The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance 2 (31 page)

And
he
knew where they’d be waiting.

Walker parked his borrowed bike at the end of the long driveway. Someone had taken a swing at the rusted out mailbox, and it dangled precariously from its wooden post. He righted it before he set out for the house on foot, though he had no idea why.

No one lived here and, unless his half-brother tired of city life, no one would.

It had been years since he’d walked the mostly-dirt path. Grass had grown up in the middle of the road, between the packed ruts, and the heavy canopy of live oaks and cypress overhead blocked out the light of the moon.

The path lightened, and he could see the house at the end of it. Walker had barely cleared the thick cover of the trees when a voice spoke from the sagging porch. “So. You come alone.”

Walker studied the simply dressed man and shrugged. “I assumed that was what you wanted.”

A soft footstep made the porch creak, and a woman appeared at the man’s shoulder. “It is easier not to have to contend with the Seer’s get, but we were not sure you would abandon her.”

Abandon.
The word rankled, shamed him. “She has nothing to do with this.”

The man laughed, rusty and flat. “No, I suppose not. Taking her from you might right the scales, but she’s more trouble than she’s worth . . . as long as you come with us quietly.”

“Just me.” Walker shifted his weight, instinct demanding a fight – though there would not be one. “The rest of the pride is hers now, and my life is yours.”

Gravel crunched behind Walker, and the two Scions on the porch stiffened. The woman tilted her head and gazed past him. “Does
she
know that?”

Damn it
. Walker turned to find Zola standing there, eyes narrowed. “I thought I might have gotten away with it.”

She raised both eyebrows, silently asking if he’d
really
thought he could, then looked past him toward their enemies. “I know what’s mine. The pride is mine, as is Walker Gravois. Are you here to challenge me for them?”

The woman paused at the top of the porch steps. “Gravois is coming with us. He must answer for what he has done.”

Zola strode forwards until she stood at his shoulder, then reached down deliberately and curled her hand around his. “He stays. You leave.”

She was strong, beautiful. Defiant.

His.

Walker gripped her hand and looked down at her, his chest aching. “They fight as one,” he whispered, “but so do we.”

“Always.” Her fingers tightened until her grip bordered on painful. “Do you challenge us, Scions?”

In response the man pulled a gun and levelled it at Walker’s head, finger already squeezing down on the trigger.

Walker released Zola’s hand and ducked into a roll as magic surged through the night. One kick to half-rotted wood brought down the corner of the porch, and the Scion stumbled and dropped his gun.

He dived for it, but Zola was faster. Her first kick sent the gun skittering under the groaning porch, and her second swiped the man’s legs out from under him, spilling him into the too-tall grass. A second later the woman – the shapeshifter – leapt from the crumbling steps and tackled Zola.

Zola bucked and rolled, using the Scion’s own momentum to throw her aside. Walker caught the woman off-guard, drawing her attention away from Zola. As the child of a Seer, Zola’s natural resistance to magic made her a better adversary for the spell caster.

And she pressed that advantage, coming to her feet just as the man fisted both hands and raised them. Magic cut through the cool air, prickling along Walker’s skin, but the brunt of the power rolled off Zola as she spun again, lightning fast, and clipped the wizard’s jaw with her heel.

His grunt of pain made his partner turn for a split-second, and Walker slammed his elbow into her temple. She staggered, and he caught her around the throat. “Will you go?” he demanded. “Leave and never come back to New Orleans?”

She replied with a snarl and a knee driving into his groin as magic snapped again, this time slamming into
him.
His vision blurred as pain and magic mingled, and he lashed out, instinct driving him.

He struck her in the throat with the blade of his hand. The delicate bone protecting her airway snapped and she fell back, choking for air in loud, heaving gasps.

It wouldn’t take her long to recover. Walker struggled to focus, to shake off the spell so Zola wasn’t left to fight alone.

The sharp crack of gunfire echoed around him, a second before a warm body crashed into him. Zola’s, by the scent and feel. She bore him to the ground and rolled them until his hip bumped into the collapsed end of the porch.

“He’s got the gun,” she whispered, a breath of sound against his ear. “Firing from under what’s left of the stairs.”

“The other support beam.” The porch had been rickety even in his youth. One more well-placed blow might bring the entire thing down on the hidden Scion.

“Can you get to it if I distract them?”

He was still seeing double, but he nodded. “Get the shifter. I’ll handle this guy.”

Her lips brushed his cheek in a whisper-soft caress, and then she was gone in a swirl of near-silent footsteps across the untamed grass.

One shot fired into the night, but a second later he heard the Scion shifter’s grunt of pain as Zola pounced on her, tangling them up so the wizard wouldn’t get a clear shot at her.

As Zola grappled with the shifter, Walker eased around to the edge of the porch. A shot whistled past, and he cursed. Without rounding the house, there was no way to sneak past the spell caster under the porch.

Screw this.
He scrambled up the collapsed side of the porch, the wood creaking under his weight. Another loud report, this one accompanied by a blaze of pain in Walker’s arm.

He’d been shot, and he didn’t give a damn. He roared his anger and punched down through the boards to close his hand in the man’s hair. He managed to slam his adversary up against the wood three times before the listing porch collapsed.

“Walker?” Zola’s voice, edged with worry. “Are you all right?”

He closed his fingers around the gun and groaned as he rolled on to his back. “Peachy. You?”

An uncertain pause, and she echoed the word back to him in her accented English. “I am hoping that means good.”

“It means I’ll make it.”

The sound of flesh on flesh followed, a muffled grunt and then silence. “She is alive. Unconscious, but alive. I will call the Conclave. The Scions. Offer her for your pardon. A life for a life, yes?”

A life for a life
. How could the Scions refuse, when the woman’s defeat rendered her life forfeit? “I think that’ll work out just fine.” Underneath him, the shattered boards shifted, and the spell caster groaned. “Maybe even twice over.”

Zola rose and crossed the yard, the moonlight glinting off her features. “Are you injured?”

“Just a scratch.” Walker rolled off the flattened porch and landed on his knees. “My jacket’s ruined, though.”

“Fool.” Her fingers slid into his hair and down, cupping his neck. Her words drifted to French, low and intimate. “I love you too much to lose you to stubborn pride. But if you walk into another trap without me at your side, I will kill you myself.”

“I screwed up, but never again.” Leaving her was, without a doubt, the most idiotic thing he’d ever done. Zola didn’t need his protection. She just needed
him
, and he knew the feeling. “We fight together?”

“As one. Always.” Her lips seized his in a breathless, desperate kiss, over almost before it began. “And now we call Alec Jacobson. He has a cage in his basement for situations like this. I’m afraid you will find they happen more often than not, if you stay here.”

He couldn’t help but laugh. “I grew up around here. I know the lie of the land.”

“Then you know it will never be boring.”

Living in a plastic bubble wouldn’t be boring as long as Zola was with him. “Are you sure you can forgive me for sneaking out on you?”

A hint of laughter bubbled up as she reached into her pocket for a phone. “This time. But only if you take over my class full of adolescent male shifters. Perhaps a weekly reminder of the crippling effects of male ego will teach you a valuable lesson.”

It was far more than he deserved, but there was no way he’d squander a chance to make up for the hurts he’d visited on her in the past – the distant and the not so distant. “Make your call, Zola. The faster we get these two out of here, the faster we can be alone.”

The faster he could convince her she’d made the right choice.

Epilogue

“. . . so after the Scion representatives struck their deal with you, the Alpha escorted the whole mess of them back to New York on his jet. Got a call from him last night to let me know they’d left the country.”

Zola made a non-committal noise, only half of her attention on Alec’s voice as it spilled out of her phone. There were only six students in her adolescent shifter group – only males, because she refused to teach them in a mixed class when their hormones would be driving them to posture and preen for their classmates’ feminine attention. Any urge they might have had to fight for
her
attention had been knocked out of them within their first week, leaving a moderately serious group of youths on the cusp of manhood.

Manageable enough, until confronted with a shapeshifter male in his prime. Zola hid a smile behind her hand as Walker deftly handled another borderline challenge, patiently but firmly, setting the boy in his place without damaging more than his ego.

Alec was still talking, and Zola made a conscious effort to drag her attention back to the conversation in time to hear, “. . . all taken care of, then. Paperwork for the pride should be ready in a few days. If you need help getting them across the border—”

“We will be fine.” Considering all the trouble Alec Jacobson got himself into, owing him
too
many favours could prove to be an uncomfortable situation. “Thank you.”

She ended the conversation just as Walker ended the class, sending the boys out into the cool New Orleans evening. When the door swung shut behind the last one, she lifted an eyebrow. “Well?”

He flashed her a hint of a smile as he cracked open a bottle of water. “Well what?”

“Nothing.” Impossible not to admire the beauty of him, sweat-sheened golden skin and hard muscles and those eyes she’d now seen glazed with passion. Making love to him was new, but loving him was like remembering a move so ingrained it was instinct.
Muscle memory,
an amused part of her noted as she crossed the room to slip her arms around him.
The heart is just another muscle.

Walker wove his fingers through her ponytail and pulled her closer, tilting her head up for a slow kiss, his open mouth teasing over hers. Hot, perfect, even before she parted her lips on a moan and realized he was determined to kiss her within an inch of her life.

Which made it even easier to catch his leg with her foot and spill them both to the ground. A breathless moment later she was straddling his waist with her hands on either side of his head. And because English was
his
native language, she ignored her self-consciousness and her odd accent and spoke from her heart. The words, in any case, were simple enough. “I love you.”

“Love you too.” He slid one hand to her hip, the other around to her back, cradling her close. “That’s why we’re stronger together.”

“And you should never forget it,” she whispered, before leaning in to kiss him again. Soft and slow, like she had all the time in the world.

Because she did.

Elissa Wilds

Time didn’t exist here. Not in this place. Not in these moments. Here, the air held an electric charge that swept through Anna when her feet touched the soft-as-silk sand and made her limbs shiver with excitement. Here, she breathed in the salty ocean air instead of city smog and the exhaust fumes of rush-hour traffic. No worries touched her mind. Nothing of the two-dimensional world she called reality could penetrate to this realm.

Which was a good thing.

The whole reason she’d decided to attempt astral travel was to escape from an unbearable reality. From a world where her husband was dead and she was alone. Two years had passed since Richard’s death, but it seemed to her a lifetime.

In the astral realm, a quiet peace filled her being and made the world she called home seem but a dream. A sad, unnecessary dream.

Anna glanced around with a quiet calm she had only recently developed. The first few times she’d attempted to astral travel, she’d been nervous and uncertain. She’d read books on the subject, but as much as the authors of those books reassured that nothing could hurt her here, it had taken a few successful trips for her to believe them. She’d learned quickly. With the slightest focus Anna could create what she wanted to see and experience. So of course, she came back here. To her dreamtime beach.

She loved the beach, but hadn’t seen much of it since she’d accepted the job in D.C. She’d been anxious to get out of Santa Barbara. To go anywhere as long as it was far away from her life in California and the life she’d shared with Richard.