Witch Interrupted (23 page)

Marcus dreamed he was on a cloud. Heavenly scents surrounded him. Sex and woman. The peppery taste on his tongue heated his body. Softness cradled him. His hips jabbed into it, filling him with lust. He thrust again, pleased when the friction ratcheted up.

Unfortunately, he was jolted out of this pleasant dream by a stout blow to the shoulder. “Get off me, sleeping beauty.”

During sleep he’d tangled in the bed blankets and Katie’s limbs. His leg was flung over her, his cock shoved against her warm hip. His hand cupped her breast.

The nipple was hard. So was he.

She kicked both her legs, knocking him aside. He raised his hands to show he meant no harm, but she bounced off the bed anyway, even more tousled than she’d been last night.

Hands on hips, she glared down at him. It wasn’t terribly effective when her hair looked like a rooster’s comb and she was wearing one of his old T-shirts.

She wasn’t wearing the handcuffs.

He flew out of bed. When his feet hit the floor, he stumbled. Righted himself clumsily. She blinked those thick eyelashes at him, not offering a hand or an explanation.

“What did you do with the cuffs?” he barked.

Unperturbed, she pointed at the canvas strap, where the handcuffs dangled. “Relax. I didn’t break your toy.”

Marcus rubbed a hand over his chest, feeling every one of his hundred-plus years. Did he have the flu? Wolves didn’t get the flu. “You aren’t supposed to be at liberty.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You’re not a morning person, are you?”

Marcus growled. Today he needed to begin calculations for the next phase of testing. Analyze what she’d done to him. He was behind in recording last night’s observations and felt like death.

Katie, in contrast, looked razor-sharp and completely rested. Her scruffiness didn’t hide that. He’d have to bust ass to stay ahead of her today, and he had enough work to do.

“Coffee,” he grumbled, though he hadn’t required caffeine since his transformation.

“You don’t have any. Let’s go get coffee and sausage biscuits and check the rendezvous point.” She pulled on a pair of jeans, wriggling to slide them over her ass. He glimpsed red panties and soft, kissable abdomen. “Look, Vern’s note didn’t say for sure Lars caught them. There’s a chance they escaped. It’s not like they have our number to leave messages or know where we are. Vern will be expecting us in Garner.”

“How long have you been awake?” he asked, tearing his gaze from her hips.

“Around four this morning I puttered around before coming back to bed. I wanted to assess our options for the rescue.” On his prep counter, she’d unpacked her tattoo supply kit and the remaining components they’d collected from the shop yesterday. “I thought you’d never wake up.”

“You dosed me with agrimony again.”

“Nope.” She gestured toward a plastic baggie full of a tan-and-green mixture. “If I wanted to knock you out, I wouldn’t use anything as lame as agrimony.”

She could have taken off. Again. Yet she hadn’t.

Why had she stayed? Gotten back into bed with him, no less?

Because he was useful to her? Or because she wanted to?

He didn’t care which one it was.

Something akin to relief built inside him. She had no idea how close he was to dragging her into bed right now to celebrate. He sniffed, checking to see if she might reciprocate, but smelled nothing out of the ordinary.

Nothing period.

Nose? Still malfunctioning.

Relief that she hadn’t ditched him? The fizzy jumble from last night. He wasn’t happy. Her magic had screwed him up inside.

Marcus advanced on her and gripped her shoulders. “Take it out,” he said. “Take the magic back out of me.”

She raised her chin to study him. “It’s not that simple. It’s been twelve hours. The dittany that lets us link has worn off.”

“I have more.” He let her go and yanked open a supply cabinet. “Your deposit wasn’t timetabled properly. You didn’t have my permission—”

A finger poked him in the ribs, and he hissed at the flash of pain. “That’s a nasty-looking bruise.”

“Bruise?” The narrow bathroom door had a mirror on the outside. Marcus, who’d slept shirtless, twisted to examine his torso. To his shock, reddish-purple bruises darkened his skin in various areas. “What the hell?”

She stroked his injuries, her touch gentle. “You didn’t seem bothered at the time, but I beat the hell out of you last night before you took me to bed. Serves you right.”

When he’d had her confined over his shoulder, spanking her shapely ass, she’d reciprocated. The knee in the ribs—Marcus gingerly probed the bones to see if anything was cracked—had stolen his breath. He should have shaken off the damage within the hour.

He slammed the bathroom door, unwilling to see more. He felt imbalanced—not like a witch and not like a wolf. “You didn’t give me magic. You put some kind of curse on me. I feel like shit. I can’t smell, I can’t hear, I can barely stand. What the fuck did you do, Katie?”

“A certain scientist might say I reversed the direction of the focal current and fed my magic to your lattice. It was your idea, might I add—some techno-babble about supersaturating yourself.” She leaned against a counter and crossed her arms. “We had the dittany link and nothing else. You can’t make magic out of hair and spit.”

“That’s all you did?” He wanted to believe her, but he also wanted to believe he could convince her that his experiments would facilitate a rescue of her family. Was he a fool?

“That’s all I did.” She scrubbed the hair on top of her head. “You know, this reminds me of something. I was the focal for a lot of group workings with the council, and I—well, I may have used those opportunities to clean the hell out of everyone’s reserves.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “You took more power than necessary?” To do so in the coven network was considered extremely bad craft. Other witches wouldn’t team with a colleague who’d leave them needlessly drained, unable to defend themselves.

“Every chance I got,” she said. “It rendered the others useless for up to a week and gave me a fucking break from the backstabbing. The council isn’t exactly the Girl Scouts.”

“That I know.” The keepers had been competitive to the point of sabotaging rivals. Chang Cai had been near the top of the ladder most of her time with the council, the go-to witch for plum and difficult assignments alike. After Vernon had arrived, she’d been in his inner circle, and Lars had not.

Lars had spoken of her as depraved and weak, resorting to various ploys to conceal her failures. Other long-term keepers—the few Marcus had been allowed to meet—had described her ruthless competence. Out of Lars’s hearing, of course. They were all thankful she was dead, because apparently she’d scared everyone. They’d worried someone with her power could actually kill them with magic if she tried. At the same time, envy of Chang Cai’s abilities had lingered.

Marcus had no doubt the woman before him was competent. Potentially ruthless. Even scary. But depraved and weak?

Hardly.

“I have some experience with your situation,” she told him. “There are ways to deal with it that don’t leave you…vulnerable. Any kind of vulnerability got exploited by the council one way or another.”

The more she revealed about her time with the keepers, the more he had to wonder why she’d remained with them for so long. Exploited was an understatement. She’d confessed they’d used her as bait. Her sexual curiosity disarmed male wolves, and her alpha would have compounded their fascination. He’d struggled against the combination himself. With wolves, hormonal responses like lust were seen as normal, but witches, like humans, preferred to think of themselves as above physicality.

“Go on,” he encouraged.

“You have an excess, more magic than you’re used to. I used to be able to handle a lot because of how often I amped up, but everyone has limits. My guess is you’ve never overdrafted.” She grinned. “Better add that to your charts.”

He didn’t appreciate her levity. “We need to fix it. At once. I feel like rubbish.”

She considered him with what seemed like actual sympathy. “The easiest thing to do for an excess is burn it off. Waste not, want not. I used to use cayenne—it can store whatever you throw at it.”

“Yes, if you want to create explosions.” Cayenne was troublesome enough when filled with a standard amount of magic. It irritated the skin, requiring additional magic to relieve pain. The layered, supercharged cayenne some keepers created was harsher.

“You did say you needed a backhoe or some magical TNT to remove your constraints,” she said. “I used to layer it with a whole coven’s worth of power. Carried it around my waist in a hidden pouch so nobody would know what I was doing.”

“How does one use it without significant damage?” he asked, distracted by curiosity. And where would they get a coven’s worth of power? “Cayenne that strong blisters the skin down to the dermis or worse. That’s not practical.”

When Katie raised her eyebrows and started to answer, he lifted a hand. “Never mind. I can’t prime cayenne anyway. I need you to remove the excess for me.”

She gestured toward the front door. “I bet if you shift, it will take care of the overdraft
and
your bruises.”

Why hadn’t he thought of that?

Ah, yes. Because he hadn’t had a chance to prepare for this phase of the experiment. Irritated and stiff, he undid the many latches on the front door and hurled it open. Once in the bright morning sunlight, he willed the wolf to take over.

Nothing happened.

Just as witches could run out of power, wolves could become form stuck if they shifted too many times in a row. Marcus hadn’t shifted since yesterday, but this didn’t feel like empty. Or overfull.

It felt like something was barricading his wolf.

Ignoring Katie in the doorway, watching him, he crouched on the ground, placed his knuckles in the mulch and closed his eyes. With all his might, he compelled his body to shift.

His extremities prickled as if they’d fallen asleep. Otherwise, nothing happened.

He sprang to his feet and nearly crumpled. Katie was there, bare feet sunk in the pine needles, to catch him. “Whoa. Take it easy.”

“Can’t shift.” He was fairly certain he could walk on his own but let her support his weight as they shuffled to the trailer. Pinecones and bark pricked his soles. “Before you ask, I’m not form stuck.”

He shook her off and climbed the stairs like an old witch at the end of a third pass-through. The weakness, the anesthetized senses and the bodily aches had started after Katie had given him her magic.

This was no mere excess. So what was it?

Yes, he hadn’t prepared, but everything he’d calculated had indicated witch and wolf magic were the same. Transferrable. A witch could use magic from a wolf without issues; so should a wolf be able to use magic from a witch.

Magic was magic. It was a neutral force, created inside a shifter, neither good nor evil. Whether taken or given, it would change nothing about the power itself. A witch could take magic directly from a wolf and prime cayenne with it to use in any spells. He shouldn’t have any issue using Katie’s magic to shift into a wolf.

“That makes sense,” she said, her chin on her hands as she perched on the other side of the small table. “Would a sausage biscuit help? Because it would help me. I’m starving.”

He realized he’d been thinking aloud. And had seated himself at his computer, booted it up and begun several mathematical computations to assess the power transfer.

“We need to view my aura and lattice,” he said, right before his stomach let out a loud grumble.

“Breakfast first. How can you concentrate when you’re hungry?”

“I can’t.” He closed the laptop and considered nearby food sources. He didn’t often eat at restaurants, but his weekly grocery run had been delayed.

Katie popped up. “I want to go to the rendezvous point. I’ll use one of Tonya’s masks from our go bag, and you can use one of yours.”

“Food only,” he corrected. “While Tonya and your father have amnesia, Vernon knows all about us.” The more he thought about it, the more he realized Lars probably hadn’t murdered Vernon yet. He would interrogate and torture the old witch first.

“Vern won’t tell Lars a damn thing,” Katie said.

“He may not have a choice.” Had she forgotten how keepers employed calming mix? “It takes time, but they can extract information from people one way or another.”

“Compulsion magic can take weeks to function as a truth serum. Vern’s crafty. There’s no way he would have broken yet.”

Marcus rubbed his temples, wishing Katie were…easier. He had no idea which one of them was right, but he didn’t plan to endanger her. Them. “I’m not driving you to Garner.”

“We’ll see,” she said in a tone that left little doubt they’d have another argument about this.

She got dressed, washed up and found her backpack in the time it took him to put on a shirt.

His progress seemed unduly lopsided. Perhaps the disproportion wasn’t all him. Katie was friskier than he’d ever seen her. Determined, even. Her depression yesterday had been a concern. He’d tried to keep her from activating the combat bonus, but it seemed probable that he’d failed.

“Precisely how much has your refill pace increased?” he asked. “Are you flush already?”

“I’ve a ways to go before I’m flush,” she said, answering only his second question. “Keep in mind—my reserves are larger than most. I heard a rumor I’m alpha.” She was at his side, already, car keys jangling impatiently. “Do you really need that?”

Marcus slipped the bay capsule into his pocket. “I hope not.”

“Look, if you still think I…” Her lips tightened and she quit speaking.

“You’re not the only convex witch, Katie.” He could see it bothered her, but it wasn’t a protection against her. Was it?

“I’m just the convex witch who’s ready to go now,” she said. “You don’t even have on your shoes. Hurry up.”

Partly because it was smart and partly because she was dancing with impatience, Marcus triple checked his utility kit before dosing himself with some primed heal-all. It helped. He offered it to her, and she waved it off.