Master of Shadows Page 5

  He sensed the flare of magic from an opening dimensional gate in the hall. Morgana swept through the door a moment later, tall and carnivorously beautiful in a gown of black velvet that made her pale skin seem to glow. Black hair fell to her hips in long swirls of ebony. The healer followed, a strawberry blonde in a T-shirt and jeans, radiating power like a searchlight.

  “Move aside, Magus,” Morgana told Davon. “You can moon at your witch when we’ve saved her.”

  Davon backed reluctantly away to join Tristan at the other end of the room. “I’m a doctor. I should be able to help.”

  “This is magic, Davon. Witch business.” Tristan frowned. The healer, Morgana, and Belle joined hands and began to chant.

  “What?” Davon asked, reading his expression.

  “That’s not good. Usually Majae just will the magic to do whatever the hell they want it to. Any time they start making an extra effort, something’s wrong.”

  The lines of blue light were winding up the girl’s arm now, and the bite itself blazed, just short of blinding.

  Davon’s big hands clenched into fists. “If it reaches her heart . . .” He didn’t have to say the rest.

  Tristan eyed the young vampire. Normally, he kept his nose out of other agents’ lives, but this time he figured a little advice was warranted. A little damned late, true, but still. “It’s not a good idea to become lovers with your partner, Davon.”

  “How did you . . .” He broke off. “It’s that obvious?”

  “It’s a natural temptation.” Tristan decided it was best to ignore the implied question. “Mutual hunger, adrenaline rush . . .”

  “Guilt,” Davon muttered.

  “But it makes things messy. The heart follows the body’s lead—or maybe one of you doesn’t feel anything while the other goes nuts, so you’re just fucked all around. I’ve found it best to do my rutting elsewhere.”

  Davon eyed him. “Rutting?”

  Tristan shrugged. “It is what it is.”

  “It wasn’t rutting with us.” The doctor’s expression turned stark with pain. “It may not have been very professional, but we both felt . . . something. Maybe not love, not so soon, but something.”

  Something strong enough to make Cherise dive between Davon and seven feet of pissed-off werewolf. Now he was going to have to deal with the fallout from her self-sacrifice. Which, in Tristan’s experience, was pretty much the way it went. Nothing could suck quite like love.

  Tristan’s mind brushed the acid memory of Isolde’s betrayal and quickly shoved the thought away.

  The chanting broke off. The healer cried out in wordless protest. Morgana cursed and Belle muttered something guttural in French, as Cherise’s slender body bowed against the mattress. She gasped out a strangled cry of pain that trailed into a wet rattle. Blue light flared.

  The young witch collapsed, boneless, limbs sprawled, her empty eyes staring blindly at the embroidered canopy.

  “Cherise?” Davon whispered it, the sound raw with disbelief and pain.

  “Oh, hell,” Tristan said wearily.

  Warlock moved around the bar, his orange eyes appraising its drunken patrons. His claws clicked on the uneven, peanut shell–littered floor, but nobody heard them over the death metal howling from the sound system.

  He had cast an invisibility spell on himself, a necessity given that he was eight feet tall, with the head of a wolf, thick white fur, and long black claws that contrasted with his even longer teeth. If the customers had gotten one look at him, you’d have heard the screams clear to Texas.

  Dave’s Beer Shack was a long, low building located on a frontage road off I-85. The lighting was provided by a few dim bulbs and neon beer signs. The bar, like the tables, was a slab of uneven wood scarred by knife gouges and sticky with spilled beer. A couple of Harley-Davidson posters hung on the walls in dusty black frames, and the waitress wore Daisy Dukes she could barely zip.

  As Warlock watched, somebody passed somebody a twenty and got a Baggie containing what looked like dirty rock candy. A sweaty man with a jailhouse build—all chest and arms, not much in the way of leg muscle—flashed a knife and roared with laughter as the waitress flinched. Pool balls clacked from a table somewhere off to the left, and somebody cursed with a distinct lack of creativity.

  The werewolf lowered his invisible head and sniffed delicately at a brawny man’s hands. Fresh blood. A lot of it, splattering his arms and the legs of his jeans. He’d done a half-assed job washing it away, as if he didn’t give a shit if anyone noticed it.

  Warlock tilted his furry white head. Careless bastard.

  A poker game was in process at the next table. He padded around the foursome, eyeing the cards. A man with a tear tattooed on his cheekbone lazed back in his seat, his face expressionless despite the aces in his hand. He was sixfour or so, more lean than bulky. Warlock suspected he’d be faster on his feet than most foes would expect. His shoulder-length hair was tobacco brown with streaks of gray at the temples, and his black eyes were cold and alert. When he spread his hand on the table, the others cursed as he raked in his winnings.

  “Jesus, Dice, you’ve got the luck of fuckin’ Satan, you know that?” one wiry, hard-eyed opponent said and threw himself back in his chair with a huff of disgust.

  Wayne “Dice” Warner laughed in a rusty rumble. “But you keep right on playing with me, you dumb bastard.”

  “I may be dumb, but at least I’m persistent.”

  The four laughed as Warlock studied Dice’s leather jacket. “Demon Brotherhood” was scrawled over the back in scuffed red lettering.

  According to his sources, the Demon Brotherhood wasn’t one of the larger biker gangs—not like the Outlaw Disciples—but its fifteen members had a vicious reputation. Murder, arson, rape, armed robbery, dealing drugs and guns—name it and the Brotherhood was said to have done it and gotten away clean. They were even rumored to have killed a Highway Patrol trooper, which was why every cop on the Eastern Seaboard was gunning for them.

  And Dice was their leader. Warlock had heard interesting things about Dice over the past month. The biker might well be perfect for his purposes, once Warlock established who was in control.

  He’d kill the waitress first, he decided. Female that she was, she was no good to him, but her shrieks should unnerve the cowardly. The bartender would go next—he was too fat and too old for Warlock’s purposes.

  Then he’d see.

  There were fifteen of the bikers. Warlock always limited his team of Bastards to twelve, like Arthur’s twelve Knights of the Round Table. But these men weren’t going to become his Bastards, as he’d originally planned before getting a good look at Dice. In fact, the more of them he had, the stronger the spell would be.

  The waitress jumped and giggled as a male hand pinched her ass. Warlock recognized his moment.

  She turned right into the werewolf’s lunge as he dropped his invisibility spell and let them all get the full effect of his teeth ripping out the little bitch’s throat.

  It made one hell of a view. Warlock’s hands were big enough to engulf her whole head, and his claws were the length of the girl’s fingers. The waitress didn’t have a prayer.

  Her dying screech was suitably shrill and nicely bubbling. He picked her up and dumped her bleeding carcass in the middle of the poker game, then vaulted the bar to deal with the bartender.

  He got to the man just before the bartender could bring up the sawed-off, knocked the weapon up, and bit off the bartender’s head. He spat it out like the tip of a cigar, and it rolled across the bar: bump bump bump.

  Now there was a conversation stopper.

  Warlock threw up a spell shield in time to block Dice’s nine-mil blast. One of the other bikers screamed, the sound thin and high. No nerve in that one.

  He bounced back over the bar and took the first bite out of a biker who didn’t scramble away quite fast enough. Magic sizzled through his jaws into the man’s arm, and Warlock cuffed him hard across the face, tumbling him
ass over heels. That would keep him down while the Curse took hold.

  Wheeling, the werewolf took a judicious bite out of someone’s shoulder, then clubbed the biker behind the ear. He fell as Warlock sought his next victim.

  You had to be careful with the bite, he’d found over the years. Merlin’s Curse could heal some pretty impressive injuries, but not if the target bled out too fast. And in this case, he needed them to survive as long as possible.

  Generally Warlock liked to restrict himself to one bite per customer, though he did enjoy the sensation of his teeth ripping human flesh. He just loved the look in their eyes, the utter panic of staring Death in the face. It made him feel like a god.

  Which he basically was, since feasting on Zephyr’s intoxicating power.

  One. Bite. Each.

  He was particularly careful when he did Dice, sinking his fangs almost tenderly in the biker’s hand before knocking the human cold.

  In the aftermath of Cherise’s death, Belle, Tristan, Arthur, and the others gathered in the Round Table chamber, falling into hunched poses of weariness in the carved oak chairs.

  The room had a twenty-foot ceiling and, like its centerpiece, was circular. A massive chandelier hung over the table, its countless iridescent crystals shaped like swords. Gorgeous tapestries covered the walls, depicting knights and their ladies fair, unicorns romancing virgins and dragons trying to eat them. Though the hangings were hundreds of years old, the magical thread was so brilliant with shimmering color, each tapestry looked new.

  But the Round Table dominated the room. The surface of the gleaming slab of oak was carved with images of Arthur and his original knights gathered around Merlin, the boy sorcerer, and his beautiful mate, Nimue. Twenty-four seats surrounded the table, enough for the twelve knights and their chosen ladies.

  Davon sat slumped in one of the massive oak chairs, looking like the survivor of a plane crash. Stunned, disoriented, utterly overwhelmed.

  Belle felt little better as she sat beside Tristan, who occupied the chair that bore his name.

  Arthur paced around the room like a lion in a cage. For all his heroic reputation, he was not a big man, though his body was brawny and capable. He wore his dark hair curling around his shoulders, and a neat beard framed his angry mouth. His black eyes snapped as he glowered at Davon. “You say I sent you to kill that boy?”

  “Yes, sir.” The doctor spoke in a monotone. It was painfully obvious he didn’t care if Arthur killed him on the spot in a fit of royal rage. Maybe Davon even hoped he would. “You told us Jimmy Sheridan had murdered a four-year-old girl and that the werewolves knew as much but weren’t doing anything about it. So we had to stop the kid from killing again.”

  “It wasn’t me.” Arthur’s hand flexed on Excalibur’s hilt. He wore the magical blade hanging from a scabbard belted around his narrow blue-jeaned hips. Its jeweled magnificence clashed with the blue T-shirt that stretched across his powerful chest, emblazoned with a Superman logo.

  Arthur was an unrepentant geek.

  “I know that—now,” Davon said, not looking up from the hands he’d knotted together between his knees. “But it seemed so real to us then. Cherise believed it, too.”

  “But it makes no sense!” Arthur snapped. “None of it. I wouldn’t have gotten involved in a criminal matter, particularly not one that was werewolf business.”

  “Cherise and Davon didn’t know that,” Tristan pointed out quietly. “They had no idea how the Round Table works, and they certainly didn’t know you.”

  “Which was no doubt why Warlock chose them,” Guinevere said as she sat next to her husband’s seat at the table, as blond and delicate as he was dark and burly. Her level gaze was cool with intelligence. She’d always been the balance for Arthur’s fiery temper.

  “We were the perfect patsies,” Davon said bitterly. “And now an innocent boy is dead, Cherise is dead, and I’m a murderer.”

  “Davon . . .” Belle began, her heart breaking for him.

  Before she could say anything else, a young woman walked into the council room, a cat riding her shoulders. She was delicately pretty in a short blue-jean skirt and a pink tank top, her dark hair tumbling in thick curls around her shoulders.

  The cat balanced on her shoulder was a gleaming blue-black, with silver striping his forelegs and haunches. His eyes burned an intense blue. “Is this the one?” His voice was deep, resonant, startling coming from such a small body.

  Davon looked up, surprised, as the cat leaped down from the woman’s shoulder to land lightly in his lap. Rearing, the little beast planted his forepaws in the center of Davon’s chest.

  Blue eyes met brown in a fierce stare. “Do you want us to discover proof of what was done to you?”

  Davon blinked at him in astonishment. “You’re not a cat.”

  “Well, not just a cat,” Smoke said, in a massive understatement.

  The doctor sighed, tired defeat in his voice. “Whatever you can do would be appreciated. Knowing I killed that boy . . .”

  Smoke pressed a delicate forepaw against Davon’s cheek to draw his defeated gaze. “I believe we can help you. I know Warlock better than anyone. If he used magic on you, I should be able to detect it.” He’d been held a psychic prisoner in Warlock’s mind for more than a week.

  Davon stared back at him, a flicker of hope ghosting through his eyes. “Do it. Please.”

  The cat extended his neck until he was nose to nose with the vampire. His eyes blazed a bright, shimmering blue.

  The girl who’d come in with him stepped up behind the doctor and put her hands on his temples.

  As Eva Roman touched Davon, a pair of ghostly antlers spread to either side of her head—the outward manifestation of her union with the soul of an elemental named Zephyr. A creature of pure magic, he’d inhabited the body of a white stag until Warlock had murdered him and drained his magic. The elemental’s ghost had sought out Eva as the vehicle of his revenge, giving her his knowledge of magic in exchange for her help.

  Magic flared in the room as the two went to work. Belle felt it rush over her skin like the brush of electric feathers, tingling and delicate. Her gaze met Tristan’s, and she was suddenly, intensely aware of him, of his powerful body and sensual power. Sometimes the nimbus of somebody else’s magic hit Belle like that, bringing her to an intense erotic awareness. Her nipples tingled, drew into hard points.

  Oh, hell.

  Tristan smiled slowly, as if he sensed her arousal, and she thought she glimpsed a flash of fang.

  Belle swallowed hard, realizing he was as turned on as she was.

  This is a very bad idea. The voice of rationality spoke from the back of Belle’s mind. You didn’t get involved with your partner. Too many things could go wrong, as Davon had just discovered.

  True, it was rare to lose a partner to death, but the Magekind were just as vulnerable to stupid anger and pointless jealousy as mortals were.

  And yet, Tristan’s green eyes stared into hers with hypnotic sensuality. Belle forced herself to look away. I don’t even like him half the time.

  Yes, he was courageous and intelligent, and Merlin knew he was gorgeous, with those broad shoulders and that lean swordsman’s build. But he could also be a raging jackass. Worst of all, half the time he acted as though he considered her the Whore of Avalon.

  Belle could forgive anything but that.

  The magic died. She looked around just as Smoke hopped out of Davon’s lap and into the chair next to him. Power starburst around him like a mini Fourth of July. When the light faded, a tall, muscular man sprawled where the cat had been. Blue-black hair fell sleek and shining around his shoulders, marked with slashing horizontal silver stripes that echoed the cat’s fur. His ears formed elegant Sidhe points, and his eyes were the same intense blue as they’d been in cat form.

  Eva sank down beside the big man, and he reached out, capturing her hand in an absent gesture. Belle watched their fingers curl together and felt her own heart ache. She’d had
so many lovers, yet she’d never known that kind of tenderness. She was beginning to believe she never would.

  “His mind has definitely been interfered with.” Smoke flicked a lock of hair behind one pointed ear. “The false memories are detailed—a little too detailed, more so than his other memories from the same period. But there’s no doubt he believed those memories. He killed the boy because he thought it was his duty, but it caused him great pain. He suffers now because of it.”

  “Can you prove Warlock created the false memories?” Arthur asked.

  “Now, that’s a bit tricky,” Smoke admitted. “The wizard did a very good job of covering his tracks. If we could get the Direkind to believe he exists, we could probably convince them that he did this, but the evidence he left in Davon’s mind wouldn’t be enough.”

  “They’re going to demand that we hand Davon over,” Tristan said grimly. “They’ll want to try him before their Council of Clans.”

  “I’ll have to plead guilty,” Davon said, his voice heavy with defeat. “I murdered that kid, no matter what my reasons were. The werewolves want justice, and I have a responsibility to give it to them.”

  “Forget that,” Arthur said roughly. “You did what you thought was your duty. I won’t allow the Direkind to execute you because their lunatic wizard is trying to start a war. You’re as much a victim as Cherise and Jimmy Sheridan.”

  “But what if they do declare war?” Davon stared at him, dark eyes tormented. “I don’t want anyone else to die because of me.”

  “Look, kid, I’m not giving you up to the Direkind, period. You believed you were following my orders.” Arthur demanded loyalty, but he also gave it right back.

  “We need to warn the other young Magekind about this.” Morgana leaned back in her seat, frowning as she tapped a long nail on the table’s gleaming surface. “We don’t want any more of them falling into this trap.”

  “I’m not sure we can prevent it.” Smoke steepled his fingers and touched them to his lips. “Warlock’s spells are damned powerful, now that he’s absorbed Zephyr’s abilities.”