My Darkest Passion (4 page)

“I can help you.” Infante wiggled his fingers at Harsh’s midsection. “With your little problem.”

“No, thank you.”

He laughed. “So what if you didn’t pass the test when you were three? Oh, come off it. You aren’t one of the ancient ones like that monster you brought with you. You grew up human. Don’t deny you were tested.”

The magekind tested all their children for magical ability at the age of three. The ones who failed were abandoned or adopted out. Harsh had been adopted.

“We’re more open minded about freaks like you these days. In fact, we have a lot in common.”

“I am not one of you.”

Infante stopped grinning. “Some demon raped your mother, and you’re on their side? You ought to be protecting humans from that shit. You ought to cut yourself loose from these hotblood bastards and accept what you are.”

“Respectfully, I decline.”

“Like I said, I can help you.”

“No thank you.” He whirled and headed for the car.

“Traitor.”

The word followed Harsh all the way to the car. Kynan, standing with one arm on the roof and the other on the open driver’s-side door, lifted a hand for the keys. Harsh threw the fob at him and slid into the back seat with the once again unconscious woman.

He wondered if she would still be alive tomorrow.

4

T
wo of Infante’s magehelds split off and trotted alongside them, keeping pace as Kynan headed the Mercedes down the long driveway that lead to a one-lane rural road.

If Addison O’Henry were a normal human, Harsh would be telling Kynan to use his lead foot to get her to a hospital. But she wasn’t. He was convinced she wasn’t a witch, and that meant, as was so often the case when the human and the demonic collided like this, her chance of survival hovered between fifty percent and zero. Infante might get his wish. He wondered if she had family. She must. They’d want to know what happened to her.

It was a good thing they weren’t in a hurry because every now and then one or the other of the two magehelds strayed in front of them. On purpose. The game of chicken got tiresome. After the fifth near-collision Kynan hit the brakes and threw the car into park.

“Just get us out of here,” Harsh said even though he knew Kynan wasn’t listening. Good advice rolled right off him. The woman moaned and twitched several times, no doubt reacting at a psychic level to Kynan’s surge of magic. There weren’t many ways a human ended up with what amounted to a demon’s life force. No matter what Infante had done, few of those reasons boded well for her continued existence.

“Fuck this shit.” Kynan pushed his door open and got out.

“Kynan—” Too late. The warlord was out of sight.

Harsh couldn’t see what happened, but the sizzle up and down his arms was explanation enough. Still laid out on the seat, Addison shivered, and astonishingly, her magic—legitimately hers or not—flared. The air inside the car pulsed once. A chasm of silence followed during which he felt a quivering response from her that didn’t square with her condition. A shower of pale sparks appeared in the air around them; something else she should not have been able to do.

Thirty seconds later Kynan slid back into the driver’s seat. He torqued his upper body so he could look at the woman. “What the fuck, Harsh?”

“I thought you had her locked down.”

“I did.”

They exchanged annoyed glances. “It’s not like you to be so careless.”

“I wasn’t careless.” Kynan stretched out a hand and touched a finger to her forehead. She flailed the arm that wasn’t trapped underneath her, but then her magic ramped down to negligible levels. “That should hold her for a while.”

“Are those magehelds dead?”

“They shouldn’t have been harassing us.” He turned and plopped back onto the seat, facing forward this time. He shut the door and blasted the air conditioning. While he drove, he stretched an arm along the passenger seat. “I’m starving. Can we stop somewhere along the way?”

“No.”

“Fuck you.”

Harsh did another quick check of her vitals. Same reedy pulse and clammy, fevered skin. Same constellation of bites and bruises that told an unpleasant story.

From the driver’s seat, Kynan said what Harsh was thinking. “Hundred bucks says two weeks ago she was nothing but pure vanilla human.”

Harsh dug out his phone headset. “Not taking that bet.”

“Damn.”

He found the number he needed and initiated the call. Somewhere in Tiburon, some hundred miles south of where they were now, Nikodemus picked up. “Talk to me.”

“We’re leaving Bodega Bay.”

“In what condition?”

“As we found it.” He’d never once regretted his oath of fealty to Nikodemus. Given he’d spent most of the last few years of his life on continents other than North America, that was saying something. “We’re heading to the farmhouse with the woman.”

“In what condition?”

“Hard to say.” He glanced at Addison, out cold and still, magically speaking, an incoherent mess. “Not good.”

“Get it over with. Tell Kynan to terminate her, and we’re done.”

They’d both known coming here that termination, if it was necessary, would fall to Kynan. Harsh didn’t envy him his role as executioner. Nor his own in sending anyone down that path. “That might not be appropriate,” Harsh said.

She twitched several times in succession, a reaction accompanied by more of her magic cycling up and then cutting off. Just when he thought she was going to seize, she went still. That Kynan had trouble keeping her locked down scared the shit out of him.

At the other end of his call, Nikodemus said, “You better not be wrong about that.”

He glanced at Addison again. “I may need Paisley.” He tugged his jacket so she was more decently covered. “Send a crew to Tomales to wait for my word. There are at least fifteen magehelds at the compound—”

“Thirteen,” Kynan said from the front seat.

“—thirteen, and Giuseppe Infante is an asshole. They’ll need Paisley if it goes down that way.”

“Noted.”

“I’ll call if I need her.”

“I’ll let her know you might get in touch.”

“On second thought, never mind. Just send her to the farmhouse once she’s done at Infante’s.”

“Will do.”

“Thanks.” He disconnected and slipped his phone into his front pocket.

They drove nearly forty-five minutes before there was any change in Addison’s status. Her eyes fluttered, and, a split second later, he felt her as more than human again. She moaned once, but he felt nothing to suggest a demon was fighting for control of her or that she was assimilating the life force of the demon she’d murdered. Allegedly murdered. She blinked several times, then focused on him. He set a light hand on her shoulder. She flinched, and that made his heart turn over, that her instinct was to react defensively.

“Where am I?” Her voice was dry and gravelly. She pushed herself upright, contorting to keep herself covered.

“Kynan, is there water up front? You’re in our car, Ms. O’Henry.” He accepted a bottle of water from Kynan. Harsh opened it and handed it to her. “Drink slowly.”

“Thanks.” Flecks of silver whirled through her blue-white irises then vanished. She felt so utterly human right now. And not.

While she drank, he continued. “We’re about fifteen minutes from a place where we can discuss what happened to you without interruption.”

She lowered the water bottle and let out a sharp breath. “An extraordinary rendition, huh?”

In the front seat, Kynan snorted.

She said, “Why don’t I find that funny?” She buttoned more of his coat and then fastened her seatbelt. There were bruises in a sea of spreading red high up on her thighs, too. “What day is it? The date, I mean.”

“The third.”

“Of?” Between sips of water, she stared out the window.

“October.”

She closed her eyes. “Only two weeks?”

“Since?”

“Since I was kidnapped.”

His heart banged against his ribs, and he and Kynan exchanged a glance in the rear view mirror. “Explain, please.”

Kynan whispered, “Shit.”

Still with her eyes closed, she leaned her head against the back of the seat. “Everyone probably thinks I’m dead.”

Harsh looked in the rearview mirror and met Kynan’s eyes again. If she had family, then most every possible explanation for her and her condition just went out the window.

“Do you have a phone I could borrow?” She straightened, eyes bright with incipient tears. “I want to call my mom.”

“Is she a witch?” Harsh asked.

“What?” She scrubbed her hands along her thighs. “Oh. You mean like you guys or Infante? No. She’s not. She must be out of her mind worrying about me. Dad, too. Please?”

He had a sinking feeling she might be what he feared. A young woman who didn’t know a damn thing about what had happened to her or why. “Are you married or otherwise in a relationship?”

She shook her head. Her eyes were huge, and he knew from what little he got from her psychically that she was barely holding it together. If what he suspected about her was true, that was more than understandable.

“Children?”

Again, she shook her head. The car climbed into the hills around Olompali and while they covered the final distance to the gravel lane that lead to the farmhouse, Harsh’s sense of doom lessened considerably as a few explanations occurred to him. Humans often dabbled in things they didn’t understand, and sometimes they got burned. He was leaning toward the conclusion that Addison O’Henry had dabbled and, out of ignorance, paid a terrible price.

Nikodemus would not insist on a sanction. Not for a human who hadn’t understood what she was doing was real.

Kynan brought the car around to the back of the house and parked inside the barn they used as a garage. Nobody said anything while they got out. Harsh kept a grip on her arm while Kynan grabbed the two overnight bags they’d brought along. When they were inside and the wards and proofing were set to keep out undesirables, Harsh let go of her arm and propelled her toward the living room with its view of sere hills.

In the middle of the room, she faced them, expression impassive. Her plastic bottle of water was empty, and she stared at it as if puzzled. She spotted the trash can in the corner and tossed it in. “Hey, three points.”

Nobody said anything. She licked her lips, and all of Harsh’s forebodings about what had happened to her came back full force.

“So.” She set her weight on one leg. Her voice remained scratchy. “Have I been rescued or have I jumped out of the frying pan into the fire?”

“I think that’s unlikely.”

“Unlikely that you’ll tell me?” She swallowed as if her throat hurt. “Unlikely that I’ve been rescued?”

“Unlikely that your situation here is worse than at Infante’s,” Harsh said.

“Yeah?” She shook her head. “Well, you aren’t human. Either one of you. You haven’t called the police. You didn’t take me to a hospital. And you’re not letting me call home.” She tipped her chin toward the front door. “You wouldn’t let me get very far if I walked out of here.”

“We need to know what happened.”

She smiled, but it was a sad and distant smile. “You want to know what happened to me? Fine.”

While they watched, she unbuttoned the jacket and shrugged it off. It hit the floor behind her. She slowly turned. Her body was a mass of old and new bruises, scrapes, and bite marks. A gash on the inside of her left arm needed stitches. Blood smeared the inside of her thigh.

Kynan spoke in a low voice, full of more venom than he’d heard from the warlord in quite some time. “What the fucking hell.”

What the hell
was obvious. Too many of her ribs showed, and under the grime her skin was sallow. At the compound, there had been so much going on, his assessment of her condition had been clinical. Confronted now with a map of bites and bruises, Harsh wished he’d killed Infante or let Kynan loose on the place.

But Kynan wasn’t done with his inopportune outburst. “What the fucking, effing hell, Harsh. You need to get on the phone with Nikodemus and take care of Infante right now.”

“In due course.”

“Now. She’s one of us now.”

Addison turned white. “I’m not one of you.”

“Awesome, honey,” Kynan said. “You sure as hell are, and the sooner you get used to that the better.”

“My name,” Harsh said in a quiet voice that belied his outrage that men like Giuseppe Infante existed, “is Harsh Marit.”

“I heard your names already.”

“Kynan Aijan and I work for the demon warlord Nikodemus. You are now officially in our custody.”

5

T
he one called Kynan peeled off his shirt and handed it to her. He was tall. Freakishly tall, because she had to crick her neck to look him in the eye. She blinked, confused when he went from what had to be seven feet tall to her size. His hand rested on her shoulder, only for a minute, but the contact pulled her into a vortex of unwelcome memories.

“Put it on,” he said. The part of her that knew he was being reasonable was overwhelmed by the rest of her. He was bigger than her, so much bigger, and he’d touched her when she wasn’t prepared.

“Don’t—” The word came out sharp enough to cut the air. She could hardly speak over the tears jamming up her throat, but she refused to cry. No way was she going to be weak in front of him. “—touch me. Don’t touch me.”

Kynan backed away. She clutched the shirt he handed to her and realized she was sitting. On the floor, and that was why he’d seemed so tall.
She was naked
. God, she was naked in front of total strangers. Male strangers. She scrambled to put on Kynan’s shirt and despite that she hated it was warm from his body, she was grateful that it covered her. All of her.

Harsh, the dark, agonizingly beautiful one, the calm one, held out a hand. “Would you like to sit?”

“Don’t touch me.” She yanked on the bottom of the borrowed shirt. “I don’t want to be touched.”

He nodded and withdrew to the couch. “Please tell us what happened to you. About how you ended up locked in Infante’s shed. Take your time.”