Naughty Karma: Karmic Consultants, Book 7 (2 page)

“I’m afraid it’s going to be a little more complicated than that.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning your staff isn’t the only reason I came to you. I need
your
assistance, Karma. Your abilities. Do you honestly think I wouldn’t have bribed one of your finders into working directly for me if it were that simple?”

Why would he need her? Her abilities were mostly useless—uncontrolled precognition, some channeling and the occasional snatch of telepathy. Nothing that would be any help in finding a lost item. Unless that wasn’t the real reason he wanted her.

At the reception, after the bouquet toss while the bride Lucy led the rest of Karma’s employees and a few wedding-crashing ghosts in the chicken dance, Rodriguez had pulled Karma aside to tell her the demon he’d banished had babbled something about Prometheus having a crush on her and harassing her in an attempt to get her attention. Could there actually be some truth in that ridiculousness? Was this whole thing about a crush?

A pack of wild butterflies invaded her abdomen—the sensation not nearly as unpleasant as she might have wished.

How exactly did a girl ask a sociopathic warlock if he harbored a secret passion for her? He was already a massive pain in the ass. She didn’t want to think about how much worse he would be if he added spurned suitor to his repertoire.

Maybe she was jumping to conclusions.
Please let me be jumping to conclusions.
“What exactly is it you think you need from me? What did you lose?”

He lifted one shoulder in a slow, deliberate shrug—the gesture failing to convey any sense of casualness. “It’s my heart actually. I need you to help me retrieve it.”

“You lost your
heart
.” Karma felt her face heating. Holy crap. He really was in love with her. An insanely powerful and completely immoral warlock was in love with her.
Let him down easy.
“Look, Prometheus. I’m sure there are lots of—”
masochistic
“—girls who would be flattered by your interest, but I really don’t have time for any sort of relationship-type thing right now.”

“What are you talking about?”

She flushed, inexplicably embarrassed by the conversation. Where was her legendary cool? Why did talking about this man’s feelings so rattle her? “Your demon. He told my exorcist about how you…feel. For me. This…crush, or whatever you want to call it.”

Prometheus blinked, the calm sweep of his lashes seeming to take a lifetime. “What exactly did my demon tell you?”

“He said you’d been trying to…woo me.”

“Woo you?” He released a sharp bark of laughter. “Don’t flatter yourself, sweetheart.”

Karma bristled. “You know as well as I do that demons can’t lie, Prometheus.”

“True, but the average mischief demon has the comprehension level of a first grader. Just because they can’t lie doesn’t mean they’re never wrong.”

“So you never told the demon you were in love with me.”

He sighed. “Honestly, Karma, I don’t remember what I told the demon. I was extremely drunk the night I summoned it, probably rambling incoherently—”

“About your love for me.” She arched a brow skeptically.

“I must have told it that I’d lost my heart and needed your help to get it back. Demons aren’t known for being brilliant. He must’ve gotten it muddled. For all I know I was slurring my speech and declaring my love for jelly donuts too.”

She blinked, her face heating as what he’d said sunk in. “You seriously summoned a corporeal demon while you were so drunk you don’t remember what you commanded it to do?” The irresponsibility that entailed was jaw-dropping, but the power required and the ability to wield it while hopelessly intoxicated—that was beyond impressive. The force of concentration, of will, needed to summon a demon was more than most people possessed sober and this man could do it drunk? Who
was
he?

“I’m not apologizing,” Prometheus warned, and Karma got the sense apologies were anathema for him. “But, for the record, summoning a demon to harass you is not something I would typically do sober.”

“So you don’t, you know,
love
me?”

He held up both hands in a
whoa there
gesture. “I don’t even know you. And, no offense, angel, but you aren’t exactly my type.”

She felt her face heating again. This time with mortification. Not that he was her type. Though he was…impressive. In a way she’d never encountered before. But she certainly wasn’t bothered by the fact that an asshole warlock wasn’t secretly pining for her.

“I just need your help. And I’m willing to go to whatever lengths necessary to secure it.”

“To retrieve your heart,” she asked skeptically. She glanced toward his chest, a strange hunch suddenly tightening hers. “Why do I have the feeling that isn’t a metaphor?”

Prometheus smiled, though the warmth of it never touched the serpentine cold of his black eyes. “Wanna check my pulse?”

She shook her head, unsure whether she was denying his offer or the very impossibility of what he was implying. “How is that possible? How could you not have your heart?” Karma thought of Brittany, her new receptionist-slash-wedding-planner-slash-all-around-good-luck-charm, who was herself a heart-transplant survivor. “Did you…” she waved toward his chest, “…did you have a transplant? Did they replace it?”

“Nothing quite so mundane,” Prometheus admitted. “I traded it, but not for another heart.”

“What pumps your blood? What keeps you alive?”

“My power, Ms. Cox.” He spread his palms and electricity arced between them, crackling through the air.

Not for the first time she found herself wishing her hunches weren’t so freakishly accurate. She dealt with ghosts and demons on a daily basis, but there was something deeply disturbing about realizing she was talking to a man who literally had no heart in his chest. Like being told zombies and vampires really did exist and one was standing three feet in front of her.

Karma would have stepped back, but her shoulders were already pressed to the glass behind her. “How…?” Her voice cracked and she wet her lips before trying again. “How is that possible?”

“It isn’t the good kind of magic, Ms. Cox. I’m not surprised you aren’t familiar with it.”

Realization slammed into her brain, the pieces falling into place with the shattering certainty that came with her own gifts activating. She
knew
how Prometheus had lost his heart. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to believe. She wanted, as she often did when the worst of the visions came to her without warning, to live in a world where dark magic didn’t exist and she never had to see what it wrought.

“You sold it, didn’t you? You sold your heart to the devil.”

Prometheus smiled, unrepentant. “
A
devil. A particularly lovely one named Deuma. Typically, they deal in souls, but I was able to negotiate an alternative. And technically speaking, I traded it.”

“For your power.”

He inclined his head in ascent. “For my power. Twenty years of immense power, to be precise.”

“Twenty years?”

“I was only nineteen at the time. It seemed like an eternity.” He shrugged, as careless as ever. “The stupidity of youth.”

Her breath caught. There were the beginnings of crow’s feet around his eyes, but with his white hair, if she judged from his appearance alone she could have placed his age anywhere between thirty and forty-five. “How long ago…?”

“Nineteen years, nine months and five days. So you see why the sense of urgency. I need you and your people to help me locate my missing heart and restore it to me.”

Karma’s extremities suddenly felt chilled, like ice was starting at her fingertips and spreading like a malicious frost toward her core. Visions flickered through her brain, but she needed to hear him say it. “And if we don’t? In three months…”

“My power dies out. And if I don’t have my heart back by then, so do I.”

Chapter Three

Sympathy for the Devil

Prometheus decided to take it as a good sign when Karma visibly paled at the prospect of his imminent death. He’d hoped to play on her sympathies and she was proving to be as softhearted as he’d pegged her. Page one out of the sinner’s bible: blessed are the saints, for they shall be easy to manipulate.

He didn’t bother trying to look innocent and worthy of saving. Whether or not she would help him depended more on her character than it did on his. “Will you do it?”

“What exactly do you need me to do?”

He smiled, triumph and a feeling that could have been hope filling up some of the void that lived in his chest where his heart should have been.

“Don’t get too excited,” she interrupted his internal celebration. “I haven’t agreed to anything yet. Just tell me what you need.”

Her sharp words didn’t discourage him in the slightest. She hadn’t agreed yet, but she would. He might see his fortieth birthday yet.

“From the research I’ve done,” he said casually, as if he hadn’t spent three complete years scouring every magical tome he could find for the merest hint of a clue as to how to steal back his heart, “it’s a three step process.” He held up a single finger. “We locate the heart—which I have reason to believe Deuma is moving or veiling in some way.” It was the only explanation for the fact that every time he did a finding spell on the damn thing, it vanished before he could get to it. Based on his finds, he’d searched from Venice to Ethiopia for the damn thing without luck. “I saw her place it in a wooden box with gold inlay, then the box vanished and I haven’t seen it since. I think the box may have been Bacchus’s vessel.”

Karma’s brows pulled into a V. “Ignoring the fact that Bacchus’s vessel is a mythological figment of warlock imaginations run wild, what’s the second step?”

“Summon Deuma. Because she is the source of my power, I am incapable of using it to summon her, but you have that lovely exorcist at your beck and call.”

“The third step?”

Prometheus met her eyes. If she’d known him, she would have known to doubt whatever he was about to say next, that he always looked ‘em in the eye right before he lied his ass off, but no one knew him that well. He was an island. “The third step is all you, Karma. As a channel, you are capable of redirecting energies. You will reverse the flow of energy from Deuma to myself and sever her hold on me. It will keep me alive.”

It wasn’t, technically speaking, a lie. If Karma did all those things, it would keep him alive. It would also piss off the devil by stripping her of her powers and giving them permanently to Prometheus. It would keep him alive, all right. It would make him immortal.

Prometheus wasn’t ready for his clock to run out, but he also wasn’t about to lose his powers while bargaining for his heart back. He hadn’t spent the last twenty years as a god only to go back to being a normal man. He was already reneging on his deal with the devil—a dangerous prospect in and of itself. He couldn’t afford to leave her with the power to smite him after he stole back her prize. But Karma wouldn’t go along with his plan if she knew there was a way to keep him alive any other way.

“I can’t.” Karma’s protest almost gave rise to a glimmer of doubt—did she suspect he was lying? But when she went on, he realized it was her doubt he had heard. “I don’t have that much power.”

Prometheus snorted. “You have plenty. You just have to learn how to let it out to play.” He straightened away from the sales counter, letting his presence fill the room. “I can teach you that.” The words were a seduction. A flush rose to her cheeks and he could see her pulse fluttering wildly at her throat—like the power he could feel beating velvet wings against the inside of her mind, struggling to get out. What he wouldn’t give to be the one to give her that release.

“If I help you…” She glared at him when he started to smile. “
If
. I’m not guaranteeing anything, but
if
I were to help you, I would need your word that none of my people would be harmed in any way.”

“Done.” For all his word was worth.

“All attempts to disrupt my business or invoke chaos would obviously have to stop.”

He smiled, flicking his fingers. “Of course.” This was going to be easier than he’d thought.

“And I would expect you to make amends for your actions over the last few months.”

“Amends,” he repeated, nausea stinging his throat as he forced out the word. He didn’t apologize. He didn’t regret. He didn’t ask for forgiveness. Prometheus didn’t
do
amends.

“As a show of good faith, you would have to work for me, using your powers only for good, to prove that your sorry ass is actually worth saving.”

This time Prometheus’s smile was genuine—though bile still left his throat raw. “We both know you’ve already decided to save me, angel. Whether I deserve it or not.”

“My terms are not negotiable.”

“Of course they are. You may want to have the position of power in this negotiation, but we both know power goes to whichever party can walk away.” Or, more importantly, which party could convince the other they could walk away. Prometheus may need her more than she needed him, but he never flinched in a game of chicken.

He crossed the room toward her, approaching her for the first time. Goose bumps rose up on her arms and her pupils dilated, but other than that she remained unmoved in the face of his prowling approach. Her scent—jasmine and something sweeter, not quite honey, but something with more bite…
ginger,
that was it—rose to his nostrils and he inhaled, deliberately drawing in the exotic aroma.