Shadow's Pleasure: The Shadow Warder Series, Book Two (A Paranormal/Urban Fantasy Romance Series) (42 page)

If she survived, it was going to be humiliating to admit she’d allowed herself to get into this situation. Isolated and cut off from her power. She suspected the spell craft they’d used was also clouding her mind, but that was no excuse. She shouldn’t have been hit by a spell in the first place. So stupid. Her reputation at the Sanctuary was iffy as it was. All they’d need was this one failure to pull her from the field for good. Her thoughts finally coming into order, Keeley realized she had two goals.

She had to find the spell they were using on her and she had to immobilize them so she could flee. Killing them would be the best outcome, but for now she’d settle for not dying herself. At least this was sort of a plan. With her body, she struggled to subdue the Voratus, shifting over him and pining his arms. While a Voratus infection gave the host body more power than it might have had as a human, it didn’t turn them into Superman. Even weakened, she was a match for this one.

Her body occupied with pinning the Voratus, Keeley sent her mind out, searching their surroundings for the source of the spell. It was a muddled task. Shadows had no innate skill with spell craft. Some, Keeley included, could barely sense it in action. Desperate, she tried to find the slightest trace. If she couldn’t break the spell crafting, she was going to die. The other guy might have a broken arm or shoulder, but Keeley sensed him already finding his feet. She had only seconds.

The spell could be anywhere. She was certain it wasn’t on her. She would have felt them get close enough to tag her and it seemed unlikely they had a regular human working with them. It was also unlikely that it was on something in the surroundings like a tree or fallen branch. She’d been moving constantly since she’d detected the tag on the Voratus. They would have had to place spells over miles of forest. Way too inefficient.

In a bolt of lightening, slicing through her slowed thought process, Keeley realized where the spell was. The tag. The simplest method would have been to combine the tracking rune with whatever the rune was for the spell that cut her off from her power. She would be focused on tracking the tagged Voratus, her mind opened to the tracking spell. And to whatever other spell they’d tied to it. Fuck. That was a new one.

If she managed to get out of this, the Shadows were going to have to sit down and find a way around this. If the enemy was running around with combination spells, she and the other Shadow trackers were going to be in for some trouble. Now she had to not only find the spelled wooden disc on the Voratus, she had to try to break the spell it cast without destroying the disc so she could get it home for study. If she could.

Her hands twisted into frantically scraping claws, she dragged at the Voratus’s clothes. Pockets, seams, on a necklace or bracelet. It could be anywhere. And fuck, the other guy wore a rune necklace. That wasn’t the spell crafting she was looking for, but it was something and she should try to get that if she could.

Finally, her search revealed a pouch against the demon’s chest, not unlike those tourists used to hide a passport and other valuables. As soon as she touched it, Keeley felt the grating pulse of spell craft under her fingers. A burst of elation shot through her chest. One good tear and she’d have it in her hands. Her fingers closed around the strap, preparing to yank it free when she felt movement behind her.

A powerful hand closed over her arm, dragging her up off the prone Voratus. She twisted, trying to pry loose the long fingers. He might have been down to one good hand, but the big guy was doing just fine. His grip on her arm was forged from steel. Wrapping his broken arm around her waist, he trapped Keeley against his broad chest. She could feel the dislocation in the bones of his arm, shifting the wrong way when his muscles pulled her close. The pain of using the broken arm must have been excruciating, but the male didn’t flinch. He just torqued the broken arm tighter, holding her so tightly she could feel each draw of his breath against her back as if it was her own. Whatever he was, he was certain he was going to heal, no matter the damage he was doing to himself. And he was going to take Keeley at all costs.

Terror, deeper and sharper than anything she’d felt in her life, swamped her. He wasn’t going to stop. She could break every bone in his body and he would drag himself along the forest floor in pursuit, his body knitting itself back together on the way.

“Come on, I’ve got her. Hit her with the spell,” the man holding her said, his urgency penetrating the fear clouding her brain.

She watched as the Voratus got to its feet facing them and reached into his back pocket. When it withdrew a small leather bag, Keeley knew she was completely fucked. They weren’t going to kill her. They were going to use spell craft on her. She had no idea what the spell was going to do, but she knew if a Voratus was sacrificing the chance to torture and kill a Shadow, it was going to be worse than the most horrible thing she could imagine.

Keeley let herself go limp in her captor’s hold. Fighting wasn’t going to save her. She needed to get that spell away from the Voratus, get the tracking spell from around his chest and kill them. Or disable them both enough to get away. A tall order when she was weak and currently immobile. Never mind how she’d get home carrying the spell craft that had disabled her in the first place. The brief fantasy of returning home in triumph, bearing the new spell for study fell to dust. As much as she hated the idea of leaving the pouch behind, Keeley had to focus on staying alive.

She only had one option. Something she’d never done before. No one she knew had ever done it. It was the most forbidden of a Shadow’s weapons. When you had access to all the energy in the natural world, there had to be limits. The Shadows were created by the ancients to protect humans and fight Vorati demons. They were ethical. They were good. What she was about to do was neither.

Taking a steadying breath, Keeley laid her hands against the thickly muscled thighs of the man holding her captive. The way he’d pinned her arms to her sides, it was easy to maneuver into the right position. The skin of her palms pressed against the rough cotton of his cargo pants. Keeley began to draw energy through the barrier of his clothes, from his body into hers. Clouded by the spell, Keeley couldn’t tap into his life force as cleanly as she might have otherwise. It didn’t seem to matter that much. While his energy was filling her in a trickle, it was the most potent force she’d ever felt. Like drinking moonshine after a lifetime of light beer, the big male’s life force slammed through her with intoxicating power.

The first waves were so distracting, Keeley barely noticed that something didn’t feel right. It wasn’t just the immense power contained in only a trickle of power. There was a repellent buzz twisting through the energy that shouldn’t be there. Like the vibration of a swarm of angry bees, it almost felt like the energy of a Voratus, but faint, like an echo. It couldn’t be a Voratus infection. The male had been holding her long enough for her to have felt a Voratus inside him.

Normally, as a Shadow, she would have felt an infection from fifty feet. Not to mention that Voratus energy was toxic to Shadows. If he was infected, she’d probably be dead by now. So maybe it wasn’t infection, but something with this guy wasn’t right. Something aside from him using a broken arm like it was whole. Unnerved, Keeley shoved her hands backward, pushing his legs out from under him. His body drained, close to the point of death, his thick legs buckled under her sudden pressure. Moving with as much speed as she could manage, Keeley leapt on the Voratus standing opposite her still holding the spell bag.

She had no idea what kind of spell craft it held and she didn’t want to find out. With a smack, she knocked the bag out of its hand. Golden green fine powder spilled into the dirt. Keeley ignored it and grabbed for the pouch strapped to his chest. Ripping it free, it took only a moment before she had the delicate ash-wood disc in her hand. Skin to wood, she could feel the rune disrupting her Shadow connection to energy. A firm snap broke the disc in two. Whole enough for her people to study later, broken enough to free her from the spell. As if a curtain dropped, the foggy barrier dulling her mind was gone.

Fueled by the power she’d taken from the big man, Keeley launched herself at the Voratus, driving it to the ground. Fumbling in the side pocket of her cargo pants, she searched for a calix. Dart-shaped, with a narrow bulb at the end where the fletches would be, the copper instrument was designed to suck the demon out of an infected host. All she had to do was stab the Voratus in the chest with the calix and it would be dead. If she could find one. At the moment, it seemed her pockets were mysteriously empty. Which meant she had to fight. She had no idea how long the drained male on the ground would stay down. She had to get away from these two. Killing them would be the best solution, but that wasn’t looking likely, even with her borrowed power.

Something was definitely off with the energy surging through her system. That odd, grating buzz had begun as just a tiny thread. As if she’d eaten spoiled food, the sickness began as a twinge in her gut. Where she had been weak before, now she was feeling strong enough from the stolen energy, but dizzy. Even a little queasy. Time to focus on the job at hand. If she was going to get sick—and it was looking increasingly certain that she would—she needed to kill the Voratus and get away while she still could.

Without a calix, it would be hard to take down. But Vorati didn’t heal as quickly as a Shadow or Warder would. Keeley gave up trying to subdue the squirming demon and reached for his ankle. A tight grip and a hard twist broke the bone. Keeley winced at the sound. She was a fighter. Not squeamish. But the crack of bone in flesh was just gross. Her already uneasy stomach heaved. Ignoring the nausea threatening to drag her down, Keeley went after the Voratus’s other foot. It was too surprised by the pain of the first injury to evade her. Another brisk twist and it wouldn’t be able to follow her at more than a crawl.

She rose to her feet, stumbling closer to the spot where the larger male lay sprawled on the ground. His eyes were beginning to flutter, consciousness easing back. Clenching her teeth against the sour heaving of her stomach, she leaned over to grab the rune-marked necklace he wore. Whatever it was, she wanted her people to take a look. Maybe they could figure out what he was. A tug pulled it free.

Keeley had braced for a hard pull. Not prepared for the leather thong to give so easily, she tumbled to the forest floor, cracking her head against the fallen Voratus’s steel-toe boot. The discordant buzz of Voratus energy rose in a wave, growing until it pressed into her skin, making every cell in her body squirm. At first she thought she was just dizzy and a little disoriented from whatever was making her feel so sick. Maybe the energy she felt was from lying so close to the injured Voratus. In a wave of horror, she realized that the roar of Voratus energy filling the small clearing was coming from the man whose power she’d stolen.

Break the rules once and get totally fucked
.

Keeley was now a cautionary tale. She’d stolen a little bit of energy to save her life and ended up poisoning herself.
Fuck
. Keeley scrambled to her feet. There was no question about staying long enough to kill her attackers. From what she understood of Vorati poisoning, she didn’t have much time before her body would shut down in an effort to expel the poisoned power. If she woke up at all, it wouldn’t be for a day or two. If she didn’t want to wake up with her two attackers, she was going to have to hide her trail.

Bending her knees into a deep squat, Keeley leapt into the air, using the energy she’d stolen to propel her higher and further than she could have jumped on her own. She came down hard in the soft soil. With another spring, trying this time to keep her motion more lateral than vertical, Keeley began to cover great leaps of ground in a zigzag pattern that left little trail. She could be tracked this way, but her followers would have to find each landing point, then do a three hundred and sixty degree search to find the next one. Her erratic pattern would make it difficult, and hopefully time-consuming, to follow her trail.

Even as her access to nature’s energy grew without the spell craft locking her down, the poisoned demon energy stole deeper into her body, shutting her body down, cell by cell. She had only minutes before she was lost. Her vision was graying around the edges, her sense of smell dimming. She landed with a stumble, struggling to get her feet beneath her for another jump. Now that her powers were online, she had her bearings back. Each jump should bring her closer to civilization. One more push propelled her into a sluggish trajectory. Too late, she saw she’d miscalculated. Her left foot caught on a vine, sending her plummeting to the ground. Rolling over, the breath knocked out of her, Keeley saw a low stone wall. Crumbling and uneven, it rose just high enough to block her path. She groaned. The impact of the ground had been more than she could handle as the corrosive effect of the Voratus energy took its toll. She rolled to her hands and knees, trying to lift her head and look around.

Out of the tangled, scrubby forest, she’d emerged into a clearing. Buildings spread out before her in various states of disrepair, all dwarfed by a square, one-and-a-half-story plantation house. By the overgrowth on the gallery that wrapped the structure, Keeley assumed it had been abandoned for years. Or, given the way kudzu grew down here, a few weeks. Either way, it might be a safe place to pass out. Gray clouds crept further into her vision. Keeley was almost out of time.

Half crawling, half stumbling, she propelled herself over the unkempt grass to the front door of the plantation house. To her surprise, the handle turned, the door swinging open smoothly, suggesting the house might not be as abandoned as it looked. She pushed herself to go a little farther before her vision grayed out completely, her weak knees dropping her to the floor. Grateful for the roof over her head, Keeley let go. Either she’d wake or she wouldn’t. Nothing she could do about it now.