In the Company of Witches (31 page)

“It’s all right,” she told Lawrence in that sultry purr. “You’re among friends.”

The ceiling fan, on an automatic timer, switched on, started to rotate. The male didn’t even blink, so spun up in Raina’s web, but the wind currents stirred up those lingering incubus vibes Isaac had disseminated. They infiltrated those more pleasant feelings Raina was using to fog Lawrence’s mind, confusing them. And a confused soldier, thinking he was in a combat situation, was a dangerous weapon.

Mikhael registered the second things changed for Lawrence, when the beautiful woman before him was no longer what Lawrence saw. The enemy had moved into his space. He shoved her back and the gun hand shot up, his finger squeezing the trigger, point-blank at her chest.

Raina lunged inside his guard, knocked his arm off center so the shot sizzled over the delicate juncture between throat and shoulder. In the next blink, Mikhael had control of his arm, forcing the gun up so the next projectile went into the ceiling. There were shouts and a short scream, and then Mikhael had him down on his stomach, Raina sitting on his other arm.

“Don’t hurt him,” she said.

The directive hadn’t been necessary. He had the male down, restrained, but wasn’t causing him any further distress. As he’d told her, he wasn’t that kind of monster. Though from what was roiling in his blood, he realized he might have become one if that bullet had found its target.

“It’s okay,” she murmured. “It’s all right.” When she put her hand on the man’s head, he realized, wryly, she wasn’t talking to him. “Easy, Lawrence. It’s all right.”

Under her touch, the man stopped struggling. Then he began to cry. From her stricken expression, Mikhael saw Raina would have shed tears, if she could. She sat on a man who’d witnessed brutality, who’d exercised it himself for a seemingly just cause, but right or wrong, it had happened because of the senseless cruelty and madness of the human world. Once a man was mired in that often enough, he knew it would never make sense, that the soul held so much darkness it was a wonder the world continued turning day after day and hope lived at all.

Raina knew that truth. Maybe it was why she understood Mikhael enough that it didn’t stop her from hanging out with him. An odd thought, one he wasn’t ready to examine at close range, feeling a little too much kinship with Lawrence under her stroking hand.

“I’ve got him, Miss Raina.” Steve knelt beside them. “I’m so sorry about this. He’s only been working the terminal with us a couple months, so he’s still figuring things out. We’ll pay for the ceiling. Let us take care of him.”

“I know. It’s not his fault, or yours. Take him downstairs; do what you need to do for him.” She squeezed his shoulder. “Get him the help he needs.”

Tucking the gun in the back of his jeans, Mikhael helped Steve and his buddies get Lawrence up. Raina turned her attention to Li and Gina. By the time he’d returned from the downstairs, she’d verified their wounds weren’t serious, not for their kind, and sent them for medical attention in the kitchen. She was opening the windows to air the room out.

He’d learned from Marisa that the next patrons weren’t due for an hour. There was blood on Raina’s shirt, but with the off-the-shoulder style, he saw the bullet’s track had been a graze, leaving no more than a burn mark. The blood was Gina’s, from her head wound. She must have hugged the girl. Even knowing that, he had to force himself to give Raina room, not to crowd her into a corner to touch it, check it, touch all of her. That gun going off, targeted at her chest, kept replaying in his mind.

She wasn’t in the mood to be coddled. A storm was building around her, because nothing pissed her off like an attack on her home. She channeled it, though, held on to a cold rationality, running down the to-dos. She obviously knew how to handle a situation like this, had likely done it before.

He wasn’t surprised. She seemed able to handle everything thrown at her except how he unlocked the ghosts of her past. Even so, she kept letting him in. It made him feel a way he’d rarely ever felt. Bonded to another.

He followed her downstairs to the smaller library she also used as her office. When she went to her desk, he caught her there at last, closing his hand around her elbow. She turned, a frown on her face, but as he examined the abrasion left by the bullet with his fingers, she didn’t flinch.

Extricating herself from his grip, she pulled a pearl-handled switchblade out of her desk. He got a glimpse of a wicked six-inch blade; then she retracted it, tucking it into her jeans pocket. She faced him, hands on hips, and that hardness to her eyes wasn’t much different from what he felt about the matter.

“So. Shall we go find our
skinny guy
who started all this?”

“He’s unconscious on the south lawn,” Mikhael said. “That’s where he hit my perimeter boundary. Probably zapped him with about ten thousand volts. If he wants kids, they’ll be born with four heads.”

“Reproducing is not going to be an issue. I’ll handle him.”

He considered the set of her chin, the fire in her eyes, nodded. “You wanted him alive. Though I’m not sure why, I figure it’s my place to remind you of that, since you’re acting like you’re going to filet him.”

She looked daggers at him, and he had to suppress a smile. He hadn’t had that urge in a very long time.

“We need to hurry. I have a client at eight.”

“Excuse me?” He stopped her with a hand. A firm hand.

“I have a client tonight. I do take a few of them, Mikhael.”

“Then I suggest you cancel it. I told you: While I’m fucking you, no one else is.” Actually he was feeling like that needed to be the case from here until the indefinite future, and he cursed Derek for putting that bug in his brain. Damn angel blood. He could manage it. He would. But she wasn’t screwing some guy right under the same roof with him.

“Well, it sounds like you aren’t, then.” Her eyes glowed with green fire, telling him she wasn’t tolerating any exercise of testosterone at the moment—except her own. “Because this is a very important, very valued client. You can watch, if you want. Maybe you’ll learn something about handling women.”

“Raina.” His tolerance had limits. He reminded her of it in those two syllables.

She closed her eyes, made a visible effort to step back from the events of the past hour. When she reopened them, her expression was calmer, but more detached as well. “It was a very nice day. Thank you for it. But this is what I do and who I am. After I resolve this, you can take Isaac and go. He’s violated the most important rule of being in my home, so I relinquish him to you. I trust you enough to do the right thing with him, but more than that, I won’t risk my family. You can both leave.”

Just like that, she’d turned away, all her shields in place as if he’d never even darkened her door. Or allowed her body to yield to his. He caught her elbow again, drew her back to him. “As warm and fuzzy a farewell as that is, it doesn’t change the fact that whoever took the item is going to track him here.”

“I’ll tell them he left with you, and that will be the end of it. They have no business with me, and they won’t make it past the protections on my property.”

He wasn’t leaving her undefended, no matter how capable she was, because they still didn’t have enough knowledge of what was coming, except that it scared the shit out of Isaac. While she was pretty damn formidable, he didn’t want to take the chance. Plus, he wasn’t done with her yet. That was the long and short of it.

“Not going, Raina. Not yet. No matter how much you pretend you want that.”

Her look would have shriveled the vital parts of most males, but he held his ground until she turned and left the library. Gods, even when she was angry, she still had that distracting pendulum walk. Right now, it didn’t make him think of sex as much as it made him glad she was still breathing. He still had a perverse urge to choke her, though.

She had a client. Yeah, if she thought that was going to happen, there might actually
be
a dead body here tonight.

“I
SAAC
. W
AKE UP
.
W
AKE UP
.”

Raina jabbed Isaac between his bare toes with the blade, bringing him jolting out of unconsciousness. Then she moved back as he twisted to his side and retched into the grass. She stared down at him until he sat up, looked sullenly at her. One look at her face, however, and his became far less belligerent.

“You just couldn’t believe me when I told you that you were safe here, could you?” She squatted, met him eye to eye, aware of his shifted attention to Mikhael, standing like a dark cloud behind her. She didn’t know if the menace was because of their argument or because he was turning up the scary volume to help her with Isaac, but she didn’t care, not if it got the job done. “I gave you sanctuary. And you nearly got my people and clients killed trying to create enough of a distraction to cover your escape. Well, congratulations. Door’s open. Go.” She pointed to the woods. “The second you step off this property, you’re all his, to extract information, to do whatever he wishes to you. If the female demon doesn’t get you first. When you hurt my family, you don’t get a second chance to do it.”

She rose, pivoted. She made it a good six steps past Mikhael before Isaac rallied.

“Wait. Miss Raina. Wait.”

She kept going another ten paces until he repeated it, and she heard him trying to scramble after her. She turned.

“Wait.” He swayed, fell back down. She didn’t move as he struggled to his knees and stayed there, fingers templed on the ground to hold him steady. “Fuck, what was in that barrier?”

“Something that would have killed you if you had prolonged contact with it.” Mikhael shifted to one hip, crossed his arms across his chest. Scratched his jaw with a jagged hunting blade twice the size of Raina’s switchblade. Isaac turned three shades paler.

“Please.” The gaze he turned toward her was full of misery. “Please.”

“No excuse, no babbling attempt to persuade me?”

Isaac shook his head. “I like Gina and everyone, but no one protects our kind. Not even our kind. It was just a matter of time before you sold me out. You’re fucking
him
.”

“Hey.” Mikhael kicked him in the side, flipped him over. Isaac yelped, then cringed as the Dark Guardian planted his boot on his chest. “You talk to her like that again, you won’t have a tongue left to save your worthless hide.”

Raina glanced at Mikhael’s dark and forbidding expression. An impartiality settled over him when he faced something like this. A variety of contingencies were likely going through his mind right now, calculations and considerations. He was apathetic to the terror of the creature utterly helpless to him. It was chilling.

“No one protects our kind,” Isaac repeated in a broken whimper.

“I can’t imagine why, since we’re obviously so trustworthy and loyal.” She studied him. The incubus looked perilously close to tears, which, of course, could be an act. It could all be an act. It didn’t change the truth of his circumstances, or that she understood what he felt. Damn it.

On certain things, she didn’t second-guess herself, or agonize over decisions. She was likely to regret this one, but she knew she was going to do it. No use beating it to death in her head. “You will apologize to all of them, especially Gina and Li. After that you’ll be confined to one of my guesthouses, reinforced by my protection and the Dark Guardian’s. You won’t leave that house until this is resolved. Then we will decide what shall be done with you.”

He nodded. “All right. Yes, ma’am.”

“Oh, please. That’s pouring it on a little thick.” She was still angry. Now that she knew her people were safe, what bugged her the most was how her nice day had been ruined. She’d taken a risk, and it had resulted in this. And she resented the hell out of it; it didn’t matter how petulant that was. She’d wanted one goddamn day.

It was just one day, she reminded herself. She’d had plenty of good ones, so she needed to suck it up. But this had been a damn near perfect day.

“Go to the guesthouse there.” She pointed to it. “Mikhael or I will be there shortly, and we better find you sitting in a chair like an altar boy. Touch nothing.”

As Isaac scrambled off, still staggering like a drunk, Mikhael approached her, but Raina moved away, out of reach. “Tell Matilda you want something for dinner. Doesn’t do any good to tell her what. She’ll prepare what she thinks you should eat. Or you can go out, so you don’t have to be here tonight, if that’s what you prefer. There’s a good steak house right off of Main.”

Marisa was coming toward them. She’d have a report on Li, and a hundred other details Raina needed to handle. Then she had the eight o’clock, followed by hostess duties from ten o’clock to closing. She was already running it down in her head, using the routine to settle her temper and her nerves, when Mikhael touched the small of her back. If she could have shrugged him off with grace and no evident agitation, she would have. Instead she set her teeth, looked up at him.

“Are you brushing me off?” he asked.

“I have things to do. I run a business here. That’s the truth of it, Mikhael.” She touched his forearm then, a contact she didn’t let herself feel. She couldn’t afford it right now. “Getting my staff calmed down enough to perform at the right level tonight will take me a while, not counting all the other things I need to do. We’ll talk later.”

He studied her. The truth was the easiest lie, so she let the harried expression show, a woman up to her elbows in alligators. Two more of her people were coming out looking for her, reinforcing it. Brush-off or not, she did have things to do, and if he couldn’t help with that, he was just in the way. Plus, having him in her field of vision made too many things rise to the surface. She was trying to lock down a montage of images. Nearly being shot, riding a kelpie, eating a sundae, staring into his eyes in that tree as she wondered what was truly growing between them.

He hadn’t given her a straight answer, but she knew the answer. It was nothing. A pleasant interlude. This, in front of her, that was her life. It was a pretty damn good life.