Master of Fire (5 page)

“Which means you’d better keep your distance.” Arthur folded his brawny arms and leaned a shoulder against the fieldstone fireplace mantel to glower. “Latents are pretty damned tempting to unbonded Magekind, and vice versa. If you get too close, you could find yourself in deep with him before you even know what hit you.”

This was going to be a disaster—she knew it. But damned if Giada could tell Arthur Pendragon no. She sighed. “Yes, sir.”

 

 

Ten minutes later,
Giada was walking back up the cobblestone path with Smoke riding her shoulder. “I told you so,” the cat rumbled in her ear.

Giada gritted her teeth in frustration. “Shut up.”

Smoke sniffed. “Well, if that’s the attitude you’re going to take, I hear an azalea bush calling my name. God knows what trouble the boy’s gotten into by now.”

A cat-sized gate opened in midair, and he leaped through it with a flick of his midnight tail. Giada sighed and opened her own gate back to the hotel.

 

 

Weary to the
bone, Giada undressed and slipped into bed. She flipped the comforter over herself, lay back, and folded her arms under her head, staring blindly up into the darkness, her mind grinding through the events of the day. When Guinevere had asked her to take this job, Giada had hoped it would turn out to be a giant waste of time—that no one was actually targeting Logan after all. Maybe all those deaths really had been some kind of horrible coincidence.

Today had revealed what a pointless hope that had been. Logan was definitely the target of a skilled professional assassin who meant business.

With a sigh, she rolled over onto her side, snuggled into the comforter, and closed her eyes. She’d better get some sleep if she meant to stay alert.

She was going to have to stay on her toes if she wanted to keep him alive. While, God help her, simultaneously keeping her distance.

Piece of cake.

 

 

Giada jerked awake.
A flick of will activated the bedside lamp, sent light spilling across her bed.

The bed that held no one but herself.

No Logan. No vampire lover with a taste for blindfolds and bondage.

What the heck was up with
that
?

Giada sat up and raked both hands through her hair. Her fingers caught in the tangled mass, and she tugged in sheer sexual frustration. She’d never had a dream that nakedly erotic.

Had
it been a dream? A product of her body’s attraction to Logan colliding head-on with Arthur’s orders? Or had it been something more?

Something like, say, a vision of the future?

Maybe it was just a dream
. She fell back against the pillows and stared at the hotel room ceiling, nibbling her lower lip.
Could have been. I’m attracted to him. It would be only natural to have a dream like that about a guy who turns me on. It didn’t have to be a vision
.

Yet she’d never had an erotic dream that intense, that vivid. Of course, she hadn’t had a whole lot of erotic
anything
. The vampire who’d made her a witch had been only the second lover Giada had ever had. Since then, she’d been so busy trying to learn to use her magic, there’d been no time to even think about sex.

Well, she was sure thinking about it now.

Not a good idea. Sex with a Latent could have serious implications.

Like Logan, all Latents were descendants of one of the original knights or ladies of the Round Table. As such, they carried Merlin’s genetic spell in their DNA, a spell created when Camelot’s chosen few had drunk from the wizard’s enchanted Grail. If the spell was never activated, Latents eventually died of old age, just like any other mortal.

But if a member of the Magekind made love to a Latent, the spell would be activated, triggering a magical transformation. The men became vampires, while the women gained magical powers. Apparently Merlin’s own alien race followed the same pattern—male vamps, female magic users.

It took at least three sessions of lovemaking to activate Merlin’s Gift—sometimes more. Good thing, too, because the transformation could have unpredictable results. Giada had heard of Latents going insane from the transformation. As a result, it was strictly forbidden to Change someone without the permission of the Majae’s Council, which determined who could safely acquire all that power. Logan himself had already been cleared years before.

Unfortunately, sometimes the council made mistakes. One of Giada’s fellow Latents had contracted Mageverse Fever, forcing the Knights of the Round Table to hunt her down and execute her. She’d been trying to murder another Latent at the time.

Transforming people was definitely not something to screw around with. Especially not King Arthur’s beloved son.

Better damned well not be a vision
.

 

 

 

 

Logan jolted awake
with a strangled gasp of raw terror, his heart banging a kettledrum beat of panic. “Jesu!” He groped for the bedside lamp, switched it on.

And collapsed in raw relief.

A dream. Thank Merlin, it had only been a dream.

But then, he’d known that. He’d been having variations of the same nightmare since he was fourteen years old, with whatever girl he was attracted to at the time playing the starring role.

Though come to think of it, this nightmare had been more detailed than usual. More intense. Almost like a vision.

Except vampires didn’t have visions. And anyway, he was just a Latent. Still.

Thank God.

 

 

In the inky
shadows under an azalea bush, Smoke yawned. Gods and devils, he was bored. He could almost wish the boy would come pelting outside and roar off in his police car, lights and sirens flashing, headed to another of his damned arson investigations.

Instead, it seemed Smoke was doomed to another night of agonizing ennui trapped under the row of bushes outside Logan’s sprawling brick split-level. Familiar territory, since it was the same house where Gwen and Arthur had raised the boy.

Smoke had been a regular guest back then, having taken interest in Logan during his visits to court with his parents. Lonely mortal boy, surrounded by immortals, with a brilliant, questing mind Smoke had delighted in educating.

The Mageverse was not, by and large, a good place to raise a mortal child. Exposure to all those magic-wielding immortals tended to encourage bitterness, if not psychopathy. Witness poor Bors’s son, Richard, who had tried to murder Arthur in an act of death magic last year.

So Gwen had taken an eighteen-year sabbatical from the Mageverse for the child’s sake, with Arthur in and out as his duties permitted. The couple had bought the house here on the theory that the surrounding small town was a good place to raise children. Smoke gathered Logan had purchased it from them after graduating college. He . . .

Something rustled, interrupting Smoke’s train of thought.

Someone cursed. Loudly.

“Shhh!” a drunken young voice hissed back. “We don’t want to wake him up!”

Smoke lifted his head off his paws.
Oh, now this sounds interesting
.

He stuck his head out from under the bushes in time to see four teenaged boys sneaking toward the massive oak that reigned over Logan’s front yard. All were dressed in black jeans and T-shirts or hoodies, apparently in some laughable idea of stealth. Each carried a roll of toilet paper.

Ahhhhh, yessssss. Entertainment.

Smoke slid from beneath the bush, casting a spell in a ripple of sparks and energy that rolled from his black nose to the tip of his twitching tail. Then he padded up behind the boys as they surrounded the oak.

Black as he was, the boys didn’t see him until one of them wound up to cast his roll of toilet paper over the tree.

“And what,” Smoke purred, “do you lads think you’re doing?”