Wrath: The Niteclif Evolutions, Book 2 (7 page)

Bahlin was shocked into silence. He walked over to the opposite end of the sofa I sat on and sank down, some of his grace returned—or forced—and he leaned back, lacing his hands behind his head. “There’s no real right answer, is there?”

“I don’t know. I’m asking what you believe.”

“I’m not sure. I don’t feel like there’s a right answer for this conversation.”

I sighed. “It’s not about right or wrong, Bay. It’s a matter of personal belief, of what you believe to be true.”

“What do you believe, Maddy?” His voice was rough, and he cleared his throat. “Because if it’s a matter of free will, then you’ll choose either Hellion or me. If it’s a matter of destiny, then what I say or do doesn’t matter, and the prophecy stands.”

I hadn’t consciously thought of it in such a basic way, but there it was. “I don’t know,” I answered, shaking my head before dropping it into my hands and closing my eyes “I think you do have a strong opinion but you’re afraid to acknowledge it because either way you’re stuck between us.”

Bahlin turned his head and looked at me, his eyes heavy with knowledge. “What happened between the two of you that you don’t want to tell me, Maddy?”

Oh crap. Here we go.
Once again, give the dragon a prize.

Chapter Five

“Why do you ask?” What didn’t happen would have been a better question.
I sure as hell wasn’t telling him about the little visit from Odin or my shift in feelings toward Hellion. Not now and maybe not ever.

Bahlin snorted and stood, walking over to the fireplace. “You’re working too hard at avoiding this conversation. You have little tells yourself, lover.” The last was said caustically.

“No need to get nasty, Bay.” Sitting made me feel smaller and more vulnerable so I stood, sticking my fingers in the back pockets of my jeans to keep from fidgeting.

“You actively avoid every question I ask, Maddy. That’s the biggest clue.” He leaned against the mantle, all cultivated nonchalance. “Did you screw him?”

“Get out. Now.” I turned and walked back to the bathroom and slammed the door, locking it behind me. I closed the lid to the toilet and sat, shaking with fury.

The lock snapped open, and I belatedly remembered Bahlin’s skills with telekinesis.
Shit.

The door crashed open, bouncing off the counter so hard he had to throw out a hand to keep from having it hit him in the face as it rebounded. “Did you?” he asked, his voice no more than a breath on the air.

“No, I didn’t.” I put my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands. “Jeeze, Bahlin, what do you take me for?”

He dropped to his knees in front of me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders, but I was stiff and unyielding. “I’m so sorry, Maddy. It makes me nuts to think he might have had his hands on you. You can tell me anything, okay? Anything.” He rubbed his hands up and down my back and sides gently, trying to convey support but only further rubbing in my guilt with every pass.

“Give me some space, Bahlin. Please.”

He sat back on his heels and, thankfully, stopped touching me. “What is it, love?”

I shook my head and stood, brushing past him to walk out of the room. I stopped in front of the picture window, not missing the irony of our switched places.

Bahlin followed me out and stood behind me, not touching me but still invading my personal space so effectively that I felt his aura cross into mine.

“I will say this once,” I murmured, “and then I need to talk to you about business. Are you okay with that?”

He briefly set a hand on my shoulder before turning and walking to the nearest sofa. He propped a hip on the back and said, “Go ahead.”

“I kissed Hellion. It was definitely more than a peck and barely less than foreplay. It was voluntary, Bahlin, so no retaliation. I feel something for him that I can’t explain, but I’m nobody’s bitch, particularly not Fate’s.” Or Odin’s. “So I’ll make my own decisions in this, and the universe can kiss my ass.” I turned to look at him, my arms wrapped around my core. I was cold, and his gaze did nothing to relieve me.

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Yes. But if it’s any consolation, I stopped myself because of you, even though you’d kicked me to the curb. I don’t know where I’m at in all this, Bahlin, but there’s work to do, and we don’t have the time or the luxury of letting this control our lives.”

He nodded tersely and swallowed hard, his throat convulsing around the emotion he forced down. “Fine. But it won’t be long before we have to talk about this in detail, Madeleine.”

“Fine,” I echoed. We could argue definitions of ”
it won’t be long”
some other time.

“Are you aware of the woman who was murdered yesterday in the park near your apartment?” I moved to sit across from him.

“She was only the first.” He held up a hand to stop me from interrupting him. “There was a second woman murdered on the Tube near the hotel’s stop early this morning, and no one saw a thing. The victim profile was nearly identical. She looked suspiciously like you, Maddy. In fact, if we’re going to practice honesty, I have to tell you that hearing about it is what brought me back here. I had to know for sure it wasn’t you.”

I ignored both the invisible stab to my heart and the creeping fingers of fear that stroked my spine with sharp nails. “Method?”

“The same. Her throat was cut deep enough to nearly sever her head. The press picked up this tidbit and is clamoring for more information. They’re speculating the killer is a modern day Jack the Ripper targeting tall, shapely women with short, dark hair, age twenty-five to thirty.”

I closed my eyes and shuddered, feeling a great deal of empathy for the women who had died because they looked right—or wrong. I heard Bahlin move closer then felt him sit down next to me. “Both victims had their throats cut from the back, left to right, with a fair-sized blade.”

“Serrated or non-serrated?” I asked in a flat voice.

“Non.”

“Bahlin, what are the odds, do you think, that the victim profile is a fluke?” Those sharp fingers of fear skittered up and down my spine with increased speed and pressure, and I broke out in goosebumps.

“I’d say slim to none.” He shifted closer and put an arm around me. “Your take?”

“I agree.” I sighed and leaned into him, but the original comfort that had existed between us was gone, replaced by wariness and hurt and a freshly wounded love that might not survive the injury. “I’d have to assume, again, that the killer is someone I might recognize. Why else attack from behind each time?”

He hugged me tight and kissed the top of my head. I sighed again, and he pulled me in even closer, tilting my chin up with his free hand. We stared at each other. He dipped his head to kiss me, and I turned in to the kiss. His lips sought an answer I couldn’t provide, but I’d try to offer what comfort I could.

I went to my knees beside him and cradled his face in my palms. He followed where I led him, and I recognized it for what it was. Insecurity. I withdrew from him, unsure how to reassure us both that the prophecy was simply a suggestion and not a firm future. Remembering the feel of Hellion’s lips on mine and my body’s response to him, I realized I couldn’t offer any guarantees. The world was too full of what ifs right now. What if the killer was seeking victims who looked like me? What if the prophecy was firm and not to be influenced? What if Hellion was my heart’s match? What if I failed as the Niteclif? What if I didn’t survive my legacy? What if I broke my dragon’s heart? What if he broke mine?

A grief-laden sob broke from my throat, and I buried my face in Bahlin’s chest, breathing hard and trying to hold it together. My life was out of control.

He wrapped his arms tight around me and held on. The only indication of his heightened emotion was his whispering nonsense into my hair in Gaelic, not English.

I nodded quickly and moved to sit on my side of the sofa again. “Will you turn on the TV? I want to see if there’s any more information, maybe some new stories, about the murdered girls.”

Bahlin silently moved to grab the remote and fetch a small foot blanket from the bedroom. When he sat back down he was close enough we could have held hands, though we didn’t. Instead, we surfed the local channels looking for morbid news about murder.

The sun had just set in a cloud-muted blaze of oranges and pinks on the metropolitan horizon when the sound of conflict in the hallway reached us. Bahlin and I stood, and he physically set me behind him toward the corner of the room. Irritated, I moved to stand shoulder to shoulder with him. Without looking, I reached across and pulled the dirk from the top of his boot. It helped knowing each other as well as we did.

There was a sharp knock at the door and the guard, Jenks, called out, “Glaaca. You’ve got a Council member here to see the Niteclif.”

I rolled my eyes. I had no illusions about who was at the door. “No one makes those decisions for me, but me, Jenks,” I called back. Do it? Don’t do it? To hell with it.
“Let him in.” I moved in front of Bahlin, and it wasn’t lost on me that I was physically putting myself between the two of them for the first time.

The door opened and Hellion stood there, fierce in his arrogance. Bahlin moved up behind me and put his hand on my hip. Hellion stepped inside and casually waved his hand at the door, slamming it in Jenks’s face.

“What can I do for you?” I looked down and saw the bandage on his hand and the blood crusted around his fingernails. I knew Bahlin scented it because he stopped breathing for the briefest second.

“I actually came to give you my new number, just as you asked.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew a cell phone.

“Stay here,” I muttered to Bahlin. More loudly I said, “Both of you behave.”

I walked quickly into the bedroom and retrieved the pad of paper and pen by the phone. “You could have called,” I said to Hellion as I jogged back into the living area. Nervous? Me? Distrustful of the angry dragon and indifferent magus was more like it.

“Sure, I could’ve. But where’s the joy in that when I have the opportunity to see you again?”

At this point Bahlin was breathing hard through his nose. Without any further warning than that, he charged at Hellion. The two began pounding on each other, grunts of pain coming from the fray when one or the other made contact with ribs or a kidney. The guards rushed into the room with the first crash, but they couldn’t seem to get the two separated. An unidentified guard stumbled back, holding his bleeding nose. The group of men tumbled over the back of the sofa, knocking the lamp to the floor with a crash. Bahlin was on his feet first and landed a particularly vicious kick to Hellion’s side. Hellion absorbed it and, grabbing Bahlin’s foot, wrenched his knee. The sickening crunch convinced me he’d probably destroyed the joint. Bahlin bellowed and went to the ground. Hellion grabbed him by the front of his shirt and threw him against the picture window and it cracked.

I sprinted for Bahlin as hard as I could and watched as the window caved outward and began to crumble under his weight. Hellion charged him and the two crashed through the window in an explosion of glass. I couldn’t slow my momentum, and I hit the open air, backpedaling as I tried to stop. I had a total moment of vertigo as I hung suspended in the air before beginning to fall.

It was twenty-two stories to the ground, and we were all observing Newton’s Law, falling at an equal rate of descent one to another.

Everything happened too fast. Bahlin spun end over end, his destroyed leg flopping uselessly as he tried to gather his bearings and determine up from down. Hellion was falling with his back to the earth, and his eyes widened perceptibly when he saw me follow them out the window.

I could hear him shouting something, and he spread his arms and legs out so he looked like he could be mounted to a St. Andrew’s cross. His fall slowed dramatically, and he reached out for me, snagging me around the waist as I raced past him. He wrapped his arms around me and twisted; I lost sight of Bahlin. Everything went black, my ears popped and with a flash of light I found myself mashed into an Oriental carpet that didn’t belong to the hotel, trapped beneath a great weight.

Hellion pushed himself up and I choked, gasping for air. He flipped me over and crushed me to his chest.

“Holy hell, woman.” His limbs shook, though whether it was from restraint, fear or fury was beyond me.

“What happened to Bahlin?” Tears coursed down my cheeks. “Tell me,” I screamed.

“I don’t know, lass.”

I pushed against him, scrambling out of his arms. “You son of a bitch! You did it on purpose! You threw him…you threw him—” I huddled on my knees, arms clenched around my middle, and rocked back and forth as shock settled over my body.

“Maddy—”

“Scry, damn it,” I screeched, hysterical. “You find him.”

Hellion pushed himself to standing and went down a long hallway off the living area we’d materialized in. He came back, holding his side, and sat on the ground. He unfolded a map of England and Scotland, went through the centering ritual and took the crystal hung from horsehair out of a velvet bag. He began with small circles, ever widening, until he’d moved more than a hundred miles in any direction from the hotel.

Head down, he mumbled something unintelligible, then asked, “Is there a chance he cloaked himself?”