My Darkest Passion (10 page)

“I don’t feel anything, you know.”

“You’ll end up with a nasty scar if we don’t take care of it now.”

“Do you sew up people a lot?”

“I was a physician until I came into my power.” He tapped her arm. “Feel that?”

“Feel what?” She grinned at him.

“Be serious.” He spread a layer of gauze on the table and set out a series of medical supply packages. Then he picked up a hypodermic, and her lungs seized up. Across the table from her, Kynan lifted his head and stared right at her. She got enough breath in her to speak.

“No.” She pushed away from the table and shot to her feet. So did Kynan. Her chair skidded back and then fell over, except she hadn’t touched it. She hadn’t. The damn thing moved by itself. By that time, Kynan was on her side of the table and his eyes were glowing. Her sense of both men flared hot and that fueled her panic. “You are not shooting me up with anything.”

Harsh remained on his chair. “It’s Lidocaine. It’ll numb your arm so I can stitch you up.”

“No.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the sound of wood scraping against wood.

“Pain has consequences beyond the unpleasantness of the experience. While you are no longer normal, you are physiologically human, in the main, and it is not good for the human body to be in pain. I don’t mean a few normal aches.” His voice turned stern, his words clipped. “You may be blocking the pain right now, but I assure you, your body is reacting all the same. It’s not healthy. It’s not safe.”

“You’re not injecting me with anything. Stitch me up without it. I’m not going to twitch. I don’t feel anything. I haven’t for days.”

“Addison.”

“Those are my terms.”

“Kynan, I’ll need you to hold her down.”

“No.”

Both of them looked at her, and she saw Harsh’s determination. Felt it. She backed away from the table and kept going until she hit the wall. “No. I don’t care if you think you’re saving my life. No. I’d rather live with the scar.” Panic choked her, and with that loss of calm came memories of what had been done to her. She was right back in that room, alone, immobilized, her physical and mental integrity completely exploded.

“Calm down, honey.”

She shot a look at Kynan. “If you touch me, if you do anything to me, I will kill you dead. Both of you.”

She meant it. She’d never meant anymore more in her life.

Her chair, still on its side, spun in a circle.

9

H
arsh shot to his feet as everything threatened to go to hell. Kynan’s magic went white hot. The spinning chair made a sound like fingernails down a chalkboard, and the air around Addison glittered with sparks of color. If her magic had been directed at him or Kynan it would have been a plain case of her life or theirs.

“Hold, Kynan. Can you get her under control?”

“Only if it’s okay to do some damage.”

“Not yet.” He tried to force a psychic connection and get her calmed down but she was impenetrable and careening out of control. Other than the coincidental connection she’d made with the chair gouging his hardwood floor, she had no focus for what she was doing, and that failure was the only thing keeping him from letting Kynan solve the problem.

Her magic spread through the room and with it came the darkness of her mental state, pressing in on them both. Kynan’s growl raised the hair on the back of his neck. She was not secure or safe. His fault. He knew that. His well-intended offer to alleviate her pain, combined with his unfortunate choice of words, had triggered her panicked state.

Kynan stayed hot, but kept his distance. He pointed at the chair. “Awesome. Honey. Get a grip.” The edge to his words wasn’t helping. Fucking warlords. Get more than one in a room and everything went to hell. The chair levitated. Kynan didn’t often use the additional punch that came with his status, but he did now, and he was reminded just how much restraint he’d been showing before.

She and Harsh both reacted to Kynan’s compulsion, though at first all it did was raise the tension. He opened his mouth for the kill order, but Kynan moved in close enough to make Harsh think he’d come to the same conclusion.

“You have a responsibility now,” Kynan rapped out. Her attention shot to him. “Take control,” he said.

“I don’t—know how.” Her eyes turned white. Ice-blue flecks whipped through her pupils to her sclera. The edges of the chair distorted. Addison’s arms were at her sides, her hands pressed to the wall. The energy about to combust ramped down.

“Addison O’Henry.” He made himself as vanilla as possible. His eyes locked with hers, and just like that they were connected, and it was an ugly place to be. “No shot,” he said. “No anesthetic. No one’s going to hold you down or do anything you don’t agree to. We’ll find another way.”

She nodded.

“Give me your hand. The other one.”

She stuck out her uninjured hand, and he set his fingers on hers. She clenched her fingers around his. The chair spun slower. Not much. Not enough. But some. “I don’t know how to make it stop.”

“How about,” he said, “you think about turning that chair into sawdust?”

“It’ll get in our eyes.”

“I’ll take care of that. You take care of the chair.”

She squeezed his hand harder and did as he asked. At the same time, he dampened the area around the chair so the detritus wouldn’t end up spinning through the air like a million tiny missiles. There was a soft
whump
, and the chair stopped moving. Two seconds later, there was nothing but a pile of ashes on the floor. Whether she understood what she was doing or not, the flare of magic from her diminished and with that diminution, the tension in the room plummeted.

“Thank you,” Harsh said.

She stood there, back pressed to the wall with her gaunt frame and pale eyes. She was bald. Jesus Christ, Infante had tried to take her mageheld and gotten far enough to shave her head, and he knew, because it had been done to him and he had, over the years of his enslavement, seen it done to others. The victim was restrained. The things a mage did to complete an enslavement had to happen quickly so the process tended to be especially brutal. His connection with her had been enough for him to know that for her, the brutality had continued even after the failed attempt to enslave her.

She said, “That’s not sawdust.”

“No,” Harsh said. “But ashes will do.”

Kynan laughed. “Awesome, what you did is a lot harder than turning a chair into sawdust.”

“I was thinking of sawdust.”

“Sit down.” Harsh sighed. “I’d really like to see what we can do about your arm. Please?”

“He drugged me.” The words burst out of her, so plaintive, so infused with her human-based understanding of the world. “Infante had me drugged, and those men held me down.”

“I understand.” He returned the hypodermic to the box and set it out of reach on the far counter. He walked to another of the chairs and used the sole of his bare foot to push it closer to his. He sat on his chair. “No anesthesia. Now, will you let me stitch your arm before it heals that way?”

“No shot.”

“No shot.”

With apparent reluctance, she sat. One of her legs quivered.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded.

“You, Kynan?”

“Fine.” His mouth tensed. “Her, I’m not so sure about. If she hurls I’m not cleaning it up.”

Fucking warlords. “All right then, Addison. Please don’t move while I have a needle in my hands.” Already he was planning his strategy for repairing her wound, seeing the edges and interior layers, where and how he would stitch given that she was showing signs of accelerated healing. Her protein-rich meal had done what he’d hoped, which was give her body fuel that could be diverted to repairing her injuries. “You’ll have a scar, I don’t think there’s any avoiding that.”

“I don’t care.”

“You might want to look away.”

She met his gaze head on, and he admired that. “I like to know what’s happening to me.”

“No problem.” He shrugged and went to work. She never took her eyes off her forearm, and not once did she twitch or wince. He did not like that. No human in her situation ought to have that kind of resistance to pain. Halfway through the process, Kynan’s phone beeped with a text. A few seconds later, so did Harsh’s. Kynan dug out his phone to check. He put away the device. “Paisley’s ten minutes away.”

“Excellent.” He ended up taking eight stitches in the middle of the gash and gluing the remainder at either edge. She didn’t flinch even once. He did the post-surgical cleanup, disinfected as a matter of habit, and got her bandaged up. By the time he was done, Paisley knocked on the back door and let herself in.

“Harsh.” She pressed three fingers to her forehead and bowed in Kynan’s direction. Her dark red hair swept over one shoulder. “Warlord.”

Harsh left the table to give her a quick hug. He admired all the humans who’d ended up sworn to Nikodemus, but he had a soft spot for Paisley. They all did. The kin owed her more than any of them could ever repay. “Thank you for coming.”

Kynan stayed where he was, but he smiled at Paisley without his usual smirk. “When are you leaving Iskander for me?”

“Sorry.” She laughed. “You don’t think Emily would mind?”

“It’s not like that with us.” Odd the way his answer came so quickly. The warlord’s relationship with Emily had been unexpected to say the least. Kynan didn’t do relationships, but out of nowhere, he’d stepped in to help with Emily’s children. From what Harsh had heard and seen, Kynan was more of a father to them than their biological father would ever have been.

“Paisley.” Harsh finished the last of the clean up and dumped the waste into the garbage. “This is Addison O’Henry. Addison, Paisley Nichols.”

Paisley nodded and took the measure of Addison in that quiet way she had. “Nice to meet you.”

“Hello.”

Paisley looked to him, head cocked because she knew what that shaved head meant. There was a moment of silence while Paisley took in the details of Addison’s physical condition. She shook her head. “You don’t need me.”

The magekind had learned how to ritually murder a demon in order to take on its magic and life energy with the result that the mage not only increased his power, he extended his life by anywhere from a few months to a year or more. Paisley, it turned out, had the unique ability to hear the screams of the murdered demon’s psychic existence, trapped inside the mage. She not only heard the screams, she could take back those lives. The process was safest, of course, when there was another demon present to ensure those lives returned to psychic peace, so her involvement with Iskander was a blessing for them all.

“Are you sure?”

“She’s not a screamer.”

“What does that mean?” Addison crossed her arms across her chest. Her irises remained white with tendrils of pale-blue moving through them. “Not a screamer.”

Paisley walked to her and held out a hand. When Addison didn’t acknowledge the offer of contact, she let her hand fall to her side. “You remind me a lot of Kynan—”

“You’re kidding me, right?” She looked at Kynan like she was expecting him to be offended, too. For about ten seconds, the warlord displayed a rare diplomacy. It didn’t last.

“Awesome, honey, we’re practically twins.” Kynan had a way of smiling that could terrify the hardiest soul. He was doing that now, and Harsh wondered if he needed to keep a closer eye on him. For all that Kynan was at least loosely involved with a witch, he had an unpleasant past, and there was just no telling when or how all that messed up past would result in unfortunate actions in the present.

“We are not.”

“You can swear up one side and down the other that the sky is green,” Kynan said. “That doesn’t make it true.”

“Will someone tell me what that means?” She looked from Paisley, to Kynan, to Harsh.

Paisley shook her head and answered Addison’s question. “That’s not my area. One of them can explain it a lot better than I can.”

“What is your area, or am I allowed to ask?”

Harsh said, “She doesn’t know much about us, Paisley. Or Nikodemus or what you do.”

“Well.” Paisley nodded. “That’s an interesting situation.”

“Please don’t talk about me as if I’m not here.”

Once again, Paisley looked to Harsh for guidance. He shook his head. “I think,” he said, “that what is relevant right now is that Nikodemus does not tolerate what Infante did to you. Nor does he tolerate what Infante did to get where he is. Not anymore and that’s where Paisley comes in.”

Harsh explained Paisley’s gifts as succinctly as he could. She had been, he told her, with the team that went out to the compound. Infante was no longer a screamer, a fact Paisley confirmed. When he finished, Addison said, “You said I’m not a screamer.”

“That’s right.”

“And that means there’s no demon trapped here.” She tapped the word Princess on her shirt. “Screaming to get out.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“But you can take screamers and release them.”

Paisley nodded. “I can.”

“Do you have to hear them? It only works if you hear them? Have you tried when you can’t hear anything?”

“It doesn’t work that way. I can take back the screamers because they’re not integrated with wherever they’re trapped. They’re suffering, and that’s not right, and I don’t have any problem with putting a stop to that. But, I’m sorry, whatever happened to you, there’s nothing I can separate from you.”

She put her palms on the table and leaned toward Paisley, white eyes wide and intent on the other woman. “I didn’t want this. To end up like this.”

“I can’t help you.” Paisley shrugged, and looked from Addison to Harsh. “Maybe Nikodemus can help. I can’t.”

“Thank you, Paisley,” Harsh said. He was disappointed. And not. If she wasn’t a screamer, then the theory that Bejar had sought the safest, closest available container once the killing ritual went wrong was the only set of facts that explained how Addison had ended up like this. “I appreciate you coming all the way here.”

“No problem.” Paisley leaned in and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Take care.”

“Tell Iskander I said hello.”