My Wicked Enemy (8 page)

“Yeah.”
Good,
he thought, smelling the extra garlic and basil. At least Carson had had something to eat. The imps were jumpy, but considering Magellan’s not-really-a-witch was in the house, no wonder. She amped him up, too.

“You sure?” Durian had been all over the city, and he still looked like he’d just stepped out of the pages of
GQ.

He was sure, except, actually, he couldn’t feel her. Not a thing. An exhausted human could do that, sleep so hard he couldn’t be felt. “She’s probably asleep on the couch, dead to the world. She’s had a hard couple of days. Makes sense she’d fall asleep after getting some food in her stomach.”

“Sure.”

She wasn’t in the front room.

But a quarter of a large pizza and two bottles of beer sat on the coffee table. The television was on with the sound off, frozen on a scene from Mortal Kombat. One of the beers was empty. The other one hadn’t been touched. Not more than a sip or two at best. Cold. Not icy anymore, but still cold.

Durian picked up her purse. Black leather, battered and shapeless, the stitching coming loose. “This hers?”

“Yes.” From the corner of his eye, he saw a red dot on the floor. His pulse shot up to two hundred. A drop of blood. Just one, a perfect circle on the floor. He knelt by the droplet. Not fresh enough to be warm, not old enough to be dry. He touched the drop and brought his finger to his tongue. Carson’s blood, no question. Even stale, the taste worked on him. He let his body react, and his magic roared to life. He didn’t do anything to bring it down. The imps chittered loudly.

“What is it?” Durian asked.

“Carson’s gone.” The house was empty. No mage. No Carson Philips. No talisman, either. An uneasy feeling settled on him. That drop of blood suggested too much that wasn’t pleasant. “I don’t feel another fiend, do you?”

“No.” He felt Durian go on alert, gathering his magic, letting the constraints of a human body dissolve enough to pull additional power. Nikodemus had already done the same. A sweep of the house didn’t take long.

“Looks like your little witch robbed you blind,” Durian said when the two of them stood in front of the empty niche. Nikodemus tried pretending the talisman was still there, but his indulgence lasted about three seconds before the disaster sank in. The thought of a mage with the kind of power the talisman would confer turned his blood to ice.

“No, she didn’t.” His defense of her came out without him even thinking about it. Now, that was a shock, to realize how strongly he felt about the witch. Well, fuck Durian’s attitude.

“She’s on her way to Magellan right now,” Durian said. “Or else off by herself, killing one of the kin on her own.”

“I want to know what happened here,” Nikodemus said. “Then I want to find her.” There was no way she could crack the talisman on her own. She couldn’t. And he just didn’t believe she’d go running back to Magellan. No way.

Durian bent on one knee, examining the floor. “You got fooled, Warlord. That’s what happened.”

“Only another fiend could have gotten through my wards.” Durian didn’t argue, because it was true. “And since we didn’t feel so much as an echo of a fiend here, whoever took it must be mageheld.”

“Of course. She’s a witch. She probably has dozens of magehelds at her command,” Durian said. He looked over his shoulder at Nikodemus. “She summoned one and let him in to do it for her.” He got up and scrutinized the hallway. “There were two people.” He knelt again to run his fingers over a spot of the floor. “Heavy boots here.”

“Fiend?”

“Impossible to say. Mageheld if it was, which we have already surmised.” He touched another spot. Nikodemus didn’t see anything, but this was Durian’s speciality. If you were going to be a good assassin, then you’d better be a damn good tracker. Durian had honed skills most fiends didn’t. “Smaller feet here. Fresh. Human. Female.” Durian lifted his chin and swiveled his head, breathing in during the entire motion. “Large male. In human form, but not human. I agree, mageheld. Much smaller female. Easy to pin down. Your human witch.”

Two sets of feet. Big mageheld fiend. Tiny little witch who reacted to the talisman like it was hers to crack. Add two and two and you could end up with him being an idiot fooled by a pair of green eyes. Only that wasn’t what had happened. Carson Philips wasn’t like other mages. He’d been in her head, and he knew different. No way had Carson stolen the talisman.“What about the blood?”

“Could be a hundred explanations.” He stood in front of the niche, eyes closed. “Accident. A struggle. Or maybe she likes to give her fiends a taste. I’ve heard some witches like a worked-up fiend between their legs.” Durian faced him, eyes open. “This was a snatch and grab. Done quickly. Hastily, even.” He frowned. “The weapon that cut through was more than capable of delicacy. He was in a hurry.” He started walking again, toward the window at the end of the hall. At the window, he stood motionless except for breathing and the movement of his eyes. “From that spot to the window, he was carrying her. They went out here. Her first. Then him.”

“Kynan?”

He shook his head. “Maybe. No way to tell.”

“You want my version?”

Durian settled his weight on one hip and nodded. “Certainly, Warlord.”

“Kynan lusts after Carson so hard his dick is in a permanent hard-on. He gets sent after her with orders to kill. He finds her, because he’s Kynan Aijan and he can find a barnacle on your ass if it has mage-magic in it. But he’s not going to do it right away. Hell, I heard him tell her he was going to take his time.”

“How’d he get in?” Durian asked. “This house is proofed.”

“There was a breach when she opened the door for pizza.” His oath was working on him. She was out there somewhere, and he had to find her. “Kynan was close enough to sense her. He went after her. Got in. Attacked her. Takes the talisman on the way out with her because he knows Magellan wants it back and it’ll give him major points.”

Durian shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Carson can’t pull. Even if she wanted an army of magehelds, she couldn’t manage it any more than she could crack the talisman on her own. Find Kynan, and we’ll find the witch and the talisman,” Nikodemus said.

Durian lost the trail about two blocks downhill from the house. “He’ll be taking it back to Magellan after he kills her.” Kynan or some other mageheld had stopped touching the ground then. He stood in the middle of the street, scowling. “You touched the witch, right? Her mind.”

“I had permission.” Helping yourself to someone else’s mind was taboo among fiends, but they always recognized extenuating circumstances. This was one of them. He’d been so deep in the witch’s head, with a little luck, he’d be able to get a lock on her general location. The closer she was, the more accurate his ability to find her. The problem was she’d know it, and if she couldn’t be trusted, or someone else already had control of her, they were fucked. So much for the element of surprise.

“If we’re going to find her before she takes the talisman to Magellan, we don’t have a choice,” Durian said. “Sweep for her.”

Nikodemus let his magic burn in him until his skin ached to be free of this form. With the reversion to a more elemental state, he felt Durian like a flame. He also felt Carson. Very far away. Still in the city, though. The lure of her mind was sweet, like a drug. Someone had taken her from his house and that pissed him off. “Got her.”

He and Durian went back for the car. He let Durian share his connection with the witch. Took them forty minutes to get to her. And forty nanoseconds to spot the fiends in the shiny Beemer parked in front of the building she was in. Mageheld fiends, because he couldn’t feel them. Their appearance gave them away. Clue one: ninety-thousand-dollar car in a crappy neighborhood. Clues two and three: two freaks inside the car with short hair and suits. Magellan should have pasted labels on their foreheads.

The lack of mental awareness cut both ways. Inconvenient as hell not to have a connection to them. He couldn’t get in to shut them down without being close enough to touch. But they couldn’t feel him, either. That gave him and Durian an advantage to work.

Nikodemus kept driving, turned the corner, and pulled his car into a spot near the house behind the one Carson was in. “What a dump,” he said when they were out of the car and looking into the back yard. Everything sagged. Cement for a back yard, with dandelions pushing up between the cracks. Water pooled around the back stairs. “I want them both back, Durian. The witch and the talisman.”

Durian’s expression said he thought it was too late. “I’ll take care of Kynan, Warlord. The witch is your problem.”

Nikodemus grabbed Durian’s chin in one hand and let his power scorch him. “You call this fealty?” he said softly. “I told you what I want. You damn well better help make it happen.”

Durian’s eyes flashed. “My apologies, Warlord.”

“Accepted.”

“We go up.” Durian pointed. “You take the back. No sudden moves. Recon only until we know what we’re facing.”

Nikodemus nodded.

Getting in was sliding on ice. Smooth, cold, and fast. He let his form change just enough to use his greater agility and climbed the side of the house. The window sash came up easy once he broke the lock. Thank God for skinflint landlords. Inside was a dump, too. Mold dotted the new paint, and the carpet was just butt-ugly. He moved toward the stairs, keeping his magic on tap and his senses wide open. Durian was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. When Nikodemus came down, he got hit with a blast of Carson’s fucked-up magic so hot he practically fried on the spot. And just when he concluded Durian was right and she’d screwed him royally, pretending she couldn’t use her magic, the heat turned to ice and sputtered out. Hot magic, cold magic, and no fucking control. He didn’t get how she’d lived this long. That kind of hot/cold swing ought to have killed her a long time ago.

He followed Durian past a laundry room with bad plumbing and curling linoleum. An indistinct male voice broke the silence. He started to get anxious, because he was remembering the look on Kynan’s face when he saw Carson. You didn’t have to have a connection to know what he wanted from her. Kynan Aijan had a serious jones for the witch. They went around the corner, two cold and silent shadows.

He was creeped out at being so close to Kynan without feeling him as kin. It was unnatural. Freakishly wrong. The feeling went straight through him. He got the chills just thinking about what it must be like to lose his ability to connect. Rage built up in him. Absolute fury. Fucking magekind were animals, what they did to fiends. Kynan couldn’t feel them, but he still had his other senses, and he was going to figure out he wasn’t home alone with his lady. When the fighting started, his buddies out there in the Beemer were going to come in. Not the greatest odds, but he’d faced worse in his life. He had faith Durian could take down the other two when they came in. He stopped in the doorway. He felt Durian go on point, too. There was blood, and the smell hyped them up.

No way Carson had gone willingly. Blood trickled down the side of her face. Scalp wounds could bleed like crazy, and the smell was distracting Kynan from what, more than obviously, was an attempt at a mind-fucking rape. She had her clothes still, so, thank God, Kynan hadn’t gotten to the physical stuff yet. But mentally, he had her just about nailed down. He’d be scouring her mind right now except Carson, even cut off from her magic, was holding him off by sheer force of will.

He signaled to Durian to go around the side, taking the primary attack, because this was exactly what Durian was trained for. But Durian hesitated. Nikodemus knew he was pushing it, doing all this to save a witch and expecting Durian to do his part. But no way was he going to let Kynan break Carson. No fucking way. He took the point himself. Durian he’d deal with later.

Carson turned her head, and Nikodemus’s gaze locked with hers. Jesus H. Christ. He was in her head so fast he got dizzy. Accessing her was the equivalent of turning on a garden hose and getting a fire hose. Holy shit. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to. Her eyes spoke for her. Fear. Relief. And a defiance that about burned him. And what do you know? He could feel Kynan through Carson’s magic, even though Kynan was mageheld. And that gave him an advantage over the fiend he’d never expected to have.

In the instant before Kynan got that he had company, Nikodemus struck. He pushed his magic through Carson, feeling the burn on the way.

Kynan flew across the room like a bottle rocket. The house shook when he hit the floor. For good measure, Nikodemus locked the two bozos in the Beemer. A little mojo to the door, and the two in the car were trapped. He shut down Kynan, amping up the control, because using Carson let him get at Kynan in a way he couldn’t have otherwise. Fucking-unexpected-A. Took about thirty seconds to lock down the entire situation.

Durian knelt and went through Kynan’s pockets looking for the talisman. That left the witch for him, except he had all he could handle trying to hold on to Carson and keep his magic going. Durian came up empty and whirled on Carson. She was pushing herself onto her hands and knees, shaking off the effect of Kynan’s attempted indwell. “Where is it?” Durian shouted.

Carson lurched to her feet, one hand on the wall for support. She looked at Durian with a deceptively calm expression. “He’s not the one who took it,” she said. Her magic sputtered and died, and Nikodemus lost his lock on Kynan and his fellow magehelds. Fuck. Kynan was twitching.