My Wicked Enemy (15 page)

He grabbed one of the wipes off the bed and scrubbed until he’d removed every trace of dried blood on her skin. It didn’t change anything. On the inside of her forearm, an undulating black line streaked up her arm from the mark on her palm along her pale skin all the way to where her sweater bunched up on her lower arm. Even though the line wasn’t to her elbow yet, he understood now what he’d been feeling from her since they left Berkeley. A fucked-up attar of fiend and mage.

Eyes big and dilated with the Copa and painkillers and whatever was happening to her now, Carson’s gaze locked with his. “It’s moving,” she said.

He didn’t say anything. Couldn’t even find the words to describe what he was feeling right now.

“Blood poisoning causes a red streak,” Harsh said, his gaze moving between Carson and him. “Why is this black?”

“It’s not blood poisoning,” Nikodemus said. He drew in a deep breath and snatched up the crappy scissors to cut off the sleeve of her sweater. The line on her inner arm was about three inches from her elbow and climbing.

She closed her eyes and shuddered. She was stifling an enormous store of emotion. This wasn’t just a line of black, and she knew it. Yeah. Now she knew it. When she opened her eyes, they were full of mute appeal. He had no assurances to give her. “You know the myths are real,” he said. “You know what Magellan was trying to do. The talisman cracked, Carson. But not inside Magellan. Inside you.”

“But Durian wasn’t dead,” she said.

“Two other fiends died there, Carson.” Killed by him, as a matter of fact.

For a while her gaze stayed on his face, and he wondered if she felt the same heat he did as their connection flared. She propped her uninjured arm atop her raised knee, leaning against Harsh. His connection to her told him she was trying hard not to panic.

The line was heading straight for her heart and from there to her brain, where the energy that had been released from the cracked talisman would seep into her body and psyche, to the very center of the magic she was unable to touch. If he didn’t figure out what to do soon, sometime in the next twenty-four hours he was going to be disposing of a body. Magellan or Rasmus might have survived this, but Carson wouldn’t. He watched and felt her panic, and then she got control and shut herself down. She drew in another breath and stared at her arm and the streak of black. He tried to ignore the fist clenched around his heart.

“All right,” she said. “All right.” This time she whispered the words. She looked at him. “What’s going to happen?”

Nikodemus pressed a fingertip to her forehead, hoping he could help her settle. The magic in her twisted him all around. “I don’t know, Carson.”

“You’re lying. Don’t lie, Nikodemus.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair. Carson took a breath and let it out in a short burst. “I’m going to die anyway, Nikodemus. What difference does it make what you tell me?”

“A fiend wouldn’t die from Magellan’s poison. And right now you’re at least partly fiend. I think that’s why you’re still alive.”

Her eyes opened wide. “Am I going to die or not?”

“I don’t know. Everything I’ve ever heard about this says you wait and see what happens.” You died or you mastered the magic. There wasn’t any choice there. And he didn’t see how Carson could master any magic, human or fiend.

Harsh brushed something, maybe nothing, off his pants. “I know someone.” He licked his lips and glanced away in time to avoid Nikodemus’s look.

“What?” Nikodemus said.

“I know someone who might be able to help.” Carson’s head shot up, too. “I’m not saying it’s certain, but
maybe
is better than waiting around to see what happens.”

“Who?” Nikodemus said. Was he suspicious? Hell, yes. But Harsh was right. Maybe was a lot better than sitting around waiting.

“They live about an hour north.”

“They?” His bad feeling ballooned. The possibilities had just gone from a couple to exactly one. And it wasn’t a fun one. “Who, they?”

Harsh looked everywhere except at Nikodemus. “I’ve known them a long time. From before Rasmus.”

“Just two random buddies of yours who can fix something like this? Oh, no . . .”

After a silence, Harsh sighed. He met Nikodemus’s eyes at last. “They’re stable, Warlord.”

“I have my issues with blood-twins.” Nikodemus put up a hand to forestall whatever Harsh was going to say. He couldn’t be talking about anything but blood-twins. “I don’t want to hear it. Fine. They’re stable. But are they stable enough?”

“Last I saw them, yes.”

“Brothers or sisters?” Nikodemus asked. He really, really wanted to hear Harsh’s blood-twins were same-sex.

“Brother and sister,” Harsh said.

“What the hell kind of fiend has blood-twins for friends?” Carson looked between the two of them. Nikodemus tried to recover some of his calm. “Are you nuts?”

Harsh’s eyes got a faraway expression. “I don’t know, Warlord.”

“Do they have the magic for this? Because I’ll tell you right now, unless they do, it isn’t worth the risk.”

“They do.”

“What are you talking about?” Carson asked.

Nikodemus gave her the highlights. Just as there were human twins who chose the same clothes or bought the same car even if they lived on different continents, so there were fiends who were psychic twins in addition to being physical twins. Blood-twins. If the effect was weak, they hid what they were. Their magic was symbiotic, doubled and redoubled by the other, typically far exceeding what a single fiend could pull. Blood-twins could do things most other fiends couldn’t, and they shared their lives the way they shared magic. They were notoriously unstable and antisocial because they didn’t need anyone else. They didn’t swear fealty and almost never hooked up with warlords. Blood-twins didn’t play nice. With anyone. They were borderline psychotics. End of story. Except Harsh was right. A pair of blood-twins might be able to stop whatever was killing her now.

They’d have to be crazy-desperate to ask a blood-twin for help with anything. He looked at Carson and just knew if she died, his heart was going to shrivel to nothing. Everyone would think he was the same Nikodemus, but he wouldn’t be.

One minute at a time, he thought. One step at a time. He’d worry about the future after he knew if there was going to be one that included her. If he was throwing away his dream of leading an alliance against the mages, so be it. He could work it in the background. Through Harsh, if he wanted to, and maybe a few others who had reason to trust him.

He tossed Harsh his cell phone. “Call. Tell them we’re on our way.”

“Thanks.” Her mouth was tense and worried. Well, he was tense and worried, too. They all were. She got in and clicked her belt on one-handed. Nikodemus got in the back, too. So far, so good. Carson wasn’t suffering badly. The painkillers helped enough to keep the pain Nikodemus was still intercepting to a tolerable level. She’d made it downstairs on her own, which was more than he’d expected. The Copa had stabilized her magic. Perfect. Right. Not.

Up front, Harsh revved the motor. The former pharmacist had taken liberties with Nikodemus’s closet, but without looking as sexy as Carson did in his shirt. Harsh’s pilfered jeans, the new ones Nikodemus hadn’t even worn yet, didn’t fit, given that Harsh was a couple of inches taller. He’d also cut the sleeves off Nikodemus’s favorite threadless.com tee, “Stick Figures in Peril.” The bastard. He should have looked like a total freak, but what he looked like was a rich guy slumming. Odd, that. He wondered what Harsh had been before he got caught up in Rasmus’s axle. He wasn’t a warlord. That, Nikodemus would have known. The guy used to hang with blood-twins. Did he eat nails for breakfast, too? He was fucking hard to read, that was a fact, and Nikodemus wasn’t sure if that was due to Harsh’s connection with Carson or if the oddness was something he’d always had. He was certainly comfortable driving an expensive car. He didn’t have any hesitation about where things were on the dash or anywhere else in the car. Like he used to own one himself.

“Everybody buckled up?” Harsh asked.

“Yes, Mom,” Nikodemus said. Carson laughed, and he saw Harsh’s eyes flick to the rearview mirror. Of course she laughed. That wasn’t her T-shirt ruined up there. His link with her was still open, and he left it that way. If she had some kind of reaction to the fiend-magic working its way into her, he wanted to know.

Harsh plugged an MP3 player into the car’s sound system and started up Mozart’s Jupiter symphony as he brought the car into traffic. Just great. He’d been a busy boy when he wasn’t ripping off his closet. He was ruining his tunes, too. “Death Cab for Cutie better still be on there, pharmacy boy.”

“Relax,” Harsh said. He turned up the volume. “101 North, here we come.”

Nobody talked for a long time. Nikodemus wasn’t much of a Mozart fan, and he thought about setting up the DVD player so he and Carson could watch Jet Li kick the shit out of ancient Chinese brigands. But Harsh had said they were only heading an hour north, and that wasn’t enough time to give the wu-shu master his due. He slumped on the seat, arms crossed over his chest.

The longer this went on, the more thoroughly he saw how fucked he was. Carson reached over and touched his knee, and he slid his hand around hers. Her fingers were hot, and his sense of fiend-magic from her was cranking him up. Fiend and mage from the same person. Wild. He opened his connection to her, and she didn’t object. Scrappy thing, she was.

He was having a hard time adjusting his worldview to include a mage he didn’t want to kill. Life really sucked when your nearest and dearest hatreds got confronted and failed to stand up to the test. God fucking damn it. He owed her. No problem there. There were worse mages to be indebted to; like, every other one in the world besides Carson Philips. Nikodemus stroked her shoulder. Through the fabric of her shirt he felt a tingle in his hand, a zing of fiendish magic tainted with mage-magic.

It was beyond lousy for him to feel kinship with Magellan’s witch. Not so long ago he’d been happily ranking his top three ways to kill the woman. Now he wanted to save her life. He didn’t just
want
to save her life. He
needed
to. Every time he looked at her, so pale and subdued, with that freaking line snaking toward her head, he could hardly catch his breath. He stroked her temple, just a circling motion of his fingertip. In the Copa-subdued chaos of her head he caught flashes of her mageborn magic, but she felt like kin, too. He didn’t want to hope, and he sure as hell knew he shouldn’t be laying plans for them, but shit, he couldn’t give up. He just couldn’t.

She swallowed like her throat hurt. “It’s hot in here,” she said. “Aren’t you too hot?”

“Harsh,” he said over the Mozart. “Crank the AC, would you?”

A minute later, cool air wafted over them. He stretched out her hand and pushed up her sleeve—his T-shirt sleeve hit her elbow—to check where the black line ended now. Answer: midbiceps. It might be slowing down a little, but unless he was mistaken, the line was darker. He followed the line with his fingertip. Underneath his fingertip he felt a swirling magnetic pulse. Pure kinship. But the mage in her called to him, too.

He leaned against the seat and closed his eyes.
Reason,
he thought. He needed reason and logic to help him through this. She was human. He wasn’t. She was a witch, or at least she’d started out that way. He was a fiend, and fiends and the magekind were natural enemies. Except he didn’t give a fuck about her being a witch, and besides, she was something else now, too, wasn’t she? Carson leaned her head against his shoulder and goddamn reason to hell. This was what it was. He put an arm around her shoulder and kissed the top of her head. “You okay?”

“I have a headache,” she whispered.

“It’ll be okay, sweetheart. I promise.” He popped out more of the ibuprofen and gave it to her, because he was distracted by how much she was hurting.

Thirty miles later, Carson had dozed off and the shopping malls and cities had given way to open land. Another five miles and he saw the sun rising over oak-covered hills. They left Marin County for Sonoma County, and for several more miles, aside from the occasional dairy barn, there were no houses.

“How’s she doing?” Harsh asked.

“Sleeping.” He pushed up her sleeve. The line reached to her shoulder joint. “How much farther, Harsh? We don’t have much time.”

“Not far.” Harsh kept the speed up even after he left 101 for a narrow road that wound through countryside. Nothing but open land, cows, sheep and horses, and wildflowers bursting into morning color against the green. Before long, they turned left onto an unpaved private driveway. They drove farther into the hills, bumping over ruts the whole way until, at last, they descended into a valley.

The road ended at a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century farmhouse with several outbuildings in the back. Harsh parked in a graveled area behind the house next to a rusting pickup. Nikodemus and Harsh got out. “How’d a pair of blood-twins score a place like this?” he asked.

“It’s mine,” Harsh said. “Land used to be cheap here.” His eyes darkened. “I didn’t expect to be gone so long.”

The pit of Nikodemus’s stomach clenched, because now he got what he should have gotten right away. He let blood-twins live in his house? Harsh wasn’t just everyday friends with them. No one let blood-twins this close without being way more than friends. “Which one, Harsh?” Nikodemus asked. He was pissed that Harsh hadn’t mentioned he was doing the twins.

“Fen,” he answered softly. “The sister.” But of course Harsh would have ended up the lover of both of them. Had to, if the relationship was going to last. There was no way someone got between blood-twins. The bond between them was all-consuming. They were strictly a two-for-one deal, no outsiders allowed. All of which meant Harsh was in a hard place. He seemed to know it, too. They weren’t going to accept him back. Not with his bond to Carson.

“Let’s go inside,” Nikodemus said. “And find out where we stand.”

“Control, Warlord,” Harsh murmured.

He ramped himself down. If he didn’t get as vanilla as possible, the twins would be entitled to assume the warlord in their yard was here to attack, and their little meet-and-greet would be over before the door closed. He wished like hell Durian were here. He’d know how to deal with this situation. He’d persuade the blood-twins of whatever it was they needed to be persuaded of and have them convinced the agreement was their idea. With Nikodemus supporting Carson, they went inside through a door that put them in a kitchen. Just your basic everyday kitchen.

Uh, not exactly.

Viking range. Marble counters. Oak cabinets and a chrome fridge. Copper pots hung from the ceiling. There was a butcher-block table in the cooking area and a set of expensive knives on the counter. Somebody sure liked to cook. The twins were seated at the kitchen table. Nikodemus couldn’t separate them magically. They felt identical in that respect, but that wasn’t unusual with blood-twins.

Harsh slicked his hands over his head, then froze with his palms cradling his shorn skull. “You never get used to it,” he said softly.

The male at the table was the poster boy for fiendkind; a tall, muscled man with straight brown hair caught back in a loose ponytail. Five eerily intense cobalt blue stripes ran down the left side of his face, tattooed in varying widths from the midline of his left pupil outward to his temple. The line that bisected his eye colored the white of his eye, too. He stared at the table and gave no sign that he gave a shit about their entrance. Good-looking guy, though. His body was fit and hale. He looked like he could go out and bale hay or brand cattle or snap some mage’s neck without breaking a sweat.

Once Harsh was in their club, the male half of the pair would have taken on his sister’s reactions to Harsh. All of them. Friendship. Longing. Lust. Love, if that’s what it was.

The sister, Fen, was brain-numbingly beautiful. She wore her dark red hair slicked back from her face so that when he finally got over her perfect bone structure, he had the unpleasant shock of taking her hair for buzzed short. But it wasn’t. A thick red braid hung down her back. Tiny silver hoop earrings went all around the outside of one ear, and dozens of narrow silver bracelets hung on her wrists. Her blouse was white gauze. Her bra was red. Very red against the porcelain skin of her cleavage.

Fen stood up. She had the body to go with the face. Lean. Athletic and long-limbed, she moved like a ballerina about to go
en pointe
. One of them, probably both, was pulling magic hard. The male didn’t stir.

“It’s me,” Harsh said.

Fen looked from him to Nikodemus and then to Carson. “Harsh.”

She had a sexy voice. Nikodemus felt the zing of magic from the twins, and besides the fact that Fen was gorgeous, he knew why Harsh had fallen for them. He’d have been tempted himself. Those two had some potent shit together. For the first time since they got Carson in the car, he thought there was hope.

Fen’s gaze lingered on Carson, and her expression tightened. Her sky-blue eyes didn’t focus, but Nikodemus didn’t for a moment think she wasn’t taking in every detail to be had from them. Five copper-colored stripes of varying widths circled her forearms. He caught a suggestion of nystagmus in her pupils, a rapid jitter of focus.

Carson’s magic sputtered. Adrenaline surged through him when he got a blast of mage from her, followed immediately by a totally warped sense of her being kin. He slipped an arm around her. Her skin burned with a dry heat that had to be sapping her energy. They were lucky she was still on her feet.

Fen’s mouth tightened. “Why come back after all this time?” she asked Harsh. Fen’s stare at Carson wasn’t a curious look. She looked at Carson like she hated her. Nope. She wasn’t happy. Not happy at all. How many women, blood-twin or not, wanted a long-lost lover to come home bound to some other chick?

“I wasn’t free before,” Harsh said. He took a step forward but stopped short of moving past Carson. Big mistake. Harsh made it look like he didn’t want to move past Carson. Fen’s gaze shifted to Carson and stayed there. Harsh addressed the male. “Iskander?”

Carson gripped Nikodemus’s arm with fever-hot fingers. Her attention fixed on Iskander. Nikodemus, with his connection to her still active, felt the avaricious longing so typical of the magekind for the kin. Man, could you spell trouble with that. Iskander lifted his head, and Nikodemus got a shot of heat when the male fiend and Carson locked gazes.

Something here stank like dead guppies on a hot day. Iskander looked at Carson as if he was getting a major hard-on, and Fen looked like she wanted to shove Carson down the Grand Canyon. If the fiends weren’t blood-twins, the different reactions might have been normal. But they were, and the divergent reactions weren’t.

“What is he?” Carson whispered. Her fingers gripped his arm tight enough to distract him. “Nikodemus, what is he?”

Good question,
Nikodemus thought.