“No joke.” She grabbed him by the arms again. “We are not leaving without her.”
He drew back, and she whirled on him, urgency in the way she set her shoulders. “She knows we’re here. You can bet she’ll have given her magehelds a kill order.”
“Then we better move fast.” She tugged on his hand again. “I need your help, Palla.”
“Then stop what you’re doing.” He shrugged. “If I go off, dead drop me.”
She nodded, and a moment later, his magic was back. The screams started again, everything tainted by what remained of Avitas, but this time he remade a connection with Wallace, hooking in deep, concentrating on her and her serenity. She was his lifeline, a sliver of sanity.
They took the stairs, sharing their mental map of the house. Madness twisted through him, compelling. Alluring. His life could be whole again, the way it used to be. She was so close. Longing spread through him, joy that his nightmare was over and through all that, fear he would lose her again.
“Palla,” said another voice. Not Avitas. “Palla, snap out of it.”
Other. Not demonkind; magekind.
He knew the woman. Wallace Jackson, and he should have fucking killed her for being a witch—The center of his body turned to fire because he was oath-bound to her. Memories flickered through him interspersed with moments of clarity. Wallace Jackson. The two of them had been practicing for this moment. Him seconds from shifting into one of his true forms and taking the sex where they needed it to go. Wallace wasn’t Avitas and then in his head she was. She was Avitas and not, and he slid back to the insanity of his missing life. Her screams became his. Pleading. Heartbroken wails. Her calls for help. Palla, where are you?
He stumbled. He’d made a blood oath to protect a witch? Why the hell had he done that when he wasn’t her mageheld? He moved up the stairs, the witch he was bound to protect behind him, steady, and yes, there was that oddness about her. There was a solidity to her, a stillness that puzzled him and drew him along the link he had with her. Not a normal witch.
Wallace. She was Wallace, and he had taken her to bed, and he had felt. He’d been so close to taking on one of his true forms and she’d considered telling him yes.
Long years as a mageheld had taught him there were thousands of ways for an enslaved demon to follow the letter of an order without carrying out the spirit of it. He’d find a way if he could, and if not, well then. Better if Avitas ended up bound by his oath to the witch than for him to do nothing. He kept moving, wrapped in magic that kept him unseen. Unfelt. Unheard.
“Palla. Slow down. Slow down. There are magehelds coming. Jesus. Stop.”
Here. In this room. The door was locked, and he drew power, more, more of it because Avitas was here.
“Palla. Wait.”
Like hell. He blew away the door. Vanished every molecule in his way. He strode in, heedless, because Avitas was calling for him, still dying endlessly.
He zeroed in on her. She was here. So close. There. On a table across the room. A box hardly larger than his hand. Seconds before he would have had the box in hand, the fucking witch lunged in front of him, blocking his way. He snarled, and only his oath whipping through him stopped him from killing her. The blowback took him to his knees. She bent over him—ready to kill him because that’s what witches did to his kind and then there was blessed calm. Silence.
Reality slammed back.
Wallace shoved the box in her purse. “You okay?”
“Yes.”
She’d done it. She had the talisman, and she’d cut off the magic inside.
“They’re coming. We have to get out. Now.”
Exactly the way they’d practiced.
“Well, well, well.”
Palla turned, his mind clear, his power on tap as he faced the witch who’d murdered his soul. His oath to Wallace burned through him, recognizing the danger she was in now. “Fucking witch.”
Five magehelds flanked her. They were big, and judging from appearances, strong enough to pose a challenge even to him. Two of them were pulling enough magic to have turned their eyes unnatural colors. He couldn’t feel a mageheld’s magic, but Wallace could, and there was enough of their link going that he got the echo of the magehelds.
“Palla. Isn’t that right?” Jeanne smiled. Hundreds of years lived beyond her natural life span and she was youthful still.
She had a cigarette in one hand, hand-rolled, because it wasn’t tobacco, but copa. The witch had managed her addiction for much longer than most. Magekind who’d been hopping their magic with copa for even half as long as Jeanne had been alive were either burned out, dead, or fast approaching the point where the drug would kill them.
He put himself in front of Wallace. Whatever happened, whatever Jeanne did or ordered her magehelds to do for her, Wallace wasn’t going to do the necessary, which was kill every single one of them before it was too late. Fine. Nothing wrong with him getting in a little vengeance while he made sure Wallace got out with the talisman.
Jeanne drew on her copa and let out a stream of smoke. Faded blue letters were tattooed on her hands and fingers, words of power—an affectation of the old French mages. Christophe dit Menart, Jeanne’s one-time lover, had done the same to his body. “I thought you belonged to dit Menart.”
“Dead.”
“I heard of that.” She let another stream of smoke from her lips and spoke in Irish. “Was it you killed him?”
“No.”
“Your friend?” She waved a hand and switched to English. “If you brought her here for me, I can tell you, I am not interested in any human with so little power. Neither are they.” She gestured to the magehelds behind her. They arranged themselves in front of the door Palla had disintegrated. The largest two blocked the way. As if he didn’t get that Jeanne wasn’t going to let them go anywhere. He could take the magehelds no problem, but not until they were someplace where Wallace could escape to the car.
Wallace slipped her arm around his waist. She could kill with her magic. With one stroke, she could take down everyone, but she would never do it. He would without a single regret, but she wouldn’t. He was ready. Willing to die. “You have such a beautiful house,” she said. “I told Palla I wanted to see the place.”
The flow of her magic shaped the chaos at the edges of the void that everyone mistook for the locus of her magic. No one but him realized what she was doing. Three of the magehelds lost their severe expressions. Wallace leaned against him. “It’s okay, isn’t it, that we’re looking around? There wasn’t anyone at the door when we came in.”
“No, dear child. No, it is not all right.”
“I am so sorry. It’s my fault. He told me I was being an idiot, but I just never listen.”
They did not know, Jeanne or her magehelds, that Wallace was taking away their hostility. Jeanne sent a sharp look in the direction of her magehelds, but she, too, was not as angry as she had been. “You should not be in my home.”
“No, ma’am. We should not be.”
She’d smoked her copa down to a butt too small to continue. She peeled open the paper and extracted the rest of the copa. She placed it, ashes, ember, and all, in her mouth. “Whatever you are doing, demon, cease immediately.”
He lifted his hands. “No can do.”
“You swore to protect her? Why?” She studied them. “Have you taken her to bed?”
“Blew my mind.”
“I do not approve.”
“Demons fuck witches all the time.”
She gave Wallace a long look. “Some things are just not done.”
“Times have changed.”
Wallace’s magic flowed through the room like smoke, and it was nothing like what he was used to. “Palla, sweetie, she’s right. We should not be here. We need to be going.”
“What is this?” Jeanne focused on Wallace, and her eyes narrowed. “An indwell of some kind?”
Wallace smiled at Jeanne full on. “Thank you for letting us have a look around your
spectacular house.”
“You are welcome, naturally.”
“It’s so beautiful.” She took Palla’s hand and walked to the doorway. “Did you decorate yourself?”
“This room, yes.”
“You must love living here.”
“I do.”
“You’ll walk us to the door won’t you? I love your staircase. The marble’s from Italy, am I right?”
Palla kept his mouth closed, and his magic on tap enough that he could take quick action if needed. The witch walked with them through the house as if they were honored guests. It was the most fucked up, amazing, ballsy thing he’d ever seen.
At the front door, Jeanne leaned in to kiss Wallace’s cheek. A ward, a normal one, popped. The sound startled them all. Jeanne blinked twice, and then her smile twisted into a grimace as she realized she’d been had.
His oath triggered.
“Why, you little bitch.” She gestured to her magehelds. “Kill them. As slowly or quickly as you like, but make sure you start and end with her.”
Palla punched the largest mageheld with a backward elbow strike and drew enough power to bring down the house. Jeanne’s eyes widened.
“Sorry.” Wallace lifted her hands like she was apologizing for forgetting to bring dessert. Then she dead dropped Jeanne and every single mageheld in the room.
CHAPTER 15
Wallace yelped when Jeanne broke free. To her right, Palla had already dealt with two of the magehelds in the first seconds of her dead dropping them. A fourth did not go down as easily as the others. The crack of Jeanne’s power scared the hell out of her, but she and Palla had practiced defending against an attack so unrelentingly that she reacted on instinct. Trust that her magic would be there. And it was.
Her link with Palla went electric. She faced Jeanne, calm, because that was how her magic worked. He touched one of the magehelds, and the other demon’s chest blossomed red. He intended to die. Even without his oath to protect her, that had been his plan all along. She wasn’t going to get that happen.
All the description in the world couldn’t convey what it was like to encounter a mageheld in real life. The ugliness shook her to her core. Was it any wonder some of the demonkind believed violence was their only recourse in the face of such evil?
This time when the center of her flexed hard, she knew why, she understood what she intended to happen. She’d made this work before, and she could do it again. She grinned big and wide, and the river of magic Jeanne sent at her hit hers and vanished, subsumed in the power she’d been surrounded by her entire life.
Jeanne drew more magic; the air around her hissed.
Wallace shaped the air. Sparks appeared then vanished at the border between Wallace’s magic and Jeanne’s. Hers gathered speed, sliding along the backwash of Jeanne’s. At the termination point, Jeanne grunted and staggered back.
Meanwhile, one of the magehelds had flanked Palla and opened up a wound across his back. More magehelds rushed them. The twisted, blackened core that was Jeanne’s enslavement of them enraged her, terrified her. Palla was in the thick of that mass of demons who were compelled to the witch’s bidding.
Jeanne called more magehelds, and they flooded in from elsewhere in the house. Some shifted into non-human forms, attacking with claws or fangs or talons. Wherever Palla touched them, red blossomed. The smell of blood permeated the room. He was drawing the magehelds away from the door, giving her a way out because she had agreed to help him get the talisman to Nikodemus.
Wallace gathered her power and displaced the remaining magehelds’ magic with hers. Not a reach for power to shape and use as a weapon but a container that displaced what had been there before. She did not give her magic form the way Maddy had taught them. She created the boundaries of the container and at that intersection; a deadly, targeted chaos.
The magehelds she reached with her magic could not fight. The air around them prevented them from moving. Palla touched the nearest unaffected mageheld, and the demon collapsed. Another mageheld down. She wrapped up more of them, and Jeanne called in more.
With a rising sense of desperation, she saw how she could kill the witch and end this right now. The knowledge lodged her in, choked her. She could not. Could not take a life any more than she could allow Palla to die. Her magic flexed. More magehelds went down and some stayed down; stunned. Others slowed, and a very few fought free of the effect. One of few who remained conscious rolled to his stomach, cut off from his magic, but also cut off from his enslavement. His gaze locked on Jeanne.
The witch drew power again. She’d spent weeks working with witches like Jeanne. She’d failed at every turn, but all those weeks she’d learned how they used their power. Jeanne’s magic burned through the air, and Wallace stopped it dead because she could do magic. She followed that with a dead drop focused on nothing but the witch, and that massive void blossomed out, and she saw that she hadn’t been bold enough. She hadn’t trusted enough. She could stop all the magic in this house. All of it.
She displaced everything that any demon or magekind had ever done to perpetuate the magic here. Somewhere else in the house something popped. One of the overhead lights exploded. Then another. And another. The effort burned through her, and then whipped through the house.
Every mageheld standing went down. Jeanne staggered and let out a howl of rage at finding herself helpless. The air over the witch rained sparks, but there was nothing Jeanne could do because she did not understand how to combat magic used the way Wallace used hers.
Her ears rang, her skin buzzed, and from the corner of her eye, she could see the glowing band of color Palla had helped draw around her upper arm. Glowing through her shirt. Then she couldn’t hear anything, and she wondered if she’d gone deaf. In the silence, one of the demons who had stayed conscious continued his belly-crawl toward Jeanne.
Across the room, Palla launched himself at her and there was nothing natural about that leap. He landed at her feet, half crouched, facing Jeanne and the magehelds. She heard him shouting, the only words in a vacuum of sound. “Go. Go. Go!”
Not without him. Never. Wallace grabbed a handful of Palla’s shirt and yanked. He came with her, running for the door while the silence softened around the edges and her fingers and toes went icy cold.
Jeanne had done something to keep the door from opening, but Wallace drew on her power, and there was a boom, and the door was open.
They headed for the car at a sprint.
CHAPTER 16
Palla drove down the hill like nothing had happened. He’d cut their psychic link, and that was strange, not having that. The gash across his back was deep and glistening with blood and two separate streams of blood trailed down his near arm and converged at his elbow.
She could see him healing, feel the magic. She was cold through and through, and even though she could hear, the world was muffled. The farther they got from Jeanne’s house, the colder she felt.
Reality returned with a painful thud. Too much noise. Too much everything. The magic she’d been holding snapped like a rubber-band stretched too far. Oh, God. Her dead drop of Jeanne and her magehelds ended, and that meant every demon who’d survived Palla’s retribution was once again under Jeanne’s control.
She sagged on the seat.
“You okay?” he asked.
“We didn’t die, so I guess so.” She was okay. Mostly. She kept her hands on her lap because they wouldn’t stop shaking. If she closed her eyes, she saw Palla moving among the attacking magehelds, a machine. Those magehelds had been ordered to kill, and his oath to her meant he hadn’t had a choice about what to do. She should have understood that knowing he’d kill on her behalf was the same as her killing them herself. “You?”
“You have the talisman, right?”
“Yes.” Her purse was on the floorboard of the car, between her feet. The talisman was inside, still in the box. Still wrapped up with her magic.
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.�
�� Blood continued to drip off his elbow so she scrounged up some napkins and put them where they’d catch most of the blood. She didn’t know how to reach out to him, or even if she should. If he wanted to talk about it, he’d tell her so, right? “Do you think her magehelds will find us before we get to Nikodemus?”
He gave her a look. “Change of plans.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can crack the talisman myself.”
“Is that safe?”
“No.” He stuck his phone in the Bluetooth car cradle and a few minutes later music came over the car speakers.
Death metal was not her thing, but she wasn’t going to complain. At least he was alive to listen to music she hated. She slunk down in the seat. More tortured, raspy, voices grated along her nerves, and just when she was sure the sound would send her around the bend, he switched off the music and said, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Quiet ate up the inside of the car. She stared out the window, sick at heart to realize that she’d screwed up. Having sex with Palla hadn’t been a mistake. She didn’t regret that for a second and besides, she half suspected it was inevitable. He was hot, for one thing. For another, even after that first fantastic encounter when he could have been an asshole about it, he hadn’t been. The better she’d gotten to know him, the more she’d understood and respected him, the more she’d trusted him, the better the sex got. And that could only be a bonus, finding out you got along okay with someone.
Liking Palla wasn’t the problem. The problem was she’d let him see and learn things about her that she’d never talked about with anyone, and he’d listened and paid attention. And there was that whole thing they’d never actually talked about which was them taking the sex farther and the way he reacted when he was thinking about that. From everything she’d seen and heard, the demonkind did not abandon their children or the mothers who bore them. They didn’t blame. They didn’t question.
Now she could only sit here aware of what it meant that she wanted to cut him a break for listening to horrible music when she knew part of the reason he’d turned it on was stop the conversation. She’d tangled up great sex with and now we have a future. There wasn’t any future for them. He was going to go forward with his life in a world she didn’t belong in.
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