My Darkest Passion (5 page)

What the hell was safe to tell them? She didn’t have any idea what would get her out of this mess, if that was even possible, or what might get her in deeper. “They put me in there and did something so I couldn’t get out.”

“Thank you.” Harsh spoke without inflection or reaction, and she found that comforting. “If you could also tell us how and why you attempted to kill Giuseppe Infante, that would also be helpful.”

She felt the oddest tug on her insides. The sensation rolled through her and took root as a need to tell him everything he wanted to know. That tug was coming from Harsh. Why she believed that, she didn’t know, but she did. In the back of her head she was dead certain her compulsion to tell him everything was not an accident or a coincidence but the result of something she was being forced to feel. Her voice rose. “Whatever you’re doing, stop it.”

Harsh didn’t react, but the tug on her faded along with the almost painful desire to tell him everything. Kynan snorted. “Losing your touch?”

“Ms. O’Henry,” Harsh said. She wanted to sink into this man’s calmness, his beauty, and his lack of reaction to the chaos of all this. He was so much more restful than Kynan. Kynan burned hot, intense. Harsh was still and deep. She didn’t trust either one of them. “How long have you been dabbling in magic?”

She shook her head, baffled by the change in subject and not certain she understood the question. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Infante had his chance to explain himself at length.” Restful he might be, but just now Addison was brutally aware that Harsh Marit controlled her future, and that there might not be much more of it. “We’re offering you that same chance.”

She tilted her head. Harsh looked her in the eye, and one of those moments she’d been having since whatever the hell had been done to her out there started up. He could stare at her all he wanted, and she still wasn’t going to submit to his authority. At the same time, she understood that her reaction came from whatever was wrong with her now; from that part of her that was foreign.

Her bifurcated sense of reality took hold and she got lost in a struggle to reconcile the world she knew with the one she was living in right now. No one had magic. There wasn’t any such thing as demons. The two men in front of her were demons, and if she didn’t figure out how to deal with that, she wouldn’t live to tomorrow.

“Ms. O’Henry?”

Her eyes snapped to his. “Giuseppe Infante can go to hell.”

“This will be much simpler, and far more civilized, if you cooperate and tell us what happened to you. Otherwise, you will be given no choice, and that will not be pleasant for you.”

She knew what he meant, and if he hadn’t been so damn sure of himself she might have given in to the panic, because when a demon took over your will, there was no such thing as safe. But instead of panic, all she wanted was to make him understand she wasn’t going to submit. Ever. She locked away every last doubt and fear and concentrated on what mattered now. “I am done being forced to do anything.”

Harsh quirked one eyebrow, but that brooding look was back in his eyes. “You wouldn’t be the first human to get in over her head after discovering she has some small ability. It’s not a crime. It’s just unwise when you don’t have competent instruction. So, please. There’s no reason for you not to cooperate. When did you first start using magic?”

“Never.” She lifted her hands and breathed in through her nose, willing her panic away when her memories surged back. What Bejar had done to strip away every last protection she had. “I swear to you, until this happened, I thought magic was nothing but tricks and misdirection.”

Harsh crossed his legs and extended an arm along the top of the sofa. He tilted his head to the side. Light glinted off his hair in a way that made her realize just how black it was. Not just dark, but a deep, deep black. His eyes went from dark brown to yellow. Her throat closed off because there was just no way he was human. It didn’t matter how convincing the illusion.

“You want me to tell you what happened.”

“Yes.”

She leaned forward and then had to wait until the massive lump in her throat went away before she trusted herself to speak, and the only way that happened was if she shoved the whole mess into a mental closet and locked the door. “You know what? Not one second of one minute of the time I was at Infante’s was pleasant for me. Two weeks ago, I didn’t know who the hell he was. And now I’m here, and I don’t know who you are either. I do know you’re saying do whatever you say or you’ll force me. Well, forgive me, but no. I’m not going to roll over and let you scratch my belly just because you want me to. As far as I’m concerned, that makes you as bad as him.”

“Point conceded.” He lifted a hand. “Bear with me, please. I’m simplifying all this, by the way. The actual circumstances are…complex. In the territory controlled by Nikodemus, we do not harm humans or the magekind—people like Giuseppe Infante. Nor are the magekind allowed to harm us.”

“Right.” She didn’t sugarcoat her disbelief. “That must be why I nearly died out there.”

“Where we found you, Bodega Bay, is not, technically, in our control, but there is a truce, if you will, in force such that our rules were temporarily in play. Therefore, your attempt to harm Infante was a prohibited act.”

“This is California. The United States of America. There’s no territories. No truces. No rules in play.” Her pulse ramped up again. “I must be a nut case off her meds, and you’re really the guys who run the asylum because what you’re telling me is insane.”

“I know this is difficult,” Harsh said.

There was weight to the silence that followed and she had the unsettling sensation that he was shaping it, that he had some way of infusing the very air with that well of calm inside him, and she wanted to reach out and hold that close, to drink it in. Infante had done his best to kill her. Harsh and Kynan could have killed her, she knew that. She knew it for a fact, and they hadn’t. They could have left her there, and they hadn’t.

“Over there”—she waved one hand—”the normal, safe world I used to live in. And here? A world where there’s magic and monsters and creatures who ought to exist only in stories.” She lifted her hands, and she saw the marks and bruises on her skin, the gaping slash on her forearm. She let her arms fall to her sides because the sight of her injuries sent her sliding into chaos.

“I think,” he said in a silk-and-cashmere voice, “it’s time you stopped denying what you know.”

“What is it you think I know?” She gave in to the indignation because that she understood. Whatever else was true, there was just no way it was right or fair to blame her for any of this. “I’ll tell you what I know. I know you can’t go around punishing people for rules they didn’t know about. It’s not like anyone went out of their way to tell me anything.”

“Agreed.”

“Something happened to me out there that changed me, and now I’m not the same. Maybe I’m not even the same person any more.” Kynan shifted position, and she jumped because she’d been so intent on Harsh she’d forgotten to keep track of him. He was dangerous, Kynan was, and she shouldn’t have taken her eye off him for even a minute. “I defended myself the only way I could. If I hadn’t, I’d be dead. Period.”

“Can you explain that? Please.”

She decided she had nothing to lose. “Two weeks ago I got grabbed off the street, and next thing I know, I’m in the middle of this nightmare. I kept thinking—I still think—I’m crazy, and eventually the drugs are going to wear off or I’ll wake up. And it keeps not happening.” Her throat got thick, and she had to wait a moment before she trusted herself to speak. To give herself time, she moved to the chair across from the couch. Kynan’s shirt fell to the middle of her thighs, and when she was seated, she said made sure it stayed there. “My name is Addison O’Henry. My friends really do call me Awesome. I’m a junior at U.C. San Diego.”

“Your major?”

“Math. ” She knew he was asking because he still thought she was lying. Well, she wasn’t.

Harsh kept his arms on his thighs, but his eyes were intense and still faintly yellow. It set her heart to pounding. “Usually people like you don’t have any close family or never lived with their biological parents. They’re orphans or adopted. They’ve often spent some years living on the streets.”

She shook her head. “I grew up in Encino. My parents still live there. We have dinner at least once a month. They were thrilled when I got accepted at UCSD because it meant I’d be close to home. Mom wanted me to live at home, but, you know, no way. I have two brothers in Los Angeles and a sister in Washington State. One brother works for one of the movie studios, the other one’s a physician. My sister designs software.”

She recognized Harsh’s habit of gathering himself before he chose his words. He liked to say precisely what he wanted you to know. Not more and not less. “Is it possible,” he said, “that you are not their biological child?”

“I look like my mom. In fact, you can’t look at any of us and not see the family resemblance.” She needed her own silence in order to choose her words. “I’d like to let them know I’m not dead.”

Harsh steepled his fingers and stared her from over the tops of his long, slender hands. As if he were praying. “At any time in your life have you ever wondered, seriously wondered, if you had a supernatural or psychic ability?”

“No.”

“For example, were you ever able to move objects, predict the future or guess someone’s thoughts?”

“No. That’s not even possible.”

“For your kind, not typically. Humans aren’t brought into contact with us—” He held up a hand. “Pardon. We are adept at passing. You’ve probably encountered several of us, but never knew we were anything but what we appeared to be. Most humans know about us only as stories they’ve heard. It’s rare, extremely rare, that any of you learn the truth. Not the normal ones. We call them vanilla. Humans without the ability to do magic. Some of you can, and they’re almost always the ones who dabble in things they shouldn’t or otherwise blunder onto our existence. If you’re vanilla, it makes no sense at all that Infante would have any interest in kidnaping you.” He shook his head. “You’d be a low-value target.”

She let that settle in, then something clicked for her. “I don’t think it was supposed to be me.”

“Meaning?”

She pressed a finger to her lower thigh, just to the side of a purplish bruise. She didn’t feel anything. Shouldn’t that hurt? “One of my girlfriends thought she was being followed. We were at the library one night, studying, and she completely freaked out when it was time to go. She was convinced something bad was going to happen. So, I called the campus police and got us an escort home. We crammed at her place and a couple hours later, I walked home. I live three blocks away. Come on. Three blocks.”

“I take it you didn’t make it home.”

“Someone grabbed me and shoved me in his car. I thought he drugged me because I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything.” She waited until she’d separated her memories from any connection to her in the here and now. Didn’t happen to her. All that had happened to someone else in some other time and place. “But it wasn’t drugs.”

“Some kind of indwell, no doubt.”

“He brought me there. To Infante’s. The ranch, I mean. Not in the shed. That came later. They put me in there later.” She let her mind shift away from what came next because it was safer that way. The memories stayed buried. Most of them.

“You think your friend was the target?”

“She thought she was.” She scrubbed her hands over her head and her heart stuttered when she found smooth skin instead of her shoulder length hair. Her stomach roiled. “It’s funny you should ask me about being adopted. My friend grew up in foster care, and she was always talking about ESP and telekinesis. She believed in that shit. She was looking for her biological parents, too. So, yeah. She fits what you were saying better than I do. I think Bejar took me because he got tired of waiting.”

With a speed and force that sent her heart pounding and every muscle in her body tense, Kynan Aijan dropped his hands onto the couch and leaned over it, and his eyes and voice felt like fire. “Are you fucking kidding me? Bejar?”

6

“K
ynan,” Harsh said. For once he didn’t bother keeping the irritation from his voice. She’d just started telling them what the hell had happened to her, and Kynan ruined everything. She’d retreated behind that impenetrable mental shield of hers. Not something a normal human learned to do.

“Bejar,” Kynan said.

Addison bristled. “Friend of yours?”

“Stop it,” Harsh said. “Both of you. I have been to every continent on the planet on behalf of Nikodemus, and I have met with more warlords that you can count with the cells left in your brain. And I swear to you, you, Kynan, are by far the most difficult to deal with.”

Kynan shook his head. “This isn’t all my fault. She wants me to admit she’s better than me. Stronger. Smarter. Meaner. And she’s not.”

“Yes, but at the moment, she has no experience with this. You do. And if for some reason in all the time you’ve been on this earth, you don’t know how to behave with a little compassion and respect, I’m asking you to fucking fake it.”

Kynan’s expression blanked out. Not a good sign. “You’re the boss.”

“I’m in no mood, warlord.”

He folded his arms over his chest. “Too bad.”

“Could you please, please try for even five minutes to put a lid on it? I have enough to deal with right now. Please.”

“I told you we should have taken Infante down.”

Nikodemus was not going to be happy when he found out this was going exactly wrong, and that did nothing to improve Harsh’s mood. He stood, careful to keep his distance from the woman, with her obvious issues about mental and physical boundaries.

“What the hell,” he said to no one in particular, “is the big deal about proving Nikodemus keeps his word by taking care of one of the kin who’d broken very, very clear rules? Nothing.” He glared at Kynan. “This should have been easy. Open and shut. Deal with the demon who tried to kill Giuseppe Infante.”