Life Cycle (15 page)

The empty glass thudded on the nightstand, clinking
against the plate.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“No, I don’t have to, but I want to.”

He knew it was a lie even as the words came out of
his mouth. He didn’t want to kill her, but it felt like a line had
been drawn in the sand. If he didn’t do this, he was lost. Who was
he? What was he? It had always been so simple. Betray. Feed. Kill.
When he’d been human, feeding hadn’t been part of the process, but
he’d still operated the same. He’d always been alone on a deep
level. Human, demon, it didn’t matter. The one thing that made the
world rotate right was the knowledge that he didn’t need any of
them. He could find pleasure without connection, without risk.

As much as he protected his own
kind, if they so much as thought about crossing him, his vengeance
would reign down. He’d never been soft. He would never
be
soft.

“Come here,” he said. He’d put the thrall in his
words and watched her fight with herself not to leave the bed and
move closer to him, but he’d put too much force in it for her to
win, this time. And having already given him her will once, she
couldn’t so easily take it back again. The sheet fell off her nude
form as she approached.

She was lovely, with a light golden tan and tan lines
from a string bikini. He liked the lines. The contrast between
darker flesh and lighter. He traced a finger over where the straps
had been, and she shivered.

“I can do this one of two ways. I can hypnotize you
again and sleep with you and take you out that way, or I can snap
your neck. Lady’s choice.”

“Please—”

Cain put a finger to her lips to silence the begging.
“Those are the options. Pick one.”

She stood frozen in terror.

“If you pick the first one, you’ll forget all of
this fireball demon stuff. You’ll have another good experience, and
then you’ll go to sleep and wake up in Heaven.” Why was he trying
to comfort her?

“Okay,” she said after a long beat, the resignation
dripping from her voice.

But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. If he slept
with her again, he’d only end up sparing her. He’d think about how
much she looked like Tam, and he’d walk away, losing a piece of who
he was in the process.

“Okay, then,” he said. Before she could realize he’d
changed his mind about choices, he’d gripped her head and twisted.
Then something horrible happened. A tear slid down his cheek.

***

Cain pounded on the door of Dayne’s cottage, still
angry at himself for taking the side trip and for all the confusing
feelings his tryst with Gloria had produced.

Greta answered the door, a look of apprehension on
her face.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. I just ate. Is Dayne
around? I need to speak with him.” Cain saw therians as moderately
more worthy of life than humans, and he tried not to get on the bad
side of magic users, so Greta would have been off the menu no
matter what.

You had to have a grudging respect for the one type
of being who could take you down and make all your powers null with
a single spell. And from what he’d heard, Dayne had a reputation.
Cole had banned him from buying blood from his website, after all.
Not that that mattered if he had a live-in cat-shifter.

He followed the skittish werecat into the house. Her
hair was dark brown, but short, like Tam’s. He growled at himself
for having that thought. The therian jumped and turned around.

“Sorry, I was thinking. Honestly, you’re not in any
danger.” He held his hands up like he was surrendering, trying to
look nonthreatening, but he knew he wasn’t pulling it off. He
didn’t have much occasion to practice the skill without demon
thrall involved.

When they reached the living room, the sorcerer
looked up from an old, dusty book in his lap. “Greta,” he said.

It wasn’t the word, it was the tone, as if he feared
for her and didn’t think he could cast a curse fast enough to save
her. Dayne needn’t have worried, because the next moment she
shifted, and a black house cat fought her way out of her clothing.
She darted under the couch and watched him with glowing, yellow
eyes.

“Well, that’s one way to escape my charms,” Cain
said, chuckling.

The sorcerer didn’t seem to find the joke funny and
raised an arm in a way only a sorcerer could make menacing.

Cain held his hands up again. “I’m kidding. You think
I’d mess with a magic user’s girl? You’re crazy. And I don’t kill
women just for the hell of it.” Except for that time about an hour
ago.

“What business do you have here, demon?”

“I need a favor.”

The sorcerer arched a brow. “I’m not in the habit of
fraternizing with the enemy.”

Cain made a
pffft
sound. “You fraternize with
Anthony. If you don’t think he’s the enemy, you’ve been smoking too
many of your magic herbs.”

Greta gave a mew from under the couch, and Dayne
laughed like it was an inside joke. Could he speak Cat-onese or had
they just been together that long?

“The only thing that gets smoked around here is
catnip,” he said, “and not by me.”

Despite the angst of the past few hours, Cain
chuckled. Greta hadn’t seemed the type to smoke a bowl of anything.
So she was a little stoner. He could still be surprised.

He composed himself to get back to the business at
hand. “I’m the one thing that stands between The Cycler finding and
taking Tam. We are about a blink away from a worldwide war, but
keeping her in my dimension carries risk. I can’t have her hexing
me. I need protection.”

“Did you lock her books and tools away?”

“Of course I did, but she’s two thousand. There is
plenty of magic she can do with just her mouth.” Wrong wording. An
image of her talented mouth and all the naughty things it could do
to him surged through his mind as if it were the witch who had the
demon thrall, putting sexual thoughts and feelings into his head
from a distance.

From the look on his face, Dayne seemed to have
caught the innuendo. “I see. Let me guess. You think she’s cast a
love spell on you.”

“I don’t love her. Don’t be ridiculous. If she cast
that, it failed.” Unless it was just starting to take effect,
making him think about her, taking the demon right out of
him...

“Defensive,” Dayne said. “Why don’t we go downstairs
and see what the damage is and what we can do about it? Do you have
a personal item of hers?”

Cain pulled the pair of black panties from his pocket
and smirked.

“It’s hard to imagine why she’d feel compelled to
use magic against you,” the sorcerer said, dryly.

Cain just shrugged and followed him downstairs. The
black cat darted past his legs to follow Dayne.

Once downstairs, Greta paced back and forth over a
spot at the far corner of the room, looking distressed and deep in
concentration.

“What’s up with that?”

The sorcerer shook his head. “I have no idea. I’ve
never seen her do anything like that in cat form.”

She sniffed at a spot on the ground, making unearthly
shrieking sounds.

“Greta,” Dayne said. No response. The cat continued
her bizarre ritual. Pacing, growling, sniffing. “Greta, look at
me!”

The cat looked up, seeming to snap out of it.
“Mrrawwr?”

“Go upstairs and shift and put some clothes on so we
can talk about this.”

She hesitated, but finally went upstairs. Once she
was gone, Dayne was all business. He uncorked several bottles,
opened some books, sprinkled a few herbs, and chanted some words in
a strange language that didn’t seem like Latin. Cain knew Latin.
And ancient Sumerian. Some of the other dead languages he’d grown
rusty on from lack of use. As he chanted, Dayne glowed much like
Tam had in the caves.

The whole ordeal made the demon jumpy. The sorcerer
could be doing anything to him. This was why demons didn’t do this.
It made them too vulnerable. Going to one magic user to protect
yourself from a second magic user raised the odds the first one
would hex you. They tended to have a code of honor to protect each
other and respected the spells of others most of the time. Cain
could be stepping into quicksand, here.

Finally, the glow faded from the sorcerer and the
glassy look in his eyes cleared. “There are no spells in effect
right now.”

“She hasn’t done magic against me? You’re sure?”

“Positive,” Dayne said. “I wouldn’t be able to undo
her spell, but I would know if it was there. You’re clean.”

The demon let out a sigh of relief, muscles he hadn’t
known he’d been clenching, loosening. “Can you give me something to
keep her from casting one?”

“You’re asking me to make her helpless,” the
sorcerer said, his expression closed.

“No. I’m not asking that. She still
has her energy balls. She can resist a lot of my thrall...” Perhaps
he shouldn’t share so much information. “I just don’t want what
happened to Luc to happen to me. Witches are dangerous to us. If
I’m being asked to protect her, then I should be protected
from
her. It’s only
fair. Remember, I could toss her on her ass out of my dimension.
Then you all are on your own.”

If things went to shit, he could be affected with the
magic users coming out of the closet and uniting. It would be a
demon nightmare. But the sorcerer didn’t have to know how seriously
Cain took the threat, not when he had more immediate protection
needs.

Dayne sighed. “I know. All right. I’m going to loan
you something of mine. If you lose this, I’ll hex you myself. It
belonged to my Uncle Arthur.” He took a gilded box off the shelf
and retrieved a ring from underneath several small scrolls of
parchment. “I need to bespell something you’ll wear that won’t draw
attention to you. If you take this off, you’ll be unprotected. The
spell will last three moon cycles at the most, so if this isn’t
resolved by then, you’ll want to return to have it recharged. When
all of this is over, you will return this ring to me.”

Cain nodded. He didn’t like the way he was being
spoken to, but at this moment all he cared about was being nice to
the magic user with the promise of safety. He was grateful the ring
wasn’t gaudy. It was a simple band made of pewter, with runic
markings carved into it. Probably no one would notice it.

He stood out of the way while Dayne prepared for the
spell. Greta came downstairs as he was finishing the
preparation.

“Hey,” she said, keeping a wary eye on Cain.

The sorcerer put the ring on the table. “Hey. So what
was that weird behavior about a few minutes ago?”

The therian looked confused. “What weird
behavior?”

Dayne pointed to the area where she’d acted so oddly.
“You were pacing and growling and looking really intense and
sniffing, like something upsetting happened there.”

“I have
no
idea what you’re talking about. I
was down here for a few minutes with you guys, then I decided to go
upstairs and change. Then I came back down. I wasn’t even over
there.”

“Is this kind of memory loss normal?” Cain
asked.

Dayne stroked his chin. “Sometimes. It depends on a
lot of factors. I think she was a little anxious when she shifted,
but she was human enough in there to engage with me and understand
what I was saying, so her memories should be intact. There’s no
logical reason for this.”

“Could she be under a spell of some sort? Something
that would affect her as a human but not as a cat?” Cain had paid
close attention to the various ways magic could be used to fuck
with someone.

“It’s possible, but if someone else cast a spell on
her, I wouldn’t be able to undo it.”

“True, but at least you would know. Besides, what if
you did it?”

Dayne looked offended. “Why would I do it?”

Cain shrugged. “I don’t know. To protect her from
something? Isn’t that what men in love do?”

The sorcerer seemed doubtful. “Something I don’t
remember either?”

“Good point. Nevermind, then.”

“Even if I’d done it, I can’t even undo my own spell
if I don’t know which spell I used. As you can see, I have hundreds
of books down here. Memory-related spells are a dime a dozen.” He
made a sweeping motion to the shelves behind him with all the
books.

“Well... you can work on this Nancy Drew mystery
after you’ve fixed my ring.” Cain needed Dayne to stay focused and
not get off track on something that didn’t involve or affect
him.

The sorcerer shot him an annoyed look. “In a minute.
Greta?”

The therian bit her lip, her anxiety rising.
“Yeah?”

“Will you shift back? Maybe you can help me in cat
form.”

She seemed upset at the idea of doing something she
wouldn’t remember doing later, but she closed her eyes and shifted
anyway, her height dropping several feet in seconds. The black cat
wrestled her way out of her clothes.

“Greta?”

“Mrawrr?”

“Do you remember what happened over there?” Dayne
pointed. “Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

Two blinks.

“But something happened?”

She tilted her head to the side, looking from the
area of the room he’d indicated and back to Dayne. One blink.

“Do you remember any spells being done?”

A pause and a look of concentration, then one
blink.

“Did someone else take your memory?”

Two.

“Did I do it?”

One.

Cain stood back and watched the kitty charades, less
than amused. Why this drama had to interfere with him getting his
ring, he didn’t know.

“Can you remember which book I used?”

Greta went to the shelves with the books and jumped
up onto one, threading her way around the dusty volumes of magic
until she got to an old, red leather volume on the middle of the
second shelf. Dayne took it and thumbed through.