Grim Haven (Devilborn Book 1) (2 page)

“Cooper. Cooper!” I couldn’t rouse him. He’d been fine with assorted knives sticking out of his torso, but whatever she’d done to him after that, he wasn’t fine now.

Said knives were still there, except the one he’d pulled out himself. That wound was already completely healed, the bloody tear in his shirt the only sign it had ever been there. But the others were seeping blood around the blades. I left the knives where they were.

“Cooper!” I slapped lightly at his face, and some of the black dust came away on my hand. I sniffed it, then gave my index finger a tentative lick.

Jet
.

That was clever of her. Normally jet is used for defense, not offense. But a skilled enough witch can get it to absorb pretty much any energy she wants, to be unleashed at the proper moment.

Who did I just kill? Or what?

I couldn’t think about that. I had to deal with Cooper first. Whatever was wrong with him wasn’t the kind of problem paramedics would be able to solve.

I squeezed his hand, not really expecting my fingers to elicit a response where my voice couldn’t, but I felt something, a slight pressure, as though he was trying to squeeze back.

“Cooper?” I squeezed again. His lips moved. I leaned in closer and pretended I did not, completely inappropriately under the circumstances, notice how good he smelled. Like soap and spices and butter. “Cooper?”

“Need…” he whispered.

“What?” I asked. “What do you need?”

With a groan of effort, he reached up and plopped his arm around my shoulders. He pulled weakly, and I leaned in farther still. One more bit of pressure from him, and our foreheads and noses were touching.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

Our lips were so close his actually brushed against mine as he spoke. It was almost more intimate than a kiss.

But he wasn’t being affectionate. He was
stealing
.

I felt it almost immediately, a tingling warmth spreading through me, and then a wave of cold as whatever he was taking flowed from me into him. I didn’t move away.

A few seconds later, he took in a great gulp of air while I put my now-shivering fingers on his neck to check his pulse. It was strong and steady. Our faces were still close enough together for me to feel his whiskers against my cheek as he smiled.

“Thanks, Verity,” he whispered. He moved his arm off me. “You can get up. I’ll need to rest a minute, though.”

He didn’t get that minute. As I straightened up, readying a million-and-one questions to fire at him, there was a scream like a little girl who’d dropped her ice cream cone.

That would be Terry.

Balls
.

“Terry!” I had to shout to be heard above him. He was a little man, and prone to fussing. “Hurry up, call 911. I think Cooper’s going to be okay, but—”

“Where did all this
blood
come from?” Terry gestured at the floor, where there was a small pool of blood. Too small for someone who’d been stabbed in the throat.

And the someone in question was gone.

I screamed right along with Terry. “What just— where did—”

“Calm down, you two.”

I turned to find Cooper standing beside me, calm as you please. His shirt was ripped, but he’d pulled the knives out while Terry was distracted with me. He wasn’t bleeding very much, either.

“There’s no need to call 911.” He punctuated his words with his trademark charming smile. “It’s not as bad as it looks. You know how cuts always bleed more than you think they will.”

“Have you lost your mi—” I began.

“Are you
okay
?” Terry interrupted, staring at Cooper’s bloody shirt. “Are you
sure
? What
happened
?”

“Freak accident,” said Cooper. “I fell and hit my head, and I was carrying my knives at the time. I don’t know exactly, it all happened pretty fast.” He shrugged and opened up one of the tears in the fabric, so Terry could see the cut in his chest. “It’s shallow though, see? A few minutes with the first aid kit and I’ll be fine.”

Well, that was maybe the most ridiculous story I’d ever heard. Surely Terry would never buy it.

But it seemed he was inclined to. People always are, when it suits them, and Terry would never want to think of his star chef in any real trouble. “You’re
okay
? Are you
sure
?” he asked again.

“Positive,” said Cooper. “But we’ll need to sanitize this kitchen before lunch, or we won’t be able to open.”

The threat of losing business got Terry moving. While he called the cleaning service, I dragged Cooper over to the first aid station and pretended to help bandage his wounds.

Once he wiped the blood away, there was nothing there but scratches.

“What just happened?” I whispered. “How did you… where did she… I
saw
her die!”

“Not quite, it seems,” Cooper said in a low voice. “We can’t talk about this right now. Help Terry. It’ll keep him distracted for a little while, and we don’t want him thinking too carefully about all this. Then get home. Throw up all the wards you can. I’ll find you later.”

“What are you going to do?”

“She may have taken enough vitality from me to crawl out of here, but she’s weak. I’m going to find her.”

“Cooper, I don’t know what you’re talk—”

But he was already leaving. He told Terry he was dizzy from losing blood, and that he needed to go home. Terry, of course, was willing to do whatever it took to keep him happy. Without looking at me again, Cooper was gone.

We spent the next hour putting the kitchen to rights, while Terry kept fussing, and a few more of the staff trickled in. Figuring I wasn’t likely to get much bookkeeping done, I left not long afterward. As I walked home I mentally composed about a thousand protection spells. I would need to draw some blood, too. I was running low on ink.

Like most of the buildings on my street, mine was a narrow, three-story townhouse that had been split into apartments. It was a quiet neighborhood, off the beaten path, and I was pretty sure I’d know if I was being followed. But I still paused inside the front door, looking out one of the tiny windows for a few minutes. Nothing moved.

The staircase was dim but not dark enough for anybody to hide in the corners. There were no creaking floorboards, no opening doors. Not even my downstairs neighbor’s yapping dog. I was certain I was alone.

Which was why it startled me so badly when someone knocked on my apartment door not ten seconds after I closed it.

I didn’t have a peephole. The obvious thing to do would have been to call out asking who it was, but given how much magic I’d seen that day, I wasn’t about to trust any voice I heard. I put my palm against the wood and closed my eyes, concentrating. It didn’t feel like an enemy.

True to his word, it was Cooper.

I stepped aside to let him in. “Did you find her?”

“No. You aren’t safe.”

I tried to project a calm practicality despite the panic squeezing my chest.

You aren’t safe
.

That was pretty much my least favorite sentence in the world. I took a few deep breaths before saying, “Who was she?”

“Kestrel Wick. The name won’t mean anything to you.”

“How could she have survived that? How did she just get up and walk away? Is she a superhuman or something?”

Cooper sighed. “She’s no more human than you or I.”

My stomach flipped, and it took a few more deep breaths before I could speak again. Cooper knowing I was a witch was one thing. Knowing I was only half human was quite another. “What do you mean by that, exactly?”

He gave me an impatient look. “We have a lot of ground to cover, and it’s already been a long day. You really want to waste time playing games?”

I shrugged. “All right, then. How did you know?”

“You mean besides those orange eyes of yours?”

“They are not orange. They’re brown.” But the fact is, they’re a lot closer to orange than brown. And plenty of people find them unsettling. Not very many jump to the conclusion that I’m not human because of them, though. (The occasional would-be pickup artist citing them as evidence of possible angelic origins notwithstanding.)

But then, I realized as I fully processed what he’d said, it might take one to know one. I studied Cooper, the body that could have been chiseled from marble, the eyes so intensely aqua-blue they could have had their own career. Genetic gifts, to be sure. But from where?

“You’re not human either. Are you…” I trailed off, feeling like
Are you whatever I am?
was a weird thing to ask. I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t actually know what I was.

But he seemed to understand the question. “No. I’m guessing you’re a phantasm. Or half?”

“Half,” I agreed.

Half devil.
Devilborn
, my mother had called me. Always with affection and pride. Others had used the nickname without such fondness.

Phantasm
was new to me, and I quite liked the word. But I resisted the urge to ask Cooper to tell me more. I didn’t want to talk about anything so personal with him. I was already feeling agitated just by his presence, and not because of who he was, or even because of everything that had happened. I hated having anyone in my apartment. Instead I threw the focus back on him. “You?”

“I’m…” Cooper began, then stopped and ran a hand through his already messy hair. “My Grandad always called our kind
vitals
. And Kestrel’s kind
feeders
. I’ve never really liked either word, but I don’t have better ones.” Like a dog trying to settle down, he walked a few laps around my tiny living room before sitting on the couch. “I don’t even know the language of the world we’re from. It’s been gone for centuries. I was born here.”

“But your kind and Kestrel’s come from the same world?” I asked.

None of this shocked me the way it might have someone else. The idea of worlds other than ours was something I’d been comfortable with for as long as I could remember. Heck, I’d spent countless hours as a child knocking on the backs of closets, tapping on looking glasses, and jumping into puddles, trying to get to those worlds. And although everyone called him a devil, I’d always been pretty sure my father wasn’t actually from
the
Hell.

“Same world, two beings that evolved differently,” said Cooper.

“What did she want from you?”

For a second his eyes looked guarded before he shrugged. “She’s a Wick. Hunting Blackwoods is what they do. Call it a clan rivalry.”

“Hunters… feeders…” I said. “Does that make you the food?”

He smiled, more with his eyes than his mouth. “Actually, it kind of does. They live on vitality.” When I looked blank, he added, “Life force, energy, mana—”

“Did you just say
mana
?” I knew the word; I’d played my share of RPG’s. But Cooper Blackwood didn’t seem like the nerdy type.

“Whatever you want to call it,” he said. “The same energy you call on to do magic.”

“So they’re like vampires, except they suck on mana instead of hit points.” I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms. There was only the couch, and I didn’t want to sit beside him.

Cooper chuckled. “That’s a good way to sum it up.”

“But these Wicks, they go after Blackwood vitality, specifically? That seems weird.”

He hesitated, then sighed. “No, it’s not that simple. But I’m debating how much to tell you. I’m sort of honor-bound not to share certain things.”

“Then you shouldn’t.” I said it with complete conviction, suddenly kicking myself for ever thinking I wanted to ask questions. Why had I even let him in?

Curiosity is dangerous. Never let it trick you into inviting darkness over your threshold. Balls, Verity, you know this.

Whatever Cooper was involved with, I was sure I wanted no part of it. I’d already
stabbed
somebody. Me, who avoided even talking to people if I could help it, had stuck a
knife
in one of them. I felt dizzy, and slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor. I stared at my fingernails. Was there blood under them?