Trinkets, Treasures, and Other Bloody Magic (7 page)

Jesus! That would have caused a ton of damage — to the SUV. Desmond would probably just shake it off his still utterly naked — and, thankfully, not blood covered — body. Yes, I get that I kept noticing the naked part, but I was out of chocolate. Actually, there wasn’t enough chocolate in the western hemisphere to stop me from noticing.

I put the SUV in park and loosened my seat belt, thinking that Desmond would want to drive. But after scowling at me for a beat, he simply crossed around to the door behind me. I checked out his backside in my mirror. What? I hadn’t seen him naked from behind. I was just checking to see that he was okay, but also noted he had a fine ass. Completely muscled. My ass was completely unmuscled, not that Desmond seemed to find it at all lacking during our make-out session a few hours ago.

He yanked open the door and climbed in. The obscenely large SUV sagged in response to his weight, but leveled out once he was seated. “You looked at me like you were thinking of running me over, dowser,” he said. “What have I done to piss you off now?”

Kandy leaped into the backseat as Desmond slammed his door shut.

I most certainly hadn’t been thinking about running him over. At least not with the car. I was relieved he was completely dense when it came to reading my face.

Kandy was nosing around Desmond as if making sure he was unharmed. Either that or she was thinking of eating him. Hard to tell with a werewolf.

“Okay, okay,” Desmond said to the wolf. His tender tone hooked me somewhere painful behind my ribcage and I looked away from the rearview mirror.

“Are we waiting for Kett?” I asked.

“The vampire can get his own ride,” Desmond answered. “Enough, Kandy.”
 

The wolf settled down on the seat beside Desmond with her head resting on her paws. Submissive, I guessed.

Desmond reached into the back of the SUV and found — to my disappointment — a pair of sweatpants. It was Kandy’s car, so it made sense there’d be extra clothing.

I tapped the gas and eased the vehicle out of the parking lot.

“It’s going to be a long ride without chocolate,” I said.

“Yeah,” Desmond said. “Let’s not talk about you and the vampire getting one of my wolves mixed up in your treasure hunting shit, putting a rare magical species in the unfortunate situation of kidnapping an alpha shifter, and triggering a life debt you still owe me. You owe me. Not the other way around. And yet here I am, at your beck and fucking call.”
 

The life debt, which compelled me to help bring Hudson’s killer to justice — and yes, should have been nullified with Sienna’s death — shouldn’t hold any sway over Desmond. So … yeah, it was going to be a really long ride.

I hit Highway 99 and wanted to speed all the way home. If my foot was heavy enough, I could turn the hour drive into forty-five minutes easily. And trust me, with the amount of angry magic sparking off Desmond in the back seat, that still wasn’t going to be quick enough.
 

Yeah, I could taste emotional nuances in magic now. Fantastic. But that pleased me way less than it should have, because none of this was a game. Magic with Sienna had always been like a game, until it really wasn’t anymore.

Unfortunately, we needed gas. So seven minutes later, I was pulling into a deserted gas station in Squamish. I must have driven through Squamish a dozen times as an adult headed to a party or dinner in Whistler. Or on a hiking trip to collect jade just outside of Lillooet. Actually, Gran had initiated those trips when I was a child as a way — I now knew — to distract and satiate my dowser magic. However, I’d never strayed more than a hundred feet from the highway. Squamish, caught between urban Vancouver and posh ski village Whistler, was a place to grab gas or ice cream. It also happened to be the name of the largest First Nations band in British Columbia. Yeah, that was a hard lesson learned. I knew I was thick about things, but I preferred to not have to get kidnapped and then nasty before I figured stuff out.

Magical etiquette and history were not my strong suits. They weren’t even my weak suits … bathing suit maybe, as opposed to an eighties power suit. All right, now I was just being insane in my head. At least my chocolate-obsessed thoughts kept me grounded. This other garbage wasn’t helping at all.
 

Desmond actually grabbed the back of my seat and leaned forward to check the gas gauge when I slowed to pull off the highway. Yeah, jerk. As if I’d lengthen the trip if I didn’t need to. Plus, I wasn’t too pleased that the delicious taste of his magic grew more potent the nearer he got. It actually brushed over my right shoulder and neck when he exhaled his grumpiness in a huff.

I pulled up to the pumps, making a guess of the location of the gas tank. Desmond was out of the SUV and at the pump before I’d even shifted into park.

“Well, I hope he has a credit card,” I said under my breath. “He wasn’t wearing pockets earlier.” I turned to Kandy in the back seat. She was still in wolf form and watching Desmond alertly through the side window. “I gather you aren’t going to join me in the bathroom?”

Kandy flicked an ear at me in response. For the werewolf, duty came first and foremost. Now, with her alpha so near, that duty was firmly focused on McGrowly.

I wished my life — boundaries and all — was so clear for me. I thought it had been, but now I understood I’d been building a life on half-truths and guesses for a long time.

I slid out of the SUV and glanced around. The car stereo had declared the time to be 11:47 p.m., but I couldn’t believe that I’d been lost, and then unconscious, for so much of the day until I saw how dead the gas station and highway were. Traffic came and went from Whistler all night long, but we were currently the only vehicle in the place. It was so well lit that most of the stars were obscured in the dark sky. I found myself wishing that I’d glanced up while we were in the forest. Granted, I hadn’t wanted to be there in the dead of night, but the stars would have been spectacular.

“Dowser.”
 

McGrowly had some speech or warning ready for me, but I cut him off with a snapped, “Bathroom.” Then I crossed toward the minimart. I could see the cashier inside texting or playing a game on his phone. I wasn’t sure if the bathrooms were inside or not. They weren’t, but I needed a key.
 

The clerk’s wide-eyed look was self-explanatory once I got a glance at myself in the bathroom mirror. Jesus. I had dirt and fir needles — or whatever — practically embedded in my curly blond hair. The word ‘bedraggled’ was coined for this look.

I — vainly, I know — really, really hoped I hadn’t looked this bad when I’d plastered myself to Desmond in the forest.

And now that I’d opened that floodgate … what the hell was up with that? I couldn’t stand McGrowly. Granted, I hadn’t laid eyes on him since he’d cut some sort of protection deal with Gran after Sienna died.

Maybe Sienna wasn’t dead.
 

Hope bloomed as it always did when I considered this option, but I stuffed it back down deep into my heart. Yeah, and maybe she hadn’t murdered all the people she’d admitted to killing. And maybe we could play Barbies, and steal cigarettes from her mom, and everything would be idyllic again.

Right.

Sienna was dead. I’d seen and felt her dissolve in the magic of the portal. And I was left here, not only practically friendless, but also utterly disgusted by my own willful ignorance.

Maybe that was why I’d kissed McGrowly. I wanted to be willful in a deliberate direction. I wanted some sort of control over my life again.

It had nothing to do with his delicious magic or his muscles or his extreme manliness. In fact, he was too muscled, too in-your-face manly —
 

Kett, with nary a pine needle or smudge of dirt in his white blond hair, opened the bathroom door and walked in.
 

I was damn sure I’d locked it behind me.

My brain did the automatic check it did every time I saw Kett now.

Skin? Pale, but normally so.

Eyes? Ice blue, not tinged with or fully blood red.

Teeth? Straight, white, but not pointy,

So this was a friendly bathroom-barge, not a dinner visit. The vampire had a thing for following me into bathrooms. He liked to intimidate on an intimate level.

“The men’s is next door,” I said. I’d brushed all the leaves and dirt from my hair while wallowing, so that now I was leaning over the sink and trying to splash some water on my face. The automatic taps made this simple task a slapstick joke. I never liked that kind of humor, and I certainly didn’t like it happening to me.

“I can break the bond,” Kett said.

I looked up. My face was dripping with cold water. “Excuse me?” A vampire breaking a life debt bond sounded like bad news, not good. I always needed bad news repeated. I was a glutton for punishment that way.

“I can break the life debt bond between you and the shifter.”

I straightened very slowly, though whether that was to not startle the vampire or because my brain was working overtime, I didn’t know.

Three months ago — after conversations that had taken place while I was sleeping and dreaming of returning to a peaceful life at my bakery — my grandmother made a deal with McGrowly. Gran was royally pissed that Desmond had extracted a life debt from me because he blamed me for Hudson’s death. This magic, I had gathered since, was at his command because of how pack structure functioned for an alpha.

Problem was, the life debt hadn’t dissolved like it should have after Sienna’s death, and the reasons for that were still up for interpretation. Now that we were slowly figuring out how my magic worked, it seemed likely that the debt had been inadvertently sealed by both of us — not just by Desmond, as was usual. And my magic was an unknown quantity. As was my literal interpretation of what exactly I owed Desmond.
 

Yes, my guilt might be maintaining the bond.

The thing was, while Gran was extracting promises from the Alpha of the West Coast North American Pack, my mother was forging a relationship with a vampire — namely Kett. Yes, my mother loved to defy Gran. And Gran, like all witches — actually, like all other Adepts in general — loathed vampires. But Kett knew about my magic. And my magic — focused and refined — could make powerful people more powerful than anyone should be, according to Gran. Vampires were big on accumulating power and knowledge.

So, short of killing him — which I’m sure Gran decided would draw too much attention from the Conclave — a bargain had to be forged with Kett. My mother’s solution had been to make him my mentor. Gran didn’t talk to her daughter for two weeks after she found out Scarlett had made this deal. In fact, my mother was currently living in my second bedroom rather than staying at Gran’s as she usually did. Their estrangement dated back to before I was born, the reasons for which I wasn’t entirely sure. But giving birth to me at sixteen — a child of unknown magical origins — had certainly cemented the divide between mother and daughter.

“You have remained silent for three minutes, dowser,” Kett said. “I believe that might be a record of some sort.”
 

Great, the vampire was attempting a joke. I was fairly certain that was one of the signs of the apocalypse.

“I’m thinking.”

“That is obvious.”

“Well, then, just leave me to it.”

Kett inclined his head in the way he did when he was only pretending to acquiesce.

Gran had forbidden me to associate with the vampire. She’d been very clear that vampires held no loyalty, not even to their own kind. That vampires’ morals were muddy, and their code of conduct indecipherable. This argument only escalated when I told Gran that I had saved Kett’s undead life.

She had warned me then to forget what she called my error in judgement. “You don’t know what a vampire would do to fulfill a life debt like that,” she said. “He might decide that your very life is endangering you. That you’re better off dead. Or worse than dead, if it’s in his power to turn you.”

So, piece that all together with the vampire’s offer, and the fact that all — all — vampire magic was based in blood, and what did I get? Well, clammy hands and a racing heart for one.

I washed those clammy hands. That gave me an excuse to turn away from Kett. The water had dried on my face, making my skin tight, so I washed it a second time. Then I patted everything dry, including the counter — more stalling — with a paper towel.

Kett was doing his ice statue impression. He could stay like that for hours, never taking his eyes off me.

I cleared my throat, which was a bad opening because it drew his attention to my neck. “That is a generous offer —”

“I’m not attempting to gain permission to bite you.”

“Ah, so biting would be involved.”

“An exchange of blood, yes.”

A spike of fear ricocheted up my spine as I ignored the impulse to run. He was effectively blocking the door, and I’d already broken my nose running into him once today.

“A bond with me would be nothing to fear, dowser.” Kett’s voice dropped into the soothing tones he sometimes used to get me to perform magic. I actually hated it when he acted so human. It blurred all the wrong lines for me.

“You want me to exchange a bond with McGrowly for one with you?”

“The bond with the shifter is malfunctioning. He is young and ill equipped to deal with it.”

Okay, if he was referring to the kiss, how the hell did he know about it? Had he and Desmond been exchanging conquest stories while I was freaking out about them possibly slaughtering skinwalkers?

Kett didn’t step closer. That was good, seeing as I was already gripping the sink so tightly I might rip it out of the wall. His tone became more intimate, though. “It would be pleasurable if you wished, Jade. And the blood would be only a drop or two.”

My gaze dropped to his neck. I remembered Sienna slashing his skin open, his blood spurting into my stainless steel mixing bowl. Then my sister had gulped that blood like it was cold chocolate milk on a summer day.

I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. I was haunted from within — haunted by everything my sister did, and everything I didn’t stop her from doing.