Blood of the Wicked (5 page)

“No—”

Naomi shifted. “Wait a fucking second,” she broke in sharply. “What about the rest of us, Peterson? Are you telling us to sit on our asses this whole time?”

Silas shut his mouth.

“On this matter, yes.” The woman’s lips compressed as Peterson shifted his attention steadily to her. “The less momentum, the less risk of being discovered. The rest of you are double-assigned to a second situation. Report back to me in one hour.”

The bald man whistled a three-note tune. “Just out of curiosity,” he said, caution practically radiating from his earnest stare. “Smith isn’t leading this merry band of thieves, is he?”

Silas’s shoulders squared. “Oh, hell, no.”

There was a beat. Then Peterson’s baritone. “I am in charge, always. You are dismissed. Mr. Smith, remain.”

“No way, what other situ—”

“I said
dismissed
, Miss West.”

Jessie leaned forward, half aware of the smell of old carpet and dust, but focused on the bright room with the ancient furnishings. Both men stood silently until the room emptied, Silas’s posture as uncompromising as the set of his angled jaw.

“Silas Smith,” Peterson said slowly, mulling over the name as if working out a particularly offensive problem. Slowly he set a digital readout on the table between them. “Orphan. Lone missionary. Wounded soldier.”

Silas jerked back. “Not interes—”

“Sit
down
.”

He didn’t. But he didn’t move, either. He wrapped white-knuckled fingers around the back of a chair and waited.

Jessie itched to pick up that readout and throw it in the smug bastard’s face as the man said in low, menacing tones, “I am watching you. I have been watching you since Miss West threw your name into the ring. I do not tolerate lone wolves, and I will not tolerate you for any longer than I must. Do you understand?”

Silas stared at the folder, a tic leaping at the side of his jaw. “Yes, sir.”

“When your mission is complete, I
will
be requesting a full physical. I expect that it will prove what you and I already know.”

“What’s that?” But Jessie thought that Silas didn’t sound curious, as if he already knew. Had expected it.

What the hell kind of politics was this?

“That you,” Peterson explained slowly and with great relish, “are well beyond your prime years. That you’re a liability in the field, and a tragedy anywhere else.” Silas’s eyes burned holes into the innocuous digital panel. “I am well aware of your history, and rest assured, you will not be given a chance to repeat your mistakes. Once this mission is completed, you’ll never again work in any Mission in this country. Am I clear?”

Silas didn’t stop to mince words. “Crystal,” he bit out, and turned away. Jessie’s sympathy welled up, thick and unwanted. Choked her anger.

“I have not dismissed you, yet.” Peterson’s tone hadn’t changed, but suddenly Jessie could taste the menace in the air. Feel it sting her skin.

No, not hers.
Silas’s.

Back ramrod-straight, he roiled underneath a thin veneer of control. Jessie gasped, knew she did, but she only heard Silas’s teeth grinding.

Felt it as if it were her own.

She struggled against the pull. The magic resisted her. It
wanted
.

“See that you are in touch frequently, Mr. Smith. Your team will be watching you. Carefully.”

Red speared through her mind, through her vision, as Silas stalked from the room. She cried out, spread her arms as if she could catch herself on something, anything else.

Her control failed. Resentment, a bone-deep fury so great that it drew her in like a sparkling net. A vortex of emotions too damned complex for her to work them out now, but all Silas.

His need called out and the magic answered, roiling on its own. It all but pulsed in her blood. The scene dipped, darkened, all in the space of a second. She tried to apply the mental brakes, to cut the flow of power and withdraw, but the magic unfurled like a banner and snapped into place with an audible, soul-wrenching
click
. Power to passion; emotion was a hell of a focus.

Suddenly she was inside Silas. Inside his head, his skin. Jessie gasped with the force of his anger.

Crimson rage mottled her vision, closed her throat until it ached.

Bitter memories filled her mind, her chest, too fast to catch anything more than blood and fire, vicious words and a splatter of blood on white plaster.

Too close. Too fast.

More than she ever wanted to see of the witch hunter who’d rather see her kind dead.

Jessie struggled to free herself from the tangled skeins of his fury. Mentally she pulled away, thrashed free of the threads of magic. Pain flashed along her wrist. No, damn it,
his
wrist. A bright seam of blue light seared flesh both hers and not hers, burned through the magic so fast that Jessie’s awareness lurched back from the room. It ripped away from the man that jerked his angry gaze up to the bright sunshine. His lips moved; it was soundless in the vacuum her consciousness left behind.

The view tilted. Upended. Golden sunlight faded to hazy blue. Opulent wallpaper withered to mottled paint, and Jessie lurched back into herself with pain, fear, and pure rage beating at her skull.

Only half of it was her own.

They were going to
kill
Caleb. They knew he was a witch, thought he’d been killing people . . .

No
.

Nausea slammed into her body, her stomach twisting. She had only a second’s reprieve before it splashed into the back of her throat.

Jessie staggered toward the bathroom.

She retched into the toilet until her stomach wrung itself dry. When she could move again without feeling as if the ground rolled out from under her, she stood, shaking, and staggered to the cracked sink. She gripped the edges for balance, stared her pale, dripping reflection in the eye.

“Pull it together,” she told herself. She breathed in, counted to three. Her wayward, roiling stomach refused to settle.

The nausea wasn’t new. Snapping back like a rubber band always left her feeling like she’d left half of her necessary organs behind, but it had been years since she’d connected so completely. So effortlessly. And even then, only with Caleb.

What did it mean?

And what had she seen?

Missionaries, they called themselves. Killers, every one of them, and she’d seen four. Silas, the exotic woman they called Naomi West, the leader named Peterson, and the bald one.

Four
, Silas had said.
Maybe five.

A fully fledged mission. To kill her brother.

Jessie twisted the tap, splashed cold water on her face until she could breathe without the acidic burn of bile on her tongue. She patted her face dry, checked her reflection again.

She was still pale. Tired. The corner of her mouth, noticeably purple around the rough scab, looked as if she’d gotten caught chewing on a leaky pen. But her chin was high and her eyes seemed steady, bright in the weak bathroom light. Jessie smiled tightly.

If they thought she was going to gift wrap her brother for them, they had something else coming.

Chapter Five

T
hree hours and thirty-six minutes.

It was an eternity to spend trapped in the tiny, ruined apartment. The sharp, lingering scent of smoky incense and fouled carpet made it almost impossible to breathe.

She still tried.

Each gasping breath battled against time, a struggle to pull oxygen into her lungs and expel the fluid that gathered there instead. Minute by minute, drip by bloody, agonizing drip.

Down in the ruins of the old city, where even the sun couldn’t push through cracks in cement and every day was a fight for survival, no one would miss her. She’d probably rot here, alone and forgotten. Her body would decay, flesh sloughing off from her fragile bones to melt into a viscous puddle useless to everyone but the hungry, vengeful city she putrefied in.

The City of Glass.

The city of magicians and fools.

She moved. A shudder. It rippled across her naked body, sucked at the breath gurgling deep inside her chest. She had been beautiful once. Even before her pale skin had been carved with ritual symbols, before the incisions had hobbled every joint and seared bloody and black into every bone.

She had smiled once.

Now she lay splayed on the floor, bound by silk and iron. Her long, long legs pointed to the east and south, held open by a length of carved wood that pierced her thighs. The concave dip of her belly twitched, strained to suck in the air her body so desperately craved, and fresh scabs split again to drool bloody tears over her thin hips.

She was naked. Of course she was naked. It wasn’t sexual. It had never been sexual, this ritual. Far from it; it was the worst ritual he’d ever witnessed.

And so necessary.

Blood dribbled from the corner of her mouth, sprayed over her chin and chest with every shallow exhale. The only possession she had been allowed to retain winked now in the sickly green light of the glow rod beside him, but she couldn’t see it. Her eyes had been the first to go.

But she
had
been beautiful, and the charming gold promise ring at her right hand said someone else had once thought so, too.

He checked his watch. It was nearly noon, not that the lack of light down here would ever have told him that.

“I—” The word gurgled deep in her chest.

He knelt in the small circle of light. What little carpet remained after the degradation of time squelched. Blood oozed into the fabric over his knees, sticky and cold.

Silk whispered, butterfly soft. Even its infinitesimal weight was too much for her shattered arms to move. “I wish—” She choked, coughed. Droplets sprayed from her cracked lips, and he turned his head as they splattered like warm rain against his cheek.

“Shhh,” he whispered gently, and touched her cheek with his bare fingers. They came away wet, tingling. “Easy, Delia. It’s almost over.”

The ruined shape of her face twisted, and as she wheezed, he realized she was trying to laugh. He caught her cheeks between both hands and held her still.

Blood gathered like a well inside her open mouth, a pool of bloody words. She hacked out a foaming cough, sucked in a breath, and choked again instead.

He leaned over, released her wrists from the restraints that held her, and brought her hands to his chest. Her fingers splayed, seeking. He didn’t cringe beneath the patterns of blood she left behind on his gray shirt.

“Promise me,” she whispered, so faint that he had to concentrate to make out her words. “Promise me.”

His grip tightened. He knew what she asked. He knew what he’d already promised. Because it cost him nothing, because it had cost him nothing to promise a dying prostitute even before she’d undergone the ritual, he said it again. “I promise.”

For a brief, silent moment, as the tortured holes where her eyes had been turned upward to the ruined ceiling, she rested peacefully.

Then her body spasmed. Her fingers curved like talons into his chest. He seized her wrists, but it wasn’t to push her away. He held her, hung on to the delicate bones of each hand, kept her close, as he said he would.

Kept her close, and squeezed every last drop of latent power from the dying shell of her body.

Another spasm seized her muscles, another searching, desperate grasp. Pain burned a line into his neck. One cord snapped, the beads of one of a handful of his charms clattered to the thinned carpet in a singing rain of metal, but it was she he watched as the last breath rattled thickly in her lungs.

He whispered in her ear, even as the life seeped from her skin like water from a ragged sack.

Latent magic. Unfulfilled potential. It would never be as sweet, as strong, as true power, but heart’s blood was something else entirely. He claimed it. Gathered it. Pulled it from her body with a last, whisper-soft brush of his lips against her ruined mouth.

When she was truly dead, he tipped his bloody face to gauge his watch once more. Three hours fifty-three minutes. He was late. Not enough to send out a search party, but enough to garner curiosity. He was never late.

Now he’d skewed the pattern.

Slowly, painfully, he got to his feet. He stretched the joints that ached from staying still for so long, rolled the kinks from his neck and shoulders.

She lay in the center of a dark, gelatinous stain. In his visual memory, it was red, but the hours had aged it to brown and black. He turned, snapped closed the glow rod case, and pocketed the rechargeable device.

“Rest in peace, Delia,” he murmured. “Finally.”

Each step squelched, gummy and clinging. The wreckage of the shattered apartment was the only tomb she’d get. But each breath of foul, stale air thrummed through his charged body, a crackling whip of stolen energy.

He pulled the door shut behind him, wedged it tightly. Let no one seek shelter in this damned, cursed place. Let no one find her, twisted and rotting. Especially the sister who wouldn’t ever understand.

Cordelia was dead. Her problems no longer mattered to her, or to him.

And death had never been Caleb Leigh’s particular problem.

Chapter Six

T
he coven was on the offensive.

Silas waited with barely leashed impatience as the elevator creaked its slow, rickety way to the fourth floor. His wrist no longer ached, but the memory of its backlash burn lingered as he rubbed the ink.

Magic. The protective seal of St. Andrew had done its job, warned him and blocked the power, but he didn’t know what the witches had hoped to do. Attack him? Watch him? Lay a curse of some kind?

Fuck. The choices were endless.

The elevator pinged feebly. He hurried to the safe house door, mind working. They’d targeted him. Why? As far as anyone else knew, he was the new guy in town. The faceless missionary brought in specifically because the coven supposedly knew every other face.

How had they known about him? Was there a leak in the Mission?

And why the fuck hadn’t he told anyone else?

Except that one was easy. He hadn’t raised the alarm when the magical warning had lanced up his arm because David Peterson had pissed him the hell off.

They all had, but a special reserve of piss and vinegar simmered for him. A hell of a lot had changed in fourteen years. The director these days had a control problem.

So did Silas. He didn’t like being controlled.

He jammed his thumb against the sensor.

Now he had to use Jessie to get to Caleb Leigh. Use her to get close to the kid, and without telling her that no matter what, he was as good as dead.

And . . . go.

The door banged open, slammed into the wall under one angry push.

Filtered sunlight painted the room in shades of reflected blue. It shimmered through the glass, unfettered by the curtains and giving the room a cozy, almost homey feel. He half expected to smell bread baking, or dinner cooking, or whatever it was real people with real families were supposed to do.

Silas’s fingers clenched on the manila envelope. “Jessie!” he barked.

No response.

She couldn’t still be sleeping, not at noon. While he’d intended to be back sooner, the Mission briefing had taken much longer, which meant his clever little captive had been allowed way too much time alone. If a two-story jump didn’t faze her, he doubted a few knots would.

Tying her to the heater had seemed a great idea at the time. When Silas had crept in later and found her asleep and shivering, he’d tucked a blanket around her and tried not to think about the trim curves beneath her damp clothes. Or the smudges of exhaustion that deepened the shadows beneath her eyes.

Letting her sleep this morning had seemed kind. And a salve to his already frayed patience. Now, it seemed stupid.

Grimly Silas shut the door behind him and threw the envelope onto the tiny kitchen’s single counter. Damn it, he didn’t have time for this shit.

He stalked to the bedroom door, shoved it open. Swore when all he saw were folded sheets and the end of a broken belt. “Motherfu—”

“Hi, honey,” she drawled from behind him. “How was work?”

Her voice burned every nerve he had. Anger throbbed a heartbeat behind as he whirled. “How the hell did you get free?”

Her eyes gleamed. “That bad?”

“How did you work through my knots?”

Her lips twitched, but her tawny eyes faded to a wary edge. And annoyed. Or maybe still annoyed, given her hard bed last night.

Yeah, he’d been a bastard. Now he was going to top it.

She turned, claimed a seat on the shabby couch and crossed one ankle over her knee. “Your belt melted,” she said, and propped her head up in classic fuck-off pose. “Your knots were fine, thank you so much.”

His fingers twitched. Hell, his dick twitched, and that just pissed him off more.
Go, go, go
.

Silas swiped the folder off the counter and stalked the three steps to the sofa. Threw it into her lap. She caught the spinning projectile.

“Cheerful, aren’t you?” she said cautiously, spreading both hands on either side of the folder. “What’s this?”

“Open it.”

Her eyes flicked to him. “Come on.”

“Jessie, shut up and open it.”

Maybe it was the raw aggression he didn’t bother to filter out from his voice, or the way he didn’t sit. Didn’t stop pacing. Didn’t want to stop and watch her face as she opened the folder and a handful of glossy photographs spilled out on her lap.

He knew what she’d see. How her mind would latch to the color red and stay there, mired in it. Rotting in it, like the bodies captured in each picture. Black, brown, red, saturated. Detailed.

High-resolution carnage.

Her gasp slapped him across the conscience. He steeled himself and turned around, knowing he was an ass and ignoring it anyway.

White-faced, mouth open, she stared at him, accusation written over her pixie-fine features. One photo bent in her hand. “Why?” she whispered.

Why. Silas almost laughed. Instead, because he had to, he pushed. “Melissa Calhoun. Bobby Jenkins. Katie Angela Morris.” Each name stuck in his throat. He forced them out on a verbal acid burn.

She blanched.

“Two don’t have names,” he continued, brutally ignoring the tension snapping over her rigid body. “They don’t exist, and this city could give a rat’s ass.” Her gaze dropped to the glossy paper again. Her mouth worked, but no sound came out. Silas crossed the tiny living room, sank to his haunches in front of her.

Eye to eye with the witch’s fragile, innocent sister.

Do it
, he thought, and cruelly twisted the emotional knife. “Your brother, Jessie, made them scream.”

The photos fluttered into the air as she jerked back. She slid halfway up the back of the couch, feet scrabbling to escape the glossy paper that Silas knew burned. Seared the mind and heart and soul.

“No,” she denied, shaking her head. Her hair slid over her cheek like silk, and Silas cursed, seized her arm and yanked her back to the couch. A photo crinkled under her hip.

“Look at them,” he ordered. He slid his fingers under her leg, freed the photo of Melissa Calhoun and the shattered remains of her mutilated pelvis. “Caleb Leigh and his coven tortured these people to death. Don’t think it was easy. It was a long, slow, painful way to go.”

Jessie, white and shaking under his grip, turned her face away.

It wasn’t enough. He spread the photos, one by one, across her lap. “Maybe they liked your brother, Jessie, until he started to cut them up. Until he dug a red-hot knife into their bodies and bones and turned them into a sacrifice for whatever demons he’s following now.”

She jerked, but he was stronger. Her skin burned hot under his palm. Edges of green slid in around her nose and mouth, and it still wasn’t fucking enough. “Stop it,” she whispered.

“No.” Silas selected another, one of the nameless two, and held it up to her face. “Look at him, Jessie.
Look at him
.” Naked without clothes, naked without skin. “They flayed this kid alive. Do you know what that feels like?”

The photo tore from his grasp as she swiped it away, scattering the pictures. “Stop it!”

He seized her wrists. Yanked her arms down and found himself practically nose to nose with her. Eye to eye.

Staring into her tears.

Jesus, don’t cry.
“Maybe it wasn’t Caleb,” he said roughly. “Maybe they forced him to be there. Maybe he’s some kind of hostage. Help me find him, Jessie. Help me find out.”

“It’s not—”

“It is,” he interrupted, ignoring her efforts to free herself. “Look at me, Jessie—”

“No!” With monumental effort, she ripped free of his grasp, thrashed back at him with fists and feet. Silas clenched his teeth when she grazed his knee with her foot, swore as her knuckles slammed into his chest.

Twisting, he forced her to the thin couch cushions. Pinned her legs down with one of his own, swore again when she arched back like a spitting cat and shoved against him.

His patience snapped; a thin line between righteous fury and bitter frustration. “It will happen again, don’t you get it?” he snarled, so close to her face he could see the flecks of gold bleeding through her brown eyes.

They shimmered in shadowed grief and fear. She froze underneath his weight, gasping for breath, face flushed. Rigid with strain.

She was so warm, so soft in a world where he’d forgotten what soft felt like. And so angry. It wasn’t enough. She needed to understand.

“Because it
will
happen again,” he repeated, quieter. Deliberately gentler. “Whoever’s calling the shots, Caleb will know. If it isn’t him, then he can lead me to the leader. Do you understand?”

Her eyes narrowed, chest heaving with every breath. He could feel every line of her body against his own. Every furious breath pushed her breasts firmly into his chest, small and erotic and so real. Her pulse pounded in the delicate wrists he held pinned above her head, echoed in a flutter at the warm skin at the base of her throat.

Silas was suddenly, achingly aware that she was helpless beneath him, and his body responded with a tidal wave of sudden arousal. It swamped him. Raw instinct and sexual need.

The timing sucked. “Christ,” he grated out, and rolled off her. Landed hard on the carpet, on the photos scattered over the floor. Pain jarred through his back, his knee. His head.

No less than he deserved.

Throwing an arm over his eyes, he did his best to block out the haunted uncertainty of her so damn fragile face. To block out the angry, determined mask of her faith in what he knew was the only family she had left.

Goddamned son of a bitch witch and his goddamned son of a bitch coven.

His mouth twisted. And the goddamned son of a bitch witch’s sister was
his
responsibility.
His
civilian to protect, to use and to keep safe and to lie to, and he couldn’t keep his eyes and mind off her
goddamned
mouth.

Fuck. This. Job.

Jessie didn’t move. Didn’t sit up. He imagined her stretched full-length on the couch cushions, her dark golden hair thrown over the edge in a wave of tangled wheat, staring at him.

She made him think of sunshine and honey, shades of warmed gold and sweetness.

He didn’t deserve it. Any of it.

“How do you know he’s a witch?” Her voice shook, every bit as strained as he felt. It bothered him that he wanted to find her hand and hold it.

He wasn’t fucking
built
for hand holding.

“Research shows that every witch shares a common allele in the pattern of their DNA.” Brutally Silas yanked his thoughts back to blood and bone and hollow sockets. “Your brother’s blood showed up at five locations.”

A beat. She shifted, old springs squeaking. “Bullshit.”

But it lacked heat. Conviction. He had her. Damn him to hell, he had her. “I can show you the workup,” he said wearily. “Don’t know if there’s a correlation between the DNA and the evil shit they do or if humans just can’t keep their goddamned hands off the magic once it’s theirs.”

“So, what? All witches are evil?”

Silas squeezed his eyes shut beneath the hard ridge of his forearm. “Yeah.” Blood painted the back of his eyelids. Blood and a young girl’s terrified smile. “Yeah. They always go that way.”

She took in another deep, audible breath. Let it go slowly, and even as it trembled, all Silas could think of was honey.

How the hell could she stay so . . . so untarnished? How could she sit there with the corpses of the dead at her feet and make him want to tell her that everything would be all right? Want to protect her?

He didn’t know what to do with honey.

So he poisoned it.

“Blood tells, sunshine. It
always
tells. Mine, yours, a goddamned baby’s, it doesn’t matter. The allele is there. Caleb’s was
there
. We don’t catch him, or the people who are forcing him,” he added, knowing it for the bullshit that was, “then they’ll find and kill more innocent people. Torture
them
. The bodies will add up.”

“You’re lying,” she said quietly. “You’re making this up, trying to get me to—”

“One way or another,” he cut in, “he has to be found. You can be part of it, or I can lock your sweet ass up topside and we’re just going to have to kill him. Your call.”

“But I—”

“No.” He cut her off again, smiled grimly at her sharp, indignant sound of frustration. “No buts, Jessie, it’s a decision. Are you in the game or out of commission?”

J
essie stared up at the stained plaster ceiling and knew she didn’t have any choice. She had to be in.

She had to find Caleb, get him out. Get him safe, or they’d kill him.

They’d kill him anyway.

Shit.

Caleb would never kill anyone. Never hurt anyone, not like that. That was evil. Pure evil, and Silas was wrong. Not every witch was evil. That was Church bullshit.

She’d
know
, damn it.

And how the hell had they gotten their hands on Caleb’s blood? How did they know it was his?

She’d find out. She’d use the lying sack of a witch hunter she knew for a fact wanted to kill him, the man who had lied to her in order to get to him, and she’d use the gun she’d felt tucked up into a holster under his arm as he’d pinned her with his body.

That hard, powerful body. Oh, she was in so much trouble. Jessie drew in a slow breath. “In,” she whispered. The word stuck in her throat, so she tried again. Stronger. Caleb needed her to be stronger. “I’m in. I’ll help you.”

He stirred, but Jessie didn’t dare look over. Not now, when she wasn’t sure if her practiced mask of lies was still in place. Closing her eyes, she counted to ten and didn’t say what rose to her lips and burned.

Silas would help
her
find Caleb. Help
her
get close, and
she’d
rescue him from whatever terrible people claimed him now. Maybe Silas could kill the evil ones, get inside and destroy this coven, but she and Caleb would be long gone before he knew what hit him.

Oh, Caleb
, she thought, an ache knotted angry and tight in her throat. What had he gotten into? Why was his blood—