Master of Shadows (10 page)

His roar sliced through her cry like a razor.
“I said give me the money, Hannah!”

Hannah Davis was Miranda’s fellow waitress at Flo’s, a timid young woman with two children and a tendency to come to work spotted with bruises. “Eddie, Carey’s shoes have holes in the—”

The crack of fist hitting flesh came louder this time. That was no slap. That was a punch, the kind that left bruises and fractured bone behind. Hannah cried out, her voice choked with pain. “Eddie! Stop it, let me go!”

Memory flooded Miranda’s mouth with bile.

“You dare change?” As she met Gerald Drake’s frenzied gaze, Miranda realized he’d lost control completely. And he intended to kill her. “You dare fight me? You
dare
?”

Miranda started across the gravel parking lot before she even knew what she was going to do, her strides long and angry as she headed for the struggling couple.

“Eddie . . .” Hannah gasped.

“Enough!” Miranda snarled, her hands curling into claws. She felt the prick of them on her palms, a warning that she was far too close to transforming. She struggled for self-control; it wouldn’t do to change in front of humans.

Eddie Gibson shot her a glower over his shoulder. “Mind your own damned business, bitch!” He had a meth addict’s bad skin and missing teeth, his long, thinning hair pulled into a stringy dishwater blond ponytail. “This is between me and my—”

He didn’t get the last word out of his mouth before Miranda’s magic jerked him off his feet.

“What?” Hannah sank back, staring with helplessly wide eyes as her boyfriend kicked and wheezed in the grip of Miranda’s power. “Miranda, how . . . ?
What are you doing
?”

“Stopping
him
. For once. He’s been beating you since I came to work here. You think I haven’t noticed the bruises?” Miranda sucked in a deep breath, fighting the blinding rush of rage. She’d spent years at the mercy of a man just like Eddie. How many times had Gerald hit her, raked her open, threatened her mother to keep her in line?

After Gerald murdered Joelle, he’d come after Miranda, and she’d killed him. It had been self-defense—barely. Eddie Gibson was cut from the same cloth. Another abusive bastard who beat someone smaller and weaker, simply because he could.

So Miranda was going to teach the little creep how it felt to be on the receiving end.

 

There was a
glitter in Belle’s blue-gray eyes that completely infuriated Tristan. Primarily because she seemed utterly unaware of how much it turned him on.

Somewhere in the ruins of the werewolves’ burned-out house, Belle had found the charred remains of Miranda’s spell book. It was only the left lower corner, and only a couple of the badly burned pages had readable words. But it wasn’t the spells Belle was interested in. She had plenty of magic of her own, and more spells at her fingertips than that poor werewolf girl would ever know.

No, the power of the spell book was that Miranda had once concentrated on it fiercely, using it as the focus of her words and her power. Which meant Belle could use it to find
her
, whether she’d been taken or had simply vanished on her own.

Which still wouldn’t make it easy. Belle was taking the project very seriously, so much so she was using the permanent magic circle in the basement of her house—an inlaid silver design comprised of interlocking Celtic runes.

The circle lay in the exact center of the room’s slate floor. The surrounding stone walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves that held rows of mysterious jars and bottles filled with Merlin knew what. Other shelves were tightly packed with ancient books of spells written in languages that had been dead for centuries. There were magical objects, too: crystals, statues of stone or bronze or silver, blades of every kind, all of them humming softly with power.

Belle had dressed for spell work, in a loose, comfortable white gown that really had no business being as sexy as it was. It draped over the full swell of her breasts in a way that made Tristan’s mouth water. If he concentrated, he could see the shadows of her nipples through the worn lace. It was cool in the lab, and both little peaks stood at proud attention against the fabric.

Her feet were bare and pink, and the gown’s short sleeves revealed long, elegant arms. It had a simple scoop bodice with pretensions of innocence its cleavage missed by a mile.

Tristan all but drooled.

She’d lit candles around the perimeter of the design, slim white tapers that cast dancing yellow light over the otherwise dark room. Incense burned, sending up coils of cool blue smoke smelling of sandalwood and lavender.

Morgana had told him once that the candles and incense, even the design itself, did not have true magical properties. But the process of entering the Celtic circle, lighting the candles, and smelling the incense acted to focus the mind into a trance state that intensified a witch’s connection to the Mageverse.

Meanwhile it gave Tristan a hard-on.

He watched her, breath caught. Belle sat with her skirts in a white cotton pool around her long, slender legs. Her hair shimmered with highlights and mysterious shadows, blond and silver, gold and umber, and shades of sable, curling around her slim shoulders. Her long hands seemed to float over the seared pages of the book, slow as seaweed in an ocean current. Graceful fingers drew patterns in the air, and sparks of magic trailed them, gold shading into white.

Her eyes looked dark and endless, until sparks of power lit them bright gray-blue, like lightning flashes in the clouds. The candlelight painted soft shadows over her lovely face, tracing her angled cheekbones, full, seductive lips parted in gentle breaths, the straight line of her nose, the round little thrust of her chin.

If he concentrated, he could hear her heartbeat, tranceslowed to a steady thump. He remembered the taste of her blood, burning magic on his tongue, and it drove his pulse into a leaping bound. His cock lengthened in his jeans, pressing hard against his fly. He thought about tumbling her down in her spell circle, tasting her throat in the candlelight, thrusting deep between her legs as the incense wove blue patterns in the darkness.

Tristan wanted to take her so badly, his balls ached like a sore tooth.

 

“Randi, you’re gonna
hurt him!” Hannah licked her lips, her frightened gaze lingering on the distance between her boyfriend’s feet and the pavement. “Please let him go!”

“Bastard needs to be hurt.” Miranda didn’t look away from Eddie’s darkening face and rolling eyes as she dangled him well off the ground. “He’s a snake, Hannah, and you know it.”

“No, he’s not really that bad. Randi, please!”

Miranda ground her teeth, caught between the pleading in the other woman’s eyes and her own outrage. Hannah reminded her far too much of her mother. Joelle had let Warlock and Gerald Drake terrorize her for years. Miranda hadn’t dared attempt escape for fear of what they’d do to her mother.

But Eddie wasn’t Gerald. And Hannah wasn’t Miranda.

With a snarl of disgust, Randi tossed the meth addict like a ball of trash. He hit the graveled parking lot in a yelping tumble of elbows and knees.

Hannah started to run toward him, but Miranda grabbed her arm. “No.” She sent a curl of magic out to catch the human’s thoughts and met the woman’s gaze. “Do you want to leave him, Hannah?” Longing flashed in the woman’s bruised eyes, there and gone so fast Miranda might have thought she imagined it. Luckily she knew better. “You do, don’t you?”

“Eddie said he’d kill my babies,” Hannah admitted in a voice low with defeat. “I can’t go.”

Little hostages. The same way Gerald and Warlock had used Miranda’s mother. “He’s not going to do a damned thing to your children, Hannah. I’m not going to let him.” With a flick of her magic, she snapped the chains of fear that Eddie’s fists and feet had forged in his victim’s brain. “You go on home now. You take care of your boys.”

Hannah wrung her hands. “But what if he . . . ?”

“He won’t. You let me take care of Eddie.”

Her hands twisted harder at one another, expressing her anxiety and ambivalence. “You’re not going to kill him, are you?”

“Do you really care?” The woman opened her mouth, and Miranda sighed. “No. No, I’m not going to kill him.”

“Hannah!” Eddie yelled, staggering to his feet, his jeans ripped from impact with sharp bits of gravel, his knees bleeding. “Don’t leave me with her! She’s some kind of witch!”

Miranda flicked a hand and he froze, locked in the grip of her magic. “Go on, Hannah.” She put just enough will behind the command to make the waitress head for her beat-up blue Cutlass Supreme. Another thought struck her, and she called out. “Hannah?”

The woman froze and looked back at her, eyes wide, face pale.

“You won’t remember this tomorrow,” Miranda gestured, weaving another quick spell. “All you’ll remember is that Eddie decided to leave, and he’s not coming back.”

“He’s not coming back.” With a dreamy, relieved sigh, Hannah got into the car and started it. She threw the Cutlass into gear and peeled out of the lot.

Leaving Miranda with Eddie.

Feeling her teeth lengthening into fangs, she sauntered toward her captive, menace in every step. A knife materialized in her palm, raining blue sparks. Eddie stared at it, his mouth forming an O of terror. His body twitched as he tried to escape, but her spell held him fast.

“How does it feel, you bastard?” Miranda whispered the words, soft and acid. “Being helpless. Being at somebody’s mercy. Knowing they could kill you if they want.
I
could kill you—and I do want.”

His fear smelled acrid as piss.
“What the hell are you?”

“I’m exactly what you think I am. A witch. And I’m not human.” Miranda grabbed Eddie by his T-shirt collar and jerked him close as she flashed her fangs in his face. “And you don’t want to piss me off by talking about what you saw tonight. Do you?”

“No! I won’t say nothin’!”

“And you certainly don’t want to piss me off by bothering Hannah again. She’s under my protection now, and I wouldn’t like it if you came around her or her kids again. You don’t want to do that, do you?”

“Okay! Okay, I’ll stay away from her. I swear it! Just don’t hurt me!”

“And you won’t tell anybody about what I can do. Not that anyone would believe you if you did.” Miranda let magic ignite her eyes with an eerie shimmer. “Hell, they’d probably think you’re stoned. But you’re not.” She jerked him closer and pressed the knife against his throat until the sharp steel bit into flesh. A bead of blood welled and ran down his bobbing Adam’s apple. “So you’d better run, Eddie. You’d better run and keep running.
Never come back.
”

When she let him go, he did exactly that, stumbling across the parking lot to dive into his Ford pickup. He started it with a roar and sped out, gravel flying from his spinning wheels.

Miranda watched him go, wondering why she felt so damned ashamed of herself. As if she wasn’t any better than the man she’d just so thoroughly terrorized.

Maybe she wasn’t.

Wearily, Miranda’s fingers found the choker around her neck. Magic buzzed around it, generating a shield that should keep her father from sensing what she’d just done.

If Warlock detected her magic, he’d be on her like a cat on a mouse. She’d pay for protecting Hannah with her own life. Miranda had known that was a risk when she’d crossed the parking lot, but she’d also known she had to take that chance. Doing nothing while another woman suffered would have made her no better than Eddie.

Now at least Hannah and her kids would sleep safely tonight.

Even if Miranda didn’t.

How the hell
was Belle supposed to concentrate with Tristan staring at her like a cat at a birdbath?

He was sitting tailor-fashion, wearing jeans in a shade of indigo verging on black. A forest green shirt was tucked into the jeans, cinched by a belt tooled with intricate Celtic patterns, its buckle engraved silver. Soft black boots shod his big feet. His sword lay on the floor before his knees, gleaming unsheathed in case he should need to defend her while she was entranced. He’d bound his blond hair into a long tail, the severe style emphasizing the strong lines of his handsome face. His green eyes glittered in the candlelight.