My Dangerous Pleasure (17 page)

She started to laugh, but he gave her a hard look and she stopped. “You’re serious.”

“The less she knows the better.”

Fen was halfway to their table, working the walk in those goddamned pumps.

“That’s crazy.”

He pinned Paisley with a stare. She needed to understand what she was involved with. No more keeping her at the far edges of his life or the truth. Ignorance might get her killed. “You knew she was coming before she got here, didn’t you?”

After a moment, she nodded.

“That happens with me, too, doesn’t it? Or something similar.”

She nodded again.

“If I’m going to keep you safe, Paisley, you need to believe that.” He touched her hand. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

Then Fen was at their table. She was even more beautiful than she’d looked from a distance, every feature perfect. Through the transparent shirt, he could see the five copper-colored bands around her forearms. They looked like tattoos, but like the markings on his body, they weren’t. At one time, those copper bands had been analogous to the traceries on his body. Sensitive and a reservoir of magic they had once shared.

“Skander,” she said.

He took his time acknowledging her. “What brings you to the city, Fen?”

Her eyes jittered the way they’d started to do shortly after she hooked up with Kessler, before she realized the cost of betraying her blood bond with him. He’d been the first to guess what was happening to them and had blocked himself enough to stop his descent into madness. She hadn’t been so lucky.

She reached for his shoulder but he leaned away. Her smile faded. “I’m here on business.”

“Good for you.”

Her smile was more than a little predatory. He didn’t miss her glance at Paisley or the flash of irritation when she saw his hand over Paisley’s. “Can I sit down?”

“Sorry, Fen. We were just leaving.”

“Only for a little bit. What’s the harm in that?” She grabbed a nearby chair but kept it turned backward. She straddled the seat and crossed her arms over the top. “What are you doing, Skander?” She tipped her head toward Paisley. “With her?”

She said
with her
like she meant
with that skanky bitch.
Which she probably did.

“Not your business.”

Fen looked Paisley over before she held out a hand. “Fen Philippikos. And you are?”

He tightened his fingers around Paisley’s hand. “Don’t let her touch you. And it’s not Philippikos. She’s lying about that.”

Paisley looked from Iskander to Fen and back and did the wise thing, which was say nothing and keep out of reach. With her free hand, though, she massaged her temple, frowning.

“Fen,” Iskander said sharply. He couldn’t feel Fen’s magic, so there was no way to be sure what was going on without getting into Paisley’s head. But it was a fair guess that Fen was trying. “Whatever you’re doing, stop.”

“What will you do for me if I do?”

“If you have business here, why are you wasting your time with me?”

“Maybe my business is with you.”

He leaned back but kept his hand over Paisley’s. “Tell Rasmus it won’t work. He can’t have her.”

Fen studied Paisley. “Give up Iskander, and Rasmus will leave you alone.”

“He isn’t mine to give up.”

“Then leave him.” She leaned closer. “He belongs to me.”

“I have a feeling he disagrees with that.”

“We don’t have any business, Fen. If you want to talk to Nikodemus, I can make a call for you.”

“Oh, please.” She made a face and stared at Iskander. “Did you mean to tie yourself to him?” She swept her thick hair behind her shoulders. “Wouldn’t you rather be free?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Seeing Fen again wasn’t as bad as he’d been dreading. He wasn’t tempted to go back.

“You could work both sides,” Fen said. “My way, there’s no rules.”

He shifted his chair closer to Paisley, which was only smart, anyway, and slung his arm around her shoulder. Paisley’s shoulders tensed under his arm. “Go home to Rasmus, Fen.”

His former blood-twin pushed back so she was sitting straight on the backward-facing chair. “Don’t be difficult, my love.”

He played with a strand of Paisley’s hair, trying to figure out what the hell Fen wanted and deciding whether it was worth the risk of staying to find out. All those times he’d thought he’d go back to her if the opportunity arose, and it turned out he was wrong. He and Fen were done. “I’m not your love.”

“You should be. I’ll always love you, Skander. Nothing will ever change that. You should be free. As we were meant to be.”

“If it weren’t for Nikodemus, I’d still be fucked up and probably insane.” His voice came out flat and cruel. “What you did to us, that wasn’t freedom. And what you have now, that’s not freedom, either.” He stood, not letting go of Paisley’s hand. “Nice to see you. No, that’s a lie.” He leaned down. “Stay away from me and stay the hell away from Paisley.”

“We want you back.” Fen jerked her chin in Paisley’s direction. “With or without her.”

He kept his voice low, but he knew Paisley heard every word. “You touch her, you do anything to her, and I will crush your beating heart in my hand.”

“I could love her, too,” Fen said as if he’d been talking about the weather. “If I had to. I would let you have children with her.”

“With all due respect, Fen. Fuck you.”

Her eyes locked with his. “You used to,” she said. “And very well.”

He pulled Paisley to his side. “If you or Rasmus want to meet with Nikodemus, I can arrange it.”

Fen snarled, and though he couldn’t feel the magic she pulled, he knew she’d done it because Paisley flinched. On the other side of the café, the witch stood up fast enough to knock over her chair.

He whirled to face the witch.
Her
magic he could feel. So could Paisley, who went completely stiff at his side. He pointed at the woman and in a voice loud enough to carry said, “Stay out of this.”

The witch, however, couldn’t leave well enough alone; her kind never did. She stopped pulling, but she also walked over to them because the magekind thought they were the protectors of the poor harmless humans, and she obviously thought Paisley was in need of protection.

“Make it stop,” Paisley whispered. She swayed against him, but her eyes were on the witch, not Fen.

Iskander remembered what she’d said about the witch being a screamer. He needed to get her out of here, and that damned witch was between them and the door.

“This is not wise,” the witch said in a low voice. “A confrontation in front of so many normal humans.”

“We were just leaving,” Iskander said. He didn’t like having Fen behind them, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that.

“Stop,” Paisley whispered. “Stop the screaming. Please.”

“Let’s go, cupcake,” he said. But she didn’t move with him. Instead, she took a step toward the witch. A chill rolled through him. Holy Jesus, that was magic coming from Paisley. Not trivial magic, either.

“The screaming has to stop.” She stretched out her hand, her face a mask of agony, and she just kept going until her palm made contact with the witch. The witch’s eyes got big, and she howled. High and piercing.

Fen had her hands on her hips, her eyes on Paisley, doing nothing. He dampened the sound of the witch’s screams so they wouldn’t end up calling Harsh to bail them out of a mess with the police. Then things got worse.

Paisley made a fist and yanked. Hard. The air around them shifted as power left the witch, ripping away with the motion of Paisley’s hand. The remnants of dozens of lives—the psychic lives of murdered kin that the magekind took in order to extend their human years centuries beyond normal—left the witch with the movement of Paisley’s hand. All that energy swirled around her.

Her face relaxed, and she opened her hand, palm up, fingers taut but shaking like a leaf in a strong wind. Those dozens of lives were free. Somehow, Paisley had taken away the magic the witch had murdered for over the years. What was left of those psychic lives whipped around her. Already in contact with them, Paisley was the obvious refuge. Something very similar had nearly killed Nikodemus’s witch, Carson Phillips. Paisley’s resistance was the only reason the energy didn’t simply flow into her.

If he didn’t do something, the entire café was going to erupt in chaos. He put their half of the café under a dampening cover of magic that would make just about all but the most resistant humans simply look the other way. He shoved the still-screaming witch onto the chair Fen had been sitting on and spun the chair to face the window. The witch had her hands pressed to her chest, tears streaming down her face. At the same time, he muttered the words that would keep the magic Paisley had released safe from the witch taking it back, safe from other magekind, and safe from Fen. One after another, the lives Paisley had freed were absorbed into the psychic realm.

He grabbed Paisley’s hand, and he hauled them both out of there. Outside, he released his magic and took vicious satisfaction in leaving Fen to deal with the aftermath of the screaming witch. On the street, Iskander kept moving. His heart banged hard in his chest. What Paisley had done to the witch was miraculous. Amazing. She’d freed kin they had believed were forever lost. Jesus, he had to get them out of here. Now. Because she’d also broken one of Nikodemus’s rules.

“Slow down!”

He kept walking.

She yanked her arm. He put a hand on her back and pushed her forward. They were not safe right now. Not at all. “Keep moving, Paisley.” He kept them moving. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here until I know if that witch intends to come after you or if Nikodemus is going to sanction you for what you just did.”

“Slow down.”

He did slow down, a little. But not much. They were nearly to his truck. “What that witch could do to you is nothing compared to what’s going to happen if Nikodemus comes after you. I can keep you alive if that witch tries something, but not if it’s Nikodemus.”

“Who’s Nikodemus?”

“My boss.”

His phone rang, and he almost had a heart attack when he saw Durian’s number flash at him. Nikodemus’s goddamned number-one assassin. He turned off the phone and dropped it into a mailbox. He didn’t want to make tracking him any easier than necessary. When they made it to his truck, he practically threw Paisley inside. “We do not go home,” he said. “We do not pass Go. We just get the hell out.”

“All I did,” she said as he put the truck in gear, “was make the screaming stop. It wasn’t real, Iskander.” She was shaking, pale as chalk, and still leaking magic. She covered her head with her hands. “I’m not crazy. I’m not. Not completely. It’s just my brain, telling me how to compensate for whatever is wrong with me. Nothing happened.”

“You aren’t crazy.” He took deep breaths until he had himself under control. He pointed them down Clay. “What you did was real. It happened.”

She lifted her head, calmer now. “What happened? Because I surely do not know.”

“What you did was harm a witch.”

“There’s no such thing as witches.”

“Wrong. Listen to me.” He squeezed the steering wheel. “I don’t think your mother is crazy. I think she probably can read minds.” He wasn’t sure how she was taking this. Not as bad as she could be, but she wasn’t sitting there agreeing with him, either. “She couldn’t read your mind because you’re a resistant.”

“A what?”

“Resistant. To magic. And trust me, what you did back there was magic. For all I know, that witch will die from what you did. It’s bad even if she doesn’t. We’re not allowed to harm the magekind. Nikodemus can’t afford for anything or anyone to screw things up for him. He’d be within his rights to sanction you for what happened.”

“What’s a sanction?”

He looked at Paisley. “It’s what we call it when someone needs to be dead.”

C
HAPTER 15

I
skander stopped in Novato, in Marin County, to stock up on supplies at a supermarket. Paisley came along, which he would have insisted on in any case. He wasn’t going to leave her unprotected. She didn’t say anything while they walked into the store, and he didn’t know whether to be worried or relieved. So far she hadn’t demanded any of the answers she deserved except for, “Where are we going?”