“Come. I will take you to my—”
“Leader? Please say leader.”
A blur of movement made me flinch. Darius appeared beside me and immediately raked the air with his already extended vampire claws. Magic crackled and sparked when his claws came into contact with it. He ripped me out of the sky and tossed me behind him. I tumbled to the ground.
He slashed at the mage. More magic sparked and fizzled, Darius’s vampire magic in the form of claws, and probably fangs, able to counteract the mage’s kinetic magic.
Thank heavens.
The man jerked away, back-pedaling until he hit the wall. He lifted his arms to block his face, throw a spell, or use his newfound kinetic magic.
“Keep his arms down!” I hollered, jumping to my feet. “He has to move them through the air to direct his magic.”
“Stay back,” Darius growled at me, pinning the mage’s arms to his sides.
“Yeah, right.” I stepped to the side of Darius and cocked back my fist, intending to deliver a blow to knock the man out.
The punch didn’t land.
Despite Darius’s vampire strength, the mage somehow managed to rip his arms up and shove his hands through the air.
Darius flew back, cracking into the wall. He rose and hissed before his body erupted into the swamp thing (a.k.a. his monster form)—faster, stronger, and more lethal. That would help, but I wondered if it would be enough. This guy had gotten a powerful gift from a mighty demon.
I felt the push of air closing around me. The man was ready to haul me away, and judging by his shifty-eyed glance in Darius’s direction and his hop-steps toward the door, he wanted to do it fast so as not to battle an elder in monster form. I didn’t blame him, but I also didn’t intend to be taken.
I ripped my sword up. Sparks erupted from the edge of the blade, as if I’d struck it against stone, but it made it through the nearly solid air, unraveling the effect much like it would a spell. The man growled, a truly demonic sound, and jerked forward to grab me.
I dodged the grab and sliced up with my sword, intent on cutting through any newly solid air. Instead, my blade caught his wrist. His severed hand went flying across the room.
Oops.
He howled, clutched his wrist, and broke for the door.
“Don’t play with air, and I won’t lop off body parts,” I said by way of a half-felt apology, and lurched after him.
We ran out into the night. That cold power throbbed within me again, begging to be used. I didn’t know how, though. Not without focused concentration, which was impossible, given the circumstances.
Darius zipped by me, way faster in a race, and stopped further up the sidewalk, still in his ghastly form, waiting for the mage to run into him. The mage flung his hands up—or arm and hand, at any rate—and cut right, into the street. Headlights washed across his body and brakes squealed.
“No, no, no!” I yelled at the car.
The mage stopped, staring at the headlights, frozen in place.
“Run, you moron! Darius—”
Darius flashed after the man, grabbing him and shoving him to the side of the road before he could become the car’s new hood ornament. I ran after them. The car had finally come to a stop, directly in my path, so I leapt up and ran across the hood. It was mighty cool.
“Let’s get him out of here,” I said before an invisible hand swatted me.
This time I went flying across the hood of the car, face first, and fell off the other side. That wasn’t as cool.
Air closed around me like a big fist. I reached for my sword, which had fallen to the ground two feet from me, but couldn’t get it before I was lifted into the sky.
The cold force within me throbbed harder, almost painful. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes, trying to connect with it. Trying to figure out a way to lift a rock and beam that danged mage in the side of the head.
A scream rent the night. I fell, landing awkwardly and crumpling to the sidewalk. Disorientated, I dazedly grabbed my sword and climbed to my feet. Someone gasped as I shook off the pain and started forward yet again.
Darius stood in human form in the street, naked, holding the now-limp mage by the back of his shirt. Before I got there, the shirt ripped at the neck and shoulder, making the mage drop a little lower in the air. The girls from the car that had nearly mowed him down gasped again.
“Tell me you merely knocked him out,” I said to Darius, limping as I worked around the hood of the car. My ankle was a little out of sorts from my haphazard landing. “Tell me he’ll wake up and give us information.”
“I do not like to lie to you, Reagan. I lost control when he had you in the air. I need to feed. I told you that.”
“There is no way it’s my fault you lost control, so don’t even try to pin it on me.”
“I am simply reminding you of what happens when you hold me off.”
“Do you also want to be a dead body? Is that what you’re after? Keep it up and I’ll add you to the pile.” I braced two fingers to the mage’s neck.
“Is he okay?” one of the girls asked with a quivering lip. The other was already crying. Their distress was evident from their lack of questions regarding the fact that a naked man was holding a potentially injured man in the air by his shirt. With one hand. And no visible strain.
No, they weren’t based in reality just now.
I deflated. “Nope. Damn it!” I turned around, seeing a row of lights and people emerging from their houses. “Well, this all went horribly wrong. Drop him and get us out of here. Fast. We don’t need anyone to take pictures of our faces. Send some vampires out here tomorrow to make those ladies forget their own names, let alone the fact that they saw a monster kill a guy.”
“I will not appear in photos.”
“You are really hard to get along with right now, do you know that? Let’s hit his house really quickly before we leave. Hurry, before the cops—” A siren wailed in the distance.
Without warning, he scooped me into his arms and raced up the street, faster than thought. We were breaking so many magical rules it wasn’t funny, not to mention that we’d killed a mage whom the Mages’ Guild, his circle, and—most recently—a demon might employ and/or like. My second night in Seattle and already my enemies were stacking up. I had a gift.
Chapter Twenty
“Are you sure this is your chosen course of action?” Darius asked me as we pulled up near the mage bar to meet Callie and Dizzy.
Instead of going in himself, Darius had given me ten minutes to run into the mage’s house and get the stuff I couldn’t live without. Eleven minutes later, he’d dragged me out. After that, we’d stopped by the hotel so he could get some clothes on, and now here we were, ready for a beer and hopefully some good news.
The beer was the only sure thing.
“Yes. Callie isn’t great at making friends, and Dizzy is weird at the best of times. He might make friends, but he doesn’t inspire the kind of intimacy that will get someone to spill their secrets. Hopefully I can be the go-between.”
Darius shook his head as he exited the car. I pushed the door open and gingerly stepped on my ankle.
“Would you like me to carry you?” he asked, walking around the car to me.
I snickered. “Funny.”
His expression was serious.
“The reason I let you carry me the last time was because we had to flee the scene of a crime. That was about speed, not a tweaked ankle. Give me a break.”
“Do you heal at a faster rate than humans?” he asked, shutting the door for me. He adjusted his satchel around his shoulder.
“You keep forgetting that I am human.”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” I said grudgingly.
“Why do you detest the side of you that isn’t human?”
I took a deep breath and paused at the bar door. “I’m sure my dad is a really swell guy, but he rules the land of evil. Of monsters. I don’t want to be reminded of that part of my genetic makeup.”
“Many demons actually do good. Spread love. Pleasure.”
Oh yeah. I’d forgotten about that new knowledge.
I shrugged. “Mainly, though, I only knew my mom. She raised me. Made me what I am. I want to identify with her, and she was human.”