Blooded blade, p.6
Blooded Blade, page 6
“Kit...” My name came out a growl on his lips, his body shuddering convulsively behind me as he swore, then began to move faster, harder, sending waves of pleasure ricocheting through me.
His need was raw and overwhelming, feeding my own until I couldn’t think, see, feel anything beyond this—the hard marble supporting my body, his hands on me, restraining me, bracing me, the heat of him surrounding me as he drove into me, branding me yet again.
It was over far too soon, his name a ragged cry on my lips as I climaxed and his low, animalistic growl seemed to reach inside me, filling me up all over again.
Chapter Three
He was gone when I woke again.
That wasn’t surprising. He was gone a lot these days, and usually from pretty early until pretty late. Granted, there were times he got in before I did—or times he might have beaten me home or slept in and I didn’t notice because I was out on a job.
I was running my ass off. My bank account was flush, but it wasn’t like I had time to enjoy it.
Rolling onto my belly, I breathed in the combined scents of our bodies, wondered if I could get another hour of sleep in, but the energized buzzing of my brain told me not to bother.
Without his body heat to warm me, the bed was too big, too empty. And even though he moved without making a sound, the air was just too...quiet.
Despite my exhaustion and the fact that I actually didn’t have a job slated for the day, I was out of bed once the sleep cleared and I made the brilliant deduction that Damon was, as suspected, not around.
After an hour in my personal gym, followed by a shower and a huge meal, I ducked out through one of the side entrances. I only saw a couple of the cats around. Not all of Damon’s cats lived in the Lair but there were always people coming and going, the place the business hub for the entire clan.
The skin on the back of my neck crawled as I made my way to the parking garage where I left my car. It took too much willpower not to look around, try to see who was watching me. I couldn’t brush it off as a lack of sleep or my general paranoia, though. That’s what I’d been doing for the past couple of days, ever since I’d thought I caught a glimpse of somebody behind me on my backtrail—far enough away I couldn’t pick up their unique ‘presence’ on my mental radar, but close enough they’d be able to close the distance in under a minute should they choose.
One of Damon’s cats—I’d known it in my bones—so I hadn’t thought much about it other than to be annoyed.
But the niggling sensation of being watched, being followed, had grown every day. Now it was at the point that annoyance no longer covered it, especially since I’d had a chance to sleep and get a decent meal in me.
Yeah, I was pissed, not annoyed.
“Maybe that’s why he disappears so early,” I muttered as I unlocked my car. Out of habit, I put my sword on the back seat before climbing into the driver’s seat.
A shadow in the far corner of the garage, furtive and swift, kicked up my already low-level frustration.
With a smile, I threw the car into reverse and gunned the engine—hard.
The tires squealed as my vehicle went flying back. Spinning the wheel, I checked my mirror again, saw my would-be shadow rushing to a car at the far end of the row. Without hesitation, I put the car into drive and punched it, speeding out of the garage.
Instead of heading to my office as planned, I swung left and headed out of town. It would be a hell of a lot harder to track me without my noticing if we weren’t stuck in city gridlock.
* * * * *
I’d almost made it out of the city when a call from the Assembly came in over the car’s onboard computer/communications system.
Code M: All Available Suitable Personnel Respond to 10th and Spade. Be advised, NH is young and has fire capabilities, may be suffering from a psychotic break. HQ requests care be taken to avoid killing the juvenile if at all possible.
I grimaced.
A Code M sucked. Nobody liked dealing with rogue witches. Who would? While most rogue shifters and vamps could be taken down from a distance by anybody with the right weapon and half-way decent abilities, rogue witches were a different story entirely. They could take you out from a distance and the only weapon they needed was themselves.
With witches who could call fire, that made it even worse. And for the witch to be a juvenile...so much worse.
Spinning the car into a three-point turn once I’d made sure I was clear, I tried to nudge my thoughts away from one witch in particular with pyro skills. Tate was only a little younger than me and had enough power in her to terrify. She was also somebody I could see having a psychotic break, too.
If such a thing were to happen, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity.
However, I was listed as having clearance for a Code M.
The truth was, even if the assembly hadn’t cleared me, I would have gone.
A rogue pyro witch was a danger to the whole damn city and we were still cleaning up the mess from the last crazy bastard to unload on East Orlando. I couldn’t sit back and do nothing.
Not with a kid in the middle of a psychotic break.
Fuck.
This already felt bad.
* * * * *
She was a kid, thirteen, maybe fourteen, terrified, pale and skinny, with bruises on her arms and big, dark eyes that told me she was on the edge of going into shock.
The girl was thin, the kind of thin that came from too many missed meals and growing too fast, with tangled hair hanging halfway down her back and clothes that had seen better years. The wild, panicked look in her eyes didn’t quite hide the deep, wrenching well of grief.
A smaller version of her, a boy with features still soft from youth, leaned against the half-busted fence, cradling his arm and staring into nothingness with dazed eyes.
A Banner unit—the law enforcement group tasked with handling NH affairs—had a car there. One of the uniformed officers was slumped against the car. The other was standing protectively in front of him, her hand on the weapon she carried at her waist. I assumed she hadn’t drawn it yet because the girl’s control was shot.
If somebody fired a weapon, this entire section of the road could go up in blaze.
“Heya, Kitty.”
The familiar voice and laconic drawl was so welcome, I might have turned and kissed Justin if I’d dared move my eyes from the scared teen twenty yards away.
“Fancy seeing you here, Justin. Colleen.”
I hadn’t seen her but her presence was as familiar to me as Justin’s, and the brush of her hand against mine as she moved to my other side was a warm welcome.
“Anybody else around, sweetie?” she asked.
Colleen might be a witch—and a damn strong one—but I had a weird knack for sensing the presence of NHs, even witches, that others didn’t.
“One.” I angled my head to the opposite side of the street where a freelance I didn’t know lurked behind the burnt out shell of a car. “Not anybody I know. Either a witch with below average abilities or an offshoot I don’t know. Kind of surprised nobody else has shown up. A Code M usually brings out the greedy.”
“You calling us greedy, Kit?”
Ignoring Justin’s dry comment, I asked, “Either of you think we could just douse the area if she goes red hot?”
“No.” This time, Justin’s voice was grim. “I’ve only got a minor talent with earth, which won’t do shit with her. Colleen’s elemental abilities are still coming into focus, but the strongest seems to be air, with a weak touch of water. That won’t touch anything this girl throws out. And it’s not greed—nobody wants to touch a kid. The Assembly probably saved her life—and a lot of other lives—being open about her age. I don’t know who made that call, but good on them.”
There was a grim moment of silence as we all considered that.
“I couldn’t put anything out,” Colleen said in a musing voice, breaking the tension. “But if we make things a little less flammable, it could minimize the damage.”
Justin considered. “Probably. But if you startle her...”
“What about trying to talk to her?” I offered. Glancing at the blackened walls and still smoking ruin of a house, I wondered about what might have happened. “It’s no more dangerous than anything else we’re talking about—might even be the safest option.”
I could feel them both looking at me. Sighing, I glanced at Colleen, then Justin, my eyes returning almost immediately to the girl. She was pacing, a red glow encasing her hands in sputtering bursts before fading away. It returned within ten or fifteen seconds, lasted about the same period before cycling back out. “The girl’s terrified. Something bad happened in that house and I don’t think it’s anything she did—or maybe what she did was in reaction to what happened.”
“She is scared,” Colleen murmured. She was quiet a moment, then sighed, the sound deep and sad. “And in shock. She...oh, poor baby.” Reaching down to take my hand, Colleen squeezed. “It was her father, I think. I’m seeing...” With her free hand, she waved it vaguely in front of her face. “These flashes. The girl came in and he was hurting a woman. Her mother, maybe. And that boy over there, he was on the ground. I think...” She flinched, then, jerking her hand from mine to cradle her arm.
Justin cupped the back of her neck. “Pull back. You can’t go so deep with somebody that close to the edge.”
Colleen was primarily a Healer—she always had been. She’d been brutalized and forced to remake herself, but the healing abilities had always been there, coupled with an empathy that let her see deep inside others. And sometimes, she did go too deep.
With a shudder, she blew out a hard breath. “Yeah. Thanks, baby. There’s just so much hurt there.”
“I’ll try to talk to her,” I said. I took a deliberate step forward, then another, slowly closing the distance between us and making no attempt to be stealthy or subtle about it. She was so focused on the Banner unit and the boy who had to be her brother, she didn’t notice me, though, until I was roughly twenty feet away.
The girl’s eyes locked with mine and I froze.
“Easy, sweetheart,” I said. Holding her gaze, I knelt and put my blade on the ground. She wasn’t likely to notice any of my other weapons, I figured, and if I started stripping them all off, that probably wouldn’t help put her at ease. As her hazel eyes met mine, I lifted my now-empty hands. “I want to come and talk. Just talk.”
She jerked her head back and forth.
“We kind of have to,” I told her, angling my head toward the Banner unit. “The folks at Banner don’t like taking in kids, but they can’t have you burning houses down, either.” I paused a second. “Might be a good idea to talk about what’s going on so they understand why the house went up in flames. I mean, I doubt you did it on purpose, right?”
She bit her lip, then slowly shook her head.
“So...can we talk?”
A long taut moment passed before she nodded. I could hear a collective sigh of relief from the others, including the Banner unit, but I didn’t look away from her until I was about five feet away. Nodding to the boy, I asked, “Is he your brother?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice a bare whisper, gaze darting from mine to linger on the boy.
“Can I see his arm? I won’t hurt him.” I waited until she looked back at me. “I promise.”
“O-okay. I think it’s broken.” She sniffed, then blinked back tears. “He broke his arm!”
Under the fear and shock, there was a low, powerful thread of fury and it made the red haze around her hands deepen and spread.
She kept staring at me, the intensity in her gaze growing. “He hurt him.”
Each word shook. Each word vibrated with her rage and pain. I didn’t even have to ask.
“Your father,” I said softly. “He’s the one who broke your brother’s arm.”
Her eyes widened slightly, but she nodded. “Yes. He hurt my brother, and...my mom...” A sob escaped and she clamped a hand over her mouth, the way a child would when they’d learned the hard way not to make a sound as they cried.
“I’m sorry, honey,” I said, daring another step forward. “I’m so sorry. Let me help. Let me help you and your brother, okay?”
She gave another jerky nod before wheeling away to stare at the Banner cops, the hand on her mouth falling away.
Crouching by the boy, I smiled. He gave me a couple of slow sleepy blinks. He was definitely in shock—and the arm was definitely broken, but I doubted that was the only cause of his pain.
Up until I’d started living at the Lair with Damon, I’d only had limited interactions with kids, especially the younger versions, like this one. I couldn’t begin to guess at his age and figured his head might reach my breastbone standing up, but that wasn’t a good way to estimate.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Ben.” He swallowed and looked past me to his sister. “Dina isn’t s’posed to let her fire out. He’ll hurt her if he sees.”
“Don’t you worry about that.” I wasn’t going to tell the kid that their dad was probably past hurting people now. It wouldn’t do him or Dina any good at this point. Instead, I smiled at him. “I brought friends with me. They won’t let him hurt you or Dina.”
Hope shone out at me from his eyes, eyes so big they dominated his young face. “Really?”
“Yeah, really.” Angling my head toward Colleen and Justin, I asked, “You see that pretty lady with red hair?”
“By the guy with the shiny jacket?”
I swallowed a chuckle. “Yeah. That’s a special shiny jacket, Ben. Those two are both witches, like your sister.”
His cheeks went red, shame, probably fear, too.
“What’s wrong, kiddo?” I asked as his gaze slid away.
“We weren’t s’posed to let anybody know she’s a witch. It’s bad.”
“No.” Shaking my head, I stroked his soft, downy hair back from his eyes. “It’s not bad. It’s just what some people are. You’re bad if you do bad things on purpose. Just being a witch doesn’t make anybody bad. It’s like saying somebody is bad because they were born with red hair or left-handed. How silly would that be?”
He swallowed, those big eyes so full of fear.
“You don’t really think your sister is bad, do you? Seems to me she’s trying to protect you.”
“She was.” His gaze moved toward her before coming back to me again. “She’s always trying to protect me.”
“Okay, then. So she’s not bad. It doesn’t matter if she’s a witch. It matters what she does.” I stroked his hair once more. “You know what the Assembly is?”
“Yes.” He nodded jerkily. “We had to come live here b’cuz ’Sembly people said so. Dad has...” His brow furrowed as he tried to remember. “He said his mom was a double... the b word and that made her a monster, so we’re all monsters, but Dina was the biggest monster of all.”
His eyes filled with tears. “But if being a witch doesn’t mean you’re bad, does that mean we’re not monsters?”
“You’re absolutely not monsters.” Brushing his hair back, I said, “Sounds like your dad might be one, but you’re not. And I know all about monsters... the scary, bad kind and the not-so-bad but scary kind and the not-so-bad and not-so-scary kind.”
“You know monsters who aren’t scary?” His eyes almost popped out of his head.
The shock in his voice and on his young face gave me some hope. He was still a child, had pieces in him that weren’t broken.
“I do. Maybe we can talk about that sometime. But first...” Nodding to Colleen again, I said, “That pretty red-haired witch? She heals people. Can she come look at your arm if your sister is okay with it?”
He bit his lip, looking at Dina.
“Will she take him away?” Dina asked, resigned fear in her voice.
“No.” I didn’t look at her but had sensed her moving closer while Ben and I talked. Tossing Colleen a look, I thought of Mandy, the daughter Colleen had lost. “Colleen loves kids. She won’t let anybody hurt either of you.”
“She can come help him.”
Dina didn’t say it, but I heard the doubt and fear—she didn’t think she deserved love, didn’t see herself as worthy of help. My heart broke a little. Waiting until Colleen was by my side before rising, I mentally braced myself.
Turning to face Dina again, I tried a small smile this time. “Dina’s a pretty name.”
She flinched. “It’s awful. It was my grandma’s name and she’s the reason we had to come here. She’s why my dad hates—hated us.” She met my gaze, then, and I saw the truth there.
She’d killed him. She knew she had and she both hated the knowledge and reveled in it.
“Your dad probably hated something in himself, Dina, and he took it out on you.” It was a good thing he was dead, too, because I didn’t have to fight the urge to hurt him. “That just makes him a coward, and an asshole.”
Her eyes widened. A second later, her mouth fell open.
“I guess that’s not how I’m supposed to respond.” From behind me, I heard Justin’s soft chuckle. I reached up to scratch my neck and with my hand obscured, I flipped the amused guy behind me off. “Dina, what happened in there? The fire...was that you?”
She flexed her hands, bringing them up between us to stare at the flickering red glow. She almost looked confused when she lifted her head up. “He didn’t know I could do witch stuff. Like fire. Mama said it came from her family and I had to hide it until she could figure out what to do—but...Dad’s mama was a witch. We weren’t supposed to know that. She was a witch and she could do fire. It was getting harder and harder to hide it and if I’m mad or scared...”
A sob tore out of her and again she clapped her hands over her mouth, but it did little to muffle the keening sound.
I touched her arm.
She flinched, but when she didn’t tear away, I reached up and curled my hand over her shoulder.
“It will be okay, Dina,” I told her. “You’re a witch. That’s just who you are. That doesn’t make you evil or bad or wrong.”
