One More Bite (29 page)

“Vayl?” I whispered.

“What is happening?” demanded Colonel John. He and Raoul had risen off the couch. Despite the fact that one supported the other, they still managed to make a threatening duo.

“Back away from her, Vayl!” Raoul shouted. “You are a guest here. Only allowed because I have pronounced it neutral territory for the duration of your stay. If I invoke the holy protections once again you will burn as surely as if you had entered a cathedral!”

I put my hand on Vayl’s chest, willing him to be calm. “I know you’re pissed. So am I. Every day. But this isn’t helping; you see that, don’t you? Come on, if you’re not going to be the levelheaded one, we’re pretty much screwed.”

“I want to be there when you confront her,” he growled.

“Okay, fine. No problem.” Never mind that I’d have agreed to slip into a frilly apron and bake a carrot cake if that would take the vengeance out of his expression. I turned to the other guys and smiled brightly as Vayl’s powers began to ebb. “It’s all good,” I assured them. “I just opened my big mouth one too many times. You know me, F this, F that. He’s so sick of me swearing sometimes he could happily throw me off the roof. Not that he’d ever do that,” I hastened to add,

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realizing my babbling was about to get us into worse trouble. Best to finish our business and get out.

I went on. “Tell my mother I’ll talk to Dad and, if he’s okay with a meet, I’ll get back to Raoul with the arrangements. But we won’t have time to do anything until after our mission’s accomplished. Which means she needs play it cool until then. Okay?”

Still looking somewhat suspicious, Colonel John nodded. Which gave Raoul little choice but to agree.

I let my smile widen. Now my entire face hurt. How did beauty queens do it? “Thanks so much for your help. Can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Big weight off my mind.” I took Vayl’s hand, clenched it hard to make sure he followed me as I said, “Don’t worry about seeing us out. We know the way. Sorry about the bar again, but it sounds like you’ve got a great plan in place for the train dealie. Keep me posted on that, will ya?”

And, having reestablished an expression of avid interest on Raoul’s face, at least, I led Vayl out the door and back to the real world.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I opened my eyes and took a deep, whopping breath. The kind you want after you’ve been stuck inside a gas station bathroom way too long. “We’re back.”

Vayl stirred. Which was when I realized how Cirilai had found him so easily. He’d come into his room, into his bed, and wrapped himself around me so tightly I felt like I’d crawled into a kid’s sleeping bag. “Um, Vayl?”

“Mmm.”

“We should get up.”

“Why?”

I strained my head to see past his curls to the little round alarm clock on the pretty railed table beside the bed. “I’m assuming you had Cole take your place when you came in here.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I have to go relieve him. And you’re going to be dead to the world [literally!] in less than half an hour.”

He lifted his chin from where it rested on my shoulder. His warm breath tickled at my cheek as he said, “Then surely another twenty or thirty minutes will not hurt him.”

“You’re damn straight it will!” Cole cut in, which was when I realized Vayl, at least, hadn’t taken off his transmitter. “Get your ass up here, Jaz.” Ooh, our third sounded pretty irritable.

“Tell him I’m coming,” I said.

“I heard,” said Cole. “What are you, sitting on Vayl’s lap or something? Never mind, I don’t want to know. Just get up here. Strange things are happening and I’m tired of trying to figure out if they’re designed to pull me off Floraidh watch or if I really should investigate.”

I shoved at Vayl’s chest. It worked about as well as poking an elephant with a daisy. “We’ll be right there,” I said anyway.

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Vayl began to nuzzle that sensitive area right behind my earlobe. Which made my eyes roll right up in their sockets. Tough not to make any noise as his hand slipped under my shirt. I wanted it to continue . . . well, was forever too long? But Cole needed us. The mission loomed. Not to mention my crappy mother. And did I really want to lock in the memories of our first time with a Scidairan’s spell-drenched B and B?

Not to mention my nap breath. Not as bad as morning breath, but still skanky enough to warrant a brushing. Because underneath it the aftertaste of Brude’s blood had lingered. Impossible, my mind whispered. Your body was here the whole time.

Tell that to my taste buds.

Unbelievable the effort it took to peel my hands off Vayl’s ass. Apparently they’d discovered it fit them better than a pair of driving gloves and they didn’t appreciate the order to move. Because they kept trying to pull the old cup-and-squeeze, I shoved them under my thighs where they proceeded to pinch me for depriving them of such pleasure after a long, long absence. “I have to pee,” I said.

The nibbling at my ear stopped. Frustrated scream from my bimbo libido, who’d been chained up so long she resembled a skeleton hanging from Brude’s dungeon wall. Which raised a whole slew of new questions I wasn’t yet awake enough to deal with. I struggled to sit up. Vayl pulled back slightly. “You do?”

I reached up to kiss him, feather-light, on the chin, whispered, “Does this feel like the right time to you? The right place?”

“Yes.”

I laughed. His chuckle sounded less strangled every time he let it roll. And when heãll.ont let me up, his smile even looked less murderous than usual. “Shall I wait for you, then?”

“Up to you. I won’t be long.”

I spent five minutes in the bathroom and came out feeling a lot more like the old Jaz, who would never have dreamed of biting her opponent on the neck. At least I hadn’t suffered any bad effects from it. Yet, whispered a new voice in my mind, one I’d never heard before and didn’t have time now to pinpoint.

At six thirty in the morning Tearlach stopped reflecting the personalities of its owners and guests, and began to show its own individual quirks. A light rain had begun outside, along with a wind that made the house whisper and creak as we walked down the hall toward the stairs. Vayl could see in the dark, and with my contact lenses activated, so could I. The knickknacks and frills that had seemed homey in the light now took on a spook-house freakishness as we passed them.

We crept up the stairs, Vayl moving silently inside his camouflage, me shielded by my Sensitivity and Bergman’s watch, Jack just naturally quiet on his padded feet. We reached the fourth-floor landing before I smelled it.

“Vayl. A witch is working a spell here,” I whispered.

“Yes, you told me. The Haighs—”

“No, a witch. A Wiccan, like Tolly.”

Cole met us a few steps into the hallway, his eyes wide and glittering as he swung them from my

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face to Vayl’s. “Look at the doors,” he whispered, shining his flashlight on the entrance to Floraidh’s room.

At first it looked like any quaint old door that’s been painted repeatedly. A dull shine reflected the off-white Floraidh had chosen to color her entryway. She’d hung a basket of silk forget-me-nots under the room number.

“You know what, I don’t think the paint on that door was cracked when I opened it earlier this evening,” I said.

“Look at Dormal’s,” he murmured as he swung the light in that direction.

Hers was in even worse shape. Paint had peeled down in strips, as if a clawed hand had scraped it top to bottom. The door creaked, and then the diamond-embedded symbol on its upper-righthand corner flared, as if it had begun to burn deep within the wood. The jewel itself glittered so brightly I’d have believed the sun was shining straight on it if the window wasn’t shaded.

Cole swung his light to Floraidh’s door. We watched the same action take place there. And then, as suddenly as I might snap my fingers, the scent of Wicca died.

“It’s gone,” I said.

“It is?” Cole trained his light all around the hallway as if to catch the culprit who’d tried, and failed, to breach the Scidairans’ defenses. “Was it Bea?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t scent witchery at Castle Hoppringhill when all those snakes appeared. So either she was trying to mask herself there because she was in public . . .”

Vayl flicked Cole’s light off. “Or Floraidh has ãorae stwo mortal enemies staying under her roof.”

After such an exciting start to the day, you’d have thought the action would swing right on into overdrive.

Nope.

Vayl went back to his room to crawl into his specially made blackout bed-tent.

After sleeping until one in the afternoon, Albert accepted the news about Mom and our plan to deal with her remarkably well. He grabbed a bite to eat and took Jack back to my room to watch a My Family marathon until we decided we needed them.

Cole and I took turns napping, attending GhostCon events with Albert and Jack like we really gave a crap about the feng shui of a haunted foyer, and watching Floraidh. Since our ward spent most of the day in her room concocting weird Scidair spells while Dormal looked after the B and B, we’d had to improvise our stalker spot, turning the walk-in linen closet beside Dormal’s room into a Scidair-hide. I came up with the name. It helped alleviate my minor claustrophobia to imagine I was a National Geographic photographer, surrounded by vast expanses of jungle, just waiting for the elusive kangahipposeal to appear, at which time I’d film that sucker like a paparazzi on speed.

We furnished the Scidair-hide with a laptop and folding chair, from which we eyeballed the empty hallway like we thought the walls were about to sprout ninjas. Sure, it would’ve been a lot more comfortable, not to mention safer, to guard her from one of our rooms. But if Bea tried something during the day, seconds would count. And though I could move a lot faster than I used to, I still wasn’t superhuman enough to race up two flights of stairs in time to save her from an assassin standing right at her door.

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The first time Cole relieved me he came with good news. “Rhona’s driving your dad nuts. She keeps knocking on our door, asking him if he’d like to accompany her to her GAPT seminar tomorrow. I think that blow to her head has lodged an obsession for him deep in her cortex.”

“Cool!”

“Plus, while I was fending her off for him—”

“What!”

“He gave me twenty bucks and promised to fart under the covers for the rest of the day.” I shrugged. How could you argue with that? “Anyway, it gave me the chance to talk to her about Iona. She came with great references. Which I plugged into the database along with one of the shots our cameras picked up. She’s clean. Squeakily so.”

Bummer. I spent my break trying to solve the mystery of Bea’s true identity while some GhostCon idiot droned on and on about why people who die violently have such a hard time resting in the ever-after. I wanted to jump out of my chair and yell, “Well, I’d be pissed too!” I settled for relieving Cole early. Since I couldn’t shuffle my chips for the noise they’d make, I practiced walking one across the tops of my fingers. Amazing how much you can improve at something when that’s the only thing you do for two hours straight. Oh yeah, there was that ten minutes when I figured out Dormal’s secret.

Before my first nap I’d sent the pictures of her room to Tolly along with a request to let me know what she could make of them.ãd m%" She’d gotten back to me with the results right around the middle of my last watch. The symbols on Dormal’s and Floraidh’s doorways were charms of protection, ones meant to keep ghostly and magical attacks neutralized. The squigglies on her wall? A massive curse aimed at one Edward Samos. The kind, Tolly said, that a scorned lover chooses, because wound around the curse is the demand for the stolen love to return.

“Meaning what, exactly?” I’d asked Tolly.

“If I had to guess, I’d say Samos broke up her happy home,” Tolly replied. “Do you know of anyone she’s holding out hopes of reuniting with?”

“Actually, yeah, I do.”

Around four Cole came to relieve me. “Anything new?” he asked as I handed him the laptop.

“Not much,” I replied. “Oh. Except I found out that Dormal’s in love with Floraidh, who’s in love with Samos.”

“Well, that could be significant.”

“I don’t know. Samos is dead. Why would Dormal want to kill Floraidh now?”

“Love is, like, the least logical emotion on earth,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “Look at us. On paper we’re perfect for each other, but in real life . . .” He shrugged.

I crouched down in front of him so I could get a better look at his expression. Hurt. Despite all my efforts, and although he’d pretended otherwise, I’d made his heart bleed. What to say now?

Where were the words that would heal him without leaving ice between us?

“What are you looking for, Cole?”

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“You!”

I shook my head. “Come on. You knew I wanted Vayl almost from the second we met. And you still came after me. What is it that you think I can give you?”

He closed the laptop lid, spread his fingers out across it and studied them, turned his hands over and watched his palms for a while. If he could’ve seen his future there, would he have felt any relief? “I want what my parents have. Real love. A whole lifetime of it. I’ve been looking, God, since I was probably fifteen. Every time I meet a woman I think, She’s amazing. She could be the one. And then, no. I realize she’s somebody else’s one and I let her go. Then I found you. And I still keep thinking, Yeah, this is it.”

I knew, if I had made a single different decision in my life, he might’ve been right. No Matt. No dead Helsingers. No life as an assassin and no Vayl might have all added up to a Jasmine Bemont with lots of Cole Jrs running around her suburban split-level. Because I did love him. And part of me wanted to be that woman for him.