Under the Moon (3 page)

Bracing one hand on the rough wood planks of the outer wall, Quinn yanked on the warped back door, taking a moment to prop it wide and let in the sunlight and crisp October breeze. Not stalling. Just…setting up.

She paused on the threshold to let her eyes adjust to the dim office. Her desk was how she’d left it the night before, with piles of invoices and orders to approve, checks to sign, and client files to review. Dust floated in the beam of sunlight that hit the floor in front of her feet. Quinn forced herself to look deeper into the room to Sam’s desk, usually as full as hers, if more neatly organized. She held her breath as her vision sharpened, and movement turned into Sam’s hand making sharp notations on a printed spreadsheet. He flipped open a file and tapped a few keys on his keyboard without looking up at her.

“How long did you sleep?” he asked.

Breathing was suddenly easier than anything she’d done so far today. Sam asked her that every damned morning. “Eight hours, thirty-three minutes.” Her perfect internal clock had amused and delighted him at first, then became nagging when he used it to manage her, whether over how long she’d slept, gone without eating, or focused on a client. But that was what he was paid for, after all, and she welcomed the symbol of normalcy. He nodded his approval and kept working. Quinn went to her desk and booted up her computer.

Sam said, “You hear from Nick?”

“No.” The ongoing lack of contact after the urgency of his call scared her. “Sam, I—”

He shoved to his feet and headed out front. “We’re low on vodka. I’ll pull some up.”

Quinn sighed and slumped. So much for normalcy.

It didn’t get better. Sam worked out front while she stayed in the office. When she went into the bar, he retreated to the back. She stopped trying to talk to him, hoping the space would be a buffer both for their personal and professional relationships, and for her fading moon lust.

There was still no word from Nick.

Finally, Quinn settled herself in a corner of the bar with her laptop to handle stuff that had piled up over the week, hoping her full e-mail in-box and the routine work, the easy decisions, would keep her eyes off the clock. Requests for appointments and vendor info she forwarded to Sam. Most of the rest was related to the Society. Quinn served as the board’s secretary, and many of her personal e-mails were about the annual Society meeting next week. Those she moved into a folder to address later. The official Society list e-mail was full of political posts, with elections coming up in November, but she skimmed and deleted most of them.

She’d gotten into such a rhythm that when Nick’s name appeared, it was a moment before her reaction caught up. The words were innocuous at first, so she didn’t understand the fear filling her until it merged with her ongoing low-level anxiety over last night’s phone call.

I plan to ask Quinn to put this on the agenda for the meeting, but I thought you should all know ahead of time, so you can be careful.

Nick Jarrett’s gone rogue.

Quinn pulled her cell phone out of her pocket to try to reach Nick yet again. This had to be why he was coming here—but what the hell did it mean and what did it have to do with her?

A crash on the other side of the room redirected her alarm. She was on her feet before she’d even spotted the source of the disruption.

“I’ll goddamn keep drinking if I wanna keep drinking!” An old man, greasy gray hair hanging below a dingy trucker cap, wobbled in front of his overturned chair, arms flailing. Despite his obvious intoxication, his aim was good enough to hit Katie’s tray and send glasses flying. Quinn stormed across the room, glaring at anyone who looked like they might want to join the fight. None of her regulars moved. Most had seen her in action, and they didn’t want to get involved. A few strangers half rose but subsided when they saw her striding to the rescue.

Not that Katie needed rescuing. Nearly as tall as Quinn’s five feet ten, the young woman had honed her manner and strength in New York City. By the time Quinn reached them, Katie was quietly telling the drunk how he was expected to behave in Under the Moon.

Quinn’s heart rate and footsteps slowed, ready to back up her waitress but also willing to let her handle it. Then the drunk fumbled a switchblade out of his pocket and flicked it open.

Shit
. She lurched forward, but she was still too far away to do anything, and Katie hadn’t noticed the knife. Reacting on instinct rather than thought, Quinn snapped her fingers and opened her hand as the knife soared to it. Relief flooded her.
Concentrate. This isn’t over yet.
She squeezed the handle of the knife so no one could see her shaking.

The drunk waved his hand, then frowned when he realized it was empty. “What the—” He looked up and blinked at Quinn. “How’d you do that?”

Quinn signaled a white-faced Katie to step away. She glanced around to be sure everyone was out of reach and then faced the drunk.

“You want to leave my establishment,” she told him with forced calm.

He scowled. “T’hell I do. I ordered a beer! And I’m not leavin’ till I get it!”

“Yes you are.” She jerked back as the man lunged at her, flicking her fingers at him. He slammed into an invisible wall but only grew angrier. Quinn swallowed hard. She didn’t have the power for more than this, and she couldn’t risk her staff getting hurt. Summoning the knife and stopping the drunk’s movement required only a little access to the waning moon. But because it had already passed the zenith of its arc, even this drained her.

She had enough for one more act.
Please let it be enough
. She thought
heat
and pointed at the sleeve of the man’s denim jacket. A second later it caught fire. He yelled and slapped at it, extinguishing the flame almost immediately, but it had done its job.

His eyes wide, he tried to back away. The overturned chair tripped him up and he stopped. “What are you?” His voice quavered.

Electric awareness alerted Quinn to the presence of the man two feet behind her before she heard his voice, a slight Texas drawl mellowing the deep rumble that always made her think of his perfectly tuned muscle car.

“She’s a goddess.”

“Goddess,” the drunk scoffed. “Them’s just a myth.”

Nick Jarrett stepped past Quinn, standing between her and the drunk without making it look like he was getting in her way. The hunger that had been easing all day flared, but because she’d never recharged with Nick, she was able to stamp it down more easily than she had last night.

“You don’t believe your own eyes?” Nick said to the drunk.

The drunk scowled at them, then at the tiny wisp of smoke rising from his sleeve. He blinked blearily and stumbled toward the door, grumbling under his breath.

“That’s what I thought.” Nick swung around to look at her, a hint of a smile on his full lips and welcome in his green eyes. “Nice parlor tricks.”

Quinn snorted, covering how happy and relieved she was to see him, and turned to her busboy. “Catch that guy and call Charlie to pick him up in his cab, will you?”

“Sure.” He pulled out his cell phone and hit speed dial on his way out. Everyone else dispersed, leaving Quinn relatively alone with Nick. Adrenaline drained out of her, and she would have sat, if showing weakness in front of him wasn’t so unappealing.

“So what’s going on?” She tucked her fingertips into her jeans pockets. The anxiety buzzing in her all day disappeared, allowing the alarm triggered by the e-mail to resurge. “You’re never early.”

“We’ve got a problem.”

Quinn watched him scan the room, cataloging her customers and staff, lingering on her computer in the far corner and the closed door to her office. His face tightened, and he moved a step closer.

“I know we do,” she said.

He whipped his head around, his eyes sharp. “You do?”

“I just found out. Come here.” She led him to the table where her computer slept, its screen dark. “I read this e-mail not five minutes ago.” They sat down, and she tapped a key to wake the computer while Nick signaled for a beer.

They waited for the wireless connection to reestablish. “You getting a lot of trouble like that guy?” he asked.

“No more than usual.” She glanced at him. “Why? Is someone else?”

“Nah.” He stood to pull off his battered, hip-length brown leather coat and hang it over the back of the chair, then rolled the sleeves of his flannel shirt up strong forearms. A waitress sashayed over to set an amber bottle on their table. She looked at Quinn, who shook her head, but Nick made a face and dropped the money on her tray. “Don’t listen to her.”

Quinn didn’t bother to argue. They had the same argument every time he came. Sometimes she won, sometimes he did. It balanced in the end.

Nick sat back down and took a pull of the beer, his strong throat working with the swallow. Light from a nearby candle picked up glints of gold in his short-cropped, dark blond hair. “Where’s Sam?”

Quinn cleared her throat. “In the office.” She diverted her eyes to the computer screen but heard his small snort of derision. “I had it under control, Nick.”

“The moon’s waning, Quinn. I don’t care how powerful you are at peak, you’re tapped out by this time—”

“Not completely. And protecting me isn’t Sam’s job.” She winced, realizing too late it might sound like criticism of Nick, and she hadn’t meant it to be.

He froze, the bottle halfway to his mouth, then set it down. “I told you to stick close. He should be out here. Or you shouldn’t. And I’m not listening to you argue with me. What have you got?” He turned the computer toward him, ignoring her exasperation.

She twisted to read the e-mail with him, now more confused by the words on the screen than anything else. “Well?”

Seconds passed while his eyes tracked over the words. “Fuck me,” he said softly. “That’s not the problem I was talking about at all.”

Chapter Two

The power harnessed by goddesses is a connection to the energy generated by all life in this world—energy that is absorbed by, altered by, or resonating in non-living objects, as well. A goddess’s power is capacity. She is like a vessel, using her source to access, manipulate, and channel energy into and through herself. This ability allows her to do amazing things.

—The Society for Goddess Education and Defense,
New Member Brochure

…

Quinn dropped back against her chair, staring at Nick. Being accused of going rogue wasn’t what had brought him here? “What’s the other problem?”

His eyes flicked toward her, then back to the screen. He scrolled down to read the signature on the e-mail, then back up to the top. “There’s a leech out there. He’s hit two goddesses already.”

Fear twanged deep inside her, like a plucked cello string—a completely different kind of fear than the routine rush of facing a drunk with a switchblade and more concrete than an undefined “rogue” accusation. “So when you said ‘we,’ you meant me.”

His mouth curved on one side. “Well, yeah.” He waggled a finger at the laptop. “This, though, this is definitely ‘we.’”

“Who did he hit?” she asked, and his smirk dropped.

“Tanda and Chloe.”

She closed her eyes, her heart weeping for her friends. Why hadn’t she heard about this before? It hadn’t been that long since they talked, or at least e-mailed. She didn’t see them often, living so far apart, but she had been looking forward to getting together at the upcoming Society meeting.

She couldn’t imagine how they must be feeling right now. “Goddess” wasn’t only a job description—it was a state of being. When the leech took that away, he would have destroyed their essence.

Quinn clenched her fist and let heat coalesce in her palm, just to connect to her source, to her core. It came slowly, the moon nearly out of her reach, and panic flirted at the edges of her consciousness until her fingers flinched open, stung.

Stop it.
She wasn’t a hand wringer. She was a problem solver. She asked questions and set a plan based on the answers. Never mind that a leech was a whole lot different from retrieving lost wedding rings and helping the corn crop flourish. “They’re on opposite coasts,” she pointed out.

“I know.”