My Darkest Passion (24 page)

“I don’t think we should use my ATM. Am I wrong that they can track that kind of thing?”

“We should assume they can. But there are other ways to get what we need.”

“Like stealing? I don’t steal stuff. Or do you mean bending people’s wills?” She shook her head. “That bothers me. A lot. I don’t want to do that. I don’t think either of us should be doing that.”

He tried to stretch his legs and couldn’t get his knees unbent. “I’m told that once upon a time, it’s how the demonkind lived among humans. We were gods to you puny humans.”

“Fuck you. I’m no puny human.”

Did she have any idea how much she sounded like Kynan? “Of course not, warlord.”

“Don’t call me that. This isn’t once upon a time, you know.”

“No. It’s not.” He stared out the window and tapped his fingers on the glass.

“That’s annoying.”

“So is not having my phone.”

“Sorry about the technology withdrawal.”

“This thing—” He held up her phone. “Hardly deserves the name
phone
. This isn’t even a recent version of the OS. You can’t do anything with it.”

“You can find the nearest ATM that will give you lots of cash. What time is the flight you booked?”

“10:10 a.m. tomorrow.”

She tapped a finger on the steering wheel. “You should check into one of the airport hotels. Get cash there. Someplace cheap so we don’t burn through our money too fast. We shop and then we leave. One of those park and fly deal things.”

“No.”

“Why not? There’s one at every airport motel practically.”

“I don’t stay at hotels with less than three stars.”

She rolled her eyes. “Could you be any more of an old man? Jeez, Harsh. Pick something that doesn’t offend you, and tell me how to get there.”

Forty minutes later, he was registered at a Sheraton with four hundred dollars in cash, a duffle with a change of clothes, and a pair of cheap flip flops. They were not, however, at the hotel enjoying room service or a soak in the spa. They were at some mall shop, and he was waiting by the doors while Addison waited in a longer checkout line than ought to be possible. Who the hell shopped at this time of night?

He was no longer in his default physical form. They’d be too easily noticed, the two of them, if he were. Even in California and wearing a five thousand dollar suit, his complexion got him looks. Particularly if he was with someone as white-American as Addison O’Henry. Most people didn’t care or didn’t realize they cared. The ones who did, though, they cared a lot. Anyone who saw him would wonder about the odd pairing. Therefore, he looked like a sixty year old man, complete with thinning hair.

She chatted with the woman behind her, and they were laughing about something. He felt a tug in his chest when she smiled at whatever the other woman had just said. You’d think she was just a normal, happy young woman. He rubbed his chest, unsettled by the loss of his bond with Nikodemus, but more bothered, now, by the pull of Addison’s power.

She got through the line, and they walked back to the car. He took care to match his stride with his appearance, but once they were back in the car, he returned to his default form. No sense leaving a trail the greenest tracker could follow.

They were on the Cabrillo Bridge when their luck ran out. An SUV sped up behind them, and they both mistook the aggression for the driver’s annoyance that her car was slow. Until the SUV slammed into the back of Addison’s car. The trunk popped up, badly dented. Somehow, she managed to keep control of her heap of junk.

“Shit,” Addison said. She squeezed the steering wheel so hard her knuckles turned white. “This is going to be hell on the insurance.”

There was a psychic bump behind that collision. Big enough to hurt. The car shuddered. The back end slid, then the car accelerated without the engine protesting. They hit the railing, pushed by a burst of magic that came too hard and too fast to block. In front of them, the barrier dissolved.

They plunged off the bridge.

26

T
he moment the car went airborne, Harsh got hit by the same icy-cold energy he’d felt when he was taken mageheld. This time, it didn’t work. Couldnt. Not on him. His bond with Carson prevented that, the same way it prevented all the demons Carson had severed from being taken mageheld again. But without his oath to Nikodemus, the attempt was enough to do him damage.

Whoever was doing this tried again. The mage couldn’t possibly succeed from this distance, but the point, no doubt, was to distract and disable, and that was working. He grabbed the dashboard as his chest tore with pain. He flashed out of his physical form. Not intended. His internal wards dissolved, and the fetid stink of the magic he kept locked away oozed through him. There was nothing he could do to stop the contamination. Nothing.

A different awareness blasted him, twisted, flipped, and folded over as the consciousness that came with being magekind went to war with the only magic he’d ever accepted.

…
the car plunged
…

Without a physical body, gravity did not act on him. Temperature ceased to exist. Color was a fading memory. Time stretched and warped and had no effect on him whatever. If this continued, he was going to end up vulnerable to a mage’s ability to absorb a demon’s life force. Worse than death. Worse, even, than being mageheld. With no physical manifestation, an indwell was the only thing that would keep him intact.

…
and tipped front-end down
…

Addison drew him because she was human and female and, under certain conditions, capable of bearing his offspring. Demonkind like him, but also a warlord and more than strong enough to protect him.

…
plummeting
…

—the ooze of magekind—

She was a warlord and warlords were rare these days. So rare. How could a mage not want control of that? How could he not want that to belong to him?

During the eon that passed while the car hurtled off the bridge, the draw of the power coming from Addison went from present to uncomfortable to a full-on flex around their immediate location that both gave him boundaries and brought the physical world into focus. Whatever mage was trying to take him got cut off.

The underside of the car smashed against the top of a tree, then another. Simple physics predicted that the car should have flipped, end over end. It should have. And did not. Streaks of color streamed past the windows. Sparks sizzled around them and zinged off the exterior of the car.

Her piece of shit car landed. Hard. On all four wheels. The thud and shriek of the impact deafened him, but it was her magic that kept the vehicle intact and both of them alive. If he were in physical form, he would feel some emotion. Fear? Or would he be amused?

In the physical world, the hood of the car twisted and flew up. Her hands gripped the steering wheel. Her seatbelt locked, but she didn’t whiplash at the slam of the landing. He could float like this forever. Unbound. Ungrounded. Losing the ability to think of himself as an entity discrete from the rest of the world. She glittered in his consciousness. Bright. So bright.

The right side of the vehicle jolted downward and ended up listing to his left. One of the headlights pointed skyward.

—
Harsh
—

The option of retaking physical form seemed a foolish thing to consider. His consciousness stretched out.

Harsh?

Magic flared again, filled the space around them. Called to him.

Gravity pulled the car farther downslope until it jammed against a tree trunk, which at least halted the slide to the street below. He snapped back to human form. Unharmed. Alert. Aware. Hot. His seatbelt was behind him, still locked. His legs were jammed up in a space that wasn’t big enough for him in this form. Physically, he was uninjured. But the magic he denied wasn’t blocked off anymore. It coated everything, leaking into the cracks of his being, an acid trickle, then a stream that could not be contained. There was a reason he kept that part of him locked away tight, and a reason he never took a non-physical form.

While he tried to wall off that source of magic and make himself whole again, Addison fist pumped and whooped. “Oh, hell, yes. Who’s the bad ass here?”

Magic seared the air around him. All the hair on his body lifted, sizzled. He was electrified, and that jolt through him came from her. From her magic, and his awareness of that in a way he should not be. Not as fellow demonkind, but a recognition of her as other. Dangerous. Demonkind.

Jesus, what the magekind felt around demons was disturbing.

Compelling.

Alluring.

She shut off the car, and whooped again.

He concentrated on the familiar. The sound of Addison’s voice. Her scent. Her magic. His bond to Carson. Memories of Iskander and his sister. Kynan enslaved and Kynan free. Where his oath to Nikodemus ought to be was…nothing. A blank. His oath had been exploded from his body, and around the edges of that realization was his vivid recollection of an arc of red against green. Blood.

Him killing a mageheld.

Infante’s grin turning to rage when he found that Harsh, as with any demon severed from slavery by Carson Phillips, was impervious to attempts to retake him. That fucker Infante had tried to take him mageheld. In the aftermath of that failure, he’d killed one of Infante’s magehelds and he’d have killed Infante, too, if he’d been mentally whole. But he hadn’t been. He was lucky the destruction of his oath to Nikodemus hadn’t killed him outright.

The only sound now came from distant traffic, the ticking engine, and falling debris. He took stock of their immediate situation. The car frame on his side was mangled to the point where a human in the passenger seat would have been seriously injured, if not killed outright. His door wouldn’t budge. A quick look told him her door was not as twisted, but since that side of the car was against the tree trunk, there wasn’t much hope of getting out that way.

“Nice work.” He didn’t realize he’d touched his fingers to his forehead until after he’d done it.

She didn’t notice. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. You?”

“Peachy.” She released her seatbelt and twisted to look out the back window. The front of the car faced away from the bridge. He contorted himself to look, too. At some point the back window had shattered. The frame was bent, top, side, and bottom. But they had a view of three figures hurtling off the bridge several yards to the right of where the car had come to rest.

Magehelds.

Several, he realized, had already landed and were headed toward them, dodging through trees and underbrush. He was too big to wriggle out through the back, not with the way the top of the car was smashed. He put a hand on the windshield and sent a pulse through it. The remaining glass spider-webbed, and he kicked out the window, then aimed another hard kick at the hood.

Metal shrieked, but the hood went down enough for him to climb out. Meanwhile, Addison threw their bags through the blown-out back window and went out that way.

At least a dozen magehelds worked their way toward the car; some from the up-slope direction, others from road at the bottom of the slope. Not all of them were in human form. Two of them split off on a sideways trajectory, obviously to flank them during the coming fight. In the next few seconds, he and Addison would be cut off from the escape route to the road that ran under the bridge and through the park below.

Far above them on the high, narrow bridge, a mage stood at the break in the suicide barrier. There were two others, out of sight. All three drew on their magic, and he reacted to that not as a demon but as a mage, and the response repelled him even as he understood they were preventing a traffic snarl at the place where Addison’s car had gone over. Any emergency response from humans would be inconvenient and dangerous for all involved.

Harsh pulled as much magic through him as he could, tainted though it was, and took up position to Addison’s right, arms at his sides. In his current state, he recognized those three on the bridge as kindred, and they weren’t. They were the natural enemy of his kind; not brethren. Never that. He and others like him had suffered too much at their hands. They wanted to kill him and everyone like him.

He was more than ready to return the favor.

“Infante.” Addison spat the name. “God, that asshole frosts me.”

Without thinking, he opened himself to her because that’s what the kin did when they were under attack; they made and kept connections going. They shared power, and information, and they supported decisions made by a warlord. The kin were stronger together than apart.

His psychic link with Addison clicked into place; two-way. All that power flowing between them was like mainlining pure joy. The mage standing on the bridge raised his arms and leapt off the edge of the bridge. Two watching from the bridge, one mage on the ground, directing the magehelds.

One of the magehelds racing toward them was Infante’s big African. Beside him, Addison muttered something and then she went white hot to him and that drove home why the magekind called them hotbloods.

Addison sent out a surge of psychic energy that raced away from them. The first of the magehelds reached them, but Harsh knew where the demon was because that oily mage-born magic loose in him vibrated with awareness. He turned and punched, a physical blow and a psychic one. The mageheld was dead before it hit the ground. Quickly, he sent the magic home, safe from being stolen by one of the mages on the bridge.

She stared at him. “What the hell?”

If his other magic was half as distracting to her as it was to him, they weren’t going to get out of this with their freedom or their lives, but he had no idea how to get it under control just now, and besides, if it meant he’d know when a mageheld was trying to ambush them, maybe it was worth it. They were outnumbered, and those mages didn’t give a shit how many magehelds died.

Addison did something and two seconds later, his awareness of the mage on the ground winked out. One minute there, the next: gone. He didn’t need to look at her to know she was responsible, despite their distance from the mage. On the upward slope, four of the magehelds stopped. Two of them collapsed. Seconds later, four new free kin hooked into their psychic connection because she hadn’t just taken a mage out of commission, she’d fucking killed him.