My Wicked Enemy (2 page)

He pulled the paper wrapper off a pair of wooden chopsticks and broke them apart. “Bet he had you homeschooled.”

Why was he so certain? “I couldn’t go to a regular school.”

“No letting the likes of you run free in the world.”

She wasn’t sure what he meant.
The likes of you.
Just like she wasn’t sure what he meant by calling her a witch. She didn’t want to know. “A normal school would have been too stressful for me.”

“Right,” he said. Only he didn’t sound like he agreed with her.

“It’s true.” She’d spent her childhood and most of her young adulthood going to specialists who did tests, who poked and prodded her and handed out pills in a rainbow of colors that did nothing to stop the headaches. They got worse, and their sequelae longer lasting and more severe. “Idiopathic migraine with accompanying fatigue.”

“Uh-huh.”

She licked her lips. He made her feel like her life was a lie. Which, actually, it seemed to have been. “He spent a lot of money on specialists.”

“Yeah, Magellan’s a great guy.” He examined his chopsticks. Gray eyes with a hint of blue. Like the sky before morning had completely arrived. Really pretty eyes, she thought. “Upstanding citizen. The fucker.”

“I don’t think he liked children very much.”

“Like I said.”

Carson breathed in slowly. Did his dislike of Magellan give her sufficient reason to tell him more? And if so, how much? She didn’t know. All she knew was she spent last night in a doorway, and hating Álvaro Magellan wasn’t such a bad thing to have in common with someone. “His work comes first.”

“His work.” Nikodemus didn’t sound mellow anymore. He threw the chopsticks on the table. His T-shirt, imprinted with the text “Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary,” fit snug against his torso. Whenever he moved, muscles flexed somewhere. “You help him with his work, don’t you?”

She winced because his voice hurt her ears. “Sometimes. He’s famous, as you must know. Preeminent,” she amended. She thought about leaving and almost stood up. Except, if she left, what then? “He’s the world’s foremost authority on the desert-fiend myth.” She tried to decide from his expression how much he knew about Magellan and his arcane expertise. She couldn’t tell. “People write to him constantly, asking for his opinion on some artifact or source of the myth. Wanting reprints of his papers. They write in with all kinds of crazy ideas. Someone has to answer the mail and keep things organized.”

Nikodemus stared at her too long with eyes that held more than just the chill of anger. She held his gaze. Looking away first meant you were weak. It was like admitting you were less, and she never let anyone make her feel less. Not even Magellan. Nikodemus’s eyes were a fortress. He could look out, but she’d never get in. She checked the tea again. It was still too pale to drink. “You think he studies myths about desert-fiends?” she heard him say.

Carson looked up and locked gazes with him again. He didn’t seem so affable now. “Of course that’s what he does.” It wasn’t. She knew that now, and Nikodemus, or whatever his real name was, seemed to know that, too. Her body started to shake. She didn’t know what was safe to say or do.

He shook his head. “That’s rich. That’s really rich, Carson. Next thing you’ll be telling me you don’t deserve to die.”

When he was done with his soup and the spring rolls—he ate them all, including hers after she declined to try them—he looked at his wrist. He didn’t have a watch, but the motion conveyed his meaning. His gaze was intense on her face. The star in his earring flashed in the light. “Tell me why you need my help, and while you’re at it, you can add in why I shouldn’t kill you right now for helping him in his work.”

For an instant her world contracted. “I don’t understand,” she said when she realized she hadn’t misheard the threat. Her chest fluttered, and she had trouble breathing again. All she could think was he wouldn’t try anything in a restaurant. Not in public. Her head hurt, a stabbing pain behind her eyes. He wasn’t going to help her. All this time running from Magellan and she ended up with someone else who wanted to kill her. Underneath the table, she scrubbed her sweaty palms on her jeans. “I haven’t done anything to you.”

“What’s to understand?” He moved his head to get his hair off his forehead. His hair was a dozen shades of brown. If he kept it properly short, it wouldn’t bother him. “All you have to say is Nikodemus, I want—whatever it is you want—and you shouldn’t kill me because—whatever you think that is. Easy.”

The waitress brought their entrees. She gave Nikodemus a slip of paper and spoke in a stream of Chinese that included the English words
cell phone
. She placed a fork by Carson’s plate while Nikodemus slipped her number in his wallet. His gaze sidled to the waitress as he picked up his chopsticks. He’d ordered something with tentacles, she saw. It smelled foreign and savory. He helped himself to rice and spooned some of his food onto the rice. She picked up her fork. Bits of fried chicken with vegetables sat on her plate in a shiny, sticky red sauce. Her stomach turned. She wasn’t hungry anyway.

“How bad can it be?” he asked. He sounded sympathetic, and despite everything, because of everything, she wanted that to be true. She wanted someone on her side. She didn’t want to be alone. “Just say it. I can’t possibly think any less of you afterward than I do already.” He waited while Carson tried to figure out how to start. The thing was, she couldn’t reconcile her urge to like and trust him with the fact that he’d threatened to kill her, all in his easygoing voice. Like it was no big deal. Like he had every right to feel that way. She should leave him to the waitress. Except he’d follow her and kill her, right? She swallowed the lump in her throat and almost couldn’t.

“Okay, then,” he said after she’d opened and closed her mouth twice. “Maybe this will help. This morning, the top items on my to-do list were these.” He held his palm in front of his face. “Eat breakfast.” He made a little check motion on his palm. “Get laid.” Another check mark on his palm. “Kill Álvaro Magellan. Did not do that.” He went back to his meal. All Carson could do was watch, hypnotized by his beautiful eyes. “You’re on that list, too. In fourth place. Kill Carson Philips.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you.”

“Why?” She used her fork to rearrange the food on her plate. He had to be either an academic or an artifact dealer. She couldn’t make herself accept any other possibility. Since he didn’t seem the scholarly type, she figured he had to be a dealer. Of the shady variety. “Did I write you a rude letter? Tell you we didn’t want to buy your fake Babylonian figurine straight from the grave of Hammurabi himself?”

“If I had an artifact, it wouldn’t be fake.” His gaze locked with hers. “Maybe today I can get three out of the four. I’d rather kill Magellan, but offing Magellan’s witch would make this a top-ten day for me. Does that help? Because despite any impression you might have of me, Carson, I am not patient.”

“Why do you keep calling me a witch?” she said softly.

One eyebrow lifted. His chopsticks stopped halfway to his mouth. “Sweetheart, you are in some serious denial.”

Carson was shaking again, so she put down her fork and clasped her hands on her lap. “All right,” she said evenly. “Whatever you say. I’m a witch.” She wondered if his behavior was normal. She might not get out much, but she read books and magazines. She read the paper. She even watched TV sometimes. God knows Magellan wasn’t a role model for normal behavior. Nikodemus knew that, she kept thinking. He knew an awful lot about Magellan. “I need help,” she whispered.

He cocked his head. “Why?”

She looked Nikodemus in the eye and said, “He’s insane.” There wasn’t any other explanation. At least not one she was prepared to broach just yet.

He ate a bite of tentacle. “Insane like he thinks he’s a potted plant, or insane like a crazed killer?” He glanced at the ceiling, pretending to think. “Oh, wait. He is a killer.” His gray-blue eyes returned to her, colder than before. For a moment, she thought she saw something else in his eyes. Movement of some sort. But that was crazy. Nobody had eyes like that. “Seriously, Carson, talk, or else all you’re doing is wasting my time, and that pisses me off.”

Orange flashes filled her vision. Nikodemus touched her shoulder, and the throbbing pain eased. She knew, intellectually, the two things—his touching her and her pain easing—were unrelated, but that didn’t stop her from making the connection.

“Carson,” he said in a softer voice. “Talk to me. I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.”

The gentleness of his voice struck hard. He didn’t mean it, but she was desperate to believe he did. She forced herself to look at him and discovered she was a wretched liar. Lying meant keeping track of what she said and remembering when reality had to be altered to fit any lie she tried on him. What she told or didn’t tell. Her head hurt too much to lie. Half-truths would have to do. “I think he believes in fiends and magic.”

He scratched his chin, nodding. “Explains the hobby.”

“Is your name really Nikodemus?”

He made a face. “What difference does that make?”

“Well, it’s just . . . a coincidence, I suppose.” On her lap, her fingers curled into fists. She thought about Magellan’s paper on Nikodemus and the ritual he’d described in it. She started feeling shaky again, as if the world was going to dissolve around her. “I think he believes there really is an ancient fiend called Nikodemus—”

“Potted plant, is he?” Nikodemus had a European face with a hint of something else. His cheekbones were high, his mouth sensitive. Not Spanish, she thought, but something exotic. Some unusual blend of heritage. But no way was he Chinese.

“You don’t study the myths, do you? You just collect the artifacts, am I right?” she asked.

“What myths would that be?”

“About fiends. Desert-fiends, I mean, not the kind from the Bible. His fiends came first. He’s obsessed with them, you know.”

His mouth quirked, then stilled. “That’s a pretty funny obsession, if you ask me. No wonder you ran away from him.”

“They can control a person’s will and even take over their bodies.”

“Ooh, scary,” he said, not looking at all scared. He glanced around the restaurant. “How many pod people do you think are here?”

“They’re evil incarnate.” She leaned toward him, her attention on his face, alert to any change that would tell her he didn’t think Magellan was crazy at all. “But a mage, a sorcerer, can control them and keep them from harming people.”
Or a witch,
she thought. A witch could control them, too.

He looked at her, totally calm. “Is that right?”

“I think he’s convinced fiends exist and that they can be controlled with the proper magical . . . baloney.” She wriggled her fingers in the air.

One eyebrow arched. “Baloney?”

“Hocus-pocus.” She mustn’t let him think she believed any of this. She stood firmly on the side of rationality and logic. Any other position was pure insanity. “Artifacts, incantations, all the things Magellan collects and writes about. Mystical stuff our ancestors believed in up to a few hundred or thousand years ago.”

“Supernatural creatures who take over a person’s will, like in
The Exorcist,
you mean?” She nodded, and he laughed. “That’s a bunch of bullshit, Carson. Do a three-sixty with a human’s head, she doesn’t keep calling you names. She dies.” He put his hands around his throat and made a choking sound.

She wanted to laugh, but she couldn’t. Her stomach was acting up again, churning away. He reached for her, touched her shoulder again, and she felt better just from the distraction of the contact. “What if Magellan has started believing in fiends? I know it’s ridiculous, but what if he’s gone insane?”

“Well, now,” he said, letting his fingers slide off her. Almost immediately, her headache pulsed again. “All that stuff about fiends living among us, that’s pretty interesting.” He poured himself tea. Was he smiling? She wasn’t sure. “To be honest, so far I haven’t heard anything to make me think he’s insane. There are plenty of normal, sane, but misguided people who believe in that kind of shit.”

Carson surrendered to the tremble of her breath through the words. She couldn’t stop her emotion, but she kept her body and expression still. “I saw Magellan kill a man.”

“A man?” Nikodemus tipped up her cup and filled it, too.

She lifted her hands, remembering the sheen of red on his fingers. “Yes. It was a man.”

He pushed her tea toward her. His fingers were slender, with nails almost too long. She remembered reading somewhere that guitar players kept their nails long. She wondered if he was a musician. Teacup in hand, he leaned against his chair and stared at her with one arm folded over his chest. “Are you saying he thought the guy was one of those desert-fiends?”

“Maybe.” She stared at the table. “Maybe, yes.”

“What’s a fiend look like? Are you sure it was a man?” His gaze held hers. She’d never seen eyes of such a pure, piercing color. That, along with her headache, made her dizzy. Someone with eyes like his could take your heart with one lingering glance.

“Yes, of course.”

Something flickered behind his eyes. “How do you know?”

“Because it wasn’t a woman. Because it was someone I knew.” She took a deep breath, and even though she wanted to, she didn’t tell him the rest. He already wasn’t convinced about anything she’d said. “He used to work for Magellan. Magellan told me to go to my room, and I did. But I didn’t stay there.” She couldn’t tell him anything else. What if she was wrong? What if she was the insane one? “I ran.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

She knew her hesitation made her seem deceptive. A liar. But she had to be cautious. With her head hurting the way it was, she needed more time than usual to get her thoughts together about what to say and what to leave out. She shook her head. “I called on my cell, but when his car came down the hill, looking for me, it rang, and I threw the phone away. I was afraid they’d find me if I kept it with me.” She took a steadying breath. “So, I got on a bus and ended up here.” All of which represented a gross understatement of the most terrifying night of her life.

He drank some tea. The space around them got very quiet. Whatever he was thinking wasn’t pleasant, she thought. After another sip, he put down his cup and said, “Are you fucking with me, or could you be for real?”

“What do you mean?” A breeze cooled her cheek when the restaurant door opened. She pushed away her plate with its sticky blood-red sauce. The smell was making her ill, and she could not afford to be sick. Not now. “Magellan killed a man. I saw it. I saw him do it.” The clench of the body, the sound, the awful sound that still grated in her ears. “According to you,” she said in a low voice, “maybe it’s not the first time.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” He took another bite of his lunch.

She stared at the ruby in his ear. Star rubies were critical to the ancient rituals Magellan was working so hard to reproduce. Was that a coincidence, too? The way Nikodemus’s name was a coincidence? His eyes flickered, and nobody’s eyes flickered between colors, from gray-blue to silver-black. She said, “Maybe I’m the one who’s going insane.”

Nikodemus leaned back like he didn’t want to be too close to a woman who was losing her hold on sanity. “What else, Carson?”

She closed her eyes, seeing the room with Magellan in the center, blood glistening on his hands, dripping down. Horror rushed up as fresh and new as ever. “Please help me,” she whispered. He was calling himself Nikodemus. His eyes weren’t normal. That had to mean something. She choked back a sob. This was no time to break down. She had to hold herself together a while longer. “I ran away from Magellan, and nobody ever leaves him.”

He reached into a front pocket of his jeans, pulled out a hundred dollars, and threw it on the table. “Incoming,” he said. He grabbed her hand and yanked her to her feet. “If you want to live until you convince me you’re serious, move.”

Carson turned her head, and her heart dropped to her stomach. Two men had just come into the restaurant. They looked like investment bankers. They wore dark Italian-made suits and polished oxfords, and their hair was short. Very short. One of them wore sunglasses. The other had a hand shoved inside his suit jacket, reaching for something. She recognized them both. Kynan and Tibold. Magellan had recently hired Tibold, but Kynan had been with Magellan forever, and he’d always frightened her. He was big and heavily muscled, with pale brown eyes so beautiful your breath caught until you saw the hate behind them. He had a way of looking at her that made her feel like she was naked.