Hex Appeal (33 page)

“If you’ve watched him die a hundred different ways, that only means he’s continually changing his fate. I bet he avoids it entirely.”

Considering what I’d done for him, I would bet he did, too.

“What you’ve seen don’t change why he’s there. In fact, now I understand why I was told you should go with him. If you recognize somethin’ from one of your dreams you’ll be able to warn him, protect him, save him.”

As Ruthie’s orders came from God himself, or so she said, I stopped arguing. I’d learned long ago that arguing with the boss only got you stranded on the wrong side of the Pearly Gates.

“What’s the assignment?” I asked.

I could almost hear Ruthie’s smile. “Ask Jimmy,” she said, then she was gone.

Since the shower was on, and I still had the grit of a dozen trolls in my hair, I lost the robe I’d tossed on to answer the door and stepped beneath the water.

I could get Jimmy to tell me the assignment, fly there myself—I didn’t even need a plane—leave him behind, hope he’d go home. But I wouldn’t.

If I was supposed to be with him, I needed to be with him. Bad things happened when DKs ignored their seers’ orders. Yes, we had free will, in theory. In practice, we did what we were told, or people died.

I shut off the water, waved my hand, and I was dry, dressed, and ready. I hadn’t really
needed
a shower. I just liked them.

When I stepped out of the steamy bathroom, Jimmy’s eyes widened.

“What?” I glanced at my usual outfit—tight jeans, a white, fringed, leather halter top, white cowboy hat, and boots. Not a smudge on them.

“You … uh … from Texas?” he asked.

I frowned. “I’m from Heaven.”

He laughed. “I suppose you’ve heard that line a thousand times.” At my deepening confusion, he added: “Did it hurt?”

“What?”

“When you fell from Heaven?”

“I don’t like to talk about that.”

His laughter died. “That was a pickup line. A bad one. As in, you’re so gorgeous, you must be a fallen angel.”

I sat in the chair next to the dresser. “You do know what the fallen angels are, right?”

He’d better, or we were in a lot more trouble than I’d thought.

“Grigori,” he answered, then something flickered in his eyes. He moved so fast, I barely saw it. The switchblade—pure silver, I could smell it—cleared his pocket as he came off the bed, opening with a single blurring motion of his wrist when he stepped toward me.

I tossed magic dust, and this time it stopped him. Planning to slit my throat was
not
an errand of mercy.

“I’m not a Grigori,” I said. “They’re all in the pit. Sit.” Another swish of my hand, and he sat, just catching his ass on the edge of the bed. “Tell me what you know.”

“God sent angels to watch over the humans,” he recited robotically, which was what I got when I used the enchanted dust. “But some of them lusted instead and were confined to the deepest, darkest level of hell.”

“Tartarus,” I murmured. An extremely unpleasant place. I’d been lucky.

Jimmy gave a jerky nod. “Their offspring—the Nephilim—were left behind to challenge the humans. They are what we fight.”

“And the fallen angels that didn’t succumb to temptation?”

“Too good to go into the pit, too tainted by earth to return home, they became fairies.” Jimmy blinked, and reason returned to his eyes. “That’s you?”

“Me,” I agreed.

“Besides that sparkly gunk”—he waved at my hands—“what else can you do?”

“Fly without wings. Glamour.”

See the future.

I left that last talent out. It always gave rise to more questions than I wanted to answer, and with Jimmy, there’d be questions I
couldn’t
answer.

“If you can practice glamour, then why do you look like that?”

I tilted my head, allowed what I knew to be perfectly proportioned pink lips to curl. “You don’t like how I look?”

With his olive coloring, it was hard to tell, but I was fairly certain he blushed. Which was one of the reasons I looked like this.

“You look great,” he blurted. “It’s just … well … You seem kind of helpless and—”

“Flighty?” He shrugged. “The more helpless I appear, the dumber I act, the harder they fall.” My smile widened. “Or maybe I should say, the quicker they turn to ashes.”

Understanding blossomed. “It’s camouflage.”

“What else is glamour but that?”

“What do you really look like?”

Something he would never, ever see.

I stood. “You can tell me where we’re going and what we’re killing in the car.”

I headed for the door. When he didn’t follow, I glanced back to find his gaze scanning the room. “You don’t have a suitcase?”

I wiggled my fingers. “Everything I need is right here.”

*   *   *

The late-March sun rose through smoky Minnesota skies, casting dim rays across the still-snow-strewn parking lot. I hoped we were headed south.

“I thought you could fly,” Jimmy said.

“I can, but you can’t.” I cast him a quick glance. “Can you?”

Jimmy hunched his shoulders. “No.”

He never had answered my first question:
What are you?
I decided to rephrase. “What can you do?”

“Enough,” he said.

I wondered if he knew all he was capable of, or if he was still finding out. Some DKs were late bloomers, their special talents latent until puberty and beyond. Those were usually the most dangerous ones, too, as if all the years spent growing into a power made that power practically explode once it was ready to come through.

“You need to be more specific,” I said. “I’m not going into battle with an unknown weapon.”

He scowled, but he answered. “I’m faster, stronger, and damn hard to kill.”

“So am I.”

He looked down. “I’m a dhampir.”

“Son of a vampire,” I murmured. He didn’t seem happy about it, but then, who would be? Vampires sucked.

Ha-ha.

“I sense them,” he continued, still not looking at me. “I’m extremely good at killing them.”

“Okay,” I said. “So we’re going after a vampire?”

His head came up. Something flickered in those incredible eyes before he glanced away again. He was hiding something, but what could it be?

“We should probably take a plane,” Jimmy said, the words an obvious attempt to change the subject. I let him. I knew what I needed to know. For now.

“I don’t do planes.” The one time I’d tried it, the controls had whirled and whirled until a few of them exploded. I’d never get in one of those tin cans again. Instead—

I lifted my chin toward the powder blue ’57 Chevy Impala. “We’ll take that.”

Jimmy’s lips curved. “Can I drive?”

“No.”

He didn’t take offense. Instead, his smile deepened as he slid into the passenger seat. He ran his hand along the dash, the movement causing something to shift in my stomach as I had an image of him running that hand along me.

To stop that line of thought—remembering Jimmy’s touch when he’d never touched me gave me a shimmering sense of déjà vu that caused my stomach to pitch and roll—I started the engine. The sweet rumble soothed me as little else could. I loved this car. It was the only thing I had to call my own.

After backing out, I headed for the street. “Which way?”

“South,” Jimmy said.

“Hallelujah.”

“And west. New Mexico.”

Hadn’t been there in decades. Or was it centuries? Time got funny once you lived through the first millennium—or ten.

“Where in New Mexico?”

“Navajo reservation.”

“Pretty big area.”

“Twenty-six thousand square miles.” At least he’d done his homework. “Ruthie said we should go to the foot of Mount Taylor.”

What were the odds that I’d need to head to the same place I’d headed to the last time? You’d think pretty damn slim, but when dealing with supernatural entities, the opposite was true. Certain creatures could be found in certain places, and Mount Taylor had always been special. Sacred to the Navajo, but sacred often arose out of spooky.

“You know where that is?” Jimmy asked, and I nodded. “How long will it take?”

“Do I look like I have Google Maps in my brain?”

“You look like you could have just about anything in there.”

He sounded impressed, and a place right between my C-cups went all gooey and warm. No one had ever been impressed by me before.

Scared of me? Horrified by me? Pleased I’d done my job? Sure. But impressed? Nope.

I kind of liked it.

“We’ll be there in twenty-three hours, give or take.”

He sat back. “Quicker if you let me drive.”

“Fat chance.”

“You gotta sleep.”

I snorted. One good thing about being a fairy—I only slept if I wanted to. Considering what I saw when I closed my eyes … I didn’t often want to.

“What are we after at Mount Taylor?” I asked.

“Sorcerer.”

I frowned. He’d graduated from vampires to sorcerers? That was kind of a big leap. This entire situation made me uneasy.

“What kind of sorcerer?”

“Does it matter?”

“The only way to kill something is to know exactly what it is that needs killing.”

“Ruthie said you’d know.”

“Great,” I muttered. I was starting to wonder if Ruthie wanted me dead. “She said this guy—?”

I glanced at Jimmy for confirmation—technically, a woman should be called a sorceress, but it was best to be sure—and he nodded.

“This guy was a
sorcerer.
” I emphasized the word. “Not a witch or a warlock, a wizard or a magician?”

“No. She said ‘sorcerer.’ What’s the difference?”

“There are two kinds of magic. White is given; black is taken.”

“Given by who? Taken from what?”

The entrance ramp for I-35 loomed ahead, and I waited to answer him until I’d merged into traffic. It was early yet; the road sparkled with the remains of the salt used to prevent vehicles from winding up in a ditch during every snowstorm.

“White magic is learned,” I began. “Given by another devotee. Sometimes inherited through families. In theory, a human can practice white magic. In practice, for magic to be powerful enough to be of any use, it can’t be contained by them for very long. They burn out.”

And wind up gibbering in the corner of their nice, cozy asylum.

“You’re saying anyone practicing magic is a Nephilim?”

“Or the offspring of a Nephilim and a human.” Evil spirits liked to propagate all over the place. It was kind of their thing.

“A breed,” Jimmy spat.

I lifted a brow. Considering he was one, that was an interesting reaction.

“Also fairies,” I pointed out. “I use white magic.”

“So the white and the black have nothing to do with the good or the evil of the magic itself but with the way the magic was received?”

“Anything good can become evil if it’s used in an evil manner.”

“By an evil being.”

“Right. And evil can be used for good.”

“No way.”

I thought of my dreams, the whispers, a promise.

“You’d be surprised.” Before he could question me further, I continued. “A sorcerer, by definition, takes his magic.”

“How do you take magic?”

“By killing someone you love.”

Jimmy flinched. “No one who’s human would do that.”

I wasn’t so sure. I’d met some humans who rivaled the Nephilim for evil. We weren’t supposed to kill them, but … accidents happened.

“Which is why we need to know what kind of sorcerer we’re dealing with so we know how to kill him. Some are part shifter, part vampire—Well, basically anything that creeps can take some magic and become a being that’s even harder to kill.”

Now that I thought about it, Ruthie’s sending Jimmy after a sorcerer alone would have been a very bad idea. As it was … not knowing what kind of murdering magician we were dealing with was a very bad idea. Once again, I got that prickle at the back of my neck.

“Tell me exactly what Ruthie said.”

“She sent me to get you.”

I glanced sideways. “Why me?”

He stared out the front window as if the never-ending highway that disappeared into the flat, soon-to-be Iowa plane was beyond fascinating. “I didn’t ask.”

“No?” That smelled like a lie, but I couldn’t see why he’d bother.

“Ruthie says ‘jump,’ I say ‘how high?’ Don’t you?”

Not in exactly those words, but yeah, pretty much.

“What else?”

“That we should go to the foot of Mount Taylor, where we’d find a sorcerer, and you’d know what to do.”

I’d had better instructions. Then again, I’d had worse. And if Ruthie’d said I’d know what to do, I had to believe I would. No doubt whatever sorcerer we’d find there would be a type I’d found, and eliminated, before.

I began to tick them off in my mind. The Nagual, a Mayan Jaguar shaman, he’d died by silver dipped in blood.

The Aghori, a Hindu cannibal that ate magicians in order to ingest their magic. I’d used hemlock on him.

While I doubted we’d find a Hindu sorcerer in New Mexico—I’d found stranger things in stranger places—I
did
carry hemlock in the trunk.

I also carried knives made of every metal known to man, bullets in the same colors, crossbows, arrows, assorted poisons in solid and liquid form, animal and human blood, as well as ropes, chains, and whips. It paid—usually in lives—to be prepared.

“Killing what they started out as won’t kill them?” Jimmy asked.

“Once they’re a sorcerer, you’ve gotta kill that, too.”

“How?”

“You know why they burned witches?”

Jimmy shrugged. “Why?”

I tightened my fingers on the steering wheel, then focused on the distant horizon.

“Because it worked.”

*   *   *

Mount Taylor loomed large from the flat, arid land like a pyramid in the midst of Egypt. As we rolled closer, the ponderosa pines that dotted the foothills turned what had appeared from a distance to be a gigantic blueberry snow cone into Tso dzilh, the sacred mountain of the south.

Mount Taylor was one of four mountains that marked the boundaries of Navajo land, known as the Dinetah, or the Glittering World. Strange things happened there—always had, always would.