Alphas Unleashed (29 page)

“You know who I am.”

Jeanne drew on her copa and let out a stream of smoke. Faded blue letters were tattooed on her hands and fingers, words of power—an affectation of the old French mages. Christophe had done the same. From the too bright blue of her eyes, she’d been dosing herself before he and Wallace arrived. “I thought you belonged to dit Menart.”

“Dead.”

“I heard of that.” She let another stream of smoke from her lips and spoke in Irish. “Was it you killed him?”

“No.”

“Your friend?” She waved a hand and switched to English. “If you brought her here for me, I can tell you, I am not interested in any human with so little power. Neither are they.” She gestured to the magehelds behind her. After these hundreds of years lived beyond a natural life spam, she remained youthful. Her presence on this earth, no more her unaged body, meant she had been ritually murdering demons.

The magehelds who’d come in with her arranged themselves in front of the door Palla had disintegrated. The largest two blocked the way. As if he didn’t get Jeanne wasn’t going to let them go anywhere. He could take them, but he needed to wait until they were someplace where Wallace could escape to the car.

Wallace slipped her arm around his waist. She could kill with her magic. With one stroke, she could take down everyone. She would never do it. He would without a single regret, but she wouldn’t. “You have such a beautiful house. I told Palla I wanted to see the place.”

The flow of her magic shaped the chaos at the edges of the void that everyone mistook for the locus of her magic. None of them realized what she was doing. Three of the magehelds lost their severe expressions. She leaned against him. “It’s okay, isn’t it, that we’re looking around? There wasn’t anyone at the door when we came in.”

“No, dear child. No, it is not all right.”

“I am so sorry. It’s my fault. He told me I was being an idiot, but I just never listen.”

They did not know, Jeanne or her magehelds, that she was taking away their hostility. The magehelds in the doorway relaxed, and Jeanne sent a sharp look in their direction, but she, too, was not as angry as she had been. She’d smoked her copa down to a butt too small to continue. She peeled open the paper and extracted the rest of the copa. She placed it, ashes, ember, and all, in her mouth. “Whatever you are doing, demon, cease immediately.”

He lifted his hands. “No can do.”

“You swore to protect her? Why?” She studied them. “Have you taken her to bed?”

“Blew my mind.”

“I do not approve.”

“Demons fuck witches all the time.”

She gave Wallace a long look. “Some things are just not done.”

“Times have changed.” If he could get them past the damned door, then he could get Wallace out of here. Safely away.

Wallace’s magic flowed through the room like smoke, and it was nothing like what he was used to. “Palla, sweetie, I think we need to be going.”

“What is this?” Jeanne focused on Wallace, and her eyes narrowed. “An indwell of some kind?”

Wallace smiled at Jeanne full on. “Thank you for letting us have a look around your spectacular house.”

“You are welcome, naturally.”

“It’s so beautiful.” She took Palla’s hand and walked to the doorway. “Did you decorate yourself?”

“This room, yes.”

“You must love living here.”

“I do.”

“You’ll walk us to the door won’t you? I love your staircase. The marble’s from Italy, am I right?”

Palla kept his mouth closed, and his magic on tap enough to make Jeanne think he was in control of Wallace. The witch walked with them through the house as if they were honored guests. It was the most fucked up, amazing, ballsy thing he’d ever seen.

At the doorway, Jeanne leaned in to kiss Wallace’s cheek. A ward, a normal one, popped. The sound startled them all. Jeanne blinked twice, and then her smile twisted into a grimace as she realized she’d been had.

His oath triggered.

“Why, you little bitch.” She gestured to her magehelds. “Kill them. As slowly or quickly as you like, but make sure you start and end with her.”

Palla punched the largest mageheld with a backward elbow strike and drew enough power to bring down the house. Jeanne’s eyes widened.

“Sorry.” Wallace lifted her hands like she was apologizing for forgetting to bring dessert. Then she dead dropped Jeanne and every single mageheld in the room.

Chapter 13

Wallace yelped when the witch broke free. To her right, Palla had dealt with two more of the magehelds. The fourth did not go down as easily as the others. The crack of Jeanne’s power scared the hell out of her, but she and Palla had practiced defending against an attack so unrelentingly that she reacted on instinct.

Trust that Palla could take care of himself. And Jesus, their link went electric with his magic, and as she faced Jeanne she saw Palla touch the mageheld, and the other demon’s chest blossomed red. Trust that her magic would be there. And it was.

This time when the center of her flexed hard, she knew why, she understood what she intended to happen. She’d made this work before, and she could do it again. She grinned big and wide, and the river of magic Jeanne sent at her hit hers and vanished. Subsumed in the power she’d been surrounded by her entire life. She saw it now, the way Palla did; not just worthy of respect but deserving of it. Entitled to it.

Jeanne drew more magic; the air around her hissed.

Wallace shaped magic around the air. Sparks appeared then vanished at the border between Wallace’s magic and Jeanne’s. Hers gathered speed, sliding along the backwash and the trail and at the termination point, Jeanne grunted and staggered back.

She saw how she could kill the witch right now, but no one deserved a violent death. No one. She could end this now, and could not even though Palla was fighting for her life and his. One of the magehelds had flanked him, and he was bleeding from a wound across his back.

Jeanne called more magehelds, and they appeared from elsewhere in the house, and it was nothing, nothing at all to dead drop them. Some of them went down and stayed down. Others slowed, and a very few fought free of the effect. Jeanne drew power again.

She’d spent weeks working with witches like Jeanne. She’d failed at every turn, but all those weeks she’d learned how they used their power. Jeanne was no different. More magehelds rushed them. and Palla was in the thick of that mass of demons, some shifted into non-human forms, fighting, and when he touched then, red blossomed. The smell of blood overpowered. His and theirs.

He was drawing the magehelds away from the door, and now there were ten of them between Palla and her. He was not going die because of her. No way.

The magehelds resonated with the magic of the demonkind, she’d learned to recognize that; one of her rare triumphs, learning how her magic reacted to demons. She also felt the twisted, blackened core that was Jeanne’s enslavement of them. She gathered what no one saw and displaced the magehelds’ magic with hers. Not a reach for power to shape and use as a weapon; a container that pushed on air. She did not give her magic form, she created the container and the chaos of the temperature at the boundaries.

The magehelds she reached could not fight. The air around them prevented from from movement. Palla pushed into the nearest unaffected mageheld and touched him. Another mageheld down. She wrapped up more of them. Jeanne’s magic burned through the air, and Wallace stopped it dead because she could fucking do magic. She followed that with a dead drop focused on nothing but the witch, and that massive void blossomed out, and she saw that she hadn’t been bold enough.

She could stop all the magic in this house. All of it. She displaced everything demon or magekind had ever done to perpetuate the magic here. Every single mageheld standing went down, and Jeanne staggered. The air over the witch rained sparks, but there was nothing she could do. She did not understand how to combat magic used the way Wallace used hers.

Somewhere else in the house something popped. One of the overhead lights exploded. Then another. And another.

Palla grabbed her hand and raced for the door. “Go. Go. Go!”

Jeanne had done something to keep it from opening, but Wallace drew on her power, and there was a boom, and the door was open.

They headed for the car at a sprint.

Chapter 14

Palla drove down the hill like nothing had happened. He’d cut their link, and that was strange, not having that. The gash across his back was deep and glistening with blood and two separate streams trailed down his arm. She could see him healing, feel the magic. He was acting like he wasn’t in pain. “You okay?”

“We didn’t die, so I guess so.” She was okay. Mostly. She kept her hands on her lap because they wouldn’t stop shaking. If she closed her eyes, she saw Palla moving among the attacking magehelds, a machine. Those magehelds had been ordered to kill, and his oath to her meant he hadn’t had a choice about what to do. “You?”

“You have the talisman, right?”

“Yes.” Her purse was on the floorboard of the car, between her feet. The talisman was inside, still in the box.

“Are you sure?”

“I think it’s safer if I keep it quiet for now.”

“Probably.” He squeezed the steering wheel.

“Do you want to stop somewhere?”

He gave her a look of pure disbelief. “What for?”

“So you can deal with this.” She waved her hands. “I don’t even know how you stand it. Not doing something right now.”

“We’re not stopping.” He stuck his phone in the Bluetooth car cradle and a few minutes later music came over the car speakers. They did not share musical tastes. Death metal was not her thing, but she wasn’t going to complain. At least he was alive to listen to music she hated. After a few minutes of pure torture, he paused the music. “Why the hell they sing about him so much I cannot figure out.”

“Who?”

“Thoth. He was an asshole who loved being worshiped as a god.”

“I guess you’d know.”

“I guess I would.” He didn’t sound angry or tense. “Since we knew him and kicked his ass.”

His slip into the plural made her uneasy. She’d gotten more than enough of his mental state when he was fighting off that trap at Jeanne’s house—or fully in the sway of the talisman. “He probably didn’t like you either.”

“He didn’t, but he was hot for Avitas.” He turned on the music again, and she slunk down in the seat. More tortured, raspy, voices grated along her nerves, and just when she was getting the hang of how to listen, he switched off the music again and said, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. For what?”

“All of it. Jeanne. Avitas. You didn’t have to do any of that.”

“Yes, I did.” She ended up speaking softly, because maybe the words were better left unsaid. “You knew that about me.”

Quiet ate up the inside of the car. “I did.”

She stared out the window, sick at heart to realize how she’d screwed up. She’d slept with him. That hadn’t been the mistake. The sex had been fantastic. Totally worth it. But she’d let him see and learn things about her that she’d never talked about with anyone. And she could only sit here aware that if she wanted to cut him a break for horrible music, and then listen hard enough to understand why, she’d tangled up great sex with
and now we have a future
. There wasn’t any future, and he was going to go forward with his life in a world she didn’t belong in.

“No.” Palla rotated his healing shoulder.

“No, what?”

He sighed. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“No you don’t.”

“I don’t have to be in your head to know what you’re thinking.”

“Oh, really?”

He glared at her. “You’ve got yourself convinced we were all about the sex and nothing else.”

“Weren’t we?”

“Yeah, right. That’s all.”

They didn’t speak until they were in San Francisco and closing the door to the elevator in his building. He punched the button for his floor.

“I was thinking about doing you way before I realized Maddy was right to pull you in.”

“You were not.”

“Can you fucking read my mind?” He was healed now. Not a mark on him. No sign of injury except his ripped shirt.

“Not right now, I can’t.”

“That’s right. You cannot. I was thinking about it. I liked the way you looked when you smile. I was thinking you’d be something different.”

“Different.” Too many people used that word when they didn’t want to be more straight up. She was right to protect herself from this disaster. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know. You tell me since I can’t read your mind right now.”

Instead of saying,
why not
, instead of asking him
why am I shut out?
 she said, “I’m pretty damned different from your usual. Blonde and blue-eyed, am I right?”

He gave her a stink-eye. “Wait, are you saying it’s a problem I thought a black chick is hot?”

“No.”

“That is downright human of you.” He let out a breath. The elevator stopped, and he opened the door. “The way your minds work, sometimes I wonder why you humans even have brains, because you don’t use them when you most need to.”