My Wicked Enemy (10 page)

While she was heading up the stairs, Nikodemus’s cell phone went off. She heard the device vibrating all the way from the front room. She slowed when she heard Nikodemus say, “Talk to me.” The next thing he said was, “Fuck,” in a low, emphatic tone.

She returned to the arched doorway. Nikodemus had his back to her, and he was pacing, listening to whoever had called him.

“Tell him I said to stay put. No. I said no.” He listened a while longer. “If he already left, why’d you let me think he hadn’t?” More listening. “Never mind. I’ll take care of it. Thanks. No. You needed to call. You did. We’re square that way.” He closed the phone and stood motionless, squeezing his hand so hard Carson expected the phone to burst apart.

“What happened?” she asked.

He turned around. “Durian went after Xia by himself.”

“Did he find him?”

He stopped squeezing his cell and the room got ten degrees hotter. She felt the pressure of his mental energy. “He followed Xia all the way to Rasmus.”

Carson kept the eye contact. “We’re going after him, right?”

He laughed. “A witch who can’t pull? Get real.”

She stayed exactly where she was, aware for the first time in her life that she had a purpose. “I felt you when you were fighting Kynan. You used me. My magic.”

His cheeks flushed. “If I hadn’t, you’d be dead.”

“I said I’d help you.” She touched his arm. “So why not let me?”

He searched her face. “Even if it kills you faster?”

“I’m offering, Nikodemus. Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “Just don’t.”

He stuck his cell in his back pocket. “Back there with Kynan? I pulled some fucking amazing magic through you. Amazing.”

“So?”

“The problem, Carson, is your magic is all over the fucking place. I can’t risk you shutting off just when I need you, if you get my drift.”

She stared at his still-clenched fists. His fingers clenched and released, clenched and released. “You can control a human, can’t you?”

His eyes narrowed, but she was certain, almost certain, that she saw a leap of anticipation in them. “It’s called an indwell.”

“And you could do that with me.”

“Yeah,” he whispered.

“Would that work?”

He took a breath. “I wouldn’t need to be in total control. But I’d need it to be permanent. So you can’t shut me out.”

“I’m still offering,” she said.

His eyes flickered through shades of blue, gray, and black. “Come here.” She walked to him and he took her wrist, bringing her forearm parallel to the floor. “I’ll keep my promise. You know that, right?”

“I know.

“This should do.” He drew the side of his fingernail out from the puncture Xia had made, leaving frost in his wake. They watched her blood pool in the crook of her elbow. “Look at me now.” His voice felt like smoke. “This is the important part. It works better if you’re looking at me. Don’t block me, okay, Carson?”

She nodded. He pressed a fingertip to her forehead, and a spark leapt from his finger to her skin and into her head. His eyes changed from gray-blue to silver-black, and Carson didn’t dare look away. Panic rose up, but she kept her mind open. Vulnerable. Nikodemus slid into her head, and when he was there, he brought up her arm and fit his mouth over the reopened cut. Her body clenched at the same time he swallowed. His other hand cupped the back of her head.

When he lifted his head, he was alive in her mind. She breathed when he did; her heart beat when his did. Without question, he could do anything to her, ask anything of her and she would do it. He didn’t, though. He just gazed at her, growing more vivid in her head.

“Holy fuck,” he breathed. His hand still cupped her head. Their bodies were just inches apart. Carson licked her lips, and his gaze followed the movement of her tongue. “You like that?” he whispered.

She nodded.

His presence in her mind flared, and in another breath, they were physically synchronized again. He wasn’t controlling her—he was just there. Incredibly
there
. She raised up on her toes to press her lips to his. He hesitated, but then he responded, and his physical state echoed her own. His mouth opened over hers, and God, he felt so good. So right. His thumb moved over her cut, pressing down as his tongue slid across hers. Slowly, he drew away. Reluctantly. He bowed his head and pressed his forehead to hers, hand still cupping the back of her neck. His breath rattled in his chest. “Next time tell me no, Carson, or you’re going to find out exactly why fiends make better lovers.”

The wry remark got her past the longing to kiss him again. Nikodemus receded from her head but didn’t disappear. “I think we better get going,” she said. She was wobbly inside, but she didn’t feel like he was controlling her. Mostly, she felt normal, if you counted her wild desire to kiss him again and see where they ended up as normal. Which for her, wasn’t. But, then, she’d never met Nikodemus before, had she?

“Trust me,” he said. “You’ll know if I take over.”

“Let’s not waste any more time, Nikodemus.”

Rasmus lived in the Berkeley Hills, across the bay from the city, on Wildcat Canyon Road, a winding road on the ridge above the University of California. Nikodemus’s Mercedes took the turns smooth as silk. It was full-on night now, but foggy, so there wasn’t any moonlight. Streetlights were few and far between. They went around a corner, and then Nikodemus jammed on the brakes hard enough to snap Carson’s shoulder belt tight. He backed up to a car parked off a soft shoulder, a Volvo that had seen better days.

“Durian’s.” Nikodemus closed his eyes and shook his head. “I can’t feel him.”

“Maybe we’re not close enough.”

“Maybe,” he said in a low voice. He gripped the steering wheel and didn’t say anything for a while.

Carson put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll find him.”

“Let’s go,” he said.

Her mouth was dry as dust as they parked on a verge choked with weeds and blackberries and walked uphill along a one-way-at-a-time driveway. Carson’s pulse beat hard when they cleared the last of the trees that shadowed the pavement. They were here. Her feet slowed without her thinking about it, so that Nikodemus ended up several steps ahead of her. In the dark, he seemed taller and more imposing. Confident, too. He moved silently, unlike her, the perfect sneak thief.

A few feet from the gate, he waited for her to catch up. They waited in the shadow of a pine for Durian to appear, but he didn’t. After perhaps fifteen minutes, Nikodemus threw an arm around her shoulder and drew her in close to whisper. “Change of plan, all right?” She nodded. “Without Durian, we have to approach this differently, so listen up.” His breath warmed her ear. “Unless something goes wrong, and it won’t, no killing tonight. I’m not after Rasmus. We’re going in cloaked. His fiends can’t feel me, regardless, and given that I have you on tap, I can hide both of us from the mage. All I want is the talisman. We get that, find Durian, and we’re gone like we were never here. Okay?”

“And if we don’t?”

“Plan B is if I let go of you, you make nice with Rasmus while I take care of business. Let him think whatever he wants. You’re both mages. Talk shop or something. Say anything. Lie. Cheat. Steal. Just keep him distracted. Can you do that for me?”

She nodded.

Nikodemus slipped his hand from her shoulder to the back of her neck and looked her in the eye. When their gazes met, that spot in her head tingled with awareness of him. “Plan A first, Carson. You lay low and I keep you under wraps. I’ll pull when and if I need to. If we can’t get the talisman that way, we go to plan B. I’ll still have you, by the way, so don’t try anything stupid. You’re a witch, and magehelds have to defer to you. Demand to see Rasmus. Acting like a bitch should be plenty convincing. Okay?”

She nodded again.

“Either way, I’ll get the talisman, find Durian, and get us out.”

“Is there a plan C?”

Nikodemus smiled. “You bet. Run like hell. You ready?”

She wasn’t, but she nodded anyway.

“That’s my girl. Balls of steel.” He turned to the gate and muttered something Carson couldn’t make out. An echo of air brushed back at her. The gate swung open. Her incipient headache vanished like someone had wrapped a blanket around it. She knew the pain was there, but she couldn’t feel it. He looked at her sideways and blew on the tips of his fingers. Nobody came out to investigate. Carson stared at the house, straining to see and hear. Was the mage in there murdering a fiend right now? Could she really have grown up to do something like that?

The top of the driveway opened onto a flagstone-paved area large enough to hold several cars. There was one car, a dark Jaguar, and a motorcycle.

The mage’s house was three stories of gray stone with olive trees and a tulip tree in the front as the centerpiece of the landscaped garden—all the signs of wealth Magellan so loved himself. A portico light was on, but only two windows were lit, both of them on the third floor, where, if the house was anything like Magellan’s, the assistants had their quarters. One window flickered with television glow. Carson shivered. At the front door her heart pounded so hard she couldn’t get a breath. She burned with the desire to thwart Rasmus, not because of Nikodemus but because it was a vicarious strike at Magellan.

Nikodemus put his head by her ear again. “Durian’s here. I can feel him now. This is going to be a piece of cake. Let’s roll.”

He moved first, soft and substantial as shadow, so silent he might have been a true shadow. She crossed the threshold after him, every nerve in her body taut. Her head throbbed. She was dizzy, and every so often some snatch of information came to her that originated from Nikodemus. His impressions tangled up with hers, and she ended up disoriented, trying to separate his from her own. Somewhere in the house, she heard a noise, a scratching sound. Like a dog walking over a wooden floor. The smell was horribly familiar. Blood. Blood mixed with the musty gunpowder odor she’d encountered the night she walked in on Magellan.

“We’re too late,” she whispered. Rasmus had already started the ritual. She couldn’t tell if the wrongness was in her or if it came to her from the house or even from Nikodemus. Her legs shook, and every time she closed her eyes, her stomach turned somersaults.

“Don’t make me do all the work here. Focus,” Nikodemus said.

She nodded and tried to filter out her fear. Whoever was watching television changed the channel. The sound cut off mid-sales-pitch and then blasted on rock music. One of the Dane’s fiends, so Carson assumed, came down the stairs, shoes muffled on the carpeted surface, then thumping on the landing. At the bottom of the stairs, he flipped a light switch. The click was louder than it ought to have been. To Carson, he looked human. As human as Nikodemus, come to think of it. He looked past them, even though seeing her and Nikodemus standing there should have stopped him cold.

She watched him for some sign of what he really was. He wasn’t as tall as Nikodemus or as broad through the shoulders, but he had muscles. He wore sweatpants and running shoes and nothing else. From the look of him, he was fresh from a fight. Blood trickled down the side of his face from a cut over one eyebrow. He kept walking. Carson gave a silent sigh of relief.

The conversation downstairs got louder and angrier. The acrid smell in the air thickened. “Fuck,” Nikodemus whispered.

As they turned the corner into a living room, the sound of running thundered. Nikodemus hissed and caught Carson’s arm. She concentrated on breathing, on keeping calm. Even he flinched at the noise, and that made her feel better. He pulled her close. Her arms slid around him, actively thinking of him in her head, helping her stay low. “No,” he muttered. “No, no, no.”

Xia walked a slow perimeter, and at the front door, he stopped and ran his fingertips over the wood from top to bottom, paying more attention to the door knob. Even Nikodemus held his breath and prayed his camo would hold against the mageheld. But at last, with a final sweep of the room, Xia headed downstairs.

At the same time, he and Carson let out a breath. “Jesus, he’s one nasty fuck,” Nikodemus said. Carson started to say something, but a shrieking howl from lower in the house froze them both. The sound continued longer than he could imagine anyone making a noise so soul-piercing. Magic, a mage’s magic, turned the air to lead.

“Durian,” she whispered.

But it was too late. Way too late.

Carson clutched his arm as the waning howl slivered the air. The sound cut off, leaving them in horrible silence. Without thinking, he slid his hand down her arm until he was holding her hand. He curled his fingers around hers and gently squeezed. He steadied her until she was used to the sensation of him affirmatively touching her inside her head. He went deeper. “We aren’t going to be unseen this time,” he said, keeping his head near her ear and speaking softly. “If—things don’t go so great, I’ll be pushing my magic through you, and you’re going to feel it. Like this.”

The amount of magic in her wound him up. The stuff was like some kind of dark and twisted lake, and if he had time, he would have explored. He wanted to kill Magellan. Jesus, she was just a kid when he started with her. As with sexual maturation, you had to castrate early if you were serious about stopping a mage’s magical development.

He worked to keep the anger from his voice. “You’re not going to freak out if that happens?”

“No.”

He pulled as much magic as he dared. He wasn’t worried about magehelds picking up on him. The fiends here couldn’t feel his magic if he handed them a glass of it to chug. It was Carson who worried him. He was confident he had her shielded from the mage, but the more magic he pulled, the higher the risk of his accidentally exposing her. One of the magehelds was bound to figure out some of the mage-magic didn’t belong to Rasmus. Or worse, he’d slip up and Rasmus would figure out he had uninvited company.

No living without risk, right? Besides, she was his secret weapon. On the way down the stairs, the air kept getting heavier and thicker. His skin crawled. Somewhere down there a mage was pulling some serious magic.

Another scream lifted the air. Despair and pain and outrage and terror all wrapped up in an awful sound tearing at his heart. He wasn’t the only one to feel the despair of that sound. Carson clapped her hands over her ears, bowing her head to her chest, shoulders hunched over. Even a human mage who couldn’t touch her magic reacted. Durian was being murdered, his soul torn apart, his body separated from his magic. They didn’t have much time left.

At the bottom of the stairs his head pulsed with an additional awareness. To the left, a corridor led to a chrome-metal door closed tight. Nikodemus slipped past her and stood with his palms pressed to the metal surface. The reflection was warped and almost as useful as his access to Carson’s sense of fiends, mageheld or not.

“Double platinum,” he said softly. “Layer of crushed rubies in between. Typical paranoid mage behavior. Nothing magical passes in or out of a door like this.” Crap. He’d really been hoping to get a sense of what was going on in there. “There’s no way I’m getting us through that.” He turned his head and saw her shaking. She had balls, though. He felt her getting ready. Fatalistic, thinking, for Christ’s sake, that whatever happened to her next was payback for letting Xia into his house. She was wrong. But that’s what she felt.

Her eyes went wide, pupils huge. Smart lady. He didn’t even have to tell her it was time for plan B. He couldn’t help admiring her nerve. She had to be terrified, but she swallowed once, walked up to the door, and knocked.

He released his camo of her just as she tried the door. It opened, and then it was too late. He didn’t have time to tell her there were two mages inside. Not just one.