Spell Bound (Darkly Enchanted) (54 page)

And that they were going in the wrong direction.

Matt finally hit the ramp for Route 222 and took it at sixty miles an hour. He pressed his foot to the floor when they hit the straightaway and shot over the Schuylkill River.

The inarticulate buzz became louder, more annoying, until her head started to throb. A migraine wouldn’t be far behind.

But she knew what she had to do.

“Matt. Stop the car. I have to go back.”

Matt’s jaw dropped, and he took his intense concentration off the road for one brief second. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I have to go back. There’s something I have to do. Pull over and let me out.”

“Shea, there’s no way in hell—”

She grabbed the wheel and forced Matt to pull the car to the side of the road. A chorus of horns and raised fingers from the other drivers didn’t faze Matt at all as he hit the brakes. She threw an arm out to stop Leo’s forward motion.

“Jesus H. Christ, girl, do you wanna get us killed?”

Before he could stop her, she’d twisted the keys and pulled them from the ignition.

“What the hell are you doing?”

She ignored Matt and looked at Leo, pasting on a smile for him.

“I’ve gotta go, bud, but you need to stay with Matt, okay? I need you to promise.”

Leo shook his head once, vehemently. “No. Daddy told me I couldn’t leave you. Never.”

Shea shook her head, unwilling to thinking about the implications of that statement. She refused to put Leo in danger with her.

Matt’s hands stilled on the wheel and his tone got deadly serious. “What else did your dad say, Leo? Can you remember?”

Leo nodded. “He said I’d know what to do when I had to.”

She continued to shake her head, but Matt sighed. “Shea, give me the keys.”

“No!” Gods, no. Her heart hurt just thinking about it. “There’s no way I’m taking Leo back into this mess. You have to protect him. I want you to take him away from this.”

Matt held out his hand. “Honey, sometimes you don’t get to make the rules. Sometimes the rules are already laid out ahead of time. If Leo says Kyle told him to stay with you, then he stays with you.”

No, no, no. This wasn’t what she wanted. She wouldn’t allow Leo to go with her. “He can’t. What if something happens to him? I couldn’t live with that.”

“Shea.” Matt’s voice got soft, softer than anything she’d heard come out of his mouth. “Your dad, he had the sight. You know that, right?”

She refused to acknowledge anything he had to say, but she couldn’t tear her gaze from Matt’s blue eyes.

“If the kid says he has to stay with you then you need to listen.”

Looking into Matt’s eyes, she knew he wasn’t going to budge. And she knew Leo well enough to know if she ran, he’d follow.

She took a deep, ragged breath. “Will you promise me you will give your life for his if it comes to it?”

Matt nodded. “Absolutely. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure he’s safe. You, too.”

With a sinking heart, she handed over the keys.

“Then we need to find Dario.”

Chapter Twenty-
Two

Serena sat on one of the benches in City Park facing the band shell.

She wondered if the
eteri
who gathered here for summer concerts ever looked closely at the markings around the pond, if they suspected that the decorative carvings were really runes blessing Egeria, Goddess of Fountains, and Nethuns, God of Springs.

Germans may have been the first Europeans to settle the area and the architecture of the older sections of the city reflected their influence.

But the Etruscans had made their mark in other ways. The city still held a powerful magic, fed by the Etruscan descendents who’d flocked here a century or more ago with Italians seeking a better life.

Today, Reading had all the problems of its larger counterparts, like Philadelphia, but the outlying areas of Berks County retained or had reclaimed some of its original wooded glory.

Her home on Mt. Penn was in one of those areas.

She hoped she got to see it again.

Taking a deep breath, she shook her head to clear it of the fear in her heart.

“You can do this. You can do this.” She’d been repeating the words over and over in her head since she’d left Gabriel and the others at the warehouse. After she’d made a phone call to the one number she’d been afraid to write down anywhere.

After a few minutes of disbelieving minions, she’d been connected to the man she sought.

Dario had sounded almost sad to hear from her but had agreed to meet her here. With Quinn.

Fear gnawed at her, mocking her decision to come alone.

“No. No! This is your mess. Fix it.”

But what if she couldn’t? She’d tried once before and look how that had turned out. She’d been so sure that plan would work. Yet she’d created another mess. She loved Gabriel more than her life, but she’d hurt him by keeping the truth from him. She feared he would never speak to her again.

Closing her eyes, she shut out her surroundings and tried to put herself into the dream state where peace was found.

Only to open them when she felt a familiar presence.

Gabriel.

He stood in front of the pond, leaning against the split-rail fence, staring at her. She wanted to go to him, throw her arms around those broad shoulders and hug him to her, but wasn’t sure he’d let her. And she wouldn’t survive his rejection.

He looked calm enough, but her son could hide so much behind those dark eyes. At the moment, though, she was too glad to see him to wonder how he’d found her.

She loved him so much. “Do you want to hear my side?”

He sighed and moved toward her. “I think I’ve figured it out. You thought I’d be the one. The female.”

Goddess, bless him. “Yes. I believed if I could produce a child with the blood of the
boschetta
mixed with the blood of the Paganellis, the curse would be broken.”

He sat on the bench next to her and stared straight ahead. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

That was easy. “You loved Davis. I never wanted you to know you weren’t his son. Stupid, yes?”

He sighed, and she heard more of his anger slide away with the breath. “No, just ill-advised, given how Davis died.”

“Yes, it was. Davis had been my
grigorio
since he’d turned twenty-one. He kept me safe, kept me hidden, and he helped me get to Dario. Then, I wiped his memory of that night, and I never spoke of it again. Davis believed you were his. But he and I were never together until after I had been with Dario. When I knew I was pregnant, I seduced Davis.” She grimaced. “Not one of my better moments. But I did love Davis. You have to know that.”

Gabriel nodded. “What about Dario? Didn’t he know who you were? Why didn’t he recognize you?”

“He’d been away at school much of his life so we didn’t have much contact with one another in our village. I went to him as a prostitute, one of the many he’s had over the years.”

“So you’ve known where he’s been this entire time?”

“Yes, but I couldn’t let the
grigori
kill him, Gabriel. Not even after…” She couldn’t bring herself to say their names. Not now. “Dario is one of the keys to breaking the curse. I know it in my heart. I just don’t know how.”

“But you didn’t have a daughter. You had a son. Celeste had the girl. Why?”

She shook her head. “I don’t have any idea.”

Gabriel sighed, frustration in every molecule of air. “You know I love you, right?”

Her heart flipped as only a mother’s could when her child says those three little words. “Yes, and I love you with all my heart.”

“Dario will never be my father. I may have his genes, but he’s nothing to me.”

She nodded, aching for everything he’d lost, for all she’d put him through. “Davis was your father. He loved you more than his own life. You and Nino.”

An invisible weight seem to lift from his shoulders. “What do you want me to do about Dario?”

Grabbing his arm, she squeezed. “You can’t kill him, Gabriel. You can’t. And I don’t believe he’ll harm you.”

“No, but he’ll cut off your head and tear out your heart in a second.”

She shook her head. “I think…he’s as tired of this game as we are. Maybe he’ll be ready to talk.”

“Let’s hope.” Gabriel threaded his fingers through hers and squeezed. “But I’ll be ready just in case.”

And she knew if Dario harmed Quinn, Gabriel would try to kill him. She couldn’t let him do that.

But if Dario harmed Quinn, she would kill him herself.

* * *

Dario sat in the back of the BMW sedan, waiting for the driver of the van behind him to signal he was ready to go.

She would be waiting for him, had tracked him down to let him know where to meet. He felt an unlikely twinge of respect for the woman and had refrained from asking the question uppermost in his mind.

How?

He had a son. Gabriel had to be his son, they looked too much alike to be anything but blood relation. An emotion he couldn’t place burned in his chest. How the hell had she managed it? The boy looked to be in his mid-twenties, but after you’ve lived five-hundred years, you begin to lose perspective on age.

And he hadn’t lived like a monk. There had been women. Beautiful women he ordered from a menu like an expensive dinner and never saw again. There were always more, always different. There are many escort services in Florida if you know where to look.