Something About Witches (43 page)

She started to walk down the lawn, passing the center drive fountain, a sculpture of a naked man and woman embracing in erotic bliss beneath the glittering fall of the water. As she moved away from the porch, Cathair took flight. In the corner of her vision, she saw him pass across the yellow crescent moon; then he did a loop and came to a landing on her shoulder. She braced herself for his four-pound weight out of habit, and he folded his wings with a
minimal mussing of her hair, underscoring the seriousness of the situation.

“Be ready to move,” she said, low. “I need to have room to act, and I wouldn’t want to ruffle your feathers.”

In response, he hunkered down like a soldier settling into a foxhole. It also gave him the right position to launch himself for a fast evacuation if needed. She was tempted to smile at him, but then her empathic senses were hit full blast.

Panic, desperation. Air…. He was gasping for air as he ran through the swamp…. on the southwest side of her property. Trying to escape. She extended her senses, pushing past him. He wasn’t her main concern. What was following him was the true threat. She didn’t identify it right away, but she caught a magical whiff of something strong, deadly…. male. Something that had every intention of catching up to the fugitive and using lethal means to get what he wanted from him.

Might be good to get a head start on this one. She shrugged her shoulders, cracked her neck. Let her hair down, so it blew down her back in the rising wind and against Cathair. He rasped his irritation in his harsh cadence. “Well, you chose the perch,” she said mildly. Closing her eyes, she reached down further in the earth, drew more energy from it. Then she pulled from the light of the moon, the wind scudding the clouds across the sky, and the water of the fountain behind her, such that she heard the water ripple as if hands had swept across it, a momentary interruption of its flow. Her palms heated and energy tingled through her nerve endings, all along her spine.

Automatically, she double-checked the wards on the house, sent them some reinforcement. Inside, those she protected stirred, starting to feel the danger. She sent her succubi and incubi a compulsion to stay where they were. It was Sunday night, the only day of the week they slept at night. She made them do that, because they were better, less frenetic when they observed the Biblical day of rest, literally. The
Bible was a pretty good practical handbook, all said and done. Sunday was a sacred day for a lot of reasons. That would help her now, since those inside would only be in the way. Her demon kin might be lethal, but they were less than useless in a fight.

That blast of emotions, of physical fear, was getting stronger, as if she’d been standing in an ocean tide and it had risen, up to her waist instead of just her ankles now. The fugitive was running, scrambling, fighting to get to her with every ounce of self-preservation he had. He was so petrified, his testicles were shrunk up into his body. He knew if what was behind him caught up, death would be the least of his worries.

Unfortunately, as he was drawing closer, what pursued him was closing the gap, now coming into clearer focus inside her radar. Moving calm, steady, cold.

Oh, shit. A Dark Guardian.

That was bad news indeed. Her lips drawing back in a snarl, she dropped to a squat, putting her hands on the earth to give her full contact.

She loved her Sundays, the quiet of them, the very few roles she had to play. She’d anticipated having a nice night with her latest
Vogue
magazine and a carafe of hot tea, sitting on the rooftop porch, listening to her music and feeding Cathair bits of biscotti. Maybe watch a DVD later. She’d only seen
Titanic
about four hundred times.

Now, a damn Dark Guardian was coming straight to her doorstep. Leonardo and Kate’s beautiful scene at the prow of a doomed ship would have to wait.

That just pissed her off.

She sifted the power she’d drawn into the blend she needed, then spun it up fast and sharp, like revving the engine of a street racer right before the light change. It was obviously going to be a shitty night, and she might as well come out fighting.

The fugitive was one of her brethren. An incubus. The
Guardian wasn’t going to get him, even if she had to use her dead body to stop him.

There. The frightened male broke out of the forest, racing toward her. He was swift, as their kind could be, flashing over the ground so fast, morphing between corporeal and mist so quickly the human eye wouldn’t detect the movement of his legs, but she already knew he wasn’t going to make it.

“Duck,” she shouted, raising her hands. “
Do it, now!
”

Fortunately, he wasn’t too panicked to listen. He dropped instantly. Her volley shot straight over his head like a lightning blast. Twenty yards behind him, just inside the forest line, that power hit a force field. She had braced herself, but it still felt like she’d slammed both her hands against a brick wall, shock and pain reverberating up through every joint and bone from fingertips to collarbone. Cathair let out a shriek and took off.

She watched the backwash of her power spread out, glittering briefly along the full scope of the Guardian’s protective shield, about fifty feet wide and that high. Holy Goddess. Never mind. She might not have hurt him, but she’d slowed him down. And her clever incubus hadn’t needed further instruction. Almost as soon as she’d loosed her power, he’d been moving across the ground toward her like a veteran Marine, his pelvis glued to the earth and his strong arms and legs pumping like a crab’s.

The whites of his eyes were prominent as a cue ball, lips drawn back in a rictus of fear, his body soaked in sweat.

She shot another volley over his head, buying him more time, but this time the Guardian answered. The incubus cringed to a halt as red flame arced through the sky and speared the ground at her feet, sending out a billow of searing heat. Seeing it coming, she’d slammed down a protection on herself and the incubus, and only that kept her from being flung back up on the porch. Even then, it rocketed through her legs and made her sway, but she held fast.

“Get over here,” she snarled at the incubus as she doused it. He lifted his head from beneath his hands, shot forward in that same low-level crawl. They could move swiftly on all fours when needed. Especially when highly motivated.

“Damn it.” Some of the flame had managed to squeeze through a crack in the protection and the fluttering hem of her dress had caught fire. She doused it, scowling at the scorched edge. She’d have to shorten the dress, and she liked that hem, nearly two hundred inches around, so it flowed just right when she moved. Asshole Guardian.

The incubus staggered over her renewed protection zone and collapsed behind her. He was wheezing like a hunting dog who’d gotten too carried away with a scent and overtaxed his lungs. Or gotten lost from his clod-headed owner and nearly starved in the swamp. She’d nursed a few of those stressed beasts when they’d stumbled into her driveway. Found them nice homes and didn’t lose a bit of sleep over the whereabouts of the owner. There was plenty of need and reason to kill in the world if you had the itch for blood and the balls to do it. Blasphemy to be doing it for sport.

Keeping the canine theme in mind, she glanced at the incubus. “Stay,” she ordered. “I can’t protect you if you move away from me. Nod if you understand.”

She asked for the confirmation, because his almond-shaped eyes were half-wild. He wasn’t one of the more civilized and tame succubi or incubi, like those who lived in her establishment. Nor even one of those who’d learned to live unnoticed on the fringes of society. Though he had the shape of a man, the glow in his eyes and the sexual energy power signature coming off him said he’d always lived outside human society. It meant he was a scavenger, an opportunistic feeder who’d never known or learned better. She was all too familiar with the story. What hunted him probably held the usual philosophy toward incubi and succubi. Hunt them down, exterminate them. Better off dead.

The old, bitter rage turned over inside her, but she pushed
it back. She’d need her wits about her, because it was about to become that kind of fight. The Guardian had only fired the one volley, and that told her he’d been checking to see if she’d turn tail and scamper back into the house. Yeah, that’d be a cold day in Hell.

She waited, because she certainly wasn’t going to him. Small fires scattered across the lawn, the result of their fallout, were starting to ebb, though she concentrated some small bursts of magic in those areas to finish the job. If he’d damaged her landscaping, particularly the clematis vine on the nearby trellises, she was going to have his ass for dinner.

No sign of him yet. Maybe he’d call it off at this point and head to a Starbucks for an overpriced coffee, chalking it up to a bad business. Sure. And she’d get that
Vogue
magazine fantasy tonight as well.

The incubus stirred behind her, started to speak. “No,” she ordered. “Be quiet until Mommy and Daddy finish arguing over who gets custody of you.”

Her dry humor went right over his pretty head. Definitely a scrounger. She had pity for him, though this was going to get complicated, because a scrounger could be vicious and savage. But she’d take the straightforward challenge of that over the subtle quagmire of cultured and deadly, any day. And that was coming toward her now.

As he emerged, she caught a glimpse of his wings, which she admitted was kind of a thrill. Not many got a chance to see their wings. For one thing, much of their wetwork was done in the dead of night, and the wings were black. Not glossy black like Cathair’s, but the deep ash of cemetery statuary at midnight on a moonless night, where the shadows seemed to collect in the hollows, offering a mere glimpse of the eerie silhouette.

The wings also only came out on special occasions, like during a pursuit where the Guardian had to exert himself a bit to stay in the race. That meant the incubus cowering behind her had some game. Didn’t mean he was clever, of
course. Crossing a Dark Guardian, incurring his wrath, was a low check on the IQ scale.

The wings began to dematerialize as the Guardian strode toward her. She noted the texture looked more like a bat than a bird. Sinister-looking. In fact, the ragged edges made her think of the black sails on a pirate ship, loaded with cold-eyed criminals armed with wicked cutlasses and daggers to slit their victim’s throats.

When the wings tucked in and vanished, she found herself looking at something altogether different. She told herself she wasn’t impressed. She was the madame of a bordello, after all. As a businesswoman, she knew a man’s appearance gave away clues to his bankroll, whereas his outer beauty had little to do with whatever lay inside his soul. Most of her clients thought they checked their souls at her threshold, so the latter concerned her far less than the former.

His clothes were custom-tailored. Black slacks, white shirt, black suit coat. What every discerning, fashion-conscious man wore to a hard chase through a Southern swamp, of course. Not a speck of mud or a drop of sweat on him. Not even a spiderweb caught in his beautiful dark hair, which was cut short but had that artful array of strands across a broad forehead, teasing a woman’s fingers to touch it.

As he shifted in and out of the moonlight, his dark brown eyes became black, then brown again. His cruel face was precisely chiseled, as beautiful as Creation could make it, because things that were cruel were always beautiful. That was the way it worked; otherwise the being couldn’t get close enough to
be
cruel.

He could break anything he wanted, destroy anything he desired. And destruction was not new to him. Actually, it was no more than breathing. She knew it, because she knew him, indirectly. By reputation versus face-to-face meeting.

Mikhael, Dark Guardian of the Underworld, and recently the hugely inadvisable hook-up of her good friend Ruby. Fortunately, Ruby was keeping better company these days,
with the wizard Derek Stormwind, the polar white to this guy’s dark. She wouldn’t be admitting that first part, though, because there was no sense in letting Derek know she liked him. Even if she had gone to their wedding and stood as Ruby’s maid of honor. For one thing it would be distasteful and intolerable to have to deal with a reciprocation of affection from Derek.

A Dark Guardian was essentially a cop, just like Derek, and Raina had never had a good relationship with authority. Neither Heaven nor the Underworld particularly favored her decision to open a bordello with creatures known to suck life out of mortals through sexual touch. Hers didn’t do that, thanks to her special abilities, but it didn’t mean anyone approved. If she ever relaxed her enchantments and her incubi and succubi unleashed the deadly side of their nature, Derek would be the first on her doorstep to take her down. It was his job, nothing personal. She understood it, the way he understood she had to dislike him on principle.

She didn’t really give a rat’s ass what any of them thought, but she had learned to straddle the fine line between snubbing and being discreet enough about her disdain to be left alone. Unfortunately, standing between a Dark Guardian and his prey was not the way to fit into that latter category.

Ruby had said Mikhael was…. distracting, in that way the bad boy always was. Actually she’d said,
“He’s the bad boy of all bad boys. Rhett Butler lumped in with Sawyer from
Lost,
Alex from
Grey’s Anatomy,
Mickey Rourke from
9½ Weeks
and Nicolas Cage from
Valley Girl
”—
the best part of that eighties movie, they both agreed.
“Oh, and Antonio Banderas doing the tango in
Take the Lead.”

As she watched him approach, Raina agreed, enough that she wondered if Mikhael also had some incubus blood. The man’s body— sinuous muscle, broad shoulders and tapered hips, the way he moved, the intensity of his eyes, flex of his hands— were all designed to make a woman think of sex. At the end of his stroll across her lawn, he might try to dismember
the incubus behind her, or do something else equally nefarious to her, yet all she could think about were tangled sheets, his slick muscles under her palms, his body moving upon her.