My Forbidden Desire (36 page)

She went back for Durian and grabbed his arm. His skin was hot to the touch. “Move it, buster.”

All around them, the air alternately sizzled and froze. Rasmus might be down, but he was far from powerless. Xia knelt over her father, his head bowed like he was praying. Her heart collapsed in on itself at the sight. Hadn’t that been what Xia wanted all along, more than anything? His moment alone with her father. Ruthlessly, she cut off the emotion; there wasn’t time to think about anything but needing to get Xia on his feet and running out the door with her and Durian. Not praying over a body, for crying out loud. Xia clutched the hilt of his knife in both hands and held it over her father’s chest.

“Xia!” she shouted.

There wasn’t any blood that she could see, not even on the blade. Rasmus’s legs twitched in a trying-to-escape kind of kick rather than a waning-seconds-of-life thing. She still wasn’t used to not feeling her magic; even worse, the way her father’s power came at her through the talisman’s magic completely disconcerted her. It was like looking at the world through the back of a mirror. Everything familiar was reversed. Her pulse thumped hard. They weren’t out of danger, not by any means. Rasmus was still alive in a house full of magehelds.

Her father’s wide-open eyes were fixed on Xia; however, the alarming thing wasn’t the rage in his face but his moving lips. He was pulling. Her demon magic vibrated with it. A part of her wanted to be closer to that much power. The sound of running thundered from upstairs.

“Xia!” she yelled again. “He’s calling his magehelds.” She could feel Xia, kin to kin, the way she felt Durian now. It was trippy, that connection to the two fiends. She had no idea how to interpret what she was getting from either of them. “Whatever you’re going to do, Xia, do it now or give it up.” Shit, this was going to hell. She gave up on getting any reaction from Durian. She ran to Xia and grabbed him by the arm. “We have to go. Now.”

Xia kept muttering, and she didn’t know what to do, because the place where her magic used to be was one huge void, and she had no idea how to use the magic she did have. He was using his magic right now, not hers.

Upstairs, something screamed.

“There’s no time,” she said. Xia turned his head, and for a moment, there she was in his head. She dropped out almost as quickly as she’d dropped in. His irises were white, his pupils huge black discs, his mouth a grimace.“If you’re not going to kill him, Xia, disable him. Now.”

“Get out,” he said. He shoved his knife into her hands.

“Not without you.” She went to her knees. Xia was locked in some kind of mental battle with her father, and it had to end. One way or another. She put a hand on Xia’s shoulder and practically fried from the heat of their connection. Her body streaked with pain at the amount of magic Xia was holding. Hers and his, and it hurt. She’d never pulled anything like that amount of magic, and she had nothing left to cushion the effect.

Rasmus was wearing his ruby ring on his thumb. Alexandrine reached out and caught his wrist, pinning it to the floor. With shaking hands, she pulled the ring off his thumb. Rasmus’s body bowed off the floor, and he shouted what she guessed was an obscenity in his native language, whatever that might be. But the magic flowing between him and Xia didn’t stop. Taking his talisman away from him wasn’t enough to stop what he was doing.

“Durian!” she shouted.

Durian was leaning against the wall with his knees bent and his hands on his thighs, but at her yell, he looked up.

“Catch.” She tossed the ring across the room. He managed to move his hands, but not in any coordinated fashion. The ruby clinked at Durian’s feet. Nothing changed with Rasmus. He was still able to use the talisman. “Shit.”

In desperation, she grabbed Xia’s knife and dove for the ring at Durian’s feet. She slid part of the way there and ended up rolling into Durian’s shins. But the ring was in her hand and that’s all that mattered. She got her legs underneath her and did the only thing she could think of, which was to grab hold of what little magic she had—the hell with not knowing how it worked. She just opened herself wide and plunged the point of Xia’s knife into the stone.

Everything stopped.

Or else she went deaf and dumb and blind to magic.

Rasmus’s body went limp, and his head lolled to one side. There wasn’t time to figure out what had happened for sure. His chest was still moving, so he wasn’t dead. Pity or not? Who knew? She shoved the damaged ring into her pocket and scrambled toward Xia. Behind her, she heard Durian breathing hard.

She grabbed Xia by both arms. Hell, even Xia was loopy. She shook him hard, and his eyes came back from whatever hell he’d been visiting. “Can you walk? Or do I need to carry you? Because I will, if I have to.”

She watched him focus on her until his eyes practically crossed. “I love you, Alexandrine,” he said.

“You’re delirious, sweetie.” Right. Wouldn’t do for her to forget that Xia hated what she was. They were going to have to deal with that later, when they weren’t in immediate danger of death and destruction.

Durian was the next problem. He was on his feet and stable enough, she supposed. He stared at Rasmus with a murderous gleam. With Xia in tow, she went to him and grabbed his arm, too. The former mageheld didn’t look so hot. His face was ashen, and beads of sweat formed along his upper lip and dripped down his temples. The smell of blood from him was stronger than before.

“Can you make it out on your own?”

He managed to pull himself away from the wall. One palm stayed pressed to his sternum. The other one was bright with blood. “Yes.”

“Great, because it’s time to go, boys.”

Crap. Whoever was upstairs was heading downstairs now. Something fell hard. She couldn’t feel them, but she didn’t know if that was because whatever was coming for them was mageheld, or whether she wasn’t close enough to feel them, or if she’d flamed out and couldn’t feel anything. At this point, she wasn’t sure if she could feel anything magical anymore.

“Whatever’s coming at us from up there is mageheld,” she said. “They should still read me as a witch, so let’s hope Rasmus didn’t release them. You two, behind me,” she said. “Do it now.”

They went out like that, with her taking the point. Not so much because she’d taken command as because she was the only one who wasn’t completely strung out yet. God knows Xia wasn’t himself; Rasmus would be deader than dead if he was. And Durian was worthless right now. She closed the metal door after them, getting that strange deadening in her hands when she touched it. Her back itched the entire time she was exposed to the stairs. Xia turned around and did something to the door that made her head freeze solid.

“Is there another way out?” she asked Durian. “A back door? A window? A secret tunnel?” That last was a joke but nobody laughed. Not even her. Durian and Xia both shook their heads. “Then up we go.” She touched Xia’s shoulder. He flinched. Great. Now he worse than couldn’t stand her. He didn’t even want her touching him. Which would piss her off if she had the time for it. She sank onto the riser above Xia and Durian. “Listen up,” she said.

Xia’s eyes cycled through all the shades of blue again, starting and ending with azure-streaked white. “What?”

“Have I flamed out?” Her heart raced to her throat. The noises from upstairs weren’t happy ones. She had a still-loopy Xia, a worthless Durian, no sense of magic herself, and a houseful of magehelds headed their way. Xia’s knife was an awesome weapon, but she didn’t see herself taking down the dozen or so fiends about to descend on them. “Xia, is there any more of my magic left?”

He swallowed. “Yeah.”

“For crying out loud, Xia. Read my mind, would you?” She was too stressed out to care about anybody’s feelings. “Yes, there’s magic, or yes, I’ve flamed out?”

“Yes, there’s magic left.” He touched his fingertip to her forehead, and a connection opened between them. She didn’t feel any magic, though. Not his. Not hers. Not Durian’s. All she felt was him in her head.

“It’ll be all right,” he said.

Right. All she had to do was get used to vanilla. “Xia,” she said. “It’s time to find out if you severing Durian was a fluke or if you can do it again.” She figured that was their best shot at getting out—if they severed as many magehelds as they could.

“We just need to be close enough,” he replied. He put a hand on her shoulder, the better to pull from her, she supposed, because her stomach filled with ice. Upstairs, something shrieked like a banshee. Xia’s irises flashed between neon and midnight blue.

The three of them stood and started climbing the stairs again. With the doorway in sight, Alexandrine came to a halt. For one thing, she was light-headed. For another, the running around upstairs had stopped. Abruptly. The hair on the back of her neck stood up. Her surroundings disappeared. Everything she ever was in her life focused on the stairs and on not falling over in a dead faint.

The first of Rasmus’s magehelds appeared at the top of the stairs. Jiminy Cricket, he was a monster. Not in literal form. Just a general observation on the creature she had to face down without a lick of magic to help.
You’re a witch, and he’s a mageheld.
Repeat as necessary.
You’re a witch, and he’s a mageheld. He can’t hurt you, and he has to do what you tell him.

He was bigger than Xia and damn near as scary. What hair he had was dark. Three cobalt stripes ran down the left side of his face, starting at the midline of his left eye and moving outward toward his temple. The first stripe actually colored his eyeball. He held a dead fiend by the back of his collar. Oh, yuck. One of his hands was bloody. He was handsome, with a smile to die for that was even creepier than the hand-sized hole where the dead fiend’s heart ought to be.

A mageheld couldn’t harm a mage, and Alexandrine was pretty sure—though not certain—that she still counted as a mage. Therefore, she had nothing to fear. Right? Right. He might want to rip out her heart, but he couldn’t. She hoped.

“Out of my way,” she said when he didn’t move. She did her best to sound like she expected to be obeyed. She got her legs moving again, climbing the stairs. Rasmus better not have had time to release his fiends, or they were all going to die a horrible death.

The big mageheld didn’t move except to let go of the body he held. Said body hit the floor with a sickening thud. Blood from his hand dripped onto the floor in bright, crimson splashes. She didn’t react to the scent of blood. Not anymore. His eyes were pools of cobalt blue, tending to the maniacal, with a hint of insanity thrown in for kicks.

“Coming through,” she said, taking another step toward him with her heart in her mouth and expecting any minute he would blast her into a pile of ashes. Or just rip out her heart. Which one was the faster way to go? At the last minute, she realized the mageheld’s head wasn’t shaved. His hair was slicked back and very long.

“Get out of the way, Iskander,” Xia said from behind them. Gee, he sounded just like the old Xia. “That’s Harsh’s sister, for Christ’s sake. No killing her. Got that?”

She turned. “You know each other?”

Xia shrugged. “He’s sworn to Nikodemus.”

Iskander moved, and the three of them came the rest of the way up the stairs. In the entryway, there were three more dead fiends, all with holes in their chests. And a lot more blood everywhere.

“Looks like you were enjoying yourself,” Alexandrine said.

“Where’s the mage?” Iskander asked Xia. Apparently, she didn’t count. She was light-headed and nauseated. Still deaf, dumb, and blind to magic, too.

“Downstairs,” Xia replied. “Restrained for now.”

“Kynan said you needed my help,” Iskander said. “Doesn’t look like it.”

Alexandrine picked her way around the dead fiends and tried not to let the sight of all those lifeless bodies get to her. She was feeling even more nauseous. Her stomach wasn’t going to put up with this state of affairs much longer. Her head pulsed with the mother of all headaches. “Where are the rest of the magehelds?” she asked.

“Hiding,” Iskander said with a dismissive look at the bodies at his feet. “Cowards.”

“Xia has to sever them before Rasmus gets out of… whatever happened to him.”

Xia ran a hand through his hair, but she ignored him. Hell. All three of them were staring at her like she’d grown a second head.

Hands on her hips, she glared at them in turn. She was hollow inside, running on fumes, she realized. “Do you honestly think I’m leaving here without doing whatever is necessary to free anyone held against their will? Tell me you’re not that stupid.”

Chapter 29

A
lexandrine watched Iskander and Durian watch Xia. The two were obviously waiting for the word from Xia. Constitutionally unable to believe Alexandrine could be serious? Yeah, well, they didn’t think too highly of witches, now, did they?

Xia shrugged. “She’s the boss.”

Iskander and Durian got in synch right away. She and Xia, not so much. She couldn’t feel much of anything. Maybe a glimmer every now and then, but that was it. All four of them knew they needed to work quickly, since there wasn’t any way of knowing when Rasmus would get himself out of whatever bind he was in downstairs.

The first mageheld took a while for Xia to sever, but when it was done, with the fiend on the ground clutching his chest, a layer of frost formed around Alexandrine’s bones. Xia recited a phone number she didn’t recognize and told the mageheld to call it if he wanted to join up with Nikodemus. By then, Iskander and Durian had two more waiting farther down the hall. She followed Xia and got there in time to see him put a hand to the first one’s chest. He pulled, or so she guessed from his expression of concentration. The growing chill in her body was the only way she could tell he was handling magic.