Master of Darkness (10 page)

She painted her toenails. He thought about nibbling them, then working his way up to even more interesting territory. His cock stirred beneath her, hardening at the tempting images spilling through his brain.

Miranda, no dummy, purred at him. Apparently she was in the mood to be distracted from her troubles.

And I’m just the man for the job
. Justice swooped down for a taste of that soft mouth, salty with her tears. She sighed and opened for him as he cupped one breast, toying with the little nipple until it grew nicely plump between his fingers. His tongue swept in to explore her luscious mouth.

Beep beep beep beep . . .

The raucous beeping of the bedside alarm made both of them jump.

“Oh, hell.” Miranda drew reluctantly out of his arms and rose from his lap. “It’s time to dress for our meeting with the Mother of Fairies.”

Justice curled a lip as his arousal drained into cold apprehension. “And then there’s whatever test I’ve got to pass to get my hands on Merlin’s Blade.”

And I’d better succeed, or we’re all screwed.

* * *

Justice stopped shaving
to meet Miranda’s eyes in the mirror. He was frowning, though he should have been in a better mood, having teased her mercilessly in the shower. She could have cast a cleaning spell, but there are some tasks too pleasurable for shortcuts. And the chance to rub soap all over Justice’s powerful body was one of them.

Even if a godlike fairy
was
waiting for them.

“How are we going to find this forge of hers?” he asked, his face half-covered in shaving cream. “She never gave us the address.”

“I know where it is.” She spoke automatically, though she’d been worrying about that same problem in the shower.

“You do?” Justice’s dark brows lifted as he leaned forward and began shaving again, running the razor over one high cheekbone and down the line of his square jaw. “How? Since when?”

Miranda frowned thoughtfully. “I have no idea. But I do.” And wasn’t that creepy? Had the Sidhe answer to June Cleaver somehow planted the knowledge in her head just now? And if so, did that mean Fairy Mom could poke around in her skull any time she wanted? And if
that
was the case, could anyone else poke his way in?

Like, say, Daddy?

* * *

Miranda and Justice
spent the next twenty minutes arguing about what you wore to meet a goddess, or whatever the hell Maeve was. Miranda was in favor of dressing to the teeth, but Justice was afraid he’d end up fighting something, which he didn’t care to do in the Armani suit she planned to conjure. He lobbied for blue jeans and a leather jacket, but Chosen werewolf that she was, Miranda thought that would look disrespectful.

Somehow he ended up wearing leather. Not tight, shiny leather—neither of them wanted him looking like a gigolo—but matte black pants and a leather bomber jacket over a black silk shirt, all loose enough to swing a sword in. The silk, she told him, would hold up to anything he needed to do.

Miranda conjured half a dozen outfits before settling on black slacks and an emerald-green sweater accessorized by a strand of antique pearls. With her fox-fire hair curling around her shoulders and her classical features flawlessly made up in shades of bronze, she looked aristocratically beautiful.

“You ready?” she asked at last.

“Whether I am or not, it’s midnight.” Justice coiled his hands into fists as his icy stomach flipped. “Open that damned gate and let’s go.”
God, I hope I don’t fuck this up
.

Miranda grabbed his head between both hands, tilted his face down, and covered his mouth with soft, passionate lips that brushed and stroked, then parted to allow the teasing thrust of her tongue. Her body pressed against the length of his, soft breasts right down to long, firm thighs. By the time she pulled away, she’d turned his anxiety into sizzling lust. “You can do this, Justice,” she told him softly. “You’re the strongest man I’ve ever known.”

And she meant it. Truth rode in her scent, in the steady gaze of those lovely amber eyes fringed in dark lashes. He started to reach for her . . .

She stepped back. “Now we’re late—and I don’t care.” Flashing him a wicked little smile, Miranda turned away and gave her fingers a casual flick. A point of magic flared blue, then expanded into a shimmering dimensional portal.

Justice stepped through first, taking the bodyguard’s lead and wishing he had a sword. Unfortunately, even he could see walking into Maeve’s forge armed would not send the right message.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t what he found. Scanning their surroundings, Justice felt his jaw drop in awe. He had to consciously close his mouth as Miranda joined him.

“Damn,” she murmured, voicing his thoughts.

They were standing in a long corridor. On one side, antique walnut-paneled walls stretched into the distance, lined with paintings and objets d’art on pedestals. The floor was constructed of contrasting shades of oak and walnut, cut into intricate geometric shapes that fit together like a gleaming puzzle.

But what riveted his attention was the enormous window that ran the length of the corridor. Beyond the glass, the moonlit ocean crashed against the rocky shore, as in the distance, a long, slim shape leaped high into the air, only to plunge deep again in a burst of lacy white froth. For a moment, Justice thought it was a dolphin, until long hair and lush curves told him differently.

“Was that a mermaid?” He stared at Miranda in disbelief.

“Sure looked like one.”

“I didn’t think there was any such thing.”

“There’s all kinds of weird shit in the Mageverse,” she told him. “Where do you think all those myths and legends come from? Periodically, something gets through to our dimension.”

A rapid thumping drew their heads around.

A cougar raced down the corridor toward them, going full out, its paws thudding on the expensive hardwood. In the ten seconds it took him to recover from his astonishment and consider shifting to Dire Wolf, the big cat raced right by them, without even stopping or giving them a look.

Gaping after it, Justice realized it was wearing something on its back.

Saddlebags?

The cougar sprinted through open double doors, turned a corner, and vanished, leaving behind the blended smells of musk and magic.

“I tawt I taw a puddy tat,” Miranda said, in a sotto voce Tweety Bird imitation.

Justice took another sniff of that uncanny scent. “And I think Sylvester’s been taking magic lessons.”

The click of small claws emerged from the same doors the cougar had disappeared through. After what they’d just seen, Justice was a bit disappointed when nothing more exotic than a black Chihuahua rounded the corner. Watching the dog trot toward them on tiny white paws, Justice curled his lip. “I hate neurotic little dogs. They remind me of bug-eyed rats.”

“And I hate rude, tardy werewolves,” the dog said in a crisp voice as English as Prince Charles’s. “But one must be tolerant of the lower classes, whose mothers apparently never taught them proper manners.”

Justice damn near choked on his tongue, though considering the lizard leprechaun, he should have seen it coming.

“Three minutes,” Miranda protested. “We’re three minutes late. I wasn’t sure what to wear, and . . .”

The tiny dog only stared at her coldly.

Biting off the rest of the excuse, she added weakly, “But we’re sorry if you were inconvenienced.”

The dog sniffed. “If you’ll follow me, I’ll take you to the mistress.” Turning, he clicked away, his tail pointedly not wagging.

“How does something that short look down its nose at someone six feet taller?” Justice whispered.

“Shush!” Miranda gave the dog’s back a wary look, but the little beast didn’t deign to retort. They hurried after it.

The Chihuahua led them through a series of interconnecting rooms. If Justice hadn’t been tied in a mental knot from sheer tension, he probably would have gotten more out of the tour. As it was, he had a vague impression of room after room filled with beautiful works of art cast in bronze, gold, and silver, enhanced with precious gems—everything from exquisitely tiny figurines and pieces of jewelry, all the way up to massive statues taller than Justice in his Dire Wolf form.

Every corner held antique furniture in satiny gilded wood, in styles he’d never even seen before. They walked across priceless hand-woven rugs—looped, soft wool in vivid shades telling stories of dragons slain, handsome young men wooing fairy queens, and beautiful maidens seduced by gods.

And there were animals everywhere he looked. Bright, curious eyes peered at him from beneath chairs or the spreading leaves of potted plants. Cats, dogs, birds, monkeys, ferrets, a couple of snakes, and a lynx.

And it seemed every last one of them could talk, calling greetings to the dog—they called him Guinness—or holding low-voiced conversations that included the words “Hunter Prince.”

One bold chimp jumped down off the towering bronze of a naked warrior and loped to intercept the dog.

“So this bloke is the candidate for Hunter Prince?” the chimp asked, eyeing Justice before falling into step beside their four-legged guide. Judging by the voice, she was female.

“Yes.” The word sounded even more clipped than the Chihuahua’s snark about rude werewolves.

“Ain’t you gonna int’a’doose me, Guinness?”

“No.”

“Stuck-up git.” The chimp glowered. “Drag the poker out of yer arse.”

Justice decided the ape’s accent was Cockney. Where the hell did Maeve find all these talking animals? “William Justice,” he said, nodding to the chimp in greeting.

Mostly to piss off the dog.

Miranda’s eyes flicked at him before she politely added, “I’m Miranda Drake.”

The ape’s pleased grin was all teeth and gleaming pink gums. “I’m Eliza. Maeve named me for . . .”

“Eliza Doolittle in
My Fair Lady
,” Miranda guessed.

“Cor! Ain’t you the smart one, then?”

Justice eyed the dog. “Guinness. After the beer?”

The Chihuahua paused long enough to direct a cold glare over one diminutive shoulder. “After the
actor
. Sir Alec Guinness.”

Justice grinned in pure delight. “Obi-Wan?”

Miranda shook her head in pity. “You really shouldn’t have told him that.”

The dog’s voice grew downright withering. “Yes, I’m sure he’ll come up with something suitably
clever
.”

“Considering the ears, I’d have gone with Yoda.”

Guinness sniffed and turned away. “As I said. Clever.”

Justice was amazed anything with legs that short could stalk.

TEN

Miranda stared in
awe at the precious jewelry that filled the vast room—rings, crowns, necklaces, bracelets, in silver, gold, and some strange, iridescent metal she didn’t even know the name of. Each piece glittered with every imaginable kind of gemstone as they adorned sculpted busts or torsos in gleaming black marble. Power radiated from them all, so the total effect was a storm on her magical senses.

“Miranda!” Justice hissed, snapping her out of her dazed admiration.

A massive oak door was swinging wide for Guinness, who trotted through it. She and Justice hurried after the little dog.

It was like walking into a furnace, but one that generated magic instead of heat. Power beat against her face, making her skin crawl and tingle.

The energy emanated from a waist-high stone fireplace in the center of the room that leaped with green flame—a type of pure magical plasma she’d never even seen before.

A spring bubbled up beside the fireplace in the center of a great stone bowl, the magical water spilling out to stream along a channel in the floor to an opening in the opposite wall. The stream didn’t babble; it chorused, countless voices rising and falling in an aria Miranda couldn’t quite understand. She tried casting a translation spell, but all she got for her trouble was an incomprehensible chant that sounded vaguely like a spell. One even more powerful than the magic blasting from the forge.

The room itself was built of gray stone blocks, each a yard square and mortared together with some odd black material that definitely wasn’t cement. A quick spell revealed there was a great deal of lead in the mortar, while the stones themselves were enchanted. The whole arrangement was obviously designed to keep an enemy from sensing how much power Maeve was using—and tracking her down.

But there was more than simple paranoia at work. The vaulting ceiling twenty feet overhead was reinforced with massive wooden pillars as thick as entire trees. That plus those massive stones added up to a facility designed to withstand magical explosions.

Just what kind of forces does the Mother of Fairies play with—and how big a crater would you get if one of her spells went sideways?

At first Miranda thought Maeve herself wasn’t even present. The woman standing beside the fire talking to the cougar looked nothing like the short, motherly person they’d met the night before. She was easily an inch or two taller than Justice, perhaps six-foot-six as opposed to the barely five feet Maeve could claim. She wore an emerald-green leather vest that hugged full breasts and bared the powerful biceps of her arms. Leather pants in the same shade hugged her long legs down to knee-high boots. Intricate symbols, possibly Celtic, were tooled into the thick hide. Miranda had taught herself to read the symbols the ancient Celts had used, but she couldn’t read these.

The stranger wore her long green hair in a cascade of thin braids tied with feathers, gemstones, and charms that chimed as she moved. Her ears were elegantly pointed, and there was a regal beauty to her profile. Maeve’s strong features weren’t even pretty, though there’d been something about her that fascinated.

The woman glanced around at them, and her eyes hit Miranda’s with a familiar magical punch that rocked her back on her heels. The Sidhe nodded, held up one finger as if to signal she’d be with them in a moment, and went back to talking to the cougar.

“Is that . . .” Justice murmured.

“The Mother of Fairies.” Who damned well looked the part today.

“That’s not some kind of glamor or illusion. Spells like that don’t work on me,” he whispered, his lips barely moving, his voice pitched for her ears only. “Neither was the way she looked yesterday. She’s got to be a Shifter.”

Maeve hooked the saddlebags off the cougar’s back and reached in, scooping out a handful of gems that chimed like bells and blazed with magic. She nodded in satisfaction. “Please tell the Troll King that I accept his first payment. The rest will be due when I deliver the sword.”

The cougar sank to the stone floor and rolled on his back, baring his belly and throat to Maeve. “It’s an honor to serve the Lady of the Forge.” The words emerged with a purring growl.

“Thank you, Erielhonan,” Maeve said. “May thy game be ever plentiful and thy prey slow and fat.”

“And may the magic ever flow to thy will.” The cougar rolled to his feet and trotted out, nodding to the dog as he passed. “Guinness.”

The Chihuahua dipped his chin. “Erie.”

The massive oak door swung wide without anyone touching it, and the cougar slipped out.

Maeve walked over and handed the pouch of gems to Eliza, who flipped them across her shoulder and loped out the open door with them.

The Sidhe witch followed her out with long, regal strides. “Come, children,” Maeve said. “It’s time to seek your fate.”

And damn, could she have picked a more chilling way to put it?

* * *

The great blue
dragon flapped her wings in long, lazy strokes, watching with an indulgent air as her baby circled her in aerodynamic loops, darting through the air like a swallow. Assuming you could compare ten feet of scales and teeth to a swallow.

Vance glided along behind them, his wings spread wide to catch the wind. He’d Shifted into a California condor, though he was a bit larger than the actual bird usually was; seven feet from beak to tail, with a twelve-foot wingspan. Even at that size, though, he weighed less than fifty pounds.

Which made it problematic to bring down a thirty-five-foot, twenty-thousand-pound, fire-breathing dragon. But since the scaly bitch was unlikely to let him make off with her baby otherwise, that was precisely what he had to do. The blood magic sacrifice of a dragon child would be even more potent than killing a human infant. Just the thing to stoke Warlock’s power to even greater heights.

And Vance didn’t dare disappoint the General again.

Luckily, his invisibility shield was strong enough to keep even a Sidhe goddess ignorant of his presence. It was apparently just as effective on dragons.

Otherwise he’d be dead now.

The thunder of running hooves snatched him from his preoccupied obsession with the best way to kill the dragon. He glanced up to see her winging away, her magic riding around her like a bow wave, supporting her great weight far more than did her massive wingspan.

Vance increased his own speed with a magical push, soaring over the ridge of hills below to see a huge herd of buffalo racing across the ground, backs rolling like a woolly brown sea. The creatures’ collective magic thudded against his senses, not so much an energy they could use as a projection of their life force.

In the Mageverse,
everything
was magic.

The buffalo raced along in an out-and-out stampede now, panicked by the dragons winging overhead. The female dragon picked out a lone cow too slow to keep up with the herd, folded her great wings, and began a lethal plunge, all four legs extended to grab her prey.

Vance saw his chance. He shot forward like a rocket-propelled grenade, the wind tearing at his feathers with more force than they were designed to resist. Angling his talons before him, he conjured an energy blade and plummeted toward the diving female dragon. Condors had evolved for scavenging, not killing prey in the air.

He rolled as he dove, slicing the blade over the dragon’s throat as he cut across her flight path, ripping through scaled flesh and muscle and great, pumping arteries. Blood flew, long, purple ribbons of it, sailing in oddly beautiful arcs.

The dragon hit like a crashing jetliner, twenty thousand pounds of meat and bones that crushed several buffalo and made the ground shake with a magical shock wave that damned near tumbled Vance right out of the sky. He barely managed to right himself and climb to safety with long, desperate flaps of his wings.

Above him, the dragonet screamed, so high it sounded oddly like a woman shrieking in grief. Vance looked up to see the child fold its wings and dive, as if trying to help its parent.

But the huge beast lay broken and still. If Vance’s magical blade hadn’t killed it, the impact with the ground certainly had.

The baby touched down beside its mother’s bloody remains and called out to her in a musical babble of dragon- speak.

In its distress, it didn’t even notice Vance land behind it, Shifting into the raptor form he’d taken to fight the Slut and her lover.

Opening his jaws, he breathed a spell over the dragonet, immobilizing it in loop after loop of magic. The baby shrieked, high-pitched cries of surprise and terror. The psychic cries could have echoed all the way to the Dragonlands, had Vance’s spell not squelched their magic.

Ignoring the dragonet, Vance set about eating its mother. There was a great deal of magic still lingering in the creature’s huge corpse, and he needed to recharge the energy he’d expended over the past days.

As he happily gorged, he was distantly aware of the dragon child’s piteous screams gradually dying away into stunned, agonized silence.

* * *

Miranda had never
seen so many sharp objects in her life—and that included a visit to the Avalon armory.

Swords, axes, spears, shields, daggers, maces, bows and arrows, weapons she couldn’t even name . . . Thousands of them, arranged in racks on the walls, displayed on tables, standing upright in bunches like deadly flower arrangements. They radiated magic just as the jewelry had, but this was a cold and deadly sort of enchantment.

The kind that killed.

Yet more than the magic, what drew her fascinated attention was the singer.

Over the room floated a single voice singing unearthly music, so beautiful the hair rose on the back of her neck. There was loneliness in the woman’s voice, a sweet yearning, so beautiful and vivid it sounded as if the singer were standing right in the room. Yet there was no one there. It had to be some kind of spell.

“God, that song is beautiful,” Miranda told Maeve, as the singer hit a particularly high, piercing note. “And heartbreaking. It’s like listening to an angel grieve.”

Maeve gave her a faint, pleased smile but said nothing.

Justice shot Miranda a sharp look. “I don’t hear anything.”

“You’re not supposed to,” Guinness told him coolly.

A chill replaced the delight. It
was
some kind of spell. And it was apparently aimed right at her. She’d read a lot of stories about mortals who’d been enchanted by Sidhe magic—that’s what the word “enchantment” meant, after all.

Those stories never ended well. At least, not for the mortal.

The thing that
ate
the mortal lived happily ever after.

Yeah, I don’t think so.

Miranda dragged her eyes away from the corner of the room where her ears insisted the singer stood.
We’re here for Justice, dammit. It’s my job to help him obtain Merlin’s Blade.

As usual, he stood by her side, apparently in bodyguard mode. But when Miranda looked up at him, he wasn’t wearing what she’d come to think of as his paranoid-cop face. Instead he stared into the distance with a distracted expression. “What’s wrong?” She asked the question as softly as she could manage and hoped Maeve didn’t hear her.

“Do you smell that?” His expression was odd. Longing.

Miranda sampled the air with her werewolf senses. The scent of ozone and power hung so heavy, she was surprised it wasn’t visible, like smoke or storm clouds. “Hell of a lot of magic in here. Hard to tell what it does without a closer look at the weapons.”

“No, not that. This smells . . . tempting. Like food or sex. Or freedom, if freedom had a smell. It keeps changing. I can’t quite nail it down, but it’s coming from somewhere over there.” He nodded off to his left.

“Ignore it,” she whispered, one eye on Maeve, who seemed deep in conversation with Guinness. “Some of the legendary blades are booby-trapped. It’s the ones that try to seduce you that are most dangerous.”

Maeve turned her face to the ceiling and went still, as if looking right through the roof to watch some heavenly object slide into position. “Ahhh, yes. It’s time.” She dropped her gaze to them, power flaring so bright in her eyes that Miranda had an impulse to shrink away. “Each of you may select one weapon.”

Miranda wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that. “We’re here for Merlin’s Blade. The prophecy said . . .”

Maeve waved that aside. “I know what it said.”

“How? You weren’t there.” Justice frowned at her. “Did Branwyn play the video for you?”

She laughed, a hearty guffaw as deep as a man’s. “Who do you think sent poor Daliya the vision to begin with?”

This is beginning to smell like a trap
, Miranda thought, though the high, pure notes of the angel’s song insisted otherwise. She ignored it.

Maeve’s head snapped around, and she stared at Miranda as if she’d spoken the thought aloud. Finally the Sidhe nodded slowly. “It’s well you don’t leap to any lure that presents itself. But this is no trap of mine. Merlin gave me the prophecy from his own mouth these fifteen centuries gone, just as he gave the blade into my care.”

Miranda frowned as the question that had always nagged at her rose to mind. “Did he know what my father would become?”
And if he did, why the hell did he let him have so much power?

“Nay.” Maeve sighed as she seemed to gaze into a past long gone. “The man who now calls himself Warlock was a hero once, a strong and clever man with courage and heart, who passed every test Merlin put to him. But the future is a tangle of choices, and no one can see where they’ll lead.” Her eyes shifted to Miranda’s again, and hardened. “Unfortunately, the choices your father made carried him into madness. Merlin said that if Warlock grew corrupted, I should give the weapon to one worthy of becoming the Hunter Prince. When it became obvious that he’d gone mad, I looked into the fire of my forge.” She nodded at Justice. “The face I saw in the flames was yours, boy. Go find your weapon.”

His eyes, focused somewhere across the room, snapped to her face. “But which one is it?”

“That’s for you to discover,” Guinness told him. His upper lip peeled off his teeth. “If you can.”