My Wicked Enemy (27 page)

Her expression was calm, but he knew inside she seethed. “I’ll sever them. Every fiend I can get my hands on. That leaves you to deal with Magellan and the other mages.”

“Two coming up the back stairs, four from the font,” Xia said. He cut off Mir’s objection. “I can hear them, Warlord. They’re not even trying to sneak up on us.”

“Good soldier, Xia,” said Nikodemus. He couldn’t help noticing the way Xia stayed near Carson. Since he came to, he’d never once let anyone get between him and Carson. He doubted Xia was aware of what he was doing.

Xia nodded at him. “Somebody had to pay attention, Warlord.”

“If you decide not to freelance, you let me know. Recommendations for getting Carson on the street?”

Xia responded exactly as if he were one of Nikodemus’s sworn fiends. He tipped his head. “Out the window.”

“We’re on the second floor, Xia, and she’s not a fiend. She can’t drop that far without getting hurt.”

Xia rolled his eyes. “Lower her out the window, don’t drop her. Form a chain. You hold her ankles, I’ll hold yours. But you and I stay here.” He looked at Siddique’s inert form. He motioned to Harsh. “Throw her body down the stairwell. That should startle them. Give us a few minutes extra to get her out.”

Nikodemus laughed. “I like the way you think.”

Xia looked at Carson. “Well, human?”

She was totally up to the challenge. “Which window?”

“Kitchen. Here.” Xia unfastened his knife and clipped it to Carson’s belt. “Take this.”

“What do I do with it?”

Xia patted the hilt of his blade. “If you see Rasmus, stab him with it.”

On the sidewalk, she tried Nikodemus’s trick for deflecting notice from herself. She leaned against the wall, gathering herself, waiting for the shiver of fear to leave her. The air was crisp and wet with mist off the river, and she breathed deeper until the stench of garbage was gone. The fear didn’t go. Several people, humans all of them—how did she know that?
Well,
Carson thought. She just did. They were human, and the men and women in the group walked past her, talking among themselves.

No one paid her any attention.

She pushed off the wall and headed past the iron-fronted buildings that gave the town its late nineteenth-century charm. What would it be like to be one of those laughing women, holding hands with a handsome young man, or flirting with someone she thought she might like? Xia’s knife was clipped to the front of her jeans, and every so often the handle touched her bare skin and sent a shock of dark magic through her. At the corner where she needed to turn to get onto the street where Magellan stood guard, her skin prickled.

Mageheld.

As if someone had flipped a switch, her senses sharpened. She saw better, farther, and in such fine detail she had a disorienting moment in which her brain couldn’t accept the stimuli coming at her.
Breathe deep. Relax. Let it come.
The world settled and came into new focus. How sad, she thought, that she had so little in common with her own species. No matter how much she wanted to be normal, she never would be. None of the humans noticed the fiend standing there, and yet for Carson, the fiend set off a vibration in her chest.

A woman this time, which was unusual for Magellan. She wore a light wool pants suit, with a white shirt and a green scarf instead of a tie. Now, that was like Magellan, to dress his fiends so distinctively. The fiend was leaning against the sidewalk side of a blue Ford Ranger with a gun rack mounted in the back window. She had her arms crossed over her chest. This time when the hilt of Xia’s knife touched Carson’s skin, the tingle amped her up even more.

Carson continued toward the fiend. She had to get close enough to touch her. She listened hard, expanded her senses, and overshot her target. She reined back the instinct to look too far. All she needed to know right now was how many fiends were in the immediate vicinity, whether her current target had backup, and how close it was.

Three. She felt three pinpoint areas of awareness: the woman by the Ranger, and two males. One was in a crowd of people spilling from the bar down the block, and another sat in a black Mercedes SUV. Not close enough to help their comrade. Carson narrowed her focus to the woman and moved down the street like a shadow. When she was nearly to the pickup’s front bumper, she let up on the stealth. The woman’s nature sang in Carson’s ears, and before she was an arm’s length away, Carson knew how to sever her. She had Xia’s knife in one hand, and she was appalled to find herself prepared to use it, to take a life should something go wrong. But if she couldn’t follow through, Nikodemus and the others would be taken.

The woman’s eyes widened when she saw Carson. She pushed off the pickup. “Carson Philips?”

“Yes,” she said. The woman was young. A very young fiend. What if she resisted? What if her tie to Magellan was stronger than the lure of freedom? Carson walked right up to her, got inside her natural defense zone, and pressed the palm of her hand to the fiend’s sternum. Power flowed out and Carson followed it, pushed herself inside and destroyed Magellan’s magic. It wasn’t hard, because she’d only recently been taken. She wasn’t very powerful, and Magellan hadn’t needed to use much magic to secure her. The woman staggered. Her back hit the door of the pickup. To anyone watching, they looked like one woman helping another who’d had too much to drink. Carson liked the magic roaring through her. She liked the power. Better than liked it. She was drunk on it.

She ramped down her excitement. The woman was severed from Magellan, but if Carson wanted to, she could do deliberately what she’d nearly done with Xia. She could take just a little more—just the merest nudge, and the fiend would belong to Carson. Her creature to enjoin instead of Magellan’s. Whichever fiends she took, she could send them after Magellan and Rasmus and they’d have to do it. They’d be mageheld, true, but working for Nikodemus instead of Magellan.

Their eyes locked, hers and the fiend’s, and the knowledge of what this moment held for them both blossomed between them. Freedom, or one servitude for another? How sweet it would be to own a fiend, to have a ready source of magic to draw from and a servant who would always do exactly what she wanted. How sweet to take Xia’s knife and slide it oh so gently along the fiend’s skin to free a well of blood, to taste copper warmth in her mouth and down her throat. The dark longing filled Carson until she shook with it. Stepping in close and still gripping the woman’s arm, Carson released her magic into the fiend.

The darkness in Carson whispered that she could finish by taking the fiend as hers. For Nikodemus. On his behalf and for a good cause. She shuddered and fought her impulse to continue. She stumbled back, gasping as the magic receded. She squared her shoulders and recited Nikodemus’s cell number, sending it into the fiend’s head with enough emphasis that the string of digits would stay in her memory. “Leave a callback number if you want to join us.”

The woman sagged against the truck, hands pressed hard against her chest and gasping for breath. Her eyes were wide open and dilated.
Not too late
. “I’m cut.”

She backed up again and let the fiend’s vulnerability close up. Opportunity faded, and she thought that, still, it was not too late to take what she wanted. The fiend nodded once, and that was that. “Go,” Carson whispered.

She stood near the Ranger, a bone-deep chill shivering through her. Only when the fiend had vanished did Carson realize she was gripping Xia’s knife. She stared at the twisting metal curves of the blade. The thing was thirsty. It ached for the taste of blood. My God, she’d been so close to taking the fiend. The knife’s longing remained, tight in her chest, a voice whispering that she could take the next one, taste the next one.
Nikodemus,
she whispered,
I need you
. The abyss was no farther away than Xia’s knife, a chasm between her and what this night required of her.

Carson slid the knife into its sheath and opened herself again. The second fiend was easy to locate in the crowd outside the bar. He was closest and most likely to have a view of the woman who was no longer at her post. She overplayed him and nearly lost him when he jerked away from their initial contact. She juked with him, and in the crowd no one thought anything of a couple up against a wall, touching. She severed him. Easy. The one in the car was simple, too. She let him see her, and he got out and chased her. Oh, he was easy. Easy to free. Easy to make hers. But she didn’t. She resisted the pull, but it was a little bit harder than before.

The fiend in the SUV had figured out something was wrong and was crossing the street toward the bar, scanning the humans for one that didn’t seem to belong. Carson waited. Before long, the street was clear. She proceeded clearing the other streets. Eleven fiends in all. Some of them she knew from the Tiburon house. Some were new.

As she worked her way toward Magellan, she felt Kynan, a distant point of darkness. By the seventh, she’d learned it was safest for her to take her time assessing the fiend, but once she knew what to do, she needed to work quickly. By the seventh, she was quicker at all of it, better, smoother. The abyss threatened every time; each time took more strength to resist.

She came around the corner, the rush of her last taking still heating her veins. Her sense of Nikodemus turned hot. He wasn’t far away, and he was pulling magic. And it made her careless. Worry kept her from opening to her surroundings the way she should have.

“Carson,” someone said.

The world stopped dead, and when it restarted, nothing felt the way it ought to. Álvaro Magellan, the man who’d had her stolen from her family, stood about five feet from her, Kynan just behind him. She shut down her power. She needed to surprise him, take him off guard, and she really, really needed not to let her hatred of the man take over.

Magellan’s expression was pleasant. Bland, even. Kynan frowned and looked at her through narrowed eyes. That was perhaps Magellan’s greatest skill as a mage, she realized, to look so pleasant and harmless even when he was destroying lives. He had Kynan, after all, to terrorize or murder for him. She had no difficulty separating Kynan’s power from Magellan’s. The magic surrounding Magellan felt different.

“Well, well, Carson,” Magellan said. “You seem to have recovered since last we saw each other.”

She looked around, frantic, because she knew in her bones something was wrong, and she didn’t know what it was. “I haven’t got the talisman with me,” she said.

“A great pity, Carson. But you will tell me where it is presently. Oh, and by the way, your companions won’t be able to see us,” Magellan said mildly. A different kind of magic than she was used to slid around them. Her head started to hurt, a familiar, debilitating pain. “Nor will they hear you.”

He gestured to Kynan, and the fiend came forward to clamp a hand on Carson’s upper arm, shifting her so her arm was tucked up behind her, painfully tight in her shoulder. Kynan goose-stepped her to Magellan’s limo. He kept her arm twisted behind her back and used his palm on her head to get her in the back. A police car went past them, and she tried to whip her head toward the cruiser.

Carson tasted iron in her mouth, dry and heavy and bitterly metallic, when Kynan got into the back seat of the limo with her. He kept her prone and her arm twisted back. Xia’s knife pressed into her belly. She couldn’t see, because her head faced the back of the seat and Kynan’s body kept her from moving. Carson tried to block out everything except what she needed to know about the fiend. She needed to know how to sever him. Her fear of Kynan went deep, and nothing was as easy as it had been with the other fiends.

The back door opened again, and someone else got in with them. He spoke from the seat opposite. “A warlord, Carson,” Magellan said softly. “Nikodemus himself, no less.” His familiar voice flowed like iced velvet. “An impressive acquisition for a witch with no ability.”

She managed to lift her chin. “Go to hell.”

“Kynan?”

The fiend eased up on her and turned her head toward the rear-facing seat, where Magellan sat with one leg crossed over the other. “One wonders, Carson, which way your relationship with the fiend goes.” His steel-gray eyebrows rose. “You don’t have the magic to control a fiend of his ability. No, we think, Kynan and I, that it must be Nikodemus who controls you. Until he becomes bored. At which time, I assure you, he will kill you. Such is the manner of fiends.” His attention shifted above her, to Kynan, whom she could not see. “How long do you suppose, Kynan, before Nikodemus realizes we have her?”

“Not long,” the fiend said. He kept one hand on her head and the other on the middle of her back, pinning her to the seat. “Half an hour at most, I think. The others will not defeat him.”

Magellan’s magic settled down, and Carson’s concentration improved. She blocked out Magellan as best she could to concentrate on Kynan. “I suggest you use the time wisely, Kynan. The sooner Nikodemus is induced to come to her, the better.”

Above her, Carson felt Kynan’s body still.

“I shall wait outside,” Magellan said. She heard Magellan kiss Kynan. The fiend’s body tensed even as he leaned toward the mage. They separated. “Do with her what you will.”

“Mage,” Kynan said.

“Take your time, of course. But do not terminate her until Nikodemus is mine.”

“Yes, Mage.”

The locks disengaged. Cold air filled the car, and then the door closed with the heavy thunk of metal against metal. No one would see what was going on. The windows were black. Carson shut down her panic. She had to concentrate on Kynan and parsing out the steps for freeing him from Magellan.

He flipped her onto her back, and she’d been so focused on his magic and finding the way in and warning off Nikodemus that she didn’t realize until then that he’d taken Xia’s knife from her. The blade hissed as he pulled it from the sheath and held it, glittering edges between them.

Kynan laughed. He grabbed her wrist and squeezed until her eyes watered. Her fingers went numb. The fiend released her, and when Carson sat up, he moved to the seat across from her. She focused on Kynan, who was just now examining Xia’s knife. He sat like Magellan did. One leg crossed over the other, crossed wrists on his knee. “You can’t get out, Carson. He’s sealed the doors.” His gaze dropped below her chin. “No one will hear you scream.”

Kynan’s magic frightened her. He felt like Nikodemus, dimensioned so she could barely follow the ways in which his magic occupied space. The knots woven into him by Magellan’s bond were far more complicated than anything she’d encountered tonight. She couldn’t visualize the knots well enough to think she had any hope of severing him. Not quickly enough to matter. And now the hot sensation of Nikodemus flared up in her head. He was pulling power again, and she weakened her guard against Kynan in order to give Nikodemus access.