My Forbidden Desire (25 page)

The woman who answered the door was a knockout, if you liked them tall, leggy, and wholesome. He didn’t. He didn’t much like the platinum hair, either. He preferred little and delicate. Like Carson. But female sufficed. His body was definitely interested in some recreational hurting. If he was going to settle down for a night of fun with a human woman, he wanted a slut, and Harsh’s sister wasn’t a slut. Pity. Not that he wouldn’t want some one-on-one with her if he was normal. But he wasn’t normal. And neither was she; he was face-to-face with a mage about to flame out.

Her complexion was ashen, her forehead shiny with sweat. She must have been pulling some serious magic to be this close to collapse. Of course, it would take some serious magic to kill Xia. So her condition wasn’t that shocking. She was wearing old jeans that showed off her long legs and a long-sleeved top that ended about an inch above her low-riser jeans. She had the body to pull it off. Bare feet, too. Her short hair was white-blond without a dark root in sight. She was leaking magic and something else that didn’t feel right. Although there was no physical resemblance that he could see, Harsh sometimes gave off a similar vibe of magic that wasn’t quite right.

Wasn’t that interesting? Harsh Marit’s sister was a witch. He wondered how long he could make it last before he killed her.

“Kynan Aijan?” she said. Her eyes were big and more than a little scared. A good act. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t an act. There weren’t many mages who could take down a warlord, and one of the few who could was already dead. Another tic in the legend that was Kynan Aijan. On the other, other hand, if she’d taken down Xia, a warlord might not be much of a stretch for her. She looked like she’d been worked over, though he didn’t see any bruises. Xia wouldn’t have been easy to kill or retake, which would more than explain her looking like she’d run two marathons, back-to-back.

“That’s me,” he said. Kynan fucking Aijan. Mage-killer extraordinaire. A little blood and carnage anyone? He smiled at her. This was his whole problem, right here. Ever since Magellan, he wasn’t really turned on unless he could look forward to dealing some pain.

“Come in.”

As Xia loved to say,
fucking witch
. She opened the door and let him in. Once inside, every instinct he possessed screamed at him to kill the witch now and be done with it. If she had managed to take Xia, number one, that meant the kin’s bond with Carson wasn’t proof against another mage since it hadn’t been for Xia, and number two, she planned to do the same to him, didn’t she? “He still alive?”

“Yes.” She drew in a trembling breath. Beautiful woman, if a bit ragged around the edges at the moment. He got a good close-up look at her eyes, and things just got more and more interesting. She was on the downside of a copa high. The better to take a mageheld with? “We better hurry.” She gestured toward the stairs. “I managed to get him upstairs before he passed out.”

“Sure,” he said.

For a witch, she was remarkably unaware of the kin. She wasn’t reacting to him the way the magekind usually did. Jumpy or greedy. Calculating and sly. Superior. Overconfident. Pulling magic to see what it would take to win. She wasn’t pulling; he was sure of that. Maybe she had nerves of steel and an Oscar or two sitting on a shelf somewhere. Or maybe she was too high on copa to think straight. A dazzling flameout was right around the corner.

Kynan thought about that. If she started to go, he could play a little with her before the process either destroyed her magic or outright killed her. He got hard just thinking about that. Hell, he could reenact Magellan’s killing if he wanted. Only it would be the way he wanted it to be. Slow and painful. Fun.

She moved past him to push the door closed and shoot the dead bolt. That, he didn’t like. He sure as hell didn’t want a doped-up witch behind him. He faced her and turned with her as she left the door. “He said no hospital. Insisted, if you want to be precise about it. I should have ignored him, I think. But after he…” Her voice shook, and she bent her head for a bit. When she started up again, the quiver was mostly gone. “Well, anyway, I found the cell phone in a drawer and called the number Xia gave me in case something bad happened. And you answered.”

There wasn’t anything organized about the magic seeping out of her. She wasn’t pulling, yet she reeked of magic. Hell if he didn’t get a whiff of the kin from her. Strange. The skin across the back of his neck prickled. Carson had felt a little like that the night she severed him. His feelings got all mixed up between bone-deep lust and hot desire to see the witch dead. He could satisfy both, now, couldn’t he?

“What happened?”

“I’m not sure.” She glanced over her shoulder at him but didn’t look him in the eye. “Rasmus Kessler came after us.”

Oh. Major deception there. The liar. She was hiding something. She turned around on the stairs and used her fingertips to scrape her hair away from her forehead. The skin underneath her copa-hyped eyes was purplish.

“Harsh was certain I was the one in danger. God, he was such a jerk about it. But Rasmus was after Xia, not me or even the amulet.”

He narrowed his eyes and stopped thinking about having her naked and spread-eagled while he had control of her. The way Magellan used to like. “What amulet?”

She turned around, and he went back to following her upstairs. If she was going to try anything, it had to be soon. Unless she thought she could take him despite him pulling more than enough to snuff out her pathetic mageborn life. She was delusional if that’s what she had in mind. Kynan would be more than pleased to tear her head off her shoulders. Might even be kind of fun. Grow the legend. Kynan the mage killer. He could break off from Nikodemus to start his own band of vicious, killing fiends. Their specialty could be killing the magekind and any humans who got in the way. Why, all on his own, he could probably blow the lid off any hope of Nikodemus bringing the kin together.

Apres Kynan Aijan? Armageddon. Had a ring to it, it did.

“Xia kept calling it a talisman.” She looked at him over her shoulder again. “Does that mean anything to you?”

For the first time, though, he thought she might be playing him straight. He grabbed the back of her elbow and stopped her from continuing upstairs. His skin crawled from being so close to her poorly controlled magic. He reacted sexually, too. Normal for a fiend to get a hard-on for a witch, so he wasn’t too worried. “Did Rasmus do something to Xia?”

She shook her head. “Xia kicked his ass. He was pretty much fine until we came here. More or less.”

“I’m sure he was.”

“He took the amulet.”

More deception leaked from her. He sure as hell wasn’t getting the truth from her, was he? “Rasmus?”

“Xia.” She waved her other hand. “Amulet. Talisman, whatever the hell it is. Xia took it.” Her voice shook. She wrapped her arms around her middle and bent over. Her entire body quivered, and he heard her bite back a groan. “I have to get back to him.”

He pulled her upright. Nothing good ever happened to the kin when they were around a copa-addicted mage. She was ashen and shaking. Going into withdrawal, most likely. She was young to have been abusing long enough to be this bad off. Well, let her feel the pain. She deserved whatever she got for getting herself addicted to that stuff. “What happened then?” And then she killed him? Took him down? Murdered Xia in cold blood?

“And we were… um.” Her cheeks turned pink. “He had the talisman in his hand, and then everything was just burning. Burning white hot.” She leaned against the banister and took a sideways step up the stairs until she was as far away from him as his grip on her elbow permitted. “Nothing I did helped him. He was just, I don’t know. Unconscious. I didn’t know what else to do for him, so when I found the phone, I called. I can’t believe I remembered right. And you answered.”

“You’re telling me Xia passed out?” He pushed her to the top of the stairs. “He’s not dead?”

“I don’t think so.” Her voice got small.

“Uh-huh.” He didn’t feel a thing. Nothing.

Kynan made it to the bedroom door first. There was Xia, on the bed, flat on his back and under the covers, though he’d kicked off most of the blankets. He was breathing, but Kynan couldn’t feel anything from him. Either he was mageheld again—and that circumstance was starting not to fit the facts, because right now Alexandrine Marit wasn’t acting like a mage who could pull if her life depended on it, which at the moment it did—or Xia really was out cold. Not many things did that to one of the kin. A talisman was one.

He knelt at the side of the bed and tried to connect. Nothing happened. One of Xia’s hands was fisted so tight his knuckles were white. He’d heard some of what had happened with Carson and the talisman she’d stolen from Magellan. His stomach knotted. According to Alexandrine, if he’d understood her correctly, she’d had a talisman and Xia had taken it. Not as in taken it away, but from the looks of things here, as in cracked it. Taking on the life inside.

Had the thing cracked on him without Xia being ready for it? Kynan took Xia’s fist. His arm was limp. Completely nonreactive. He tried unfurling Xia’s fingers, but that didn’t work. They were closed too tight. He unleashed a little power. Nothing much. He tried a little more.

“Don’t you dare.” The last word came out of Harsh’s sister low and venomous. She launched herself at him like she was rocket-propelled. She didn’t pull. If she had, Kynan would have killed her on the spot. “Don’t you hurt him!”

Now, she was by no means a delicate female like Carson, but in his human form, Kynan was six-four. A mage wouldn’t have bothered running at him. A proper mage would pull magic and let him have it. But she didn’t. She barreled into Kynan, arms extended, and caught him off balance because he was expecting magic, not a tackle. At the contact, her magic came out of nowhere and shot through him, and it hurt. Bone-deep. He hit the ground and roared.

His worst fear sprang to life before his eyes. Her magic ripped through him. He wasn’t going to lose his freedom again. He wouldn’t. He pulled so much power the air over him ignited.

“Don’t you touch him like that.” Alexandrine bared her teeth and stood over him, fists clenched. Why the hell wasn’t she going for the kill? He was down and momentarily vulnerable. “If you hurt him, I will rip off your arms and beat you with them. Do I make myself clear?”

“You and what army?” He was still free. Still in total control of his magic. Why wasn’t she trying to fry him again? Why wasn’t she doing to him what she’d done to Xia? She’d knocked him on his ass, getting the advantage long enough that any mage worth his salt would have tried to take him. And she didn’t.

The answer, incredible as it seemed, was that she didn’t because she couldn’t.

He got off the floor, temper flaring. Whatever the hell her deal was, he didn’t want a mage that close to him ever again. “Witch, I’m trying to help him, for crap’s sake.” She advanced on him, and he snarled, the sound right on the edge of human. She caught up short. “Touch me again, and your head’s going to land fifty feet from your shoulders.”

The woman flinched but she stayed put. “Don’t you do that to him.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Kynan stretched out a hand and touched the tip of his finger to Alexandrine Marit’s forehead. He got a blast of magic, unfocused and not all that impressive. But he also got a direct line to Xia, which shocked him to hell. The woman gasped, and then her eyes rolled up in her head, and she hit the ground like a sack of dead rats.

“Oh, hell. No,” Kynan said. Impossible as it seemed, he finally got what had happened.

Chapter 20

A
lexandrine came to with a pounding headache that threatened to turn her stomach inside out. Her head felt like mush, and her nose was getting a strong whiff of hot sand. Swear to God, that’s what she smelled. A desert at high noon. Coherent thoughts came… very… slowly. She was almost—almost—content to drift in the soft heat of her head.

Odd,
she thought through the mush that made up her brain. She didn’t seem to be hearing very well. Her ears were stuffed full of the same pudding in her head. Another problem was that something held her tight enough to have her ribs in a painful squeeze, and that didn’t feel so great. Her feet also didn’t seem to be on the ground, and her torso was smashed against something else hard with her right arm trapped between. That didn’t feel so great, either.

Ouch. Yeah. Definitely ouch. Her shoulder hurt. Her other arm dangled in the air. She remembered she could open her eyes and look. What a genius! She pried open her eyes and got a fantastic close-up view of… black. Not an inside-of-the-eyes black, but a cotton-fabric kind of grayish black. She ought to know what she was looking at, but her mush-for-brains couldn’t come up with the information. The sensation that she was floating came back for a while. Ah, but what about moving? Was she capable of actual movement? How clever of her. Bodies move. She had a body. She could move and see what happened.

Wriggling didn’t do any good. Whatever had her wasn’t letting go. She concentrated on making sense of her situation and fighting off the desire to just float in the vast nothingness around her. Concentrate.

Held tight. Feet off the ground. Sandy scent. Cottony-black. People. No. Not people. Xia, who she needed to be near. That jogged her brain but not enough to know who Xia was except that she had to be with him. Out of order and jumbled, and terrifying. She stomped down her panic. The memory gates were switching on now.