Hunter

by Jacquelyn Frank

  It did. This time she was the only thing to freeze. Flames continued to flicker in the fireplace, and Hunter was still moving toward him.

  “What are you doing?” Hunter demanded. “For the Mother’s sake, Dimitre, she’s a grown woman! She can make her own choices!”

  Dimitre finally did explode. He swung at Hunter, shouting in fury. Hunter dodged him easily, catching the roundhouse punch by the back of Dimitre’s wrist. As gently as he could, he forced the witch to follow the momentum of his own strike right off of his feet. Dimitre hit the floor with a grunt.

  Physically, the blond witch was no threat to Hunter. Magically was another story, he knew, as he glanced over to Tatyana’s frozen form. Leaving Dimitre facing the floor, he cast a binding spell that kept his hands and body locked down where they were. He was hoping that without hand gestures and without being in his line of sight, Dimitre couldn’t target him.

  “You son of a bitch!” Dimitre shouted, making Hunter consider a muting spell as well. However, they needed to talk.

  “No more or less than usual,” he retorted dryly. “What is your problem, Petrova?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re sleeping with her!”

  Hunter sighed. “Yes. I’m aware of that. Why is this such an issue for you?”

  “Because I love her, you miserable bastard!”

  “And now you can’t love her because she slept with me? Or is it because you don’t think I’m good enough for her? Frankly, my friend, you aren’t going to think anyone is good enough for her. And you have to get over that”

  “I swear to God I’m going to kill you for this,” Dimitre hissed. “I thought you were after my damn sister, and that was hard enough, but Annali is mine! You hear me? She’s mine! I’ll kill you for touching her!”

  “Anna—?” Hunter swiveled his head between Dimitre and his sister, completely puzzled. “What in the name of the Lady are you talking about? I wouldn’t ever touch Annali! No more than you would touch Tatyana!”

  Dimitre laughed, but it was a mirthless, pained sound. The sound of a man with a heart that was breaking. A man shattering into pieces.

  “I find you in here alone, the two of you dressing, and you just admitted to me you were screwing around! She’s standing right there, frozen in time like an evidence exhibit!”

  “Wait ... Annali? Annali is frozen in time? Right here?”

  “Oh my God, I can’t do this,” Dimitre rasped.

  “Dimitre!” Annali exclaimed as she came running into the room. “Hunter, what are you doing?”

  Annali scrambled onto the floor beside the man she loved and Hunter released the binding so she could touch him. Dimitre shoved himself away from her, staring at her with real tears in his wounded eyes. He flung his attention between the blonde reaching toward him in moving supplication, and the one he had frozen.

  “Don’t! Don’t touch me!” he demanded of the moving Annali, keeping his hands down so he didn’t freeze her as well. “Is this a trick, Finn?”

  “If it is, it’s of your own making. I see two different women here. Your sister, Tatyana, whom you’ve got frozen like a popsicle, and Annali, your lover. Not mine. Yours. This one is mine.” He moved to Tatyana, his mind moving through his vast inventory of spells as he tried to come up with something he could use to countermand the magic her brother was using.

  Annali gasped and turned on Dimitre with every ounce of indignant Southern fury she could muster. “Dimitre Petrova, you think I slept with Hunter?” She reached out and slapped him so hard across the face that Hunter winced.

  “Ow! Son of a ... ! Okay!” Dimitre grabbed her recoiling hand and looked into her furious lavender eyes. “I would never think anything of the kind unless I saw it for myself! Never! So, when I came in here and found you half naked, and him just as good as, and a room that, forgive the indelicacy, reeks of sex, what was I supposed to think? If it’s not you, Annie, then it’s someone who looks a hell of a lot like you! That,” he pointed to the replica of Annali, “is not my sister! That woman is your spitting image!”

  “That is Tatyana!” Hunter and Annali argued in tandem. “Don’t you know your own sister? I thought you two could sense each other,” Annali said hotly. “We don’t know who you are seeing, but that’s your sister.” Annali looked back at the redhead stopped in mid-motion. “But nice job isolating your magic, baby,” she praised him in earnest.

  As confused as he was, Dimitre knew without a doubt that the blonde in motion next to him was his Annali. She was forever finding the good side of even the worst situations.

  “You know, I never thought I’d be trying to convince someone’s brother that I am sleeping with his baby sister,” Hunter grumbled. “Would you mind freeing her? I’d like to figure out what’s going on here.”

  Dimitre moved to do so, reaching for the other Annali and feeling a surreal shiver down the back of his neck as he touched her and slowly freed her from his time trap.

  Tatyana found herself stumbling into her brother and abruptly realizing that Annali had appeared out of nowhere. Hunter had completely shifted positions. It was as if she had blinked and stepped into an entirely different moment in time.

  Understanding struck and she put her hands on her hips and glared at her sibling. “You used magic on me!” she accused him. “What’d you do that for, you big jerk?!” She looked from him to Hunter. “Did he do something stupid? Are you okay?”

  Hunter found her concern amusing, rather than insulting as he might have. More than that, he was getting a kick out of watching her brother’s expressions.

  “Holy shit, that sure sounds like my sister,” Dimitre acknowledged. “And I can feel her psychically. But I swear to God, she looks like Annali!” He reached up and poked a finger against his sister’s cheek, getting his hand slapped for his trouble.

  Hunter quickly explained the trouble to Tatyana.

  “It’s some kind of spell.”

  “Yes, but who cast it?” Annali asked.

  “Let’s go find Ryce. Maybe he can figure it out. Give me a second to umm ...” Hunter let the sentence hang and moved to retrieve his clothes from the floor. He got dressed while Annali glared at Dimitre alongside his sister.

  “Okay, stop that. It’s just too freaky getting stared at by two of you. I mean, two of you,” he clarified pointing to the real Annali.

  A few minutes later the quartet was interrupting Nox and Ryce’s reconstruction of the house wards. Ryce turned sharply, annoyed at their entrance into the room he used for complex spellcasting.

  “Sorry, Ryce,” Hunter said, “but we have a problem.”

  Ryce watched Hunter reach back and pull forward Yelena Suarez, a sultry little black-haired beauty Ryce had been having an ongoing affair with whenever he was able to find time away from the coven. Circumstances had been keeping him out of her bed for the past few weeks, and he had missed her lusty little appetites. However, he had never told her where he lived, and she absolutely was not invited into the sanctity of the coven.

  “What in hell is she doing in this house?” he demanded of his witches, a sharp cancellation gesture ending his current magic. “And why would you ever bring her in this room? Are you out of your minds?”

  Hunter looked from Ryce to Yelena with a strange expression on his face and then asked, “Ryce, who do you see here?”

  “Who do I ... ? You’re the one that brought her here, Sentinel. Why are you—”

  “Just humor me,” he encouraged dryly.

  “Yelena. Suarez. She’s a ... she’s my ...” He ran a hand back through his hair a little sheepishly. “Right, well, she’s my current mistress then, if you must know. But she doesn’t know what I am or where I live, so this cannot be her.”

  “It isn’t,” Hunter agreed. “It’s Tatyana.”

  “Like bloody hell it is,” Nox argued over them all. “There’s Giselle, that tiny little redhead from Raven’s shop.”

  “Whoa, now even I’m confused,” Tatyana complained.
>
  The other two men gasped when Tatyana’s voice came out of the image of the woman each thought she was.

  “It’s a glamour,” Ryce marveled, coming up to Tatyana and reaching to touch her face. Hunter frowned, but he allowed it reluctantly.

  “A very specific glamour. She’s different to everyone,” Nox noted.

  “Not to me,” Annali snorted.

  “Or me,” Hunter added.

  “Me three,” Tatyana said, raising her hand before she brushed Ryce’s touch away.

  Hunter was trying to think. Could a glamour be cast through the wards while they were being repaired, from an outside source? Had Braen cast a delayed effect on her, hoping to cause even more chaos among them? Or ... had she cast the spell herself?

  Hunter sucked in a hard breath and suddenly turned to look at her. Holding her between his hands, he studied her long and hard. Sure enough, even though he was looking at Tatyana, he was looking at a very perfect Tatyana. A flawless one.

  “No bruises. You have no bruises,” he said quickly. “We all know for a fact that you do, and when it was bothering me earlier ... you said...”

  Tatyana recalled what she had said and hurriedly slapped a hand over Hunter’s mouth, blushing thoroughly as she looked at her brother and the others.

  “Hunter!” she warned through gritted teeth. “Shut up!”

  Ryce chuckled at her reaction. “Tatyana, we need to know what you said so we can figure out what’s going on.”

  “Let Hunter figure it out,” she ordered.

  “Two minds are better than one, angel,” Hunter reminded her. “And the more the merrier. Besides, they’re going to find out eventually.”

  “Oh, crap,” she groaned, burying her face against his chest as it burned with embarrassment.

  “Yeah, let’s hurry this up. It’s freaking me out watching you get hugged on by my woman,” Dimitre complained.

  “You mean you see Annali?” Nox asked, chuckling. “Now there’s just something wrong with that, mate.”

  “Tell me about it,” he grumbled.

  “The boy genius walked in on them ... and thought Tatyana was me,” Annali sniffed. “As if I would cheat on you!”

  “Well, you used to be in love with him!”

  “I was not!”

  “I’d say it was a crush, really,” Ryce mused, “wouldn’t you, Nox?”

  “Infatuation, actually,” Nox suggested.

  “Hero-worship,” Hunter injected.

  “Men!” Annali growled with a stamp of her foot. “You are all irredeemable! I swear!”

  “So tell us what you said to Hunter, Tatyana,” Ryce said with a grin, returning to the matter at hand.

  Tatyana just kept her face right where it was and shook her head vehemently.

  “Dimitre, darlin’, give your sister some dignity. Ryce will explain later when she doesn’t have to face you,” Annali coaxed him. Dimitre frowned, the whole situation displeasing him and disturbing him.

  “I’d feel better if I could see this spell reversed.”

  “Dimitre Petrova, you move that fine ass of yours out of this room this instant or I swear to the Goddess I will tell every soul in this room what you said to me last night when we made love.”

  “Whoa!” Dimitre reached out and this time he was the one slapping a hand over his lover’s mouth, knowing full well she made no empty threats. “Umm, okay. Tat, I’ll see you after you fix this. We’re going. Bye.”

  Dimitre dragged Annali from the room as she snorted giggles from behind his hand. Once they were out the door, Hunter turned to Ryce with a sigh. “That is one scary power that boy has. I’m lucky he didn’t stop time in the entire room. He just singled out Tatyana, although I doubt it was his intention. Otherwise I would be dead before I knew what even happened: ”

  “Yeah, that’s the unfunny part of this,” Ryce agreed. “So, what’d she say?”

  “I’ll try to quote it perfectly. ‘Look at me and see only who you need. See only what you want ... see the woman who wants you to make love to her,’ or something very close to that”

  “Far out,” Nox murmured. “Right, then, I get it. Everyone who looks at her sees the woman they want. Dimitre saw Annali. Ryce sees his mistress. You want Tatyana, so you just see her. Annali doesn’t want a woman, so it doesn’t work on her. Nice little spell, that”

  “Except I don’t think it’s a spell,” Ryce mused. “It was about bruises, you said?”

  “Yes. I just wanted him to see past them. To not let them bother him,” she sniffed.

  “To look beyond the surface. You wanted to bring his mind beyond its limitations. Emotional limitations. As a result, you’re walking around in an unlimited glamour that is making men see you as the woman they desire without limitation” Ryce cocked a brow and grinned at Nox. “Giselle, eh? Never knew you had a thing for her.”

  “I bloody don’t!” Nox protested. “The spell’s gone wrong or something. I wouldn’t go for a non-magic girl. Too complicated even with a magic one.”

  “It wouldn’t kill you to take her as a lover so long as she knew the limits,” Ryce argued.

  “But I don’t want to. She’s all cute and that, but not my type.”

  “Well, I did make the wording reciprocal. Maybe she wants to make love with you, rather than the other way around,” Tatyana suggested.

  “There you go. That’s it exactly. Hey, that’s cool. It’s like scrying for a girl who’s hot for you,” Nox chuckled. “That’d take the guessing out of it.”

  “Where’s the fun in that?” Ryce laughed.

  “So how to reverse this?” Hunter prompted.

  “I think it’s up to Tatyana. Seems like she’s using the power of suggestion here, not a spell.”

  “Well, whatever it is, it’s giving me a headache. This is all giving me a headache,” she complained.

  “What it is really is a sign of magic,” Ryce pointed out. “The first since that spell out by the Blessing Tree.”

  “It’s vague. It could be any number of schools,” Hunter said, shaking his head. “Spellcaster, Ritualist ... Presage ...”

  “It could be anything,” Nox interrupted. “We all can do glamours. It’s just that this one is rather strong.”

  “The desire behind the suggestion was strong,” Ryce remarked. “It’s a good sign,” he assured Tatyana. “It says something about your power level.”

  “Terrific. But can you help me fix it before I completely weird out my brother?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Hey, brat.”

  “Hey, jerk,” Tatyana greeted in return when her brother tugged on her hair before kissing her on the cheek she turned up to him.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Well, I have a headache, possibly from the idea of my boyfriend and my brother having a fight, possibly not. I haven’t decided.”

  “It was a perfectly understandable mix-up.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sure Annali is very pleased to know you have such faith in her,” she said dryly.

  “I’ll let you know as soon as she starts talking to me again,” he sighed.

  “Ooo, a bit miffed is she?”

  “Pissed. With a capital P. Worst thing is, she’s talking but not talking. Hard to explain. I’ll work it out.”

  “No doubt. You have that talent,” Tatyana laughed.

  “So it’s ‘boyfriend’ is it? What’s it been? Two days? Three?”

  “Hmm, I don’t recall. What was it for you and Annali? Maybe that will jog my memory.”

  “Touché,” he chuckled. “But are you expecting you and Hunter to go the way Annali and I are going?”

  “I’m not expecting anything,” she said quietly, rubbing at the ache in her forehead. She knew what her brother was getting at. He didn’t want her to risk getting attached so quickly to a man she knew so little about. He was worried she might get her heart broken. “I never expect anything.”

  “It’s just, you’re young yet, Tat. Nothing says you h
ave to—”

  “Yes, Dimitre, I get it,” she snapped, turning sharply to look at him. “I’m not some idiotic schoolgirl with a crush on a movie star. I know he’s a witch. I know he’s a killer. I know he is ten years older than I am and twice as powerful as I ever hope to be. I know I would be insane to think someone like that will ever want to settle down, never mind settling down with a ‘child.’ Okay? I get it.”

  Dimitre was speechless. She had hit every point he might have made right on the head, except hearing her say it all like she had made it sound damn cold and unflattering to her.

  “Listen, honey, I’m just—”

  “Well stop, okay? Stop worrying about me so much! You didn’t worry about me one damn bit these past two months, and frankly, I seriously underestimated the freedom of it.” She stood up, grabbing the book she’d been reading on the different schools of magic and hugging it tightly to her body. “And for God’s sake, call Mama. You’ve been a real bastard to her. You hurt her when you didn’t come for Christmas. We always come for Christmas. All of us.”

  “I was in Pennsylvania!”

  “Yeah. Okay. You tell her that. I’m sure that’ll make her feel so much better.”

  Tatyana left after that sarcastic parting shot.

  “How is he?”

  “Better,” Kaia said wearily. “He’s out of stasis and holding his own. I’ve repaired everything life-threatening either by magic or conventional medicine. He’s lost a lot of blood. I could use a trip to the clinic.”

  “You’d have to account for that blood.”

  “There are ways,” she said with a shrug. “Fact is, he needs it and I am too weak to help anymore.”

  “What about Dimitre or Tatyana?” Hunter asked. “I know none of us can donate, but surely you can see if they can.”

  “No. They are both A positive. I already checked. The only universal donor in this house is Annali, and I can’t use hear.”

  “Well, why in hell not?” Hunter made a frustrated noise when Kaia gave him a look. “Don’t give me that doctor-patient privilege crap,” he snapped. “Is she sick? Was this something Evan caused?” Kaia hadn’t been a full-fledged doctor and had still been just learning to be a Healer when they had first brought Annali home. It was possible she had missed something in that first year that he didn’t know about.