My Darkest Passion (26 page)

Harsh struggled to sit up, and she curled an arm around the back of his neck, moving in close, keeping physical contact. She whispered, “Only until we get you back to Nikodemus.”

The words of the oath, she’d been told, didn’t matter so much as the intent behind them. The bond would shape itself to the moment, to the warlord and demon involved. Between them, they got the words done and the magic behind them grew in her, took root. Already, Harsh was a bigger presence in her head.

The other demon leaned in when it was time for her to offer her blood to Harsh, anticipating the difficulty imposed by her having only one form and by Harsh outweighing her by something like a hundred pounds. He used the side of a preternaturally sharp nail to score the inside of her wrist. She lifted her hand and met Harsh’s eyes.

“Your choice.” She blocked off every bit of her fear that he’d say no, or that she’d made a mistake doing this. Her need for him to complete the oath rolled through her, but she walled that off. This was his life. His. Whatever happened next had to be his decision.

The moment Harsh’s mouth closed over her skin, her skin went hot. Her blood went to full boil. He gripped her wrist and her fevered response to the contact was better than sex.

When he drew away at last, he still held her arm. Eyes on her, he flicked his tongue across the nick in her skin. Closing the loop was easy. She swiped a finger through the blood that covered him and licked away the wet.

The bond between warlord and demon locked into place, and she no longer had to force the mental link. It was there. Easy. She felt a deep and violent triumph. He was hers, and she would die protecting him.

Hers
.

She continued to keep his other magic veiled from the former magehelds. Until she understood more about that, she wasn’t going to open either of them up to trouble.

The dark-skinned demon touched her shoulder and broke her concentration on Harsh. “Well done, warlord.”

“Thanks.” She scanned the slope. Only three of the former magehelds remained. The rest had vanished into the dark. Those three moved closer. Carefully. No longer running, not howling. Not compelled by any will but their own. They stopped in front of her and each one touched his fingers to his bowed forehead.

The demon with her picked up Harsh and headed down the slope. The others followed, but two split off and trotted downslope ahead of them, silent as the grave. Addison located her bag and Harsh’s and slung them across her chest. Then she obliterated what was left of her car. Satisfied with the result, she trotted after the others.

Harsh stayed present in her head but the sensation settled down and stopped being such a distraction that she couldn’t think. Kynan had also taught her how to cover her tracks, but like everything else tonight, this was the first time she had to do it when lives depended on her not being careless.

Just her luck, their tracks, magical and physical, were a hot, sloppy, bloody mess. So many of them to hide. So much magic. More blood than could possibly be safe for anyone to lose. She did the best she could. Where she had to, she burned the ground and the residue of their passing. She was leaving a physical trail, but as long as the magical one was obliterated she was happy. Anything that would make it harder to follow them once they reached the road was good enough.

It was strange to be walking in silence with men who not long ago had been trying to kill her and Harsh. Not to mention how she was hyper-reactive to Harsh. The others, too, but Harsh most of all. Her skin shuddered and rippled with awareness of them, and she kept getting these urges to stride past them and take the lead. That’s where she belonged. Leading them. Making sure they didn’t run into something they couldn’t handle. Not following. It pissed her off, bringing up the rear. Even though it was necessary. Even though she recognized how wild her reaction was, and even though she understood this was an irretrievable step into a world she’d denied for the last year and a half of her life.

As they made their way down the slope, Harsh flickered in and out of her awareness, sometimes as kin, other times as magekind. Unfamiliar reactions and emotions bombarded her; a ferocious desire to be acknowledged, to have each and every one of these kin kneel and swear fealty.

A dark sedan and a white van with blacked-out windows waited at the side of the road. One of the kin who’d gone on ahead got out of the sedan. His attention slid to the man holding Harsh, then to her. He bowed his head and pressed three fingers to his forehead, and her need to have his loyalty flashed hot. “Warlord.”

The correct response to that couldn’t possibly be a demand for his fealty. She settled for a nod. But she wanted his oath. Now that she’d done it once, it was shocking how badly she wanted it again.

With an acid grin, he handed over the keys. “Lucky the mages brought two cars.”

The one carrying Harsh maneuvered him into the front passenger seat of the sedan. Harsh was conscious, but still bleeding, and his mental status remained unsettled. She threw their bags in the back and got behind the wheel. A BMW so clean everything sparkled. The stink of mages clung to everything.

She nodded to the dark-skinned demon. He’d stayed at the side of the road. “I owe you for this.” She stuck out her hand. Maybe she didn’t understand the protocol but she knew when she needed to say
thank you
. “Addison O’Henry. If you ever need anything, let me know. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

Their fingers touched. She wanted his oath. All of theirs. She shut that away, and he nodded. Just once. “Moeletsi Tau.”

“Thank you, Moeletsi.”

He walked to the van and got in with the others.

She punched the door lock, then went through the glove compartment and any other place there might be documents it would be better not to have with them. The car was registered to
BFM Enterprises
. She found a black wallet underneath the passenger seat with two hundred twenty dollars and Infante’s driver’s license in it.

“Fuck you,” she said. She understood what Kynan had meant about wishing he’d been able to kill Magellan slowly. She didn’t much like that if she’d known which one of the mages was Infante, she would have wanted to find a way to make his death a painful one. She fished out the money and incinerated the rest.

Nothing else worth keeping turned up. What a long, fucked up evening.
Giuseppe Infante was dead
. The man who haunted her was dead and now she sat here more alive than she’d ever been. There was no time to process what that meant except that she was happy and probably shouldn’t be.

She bowed her head to the steering wheel until she had herself in hand. Once again, she pushed everything away but what she needed to accomplish right now, which was to get Harsh Marit the hell out of San Diego before the other mages found them.

She checked the controls of the car. Lights. Radio. Wipers and the rest. A full tank of gas meant they were getting out now. Taking Harsh to a hospital was out of the question, unfortunately. There was nothing human medicine could do for him that wouldn’t, sooner or later, cause more problems than was safe for anyone, and that was if she could think up a plausible explanation for why his chest looked like he’d lost a fight with a polar bear.

While she drove, she continued drawing away his pain. She got used to that with astonishing ease and before long, she didn’t even have to think about it. She passed Los Angeles sooner than she expected. At this hour, she was riding the edge of the morning commute. Maintaining an even seventy miles per hour was easy as pie in this car. Heck, ninety in this monster felt like forty-five in her heap of junk. Total junk, now.

For a while, Harsh was so subtle a presence in her head that she could almost forget about the oath between them. It wasn’t just her keeping him separated from his pain, and that was good. He was drawing energy from her, now. The more resources invested in getting him healed, the better.

An hour later, he was somewhat improved. Her awareness of him was sharper, too. His head rested on the seat back, and his eyes were closed, but he was awake and aware enough to mouth off if he wanted to. So, yes. Not dying. Improving. Slowly. She continued to get a strong sense of magekind from him. “You okay?”

“Better than I was.”

He was telling the truth, and she
knew
that. “This is creepy.”

“You’ll get used to it, warlord.”

“Any day now.” She let everything settle down and concentrated on driving. She stayed relaxed until a white van appeared in the rear view mirror.

28

H
er heart wouldn’t stop pounding, not even when she concentrated on regulating her breathing and ramping down her high-energy state.

“What is it?” Harsh asked.

“Nothing to worry about.”

“Hardly.” His eyes stayed closed, and he was still slouched against his seat.

“Fine. There’s a white van behind us.”

“I see no reason for concern. There’s more than one white van in the world.”

“Think back a few hours. The occupants of a white van just like that were trying to kill us.”

“They are free now, those kin. They can go anywhere they want.”

“Exactly. So why follow us? If they wanted to come with, they could have asked.”

“They may not have decided until recently.”

“I don’t like it.”

“If they mean you harm, we’ll deal with that when the time comes.”

“I’m not keen on going off another bridge.”

“On that we agree.”

She took the next exit and ended up in a mostly empty mall parking lot. The few people here were normal. No magekind. No demonkind. She parked behind a building where she could watch for white vans on the freeway.

It occurred to her that she could open herself more, expand her senses the way Kynan had taught her. About now, she wished she’d complained less and worked harder because none of this was as easy as it had seemed back then.

“I was about to suggest you try that,” Harsh said.

“I got it.” She squeezed the steering wheel. After she worked out how and what information to filter out, she recognized the particular resonance of Infante’s African mageheld. Former mageheld. Moeletsi Tau. Friendlies, she told herself. The van was full of friendlies. The mages who’d once enslaved those demons were dead. If any thing, the occupants of the van ought to be grateful, but what the hell did she know?

She left the wider net in place and settled in to wait. Her link with Harsh was stronger than it had been a couple hours ago. He wasn’t looking or feeling to her quite as dead to the world, but he wasn’t his usual self yet, either. Far from it, actually.

Five minutes later, the skin up and down her arms and along the back of her neck rippled with awareness. Five minutes after that, a white van appeared on the same freeway off ramp she’d taken. “Shit.”

Harsh straightened and put a hand on the dashboard.

“Company,” she said.

“Ah.”

“What the hell do they want?”

“Food.” He wasn’t very worked up about this. “Something to drink. They’ll be needing it by now.”

“What does that mean?” She frowned at him. “Does that mean you need food?”

The van dropped from site while it navigated the city streets, but she got a visual again when it pulled into the parking lot. It stopped several yards distant. One of the occupants went into a nearby fast food place. A second one got out and headed for a coffee shop.

He gave her a dry smile. “Protein would be welcome.”

Protein. Right. She should have thought of that on her own. There was another burger place a little further away. They could go there. She reached for the key, prepared to turn it. “Cheeseburger okay with you?”

“Several, please.”

“Okay.” She hadn’t yet started the car when Moeletsi Tau came around the corner, heading for their car. He walked easily, carrying a white paper bag, a plastic bag and a paper cup from a coffee shop. No lie, she got a surge of heat again, the longing for his oath of fealty. Because, Tau? He would be worth having on her side. She gave a rueful smile at the thought. She was ready to build her own little cult, wasn’t she? “What the hell does he want?”

“No need to panic,” Harsh said.

“Easy for you to say.” But she was grateful for his experience. Knowing he wasn’t very concerned made a big difference.

“I am certain, by the way, that if I am wrong and he does intend to cause trouble, you will deal with it handily.” He dipped his head a little to get a look outside her window. “Ask him if he’s from one of the African deserts.”

“What?” She looked away from Tau. “Listen. There’s you two people I trust in a situation like this: Kynan and you. Kynan’s not here, and I’m not keen on putting you in danger again. So you better be damn sure.”

“If he was going to cause trouble, he would have done so already.”

Tau arrived at the car and gestured at the closed window.

Addison stared at his hands. “He has coffee. I would kill for a cup of coffee.”

“Talk to him. If he gives you trouble, do the needful.”

“Whatever the hell that means.”

“Precisely.”

She lowered the window, but she was ready for anything. “Yeah?”

Tau touched three fingers to his forehead then held up the plastic bag. It was full of something heavy. The smell of fast food wafted through the car, and her stomach reminded her she was ravenous. Tau handed her the paper bag. “He needs meat.”

“Thank you.” She took the bag. Boy, she did want to touch him, because if she did, he might decide to join her. Thoughts like that made her feel guilty. She wondered if she could say thank you when saying the words felt a conflict of interest. She gave the bag to Harsh. “That’s nice of you. Thoughtful.” She cleared her throat. “Thank you.”

Tau handed over the plastic bag, the white paper bag, and the coffee. “For you.”

“Oh, God, you are my favorite.” She dug in her purse for money but when she came up with two twenties, he just pressed his fingers to his forehead and walked off in the direction of the van. She watched him, and told herself his obeisance was no big deal. It was, though. She looked to Harsh. “That went pretty well, don’t you think?”