Cassandra's Dilemma (24 page)

“Don’t focus on that right now. You haven’t eaten enough to allow for you to throw up, and I don’t need you going into shock. Shower. Then food. Then we work on a solution.”

She stared gape-mouthed at him for a long moment until he blew out a sigh and reached for the towel around his waist. She scampered then and slammed the bathroom door behind her. When she looked in the mirror, her eyes widened even further.

Beyond the disheveled hair, scratches, and bruises, she saw a pale shadow of the woman she was used to seeing in the mirror. Her eyes seemed bigger, rounder, and the hollow of her cheeks more pronounced. Cassie leaned forward and stared fixedly at her eyes.

The tawny
golden
eyes gazing back at her didn’t belong. They couldn’t. Her eyes were green. Cassie looked away and then back again, trapped, mesmerized. She yanked her gaze away and blinked rapidly. She panted for air, gasping as she could feel the panic attack swelling inside.

“Breathe,” she ordered. She turned the shower on with jerky motions and stripped out of the borrowed clothing. She all but threw herself under the spray, and closing her eyes, she tried to blot out the image of the deep, golden eyes that seemed to be lit from within. They weren’t natural. In fact, they were downright freaky.

Her eyes were supposed to be green.

It even said so on her driver’s license.

Chapter Fifteen

“What exactly are we doing again?” Cassie asked. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed closest to the window. Her still-damp hair hung loosely down her back. It was growing back. The Brownie’s magic seemed to be speeding her hair’s regrowth. Cassie wasn’t going to question it.

The shower did much to restore her. The food did the rest. The scrapes and scratches seemed less angry, and she preferred her skin tone sans the blood accents. She avoided looking in the mirror, however. Her eyes remained that unnatural shade.

Hopefully it was just the blinding spell not fully worn off.

Hopefully.

“It’s a blood-marker spell. Someone’s marked you. I want to see if I can track it back.” Jacob wore a pair of black slacks, belted at the waist, and nothing else. Old scars and warm muscle rippled across his chest as he reached into his bag. He’d transformed their dull little hotel room while she’d been in the shower. There were fat candles sitting in all four quarters of the room, each with their own little bit of cloth.

Feathers sat next to one, a water glass next to another, ashes at the third, and a flower at the fourth. The bed closest to the bathroom had been shoved out of the way, with the box spring and mattress tilted up to lean against the wall. In its place, a large cloth lay down with a circle stitched into the fabric.

“So you cross-stitch?” Cassie asked, studying the complicated circle of green and yellow thread surrounded by symbols decorating the squared edges of the cloth.

“Hardly.” He spared her a glance. “This is a protective circle. We could use chalk, but we’re on carpet and I don’t want to go outside for this.”

“So instead we use cross-stitch.” Cassie didn’t care for the whining note she heard in her voice. She watched as he pulled even more stuff out of the bag. “Jacob?”

“Yes?” he replied without looking up from his task.

“Is there something funny about your bag?” She squinted, trying to see if it was something other than the olive-green army duffel that it looked like.

“Hey.” He snapped his fingers right in front of her eyes, breaking her concentration. “None of that. You can smash the glamour on the bag just as easily as on the car.”

“That is not a car.”

“I know it’s not a car. But if you break the glamour, then everyone else will know it’s not a car, too.”

“But what is it?”

“He is called a Glashtyn. He’s a type of Goblin.”

“A Goblin?”

“Yes, a Goblin.”

Cassie studied the circular pattern on the cloth. The circle seemed to be made of consistent silver and gold threads twining back and forth in a knot work. A lattice of green circled around the knot work, like ivy grown on a trellis. It was really quite lovely.

“The glass thing—it’s from Underhill, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He offered nothing more. A muscle ticked in his jaw, and Cassie resisted the urge to run a hand over his stubbly cheek to soothe him. He paused in mid preparation to look at her. “My
Domovoi
gave him to me.”

“What’s a—”

“
Domovoi
? You could call him my godfather.”

“Because you’re a Wizard?”

“Something like that.”

Cassie waited. Jacob rubbed a hand against his face. His eyes looked tired. Shadows clung to the skin beneath his eyes, giving him a haggard appearance. His hair dried sticking straight up in places, and while he could definitely use a shave, there was something of a scamp to his current state. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to comfort him, kiss him, or both.

Jacob’s gaze flickered to hers. She dropped her gaze to his mouth, which was a mistake as one corner of it tilted upward into a knowing grin. Lips pursed, she lifted her gaze to meet his head-on and shoved all thoughts of kissing him to a dark corner of her mind, where they would hopefully stay shuttered and undisturbed.

“How much of this do you really want to know?” Jacob asked into the curtain of stillness hanging between them.

“That’s a really stupid question. I want to know all of it.”

“It’s not a stupid question. You don’t know it all, do you? You really don’t know it all about the Fae yet. The Danae has only told you what you absolutely need to know, and her guard dog Helcyon told you less than that.”

“You think I need to know more.” It wasn’t a question. His dark eyes, compelling and sweet, held hers. The air conditioner hummed to life, breaking the reverie, and Cassie looked away, blinking.

“I think you don’t know what you really want. You can’t
unknow
something. You can forget details, you can try to put it out of your mind, but you can’t
unknow
a thing.” His tone suggested he longed for a way to
unknow
a few items himself. “I think right now, you know just enough to be dangerous—to be a tool—and if I tell you more, you’ll wish I hadn’t someday.”

“That’s circular logic. I’m a grown woman. I could have turned the Danae down. At any point in the vetting process, I could have ended it. I didn’t.” Honesty was a bitter pill, but Cassie didn’t run away from her own culpability in this.

Yes, in retrospect, the Danae and her people had courted Cassie, but they’d also driven her to jump through a lot of hoops. Hoops she would never have bothered with if she hadn’t wanted the result on the other side.

“And now? Your assistant is dead, and something out there wants you the same way—dead or put away from anywhere you can harm anything.” Jacob’s tone was harsh, unforgiving, and brutal in its honesty. But Cassie appreciated the honesty. He wanted them both on the same page.

Fine by her, so did Cassie.

“You don’t
know
that.”

“Actually, I do
know
that,” he responded hotly, emphasizing the same word she did. “I know that whatever keeps bringing that Feth Felen onto your trail can’t care if it kills you. The Feth Felen isn’t the brightest of bulbs, and it’s taking a lot of damage trying to get to you. You’re very unlikely to go willingly, which means it will start to amputate your body parts.”

“Ewww!”

“Precisely.” Jacob stood up and held a hand out to her. “That’s why I’m going to shield you and see if I can sever the blood tie it’s created to you and, barring that, track it back to the source.”

“And then go and arrest them?”

“No.”

“No?” Cassie glanced from his beckoning hand to his eyes and saw the regret in them. “But you’re in law enforcement.”

“Human law enforcement, yes.” He beckoned with his fingers. She slid her right hand into his, reluctant to deepen the physical contact. Closing his hand around hers, he tugged her from the bed to stand in front of him. He angled his head to look into her eyes. “Cassie, this isn’t a legal matter. Our Courts, our Justices—our Law—it doesn’t govern the Fae.”

“Not
yet
. But when they come out, it will stimulate change. Our laws will have to grow to include them and so will our justice.”

“You really believe that, don’t you?” His expression softened as he studied her. Was it so hard to believe that she would believe in change? She’d accepted a Fae and a Wizard as lovers in less than a handful of days. Change was in the air.

“Yes, I do.” She tilted her head back as he angled his head, looking down at her. “You’re very tall.”

“Thank you.” He chuckled, tugging her closer, and she longed to lean up on her tiptoes and kiss the hardness away from his mouth, to feel it soften beneath her lips and then devour her as heat kindled between them.

Humor flickered in his dark eyes as he ran his hands up her arms to her shoulders and turned her around so that she was standing with her back to his front. He pulled her more snugly against him, head tilted so that the back of her head rested comfortably against his shoulder. The loose T-shirt did little to cushion her against the warm contact with his flesh. His pant legs were hot against her bare legs.

Heat clenching her pussy and heart racing, Cassie took a deep breath, but from the chuckle rumbling in his chest, there was no denying that he was aware of her feelings on the subject.

“Do I ask why we’re standing like this?” She studied the picture of vague countryside that occupied the other wall.

“A blood mark leaves a tether that extends from you back to the person who placed it on you. Think of it as an invisible leash that goes with you wherever you do. All the one who casts it need do is tug on it, ever so slightly, and set his beast on it, and no matter how far you have traveled, the creature will follow it right to you.”

Fear squeezed her heart, causing her pulse to beat faster. “So it could be on its way right now?” She could still see the rapidly spreading black tendrils as they sliced toward her, hungry for flesh and blood.

“Not yet, the sunlight will slow it down. It can hurt it. We also crossed a river a ways back. That will slow it down, too.” He rubbed his cheek to the top of her head. The stubble caught on her damp hair, yet it soothed the tension threading through her shoulders.

“Running water?”

“Yes.” The smile in his voice warmed her, and she relaxed more. “Creatures of magic are slowed by running water unless they are made of it. There are many Fae that running water wouldn’t slow down a bit. If the Feth Felen were not following a blood marker, we would have lost it already.”

“Okay, so let’s just cross lots and lots of water.” Terror chilled her marrow. She preferred the Fae debate to this talk of blood markers, dark creatures, and magic.

Jacob chuckled. “If you didn’t have a Wizard with you, I’d say that would be a good plan.”

“But I do have a Wizard.”

“You do.”

“Jacob?” she asked when Jacob lifted her right hand with his and then held out his left hand. She leaned back against him, off balance.

“Shhh,” he murmured against her hair. “
Teine!
”

His command startled her, but the candles around them lit all at once, or so it seemed. Cassie started to lean forward to look when Jacob tugged her back into place. “Stay.”

Bristling at the command, she did as he said. The hair on the back of her neck stood up. A cool tingling spread across her whole body, a hum like one felt when static electricity was generated. The feel of it pushed her away from Jacob, but he tightened his hold on her and she resisted the compulsion to pull away, leaning more firmly into him.