My Wicked Enemy (4 page)

The decor here was homier and more inviting. The green velvet sofa looked comfy. There were two matching chairs and a black leather recliner, battered in a comfortable way. He put his beer on the glass table and sat on the sofa, knee up, booted foot on the green-velvet cushion. He took a cell phone from his back pocket and set it next to his beer. There was a flat-screen TV on one wall. She recognized the Wii on the table next to the TV because Magellan’s employees played constantly. Wiimotes and Nunchucks were on the table. He rested an elbow atop his knee and let his hand, with its long and slender fingers, dangle down. He was all long legs, lean thighs, and ripped abs. The muscle was impossible to miss from this close. No wonder he wasn’t afraid of Kynan. “The chair is for you,” he said. “It’s better if you’re not too comfortable.”

“Okay.” Her mouth went dry. She dropped her purse to the floor and sat on the chair. It wasn’t comfortable. She stared at the ceiling. Faint in the plaster she could see bronze stars that ran in a pattern along the ceiling and down the wall into a copper pot placed so that it looked like the stars were spilling into, or maybe coming from, the pot.

“I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt.” He was serious now. His good-humored smile was gone. It had never occurred to her he wouldn’t trust her. The idea startled her, that she wasn’t the only one with reason for distrust. What else had she overlooked?

“What do I seem like to you?” she asked.

“A green-eyed witch who almost got her head taken off by Kynan Aijan.”

She gripped the sides of her chair. “You know him.”

“Magellan doesn’t sic Kynan on someone unless he’s serious about doing some damage.”

“Kynan hates me. He always has.”

“Well, yeah. You’re a witch.”

Carson blinked.

“I’m not going to off you, if that’s what you’re thinking. All I’m looking for is the truth.”

“I told you the truth.”

“No, you didn’t. Not all of it, anyway.” He cocked his head. “How about you tell me everything you remember from the last normal thing you did up to right now.”

Carson huddled on her chair, but it didn’t help the cold in her bones. “Nothing is normal about my life.”

“Normal for you.”

“The last thing I recall is being in my room.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. I had a headache. A bad one, and I was trying to open my medication, only my hands shook so hard I couldn’t. I was sick to my stomach.” She touched her head. “I couldn’t see very well, either. Magellan doesn’t like for me to bother his assistants, and it was the cook’s day off. I went looking for him.” Downstairs, barely under her own power. Crying from the pain and from the fear something deadly was wrong with her. And then, the moment she opened the downstairs door, normal stopped. “I’m not crazy,” she whispered. “I know what I saw.” And she did know. She did. That was incontrovertible. “I know what I saw.”

“You saw Magellan. And?”

She watched his face when she answered. How much more she said depended on what she saw there. “He was standing over a body.”

“What happened next?”

Carson sat on her hands so he wouldn’t see them shaking. “He had a stone knife.” Thinking about the knife kept her mind off worse things. “Catalogued as having come from the Thar Desert. I’m fairly certain the knife was stolen. From a dig.” She sucked in a breath. “Magellan stabbed him with the knife.”

“And?” Not disbelieving. Not horrified. Not sympathetic, either.

Horror lapped at her, as if she’d just now walked into that room and stood there, staring at someone she knew, whose body didn’t look right anymore. A body that didn’t look human. Carson brought herself under control. But then, that was the whole point, right? The body hadn’t
looked
human. The emotional cataclysm of that night had affected her ability to correctly process what she’d seen. She was experiencing some sort of cognitive dissonance and now remembered the scene in monstrous terms because the event itself was monstrous. In measured words she related almost everything that happened.

“Nobody disobeys Magellan.” She wasn’t a naturally fast talker. She’d always spoken with deliberation. Words needed careful choosing. Especially now. “He never raises his voice, but you know when he’s angry. It’s awful.” She leaned forward, knees pressed together, balanced on the edge of her chair. “And he was angry with me. I’m not supposed to bother his assistants. And I’m not supposed to disturb him when he’s working downstairs. Until then I never had. But I had to do something.” She ran her hands through her hair. “He was angrier than I’ve ever seen him before. Tibold was there. He walked me out.” She shivered at that recollection, too. Odd, though, how she felt better telling him about it. “He opened my medicine for me. After he left, I was afraid to take the pills.” She glanced at him to see how he was reacting. His face was calm. Unreadable. “Because I knew, I just absolutely believed I wasn’t safe anymore. I couldn’t stay. So I ran. Away. Out of the house.” She took a trembling breath. “I ended up here.”

“With only the clothes on your back.”

“Yes. That’s right.” She looked at her legs. Until now, she’d never owned a pair of jeans. “But these aren’t my clothes.” She unwrapped her fingers from the sides of her chair and clasped her hands on her lap. “I knew he’d keep looking for me, and I wanted to look unfamiliar. Magellan doesn’t like to . . . lose things. And then you followed me.” Nikodemus, a man with the name of a five-thousand-year-old fiend, nodded. Their eyes met, and she felt a pull between them, as if he were tugging on an invisible string. But she just couldn’t say it. She didn’t want to say out loud what was in her head. “So, if I had to pick one of us to be crazy, I guess it’s me.”

“You’re not crazy.”

In her head she could see Magellan with his blood-red arms, and she could feel the chill of the room. All over again, the light in Magellan’s eyes glittered with madness, and the thing in the room that was a man and then something else, something inhuman, and then dead. She’d felt the life go out of him. It. The monster. Nothing could erase those memories. Not even if she lived to be five thousand herself.

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

She looked away, then back. “Yes.” Her heart pounded so she could hardly speak, and when she did, the words came in a whisper. “I keep wondering, Nikodemus, if the myths about desert-fiends are real, what that makes you.”

He seemed to think about it. “Warlord without portfolio?” Carson studied him, unable to tell if he was joking. Was she about to take a leap into a madness of her own? He shrugged. “The kind of creature Magellan likes to kill, I suppose.”

“If you were from China, you’d have brown eyes.” She stared into his blue-gray irises.

“Why?” he asked. “Seriously? If there was such a thing as a fiend, Carson Philips, why assume it has human geographical or racial patterns of appearance?”

“Then why assume they’d look human?”

He cocked his head at her. “Good question.”

“You look normal to me,” she said. “A normal, everyday person.” Her voice abandoned her, and she took a sip of his beer without asking. Cold, biting chill.

“I like to think I’m above average, actually, but that falls within range of normal, don’t you think?” Nikodemus put his elbow on his upraised knee. “Let’s say I’m one of those desert-fiends.”

His smile sent a chill down her spine. He wasn’t normal. She knew that, but she couldn’t make herself admit it out loud. “Okay.”

“Know what I’d do?”

Carson whispered, “What?”

“I’d get in your head. Bend your will. Just a little. Enough for me to see what I need to. Then I’d find out for sure what you are.”

Neither of them said anything for a long time. She felt a point of pressure on her forehead, and she jerked her head back, neck muscles tight. “Can a fiend do that?”

“Oh, yeah,” he whispered, all soft and tender.

“What would it be like?”

“Fast,” he said. “You wouldn’t like it much, but the fast way I’d be done sooner. Slow isn’t quite as unpleasant overall, but the part that isn’t fun for you lasts a lot longer. I’m good either way. Your choice. Fast or slow?”

“Fast,” she whispered. Her mouth was bone-dry, but she still had to wipe her palms on her jeans.

“You sure?” he asked.

She nodded. This was crazy, she thought. Crazy to talk as if any of this could actually happen.

She felt a tap on her forehead, a burst of pressure. Behind her eyes, she saw stars, and then there was someone else in her head. Instinct told her to fight, and she did. With all her might. His attempted invasion intensified, burned behind her eyes and in the back of her skull. Her throat felt like it was on fire; her blood heated beyond endurance.

“Sweetheart,” she heard him say. He sounded as if he were a long way away. “You gotta let me in or this is just going to get worse. I don’t want to hurt you.” His voice softened. “Please?”

She opened her eyes. Nikodemus looked sad, as if he were on the verge of tears. She saw his mouth form the word
please
. Worse than this agony? Despite the screaming protest of her better sense, she stopped fighting him.

She got a sense of relief—it wasn’t her own relief—and then Nikodemus came on, taking over, ripping through her mind, looking for anything that indicated deception. She was choking, she couldn’t breathe. Her head was on fire. He pushed deeper, lightning fast. Faster than she could react if she’d been able. Memories raced through her head, images without control, emotions without context, brought up, discarded, examined dizzyingly, sickeningly fast. Her ears throbbed with sound, a roaring protest at this violation of everything that made her Carson Philips.

Through it all, Nikodemus sat on the couch, still with an elbow resting on his upraised knee. Silver fire flickered behind his eyes. Sensations blasted through her, searing.

“You are so totally fucked,” she heard Nikodemus say.

“Durian. I need you here.”

“Check.”

He closed his phone and went back to studying Carson Philips. No denying she was totally hot. Small but stacked, you might say. Proportionally long legs, teeny-tiny waist. Exactly what he liked in a woman, human or otherwise. Too bad her life was so royally screwed up, or he’d be wanting to get something going with her. Humans, even if they were witches, were a funny lot, bound as they were to their corporeal bodies and short lives. Of course, most of the magekind had the nasty habit of extending their lives by any means necessary, which invariably meant murdering his kind. Which was exactly why Magellan and his witch had landed on his to-be-killed list. They were enemies, mages and his kind, but Magellan was really, really good at killing. If the mage got any better at it, even he might not be able to stop him.

Psychically, the witch made for an amazing high. Once she’d relaxed and let him in, looking around was easy. Coming out was not. She felt really, really good. They were a good match that way, even if she was magekind. Possibly because of what she was. His enemy. Evil. Evil, however, didn’t whack a mageheld fiend on the back of his head in an attempt to protect a fiend who wasn’t mageheld. Misguided scrappy little thing, she was. Musta never gotten around to reading the Guidebook for Evil Mages, even though she’d lived with the guy who could have written it. He went to the kitchen and grabbed another beer. Back in the front room, he sat on the couch with his feet on the coffee table and his open beer in his hand.

He shook his head, but it didn’t make the queer tightness in his chest go away. He never had emotional reactions to humans, but he was having one with Carson Philips. Hormonal ones, sure. He had them all the time. He got as sexually worked up as the next guy, but this connection to Carson Philips? Feeling sorry for a witch? No way. He couldn’t let that happen. He’d lose everything. Besides, he hadn’t felt sorry for a witch in more centuries than there were letters in the words
drop dead
. He drank his beer in silence, thinking about a pair of gorgeous green eyes and a witch who just didn’t have a clue.

He felt Durian approach the house. The proximity of another fiend was presaged by a sort of electrical charge, a ripple through his consciousness that put him on alert. By now, Durian was feeling that same ripple, a little stronger for Durian, since Nikodemus outranked him in power.

When the knock came, he ignored it long enough to piss off Durian. His cell phone did a little dance on the coffee table. He had it on vibrate, so the damn thing sounded like a bumblebee. He ignored the phone and walked to the door. “About time you got here.”

Durian snapped closed his cell. Always a natty dresser, he had on black trousers, a black cashmere shirt, and shiny, very shiny, black loafers. He had brown eyes and long brown hair that looked black until the light hit it. “About time you opened the door, Warlord.”

With a nod, he acknowledged Durian’s respect of his position, empty though it might be right now. There weren’t many warlords left, not after centuries of predation by the mages. Hell, even fiends were getting scarce. “Beer?”

“Thanks,” he said. They went to the kitchen, and Nikodemus got another Asahi Black from the fridge. Durian popped the cap, fit his mouth to the top, and drank. “Ah. That hits the spot.” Nikodemus walked back to the front room with Durian behind him. “So, what’s got you all worked up? Is there a problem with the meeting? Somebody say they weren’t coming?”

In seven days, three warlords were coming to San Francisco, willing, at last, to talk about stopping their infighting for a common effort against the magekind. Some stress there for sure about convincing the kin to work together. So it was saying something that he wasn’t worked up about the meeting right now. He actually had other things to worry about. “No,” he said over his shoulder. He went in and pointed to Carson. “Her.”

Durian stopped next to Nikodemus, gave him a sideways look, and took another pull from his beer. Like most fiends, he was tall and athletic in his human form. His hair was loose tonight, not tied back, and it reached past his shoulders. These days fiends were especially proud of their long hair, given short hair meant you were screwed. Durian rarely had to use his considerable abilities to convince a human woman to volunteer for bed duty or a little of the emotional connection fiends found so compelling in humans. He just flashed a smile and fluttered his big brown eyes, and that fueled most any woman’s desire. “She’s not dead. You’ve got that going for you.”

Nikodemus picked up his beer. “Yeah, there’s that.”

“Passed out, huh?” He lifted his bottle in a toast. “That’s some serious loving there.”

“You don’t recognize her?” Understandable if he didn’t. Her hair partially covered her face, and her closed lids hid her gorgeous green eyes. Every fiend in a hundred-mile radius of San Francisco knew Magellan’s witch had green eyes. She was legendary for them. He would have thought Durian would feel the thread of magic in her, stunted though it was. God knows he did.

Durian shrugged. “Should I?”

“That’s Carson Philips.”

Without his smile, Durian didn’t look so affable anymore. In fact, he looked downright dangerous. Easy to believe now that he was a born killer. “Is that so?”

“Says she ran away from Magellan.” Nikodemus sat on the couch again, stretching his arms along the top of the cushions, a palm curled around his beer. “I found her about half an hour before Kynan did. He had orders to kill.”

Durian’s eyes opened wide. “Kynan Aijan?” Nikodemus nodded. The other fiend leaned back, impressed. “Why isn’t she dead?”

He waved off the subject. “Dumb luck? There she was walking downtown, not bothering to hide what she was, and I’m thinking, who the fuck does she think she’s going to bag with that lame come-and-get-me act? Some low-level kin gofer?” He drew his eyebrows together. “The closer I got, the more chaotic she felt.”

Durian snorted.

“True tale.” He held up a hand. Carson wasn’t moving, but her magic fluctuated from high intensity to practically nothing at all. Distracting. And enough to make Durian’s head snap toward her. “Relax,” Nikodemus said. “She’s at least twenty minutes from coming to.”

“What is that?”

He nodded. “Exactly my point. No way is she helping him. How can she when her magic is like that?” That was the strange thing about Magellan’s witch. Everybody assumed she was Magellan’s partner in crime, but she just didn’t have the ability. “She’s like that when she’s conscious, too. Burn-you-to-a-crisp magic. No magic at all.”

Durian rubbed his arms through his sweater. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She doesn’t know shit about anything. Or about us, either,” Nikodemus said. “Just a bunch of bullshit book facts. From what I can tell, Magellan never let her get near the real stuff.” He crossed one ankle over the other. “Except maybe once.” The problem of Carson Philips was getting more complicated by the minute. “It got a little obvious while Kynan was trying to kill her that something major was up.” He remembered his beer and drank some. It didn’t taste as good as he needed it to. “Kynan Aijan is after her, and she’s like a goddamned puppy.”

“Right,” Durian said. “A wolf puppy who’s going to grow up with sharp teeth and a predator’s instinct.”

He shook his head. “Well, that’s just it, Durian. She’s not. It’s too late for her.”

“How so?”

“She thinks she has migraines. I’ve heard of mages doing this kind of thing to their own. He obviously did it to her.” He stretched and looked over at Carson, still out cold. “Mage finds some young witch or sorcerer with plenty of power. They have to get them young, before they’ve come into their magic.” Durian’s look of revulsion was priceless. “Feed the magelet enough of the right drugs, and then cut the magelet off. The power is still there, but the kid can’t get to it. Ever.”

“But the mage can?”

He nodded. “For Magellan she’s like having his own personal reserves to call on when he needs it. Until the poison kills her, that is. Or else all that pent-up magic. I’m guessing she doesn’t have much longer.” The thought made him a little sad. She didn’t deserve this. Nobody did.

“She really can’t pull?”

Nikodemus sorted through the information he’d gleaned from scouring Carson’s mind. A born witch, and he’d found no indication she’d ever pulled magic in her life, not even a suggestion that she knew what she was. Durian waited for him to come out of his reverie. He didn’t want to. There were some good moments in there. He shook his head. “Her power ebbs and flows like crazy. When it’s ebbing, she feels vanilla. Totally human.” He stretched again and tried not to react to the witch’s sputtering power. “She could almost pass for normal. But come high tide, she’s got headaches and shit from the magic she can’t touch. Starts stumbling. White as a goddamned sheet. I thought she was gonna pass out on me at least once.”

Durian studied Magellan’s witch for a while. “That must have been distracting.”

His shoulders slid lower on the couch. “Yeah.” A mage’s magic had a widely known attraction for fiends. The magic felt good. Gave you a tingle down low. These days you learned to control the reaction, or sooner or later you got too close and ended up with a shaved head, enslaved to some mage until he decided your life was over. The days when fiends could trust the magekind were millennia past. While a fiend was enslaved, the short hair was permanent, a side effect of the magic. The permanent buzz cut made it easy for mages to tell which fiends were enslaved and which were free for the taking. Durian was right. He ought to kill the witch on principle. What was the old saying? The only good witch is a dead witch. Or something like that.

“And she doesn’t know what she is? Nobody ever told her? She never figured it out?”

“Why would Magellan tell her anything? The whole point is it’s easier for him if she doesn’t know shit. He’s the one who fed her poison until there was no hope of her ever touching her magic. She’s gonna die because of him, the bastard.” He drank more beer. “You think he’d tell her all about it? What Magellan’s done to her is just all kinds of evil.” He shook his head. Hell, he did feel sorry for her. “In a sick sort of way, she has a lot in common with us.”

Durian stared at him. Hard.

“That’s called irony, Durian,” Nikodemus said. “Magellan’s screwed her but good, and just like his magehelds, she’s not going to survive it.”

“You have my respect and fealty, Warlord. I will fight with you when the time comes.”

“Well, that’s good.” Because he had to.

“I don’t care what the mage was giving her or what it did to her. She’s a witch. She ought to be dead. One less of them in the world is one less enemy for us to kill when the time comes.”

He made a face. Like he didn’t know Carson was a witch or what her kind did to his. He knew he shouldn’t be making excuses for her. But she’d whacked Kynan Aijan across the back of his head when she didn’t have to do anything. And she did it even though she was clueless and defenseless against the fiend. “I hate the magekind same as any of us. I’d be happy if they all shriveled up and died in the next five minutes, but I still think what Magellan’s done to her is sick and perverted.”

At last, Durian sat down. How long had he known Durian? Not as long as some. Just since he came to San Francisco, but Durian was solid. And smart enough not to get caught. Smart enough to understand, as Nikodemus did, that their kind needed to get their collective acts together if they were going to survive. No more of this clannish refusal to work together. The remaining warlords needed to join forces against the mages. There was no other way out of the annihilation the kin were facing. Durian was the first to join him when he decided the time had come for him to pull together a fighting force. A clan. No more freelancing, lone warlord for him. Warriors fight. Warlords lead. It was time for him to lead. He needed Durian, his intelligence and his skills. Durian wasn’t afraid to think out on the fringes. The guy had a way with the other warlords. The whole meeting would never have come off without his skills.

Durian smoothed his pants leg. “Kill her now, Nikodemus, before she runs back to her lover and begs his forgiveness. And then tells him all about us.”

He shook his head again. “No way. She’s scared to death of him. And besides, Magellan never made a move on her. He gets his rocks off with Kynan.” He stared at the label of his beer, feeling sick at some of what he’d seen in her head. “That’s a memory of hers I could have done without. She saw them once. Kynan was giving him a blow job. Her boyfriends, all two of them, she met through Magellan. Probably mages, but there’s no way to be sure about that. Neither of them lasted long.” He swallowed more beer, but it didn’t drown the taste in his mouth. He knew for a fact Kynan didn’t swing that way. Some did—in that regard fiends were no different than humans—but not Kynan. He was strictly hetero, and if Magellan was fucking him, then it wasn’t Kynan’s choice. Nothing ever was with a mageheld fiend.

“Just how deep were you in her head?”

Nikodemus plucked at his shirt. Really deep. So deep he wasn’t sure he was completely out yet. “She’s a scrappy little thing.” And a liar. Not that he blamed her, but still, she hadn’t told him everything.

“Scrappy.” Durian drank more of his beer. “You’re losing your objectivity.” His voice rapped out his displeasure. “She’s a witch, Nikodemus.”

“A witch who can’t pull. How can she be dangerous if she can’t pull? Magellan wants her dead, and she believes Kynan’s going to find her and make it happen. Based on what I saw, she’s not wrong.” Durian’s expression was unreadable. “The kill order had to come from Magellan.”