Bitter Night (7 page)

Max wriggled out and levered herself upright. Lise was already walking away, heading for the kitchen tractor trailer affectionately dubbed the Garbage Pit. Max stretched, cracking her back. “Save me some coffee.”

Lise waved dismissively. “Like you need the caffeine.”

Max stretched, wishing she could follow. Her body had already burned through the powerbars and Gatorade, and the smells of garlic and fresh bread wafting through the air made her stomach cramp. Instead she glanced around the warehouse, taking its measure with a quick examination. It was windowless and sealed against light and dark. Witchlights illuminated the interior’even the darkness of a warehouse did bad things to Sunspears. The hospital semi was parked next to the far wall, and beside it, Giselle’s RV. The Garbage Pit was slotted in next to it, and another couple of smaller RVs and a half dozen cars and trucks were parked haphazardly about on the concrete. It was a gypsy village, ready to roll at a moment’s notice.

“Max. I want you. Now.”

Giselle stood in the doorway of her RV, her voice echoing off the corrugated-steel walls of the warehouse. She didn’t look like much. But then neither did black-widow spiders. She was beautiful and delicate like those spindly museum chairs that are useless for sitting and porcelain cups that break the moment anyone picks one up. She had straight chestnut hair hanging to her waist and was wearing blousy cotton pants with a halter top. She looked as weak and helpless as a baby lamb. Max snorted. A lamb with a streak of Jack the Ripper running through her.

The witch turned and went inside. Max followed her up the narrow steps. Inside, the RV was like a small, luxurious apartment. The cabinets were cherrywood and the floors covered in thick wool rugs. A small kitchen was on the left and a sitting room on the right. The walls were slid out to make it spacious. Giselle sat in a red leather chair with wooden-clawed feet. She curled her feet up under her, weaving her tanned fingers primly together. Max remained standing.

Giselle wasted no time. “Tell me again.”

Max repeated her report, ignoring the cold of the hailstone radiating down her thigh from her pocket. She should have hidden it in the Tahoe, but she couldn’t bring herself to be separated from it.

“How did you get caught?” Giselle’s voice was accusing. She glared at Max, her hair lifting and curling on invisible currents. Max eyed it with a smirk of victory. Sure, it was childish, but she took what she could get, and needling Giselle always made her day. The witch noticed Max’s look, and her hair smoothed into a starched silk curtain.

“When I broke the charm circle on the Hag, the magic burst attracted some attention. I took a hit and couldn’t get under cover fast enough.” Max shrugged. “I figured you’d prefer that to the Hag falling into the wrong hands, right?”

Giselle leveled a suspicious look at her. “You were thinking of what I wanted?”

“Yeah, well, she didn’t seem to be all that happy being trapped and tortured.”

Giselle sighed. “Thirty years and you still can’t get past it,” she muttered, recognizing the dig for what it was.

Anger rippled hot through Max. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Which did you want me to get past? Being turned into a mutant freak by my best friend? Being enslaved by her? Or maybe all those hours of torture on your altar while you chained me tighter? Oh, yeah, I can see where you would think I could just forget all about that. After all, it’s only blood under the bridge, right? Hardly worth thinking about.”

“Max, I need you. I don’t think anyone has ever made a stronger Shadowblade than you. Whether you know it or not, you’re very precious. If you wouldn’t resist my magic so strongly, I wouldn’t have to drive you out of your head with pain before I can start working on you.”

“Must be all my fault then,” Max said acidly.

“You know, it’s not like you didn’t benefit from becoming a Shadowblade. You’re stronger, faster, you’ll never grow old, you don’t get sick, and you’re hard to kill. And I pay you very well. Most people would kill to be you.”

Max felt her face contort. She willed her muscles to relax, feeling her usual mask sliding back into place. She took a breath. One more.

“Don’t act like you’ve done me any favors. You screwed me over and you still are. Not giving me a choice is called rape and slavery.”

There was a pause. Giselle lifted her chin, meeting Max’s hot gaze squarely. “I couldn’t have bound you if you hadn’t agreed.”

“I never agreed to this.” An old argument. Max was tired of it. “Are we done here? I’m hungry.”

“Not yet. What is your impression of what happened in Julian?”

Max forced herself to shift gears away from her anger. It served no purpose at the moment. “Someone sent the redcaps after the Hag, and I don’t think it was the territory witch’her Blades were on cleanup. Whoever was behind it has to have balls of brass if half the rumors about Selange are true.”

“They are,” Giselle confirmed, her gaze narrowing hard on Max, who pretended not to know what she was thinking. Which was, what sort of payback for Max’s trespassing was Selange going to demand tonight at the Conclave?

“Then our fearless invaders took a big chance. But why would anyone want the Hag? If the redcaps hadn’t been stopped, they’d have killed her.”

“Most likely they didn’t care about her; they just wanted her staff. It has a great deal of power and anyone can use it. Legend is that it controls the destiny of humans’at least any humans near enough to get caught up in its spell. Which means either it’s a powerful weapon for killing, or it can be used to control the population. Think about it. A flesh witch gets ahold of that and suddenly has an unlimited source of power. All she has to do is stir up the local humans and magic pours into her.” Giselle paused. “Selange is a flesh mage. Now that she knows the Hag is there, she won’t be able to resist that staff.”

Flesh mages siphoned their magic from ordinary humans, who vented it like steam off a sauna. It came from their passions, their hatreds, their battles, and their burned-out hopes. Every emotion and interaction a human experienced created magic, and a flesh witch collected it like a big vacuum cleaner. And if that wasn’t enough, or if they needed a really big spike of magic, they turned to sex rites and blood sacrifice. Thank whatever beings looked out over the universe that Giselle was not a flesh mage. Max couldn’t draw a lot of lines as a Shadowblade, but she didn’t hunt down helpless people and turn them into sacrifices so that some witch-bitch could generate a few more watts of magic.

She thought of Alexander. Did he?

“Go eat,” Giselle said. “Stock up. Selange is going to issue a challenge’she likes unarmed combat to the death. Are you ready?”

Max shrugged, her grin pure malice. “If I win, I win; if I don’t, I’m dead and you lose your favorite chew toy. Either way, I can’t lose.”

Giselle’s mouth tightened and Max couldn’t tell if she was biting back a smile or grimace. “Some might say dying is a loss. Your uniform for tonight is in your bunk. We leave as soon as it’s dark enough.”

MAX WANTED A SHOWER, BUT FOOD WAS MORE IMPORtant. The spells that made her a Shadowblade would start feeding on her body if she wasn’t careful. The powerbars in the Tahoe had helped to replace what the Hag had taken from her, but she needed to calorie load and quick.

The Garbage Pit was putting off a mouthwatering mosh of smells. Max went around to the back of the semi where a set of stairs led up into the interior of the trailer. At the cab end was the kitchen, and lining the walls on either side were stainless-steel tables bolted to the walls and chairs bolted to the tables. The floor was matching stainless steel, as was most of the kitchen. Low, haunting music played through the speakers. Except for Magpie, the cook, no one else was there.

Magpie glanced up, her eyes a shade or two darker than Max’s, with two streaks of pearly white interrupting the blue-black ponytail that fell to the middle of her back. She was a witch of the outer circle, which meant she had some power, but not a lot, and not nearly enough to hold her own coven. She was also a damned good cook, and that’s all Max needed to know.

“Sit,” Magpie ordered, walking over to her with a jug of milk and an empty glass. “What are you hungry for?”

“Whatever you’ve got. You know what I like.”

Magpie nodded and gave a half smile. Her teeth were white against her tanned skin. “I’ve got a couple of pans of enchiladas on the warmer. You can start with those.”

“Sounds good.” Max’s stomach growled and she laughed. “Better hurry.”

Magpie patted her shoulder and hurried back into the kitchen. Max drank a couple of glasses of milk in quick succession, then turned the glass between her fingers broodingly. She wanted to touch the hailstone, but didn’t want to call attention to it.

Footsteps on the stairs made her twist around. The first person into the Garbage Pit was Oz. He stood about six foot three with sandy brown hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders that looked like they could hold up a tank, and about a dozen dimples. He didn’t look like a Sunspear Prime, but just as with Alexander, power surrounded him like a cloud of hot lightning, and hiding behind those smiling eyes was an unrelenting violence. He was scary. When he walked into a room, anyone with sense started thinking about finding the exits.

Behind him came Niko, Max’s second-in-command. He was about the same height as Max and looked to be as broad as he was tall’all of it was muscle. His eyes, like his fists, were stone. He always wore the latest New York fashion, which made him the object of much teasing among his fellow Shadowblades, all of which he took with good-natured humor. Still, Max knew she could count on him to have her back, no matter how bad things got. He didn’t know how to back down or back off, and he could inflict more damage than a platoon of marines.

After him trailed Akemi. She was Chinese, with a broad forehead and rounded chin. She was the only Shadowblade in Max’s crew who was actually shorter than her. More than a few idiots had mistaken her size for weakness. She’d set them straight’and dead. No one handled knives better than she did. She was also clearheaded, smart, and careful. Max had never seen her lose her cool. She smiled fleetingly as she entered, her eyes dropping. Dangerous as she was, she was also ridiculously shy. She was exactly what Max would expect the daughter of a geisha and a terminator to be.

Oz slid into the seat opposite Max. “Want company?”

“Do I have a choice?”

He smiled broadly, taking a drink from the milk jug. “Nope.”

“What happened to you last night?” Niko asked. He sat at the table across the aisle, kicking his feet out and slouching down, tapping his fingers on the table in a drumbeat.

Akemi sat across from him, her hands folding together on the table, her back straight. She watched Max from beneath lowered lids.

“Trouble, of course,” Max said, rubbing her forehead.

This was the hardest part of the role she played for Giselle. She liked Oz. She liked Niko and Akemi, though Akemi continually treated Max as some sort of half-god. The problem was that she did like them and she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to care. She didn’t want Giselle to have any hostages against her good behavior. But she’d lost the knack for keeping them at arm’s length. It had been easier in that first fifteen years. She had spent so much time running or laid out on Giselle’s altar that she hadn’t had a chance to get to know the other Shadowblades or Sunspears before they got killed in the line of witchy duty. Once she’d stopped running, she’d learned all she could about combat, strategy, tactics, and most especially about the world of magic’she had a mission. She wasn’t going to die doing Giselle’s dirty work until she could kill the witch-bitch herself.

That’s when the rest of the Shadowblades and even a lot of the Sunspears started looking up to her, asking her for help, for advice. For years Max had been Prime in name only and finally had to take on the role for real or watch her friends die from sheer ignorance and inexperience. But the job came with confessions of fear and misdeeds, longings and hopes, grudges and frustrations. It brought them closer to her. Every day it grew worse. Attachments of the heart, drilled in with titanium screws she didn’t know how to dislodge. Worse, she wasn’t sure she wanted to anymore. Beneath the table, her fingers brushed across her pocket, feeling the cold of the hailstone. Maybe she didn’t have to. Maybe there was a way out without destroying everything she’d come to care about. There had to be a way.

She gave them the bare bones of her night’s activities. As she finished, Magpie delivered a plate of enchiladas and Max dug in.

“This could get ugly. Selange isn’t going to take this sitting down.” Oz pointed out the obvious while stealing one of the folded tortillas on the edge of Max’s plate.

Max pointed her fork at him. “Touch my food again and I’ll eat your hand.”

He smirked. “Might be worth it. I always wanted to know what it would be like to have your mouth on me.”

Akemi made a squeaking sound of disbelief and Niko snorted.

Max set her fork down carefully, pressing her hands flat on either side of her plate. She stared at her plate for a moment. Then she looked up at Oz. He looked wary, knowing he’d tested a line. Another day she’d have tossed back a razor remark or broken his jaw for him. But today ...today she’d been given the first real hope for freedom.

A daring she hadn’t felt for years swelled in her chest. It was heady. Oz flinched as Max pushed herself upright. She leaned over the table, stopping mere centimeters from him.

“All right then,” she said, then closed the distance, pressing her lips to his.

Oz went rigid, then kissed her back. Their tongues touched tentatively, and Max tipped her head. He reached up, holding her face with his fingertips as if afraid she’d break, or maybe he was afraid she’d bite him. He tasted of milk and mints, and his tongue was deft and light. A sense of dizzy wonder rushed through Max. Like she was back in college with a future full of possibilities.

She pulled away slowly. Her brows rose. “Satisfied?”

Oz touched his fingers to his lips. His eyes were wide, his cheeks flushed. He shook his head. “Hardly.”