Soul Kissed (9 page)

For the love of Shadow, her stepmother was going to drive her insane. Cari was the Dolan now, responsible for all of them, the house, the company, but she didn’t think the rest of her family recognized the distinction. She didn’t know whether to hug them or demand a little respect.

She went back to the table to concentrate on the membrane tissue again. A prototype was nested in a box. She lifted out the vial, formed out of the thinnest, most delicate of lab-grown membrane. It was shaped like a palm-sized teardrop, black with magic. DolanCo was going to call their new product Umbra. The logo was a stylized U representing the unusual vial.

It would be her father’s legacy. Her throat tightened just thinking of him.

Perhaps if she could see the Shadow and the containment more clearly, she could figure out what was wrong.

Maybe . . . ?

Why not.

Cari drew from her Shadow within, just a little, but once again, she received too much. The power submerged her in waters of possibility and promise, making her feel strong, when she knew she should be tired, and it made her feel invincible, when she’d had very recent proof that even the mightiest mage could fall.

Maeve giggled as Cari reached for power like a newborn kissing the sea for a drink of water. Maeve paced along the bank, restless and wanting.

Cari could open her lips wide and fill her belly.

Dolan. Dark House. Revel House.

Royal House.

Welcome me and we will rule together.

 

 

Cari turned abruptly. “Who’s there?”

Her Shadow-logged vision swam with murky fronds of magic, a ready, ecstatic kind of feeling, like the build-up to a climax. But the alarm that zapped her system stung, and she concentrated on that.

Someone was definitely in the room. She’d just
heard
them. She turned again.

Nothing. Just drifting Shadow, warping her senses.

Cari felt like she was swimming in circles. Whoever was with her remained hidden behind her. She wanted a mirror to see what or who was in back of her, playing a game.

The feeling made her skin tingle, her neck tense. She’d felt this before, in the courtyard at DolanCo. This sense that someone was with her, watching her. There had been rumors about the fae crossing into the mortal realm. And since this had happened only when Cari attempted to use Shadow, then yes, her stalker had to be fae.

Her panic swelled: first there was fighting among magekind, then the angry attention of humanity, and now something altogether different . . . within Dolan House?

“Who are you?” she demanded aloud.

The answer came from within Cari, in her own voice. She had to grip the back of a chair to keep herself upright.

“Are you fae?” Cari already knew the answer. Dolan House, like any other mage House, was on the brink of the Twilight wilds. Curious fae were going to come; they were to be treated like dangerous guests and directed elsewhere for their diversions.

I am a god,
the voice answered.
And I am your mother.

No. “My mother is dead.” And a mage, once dead, is always dead. Mages did not possess everlasting souls as humans did. They had one life of magic and then oblivion. So live large.

“Interesting. My father never spoke of you.” It was well-known that fae lied when it suited them. Or rather, that the fae didn’t know truth from lie.

Father had never mentioned any such thing. He rarely brought up the fae at all. He was practical, not passionate, in nature.

The fae laughed, the trilling feeling dancing up Cari’s throat. The sensation of the fae—a wild, giddy leap of energy—was located within. Cari finally understood that the fae was the source of the panic that had seized her since her father had died. The fae was the pushing, no-breath feeling. The fae was inside her.

Passed down each generation, lord to heir. Son to son. But
this
time, this once in so very long, father to daughter.

At the recitation Cari went rigid, a sudden hot sweat chilling on her skin. The room began to spin, her palms going damp.

Think. She needed a specific detail about this fae so she could find information later. “Who are you?”

Laughter.
I am Maeve. I am yours. And you are mine. What do you want most? I’ll give it to you.

Okay,
Cari thought bitterly. “I want my father back.”

Maeve wailed and it was the sound of Cari’s own grief wracking her heart and closing her throat with sobs. Cari guessed that meant, no can do.

“Then if you’re so powerful, why didn’t you save him?”

I saved
you
. I saved
you. Pleading now. And who knew if it were true? If Maeve had saved her from the plague, then who had saved Mason?

“Okay, then I want to know who killed my father.” Who brought this plague down on all the mage Houses?

Anguish again:
I cannot see! I cannot see!

Cari wasn’t surprised. “Then what use are you?” Faery. God? Mother. Please.

First, she’d search her father’s things for a mention of Maeve. She had to go through them anyway and had clearly put it off too long. Then, she’d widen her scope to the faelore. And she would find time to do this when? Her panic rose; Maeve again.

“No.” Cari wasn’t a fool. Dolans weren’t fools.

Cari considered what she’d been taught about dealing with the fae: Don’t make her angry. Placate. “Not now,” Cari clarified through gritted teeth. How could she push the fae out of her mind? Out of her guts? Out of her Shadow soul? She let go of her pull on magic, released, and felt the fae go distant, like a leash pulling quickly through her hand. It begged the question: who was bound to whom? Was Cari the pet or was the fae?

Maeve crooned, a sound that Cari had never made in her life,
We belong to each other.

Mason was on the inside of a mage House, and like never before, he could sense the flows of magic and almost hear the hiss of the fae as they looked in from their world. It was an uncanny, skull-crawling awareness, one that reaffirmed that he, Fletcher, and even Cari were sliding down the knife’s edge of danger toward certain doom—plague, mob, magic—and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Cari’s company was trying to contain Shadow in some sort of membrane (as far as he knew, an impossible feat); Mason needed to know how. He couldn’t deny Webb’s assertion that he was “fortuitously placed.” He was. Ridiculously so.

The new Dolan was about to get a very good lesson on why strays weren’t permitted inside warded Houses. Maybe she
needed
to learn, so that in the future she wouldn’t lose just her company’s most exciting product, and at the worst time possible. The best thing that Cari could hope for was the misfortune of some other mage House to contract the plague so that he and Cari would have to leave Dolan property. In that case, they could finish their investigation and part ways.

He hoped for it too because he still liked her, the sweet girl turned mistress of a small empire. Made him grin, what she’d become. She’d always been capable, if a little soft-spoken. And damn smart. Scary smart, which he’d admired. And scarier still was the way she looked at him, like she was thinking complicated things, maybe guessing the worst. And yet, they’d been friends once, briefly. At least he’d thought so. And there’d been that one day when he’d gotten up the courage to make a move . . . Her tricksy, telling mouth had obsessed him. He’d wanted to kiss her so bad he still felt the disappointment nine years later.

He’d been such an idiot. Cari Dolan, of all people. Her father would’ve killed him, after torture and dismemberment.

And now this Webb business with the membrane. He wanted to watch her rise, not be the instrument of her downfall. Or one of them, at least. There were so many ways she could crash.

He regarded the flat screen in his room, tuned to a cable news program that specialized in hyperbole. The celebrity newscaster spoke in exclamation marks and agitation.
Shadow! On the ground! What’s anyone doing about it!?

Humanity had caught a mage fever to go with magekind’s plague.

The main road that led to Dolan House’s extended drive had a small encampment of humans, barely visible through Cari’s security cameras, but clear on the webcast streaming video that someone had set up to watch the house. Signs that read,
No More Shadow!
were stuck into the ground. The area surrounding the house was protected by wards—which had made headlines as well—so that any who tried to approach were blocked. One brilliant soul had tried to shoot in the direction of the house, but had ended up with a bullet in his elbow.

It was making everyone within the wards a little crazy, too.

He was almost certain that the stepmother was plotting to kill him. Shrewd lady. And the weird sisters had made a game of catching him alone and dropping increasingly lewd suggestions. One of them, the blonde, he thought, had stood outside his bedroom door singing, “Cupcake delivery.” He was pretty sure that the “cupcake” was her. He’d bolted the door, then switched the lock so that no one could get in.

House women.

Cari, at least, was like him and had locked herself in her office. He hadn’t seen her in two days, though he’d tried to catch her more than once. Thoughts of Fletcher were consuming him, making Webb’s request more pressing. He was going to have to create an opportunity for himself. It was all Cari’s fault; she shouldn’t be this trusting. Her father should’ve taught her better.

So be it. He’d put it off long enough.

He didn’t trust the empty hallway. The naked lady statue followed him with her empty eyes. He went down the stairs, softly, as only a parent can. Across the main foyer. He knocked when he got to Cari’s office, identified himself through the wood—it had been embued with magic, a good precaution, though that wouldn’t keep him out—and then he entered when the lock released.

The change in her was startling.

She looked exhausted, gray, the antithesis of the flighty birds that were her sisters, and yet still more deeply beautiful than either. There was something substantive about Cari, but he was still trying to figure out what she was made of that was so compelling—maybe her sense of duty, or maybe her absolute loyalty to her House. And she was powerful, maybe too much so.

Although this morning he couldn’t feel the churn of Shadow that Cari kept bottled up inside. Not good. Mages needed Shadow; where was hers? She looked thinner, too, which was strange after so short a time. The lack of Shadow was costing her body.

Huge house, full of people . . . Who was supposed to be taking care of her? She couldn’t do everything on her own, although the Cari he remembered would try.

Mason noted that Cari covered the book she was reading with her hand. A loop of script was visible though—a journal?—so the contents had to be personal.

A soft shuffle behind him brought his attention quickly around. A stray always knew who was at his back, though he could have guessed: either the stepmother, with a knife rushing toward his spine, or one of the sisters, to torture him with innuendo.

The sisters. Perfect.

Mason turned to the head of Dolan House. “I want it known that I have made no advances and refused all of theirs.”

Cari smiled, humor sparking in her wide eyes, still so lovely, even when tired. “They’re just messing with you.”

“. . . haven’t even begun to mess with him . . .” The one with the red-black hair sighed under her breath.

Mason raised his eyebrows at Cari.
See?
Liv’s family had tried to kill him. He wasn’t risking a repeat without at least committing the crime first. And these girls didn’t tempt him.

“They’re scared and bored and don’t mean anything by it,” Cari explained. “Do I really have to defend your virtue?”

“I don’t have any virtue,” he told her. “Never did.” Virtue was too much like good-breeding; it was hoarded and parceled out to the deserving. He had nothing to hoard, and had never been deserving, least of all now, when he planned to steal from her. “I just don’t want any misunderstanding.”

Cari glanced back and forth between her sisters. “Cut it out.”

Stacia pouted. Zel made a
pft
sound.

They didn’t seem to be taking Cari’s request seriously.

Mason sensed magic gathering fast within Cari, too fast, frightening, like storm clouds rolling into sudden potent and electric density.

“You will leave him alone.” Her voice was filled with command, underscored by an implicit threat disproportionate to the issue. It was disproportionate if the sisters were, in fact, just messing with him. Appropriate, however, if they really wanted to tangle with the stray who’d already ruined one mage woman.

Her sisters sobered, their postures changing instantly. Who knew they could be normal?

“Sorry, Cari,” Stacia said. “I didn’t mean to stress you out.”

Zel had gone tentative too. “Can I help with anything? Get you something to eat?”

So they were at least
trying
to take care of her. They needed to try harder.

The concentration of magic slowly disassembled, as if Cari were swallowing it. She looked down at the books and papers on her desk. “I just need peace and quiet.”

“But if you’d let someone help . . .” Zel argued.

Maybe they
were
trying harder.

Cari’s face was still angled down, but the black of her irises shifted up to look at Zel. Cari was the picture of mage menace: isolated, besieged, not able to trust anyone who didn’t share her blood. And her stepsisters did not.

Mason’s instincts said,
Danger
. This was why she’d been left alone.

“You can’t help me.” Cari’s body had a feminine frame, but somehow she dominated her father’s big chair. But Mason didn’t trust it. He knew Cari, and she’d seemed off from the first moment he’d arrived.

Zel’s face reddened. She nodded, her mouth going into a white line. “I’d do anything for you, ya know.”

Stacia put her hand on Zel’s arm to pull her back. “Just give her some space. She’ll figure whatever it is out. Cari can do anything.”

No answer from Cari. Just that dark glare.

Mason found himself unwillingly liking her sisters. But they were idle, and that was a mistake on Cari’s part. He’d learned that lesson every single time Fletcher got bored.

Stacia and Zel retreated from the office, but Mason was staying. He shut the door, then met Cari’s blackened gaze with his own. Dead-on. “What’s wrong with you?”

He couldn’t help the way the air snapped between them, nor could he quell the impulse that he’d find out more if he were touching her. If there was any Dolan woman he was interested in, she sat before him. And she was utterly untouchable.

“I have work to do.” She didn’t look at her spread of papers and books, and she didn’t have to in order to make her point.

“I can sense concentrations of Shadow.” Mason cast his eyes over her messy desk. “You feel different than you did yesterday. You feel weak.”

She flinched as if stung. No mage liked to be called weak, but her instinctive reaction confirmed that she was beyond her strength. It was strange to speak to her like this—he’d have kept his distance with someone who was merely a business associate, but Cari was more than that. There’d been something between them once, and damn if it still wasn’t there, tugging at his gut.

“Are you ill? What’s going on with your Shadow?”

She smiled, mean. “I could ask you the same question.”

Mason frowned. “Nothing’s wrong with me.” Nothing that distance from here, from her, returning to his home, and playing with his kid couldn’t cure.

“Your Shadow isn’t right either. I can’t find your umbra when I look.” She pulled back to turn a page, scanning down the text. “So you’re hiding something, yourself really, from me. You must be very strong to hide like you do, when it is my House’s purview to see.”

His umbra, or lack thereof, was none of her business, so he didn’t answer her observation, and went back to his own. “You’re in trouble. You should let your sisters help you with your work.” It was honest advice, intended to help.

Wasn’t she supposed to be involved with Erom Vauclain? Where the hell was he? Must have just been gossip, or the relationship was over. What kind of a man would leave her to deal with her nightmare alone? What kind of a man would leave Cari at all? But then, thinking of Erom, she was probably better off.

“My stepsisters’ talents skew toward beauty and attraction. I’m surprised that you haven’t enjoyed their attention.” She gripped the book, pulled it close to her.

“I’m not interested.” Among her skewed papers he spotted the word
membrane
. Cool logo. “They could clean up your desk, for one.”

“Then I wouldn’t be able to find anything.”

But neatness would help him find what
he
needed. “They could take care of basic corresp—”

Cari interrupted with a strained smile. “I can’t trust them with this.” Her long, heavy, black lashes swooped up. Her gaze hit him. Hard. “Can I trust
you
?”

She was on to him. He must have given himself away. He stepped back.

Damn, she was smart. It had always turned him on. The rush of his blood sharpened his mind. She was the real thing. The epitome of mage royalty—too powerful for comfort, Twilight beautiful, ruthless. Cunning.

And that was just skimming the surface. He wished the man who did marry her luck. He’d need it. Cari was just getting started. Give her ten more years and she’d surpass her father.

“No,” Mason answered. “You can’t trust me.” He wished she could, but that’s not what life had in store. Fair warning.

An eyebrow arched upward. Aloof. But her mouth twisted, sardonic—revealing how she really felt. She was mocking him. “Thank you for the truth.”

“I lie when it suits me.” She had to know. He was even now trying to compartmentalize the morass on her desk to identify the information he sought.

Those lashes went up again, fringing the heart of her face. Deadly. “Noted. Again, thank you. I appreciate your candor, so I’d like to hire you.”

He took another step back. Distance to gauge her. She’d been so quick with the offer, she must have been considering it before he’d come down.

“You just suggested I get help,” she pointed out. An advance. “And I happen to have someone with an impressive reputation right here.”

Caspar would be proud. The way she maneuvered, even when exhausted. Keep your enemies close, and all that.

Mason preferred her relaxed and laughing, like the old days. But maybe that would be more dangerous. It was better for them both to be on their guard.

She sized him up with a scrape of her eyes. “I witnessed a brilliant performance just two days ago at DolanCo.”

He didn’t take jobs that conflicted with each other. And Webb had him already. “What’s the nature of the work?” He didn’t know why he asked. He knew his answer.

“I’m looking for information.” The book she was holding went down on her lap, a crooked finger marking her page. “On the fae. Crossing over into this world. How they do it.”

But he was not helping Webb with the fae.

“Has a fae crossed?” It was happening more and more, the most worrisome of this era’s dangers in his opinion.

“Not that I’m aware of, no.”

A dodge. Cari could lie like the best of them. She had a fae problem to go with the rest of her troubles. Plague, business, mob, her father’s death, the impending theft of her company’s membrane project. He wanted to tell her it would be okay.