My Wicked Enemy (5 page)

“Why, if she’s going to die anyway?”

He shrugged. “What Magellan did to Carson is borderline unlawful among the mages. There are certain mages who, if they find out about it—
snick.
” He slashed a finger across his throat. “If she’s dead, there’s no evidence.”

Durian sat forward to put his beer on the table. “Why did you call me, Warlord?” He stared at Nikodemus. “If you want me to babysit your scrappy little witch, I decline.” His eyes flashed. “With all due respect. I don’t want anything to do with her.”

“Not her.” Durian owed him. In a karmic way, Durian owed him. Durian had sworn him fealty, so it wasn’t just a matter of him calling in favors and Durian being honor bound to pay them back. Durian was magically bound to give Nikodemus the aid he requested. Just as Nikodemus was bound not to make capricious or self-serving requests of those who were sworn to him. Warlords who did soon found the bonds weakening. Nikodemus turned his head and looked at his friend. “I need you for something else, Durian.”

He sat up straight, gaze fixed on him. Durian blinked, once, and his pupils were huge. Yeah. That was Durian’s thing. He said he’d given up the killing that made him feared among the kin, and maybe he had. He’d have been hunted down and taken in Copenhagen otherwise and, if not dead, then serving some Danish mage. “Kynan’s out there. Without Magellan stuck to his rear.” A warlord himself, and not to be lightly dismissed. Kynan Aijan was scary as hell, and right now he was playing on the wrong side. “I want you to find him and take him down. Permanently.”

Durian grabbed his beer by the neck and spun it. “For being Magellan’s fuck buddy?”

“Killing him is the only way to call him off. I want the witch alive and Magellan dead.” Nikodemus heard Durian’s heart beating. He was getting permission to assassinate one of their own kind, and the fiend was glad, the way a drug addict was glad for another fix. “If Kynan’s dead, Magellan is vulnerable.” And that was true. “Carson Philips will get me close enough to take him.” Because, yeah. Once a fiend gets a taste for killing, he never really loses the desire. “He’s out there. Without Magellan. Find him and take him down.”

He let go of the bottle. “My pleasure, Nikodemus.”

Nikodemus told Durian where Kynan had been the last time he saw him and where he and Carson had been when he managed to get her stunted magic shut down enough for Kynan to have to work at tracking her. Kynan was going to find her eventually, and Nikodemus didn’t want him carrying out Magellan’s orders. The witch was going to be useful to him. “There’s nobody better than you, Durian.”

He rose, all six-foot-plus muscled length of him. His eyes sparkled. “Doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.”

“No fooling.” The problem with mageheld fiends was you couldn’t feel them. Other than fiends who belonged to the same sorcerer, a mageheld fiend was cut off from his own kind. No back and forth the way he and Durian had with each other right now, feeling each other slip in and out of each other’s minds. Magehelds were practically human in their inability to connect, the poor bastards. He felt another flare-up from Carson. High tide right now. Her witch magic was seriously cranking him. Had to be the magic, right? What else could it be? At this rate, he was going to have to do a little self-pleasure to get through the night.

Durian felt it, too. At freaking last. “She’s waking up.”

“Yeah. Any minute now.”

Durian took a long breath. “I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to. Just be careful and call me when it’s done.”

Durian gazed at him for a while, then bowed his head and pressed his first three fingers to his forehead. “Warlord.”

After Durian left, Nikodemus relaxed against the couch and let Carson’s magic flow over him. He felt the draw all the way to his balls, and he imagined what it would be like with a woman as beautiful and forbidden as Carson Philips. He’d get her naked slowly, kissing and caressing all the parts he revealed, touching her until she was melting in his arms. Making love to her would be sweet, because that’s what she was deep down. Slow and easy for their first time, because Magellan had damaged her so badly—he happened to know her sexual experience was limited enough that she thought she wasn’t all that wild about men and their needs. Later, when she knew how good sex could be for her, they could try a few things. But first, they’d do sweet. She needed somebody to show her what that was like, to have a lover who thought of her first.

Carson’s eyes fluttered open.

Nikodemus. He was real. A fiend out of the Gobi Desert. And he had made her feel like he was in her head. He had been. He’d taken control of her and had done whatever he wanted to.

He was in the room with her right now.

Adrenaline flashed through her. That got her eyes open again. This time the streaking colors didn’t take over her vision. Her purse strap did. She wasn’t on her chair anymore. Her cheek pressed against an unforgiving floor. One arm was trapped under her stomach, and her fingers were numb. Her other hand lay palm-down on the floor. She managed to roll onto her back. The room started to spin again. A line of pale bronze stars floated on the ceiling, a dizzying perspective until the sensation that the stars were moving passed. She sat, flexing her fingers to get the feeling back. Pins and needles shot up her arm.

Nikodemus gazed at her from his couch, his eyes intense but his face calm. Remnants of the energy he’d sent into her flashed and sputtered like a dying electric current. He crossed his arms over his chest and continued to watch her. For the space of a breath, he blurred at the edges. The whites of his eyes were lost to shadow, and even when they’d returned to normal, his pupils burned silver-black. Impossible, she thought. Then again, not impossible at all.

She blinked. His clothes were the same, faded jeans, T-shirt, and cowboy boots, but his bronze-blond hair was dark brown now, almost black, and instead of reaching to his shoulders, it hung past his shoulders to his waist. Like hers. His stubble was gone in favor of a baby-smooth shave, and the shape of his face was sharper and prettier than before, with the fair skin of someone with Black Irish in his gene pool. Like her. He had a long nose and a stubborn mouth. It was a face of character, this masculine version of herself. His eyes were green, a dark, mossy green. Like hers. She blinked again and he was back to the scruffy good-looking man she’d first encountered.

He stood but didn’t help her up. She didn’t blame him. She ranked second only to Álvaro Magellan on the list of people he wanted to see dead. If she hadn’t come back from the abyss he’d left her facing, he’d have one less to-do item. He didn’t want her here any more than she wanted to be lying on the floor of his living room feeling like she’d been seared from the inside out.

You are so totally fucked.

Something in her head buzzed, or maybe it was in her chest. She couldn’t pin down the feeling, only the newness of it. The strangeness of it. The inside of her head pulsed, but this pain was different from her headaches. The entire inside surface of her skull felt tender and inflamed. She decided to stay where she was. If he was going to kill her, there wasn’t any point to getting up. She stared at the ceiling, breathing through her open mouth. Underneath the sleeves of her sweater, her skin prickled. “Well?” she whispered. “What am I?”

It’d be nice, she thought, if he knew.

Nikodemus moved toward her. This time she heard his boots on the floor. Heel tap, soft sole. Heel tap, soft sole. Then his head blocked her view of the stars glowing on the ceiling. He held out a hand. “Alive.”

“Am I?”

He grabbed her upper arm and hauled her to her feet. “Yeah, you are. For now.”

Her legs wobbled, but Nikodemus steadied her with a hand under her other arm. Her head started buzzing again, and when she closed her eyes, giant purple streaks crossed the field of black behind her lids. The room came almost right after a deep breath. Nikodemus led her to the couch, and she sank onto the cushions, head lolling back. The room spun. Pretty spinning stars on the ceiling.

He grabbed her purse and dug in it until he pulled out a carving about three inches high, black basalt with the body of a man and the head of a wolf. “Care to explain this?” he asked.

“It’s Sumerian,” she said. The figure had ivory sclera and obsidian rounds for pupils. The irises were gold. The subject stood one foot in front of the other, robes so delicately carved she could practically see them moving. She licked her lips. “Magellan stole that, too.”

“What’s it doing in your purse? Taking a vacation?”

“I suppose,” she said slowly, “that I stole it from him.” She reached out and took it. A spark streaked through her hand, strong enough to be painful and make the tips of her fingers tingle. The sensation worked its way up her arm, all the way to her shoulder. Her fingers went numb again. “Ouch.”

“What?”

“Static electricity, I guess.”

“You felt that?” He leaned forward, staring at the carving. “That’s very interesting, Carson.”

She transferred the figurine to her other hand so she could shake out her arm. Her other hand tingled, too. The stone was warm on her palm. In addition to the warmth, it was unusually heavy for its size. Up close the carving was even more detailed than she thought at first glance, down to the locking pattern carved into the hem of its robe. “This is why Magellan is after me,” she said. “I stole it from him because he thinks he needs it for the rituals he’s been writing about. The one he was trying that night. I thought if I took it, maybe he wouldn’t try killing anyone else.”

“That’s damn noble of you.” Nikodemus ran his fingers through his hair and left his hands clutching his head. “Do you know what that is?”

“A talisman. A good luck object for the bearer. In the world of the desert-fiends and their worshippers, used as a way to communicate with a personal god or perhaps a revered ancestor.”

“Close enough.” He let go of his head. “There’s a myth about this one that makes it special.”

She kept turning the figurine in her hands. The material looked like basalt, but it wasn’t as cool to the touch as it should be. If she were prone to flights of fancy, she’d have said it felt warm from the inside. “Really?”

“There’s a fiend inside, locked there by a mage. Only a mage can release him. So the story goes.”

She didn’t look at him, even though he was far too close. She rubbed a forefinger up and down the black rock. “It’s not uncommon for a culture to develop myths about objects they endow with human or godlike characteristics. But I’m sure there’s more to your story than that.” Carson waited for him to continue.

“Yeah. There is. A lot of mages today would give their firstborn child in order to release the fiend inside that thing. A mage like Álvaro Magellan would want to crack this wide open and take the power into himself.” Carson’s pulse thundered. “Anybody who studies the past knows there’s a price to pay for everything, especially power. You have to take a life in order to crack this thing open and get at the spirit inside. And if the mage succeeds and lives through the aftermath—trust me, that’s not a given—he’ll become invincible. Possibly even immortal.”

“That’s what Magellan wants,” she whispered.

Nikodemus tipped his head, exposing his star-ruby cabochon again. “Of course, the mage can’t kill just anybody.”

“No?”

“He’d have to kill someone like me.”

Her heart clenched. “Are you really from China?” she asked, looking at him from under her lashes. “The Gobi Desert?”

“What do you think?”

She ran her gaze up and down him and couldn’t tell he wasn’t just like her. He stood close, too close. If she moved her knee even an inch, she’d hit his leg. “I don’t know anymore.”

“The world has changed, Carson. We pass for human most of the time.” He rubbed his upper arm. “Adapt or die.”

“What do you really look like?” When she closed her eyes, she saw the creature on the table. She saw the room where Magellan had stood with red dripping down his arms, the tangy smell of blood in the air. The thing dying on the table had looked into her eyes, and his rage and despair pierced straight to her marrow. No one should die like that. No one.

He spread his hands. “This is the only form you need to worry about.” He didn’t back away. He was too close. Way too close. Making a point.

“What now?”

“That, sweetheart, is the question of the day.” Her body twitched from wanting to back up, but she didn’t want to concede the territory. “Hell, that might even be the question of the century. What am I going to do with Magellan’s witch now that I’ve got her?”

“Take me back to the store you got me from?”

He didn’t laugh. Didn’t even crack a smile.

She shifted her butt backward, but to maintain the moral victory, she didn’t move her legs. Was he going to just put her out on the street for Kynan to find? The thought induced more than a little terror. She’d be alone. With a dwindling supply of money and Kynan out there looking for her. Hunting. Her throat closed up. Nikodemus was right. She was fucked.

He sat on the couch, and she scooted away, as far as possible while still maintaining her dignity. He stretched an arm along the top of the couch and rested an ankle atop his knee. “Even if I thought it was in my interest to let you go, which it isn’t, there aren’t many places where Magellan can’t find you.” He leaned over her, invading her space again. He had such a wonderful smile, and he could poison it faster than she could blink. “Could be there’s none.”

She moved. Like him, she sat sideways on her end of the couch, one knee drawn to her chest. He looked completely the way she remembered, and she wondered if she’d imagined seeing him with black hair and green eyes. “People disappear all the time.”

“To find you, all Magellan’s fiends have to do is use their natural affinity for a human with magic. The way you were telegraphing, a baby could have found you. You’re lucky Kynan didn’t find you first.”

“Telegraphing what?” She ran a hand through her hair and wished she had a tie for it.

He put his near arm along the top of the sofa, fingers stretching toward her. “Magic, Carson. It’s our sixth sense. It’s how we survive. We can’t live without connecting to magic one way or another.”

“This is absurd.” Carson rested her forehead on her knees and shivered like there was a blizzard in the room. “There’s no such thing.”

Nikodemus shot off the couch and started pacing. Carson turned her head to the side and watched him. He stopped midpace and stared at her. “Magellan’s been fucking with you. Mages like him don’t leave anything to chance. Everything you are or are not is calculated.” He frowned at her. “You are totally—hell, what’s the word?” He snapped his fingers. “Innocent? Naïve?”

She lifted her head.

“Clueless. I’ll be honest. I didn’t expect that. You don’t know the first thing about Magellan or what he is or what you are.”

“I hate him.” It felt good to say the words. She hated Álvaro Magellan with white-hot passion.

He threw himself onto the leather chair, hands clasped behind his head. “If I were you, I’d be wondering what the fuck Magellan did to me.” Nikodemus looked at the ceiling, and Carson could have sworn the stars started to glow. He was maybe two feet from her, but she refused to look away even though he was glaring at her now. “Everyone knows you’re his witch. Helping him. His right-hand man.” His attention flicked to her chest, and boy, oh, boy, was that glance unsettling. “So to speak. You resonate, Carson, and most fiends just can’t resist.”

Carson didn’t say anything for a while, because she didn’t trust her voice not to break. She wasn’t crazy. Why didn’t that make her feel better? “I didn’t know. I didn’t know what he was doing until the day I ran away.” She rubbed her temples. “No wonder you want me dead.”

“If it’s any consolation, now that I know you weren’t helping him on purpose, you’re off the kill list.”

“Lucky me,” she said. So she could go out there with Kynan looking for her. “Does that mean I can leave now?”

“You go out there unprotected like you were today and you better believe that big fiend of his is going to find you. If he does, you’ll wish I’d offed you instead.”

“I have a little money.” She hugged her knees to her chest. “I was thinking of going to Los Angeles.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. Neither did she. “Okay,” he said. “Look. I know you’re not a normal witch. I know what Magellan’s done to you.” He cocked his head, and she had the feeling he was being careful with his words. “So here’s the deal.”

“A deal.”

“I’m offering you my protection. My oath,” he said, emphasizing the word, “that I’ll do everything in my power to keep you safe.”

“In return for?”

“You don’t have to do anything. You’ve proved yourself to me.” He leaned toward her. “We both know if you go out there by yourself, you’ll just get killed. Hey, you took on fucking Kynan Aijan for me. I’m not letting him or Magellan have you. It’s as simple as that.” He looked thoughtful as he shook his hair behind his shoulders. “Although . . .”

“Although?”

“I could use some help with Magellan.” He grabbed his beer and finished it off. “You don’t have to. No pressure, Carson.”

“I’ll help,” she said after another long silence. “If I can.”

“Thanks.” Nikodemus set the carving on the table. “I do mean that.” He looked at the ceiling. “Shit. I cannot believe I’m saying thank you to a witch.”

“I’d be dead if it weren’t for you,” she said.

He walked to her, but he didn’t say anything. He stared into her face like he was memorizing her. His eyes looked normal. Gray irises with a hint of blue. But they weren’t normal. He wasn’t normal. Her skin crawled with the cold inner knowledge that he wasn’t human and that he was letting her feel the difference. “You and I are just totally wrong.”