G
o take a shower,” Iskander said. He used his phone to take a picture of Paisley’s list so he could e-mail it to Gray. “But you might want to get your clothes into the laundry first.”
Since her rental agreement gave her use of the machines in the utility room at the back of his house, he figured she could handle that without help. “Have you got a robe I can borrow?” she asked.
“I live here alone.” He looked up from typing into his phone. “I don’t need a robe.”
“Oh.”
Iskander looked up from typing into his phone. “I’m not going to run around naked, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“That’s because you have more than one change of clothes.”
“If you want to borrow something of mine until Gray gets here, that’s totally cool.” He sent his e-mail to Gray and returned his phone to his pocket. “I have to check on my security system. If you want something to wear, my room’s upstairs. First door on the right.”
“Thank you. I would really appreciate that.”
“No problem.” She’d had a really rotten day, and here she was smiling at him. He was ready to slay dragons to make things better for her. “See you in a few, okay?”
He went out the back, through the French doors that opened onto his patio, and checked the status of his proofing. He saw nothing unusual, but he made a quick circuit of the perimeter of the house and yard just to make sure. The morning commute was getting started. There were more traffic sounds now. Times like this, he missed the quiet of living in the middle of nowhere. All of his street-side proofing was in place and undisturbed. He swung around the rear of the house again so he could go back in the door he’d gone out. In the yard, his spine turned to ice. One of the medallions by the French doors was nothing but charcoal. Another one had broken clean in half.
Shit.
If Rasmus had come back, he would have felt it, and he hadn’t. The thing was, he could see Paisley through the French doors. She looked fine. In fact, she walked over and opened one of the doors. “There you are,” she said. Perfectly fine. “I was looking for you.”
“Are you okay?” he asked. Had something tried to get in and failed? He went inside, reached behind him, and closed the door tight. Six of the wards he’d set around the inside of the door were broken. Paisley was fine this time because he’d reset everything to account for her presence in the house. That meant someone else had triggered them. He pulled his magic through him so he’d be ready for anything.
“I was upstairs looking for something to wear when I heard the most god-awful racket.”
Iskander tried to keep his cool, but it wasn’t easy, not with the way he was feeling all twitchy. “Was it just noise or did you see something?”
“Yeah.” She laughed. “Your cat.” She pointed at the French doors at his back. “Yowling and scratching to be let in.”
“My cat?” Some of the kin could shift into shapes besides their nonhuman one. Kynan Aijan, for example. Back in the days when he didn’t pay attention to much besides Fen, he’d heard there were a few mages who could shape-shift for short periods.
“Yes. I’ve seen it around before, but I thought it was the neighbor’s. I didn’t know it was yours. Anyway, I let it in.”
His stomach dropped off the edge of the earth. “What?”
She cocked her head, at last uncertain. “Was that not okay? It acted like it lived here.”
“I don’t have a cat.”
“Oh.” Her eyes widened, and her cheeks flushed. “I am so sorry. Tell me you don’t have a deadly allergy to cats.”
“Where is it now?”
Please, please
, he thought,
let her have put it back outside
. But he knew she hadn’t. There was a fucking mageheld in his house somewhere, and he was essentially blind to its location.
“I don’t know.” She twisted her upper body to look around. “It was here a minute ago.”
“Shit.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again. She scratched the back of her arm. “It’s just that it acted like it lived here, and I thought it was yours.”
“No problem.” He forced himself to smile. “I’ll find it and put it outside so it can go back where it belongs. Go get the laundry started.”
“Sure.” When she was gone, he stood in his living room, feeling like he might just jump right out of his skin. Where the hell was it? He cast around for more breaks in his proofing, but there weren’t any so far. Could he be lucky enough that whatever was here was too injured to do anything? The laundry room door closed with a click. The mageheld had to be after Paisley, because even the dumbest mage alive would know he’d have to send more than one mageheld to kill him. He jogged down the hall in time to see the laundry room doorknob turn. He directed enough magic at the door to keep it from opening because he was pretty sure that wasn’t Paisley trying to open the door.
Now that he suspected where his enemy was, he focused on the one thing he knew he was good at—turning himself into a weapon. He concentrated his magic, pulled it through him, allowed it to inhabit every crevice of his being. When he was like this, life was sweeter. More intense. The possibility that he might face someone stronger than he was hyped him up something fierce. He thought more clearly, moved faster, saw better. He fucking owned the world.
He sent more magic toward the laundry room door, and as expected, a soft
pop
accompanied the collapse of the magical constructs that kept the mageheld invisible. The air around the door shimmered and flashed blue. A mageheld fiend in its nonhuman form dropped to one knee, one fist arcing toward the door. The thing snarled, but Iskander had already secured the interior and exterior doors to the laundry room. No way was that mageheld getting in. He dampened this end of the house as best he could; with a bit of luck, Paisley wouldn’t hear anything. If she tried to open any of the doors, hopefully she’d just think they were jammed.
The air got hot, and more and more of his proofing went off around them. Blood trickled from one of the mageheld’s ears, but it twisted away from him and lunged toward the laundry room door. He grabbed it by the shoulders, but his fingers slipped in blood, now leaking from both its eyes, and that allowed the fiend’s arm to slip free. Iskander danced sideways to avoid a vicious blow to his rib. The blow still landed, and it still hurt, but not as much as it might have. He got an arm around the mageheld’s throat, cut off its air, and dragged it, kicking, down the hallway.
He had to juke to avoid a shot to his temple. With one arm around its throat, he caught the mageheld’s fist before the asshole made a hole in his wall. His biceps screamed with the effort of holding the mageheld back. The bones in its hand broke, and even under a magical compulsion to get to Paisley at whatever cost, the enslaved fiend faltered.
Room to maneuver was precious here, hindering them both. He was holding back so he could keep the dampening going. The effort cost him more than he liked. The mageheld’s other ear started bleeding, and as it flailed back, fighting to get out of Iskander’s choke hold, it loosed a burst of energy that slammed Iskander against the wall, right into a closet door. The doorknob just missed his spine.
He took a breath and tightened his arm around the mageheld’s throat while he fought for the leverage he needed to break its neck. The fucker shape-shifted to a mountain lion–sized animal. He gathered himself and slipped into the roar of his magic. He punched the mageheld; his fingers stiff and shifted into talons. His arm tore through the feline body and sliced through its spine. When he drew back his hand, the mageheld’s heart was crushed in his fist.
Iskander had to let go of the dampening magic so he could safely bind the dead fiend’s magic to his own. If he didn’t, that magic, which made up a part of the fiend’s life, might never rejoin the magical space shared by the kin, and its life force would never find peace. Nor would it ever really be dead. He didn’t wish that agony on any of the kin. He said the required words and the energy crackling in the air diminished. The fiend’s magic was now safe from the magekind, too.
He looked up from the body and saw blood everywhere. The laundry room door rattled. Magic raced through his body. He used the heat to scour away the blood and then incinerate it. The mageheld’s body was still there, in human form now and not fading fast enough.
Paisley rattled the door again, then knocked. “Iskander? A little help, please?”
He opened the hallway closet, dragged the corpse inside, and shoved hard enough to close the door. He released the magic that had kept the laundry room door shut. The door flew open and there Paisley was. He could hear water sloshing around in the washer.
“Hey,” he said. He straightened but kept a hand pressed to the closet door. “I forgot to warn you that door’s tricky.” He smiled at her, and hell, he was going to qualify for sainthood for all the time he spent not looking at her chest. “Now that you’re here, I’ll have to take a look at it.”
She was wearing a faded black T-shirt of his he kept meaning to throw away. She had it knotted at the waist. A pair of gray boxers, brand-new and still creased from the packaging, hung to about midthigh on her. She had on a pair of his socks. Jesus, her legs were long, long, long. “I was having visions of spending the rest of the day in there.”
“Sorry about that.” Delicious. That’s what she looked like. Lickable. Totally fuckable.
“Did you find the cat?”
He leaned against the closet and crossed his arms over his chest. She was naked under those clothes. His clothes. “I took care of it.”
“Thanks for letting me borrow your clothes, by the way.”
“No problem.”
“Did you hurt yourself?” she asked.
“No.”
“Are you sure? You have blood on your face.” She walked to him and brushed his cheek. Her fingers came away smeared with blood. He had to steel himself against touching her. He wanted to. “Did that cat scratch you?”
“Didn’t even feel it.”
“Do you have a first-aid kit?”
“No.”
She grabbed his hand, and he sent a pulse of magic into the closet door just in case. It didn’t come open, so it must have been enough. She hauled him to the bathroom a few feet down the hall, where he could see he did have a cut on his cheek that still oozed blood. Not horrible, but he could see why she was concerned. He let her wipe off his cheek and clean out the scratch with soap and water. He kept himself from healing too fast.
“Cat scratches can be dangerous, you know,” she said, dabbing at his cheek.
“I’ll live.” The bathroom wasn’t all that big, and, well, being good and not thinking about having sex with Paisley just made him think about it more.
She stepped back and studied the scratch. “I suppose you will.”
For a minute they stood there looking at each other, and hell if it didn’t feel like maybe she wouldn’t mind if he put a hand or two on her. Half a second before he tested the theory, she backed away.
He cleared his throat. “You should probably get into the shower now.”
“Yes. I probably should.”
“Don’t use all the hot water, okay?”
“I’ll try not to.”
He left and she closed the door.
Damn.
He listened to the water run in the downstairs bathroom while he cleaned up the dust. It didn’t take long. He took the whole load into the backyard and incinerated it with a minor pull of his magic. After that, he went upstairs and took a shower himself. The whole time he thought about Paisley downstairs. Naked. In the shower.
Ten minutes later, he went downstairs in clean clothes. He checked the hallway to make sure he hadn’t missed anything before, then checked the closet. The mageheld’s body was only faintly visible. In the laundry room, he opened the washer and found about what he expected. Her jeans were little more than a mass of white threads held together at the seams. Nothing was left of her white chef’s jacket except the metal snaps, which he picked out of the bottom of the washer. The shirt she’d had on underneath was dotted with holes. So were her bra and panties. He set them on top of the dryer so she could decide for herself if anything was worth saving.
He threw himself onto his recliner and grabbed the remote from the table next to it. He started running through the cable menu. She came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, her damp hair slicked back and her skin smelling like the peppermint soap he kept there. “Feel better?” he asked.
“Yes.” She sat on his couch, looking all adorable in his clothes and with his socks falling around her ankles. “I think that qualifies as the best shower I’ve ever had.”
“That’s good.” He muted the TV, then wished he hadn’t. Now it was too quiet. “Gray should be here pretty soon.”
She nodded. “You have a very nice place, Iskander.”
“Thanks.”
“Have you lived here long?” She curled her legs underneath her, and he looked because, well, she had killer legs.
“ ’Bout a year.” He kept his eyes on the TV. No looking at her chest. No looking at all.
“Really?” She ran her fingers through her hair, fluffing it a little. Her eyes were a really pretty hazel, more green than brown. “A year. That’s so funny.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Could she be any cuter? He wondered why she didn’t have a boyfriend. What idiot would ever cut her loose? She put her arms on top of the couch, and sitting kind of sideways so she could see him, she rested her chin on them. “You meet someone and you think they’ve always lived where they do or always had the same job. I thought you must have lived here forever.”
“Nope.”
“Where did you live before?”
He’d already figured out that she was nervous and that she talked when she was nervous. He was the opposite. When he first got severed, he used to almost never talk. Different ways of coping with a fucked-up life.
“Are you from around here?” she asked.
He didn’t take his eyes off the TV. He saw her just fine in his peripheral vision. “I moved here from Sonoma County.”
“I’m from Georgia. I came here for college. Straight from home.”
“Yeah?” He put down the remote and looked at her. He smiled. He could do this. He passed for human all the time. “I lived at Harsh’s place up north. Way out in the boonies. I think most of my stuff is still at the farmhouse.”