Raven Cursed: A Jane Yellowrock Novel (20 page)

As to the Leo-and-Grégoire-lover part, Grégoire had supported Leo when the master of the city’s back was against the wall, when he was being challenged by the vamp who was now the MOC’s heir, and had stuck around when Leo was in the dolore—the whacked-out grief suffered by vamps when people they love die. And Evil Evie, who was not acting like herself, had left restitution talks and come home to Asheville. For Grégoire? For me? Or Leo? Had she heard he was considering coming here himself? I blew out a breath.
Okay
. She found out about the parley and could further some sneaky, evil end better if she was here, drawing on her coven. “And Jodi doesn’t know why Leo agreed to Lincoln’s parley, after denying his petition for so long?”

Rick scraped his plate and sopped up the greasy egg remains with a hunk of biscuit. “Nope.” But he didn’t meet
my eyes and I was guessing that he had ideas even if no facts.

I said, “To answer your question, I don’t know why Evangelina left New Orleans.” I didn’t tell him about the spell or the vamp bites or the werewolf scent she carried. I couldn’t. Rick was being courted by PsyLed. If he took the job, he’d be my enemy. The Everharts’ enemy. And now that I knew he could smell truth and lies, I couldn’t tell him a bald-faced one, maybe not even fudged-truth-lies. Things to think about. I fished in my pocket for my keys.

“Don’t you want to know about the other calls?”

I stopped, pulled my hand free from the denim. Rick smiled slightly, his eyes crinkling at the corners. I’d kissed him there several times, his eyelashes tickling my lips. Pain moved through me like snakes of fire.

“George Dumas called.” When I didn’t say anything, Rick said, “He wants to know if we’re seeing each other. He wants to ‘court’ you.” Rick waited as if expecting me to say something. But I had no idea if we were seeing each other or not. I had no idea if Bruiser was serious about wanting to “court” me, or was looking for a way to keep an eye on me, or had been told by Leo to sleep with me for some nefarious Leo-reason. My life was way too complicated.

I stood and pulled out my keys. “Thanks for the warning.”

Faster than a human could ever move, Rick’s hand slashed out and grabbed my wrist. His grip was crushing, were-strong. “Don’t you want to know what I told him?”

I looked back and forth between his eyes, seeing nothing there that I could read. The reek of big-cat heated the air, the smell of jungle, and murky water, and musky male. “Not really.” I jerked my hand to the side, away from his palm, against the weaker pressure of his fingers. Broke his hold. I dropped thirty bucks on the café’s counter and walked outside. As I got into my SUV, I tossed Evangelina’s scarf and hair into the passenger seat. The first patters of rain made little splats against the windshield as I took the wheel, feeling the leather give under my grip.

Molly might be in danger. Might. Maybe. I had no idea
how witch magic worked, except that interrupting a spell or a working was dangerous to both spell caster and spelled. I had no idea what to do and I wasn’t used to feeling helpless. I needed to research spells and stopping them. I needed to go after Evangelina and knock some sense into her. I needed to be
doing
something. Instead I started the vehicle and backed away from the café, useless.

I spent the next few hours in my room, researching spells and how to interrupt them. There was precious little on the Internet about the subject and most of it was contradictory. When I ran out of info, I talked on Leo’s fancy cell with the paddler, Dave Crawford, who had organized the creekers—adrenaline-junky-kayakers who took the most dangerous, steep whitewater runs—to look for grindy markings, and aligning the newest sightings on a map. I was pretty sure where, within twenty-five linear square miles, the grindy was holing up. When I took into consideration the folded terrain inside that twenty-five square miles it was more like a hundred square miles. It was a huge amount of area to search.

Frustrated, I pulled on tight exercise clothes, black spandex, and went looking for a sparring partner. Wrassler, standing guard in the hallway in front of Grégoire’s room, told me how to find the hotel’s fitness area, his smirk ringing bells in my mind. I jogged downstairs, and took it in fast: the small room and blood-servants. The B-twins had cleared space, machines pushed to the side. Some tinkly Oriental or New Age music played over the speakers. The twins were dressed in black cotton martial arts uniforms—traditional karate Gi tops with kicker pants, and were still warming up. The clothes told me a lot about the martial forms they practiced. We had the place to ourselves. Wrassler had known they were here, of course.

The door closed behind me with a soft whoosh. The twins paused in their stretches and I grinned at them, letting Beast rise in my eyes. They stepped apart slowly, facing an opponent. My heart started to pound, a fierce, hard rhythm. “How quickly does vamp blood heal you boys?” Brian laughed and shook out his hands, setting his feet, carefully balanced. Brandon bent his knees, finding his own
perfect readiness position, one hand fisted in a defensive posture. With the other, he made a little “come and get it” motion. I leaped.

It wasn’t play. It wasn’t practice. It wasn’t sparring. It was the closest thing to real combat I’d had, outside of fighting for my life, in years. I proved to myself that longtime blood-servants were faster than humans, stronger than humans, and sneaky as cats. They didn’t play by TV rules, attacking one at a time. They played by fire ant rules—swarm and destroy. Punches, open handed and fisted, kicks, sweeps, blocks that disguised punches, kicks that hid more kicks, attacking from both sides and from front and back, holds better suited to judo or the wrestling mat, and moves that were strictly illegal in the fighting ring came at me. I loved it.

For nearly half an hour, they attacked, the beating we were giving and receiving growing in speed, force, and complexity, until we moved in a blur. The scent of vamp blood, their blood, human sweat, testosterone, and big-cat musk-and-blood filled the space; faint lust pheromones added to the wonderful stench. We overwhelmed the air-conditioning, our body heat condensing on the door and windows. When I cheated, using momentum and the Gi tops, throwing one brother into the other, both men lost the tops, fighting bare chested. Which made Beast pant with delight. I took two hard punches, one to the face, before I got her back into the brawl.

We fought hard, pulling no punches, and I gave as good as I took. It was painful, swift, and exactly what I needed, bruises, strains, sprains, blood on the mats, and all. When we were exhausted, sweating, and breathless, I heard a sound that pulled me out of the fight. The door to the fitness room closed with its soft whoosh.

I bounded out of Brandon’s fist-punch-range and into Brian’s space. Brian’s arm went around my waist, pulling me against his sweaty chest and abdomen, steadying us both, stopping the bout. Brandon whirled toward the door. We went still. Two of my security boys were inside the room, sitting on equipment, as if they had been there a while, dressed in workout clothes but looking lazy. Derek was standing in front of the door, his heels twelve inches
apart, legs braced, hands clasped behind his back as if at Marine parade rest. He was dressed in baggy workout clothes. But his eyes were hard and predatory. Derek Lee was seriously ticked off.

I started to say something. Started to try to explain why I was faster than a blood-servant. As strong as one. Make that two. But Brian’s arm tightened on me in warning. I clamped my mouth shut. Brandon turned to me and said, “Nice bout, Yellowrock. Rematch. Soon. And we take the gloves off for that one.”

“Yeah. No more Mr. Nice Guy. No more holding back to protect the little lady.” Brian pushed me away from him as if I burned his skin and picked up a towel. He tossed one at his brother and they moved toward the door. I fell in behind them.

Okay, I got it. Act as if nothing had happened. Riiiiight. “You boys weren’t holding back,” I said. “You gave it all you had and I busted your butts. But if you’re gluttons for punishment . . .” The twins pushed past Derek and out into the hallway. Derek didn’t try to stop them. He didn’t reach out and grab my arm, to hold me back, but I could feel his eyes smoldering holes in my spine. He murmured, “You’re as bad as the suckheads. Maybe worse. At least they don’t pretend to be human.”

I blinked but didn’t give away that I had heard, though a heated shock flushed through me. I was in the hallway, the door wide open behind me, still talking. “. . . I’ll be happy to provide the fists and feet to teach you to respect the weaker sex.”

“If it’s sex you want”—Brandon said, wrapping his arm around me and pulling me along as Brian punched the elevator button—“we can oblige on that score too.”

“Ever heard of tag-team wrestling?” Brian asked. “We can make you scream for more until you’re begging us to stop.”

And we were in the elevator, the doors closing on us. I fell against the elevator wall as the unit moved, my eyes closed. “Crap,” I said.

The brothers chuckled, twin sounds of amusement. An unwilling grin pulled at my mouth. “Tag-team sex? That’s the best you could come up with?”

The door dinged open and we stepped into the hall
way. “Admit it, Legs. You have mental images right now. We know. Your heart rate sped up. Blood-servants can tell.”

I walked between and past them, feeling their eyes on me in all my sweaty glory. But I was not going to reply. Not. Going to.

“All you can think about is how big the bed is in the master room of the suite.”

“And how big we are.”

I couldn’t help my grin but I wasn’t about to let them see it. “I can be titillated without being tempted. Thanks but no thanks.”

We entered our suite and moved through the common space; I went into my room and shut and locked the door, hearing them laugh in that securely masculine way that makes a girl’s heart race and mental images dance around in her head. I leaned against the door at my back and remembered to breathe. I would not be tempted. I would not. Beast, however, had other ideas and a good imagination. Even better visual skills about things she wanted. I made it to the shower and turned it to scalding, stepping under the spray fully clothed. Just as quickly, I switched it to cold and leaned into the tile. Cold water sluiced down me. Very cold.

Dang blood-servants.

I got a much needed nap, followed by a half hour on the Internet again with a more refined search on breaking a coven leader’s spell without killing everyone involved—which couldn’t be done from the outside, apparently—and was dressed and ready for work as parley security chief, early. Tonight I was wearing tights, knives, and a split-skirt dress that went to my ankles, sterling silver stakes in my bun as hair sticks. A new Walther, delivered courtesy of Leo, rested at my back. Lipstick my only makeup. My eyes looked feverish, my cheeks bright with blood flush.

Hungry, ignoring the twins, I checked my com equipment as I stalked through the suite and down to the Black Bear Grill, where I ordered fried green tomatoes, orange glazed duckling, and the cowboy bone-in rib eye, with grilled asparagus and stag fries with truffle oil and cheese.
And a bottle of wine. I didn’t once look at the prices, knowing that I could feed a family of four in Bangladesh or sub-Saharan Africa for a year on what I was letting Leo pay for one meal. I was a hedonist. I was evil. I needed to get down on my knees and beg forgiveness for everything. Instead I downed a glass of wine on an empty stomach and let the alcohol flood my system, knowing the sensation would last only minutes, but wanting the buzz, however fleeting. I tore off a hunk of bread and ate it with my second glass of wine. I felt, more than saw, the twins enter.

They flowed through the room, around tables and chairs and the other patrons, and they sat at my table. Silent, they helped themselves to my wine, looking at the bottle with disdain. They ate my fried green tomatoes when the order came. They ordered meals and salads and more appetizers. Brandon chose another wine from the list. In French. With a perfect French accent, of course. When the waiter left, I rested my arms along the chair rests and stared at them.

“We’re sorry,” Brandon said. Which was not at all what I expected them to say.

“We can’t do a job if we’re all in the sack together.”

“We can’t think straight if we’re thinking about you.”

“We can’t protect Grégoire if we’re thinking about protecting you too.”

“We might try to keep you alive instead of him.”

“If push came to shove.”

“We apologize.”

“We hope you’ll accept our apologies and lack of professionalism.”

It was sorta like watching tag-team wrestling. “Fine. You’re forgiven.”

“Good. Now let’s eat. We have a long night ahead of us.”

We ate. We chatted. And when the meal was done, we stopped in the hotel lobby to meet Gertruda, the Mercy Blade of the MOC of the Raleigh-Durham area. She had been in town all day, moving between patients in the hospital, using the healing magic and skill of her race, and this was my first opportunity to meet her. She swept through the doors, imperious. And totally unexpected. She was a plain woman, steel gray hair pulled back in a bun, wear
ing a denim dress with a frilly shirt underneath. She was homey, a little stout, grandmotherly. She was as unlike the other Mercy Blade I had met as it was possible to be, and she wanted nothing to do with me.

She glanced over us all, greeted the B-twins by name and ignored me totally. Lifting her nose at my proffered hand, she pulled her skirts aside and went to the elevator. “Well, that was lovely,” I said, my face burning.

The twins laughed. “Gertruda thinks women should be properly covered, with long skirts and no adornment. And no guns. It isn’t ladylike. Don’t worry about her.”

“We like you just the way you are.”

“She thinks I’m trashy,” I clarified. The twins shrugged, still amused.

We made our way back to Grégoire’s suite. The meeting was to take place there tonight, and Derek was already set up and waiting in the central seating area when we entered. He looked at me once, his expression telling me that we had things to discuss, but I knew it would be later, not when the package—his word for Grégoire—was at risk. The current phase of an ongoing job came first, before anything more personal. Derek was a pro.