie paced across the room. She raked her fingers through her hair. Finally, finally, as thoughts of actually being found by Lars intruded, her sex obsession ebbed. “You must have nothing to tell. We need to make some calls. We might get lucky and dodge the patrol—but it’s less likely the longer we hang around here.” When he didn’t immediately leap into action, she continued. “That doesn’t help Ba and Tonya get their memories back. Our situation is desperate. I could telephone Vern.”

  She was babbling. Her mood had escalated into the panic she should have been feeling this whole time, and she was paying for the delay with a vengeance.

  Zero to sixty in under ten seconds. She buzzed with a harsh panic she hadn’t felt for years. They were going to get caught. Marcus was being a dumbass. Why were they lingering? They needed to mobilize hours ago to avoid the Birmingham patrol.

  “I got the impression you don’t want to rely on Vernon. What about Tonya’s sympathizer friends?”

  “They won’t be her friends when they find out what she’s been up to the past twenty years. They’ll cut her off without question for helping me,” Katie explained. “They aren’t very forgiving.”

  Many sympathizers considered wolves to be their better aspects. Their attrition rate, however, wasn’t as high as one would expect for witches who seemingly worshipped the wolf.

  Purists, on the other hand, wanted all wolves dead. Lars had been rabid about it. Purism had been a calling for him, barely kept in check by region elders and various directors of the keepers. There were other purists on the council, but none as zealous as Lars.

  Katie would have expected a council led by Lars to try to take over the world, but oddly enough it had become less effective once he had become director, according to Tonya.

  “The sympathizers wouldn’t help me either. They think I’m on the keepers’ side,” Marcus said.

  “That leaves Vern. He’d hide us all.” She might need to tell Vern a few lies to get him here, but once he arrived, the old donkey would do the right thing.

  He always did.

  “Vernon Harrower might be Harry Travis’s friend, but he won’t hesitate to notify his fellow elders about me,” Marcus said. “That’s assuming he could reach us unnoticed. The Travises and Vernon are both being watched by the council.”

  “Lars hates him. Of course they spy on him. But Vern knows how to duck spies.” Staying in touch with Katie had been child’s play for the former director of the keepers.

  “I realize you have great faith in Vernon’s abilities, but it’s not safe to contact him.” He checked his watch and sighed. “Five minutes. Come here.”

  “What for?”

  He just crooked his finger at her. She kicked a pillow on the floor, walked over to him and glared. “Is that an order?”

  Marcus, completely unexpectedly, caught her in a strong embrace. He held her against him, no claws, no innuendoes, no comments about monkshood, and scuffed one big hand across her hair. “It’s all right, Katie.”

  She hadn’t cried today, but her throat lumped with a sudden threat of tears. “It’s not all right. Third worst day ever.”

  “Not first?” he asked, stroking her neck and back. “I like to be first.”

  Damned competitive wolf. “The day they came to get me for the council and the day Lars tried to kill me were worse. You’re number three on my list of suck. You’ll have to try harder.”

  He laughed, a rumble that started deep in his chest. “If I told anyone Chang Cai, the dreaded Black Widow, could be funny, they wouldn’t believe it.”

  “I didn’t use to be,” she said, relaxing against him. The life of a keeper hardly lent itself to comic relief. “I changed.”

  “I didn’t use to be either.”

  She drew back and looked at him. “You’re not funny.”

  “You’re kidding, right? I got off some great one-liners yesterday when I was trying to impress the pretty tattooist.”

  “You were flirting with me before you knew I was a witch?” Was he flirting now? He didn’t have to. This was a blackmail slash business relationship, and he’d garnered her cooperation by other means.

  “You’re clever, you’re attractive, and you smell really, really good.” She didn’t think he realized his eyes had flashed blue. “Of course I was flirting.”

  “Marcus,” she said, licking her lips, “I want to get through today alive. If I know your plan, I can help with Ba and Tonya. I can help if anything goes wrong. I would do anything to save them the way they saved me twenty years ago. I would never put them at risk.”

  “Until yesterday.”

  “You and I both sucked yesterday. And now we can’t be egoists fighting over who’s giving orders and who’s tricking whom.”

  He rested his cheek against her hair. “You’re right.”

  “What is going to happen until my magic comes back? Tell me your strategy to keep us hidden. I don’t give two shits about your research right now. The one thing you can definitely trust about me is that I don’t want Lars to find out we’re alive. That includes you.”

  “I don’t need magic to take care of you and your family. I have a route planned that avoids the patrol. My Airstream is warded, and there’s another location we’ll go after that. I can’t let you relay the address to anyone, but I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  Katie tried not to let the panic overwhelm her at the not knowing, at the helplessness. Marcus’s arms around her comforted, as did the fact he was willing to hold her, but he was one man. Too much was at stake. “If the keepers find us together, they’ll kill us.”

  “The benefits of our partnership outweigh the risks.” One of his hands settled at the small of her back, while the other curved around her neck, steady and powerful. Her awareness of his body heightened. “Aren’t you curious, Katie?”

  “About what?”

  His gaze lowered to her mouth. “So many years tracking witches seduced to the other side. Did you wonder how they could be so foolish?”

  “No.” She already knew why. Temptation in the form of a large, masculine hand was spreading across her back until his fingertips brushed the top of her ass. If she’d been sent against Marcus twenty years ago, would she have been able to resist him?

  She sure as hell couldn’t now.

  “Did you wonder what it was like?”

  “No.”

  He lowered his head. “Are you wondering right now?”

  “No.”

  His lips grazed her brow and her cheekbone, lingering. “Are you going to fight me?”

  “No. I mean yes. What?”

  Teeth nipped her jaw. Breath feathered across her lips. Katie closed her eyes and willed him to stop. And to keep going. She couldn’t even answer herself properly. He licked the corner of her mouth, and her fingertips dug into his chest.

  “I haven’t been with a woman since a week after I transformed.” He drew his cheek across hers, his face smooth-shaven, his lips hot. “I’m extremely curious. I can already sense differences.”

  She found herself rising on tiptoes to get closer to him, bending her neck to allow him better access. Her hands slipped up, past his shoulder, to caress his nape.

  Was it the first time she’d touched him without it being a ploy? His hair curled around her fingers. His scent, a heady mix of her sheets and his skin, enveloped her. His hand dropped several inches until he blatantly cupped her ass.

  Katie exhaled as his cock stiffened against her. He nuzzled her, nipped her, everything but kissed her. Need rose in her precipitously.

  “I smell your desire and lose focus. I can’t say I’m fond of my reaction, yet I keep seeking it out. I’ve had more erections in the past twenty-four hours than—”

  The television crackled into loud static.

  Marcus tensed, growing as still as a brick wall. “Someone’s here.”

  “Not agai
n.”

  Beneath them, a gun fired. Tonya screamed.

  Chapter Ten

  Marcus burst into the tattoo parlor to find a middle-aged Caucasian man he didn’t recognize confronting Tonya and Zhang Li. Both men were scowling.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” The unknown man gestured at the bullet hole in the shop window. “Why did you shoot at me?”

  “My goodness, Li.” Tonya hastened to the newcomer’s side and held out her arms as if protecting him from assault. “I know he ran in here like his tail was on fire, but is that any reason to gun him down?”

  Zhang Li studied the pistol in his hand as though he’d never seen it before. Dammit, how had the old weasel found it? Marcus had shut it in his briefcase. Zhang Li set the gun on the counter. “Hell if I know. Been jumpy lately. Too much caffeine.”

  “You could have killed me.” The newcomer swung a backpack off his shoulder, dangling it by his side.

  More complications. Would anyone nearby report gunfire to the police? How was Marcus going to keep this stranger quiet? Not with a hug, that was for sure.

  “I wouldn’t, and I didn’t,” Zhang Li snapped. “So quit your bitching.”

  Tonya shook her head. “You can’t go around assaulting our customers. I’m so sorry, sir. What can we do to make it up to you?”

  Marcus sniffed. Over the scent of gunfire, he realized it wasn’t a customer.

  It was Vernon Harrower.

  Vernon appeared to be as confused as Tonya and Zhang Li. “I’m not a damn customer. I’m…” His bright blue gaze fell on Marcus. “Rodríguez? I can’t believe you’re not dead.”

  Katie’s footsteps pounded up behind Marcus, but he barred the doorway so she couldn’t enter the front room. She must have called the bastard—and told him she was going to kill Marcus.

  His stomach pitted. His disappointment was naive. He’d known what kind of person she was from the beginning. A keeper. He had to quit trying to convince himself she wasn’t like the other keepers simply because he was too fastidious to lust after a killer.