Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) (9 page)

Neither man sat.

“I set the protection spell on you.” William stood by his desk. Protection, he said. Not poison. “I acted alone.”

Lewis could respect William’s defense of his fellow healers. He couldn’t accept the spell. “Why?”

“For the Collegium. The death of its president, especially at this stage, would destabilize the Collegium.”

“Healers would be needed and respected without the Collegium.”

William moved abruptly around his desk and opened a drawer. He produced three bullets and laid them on the desk. “These were dug out of me when I was twelve. My mother, father and two sisters died. Violence. A home invasion on the outskirts of Cape Town. No institution, no force for good, can be allowed to be diminished. Evil is real and we have to fight it.”

“You’re a healer, yet you used poison as your spell.”

“It is where my strength is,” he said simply. His gaze remained on the bullets. One was misshapen. Probably from the impact of striking bone. “Gilda is a demonologist. She banishes demons which is the flipside of summoning them. The same thing. The difference between us and those who do evil is not our power, but how we choose to use it. For good or death.”

“Your spell would have killed.”

“It would have killed people who intended to kill you.” William scooped up the bullets and dropped them into the drawer.

“You bespelled me without my consent.”

“That I regret. It is as Kora said. I believed I wouldn’t receive your permission to protect you, so I acted unethically.”

“You acted from fear,” Lewis said deliberately.

William straightened, jerked out of his somber mood. “What?”

“Fear diminishes and tarnishes everything when you let it rule you. You were afraid to lose the Collegium, and so, you allowed yourself to believe that I couldn’t protect myself. You diminished me, betrayed me.”

“You have no magic.” William’s voice was raw.

“What is magic?” The silver light flared in Lewis’s vision. It danced over the office, linking and recoiling, rebounding between the herbal stashes in William’s apothecary cupboards. It broke through the walls; turned them translucent to his sight, so that silver pulsed and pounded out across the city.

Lewis wrenched in his attention. The walls of the Collegium and the solid three dimensional physicality of human reality returned. Only a single layer of silver remained.

“My magic is gone,” he said. “But I remain me. The guardians recognized it when they elected for me to continue as their commander last year. A month ago I accepted the role of president of the Collegium because I knew that even without magic I could fulfill it. Many of the senior mages elected me because they believe the role thankless. After the restructure and the fallout, someone will suggest I be replaced. They’re allowing me to bear the weight they can’t before they throw me out.”

“And you accept that?” William sunk into his chair, stunned.

“I
serve
the Collegium.” Lewis sunk his intent into that one word. He served the vulnerable.

The single layer of silver light that remained in his vision parted and realigned itself, the interlocking honeycomb pattern inviting and distracting him. Mentally, with the part of him that had cast spells, he reached out and touched it.

His mental touch gently vibrated the pattern where it hung like a cobweb over a corner of the office by the window.

The sounds of the ocean struck. The boom of the waves and the cry of a seagull.

William turned swiftly toward the window.

There was nothing there.

William looked at Lewis, suspicion narrowing his gaze. His thoughts were practically flashing in neon: had Lewis somehow regained his magic? Could he defend himself magically?

Can I?
Lewis simply held William’s gaze.
I have to speak with Morag.
The dragon could explain what he’d just done. “If you bespell me again, I will consider it an attack on me as president and respond accordingly. Your membership of the Collegium will be revoked.”

A long beat of silence. William looked at the window and back to Lewis. “In the meeting you said you took the bespelling as a personal challenge. As a person, not as president, what do you intend to do?”

“To you?”
After hearing your story.
“Nothing. I think we understand each other.”

“Thank you.”

Lewis nodded and walked out.

In the outer office, the seven senior mages, healers all, watched him warily. He kept walking. Kora was waiting for him in his office. A conversation with the commander of the guardians would make his encounter with William look positively enjoyable.

In the foyer of the Collegium’s headquarters—which had obviously been designed by a house witch, the proportions were just so right—Gina did battle with the receptionist. “So I’m not on Lewis’s list of approved guests, those with the right to immediately see him. Tell me, does Lewis even have such a list?”

The receptionist was a professional. “Tomas”, his name tag said. He didn’t show any reaction to her point.

But Gina had worked as a receptionist in a couple of her family’s hotels. She knew what that blank face meant. It meant she was right.

Accurately guessing Lewis’s behavior, however, wouldn’t get her past Tomas to the elevators and up to Lewis’s office. That would require guile.

She smiled. “Lewis isn’t expecting me, but I didn’t want to wait at his apartment.”

Tomas’s eyes went wide.

Gina suppressed the urge to giggle. The reason she wasn’t waiting at Lewis’s apartment was because he hadn’t given her a key to it, but all Tomas needed to know was that she was Lewis’s girlfriend. She flicked her head in a way that drew attention to her red hair, worn loose and flaunting that she was comfortable strolling unannounced into Lewis’s life. Her jeans and tight blue cotton sweater said she was equally comfortable with her curvy body.

She admired her fingernails, painted with tiny multicolored hearts on a blue background, as she laid a confiding hand on the reception desk. “I realize you can’t let me up. But I don’t want to phone Lewis to tell him I’m here. He’s busy.”

A flicker of Tomas’s black lashes told her that Lewis was busier than she’d guessed. Something big was happening.

She kept her voice casually seductive, as if she hadn’t noticed Tomas’s giveaway. “Why don’t you phone Chad or whichever of the bodyguards is on duty—Haskell or Shawn—and have them take responsibility for allowing me up?”

“Very well.”

Gina leaned against the reception desk, her back to Tomas’s low murmured phone conversation, and surveyed the foyer.

Of the nine people in it, all nine were staring at her.

She smirked. Her and Lewis’s grand exit yesterday had certainly spread the news. Lewis had a girlfriend! It was what she’d counted on: not her smiles or guile to convince the receptionist to allow her access to the president’s outer office, but the gossip as to her identity.

“You may go up, Ms. Sidhe.”

She borrowed from one of her favorite great-aunts, a famous Hollywood actress. “Much appreciated, honey.”

And she stayed in character—a woman casual and happy, surprising her lover—keeping her stance relaxed and her expression just tipping into a smile as she rode up in the elevator.

She walked into Lewis’s outer office and into the heat of another woman’s angry glare.

The woman was forty something, wearing a gray trouser suit whose poor cut didn’t disguise a fighter’s readiness to attack or defend. Brown hair, brown eyes, lipstick worn off and a square chin.

Gina kept her stride confident, perhaps adding a little extra sway to her hips, just to annoy, and looked beyond the woman to the PA seated behind his desk. “Shawn?”

The man’s swift glance at the woman was difficult to decipher. Doubt? Challenge? Seeking permission?

Who was the woman?

“Gina Sidhe.” Shawn found his voice. “President Bennett isn’t in.”

“When do you expect him back?” Gina crossed to the PA’s desk. Her path took her within double arms’ length of the woman.

“How is that any of your business?” the woman challenged.

Gina spun slowly to face her. Sidhe family policy was not to antagonize people. It was a necessary discipline in hospitality work. It also meant they avoided challenges that might expose the strength of their house witchery magic. It was always better to be underestimated.

But Gina decided to make an exception for this woman.

Lewis had given the impression of total isolation within the Collegium, so it wasn’t as if Gina would be alienating one of his friends.

She perched her butt on the edge of Shawn’s desk.

A faint cough from him suggested amusement.

Not so the woman. Her brown eyes went even colder, if that was possible. “I asked you a question,” she snapped.

“This is Gina, Kora.” Lewis walked in and strode straight to Gina. He kissed her briefly, but on the mouth. “I promised Kora ten minutes of my time, but then, I’m free.”

Gina shivered. She’d thought the woman’s brown eyes were cold, but Lewis’s were glacial.

Lines of tension bracketed his mouth and he held himself with a powerful restraint that somehow suggested violence.

“If you want coffee or anything, Shawn will get it for you.” Lewis opened the door to his inner office. “Kora.” Just the woman’s name, but it was an order.

Gina stared as the door closed behind them.

“Coffee?” Shawn asked.

“No, thanks,” she said absently.

“You wanna get off my desk?”

She turned her head to study him.

He was tense, too.

“Kora?” she mused. “So that’s who replaced Lewis as commander of the guardians.” Gina knew the name. She hadn’t bothered to match it to a face. “A tough cookie.”

Shawn didn’t comment.

Gina nodded as if he had. She sauntered over to the visitors’ seats and sank onto one. She felt a surprising sympathy for the antagonistic woman. It didn’t matter how good a mage Kora was or how determined, she’d never measure up to Lewis. He was a living legend, a hero. That would be a difficult situation to accept. Perhaps that explained Kora’s hostile reaction to Gina. But what explained Lewis’s rage? She recalled the three spells Morag had removed from him. That would do it.

Lewis stopped a few steps inside his office. He didn’t sit or invite Kora to do so.

“I’m sorry,” she bit out. “But I was doing my job.”

“Having me tracked, by guardians or by magic. I accepted the bodyguard.”

“Barely,” she interrupted. “For the look of things, to reassure outsiders that you were protected, but you don’t respect their protection of you. That woman outside, you went off with her yesterday, out to Cape Cod.”

Evidently, Paul O’Halloran, the porter, had reported Lewis’s destination. Lewis had expected as much, but it didn’t improve his mood. He reached for the cover story, that Gina was his girlfriend. “I am entitled to a private life. Do not bespell me again.”

“Or what?” It was a flagrant challenge to his presidential authority, and a taunt to his lack of magic.

He stared at Kora, consciously summoning the clarity of sight Morag said led to the Deeper Path. Silver patterns ran through Kora and coiled in compact density where she likely held her magic and spells in readiness.

To act without full knowledge of what the silver light represented would be reckless. Just to touch the mesh of it in William’s office had brought the ocean in acoustically. What if it had instead brought the actual ocean and flooded the office? Yet he was angry enough to be reckless.

He looked away from the silver figurine that was Kora to the silver light coating his fingertips. Consequences that recoiled on himself were an acceptable risk. He flexed his fingers and the silver sparked.

He clenched his fists, closing down the clarity of sight and its temptation as well. “If you bespell me again, the consequences are the same as for William. You will be dismissed from the Collegium.”

“On your say so?”

“On the grounds of treason and inability.”

“Inability?” she gasped. “It’s not me who burned out my magic.”

“But it is you, in constant contact with my bodyguards, who failed to detect the other two spells cast on me.”

Her wide mouth compressed.

Lewis held her furious, frustrated gaze. “That is failure plain enough for all to comprehend.”

“Who revealed them to you?” she demanded.

“Someone more skilled than you.”

Kora swore and stalked out of the office.

A minute later, Gina walked in. “Is now a bad time for me to suggest an early dinner. I thought we could eat-in at your apartment. I’ll cook.”

He dragged his thoughts out of the mire of anger. If Gina was here and suggesting a private chat, she had information on the Group of 5. But he needed more than that. He had to shed the tensions of the day, and he needed to consult Morag concerning the intrusion of the ocean into William’s office.

“It’s been a hellish day,” he said. He had to remember their cover story. “I’d like to get right away. Your house?”

“Even better.” She rubbed her knuckles along his jawline. “You can forget about the Collegium.”

“Like that’s possible.”

A smile glimmered in her green eyes. She stretched on tiptoe. “Don’t worry. I’ll help you forget.”

Her lips were warm and soft on his.

In the outer office he’d kissed her in greeting, a swift, meaningless acknowledgement of her as his pretend girlfriend. Perhaps she’d meant this caress as something similar since Shawn lurked beyond the open door. If she did, it went wrong.

The kiss escaped them both. His fury with the senior mages transmuted into a different kind of passion. Her mouth was sweet and hot, and at the flick of his tongue, she sucked him in. His hands went to her butt, lifting her into his body. She wrapped her arms around him.

Very reluctantly, he pulled out of the kiss. “Your lipstick is strawberry-flavored.”

“Lip balm, and I’ll have to renew it.” Her tongue tip licked along her bottom lip.

A groan vibrated in his throat.

She smiled, wicked and inviting, looking up at him through her lashes. “Hurry up, Mr. President, or your dinner will get cold.”

The tease sounded sexual. But the laughter in her eyes said she was playing, enjoying their game of fooling Shawn.

For an instant, Lewis wanted it to be real. He wanted Gina to be here for him at the end of a long and ugly day.

The momentary lift of his spirits faded. This was only pretend. Their attraction was real, but they’d agreed not to act on it. It was the only possible decision since Gina would chafe at the constraints of his life. The Collegium was an all-consuming duty.

He locked away desire, put an arm around her, the picture of a devoted boyfriend, and urged her out the door.