Witch Interrupted (6 page)

Marcus lunged. Tonya leaped back with a squeak. The metal of his handcuffs clanked against the headboard, followed by a crack.

One of his arms swung free. The handcuff on that side twirled loose on his wrist.

Katie started to scramble off the bed, but Marcus grabbed her. Jerked her toward him, hard. She fell across him awkwardly. Her glasses flew off, landing somewhere on the floor. Before she took another breath, he had his hand around her neck.

Tonya froze and held up both hands. “Don’t hurt her because you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you. I was there. I know your errors weren’t malicious.” Marcus firmed his hold on Katie, and she felt the edge of his control slip. The tips of claws poked her throat. “I simply regard you as inept. You may as well have killed her yourself. She was the only family I had left.”

Their species—witches with their covens, wolves with their packs—weren’t solitary beings. Losing one’s family would tear any of them apart. Katie’s sympathies went out to the man, but then she remembered he was two centimeters from strangling her. Tonya tried to placate the angry wolf. “Honey, listen to me. Your sister—”

“Not another word about my sister.” He raised Katie’s chin to demonstrate the risk. “Do I make myself clear?”

Tonya’s voice thinned when she answered. “Clear as crystal.”

Katie’s heart pounded. Her mouth dried. Her upper body was squashed against Marcus’s muscular torso, and it felt…good. He felt good.

She reacted how she ought to, instead of how she wanted to.

With a vicious twist, she went for his groin. He caught her legs between his. She struggled, pushed him with all her strength. Bit him, kneed him, gouged him. Nearly freed herself, but he caught her again.

This time, he wasn’t as careful. Katie yelped when fingers dug into her throat.

“I’m getting Zhang Li,” Tonya warned.

“Stay where you are.” Marcus’s claws stung Katie. He’d broken the skin. She, who used to be the bane of transformed wolves, had been defeated in forty-five seconds. “And you. Hold still before you puncture an artery.”

She smelled blood. Hers again. Shimmering behind her panic and anger, she felt desire. He could yank his other arm free, pin her down, do whatever he wanted. They both knew it.

Her question was, were they both fantasizing about it or was that just her?

“I asked you not to hurt her.” Katie had rarely heard Tonya upset. She hardly recognized her friend’s voice. “Now we’re going to have trouble.”

“We don’t want that.” To her shock, Marcus bent and inhaled near her throat. “What do we want, Katie?”

“I want you to let me go.”

“Is that so?” The corner of his mouth curled, and his gaze locked with hers. His eyes were pale with the wolf. Against her hip, where he’d restrained her legs between his, his cock hardened. “Pain isn’t what she’s feeling right now. Is it, Katie?”

“Shit,” Tonya muttered. “You’re right. Let’s leave Zhang Li out of this. Perhaps
I
should take myself out of this.”

“Tonya, don’t go.” Katie closed her eyes, humiliated.
Dammit.
Hell, dammit again.

She’d hated being a keeper so much, she’d discarded everything about it she could. She’d tried to become the person she’d always wanted to be, and it had left her so out of practice.

Marcus adjusted their position until he was sitting against the headboard. He curled her against him, her face to his chest. He smelled like kava and man. Her breasts rubbed him. His fingers around her throat eased, but she made no move to escape. She’d allow this. Yes, allow it. If she allowed it, it meant she was in charge of the situation.

But then he shifted his grip, and his hand fisted in her short hair, holding her head immobile.

Her nipples tightened. Her pussy woke with an ache she hadn’t felt in a long time. As a male, his physical response was easier to read. She parted her lips and pretended to be helpless. Just for a minute, she pretended she was in his arms voluntarily.

“Ms. Applebaum,” Marcus said calmly, “now that we’ve agreed there’s no need to call Katie’s father, perhaps we can solve the quandary I find myself in.”

Katie heard Tonya’s footsteps as she came closer to the bed. “I’d like nothing better, my friend.”

“Not your friend.” He jiggled Katie’s head until she opened her eyes. His fierce expression deepened, and his eyes glinted with anger. “Nor yours, keeper.”

“I’m not a keeper,” she said, hoarse. “Not anymore.”

“Obviously.” He let his gaze travel down her body and back to her face. “I don’t think this was in your combat training, was it?”

He had no idea.

“You were faking sleep,” she guessed. He tugged her hair as though she was a doll he could reposition. Her hands were trapped between them. “You heard us talking. Could you have gotten loose anytime?”

He pulled his other arm. His muscles bunched. The handcuffs gave with a metallic snap, the lock popping.

He wrapped that arm around Katie too. There was no chance she could get away without magical intervention.

There was no chance she’d
want
to get away without magical intervention.

Katie groaned and rested her cheek against him in defeat.

“I knew I shouldn’t have ordered those from that sex catalog,” Tonya said, disgusted. “They promised to hold like the real thing.”

“Perhaps they did,” Marcus said. “Now, as much as it pains me to ask you two for anything, I stayed here on purpose. Would you hear me out?”

Katie, an inch from agreeing with whatever he wanted, stopped herself. The fact he knew about keepers meant he knew what they did to wolves who threatened the covenants.

Goddess, if he brought the keepers down on them…

“We’ll be happy to listen,” Tonya answered. “First let her go. I’ll make us tea and cookies.”

“I don’t want to let her go,” he said thoughtfully, addressing them as if conveying a scholarly thesis. “It would relinquish my advantage over you. What’s more, I find restraining Katie like this, considering who and what she is, to be…invigorating.”

“Is that what you kids are calling it these days?” Tonya quipped.

Marcus smiled, and it was so very difficult not to smile back at him. “It’s been an educational year. Now that I’m a wolf, it’s harder to stop myself from doing what I want.”

“You just need time,” Tonya said, hands on her hips. “You’ll get the hang of it. You could start by letting Katie go.”

“You’re assuming I don’t have the hang of it.” Marcus pulled Katie’s hair until her head tilted and her throat arched. Her skin smarted where his claws had marked her. She didn’t moan. It was there, wanting out, and she swallowed it. “You’re assuming I’m not in control.”

“Your eyes are blued out,” Katie said. And his cock was hard. It was looking likely that he did make passes at girls with glasses.

“Occupational hazard. I don’t want to lose control, therefore I don’t. That want, so far, has surpassed my need for…” He paused and glanced down Katie’s body again. “My need for other things. But restraint isn’t as easy as I’d like.”

She inspected his jaw, the whiskers starting to darken his skin, the handsome arch of his nose, his heavy eyebrows and long lashes. His sensuous lips. He watched her as she watched him, and she wondered what he was thinking. Was he resenting the fact her body and scent gave him an erection? Was he thinking he’d like to break her neck?

“Start talking,” she said. “I’m getting a crick.”

“Drop your mask first.” He stared at her. “The everyday one.”

She swallowed, the bow of her neck making it difficult. “My mask?”

“I want to know who I’m dealing with. What are you doing in Alabama, keeper, running a tattoo parlor with an incompetent sympathizer and, if I’m not mistaken, a dead region elder formerly known as Bob Chang?” While Katie hadn’t been in the system since she was part of the council, her father had been deeply imbedded. His death, in a falsified boating accident, had been mourned.

“She hasn’t been on the council for years,” Tonya said. “Don’t hold it against her too much.”

“Keepers don’t quit. Lose the mask,” he insisted.

“No.” Witches didn’t drop their everyday masks around strangers. Certainly they didn’t drop them around wolves. That tiny barrier was the only thing between her and total meltdown.

“Take it off.”

She could release it. Marcus had already scented her blood. Except…he hadn’t scented everything.

“I don’t want to.” He’d learn the full extent of her weakness, and that was none of his business. Let him think she had a crush on him because he was good-looking. “If you’re so concerned about appearances, why don’t you tell us what you looked like before the change?”

“I looked a lot like this,” he said. “Softer around the middle though. Don’t miss that. Your turn.”

“This is my true face.”

“Pretty. But you’re not showing all of it.” He ran a finger down her throat, smearing blood from the feel of it. “I don’t have a mask, Katie. Play fair.”

“Like you’re playing fair?” How could her body jitter and melt at the same time? He was already using her attraction against her. She didn’t want to hand him the larger weapon.

He touched her lip, his finger sticky with her blood. “I want to see you…naked.”

“Fine. Fuck. Whatever. I don’t care.” Katie accessed her magical core, the flame burning inside her, and torched the mask spell. Her skin heated. The hairs on her arms prickled with static.

Then her only protection was gone. She was completely exposed. Her weakness. Her want. Her intense need.

Marcus inhaled. Blinked. Exhaled long and slow, his eyes silver.

Katie didn’t require a wolf’s nose to realize he was stirred by her scent and what it meant. No wolves since her final mission, the one where she’d nearly died, had been exposed to her without any trace of a mask.

Would he react like they had?

And why wasn’t she sickened by the thought?

He trapped her head in one hand while the other gripped her shirt. Did he tremble? He shifted his hips, his erection a hot bar of steel in his slacks. Confusion wrinkled his brow. “I didn’t expect… I don’t understand how you could have been a keeper. Unless…”

“You got what you asked for. Let her go.” Tonya flew at Marcus, tugging him with frantic hands. Katie smelled peppermint and hairspray. “Don’t make me hurt you.”

“It’s you,” Marcus breathed. “Chang Cai. The Black Widow.”

Marcus pushed Katie off the bed and himself to the far side so fast, he was up before Tonya finished casting her spell.

It missed. The air popped harmlessly, and minty freshness filled the room.

Tonya cursed. Katie rustled on the ground, unseen. The bedside table rattled. “Dammit. Where are my glasses?”

“Here, Velma.” Tonya kicked them across the hardwood.

Katie’s hands trembled as she slid on her ugly black spectacles and adjusted her clothing. Marcus tensed to spring again.

“Chang Cai is dead.” She shoved her hands into the pockets of her skintight jeans as if holding herself in check. “Did nobody tell you? She was killed in a plane crash.”

Tonya, some kind of candy in her hand, drew back to throw at him again. “Are you going to behave?”

Marcus had never been wonderful at thinking on his feet. For most of his life, he hadn’t needed to. Being a wolf on the lam required it of him, and he hated it. “What are you going to do with peppermint and sugar? Cure my headache?”

“Hold still and you can find out.” Katie eyed Tonya in surprise, and the woman shrugged. “It was all I had.”

Not since Marcus had lost his sister—and then five years of his life to the blackmailing keepers—had he been this stunned.

Not by Tonya this time, but by Katie. She wasn’t just a keeper. She was the Black Widow.

The best, or worst, of all keepers in recorded history. More captures and wipes than anyone outside Hiram Lars, whose record spoke more of longevity and malice than anything else.

And this small woman, this vulnerable, mortified woman, whose smile was like a star, who smelled like sex and shampoo, was the amoral Chang Cai?

“You shouldn’t have put a name to my first pass-through.” Her eyes glistened behind her lenses. She fingered the cuts on her throat gingerly. “You shouldn’t have told us you knew about witches. Do you realize what we have to do now?”

“Kill me?” If anyone could commit murder with magic, it was a convex witch like Chang Cai. The rumors all over the keeper stronghold had left no doubt on one topic—Chang Cai had been powerful and remorseless.

The gun he’d seen took on an additional significance. What had he gotten himself into?

“I don’t want to,” Katie said, reminding him how she hadn’t wanted to drop her mask, either. With good reason. The full force of her longing had dazed him, and his wolf had leaped to meet it. He’d barely held out.

If he would have kissed her, no doubt she’d have bitten off his tongue.

“How will you kill me?” he asked, rubbing his wrist where the dangling handcuffs scraped him. “Gun? Poison? Death spell? How much magic do you have to use, Chang Cai, to kill someone?”

Her expression crumpled. “I can’t let you leave here with this knowledge.”

“My chi says I’m trustworthy.” He laughed. “Change your mind?”

“I’m not sure,” Tonya said. “You could have hurt her, and you didn’t.”

“I could still hurt her. I could hurt you both.” He stalked around the foot of the bed. Both ladies stood their ground when they should be scared. But he supposed the Black Widow feared no shifter, and Tonya Applebaum thought wolves were harmless.

She was wrong.

“You won’t hurt anyone.” Without further ado, Tonya threw the mint.

He dodged easily. The spell puffed open, brushing past him with a tingle. She fumbled at her pocket for another.

Ignoring Tonya and her pathetic candy, he faced the real threat. He halted almost within arm’s reach of her. Black Widow. Whoever she was. “What are you going to do, Chang Cai?”

“Katie,” she corrected, lifting her chin. How could she be a heartless assassin? Why did he still want to kiss her? “Call me Katie or Katherine. It’s my name now…Marcus.”

“Will it be painless, or will I suffer?”

“I don’t know how you heard of the keepers. I don’t know why you recognize Tonya. All I know is I’m not Chang Cai anymore, and I don’t want to do this.”

“But you can,” he said softly. “You’re convex, and by your father’s admission, alpha. You warp our gift, our magic, in a way it’s not meant to be used. With power like that, how can I not believe everything I’ve heard about you?”

And even as he said it, he wanted to know. How did a convex alpha use magic? Would she transform if she slept with a wolf?

If she slept with him?

“Believe what you want about me. I don’t have to prove anything to you.” Blinking fast, she nudged her glasses up her nose. The woman all keepers had feared quivered with nerves, had terrible eyesight and oozed so much desire for him—a wolf—that he couldn’t wish away his hard-on.

It didn’t add up.

Damned curiosity. Why couldn’t he just run? Jump through the window behind him, hit the empty street and go. Why did he have to know everything about everything?

That’s when it occurred to him he
could
run.

And he could take her with him.

He’d wanted to convince Katherine Zhang to assist willingly. Did he owe Chang Cai the same consideration? She’d wipe him, kill him, to protect herself. She’d admitted it.

Giving in to the impulse, he pounced on Katie and tossed her slender body over his shoulder. She pounded his back, her fists more like a massage than a defense mechanism.

Marcus laughed. After a year of living as a wolf, rarely had his id ruled. He’d fought it and hated it and fought it some more.

This felt magnificent.

Tonya screamed. Katie cursed. Zhang Li thumped through the living room, shouting questions. The noise faded to a low buzz as Marcus’s adrenaline surged. He leaped beyond the bed, kicked down the bedroom door and dodged the old man brandishing a glass jar.

He was out of their apartment, down the stairs and in the darkened street before Katie had taken a third breath.

His truck, parked outside, wasn’t locked. The crappy streetlight blinked off, as if eager to conceal his escape. He swung open the door and tossed Katie into the cab. She hit the seat, bounced and scrambled toward the opposite door.

Her reaction time was impressive. He’d expect no less of an assassin. But he was faster. Marcus latched onto her ankle and slid her back to the passenger’s side, clapping a hand over her mouth.

She bit him. He winced but didn’t let go. He needed to hurry; he could hear movement inside the shop as Tonya and Zhang Li marshaled whatever weapons they had handy.

“I’m acting in self-defense.” Using his thumb, he popped open the metal cuff around his wrist. Katie hit him and kicked at his legs. Landed a solid blow. It would bruise and heal within an hour, like his hand. “You threatened to kill me, Chang Cai. Did you expect me to bend my neck?”

She quit biting long enough to snarl something as furious as a wet cat.

The night air whooshed his bare torso, a crisp October breeze. Marcus wanted to laugh again, he felt so galvanized, so completely alive. Instead he flopped his prisoner over on her stomach. As soon as he released her mouth, she screamed, the sound piercing enough that it hurt his ears worse than her teeth had hurt his hand. He handcuffed her more roughly than necessary and let his gaze rest on the curves of her ass.

He wanted to bite it. And more. The cuffed wrists, the struggling woman… He was enjoying this too much.

“If you don’t quiet down,” he growled, “I’ll make you quiet down.”

As threats went, it wasn’t particularly menacing. His prisoner responded in kind, inhaling deeply and loosing another shriek.

He slanted across her body, his hips pushing against her, knowing she’d feel his erection. She bucked, and not in a sensual way. Her heels whipped up to drum him wherever she could land a kick. The tense situation wasn’t having the diminishing effect on his libido one might expect.

She might smell aroused, but she wasn’t going the Stockholm route anytime soon. Marcus stuffed his pocket handkerchief into her mouth.

She hurled curses at him, distinguishable though the hankie. He crawled over her, slammed and locked her door, and started the truck with the key still happily in his trouser pocket. He was losing his tie, his shirt, his briefcase, his travel pill pack and his suit coat, but he was gaining a test subject.

Good trade.

Just as Zhang Li limped through the shop door, Marcus peeled out, grateful this run-down neighborhood was mostly vacant and little trafficked.

He quickly realized Katie wasn’t going to make his first ever abduction easy on him. She scooched to the passenger door and tried to open the lock with her chin. He grabbed the back of her stretchy pants and yanked her to his side.

She rammed his shoulder with her skull. He looped his right arm around her until he could grip her throat.

“Are you crazy? You can’t jump out of a moving vehicle. I’m doing almost fifty.” Not used to driving with one hand, he took a turn too fast. Braked. Thank Goddess for automatic transmission. The truck fishtailed onto another side street. He braced his knee against the wheel and flicked on the headlights with his steering hand. While his night vision was superior, human drivers didn’t have that advantage.

Marcus knew the roads through this town and everywhere on the Birmingham border patrol’s path like the screen of his smart phone. When you were a fugitive, it paid to know the escape routes.

As he held her, Katie’s breathing whistled with anger. She crooked her left leg and started kicking him, throwing her small weight into the blows.

He let the claws of his right hand jab into her soft neck. Again.

She froze.

“Calm down,” he advised.

She worked her jaw furiously until the soggy hankie plopped out of her mouth. “I wasn’t going to kill you, but you’re changing my mind really fast.”

“If you scream, I’ll duct tape your mouth. I’ve got a roll in back. In fact, if you keep kicking me like little mule, I’m going to duct tape your legs.” An image of her restrained on the Murphy bed in the Airstream flashed before his eyes. Was turnabout fair play?

“Why don’t I get to excuse my actions with self-defense? For all I know you’re going to kill me.”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“You manhandled me.”

“I’m a man. I have man hands.”

She choked out something so enraged it wasn’t even words. The truck whizzed beneath a broad overpass. Marcus kept his eyes on the road ahead, the area around them, for signs of pursuit. Witch or human. He wasn’t exactly obeying the posted speed limit. A light mist had risen as the chill of the night met the warmth of the humid Alabama day.

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Katie said abruptly.

“It may be the dumbest thing I’ve ever said,” he concurred, slowing as they neared a four-way crossroad. He hadn’t planned an abduction, so he was glad as hell he’d docked the Airstream in the state park instead of the motor home village.

Nobody to hear her scream but him.

He felt guilty, suddenly, that he was doing this to her. Soon he’d be wanting to take her home—but he couldn’t give in. He needed her.

“What exactly are you trying to achieve by kidnapping me?”

Her tone had gone from furious to curious. He didn’t trust it. Chang Cai would be a master manipulator. “This was the best way for us to have an uninterrupted conversation.”

“We were having a conversation in the apartment.”

“About how you were going to kill me.”

“I told you, I wasn’t going to kill you. Just wipe you.” She squirmed in his grasp, arching her neck away from his claws.

“I tell you what. Let’s assume neither of us wants the other dead,” he said. “There are only so many times we can say, ‘I’m not going to kill you,’ before it becomes meaningless.”

That silenced her for a moment. A short moment. “Tell me how you know about the keepers.”

“I suppose this is a story your sympathizer friend wouldn’t have shared.” The truck whizzed out of the city limits, and Marcus felt safe enough to slow to the fifty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit. An ounce of worry dissolved. “Eleven years ago, I made the mistake of contacting the sympathizers after my sister Elisa transformed into a wolf. A colleague told me about them, and I took a chance.”

“That’s how you know Tonya? She wasn’t even supposed to be… Never mind. Go on.”

“Tonya and her team failed.” Katie didn’t need to know the other circumstances of Elisa’s life—like the fact she’d been pregnant at the time and desperate to find a cure for the cancer that threatened to kill her before the baby was born. “The keepers hit, and hit hard. There wasn’t much the sympathizers could do against your people, and Elisa died in the chaos.”

“Goddess. I’m sorry about your sister, Marcus.”

He had no idea what route his life would have taken if Elisa hadn’t gotten cancer, but it wouldn’t have been here. He would have been an uncle, a brother, not a lone wolf with a dangerous mission. “Why? You probably did the same thing to a hundred wolves.”

“I tagged,” she said. “I didn’t bag. Unless it was self-defense. That wasn’t my…function.”

“Sure.” That wasn’t what he’d heard. However, he’d heard so many things about the Black Widow, they couldn’t all be true. “Hiram Lars blackmailed me because of my part in the fiasco. I lost five years running experiments for him to pay for my treason.”

“Experiments?”

“On wolves.”

Not sounding as disturbed as she ought to, she said, “I thought the experiments were pure speculation on Tonya’s part.”

“I wasn’t sure Chang Cai was entirely real, yet here you are.” What had he expected—that the Black Widow would be horrified by what other keepers considered animal testing?

In the corner of his eye, he saw Katie frown. “Are you going to use me to cut a deal? It won’t work.”

He’d been thinking more along the lines of using her in his research. Running tests on her like Lars had forced him to test wolves. What he’d do to convince her—bribe, bargain or coerce—he hadn’t decided. “What do you mean?”

“Giving me to Lars won’t get him off your back. He’ll kill us both and anyone connected to us.”

“Don’t be so sure.” It was, ironically, the perfect inducement. That kind of strong-arming might not have occurred to him. “He often expressed regret you were dead because he didn’t kill you himself. Surely he’d reward anyone who gave him that chance.” Chang Cai had become a legend among the keepers, reviled and revered. Whenever Lars had spoken of her, he’d frothed at the mouth with loathing.