Frozen Desires (Asylums for Magical Threats) (2 page)

since they were now alone, with no humans in sight, Marco reached a hand to the west—the direction of

elemental water—in case he needed to draw on the elemental water particles in the air to do his magic.

But the man just stood there, not trying to get away or even bothering to attack. Marco knew that

inaction could be a tactic, so he kept up his guard, and waited.

Then the man did something Marco should have foreseen—but had overlooked—and crashed through

the window of an abandoned house to the left.

Marco grabbed the gun tucked into his waistband under his shirt and crawled through the broken

window, careful not to cut himself on the glass. Once inside, he rolled to the side and hid behind an

overturned couch that had seen better days. His finger near the trigger, he peeked around the edge, looking and listening for any sign of the man, or anyone else that might happen to be inside the abandoned house.

The coast clear, he inched his way toward the open door in the back of the building. There were

footprints in the dirt on the floor, leading toward the back door, but they simply stopped a few feet from the exit. The prints looked fresh, but no one could just disappear into thin air.

But then he remembered. He’d seen it happen once before.

The odds were long, but he could be dealing with a shadow-shifter.

Even with the sun filtering in through the threadbare curtains, the room was half engulfed in darkness.

Marco moved to stand in the light near the window and debated using his elemental magic. While streams

of water or shards of ice might draw the shadow-shifter out from his hiding place, it would also reveal

Marco’s abilities to his opponent.

And the last thing he needed was to destroy the cover he’d built up over the last eleven years by using

his magic in front of a stranger. Especially if the man somehow managed to escape.

Another option would be to throw something heavy at the first sign of suspicious activity and force the

shifter to return to his human-looking
Feiru
form. After what had happened in the States, Marco had learned that a shadow-shifter could only shift once every twenty-four hours. If he could scare the man into shifting back, it would give him a chance to catch and interrogate him.

Deciding to try the latter approach first, he circled around by degrees and checked the shadows for

movement, careful to keep his back exposed to the light. Then he saw it—a piece of peeled wallpaper near

the ceiling that waved back and forth in the still air.

Marco did a quarter turn away from his target, placed a hand on an old kitchen chair nearby, and swung

it around, tossing it up at the spot on the wall where he’d seen the movement.

Right before the chair smashed against the wall, the man emerged from the shadows and rolled to the

ground, out of the way. Marco jumped after the man, but the shadow-shifter dashed out the back door and

slammed it shut. He heard a screeching sound of something heavy moving across the ground.

Marco pushed against the door, but it wouldn’t budge.

The bastard had blocked him in.

Left with no other choice, he made for the broken window he’d come through, and crawled outside.

He made his way around to the back alley, and saw the rusty metal display case sitting in front of the

door, but there was no sign of the shifter. After checking up and down the alley, looking into every possible hiding spot, Marco accepted that the man was long gone.

In case the shifter came back with reinforcements, he made his way back toward the street of vendor

stalls, careful to take a different route than the way he had come. He needed to find Cam and tell her what had happened.

Thanks to the appearance of an unknown shadow-shifter, he was now going to have to spend more

time with Camilla Melini than he’d counted on.

Chapter Two

Cam leafed through the documents she’d received from Gonzalez, her vendor stall contact in Merida,

and tried to memorize the lists of safe houses and assets. She was pretty sure that she’d made it in and out of his shop without being followed.

Not for the first time, she wondered why she’d been sent here. She didn’t know any of the DEFEND

contacts in Latin America, nor could she speak Spanish. Yes, she had latent abilities that would be useful in any mission that required stealth, but she was far from the only one with that skill set.

But Jaxton and Neena had sent her here, and Cam had a high success rate for a reason. She’d adapted to

new places before, and she could do it again.

She was just about to ask Jacek to quiz her on some of the information when she heard a twig snap in

the distance. A quick glance told her that the sound had been too faint for Jacek’s normal hearing, so she kept her head down and pretended to read as she scanned her surroundings and listened for anything else

out of the ordinary.

But all she heard were bird calls, an occasional monkey sound, and the buzzing of flying insects.

Thanks to the keen hearing she’d inherited with her latent ability, Cam knew that something heavy had

caused the twig to snap, something along the lines of a big predator. But since jaguars were the only big

predators in the Yucatan, and they were restricted to animal reserves, that left the two biggest predators of them all—humans and their close cousins, the
Feiru
.

While odds suggested it was either some tourist looking for an adventure or a local poacher, she wasn’t

taking any chances. Jacek had told her about the strange man pulling a gun and harassing Gonzalez’s son.

Cam and her team had been careful as they’d left Merida, but she wondered if the man with the gun had

managed to follow them.

She casually nudged Jacek’s outstretched leg and he looked up. Cam glanced toward the direction of the

snapped twig, telling him to go and investigate with a slow blink. Jacek gave a nearly imperceptible nod.

He yawned, stretched his arms over his head, and rose from his position on the ground. “I’m just going

to answer the call of nature before I hit the sack.”

To keep up appearances in case anyone was watching them, Cam said, “Just don’t wander too far. If

you get lost, I’m not going to go out and look for you.”

Jacek placed a hand over his heart. “I’m feeling the love.”

Cam rolled her eyes and Jacek grinned. As he started walking, he threw over his shoulder, “Don’t

worry, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Just hurry up already.”

Once he faded into the jungle, Cam tidied up the sheets of paper in her lap. She tucked the most

valuable sheets into the pocket of her cargo pants before taking out a lighter and setting the ones she’d

already memorized on fire.

After she stomped out the ashes with her boot, she sat on top of one of their packs. In case anyone was

watching, she didn’t want to give them any reason to suspect she’d heard something. She extracted her

claws on one hand—another boon she’d inherited with her ability—and waited.

In the legends her mother had told her as a child, Cam’s set of latent abilities had been called either a

Black Annis or a Blue Demon. She preferred the latter name. But no matter what she called herself, if the

people from her past knew about her special set of skills and succeeded in hunting her down, they would

use her for their own personal gain. She’d barely escaped the anti-AMT fringe group once, and she didn’t

want to have to do it again.

There was another snap, but louder this time—as if a small branch had been broken—followed by a

male grunt. She waited, and when she didn’t hear the all clear sound from Jacek, Cam kept her claws

extended and dashed in the direction of the sound. She stopped at the edge of a tiny fire-scarred clearing, no bigger than twenty feet across, and hid behind a tree.

She peeked around the trunk of the tree and saw the moonlight glinting off something on the far side of

the clearing. But despite being able to see just as well in the dark as in broad daylight, she couldn’t make out what it was.

A few drops of water splashed onto her face, but when she glanced up, all she saw was the patch of

cloudless sky above the clearing. It was too early for any dew, and it hadn’t rained since their arrival,

meaning the water had come out of thin air.

When a chill brushed across the back of her neck, Cam knew she was dealing with an elemental water

first-born.

Her senses now on high alert, she strained her ears and listened for anything that would give away the

Feiru
’s position. A small shift in the foliage behind her was enough. Cam turned and rushed the area, her skin glowing a faint blue as she drew on her inhuman speed reserves. Water danced in front of a male

figure concealed by shadow, but between her hypersensitive vision and her speed, she dodged the large

stream of water heading toward her. Feinting left and then moving right, she reached the unknown man and

tackled him to the ground.

Before he had a chance to fight back, Cam used her speed to flip the man over to his stomach. Then she

tugged his arms behind his shoulders at the same time as she pressed her knee into his lower back, careful to keep his hands from pointing west—the direction of elemental water. He didn’t so much as wince at the

pain, which meant that this man was no ordinary tourist or poacher, but a trained soldier of some sort.

Cam dug her knee in a little deeper. “Who are you?”

“Nice to see you again too, Camilla.”

Cam froze a split second, and then tightened her hold on the man’s arms. Only one man pronounced

her name Ca-me-ya in the bastardized Spanish fashion. “Explain yourself, Marco.”

“It’d be a lot easier to talk if you weren’t about to wrench off my arms.”

She leaned all of her weight onto the knee digging into his back, and she was finally rewarded with a

grunt. “Start talking or my knee may slip and pin your balls to the ground.”

He gave an exaggerated sigh. “And to think, no one’s ever talked of your charming personality.” She

moved her knee down an inch and Marco squirmed. “All right, all right, just don’t damage my jewels. I’m

here because you’re in danger.”

She moved her knee a little farther, onto his firm left buttock. His tight muscles reminded her to not let his charm dissuade her; the man could be dangerous, even without his elemental water. “You’re aware of

my tolerance for your theatrics. Do you really want to test how far you can go before I carry out my

threat?”

Marco turned his head, his eye just catching hers. “Maybe I should so you’ll take my warning seriously.”

Cam tried not to frown. “So you’ve given up trying to sweet talk me with ‘my beauty’ this, ‘my beauty’

that?”

Marco’s tone was like steel. “You think you know me, Camilla, but you don’t. Not at all.”

She wasn’t sure how to respond. The man she’d been forced to put up with back in the States had been

replaced by a version she didn’t recognize. His black hair was a little longer, and his skin a little darker from the sun, but the physical changes weren’t the cause of her unease. He’d not only managed to sneak up on

her and her team, but he’d somehow tracked their location despite being in the middle of the jungle.

Until she figured out the extent of his abilities, she was going to keep a close eye on Marco Alvarez.

After meeting him the first time, back in the States, she’d checked out his DEFEND file, but nothing

remarkable had stood out. She shouldn’t be surprised; the public DEFEND files rarely contained all of a

person’s secrets.

Cam’s file, for example, didn’t mention her past involvement with an anti-AMT fringe group.

Before she could ask her next question, Marco gave a one-sided grin, the serious mien gone. “If I’m

going to be in this position for a while, could you move your knee to my other cheek, and work out the knot there?”

She pulled on his arms. “Stop with the games and tell me what happened to my team.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Let me go first.”

His temperament shifts were going to give her whiplash.

Most people underestimated her because she was a female soldier, and dismissed her position in

DEFEND’s hierarchy as nothing more than a token rank. It was time for Marco to realize she was more than

just bark.

She wrenched his shoulders back as far as she could before they would dislocate and said, “Try to pull

a fast one on me, and I won’t be so gentle next time. Are we clear?”

“Ma’am, yes, ma’am.”

Wishing she had someone as straightforward as Jaxton Ward here in Marco’s place, she released his

arms and stood back. But she wasn’t a fool, so she kept her claws extended as a precaution. “What

happened to my team patrolling the area?”

Marco rotated his shoulders and nodded behind him. “Jacek’s over there, tucked up in a tree. And

Zalika, well, let’s just say that she isn’t as resistant to my smiles and compliments as you are, beauty, and I convinced her to let me try to sneak up on you. She swore it was impossible, and that I couldn’t do it. Too bad I didn’t make a bet with her, or I’d have some extra fun time money right now.”

Cam narrowed her eyes, but managed to keep from making a snarky comment since Marco still had

information she might need. “And the danger?”

He gave a half-shrug. “A man was tailing you in Merida.”

Dread gathered in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t want it to be
him
. “What did he look like?”

“A man with some sort of local indigenous descent, but not much taller than me. Sound familiar?”

She shook her head, her heart calming a little
.
Marco’s description could fit any number of people from her past, but the only person she wanted to avoid at all costs was taller, with different features. “What